Chris

I think it's possible to try and strive for it without turning your life into a series of checkboxes or a numerical exercise. I think it's more about trying to embody a certain spirit than to actually mark things down as "this versus that." Of course it is "this versus that" in some respects, because we DO live lives with finite time to spend, but that doesn't mean you have to internalize it as such. I think Stein clearly made his argument in a very flawed way, but I think the spirit of the argument is more interesting to discuss and consider than the letter of the argument.

This is totally true--the difference is that instrumental music and abstract expressionism don't PURPORT to be about humans and the world they live in, at least not in a literal sense. They concern themselves much more purely with form, emotion, structure (or interesting lack of it), patterns, and so on. I think games have a lot of potential in this regard (and a lot of realized potential, for that matter), and yet the vast majority of modern games are still very literally about people doing things (often crass, violent, or banal things) and so they basically opt in to being stacked up against other forms of expression that are also about people doing things. That's also my response to people saying "games shouldn't be judged against movies." I entirely agree with that, in theory. But that relies on the games in question not actually being like movies. The reality is that if a game tries to tell a story like a movie does, then of course it should at least in those ways be judged against movies. If you're going to tell a written narrative (in text or in visual representation of people running around or in audio logs or whatever), then you're signing yourself up to be compared to other forms that use similar methods of conveying narrative.

I don't entirely agree with this. You're describing a particular kind of value within a evolutionary line of a particular medium, which is definitely interesting and worthwhile, but not really what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about things being important with respect to posterity or placement in a literary canon. For example, I basically jumped headfirst into modern literary fiction as an adult, not having grown up with it, so I was pretty unaware of the evolutionary line tracing, say, 19th century English lit to modern lit. (As a kid, I read a combination of "classics," and young adult/sci-fi/fantasy stuff, which I think is probably pretty typical for people who are demographically similar to me.) I've filled in some of those blanks since then, but I'm still REALLY under-read with respect to fully appreciating that context. So while I'm sure I'm missing a lot of stylistic and evolutionary subtleties and historical reactions, it's still entirely apparent to me that a good and thoughtful writer of modern literature is holding himself or herself to a standard of depicting human experience that largely doesn't exist (or is at least drastically underrepresented) in video games. That doesn't mean video games can't illuminate interesting things about humans or our world, but (I think) they are on radically different planes when it comes to the standards people seem to hold them to.

It just depends whether you see combat mechanics as a means to an end, or as an end unto itself. I think my feeling on this has changed somewhat over the years. In the past I would have been much more inclined to agree with you. My feeling on it now (and this is not a hard rule AT ALL, just a general tendency) is that even a very expressive combat system is expressive of something I don't find all that fundamentally interesting, so if game has poor combat, it's not so big a deal to me if there's something interesting going on elsewhere. Whereas in something like Doom, the combat experience is much more expressive, but since I don't really find "combat" as a concept as interesting anymore to begin with, that doesn't necessarily make the game as a whole more interesting to me, except in an academic sense. Hopefully that makes sense. I also want to stress (again) that this isn't an all-or-nothing statement or a manifesto or anything. It's just a general trend in my reaction to games over the last few years. There are cases that fall somewhere in between, like (here it comes) Far Cry 2, where I think the experience of the combat actually reinforces the game's larger themes--unpredictability, disempowerment, unintended consequences, and general sense of clusterfuck.

I don't think his opinion is particularly limiting. I think he is actually arguing for people expanding their horizons as they enter adulthood, rather than remaining mired in what really is a pretty limited range of adolescent culture that is increasingly marketed to every single age group. In that AV Club interview, he also says: AVC: But can’t people enjoy The Avengers one weekend, and then an arthouse film the next? It’s not either/or, is it? JS: On some level it is. There’s that great David Foster Wallace commencement address about how, on some level, there is an either/or. You are choosing your input. It’s not bad to know about a bunch of different things, but every time you choose to know about one thing, you are choosing not to know about something else. It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t listen to any rock music, or I shouldn’t know about some young-adult novels. But especially with reading, I don’t read that many books a year, so I want to choose wisely. I would assume that a well-written book written for adults is going to be a richer experience than even the best-written book for young adults. And maybe there’re exceptions, but the impression I get is that the adults who are reading young-adult novels are reading a lot of them. Ultimately I think that's pretty much true. The way marketing and culture currently work in our society means we're constantly bombarded with a very specific type and range of media, and to some degree I think it's worth taking a stand for another approach to culture and media. I think it's hard to really split one's time between them with any real amount of integrity. It's definitely hard for me. When you have a full time job and there's a practically infinite amount of stuff out there to consume, you really are experiencing one thing at the expense of experiencing something else. And for what it's worth, I didn't choose to ignore the video game part. My feelings on games are really complicated and conflicted. I definitely feel that most of the games I play, even most of the ones with noble aspirations, don't really end up feeling as substantial to me as I wish they would. If I weren't already so immersed in games, I honestly don't know if I would be drawn to them fresh. That's obviously entirely hypothetical, since I AM already so connected to games and their industry. But if I meet someone who isn't already into games, I don't really recommend they try this or that, whereas I am much more likely to try and recommend a piece or writing or music or film to someone who might not be as tuned into whichever of those forms already.

