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Idle Thumbs plays BioShock with JP LeBreton

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This happened!

BioShock!

We'll be better about creating threads for these before they happen in the future, but for now here is a thing to let you know about cool Internet content!

Our good friend JP LeBreton was one of the designers on the original BioShock. You may know him most specifically for Arcadia, which was his level on the game. He came by the Thumbs office this morning to do a playthrough of the opening of BioShock (on which he also contributed) then we skipped ahead for a full commentary-laden look at Arcadia itself.

As a bonus, we also played through JP's "Arcadia Demade," a front-to-back interpretation of Arcadia he made as a level for Doom II, using only stock Doom assets (with the exception of the undersea skybox).

The video is split into a bunch of parts because we had a few issues with streaming, but you can check the whole (four hour!) playthrough on the Idle Thumbs Twitch.TV channel. Enjoy!

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I just finished watching the recordings, and this is great stuff. I've previously said I wish you'd do more video content, and this is exactly the kind of stuff I had in mind! Not you sitting in a sofa being uncomfortable, but interesting content that can only be done with video. I loved it!

A comment on the live thing: As I keep repeating, I'm not a huge fan of the whole live chat thing. I don't mind it, but it's a bit too hectic and hilarious, and hasn't in my experience really added anything to the little you've done. If it was up to me (and I know it isn't) I'd probably prefer a more polished pre-recorded thing, maybe with better audio quality. Maybe that wouldn't have changed anything, and maybe it being live gives it some quality I'm missing – I don't know ... Anyway, it's up to you, and I'm sure you have some numbers to indicate how popular the live stuff is vs. how popular the downloads are.

I thought all of it was funny and interesting, and I'd definitely watch more of the same, or other people playing other games whilst talking about them or other things.

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I just finished watching the recordings, and this is great stuff. I've previously said I wish you'd do more video content, and this is exactly the kind of stuff I had in mind! Not you sitting in a sofa being uncomfortable, but interesting content that can only be done with video. I loved it!

A comment on the live thing: As I keep repeating, I'm not a huge fan of the whole live chat thing. I don't mind it, but it's a bit too hectic and hilarious, and hasn't in my experience really added anything to the little you've done. If it was up to me (and I know it isn't) I'd probably prefer a more polished pre-recorded thing, maybe with better audio quality. Maybe that wouldn't have changed anything, and maybe it being live gives it some quality I'm missing – I don't know ... Anyway, it's up to you, and I'm sure you have some numbers to indicate how popular the live stuff is vs. how popular the downloads are.

I thought all of it was funny and interesting, and I'd definitely watch more of the same, or other people playing other games whilst talking about them or other things.

This was a big enough time commitment as it is as a live affair--were it not live, there would have been several additional man-hours devoted to (at the very least) assembling files, encoding them, and uploading them--but more likely it would end up being some amount of editing and then also those things. Doing it as a live show through Twitch means we just do it and then it's instantly archived on the internet and we don't need to justify to ourselves or anyone else why it's not any more polished than it was. Even though Twitch runs ads on this thing, in reality we make basically zero money off of it (our total ad revenue to date from all our videos combined is $2) and it does already cost us our time, so I think we're unlikely to get much more polished than this. I know that's a fairly crass way of looking at it, but there it is.

Also, I do think we get something out of it being live. There were quite a few questions asked by live viewers that, when put to JP, resulted in interesting anecdotes or explanations.

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I thought I wouldn't mention the fact that you'll get away with more roughness when it's live, but now that you have – I appreciate that, but your podcasts are pre-recorded, edited and polished; Do you consider the video content somehow outside the core franchise product market quadrant, or is it just a lot more work to edit video stuff (I really have no idea.) Your site isn't up yet, so I don't know to what degree you'll integrate the Twitch stuff with your other content. Will it be part of the core franchise product market quadrant, or will it remain just some weird external stuff on the Twitch network?

Anyway, as I said, it ended up great (I imagine you'll eventually figure out the lagging weirdness too – what was that?). I still would prefer a more polished thing, of course, but as I said, the recorded live stuff is great as well. Oh, and I didn't catch that chat questions triggered some of the interesting stuff, which is great. I still think you should look into getting a better audio setup (I'm imagining you're going to do a ton of these things here) – it was really hard to pick up what you two were sniggering about back there.

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I thought I wouldn't mention the fact that you'll get away with more roughness when it's live, but now that you have – I appreciate that, but your podcasts are pre-recorded, edited and polished; Do you consider the video content somehow outside the core franchise product market quadrant, or is it just a lot more work to edit video stuff (I really have no idea.) Your site isn't up yet, so I don't know to what degree you'll integrate the Twitch stuff with your other content. Will it be part of the core franchise product market quadrant, or will it remain just some weird external stuff on the Twitch network?

