Nachimir

I started editing and posting talks from the event I did last year (the next one is on July the 4th in London). Here are two, apologies for audio quality: The venue were kind enough to set up a camera, but they couldn't run the mic into it, and also set it to 1080p and 120FPS… transcoding and cleaning up the audio has been a bunch of work, and it's still far from perfect. The source files had a lot of ambient sound, and I don't think I can clean them up any more than this. I've bought a lapel mic and decent audio recorder as a backup for this year.

I thought each part was more beautiful than the last, but there were slow moments in every part, during which I had to really actively commit to what it was doing. It's mostly about exploration, and it's a beautiful thing to explore.

It's a better video with annotations turned off. I didn't realise there were any until I came back to this thread.

This series of GoT has been very grim. I can cope with it, but it gets a bit… egh.

I got to do bike stuff in the sunshine today: Which was a really nice way to take my mind of money stress. Sometimes freelancing sucks, as the income can be so erratic.

It's true. I saw dibs wearing this hat.

Insecurity (even fake insecurity) over something not being not-gamey enough is my favourite thing to happen this week.

Well, since this is now the ridiculous games industry wishing thread, now I want a studio to announce a stealth game about the privatisation of public services.

I've not touched TF2 in ages, but a friend said it's not been good recently. Maybe that will end up a poor man's version of this. Anyway, cynical as I'm feeling, I don't think it's particularly fair to call any multiplayer death match a TF2 rip off. But extra difficult to aim with the RadGangsta™vertical bow. The RadGangsta™vertical bow almost completely defeats the point of a pistol form-factor, but looks rad! Video games! This is one of the reasons the setting almost put me to sleep, it seems like poor world building. Which is surprising, given just how much effort Antonov put into City 17; i.e. they had narratives along the lines of "What happened her an hour ago? A month ago? A year ago?" for pretty much every location, which were just used as part of the level design briefs. It's possibly an interesting constraint to impose on the people designing weapons for the game, but in narrative terms "because the world government banned it" is a cruddy reason. What's the point of banning gunpowder when there are so many other weapon technologies? What about mining and demolition? If it's post-apocalypse, how is there any authority than can spread that far or be that overbearing? If such an authority exists, why has geopolitics come down to people fighting in an arena? It reminds me of .

It's nice to see Victor Antonov doing something new (I was a little disappointed that aspects of Dishonored so closely aped his work on HL2). The setting almost put me to sleep though. Yes, really dumb. Even if there was a goat's foot on either of them to make cocking easier, they're still two handed.

Fuck. There's no hope for any of us.

It's not pretentious. I had years of injuries trying to run in the wrong shoes, and it didn't take much to find out what shoes were right for me. Twig, try a wet footprint test, and look at the wear patterns on all your other pairs of shoes. Those plus about one minute on google will tell you most of what you need to know, and a professional running shop will give you the exact right advice.

Ukiyo-E3! God no one is going to get that joke

The Mad World Gears of War ad was ridiculous, Far Cry 3 failed at satire, and this latest Ubisoft stuff is just inscrutable but I don't feel like giving them the benefit of the doubt. They reference serious things, they shove them into cutscenes, but ultimately they have to find a way of connecting them to the JUICY VIOLENCE, and that turns them into entertainment companies playing at making something more serious than what they actually do. Or at least, significant in different ways. I hope one day we'll look back on all of these games that are the equivalents of Michael Bay films and find attempts at "dealing with issues" in them ridiculous. I think this is one of the primary things that makes video games still look so fucking idiotic to some people in other creative fields, and I'm embarrassed by it. There are tens of thousands of incredibly clever, technically and artistically skilled developers who, collectively, manage to spew this stuff out. I am really looking forward to the re-release of N.O.L.F. Edit: "A comprehensive examination of the marginalisation of indigenous people, but fun!" "A long form mediation on the oppressive nature of mass surveillance and belief in big data, but fun!" Either this trend dies, or we end up with studios trying to shoe horn it into racing games too.

Chris, Argobot and Bjorn have said most things better than I could, but: Things are not as progressive as you think, Synth. Yes, the DSM is revised periodically, and a lot of prejudice and poor understandings have been excised from it. However, "It's only generalised in cases where we don't know what's wrong with somebody" is itself a terrible generalisation. Many named disorders are very poorly understood, even in diagnostic settings, and in turn sensationalised by media. Where there is an understanding, it can be extremely difficult to propagate that outside of that professional context. Schizophrenia is a really good example. I've also known people with extremely complicated sleep disorders that (so far) defy diagnosis and treatment. I would really like for there to be an understanding of mental illness on as broad a spectrum as physical illness. I think there is such a thing as very mild mental illness that just gets fixed by regression to the mean, but we call it "being a bit stressed" or "being bummed out for a few days". The label "mentally ill" still implies a degree of severity to many people though, and as such is a still something media uses to sensationalise. When it comes to physical illness, we usually have or are capable of a fairly accurate assessment of risks. I think mental illness in others is still an incredibly vague blob of anxieties for most people.

