Ninety-Three

It's not inherent to capitalism. People often do things because others, for example, their friends want them to, rather than they want to, and that's got nothing to do with economic systems. Ah, I think we disagree about the meaning of the word. The way I see it, consent is just a synonym of agree, and you can agree to all kinds of things you don't like. I consider it to be unrelated to circumstances and all about frame of mind. If someone is inebriated, then they start sliding down the consent spectrum. Do other people not use the word this way?

I think one has to accept that as consensual, or it starts doing weird things to the meaning of consent. Is someone working a shitty job at McDonalds really consenting because they need the money? Is someone dressing a particular way not for themselves, but because their partner will like it, really consenting? Is any party agreeing to anything they're not 100% enthusiastic about really consenting?

Well, it kind of is to some degree. The trick is being able to incorporate new information and perspectives when you find out, instead of descending into a siege mentality. I think the siege mentality thing describes it well. As Gamergate has gone on, I've realized that anger over the "Gamer identity is dead" thing isn't just a manufactured talking point, a lot of them really seem to take it as a personal affront, instead of just saying "Well that's silly" and moving on. It's like they're all this guy:

It's adding the comma to the URL on that link. Remove it and it works.

And you're saying they haven't created a good thematic treatment of the prison-industrial complex? I realize that's probably not really their intent, but I think there's something to be said for the style of a game like DEFCON, which presents its subject matter through mechanics, and leaves it to the player to realize "Holy shit, this is horrifying."

Because it's gotten a lot of people to talk about the Apple Watch. It fits perfectly with modern marketing's ideas of brand awareness and so on.

I'll also weigh in to say I've seen no evidence of watch fetishization. At some point in the last ten years, phones completely obsoleted them, and now the only people with watches I know are fancy businessmen. I suppose you could call that fetishization, but I don't think it was what you meant.

That's not true at all. Just because they're products doesn't mean they must target the largest market, they can go niche just like every other type of product can. Regarding the whole "Games as art" vs "Games as industry" discussion going on, I feel like I'm seeing a strange conflation that mindless entertainment games are products of industry, and arty message games are the result of someone who just wants to share an experience with the world. People can make "arty" games for money, and they can make mindless entertainment games for free. Hell, if we were to count the games on the various flash portals of the internet, I bet games with pricetags would have a higher ratio of "This has a Message" to "This is a fun thing for you to play for fun" than free games do. I'm not sure I have anywhere to go with this, I just thought I'd point out that it's weird that people seem to have made that connection.

I am clearly doing something wrong. In two days, I will maybe be able to assemble a single tool or plastic key. Is there some magic ritual used to reset desk contents and shop inventories? I just hit desks every day, and check out maybe four shops that spring up over the course of a day.

So I finally finished Prison 1 by giving up on subtlety and just KOing four guards. Made it to prison 2, and I've run into exactly the same problem as 1. I need tools, files and duct tape to make them, or I need lighters and talcum powder to make keys, and the only way to get them is a daily desk check on the other prisoners, or waiting for something useful to be randomly sold. It's frustratingly slow, but more than that, it's frustrating that I can't make it go faster. In a day's gameplay, I'll spend maybe four in-game hours actually -gathering- stuff, and the rest is either just killing time, or following the schedule to lower heat. My prison 1 problem is repeated exactly, so to reopen that question now that I'm at prison 2:

Sure we will, that's they're on track to release it with HL3.

Again, this is an ableist *chan code that means "these people are in the corrupt Progressive Indie Game Devs clique and probably have tumblr accounts". It's bizarrely demonizing indie devs and tumblr users, but how is that ableist?

I'm not sure if there was a recent balance change, or if I just suddenly figured out the key to this game, but I took a week or two off, and suddenly I'm crushing AIs on the higher difficulty settings. Watching them, it's obvious that the AIs aren't exactly great at playing the game: their build orders are often suboptimal (and sometimes just insane), they're far too scared of debt, and they don't react to shortages/surpluses (this is a huge shortcoming). I suppose that's to be expected for an Early Access 4X, hopefully they improve. Is anyone else interested in putting together an all-humans game? I'd love to start figuring out how the game plays out with more than just braindead AIs.

