James

HI GUYS WHATS UP

The problem arises if it starts forcing developers to tone down their material to reach a large enough market, I'd say. Not that I'm some sort of gore-hound, but I don't want things to seem artificially neutered, either. Then again, looking through my game collection from this generation, I'm surprised how high the proportion of BBFC 18-rated games is, which has always been legally enforced, so perhaps developers aren't too concerned with UK ratings. Perhaps kids get everything bought for them anyway. A flatmate at university bought San Andreas for our communal PS2 when it came out, and on the bus home saw a mother who had also bought it for her two pre-teen sons looking fairly concerned about the content. That's anecdotal, of course, but if enough people fail to respect even the familiar and highly visible BBFC ratings, what's the chance of their respecting a much less familiar (albeit Europe-wide) system, particularly when they never see it in a context that they can relate to? I wouldn't want to say anything too strongly one way or the other on the subject, though, as I really don't know how people tend to behave with regards to all that stuff. As long as the content available to adults doesn't change, I don't mind too much. As a side-note, I do get concerned about what some kids are playing, but in retrospect I was playing the original GTA when I was 13, and the Doom games before that (ten or eleven, even), both of which had some pretty gruesome imagery. Did the lack of visual fidelity protect me from psychological damage, or did I just happen to be sufficiently balanced and resistant to nastiness? Or am I being hypocritical? Or was I actually fucked up by that stuff and just haven't realized it? To continue the tangent, as we become more accustomed to ever-more-realistic graphics, will the content of older games become less shocking and dangerous, even to those who have no experience of them? Will the children of the future be better equipped to handle the original Doom than the children of 1993? Or will it always be recognizable enough to be a concern? I guess at least the PEGI system has smaller bands.

WELL SORRY. Yeah, I don't know, I tend to "pronounce" it in my head as a word, but feel awkward either way saying it out loud. Both sound wrong. Out of interest, why is it so jarring to some people? I mean, nobody I know says "jay-pee-ee-gee". Is it just because "url" is a homophone for a real word? I guess I find it annoying when people pronounce "UFO" as "yoo-foe". Perhaps it's to do with what we've come to expect.

In the Kingdom of Loathing the HTML man is the game.

NEVER

You're not even a little bit into their uniforms? Do you seriously not see a distinction between self-defence and frustrated destruction of property? I'll grant you that the two have something in common, but they also have a lot to differentiate them. Granted, there are difficult border cases, but there are also clear-cut cases. For example: fighting off some people who are mugging you is OK; breaking a child's leg to see how it makes you feel is not OK. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're saying. My point is that, to take a fairly recent example, smashing bank windows at the G7 anti-capitalism marches was counter-productive and impermissible. The minority who do stuff like that taint the whole affair, which isn't fair on everyone who just wanted to make their point peacefully. That's how I see it, anyway. Also, congratulations, Miffy.

But then what you're doing is (x - x) / 0, which is 0 / 0. Apparently that's still indeterminate, but it's not the original problem.

OK, but that's different than smashing a shop up. Perhaps your retaliation was justified, perhaps not, but it was in response to actual violence and the threat of further violence. I'm not a pacifist; I won't claim that war is always avoidable, but that shop wasn't about to beat anyone up. More generally, I don't think violence at protests is justified unless very strongly provoked (who provoked who is, of course, a very difficult matter to untangle, butthere has to be an element of self-defence for it to be at all legitimate, and even then I think it should be as restrained as possible while remaining effective).

"Like the fucking Wizard" - IGN.com

I think it's entirely normal to have violence in you, but I don't think it's really acceptable in modern society to act out those impulses in such a dramatic way. We're civilized people, and I'd much rather these issues be fought in terms of the values and ideals behind them rather than with exhibitions of physical might and destructive intent. If you smash up a shop, all you're saying is that you don't approve, not why or why people should agree with you. The fact that violence appeals to innate drives, if anything, works against the cause, as it suggests the protesters are just thugs looking for thrills, rather than people with serious things to say. Violence makes protesters seem intimidating and uninviting, which seems completely counter-productive to me.

According to the article on the Guardian website I read earlier, the reason for the apparently candid results was anonymous participation (by way of PDAs, apparently), so I'm not sure if it can really be put down to macho cred, unless people want to impress themselves that way. I personally think that in an anonymous context people are more likely to deny their crimes to themselves than invent new ones, but I could well be wrong on that. Either way, it seems a remarkably high figure, and makes me wonder if there's something up with the study (and irregular sample, perhaps?). It could even be that the definition of rape has been a subject of discussion recently, and it's causing men to question what they previously viewed as usual sexual practices. Or there's a load of terrifying bastards in South Africa. I don't know. Two of the guys at work are South African. Does that mean there's a 50% chance of one of them being a racist? Actually, from what I've heard from the aforementioned South Africans at work, South Africa is in parts a pretty dodgy place. Driving around with your doors locked and so on. I don't know how reliable they are on the subject, but I thought it bore mentioning, and they certainly know more about it than I do.

