vimes

The great thing around here is that each argument lives in its own bubble: it's very common for debate to get heated, but people don't burn bridges and in the rare occasion that a debate ends in bitterness, that sentiment seems to never be carried over to the next or concurrent ones. The only sad part is when people patch up relationships by throwing Idle Thumbs meme at each other face lovingly. That's awkward. Video Games, though.

Just finished what I think is my first Balzac ever, Le Père Goriot. It's a good book, but Balzac's tendency to only describe things and event with the lens of the book's message irritated in some places; mainly because he does it very explicitly. For that reason, it took me a good 5 attempts to get through the first 20 pages of the book, which lay out in that style a lengthy description of the crummy residence most of the characters live in. The final act is similarly excruciating (maybe on purpose) as it drags on and on about how terrible everything is, focusing on how each event, each detail comes to confirm that Society defiles humanity, and how many characters consciously accept and embrace that model. The rest of the book is fantastically cynical both about thisand romantic notions of dedicated love, desire and passion. Those are expertly embedded in Vautrin a sort of merry Jean Valjean, who act as the Mephistopheles and protector of the main character, and Goriot, a father whose blind dedication to his family earn him terrible hardships and the respect of nobody. So I guess

Yes, this is possible; and like you say, it's a misinterpretation, not a valid interpretation. You can blame the author's for his failure, but I feel that - though I'm not entirely sure about this - that if the misinterpretation comes from a genuine lack of skills (and not, say, an active ploy from the author to pass for misinterpretation what is his true intent) or a gap in understanding that the author couldn't foresee, then you cannot give him credit for your reading, since in a sense he's not the author of what you understand. The basic example of this would be to read a book from an author from a time distant enough, that the meaning of some words has changed: Kant talks about sentience in his writings, but the word is now use in a broader meaning today, after sci-fi took hold of it, than back then. If while reading Kant, you think that he refers to being able of self-awareness or consciousness, you'd be wrong, as he actually mean beings capable of feeling and experience. This difference in understanding and thus interpretation cannot be the author's fault. You'd be wrong in extracting that interpretation from the text; and that, even though his theory still made sense if you maintain this misunderstanding throughout.

About the 'Death Of the Author' I think there's a crucial difference between 1) what the author meant, 2) what the reader gets and 3) what the oeuvre tells in the context of its creation. For the first part, I feel one needs to respect the author's intent: if he meant to leave his oeuvre open for interpretation, then any coherent interpretations that are bolstered by evidence from the oeuvre's content can be identified as the author's intent (see, if I'm not mistaken, 30 Flight of Loving). But if the author meant to convey one thing or a finite set of things only, they you have to respect that what he meant was deterministic; even if he fails to convey it. This doesn't deny the reader's subjective experience of the oeuvre (point 2), which yields a vision that can be coherent and valuable even if not in synch with the author's intent. But it would be misplaced to qualify it as a valid interpretation and promote it as the author true intent: if the author say it's invalid, then it is. Those two vantage points are perpendicular to the act of analyzing the oeuvre in the context of its creation. From this angle, you are allowed to study subconscious processes, undetected influences or knowledge that could have influenced the author during the creation. For instance, Victor Hugo had a clear political agenda when writing Germinal - but the way he came to writer about miners and what was the source of his information definitely gives insight into how writing Germinal positioned him in the society of his times; and what were the reason he took this particular stances. Similar analysis can be done on, say, latent racism or allegories in Lord of the Rings: Tolkien has repeated over and over that he didn't put those in his books, but inferring from the life of the author and from his circle of collaborators, it isn't far fetched to say that those elements might have introduced themselves despite the author's intent. This sort of exercises provide another layer of understanding of an oeuvre but, I feel, can never negate the author intent.

Lies, LIES! As a sidenote, on Firefox 15.0.1., when I click on the 'XCom Livestream' vignette once on the main page it brings the full image in th header; but if I click on it a second time, I'm being sent to the blog post about the PAX conference. Clicking on the big picture brings me to the proper blog entry though. It's also weird that, on the main page, if I click on the vignette of any of the podcasts episodes twice or on the 'big picture' I'm being brought to the corresponding show's mainpage rather than the page of that particular episode. There's a bit of a discrepancy with the vignettes for the blog post which lead you to the actual blog entry.