Well, there's a whole lot of the game being played, which as far as I'm concerned is inherently spoiler material. While BioShock obviously has a plot that's central to the game, it is really about the entire experience, which includes the beauty of its environments, and uncovering bits of environmental storytelling, and simply soaking in the atmosphere. I think it would be unfortunate to see any of that in a video with people talking over it before actually playing it yourself.

You can flag videos to be permanently archived on Twitch; we've done that for everything currently on our channel.

There are at least a couple different companies working on pressure-sensitive tablet pens, like this: http://www.tenonedesign.com/bluetiger.php

Possibly--I just have no idea. The difference between those two things is that all the crazy graphical stuff can be done entirely through software, whereas audio is much more dependent on actually buying a bunch of physical equipment and having a system that can accomodate it all with the stream. I'm sure there are better solutions than what we have, we just have to figure out how affordable and manageable they are. We can't use our existing podcast equipment for it because those are mics that sit on a table in a fixed position, whereas with the stream we're all crowding around one guy at a computer.

Editing video is considerably more time consuming than editing audio, in part because it is so much more demanding for a computer to process HD-quality video plus an audio stream, than simply the audio stream on its own. Also, anything with a visual component is inherently less forgiving when it comes to editing, for obvious reasons. This video content also ended up being roughly four times longer than a typical episode. It took most of our Saturday as is; and that's fine, I mean we chose to do it because it seemed like a fun thing to do, but I can't imagine setting aside even more hours to do a bunch of editing and polish. Those are just hours we don't have. I have no idea where this stuff will fall on the new site. We didn't start doing any of this streaming stuff until fairly late in the site design process, so we never really took it into account. We figured out the lag issue already; only the first of five BioShock videos has that issue. The rest are fine. As for audio, we'll see. This was just using a webcam. I guess we could buy headset-style mics for the additional participants. That would add multiple layers of complexity though, because our audio interface hardware and software package is set up with our Mac and all of our streaming is done on the PC. Dealing with multiple simultaneous audio inputs plus the webcam plus the audio from the game is something we currently have no idea how to affordably tackle, but if we end up doing a ton of this kind of thing and it seems like a big weak point, we'll probably look into it. Right now all of our video streaming stuff is software-based. Sites like Giant Bomb have complex hardware-based setups for that kind of thing, but that's a level of expense that is probably too extreme for us; there may be intermediate solutions, however.

It's a competitive game, so I think being terrible would just mean you would have a lower likelihood of winning. You can save a game and reload the save game with the same players. That was pretty buggy when I last played it, but that was within a week after launch so I wouldn't be surprised if it's been patched by now.

This was a big enough time commitment as it is as a live affair--were it not live, there would have been several additional man-hours devoted to (at the very least) assembling files, encoding them, and uploading them--but more likely it would end up being some amount of editing and then also those things. Doing it as a live show through Twitch means we just do it and then it's instantly archived on the internet and we don't need to justify to ourselves or anyone else why it's not any more polished than it was. Even though Twitch runs ads on this thing, in reality we make basically zero money off of it (our total ad revenue to date from all our videos combined is $2) and it does already cost us our time, so I think we're unlikely to get much more polished than this. I know that's a fairly crass way of looking at it, but there it is. Also, I do think we get something out of it being live. There were quite a few questions asked by live viewers that, when put to JP, resulted in interesting anecdotes or explanations.

I'd be up to give this a shot, depending on the time commitment.

I've seen a fair amount of The Simpsons but I definitely don't fall into the category of person Jake described. My affection for the show is primarily of the era he calls out, but my knowledge of it isn't nearly as comprehensive or ingrained as he describes.

It must still do well or it wouldn't still be on the air.

id Meier

I don't really think that's quite true. People can change their national allegiance and identity in a way they can't change their ethnic heritage or skin color. Obviously from a scientific point of view, claims about the relative abilities or qualities of people based on their nationality or their ethnicity are of equal merit (that is to say, none), but I don't think that makes them the same thing in all respects.

Sure, but it still definitely wasn't what Sean was describing.

