Chris

Welcome dudes! Thanks for being cool!

I don't think it's entirely true in the sense of what is being claimed--I started to compare the game press to the political media when I started talking about the audience impact thing, but I did admittedly kind of meander off into that tangent and forget to actually tie them back together. However, I do think the game discourse has something weird about it. Most criticism has at its root the emotional thrust and weight of the thing being critiqued; game discourse tends to value technical concerns and that ever-present vague steamroller of game evaluation, "fun," above all else. I think it does contribute to implicit limitations in how games are made and received. I also don't think that needs to be the case based on what games are.

If you want to change your address, send a message through Kickstarter--it's easiest to keep track of when all of that stuff is in the same place. Thanks!

So far only the game has gone out (we suck). We're working on everything else though. I imagine we'll be communicating about that stuff on the blog as we get each reward finished. Sorry!

God damnit I guess I need to see this dumb movie.

Yeah, I agree with everything in this post.

I don't think the picture was intended as proof that there are no strong female characters. I've played almost no Borderlands so I've refrained from making any claims about the validity of anyone's opinion one way or the other, but what I think the picture was intended to convey (and I assume this is what Sean was getting at on the cast as well, although it's only an assumption) was that whether or not the game has strong female characters, it is ultimately all filtered through a very strong male gaze. It's pretty easy to just stick a "strong" female character in a game (or a movie or whatever) but it requires more thought to actually present a legitimate female perspective. That's clearly not a problem that is unique to games.

Your following sentences were a defense of Borderlands in aggregate as a non-misogynist game, which is totally valid, not an explanation for a really tiresome jokey dismissal of having an objection to a picture of a woman that is deliberately cropped to identify her entirely by way of her chest.

I think what I said was that it was trying to have and eat its cake. I think your reading of the game is totally valid, but I didn't have the same reaction. I think the developers fully intended the gameplay itself to be fairly traditionally fun and engaging throughout, and it ended up feeling basically the same for me as most other modern cover-based shooters. I also don't think they really do present turning the game off and walking away as any more of a legitimate player choice than any other game does. That comes off as disingenuous to me. That's always a "choice" in every game(/film/novel/etc.) but it's pretty obvious that the developers of this game (like the developers of pretty much every game) expect and hope that the player will complete the campaign and see the game's ending. Again I think your reading is totally valid given your experience with the game. My reaction to the gameplay experience might have been colored by having played either too many or too few similar games (I really have no idea) or any other number of factors. It wasn't "fun" for me either, but it was un-fun in the same way most games with similar gameplay end up feeling un-fun for me.

Could you try making an actual point here? Are you saying you don't think casual objectification of women is real, or an issue in games, or what?

Yeah, I've been meaning to do this for a while. You think 7 is a good one to jump into?

Just as it's important not to jump to conclusions, it's also important not to ever avoid coming to any conclusion because you're willing to go out on the thinnest limb to imagine a circumstance in which a particular statement is actually harmless. In the specific context in which the statement was made, I find it overwhelmingly difficult to believe that the guy meant absolutely anything other than what the most straightforward interpretation of the statement implies. I think this is a clear case of Occam's Razor. It seems pretty obvious he called it "girlfriend" and not "girl" mode because it's a mode for companions specifically, with the implication obviously being that the female half of a male/female relationship will be the one that needs the help. If you truly don't think that's what was being said, then I admire your charitable nature but I think you're being naive.

I had only read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle before 1Q84, and I ended up not actually finishing 1Q84. I got about halfway through. I basically always finish reading fiction, too. It's incredibly rare for me to just stop. It just went on too long. I didn't feel like I was getting anything out of it past a certain point.

Good.

They're almost certainly going to have to, if they want to ship a strategy game at the level of fidelity they showed in the trailer. Also, even if that trailer stuff is entirely pre-vis, at a minimum they have spent money paying their artists to make assets and animations so far.

Benjamin Franklin is my favorite founding father. Can't believe I've never read this.

I backed this. Well, I backed the first Kickstarter. I guess that means I won't be getting it for the platform I actually want it on? I guess I may have to pay for it again on PC. Edit: Oh actually I guess the first Kickstarter doesn't come with any access to the game. Well anyway yeah I'll just buy this on PC when it's done it seems.

iTunes takes a while to update its pages--it just does an automated crawl every several hours or something. You used to be able to prompt it to manually update your feed after you added a new episode, but they removed that functionality. Sometimes it takes up to a day. Super lame. If you actually subscribe to the feed through iTunes, it should show up as soon as your own application polls the RSS feed, but if you just go to the iTunes page, it can take a while.

I think you're slightly misinterpreting me. I'm sure the Oculus Rift can make games even more immersive; I'm more saying that I don't think that's necessarily a great goal to be striving for, or a great way to be doing it. Obviously that won't make you agree with me, but I did want to clarify.

In general I don't really think escapism should be the principal goal of art/entertainment, and to me VR-type stuff represents an attitude to escapism and immersion that I'm not very much in favor of. The immersive qualities of the creative content itself should be enough, I think. And games are already good at escapism and immersion as it is--I think VR is a distraction from the other areas in which games could be significantly improving.

Yep, it's been in stereo ever since the last Progresscast. It's not a very heavy stereo mix, though. A number of people have said they listen to podcasts in the car and they hate stereo mixes that are too noticeable. I tried to find a decent compromise.

Yeah. I mean, ultimately it just points to the thematic and aesthetic lameness of games (and a lot of nerd stuff more broadly). Even outside mods those tropes are incredibly commonplace.

Yes, the point is that the choice that was made is to depict a dominatrix succubus.

I would challenge your certainty about this. Do you have any evidence to support this claim about Einstein or anyone else? Of course he had passion for his subject matter, but I think it's extremely presumptuous to suggest that nobody is driven by thoughts of posterity, of worthwhile self-improvement, of worthwhile improvement of society or humanity, or any other similar goals. The idea that someone would say, "Yeah I've dedicated my entire life to cancer research purely because I love it, not because I give a shit about what happens to other people or to advance the knowledge of mankind," just seems very unlikely to me. I also don't believe at all that all pursuits are equally worthwhile, and that that worth is derived purely from personal satisfaction and nothing else. My job (for example) is one that probably wouldn't leave the world much worse off if it didn't exist; of course that doesn't mean people shouldn't have such jobs. But even within the sphere of how I can spend my free time, I believe there are ways to spend it that are, generally speaking, better than other ways. That's not to say any of those ways are totally right or totally wrong--there's no objective scale. Obviously not every job, hobby, or pursuit can possibly be crucial to the advancement of mankind. I don't mean that personal satisfaction is worthless, or shouldn't be a big consideration in how we spend our lives, but it's certainly not the only thing, at least not in my worldview.

That only happened this week because we had already put out the QuakeCon episode this week--generally we're trying to stick to a regular schedule.