gdf

Puzzle Fighter HD and Marble Blast Ultra are all you'll ever need, I've probably spent about a hundred hours on those two combined. Overall I love XBLA, don't really want to think about how much money I've spent on Microsoft Points. And you guys should totally check out Text Zedventure on Xbox Indie Games. A guy I used to write about games with made it and it's really good!

I think Jake might be a surrealist comedian whose sole topic is video games.

Yeah, it's Stockholm. I'll hopefully find out soon if I'm getting student accommodation or not, they put everyone into a lottery for it because it's so scarce. The University apparently help you find somewhere to stay if you don't get it, but I'm aware it'll be costly either way.

TEAM FORTRESS 2 MEETS BIOSHOCK MEETS DESTROY ALL HUMANS IN (SUBURBAN) HELL. Looks fine to me.

I have no idea Sombre, that sounds like a shitty situation. Have you avoided a student loan so far? That's what I managed by staying at home for first year but I might need to get one for going to Sweden depending on the cost of accommodation. Also, Miffy, mega congrats, that's rad!

Yeah, that would be emergent. Maybe we should draw a distinction between Far Cry 2 style designed or intended (lololol) emergent play and out of the blue, "check what we can do or make with this mechanic" emergence. Both are valid and awesome. Thus, in the case of Noby Noby Boy, I'd say whether Takahashi designed the game that way or not - and he did, of course, because the whole purpose is one of a sandbox - is pretty irrelevant to its emergent value. Intent by the designer plays a role only in defining which type of emergent systems are available, but often these are distinct from rocket-jump style examples anyway. Emergent play is where the medium really comes into its own, allowing its inherent non-linearity and reactivity to, well, emerge. Am I still making sense? I have no idea at this point, but I'm glad that this discussion is taking place, video game theory is still in its infancy and that means there's a lot to chew over.

Should be a pretty cool cool game.

But that's the way the real world would interact, you know; that's what most emergent experiences are right? I'm mostly with Lork on this one: some elements of the game combine based entirely on the player's actions, intentional or unintentional, to produce an outcome that wasn't hard coded in by the designers. Maybe they foresaw a similar outcome, but it will seem like a unique event. In the case of Far Cry 2, the game is constructed in such a way as to be conducive to such outcomes because of the volume and consistency of interactions. I believe it was Remo that said its brilliance was down to a lot of the player's experience being "so plausible". I'd probably call it plausibly implausible, the kind of stuff that doesn't usually happen but theoretically could. The most common one is driving a car off a bridge whilst looking at the map in Far Cry 2. It won't happen to everyone, but that's a situation made possible by several aspects and sub-aspects of the design working in concert with player input. Maybe we can break it down into broad but largely accurate points. A) Design 1) Driving (play mechanic) - cars are pretty fast and the handling is fairly tight. 2) Physics (passive mechanic) - this allows the wood on the bridge to be smashed when driven through. 3) The map (play mechanic) - sufficiently large to obscure the player's view of the road. Intended input 4) Destination (mid-high level interaction) - player is heading to objective in vehicle. 5) Current location (mid level interaction) - player is navigating the immediate route, which happens to be a bridge. 6) Orientation (low level interaction) - player is viewing map in order to effectively navigate to 4). C) Emergent interaction 7) Loss of concentration - some of the above factors combine to make the player lose concentration. The "emergence" happens here - in some ways it is "immersion", because the player's unintentional mistake results in something that could plausibly happen were this scenario replicated in real life. It's not the outcome, but this that is emergent because it's the eye of the storm of contributing factors. The player and the game have "fused" to produce something. Not sure how well I'm communicating this, I'm struggling to describe it well. In my rhino example there may be several emergent interactions. D) Outcome 8) The player ends up flying off the bridge and crashing into the stream or, if very unlucky, river valley below. This has not been "scripted" into the game. You see where I'm coming from? I'd add an extra qualification that it has to be both uncommon and relatively significant to be "emergent". It needn't be unexpected, because the player could deliberately interact with a game in such a manner as to produce an outcome that was expected in real world logic, but isn't often part of game logic. This has possibly never happened, but is theoretically possible. All of this is IMHO, of course, but I'm confident that most people would agree.

