clyde

My wife had a dream where she finally beat level 65 of Candy Crush. In real life, she has been trying to beat this level for about a month. She says that she got fireworks on the screen and she showed it to me. She says "It was like the game was beat." She remembered all this when she started it up a moment ago.

What's the difference between a squirrel on water-skis and a guy telling a rape-joke? The squirrel on water-skis understands why it's a bad idea.

I got more, but as a white male telling rape-jokes, I'm starting to feel oppressed, so they are censored.

This thread suddenly got exponentially more interesting.

So I spent too much time playing Civ 5 yesterday, but it was really fun. I finally finished my game as Korea (fighting!). This is the second game I've played all the way through to the end. I haven't played any Civilization games before 5 and so the process of learning how to play them has been interesting to me. My first game (which I did not finish) was fun because I just tried to colonize as much of the world as possible. I played on a map designed to look like the actual Earth; so doing things like building the Great Pyramids off the coast of south-eastern China (which was actually Arabia in my game), colonizing Austalia and turning it into a giant factory and mine for my war efforts with Egypt, Rome and England, was super fun and novel. I learned the basic mechanics as I played and eventually, the combination of having an idea of how I wanted to play and getting overwhelmed made me quit. Then months later, I played as Ethiopia on a randomly-generated map (so that I wouldn't know if there was a continent across the Atlantic ocean, for instance). When I started that game, I had an idea of what production did, and the importance of science and luxury goods. I concentrated on having a small empire (which gets bonuses when you play as Haile Selassie I) and I tried to be as peaceful as possible, but I was also far too isolationistic which led to Greece becoming far too powerful. Greece "won" the game by building a spaceship. It was really odd when I was trying to manage my empire and a game-over screen popped up to tell me that I lost. I kept playing that game after victory was announced and tried to deal with the world-state and tried to make sure my empire would continue to flourish. During that period, I finally started to understand how diplomacy with the other civilizations worked. I got a taste of how you can bribe civs with luxury goods to go to war, and I started to understand how to use defensive-pacts, denouncements and declarations-of-friendships. I couldn't wait to play again, now that I had discovered this whole layer of the game that I didn't really understand how to influence before. It was like finding out that you could turn into a ball after finishing Metroid. So then, about a month ago, I started my game as Korea. I understood how the "science-victory" and the "domination-victory" worked, but "cultural-victory" and "diplomatic-victory" were still confusing. Brave New World introduced the World-Congress (which is a by far the coolest addition to the game) and tourism, neither of which I knew how would work, but like I said, I was excited about negotiating with the other civs from the beginning of the match. I didn't really care about winning, I just wanted to build up my civilization and make sure it was the coolest. My game as Korea was fucking epic. Understanding what types of negotiation between civs are available and using them as tools is so satisfying to me. Poland, which was my bulldog at the beginning of the match, got way too powerful by being oddly successful in the wars I paid it to wage. 3/4 of the game was trying to nerf Poland while not angering them; all the while having to maintain enough military presence, beneficial trade-value, and reliable alliances to keep Persia from deciding that invading one of my most productive cities (less than 6 tiles away from it's capital) would be worth it. Luckily, the majority of the civilizations joined the communist ideology with me, leaving Poland and Persia to fend for themselves. It was amazing. Around 2040, I realized that the game was going to end. I had made sure that I would achieve "science-victory" first, and "domination-victory" would not be possible for anyone. I had the majority of delegate in the World-Congress, so "diplomatic-victory" would be easier for me than anyone else, and my tourism had overtaken the local culture of France, Venice, Persia, and was gaining in Germany and Carthage. The World-Congress had embargoed Poland as it's first resolution, and so my cultural influence could not go in. 2050 comes around and I get the game-over screen. Poland won through points. Fine, I don't care about winning, just looking forward to building this spaceship I've been working on for the last 20 years. Nope. After victory is declared, you can't assemble the spaceship. The game was over. I understand that the game has to have victory-conditions and that around 2050, the game can get kinda boring because you run out of available upgrades. By 2049, all of my cities were just creating wealth, where for the majority of the game, they had been building granaries, and universities and cool stuff that I wasn't sure what it would do. There is an awesome sense of discoverability to research and building shit. I actually feel like I won, even though a screen popped up that said I lost. The world in my Korea game was a paradise compared to the world at the end of my Ethiopia game. Poland was still aggressive, but we had it under control. We even signed a non-nuclear proliferation treaty. I had influenced the world to create a balance of power where trade was more profitable than war, that was what I had wanted to do and I did it. I'm going to play another match, but this time, I suspect that I'll be trying to win. I'll be trying to win after just having fun trying shit out for 90 hours. It finally turned into a game for me, where before it was a history-builder. If I can only appreciate Civ 5 as a game-to-win, it'll be a little sad, but honestly, it's a computer-game; after 90 hours, I would expect to have a good idea of its limits. Now that I REALLY know what I'm doing, Civ 5 has transformed into a very enjoyable strategy game, from an interesting sim. What a fantastic game.

