Chris

Idle Thumbs 278: Beef Chief

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Idle Thumbs 278:

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Beef Chief

Beef Chief [3/5 stars]

We visited Thumbsland this weekend, and while riding Beef Chief I had fun with my son! So many ghosts every time I go down there! (Which is certainly not a problem.) I heard that burgers are real. I heard they're from burger church. I think about Thumbsland in my head, and it hurts, so I don't think about it for many years. Anyway, enough with the pleasantries! Come to our PAX meetup! (Saturday at 7pm at The Diller Room.)

Discussed: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Planet Coaster, trailers, ethletes, the catacombs of Paris

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I think there is a version of the Deus Ex silliness that could have worked and been mechanically interesting.

In China Mieville's Bas Lag books. "Augmented" are called "remade" and it's a brutal prison sentences foisted on the poor, turning them into living tools.

So basically the story should be that oligarchs sponsor augmenting in their capitalist war with each other. The hackers are in debt to them, but it's the only way for the desperate to get work, and society hates them. So the player is constantly scrambling to pay for his/her AUGZ.

In the Satellite Reign 3MA, they talked about too much modern cyberpunk ignoring the political component of the genre. This sounds like more of that.

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In the Satellite Reign 3MA, they talked about too much modern cyberpunk ignoring the political component of the genre. This sounds like more of that.

This sounds worse, in that it's repeatedly drawn attention to but with a complete lack of care or understanding.

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I haven't listened to this cast yet, but judging by the banner image, I hope it has to do with Burger Time. Great music in that game.

 

 

I have now listened to the relevant part of the cast. It was everything I hoped for, and more.

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Nick, if I remember correctly, the T1000 being a machine is also a surprise in the movie. It is only revealed after Arnold shoots it and it's all silver and autohealing. So before the scene in the mall, the setup appears to be the same as in the first movie.

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So basically the story should be that oligarchs sponsor augmenting in their capitalist war with each other. The hackers are in debt to them, but it's the only way for the desperate to get work, and society hates them. So the player is constantly scrambling to pay for his/her AUGZ.

In the Satellite Reign 3MA, they talked about too much modern cyberpunk ignoring the political component of the genre. This sounds like more of that.

The game actually comes incredibly close to making a commentary on that subject, but then strangely pulls back from it.  There's a couple of points where the story requires you to enlist the help of a rich asshole, not because he's sympathetic, but just because you need his money and influence to achieve your aims.  It wouldn't have taken much to make this a central theme in the story but it gets overshadowed by the awkward 'racism' stuff.

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Seems like Chris and I are playing Deus Ex the same - going into a building one way then exploring all the other possibilities in / out of the building too. Great fun!

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I think they mentioned this in the cast at least once, but the end of Deus Ex: Human Revolution does have every augmented person in the world going into a murderous rampage. I think there's a good fictional reason to have the augments go through at least some of the features of racism and I think you could make an interesting story out of it, but it sounds like they went in too heavy handed (mechanical apartheid? No thanks.) Subtle but pervasive prejudices are far more interesting I think.

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Not-quite-in-the-same-vein-as-Terminator:

 

I think if you could just laser out the part of my brain that knows anything about Bioshock (except that I should play it) then I'd be happy.

 

We all knew from trailers and preview coverage that it was set in an underwater city but how sweet would that reveal have been if you didn't? I know descending to Rapture was less "twist" and more "basic premise" but oh man, if I'd managed to avoid knowing that it would have been incredible.

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I think they mentioned this in the cast at least once, but the end of Deus Ex: Human Revolution does have every augmented person in the world going into a murderous rampage. I think there's a good fictional reason to have the augments go through at least some of the features of racism and I think you could make an interesting story out of it, but it sounds like they went in too heavy handed (mechanical apartheid? No thanks.) Subtle but pervasive prejudices are far more interesting I think.

