Denial

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    369

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Denial

  1. Posted

    I've just written a thing about this - but the short version is that it feels like the thing that needed to be said to encourage people who wanted to continue to attend PAX/ read PA or similar, but who were having qualms about doing so, to stop having qualms.

     

    However, it does hit a few bum notes. Most obviously, it talks about people being hurt and offended by the strips, and about the "debate" that the merch being issued/pulled caused, but it doesn't really acknowledge that people, largely women, were repeatedly threatened with rape and murder by people who thought they were upholding the honor of Penny Arcade. That's not exactly the same as debate.

     

    (Courtney Stanton did an amazing visualization/presentation of the abuse she got for blogging about deciding not to go to PAX, btw - slides here. Obviously, NSFW.)

  2. Posted

    Yeah - if anyone is saying that, Niyeaux, you should absolutely post a link. OTOH, if nobody is actually saying that the whole PAX event is a hive of rape and misogyny, it's probably not a good use of our time to imagine how ridiculous it would be if someone did.

     

    There are people who are saying that they don't feel as good about going to PAX as they used to, and/or that they no longer want to attend, and that is in part because of things like this.

     

    Rachel Edidin at Wired.

    A long-time PA fan, requoted by Ethan Gach.

    Lesley Kinzel, a long-time attendee.

     

    And to be fair to Mike Krahulik, he seems to be aware of this - his post when the merch was pulled described it as an "easy fix" to the problem that people had been writing to him saying that they, personally, would not feel as comfortable at PAX if there were a lot of dickwolves shirts on display. And, likewise, when he closed the book on the cis/trans thing, he said that he hated the idea that his Internet jerkishness might make even one person reluctant to attend PAX or watch PATV.

     

    It feels like he's maybe just stuck in a very geek-appropriate cycle of not wanting to feel like he looks weak - so, despite that sincere feeling, he still wants to make the point that he was actually right all along - by saying he would be wearing his dickwolves shirt to PAX originally, by making "The Sixth Slave" one of his nominated stand-out comics, by drawing dickwolves on request, and now with this. You get this kind of behavior in arguments about whether Ken is a cheap character, or whether the Asari are commendably gender-indeterminate or regulation hot bisexual alien women - people simmering over time, and then throwing out an "and another thing". The stakes are just higher in this case, I think...

  3. Posted

    But telling those people not to go at all because they'll be "supporting" PA doesn't seem like the right course of action to me.  I feel like seeing those kinds of panels go away would cause more harm than not attending in the first place.

     

    Well, I don't think I did say that they shouldn't go because they'd be "supporting" PA. I said I wasn't sure it was a good use of resources for people with those objectives to travel long distances to hold panels at an event where they couldn't be confident that the event's corporate officers were not going to say something that would create a hostile environment for them - not just at the panels, but while getting to and from the panels, while walking around the expo and so on. I don't think that's really a question of whether they are supporting PA. It may be to some extent a question of whether PA is supporting them.

  4. Posted

    But the goal of many PAX panels isn't to try and educate the stubborn, but rather to inform the uninformed.  A lot of people who attend PAX really are oblivious to the kinds of things we're talking about here.  They're certainly not going to try and educate themselves in their free time, but having a panel at PAX at least might show them that these kinds of issues exist in the first place.  Unfortunately, it's also very unlikely that anyone who isn't interested will attend a panel like that, but at least it's another possible avenue to make the issues known.

     

    It's a possible avenue, but is it a good one for them? I mean, you're talking about somebody submitting a panel idea, getting it approved, possibly travelling across America to set up a panel at a convention which is being told to be hostile to the kind of points they are raising by one of its spiritual leaders, which may not be attended by anyone they could have a useful conversation with. That's a big ask with no guaranteed payoff...

  5. Posted

    I'm of the mind that overanalysis doesn't exist. It may not be useful to do deep analysis of a piece of work and it may be even harder to substantiate and back up that analysis but I think that generally there is nothing wrong with picking something apart and drawing ideas from an art work. 

