prettyunsmart

I'd say that's the case for 2001, but that might just be because Kubrick is Kubrick. While Alien is generally regarded as a great film, it doesn't hold the same kind of cultural capital as something like a Bergman or Kurosawa film does (not saying this is good, but that the distinctions between genre and art films are still drawn).

Last night, I dreamed that I was back working at the terrible retail job (garden center stocker!) I had when I was 15. Appropriately enough, this accurately reflects my post-grad school job prospects.

Well, you were right. My character wasn't gone, but the second I logged in (or minutes after to be more accurate) I got held up. Some guys handcuffed me and took stuff out of my bag. They were generally polite, but they left me handcuffed with pristine cuffs, so it took 15 minutes or so and I still wasn't free. Then I got the "no message received from server in 43 seconds" error, so I think my character is going to die for logging out while cuffed or whatever. Not sure how I feel about this game right now.

Good to know. Maybe I'll check back on the Thumbs server to see if my shotgun having character still lives.

I think I'm contractually obligated to support Ohio State basketball, as middling as it is this season. About all I know for sure is that Aaron Craft's cheeks get really red during games.

The other romantics may have been self-involved boners, but don't sell Keats or Wordsworth short. Mutability and Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 are pretty good. Also, I now feel the urge to blow off what I need to do for the rest of the day and read some Derek Walcott.

I was playing Civ V as Egypt, and I was struck by the plight of this one American unit that got caught on a peninsula outside one of my cities. My borders expanded as this band of warriors reached the end of the continent, leaving them with no way to get back. They spent the rest of the game sitting there, moving back and forth, as society advanced all around them. Also, this:

I am totally going to download that as soon as I find my tablet.

My taste in poetry is by no means refined, but I'll write down a few books I have enjoyed over the years. Muriel Rukeyser, U.S. 1: A fascinating book of radical modernist poetry. Its most famous section "The Book of the Dead" mixes in found documents with original compositions to expose an industrial accident that lead to hundreds of deaths in the 1930s in West Virginia. Not exactly uplifting, but well constructed and original. Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues: A really uneven collection of poems tonally that spans the author's late adolescence into early adulthood. Topics range from his time at sea to his better-known works about race relations. Overall, the work is beautifully simple and profound. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind: My favorite book of poetry as I was growing up, I think because it is playful in a way that a lot of poetry doesn't seem to be at first. I haven't read it in a few years, but I have fond memories. Robert Frost, North of Boston: I read this a few months ago for my exams, and I was expecting to despise every moment of it. Robert Frost has a number of literary reputations, none of them too flattering. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it, especially in the context of the other modernist poetry of the time. That's a weird list.

Leaving aside anything else about how people feel about him, I thought his review made a fair deal of sense. It seemed like he was saying that there are issues that would probably bother people, but they didn't bother him too much. He enjoyed it, others may not.

I know what this thread needs: gifs of guinea pigs eating stuff.

Man, the Alpha-ness of this game can really kill my desire to play it sometimes. Last night I signed onto the Idle Thumbs server with a friend. Shockingly, we both spawned near each other and were able to head into a pretty good sized town and find both ample food, water bottles, and some melee weapons. We were already feeling pretty good when headed into a barn and found a rifle and a shotgun. This is the first time I'd ever had a gun in DayZ, so I was ecstatic. We continued looting the town for a minute...and then I saw the red chain of doom. We lost connection to the server and didn't see it in the browser to reconnected. When we logged in to another server, both of our characters had been reset to fresh spawns. I know, alpha is alpha, but I think I'm going to wait for a patch or two before playing again.

I don't know if this counts as a plug, as much as it is just me being generally excited about it, but here it goes. As a lowly grad student, I organized a lecture/discussion series about games at my university. I even convinced administrators to fund it. From how it looks so far, it should be pretty well attended and could grow into either an ongoing series or a chance to teach game-related classes in the future. I'm kind of giddy right now.

Is the offer to share Splinter Cell still valid? If so, let me know. In other news, is anyone interested in copies of Antichamber and Monaco from the most recent Humble Bundle? I beat the average, but I already owned those two. Claimed!

I'd really love to see something like this happen. Giant Bomb tried something similar with a group called "Shoemaker's Army." Unfortunately it just ended up with a couple of people organizing some night to play, lots of people not being free at the same time, and a now seemingly abandoned chat channel. Still, I'm usually too scared of being the worst DOTA player in the world to play anything other than bot matches, and playing with other people of a less-skilled but also less angry persuasion could be cool.

I think the idea of motivation is interesting, because in the game, you would be driven to optimize because it is a game, and you want to win by providing the greatest amount of good for the most amount of people. It could create some interesting conflicts between the desire to help a smaller, more local unit a greater amount, or providing some rudimentary assistance to a wider group of people (like providing comprehensive funding to one impoverished school district or making more modest contributions to schools nationwide). The problem with tackling this question in games is that games are systems, just as administrative bureaucracies are. In the kinds of systems Weber described, governments and corporations strive to maximize production/utility without dealing in things that are harder to quantify like the physical toll taken on workers or their non-monetary desires. As a player, if you are in the role of the administrator, optimizing your systems, you will probably always choose that path. Maybe some kind of narrative system could come into play like Hotline Miami's "home" segments that show the cost of your optimization efforts. I don't really know where I'm going with this.

Well, it looks like the Idle Thumbs forums drew me back into Dark Souls. With some advice from the nice people in this thread, I escaped the Painted World and am back in Anor Londo. I upgraded my Black Knight Halberd to +5 and got ready to face the next boss, which turned out to be two bosses in one. I think I'm stuck again. Oh well, that's Dark Souls I suppose.