But why would you setup an apartheid system as opposed to just implementing a ban on augmentation if you're a government? That's one of the many things about the new Deus Ex premise that makes no sense. I think it is also kind of weird how jarring the fiction is of how augmented people are 2nd class citizens but the game also does the typical video game thing of making you the ultimate badass and doesn't really get in the way of that power fantasy. Like, if that's the premise of your game why not at least explore that via the mechanics of the game?

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Also Chris' reading of the predictive text output from Yelp reviews of the Parisian catacombs made me so happy.

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Listening to the episode now, but Chris seems to basically hit DX:MD square on when he mentions that the game is trying to play Jensen as a cipher that says nothing so he can be for whatever the player's feelings are.  And as bad as that spot is, the writing hurts it even more. This screenshot is from a story beat that's like, 2 or 3 story missions in, but, man, this writing is rough. 

 

https://twitter.com/hot_jughead/status/770848985108078592

 

About that dialogue choice:

You're having a mandatory session with your psychologist who has to clear you to go back into the field.  She's asking how you'll feel if the evidence points at the Augmented Rights group having carried out terrorist attacks and you're asked to take them down, and the total variation in dialogue choices is "It doesn't matter how I feel, I have a job", "If they did it, I'll absolutely take them down", and the option which is selected, which is that text followed by something to the effect of "... but I have a job, and I'll do it if it comes to that."  I haven't seen how this may factor into anything later, but I'd bet that it's minimal at best.

  There's a few other instances where it feels like the dialogue comes from a college freshman's paper on civil rights movements.  It's so frustrating, because so much else of this world is so fun to be in, but you can't help but get hammered with some of the worst elements of this game.

 

The one bone I do have to pick with the discussion is that the game does, once you get a little further in, try to give you some perspective on who makes up the augmented.  A lot of them are lower class folks who took on augments for jobs, because this is literally a game about megacorps and the Illuminati.  Your augmented workforce can do more work.  Any job where they used to have to hire people and also buy heavy machinery, now the employer is hiring people and turning those employees into the heavy machinery.  Additionally, the augments give you a drug dependency, so you now have an extraordinary reliance on your employer because your life will go bad if you quit and can't find a steady and affordable source for neuropozene. They do at least explore that space a little.  It's definitely not enough to redeem it, but I felt it was worth mentioning.

 

(As an aside, on the note about the good apartments fixing the walls and the apartments in the shitty parts of town not doing that, the developers of Mafia 3 have been saying that their game has something to that effect.  Where if you're in downtown near City Hall and the cops get called, they're on top of you near instantly, but if you're in a poor neighborhood, the cops take forever to show up if they ever do.  Austin Walker wrote something on the way the devs have been previewing that game, and who knows how the final product will turn out, but it's actually one of the few times I can think where a major game supposedly has an intentional mechanical adaptation of structural racism like that.)

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The one bone I do have to pick with the discussion is that the game does, once you get a little further in, try to give you some perspective on who makes up the augmented.  A lot of them are lower class folks who took on augments for jobs, because this is literally a game about megacorps and the Illuminati.  Your augmented workforce can do more work.  Any job where they used to have to hire people and also buy heavy machinery, now the employer is hiring people and turning those employees into the heavy machinery.  Additionally, the augments give you a drug dependency, so you now have an extraordinary reliance on your employer because your life will go bad if you quit and can't find a steady and affordable source for neuropozene. They do at least explore that space a little.  It's definitely not enough to redeem it, but I felt it was worth mentioning.

 

huh that is more interesting. That makes augments seem more like student debt, almost? You take it on to get skilled for employment, and needing to pay it back can trap you into some really exploitative work. 

 

The fact the groups are divided by an actual difference in ability seems weird to me. Racism usually means a meaningless difference (eg skin colour) is used as a pretence to create a very real difference in advantages/disadvantages. While plenty of times racism has been justified by the idea that the oppressed group is "physically superior, but less human in some other way" that's supposed to be an unfounded pretence, not an actual real difference in ability like it is in this game. There are stories where robots are the underclass, but the premise is usually that the robots are secretly equally human, just humans discriminate against them b/c of a superficial difference (they're electric, even though they feel all the things humans do). Janelle Monae's albums equate black people with a cyborg underclass and essentially take this approach. 

