Chris

What are you calling me out for? I specifically said how idiotic all that nonsense is!

I am super tempted to get in on another game. That was frequently in the case in the last couple of weeks (my podcast announcement might illuminate why), but I don't know how drastically I could have changed things by that point in the game anyway. I ended up just trying to help Jake Rodkin/ens have a better chance of winning, but for the last week I wasn't even able to supervise that very closely.

Don't you need more than just a user ID to add people to your list? I think more than one person can have the same name, so you also have a randomly generated number that accompanies it.

Hahahahaha, Jesus Christ.

Hooray, Mcheese didn't win, and I didn't drop down to zero planets! Those were my main hopes by the end. Sorry Jake Rodkin/ens that I couldn't help you do better in the end, and apologies to Spacelad/SGP that I wasn't more help earlier on.

Thanks guys. Sorry guys.

If you think the adventure genre and the kart racer (??) genre are somehow "thriving," I just absolutely cannot agree. The adventure genre seems extremely stagnant to me, even within the context of a more niche audience, and I don't see how one game (Mario Kart) means anything for an entire genre. Personally I don't even really care if the kart racer genre does well, I'm just saying that bringing up one specific game to me doesn't demonstrate a trend at all.

What "fresh" games are coming from Facebook, out of curiosity? And I'm not cherry picking games, I'm talking about a broad group of games that provide relatively in-depth experiences that gamers can really get into. That can include indie games, portable games, console games, PC games, online games, whatever, but it doesn't include Wii Fit because that game exists for an entirely different purpose. Let's say someone wanted to have a discussion about the trends in fictional film or television today, and after the conversation has progressed a little bit it becomes quite clear that the kind of thing they're interested in discussing falls within the broad scope of dramas, comedies, and so on--generally speaking, things you can call "fiction." Would you start heckling them for not talking about exercise shows and The View and news programs and reality shows and Judge Judy and infomercials and so on? No, because that's clearly an entirely separate creative and/or functional category to what they're actually interested in. If someone wanted to talk about what's going on in literature today, would you insist they also include in the discussion cookbooks and picture books for children and exercise guides and whatever else? Those things might all be "entertainment" within the context of the broadest view of their medium, and they all have their value and place, but they aren't all the same thing. Just because something can be committed to video doesn't mean it's part of the same type of entertainment as everything else that can be committed to video. And just because something can be broadly construed as a "video game" in some respect doesn't mean it can be usefully compared. We don't really have a good term for what I'm talking about in games, but don't we basically have a functional intuitive understanding of what I mean?

That Roberta Williams quote is insulting and absurd to the extreme. Jesus. I think what's more likely is that, in general, the PC gaming audience simply used to be older. I can't count myself as part of that, because I was young at the time, but I was definitely thrown into a world of gaming that, although I didn't realize it at the time, was absolutely marketed to people older than I was. On the action game side, particularly post-Doom, a lot of PC games were marketed at teens/twentysomethings with garishly bloody and violent advertising, and lots of other genres like simulation and strategy were marketed towards audiences older than that--if you read PC game magazines from back in the 90s, which is where I got all my gaming info at the time, you get the sense that a lot of the guys writing were 30- and 40-something bearded dudes with families who were writing for that same kind of person. Both of those groups are older than the groups Nintendo and Sega were marketing to at the time. This isn't "lol consoles are for babies" argument, it's just a straightforward demographic observation that I think is empirically borne out. What's happened now, I think, is that the average console gamer demographic age has risen (largely as that generation has grown up) and the average PC gamer demographic age has fallen (surely to some extent because the older-targeted genres have been marginalized) to the point that they are basically both the exact same twenty-something male consumer. I'm talking here about fairly "hardcore" games, I'm not talking about Facebook or Wii Fit or whatever because I think we all know that, regardless of age, that isn't the kind of game we're discussing. For all the talk about how games are reaching a more diverse audience, I don't know if that's really the case. In terms of the entire category of things that can feasibly be called "video games," I'm sure it's the case, but in terms of relatively in-depth, gamey-game experiences, I wonder. I want to stress that I don't actually know, I'm just idly wondering. But it does seem to me that the "core" game market has really been distilled down to a particular kind of person and a particular tone of game.

