Blambo

Sorry but the abbreviation gater is really funny to me because of the image of a bunch of alligators typing angrily with stubby arms and lying in bogs waiting for conspiracy material to snatch up. Ignore me.

guys is there a thread making fun of VR stuff if not: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/768618350/airvr-virtual-reality-for-ios

Ah right, thanks. It was cool to see a weird reincarnation of that perception.

Chris used the same terms to describe some indie studio as he did valve two years ago, and I'm too sleepy to remember or relisten to the episode. It was something along the lines of "studio x is a stoic face that pumps out good games forever" or something.

interrr,,,net

I feel like Moby Dick had been completely and forever ruined for me. I knew the ending beforehand, I had a light grasp of the themes involved, and all that was left was seeing how the little details fit everything. The specter of my prior knowledge even retconned a lot of the emotional experience I had while reading it.

It doesn't even come with Rocky?!

I'm having this conversation with a gamergater (a rare species of alligator) who is insisting that feminists are shaming artists into making PC art and considers it systemic cultural oppression, but at the same time doesn't recognize the actual systemic cultural oppression in art. It's really disorienting.

Buh I didn't mean for what I said to come out as weirdly elitist and pedantic. Fiction being purely storytelling isn't a waste. Exploring form is just as important as exploring purpose, its just that having both makes a Cooler Thing.

Isn't that a personal, subjective thing though? For people who can easily parse abstract ideas, nonfiction might be better at conveying stuff while for others relating and extrapolating concepts from concrete plots might be easier. It's just that fiction focusing on form (storytelling) rather than purpose is kind of a waste, because it could be about so much more.

Or a completely flaccid cultural revolution.

This is the best joke I've heard all year

If you were a content creator, how would you deal with allowing things like this in culture and fostering a respect for the difference between fantasy and reality? I would assume most sexually themed games centered on rape play out in a realistic setting with realistic situations, since the fantasy/kink element of it comes from not being able to do things like this in life.I guess this is kind of similar to the problem with violence in media, but I've always had this feeling that there's a stronger culture normalizing rape and suspending empathy in it than there is in like, killing.

He looks more like Sartre with two straight eyes and a lower nerd factor.

I always imagined him to be the frail pale he is. Although he's the one I would most expect to call everyone a nerd and preorder nba 2k15.

What the hell? That's some in depth shit. I wonder if lawyers can represent a txt file of ip addresses.

Pretty much, though their intent when saying this is probably more along the lines of "we don't like the smaller engine" vs "we don't like the baby seat". It's still a garbage metaphor because it's saying that suddenly the press has made it so you can't play different games, then leveraged this lack of choice and pinned a social agenda to it. They're saying "you hijacked our games and made them into stuff we don't like, then turned us into the enemy". Stupid, myopic, and shitty.

yas

Yeah it seems like the IGF started as a suitable replacement for the lack of academic grants and public support, since it's focused on innovation and advancement. It has an image of being super messy now because it's suddenly become a big part the industry through sheer attention and the judges are often active members of the industry themselves, though I still feel that the more pressing issue is the fact that it kind of is the biggest and sometimes sole voice for "what's in". That said there are plenty of examples where the IGF results were descriptive of an existing zeitgeist and didn't seem to sway anything one way or another, so its role in the industry seems a lot less clear than we're making it out to be. I'd want to do a study comparing the academic character of games with that of film or the arts. EDIT RE systemic corruption: the thing is the source of this kind of herd behavior is really decentralized and is indistibguishable from normal people choosing what they like the most in good faith. A centralized culture certainly seems to enable it but then it just seems like it's pointless to try to fix it at its core, which is human nature.

Indiefund has a hard cap on the ROI it receives from investments, the IGF definitely doesn't force judges to only play their assigned games, a possible 8 person bias doesn't immediately turn the tide of judging, the judging process is decently decentralized and the organization encourages judges with links to the games they judge to shy away. Not a lawyer, but I'm not sure if any of those things constitute racketeering, and if it does, the combination of all of that stuff seems to point to it all being a consequence of the industry being really small (and pretty imbalanced), plus the honest effort of people trying to promote a game that they think deserves it. It's not symptomatic of corruption but it touches on something that's been said to death about the indie scene as an industry player: it's super small, super nascent, is individual focused and thus has a tendency to popularize solitary voices, yadda yadda yadda. I recognize these as actual problems but they're not worth the directed, hateful ire at the fortunate or assuming that there's a conspiracy behind everything. It's probably much better to focus on alternative voices and underground scenes and foster a culture of inclusiveness through diversity of taste and opinion in media. The power structure that exists exists as a natural consequence of weird tribal tendencies and curation, rather than through authoritarian enforcement. The indie scene has always fostered a very inclusive, diy culture. I like to imagine gamergate people as Captain Ahab projecting intent onto the great white whale; it exists and its a potential problem but Jesus christ it's not out to get you. Anyway does anyone have any links to constructive discussion about how the IGF is structured and how it could be improved? EDIT: This last week weirded me out because I felt really compelled to make certain arguments in bad faith. I don't think I would've said that capitalism is a truly equalizing force if I wasn't so pissed about the whole situation to begin with. The conversation was started in bad faith so everything after it feels kind of illegitimate.

:I

EDIT: Dammit I got ninja'd. I think you want a vector projection, though this is completely overkill because all you want is the x component of the vector. With this you can find the component along any direction in any dimension. Assuming your velocity is a vector quantity that can be expressed as a linear combination including what you want to project it on, you can find its projection along the vector you want by multiplying the scalar projection: by the unit vector (of your projecting vector): Where a(vector) is the direction you want to project onto and b(vector) is the direction you want to project. (images stolen from http://www.math.oregonstate.edu/home/programs/undergrad/CalculusQuestStudyGuides/vcalc/dotprod/dotprod.html) So here your velocity vector is (1,1) and the vector you want to project onto is (1,0), then your scalar projection is You end up with 1, as you might expect. This method should work with any projection p and any vector v. It's just that if you're using x or y as your projection and you have the vector quantity of your velocity, you can just take the x or y spot in the vector and that's the projection. ...I hope I did that right.

http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2014/09/on-gamers-and-identity.html http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2014_08_01_archive.html These are cool articles. I feel like removing yourself from the disgustingness and vitriol and focusing on the origin of the hate is important (though I don't mean to justify any of it). These articles focus on cultural miscommunication and the apparently insular nature of the perceived indie scene and how that image propagates. This seems to mirror the sentiment that Sean talked about in last week's episode, of being an outsider looking in, and the inevitable split between joining and becoming what you see as "something else" and rejecting it.

The hammyness, vagueness, and sense of tokenism of that tweet makes me feel like the writing will be the same.

Everything aside I'm happy to have my artwork be seen by new hundreds of asshole conspiracy theorists online.