 

I guess there are a few examples where people have been exploited for real physical advantages (the sherpas on mount everest come to mind). But this would be like enslaving the sherpas to ensure the inferior non-sherpa climbers had more physically fit guides to assist them?

 

Or maybe oppressing the augs b/c you fear they might attack you is more like the way some people perceive all muslims as a bomb waiting to go off? 

I don't mind if the game isn't making a metaphor, just telling the story of what happened in this particular made-up society. But if it's not a metaphor then the allusions to stuff in our own world are weird.

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Really enjoyed listening to the Deus Ex chat - I played the first game a LOT when it first came out, but haven't picked up any of the sequels (though may well get Mankind Divided, as Chris is playing it exactly how I like to, and if he's finding it so rewarding, then that bodes well).

 

However, I was struck by a couple of his comments as they made me consider the temporal expectations that games lay on us. Now, I don't know if there's a day / night cycle in this game, but assuming not, Chris says he's been playing it for about 12 hours, and was a little disappointed at things like news reports being repeated often, newspaper headlines not changing, people not fixing massive holes in their walls. Unless there are some other visual cues that time is passing much more quickly than in the real world, it's unlikely these kind of things would actually change over a 12 hour period. Go switch on a 24 hour news channel, and in half a day's time it's very likely they'll continue to be running the same stories, almost verbatim. This morning's newspapers won't have changed. And - given how many buildings appear to be having holes punched in them - it's no surprise that most people find it hard to find a builder at such short notice (they're clearly all working flat out fixing the problems caused by all those other blasted "augs"). 

 

Gametime (the temporal flow in time) has always struck me as an interesting concept and how expectations are set and players so accepting. After all, even games like (say) Mass Effect 3 where you're flying around saving the galaxy, all happens within a couple of days (48 hours av. completion time), which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it like that.

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My understanding with the time in Mankind Divided is that after you hit certain story beats, you'll come back to Prague and it will be night. Until you do that story beat, time doesn't pass.

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I think you'll find, Chris, that although most augmented people made the choice to become so, there are some who, like Jensen, never asked for it.

 

The one bone I do have to pick with the discussion is that the game does, once you get a little further in, try to give you some perspective on who makes up the augmented.  A lot of them are lower class folks who took on augments for jobs, because this is literally a game about megacorps and the Illuminati.  Your augmented workforce can do more work.  Any job where they used to have to hire people and also buy heavy machinery, now the employer is hiring people and turning those employees into the heavy machinery.  Additionally, the augments give you a drug dependency, so you now have an extraordinary reliance on your employer because your life will go bad if you quit and can't find a steady and affordable source for neuropozene. They do at least explore that space a little.  It's definitely not enough to redeem it, but I felt it was worth mentioning.

 

That stuff is elaborated on in the maligned tutorial mission. It takes place in a half-constructed hotel off the coast of Dubai. It was being built by a workforce of entirely augmented labor who then went crazy and killed each other, and then the company abandoned the project because loss of workers/money.

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The E-thlete reality show has the same structure (probably other shows do as well) as a recent Korean show called The Genius. Instead of athletes, the cast consists of roughly half South Korean celebrities, half semi-well-known-in-South Korea people of supposed higher intelligence - including multiple StarCraft pros. Additionally, instead of physical challenges, they engage in competitive mental games, usually involving bargaining, deduction, and deception on multiple levels.

 

It's not the sort of thing I typically go in for, but I found it super entertaining, especially how the demeanor and relationships of the contestants are such a far cry from what you'd see on American reality TV. Here's the tumblr page for the person who's translated and subbed all four seasons (listed 4-1) http://bxrme.tumblr.com/tagged/the-genius

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Listening to Chris read auto generated text things is amazing. Something about his delivery, where he reads it like a normal sentence and smoothly transitions into "organized by blood-sucking vampires" without breaking character once. It's so much better than reading. Also "these people died from taking pictures of people who died from taking photographs of the tour guide" paints an amazing picture of the catacombs.