     

    Agreed - or at least, what is often called overanalysis is often either bad analysis, which is indeed pretty surplus to requirements, or worthwhile analysis outside the comfort zone or level of interest of the person calling it overanalysis. "You're overthinking this game" is certainly a surefire way to be told you're underthinking it...

     

    (Incidentally, the canonical explanation for the audiologs is I think

    that your playthrough is Caitlin reading the diary at the end of the game and  remembering the relevant items to each diary entry that she found while walking through the house. So your playthrough is actually Caitlin remembering e.g. the list of Street Fighter 2 instructions and thinking "oh, right, that item totally tallies to this diary entry".

  7. Posted

    It's interesting to see what's left of the different layers - the bouncy blobs, now called "Silacoids" are still around, and the black ooze still features in the environment design and the storyline, but it's completely at odds with the design of the core alien baddies and their technology. The textual justification being that the "Outsiders" are a scavenger race who co-opt technologies and races, which is also how the presence of Sectoids and Mutoids is justified.

     

    Being able to look at that Polygon article and see where things have survived or been welded onto is fascinating. Not many games wear their development on their sleeve quite like The Bureau...

  8. Posted

    You didn't say it, but the implication was there, whether you meant it or not. 

     

    Implication requires intention - I can't imply something without meaning to do so, pretty much by definition. Implication is precisely something that somebody seeks to communicate without explicitly stating it.

     

    What you mean is that the inference was there, which is true, because you made the inference. Incorrectly, in this case. But don't feel bad! None of us are perfect all the time.

     

    In this case, though, the implication is pretty straightforward - I don't have an actual example what Ben Kuchera sees as an unreasonable response to the idea of length being a thing that informs purchases of games. In the absence of that information, all I have is how he characterises the behaviour:

     

    And then critics and developers shake their heads sadly at the unwashed masses who just don't understand QUALITY and ARTISTRY.

     

    That feels to me like something of a straw man, is all. It's always tempting to make people you disagree with sound like caricatures, but it's not usually conducive to a good discussion. If you're good with the Potter Stewart approach to this, that's fine. I'd just like a little more.

     

    However, I don't imagine we're going to get much further on this, and there's something else in that piece which I think is more interesting, which is the follow-up:

     

    I know, I know, claiming games are supposed to be fun is heretical to a critic. We don’t expect to go to Schindler’s List to like, enjoy it, but for most people the hobby of gaming is primarily about the pursuit of pleasure. We want to have fun, we want to be told a story, and we want to enjoy ourselves. That may not be true for everyone, or every game, but I’d argue that the idea of “fun” and “enjoyment” drive most game purchases.

     

    This seems like a really interesting way to approach the idea of entertainment. I mean, Schindler's List is obviously not a knee-slapping laugh riot, but it's a piece of film that people get something out of seeing. That something is probably (hopefully) different from what one might get out of seeing Spinal Tap, but it's well within the bounds of the emotional range we ascribe to leisure pursuits. 

     

    I don't think many people are playing Gone Home or Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons out of a sense of duty, or because they have to (barring some game reviewers, I guess...), and the people who are talking about how much they enjoyed playing them are not lying. So... what's the distinction being drawn, here?

  9. Posted

    I'm fine with critics and reviewers discussing the length of a game as long as it isn't in some "bang for your buck" context. How much a game is worth will depend on a person's economic status, and you can't make that judgment for someone else, but talking about things like the flow and pacing are obviously important.

     

     

    That's the other side of the coin - Gone Home, it seems to me, is about the right length _for Gone Home_. Obviously, that's going to vary between people. If you're not engaged by the story, it might seem overlong. But I think it would be hard to make the case that it would be a better game if it retained the same mechanics (i.e. no combat, no serious puzzling to solve, no other characters to interact with) but was ten hours long, say - that is, it was gated in such a way that you had to spend ten hours to get to the same narrative conclusion. I'd say that Thirty Flights of Loving is another example of a game that's exactly as long as it should be, to achieve its objectives.

