clyde

Four of us did this for homecoming dinner at taco bell. It was satisfying.

Here is something I really appreciate about this game: I'm reading through the rulebook for the second time and I've played three matches now. I've had dreams that were influenced by the game-systems for the past three nights. The only one I remember the details of were that someone was coming up our gravel driveway (we live in a rural area and do not have many visitors) and I was thinking of the situation in terms of a run; had I installed enough ice on the driveway?; was the intruder breaking subroutines? The fact that I am having hallucinations of logic where my default thought-processes are being supplanted by game-mechanics during my hypnagogic state makes me suspect that this game is super-fresh (within the sphere of what I games I have been exposed to personally). I love it when this "tetris-effect" happens with logic, rather than with visuals when I close my eyes. I have no idea what hacking into a corporation or managing firewalls is actually like, but Netrunner totally makes me feel like I'm making decisions in a cyberpunk world. This is the coolest version of a hacking-themed game I've played I would have loved doing this in Deus Ex or Mass Effect. Even tower-defense games have significant things to learn from Netrunner; have multiple targets of varying importance and disclosure, have those values change bewtween player turns and ideally allow the access of those targets to change the abilities of the defense and the abilities of antagonist. I'm getting a lot out of this game.

I wonder how Arcosanti deals with it.

Ok, that is useful information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=X7JgVqbh8nE

The current art-style is also enjoyable. It's cohesive in a way that makes me feel like there is a comicbook set in this world. I heard someone say that the 1950's version of the future is different than the 2000's version of the future. Further, the 1880's version of the future is distinctly wicked/cool. I have an affinity for the 1990's cyberpunk amalgumate style. It's probably because it is the style which has been associated with the most severe (yet attractive) version of the genre I have been exposed to. Blade-Runner cities and Max-Headroom sabatoge will always evoke speculations of how technomancy will create a new age of wizards and magic. So can a runner use a click to gain credits after the corporation has decided how much to spend on a trace, so that they can have enough to not get the tag? Edit: From what I read in the rulebook, it seems like the idea is basically "You can use a click whenever you want as long as you have clicks and it is during your own turn." We just played our third game and it felt like the first one where we really knew what was going on. Chrissy had 5 points scored and I had 3, at that point she has a lot of ice installed. We both knew that her first remote server was the one that was the most heavily protected; I could get through it, but it would cost me around 20 credits to do so and I only had 4. She installed another piece of ice on that server. Then I spent all my clicks on magnum opus to gain 8 credits. On Chrissy's turn she put a new agenda in the server and advanced it two times. It was pretty obvious to us both that whatever she installed was going to be at least 2 agenda points. I spent another turn gathering 8 clicks ( because now I needed even more credits to get through), She spent her next turn advancing her agenda three times and scored an agenda for 3 points. It was really fun, because we both knew what we had to do in order to win and we were racing for it.

Oh my gawd, can you imagine how much fun a Mount&Blade style Lord's Management game would be? They already have the creeps running at each other. Just make it a single lane where both sides have a barricade on the field and a castle to siege. You could loot the clubs and fur hats from dead looters (is that irony?) and take it back to your castle to have the smith turn them into better armor and weapons for you and your creeps. Maybe that's how you get siege-ladders.

Last night we broke all the tokens out of the cardboard template and attempted to make the starter decks as instructed by the rulebook. I finished reading through the rulebook today and Chrissy met me downtown after work for our first game of Netrunner. At first we were playing outside, but the wind picked up. Note to self: if you want to make gaming friends, play Netrunner upon a picnic table on a college-campus. Two people approached us separately to ask what we were playing within 15 minutes. I had to explain that we had no idea how to play it yet, so we couldn't give much of a description. We are such posers. It got windy, so we had to take it indoors. We ordered fries and drinks and appreciated Burger King's huge booth-tables and lack of customers. They played dance-music the entire time which was cool. I played as the corporation; I figured that if Chrissy played the runner, all her cards would be face-up so I would be able to explain stuff she needed to know. She got that fucking card that lets her gain 2 credits every click and was swimming in money the entire game, where I was using most of my clicks for 1 credit each. Most of my attempts to trap and ambush her failed because she would use an event that exposed them or I wouldn't have enough credits to be able to advance the asset and pay for rezzing the ice in time. Or she would just look at me and be like "That's one of your traps, isn't it?" and I wouldn't be able to make a good poker-face. It was a massive struggle. She accessed the first three of my agendas and there she sat at 6 points for the rest of the game. I had ice all over the place on servers that she had no interest in. So then she starts accessing my R&D, going through my ice very easily with her tons of credits. I had very few credits the entire game. She had all this hardware that let her have a total of 8 memory units and so she had plenty of programs and credits to just run whatever server she wanted successfully. We get to the point where she has one card left in her stack and she's like "What happens if I run out of cards?" and I was like "I don't think you lose like I do when you run out." and she was like "Well let's do this, I don't care, look at all my stuff, I can run your piddly shit all night." So she just kept running my R&D and telling me whether or not I had a good card coming. She was dominating so hard that she felt bad for me and started saying things like "I'm going to play the corporation next time because you aren't very good at it." We get to my last card and it's just a piece of ice. We were like "How are we supposed to win if there are only 6 agenda-points total?" Upon further examination, we discovered that the neutral corporation-cards had not been put into the starter-deck. It was really fun. We have a pretty good grasp on the game-mechanics (we think) but we didn't do a trace or a tracker or bad publicity, and she didn't even get any brain-damage. It was really fun. She said "I'm already glad you bought this game." Next time we will have a legal deck for both sides. We both look forward to playing again.