You're right in some respects, but that isn't what I mean. Stuff like Wii Fit and Wii Play isn't really representative of anything. Fine, there's a successful fitness game--there are also successful fitness DVDs, but that has pretty much zero bearing on what's going on creatively in the world of film or television. And Halo Wars being on there isn't reflective of anything other than a game releasing with "Halo" in the title. Looking at outliers--in this case, the very few top most profitable titles--is not generally useful, in my opinion. Mario Kart Wii is super successful, but does that point to a vibrant market for kart racers? The Sims is super successful, but are there many (or any) other critically and commercially successful life simulators in that vein? I'm talking about broad relevance here. I really can't see anybody arguing that adventure games are particularly relevant these days, and I don't mean to offend Jake and co. at Telltale, but adventure games simply aren't a vibrant, meaningful part of the game industry right now. Maybe there are some people, including you, who play more of them now than ever, but I'd be extraordinarily surprised if that were borne out on a larger scale. Same goes for strategy games, management games, certain types of RPGs, pretty much any kind of simulation, and so on. Certainly, digital distribution has done wonders for those genres among people who are willing to be receptive to them and to actively search them out, but there is no large apparatus set up to extend the reach of those games beyond that group of people (again, unless you're an extreme outlier like Blizzard with StarCraft II). That didn't use to be the case, at least on PC; I can't speak for consoles historically.

Sadly, yes. Back when the PC was all I knew, and I wasn't keeping up with the nonstop hype of the video game internet cycle (hell, before there was such a thing), I played an amazingly broad variety of games roughly equally. I'd play adventure games, action games, shooters, strategy games, platformers, turn-based strategy, real-time strategy, RPGs of various types, simulations, space combat games, etc., all of which were available on the PC in abundance. Now, just like everyone else (it seems), I seem to have funneled down to mainly playing first- and third-person action games of various types, because that's what the industry and the audience have decided is the rough category of games that is worth pursuing. They can include action and action/adventure and RPG or whatever, but the point is, you're controlling primarily one person from a fairly up-close perspective and working through a pretty clear narrative, with mechanics that largely consist of killing dudes. It seems that that is the kind of game that is both easily marketed and described, and easily developed for a broad number of platforms, which means it gets all the support. Thanks to that evolution, in my mind I can't help but see those games as the "default" form of video game, and then all the rest of the genres as the "other" types, even though I didn't used to make that distinction at all. I still think my openness to genres is much wider than that of most gamers, and I definitely credit my PC gaming upbringing for that, but it bothers me that I no longer see the medium as such a smooth continuum, and that the industry itself can apparently no longer support that continuum particularly well.

I think I enjoy that page-flipping Marvel studio logo at the beginning of its movies more than I have enjoyed any of the content of the movies themselves.

This is how I feel. I didn't see Inception as a film that particularly demands intelligence to watch; it leans extraordinarily heavily on explaining everything to almost too high a degree. The fact that dreams are so codified and grounded is also a stretch, and it that sure doesn't line up with my experiences dreaming. However, within the context of a film, since there are so many movies that are about much more mundane things but still can't stick to a consistent logic, I appreciate that this one was so rigorous.

I beat The Ballad of Gay Tony with mouse and keyboard, and what I did play of Just Cause 2 was also with M/K.

QWOP is no joke

Yeah, I have a 360 controller plugged in there just in case. The only game I've used it for recently though is Assassin's Creed 2, because it seriously has essentially no UI support at all for mouse and keyboard. Except in really extreme cases like that, though, I play everything with mouse and keyboard.

I have a similar setup. I have my PC outputting to my HDTV, although rather than a trackball mouse I just use a regular mouse that sits on a little table, so as I'm using it I'm still resting my arm. For strategy games and certain other games, I switch the video output to a computer monitor so I can sit up close, but I think in the near future I'm going to just completely dedicate my desktop computer to my HDTV, and hook up my m11x laptop to the monitor for those other kinds of games, which usually have lower levels of graphical insanity.

Though some of the specific details and order of games played is different, the basic overall situation and trajectory described by MysteriousLeg is incredibly similar to mine. I connected to local BBSes right around that same time frame; we also owned a 286 right around that time. In San Diego there was a free weekly magazine called ComputorEdge (spelled that way), and in the back, they had a directory of local BBS numbers. It was rad.

This thread has become my favorite thing

VISCERAL GAMES PRESENTS...

