Chris

Great, thanks! Seems to line up with the discussion we had on the cast.

I can't remember seeing a single Facebook-related thing in Netflix ever. Maybe it's there and I just never noticed? The interface has always seemed fine to me. I click a movie or TV show, and a few seconds later it starts playing. If it's a TV show, at the end it queues up the next episode. I don't know how much more I'd need.

This is basically what Antichamber is all about.

I agree. I appreciated that it was so far from a typical crime thriller, but as a piece of literature unto itself the existence of the genre subversion didn't really seem necessary.

I loved Oryx & Crake. I didn't actually realize there was a sequel.

I've actually done this as well. It's often really interesting and funny, but also often is a bummer in how it highlights the way we're taught to consider works in a super media-heavy environment. Because people are doing these playthroughs live, there's an inherent tendency to just analyze everything in real-time, with no meaningful thought or consideration. (I realize the irony in the fact that Idle Thumbs does occasional livestreams.) Suddenly at the end of the game, people toss out their immediate understanding of the events, which usually boils down to, "Well that was crazy!" and nothing else, and they put a quick conclusion on it, and that's it. These kinds of videos are a really extreme example of it, but I think that's generally speaking the amount of time people are expected to spend judging things at this point--posting real-time reactions on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, immediately finishing an article and commenting on it (or not commenting, but still absorbing a bunch of other kneejerk comments), and so on.

Then we'll just have to call it a game. If an alternative term emerges and gains widespread acceptance, fine. Until then, the argument is basically moot. Or it belongs in an actual thread dedicated to it. But this entire thread is located in the "Video Gaming" forum and we have nowhere else to put it. If you want to make a new thread about this topic in this forum or another one, fine. This conversation needs to end. It has completely derailed a thread about a really cool THING that bears discussion in its own right entirely aside from the word used to describe the category of thing it is.

Hooooooooooly shit.

IBM pitchman from the 70s.

Those movies are both amazing. I just saw Gun Crazy at the Castro Theatre last week, and I've seen Sweet Smell of Success in theaters a few times. Sweet Smell of Success really is one of the all time great films. And The Apartment is possibly personally my favorite film.

We're going to open-source it, and I can't imagine that would be possible with a license that would restrict sales! (Maybe that is possible though? I honestly am not super familiar with the particulars of the open source movement and its licenses.) The underlying engine, MOAI, is already free to use. What we're going to release is the toolset we're building on top of it, 2HB. (There are engine-level changes as well of course.) An earlier version of 2HB was used to build Middle Manager of Justice, and the latest 2HB work is being done to support Reds. 2HB was also used for Spacebase and Hack 'n' Slash during Amnesia Fortnight, although I doubt we're going to be folding additions from those into the main 2HB branch. I really loved using it on Spacebase, it's a great toolset. It's a whole lot less accessible than something like AGS though; it's intended for game developers, not hobbyists. But a lot of hobbyists are basically no different to professional developers in terms of skill level and ingenuity, so I'm sure a lot of people will get a lot of use out of it.

Cart Life is an AGS game and it's amazing!

Haha, that is fantastic. Man. Good job to whomever at IG, or some agency, put that together.

As I say, I understand the difference in implementation, but that doesn't affect my opinion about whether the presence of either one is appropriate.

Policies of that kind of bureaucratic detail don't tend to change with each administration. An executive administration can't simply change policy as it wills it. It's different in a parliamentary system where the party in power necessarily has a majority in the legislature, but that is rarely the case with our system. And even when it is, it's no guarantee that the president will be able to push his policy through. The president has certain executive powers, but outside of military matters they are very limited when it comes to actually setting concrete policy. Anyway, that's different to the relevant points as I see them in this case. To me, it's immaterial what the details of the policy or how it is enforced are--the objectionable part is that the government would be able to mandate regulation of creative work as a matter of course in the first place. Right now, we do have enforced regulation of creative work around the margins--work that is, say, exploitative to children, and so on--and I think that is fine and good. But I absolutely find it extremely objectionable that the government (or any body with legally enforced authority over an entire medium) would have any kind of say about what materials can be sold by private citizens to other private citizens. I don't think art and creative work are the same as cigarettes, or guns, or energy generation, or the operation of a fair market, and I don't think you can simply extend out any conversation of "regulation" to them as if creative work were simply one more category of goods to regulate. I think speech and art should operate as a protected class of human work, except in very specific cases where there is demonstrable harm done to individuals not in a position to understand or avoid that harm, as with child pornography.

I don't think there's NO difference, but I think it is a minor difference. The people doing the evaluation are either paid by the government, or selected by the government, or sanctioned by the government, or whatever--they're still just individuals attempting to adhere to whatever arbitrary standards have been determined. Whether the evaluators are technically on the government payroll or a payroll of a company selected by the government, I don't see how it makes a substantial difference.

This is extraordinarily good.

Pretend I said "government-mandated evaluation" rather than "government evaluation" and let's drop that semantic argument. I feel the same way about it. Not that it matters all that much since this is clearly never going to happen.

Yeah I've only had time to read books and play video games for one of us. (Or neither of us, some weeks.)

I think that sucks and is gross. People shouldn't have to submit to government evaluation in order to sell a piece of creative work, let alone pay for the privilege.

I second the Sublime Text recommendation. Great editor, I use it for everything.

It was intentional. I wrote the Time Traveler level.

They're definitely very similar in terms of subject matter, but pretty different in terms of how they communicate it, I think. Dys4ia is more stylish but I kind of appreciated the way Mainichi made its point more. They're both worthwhile game experiences though.

I agree. For one thing, it entirely dispenses with issues of class and wealth divisions, which are far more sinister because they are so powerful and yet increasingly ignored by this kind of commentary. The "white people problems" are almost always related to people with a decent amount of disposable income living in metropolitan or suburban areas. They entirely discount, say, affluent non-white people, or the fairly considerably populations of, say, white rural people from economically depressed areas. It's just a lame catch-all, and it's been used so often that it's not even novel anymore.

I would you say you aren't alone.