Jake

Idle Thumbs 70: An Angry God

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I have an urge to illustrate the lawyer's day from this episode. Be back in a bit.

oh god i cant wait

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Has anyone here played the DS game published by Platinum called Infinite space cause it was a like FLT except the combat was simpler but the number of ship systems like accounting, a gym and a mess hall which all had effects on your crew which was spread across multiple ships.

It was a fun game for a while, and the ship-building was very enjoyable in that "spreadsheets in space" sort of way. But the plot was pretty painfully boring, and it had glacially slow plot pacing.

Even worse (to me), it pulled a total dick move...

(minor spoiler warning)

Late in the game, there's one dungeon where your intrepid team has a choice of whether or not to burst into a particular room. By this point, you've been doing this for dozens of dungeons, and it's just the basic way to enter a room. But in this one, if you enter, you all fall down an elevator shaft and die. No warning, no rolls, just immediate Game Over because you did the thing that game taught you to do. And with the way the game's save system is set up, it ensures you have to redo the entire dungeon all over again.

So yeah. I had fun playing it, and got my money's worth, but that was the point where I just quit it forever.

It broke my cardinal game design rule: Thou Shalt Respect The Player's Time.

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Good cast with some great discussions but, if you don't mind me saying, casting a pod every 5 days or less seems to dilute the content quite a bit.

The discussion about realistic shooters and the schizophrenia of pacifist/freewill FPS was very interesting. It made me wonder how little needs to be changed in the FPS genre to escape this obvious contradiction and if this change is very small, doesn't it mean that we're just hiding the issue under the carpet? Like Jake said (if I'm not wrong) what's OK about realistic shooters anyway?

For instance, let's say we keep all aspect of a tactical FPS the same except that, for the main character, hitting a target translate to tranquilizing it rather than killing it. If all NPC keep their gun and the gore level is the same, it might lead to the player to want to steal target from the rest of his squad or trying to resolve the situation differently to diminish bloodshed. In turn, that would have greater chance of putting his allies at risk. That sounds interesting to me, but does that really change the nature of the game? Isn't it just a skin of a normal shooter and if so, doesn't that mean we're still avoiding the issue? I want to say no, but that change is so insignificant (basically, no blood for your kill) that it still seems like it advocates oblitarating people as a valid solution for real world conflict.

About the realistic shooter genre and Sean checkpoint anecdote, my main belief is that winning/losing conditions come in the way of telling combat related narratives that are thought provoking and thus, worth telling.

Saying the winning condition is 'not killing the guy' would be the most straightforward way to turn Sean's anecdote about the checkpoint into a Video game sequence.

However, it probably defeats what Sean meant to say with that anecdote. Leveraging Video games technology would allow the designer to craft a more nuanced message: you could procedurally reveal the Koran if the player decides to shoot or replace it with a gun or a bomb, if the player decided not to shoot. You could have a parallel activity of trying to calm down other soldiers around you as the situation gets more stressful, thus demanding to focus on monitoring the guy or your teammates.

Having that, plus long term consequences of that choice, would allow to convey a message that games are better at telling that any other medium. But that would also mean getting rid of clear winning/losing condition in the minute-to-minute gameplay loop which is something games are really attached to.

That is possible, but probably not in games like CoD or Bioshock whose high fidelity relies on predictable and limited branching of in-game situations.

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Has anyone here played the DS game published by Platinum called Infinite space cause it was a like FLT except the combat was simpler but the number of ship systems like accounting, a gym and a mess hall which all had effects on your crew which was spread across multiple ships.

Oh weird. Never had a DS, but I'm a little impressed there wasn't lawyer trouble one way or other (no idea which came first) with the PC game strange adventures in infinite space or the sequel weird wars: return to infinite space. They are pretty good, btw (and the first one is free, on the right here). Although the $25 they are asking for the sequel is maybe a bit steep. Actually, on reflection I don't remember that I would have been willing to pay that so maybe I never played it. The first one is pretty good for a kind of short coffee break type thing. It's been a while, so I've no idea if trying run it on a modern OS will cause any issues.

edit: Kieron Gillen has a mostly complimentary review of the second one here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/r_weirdworlds_pc

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Vimes, I think you're right about how our relationship in games with NPCs (and other players) is essentially predetermined by how we can interact with them. And like they were saying on Idle Thumbs, shooting people ironically is still shooting them in the end.

I guess the challenge is to design a system of interaction with enough granularity and expressivity to enable richer relationships, to have similarly expressive systems pointed back at you, and to have clear and perceptible causality between the two.

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oh for anyone else who was curious about the inspiritional letter in defense of space spending (instead of spending to feed starving children):

http://www.lettersof...lore-space.html

Good stuff ... I had no idea NASA was promoting Earth science so much back then (Landsat & most of the other early Earth observation satellites hadn't even launched yet--just 2 types of weather satellite.)

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You guys did a good job at articulating why I dislike games that pull a twist that reveals that you (or rather your character) is a horrible person and/or a mindless product of an environment because of everything you did by playing the game.

The only game I can think of that actually did a good job at addressing that idea was Deus Ex. The twists are heavily foreshadowed throughout the game (like at the very beginning when Paul expresses his concern about you killing real people), and you're always implicitly given a choice on how to get around each situation. After it was revealed that

Paul is a traitor, but is actually the good guy, and you've been lied to by your superiors

(does Deus Ex need spoiler warnings anymore?) I changed my play style since I realized how cloudy the morality is.

