Jake

Idle Thumbs 266: Memeify McCree

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Idle Thumbs 266:

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Memeify McCree

Maybe, somewhere beneath the games you play, somewhere too deep to feel, there is another battle taking place between forces so staggering, so total, as to be invisible. You choose a hero, enter the arena and attack, then hear a faint echo coming from miles away, or maybe the past, the future? An assailant vaporizes before you, your leaderboard lights up and you smile, but way down deep in the earth, deep in your bones, you hear the muffled cries of the Heavy and all the heavies that came before and after him, and you know what you are a part of. You change loadouts and respawn.

Discussed: Overwatch, Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, Defense of the Ancients, Total War: Warhammer, Total War: Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games, Deus Ex GO, Imbroglio, Bridge

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I'm glad I'm not the only one still holding a torch for Chu-Chu Rocket.

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FYI, confederations were introduced in Total War: Rome 2, but only for the Gauls and Germans. It's probably fair to say that this is the first game where that mechanic is actually influential to gameplay, though. As both the Gauls and the Germans, forming a confederacy was difficult to do except by accident, since the diplomatic penalties of conquering your neighbors tended to negate the bonuses that common culture offered, so your fellow Gauls or Germans hated you for becoming strong by the time you were strong enough for form a confederacy.

Also, Total War: Warhammer has been described by Creative Assembly as a platform with a ten-year roadmap for content already laid out, so whether or not they go back to history, Warhammer is here to stay.

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The Tarkovsky discussion made me think of Metal Gear and its use of ladders, most notably in Snake Eater.

 

 

Out of context it probably seems ridiculous, but in the game, it's effective. You've just been through some serious shit, and the change in pacing and mood is wild.

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Just gonna brag here that I hit the top 20 in Imbroglio with the Count Harry IV character. Feel free to copy my board and let me know what you think!

 

I think the ultimate version of that Twitch game is to have twitch chat have assigned roles like in a game of Werewolf or Mafia (you can have a bot in chat assign those roles to people) whose job is either to help or fuck over Nick, and they only have access to particular slivers of information.

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I think the ultimate version of that Twitch game is to have twitch chat have assigned roles like in a game of Werewolf or Mafia (you can have a bot in chat assign those roles to people) whose job is either to help or fuck over Nick, and they only have access to particular slivers of information.

 

I was thinking a lot of party/social tabletop game mechanics might be fun there. Another angle to explore would be limited set of communication tools that pass information to the streamer, a la Codenames or Mysterium. Perhaps certain words trigger pictographs visible to the streamer, and the chat has to make sure they only use words that will make helpful information appear, but some other common words also show useless or misleading info, so you have to choose your words carefully?

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hope you guys will enjoy deus ex go :) been hard at work on it for a long while now! 

 

by creative process, it's very much like LC GO and Hitman GO, which means that the result plays differently, as the main franchises do.

 

can't wait for people to get their hands on it. we'll be at e3 next week.

 

here's 2 guys discussing how it felt playing it: 

 

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7 minutes into the episode, I'm already a bit angry at Jake about saying that "a [pro-player] community never formed [around TF2]". That's just not true. There is a pro-player community and there are tournaments. The tournament mode was released very long ago.

 

There are ingame awards for tournaments — the medals cosmetic items — since the very early days. And Valve adds new ones all the time. And they do the blog posts about the tournaments on the TF2 blog too. So it's not like they don't give a shit as you've guys put it.

 

For more information about competetive scene of TF2 see here.

 

It's just that Valve've never made anything about it prominent in-game. And never made big Valve-hosted events like The International, etc. All the tournaments are 3rd party with very little promotion and visibility.

 

Counter Strike folk are also annoyed that they didn't get their TI so far, by the way. But there are more large scale tournaments (even though being 3rd party too) for CS than for TF2. And with far larger prizes. So yeah, CS competetive scene is much much more visible.

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TF2 competitive was always vaguely talked about but it only officially exists now, even though it unofficially existed for years. I think it's less that Valve didn't care about the competitive aspects and more it doesn't seem like they actively care about TF2 that much. Not to say they don't care, but the game is more of a wacky experiment hotbed where they try stuff out and see what sticks. 

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On the subject of slowness and repetition, I highly recommend Lucas Pope's new game (still in development), Return of the Obra Dinn.

