Chris

I still don't understand why people care. The books or whatever you like aren't going to disappear from the earth or your memory. What difference does it make if someone declares them "official" or not?

I don't find this to be hypocritical. If a developer gives us a space to explore, the implicit understanding should be that it's a place interesting enough to explore. Otherwise, why are we there, and why can we explore it?

Haha, god.

None of it happened anyway because it's all made up

I think it's just that the characters are so spatially distributed at this point that it's much less about following office politics as much as it once ways. The agency is no longer the default focal point. So Joan's ascendance can be a focus for a significant portion of one episode, and a huge amount of screen time can be allocated in a given episode to Betty's trip with her kid, but those both come at the expense of any characters who aren't in their immediate proximity, especially with Betty since she doesn't interact with any of the office crowd; same goes for most of the rest of the characters. I don't think the women are suffering from this any MORE than the men are currently. The show just really has to choose to focus on specific spheres of influence at a time now that they've all spread out.

Whoops I don't know why I said Ubisoft Montreal. I meant to say Eidos Montreal, which was apparently also incorrect but definitely the actually more-correct thing I intended to say.

Well obviously we were joking. It's not a matter of it being nasty, it's a matter of how borderline-insufferable it has been.

I've been to Europe numerous times. Switzerland, the UK, lots of places in Italy. (I've also been to Canada plenty of times.) I used to spend a couple weeks in London roughly every year, although it's been about two years since I've been and I don't have a current trip planned because my life has just been really busy. Also for what it's worth in terms of traveling the "furthest", the distance between coasts on the US is equivalent to crossing several European countries—and as far as I'm concerned, based on my own experience, the cultural difference between rural America and coastal metropolitan America is considerably greater than the cultural difference between San Francisco or New York and London.

Welcome, new folks!

Not that it matters much, but just to set the record straight slightly: if you're talking about the actual "From Double Fine and 2 Player Productions" forum (as opposed to the general discussion forums for backers), threads soliciting input definitely affected the game. There was a thread asking for location ideas, and the artists mocked up a ton of those ideas and then several went into the actual game. And Tim polled the userbase on things like the female character design and the name of the game, and both of those had a significant impact on his decisions. If you mean polls that were just started by other backers, then yeah there's nothing binding about those. Anyway again it doesn't matter one way or the other at this point, but I had to point it out!

Idle Thumbs 145: Rich Uncle, Cool Uncle Much like the ephemeral Flappy Bird, Idle Thumbs spent this week embroiled in a conspiracy which quickly came to an end. Unlike Flappy Bird, the Idle Thumbs conspiracy concluded with us receiving amazing paintings of ourselves, Bobby Kotick, and J. Allard. In the words of Flappy Bird creator Nick Breckon, "I can call this podcast a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it." Things Discussed: Flappy Bird, Mechanical Bird, Renegade Bird, Maverick Bird, Athletic Bird, Flappy Fly Bird Flippy Floop, Threes, Jazzpunk, Far Cry 2 Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

This thread makes me hate hipsters, and non-hipsters, and everyone

I'm a big Mingus fan--Mingus Ah Um is one of my favorite albums. I also love this track from Blues & Roots: Like a few others here, I'm not super familiar with contemporary jazz.

This is probably a fairly intuitive and complex issue on a day to day basis, but one general principle I would put forth is that if you find yourself having to redo an identical or very similar block of Playmaker script again and again (say, a door interaction), it may be worth formalizing it in code--perhaps in a custom Playmaker action that you can then call as many times as you need.

We're using Playmaker on Firewatch. I also know that The Novelist was 100% scripted in Playmaker--Kent didn't write a single line of code. We're writing plenty of our own code for Firewatch, but Playmaker is still a really valuable tool.

Super cool thread

Yes, this is how I feel. There are also plenty of works I enjoy that are unremittingly bleak and cynical, but I don't think that's an inherently more "correct" worldview.

I don't think I've had that happen. I've had a weird inverse thing happen often, where I'll meet someone in circumstances in which it seems neither of us previously knew of the other at all, then deep into the conversation they will reveal that they're a big fan of Idle Thumbs or some other thing. That's always a bit jarring.

What do you mean by this?

Do you have a question in particular? I'm not sure what you mean when you say "bring us an episode"--do you mean how do we determine what to talk about? Or how is it edited? On the former, we just individually talk about whatever we want; we never agree on topics in advance beyond "oh I played AC4 this week, I can talk about that on the cast." On the latter, there's generally almost no editing; usually the only editing is to insert the ad reads we put in, and to excerpt some dumb hopefully funny bullshit from the break. But we don't edit the main discussions for content. The main exception to that is if someone lets slip something that is under NDA or they realize was told to them in confidence. Well, whatever. It's a thing that happened to me, not a thing I actively pursued.

I bet he was one of the highest-paid employees at the company--he was certainly one of the most senior.

As would probably be the case moving to any desirable place, it depends on the field you're in. What do you do for a living?

I don't have time to dive deep into this discussion again, but regarding games treating this kind of subject matter in a way that goes beyond the surface style: Anna Kipnis, one of my former coworkers at Double Fine, was born in the Soviet Union and came to the United States when she was young. She has told me how much she appreciates Papers, Please, since--despite the satiric angle--she recognized in it something really powerful and true about the experience of dealing with Soviet border control and immigration, and bureaucracy generally. She knew people who faced severe challenges in their attempts to leave the Soviet Union and felt the game addressed this in a meaningful and empathetic way.

I don't have the energy to reply about the withholding story stuff other than to, like Jake, fully disagree with the characterization of our argument as "just fucking come out and say it." My position is that you should EITHER come out and say it, OR reduce it down to tone. (I mean obviously you can do whatever you want, including something in between, you just have to be more confident and intentional about it than I think a lot of games that try to skirt the boundaries usually are.) I think games are generally BETTER at the latter than the former, and I have no problem with it at all. I just don't like when games get, to my perception, overly cute and precious about it, precociously teasing at something that I don't believe is actually there. Beyond that, Jake's replies mirror my own feelings on this.

Understood. On that note, I would hope that all Americans would be fully aware and sensitive to the history of slavery in this country but that doesn't always make it so.