clyde

She's super friendly, skilled, and helpful. Now that I'm playing it again, I don't know why I stopped. Moving my party forward and rotating their front (especially at the beginning of the game) is rewarding in itself; I suppose some might find it tedious though. Yesterday (before a few matches with JMBossy), I made a mistake by letting my warrior take most of the beginning damage instead of throughing my shieldbearer in the way. I thought I was going to lose for sure. I managed to come back by luring their melee attackers with my archers, rushing their archers while mine used their area-of-effects to route their melee-units, and then surrounding them with both once their archers were dead. It was a thrilling victory. Edit: This was not the battle with Stoicmom. She wiped me out even though I could tell he was being easy on me.

I'm listening to episode 201 of the Rebel FM podcast and their stories from Rust are really enjoyable to listen to. It sounds like the game requires a time-commitment that I can't afford right now, but running around with a gang or spending enough time on a server to establish property-lines sounds like a neat tribal experience.

My point being that even though some of us are willing to exercise some imagination and consider that the status-quo is unnecessarily unjust, there is a group of people just as passionate about maintaining their financial advantage and rationalizing that it's more important than the health of the poor. I don't know of anything I can do to help the situation but keep an open mind, look for alternatives, and be honest about what my understandings are.

I love drinking and listening to precise music and saying to myself "Fuckin-A, these movements are telling me how it is and the composition has resulted from the right decisions."

I don't think I have much of a say. Here is a video I just received from a family member with no ironic intention:

I still think that the ability to create hypothesis about what happened in the past and then committing to that hypothesis in some way, would have improved the game. The commitment to a hypothesis by the player wouldn't necessarily change the outcome, but simply increase the investment and understanding of the player. I think an argument could be made that the player writing an interpretation of what happened in the game on a forum could fill this purpose, but committing to a perspective during the game and then having the game reveal that your idea was an over-simplification would be more cohesive. The multiple perspectives (the player's thesis and the antithesis provided by further discovery) would make the fictional characters and their circumstances more complex. I agree that the game is about the methodical exploration of the mansion. The reason I think this is because after playing Gone Home, I close my eyes and see myself opening drawers and cabinets. But I think Short's argument points out that the game had an opportunity to involve the player by having them choosing sides in a family dispute; perhaps deciding to hide evidence of what has occurred or collecting it.

Anectdotally, I work a part-time job and most of my co-workers are retirees or people on disability that are trying to earn a little bit. The thing that I've seen tbat makes no sense to me is that the people on disability have to manage their hours so that they don't work too much. As I understand it, if they make $1 more than they are allowed to, they lose the entirety of theor disabilty payment for the month. This removes all incentive to work more than a certain amount when these people wouldn't really mind working more. The basic income solution seems to suggest that it would not create this disincentive because money would not be taken away if people decide to earn more. Loss aversion is a powerful force.

Here is a talk by Professor Evelyn Forget who is mentioned in the article linked in the OP. It's kinda slow, but I'm having a hard time reading anything of length this evening.

I just started playing again today and I got matched with one of the developers' mom who was on the global chat answering questions. Of course she wiped me out. but then I got matches with someone else who didn't chat at all and we had a pretty good game. The first few games where you are trying to understand the health/attack/armor relationship can be really frustrating. You may think you are winning because you have a ton of dudes left, but then you find out that they have two archers at full strength and all of your armor is gone. Anyway, I'm horrible at scheduling, and I will probably only type-chat; but if you see me on I won't be mean and I will explain mechanics as much as you want me to (maybe a little more). I'm "clyde" on steam.

So have any of you played the multi-player "Factions" game? I ask because the combat system was hard to wrap my head around for a while. Rock Paper Shotgun seemed somewhat disappointed with their preview of single-player and I suspect that some of that is because they never really understood how to be effective with the combat-system. I love the combat system now though.

It's awesome.

So I just played Armada by Porpentine. It's currently free here: http://aliendovecote.com/armada.html I went into it expecting a naïve-game, and that expectation put me into a receptive stance. MS Paint creatures float about or are anchored to the space. You control a girl with green hair and can press "z" to do an area-of-effect that sprays slime. Slime seems to kill hostile creatures and amuse friendly ones. The animations are sparse and there only sense of weight is the difference between an object being static or mobile. You move through maze-like tile-based areas where you may find yourself examining grave-stones, speaking to inhabitants, or getting lost. I really enjoyed it. Porpentine's mythos is present. It's an odd thing that her tweets prep me for her games. I get excited when I encounter characters and environments that she has mentioned previously. I don't enjoy the moments of not being able to find the exit and the combat was not a joy (though both contribute to the tone), but exploring the alien world of Porpentine provided me with multiple instances of joyful discovery. I'm not actually sure I finished the game. I think that it may be designed to just be a world meant for exploration without an end objective. Things happen, but the game hasn't ended for me. I've seen enough to feel satisfied, and I wanted to see if anyone else wanted to discuss Armada.

I continue to think of Armada. I took it for granted when I played it. Now I see how under-used the JRPGesque template is. It may have been done before, but Armada is my first exposure to a lot of ideological design assumptions being questioned in such a way that it makes me want to make a JRPG style game too. I'll probably just download GameMaker and do very little, but it's fun to be hiking in the mountains beside a frozen creek after a week of solid internetting and thinking about what I items I would choose to codify to express my thoughts and experiences for the game.

I hate running, but those Razor scooters are a blast in hilly areas.

Not to be overly presumptive, but are you particularly interested in mystery games Mangela Lansbury?

I agree. There's also some moments where I tested hypothesis by exploring. I went to the refrigerator and checked the expiration-date on the milk with the intention to find out how long ago Sam had left the house. Still, I never made any assumptions about who the characters were and was able to make a decision to do one thing or another, or explore in order to confirm my suspicions in an intentional manner.

I'm "cognitive bias" on game center if anyone wants leaderboard interaction.

Emily Short just published a piece describing some of her thoughts on how reader's hypothesis can be leveraged to create an interaction in works of fiction. She seems to give a lot of importance to the ability for player/readers to test their hypothesis so that characters and events can appear to have complexity. Gone Home is used a a central example in the piece. Here is an excerpt: Hypothetical reading is most interesting if the reader is likely at first to form incorrect hypotheses. Gone Home misguides the player initially, but it does so in a way that is completely orthogonal to the actual substance of its story. http://emshort.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/reading-and-hypothesis/

.D_BOM does seem to have a similar effect. I guess it's because the rainbow-egg hatchlings only take one hit to destroy. I'm actually glad I noticed this because before I did, .SHOW seemed kinda useless. I haven't unlocked .DELAY yet. I keep getting stupid greedy and dying. What does it do?

Pro tip: using .ANTI-Vwhen the enemies are about to hatch kills all the viruses with one hit. I had a .SHOW active so I saw what happened. I find myself saving $ and energy until I have a hallway and .DEBUG and then just pecking them away at the bottle-neck; doesn't always work.

Somehow, I had not seen this thread. I'm kinda old; can you explain what the appeal is of live broadcast versus archived video?

You could make the score objective. Objective doesn't mean relevant. Maybe just total up the vowels and use a base-10 system. Or just use the last digit of it's file size.

The song sounds better when I don't watch the video. http://youtu.be/9RYsrU6TKVc Same producer (Shinichi Osawa), different song, better video.

Saw something you might appreciate TychoCelchuuu. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/05/live-free-play-hard-porpentines-top-10-of-2013/