Kadayi
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Posts posted by Kadayi
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Listened to the podcast. GJ as usual. However, you guys seemed to get a little fuzzy with the whole Tulpa thing, and specifically Dougie.
We only ever witnessed the Tulpa Dougie in episode 3 when he was talking to Jade before being drawn into the Red Room, and then self-destructing in front of Mike. Good Cooper was never Dougie, he was just simply not fully there, which conveniently fit with certain sporadic aspects of Tulpa Dougie, which is why Janey-E, Bushnell etc presumed and accepted he was Dougie, just having an extended moment, a consequence of a car crash he was involved in at some point in his life (based on what was said). However, albeit we only saw him briefly it's clear that Tulpa Dougie despite being a bad seed created and drawn from Evil Cooper (prostitutes and formidable debt) was capable of driving (his car was the one that got blown up by the hitmen) as well as being able to hold down a job at the Insurance company. Any and all commentary by Sonny-Jim seems to relate to the Dougie he's known latterly.
A Tulpa drawn from Good Cooper is likely going to be a perfectly functional replicant which encapsulates much of Cooper's resoluteness. Neither Janey-E or Sonny Jim are going to be getting shortchanged.
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14 hours ago, Jake said:There's bewilderment because we are human beings, an emotional species that finds comfort in expectation and is confused or anxious when they are defied. It's cool to be a bastion of rationality and say "David Lynch said its structure is unusual," and end the story there, but that 1) is a more unique reaction than you may think it is (see above, re: what we are) and 2) I think that attitude has the potential to limit discussion rather than enhance it.
I'm all for saying that one shouldn't draw conclusions until the end, especially given the unique-for-television structure of this show, but I think it's perfectly within bounds to feel shocked and upset by the imagery and behavior in Richard Horne's scenes even without knowing "what they mean" in the larger picture of the show. Regardless of whether he gets comeuppance, he did these things, the show chose to present them in a specific way, and we watched them. That's going to cause a reaction!
Amusing as the implication is that I'm some unfeeling replicant. I'm merely pointing out how Lynch described it, Jake. The only thing the return is doing that's different than say most TV drama is it isn't heavily invested in trading in the short narrative payoffs and pacing that are part and parcel of typical television scripting. They're there (Albert on his dinner date with the mortician for instance), but that's not the journey Lynch & Frost are taking us on.
A lot of peoples frustrations with what they're seeing is indicative of a Pavlovian expectation as to how things should deliver, based on years of a steady diet of largely formulaic TV scripting and more pertinently pacing. Given how in its day the original Twin Peaks irrevocably shifted the paradigm of typical 90s network TV drama, it's not really surprising that Lynch & Frost would eschew the typical beats of Cable TV and do their own thing. I doubt that the return will have as widespread an impact on the TV landscape as the original show did in its day, but it certainly illustrates how trite a lot of current TV drama is, in comparison.
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I thought it was a decent episode. Storylines are moving along and threads converging. I honestly don't get the upset with the Richard Horne scenes. He's a despicable piece of shit, and his comeuppance is inevitable. Lynch has repeatedly said the show needs to be regarded as an 18-hour movie: -
So I don't get why there's this bewilderment because narratives payoffs aren't delivering in what would be regarded as a films second act (Episode 10 of 18). At best you're looking at episode 13 before threads are going to start resolving, and in truth, I doubt Richard Hornes is likely to wrap up at that juncture, least of all because we still have yet to find out what happened to his mother, what she may be up to, and where she is. Her absence from Ben's storyline and Richards cash grab seems to suggest she's likely not in Twin Peaks or involved in the running of the Great Northern at the very least.
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The scene in the morgue was legit up there in the unnerving stakes as the Winkies scene in Mulholland Drive.
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Curious to know what the thumbs make of the various criticisms going the rounds in the mainstream press regarding the season.
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Just listened to the podcast. WAS the Osterman guy Caspere's son? It sounded like the chief was saying that the girl was Caspere's daughter (shades of the classic "father finds out prostitute is his daughter" urban legends) but that maybe the mother was pregnant with another baby? I couldn't quite figure it out. The Oedipus connection obviously works better if Osterman was his son of course, and didn't know it when he killed him.