I'll admit that Loadout's aims are relatively modest. It's a free-to-play third-person arena shooter in the vein of Quake or Unreal tournament featuring excessive gore and lots of juvenile humor. I'm not too sure if it is reasonable to expect much from a game that features this as a purchasable outfit: or animates character death like this: Still, it isn't the violence or adolescent sense of humor that's driving me away from the game. Admittedly, if that was the case, I'd have to avoid a great portion of the games released since the NES era. No, I actually want a big, dumb arena shooter which can bring me back to the days of playing Unreal with my friends in high school; something fast-paced with a good variety of weapons and some interesting modes to keep things entertaining. Loadout has all of these things. The weapon customization works nicely and adds a clear sense of progression from the game. The gameplay is fast and skill-based. The free-to-play model is not too bad either, making only boosts and cosmetics purchasable with real money. From almost every perspective, this is the UT successor I've been waiting for. Except for one: the character models. The two male playable characters are pretty clear attempts to make off-brand cartoon versions of Sylvester Stallone and Mr. T. respectively. Fair enough. Not particularly original, but not anything to get worked up over either. On closer examination of "T-Bone," the Mr. T. look-alike, something started to bother me. In the picture above, things seem to be generally on the level. Maybe something feels a little bit off, but nothing too egregious. The concept art similarly looks relatively subdued in its style: It's only when you get a good look at the character's face up close that things get really creepy. Take this picture for example: You get a similar perspective on the character on the game's main menu if you've been using T-Bone as your character, complete with unsettling eyes, gold teeth, and distorted features. The problem only becomes clearer looking from T-Bone to his Stallone-looking counterpart who is all symmetrical features and wry smiles. It dawned on me after playing a few rounds of the game that T-Bone's character design, whether consciously or not, feels uncomfortably similar to the racist caricatures coming out of minstrel shows. Some examples: Each image shares some quality with T-Bone's design, whether it's the gold teeth, the exaggerated features, or the general menacing tone. I hesitate to even post this since the gaming community (as much as you can define a thing like that) seems to shy away from discussing race to an even greater degree than issues of gender...and we all know how well that tends to go. And on that topic, here is the game's lone female character: Helga, like T-Bone is complete with a variety of grotesque and distorted features and mostly seems to exist for the purpose of finding humor in the fact that an overweight woman is wearing tiny clothing. I'm frustrated with this game, and my own conflicted feelings about it. I want to outright condemn it for putting forward attitudes toward race and gender that should have been abandoned many, many years ago. On the other hand, I'm frustrated with myself for still finding the game to be pretty fun. Am I getting too worked up about this? I know that as a graduate student, my general tendency toward most things is to find them problematic, but I don't think that's the case here. So, fellow thumbs, am I alone in this? I am the only one seeing this?

I think that pretty much summed it up. What got me about this more than anything else was looking at coverage of the game, especially from outlets (for example Rock Paper Shotgun, Polygon, and Giant Bomb) that have been generally supportive of a variety of social justice issues (can we please not say that like that's a bad thing?) in the past not make any mention of something that looked relatively obvious to me. It just seemed like either I was crazy for seeing something that disturbed me or that race is a big blind spot for coverage of games, even as things like gender and sexuality issues are slowly getting better. Oh, you.

Woah. Things happened in this thread while I wasn't paying attention. So my original point, probably not very well stated isn't to say the artist him/herself is racist or people who don't find the image racist are racist. Really, what I wanted to raise is that the Mr. T-styled character reproduces elements of problematic images from the past. The insidious thing about these aspects of culture is that they get produced and reproduced often just through cultural osmosis. We see them so often that we don't think about them, but the troubling history behind them still lingers. Did the person who designed the character set out to make a racially troubling image? Probably not. Does its presence continue a cycle of racial representation that leads to ideas about race that are generally pretty messed up? Maybe. EDIT: I just noticed Bjorn basically said this a post or two ago. I guess I should read the whole thread before posting.

I'd be tempted to reply to you just saying that it might come more as a Bioshock, but this is just too sad/weird for that. It's sad to see such a prominent and consistently interesting studio go out of business, and to see so many people out of work.

So would you imagine your charity simulator as a positive spin on the more insidious version of rationalization that Pedercini lays out in his talk? In a way, it seems to fall into the same category of a large, logical system in which a player can expect to wield a great deal of power in a logical, organized system. I'm not saying that it sounds like a bad idea, but that it might just end up providing another version of the instrumental rationality we see in games all the time (as an aside, there's an interesting critique of charity in Slavoj Zizek's book The Universal Exception that suggests that large scale charitable efforts by capitalists such as Bill Gates are often attempts to seed the lower classes with funds that can be later extracted by the multinational corporations they own/partner with). I'm a little suspicious of his later claims about how film used editing techniques like montage and parallel composition to sidestep rationalism. On the contrary, a lot of film theorists have written that this kind of classical style helped to reinforce the stable, rational vision of film as indexically realistic. Still, it's heartening to see someone thinking about games in terms of ideas like Weber's and considering the kind of implicit aspects of design that we take for granted. It is a little hard to imagine a game that operates outside of the ideology instrumental rationalism as games generally are made up of rules and systems, but I'd certainly like to see more people push up against that idea.

As betas go, it's rather far along. I've been playing Rust and DayZ in parallel for a while now and Rust has been pretty impressively stable so far. They're going to add more features as they go, but it seems like what's in so far has been pretty well polished.

I can see that. It's just that I'm unsure if the joke is at the expense of the player who is made uncomfortable (which I'm fine with) or overweight women (which I would not be).

Thanks! Fixed. Sorry for anybody who accidentally looked at pixelated genitalia at work because of my ignorance.