I feel similarly. It all seems kind of weird an alien to me. I find the whole subject kind of depressing for some reason. Perhaps I have an innate pessimism about it.

I think tutorials are probably a good thing, as I think most of us are past reading manuals, but I prefer it when they're done subtly, with minimal pop-ups and breaking of the fourth wall. I'd never really thought about it, but OssK points out that Mario did a pretty good job of conveying several of the game's few mechanics in one minute slice of gameplay. If possible, I think players should be able to learn stuff by natural experimentation. This is trickier with current games, not least because the third dimension requires mechanisms (or metaphors or whatever you want to call them) less obvious and literal than simply pushing a compass point to travel in that direction. I was by no means new to games, but I think Portal did a pretty good job of easing the player in without being too explicit about it. You get a few button prompts, and beyond that you're introduced to ideas such that initially they're completely obvious, and gradually you come upon situations where you have to recall the techniques you've previously been using. I suppose its puzzle nature separates it somewhat from action games, but I think the principle can be applied elsewhere, and to lesser or greater degrees, it is. It's jarring to have a dialogue window pop up over the action, and possibly even pause it, although I can see why, for example, inFamous can't demonstrate a concept as abstract as the morality mechanic through gameplay alone, particularly since the meter has several components to it. Nevertheless, I kind of feel like if it was just impressed upon the player that moral choices had practical effects on your character and the world, players could observe the finer points for themselves. Perhaps I'm assuming too much intuition for this sort of thing -- I think the main dividing line between the technologically literate and illiterate is not specific knowledge, but an intuition for the conventions of interface design and so on (my mother has on several occasions asked me how I remember how to do all the things that come naturally to a computer user, when in fact I probably don't; I just work it out as I go along) -- but on the other hand I think wordy explanations are pretty intimidating to a novice user. When you lay everything out in words, it looks like there's an awful lot of stuff to remember. Sorry, I never got around to the actual Nintendo thing, and now I have to go.

I guess I'd say that we shouldn't try to shelter people from ideas, no matter how repugnant, but that we should endeavour to put all these ideas into some sort of context, and hopefully that will equip people with the ability to assess things for themselves. I find these sorts of issues a bit overwhelming, and have difficulty working out a clear stance on them. I probably need to organize my mind somehow.

Yeah, I kind of suspected that was the case. I guess it's less apparent when the virtual things aren't supposed to be attached to surfaces anyway. That sounds great!

That's what the M stands for.

I got Cryostasis a while back (Dave Snider gave it a positive review on Giant Bomb, and I was pretty much won over by a single very striking screenshot), and played an hour or two of it. It had its faults, but had some fantastic atmosphere to it. Just before I left it, though, there had been a flashback cutscene that appeared to be elaborating on the plot. I haven't got as far as any explanations about the psychic powers yet, but that sounds like a further disappointment. I really like the eerie near-silence you occupy when wandering the ship, juxtaposed with the chaos happening in the flashback. It gives a really good sense of the unsettling calm after a cataclysmic event, and is a really efficient way of describing an event without resorting to verbally communicating it. I don't have a problem with wordy plot stuff, but I think there's room for other methods of storytelling, and kind of wish those paths were explored more thoroughly. I think games are uniquely capable of keeping long periods without dialogue interesting; one of the main things I loved about Shadow of the Colossus was that it felt like a story that couldn't have been told in that format in any other medium. Perhaps that's overstating my case a little -- you could probably make a really good film that follows its format pretty closely if you were willing to sink masses of money into an art house project (not Shadow and the Colossus) -- but I do feel like the method of delivery actually had some influence on how I felt about the story. Anyway, I liked what I played of Cryostasis, and I really need to come back and play more, but I definitely agree with THE REMO about wanting developers having a bit more faith in their audience and possibly themselves, and daring to be a bit more minimal about things. And yeah, I love the whole not-quite-knowing-what-it-is-you're-experiencing thing, too. Speaking more generally, I kind of wish some developers would be willing to let go a bit more in general. For example, I think the GTA games would be improved if Rockstar weren't determined for you to experience all the stuff they've designed for a particular mission. By all means, include all the trucks dropping logs in front of me during chase sequences and so on, but if I find a way to kill the guy before the chase has even begun, let that happen too. I know some people argue for the opposite. For example, I listened to a podcast in which Garnett Lee was getting really wound up about accidentally missing a bunch of quests in Fallout 3 because he happened to talk to the right/wrong person in Rivet City. His stance was "well that must mean that they don't care about any of that content". I can understand that (I have on occasion tried to consume everything single thing a game has to offer), but that stance is incompatible with truly open gameplay. In GTA, the world might be open, but the story essentially is not. Which I suppose is fine, but I'd like to feel a bit more like I'm making my own way. That has barely anything to do with this podcast. Sorry. Incidentally, are you aware of the technical problems some people have been having with it? Apparently it only utilizes a single core of multiple-core processors or something. That seems pretty dumb, but it ran OK for me. Great blast, by the way.

