Chris

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/05/30/nuns-on-the-run-new-hitman-trailer-is-silly/ " But there we go – the sexual fantasy of chaste women revealing their sexuality, immediately before being murdered, is there for us all to enjoy."

Maybe I'll give it a shot!

Ah yeah, I guess that's possible. I tried watching that but it just seemed too silly. Obviously it's intended as fiction and not strict historical fact, but it didn't seem like there was actually anything of substance there to justify that. It just seemed like soap opera that happened to use some names of historical characters.

When I was at Irrational one of my coworkers there would read this on the train every day for quite a while. It sounded quite interesting from his descriptions, but I also suspected that if I were to attempt to read it I would never finish.

I take your point, but I still don't think that just because situation A features a trailer that doesn't represent game X, and situation B features a trailer that doesn't represent game Y, the situations are necessarily equivalent in any other way. I'm specifically referring to the tone and content of the trailer; expectations for gameplay are a different matter.

It's not missing the point. It's just a different point. Game jams ARE shallow. That doesn't make them worthless. You aren't really contesting Blow's point, you're just pointing out that you and Blow are interested in game jams for different reaosns. Of course you can, but at a certain point you have to make a call as to whether a particular event is likely to be worth the time necessary to devote to it. I've been to a lot of game developer meetups and I think Blow is entirely right. I'm not even a particularly experienced game developer but I still find that most meetups are largely attended by non-industry folks who are looking to break into the industry--which is totally fine, and I still enjoy those meetings when I go usually, but I enjoy them for the social aspects. And even though I enjoy those aspects, and even though I'm not that experienced, I STILL usually wish they were more substantial. Blow is correct that they aren't generally useful for the reason they often COULD be useful. You can't attend every single event in the world, so you need some rubric by which to decide which ones you're going to invest your time in. He's speaking from a certain perspective, and I think he explains his perspective perfectly well. Remember, as he points out, he's been going to GDC since 1996 (longer than the vast majority of people in the game industry have been in this career at all), and he's been instrumental in multiple GDC institutions. It's not as if he's just showing up for a game dev meet up for the first time and declaring it worthless. He has nearly two decades of exposure to this stuff, and I think it's more than fair for him to determine at this point that most of the existing jams and meetups (very few of which make any real effort to be deep or substantial) are no longer very appropriate for what he is looking to learn and improve.

Where would the potentially keylogging be happening? Through malware that gets somehow installed on the user's PC?

Three Moves Ahead 163: Fifty, Alive, and King Rob welcomes freelancer Rowan Kaiser and designer Jon Shafer to talk about Crusader Kings 2. They swap stories, discuss the impact of making a family-based strategy game, and question whether there’s all that much crusading going on here. Remember to attend the 3MA panel at PAX East this weekend, at 4:30 on Sunday in the Cat Theater. Spread the word! Episode post Direct download RSS feed iTunes page Rowan’s review for GameSpy

Just picked up Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I heard an interview with the author on the BBC World Book Club a while back, which made me really interested initially, and it won the Booker Prize, so it can't be bad! All I really know about it is that it is historical fiction in which Thomas Cromwell is the protagonist, which is interesting in and of itself, since I think to most people (including myself) he is best known in popular culture through A Man for All Seasons, in which he is portrayed quite negatively.

What is the basic process by which this happens? Why is it so common with Blizzard games specifically? Is it brute forcing?

A game is not just its mechanics. Both in content and tone, this trailer is offensively idiotic. Nothing about it has anything to do with what a good Hitman game is like. It also looks absolutely nothing like Call of Duty. I'm not much of a Call of Duty fan, but you'd STILL never see something this blatantly absurd and stupid in a Call of Duty trailer. If nothing else, a Call of Duty game at least attempts to simulate realism--or convey the illusion or tone of it with the window dressing, anyway--whereas this is just 100% contrived nonsense.

Well that sure was the absolute stupidest thing I've seen in quite a while.

I'm not surprised to hear that--in fact the Flaubert ended up not being what I expected, since I've so often seen him referred to as the father of the modern novel, or what have you. Thanks for the insight there. Indeed, the split you describe is very much what I was getting at.

No; Freedom is the only work by Franzen I've read. I mean to correct that, given how much I loved Freedom and how much I enjoy Franzen's voice in interviews and editorials.

I just read Three Tales by Flaubert, my first by that author. I enjoyed it a great deal. It was surprising to me how incredibly infused with religion all three stories were, and it was one of my favorite qualities of the book. Flaubert seems to regard religion with a critical eye but not at all a dismissive one; faith was crucial throughout. That's a stance that I think is hard to come by in serious writing in 2012--simply by virtue of the global, multicultural society in which we live, a writer can't (and probably shouldn't) treat religion as simply a matter of course; more frequently they must pick sides, for or against, which I think is a really unfortunate side effect of what is in many other ways a positive development. It means I rarely read modern works of literature that treat religion with the nuanced and human perspective it demands, and I say that as a nonreligious person. It's one reason I really loved David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I finished right before reading the Flaubert. Mitchell is just an incredible writer flat out, but on this topic I really enjoyed the wholeness with which he threw himself into writing a devout protagonist from the Netherlands living in 1799 in Japan, where not only is there a totally distinct strong spiritual tradition of its own, but his own spiritual traditional is punishable by death. It's certainly relevant to our modern world, in that we have plenty of religious conflict of our own, but treated much differently, in that because Mitchell set the story in 1799 he did not need to adopt the cynicism or distance or naivite (take your pick) that would almost certainly accompany a work of similar themes set in 2012. (That was by no means the central theme of the work, or even close to it, but it's one that I thought was treated extremely well, and is a topic that's been on my mind recently. I would highly recommend the book outside of that context as well.)

I adored Freedom. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about the book as a political soapbox. I actually thought the book was simultaneously generous and harsh in its portrayal of its characters regardless of their political viewpoints, showing hypocrisy in people of different political persuasions but also being pretty compassionate regardless.

I imagine that's because it's generating a thumbnail for the post, rather than displaying the original image.

Oh man, I've read The Big U. I guess I have read one Stephenson book.

Shit certainly got real in Mad Men this week.

Thanks for the heads up! Purchased.

We finally have both computers set up in the Idle Thumbs office. Here they are, including Sean with Dota 2:

It's pre-digital color grading so at the very least it's in a different category by that virtue.

I can't possibly disagree more strongly. My opinion of myself is not so inflated that I believe that simply by sitting around bullshitting with friends I will explore topics of human nature and the way we live in this world with the same degree of nuance and empathy as a skilled author who has poured a significant amount of time and mental energy into crafting a work. That's not to say my conversations with friends won't be immensely valuable or raise interesting topics. But I've certainly not been wrenched into the kind of reflection this book prompted in me in that context. If I felt I were able to regularly come to meaningful (and novel) reflection about myself and my world just by reading a bunch of topics on a list, I would be concerned I'm thinking about things much too shallowly, or too guardedly.

I don't think anyone is saying it says NOTHING about the audience. But it seems bizarre to suggest that the work itself doesn't play an extremely strong part. If numerous peopl experience similar emotional reactions when reading a work, do you think that's merely coincidence, rather than the author tapping into some common human experience, even if that experience is more likely to resonate with a particular audience?

Not when the star essentially IS the movie.