clyde

Creamerz feels like an off-brand version of an American Greetings property (Strawberry Shortcake and the Care Bears were created by a greeting card company). But while those narratives include personified opposition that positivity can conquer, Creamerz shows us a saccharine, intentional optimism with no explicit opposition which leads us to assume that the optimism itself may be a flaw. Self-care seems like a low priority in the beach-scene where the creamerz is melting away. It's possible that the dogmatic positive-thinking is blinding the sweet treats from their actual needs of survival. And once I see this, it occurs to me that maybe Dipped In Chocolate isn't actually shy, that's just the protagonists rose-colored version of getting a cold. shoulder. The reasons for non-interaction with the other creamerz in the downtown-scene is possibly an excuse to escape the hurtful realization of the protagonist's inability to socialize with them. Throughout the game I sense that whether or not the reality of the situation is non-ideal, the hopeful thinking distorts the protagonist's perception enough to maintain their isolation and non-interaction. There is the exception of the friend at the store who in encouraging this attitude.

I feel like asking why, but figure that I would have to play through again to ask with any sincerity.

I'm going to make a bad recommendation, Mount & Blade Warband. You start out as a single person with some weapon training but you can do work for various people in the world. As you earn money from those jobs (and from selling clothes from looters or buying low and selling high), you can hire farmers and mercenaries to create a gang. Eventuallly you will want to affiliate yourself with a nation after doing some missions for their generals. After that, if you do well, they will give you some land and maybe even a castle. You may find yourself leading the nations army and I've heard that you can eventually become the king of that nation and take over the whole map. It's very combat focused, but I think the combat is fun. Also, once you use a game-system once or twice, they can feel very repeatitive. This is probably not the game you are looking for, but your description reminded me of it.

I really enjoyed Horse Mastery the game of horse mastery http://noncanon.com/HorseMaster.html I haven't played it looking for questionable material though. It's got a Philip K. Dick vibe, but from what I remember, all the crime and drug use instances are reflective of the culture rather than glorified. The narrative is one I would love to discuss with middle-school kids; there are lots of relevant themes. Like I said though, it's been a while; there might be some questionable stuff that's not accepted as distopia.

I suspect that a big reason they hold those negative views are because they are frequently expressed in order to establish and maintain solidarity with their peers. I had a conversation with a co-worker the other day where he expressed some doubts about his racism being worthwhile. I can pretty much guarantee you that if I had said "Yeah, but you know how they are..." rather than being discouraging of the racism he was questioning, then he would have joined in for some casual white-supremacy talk. And that's how it is in a lot of work environments, the groups in power at many of the hierarchal levels (because whether or not the other guys in the warehouse think you are one of them is more important than if your boss does) express the views of white-supremacy for a sense of solidarity. I'm sure that me being a heterosexual white male makes it so that I'm more exposed to this racist chatter than others, but I have been in probably around 20-30 occupations in Virginia, Louisiana, Georgia, and Hawaii and the only jobs where I haven't seen this be the case were the ones where I worked alone, and the one where the majority of people working was non-white. My point is that these stupid-jokes and one-offs are part of a communal appreciation of white-supremacy. How weird is it that it takes courage in pretty much every workplace I've been in to point out an offensive joke and try to explain how it creates an uncomfortable environment for people who aren't white, heterosexual men?It should take more courage to make the joke in the first place! As far as harassment against Sacco goes, threats of violence and being excited that she's suffering are despicable, but firing her and threatening to strike rather than serve her seems like reasonable responses to me. I'm not trying to ignore the scale of attention she was receiving for her one tweet, I just don't know how to respond to it. I have no doubt that some of the individuals who were dog-piling on her Twitter-account ignored some racist, ableist offense that they witnessed in their physical space that same day (because it wasn't viewed as the group activity like the anti-Sacco campaign on Twitter was). I don't know what to do about it. But Ronson's examples are all of people being douche-bags. If Ronson wanted this article to be about online mobbing than he should have included an account of someone like Suey Park so that I wouldn't get confused about his motives.

Thank you. I talk big, but after hours of play-time, I still don't know how to win. This may help.

It frees up the position for someone who has tact. It also gives casual white-supremacy some punitive consequence. Which may influence the corporate culture she left behind. Maybe it will influence some of the public relations workers that read Jon Ronson's article. I agree that it is a systemic problem, but maybe white-supremacy doesn't just hurt non-whites.

Game is hard. To be honest, I think this is just the nature of something that innovates as much as OffWorld does. I'm not suggesting that they shouldn't try to communicate successful strategies and priorities to new players, but there is a lot to think differently about.

I agree. Maybe if the content of her tweet was enough to get her fired, then there wouldn't be as much of this loud, violent reaction. Hopefully they hired someone with a chronic disease to fill her role.

If my public relations employee fails to understand how tweeting that she is not afraid of getting AIDS because she is white might not be taken as satire, then she lacks the skills necessary for the job.

We just released episode 4 of the Short Free Games Talk podcast.