     

    (But "bang for buck" is not wholly meaningless - although campaign length is only one part of that bang. I often find myself telling people that they probably shouldn't pay full price for a game, but that when it reaches $15 or so it is interesting enough to justify the purchase.)

     

    Looked at another way, the single-player campaigns of games like CoD are very short compared with, say Tales of Xillia. That's partly about the cost of generating a minute of gameplay, and partly about the amount of resource that goes into the multiplayer, but it's also about making the campaign the right length for the buyer - fulfilling an aesthetic criterion.

     

    Many to most of the buyers of CoD are going to want to play the multiplayer for most of the time they spend playing the game over its life, so the single-player needs to be pretty snappy - because for many players it's there to a considerable extent to teach them about what's changed in the control scheme, what the new guns are like and things like that. Obviously Activision wants it to be good - to tell an engaging story, to have relatable characters - and will spend a lot of money on that, but they are sensitive to the fact that for a significant chunk of their audience it's a long tutorial as well as a campaign.

     

    You can complain that the single-player campaign is too short or badly-plotted, or that the characters aren't relatable, and those can be valid criticisms, but they are probably less important than the same criticisms levelled at, say, Star Trek: The Video game for most of the potential buying audience.

     

    Whereas Mass Effect 3's multiplayer could be buggy and strangely balanced and have less variety, precisely because the audience were not primarily buying Mass Effect 3 for its multiplayer component - in fact there was much consternation that the development of the multiplayer would lead to a shorter single-player campaign and interfere with the delivery of single-player DLC.

     

    To look at a different medium for an example: I went to "The Drowned Man" recently - a theatrical event by Punchdrunk. They took over a postal sorting office - so, five floors, with a mix of small rooms and big empty spaces - and turned it into a Hollywood studio from the 1960s, then let the audience loose to wander. You got to spend 3 hours or so walking around the "set", interacting with the space, reading scripts, being grabbed by actors, following them around and watching set pieces.

     

    In those three hours I got maybe 20-30% of the main narrative, and a smaller percentage of the "audiologs and grafitti" level information - I could have spent ten minutes reading all the clipboards on the wall of the doctor's surgery, or all the letters from hopeful actors in the producer's office. Did I feel like I could have spent longer there? Absolutely. But in reality I would eventually have got hungry, and tired, and probably ultimately bored. Even if something is good for its genre, there's a point at which you start losing your audience. Good games design recognises where that point is.

  10. Posted

    It was absolutely mockery, and if you listen to it and think it's not, then I guess I can sort of begin to understand why you think mockery doesn't exist all throughout the internet for this kind of attitude. Go to any average gaming forum and you'll have both sides yelling at each other for years.

     

    If you actually read what I wrote - which seems like an increasingly forlorn hope on the Internet these days - you'll find I said nothing of the sort. What I said was that I don't know what Ben Kuchera means when he talks about mockery, because he didn't give examples. You gave an example of what you see as mockery - which is good! It's a step forward! - but didn't actually cite the elements of it that you saw as mocking.

     

    That's fine; you're not a journalist - you're someone on an Internet forum providing a data point, and I can listen to it if I want to and see if I agree with you that the disagreement is being framed in a disrespectful fashion, which Is what I would understand as being definable in this context as mockery. Although that still doesn't help me to know what Ben Kuchera thinks of as mockery. Which is where we came in. I just would have liked him to evidence some of the responses he, personally, was taking issue with.

     

    Considering in the exact same paragraph he insinuates people who care about length value just want to shoot stuff, I don't think he does.

    I think you might be a little defensive, there. If you feel like liking games with shooting in means people look down on you, that's a thing I can't really speak to, but I like games with shooting in and like to play them. I don't think I need to be ashamed of that, and nor should you.