 

Got to go now, there's a Tarkovsky cycle in town this week :)

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I enjoyed Jake's story about the college newspaper becoming slightly less slovenly (at first glance, at least) thanks to the wholesome influence of local business. Good job, printing shop. :tup:

 

I always thought "TF3" would be a better name than Overwatch. It wouldn't stand for anything of course. It's just a nice three-character name.

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7 minutes into the episode, I'm already a bit angry at Jake about saying that "a [pro-player] community never formed [around TF2]". That's just not true. There is a pro-player community and there are tournaments. The tournament mode was released very long ago.

There are ingame awards for tournaments — the medals cosmetic items — since the very early days. And Valve adds new ones all the time. And they do the blog posts about the tournaments on the TF2 blog too. So it's not like they don't give a shit as you've guys put it.

For more information about competetive scene of TF2 see here.

It's just that Valve've never made anything about it prominent in-game. And never made big Valve-hosted events like The International, etc. All the tournaments are 3rd party with very little promotion and visibility.

Counter Strike folk are also annoyed that they didn't get their TI so far, by the way. But there are more large scale tournaments (even though being 3rd party too) for CS than for TF2. And with far larger prizes. So yeah, CS competetive scene is much much more visible.

Sorry I should have said "is small," not "doesn't exist," as you're totally right what I said was not at all accurate.

That said I would love to learn more about competitive TF2 and I bet others would too. Any interest in writing to [email protected] about it?

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Sorry I should have said "is small," not "doesn't exist," as you're totally right what I said was not at all accurate.

That said I would love to learn more about competitive TF2 and I bet others would too. Any interest in writing to [email protected] about it?

 

comp TF2 has actually had a (minor) spotlight put on it recently as many competitive players (such as seagull, who is both charismatic and very good) migrate to overwatch

 

I'm more of a casual observer, and probably can't captain an email, but it's fascinating. Low graphics settings, disabled viewmodels, bizarre rules, farm leagues, sticky rollouts, pocket vs roamer soldiers.. It's got the heavily refined eccentricities of a competitive game thats simmered away (mostly) out of sight for years.

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Here's a link to that video series about card shuffles and coin flips, for anyone interested:

 

 

Some quick notes for those who don't want to watch it all but are interested in some of the takeaways:

 

Card shuffling:

—Most people do not shuffle their decks nearly enough

—Generally speaking, seven shuffles is the threshold point at which a 52 card deck will most likely be truly randomized, though obviously shuffling methods can affect this

—Bigger sized decks are obviously harder to randomize, because it will require more shuffles

—"Neat" shuffling (where you're dropping one card alternately from each hand) is actually less random, because it's a fairly orderly system that, if perfectly "neat," would actually loop back around to resemble a completely "unshuffled" state

—If most of your players aren't shuffling enough, it may actually affect the way the game is played (as in the Bridge example mentioned on the podcast), so if you're designing a game that uses shuffled cards, keep in mind the disparity that might exist based on how your players shuffle

 

Coin tosses:

—A coin tossed and caught in the hand is almost perfectly random, although there's a fraction of a chance that it will favor the same side it was at the start (i.e. if it starts heads up, it's just slightly more likely to be heads than tails, and vice versa)

—You cannot "weight" a coin to prefer a particular side like you could with dice, if the coin is being caught in hand

—However, coins that land on the floor/table are more likely to have biases to one side i.e. uncaught coins are less random and could be weighted to cheat

—Of course, whoever is catching a coin might be able to cheat using some sleight-of-hand trick, so the "caught coins are more random/fair" only applies if you don't have a cheater catching it

 

 

Also, on the topic of Tarkovsky games, I 100% thought of Shadow of the Colossus. There's the long journey to the colossi, the drawn out battles that test your fur-gripping endurance, the slow build-up of "charging" a stab, plus the minimalist repetition of it all but with a finite ending. I don't think it's any coincidence that that game inspires the same kind of awe from fans, as well as the same "these people think they're so cool and smart and deep just because they love this boring thing" reaction from its detractors.

 

And now that I think of it, Journey also has a similar sense of rhythm as motion, and also has received these kinds of reactions. I guess in general, these slow "meditative" games which often have finite, contained stories told through minimal dialogue feel like the closest Tarkovsky analogue, to me.

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I was walking in to the office and when Chris started talking about a video series regarding shuffling probabilities, I thought "I wonder if he's talking about Persi Diaconis," and HE WAS. Everyone, do yourself a favor and look up as much as you can about this man. 

 

FACTS

 

- Persi Diaconis' parents were musicians, and up until he was fourteen, he studied classical violin at Julliard.

