Chris

Part of the point of our cast is to focus more on literary fiction than genre fiction. I think there's a deficit of attention paid to the former. It's likely the majority of our audience already trends heavily towards genre fiction--and, as you say, one should try to expand one's horizons. Also, there are three of us; we aren't one single collective brain. I recommended the first book we'll be discussing, but Jake and Sean will be recommending others. To your point more broadly, we generally take the attitude on Idle Thumbs to talk about games we're interested in. I don't think this has made the podcast a relative failure!

Maybe it's not SUPPOSED to be a strange thing, but it's absolutely an uncommon thing, especially in the game industry. It's a field that is utterly dominated by straight white men, to a ridiculously disproportionate degere. It's completely worth pointing this out.

Thanks for the recommendation, but it's unlikely. That's not so much what I look to books for. I don't really watch action movies either. Nothing wrong with doing so, but I get my full allotment of brain-turned-off stuff from goofing around on the internet.

I agree with all of this. This is a great film.

Nope!

I miss you guys as well! Welcome to the forum!

Our game was Unbearable, Or: How They Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bear, which is distinct to the Seattle-based game UNBEARABLE currently up on the site. Hopefully we can get ours up there soon. As one of the original organizers I definitely want to do it again next year.

OMGPOP is a developer that was acquired by Zynga last month.

As to your question, yes, the former. As to your statement, we agree!

We don't know yet. We're planning on launching the book podcast at the same time as the return of Idle Thumbs, and all that has to coincide with our new site, which has a fair amount of development left still. We're hoping it won't be too long but we don't have a date.

Close. I think "Your Bed-Wetting Game" would be more appropriate.

This title is too related to the actual overall topic of the podcast to be one of ours.

That's addressed in the original Kickstarter update.

I think the real problem here is that games are so concerned with themes that are, historically speaking, indisputably male-centric--waging large-scale warfare and enacting individual personal violence, mainly. I think if you're setting something in a historical era you have a responsibility to be true to the realities of that era. (Obviously Assassin's Creed's premise is pretty absurd so it hardly achieves that in many meaningful ways, but those are the exact parts of this series that I find dumb and off-putting.) I know not everybody agrees with that. It's a tough argument to make because it makes me sound like a sexist who just doesn't want to see powerful female characters in games. That isn't the case. I personally like to see fiction reflect reality, not provide artificial power fantasies. (Video games are terrible at this, generally.) That said, if you ARE going to make a game set in the 18th century about a character who is a cold-blooded serial assassin, that character is overwhelmingly likely to be male. If we knew how to make games that weren't about nonstop killing, there would be plenty of stories to tell about strong females from pretty much any era, even if they existed in societies that repressed women, because all humans have deep and complex interior lives, motives, and actions.

You don't get a personalized password or anything. You can either see the forum or you can't, depending on whether I've gotten to your account yet.

The Progresscasts are already backer only, and have only been linked from the Kickstarter page, which is no longer a particularly great place to keep sending people as the campaign is no longer active. A backer forum allows us to actually aggregate that content on our own site and provide a place to discuss it that makes a bit more sense than Kickstarter updates comments.

I don't know anything about this alleged situation at Junction Point, but I've definitely heard of this practice being employed at developers.

Hello new forum folks!

I disagree. I think all that extra supernatural shit in Assassin's Creed is ridiculous, but I don't think it has anything to do with the plausibility of a female assassin in the 18th century. The actual settings themselves of the series are intended to be essentially plausible in terms of their basic premise (the supernatural garbage exists almost entirely in cutscenes and transitions between the modern and historical settings), and I think it is relatively implausible for the type of character they've chosen to depict in these particular eras to be female.

Here it is "You Gotta Have Spice" A 386 perfectly captures his slam dunk. Looking down from space, you see the Earth and smile. Mid-swing, the game asks you to recalibrate, and you do it just this once. Sometimes, you gotta. Games Discussed: Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta, Left 4 Dead Crash Course, Dawn of Discovery, Wii Sports Resort, Fat Princess, IL-2 Sturmovik, Subversion, Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms, Crash Bandicoot, Rebel Assault, TIE Fighter

That's fine

Ah, okay. I've never heard (seen?) Howard Stern. We're referring to this:

What do you understand that phrase to be in reference to?

Probably Jake or me, because we enjoy it.

It refers to the dots on the level meter on the mixing board we used. During pre-cast mic checks we'd just say a bunch of garbage to test volumes, and often (mainly Nick and Jake) would say "Dots, dots, we got some dots," as their voices were causing dots to appear on the mixer. I personally hate that that ended up bleeding into the cast itself, because its origins are basically unknowable to anyone except us. Jake and Nick are lame. (I probably said it too occasionally, in which case I am also lame.)