clyde

My Nvidia 460se is crashing lately and informing me that a kernel mode crashed (whatever that is). I'm assuming that it's on its way out and the lack of an announcement of required specs for the oculus rift has got me nervous that I may end up in videocard limbo. I'll keep treating it as a software problem that I can't seem to solve and hopefully that denial will hold me off until a possible e3 announcement.

This was a neat article. I enjoy the idea that creating an automated narrative requires modularized memories that can be abstracted from their narrative context creating a story that resembles dream-logic. It makes me think that the way our minds put events together necessitates a lot of strange side-effects when the tools our minds use (space, anthropomorphic actors, and chronology) are applied to symbols and then rearranged for unusual purposes. I think surrealists are very much interested in these tendencies. I'd consider myself a surrealist. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- With Pamela Adventures In Dreamland we get another examination of how weird dream-mechanics are. The author seems to be fascinated by how events in the physical world can affect the contents, or possibly the emotion of a dream-state while the dreamer remains unaware that they are observing a hallucination. The visual set-up is rather expressive in itself and inspires a lot of neat potential; having half of the screen depict the dream and the other half that of the physical state of the dreamer is a fantastical premise that I find myself excited by as a player. At first it wasn't apparent to me that the spider would only affect the dreamer in the physical world because it had not be established that the spider was physical itself. And once that did become apparent with some playful poking, I experimented to find out if the spider-body existed in both the physical world and in the dream-world. Having a narrative occur in one space that you can only affect in another tends to be intriguing for me. I'm attracted to remote robotics that send back a camera-feed, magical effigy fantasies, and computer-games with player-controlled avatars. The spacial lay-out in Pamela Adventures In Dreamland inspires play in me. The subject matter is also something I have been experimental with throughout my life. My first memory of this type of thing was my older sister claiming that by resting a sleeper's hand in warm water (assumably without their consent), they would likely wet the bed. This claim really opened up a lot of questions for me. First of all, the idea that we require a restful, unconscious state on the regular is pretty weird especially for those of us who strongly identify with our conscious state. Then the possibility that a non-conscious awareness (still assumably us to some extent) makes decisions and wanders around an environment and logic composed entirely of its own priorities, heaviliy influenced and borrowed from the experiences of our conscious-selves, is just wacky and a bit concerning. The suggestion that we could poke at a sleeper to get any sort of feedback that would imply a real-time bridge between these two worlds which want to ignore each other tickles a deep urge for mischieviousness in me. And here we have a game that appeals to that very fantasy. Some things I wanted to mention: -When Pamela finds DVDs that she has been trying to find for a long time and she mentions that she feels a lot of success, I'm reminded of some of the dreams I had when I was collecting comic-books in waking life, or the period of my life where I spent a lot of energy aquiring Smashing Pumpkins bootlegs. I really enjoyed the feeling I had in those dreams being part of this narrative, I don't know that I've ever considered that type of dream as a thing; now I do. -The change between controlling the spider in the physical world to controlling an avatar inside of the dream which the spider was affecting was interesting to me. The severity of the physical-world/dream-world framework is established by relying on the way players prioritize the tools and contexts of the elements over which they have agency. Then when I am hanging with Wuffles, I'm reminded of that severity and now I'm in a position of suffering from that severity, no longer in control of it. I thought that was interesting in a game that I didn't really find scary, moralistic, or intense. -Another thing about the Wuffles scene I enjoyed was that the nightmare scenario is triggered by the protagonist recognizing the non-sequitur aspect of what was going on.

I expect that my first VR experience will be paying $10 for 15 minutes to some dude in the middle of the shopping-mall.

Hmm. Now that you mention it, players would probably be giving off body-heat that could be used to subsidize the electricity required to power these devices. Maybe the sensory-deprevation tank/VR system could harness that power to eventually reproduce and create robotic entities that can forcibily reintroduce VR to those who accidentally fall out of the experience.

Office Depot ate Office Max and now Staples is eating Office Depot. When I heard the news, I immediately visualized that all of this was taking place on Mars.

Imagine playing an RPG and finding out many hours into the game that you have been getting paid less for finishing quests because you choose a non-white and/or non-male character.

[accidental double-post]

Ben Esposito's GDC presentation has brought this issue up in various comment-sections and I found another essay that is helpful.

I don't know the specifics of that situation, but it reminds me of the confusion I and others face regarding increasing diverse representation versus cultural appropriation. We had a nice little talk over in the Game Development thread but this tweet (and the first comment to it) reminded me of it yesterday. https://twitter.com/sererena/status/572851759770574848 In the Game Development thread, the conclusion that folks helped me come to was to just go ahead and try to increase representation of diversity in my games and commit to making corrections when I inevitably fuck up. https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/9864-representation-of-minorities-in-your-game-when-you-arent-a-minority/

This is already the case. But it is getting harder and harder to jack-out.

what about the tear-drinking?