I've never been a huge fan of BioShock in general, but one thing about it that really irritated me was the fact that after you learn that

Ryan's been mind controlling you the whole time, and then you get rid of the mind control thing

literally nothing changes at all after that. You just keep on mindlessly killing a hundred nameless people just like you did before.

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Can anyone tell where "The Vision" game is located? It's hardly impossible to find it using usual means like google.

It's called The Visit and we link it in the blog!

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Is there an RSS feed for the new blog? Can only find the podcast feed.

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For the love of all that is holy, what headphones do you guys use in your office?! :sombrero:

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When you listen to tomorrow's episode you will learn that we had our mic setup reversed which totally screwed our audio quality on ep 70. (Called an Angry God because we felt like we were experiencing the wrath of one when we went back to listen to it).

That being said we bought some nice headphones that we use quite often. Thanks Kickstarter.

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I just listened to the podcast again. "Twelve Angry Men, except with automatic weapons." - IGN.com

I've been meaning to ask you Thumbs for a while. You've read Red Mars and its sequels by Kim Stanley Robinson, right? It's gotten bad press since its publication for being details-obsessed and underwritten, but when I reread it last year, it struck me as the closest anyone's gotten to capturing the as-of-yet unrealized wonder and majesty of setting foot on and inhabiting an alien world. I think I've got a good quote from the short review I posted on my school blog a while back...

His novels represent the true and concerted effort to imagine every preparation and ramification for the colonization of another world, incorporating physics, engineering, biology, economics, psychology, philosophy, and even history in a synthesis that would make a whole tenured faculty blanch in envy. Scholarship is the building block of Robinson's futurism, not the polemic of so many others, and the vision that results, reasonable to its core, invites discussion rather than dissent. For weeks now I have kept sundry thoughts on matters he exposed to me, whether the typology of "anti" and "not" or the possibilities of a post-capital economy, and been the better for their inclusion in my conversations. Robinson's prose is wordy and self-serious to the extreme, belying his Ph.D in English and impressive body of work, yet sincerity lurks behind every paragraph, waiting for your honest consideration. Consider it you will, have you any curiosity. This is a series you should read, but only if you follow it to the end.

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Red Mars has gotten bad press? WHAT.

I love Red Mars. Haven't yet read the sequels, though. I think I started Green a while back, but didn't get far before getting distracted.

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Red Mars has gotten bad press? WHAT.

Almost everyone I've spoken with views it as one of those books that's amazing when you're fourteen, but now you can't get over the fact that the prose itself is never clear, concise, and interesting all at once.

Honestly, I think a lot of that is the product of people trying to "grow up" out of genre fiction, along with New Space Opera's popularization of jaded cynicism (which I also love, mind you. Huge Iain M. Banks fan here). To me, Red Mars and its sequels capture the childlike wonder that I still brush up against playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri to this day. I'd really recommend reading the whole series when you get a chance, Twig. Robinson never runs out of ideas or stops being excited about space, which is exactly why I'm sure the Thumbs would or do love him.

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I read Red Mars about... three years ago? Maybe five, at most. So I guess I was 20-22 at the time. I loved it, then, but, like you say, I also love the shit out of space, and dreaming about the future of humanity. And the book is really good at that.

I've got a long commute to my new job, so I plan to start reading a lot more. I'll dump Green Mars on my Nook. U:

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A strange thing happened after listening to this episode; something that I never thought I'd get out of what a video game podcast about video games. I was in my car, hearing you guys talk about Space Engine and dying to fly around the known (and unknown) universe looking at things. I followed the suggestion of throwing on an Italian opera singer in the background while I did it. Not knowing any I simply googled "famous female Italian opera singers" and threw the first name that I saw into grooveshark, Cecilia Bartoli. Added one of her full albums, "If You Love Me, 18th Century Italian Songs", and jumped into space.

Space Engine is really cool firstly, love flying around and looking at planets and crap, but that music. I've seen my fair share of musicals on and off Broadway, but never came out of them wanting to listen to the music afterwards. My brain always connected musicals and opera together, so I figured that I wouldn't ever want to listen to it, particularly when I have *no clue* what the singer is saying. Boy was I wrong.

This stuff is excellent. I've found myself closing my eyes and drinking it in. You don't need to know what Cecilia Bartoli is saying.

Video games.

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A strange thing happened after listening to this episode; something that I never thought I'd get out of what a video game podcast about video games. I was in my car, hearing you guys talk about Space Engine and dying to fly around the known (and unknown) universe looking at things. I followed the suggestion of throwing on an Italian opera singer in the background while I did it. Not knowing any I simply googled "famous female Italian opera singers" and threw the first name that I saw into grooveshark, Cecilia Bartoli. Added one of her full albums, "If You Love Me, 18th Century Italian Songs", and jumped into space.

Space Engine is really cool firstly, love flying around and looking at planets and crap, but that music. I've seen my fair share of musicals on and off Broadway, but never came out of them wanting to listen to the music afterwards. My brain always connected musicals and opera together, so I figured that I wouldn't ever want to listen to it, particularly when I have *no clue* what the singer is saying. Boy was I wrong.

This stuff is excellent. I've found myself closing my eyes and drinking it in. You don't need to know what Cecilia Bartoli is saying.

Video games.

Good.

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