I thought that was what was said/implied. Either way through it caused Osterman to blow his lid versus letting Velcoro gather his information, and led to everything going south with respect to being able to clear his name.
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I heartedly endorse the Banner Saga as it's going at 50% at the moment. Not an easy game (think FTL but with fantasy Norse mythology and a bit of structure to it), but decent overall.
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Bjorn, on 07 Jun 2014 - 20:20, said:
Outing isn't the only issue though. There is a mechanic by which you can use people's personal information against them. We don't know if gender identity or sexual orientation are in that pool, but it's clear that mechanic is what led people to the assumption that something jenky was up. In journalism, there's a phrase that goes, "The impression of impropriety is as bad as impropriety itself." Because you allow yourself to get into a situation where someone can question your ethics, or methodology, or whatever, and cause as much harm to your reputation as an actual impropriety. Including what appears to be not terribly thoughtful flavor text about gender identity (particularly based on the tweets of one of the writers), in a medium that is well known for how shitty it is to any group that isn't made of white males, and then including a mechanic by which personal information can be used as a kind of blackmail creates the impression of impropriety, the ability for people to easily misunderstand how that information can be used. I'd say it's completely reasonable to suspect that they overlap, given that the permutations you might have to go through playing to see it. And honestly, I don't see attacking someone with personal information like that anymore of a commentary on privacy intrusion than do I see shooting someone in the game a commentary on gun control. A big reason for that is that you never have to see or deal with the repercussions of your actions.
Outing was the subject under discussion.
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In your original post that started all this, you denied that any such system existed at all, while claiming the high ground in the argument because you had experience with the game while others did not. And yet even with your experience, you hadn't put together the combination of the "distraction" option with some of the troublesome flavor options that appear. Which, to me, somewhat drives a stake through the heart of your argument that someone needs to play a game in order to have something worthwhile to say about it. You as someone who played it missed something, while people who hadn't played it had identified a potential problem (the intersection of a blackmail-type mechanic and personal information hacking system). This entire conversation essentially disproves what you were originally arguing.
Again there is no system to 'out' anyone. I haven't yet encountered a sexually orientated distraction whilst playing, and none of the distractions have any larger impact that occupying the attention of a guard in order that you can either sneak by them or sneak up on them. They get a text message it grabs their attention for a short while and breaks their usual patrol routine. That is the extent of the mechanic. The mechanic is only available in certain situations. It's not something that you can deploy ad hoc whilst driving around amongst the general citizenry of the game.
As regards the 'The impression of impropriety is as bad as impropriety itself ' given we live in a global digital age where in pretty much anyone can throw shade at all manner of things with little regard to the facts of how they play or operate through twitter or speculative articles I'm not sure how developers are supposed to mitigate against off kilter accusations at the end of the day. There will always be someone who is offended. Also I question whether a phrase that has more to do with whether it's right for say a person to judge a contest that they have a relative participating in (and thus whose inner thoughts of assessment cannot be known) is that applicable to a game which can be judged through the experience of play at the end of the day.
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Okay. I'll wait for the next big Steam sale for the game, then. I'm in no rush to play it, having JUST powered through Revelations, but I'm curious enough if only to see how they manages to go downhill from the excellent AC2. Thanks!
EDIT: Oh, wait, how's the DLC? It looks sufficiently stupid!
I'd say get ACIII when its 70% off. ACIV is a pretty fun and well worth getting when it's 50% or so. Haven't tried the ACIII DLC, but in large part as it seemed to be an alternative history I couldn't really see how it advances the main story so avoided it. Given there's 3 parts I imagine it's fairly substantial, but I'd say hold off until you've played III through before deciding.
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Trailer looks good, but Feb 2015 is a long way off.
Reminds me I need to restart TWII. I got a fair way through it at release, but RL intervened and I never got back to it, and like anything once you've been away from it for a while your muscle memory gets shot. Interested to see how how differently it played with the enhanced additions. I recall the fight with the monster at Flotsam was a particularly painful exercise in the joys of the QTE, not helped by some lousy optimisation, so I'm hoping that's been addressed.