Excellent cast, keep it up! Though still not a fan of the intro and outro. One of the thing that I got from Tony and wasn't mentioned on the cast is that, not only is he reexamining his life, but he also genuinely wants to make up for past mistakes. If I remember well, after the recollection of his 20s the book is mostly about him, mulling over how to do that properly and putting that on paper. In that sense, I thought that the example of him mentioning Victoria's brother in his e-mail wasn't representative of the way he's written since, in that instance, he's being a dick on purpose. Present Tony's whole existence is bent toward finding a course of action for making things better: sometimes, his lengthy thought experiments even bring him to what could be a proper and sensitive course of actions, but he always ends up choosing the worse alternative. The irritating and tragic aspect of his character is that he means well, but he thinks that relationships are puzzles with a definite solution and with each realization, self discovery or unearthed information, he wrongly assumes that he finally got the last missing piece and that his actions will from now on be spot-on. Personally, I never really understood the relevancy of likeable or lovable quality when it comes to character writing. The only thing I value is the writer's ability to make his characters relatable - either by making me empathize with them or giving me keys so that I can rationalize their behavior and emotions. Whether I like them or not, agree with their actions or not, it has nothing to do with how potent they are or the worth of what the book is telling me through them.

I'm confused: I heard earlier in the week - but didn't believe it - that Steam had suspended their original game submission process. Is that true?

Thanks a lot for the discussions about UI and immersion: my strong opinions on the topic have been shaken, so . Your reward comes in the form of a wall-of-text and requests for more details. Until now, I've mainly done gameplay programming on high-fidelity games with a focus on immersion, so I always found that transitioning from the 'in-your-face' signs & feedback of prototyping to the more final ones was damn unpredictable and risky. It's a challenging process because you can suddenly break your gameplay ingredients in 2 ways that are often unexpected. Either the subtlety of 'art direction compliant' animations, SFXs, sounds and UI greatly hinders the readability of the mechanism or, at the other end of the scale, the increment in the artificiality of signs & feedback topples the overall balance - i.e. slightly too much of the underlying simulation is now revealed and immersion is compromised. The latter can happen slowly over time, sneaking on you like a bastard which makes it uncomfortable to resolve. Anyway, these things are very tricky to evaluate internally, because the people who are involved quickly become biased, each iterations making them grow artificially aware of the designer's intent. Sadly, playtests - which reflect real playing situations way better than employee test - rarely happen that early or massively enough. Before your discussion on the topic, I stood firmly on the principle that, when developing the kind of game mentioned above, if the sign & feedback of a gameplay ingredient disrupted the immersion or the fidelity clearly, then you had a nearly full proof case for cutting this element altogether; no matter how good it was. As a gameplay programmer, I fight for the depth and breadth of the gameplay; but sometimes, it's not the ultimate objective of a game, and in this mindset, I couldn't think of any reason to not compromise. Your point about players developing blind spots for UI elements and feedback in general is very new to me: usually when game and level designers support artificial feedbacks, it's because they think it's a lost fight anyway or they, hum, don't have the tendency or time to care enough. You managed to shift my position on the issue because it's very 'thoughtful' and credible to say that it is better to pay an upfront cost for artificial yet concise info than to maintain immersion through a more integrated solution based on a metaphor: the first yields incredible value once players have absorbed the artificiality while the other will always trigger a conscious and longer mental process to access the final info. So yay for giving me one more sound argument in the debate I've got a few questions for Sean, Chris & Jake though (anybody else can join, but I bolded them out because wall-of-text) - some of them will be naive. let's say you want a piece of UI to be 'blind spot' friendly but you want players to notify a strong change of state, for instance Red flash of the widhet when going to critical health. Would you expect the blind spot to prevent the player from noticing that change at all or not? my instincts tell me that blind spot or 'blindness' is difficult to develop for in-universe overlay (like 3D arrows, marker on top of NPCs or highlights effect). What's your take on that? I'm thinking that players forget those elements because they have absorbed the standard signs & feedback (like fog of war or outline) and they are airbrushed out of their vision. How about newcomers to the medium? Do you think they'll benefit from blind spots too? Does that even matter since they'll probably be super conscious of the physical controller anyway? How long do you think a player would need to develop a blind spot? What can affect that in the design of the UI or the type of info? I'm probably to bring it up to some pals so, to clarify, would you go as far as saying that, if they are well designed, consulting UI elements becomes quasi-unconscious (like a virtual proprioception) or am I caricaturing Jake's point? Anyway, great food for thoughts On a side note: amazing ending to the Daisie session.

Err, how come the main site wasn't updated and still shows 184 as the latest 3MA installment?

May we have a link to the idlethumbs.net in the forum's header pretty please ?