I just bought the set yesterday. Seeing the older art, I feel kinda cheated.

I don't have much of an opinion on the gritty military part, but I'm waiting for another well-made FPS-Dota-like. I play a lot of Super Monday Night Combat's Turbocross-mode, but I miss Crossfire-mode where there was a heightened sense of severity. When that new free-2-play dota-like came out on steam earlier this week, I was like "oh, oh, maybe you can use a controller and jump" but it doesn't look that way. Super Monday Night Combat is great but the match-making is so bad due to the low population, I look forward to jumping on the band-wagon for the new hotness, whatever that might be. When I was playing last night I was thinking about how I wouldn't know how to do sneak-attacks in Dota or Lol because I can't go above or below the enemy to come around their rear.

If you change the scale of these questions of reality to that of an individual in typical daily human-experience, you can get an idea of what the knowledge that this is a simulation changes. The difficulty isn't that it's a giant simulation in which we all reside, but that we are all simulating our own realities (some more reliably than others). Realizing this can have a huge impact on a person's perspective and therefore, on the way they interact with the world. I went through a 4-year period of my life where I video-taped a large quantity of my daily doings. One of the odd side-effects was that I am far more willing to doubt my memory of events than I was before. A great way to test your memory is to video-tape an argument you have with someone, one where emotions are high. Allow some time for your memories of what happened to coagulate and then watch the tape. I suspect that you will experiene this uncomfortable dissonance when you see things go down a way you distinctly remember them not happening. Chronological order can also get super mixed up. We have a ton of perception-biases that affect our sense of reality and that is the information that can make a huge difference, more than whether or not the Earth is a giant computer being run by mice.

That's amazing. I've heard of tribal societies coming to the same conclusion. I'm not sure if it was the indigenous people of New Guinea or maybe Borneo. Anyway, I heard that the general mentality is that if someone dies from a disease, witch-craft may be suspected, so they feel a need to kill a witch. It very much seems like it's a matter of not knowing if it was a head-shot or an accident but feeling the need to disincentivize any intentional killing (regardless of if the method can be determined) at the cost of executing innocents. I suppose we could see some examples in our society too.

I'm looking for games with interesting economic systems. I'm watching a lot of Youtube videos about capitalism and as I do so, I realize that I have no ability to visualize anything else. In theory, computer games can rapidly prototype alternatives. Even though massive multiplayer games such as EVE are the most fertile grounds for such discoveries, I'm hoping for single player experiences where you eventually get the sense that there is a well simulated economy in the background that you can explore. The best example that I know of is Greed Corp, though it is pretty much an essay on the ecological impact of militaristic capitalism. It doesn't take long to figure out how it works and you have to change the way you are used to thinking about economics in order to be successful. I suppose walking around, killing rats with a sword and then spending the gold you find in their belly is an interesting economic simulation, but really it's evidence that game designers have difficulty thinking of alternatives to capitalism. You take the profit from the rat, spend it on better machinery to kill more rats faster and enter into a spiral of paying more for machinery for a thinning profit eventually ending in crisis. Anyone know of games that introduce something fresh?

I've been playing Le Havre on the iphone (the screen size is too small). I love how a business-plan develops over time based on what I already have available. I always end up slaughtering cattle and making leather because cattle is such a great way to feed my workers at the beginning and then I'm like "I could use that tannery". I should check out some of the others. I'll look into it. Thanks.

I still haven't found a game where there is a strong incentive for raising the living-standard for the poorest, but today I'm thinking about the similarities and differences between Chicago Express's shares/currency relationship and the international-project system introduced to Civilization 5 with the Brave New World expansion. Chicago Express's amazingly succinct model of corporate-capitalism was described very thoroughly on the first page of this thread, so I'll describe the international-project system for Civ5. When a proposal for an international-project, such as an Olympic-games style event, passes through votes in the World Congress (that's not the important part in this discussion, though it is somewhat influential on who has more incentive) all the civilizations can then decide to produce toward that international-project in their city-menus. The info that is provided to you as you are choosing how much production to invest is what the top investor gets and what the second and third largest contributor will receive. You also see the percentage of the project which has been completed, what percentage you have contributed, but not how much other civs have contributed. The effect of this is that you have no incentive to continue contributing production once your contribution achieves 51% of the effort required to produce the international-project. This aspect is really similar to the change in incentive that occurs in Cannonball Run once a majority of shares for a railroad is owned by one player, but it's inverted. If you become a majority share-holder in Cannonball Run, you get a huge increase to your incentive to invest in that railroad because you know no one else will do so since you are the one who will profit from it the most. In the international-project system of Civ5, you rarely can tell if any other civ has managed to contribute more than 50%. This secrecy encourages you to continue to invest long after it stops benifitting you to do so (if you have not yet contributed 51%). I think that is so interesting. Another big difference is how the wider game of Civilization 5 can have such a massive influence on your incentive to contribute capital to the shared-project. If I got war on two of my borders, I couldn't care less about the 200% increase in tourism for 20 turns. The opposite is also true. If a country has already invested a lot in their tourism, they have more incentive to make sure they contribute the most to the international-games project. Cannonball Run is so abstracted ( for elegant purposes) that the incentive for investment is the potential to invest more. Good stuff. I'm still interested in seeing a good procedural argument for welfare though. I want a game to be able to convince me that raising the living-standard of the poorest, benifits the most wealthy.

