Golden Calf

I just quit Breakfast of Champions, very early on. The way it starts, with an extended section where Vonnegut tries to be clever or transgressive in looking at some bits of human culture in an alternative light, or from an outsider's perspective or something, seemed incredibly hackneyed to me and was off-putting. His observations were not interesting, and his shitty drawings of vaginas stuck in the middle of the prose didn't feel transgressive in anything but a childish way. And worst of all, it didn't seem to have anything to do with the characters or world of the novel at all, but was just a chunk of musings by the author himself. Maybe it would have been more cool when it came out. Maybe it gets better further in (I "bounced off it, hard"). But I have a bunch of school and other stuff to do, so I returned it to the library. Maybe I've made a mistake?

Tout de suite, commandant.

Man, what a cool guy. The only Tim Schafer games I've played are Psychonauts and Broken Age, so I'm thinking I should check out some of his older work. Any suggestions for where to start?

I think this is mostly wrong. I don't think evaluating media literacy is elitist or self-important in any way (or, at the very least, doesn't have to be). It's an empirical question, in the same way that regular literacy is, even if it's harder to quantify. It doesn't make you more or less stupid or important. There are plenty of things I completely lack critical faculties for, and that's fine. And furthermore, it's something that everyone responsible for a creative work should consider: if, purely theoretically, 75% of your audience fails to understand the meaning you had set out to convey, that's a problem that you should care about, because you presumably care about what you were trying to say and want people to grapple with it. If those same audience members start harassing people based on that misunderstanding, you should really fucking care about what went wrong. I don't think that's grounds for censorship, but if that sort of thing starts happening frequently or is sustained for a long time, I can't help but doubt the creators' integrity. Now, I have no data whatsoever on South Park in particular (so I withhold judgment), on what percentage of people 'get' their satire, and I suspect that you may be right that most people understand what they're doing most of the time. But I absolutely disagree that "It's unfair to suggest that there's some kind of sub intelligent sect of society out there who are susceptible to negative influences of contraversial media that only the enlightened can responsibly enjoy." There is such a sect of society, and in the US it's made up probably mostly of children, because they often lack sophisticated media literacy. TONS of kids picked up using Jew as a slur uncritically from South Park when I was in middle school. And a disturbing number jumped on the "kick a ginger day", resulting in actual harassment. Is that the majority of the audience? Probably not, but the important point is that this doesn't discount the overall value of media literacy, because it theoretically could be the majority for a given piece of media. If you're deploying a work of satire into an environment where 90% of the audience fails to grasp the point you're trying to make, and instead adopts the ideas you were critiquing, I think that's at least irresponsible. Edit: Just for the record, I think your original conclusions are perfectly respectable and seem to have been arrived at and expressed in good faith.

Yay, I love long episodes. Also, Danielle! Re: shitty cliches - I never want to see a hand close the eyes of a newly dead person ever again.

That's cool. I definitely felt some frustration over puzzles feeling a little too much like fiddly trial and error toward the end. I was pulled through I think because I played it in 1/2 - 1 hour chunks over a few days, which cut down on the frustration, and because I read a lot of philosophy in college and was happy that the game referenced Dennett and Chalmers, the former being probably my favorite living philosopher. But, clearly, not for everyone.

I'm sort of confused - were you not aware it's a puzzle game? (Perfectly acceptable if that's not your thing, but the devs describe it as an "atmospheric puzzle platformer")

My god this book is so good. I finally got around to checking it out from the library a bit ago and I'm about half way through. I wish I could drop all my homework and just read this for a while. Alas, alas. I absolutely love how Thomas More is drawn (along with basically everyone else). I wonder if you could get Shawn Elliott to do the cast. He tried to do a book cast with Jeff Green and N'Gai Croal, which foundered after a few episodes. And he's a cool/smart dude.

Ya the song didn't work for me either. It came so far out of left field. There was no discussion from either character about it. Aren't they also running for their lives at this point too?

Consider me chastised. Still stand by my other claims though.

Would you spend 2 BILLION dollars on something and then just cancel it a year or two down the road? I mean, I don't particularly like the company, but I don't think they're morons. The deal seems like an all-in move to me. From what some of the Oculus folks have written, it sounds like this is what was slated to happen if they hadn't gotten funding from facebook. I agree that this is at least cause for concern. But I don't think that we should be worried about this in the same way that we would be a game studio, or a company making some sort of creative software; I wouldn't give a shit if facebook bought my TV manufacturer, because the quality and reliability of the hardware is basically the only thing that matters there, and lowering the quality only hurts sales (especially since it looks like Sony and Valve will soon be providing competition). In order for this to succeed the hardware has to be amazing, and the selection of experiences on it has to be numerous, varied, and broadly appealing. I think the facebook acquisition makes these more, not less likely.

Ya that stuff is absolutely a great improvement. Adventure mode lets you basically turn all the acts into that, going on mini-quests to clear dungeons and do events all around the map.

