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These thoughts make me imagine the foreign language being used as a predictive tell in the game. For example, when a enemy is about to club you he says "I'm going to hit you with my club" or maybe friendly NPC's could do the job of describing what is about to happen in a repetitive fashion saying things like "He's going to hit you with the club!" or "She's got a knife!". If the player hears prediction of events in a foreign language repeatitively, it might teach not only the meaning of the nouns and verbs, but also subtilities like subject/object syntax.

Do you remember any break-throughs. I'm interested in finding mechanics that act as entry points for beginning to decipher an unknown language. Moments in a game that could give you the first piece of the puzzle that you can then attach more pieces to.

This has been the case for me, but I think it was necessary for me to already be obsessed with games in order for me to learn from the non-functional ones. We take so much for granted when we claim that a game isn't worth playing because it is a clone or doesn't introduce anything new. It's practically a miracle that it works at all. Playing something with unresponsive controls or that requires the player to use a walkthrough to progress can be enlightening. Along the same lines, Making a game can reveal a lot. I tried making a 2d shape jump and I spent hours trying to get it to act like Mario. Kodu is free on the PC and is built for making games through a menu system. There is a ios app called "Geovertex" that allows you to make 2d vector graphic games by making menu selections. You quickly get overwhelmed by how many logical triggers are necessary in order to have anything remotely intentional occur. It also shows me the extent to which most games are extremely similar.

Have you ever heard the quotation: "Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born."? I like that. But to entertain your fantasy: Bride of Pinbot Tetris Super Mario World Portal Minecraft.

Yeah, we've been watching Korean dramas obsessively for about a year now. That has acclimated us to some common phrases and the general tone of speech. She has taken it further by watching youtube classes. But as I'm watching her learn I'm thinking to myself "Video games could do this so much better." Seems like designers could simulate immersion and even script events to add relevance and context to new vocabulary and syntactical protocol. Still, I was just thinking that I could find some educational kids game in Korean or something more demanding (but still approacable) than subtitles on Dramafever. Haven't had much luck though. There are flash card apps, but I need something more like a dating sim where you play as a English girl who suddenly finds herself in a Korean boy band and has to improvise.

That's interesting. I have never thought about demand for luxury goods raising the prices of mid-tier goods. It makes sense though, that a speculative market could attract labor away from a stable market.

Is it that you want the upgrades to have significant impact on gameplay? Instead of choosing between an ice-damage spell and a fire-damage spell, you want run really fast or see through walls?

I don't understand how the race for straw was messing up the rest of the economy. Was it the equivalent of the entire world population giving up farming food in order to collect Beanie Babies? Could an individual provide for themselves if they weren't camel-crazy? It sounds like it would have been fun to witness. Sounds tedious though.

Did it give you any insights into civilization that you would like to share?

As far as game mechanics go, I believe that: You solve puzzles. You beat opponents. You achieve highscores. Games with violent themes can be played in any of these ways. And there are tons of games with violent themes and tons without. By "tons" I mean "multitudes of games in the amounts of two-thousand pounds." But your question makes me think of games where it feels like I am solving an opponent like a puzzle. "Think Like A Shrink" is an interesting example of this, where the opponent is actually imprisoned by their own psychological defenses. Your job is to remove those defenses by identifying their type. It is still a domination-fantasy, but every puzzle game is. I think the vibe of separating the behaviors from the person is so interesting in a game. I also like the idea of getting non-player characters to open up to you. Bioware does this sloppily, but I appreciate that they are trying.

That is awesome. This did not happen to me, I'm not as observant as you, I just got a citation.

I don't know why I don't know why, but that makes it so much better for me.

Are they really procedural?

It was easy to be nice once my family was dead. Awesome game, I was surprised that is was so fun. I'm hoping the final version allows more clarity on the fingerprint system. I had a situation where the finger prints didn't match and i couldn't figure out how to highlight the discrepency. Also, I broke a rule and the next day's paper didn't reflect it well. That could have been an intentional demonstration of my futility, but I'm not sure. I think the fact that it is a beta leans me towards thinking it's an unfinished thread rather than an intentional statement. Man alive this game is a gem. I just want to play more. Such a great example of what games can do.

Is that what your friend was saying? For the record, you cracked me up.

I'd want to play an Oculus Rift game made for ASMR for the same reason ai enjoy the youtube videos. I'm fascinated by media created for people with different perceptions than mine. I guess I figure that I'm expanding my own perceptional abilities by exposing myself to media which is tailored for something I can't sense. I have no evidence for this. My incentive is dependent on my personal fantasy that it'll have an effect.

