clyde

As I try to work out a way to deal with a militaristic superpower who seems bent on controlling every tile on the map in order to feed its war-machine, there is a part of me that says "If I can't figure out a way to bring balance of power in this game, then I'm just a naive idealist." And some of that self-identity will come with me as I re-enter the natural world. That may be a good thing. Could be bad, definitely there (for me). The paranoid argument that this particular match of Civilization 5 makes does a better job of convincing me why military strength is a national priority than my U.S. Navy-indoctrinated father.

I am fascinated by the theme, but I can't force myself to consider that a heavily experimental game that relies on stealth-mechanics by a first time developer is going to be a pleasure to play. I will remain respectful by not listing my personal ideas on how this theme could be approached in a game with much more stable systems. Especially since it would be coming from me, who feels challenged when making a Twine game.

I just spent the whole day playing Civilization 5 and I gotta tell you, it certainly affects how I view imperialism in the real world. I have maintained peace and happiness, accumulated a massive treasury and large quantities of cultural successes up to 2013, but I did it in a largely isolationist way, rigging the elections of every city-state on my meager borders and funneling troops to them to defend themselves. Now that I've revealed more of the map, I'm kinda freaked out. Greece and Russia are covered in fallout. Greece has no intention of stopping with Russia, and Vienna is just enabling this imbalance of power. If I don't ally with Vienna and nerf the shit out of Greece with nuclear weapons and take quite a few cities, Greece won't be satisfied until it is the only world power. It doesn't give a shit about my religion, culture, or technologies except when it sees them as military threats. Dog-eat-dog til there is one angry dog left; that's how I view the world at this moment.

Greed Corp is a game I frequently reference. I love how the mechanics express the theme so aggressively.

I think that one way to give prominence to a wider breadth of cultural values would be to provide content that is neither necessary for a victory condition, nor completely ignored for one. I mentioned the procedural music example earlier in the thread, but idiosyncratic development could be provided for architecture, literature, folklore, mannerisms. I can easily imagine myself focusing more on exploring and influencing my civilization's procedurally generated folklore than going for a Science-Victory. But maybe some odd mutation in that folklore, leads to inspiration for a new technology.

If my arguments are ever used to tell someone that they can't make a game a certain way, do me a favor and please ignore them. My view is that games with more perspectives need to be made. No individual, group, or policy will ever be able to determine which perspectives are permissible. Tolerant, intolerant, whatever, bring me more games with more perspectives. But then let me criticize them.

This is why you shouldn't (or should) read alchemical illuminated manuscripts before you go to bed.

For those of you who have a difficulty with the wroting style, I may have a solution, but I'm having a hard time linking to it. Before playing the Business Tycoon game, you should spend about 15 minutes reading some of brion gysin's cut-up poems. When I read Brion Gysin's cut-up poems such as I Am That I Am http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/2008/07/16/1960-brion-gysin-i-am-that-i-am/ it breaks my associative mind and I start reading each word without the context of the words near it. Then mere pairings become exponential potentials of meanings. In other words, it slows your reading down. No, I still haven't finished it even though the ending is supposedly really good.

I strongly recommend loading up civilization 5. The game has advisors that tell you everything you need to know in order to have a good time for your first try. There will be systems that you don't quite understand, but the basic gameplay of just picking a place to settle, using workers to upgrade your territories, scouts to explore, and choosing something to build every 10 turns or so is very pleasurable. It starts out super slow (which is good if you are new) as you build more units and cities, that's when it can get overwhelming. If you get bogged down with decisions or just overwhelmed and depressed because of your geopolitical situation, just save your game and start over. You'll be surprised how muh you learned about how to play from just trying it once. It can be a very zen-like game.

I just found out Mazzy Star is releasing a new album. Never lose Hope... Sandoval. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TxV-4h36aTU even better:

I think this really gets closer to the suggestion that the game mechanics are exclusionary. The history of technological upgrades seems to be irrelevant in the game. Maybe not though, because the build of your cities can both be reactive and speculative based on how the player views the needs of their civilization. For instance, though I may have unlocked the first four founding technologies by the time I'm considering radio (just like every other civ), I may have unlocked them in a specific order because I was dealing with an unhappy populace and a threat on my western border. And my civilization's particular history of technological upgrades had an influence on the my success in a war a century later (thereby shaping my borders and diplomic relations). So even though later technological upgrades seem to make the older ones obsolete, the choices for upgrades I'm making now are based on world conditions influenced by what I upgraded first. Still, there are opportunities for the game mechanics to make the idiosyncratic historical contexts of each civilization more prominent. Like I said, national borders and diplomatic relationships (and also religion, trade-routes and city-placement) have a reasoning influenced by your civilization's history, but I think that there are more ways to reflect it. Feature Request: How cool would it be if each civilization had procedurally generated music tracks based on its history? For example, a civilization that was founded in the marshlands or near rivers may have reed instrumentation. As its borders expand to other climate zones and as it begins to trade with other civilizations, the instrumentation could widen, but reeds should always have prominence. Musical scales could be the results of your civilizations particular needs in mathematics. The musical scales for sea-faring civilizations could be somewhat geometric whereas the musical scales for a civilization that has a comparative prioritization on trade or currency might be reflective of accumulation and equation. This way, even though complex technologies are adopted in order to remain competitive, the path and unique history of the civilization could still be reflected. Personally, I would prefer an even more simulation-dependent way to represent technology than choosing from a somewhat arbitrary upgrade-tree. Instead of choosing what to research, I'd like technologies to be discovered by what my sims prioritize and what resources and methods are available based on our national history and the player's interpretation and amendment of law. But you know, that's not going to be in Civ 6, I'll probably hav to wait til 7 I wonder if this kind of subtility would reduce the criticisms we are discussing in this thread. Or if history is just too sacred for some.

I guess the question becomes, "Is Guns, Germs and Steel a post-racial attempt to establish the inevitability of Imperial success?" Seems like Rodi has a similar view: I think that the complaint may be that the use of actual historical symbols in Civilization's procedural rhetoric has the effect of making an argument (though it seems not a very convincing one for some of us). That argument being that Imperialism is inevitable and it's just a matter of which race and culture gets there first. This argument could be seen as an attempt to reduce the accountability of the imperialists; kinda like calling foreign cultures "sore-losers".As the Poblocki essay (linked in my previous post) puts it, "That means that every Civilization, also the Iroquois, has an equal opportunity to become the United States of America, but only those who are skilled and clever enough do succeed."

I didn't play the O.G. This forum posts seems comprehensive:http://mossmouth.com/forums/index.php?topic=2585.0

I have so much American bias! That's funny. I feel like a gluttonous cowboy right now.

The Steam version is going to have daily challenge levels that are the same for everyone and you get one life. http://spelunkyworld.com/dailychallenge/ SWEET! I'm buying it for this feature. That sounds like a blast.

I just realized that nursing homes are going to turn into giant LAN parties about 30 years from now.

Minor correction: It was five bucks to upgrade. Unless there was some sort of flash sale I missed.

Excellent. She called from the hospital, but Niko didn't go visit her. When confronted, he was like "It was just one date!"

I don't think mine would live long, based on my past experience with how I park my cars at my safe-houses in the previous games. I guess I could just keep the cat indoors though. Man, that would be great if sometimes when you open those loose-hinge GTA house doors, your cat would sometimes escape and you had to try to catch it running through the streets before it got run over.

Making it and distributing it are two separate actions. My vote is for you to make it if it is cathartic, just don't publish it. Not until you are comfortable doing so anyway. Obviously, you won't be able to accurately present her side, but that's not really the point is it? Seems like you are just trying to consider what her side may be. I think the thing that pisses people off when making art about personal things that happened (well, besides a breach of privacy) is that they don't like people to assume things about them. I don't see how you can avoid assuming things about her in this scenario, but it is possible that she may at some point be willing to see this creation of yours in order to try to understand what you think she thinks. It's nice that you seem willing to be proven foolish.

Are you saying that it order for something to be art (by your definition), it has to change how art is defined? I'm not debating, I'm just trying to figure out what you are saying here.

AWESOME! I'm quite excited. I'm laughing a lot. I love it when Nick goes "Wow this is so easy" referring to finding a wife "I wish I was born in 1066." You guys are hilarious, I think that's a big part of why I enjoy watching you play.

Upgraded Civilization V to gold (including Gods&Kings) for $5. It's already paid off because it's given me an excuse to start a new game. I had played as a successful expansionist in my previous game, and my empire was starting to fall apart and I lost track of what all was going on. Starting a new game of Civilization is so relaxing and fools my brain into thinking it's being incredibly productive.

Sorry for spoilers, I'm on my phone. Don't read this. I explored everthing I think I could, unlocked the shareware. I'm at like $... I don't remember how much money. I couldn't buy anything at the oasis or jump high enough, the trash priest keeps killing me. I tried to shut down PorCorp (that was my favorite section) It's hard to say "where I am" I did try to set the difficulty to easy, but it still wouldn't let me pass the bees. I have a hard time imagining myself playing through what I already did again. It was fun, I rarely complete games.

Super enjoying this. I'm not finished, but I just had to mention my affection for this spoiler because it has relevance to the Episode 115 thread: 15 minutes later: I enjoyed what I saw, but I'm now stuck enough that I have no interest in figuring it out. I really enjoyed the Cronenberg/Cyberlust atmosphere of the video game, including it's options. It was really interesting