I Saw Dasein

I played a ton of the original Spelunky and am playing the new one now. It doesn't seem any harder. To me it actually feels a bit easier, because the physics engine seems better as do the controls. I feel I'm able to control my dude a lot more effectively. Looks great too!

But Jake does psychoanalyze people. He spends a fair amount of time talking about Cohn's various flaws. Here's an example from the start of the book: So we do get some insight into the inner lives of other characters (albeit from Jake's point of view), but not consistently.

SR is over-the-top stupid and violent, and does totally embrace that aesthetic, but most games (intentionally or otherwise) are also over-the-top stupid and violent. It's like if every snack tasted like cheese, but there is this one snack that REALLY EXTREMELY tastes like cheese, I wouldn't be all that excited about the extreme cheese snack.

I had similar feelings to Argobot, as I mentioned earlier in the thread. I just don't really have any sympathy or interest in the characters, they behave in ways that are kind of incomprehensible to me, and they all seem really stupid and spoiled. The book features a bunch of young, rich, white, Americans and Brits traipsing around Europe without any real appreciation for their surroundings. It's kind of the ultimate in "Ugly Americanism". It may be that this is all intentional, but it still really bores me and grosses me out. I don't feel bad for these characters; I want them to grow up already. I also feel like the book exhibits an amazing sense of obliviousness. The young people of America, as a whole, were not really all that damaged by the Great War. France, for example, lost something like 5% of its total population, and a majority of its young men were killed or permanently maimed (by comparison, the US lost 0.13% of its population). But there are few European characters in The Sun also Rises, and those few that are included are often made fun of, ignored, or are hilariously stereotypical (e.g. the Spanish matador). Europe is just kind of this romantic backdrop upon which the characters in the book can project their own personal "tragedies". That annoys me too.

I really have never had that experience, as far as I can remember. The men I interact with aren't generally engaged in a power/dominance dynamic. It's interesting how your idea and experience of what it is to be a man is so different from my own.

So what? One of the cool things about media in general is that you can learn to understand people you wouldn't really understand on your own. Like, wouldn't a game that showed you what it was like to enter a room as a woman and interact with women be really interesting for you? If anything, your argument seems to support the idea that games should be more diverse.

Just to focus on one point, I don't think anyone is saying that every single game has to be for every single player. If someone wants to make a "beer and farts" simulator to market exclusively to men, that's fine; if someone wants to make a "wine and giggles" simulator and market it to women, that's fine too. I doubt either of those games would be very lucrative, but a designer should feel free to make it. The problem is that all of the games in the middle--mainstream games with big budgets and a wide audience--implicitly assume a (white, straight) male audience. So what we end up with is that 95% of games are explicitly or implicitly made for a male audience, and 5% are explicitly made for a female audience. The 5% made for a female audience tend to rely on pretty gross stereotypes, as do many of the games marketed towards men. So in effect, we already have games that are explicitly made for both genders, and that explicitly appeal to stereotypes about those genders. What I think most people and most feminists want is for those games in the middle--the 80% of mainstream games that are not explicitly targeting either gender--to be more inclusive and more representative of the actual market for video games. The fact that there already are games that explicitly target both genders does not make up for the basic unfairness in the way mass market video games treat women.

I don't understand what a game intentionally see "just for men" or "just for women" would even look lie. Tell me what you think a game designed for a particular gender would be like.

I read some cool books in the past month. I read The Third Reich, by Roberto Bolano. It's another of his post-humous works, and it is not one of his best. It is pretty scattered, and while it builds tension in a very effective way, the expected apocalyptic climax never seems to arrive (this may be intentional, since many of his books have the same feeling to them). It is about a young German grognard, a rising star in European wargaming, on vacation with his girlfriend. The book is sort of split between two aspects of his vacation: his time with his girlfriend and another German couple, and his time spent playing a wargame, entitled "The Third Reich". Violence seems to lurk right around the corner and there is a very unsettling feeling throughout the whole book. It's typical Bolano and not likely to convince anyone who doesn't already like him, but I enjoyed it very much. I especially liked the way the book addressed wargames. Bolano himself was apparently an avid war-gamer, but he must have had mixed feelings about them. In my view, the book treats war games as basically unhealthy (I think): they give the main character an illusion of control and of mastery of violence, but they also distract him from the violence (and threat of violence) that is right before him. Through the "Third Reich" wargame, he is convinced he can "win" WW2, but in the end, all he does is teach others how to use violence more effectively. As a narrative device, the war game is also interesting: the progress of the war game mirrors the main characters own progress and downfall. Interesting stuff, and novel (to me at least). I also read Hell House by Richard Matheson, which I take it is a classic in the haunted house genre. I thought it was pretty good: it had moments of genuine spookiness and the somewhat dated pseudo-science was charming. I then watched an old BBC movie adaptation, which was hilarious: it was kind of like Clive Barker directs Masterpiece Theatre. I read Throne of the Crescent Moon, by Saladin Ahmed. It is basically a swords-and-sorcery romp set in an Arabian-Nights themed fantasy world. I liked it. Totally fun summer reading. The somewhat different setting livened up what would otherwise have been a pretty by-the-numbers fantasy yarn. It's also refreshingly brief: maybe 300 pages or so? I think it is the first book in a planned series. I'm nearly finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, by Haruki Murakami. I will have more to say on this when I'm done, but so far I love it. One of the best books I've read in ages.

