Chris

Could you delve more into your Hemingway prejudices, and your feelings on the book beyond the purely mechanical stilted stuff? I'd be curious. (It's funny; I really like the style you describe and find off-putting, but I feel like I understand why someone wouldn't be into it and it seems like a less substantial/interesting line of criticism that what I assume to be deeper barriers you were butting up against. I could be wrong of course.)

Outstanding.

Whoa, there was a Terminator 4?

It probably does, but you have to manually enable them as a "windows feature," then they all just show up. (?!!?!?) We had to go through that process to get Solitaire going, and Nick's rage during that process alone should have probably also been streamed.

generationxhand.tumblr.com

Ah, that's interesting. I don't remember if I saw that content in GTA4 proper. That's a shame, but also good to know that they consciously changed direction, because I really loved that character in TBOGT.

I'm sure I would find plenty of stuff to like but it just doesn't sound very appealing to me. I'm not super attracted to genre/"gritty" stuff in the first place (I read a lot of it when I was younger and I just feel like I got more than my fill at the time), and the main reason I like all the crazy twists and turns in CK2 is because it's coming out of a game system. I feel like my brain processes fiction sort of differently than it processes game content (just as it also interprets music differently, and film, etc., even if there are plenty of artistic commonalities as well). At this point for me fiction feels like a respite from a lot of the things that, thanks to games, I'm pretty oversaturated with—stories told as incredibly long multi-volume series, genre tropes, self-consciously gritty worlds/scenarios, emphasis on twisty plots, heavy amounts of invented lore, etc. You can of course produce great work with ALL of those things, but at this point for me they are not really what I generally seek out in literature. (Over the last few years, cable TV has also been burning me out on dark antihero stuff too, it's really doing that angle to death these days.) There are also some genre tropes I love, which will not be surprising to podcast listeners, including things like 60s-80s-era NASA-inspired space stuff, 70s-era cinema (and if you want to drill down into more specific tropes there, I have a soft spot for 70s-era political thriller stuff), and various other things. I mean I find most historical fiction pretty tacky as well; there's a sense of affectation that comes off as very cheesy and artificial to me (Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall was a mindblowing exception to this), which is how I feel when I see fantasy stuff. I feel like it's totally fine in something like CK2 because it's really pulled-out and abstracted. If I had to watch a bunch of cutscenes of all this shit happening I can't help but assume it would be unbearable. But when I look at Game of Thrones trailers or hear people describing it, it just turns me off instantly. I don't really know how to describe why in more detail without sounding like a butt, which I know sucks. Even if it's not super-heavy D&D-style fantasy, it still looks pretty unappealing to me.

It's only a matter of time until that's the only kind of news there is. Idle Thumbs 115: Robot News Can a video game facilitate the highest expression of skill and competition, as well as the most menial of tasks? Can it show us the way towards harmony between all nations? Can it unite far-flung strangers in spectral pottery-spinning? None of this will matter when the robot army crushes our skulls beneath their feet. Games Discussed: Viscera Cleanup Detail, Civilization V: Brave New World, The Last of Us, Half-Life 2, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Catherine, Super Street Fighter IV, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

I looked this up but I don't understand the implication!

I'm just not really into fantasy stuff, and also really plot-driven stuff.

Haha holy shit, I didn't even remember that.

Yes. The idea was there would be no way to take the quote literally given the near-unimaginably vicious nature of those comments.

Yeah, board games have more freedom to do that kind of thing in the first place. See also Battlestar Galactica, etc.

Agreed.

Is this being directed at the podcast? If so, was it the same person who actually said both things you are referring to? Your post doesn't really line up with what I think our actual expressed opinions to be.

Fair enough.

I'm not talking about the developers' intentions; I'm just saying that, as a work, Civilization to me appears to only concern itself with one particular facet of modeling power, and that to me seems sufficient given how complex that subject matter already is. Similarly, in chess, you control explicitly-named units (with visual components that are roughly representational and not totally abstract) which include things like bishops, and yet the way this religious figure exerts his power is ultimately no different to the way ostensibly-military units like the rook does. We understand that chess only models certain facets of conflict. Of course, Civilization attempts to be more literally representative of our world than chess is in many ways, but it is also significantly MORE abstract than many other games that are actually direct competitors to it. To me, the extreme abstraction that Civ uses to facilitate its systems is the key to its scope. Meanwhile, a Paradox game aims for, comparably speaking, much more directly representational versions of nearly everything it attempts to portray. I have the same attitude to action games and the like. A game like The Last of Us or The Walking Dead, because they go to such great pains to represent individual human interaction in a high-fidelity way, to me is much more accountable to the human-scale truths of those interactions than is, say, something like Rogue Legacy, which purports to be about family lineage and genetics but is framed in such a highly-abstracted way that we have an intuitive understanding of its attempt to capture certain sensations and evocations of various themes (and hopefully also some level of truth) without attempting to literally recreate them. Obviously there is nothing universal about this way of approaching game subject matter; but it is a framework I find useful.

I think it's only a statement about what Civilization attempts to (very abstractly) portray. I don't think Civilization is making any claim that it represents the totality of history.

Civilizations that gained that types of power are the ones that are most consequential on the world stage, though. It doesn't mean they're the "best" in some absolute moral framework, but are the ones that drive world events, and the global scale is the scale on which Civilization takes place. China is not a European power, and yet it is enormously powerful on the world stage largely for economic reasons.

Isn't saying you want to "win" by being the happiest basically the same thing? I mean, Civ has added numerous additional victory conditions over the years. I could easily imagine them adding a happiness-based condition. Would that actually address your underlying concerns in any meaningful way? When I play Civ I don't even try to win. Often I do, and that's cool. But sometimes I don't. I just hang out participating in the simulation and bolstering my culture, which is the thing I enjoy. I'm super non-expansionist and non-aggressive, and I go out of my way to maintain positive diplomatic relations when possible (which is obviously not always). It may not be a common method of play, but it's satisfying to me and as far as I'm concerned it's a totally legitimate usage of the system.

Oh man.

I think he was only married once and she died, but wasn't murdered.

Fuuuuuuuck

This is how I feel. There are definite tradeoffs and the change affects different playstyles in disproportionate ways, but as someone who is relentlessly non-aggressive in Civ, it allows me to play a much less absurd-seeming defensive game.

I had the same initial experience with CK2 but I figured out the solution: just have a bunch of people on the Internet tell you what do to.