Deadpan

Intentional or not, I like the idea of additional content that unlocks over longer periods of time. Probably a nice way to space out "what the hell is this?" moments and keep them refreshing instead of confusing.

It does, but she also starts with an item that gives her a new permanent demon familiar after taking damage a certain number of times. I actually wasn't aware of this myself, I didn't find any blood donation machines and the combat itself became pretty trivial with the amount of helpers I had.

The fact that room effects persist between rounds in Greed mode even though it gives you fresh charges for items makes Lilith and her familiar cloning active item pretty interesting. I just had a run with her where I found a nine volt, so by not leaving the main room in between rounds I could get all the way up to a dozen of her starting familiars. I didn't find many others, but I did get a bunch of peepers floating around and a cube of meat that slowly grew into several meatboys, and even those were enough to make everything very confusing.

I watched a video of somebody playing that daily and that's basically what happened there too. I think it's because one of the starting items, Sack Head or something like that. I encountered it in one of my runs, it gives you that paper bag over the head look and seems to drastically increase the amount of mystery bags you get (and holy hell the amount of batteries you get with those is absurd). Was this update meant to reset saves or is that just my experience? Anyway, on my second run I encountered a big new boss on a different path out of the womb, and managed to beat him on my third. Pretty neat so far.

The Huni vs Smeb matchup really seemed to go strongly in KOO's favor. That series was rough, and the ultimate 3-0 for KOO really doesn't tell you how close it was, initially. In the first game Fnatic actually got ahead with a significant gold lead and seemed to be winning every single lane, but they couldn't translate it into one of those huge teamfights they usually get where they break the game open afterwards, and kudos to KOO for not giving them the opportunity I guess, but when you look at the second game and see that KOO absolutely still made the kind of mistakes that would have set Fnatic up, and how Fnatic managed to then take teamfights from them even while they were behind in gold, you have to wonder how different this all may have looked if one of these fights had happened in the first game instead. As it was, Fnatic seem to have exhausted their entire mental fortitude in the second game by trying to come back after losing all three inhibitors (and almost getting away with it like they did against AHQ). So by the time they get to the third game they just start looking more and more shaken the more they fall behind and start making really unfortunate mistakes. If any one of these games had gone to Fnatic, like the first two were very close to, it might actually have given them the confidence to turn everything around. KOO take a deserved win here ultimately, but I really would have liked to see the series go to five games anyway, just so they actually get to beat Fnatic at their best and not by messing them up by taking close games from them.

I'll try to participate a little bit whenever it happens, but since I'm also going to try and work on some unfinished Twine stuff under the auspices of NaNoWriMo I might need a bit of time to recharge depending on how early you go with it.

To a certain degree, these conversations are always going to involve a weird balance of arguing about these concepts as they are presented in the actual current discussion and the way they exist out there in the wild, as hard to pin down attitudes that you can't really get a clear taxonomy of. So, I understand where this is coming from, kind of. Still, the fact that you come here to say "don't make assumptions about what people are saying" while going on to make a hell of a lot of assumptions about what myself and others are saying is pretty frustrating. 1) The exact reason I used the word clear-cut in the follow-up to my original, intentionally vague post is because Gaizokubanou explicitly mentioned missing "the clarity of old definitions" and how the term is now probably broad too the point of being meaningless. So I super don't appreciate the accusation that the longing for more precise definitions is just something folk like to pin on you for no reason. 2) The point isn't that I honestly think people would not consider Solitaire (or other examples) games. It's that as soon as you try to come up with some universal rule or feature to define games, these kinds of examples are left unaccounted for, even though most people, even the ones making these definitions, would intuitively describe them as games. 3) Your point about Wittgenstein not arguing for maximum fuzziness at all times looks completely misplaced to me given that nobody here seems to be arguing for this either. I mean, if you think that including cases near the existing boundaries of the word (like Mountain and Dear Esther) in my definition of games is about wanting to maximize the territory claimed by that term, you are seriously underestimating how far a radical approach could take these thought experiments. Is TV a Video game? Are museum audioguides video games? Are programmable gadgets video games? 4) If you want to break it down this far, "has value to me" or "doesn't have value to me" is also the frequently literal reasoning used by Video game traditionalists to argue against including certain titles. Regardless, the personal enjoyment that I, for example, draw from these games hardly precludes them having a larger effect on the medium, as we have seen in the proliferation of walking simulators, for instance. Either way, I'm not sure by what kind of yardstick you thought it possible to judge in a more holistic sense whether or not a new entry would benefit a category overall. 5) At what point in history do you think art transcended a definition of "I like this and it has value to me" because as far as I see the only things that really change over time is what people consider to be of value and which fancy reasoning they use to sell their personal tastes or cultural mores as the natural and desirable state of things. A side-note: Dan Pinchbeck gave a talk in Vienna recently and described his intentions with Dear Esther mostly as honing in on the sense of "really being there" he got from first-person shooters, making it less an exercise in poetry than an attempt to stretch the short, visually and narratively impressive scenes in traditional games where gunplay is paused for a while to the length of a full experience, a possible precursor in that sense to the kind of VR dioramas being made these days.