- Persi Diaconis was inspired by meeting (one of my heroes) Martin Gardner to think about both mathematics, and more importantly, magic, when he was thirteen. 

- Persi Diaconis left both school and home to be a professional magician when he was 14, traveling extensively for a few years with MOTHERFUCKING DAI VERNON OF ALL PEOPLE. 

Persi Diaconis can perfectly riffle shuffle a deck 8 times in succession, a task that involves first cutting a deck exactly in half, and then interleaving each card with the other card. He can do this, live, only to show that this act returns a deck BACK TO IT'S ORIGINAL STATE. I have seen him do it during a math talk.

- Persi Diaconis, after years of being a card shark across the country, decided that he wanted to understand probability theory so badly that he enrolled in New York City College, and eventually got a PhD in Mathematical Statistics at Harvard. To get into Harvard, his friend Martin Gardner helped a little: 

 

Persi was very anxious to get into Harvard. The head of the statistics department at Harvard was Frederick Mosteller, who is a magic buff. He was very active in magic, and his picture has been on the cover of magic magazines. I knew Mosteller slightly, so I wrote him a letter and said, "This young student is one of the best card mechanics in the country. He does a fantastic second deal and bottom deal." (Those are terms for fake deals. When you are dealing from a deck, there is a way to deal the second card instead of the top card, and there is a way to deal the bottom card instead of the top card.) I got back a letter right away from Mosteller, which said, "If he's willing to major in statistics, I can get him into Harvard." So I asked Persi if he was willing to major in statistics, and he said, "Of course!" So he got in, got his Ph.D. in statistics ...

 

- Persi Diaconis then proceeded to do a shit ton of amazing math, including proving that it takes seven shuffles to sufficiently randomize a deck, as described in the video above. 

- Persi Diaconis won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1982, because of course he did.  

 

PERSI DIACONIS DEMANDS YOU READ ABOUT HIS INTERESTING LIFE AND WORK 

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The theoretical game they described around the 40 minute mark reminded me of Sleep is Death by Jason Rohrer: http://sleepisdeath.net/

 

One person plays the game while the other is doing improv based on the first player's decisions. It's sort of like if an adventure game met D&D. If you could stream the side of things that was creating the game with the player not watching the stream, this could lead to some pretty interesting results. 

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Weird,I thought everyone knew the seven shuffles thing. My issues with not shuffling enough are mostly related to the fact that I really suck at shuffling and tend to get clumps of a few cards, rather than real interleaving. 

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jake r u trolling me with that ANIME comment ):<

TF2 is about to get a huge update that will finally add competitive matchmaking, among other things. I personally am pretty fucking excited about it. It's entirely possible it's too late for competitive focus though. Which is a shame because the game is better now than it's ever been.

They've also had in the past year or two a ton of awesome updates (including massive balance patches, new maps, new game modes, new cosmetics (very few actual new weapons, relatively speaking)), so the game is well alive right now. It's just also kinda... stagnant in terms of community. Unfortunately, I dunno what a decade old game can really do to grow its community. Seems like its time is coming to an end, or even arguably long past. Which is fine, no game lasts forever, but I sure wish it would, haha.

I wonder how the people who dislike all the weapons in TF2 will feel about overwatch a few years down the line when a bunch more heroes are in the game, effectively making it just as theoretically convoluted. I imagine the distinct separation of heroes will make it easier to swallow than the admittedly muddled weapon loadout system. TF2 could really do with a UI overhaul in that regard.

Hmm hmm hmm.

The future will be fun.

EDIT: I've also heard recently that Valve is interested in, though has no immediate plans for, becoming more involved with that actual competitive community.

Personally i find comp tf2 in utter snore fest to watch. Same goes for most other fps games. Really fun to play, though. At least, highlander. Not a fan of 6s.

I'm rambling now!!!

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In regards to the Tarkovsky email, it's not quite the same thing but the first thing that came to my mind was Proteus. On the second night of that game I guess I hadn't done the specific thing I needed to trigger the lights in the sky, so I spend nearly an hour just wandering around, frequently stopping to look around. I knew eventually the lights would show up because they did before, but the delay (which may have been a bug for all I know) definitely ended up having something resembling that Tarkovsky effect.

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I'm not a DOOM scholar by any means, but I recently watched a short 2-part behind the scenes about the music. It's a really cool look at how the composer started from the original music and made it into what's in the new game. It's practically unrecognizable to me once he's done, but it's still a cool look at the process!

 

 

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