I'm not susceptible to ASMR. I just recently found out about it from episode #491 of This American Life. Last night I watched a bunch of ASMR videos out of curiousity. It probably helped that I have a thing for well done slow films like the work of Agnes Varda. Anyway, when the lady started brushing my non-existent hair (assumably a wig set atop a 3D microphone), it was akwardly intense. When someone tries to persuade me to relax, I become very anxious. I have an intense fear that someone is going to be hurt while I am not paying attention; while I am relaxing. I was able to slip through the hair brushing, but I thought to myself "I don't know if I could do this is if I was in an Oculus Rift."

Wouldn't it be interesting if the ASMR community got interested in the Oculus Rift?

Y'all could just collaborate online in the meantime. I'm sure you have a list of ideas, I would think that one idea from the list would match someone else's. You might not make money from it, but it'll give you the sense that you are doing more than working a job and feeding yourself.

Today I'm especially interested in games that demonstrate the competitive benefits of having a social welfare system or a higher standard of living for laborers. I would prefer the game to express this through interacting systems of low-level simulations. Arbitrary bonuses that are assigned to ideologies like those in Civilization 5 aren't very convincing to me. I'm hoping that a game can show me how raising the living standard of the most impoverished can provide a competitive edge, regardless of morality or compassion.

In reference to my original post which was asking for economic systems in games that provide alternatives to capitalism: As I'm looking into this stuff more, I'm realizing that most city simulations and time management games demonstrate an alternative to capitalism. Most of these games are based on the idea that the player is the deciding method of a planned economy. In a capitalist economy, the different exchange values decide where to allocate labor using price. Capitalist economies are also known for their tendency to encourage producers to make things in order to exchange them, rather than to use them. In a planned economy, an organized body (like a government) decides what needs to be produced. It's assumed that the planned economy would decide what to produced based on what it can use or needs. Most of the single-player city management games I've played resemble a planned economy. I am deciding what should be produced for my own use. Even Command and Conquer is this way; I'm deciding which combat units to produce in order to defend or attack. Games with capitalist economies like Chicago Express a.k.a. Wabash Cannonball and Settlers of Catan don't assign values to the commodities which you can produce (shares in Chicago Express; wheat, wool, lumber, brick, and rock in Settlers of Catan). The values are determined by exchange with other players. Though you do produce some commodities for your own use in those games, the reason I think they feel fresh is because of the trading aspect. I have often raised my brick output not for my own use, but because I think I can get a large quantity of commodities in exchange.

I can accept the way it is as something I have to work with, but I'm too busy redesigning the game One thing I had never thought of before is that an advantage of boardgames versus computer games is that you can make house rules. I'll just have to change the narrative to fit the win conditions. We only have a month to raise enough money to save the community center from the other capitalists who will turn it into a shopping mall if they have more cash by then. No, they said it was going to be a shopping mall, but now we've been a thorn in their side so they will turn it into a parking lot in spite.

Chicago Express a.k.a. "Wabash Cannonball" is killing me with the game ending too soon. Right when I manage to position myself perfectly to turn my would be competitors into soon to be paupers, the game ends. It drives me crazy. I want to watch the bots drop out one by one. I get the concept that eventually the established income will accumate enough capital to make one player's interest unstoppable, but not by turn 8. This was obviously developed as a board game that can be played in an hour, but the developer of the iphone version should consider the option to turn the end game switch off. That way I can expend all the resources of a railroad I own a small amount of shares in. That method of reducing a competing investor's buying power isn't effective when I only have 8 turns to do it. There are other disingenuities I can't fully explore because of this crazy turn limit.

I found Chicago Express for ios and it's even got A.I.: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wabash-cannonball/id392800625?mt=8 I've only played one game, but this is exactly the type of thing I was looking for. Even though I didn't know what I was doing, I was still completely baffled when another player bought shares in what I had considered "MY RAILROAD" and started expanding it with their own money. As the game progressed, I had to change my mindset from owning a company to having vested interests in multiple competing companies. This game is not a demonstration of an alternative to capitalism, but it is a new way for me to think about capitalism. It's exactly what I needed to complement my casual research. I suspect that this game's mechanics will give me an operable understanding of concepts such as price versus value, the equalization of profit, and how surplus value accumulates within the capitalist class. I'm just starting to be introduced to these concepts, so I don't really know what they mean, but I'm hoping this game and others like it can allow me to apply the terms for a more describable understanding. Plus it's pretty fun and only a dollar

That is such an awesome idea.