Smart Jason

The subject matter and aesthetic isn't personally appealing to me, but Papers, Please is very possibly the closest thing I've ever played to a perfect game and I've devoured all the browser-based gamejam games Lucas has on his site (recommendation: check out The Republia Times), so this is a day one perch.

I hear you, but I'm usually around for (US) day time play as well. Don't mind being a kernel for Eurothumbs! Bear in mind this is a game where you only need four people at maximum for optimum enjoyment.

Is it cool if I add you on Steam? How about Mupp and dibs - would that be a good way to start?

Yeah! Now even more than when I made my original post I'm into it, since I have reason to grind for experience again despite being at the level cap thanks to these perk decks! Is there, like, a time that people could play... ?

Awesome, awesome! I have zero experience trying to organize this kind of multiplayer networking!

Pardon the bump but I'm totally addicted to this game. If you haven't been following it for the past several months, now would be a great time to reinspect it, as it's Crimefest. That means starting tomorrow we'll be in for a week of free daily updates that will culminate in the Old Hoxton Breakout Heist, along with original Hoxton as a playable character and several other items of interest earned by the community in the past month. Also look for a Halloween update and (most excitingly, I think) a female heister coming soon, as well. Plus, the game and its DLC (minus the most recent Hotline Miami heist) is all currently on sale, so now is a great time to check out the Big Bank or get that Gage Sniper Pack like you'd always meant to. Seriously though, I think Payday 2 is super creative and exhilarating and is one of the few first person shooters I've ever connected to, and one of the infinitesimal multiplayer-based first person shooters that have truly captivated me. I've put nearly five hundred hours into the game, I've hit the (current) level cap, and I am still always up to play it with anyone, at any time - which is why it's such a shame that its player base is such a garbage heap and playing with random people is just asking to have your day ruined with horrible jokes and bigotry and gamers. Playing Payday with Thumbs, though, sounds super good! If that sounds super good to you too, and you'd like to celebrate Crimefest - let me know! Or else continue to let this thread die a silent, decrepit death!

Another thing that should offend all of us bachelor's in English types is that they've just repurposed the term "antagonist" in order to allow themselves to make a protagonist with no redeeming qualities, arc, motivation, or character whatsoever, because that's just video game license and nobody cares.

Not to demean real issues, but this phenomenon always feels like crying reverse racism and other forms of privileged persecution to me. As soon as there is even the slightest hint that the status quo of video games being about unrepentant mayhem and violence is being challenged, it's time to double down on The Way Things Have Always Been on account of these encroaching trends and insist that this medium is for gore, which is fun, which is gore, which is fun ... P.S. Is "opinionated in a way that is different from me" world-filtered here? P.P.S. Yes. So, it should be noted for anyone who missed it, that, in their explanation, the developers had the gaucheness to invoke P.C.-ness.

I haven't listened to it yet, but I imagine it is limp - although obviously nothing is ever permissive enough.

How to Victim Blame, by TotalBiscuit (If thefncrow already posted this too I'm starting a hashtag campaign.)

A Chris Remo tweet just brought this article to my attention, which seems to be a pretty excellent overview piece.

This post just freaked me the hell out and the fact that I didn't even know you could make guest posts on this board makes it even creepier. I'm definitely not going back to the episode to check.

I think the problem is that games are an insular community and will remain so, more so than other forms of media or culture which may also give rise to extremism. This ties into a lot of the pontificating, academic arguments I've been having for years, but as long as games are something that are so silly and violent the community itself will be subject to fracturing as it has with GamerGate - which I don't view as a vocal minority but a true articulation of the fact that we have a serious privileged white male problem in our most robust communal habitats like Reddit and 4chan. I'm an atheist but I have the perspective to recognize the inclusiveness of religion and see the Westboro Church, which you'd cite, as a splinter group. But the idea of an analogue to that for video games - i.e., someone who doesn't play games but understands the culture enough to be fluent and knowledgeable of the denominations in which we've now been forced to assemble - is absurd. To an outsider, the hobby itself is still too easily dismissed and I think the complaints that games are too unsophisticated, violent, and culturally monolithic all go hand in hand to keep the general audience for them essentially similar and therefore essentially volatile.