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huh that is more interesting. That makes augments seem more like student debt, almost? You take it on to get skilled for employment, and needing to pay it back can trap you into some really exploitative work. 

 

The fact the groups are divided by an actual difference in ability seems weird to me. Racism usually means a meaningless difference (eg skin colour) is used as a pretence to create a very real difference in advantages/disadvantages. While plenty of times racism has been justified by the idea that the oppressed group is "physically superior, but less human in some other way" that's supposed to be an unfounded pretence, not an actual real difference in ability like it is in this game. There are stories where robots are the underclass, but the premise is usually that the robots are secretly equally human, just humans discriminate against them b/c of a superficial difference (they're electric, even though they feel all the things humans do). Janelle Monae's albums equate black people with a cyborg underclass and essentially take this approach. 

 

I guess there are a few examples where people have been exploited for real physical advantages (the sherpas on mount everest come to mind). But this would be like enslaving the sherpas to ensure the inferior non-sherpa climbers had more physically fit guides to assist them?

 

Or maybe oppressing the augs b/c you fear they might attack you is more like the way some people perceive all muslims as a bomb waiting to go off?

 

Yeah, augmentations-as-Islamophobia or augmentations-as-debt/wage-slavery makes sense, but the developers (despite statements to the contrary) seem to have wanted to tap the richer vein of state-supported racism, maybe because it was in the news, and it just doesn't fit on so many levels. Despite the culturally sublimated trope of Darren Wilson's "black demon," there hasn't been a plausible or substantiated fear that black people will rise up and kill all the whites since the days of Nate Turner, so the fifty million deaths from berserk augs makes no sense as a parallel. Maybe the Germans and the Holocaust, maybe the Transatlantic slave trade, but not racism in the modern West. Also, humanity's experiment with augs ends in a generation, as Chris says, but I haven't heard that the game discusses children born to aug parents. I guess they just stay in the ghetto, too? "This is just the way the world is now," says the game developer from Montreal. Finally, what's weirded me out the most about the consequences of the last game is that lower-class workers weren't the only people who were pressured to get augs. There was a lot in Human Revolution about how the military and the police were almost entirely augmented now. When the various systems of mechanical apartheid was put in place by political elites, some of whom were also augmented like David Sarif, who put it into effect at the local level? Did all the augmented cops and soldiers quietly quit their jobs and allow themselves to be put into camps or blacklisted or whatever? It feels like the first whiteboard session at Eidos Montreal was like, "First the augs were the future, now they're oppressed! What a twist, right?" and then they worked backwards from there.

 

The review that best touches on the problems with Mankind Divided's world, for me, was the one published by Wired, which points out that Mankind Divided is a game that wants us to suspect augmentation actually might be bad, except we play a character who solves all his problems through augmentation, and that wants us to suspect that there are no good cops, except we play a character who's the best cop, in part because his augs give him a third option that the rest of the characters (and the real world) doesn't have. It all just seems really terribly unconsidered, and I don't really agree with Jake Muncy that Eidos Montreal wanted to make a more socially relevant and incisive game but were undercut by the constraints of AAA. From interviews and statements, Mankind Divided seems like exactly the game they wanted to make.

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Oh, so I finnaly found the blog they comment - is actually a tumblr - http://objectdreams.tumblr.com/ there is some gold there, not much, but finest gold there.

Now on the Deus Ex, I was looking forward to it - but even before most of the current debate about the game issues, I find myself floating away from it, don´t know exactly why however - I liked a lot the first game, despite that ending. When I saw the first offical stream/show of the game I find it cool, but didn´t "hyped" me or anything, then there was the debates/critics around. In the end between Deus Ex and God Eater 2: Rage Burst, I bought God Eater 2. Still I might maybe pick it later on a sale.

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I'm unsure if this is the right thread but...

 

Animatronic pirates being attacked by animatronic tourists while animatronic dinos are riding around them in animatronic rides?

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I made an account just to say that the reading of the Catacombs of Paris Review nearly killed me. I haven't laughed that hard in months. 

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