I_smell has nailed E3. I bet all kids named Sephiroth have this conversation: "What's your name?" "Seph" "Seth?" "No, Seph" "Huh?"

There are also non-toed shoes designed to mimic barefoot running as closely as possible, like Nike Free. Probably don't get as close to it as Vibrams though.

I would totally go for that. I really like my Kindle, but it hasn't replaced paper books.

No one is "just" a psychopath, they have some complex of motives and habits. Elliot's were fed and enabled by misogynist subcultures, which people seem to have a huge problem seeing and understanding as such, and in turn, people from those subcultures are able to overlook that the was probably a psychopath because he murdered and wrote invective about a type of person they obsessively hate. He probably was a hateful person who would have ended up doing terrible things without that influence, but I think it's significant that of all the places online he could have ended up, PUAHate and a few other alpha moron forums were the closest to home.

It's transference of any culpability for a situation from oneself to the outside world. In my case, I certainly felt some of that before developing an understanding of more than simply how I felt and what it immediately related to. That hatred also manifested in a taste for post-apocalyptic fiction, which faded as I became better adjusted. Argobot, I didn't mean what I said about your post in my last one to sound dismissive, but it does now I read it back. Sorry. What you describe actually reminds me massively of the religion I grew up in. Advocation of total abstinence from anything sexual (including masturbation) until marriage creates, funnily enough, chronically low self esteem among Jehovah's Witnesses. They have many other contributing standards beyond sex, but it's the biggest form of self-denial they practice. I think many kids who leave it the way I did (reading rather than partying) continue to struggle with that repression. I got over it eventually, then gradually parsed the double standard. I got into some relationships with women who shocked me in how repressed their sexuality was, and how eerily similar that repression was to the remnants of cult conditioning in my own. It's not that they were disinterested in sex, it's that even in enthusiastically consensual situations it still took some work to draw that out of them. My own sexuality works kind of like that, the conditioning was deep and I think has probably had permanent neurological effects. Obviously, that stacks up poorly with the masculine image of being an insatiable, instantly erect alpha-monster. My own situation was extreme, but again once I was out of my early twenties I realised a lot of men don't and can't conform to that image either. All of it, the sexual repression of women and alpha male hypersexuality have always had the stink of my culty upbringing about them. The double standard isn't just one half being denied something the other gets a free pass for; it hurts everyone.

Every time I read or post in it I feel like a dog eating puke.

(Edit: That's interesting, thanks Argobot. I don't think I have much to say about it Stuff below in response to Bjorn's post) That's kind of how it was for me, though I too realised this: I was very intentionally steering clear of the manifesto type thing Eliot wrote, but someone linked it on Facebook. His mindset was weird, very intensely built up in an unhealthy way. He didn't believe he was a nice guy and that's why he deserved love/sex/etc. He believed he was a superior guy and deserved it on that basis, but it seems like none of his time was spent improving himself at all. A great many times, he refers to women having "rejected him", but he never approaches or talks to them. As well as toxic PUA bullshit, he was also intensely into "The Secret", another bullshit ideology based around entitlement and woo. He repeatedly drove to Alabama to buy stacks of lottery tickets, believing on the basis of The Secret that if he just wished hard enough, he'd win the lottery and then he'd have a beautiful blonde girlfriend and kids, a mansion and get to rub it all in everyone else's face. Potentially distressing parts in this spoiler tag: His thoughts are some of the most misogynist things I've ever read. Sex would not have fixed this situation, and the PUAs claiming it would as some form of validation have dropped even further in my estimation. They are pond life, but I'm pretty sure Elliot was a psychopath. He shows an extremely volatile mix of soppy romantic ideals coupled with extreme narcissism. The police interviewing him weeks ago then concluding he was a "perfectly polite young man" doesn't stack up with the idea that he had Asperger's. If that's correct, he'll be written off as "just a psychopath", and the incels/PUAs/MRAs etc. will take nothing from this

I guess you either have a white protagonist dressed down as an asshole for every insensitive blunder, or… a power fantasy with an ethnic protagonist. Attempting to touch on any serious cultural or geopolitical issues using the verbs "shoot" and "run" is probably a hiding to nothing. Highly developed FPS mechanics tuned for fun, plus social issue, is hardly Escape from Woomera. Interviews with the writer of Far Cry 3 were embarrassing, I have zero confidence Far Cry 4 won't be as cringeworthy.