Just finished Vagabond and it manages to do this largely because you are given the impression that the person with whom they encounter coincidence is significantly noticeable with the size of the community in which she wanders. It is by.... Agnes Varda. I'm starting to think that Agnes Varda is the person you want to look at for this query.

So has anything been announced about what type of attention NBN is going to get? Anyone think that they might add a new runner faction to pair with it in a large expansion? I suppose it's way more likely they'll add some cards to all three runner factions with an NBN big box.

Carte by Barnaque I'm a fan of Barnaque's work, but I hadn't played this one until I happened upon it this morning. It was its' compatibility with ShareCart1000 that peaked my interest. Barnaque tends to make brutally difficult collision avoidance games that are populated with sharp, flat assymetrical abstract sprites. I typically enjoy the abstract sprites more than meeting the requirements of dexterity. But I gave it a little time and I didn't die immediately. Suddenly, the game began to unfold into an exploratory puzzle-game. An hour later I finished it and I'm just struck by how this game managed to engage me.

Lots of images are available from The Getty's open content program. http://bit.ly/GettyOpen Here is the page explaning that you don't need permission and how they'd appreciate a copy (of scholarly papers, but whatever, I'll send them my game too). http://www.getty.edu/about/opencontent.html

For the week of February 9th, 2015 we will be playing: Creamerz 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.

I love Super Monday Night Combat. I'm trying to get a group together to play it every once in a while. Like many other games, it is best when played with groups that you know from somewhere that is not the game. The good news is that it is FREE! It costs nothing to play, but I think you do have to register a free account with Uber. I have captured a video of my trying to play and explain the basics of what you are supposed to be trying to do in the game. You don't have to watch the entire thing in order to pick up the basic idea. Ideally, we can get 6 or more people to show up. A three on three game with y'all would be fun. A five on five game would be heaven. If we can only get 3-5 people, then what we could do is form a team and the go in and laugh as we are slaughtered by people who play a lot of the game. I'm not making this sound all that great, am I? I guess I'm testing the waters here. Is anyone interested in playing this together? If so, what would be a good time and day to do so? After 7 P.M.EST is necessary for me. Gosh it would be so much fun to discover this game with friendly people who just want to have a good time. The characters are fun to use and when you win it's amazing, when you lose it's awful.

SecretAsianMan and I played a public match of Turbocross on separate teams. I couldn't figure out how to put us on the same team (and we suspect that that may be an intentional design-decision of the game). BUT since there are only two teams, hypothetically we could go into public games of Turbocross if we had 4 people and I would have a pretty good chance of being on the same team with someone I'm chatting with which would greatly increase my enjoyment of the game. I'm still interested in a league. And of course a 3v3, 4v4, or 5v5 match between thumbs would be much more satisfying. It was also interesting to find out that I knowledge of a game I've played for hundreds of hours has massive holes in it. SecretAsianMan was asking me about all sorts of stuff and I was like "I don't know, I've never actually thought about it or figured it out." My best guess for why Megabeth has her spinning rainbow attack was that it looks pretty.

This is a helpful perspective for a conversation I've been having with my wife about some of these objective-lacking games. She loved Wilbler Park but didn't feel engaged with No Fun House (with the exception of finding prompts to other areas). Your comment suggests that she may have similar methods of engagement. In Wilbler Park you quickly go from one area into another through portals and all the scenes feel like individual segments with beginnings and ends. In No Fun House the player wanders through a labryinth, finds one of three types of portals that take you to one of three places and then spits you back to the beginning of the hub world. Once the prompts started repeating, she had no interest in playing more. In contrast, I'll just walk around a scene looking at all the paintings and trying to figure out why the game exists.

Roomba attempts to eat sleeping person. http://www.dailydot.com/technology/robot-vacuum-attack/?tw=dd

Way To Go was a neat, pleasant, surprising experience. The first screen seems to be an intereactive loading screen, so the real stuff doesn't start until that number reaches 100. via Warpdoor

I wish TurboCross was on top. I think it's natural for people to choose the mode on top first and that is not where new players should be going. Waiting 10+ minutes for a game, getting out-levelled and told to leave because you are feeding is Supercross. Turbocross can still be kinda rude, but it is comparatively far more accessible if only because it puts you in a match pretty much immediately.

I played another game and felt bad because I was way better than everyone on both teams. That is not common for me at all. I never see this many new players at the same time. I don't know why there seems to be an influx of new players this weekend, but it seems super unusual to me. I know I keep repeating that, but.... I guess I'm trying to accept that it's happening. Who knows what it will be like next weekend, or tommorow I suppose. Oh man it would be so nice if the population of the game increased. Then new players could stand up for a second before being held down and smacked repeatitively for 15 minutes.

I just played again this morning and the matches had two very good players on each team and 3 new people on each side. That may not sound all to peculiar or amazing, but it isn't usually like this. Usually the teams are either very unbalanced or it's all advanced players with tons of endorsements (which are overpowered buffs that players earn by playing many games, they do a good job of trying to ruin the game). I don't know why I'm getting into matches with lots of new people this weekend, but it seems to be happening. No idea why, I hope it continues. SMNC needs new players so badly.

YAY! Congrats Dinosaursssssss!!