GOG galaxy I figure is a necessary step to attract new games to the site, as its a necessary conduit for patch delivery. I'm not against it as an idea tbh as long as it runs ok.
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I think I definitely preferred 'Wolf Hall' to 'Bring up the Bodies'. I think Mantel has perhaps turned Cromwell into too much of a superman in terms of his innumerable abilities and many fingers in many pies and in doing so undoes a lot of the core belief in the character. Still looking forward to the conclusion mind.
Was unaware of the BBC adaptation. Shall keep an eye out for that.
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So now that AC4's been out for a while and AC Unity's coming out at the end of this year (?), I just finished Revelations. I want to know why AC3 is bad and why I shouldn't play it, because the setting really appeals to me. For context of how I might feel here are my opinions of each game, which are probably not too surprising...
I think if you're really into the American history then you might well enjoy it. Being from Euroland (an off shoot of Legoland) I can't say I found it particularly gripping and in large part the game makes no effort to really introduce the various historical characters the game throws at you versus assuming you'll take the time to read through the codex entries. Instead you find yourself constantly engaging with people who seem all too familiar with you 'Connor do this' 'Connor do that' with little explanation as to the why of things.
There's also a lot of 'stuff' to the game. You need to build up your estate in order to harvest resources to then manufacture/trade goods (using a really tedious UI that defaults at every stage), in order to make the necessary money to upgrade your ship and it's a lot of tail wagging when all is said and done. Plus there's the obligatory assassins management as well.
The ship stuff is pretty great, but feels very detached from the rest of the game.
Albeit Connor isn't the personality vacuum that was Altair, there's no real sense that he's anything other than easily lead and often times he comes across as a petulant boy even though he's much older.
Ultimately I only powered through ACIII because I wanted to see where the main story went and so get into ACIV, which so far has been pretty enjoyable in comparison.
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Merus, on 07 Jun 2014 - 03:18, said:This is incorrect; the problem with outing has nothing to do with the act itself, but in how that information spreads and gets used in a culture that, in part, sees people crossing gender categories as sick deviants. For transgender people, their privacy can be literally a matter of life and death. Watch Dogs is feigning progressivism by having transgender people in their game, and then uniquely make them victims of the protagonist just by existing in the game; the fact that
your argument is, essentially, that it's meaningless suggests their either you really didn't follow Watch Dogs' examination of privacy or (the more likely option) that there's nothing there to follow.
But again in the game you're not utilizing that information in any way. Outing as an act implies broader public exposure. Lets say you learnt that a friend was transgender or a closet homosexual for instance, you knowing that information is not outing. You'd be outing them only if you broadcast that information to other people. It's not simply about knowing the information.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/outing
I dunno, there's only so much time in the day. You have to filter things somehow, and off-putting artistic choices seems like as good a criterion as any. With SR4, Chris and Nick were initially dismissive, were told it was more interesting than the marketing would have you believe, and then tried it a bit and found they didn't like it.
With Watch Dogs, I don't think there's been much evidence that it's anything more than a sort of fun open world game. If people push back against an initial impression, and you still bash something and demonstrate no willingness to engage with the other point of view, that's shitty. But I don't really think that's what's going on here, nor can I remember that happening much at all in the podcast's run.
I think to appreciate SR4 you kind of need to play SRIII beforehand at the very least (and maybe SRII for good measure) . There's a lot of back referencing in IV that would largely be lost on most people unfamiliar with the previous games. Without that carry though and an appreciation of events beforehand I can understand how the game might not add up.
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Is it possible to do a totally pacificst run in WD, or does killing dudes become required at some point? One of the reasons I was so fond of both Deus Ex: HR and Dishonored were that they let you do pacifist runs (barring the boss fights in the original release of DE:HR). I actually wasn't successful in either of them, but it let me decide that I was going to only kill when I felt it was narratively justified for my character, not just because it was the easy way out.
On the whole you can avoid it save a couple of the main missions where it's very much kill, or be killed. You can unlock some pretty nifty tools like the blackout ability, a noise bug etc which make evasion and non lethal at night pretty straight forward and there are non lethal hacks like distract and coms jamming that you can use on certain individuals as well. Much like silent assassin in Hitman, it's pretty satisfying to pull off a well orchestrated infiltration with zero deaths.
