Chris

Discussion of Disneyland and Disney World took over a pretty big chunk of the most recent episode thread, so it was suggested to me that we have a dedicated thread on the topic. I don't have anything specific to kick it off with, other than that I went to Disneyland recently for the first time in several years and it was really fun, and I've realized as an adult how much differently and more satisfyingly I can appreciate the value of these weird places than when I was a kid.

Welcome, new people!

Playscape: Los Angeles 1: Ashly Burch A shining guest for a shiny first episode - Teddy talks with writer, director, and voice actor Ashly Burch about her path to acting, putting passion behind work, and social change through media. On the verge of releasing Hyper Light Drifter, Teddy describes what it’s like to hunger for an audience. Listen on the Episode Page Listen on Soundcloud Listen in iTunes

Idle Thumbs 255: Awkwardness and Harmony There's something strange about the person facing you—as though their face isn't quite their own. Strange. Everything seemed fine when you were talking online about resource management games and the new Hitman. They even had some great tips to deal with your rodent infestation. But now something seems off. You confidently offer a handshake, but just then, they go in for the fist bump. Oh, God. It's all over now. Discussed: Factorio, Diablo, Hitman (2016), Darkest Dungeon Listen on the Episode Page Listen on Soundcloud Listen in iTunes

Idle Thumbs 251: Signature Moves Boston Dynamics has upped its robot game, advancing the state of cybernetics ever further. Meanwhile, all we've been doing is playing some video games. So grab your hockey stick, your basketball, and your devil dagger, because the clock is counting down, the future of humanity is on the line, and all eyes are on you. It's time to bust a signature move. Featuring James Spafford as Jake Rodkin, and Robot Jake Rodkin as Jake Rodkin's introductory spiel. Games Discussed: Devil Daggers, XCOM 2, NBA 2K16, Overcooked, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Spaceteam (card game), Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime Listen on the Episode Page Listen on Soundcloud Listen in iTunes

Idle Weekend March 18, 2016: In Search of (Burnout) Paradise It's GDC week! Which means the Weekenders have serious FOMO. Rob is dealing with it by playing a ton of Burnout Paradise, one of the finest arcade racers ever produced. Danielle went to GDC for two days, and has the burned-out vocal cords to prove it. Discussed: Burnout Paradise, Need For Speed: Rivals, Forza, Driver: San Francisco, Spec Ops: The Line, Redshirts, Codex Listen on the Episode Page Listen on Soundcloud Listen in iTunes

That last URL segment is a unique identifier. So when Teddy submitted the episode title "Brendon Chung," the CMS did its standard conversion of that into an appropriate string for a URL, "brendon-chung," found that there already was one, and appended the number. That episode-specific segment is the sole part of the URL that actually identifies the episode itself. The earlier segment identifies the show. I guess there's no checking to make sure the show segment matches the episode segment, haha. Whoops! Doug Tabacco wrote our CMS himself and did an amazing job but apparently you can break it in this weird way. I suppose a fix for that would be to check the episode segment against the show segment and then recompose the URL so the show segment matches, and redirect.

Idle Weekend December 11, 2015: TGIF, Finally Join hosts Rob Zacny and Danielle Riendeau as they kick off Idle Weekend—and yes, they really mean it this time! The Idle Weekenders take on the new-and-improved The Game Awards, wherein actual good games were honored, and talk up 2015's obsession with bigger, broader and more... badass? open worlds. You can learn more about the show at idleweekend.net, and send us questions for our weekend correspondence at [email protected]. To keep up with the latest from us, follow us on Twitter at @idleweekend. Discussed: The Game Awards, The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Destiny, The Walking Dead: Season One, Life is Strange, Fargo Season 2, Jessica Jones Listen on the Episode Page Listen on Soundcloud Listen in iTunes

I don't think the structure of the cast itself has changed really. Most of the show's existence has had a pretty consistent host lineup, there was just one significant period of exception.