See, I don't even know what a "gaming type PC in the 80s" means, though. I mean I ran tons of stuff on just a straight up "computer" that was leftover from an office. At the time I had almost no clue what was inside it. So many games back then would let you run graphics in modes down to 16 colors, and with sound ranging anywhere from no sound to PC speaker, to adlib/soundblaster/whatever, and so on. I'm not talking about playing games at the bleeding edge, I'm talking about just playing games. Yeah, games have always been unusually expensive entertainment items across the board. But cartridges were, on average, more expensive than diskettes, and as you indicate, there were cheaper ways on all platforms. On the PC, for example, you could borrow a friend's game and install it. Well, there's a difference between something being sort of problematic and something being expensive. I mean, I had to learn my way around DOS configuration files as a PC gamer, sure. But I had basically zero disposable income. I managed to play a ton of games despite not once ever upgrading a part in a PC. The Pentium came out in 1993, but it was years until that became a requirement. I first got a 486 in 1993, and I used that thing for ages. Like I said, lots of games--particularly DOS games--would come with a big range of sound and display options. And even in the 3D acceleration era, most games (including Quake et al) had a software rendering mode. I specifically remember the first time I ever couldn't run a PC game, for any reason whatsoever. It was Grim Fandango, which required 3D acceleration in 1998. That was the first game I ever owned that had that requirement. I went many, many years with dated hardware, still playing games, and even today I couldn't tell you if I was actually missing any substantial features. Even past that point, I was able to keep going for a while until I got a 3D accelerated PC. It's possible I was just trying to play different games than you were, and having better luck with requirements. I played a lot of strategy games, adventure games, action games in the id Software vein, and so on. I don't know what the more demanding ones were. But my memories of the 90s are that I never had to think about requirements. It wasn't until the 2000s that it became a bigger deal.

This is becoming increasingly common in narrative-driven PC games, even in games that aren't just console ports. I'm of mixed mind. On the one hand, I completely understand that a designer would want to heavily discourage behavior that breaks a game with nonstop risk-eliminating quicksaving. On the other hand, when I'm in a situation where I really need to quit the game right this second but I know I'll have to lose a lot of progress if I quit, I'm really irritated because my PC is obviously capable of saving at any time but I'm being kept from doing so.

PLUG INTO THE ANIMUS

Xeneth's post made me think I should mention the circumstances that led to my being weaned on PC rather than consoles. We were never an impoverished family but we had a lot of really difficult financial situations that resulted in us moving around a lot when I was a kid, based on where my parents were able to get jobs (not that I had any understanding of that at the time). Eventually, in a particularly lucky break after my dad had lost his most recent job, my mom got a job at a real estate company in San Diego, so we moved there and that became our longest-lasting city. Financial issues aside, my parents were the type who didn't let my brother or me have video games or watch much TV, and so on. They had us regularly check out books from the library, learn to play music, that kind of thing. So, for me, consoles were entirely devices that lived at friends' houses. I never really thought about the possibility of owning one myself. However, because of that job my mom got in San Diego, she had to learn spreadsheet and word processing software like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. So, she would borrow an extra computer from work and bring it home, and I got totally obsessed with just typing shit into it until I got stuff to work. This mainly consisted of figuring out how to change text properties in WordPerfect (which, at the time, was represented by putting the text in different colors on the screen, since there was only one actual display font). I never had the slightest clue what Lotus 1-2-3 was for. I also fooled around in DOS, though, and I was really pleased when I got to the point where I could navigate around the file structure and bring up a list of files and run them. Eventually at school I met a kid whose dad had some kind of computer related job, and this kid would always have access to lots of computer games, so I started to borrow some from him and covertly install them on my mom's borrowed work PC, which was an IBM XT. I think it was already an old machine at the time, but most games back then would let you select display modes going down to 16 colors, and that kind of thing. At a certain point, we were able to keep for ourselves an IBM 486 that the office no longer needed. That was the computer that I really got into gaming on. I used it to play stuff like Civ, X-Wing, all the LucasArts games, WarCraft, Doom, and so on, most of which I traded around with friends. Anyway, it wasn't until probably five years ago or so that I actually had a nice "gaming" PC. Whenever I talk about growing up a PC gamer, people always say things like "Oh yeah, I could never afford that," but the implications of that sentence run totally counter to my experience. I had friends with consoles who, to me, just seemed to be swimming in expensive shit. They would have consoles, all of these new games their parents would buy them for $60-$70 each, tons of peripherals, associated toys, just all of this shit. Meanwhile I had a out-of-date hand-me-down PC, and I'd get games in hilarious ways because my parents never once bought me a video game. I remember saving up to order a copy of TIE Fighter for $15 from the back of a PC Gamer--you used to be able to buy used PC games from sketchy game dealers who advertised in magazines. They would literally say things like "Two in stock," in the print ad. It was absurd, but I didn't realize that at the time. None of the PC gaming friends I had as a kid had pumped-up insane rigs. People always seem to assume that was the case, but I don't think that's a common experience at all for young PC gamers. You never needed that to run games in the era before 3D acceleration. Hell, you probably still don't now. I'm sure there are lots of kids growing up now with the same kind of parents I had, and they're finding ways to play video games on the family computer. I sure hope there are, anyway.

Likewise, I suppose.