I value this community. Thanks for being here y'all.

I'd have coffee with Wardell if he was paying, but I don't know what the point of announcing a truce would be. As far as citing business reasons, I eat meals with racists on Christmas so I can identify. I'm not saying that Wardell is racist by the way, I'm saying that racism is endemic in my family and that I struggle being near them, but still end up doing it for whatever reasons. Twitter politics are weird and honestly it's none of my business. The whole thing is weird. Poor everybody.

Last night David Grenzowski @david_is_neato was streaming work in the Unity editor while doing some creative djing. It was 3/4 silent tutorial and 1/4 performance art. Grenzowski seems to have built up a toolset of scenes and scripts that he can pull into the editor to when it will complement a song or vice-versa. It was really interesting seeing the Unity editor used in this way. Creating environments from primitives, particle-systems and lights can have a similar feel as that sand-painting projection thing, or just watching someone paint. But when Grenzowski starts using the dollar-sign for a particle-sprite and searching through their audio library for the best "money. money, money" sample in their collection, and when there is no intention to actually use this is a resulting game, I feel like I'm watching expression.

I was trying to redownload Surviving Highschool after the visual-novel conversation above and I discovered that EA removed it from the servers in September. What a bummer. I don't think I ever backed it up.

I did a single play-through of Hatoful Boyfriend and enjoyed it enough (always waiting for it to get interesting) until it basically said "Your ending is not optimal and you are now dead." I don't like the formula where you have to specialize in a specific romance-option and look at walk-throughs to get all the endings. I want VNs to provide me with a choose-your-own-adventure where I meander through a spectrum of relationships. Obviously I am often disappointed by them. I really don't understand how it has gotten so much attention.

If I can't play non-steam games on this thing then it is useless to me. Oculus has announced Unity-Free support so hopefully Vive will too.

For the week of March 2nd, 2015 we will be playing: Pamela's Adventures in DreamLand by thecatamites You can play the game in your browser here. You can download the single game from here for free Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here.

So I enjoyed researching Daniil Kharms (and by association Alexander Pushkin) for the intentional purpose of letting those subjects color my perspective on playing Maskin Sees It Through. I find myself making a lot of connections, but none of them are foundational premises for any sort of argument so I don't really want to focus on extrapolating about them as I provide my impressions for this particular game. At the same time, the decision to expose myself to these subjects for a few hours was really rewarding in the context of how it affected my play-through so I want kinda summarize some points from the psuedo-research. -The notes that come with 50 Short Games mentions that "The prose is a kind of pastiche of some of Daniil Kharm's writing although not nearly as good" -One of Kharms's stories is titled Anecdotes from the life of Pushkin -Articles about both Daniil Kharms and Alexander Pushkin include tales of state-persecution of writers. Interestingly, Pushkin was apparently actually writing politically charged stuff (though later it seems that his complicity was determined by revolutionaries having his poems on them) while Kharms was just writing weird stories for children. -Historical accounts of Pushkin make him into a bit of a byronic hero; he was in 29 duels and seems to have been considered as some sort of lovable enemy of the State. -The stories of Daniil Kharms often have a condescending narrator voice from which a lot of the humor comes. Again, I don't want to focus too much on corroborating this material with Mashkin Sees It Through, but it's great supplemental reading for consideration. --------------------------------------------------- I love the voice of the narrator. They seem to be in a situation where they are obligated to provide choices, but they resent having to do so. Most of the choices feel more like pledges of faith in the narrator, or traps that put the reader in a position of foolishness so that the authority of the narrator can be re-established. I feel like Fred Savage as Peter Falk reads to me. This voice evolves into a homogenous historical canon of events which is interesting to me especially as Mashkin's character becomes larger than life. It's with this authority that Mashkin is presented to me as some sort of master pensman in the advent of gunpowder. But at the same time, the narrator's tactics seem to show a lack of confidence that makes me doubt the entire idea that Mashkin was influential at all. I end up in this odd depiction of a world where a writer busts into a conference on horse-back and slaughters those in power gleefully and righteously from the voice of a narrator who seems too gain authority from the historical character's cult of personality. It's pretty cool really. I feel that the dramatic stakes of the story are sincerely felt (by the narrator in a fictional world) though not necessarily realistic; this is largely due to reading about the lives of Alexander Pushkin and Daniil Kharms so it's a weird hybrid of actual historical events and the historical events of a fictional world from the perspective of an unreliable fictional character. It's complex. I may be completely wrong about this, but I don't think this complexity was premeditated, I think it's a result of freely moving between history, imagination, summation of actual voices, and whimsical divergence from any of these. That has fascinating implications to me. I see it as being more constrained than absurdism or surrealism, but evokative on all the described literary planes.