We have been trying to pare down the show recently to very rarely be more than three people. (Special cases like someone being in from out of town for GDC or whatever are exceptions.) This isn't detail I was planning on sharing, but whatever, it's not really that big a deal: Idle Thumbs lost a LOT of listeners when the cast of the show grew too big and we turned into sort of a weekly game of musical chairs. I am strongly convinced that this is not because of the presence or lack of any particular combination of people, but rather because the changing combination of people made the show unpredictable and inconsistent from week to week. Not necessarily inconsistent in terms of end quality of each individual episode, but inconsistent in terms of tone and listener expectation. I don't imagine this hurt the show much for people here on the forums, since you folks know us all really well relatively speaking, but I think the larger listening audience, especially people who haven't been listening as long, would just kind of lose interest over time when it seemed like they didn't know which version of the show they were going to get week by week. We also think it's conversationally manageable with three people, and gets really tough with four (and especially five). We have such an unstructured style, with lots of interruptions and cross-talk, that when you go above three, things get dicey--again, probably not as big a deal for the longtime hardcore listeners, but I think often very frustrating and difficult to parse for many. Once you have four people, you're in the zone when you can have two different parallel small conversations, and that is the absolute worst. It also kind of sucked for me to have to deal with scheduling a different group of people each week, where people who weren't me and Jake could basically decide arbitrarily whether they were going to be on or not; that's just inevitably how free-time projects end up if you don't have a really strong requirement that a specific group of people always show up. So it has made things much easier to just assume "Okay, this group of three is going to be on every week, and if someone absolutely cannot make it, we'll figure out a sub." I am completely certain that Sean will still end up on episodes. In terms of the default week to week configuration it has just made it a way less hectic show to have a consistent group.

True Detective Weekly 0: Season 1 Recap & Season 2 Anticipation Welcome to True Detective Weekly! We'll be discussing each episode of True Detective Season 2 as it airs on HBO starting June 21. In the meantime, we sit down to talk about what we liked about Season 1, and why we're excited about the show's unusual anthology format. Join us, and send in your thoughts to [email protected]! Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed (Soundcloud page hopefully coming soon!)

I wouldn't hold your breath Maybe some day...

This was really fun! Thanks to everyone who came!

So, again, I'm not really making any argument about the quality of corpses as a gameplay element. Edit: I understand the importance of listening to an early access audience. I also never advised anyone to ignore actual substantial criticism. But you simply can't listen to people who act as though a gameplay change is the actual end of the world. People who make arguments in that kind of manner MAY be responding to something real, but those are ALSO the kinds of ways that people respond to things that are completely not real. Those extreme reactions can certainly have overlap with reasonable reactions, but you have to react to the ones that are actually reasonable, otherwise you're going to wildly swing the pendulum of your game design back and forth trying to please extremists. The game ended up shipping with the corpse system, even though it changed from its original design, and has been extremely well received since then. So obviously the problem isn't "UYGHGHHHHH CORPSES ARE AWFUL AND YOU ARE AWFUL AND YOU RUINED EVERYTHING," the problem was, as is often the case in game design, with the details of implementation. Obviously ideally, an early access audience would understand the realities of an early access game, but realistically, that is probably not the case, which means by the time you put your game on early access, you better be pretty happy with the state of your systems. The developer made the point that new CONTENT was pretty much always received well, but new or changed SYSTEMS were not. That's a bummer, because being able to experiment with systems with a real audience, instead of within the insular world of your own development team and trusted friends, would be a great asset, but for many games (and most especially games whose art LOOKS basically "finished", as Darkest Dungeon's did), it is probably not realistic. The expectation for an early access game seems to be that it will change ADDITIVELY, but not QUALITATIVELY, and that was the lesson I took from the postmortem. I'm really not interested in discussing whether one mechanic was good or bad, or done well or not, because I don't have a horse in that race; the larger issue of how these things are received in GENERAL, using this as an example, was what I intended to pass on.