Isn't the difference between work and leisure whether or not someone else gets profit from your labor? I'm kinda like a leisureaholic. This morning, I spoke to a guy who spends a large quantity of time in attics spraying insulation that is steaming-hot. I bet he can afford medical insurance. After speaking to him, I went back to my non-essential desk-work where I wrote about how I'm going to die one day. People pay for sprayed insulation and I doubt it's enjoyable to spray. Writing about the inevitability of death is enjoyable, but doesn't pay.

I started watching this video on how to play the game. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=g3w0B7txipk This looks very difficult to learn unless someone is teaching it to you as you play. Looks really fun. If I can get the sense that I'll be able to figure out how to play it, I may buy the 252 card set for $40. My wife always wants to play Magic, but I have a hard time being excited about Magic. We might be able to get into this.

I can't tell if the new Miley Cyrus video is a joke or not. It looks like a parody.

Word. In elementary school, I often considered that everyone around me might be a robot, programmed to not talk about being a robot.

Neat video. This guy is an impressive orator. At any given moment, he seems to know what express that he is aware of what he is saying even though it is (I assume) memorized. His reporter-intonation drives me nuts, but he is obviously skilled. Yeah, a soliptic is someone who suffers (or profits from!) their own solipsism. I was using it as hyperbole, I haven't been diagnosed or anything. But I'm happy for you (and simultaneously saddened in my pity) that you have discovered the concept of solipsism and have given it some thought. It's a potentially very deep rabbit-hole which flavors a lot of my personal philosophies. If you start worrying that you are becoming a nihilistic sociopath, read D.T. Suzuki's The Beginner's Mind , he will hook you up. I suspect that we all tend towards solipsism. It's a great thing to remind yourself of, but a shitty reason to be an asshole.

We aren't looking hard enough. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0131350382/ref=pd_aw_sbs_1?pi=SL500_SY115 Edit: Now that I'm home and trying to do a proper search so that I can enlighten you all to the magic which is this book, I find that there isn't much information on the internet (I forget that the internet has different info banks than large libraries.) So here is the a summary of the awesomeness. This guy, Wilson Bryan Key was a professor or something and he took a class of his students to a Howard Johnson's which (I guess) had a restaurant. After looking at the menu, most of the students ended up ordering the clam-plate. This caused discussion which resulted in the discovery that the people who ordered the clam-plate didn't actually like clams. So imagine this most eventful dinner: the professor and the students examine the picture of the clam-plate on the menu until they discover that the fried clams depict an orgy... that includes a donkey. From what I understand, this discovery was part of the paranoia in the 80's that we were all being brainwashed by extremely subtle subliminal messaging in advertising. Wilson Bryan Key toured universities, preaching this stuff. I just assumed that it would be common knowledge on the internet because I'm soliptic.

Regarding being cautious about talking about well-known games: Drama Beans, which is a website that does summary and ocasional criticism of korean dramas, has a scoring system which is interesting to me. The first number represents how much they enjoyed watching the show; the second number is how "good" they think the show was. So if they enjoyed watching the show, but thought that it was genre-excrement, they might give it a 9/2. Let me be clear: I am not at all suggesting that Idle Thumbs adopt a scoring system. The reason I bring up Drama Bean's technique is because I think it is an effort to address this issue of wanting to feel free to discuss media subjectively and also attempt to do so in a more objective, categorical way. They have imbedded a rhetoric within their scoring system that says "As a reviewer, I am many things and those things may contradict." It's not a solution, I just wanted to express that it's an interesting problem. Also, Shammack: I'm staring at the Colonel's head, assuming that there is something raunchy in the negative space, but I'm not seeing it.

The gambling angle where I could get a million dollars from buying a happy-meal during Monopoly season or have a $20 bill pop out of my can of Coca-cola had a persuasive effect on me. I've always wanted to be blessed with currency.

I finished a short Twine game! It's not any of the overwhelmingly ambitious projects I've been working on, but I had an idea this morning that I wanted to include in a Twine story. I was able to do so, though you may not see the idea I wanted to include during your play-through. It's short. Another Day, Another Dollar