I don't think there's ever been a point where a clear-cut definition did the subject justice, and in a sense video games are only catching up to how broad the concept of games has always been. If they're something we play with others (something video games call into question depending on whether or not you consider a computer an "other"), what of things like Solitaire, throwing a ball against a wall and catching it over and over again, or those hypothetical scenarios we like to play out in our heads? If they're meant to be fun, or voluntary (as in "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles"), or to have clear barriers seperating play from reality (as in the concept of the magic circle), then what of mind games, or the kind of games we're thinking of when we're telling another person to "quit playing games" in a romantic context?

I didn't anticipate there'd be this much interest in discussing this here, but the fact that there is makes me think it'd be a good idea to plug my weekly Game Crit Club, where we had several conversations on this early on, particularly opposite a short reading from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, which both precede and, in my opinion, solve this problem. He even uses games (although not video games, obviously) as a recurring example in the text. The long and the short of this is that it approaches the question not by looking at how games work but at how definitions work. I first encountered the text in linguistics, where it was used to explain the difference between invariant and prototypical definitions. Invariant are the kind that assign universal features that all candidates need to have in order to be allowed into a category. This doesn't really work well for language because there are all sorts of cases where (for instance) words do some of the things that are expected from a word class but not all of them. Some adjectives can only be used attributively or predicatively ("The child is afraid" but not "An afraid child" and "the main reason" but not "the reason is main"), others can be used both ways. So linguistics relies on prototypical definitions instead. These assume a modifiable catalogue of features (based on established members, this is where the prototype part comes in), any number or combination of which is enough to be considered part of the group. With these, some members are closer to the center and some are closer to the edges, like doing all the things that are expected of adjectives vs. only doing some of them, but where exactly the center of such a definition is located can change over time and the boundaries are quite fuzzy overall. One lesson you could take from this is simply go from looking for a clear-cut definition of games to trying to figure out their exact feature catalogue, i.e. to replace a binary game/nongame model with a prescriptive hierarchy of gameness based on certain key requirements. The salient point, however, is that Wittgenstein is arguing that definitions on the whole could stand to be a whole lot messier. The existence of weird fringe cases or atypical examples inevitable threatens to topple invariant definitions, since they don't allow for deviation. So for them, something that is considered a game by some people and not a game by other people represents a loss of knowledge because it calls into question their established conception of what games are. Prototypical definitions, on the other hand, only stand to gain from such cases because they are always willing to expand by adopting new members and revising their own understanding of the concept accordingly. In other words, asking "Is Proteus a game?" is kind of a boring question. Asking "What does it mean for games that Proteus exists?" is a much more interesting one.

I kind of agree with another point made by somebody on the analyst desk though, that KOO's approach of dismantling a team's strategy might not be that useful against Fnatic because of how much versatility they've shown recently. Across the entire season they've been seen as this team that plays passively mid and bot and waits until Huni goes huge with some teleport powerplay, and while they stll do that, they've also shown more pressure in those lanes recently, with Rekkles bringing out the Kennen and the Jinx, and Febiven going back to assassins like LeBlanc and crushing it. The remade game against EDG even showed them willing to forego their usual approach of early game picks and teamfighting to stall out a game, and while it's hard to say who would have ultimately won that, EDG didn't seem to think they had the upper hand there, what with the change in bans. I remain tentatively hopeful that we'll see a rematch of SKT vs Fnatic for the finals.

This was a really interesting series of games. The game they had to remade because Gragas bugged out highlights the weirdness of esports a bit, but it's a shame that this prevented the Mordekaiser vs Gangplank duel from concluding, meaning they are both still undefeated despite being played on opposite sides in this game. Gutsy move for sure from Fnatic to let those through, and in a sense they even got something out of that game since EDG were apparently not satisfied with how that match-up went for them and ended up banning Mordekaiser away on blue side, allowing Fnatic to get one extra ban of their choice on red side, besides having to match the Mordekaiser ban with the Gangplank ban. That's an interesting thing about those power picks, I guess, that there's a chance some teams haven't even prepared them that well since they didn't expect to ever get their hands on them, which means you can kind of dare them into that if you want. Other than that this seemed pretty classic Fnatic stuff, going even or falling behind a little bit and then cracking the game wide open with great teamfights around baron.

With their tiebreaker added in, NA teams apparently went 0-10 in the second week. That has to be rough to watch for fans.

Oh wow, that first game out of Fnatic was huge. After their first week I though "Okay, they can probably beat C9, but it'll be close" and then NOPE, they just completely crush them. Hopefully this isn't a repeat of last week's "win first game completely then lose the other two" approach.

Seeing wins out of Origen and Fnatic would make this chill weekend perfect for me.

Why the Yasuo guys?

Please don't misunderstand my intent here. I do not wish to defend a chain of articles that, starting with the follow-up to the original, merely inconsequential story, was clearly mishandled. My intent is for us not to become our ideological enemies in talking about our ideological enemies, and not to simplify and thus mischaracterize complex situations simply because now is a time where it it convenient for us to do so.