I've been turning this over in my head a lot for the past several days and I've actually noticed a lot of people seemingly flirting with the same idea, and it's one that I find rather discouraging. More and more I think the very medium of games' predisposition to violence and the fact that they get into the hands of people at such a young age (this was something that, despite his enfeebled rhetoric and lack of familiarity with the subject, I never disagreed with Jack Thompson, et al about) - as well as the more subtle message of individual exceptionalism, solitude, and the eventual conquering of every obstacle through some manner of action verb - instills in this entire community a truly toxic sense of righteousness, privilege, and antipathy that we've always attempted to mollycoddle because it's never before been so prominent. And it's deflating because I feel like this is an unsolvable issue with games themselves, that they'll always be a domain of violent and aggressive thought, an even attempting to whitewash them of their sexist attitudes and diversify their casts and creators will only be putting a Band-Aid on the problem. This community may always have this seething tendency toward violence because the art form itself celebrates violence as the sole means of interaction and progress within the world (a world designed exclusively for you). For years that's simply been creatively exhausting, now I wonder if it's not genuinely, unconscionably sinister. (I might write into the podcast for the first time about this.)

Maybe I'm not alone in thinking 2002 was generally an off year for the industry.

Correct! Nicely done. You're a victim of your past successes, though, Horse Bag - I expected more than one from you! That's the game! Still looking for the track. 2002 is looking to be a difficult one!

I went down that same road with Erik Kain. My breaking point was his hour-plus Google Chat talk show with TotalBiscuit, The Escapist's EIC, and a female pro-GG voice and one of the first hard-hitting, insightful questions they asked themselves was "Why do we have people making such ludicrous accusations as comparing us to ISIS?"

Here is that Huffington Post video interview, which is now between Brianna Wu, Erik Kain, and an administrator of 8chan. The moderator notes that Zoe declined to appear and, for his part, seems to be rather gracious and receptive to Brianna. I'm going to see how much I can bear to watch. I can't see a way to tab out the chat (which is predictable in its content), but you can at least switch to the video chat, which is blank.

The undisputed master of Nintendo. Maybe I should make it a personal goal to try to slip one by you at some point. You're even right about being wrong on twelve. Don't sell yourself short! I've probably personally played the fewest of these games too, come to think, and I wouldn't have gotten this one! I really love it when people are able to get answers just like that, in a flash of revelation. That's what the quiz is all about - the moment of realization that a certain song is just indelibly embedded into your memory for life (in, you know, a good way). Yup! I found this mislabeled, but your title is correct! Well done! You win the unofficial prize of finding my preexisting favorite track of this year's quiz with number fourteen! Yay! That's unfortunately incorrect, but so few people bother to take potentially wrong guesses that I'm genuinely glad you tried!

Meanwhile, here are the answers to the 2001 quiz! Is anyone else starting to get real confused keeping track of all this stuff?

Wow, case closed 100%? Great work, gumshoes. Hell with it, I see no reason not to keep things rolling... 2002 was a weird year for games! I know having done my own top ten lists in the past that this is one I've struggled on perhaps more than any other, so maybe I'm just personally not a fan. Don't let that dissuade you from playing, though, as I had fun making this quiz and am getting more and more smugly self-satisfied at the ways in which I tie tracks into one another as a playlist. And if that's not the true goal of these things, what is?

All right, well, I semi-ashamedly pulled an atte and used context clues rather than pure knowledge to identify seven: Three is still on its way to driving me literally insane, though, which is why I'm puzzling over the list so meticulously.

I'm in such envy of your graphic design for your quizzes! I love this! OK, I am trying to parse the table of contents, though. The alphabetical order is not also the track order, correct? And the numbers and their asterisks, are they hints or meaningless? (I think I can see what you've done with them.) Regardless, my one concrete answer is twenty: Oh, and I guess I might as well snipe in number seventeen before anyone else can: But number three is seriously going to give me an aneurysm because I know it so hard.

Well, that's the right song, the point is purely academic. The answer's marked correct! Good enough for me! With seven, you now have the highest single contributor record for a quiz and you're making me reevaluate box art's inclusion! That's eighteen out of twenty all together - great work, everyone! I consider this quiz solved, whenever atte is ready to post his next.