     

    See above re: increasingly forlorn hope, but if you read what I said, it was:

     

    Plenty of people have said "It is a short game, and you will get more gameplay per dollar with other games, but it has other virtues", but that seems to me to be like saying "It is a game without shooting, and you will get more shooting with other games, but it has other virtues".

     

    I like shooters. There are many good games with shooting in them. Dear Esther is not a shooting game. Gone Home is not a shooting game. If you are looking for a shooting game, you should probably not go for Dear Esther or Gone Home (or indeed Spelunky, or FIFA, or Civilization). If you are looking for a game with 80+ hours of gameplay, you should probably also not go for Dear Esther or Gone Home, whereas FIFA or Civilization (or indeed Spelunky, which I've played the crap out of) might be a really good choice. Length is a game feature you might value over other features when making purchasing decisions. So might be the amount and quality of the combat in the game. It is possible for a game to have virtues which are neither related to its length or the amount or quality of combat in it.

     

    This seems so self-explanatory that I'm surprised it needs this level of explaining, but here we are and there it is.

  12. Posted

    Do you really need any? It's fairly common for people to complain about game length/cost ratio and then for other people to scoff at their ignorance...

     

    I can cite an example: on the Geekbox, there's a common exchange between two of the hosts: Ryan Higgins complains about the cost of digital games compared to their short length, and Ryan Scott is immediately dismissive of that attitude. Higgins is the person complaining, Scott is the person mocking. They were even talking about Gone Home when this exchange happened on the latest episode. Past offenses have been Limbo and other similar games.

     

    ...Sometimes I wonder why I even still listen to the Geekbox.

     

    Right, so that's an example - except, actually, I still don't actually know what Ryan Scott said. "I don't think that's a useful way to assess the value of games" is disagreement, but it isn't mocking, or indeed scoffing. But I can go and listen to that exchange, and see if it fits my idea of mockery. "If you are complaining about the length of Gone Home, you are not really getting its value proposition, and are also probably not its target audience" is not necessarily mockery - it's just a statement.

     

    So, I don't know what Ben Kuchera has read, or encountered, which has made him feel that it's necessary to write a counterpoint piece. I'm not denying that he feels that this is the case, or that he has encountered material that makes him feel that this feeling is justified, but I have no idea why he's drawn that conclusion. If people are saying "there is never a good reason to make purchasing judgements based on the length of a game relative to its cost", then I definitely think that's a position that can and should be criticised, because it's a silly position.

  13. Posted

    Kuchera didn't cite a single critic or developer who mocked people who complained about it being too short. With that in mind, I have no idea what his metric for "mocked" is. Plenty of people have said "It is a short game, and you will get more gameplay per dollar with other games, but it has other virtues", but that seems to me to be like saying "It is a game without shooting, and you will get more shooting with other games, but it has other virtues".

     

    I don't think that's indie vs AAA, either. The best hours-per-dollar game I suspect in my collection right now is FTL - if you like what FTL is offering enough to gather up every element of the playing experience, you can easily put 100 hours into it. That cost me $10.

  15. Posted

     

    Firstly $20 or $18 with the 10% discount is a lot for the amount of gameplay you'll get out of this game. It's definitely a one play through affair.

    I think reviews _ought_ to mention the play time and the possibilities for replayability - those are important things to keep in mind when deciding on whether or not to make a purchase, especially in the knowledge that the game will at some point be available for $5 in a Steam sale, almost inevitably. I think that as a game it is so unlike the traditional run of first-person games that these are things worth noting, as likely to be contrary to expectations - but I think these are arguably strengths rather than weaknesses. Building in replayability and length are marketing necessities for many games seeking to justify their price tag, and can impose damaging constraints on the artistic freedoms of the creators.

     

    Non-expert press review here:

     

    Warren Ellis observed some years ago that one of the strange things about comic books as a medium was that it treated “mainstream” as being a synonym for “superhero” – that is, that the comic books about spies, soldiers or regular people were regularly relegated to the status of “indie”. This, he argued, was like  the publishing industry deciding that books about nurses were mainstream, and that every other kind of fiction should be reassigned to the genre shelves.

