Jake

I think the presence of suspension of disbelief, and the fact that human beings are human beings, both have a place in this argument. They are both aspects of the discussion which are dismissed by anyone who tries to dismantle games down to something so minimalist and theoretical that you could be talking about anything. Films or paintings or music or anything else can draw emotion from the tools of conventional storytelling and general human relations/experience, or they can blur and abstract themselves to all hell and evoke other responses. Games are no different to me in this regard, except that maybe they have an even broader potential than many other mediums to hit both ends of this spectrum while remaining accessible, both due to gaming's ability to so directly incorporate and access many other mediums wholesale, and because games are by nature about responding to someone interacting with them (versus being mostly passive). I feel like people going out of their way to refute that or dismiss it might be trying too hard, or are missing something. I guess the thing that bugs me a ton about this in general is that, at least by the traditional definition of gaming, human beings are the primary input devices. Games are made interesting because of the exchange happening between the game and the person playing the game. If the game can do something which causes the person playing it to react differently (eg make a girl act hurt that you pulled on her arm), then that's a totally valid piece of design, and not window dressing painting an artificial/external response. I changed how I interacted with Yorda, became more conscious of how I navigated the world, because of the way the game made me feel. Anyway, in conclusion: I have said too much and am digging myself into a pit of my own self-annoyance.

I cite this example too often, but the control mechanic alone in Ico got an emotional response from me. Just moving the analog stick too fast while holding hands and causing Yorda to jerk around unexpectedly, it surprised the hell out of me, and made me feel bad. Just moving an analog stick around. Not watching a cutscene or whatever. I mean, would the argument against that be something like... since the player controlled object and the thing it was tethered to look like human beings, my response is irrelevant, because I was reacting to some sort of narrative event (a girl being startled and hurt) instead of pure collision of boxes? I can't imagine someone missing the point to that large a degree.

No Nick in this blast because Steve, Chris and I recorded this while sitting around bored at Chris' apartment on Sunday evening. Nick might not know this exists. Hopefully he doesn't knife us or something on Tuesday night. Also, from the Idle Thumbs E3 2004 press release referenced in this blast:

This thread is fairly horrible.

INDY walks past aisles of book-lined shelves. He stops, turns, then looks down. CONTINUED: (3) INDY Three, seven and ten. He climbs a spiral staircase leading up to a LOFT and looks down at BRODY and ELSA. The floor beneath their feet is an elaborate tile design containing a huge dong--visible only from this higher angle. INDY Erm. (wryly; to himself) It looks like a big cock, or something.

It has been strongly denied by many Brits, but has anyone noticed that an "r" is often added to the end of some words? This seems especially true if both that word and the word following it end and then start with a vowel or softer sound. "Pizza" ends up somewhere between "peetzer" and "pizza," especially if its followed by "and" or something. Am I crazy or are there people in the UK somewhere who are stealing "r"s from words which properly have them, and then sneaking them back into the ends of words which don't?

"We've hidden a giant cock somewhere in this set. We can't tell exactly where, but looking at this, a cock is evoked for some reason. Maybe its us. Your challenge, gamers, is to identify it. Prepare to qualify."

The first thing I thought of when I saw their palette choices and the style of brushstrokes in the background was "hey that looks like Braid." I don't think it's a ripoff, but Braid was definitely the first thing which came to mind for me, too.

Before and after re-discovered, four years later: Before: Missing Link: After:

This thread will scare your mom. - ign.com ...and stuff her in a mailbox. - attr. ign.com

Man, nice A Boy and his Blob avatar. I never really got anywhere in that game, but just saw over on GAF that there is a really visually nice looking remake coming out for the Wii, which I want now, after checking out the screenshots in that thread.

It's maybe frustrating that for me that "perfectionist" bullshit possibly is my worst quality as well as my best. Producers actually hate me because I end up going over on things all the damn time, due to polishing them to a degree that is higher than they think is necessary. I've been accused of "overdelivering" many times, at many jobs, and it remains just as insulting to me now as it did the first time I heard it. I don't see the point of releasing something I'm not as pleased with/proud of as I can possibly be given realistic constraints, and I'm sure others feel that way as well, but I guess I'm more comfortable pushing and squeezing those constraints to the limit than other people, because it tends to annoy them. That probably makes me sound like a big old douche, but I really enjoy doing good work, and its frustrating beyond belief when people effectively say "no, don't do good work," so I often just do it anyway and then get in trouble.