Showing up slightly late to the discussion, but I'm completely baffled by the sentiment that the pejorative "crazy" should not be used. It implicitly paints mental illness as negative, but, well, yes? We shouldn't call things gay because it's making "gay" into a pejorative, which is a homophobic thing to do. But crazy is negative. I'm as confused as if people were saying we shouldn't use "stupid".

That would provide a nice answer to the increasingly perplexing question of "What has Valve been doing with all their programmer-hours for the last few years?" It doesn't seem logistically feasible for any of the VR companies to assemble a large number of games for the fractured-looking VR market, but if there's one flagship title that could move a system, it's Half Life 3 (bundled with Portal 3).

I think LoL has a problem more specific than that. In most games, there are limits to the incompetence of your teammates. No matter how bad a teammate is in most games, at worst you're effectively fighting 4v5. LoL, and MOBАs in general make a bad player substantially worse than no player at all. I think that's where a lot of the vitriol in most Lords Management scenes comes from. Even if no one is playing that badly, the possibility makes people much more prepared to get angry (and this being the internet, lots of people automatically assume maximum incompetence at the first mistake).

This seems in line with the comparison:

I would say none of those are tone arguments, because I don't think a tone argument happens until one crosses the line separating "I don't like it because ~" to "It shouldn't be done because ~". After all, I can say that I don't like jazz, and no one will interpret that as an argument against jazz. If they were phrased as "It shouldn't be done", I think the first is a tone argument, because if it isn't, then what is? The third is surely not a tone argument, because its point is "That's discriminatory". If that was a tone argument, then calling things racist would be a tone argument, which is obviously absurd. Having phrased it that way, I think the second is also not a tone argument, as it seems to be saying "That's perpetuating a harmful and untrue stereotype", though there's some room for interpretation on what exactly is meant by "nerd jokes are shitty". I suppose perception of X and their motives could come in there, though I think if it were more clearly stated, perception of X wouldn't enter into it.

I'm not sure 'bandwagon' is the right assessment. It is of course, impossible to tell at this point, but I think it's plausible that rather than VR turning into a "console wars" thing, it could be more of a format war like HD vs Blu-ray, where eventually a winner will be declared and everyone else falls away. Assuming VR takes off anyway. I'm still cynical because of the catch 22 of "No one makes games for VR, because so few people own VR hardware, because there aren't enough games to justify the purchase".

There are memes like "A delicious mug of salty gamer tears" (I'm not sure if 'gamer' was actually the first version of the meme, but it'll suffice for an explanation), generally used in response to gamers complaining about stupid stuff ("They nerfed Shadow Priest, everything is ruined!", "I lost to one in PVP, Paladins OP!"). The meaning of the meme is generally "I'm enjoying you crying over this stupid thing", and the "male tears" thing evolved out of that meme.

I haven't been following this closely, what ableist discussion are you referring to here?

It'd be easy enough to write the article to talk about "Games which are just kind of similar and definitely not clones no who said that not me", but I think an important piece of information you just can't get is how much each game costs to make. I know mobile games are kind of a lottery, but I assume that it's not so severe that production costs are rendered irrelevant for a success.

Well from the sounds of it only one of them's getting the money now. So that's better at least, right?

Based on prison 1, I've found that items left on the ground, even in my cell, will get picked up by guards and vanish, while illegal items stashed in someone else's cell seem invincible. Is that wrong/unique to prison 1?

I was really thrown by some of the sky detail in the demo. At minute one you see the sun, at minute eight you see a dark blue and starry sky (while the terrain is still lit like it's late afternoon), and by minute twelve the sun is set, leaving uniform sky and a darkened landscape. I wouldn't know, does it actually work like that away from the light pollution of a city, or is it videogаme time scale at work? I'd go so far as to say the banter looks like it is the game. It makes me think the game's not for me because I'm a quiet person who wouldn't speak up at most of those points in the game. I feel like I'd leave a lot of the dialog prompts untouched and so miss the point of the game.