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When I read about the bad writing, that makes me so sad. Ubi made a huge deal out of its screenwriting department Alice. If this is their output... I wonder what went wrong.
It's not bad, it's just fairly predictable in this particular case. Some of the characters are well drawn, some less so. I think Aaron Douglas does a great job as Jordi Chin one of Pierces associates for instance. With Aiden Pierce himself I think the writers made the mistake of writing him as a bit of a blank cypher and it has the unfortunate effect of dampening him. It's a mis-step that brings to mind Adam Jensen from DX:HR. Albeit it would of involved a bit more dialogue work it wouldn't of been a bad idea to take a leaf out of Dragon Age 2 with regards to how player actions inform and alter not only how you talk to characters but also how they respond to you. Adopting that approach would make some of the conversations feel less out of character.
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But there is a mechanic where certain guards will have a "distract opportunity" where your character sends them text messages capitalizing on their secrets as a way of getting them to stop paying attention to guarding so you can get by. I don't know whether their sexuality is one of the possible pieces of information that gets used in that mechanic, but it's inaccurate to say that none of those facts are ever used as anything more than flavor text.
I haven't yet witnessed a distract option that did capitalise on such a thing. Feel free to post a screen of any that do so in your investigations though. I'm interested in the actuality versus the potential.
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Not surprising, I think everyone sort of expected an AC1 kind of situation. Which means I"m really excited for Watch Dogs 2 next year.(that isn't sarcasm)
Yeah. It's very much a case of it being a test bed game in terms of content. I think that's generally the case with most new IPs though overall. It's rare if ever that someone hits it out of the park on the first try.
The premise is interesting and the game play is enjoyable enough. I think where it suffers is in a lot of heavy-handedness when it comes to the writing and a fair amount of the characterisation (based on what I've seen), and the game could of benefited from taking a lead from GTA as a series and had you engaging with NPCs more often as mission givers, Versus solely participants you encounter on the main storyline. There needs to be a lot more connectivity to these people as a whole in my view. Not that I want them to phone me up to go bowling, but more give a rationale to side missions etc. For instance beyond the fact that intercepting/beating up criminals improves your vigilante rating, there's no real explanation given AFAIR and as far as I've gotten as to why you've become a vigilante. Overall I'd say it's a more accessible title than AC1 was (that game was tedious to the max) and there's some interesting ideas, in there for sure, but I'm expecting the sequel to be more robust in terms of experience.
Given Ubi decided to make the title cross gen rather than commit solely to next Gen & PC it's inevitable that ideas of scope had to be curtailed in terms of functionality and processing. Given the bulk of the sales have come from next gen and PC sales, one suspects that the next title will take proper advantage of Next gen systems.
Anyway, let's compare this to GTA V. I'm sure GTA V was more costly to produce, but it was done in four years' time (as opposed to Wash Rags's five), and I think most would agree that GTA was a far more polished product. Unfortunately, Rockstar only discloses sold-in numbers, but they've probably sold somewhere around 30 million copies since September (and they sold a third of that in 24 hours!). GTA's day-one business was three times better than Hot Dogs, and it managed that on 40% fewer platforms.
GTA is an established IP, where as Watch_Dogs is a new one. Albeit the game may have been in development for 5 years, it's probably fair to say that a substantial amount of the first few years would of been dedicated to developing the ideas and principles and running through proof of concept, Versus full on development.
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But if I am reading your post right, the information that someone is transexual is just an element of flavour text and there is no mechanical use for it. (ie. You can't blackmail or somehow reveal it to people). Which means there must have been crossed wires somewhere, someone mistakenly connecting the information system to the bank account draining one I guess. In general it's best to clarify things and discuss them rather than taking an adversarial stance, both sides learn more from that kind of conversation and you actually get to exchange information.