The way I see this is as a channeling of Daniil Kharms's peculiar narration-voice into an interactive text. Kharms has a way of making you feel foolish for listening to his story while putting the shame on the reader rather than self-deprecating, as exemplified by this micro-fiction. The way Maskin Sees It Through chastises the reader for making a choice implying that it is such an absurd choice that no one could possibly chose it in good faith seems like a similar voice to me. There is a really great instance of this that I didn't get in my first play-through by chosing - It's obvious! (this is you speaking) Mashkin took his case to the police. the role of the player and the narrator is completely inverted for multiple pages for the purpose of letting the player dig a deeper hole for themselves so that the narrator can then say "Well now that you have told your story, we can return to to one I was telling in the first place." This authority which offers you choice just so it can patronize you for daring to consider something vaguely different than full faith in the inevitability of the narrator's version of events, is also expressed with the rescue by helicopter. Kharms doesn't have the option to provide actual written multiple-choice events, but he has a technique that I think is similar where he leads the reader into being desensitized from wackiness, violence, or nudity by continuing on without comment after listing it in a series of events only to seemingly bring up a polite concern in order to embarrass ourselves for not having that reaction on our own (because that reaction has been disassociated from their typical triggers by lacking any comment and getting us to expect the described situation to perpetually exacerbate). I think this story is a good example of the technique I describe. I know it's a pretty loose comparison, but it has a big effect on how I read Mashkin Sees It Through. I wonder if this page is a reference to that technique. Though the fight scene was just choosing a few sound-bites from a clownish brawl, I think of it as being an attempt to put us in a comedic scene similar to this Daniil Kharms story.

The Idle Thumbs' game dev forums are an awesome resource especially for the type of feedback you are describing (and Unity troubleshooting). The reason I recommend Glorious Trainwrecks is because when I was trying to move from a playable mechanic like this to more of a complete-feeling experience like this, I struggled a lot. The reason I was struggling so much in retrospect is that I had no internalized understanding of scope when making games. I didn't understand what modularization was or why it was needed, so I was constantly making a single mechanic with lots of hopes about the world that I would eventually fill in around it. Doing it this way I kept getting overwhelmed by how much work it actually was to "fill in" the rest of the game. Glorious Trainwrecks has regular, extremely casual, game jams; ihavefivehat (a thumbs member) actually just hosted one throughout all of February. Once I started playing the games coming out of that community and participating in the monthly 2-hour game-jam, I started to finally get a sense of how to conceptualize a game that would take 2 hours, 2 days, 2 weeks, or 2 months. Your process may not be similar to my own, but when I finish any game (regardless of its scope) I can feel how much my game-making skills have improved. Then I can apply them to the next game. I get much faster with every game I make and so my capacity for larger scope is increasing every time I finish a game. I think the reason for this is that because development is so incredibly complex in it's amount of parts, it's really hard for me to remember how to do everything that is involved. For instance I'll forget how to turn an audio file into a 2d audio file in Unity because I haven't done it in so long. But once I made a bunch of small-scope, complete experiences, I gained a familiarity with each step of the minimal work-flow and then I could add in a sprinkle of learning how to do something new every time. I don't know why I keep assuming that this is your first game though, but even if it's not maybe it will help a lurker. What engine are you using?

Personally, I don't have any interest in hearing about a game unless there is something (anything) playable. Of course, if a developer needs help figuring something out, that's a different situation. But it is not always about me (I know right?) If you want to start a development blog to get yourself to commit to the project more, then put something up where there are people you don't want to disappoint. This can sometimes backfire. I can't remember what your game-dev history is, but if you haven't published a playable anything before I strongly recommend starting a Glorious Trainwrecks account and putting your dev-log there. That community is so good at lowering the barrier of entry and the scope of expectation. I don't know if I would have ever gotten over that initial hump without them. I'm not really sure what your reasons are for being cagey, so it's hard to give you solid answers.

Just in case anyone plays with the idea that "To Eat Hen Young" is an anagram, I did a little bit of research on it and I'm never going to consider anagrams as potentially applicable to interpretation again. In the notes that you get if you buy 50 Short Games, thecatamites mentions that Daniil Kharms is an influence for Maskin See It Through. Reading some of his micro-fiction and seeing the voice he tends to use greatly increases my appreciation of this game.

I found this, but I'm not sure if it would still be helpful (or if it would ever be helpful, I don't know what MBMBAM is or what your involvement was with it).https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6493736 -------- I'm tempted to use Amazon S3 because I can't imagine our podcast getting very popular. I have no idea how many people are listening to it, but I would guess it's around 5-10. I'm reading some of the tutorials about how to set up a podcast through Amazon S3. I'm guessing that it will just take me a while to figure it out for the first couple of episodes then it will be cheap and easy unless someone famous mentions us. Plus since they host anything and it's scalable, this might be a service I end up using later on for whatever my next hobby is.