Anyway, as I said, it ended up great (I imagine you'll eventually figure out the lagging weirdness too – what was that?). I still would prefer a more polished thing, of course, but as I said, the recorded live stuff is great as well. Oh, and I didn't catch that chat questions triggered some of the interesting stuff, which is great. I still think you should look into getting a better audio setup (I'm imagining you're going to do a ton of these things here) – it was really hard to pick up what you two were sniggering about back there.

Editing video is considerably more time consuming than editing audio, in part because it is so much more demanding for a computer to process HD-quality video plus an audio stream, than simply the audio stream on its own. Also, anything with a visual component is inherently less forgiving when it comes to editing, for obvious reasons. This video content also ended up being roughly four times longer than a typical episode. It took most of our Saturday as is; and that's fine, I mean we chose to do it because it seemed like a fun thing to do, but I can't imagine setting aside even more hours to do a bunch of editing and polish. Those are just hours we don't have.

I have no idea where this stuff will fall on the new site. We didn't start doing any of this streaming stuff until fairly late in the site design process, so we never really took it into account.

We figured out the lag issue already; only the first of five BioShock videos has that issue. The rest are fine.

As for audio, we'll see. This was just using a webcam. I guess we could buy headset-style mics for the additional participants. That would add multiple layers of complexity though, because our audio interface hardware and software package is set up with our Mac and all of our streaming is done on the PC. Dealing with multiple simultaneous audio inputs plus the webcam plus the audio from the game is something we currently have no idea how to affordably tackle, but if we end up doing a ton of this kind of thing and it seems like a big weak point, we'll probably look into it. Right now all of our video streaming stuff is software-based. Sites like Giant Bomb have complex hardware-based setups for that kind of thing, but that's a level of expense that is probably too extreme for us; there may be intermediate solutions, however.

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Sounds like you have things under control. Hopefully at some point the low-fidelity sound quality will be raised to something matching the broadcast-level multi-feed-switching visuals with sweet digital effects and full on-screen lockboxing (FO5LB™).

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Sounds like you have things under control. Hopefully at some point the low-fidelity sound quality will be raised to something matching the broadcast-level multi-feed-switching visuals with sweet digital effects and full on-screen lockboxing (FO5LB™).

Possibly--I just have no idea. The difference between those two things is that all the crazy graphical stuff can be done entirely through software, whereas audio is much more dependent on actually buying a bunch of physical equipment and having a system that can accomodate it all with the stream. I'm sure there are better solutions than what we have, we just have to figure out how affordable and manageable they are. We can't use our existing podcast equipment for it because those are mics that sit on a table in a fixed position, whereas with the stream we're all crowding around one guy at a computer.

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I have no idea where this stuff will fall on the new site. We didn't start doing any of this streaming stuff until fairly late in the site design process, so we never really took it into account.

You're a victim of your own success, Chris!

I think that the Bioshock playthrough looked good live and held up in recording afterwards as well. But you really are creating something unique and enlightening—JP LeBreton was spitting out facts that could easily end cited in someone's thesis or on Wikipedia.

Your Twitch.tv account belongs to the ages!

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Yeah, it's definitely one of the most interesting game commentary things I've seen, easily rivalling the best of GCD vault stuff I've seen. I'm assuming Twitch.tv stores all the recordings indefinitely, but if not, you guys should make sure to get a copy for your own site.

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Yeah, it's definitely one of the most interesting game commentary things I've seen, easily rivalling the best of GCD vault stuff I've seen. I'm assuming Twitch.tv stores all the recordings indefinitely, but if not, you guys should make sure to get a copy for your own site.

You can flag videos to be permanently archived on Twitch; we've done that for everything currently on our channel.

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Also, while you're at it, you should invest into your own video streaming backend and custom Idle Thumbs codexes, just to be safe. :fart:

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I'm doubt i'm alone when i say as long as you keep putting intelligent people with a unique perspective playing interesting games, i'll happily put up with the occasional annoying stuttering. Yeah it would be nice if it had perfect production but i'm just glad we get to see it.

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Are there any Bioshock spoilers? I'm only partway through the game, and have somehow managed to not spoil the end for myself all these years.

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Are there any Bioshock spoilers? I'm only partway through the game, and have somehow managed to not spoil the end for myself all these years.

Well, there's a whole lot of the game being played, which as far as I'm concerned is inherently spoiler material. While BioShock obviously has a plot that's central to the game, it is really about the entire experience, which includes the beauty of its environments, and uncovering bits of environmental storytelling, and simply soaking in the atmosphere. I think it would be unfortunate to see any of that in a video with people talking over it before actually playing it yourself.

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Seeing these videos (1, 2, 3) reminded me what a dumb game BioShock is. Sure, everything about the art and environments and so on is awesome, and it's worth experiencing for that alone, and it was great seeing that commentary, but otherwise it's a pretty average shooter with a plenty of cool mechanics, but the choices you make don't matter all that much. That's why I never got into BioShock 2 (seemed more of the same), although I'd like to play Minerva's Den. I think I will play BioShock Infinite just to experience the environments and atmosphere, though.

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Seeing these videos (1, 2, 3) reminded me what a dumb game BioShock is.

