Jake

We were heading more in that direction, which is partially why we opened the blog and re-designed the front page, somewhere in the late 30s or 40s of the original podcast... but then Nick left and we stopped doing them, so all infrastructure/business-type stuff was put on indefinite hold. The new podcast with Steve (and Sean) has always been a more nebulous thing so we didn't really invest in infrastructure for that either. Oh well!

It's weird that you guys are taking such a business centric approach to this stuff. Measuring success in terms of what quantity of individuals will pick up X hypothetical created object (book, game, whatever). I mean, games are funded generally through business transactions, as are books, but that doesn't mean shit, especially when people are being as theoretical as they are in threads like this. Maybe an author really doesn't give a shit how many people will be able to read his work, or whether it will "get lost" because it doesn't sell like Harry Potter. Maybe people have things they want to say or ideas they want to write, and they don't particularly care who their target audience is, beyond "someone who might for some reason be interested in reading what I'm writing." On the opposite end of the academic scale, there is the rolling, roiling audio fart attack we all know as The Idle Thumbs Podcast, but I think this is a decent example. We have no idea what our audience is really. Maybe we have a vague idea at this point, but we definitely had no idea when we started the podcast. We just placed microphones down on a table and started talking about what we wanted to talk about, recorded down in a medium that is potentially consumable by a large number of people (an MP3 file, which is probably as close as you can get to the digitally-distributed-audio equivalent of a book or something). Would we have been smarter to run the numbers first, to find that maybe people like a table of contents or sectioned off parts of the podcast? Should we have made sure to boilerplate every game's discussion with a five sentence summary of the game's play-style, genre orientation, and franchise history, so people aren't confused? Should we not reference any games released more than one and a half console generations ago, unless they sold 500,000 units, as to not confuse people with esoteric subject matter? Or is the podcast better because it assumes that -- if you've listened past the first twenty minutes, or your first few episodes without giving up -- you either already have the leg up necessary to understand the references and subjects of conversation, or are at least willing to invest the mental processing power to filter through and contextualize the parts you don't fully understand because you're still getting rewarding value from listening to the parts that you do like? This seems like a no brainer to me (I imagine many of you are here because you appreciate that on the podcast we follow to the second of those two examples), and it seems like that can clearly be extrapolated out to other works and endeavors in other (all?) mediums. Edit: Also, I'm pretty excited for BioShock Infinite.

There's probably a little bit of meeting in the middle to be had, but increasingly it seems like gamers (and kind of disgustingly, "core" gamers) want to load up a game, sit back in their chair and say "impress me." When the game then replies with, "well, you have to actually play me to be truly impressed," one should maybe not fault the game for asking. Something like Gears of War, or God of War, doesn't ask too hard. It shows you expensive guts and rocks splitting in half while you, the gamer sits back and, lords it up. I'm not saying games should be deliberately opaque/obtuse about things, I don't necessarily fault a thing for asking and expecting curiosity. I don't fault a game for responding poorly to someone expressing "I'm waiting to be impressed" through their play style. I quoted this just because I think the analogy is good and I agree with it.

Yeah it feels like, from the trailer at least, Irrational is deliberately trying to do a game with *shock-inspired mechanics in more vertical and wide open spaces. No idea what the actual game is, but that's the vibe they've been sending so far. Also, as far as isolation goes, I think that being alone in empty space -- where seemingly no matter how far/fast you move, the things you can see around you aren't moving because they're so far away -- can be as isolating as being in a confined/constraining space.

BioShock Infinite: I Know You Are But What Am I

FACT: I read this thread title as "RISK on a Plane."

I wouldn't mind if the "BioShock" name from here on out was applied like a (far) cooler version of the "Final Fantasy" name. Eg, I hope that this game actually has nothing to do with the first two BioShocks other than the ideas behind the core design, and the idea of there being a strong central theme manifested as a physical space. Unless something super brilliant and unexpected happens, I don't know if, as a fan of the world of the first two games, I'd want these realities to be connected. That would imply that Andrew Ryan was aware of this huge other amazing ideology-as-city when he built Rapture. Takes some of the thrill out of that for me, for sure.

A clear path through the atmosphere has been set. We're on an exponential curve to the moon! BioShock 1: Rapture, under the sea. BioShock 2: Rapture, also under the sea. BioShock 3: Columbia, turn of the century floating city, hundreds of feet above the earth. BioShock 4: In a late Cold War-era city-sized NASA/European space station, orbiting Earth. BioShock 5: MoonShock.

In my life I have maybe played enough multiplayer Worms that some of that time has preemptively rolled over to the new game. I'll still suck, and rope like a baby, though.

I've purchased this Worms game, along with a few others (including Metallus and tabacco, who don't post around here much anymore but do exist, and would probably play worms.)

Do we eventually get a new thread for this, or does it keep living on in the same thread as past games? It seems like at some point you guys were numbering them, as this is the third one... Just wondering.

Oh. I don't really play MMOs, but I'm glad you picked up on my reference to taking a shit during the BioShock conversation.

What's wrong with it? Should I have said "features removed or cut from BioShock 2: Sea of Dreams, late in production," or something?

That was a great listen. Thanks for the link. The guy wanting to sit down and figure out how to represent and display little facets of life in games, using the analogy to noticing something in life and dropping it into a sentence in his novel, maybe made my week. As someone who is maybe too mired in the details of stuff like that, it's refreshing as hell to hear someone from the outside acknowledge what so few people inside gaming do -- that every single thing you see in a game came from human hands and was a conscious choice based on observation and thought (even if the thinking was about what rules and formulas will guide a computer to create it procedurally). Or, at least, that everything in a game has the potential to be that.

When does this game start/how etc? I haven't played a game of Neptune's Pride outside of in the office where we can yell at each other to set this sort of thing up.

Yeah that would be Carl, and he's awesome. If you happen to see Telltale playing TF2 at lunch, odds are he will set you on fire.

Video'd http://twitter.com/idlethumbs/status/20102706425

My feelings echo Steves on this matter. Also, hahahaha "Bogost in the Shell." now I'm sad.

I second this motion.

I remember in one of his GDC talks, Clint Hocking was talking about both JP Tresspasser and Assassin's Creed for how they connected the player and the player character to the world very physically, and that influence was pretty directly apparent in how FC2 shows hands interacting with the world. Or were you talking about something else?

Ah okay, thanks! That's vaguely what I remembered, and it seems like they come from the same technological or at least ideological space, even if they diverged very early on

Yes we're just fucking around.

Current time for the panel: Sunday, 2-3 in the Wolfman Theater. Current attendees: Chris, Jake, Nick.

And That's Who "The Lord of the Donk" Was All rise. At his command, Chris and Jake play a bunch of Brütal Legend, while Nick frantically stockpiles gas cans to make it through Left 4 Dead 2's Scavenger mode, all the while trying to come to grips with his feelings on Borderlands. Plus a song about video games, but probably not what you're thinking. Games Discussed: Brütal Legend, Left 4 Dead 2, Diablo, Borderlands, Risen, Stargoose