I watched Now You See Me last night. It was a decent comic-book movie. Made me feel like I had planned to brush my teeth and go to bed at the specific time and in the specific way that I did, 5 years ago. I like it when movies have that kind of residual effect.

Ok, I got another one: Knock, knock. -who's there? "Rape-joke!" -rape-joke who? You were supposed to laugh. Ba-dum-bump

Ba-dum-bum!

Okay, I read the jezebel article on how to write a rape joke and I want to try. Tell me if it's offensive, I'm new to this. Ok, here we go: How many PAX attendees does it take to make a rape joke? One to write the comic strip and kinda say he's sorry(?), ten to make the t-shirts, 1000 to insist that IT IS REALLY FUNNY! and 50 to threaten physical harm to anyone who disagrees on Twitter.

I love the Grand Theft Auto series and fail to appreciate the Saints Row series. Of course I know that one is not better than the other, but I do believe that games within a series tend to display some amount of consistency. As I try to describe what I like about GTA, I find that the details I list are present in the Saints Row series. This makes me suspect that I have no clue what I actually like about specific games. I'm just picking details that are in games I enjoy and that are not in games I do not enjoy, and just assuming causation. This is apparently a useless school of criticism. What if the unifying factor of games I enjoy was something as basic as being within a small range of latency. What if I enjoy every game that delivers audio or visual feedback within 20-10 milliseconds or whatever, and only those games. My claims that Spelunky is great because of chains of causation and resource management, and that Civilization 5 is amazing because of the sense of history-building, can all be reduced to how fast something happens when I press a button. I'm not saying that this is the unifying factor, but I can't figure out what Saints Row doesn't have that GTA does, so I am no authority on what causes me to enjoy some games and not others. I wonder if there is a school of criticism that can reliably tell me whether or not I will enjoy a game before I play it.

Well, that was an epic game. I feel pretty successful even though I didn't win. One thing that kinda bummed me out was that I couldn't finish my spaceship after a winner was declared. That was quite a blow to national pride. I love Civ 5, I wonder how long I should wait before starting another game, that one took me a while. Go KOREA! FIGHTING!

These responses are inspiring some interesting thoughts. I have an exciting hypothesis after considering what y'all have written: I enjoy games that maintain comparatively high levels of expected behavior in their simulations while increasing my sense of personal influence. This actually leads to some weird shit if you extrapolate the logic of this lense. You are right Osmosisch, I'm basically saying "I like dinosaurs so I like games with dinosaurs in them!" and it's not working. Reyturner was able to provide a pretty compelling argument that gave me a place to start. I think the sense of meaning or influence is likely a function of the player's ability to change the simulation and the simulation's believability. Believability seems related to expectations of realism, but expectations of reality isn't necessarily realistic which brings up TheStalkingHead's suggestion that analysis should include my life experiences. My expectations of what makes a realistic strategy game has changed massively as my political beliefs have gone from referencing nightly news reports, G.I. Joe cartoons and Encyclopedia Britanicas to watching content from Democracy Now, reading Reuters, and (in a frightening feedback loop kinda way) playing strategy-games. My expectations of realism change. This is also a good spot to address Juv3nal's point that games may not be enjoyable 15 years later. This may be happening not only because my expectations of realism change over time, but my expectations of the level of realism I can expect from a video-game can change over time. My expectations for the level of player-influence in video-games (the other side of the equation) can also change over time. Things like tighter feedback-loops, scale of influence, width of potential actions, and perceptible chains of causality all increase the sense of player influence; but they also tend to decrease expectations of realism. I suspect that I enjoy games that find a way to increase the sense of player influence while maintaining a level of expectations for realism. Higher jumps are expected from cartoon characters; the influence of nation-states is expected to be on a larger scale, long-term consequences like being investigated and going to prison can be post-poned or explained away with narrative. It seems like a pretty good hypothesis. Let's check out some of the odd extrapolations: Hypothetically, sense of player-influence could be increased drastically while maintaining expectations for realism if the person playing is a meglomaniac. Wouldn't it be interesting so see if game preferences of someone were predictable based on psychological assessments of narcissism? This could explain some of the effects hallucinagen or stimulant use has on gameplay experiences. Wasn't there a games-writer that played GTA IV during a stimulant binge? It's also interesting to consider what happens when the sense of player-influence goes much lower that realistic expectations. Maybe that's where empathy-games fit into the picture. This is especially interesting if you consider the possibility that experiences in a game may influence your expectations of realism. I'm going with this school of criticism for now: examining the ratio between expectations of realism and level of player-influence. I think I can get a lot out of it. I think it explains my current confusion about Saints Row and GTA. My steam handle is signalflow Reyturner, tell me what to buy.

I think I've read that the potential for actual assault is when she is with someone she knows.