Ya the environments of the new act seemed pretty bland and weirdly washed-out to me, with the exception of the small portion in the streets of the city. But the max-level gameplay is great. Adventure mode makes the drudgery of looking for new gear much more varied and interesting. It remains a pointless and unending search for loot upgrades, but my friends and I are enjoying it for the moment anyway.

Ok I really don't understand what everyone is so worried about here. To be clear, I hate facebook, but I think the acquisition has major upsides for basically everyone except facebook. Here's my reasoning: For this to be worthwhile for facebook, the Oculus products have to really be mass market. If it stays a niche product, it would be useless to them, judging by the ambitions Zuckerberg appears to have for it. So, for it to be sufficiently popular, it is going to have to be really polished in every respect. That plus the massive wads of cash they've just stumbled into basically guarantee that it will be a great device when it ships. I think of it like a television or a computer, technologies where you can have a variety of experiences, with one of them being video games - improvements in one area often spill over into others. The types of situations Zuckerberg claimed interest in ("enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face") pose an almost identical set of technical challenges as do immersive video games. Making an immersive basketball-watching experience is technically very similar to making an immersive first person video game, in terms of getting your brain to buy that you're in the space. People seem worried about the apparently sinister sentence "After games, we're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences," but this too seems great to me. How good can a VR headset get, as a theoretical maximum? Once the core issues are solved, there's not much to do besides tweaking here and there. I mean, how do you make it more immersive than a very well-tuned 3D headset? To get much better you would probably have to make a neural interface. So once that's nailed down, you can turn your attention to supporting a wider variety of experiences, making it a true platform for all sorts things other than games. And furthermore, the broader exposure that facebook is certain to bring guarantees that a much wider set of experiences is possible than would have been if the rift stayed a gaming peripheral. Imagine tours of the Louvre, or walking tours of Budapest, or really immersive nature documentaries. Those (and so many others) all seem amazing to me, but how many of them do you think would have been produced were the rift to have remained a gaming peripheral? I can see only one potential downside, which is that facebook could decide to turn it into a closed platform, making it a hassle or expensive for game developers or anyone else to make content for it. But I think this is extremely unlikely for two reasons: first, facebook is probably going to want as many creators as possible to be making stuff for it, because their social stuff alone doesn't seem appealing enough for it to be successful - second, I genuinely doubt the Oculus people would have agreed to the buyout if this were the case. Anyway, I've rambled too long and forgotten some of the things I was going to say, so maybe this is an incoherent mess. But either way, I was and remain excited and optimistic about the Oculus Rift.

Great, thanks.

I dunno if this counts, as it was only a demo, but I just finished the demo for Gorogoa after seeing Jonathan Blow tweet about it. It's a really cool little puzzle game. It works like one of those children's books with holes that allow images from one page to show through to the next, except you're the one figuring out how the different scenes should combine and show through one another. That's a bad explanation, but the best I can do. Anyway, it's short (max 15 mins), free, and quite pretty. Check it out.

Does anyone know where to actually download it? I've been trying from his website for the past week or so and it's been down the whole time, and I can't seem to find it anywhere else (coincidentally, I signed up to give a presentation on it in a few weeks).

I just had a dream that Campo Santo announced they were making flash games for the Nickelodeon website. They all seemed super excited about it though.

Does anyone know of a way to have multiple people simultaneously editing a scene over the internet? I've started on a project with 5 people and have been using git, which is great for all our scripts and assets, but having multiple people work on the same scene has been pretty difficult and a frustrating bottleneck at times. I tried (somewhat feebly) finding a solution online and wasn't successful.

Yes I believe so.

In the first case, "Vector3 pos = transform.position;" copies the x,y,z values of the transform's position into a new place in memory. So when you then update pos, you're just fiddling with the x,y,z values of the Vector3 variable somewhere in memory and NOT the Vector3 variable tied to the transform. When the engine then tries to read your transform's position, it still has the old values. If you wanted this to work, you would have to add "transform.position = pos;" to the end. On the other hand, "Transform tran = transform;" copies the address of your transform, so when you edit the position this time, you travel to the location in memory stored by your tran variable and directly change the values tied to the transform. This is what is meant by a reference variable - it isn't its own instance of the type specified, it refers to a variable of that type and can be used to access it. It's also sometimes called an alias. I hope that helps.

I started listening to avoid working on some AI programming I have to do for tomorrow. Your discussion of ephemeral moments of inspiration and productivity leads me to believe I probably won't be sleeping tonight. At least I have some cool dudes to keep me company for a while.

God for some reason the part of that level where the floor is a pile of dead people made me viscerally disgusted. I almost never feel anything in video games, and that part wasn't high res or particularly realistic in any way. Somehow that did it for me. When I was in the middle of that floor and finally realized what it was, I got these weird shivers and just wanted to be somewhere else. Seriously the weirdest thing I've ever experienced from a game.

Ok so the next server event should be a server-wide capture the flag, with the flag being Jake. Whoever or whichever team has control of Jake at the end of a pre-decided period wins. Jake streams from the idle thumbs twitch channel and can do whatever he likes. People may choose to give him things to defend himself from capture.

Avoid garish ornamentation at all costs.