It would be interesting to hear your friend's justification for that claim, because the way 2001 was "adapted" is fundamentally different to how most adaptations work. The book was written concurrently with filming, and Clark and Kubrick collaborated on both the screenplay and the novel. The book was based on early screenplay drafts and didn't even end up being released until after the film was out. So I don't think it's even accurate to describe the film as an adaptation. It sounds like your friend just preferred the way the material was treated in the book. As for myself, I love the film, but I was young enough when I read the book that I barely remember anything about it.

Can you at the very least understand that not everyone responds to these "jokes" in the same way you do, and in many cases the reason for that different response is due to factors that lie outside your experience? We get it, you just take everything as a joke and nothing in the universe offends you. However, it seems pretty unempathetic to imagine that the way things affect you is (or should be) identical to how they affect other people.

Simply dismissing all religious belief as "bearded man in sky" is really condescending and just as simple-minded as that dismissal's own conception of religious belief. I'm not religious but I can entirely understand why people find religion and faith important in comprehending the extremely complex world in which we live. I DON'T mean simply in the sense of comprehending how the physical world got here at the expense of scientific understanding; I'm speaking about coming to terms with the magnitude of how humans live in this world, how we live with each other, how we govern ourselves morally, and how we comprehend our own interior lives and those of others. "Religion" as a concept and religions themselves as traditions and faiths are many, many orders of magnitude more complex than the simple notion of a guy in the sky. Some people are no doubt drawn to that part of religion--the notion of a personal god. Some people are drawn to the more purely spiritual aspects. Some people are drawn to the sense of an ongoing tradition, or ritual, and are less invested in the spiritual aspects. Some people are drawn to a sense of moral order that is manifested externally; some internally. I don't find organized religion a personally satisfying way to address the great questions of existence, but I don't have enough answers to feel justified in declaring somebody else's method or structure worthless. Even if I did have all the answers, I wouldn't presume their substance or the way in which I arrived at them would be equally satisfying to someone else. I've had enough exposure in my life to incredibly thoughtful people with incredibly nuanced and well-interrogated religious beliefs to not write someone off simply because they subscribe to some form of religion. Like many others here I'm sure, I find it very objectionable when religious belief comes in the form of institutionalized intolerance or legislation. There are plenty of other kinds of legislation I find objectionable that DON'T fundamentally spring from religion. Once you simply tar everyone of religious belief with the same brush, you're giving into the same kind of intolerance you profess to loathe, and you abdicate a considerable measure of empathy. A religious person can be homophobic or racist or whatever else; many, however, are not these things. Religion is a major part of our world and our history as humans. You don't have to engage in it; I don't. But it is of crucial importance to many, many people. Let an individual demonstrate why he or she has views you find objectionable or sympathetic; don't ascribe such views right from the start. Being tolerant is hard. Don't just demand it from other people, or just for people like you.

I agree entirely. In fact, one reason I love literature so much is precisely because it has so much freedom to adopt such modes of expression as much or as little as the author likes. "Show, don't tell" is merely one principle that can be applied to writing or anything else. It is not a universal stricture of creative work. Similarly, people often get caught up in the structure of the hero's journey, as if that is the only valid premise for a story, rather than simply an observation about many stories. (Although playing a lot of video games, you could be forgiven for believing it really is the only possible framework.) There is really no reason for any given artist, regardless of medium, to accept that any one given rule must be applied in all cases. I love that literature CAN do the "telling" part so well. It's a nice counterbalance to games, which tend to either 1) just show show show show show all the time by way of constant interactive spectacle, or 2) tell, very very poorly by way of interminable cutscenes. All those things said, I don't even think this book abuses the telling part. I think its central character, and by extension its author, leave plenty to the reader.

Yeah, I think the thing that people in a relatively privileged position sometimes don't keep in mind all the time (and I say relatively privileged because obviously not every white male is as privileged as every other; the whole thing is a spectrum of course) is that forms of prejudice or bullying, even if seemingly lighthearted in some cases, are institutionalized in the case of women and many ethnic minorities. Obviously people of all stripes get picked on and bullied in all sorts of contexts, but generally speaking in Western cultures, white males aren't inherently subjected to institutionalized disadvantages and power structures. Individual people may have all kinds of disadvantages, and that's also bad, but the reason it's a particularly crucial issue with respect to feminism, for example, is that simply by virtue of being a woman at all, regardless of any other factors, it is all too common (on the internet or otherwise) for people to be grossly disregarded or abused.

I'm not saying the soft keyboard is useless, I'm saying it is much less robust and allows for much less fluid input than a physical keyboard.

Yep, the Android version of the app is really well put together and has that as well.