Yes it's flavour text. There is no mechanical use to it. That you're able to chance upon such facts about people essentially ties into the premise of the game of where in the CTOS system that you're piggybacking off of is effectively recording every aspect of every citizens lives without them knowing. It ties into the whole idea of the surveillance state. It's very 'person of interest' when all is said and done, if you're familiar with the premise of that particular TV show.
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Well the basic seed of the idea makes sense, that the context of experiencing something in game as it's intended changes how it comes across. On this basis, making judgements on external impressions can be inaccurate. But too often people default to "You don't get it if you haven't played the game." which seems particularly silly given that you can't know how someone played a game. You could go through the whole game and not happen to find an opportunity to out someone as transgender even if the game contains that somewhere in it.
There's nothing to get. Outing as an act implies intent. There's no active investigation option with regard to a persons sexuality of gender persuasion in the game, or any option to exploit such information. It's merely one snippet of personal data that might appear when you scan a person. Same as you might find out that they were declined credit, or were polyamourous by nature.
The accusation doesn't hold up to scrutiny of the system in action.
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I think there's value in discussing why something you're never going to play repels you. That is almost certainly going to rely on third-hand knowledge. There are enough games with terrible elements to them that you can't go into every game with an open mind and an open heart, so it's unrealistic to say that people 'should' play a particular game before having an opinion on it. If Saints Row, for instance, wanted adults with standards to play it, they probably shouldn't have been so keen on the dick jokes.
If they don't want to play it, then don't go into it. Would you tune into a film podcast where the hosts talk about the films that they haven't seen and don't intend to, or a book podcast where the hosts talk about the books they've not read and don't intend to?
Regarding Watch Dogs specifically, though, the ctOS system is outing trans people simply by displaying that information to the player. David Gallant (I Get This Call Every Day creator) got into an argument with the writer of Watch Dogs where the writer dismissed Gallant's claims that this was in itself traumatic, and seemed pretty dismissive that there was a problem with how trans people were portrayed in Watch Dogs at all. (Not surprising considering that it's also pretty sexist.) We know from reviews that Watch Dogs is a privacy-themed open world game rather than a game that actually meaningfully examines the implications of invasions of privacy. The deepest it goes is outing trans people, and that only reads as invasive to trans people and those who know them. Given the content of the podcast, it's not surprising the Thumbs would dismiss it, as it's not mechanically interesting, and it's not thematically interesting.
So you'd rather trans people didn't exist at all. What next? No sexuality to any of the people? Then what? Ageism? It's very tenuous accusation in the first place. Even more so given said information reveal has no bearing on the game or narrative whatsoever.
Do you also show up to parties and pick fights right off the bat? That's why people notice post counts in your case.
If you've just registered to argue, please just go away now. If you'd like to contribute productively, awesome.
I thought it was a bad episode for the reasons given, and I'm providing feedback (after all this is the Idle thumbs podcast forum). That that happens to grate with regulars like yourself is really not my concern. I'm not a regular here simply because in truth there bigger more active forums elsewhere and my time is finite.
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I for one am genuinely curious to hear what you think.
if you're going to do a show about games, talk about games you've played/are playing Vs talking about 3rd hand impressions of games that aren't remotely in your wheel house.
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I'm enjoying this new running joke of a person with <20 posts showing up on an episode thread and acting like they're on a YouTube comment thread!
Post counts. The ultimate sign of significance. Never mind the quality, feel the width.
Please, go on.
Why bother. This episode reminded me of the one back when Saints Row III or IV came out and the entire episode revolved around deciding to not to play it because "reasons".
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Don't do that. Feel free to correct people when they're wrong if they're actually wrong, but don't act all high and mighty. He probably heard it somewhere and, because it's rooted at least partially in fact, it sounded believable. Nobody has a fucking agenda. Thank you.
I like it that you put 'if' in there. Some of us actually play games before criticising them. I guess that's being high and mighty in your view though.
As regards this episode. Telephone the podcast. Seriously if you're going to do a show about games, talk about games you've played/are playing Vs talking about 3rd hand impressions of games that aren't remotely in your wheel house.
Twin Peaks Rewatch 51: The Return, Part 16
in Twin Peaks Rewatch Episodes
Posted
My take was that the seed is the framework whilst the hair provides the data, rather than the other way round.