Someone at school kept referring to me as "Murray the talking skull" (guess why) at school before I'd played the game. It was pretty annoying. He was one of those people who's kind of boring and keeps saying the same things or making the same jokes to you over and over. I get a bit paranoid about being like that sometimes. SORRY IF I AM.

Well it's certainly a step along the way, and very cool. I guess the fact that it's fish swimming frees them from a lot of the problems with how to interact with real objects by allowing all the virtual stuff to float in open space. Snazzy.

I was just curious as to whether it was still down. I don't know when the whole process started, and how long it actually took in the end. Not that we should have changed our plans, of course. JUST WONDERING. Impromptu L4D last night was very good, by the by. Just don't tell the Left 4 Thumbs thread. Afterwards non-forum-Dan and friends and I got a gold on a survival map none of us had, too, so it was a satisfying night.

That sounds like something from a bizarre advert. Generally I favour people I roughly align with politically keeping their hands more-or-less clean so that they can take the moral high ground, rather than creating easy targets for the opposition ("those guys are just worthless anarchists who don't respect legal property and will smash your shop next", etc.). I do, however, appreciate that the real world doesn't allow for complete adherence to such absolutes. Nevertheless, I think it's an ideal to be strived for. If you stick to the issues, you're making an appeal to the general public ("do you see why we disagree with these people?"), whereas if you start getting destructive it gives the appearance that you are seizing control without discussion ("we know what's best, you will do as we say"). Perhaps I'm being idealistic, but I think you're more likely to win people over with persuasion than violence. Then again, I suppose by now the discussion has been had many times over, and everything worth saying has been repeated ad nauseam. I'd say that that just illuminates the ridiculousness and hypocrisy of their march. If people can see it that way, great, although I'd suspect the people who do see it that way are already against the whole Nazi thing. But if we don't allow them to march, doesn't that make us almost as ridiculous as them? Peacefully protest, sure, but I'm not sure how I feel about completely preventing it. I'd rather these things didn't take place, but I don't think I can justify actually stopping them. I don't know if that's true. I suppose it depends on the specifics of the situation. If you're shutting them up, you're making the assumption that people are likely to be won over if only they hear their siren song, and that lots of people are actually just dormant Nazis who we're trying to keep from their true beliefs. That's exactly the sort of thing extreme right-wingers keep claiming: "we're just saying what everyone's thinking". If that is what everyone's thinking . . . well, that's a depressing prospect. I would agree with ridiculing them, in as much as they are ridiculous, but to outlaw them and cause them criminal damage suggests we're scared. I don't know, perhaps people are worried they'll take control. I currently have more faith in the majority of humanity than that, despite the recent election results. Perhaps I'm foolish and complacent. Like I said above, no ideals stand up completely to the mess that is reality, but I do think it's important to avoid as much as possible the kinds of hypocrisy our enemies are guilty of. Yeah, even the simple act of egging Nick Griffin disappointed me a fair amount. People think they're sending out the message that "we, the people, don't want you", but to me it seems more like "we, a minority, are taking matters into our own hands", which is the kind of thing that scares people who can't relate to that minority (young angry leftists, or whatever), and could potentially even make extreme politics in the opposite direction seem like the path to safety (I'm sure the BNP would enact all sorts of measures to lock those sorts of protesters up, safely out of the way of the good honest public). I don't know, perhaps that's not a good representation of how people think, but it's how it seems to me. And yeah, it's pretty hypocritical in general. If I expect the right to go around without being assaulted, I have to support that right for everyone else, regardless of their politics. If they break the law, punish them, of course, but keep things above-board.

I've got Belleville Rendez-vous on DVD. Apparently that's the UK title. Pretty good, I thought. I don't even remember what the translation situation is. To be honest, most of it's non-verbal. I think Tartan put it out. (I know you weren't talking to me, but I thought I'd chip in.)

If they could work out a way to make the stuff on screen fit into arbitrary real-world scenes without any explicit guides, that would be pretty spectacular. I like the idea of just pointing a phone at something and having a load of virtual crap projected over it and "interacting" with it on the screen, and for it to all scale properly and find the surfaces and so on. I imagine that'd require some pretty intense algorithms and general craziness going on in the background, so the capability might be some way off, but it's an appealing prospect, even if it would end up being yet another tech-demo-toy-thing like most camera-based stuff turns out.

Very cool. It kind of reminds me of a tech demo video somebody linked me to three or four years ago, but putting all that stuff on a mobile device makes it all that much more relevant and interesting.

Yeah, the time travel puzzle was probably my favourite bit, too. My main other memories were collecting seemingly endless prosthetic body parts and giving up at a scene with a really high diving board or water slide or something. I don't know if that bit was particularly irritating or if I'd just had enough in general.