I've got so many not very rational reason to love physical books: In public places, it's fascinating to be able to tell whether people are reading new or second hand books, hardback or paperback, how far or early they are into them, how fast they read, if they are very absorbed or not, what's the title or at least the general look of the cover... it's like having a peek into their personality. You definitely loose that with Kindle. just like Chris, I like to have books around where I live or work, for the awesome moment when my gaze randomly drop on one and suddenly, memories and 'challenging' thoughts that were linked to that book spring back. With posters and cultural event tickets, books are the only 'decoration' items I can really relate to and understand (not games, not figurines, photos...). I'd probably buy a paperback simply because I think it'd look nice in my room. I love having "currently being read", "just finished' or "on-hold" books lying around so I can pick them up when I'm idling: right now, Could Atlas is on my sofa for a second attempt at finishing it, Balzac's Le Père Goriot is next to the kitchen oven and Penguin's The Wind in the Willows is next to my PC. I don't know why, but I love turning pages and the sensory experience of real paper. Those are very personal reasons, but - and that's gong to sound sappy - it's why encountering physical books usually makes any day a better one.

Sadly, this is mostly true: game devs feed on Kotaku because, during production, it's fairly difficult to put enough time aside in the day to read full length articles whereas screaming-headline news fit that constraints perfectly. But the disappointing truth is that there's also a very significant amount (I want to say majority, but that might be wrong) of game dev who completely agrees with the editorial style, tone and vantage point of Kotaku and will forward the shit out of them on internal newsletters. That makes me sad, because it gives the impression (sometimes proven wrong in face-to-face discussion) that they don't really have any distance with the PR-built image of the industry and don't want to be more articulate or subtle about the medium they work in and what's happening around it. Still, I've noticed that 'seasoned' developers are mostly using Kotaku,VG24/7 and Joystiq rss feeds as 'flag' that something in the industry came up: they know better than to read the content of the articles or comments and go straight to the source the aggregator mention instead.

So far, I discovered and voted for Signal Ops and Dreams; so, Greenlight was valuable so far. But, I don't know... the grey background of Steam and visual uniformity of each games pages makes it a very depressing experience to go around and find games that could be interesting.

Is it the piano version of the Video game song? I thought so too for a moment, but it seemed quite different in the end. As for the episode, it was good but to be frank, the piano intro and Sean librarian husky voice put me off: it felt like you were adopting a more proper, uptight attitude because this was about Them Books, aka serious business. The tone didn't feel genuine at all to me for a couple of minute, but hopefuly, that awkwardness rubbed off after a while, and it went back to a relaxed and authentic flow. Still; I'm actually enjoying that there is none of the brain-farting that happens quite a lot on the main Podcast. I mean, it can super funny, but I find it sometimes overwhelming. Also, I agree with Rodi; when the podcast turns into Idle 'Other Cultural Media' Podcast, it still felt very valuable; so don't restrain yourself on that aspect. The stylists discussion was nice and it made me realize I still can't quite make up my mind about that. My main tolerance treshold is that style and tricks should only be used to the extent that they do not remind the spectator/reader that he's having an experience by proxy. But beyond that, it's complicated. On one on hand, I admire and support the finesse and restraint that are required to present the narrative elements as bare and as purely as possible. The intellecutal or emotional involvement required to bridge the distance to where the creator wanted to lead me is one of the thing I cherish most out of reading books and watching movies. But on the other hand, I also find it priceless when a distinguished style allows me to pick inside a creator's head and be as close as his vantage point as possible - even more so when this vantage point is very peculiar. For instance, I love the opening shot of Welles's Touch of Evil: it is not very subtle and there would probably be value in having more quiet camera work, acting , etc... but those carries with them connotations and tonal foreshadwoing that I don't think could be achieved otherwise. I don't know... the cliché thing to say would be that, maybe the lack of visible style is a style in itself, like Kubrick clinical sobriety was a mark of the filmmaker: in Anderson's case, the restraint of The Master might be as self conscious as the lush camera work on Magnolia or Boogie Nights... As a side note onTarantino, I think that he's plagued by an habit of re-using iconic styles purely for hommage sake rather than because his movies thematics actually require it. The only time that I can digest those references is when I'm not at all versed in the original genres: in the case of Jacky Brown, there might be a huuuuge amount of references to Blaxploitation; but I can't see them - so it's fine. The saving grace of Tarantino imo is that he's a genius at conversation writing and mise en scène: I hated most of Inglorious Basterds but I love the opening scene and the one in the underground café - they are small self-contained masterpieces. It's also probably why Reservoir Dogs is my favorite of his movies, and another reason why Jacky Brown is a close second. Anyway, good cast keep up the good work!

