Deadpan

Thanks for the suggestion, GifCam is really neat. Anyway, here's a thing I built from scratch yesterday. I want to make this into a local multiplayer game where you try to redirect the moving ball into each other, sort of like a wizard-themed mix of Lethal League and Magnetized. But at the moment it's just a ball bouncing around an arena and making my brick-tile test player spin out of control on hits.

Skeleton to skeleton is a communication technology that makes your bones vibrate in resonance with somebody else's bones (invest in my startup btw)

What do you fellow Thumbs use to make gifs of your progress?

The Detention Centers come up on their own, although if you do a Site List mission after the first one, you get to pick a mission to add to the map from a short list (not sure if it covers all types) so that may be a way to increase the odds.

That problem is already solved if you just use the SJW to skeleton browser plugin. Although clearly it should be Skellington.

Might be a good month to pick up video games for Humans, an anthology of close reads of Twine games edited by Meritt Kopas. Or read through Embed with ... by Cara Ellison. Or everything by Lana Polansky. I've also enjoyed Susan Sontag's essay collection Against Interpretation recently.

With Murdoc, we just hit seven players plus me as admin, which is the bare minimum for making a game. I'd like to ask around a little more before getting set up next weekend though.

Ran my first campaign on Expert meanwhile. I was mostly scraping by and escaping by the skin of my teeth. Still made it to the final mission with four agents, although one of them didn't even have any equipment at that point since I sold his empty handgun a while back. I got closer to pulling the final caper off than I expected, but ended up having pretty bad luck with the level layout since the two hotspots were as far away from each other as possible. Interesting thing about this game, I guess, is that it's pretty easy to find yourself in a situation where you can no longer win, but pretty hard to just straight up lose. Like, I lost the guy I had sent to hack a console, but since the guards in that area showed no intention of ever moving towards my pile of pinned guards (Invisible Inc., more like Guards of Hanoi, really), I eventually got my agents into position for one to hand over medgel to another, and for that one to try and rescue her downed friend. Which she did, shortly before both of them got knocked out again. At this point I had all my remaining agents on pinning duty and thanks to the Volt Disruptor and surplus energy, what with everything important on the stage already being hacked, it took a pretty long time for my arrangement to no longer be stable. Even once most of my agents got knocked out, I managed to sneak one away into a far off corner that the twelve guards now running around like headless chickens showed no intention of ever investigating. After like ten more turns I had to actively go out of my way to end things.

Nope, still gathering players. Just send me a message with your email address and I'll keep you posted.

I'm writing something about Dark Souls at the moment, so here's a thought I had along the weay about dying in these games.

"Bow cheesed" makes it sound like you used the gesture excessively. Or got up on some hard to reach ledge and whittled away at them with arrows. Seeing how they summoned you and you even telegraphed the bow theme in advance, how's using a bow in a straight fight any different from using ranged magic though? Bowing after a win is something I never read as gloating, even though I get quite frustrated with invasions. In something like Hearthstone, the "Well played" emote can sound a bit smug, but in Dark Souls there's much more rude options that the actual douches go for.

Got this recently after many recommendations and I've enjoyed it so far. I only played two campaigns, but both of those took me all the way to beating the final mission. The first was a pretty straightforward run on Beginner difficulty where I only picked up another agent towards the end of the game, but didn't really have time to level them up, so I mostly used him as another paperweight for guards (which across all turns and all agents is probably their most common occupation). Second run was on Medium difficulty and I upped the length to five days, so by the end of that I had four agents with maxxed out speed and decent marks and equpiment across the board. Everything went pretty smoothly until the final mission, but that one was a bit of a close call. I only had one guy who could take out the guards with level 3 armor and the very first guard I knocked out triggered a Daemon that locked me out of hacking for three turns. I ended up wasting all my rewinds pretty early on when I poked around too much and a guard wandered into the starting room where most of my crew was still hanging about. After rewinding a few turns, I got incredibly lucky when a camera drone (!) opened a door on which I had accidentally (!!) put a shock trap, and so knocked out not only itself, but the guard on the other side of the door (!!!), who was just taking aim on one of my agents (!!!!). Fast forward a bit and I have two agents still in the starting room pinning down two guards and regularly injecting them with paralyzers, one agent outside pinning down the two guards that collapsed on top of each other from my tranq darts and another who just knocked out one more. Took quite a bit of rearranging to deal with the constant reinforcements. Turns out you can't drop guards on a tile already occupied by another, but you can drag them there at least, although that does mean your agent can't do anything else while holding these two down. I lost one agent just before everything wrapped up. In the next few turns like five more guards would have woke up directly on top of me, but it worked out. Just so.

Wait, that's what Pegg said? I only heard of this interview by way of Twitter headlines, which summarized his statement as calling sci-fi infantilizing, which seems to sell the actual thought rather short. If any GG thing deserves the level of scrutiny you are talking about, it might be their hapless database of ethical non-issues, but combing through that to point out every single thing that's wrong with it would a) be incredibly depressing and b ) require convincing them that giving a game a score that is not exactly identical to the Metacritic average isn't malfeasance by any stretch of imagination.

Just never gets old when the hate mob that formed around the idea of punishing women for having sex accuses its enemies of being puritanical.

That would be great. Although at this stage I'd be happy if people at least managed to not blatantly misread the headlines they get upset about, at least, as a certain internet hate mob is wont to do.