It is my personal worst game I ever played. I really do feel ill every time someone claims that more games should be like Bioshock.

I quit watching after LeBreton's first splicer fight, an ugly slugfest in which he was expected to soak up damage until the splicer was dead. What a terrible combat system.

I then skipped to Arcadia Demade and fell in love with Doom II all over again. LeBreton is a balletic Doom player and correctly pointed out how important movement is to the Doom experience.

I know this isn't important to everyone; if shotgunning dudes in the face while they run in a straight line towards you makes you happy, so be it. I can't stand it.

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It is my personal worst game I ever played. I really do feel ill every time someone claims that more games should be like Bioshock.

I quit watching after LeBreton's first splicer fight, an ugly slugfest in which he was expected to soak up damage until the splicer was dead. What a terrible combat system.

I then skipped to Arcadia Demade and fell in love with Doom II all over again. LeBreton is a balletic Doom player and correctly pointed out how important movement is to the Doom experience.

I know this isn't important to everyone; if shotgunning dudes in the face while they run in a straight line towards you makes you happy, so be it. I can't stand it.

It just depends whether you see combat mechanics as a means to an end, or as an end unto itself.

I think my feeling on this has changed somewhat over the years. In the past I would have been much more inclined to agree with you. My feeling on it now (and this is not a hard rule AT ALL, just a general tendency) is that even a very expressive combat system is expressive of something I don't find all that fundamentally interesting, so if game has poor combat, it's not so big a deal to me if there's something interesting going on elsewhere. Whereas in something like Doom, the combat experience is much more expressive, but since I don't really find "combat" as a concept as interesting anymore to begin with, that doesn't necessarily make the game as a whole more interesting to me, except in an academic sense. Hopefully that makes sense.

I also want to stress (again) that this isn't an all-or-nothing statement or a manifesto or anything. It's just a general trend in my reaction to games over the last few years. There are cases that fall somewhere in between, like (here it comes) Far Cry 2, where I think the experience of the combat actually reinforces the game's larger themes--unpredictability, disempowerment, unintended consequences, and general sense of clusterfuck.

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So if game has poor combat, it's not so big a deal to me if there's something interesting going on elsewhere. Whereas in something like Doom, the combat experience is much more expressive, but since I don't really find "combat" as a concept as interesting anymore to begin with, that doesn't necessarily make the game as a whole more interesting to me, except in an academic sense. Hopefully that makes sense.

It makes perfect sense; if the combat AI was made deeper like Halo ("Look, the Covenant flanks you and takes cover!") or Half-Life ("Look, the Combine soldiers kneel now in Episode 1!") that wouldn't make any difference to people that aren't playing for the combat.

And while you've gotten disinterested in combat, I feel like I've become something of a combat snob as I stand in the store criticizing the slight hops of the Goombas in New Super Mario Bros. Wii. ("It matches the music but it doesn't meaningfully inform the gameplay...") I'm insufferable!

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I also want to stress (again) that this isn't an all-or-nothing statement or a manifesto or anything. It's just a general trend in my reaction to games over the last few years. There are cases that fall somewhere in between, like (here it comes) Far Cry 2, where I think the experience of the combat actually reinforces the game's larger themes--unpredictability, disempowerment, unintended consequences, and general sense of clusterfuck.

You don't need to apologize for bringing up Far Cry 2, at least in this instance. I regularly mention it as an example of themes and mechanics reinforcing each other, usually in response to someone's po-faced belief that CODBLOPS2 is the final evolution of the modern FPS or something. Even though I haven't played it in months, I continue to think about it, which feels like a more practicable definition of "art" than most.

For my part, I loathed the combat all the way through the first Bioshock. I was one of those philistines who froze Fontaine with a plasmid, shot him twenty-five times with electric buckshot, and called it a day. For the first few hours, I felt exactly the same way about Bioshock 2 when I played it years later. Once I got clear of the heavy progress-gating, my mind began to change. At least in Bioshock 2, the imperfect and imperfectible combat feels like it's meant to work hand-in-hand with the extremely granular equipment/character customization options. Like a wargame where you draw up the battle plan and then let the AI simulate the outcome, the game here obfuscates and frustrates in order to ensure that decisions made before the battle have more impact than decisions during it. Sure, the outcome is typically to make the player feel like a clumsy oaf who bungles every encounter, but I think there's a philosophy at work here, and I like the idea of a system where the choices you make going into combat matter more than your skill at resolving it. The STALKER series tried something similar, and I liked it there too.

Or maybe I'm overfinessing floaty controls and weird hitboxes when they just weren't a priority for the developers, I don't know.

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criticizing the slight hops of the Goombas in New Super Mario Bros. Wii. ("It matches the music but it doesn't meaningfully inform the gameplay...")

That's a legitimate criticism. It also messes up the rhythm of the Goombas and makes it impossible to judge and predict their patterns as precisely as one could in the non-hopping-to-the-music versions.

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