I quit A Song of Ice and Fire at around the same time. It just felt so ponderous and pointless. I feel the same way about a lot of epic fantasy series: it just feels way longer and more convoluted than it needs to be. Fantasy can be effective without spending thousands of pages "world building". I mean, you can read the entire Book of the New Sun series in the same time it takes to read a single volume of the Wheel of Time or A Game of Thrones, and I think the Book of the New Sun is just way more interesting, creative, and effective.

Well I'm sold. Thanks for the recommendation.

I heard that Hemmingway had a three-legged cat. So ya.

Weird, I don't think those bands sound much alike at all. Man every time the Vampire Weekend put out a new album I sneer at it with utter contempt, and then it turns out to be great and I can't help but like it. I'm the lamest. Also this came out way earlier in the year but I still can't get over what a great song it is. Cool video also.

Doubtful, there were communist thinkers before Marx and contemporary with him. There were also revolutionary movements before him, obviously. The situations in Russia and China were such that some kind of leftist revolutionary organization would have risen up with or without Marx. I agree that Marx is influential, but in his absence there still would have been some form of communist ideology and there would likely have been revolutions in the same countries.

Lol shamelessly stolen from Polygon comments

Game is out, getting pretty good reviews, but apparently is kind of gross throughout: http://www.polygon.com/game/dragon-s-crown/9102 Seems like a cool game but there's no way I want splayed anime ladies displayed on my living room TV.

Too bad about The Idiot, the ending is pretty incredible. I also liked The Tin Drum; if you have any remaining interest in Gunter Grass, you could try Crab Walk, which is much shorter and more recent, and on somewhat similar themes (legacy of National Socialism in Germany). I learned a lot from that book.

Yeah Anna Karenina is pretty rough, although I finished it. I was utterly defeated by War and Peace, though. Recently I got part of the way through John Dies at the End, which appears to be internet-beloved but really kind of sucked. It's purportedly a horror/comedy, but isn't actually scary or funny. It's also really badly edited; not just rife with grammatical errors, but totally meandering and repetitive and dull. I quit about half way through and am glad that I did.

I don't know about how other people use the term, but for me escapist media is something that I enjoy as I consume it, but that does not challenge me or teach me anything lasting.

I think I'm going to take another try at borderlands 2 tonight. I keep bouncing off it--all of the enemies feel so bullet-spongey and while I like the visual asthetic I don't think the game is as funny as the game believes it is. I'm going to try playing it couch-and-controller this time. Maybe it will stick that way!

No, I definitely think genre fiction, including sci-fi and fantasy, can have important things to say and have a lot of value. I just don't think AGoT in particular has much to say. And I don't think there's anything wrong with escapism, I'm just not personally not that interested in spending hours and hours of time with an escapist epic fantasy series. By contrast, the Wire succeeds both as an entertaining story and as an exploration of the themes and issues I mentioned above (policing, surveillance, corruption, the war on drugs, failure of education, and so on).

But what makes the Wire so good is that it is about issues that are actually important to us today: policing, surveillance, corruption, the war on drugs, failure of education, and so on. The Wire is entertaining as a crime drama, but I think what makes it so good is that it actually has something important to say about North American culture and institutions. I'm not sure there's anything comparable in AGoT: it's basically an entertaining yarn with not much to say about anything. I don't know, I really disliked the AGoT books so I haven't seen the TV show. I feel like many or most fantasy series are just kind of escapism, which is fine at times, but not something I really want to spend hours of my life watching.

I'm pretty sure that Mark Kozelek/Sun Kil Moon did a whole album of Modest Mouse covers... I never got into the Sun Kil Moon stuff but Red House Painters are amazing. On that note, there is a new Sebadoh album. So many new albums from 90s bands this year.

Agreed, that book is awesome plus scared me as child. Has a maze and a wizard and stuff. Good book.

That sounds legit awesome to me.