     
    Gone Home  is a mainstream game.  Which is not to say that it is a game about marines, or space marines, fighting in the Middle East, or Space Middle East. It has the kind of setting and the kind of emotional dynamics we encounter in TV and film often, and in games almost never.

  16. Posted

    Man, I thought for a moment you meant a mobile version of Omikron: The Nomad Soul. Which would have been belter, but very ill-advised.

     

    Has anyone suggested Lords of Midnight? A remarkably faithful adaptation of the ZX Spectrum original. Mike Singleton, the creator, originally planned to make an undated version with new mechanics with Chris Wild, the programmer, but when Singleton died Wild decided he had to release an unchanged version (barring the art, which is now line rather than pixel) as a tribute. 

     

    It holds up incredibly well - the enemy AI (basically a set of If/If not, thens and a set of paths for each army) feels weirdly alive, although of course it's easier to represent implacability.

  17. Posted

     I'm sure the price on the actual story DLC will still weigh in above the $20 for the season pass, but it's disappointing.

    For reference, yes - the two chapters of "Burial at Sea" will go for 1200 Microsoft points each, according to the press release - i.e. about $30 all told. If you are convinced they will be worth it, you save money by buying the season pass and never playing Clash in the Clouds.

    That said, I'm increasingly cynical about the wisdom of ever pre-ordering anything...

  18. Posted

    It's a little baroque - the 4-player game can take about 8 hours - but the big, grown-ups Game of Thrones game is really good. Several interlocking systems and a lot of politicking and backstabbing - the different lords have different but balanced strengths (the Starks have lots of territory but few resources, the Greyjoys are psychotically good in a fight but have little room and cannot expand without making enemies), and there is a counter that represents the growing threat from the North, which has to be fought off by all the players together.


    So, big and expensive and time-consuming, but worth playing. Not sure I'd recommend it for a light user, though...


    Cosmic Encounter is great, as long as you don't feel too strongly about game balance... haven't played that in _ages_.

     

    Race for the Galaxy and Lords of Waterdeep are now on my to play list.

  19. Posted

    I'm about 40 hours in, taking it slowly and doing all the side quests I can find, so I can solo the harder parts, and I'm finding the combat is getting better - which may be partly just that I am dying less now I have a couple of elite abilities. It's still a little spammy, but wilth seven attack slots, a couple of which are going to go on active buffs, you're always going to feel like you are going knockdown, small attack, small attack, rage bar (or in this case weapon resource on target) filled, big attack to some degree. I'm playing with a modified Crusader build, and it's interesting that some monsters I can just burn through, now I have some high-damage attacks, but others I have to work to debuff...

    And pretty much the whole thing outside the combat and the crafting (the basics of which are laid out in two starter quests, but does need some more explanation, definitely) I'm impressed by. I think it's a game you'll need to go outside the game itself to fully get, though - whether that's finding out how to craft or researching builds in the forums or looking for puzzle answers on the fake websites they've put up...

  20. Posted

    So I finished Mass Effect 3 today. I was disappointed but not enraged by the ending. There's probably a lot to talk about regarding the ending, but most of it has been done more thoroughly by others already. Also, I just don't think it actually hit me as hard as many. So I'll just touch on a couple of points.

    Warning: Ending spoilers follow.

    The obvious but possibly less important point is WTF is the deal with the Normandy? I've yet to hear anyone explain that in a way that is sensible. Why were they leaving? Where were they going? How did squad members who were on Earth just moments before (let alone the ones who were literally by your side) end up on the ship? That whole thing was just... bizarre.

    I found myself trying to justify the

    Normandy

    section of the ending, and came up with basically this:

    1) (Not shown) The battle in space with the Reapers is ongoing; Sword has secured a corridor to Earth; however, Hackett does not have enough resource to make a substantial difference on the ground, and the Unified Fleets are losing ground. Hackett starts to position the fleet to shield a strategic withdrawal from the Sol system, and to cover the evacuation of as many personnel from Earth as possible.