The site could be a lot better than it is, both in terms of presentation of information (wouldn't it be cool to be able to check in on Steve and Duncan and Marek's excellent blogs, for instance?) and under the hood (the front page is basically one giant background image right now, which is horrible!).

Why use an 8 bit png? I can understand why using CSS can be worthwhile, but holy fucking shit people need to get off of their high horse about PNGs/CSS/etc. It's an image file. When someone tells me to arbitrarily use 8-bit PNGs over GIFs, I immediately picture them wearing one of those shoulderbags with a car seat buckle for a snap, and some t-shirt from Hot Topic. Sorry! CSS can theoretically be great for instantly repurposing or re-flowing content simply by changing the stylesheet, but I have almost never, ever, seen this actually carried out in practice. More often, all of the data that is re-flowed in those situations is already stored in a database system, so when the new design is made, both the CSS and displaying HTML are rewritten or heavily modified, and only the tokens which call back to the database fields are entered in. Also most CSS driven designs that I see are still filled with crazy hacks and workarounds to get "only in CSS!" type tricks to work. I see guys at work spend hours poking at something to get a piece of content to move 5 pixels to the left and its something that I could do in about 20 seconds in my grizzled hobo-style hybrid code which dates to use a table for something other than tabular data. I'd eventually like to get my markup prowess up to a point where I could do a page in pure compliant CSS-driven markup, mostly to get my familiarity with layers and overlapping elements a lot stronger, because that aspect of CSS driven design has actual tangible benefits as a visual and functionality designer, but (and I imagine this is sadly the appeal for a lot of people) less because it makes the code looks pretty.* Anyway, CSS has a lot of amazing positives, but I am tired of people treating it like a religion, and denying any advantages of the things that it replaced. I am admittedly probably an old grandpa stuck in the past, but it kills me to see people kill themselves to accomplish stupidly simple things, and then admonish me for achieving them. I know you weren't doing that to any notable degree, ys, but you apparently touched a nerve! As for the Idle Thumbs' front page itself... It is... the worst thing ever... under the hood. It's based on some temporary code that I shat out at 4 in the morning when we were launching the first episode, and I've been grossly stretching it out over time since then. One day something more real will exist. It's currently not representative of anything. That said, to end users, it doesn't really matter as long as it gets the job done. * I'm not arguing against clean code here. I'm arguing that CSS driven code looks pretty to the person who wrote it, but to outsiders, even those familiar as hell with CSS, it can be just as fucked to untangle as any other piece of script or markup. Cough. Anyway. Video games!

How does he love?

It would still win if we called the contest right now! ps kween mutha

PNGs make IE6 cry, are still not wholly trusted by me in IE7, and sadly, in a bid to be helpful to designers but actually ends up being harmful and horrible, are dynamically color-adjusted to compensate for their creator's color profile by Safari. Paradoxically, this only happens to PNGs which are saved from Photoshop via "Save For Web" -- PNGs saved out through the standard save window display perfectly correctly in Safari -- but if you are using some sort of hardware color correction solution for print design, and Photoshop is calibrated for that, you're going to end up fucking up PNGs for Safari users. It's retarded. That is all a smokescreen, though, for the fact that I'm actually just sort of lazy and wasn't thinking when I threw the site together a while ago. I don't actually give a shit about IE 6 or IE7. (See the IE rendering bugs on goty.cx for proof of this fact.) Whenever a real Idle Thumbs site is made (that needs to happen, jeeez, its been 20 episodes! I'm horrible) I will probably use a million PNGs and then somehow break the site for a bunch of people.

When I was writing it I was concerned that it would be suspicious to reference a throwaway line of UK TV dialog from 10 years ago, especially on a forum full of British people. Maybe not?!

Argh you included a metallicock.

If anyone has Alex Ashby's current email address, could you send it to me in a private message? Thanks!

You guys are all failures. Anyone? no?

I dislike that it's not on Hulu or scifi.com yet. Boo I say.

Some editor was the most happy person in the world when they came up with that. Amazing.

I haven't read a lot of gaming news lately, which is a bit weird I guess, but I generally read www.shacknews.com www.gamasutra.com www.rockpapershotgun.com sometimes www.giantbomb.com and I often check in on www.mixnmojo.com and www.adventuregamers.com but that's about it. When scouring for things to read I also sometimes check out www.4colorrebellion.com and http://blog.wired.com/games/ and www.offworld.com