News is never not biased. You cannot keep opinion out of it entirely, and the dogmatic demand that it has to be anyway is a major GG talking point.

"Several facts point to the latter scenario: [...] - As we pointed out in our response to your original (incomplete) inquiry, the Author appears to have been biased due to previous involvements with known detractors of CIG, its executives, and the project Star Citizen."

As delicious as the irony of a proGG journo at a proGG site getting punished for their ethical misconduct may be, I'm not going to cheer for a letter that accuses any writer of being biased.

Rooting for Fnatic feels like a really mixed bag right now: totally crushed IG, struggled and then ultimately lost against AHQ. I really hope that they'll give Huni a comfort pick today against C9. The guy plays a lot of champions really well, but it feels like if you focus your drafting on getting him one of the meta powerpicks, he's prone to getting nervous, feeling like he should be doing more with it than he is and that leads to mistakes and weird plays, especially if he gets pressured. Probably better to focus on Reignover, Yellowstar and Rekkles first.

I'm not really interested in defending this, but I'm curious if this conversation wouldn't be going a little differently if this had been written by somebody else, somewhere else. Obviously the who and where are big points of context that you can't just rewrite without changing the entire situation, but some of the talk here goes in the direction of implying that the writing and publication of these pieces was just a series of one obvious ethical misstep after another, and I don't think this is actually too different from the kind of content other, more well-regarded sites run? At the very least, I cannot find any glaring flaws in the first article of that whole chain. It's a little heavy on quoting Smart perhaps, but that's not necessarily an issue in itself. We're reading this from a point of view of having just discussed for multiple pages his various bizarre actions, but not everybody out there is going to care about his shitty politics as much as we do. Not pointing out that he's working on a game that, as far as I understand it, is kinda going in a similar direction as Star Citizen a little bit and could be seen as a rival product (if it wasn't such an obvious broken mess) is a pretty glaring omission, but otherwise this initial piece is pretty decent about contextualizing things, by mentioning the petition for Smart to shut the fuck up and generally being pretty open about how non-substantial most of this information is: here look at this twitlonger, this archived page, this LinkedIn profile. That makes the article pretty non-substantial by extension, but honestly, that applies to like 90% of stuff that is written about games that aren't released yet. The follow-up seems to mostly fall apart because 1) it pretends to be serious journalism, with all this talk of confidential sources and such, but actually still deals in the same internet rumors as before, just less honestly so and 2) it doubles down way too hard on trying to prove a speculative "a guy said X" story, which inevitably looks like they are actually picking up that guy's crusade themselves instead of just reporting on it. So yeah, that was all handled pretty poorly. At the same time, I don't think the initial story was really far enough out of line to make a fuss. The nature of Star Citizen just opens it up to speculation: it's sitting on this huge pile of crowdfunded money and nobody really knows what's going on. Game development is always a bit of a black box, but the amount of smokescreens set up around this game in particular is still spectacular, what with all the fictional companies and in-universe stuff that you need to dig through if you want to get to any concrete information, of which there is very little made readily available (out of curiosity, I just downloaded their presskit, and it consists of a bunch of screenshots and a two-page pdf that doesn't tell you anything at all, really). I don't think it's fair to tell journalists that they have to cover both sides, get in touch with the developers, and always respect their wishes in that kind of situation, because that makes it very easy for big devs to control the terms of the conversation and shut down unfavorable reporting by starving it out. This isn't the kind of reporting I would have done perhaps, but I'm still not a fan of the terms on which it is criticized sometimes.

I didn't think I'd regret turning off the Autoblocker as quickly as I did, but here we are. Immediately afterwards somebody tagged me into a conversation over an article I wrote, and I can't tell if this is terrible timing or people have been yelling in my general direction a lot more than I was aware of.

You can remove legendaries, sure, but that doesn't mean that they don't have a lot of value. In Magic, big cards feel much more situational to me: drawing mana relies on chance a little bit so if you want to play huge cards reliably you might have to add more land cards or cards that help you draw more land. In Hearthstone, the economic progression is automated (plus the decks are much smaller), meaning things will go to that mid to late game. So unless you run an all out rush deck that tries to end things before that point, it probably benefits from having some late game kickers in there, and in that department you just get much more out of legendaries than you do standard beefy cards. Very few of them are going to turn the game around if you already built momentum against the person playing them (while still keeping removals on your hand for security). But if you're kind of going equal, or maybe have fallen behind a little bit (and maybe had to use some removals already), they just spell doom for you in a way that no basic card really could. Plus a lot of them actually do what they're supposed to do as soon as they enter the field, at which point getting to keep them out is just icing on the cake. Ysera will give the enemy 1, Nefarian 2, and Neptulon 4 extra cards even if I remove them on my next turn. Ragnaros gets at least one hit out before I can do anything. Dr. Boom has those explosive bots. A mechmage rolling out Antonidas can use spare parts to get 3 Fireball spells before I can do anything about it. They'll still have that upgraded hero power after Justicar Trueheart goes away. And Jaraxxus, well, you know.

When's the right moment to start making bets about Worlds?

I think we kinda took issue with the same stuff there if that makes you feel better about your frustrations.