Well, a proper student of history would in all likelihood not attempt to downplay the impact of the pervasive racism and homophopia of the 30s era Germany, seeing how its those exact "fake" problems that shortly thereafter led to the systemic murder of Jews and gay folk. Also, they would know how to spell Weimar, I'd hope (I made this jape on Twitter but I missed out here, until now). In general, this is indicative of GG's inability to grasp the fact that even the abstract thinking they so despise can be of benefit to the concrete games they do like. Since Tweetdeck is apparently unable to apply my blocks to searches, I caught some of their tweets while trying to check out what folk were saying in the DiGRA hashtag, and one common trend there was them trying to tell game developers not to pay attention to any of this high-falutin' garbage because "gamers do not care about it", as if having a complex thought about games prevents you from ever making one of the Shooty McManshoot games that they like ever again. And of course they are once again building this thing up as this big enemy that needs to be dismantled and that people need to be made aware of, while simultaneously harping on about how unimportant it is. Academic conferences not drawing crowds? Shocker!

This is a pretty misguided conversation, but I still feel like pointing out that the person you're talking about isn't Cliffy B, but another guy with a similar name, as clyde identified. Edit: I was late. The many patterned shirts in my wardrobe probably mean I'm contributing to the trend, hopefully I've at least personally unlearned stuff to the point of taking people in other garb seriously regardless.

DiGRA 2015 concluded recently. It was pretty close to me this year, so I tried to make time to go. Didn't work out, but what I caught on Twitter seemed pretty interesting. And here's what GG wants you to think about it. TL,DR: "Before all of this, I had never even HEARD of DiGRA." "The goal of academia can generally be summarized as advancing society through research. Unfortunately, for the most part that’s almost entirely redundant in a capitalist society." "Rather than actually advancing society and civilization, a higher priority is put on the feelings of utterly unimportant individuals." "Even the pozzed portion of GDC is still kept in line by capitalism." "None of this is actually beneficial or important to the games industry- it won’t make anyone any money." And last but not least: "For all of Hitler’s faults, at the very least he was initially acting for the good of the nation."

While it's already quite hard to work out exactly what impact your support has on such a complicated production as a TV show, things get even more complicated when you consider a longer frame of reference. Even if the immediate effect of one's decision to watch GoT is mainly that HBO makes money off of something we all agree has quite a few problematic aspects, their existance as a media company is predicated on eventually creating more content in a similar vein, or at least content that is similarly successful. And that process requires working out exactly what the identity of that show even was, as things frequently end up being wildly successful without anybody being quite sure of the exact reasons. So in other words, eventually HBO, or somebody else, will likely want to create something that resonates with people the same way GoT does, and if in the process of trying to work out why exactly people latch onto that show the way they do in the first place, they find that people watch it not because but in spite of certain problematic aspects, they might just end up removing these from the equasion thanks to this kind of tentative support of a not-ideal thing. That's a big if, of course, but it still stands to reason that the relationship between creators and audience is slightly more direct than the former spinning a big wheel of tropes and the latter having to settle for what few entertainment products end up decently progressive by pure chance alone.

I'll just need an email address for working out nicknames and sending you the game link and password when it goes live. So, write me when you get a chance.

Looks like we got four interested players here and I can probably rustle up a few more, so I guess I might as well put that lifetime license to use. Time for another game of intergalactic warfare. Send me an email to deadpanlunatic at gmail dot com if you want in on this. Setting things up and getting folk in will talk at least until early June I figure, so you know, be aware of that. The (likely) deets: - Real time, 24 hour cycles, no formal alliances, rare random warpgates, regular everything else. - We'll use fancy nicknames to anonymize the game. - I'll be in the game as admin to restore players that go AFK or pause the game if needed, but will otherwise stick to my six starting planets and act as DM only.

It's not terribly surprising, I think, given that Dyack himself once created a similar kind of rebuttal to an article about production issues in a project he was involved in.

I don't think she means to say that she's idolizing them in her personal life, best intentions and all that, but to go from "I think these women are inspiring" to crowdfunding making a bunch of inspirational drawings of them fits the bill pretty accurately. I also heard from folk that apparently she only asked people if it was okay to draw them without any mention of her plans beyond that, and others seem to have not been asked one way or the other.

I'm familiar with their guidelines, but not what the actual institution gets up to beyond that (doesn't sound too great here). LIke most people writing about games, I'm a critic and do next to no reporting, which is just another facet that makes this entire "let's take their complaints seriously for a second" thing so ludicrous. The lack of actual journalism about games isn't an ethical issue, it's an economical issue. It's not like gamers are entitled to coverage that goes beyond enthusiast press (it would certainly be hard to make the argument that this area is of general interest or necessary for keeping citizens informed), especially not if they continue to refuse to pay for anything even remotely going in that direction.

It's hard to really gage the impact this might have on academia across different fields and different universities in different parts of the world. My impression, based both on my own experience and what I heard from other undergraduates, PhD candidates, teaching assistants etc. in various places, is that the frequently commented upon trend of the humanities ever so slowly opening up to games does exist. There's a certain reluctances still, because academic institutions are always reluctant to any kind of change, and the constant battle for an ever smaller pool of funds doesn't help, but on the other hand there's almost a certain level of prestige attached to dealing with something modern like that. Some professors are glad to have that kind of feather in their cap, even if they don't know enough about the subject itself to be of any further help, as is the case for one of my friends, who's both glad to get to write about what he likes and also struggles with having to write his thesis without any real guidance. Maybe GG changed some of that, and maybe interest in games is decreasing in certain of the many, many areas of academia, but I'd still be hesitant to say that GG is the cause of that change in this case, because the movement is primarily an expression of cultural issues that were already there long before GG became a thing. And if the interest of certain institutions depends on them remaining ignorant of the shady parts of this culture, if they need to be tricked into accepting this as a field worthy of study, then it would seem that the issue isn't that GG made it any less worthy, but that it reveals whatever half-truths people have been telling to get them interested. On the flip side, me talking about GG actually made the local Gender Studies apartment very interested in video games, since they suddenly learned that how actively a feminist/anti-feminist discourse is being negotiated there at the moment.