Disregarding that it probably makes no sense in terms of naval warfare, that bit was actually coherent narratively: one of their cannons gets damaged and the crew needs to transport one huge shells from that part of the ship to where the usable twin cannon remains (this one having no ammo anymore). The structure of the ship was never meant to ease that operation, so of course they struggle and they are racing against time because they are entering the enemies firing range. The movie isn't at all smart beyond what greg mentioned and yeah, the action part are very low brow; but I don't think the movie is nearly as dumb as what Frenetic Pony describes.

Well, the intent greg describes is there; but it's covered by a decent layer of bad writing too (mostly on the character development side): it feels like the original direction barely survived through several 'beefing it up' iterations on the script by writers who didn't really get the original intent.

Those are actually deep ocean tsunami buoys . In real life, the network isn't at all as dense as what the movie suggest; but it's a really cool idea. When the landing begins, it's made very clear that they are targeting infrastructure or elements that are a serious active threat: they don't fire at the ship not pointing at them and the brute alien doesn't attack the old guy from the machine room. It's sort of silly and doesn't really make any sense; but yes, the aliens do not fire first. From what I remember, the shield is raised; the alien ships respond to the US horn by a sound that makes the windows of the navy ships explode; then the US navy freaks out and start firing.

Yeah, I actually liked Battleship; it could have actually recommend it if not for the 3 Michael Bay moments . I was also happilly surprised by the way they used the original licence and how they played out the US/Japan relationship. There were a few details here and there that were actually pretty well written. I don't know... it's not a superior piece of entertainement, but it's not a bad movie either, and somehow, it felt more adventurous in what it tries to do than the Avengers.

Part 1 never worked for me; but I just checked and Part2/3 are still working on my end.

I finally finished The Diamond Age, and I've got very ambivalent feelings about it. On one hand, the book features a significant amount of insufferable piles of exposition and jargon introduction (not unlike this). The first 80 pages are in that trend, and the last third dives back into that kind of content at random. But on the other hand, when the author goes down to the characters, to explore the topics of education vs subversion, societal rules for the 2nd generation of that society or the contradiction and overlap between Confucianism and Victorianism ; it is very unique and interesting. In those moments, the jargon and sci-fi elements prove themselves indispensable to explore thematics from angles that wouldn't be available otherwise; and for that, I would definitely recommend it. But still, the jargon made my flesh crawls more than I wished. (Also, for some reason, the ending is abrupt and devoid of meaning)

I really admire Crawford for his drive and tenacity: he basically forged ahead in one creative direction for a good 20 years, not knowing if it lead anywhere for sure. Doing that, he advanced the field of interactive and simulated narratives in some ways, and failed on others; but the whole undertaking isn't something everybody has the balls and vision to do. It's a shame that these enduring qualities seem to have turned into bitter denial and are now preventing him from learning from his past projects and this very Kickstarter: if he looked at other non-Video game Kickstarter he would see that the spirit he's talking about his very much alive (that's the only reason I backed him); and that this failure is his own.

To me, your first sentence corresponds exactly to what the poster does, not what's in your PS. But I haven't been exposed to Borderlands beside trailers an short playthrough; so maybe I don't have the context.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "nipponoweirdness" but you might want to check 'Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman': the short stories have less of the 'fantasy' element but retain Murakami's style; so the result is better IMO. edit: reworded because the original might have sounded agressive.

Yeah, I agree the Diablo 3 reaction makes no sense to me. This is the interview, and this what Brevik is basically saying: Blizzard North would have steered the game in another direction It's sad that the Diablo 3 team couldn't learn from Blizzard North expertise on core systems and made the painful mistakes on their own. He's a little happy - not in a celebratory way though - that this proves the people are important in a game creation and even more so in a franchise. How is this inflammatory? It's one of the most politely expressed and honest opinion I've heard in the game media. What the hell, if game creators cannot have the level of maturity to take in that sort of criticism, how can they possible hope to learn from their past projects? The FTL(I'm definitelyy going to buy that one) and DayZ ivestreams were grea;; are we going to get the amazing revelations about the DayZ one in the next podcast ?

Before 1Q84, I had only read from Murakami 'Kafka on the Shore', his interview oriented 'Underground' and a collection of short stories 'Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman'. I like the eerie atmosphere and melancholy of his world, but it works better in his short stories for me. I enjoyed Kafka a lot, but both it and 1Q84 are disappoiintely designed to tie everything together in the end. It's sad, because I feel ike each of the stories could inform the other without having to be actually related. On top of that, 1Q84 also features a collage of heteregenous and sometimes new age mythos which feels very tacky to me. There are very good elements in 1Q84 though, but the whole works often felt to me like an grotesque version of Murakami more sublte works .