As you note, I did mean the reactions themselves were insane; I really don't have an opinion on the substance of the change itself. I can't remember what examples I gave on the podcast so it's possible I didn't contextualize the reaction well enough, but some of the stuff was actually bonkers. Part of the point of the story was also to contextualize that despite what I think we tend to BELIEVE we want out of early access, in reality most people actually simply treat it as "buying a finished game." The developer clearly entered into early access with the idea they would be able to try things and make changes. And there's a difference between finding a change to be poor and giving feedback in the hope the change will be addressed somehow, and acting as though the developer has committed a personal and irrevocable sin against you for doing so. BUT despite that, his takeaway was in fact that you should treat early access as simply a normal product being sold, because there's no way to ensure that the bulk of your audience will ever engage with it as anything else. For what it's worth, at one point he asked the audience for a show of hands illustrating how many people were even aware of the corpse controversy, and only maybe two people raised their hands, which utterly blew him away. He was expecting it to be common knowledge amongst a large roomful of relatively well-informed people who were familiar with the game. (I would imagine most people in the room had played the game, anyway, because they chose to go to a talk about its development.) That further suggests to me that incidents like this are not necessarily representative of most people's experience. At a GDC event last night I was talking with a couple people about this and they both said "Yeah I played the game before and after the corpse thing and it seemed like a pretty good game in both cases, just different." That's not to suggest that anyone who didn't like the change is incorrect, or that it is definitely a good change, or anything--just that the INTENSITY and virulence of people's reactions was clearly way out of line. But, again, that's just the reality of the audience, so as a developer you have to either learn to live with it, or learn to avoid it.

Idle Weekend March 4, 2016: Soft Spots Idle Weekend invites you to a judgment-free zone where the hosts reveal their gaming soft spots. You know, those juicy indulgences that will always call to you, whether it's the fashionable (or acclaimed) thing of the moment or not. For your intrepid hosts, those siren songs may include cyberpunk, weird horror, learning new places, and, naturally, The Witcher 3. Discussed: ANATOMY, Dust City, Curtain, the works of Kitty Horrorshow, The Witness, The Witcher 3, Grand Theft Auto IV, Mafia, Scourge of War, The Witness, Lost Girl, Offworld Trading Company, Defragmented, Southern Cross, Batman (Grant Morrison comics) Listen on the Episode Page Listen on Soundcloud Listen in iTunes

I guess you should just try and see--they should be in the same neighborhood, as they use the same shipping methods and automated calculations, but it's hard to say with certainty without just plugging in an address to check.

Idle News Podblast: Her Story Spoilercast Our long-awaited Her Story spoilercast is here! We sat down to discuss our thoughts on Sam Barlow's excellent FMV murder mystery, from its mechanics to the nuances of its plot. If you haven't completed the game, you will be spoiled! Listen on the Episode Page Listen on Soundcloud Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

loll

I agree. I think the fact that the game makes you address this head-on at all is already more "useful" (I guess?) than the majority of most games. Not that usefulness should be a rubric for the value of a game, but if it's being used as one, I think The Witness comes off much better than average!

As Doug said it seems like this thread has pulled out of its disastrous tailspin, BUT it also seems as though it has taken on a far grander scope than intended, so my recommendation would be that if folks consider starting fresh threads for specific labor- and employment-related topics if they want to continue discussing them, instead of continuing to bolt them on here.

I believe there were cases where the researchers told the subjects flat-out that the robots were malfunctioning. But I also didn't read the study itself, only a summary, which was already a mistake!

Regarding escape:

That's true; what someone CLAIMS something to be isn't necessarily accurate. But I think it's generally not that hard to look at the actual reality of their published scores and see what it reflects, broadly.

I started by trying a few full-length pieces that were in the same vein as all the previous intro music, then Jake suggested doing something really short this time around, and I thought that made sense. All of our other podcasts that have intro music tend to get the music out of the way pretty quickly. A big outrageous two-minute theme is a fun and unusual thing for a podcast but that's what we've been doing for years and years and there have been a lot of times during editing where I've wished I could just get on with it. It felt like an appropriate change in direction to me. The idea is that it's not a "song," it's a quick musical identifier.