One time my wife and I were hanging with a friend and she decided that she wanted to walk home before I wanted to leave. We were both cool about all of that, this was not at all uncommon for us. I got a call from her about an hour later where she was saying that she was hiding under a car from a bunch of drunk guys that jumped in their pickup and started following her. My friend and I jumped in his car and raced around the neighborhood looking for her. This was possibly the worst ten minutes of my life thus far. We saw some guys tailgating out of a pickup and I described my wife and asked if they had seen her? They said no in such a way that I did not believe them, but it seemed very unlikely that they knew where she was. I tried to memorize them and continued on. It was horrifying. We eventually found her, the car owners saw her under their car and came out to see what was up. It was really scary. She still walks around alone. Since then, she got shot with a bb gun (drive-by), solicited for sex and probably some stuff she hasn't told me about. As we get older, she gets more cautious, but it's her call.

It's her call Patrick.

It's a hard call for me. On one hand, I hate the idea of rape-apoligists being empowered with a sense of solidarity while creating an uncomfortable environment for many; but on the other hand, it seems like having rape-apoligists wearing clothing that identifies them as such could be useful in figuring out who needs to be introduced to compassionate methods of getting attention.

Here is a neat article that makes similar comparisons between tent-pole summer movies and social gaming. It's interesting to think that these free-2-play in-app-purchase gates are a mutation from the hooks in the social-game format that exploded a few years ago. This is just the single-player version.

Spelunky stream, everyone is climbing through the caves as a team, Sean goes " Look at this. THis is like fuckin' Scooby Doo!" It's funny because it's true.

I'll play that card any time you want me to. Essential reading.

Also, the conversation you guys have after the hour-mark is so inspiring. Rob's ideal victory being defined by the compromises his civilization has had to make is something that I would love these games to strive for. At the end of a game, I want to look at the resulting map and see a reflection of the goals my nation chose to achieve and the compromises we had to make in order to achieve them. A cultural-identity based on the various factions acting within and outside of my nation, and the methods with which we decided to interact, creates a history. That's why I'm playing Civ 5, to form a history. The more that the history is reflected through presentation and mechanics, the more i can take pride (or be shamed) by it. This was such an enjoyable show.

The argument you guys make beginning around 24:30 regarding putting cities to the sword is so interesting. You explain so clearly how the combination of designing rebellions as an annoyance to the player; multi-prong responses to rebellion being available; and a lack of incentive to compromise, leads to the use of genocidal tactics. Bonus points are given for a relevant Princess Leia quotation. I found this webpage that seems to explain how ideology relates to happiness and dissent in Brave New World. http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Ideology_(Civ5)

I wonder how to attract diplomats to my capital so I can sell my votes. Was Rome super unhappy? Was the city in the middle of Rome's empire wanting to join you a result of the rebellion mechanic? Details, give us the hawt stuff. I want to know how it happened. Dish! Edit: also, just to make sure you know, you can mouse over the "guarded/neutral/friendly" statuses to see why other civs like or dislike you. Second edit: I found this page that explains how ideologies, tourism, and happiness can create the dissenting cities that want to join (or leave) your ideology. http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Ideology_

Word TychoCelchuuu. I don't know if you were able to communicate what you mean, but your attempt was illuminating.

I wish embargos meant that other civs couldn't trade with them.

Regarding the perceived challenge doldrums in tower-defense games: I think that Castle Storm is trying to solve the problem of feeling like everything is under control by offering an additional mechanic that allows you to push when secure. The division of your attention makes it so that you will eventually overextend and have to regroup your efforts to play defensively again. Then when you feel confident, you can switch to an aggressive mode and push for a little while until you overextend again. I like the idea, but find it too stressful. I do tend to appreciate when I can increase my risk/reward at any time during a game though. Denki's game "Juggler" simplifies that idea to a point of elegance by allowing the player to just catch an additional ball. Also, if the world of Plants versus Zombies can satisfy you without the mechanics, then you might want to check out the Plants versus Zombies video-pinball table. It has modes where you hit the zombies with your ball and you can buy bonuses from Crazy Dave. It's a bit too easy for my taste, but it's novel. Regarding how non-traditional gamers view micro-transactions: My wife works with a lot of adults who would not consider themselves gamers, but have found themselves playing and discussing Candy Crush Saga frequently. She says that they describe the game to each other as "free". They pass around iphones and ipads before work and on lunch-breaks to see who can get past a level. The group that plays, talks of the legendary woman among them who "finished the game" by saying that she only spent $2; so there seems to be pride in not micro-transacting. Also, they trade tips on how to get extra-lives for free (such as changing the time on your device) in such a way that it reminds me of discussing Zelda secrets in grade-school. The only negative she has heard about micro-transactions is an indignance regarding their kids making purchases unknowingly. They seem to feel that it is an unethical design decision intended by the game-makers.