Noby Noby Boy is the only game I've ever played that's one hundred per cent "emergent". Every event that occurs is the direct and unique result of your input, and it's fascinating as well as hilarious. If you give yourself an hour or so to get accustomed to its controls and realise that it's a tool with which you can make your own fun just by experimenting you'll have a blast. I've seen people dump on it because there's "no point" and it basically requires effort, but it's more open-ended than even Far Cry 2 et al., though they're obviously still marvellous in their own ways. Far Cry 2 is certainly the game that best straddles the traditional and the emergent, and it does it fantastically well. Every time I play it another hilarious/sad/mindblowing thing happens. Last time I played I was chasing a weapons convoy, managing to get rid of the protection vehicles first time as the actual truck got away. I set up on a ridge ready for the next time it passed by but realised I had no ammo, so I drove to the nearest weapons store as quickly as possible. In the jungly bit I ran over what I thought was a tree stump, it was too dark to see, and I continued, grabbing some munitions and checking my map. It looked as though I'd missed the truck again, but when I checked my map it had stopped. I drove back up the road and saw it in the exact place I had hit whatever it was. Turns out it was a rhino, and the weapons truck had collided with the corpse, ending up leaning on top of the beast with two wheels in the air. I chucked a grenade and ran away laughing my ass off. That's an hilarious one. Maybe Far Cry 2 is one big argument for determinism, and I'd wager that lines of code are way easier to observe than atoms. A sad story is about the time I shot an escaping enemy across a small valley. He was the last of the assailants and was clearly already injured and desperately trying to get away. Without even thinking I scoped him and shot him in the back. I thought about it for ten minutes. He was virtually unarmed, he was probably over a hundred yards away and, basically, no threat to me. I just killed him for no other reason than I was compelled to. No attempt to retroactively justify it - maybe he was fatally wounded and I just put him out of his misery? - was really convincing. I reflected on the monster this world, this game and by extension video games had made me. I exist only to kill, apparently. The - possibly only - other truly great example of the latter is Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. It has a very traditional, rigid structure and a lot of people were put off by the "boring" challenges, but the reason they were kept simple was to allow your child Mechano brain to go mental and invent some krazy kontraptions. Some of my favourite emergent experiences have been with that game, though obviously the correlation between intention and outcome is much closer. And there are others like Trine, Stalker and Fallout 3 and a couple of indie games that do these things to a lesser extent. I haven't played Spelunky very extensively because keyboards suck for it and I could never quite get a comfortable configuration on my wired 360 controller, but I think I'll get the Live Arcade version when it comes out. Edit: Oh wow ultrapost. Sorry guys. Ed2t: Also, that Red Dead Redemption thing happened to me literally about an hour ago and I found it incredibly lame and the only time that game has let me down in some way so far. It's entirely inconsistent with pretty much every other encounter of that nature.

I'm done today as well, high thumb motherfucker!

That sounds great, Nachimir! Except the throwing knife bit. I'm a little worried about the throwing knife bit.

Why is he not nicknamed Chris "Space" Remo?

Actually fixed.

One of my favourite Thumbs moments was after the old PC game discussion and the Windows "splattered brains on the wall" quote from Jake. It was towards the end of a later episode, but I can't recall which one. The whole "curmudgeonly old assholes sailing off a cliff" crack me up every damn time. I also love the "Uh, nothing, I'm just inspecting this mechani- SUCKBOX" thing with Batman and I can never find it.

I'm so shit at studying, I can't even get started half the time and I keep putting it off so it never gets done. Good job I'm fucking awesome at exams. Take that International Organisations!

There will always be a percentage of piracy. The Humble Indie Bundle is readily available for as cheaply as you wish, so in this case I don't even think it was the money. If someone wasn't going to give the developers or charities much money at all, they'd probably see it as more hassle to go through that process. It's laziness, really. If I have no sense of duty to pay the devs/charities, it'll be easier for me to click on a link than arse around with PayPal. Valve's position is one they're able to take, right? They own the closest thing to a unified PC platform there is, it's available all over the place, has no intrusive or terribly restrictive DRM and many of the games they sell are cheap. I don't think there's "no excuse" for not serving a certain market; I don't really know what factors are involved, but you can be sure it's not as simple as they'd let on, though they're probably still right to an extent. What I'm saying is that however easy and cheap it is to download a game to own, there will still be a number of people ready to pirate it. Ideological opposition to DRM is probably still an incentive for some, but was probably used as cover for others. Why do you pirate? "Oh, I hate dat DRM". As more companies realise that punishing legitimate customers while the pirates easily crack their systems and play for free is utterly disingenuous, the excuse will lose legitimacy. As for indie games and others that don't operate any intrusive DRM, piracy has been pretty much indefensible for some time unless you've got some kind of Valve-identified loophole. That's why, though, most pirates probably don't defend it. I like eating meat. I know it's probably morally wrong in a Western capitalist society with the availability of other, less harmful sources of nutrition. However, I'm not going to stop because meat is awesome. Selfish, yes, but I don't really care, and I'm guessing this is the stance of most game pirates. For the record, I'm not a pirate. I've spent a silly amount on video games, I use Steam a lot and I paid $20 for the Humble Bundle. I watch the occasional episode of Family Guy online, but I pay for all my music etc. etc. Hopefully DRM dies out. It makes games a little easier to share, but in the end probably does good for the profit margins. Don't know how to finish this off so

I was thinking a fat, douchey Jake.

Oh so like the Virtual Boy.

Way ahead of you. Groucho, get that game. Best ninety-nine pence I've ever spent.

I'm not sure what you're on about. I mean, this topic's just about smothering your fresh hot scoops in other users' faces. It's delectable, it's sinful. GOG.com PC DL

A few weeks ago I went a bit nuts and have since played through Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, The Darkness, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Halo 3: ODST, Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, VVVVVV, Splinter Cell: Conviction and Kane & Lynch.

Nah, think he worked on the first two and Chaos Theory. The latter is amazing in so many ways. Conviction isn't subtle at all; by no means a bad thing, but you can tell Hocking didn't work on it. Hope he does a couple of wee indie projects, but it's a shame one of "our guys" won't have access to stacks of money and resources and the backing of a big publisher. Well, maybe he will if he starts his own company, could give him more creative freedom, but that's not to say he didn't get that at Ubi.

Outcast has just been released on GOG for six dollars and I downloaded it to my netbook. Firstly, I'm very impressed so far. Secondly, voxels are awesome. The only problem is that the music jumps forward through itself between two second segments and it's really fucking irritating, but I'm sure some fiddling with options and hardware sound acceleration levels will do the trick.

Video Games or video games? I hope it's the former

Dear Mr. Ebert, A "video game" need not contain any material ludic element. Sincerely, the internet.