    2) (Shown) Shepard makes his/her choice at the Citadel.

    3) (Not shown) Hackett sees that _something_ is happening with the Crucible, but nobody is sure exactly what. He orders the fleet to start breaking off. At some point during this period, the Normandy uses the secured corridor to Earth to evacuate any team members seen on the ground in the endgame and on the Normandy in the final scene.

    4) (Not shown) As the Crucible starts to build up power, Hackett, seeing what at least looks like a gigantic explosion in the making, orders the evacuation of the system. The Normandy, because it is the fastest and most manoeuvrable ship of its size in the fleet, makes it to the relay.

    5) (Shown) The Crucible does its immediate thing. The initial radiation (possibly accompanied by a giant shockwave) affects the Reapers (and other lifeforms depending on colour) in the Sol system, and is then propagated through the relays, having whatever effect it is set to have on synthetic life/the Reapers/all life. As the relays retransmit this radiation, they either quietly self-destruct, having vented their energy to the next relay in the chain, or blow up and take the system with them, depending on your interpretation. As they do so, the relay “tunnels” become unstable.

    6) (Not shown) Joker switchbacks through an undefined number of relays, attempting to outrun the shutdown of the “tunnels” and/or the energy wave. Since this is happening very quickly, he (and the rest of the fleet) are unaware that the relays are ceasing to exist, do not know what the radiation actually does, and are not able to communicate with each other.

    7) (Shown) As the tunnel collapse/radiation catches up to the Normandy, the relativistic effect on parts of the Normandy suddenly dropping from relay FTL to regular FTL makes them appear to be disintegrating – in fact they are being left a long way behind the still-superfast Normandy’s body.

    8) (Not shown) The damaged Normandy either reaches a relay or is ejected in mid-wave by the tunnel collapse. In a prodigious piece of piloting, Joker pilots the dying Normandy into a crash-landing on the nearest habitable planet.

    9) (Shown) Joker and the survivors of the crash emerge from the ruin of the Normandy.

    10) (shown) Many generations later, the Stargazer and child are on the same planet – either direct descendants of the Normandy’s surviving crew or a sign that, eventually, they were rescued and a colony established.

    That’s a lot of fansplanation, and there are some issues with the physics: the status of the different-coloured blasts/waves/beams, obviously – is each a shockwave or a carrier wave for a signal? And, although a signal could theoretically trigger a self-destruct in the Reapers, or transmit new operating codes containing Shepard’s mental image, how could it simultaneously techno-organicise all life in the galaxy? And, if the Normandy drops suddenly out of a relay tunnel, it would, presumably, accumulate an incredible amount of energy and mass very quickly, which would probably end very badly even if it was still structurally intact. Also, the relay jumps are generally pictured as instantaneous or near-instantaneous, so there's some dramatic license there, also... possibly perceptual time on board is different, due to relativistic effects...

    And so on… a lot depends on how far suspension of belief is allowed to stretch. If you have experienced Mass Effect as a hard sci-fi universe, there is a lot to digest here. The faster-than-light space freeways giveth, and the faster-than-light space freeways taketh away, in a sense…

  21. Posted

    I disagree. I mean, while playing it, I thought "man, I wish I could bunny hop through this". Seriously. Well, I don't give about jumping, but a run button would have been nice. The fact that I was thinking about that and not able to do it was a worse immersion destroyer than actually doing it.

    To be fair, the guy

    has a broken leg for at least half the game, or the whole game, depending on how you read the narrative.

    I'm with Marek on this one as well - I think there are enough games that do things like action, combat and puzzling to make it OK for this one to do none of those things. What it did do is far rarer and far harder to pull off. I'd played the original mod to death, so the mechanic was pretty familiar, but moments like

    the motorway level, replacing the overturned car in the pool

    really did make a difference.