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Chris

Idle Thumbs 72: Crazy Crane's Deceit

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Great things are afoot.

Idle Thumbs 72: Crazy Crane's Deceit

As you contemplate the vast chamber's terrible sense-deadening magnitude, clawed machines grasp uselessly at your limbs, the distant hum of starship engines recede into the distance, and a dispassionate god enacts his ineffable plan. Please attend our PAX panel.

And as promised during the reader mail section, please enjoy these fine links, courtesy of reader Robert Simmon of NASA's Earth Observatory:

Games Discussed: Dota 2, Team Fortress 2: Mann vs. Machine, FTL: Faster Than Light, The Binding of Isaac, Far Cry 2, Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures, Yoda Stories, Thirty Flights of Loving, games of crane.

Direct episode download.

iTunes page.

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Mike reads the description: "Yeah, yeah, Dota 2, Far Cry 2, a whole buncha other games I'll never play..."

Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures

Thank you, Idle Thumbs!

I'm actually surprised that these games haven't been re-released as free-to-plays yet, where we have to in-app-purchase killer ants, nuclear test fridges, etc.

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That Quora crane game answer: http://www.quora.com...swer/Zach-Baker

Thanks for answering the Polygon question! I didn't get into it in the question (in the interest of keeping it short), but political journalism has followed the same arc, where politicians have pretty astutely figured out reporters' needs such as the access to get good quotes quickly, and use them to turn reporters into stenographers. There are some other elements at play, of course—a crippling addiction to horse-race narratives, obsession with finding contradictions rather than questioning premises, etc.—but the effect is largely the same: the reporting apparatus has in a significant sense been captured and is now simply used by those who it was intended to report on.

I ended up touching some on it in the Polygon thread elsewhere on Idle Thumbs, but there's that expected pace that absolutely cripples online tech and game reporting, in that you have to be talking about everything that's happening now. It's probably even best described as sort of a Prisoner's Dilemma: gaming journalism and most gaming sites would be far better off if everyone was off covering their own stuff and writing about different interesting things, but the easiest model for most readers to understand is gaming news—and once there's one gaming news site, the way the next site finds a place for itself is reporting the same news even faster. It ends up being this all-sucking attention vacuum that results in dozens of sites all reiterating the same material: some of them faster or more popular than others, but all of them generally going over the same stuff. (And now we are getting another one, which—if The Verge is any guide—will distinguish itself from more pictures and more video content. And, I guess, a sponsored documentary.)

Like you guys said, Rock Paper Shotgun is one of the few exceptions: a site that does report some gaming news, but also manages to reflect on what's happened in a model other than a game review with a numerical score. (Even their reviews are excellent!) I'm amazed that it exists, and I can't expect any other sites to go down that road because there's really very little pressure from readers to break away from the traditional model. And no pressure from any of the monied interests, either.

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Greg Brown's question to Idle Thumbs is a question that I find extremely interesting. This was within the past several months also talked at for a bit on the Giant Bombcast as well and also if I'm not mistaken also briefly debated on a progresscast as well. My memory is hazy though so I could be getting these all mixed up in my head.

The weirdest part about gaming news sites and magazines is that the much more incestual relationship that the game media has versus other forms of entertainment. In fact I'm pretty sure I'm just paraphrasing someone else when I just said that but its true. There is a dependency that games journalists seem to have more so than say a film news site because access to the games, events, and everything else that goes along with it is so much more important because as you all said its about being there first and simply breaking things fastest. I always remembered reading gaming magazines like EGM or PC Gamer growing up and seeing the previews for games that were much more optimistic than they probably had any business being like. Things would read something like Superman 64 is blah blah, has some rough edges but developers have promised that things will be smoothed out by fall for its release. Where as I feel like (and sorry for the constant comparison to the movie industry but I do feel its most apt) the film industry having invited a group of people to a pre-screening of Catwoman with the intention for prominent movie journalists to view it would immediately get shit on for having previewed a garbage film. There wouldn't be a preview written in Entertainment Weekly with kid gloves. Not that I think Entertainment Weekly is some sort of paragon of hard hitting journalistic endeavors, but the relationship that the video game industry dictates is that access is indeed everything and that the big companies can and will shut someone out in a way that just isn't really possible elsewhere. Hence if someone doesn't get a review copy early and has to actually just buy the game, they lose out on those precious launch day review hits because they're still playing the game.

We certainly know big publishers have in the past leaned on sites to review games nicely or they may get advertising dollars pulled away. Hell, look at how the entire Gerstmann thing went down at Gamespot. Of course some of this ties in to the idiotic way of tying things like bonuses to Metacritic scores but that's an entirely other issue. The problem is I feel as though there is silence based on fear. This begins to enter conspiracy theory territory but goddamn if I wasn't pissed as hell when my Xbox Live account got hijacked and MS took over 100 days to do anything about fixing my account. I was deeply disappointed with the level of coverage on this and I honestly believe some of it was simply because Microsoft is that big of a monolith that they can simply say "No it's not a big problem, it's hitting that magical one percent of users." The stories that existed were simply rehashing of MS press speak and official statements followed by "IT SURE FEELS WORSE THAN IT IS, BUT WE CAN'T EVER KNOW...SHUCKS." Except we already know Microsoft lied about failure rates on those original Xbox 360's. But there would be no Woodward and Bernstein to crack the case open because the news cycle moved on and that you can't really piss off an entire console manufacturer. I genuinely feel like (PUT ON THOSE TIN FOIL HATS) this story should have been bigger but one part not wanting to step on MS's back and one part you can't really do anything because the apparatus to investigate doesn't really even exist in the current game journalist construct kills the entire thing. Thus, ME SAD.

I haven't even touched the issue of the feedback you get from thousands of people, many who have nothing to add to the conversation beyond vitriol but one hopes that some can rise above it all and believe in what they do and say. I don't have a smart or insightful thing to add except that I like when people strive to do their best.

I think there is plenty of room to grow and mature given the relatively young age of video games in general, but there is a lot of cases of arrested development that hinder everything. I apologize for this rambling post but I just heard the question a few minutes ago and I got excited.

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There seems to be this running theme that the gaming press and industry is the odd duck of entertainment and that other media have everything figured out. I think it's more that books, music, and movies have their own distinct audience with a different set of demands for content along with their own issues, for example, I still find most music reviews to be obtuse, impenetrable, navel gazing fluff. That's not to say gaming doesn't have incredibly glaring issues but it just always feels like an apples to oranges comparison, a different audience and a different industry obviously need to be handled differently.

Clearly there's demand for better and since gaming is relatively new hopefully there's room for drastic changes. I'm pretty sure RPS started because it wanted to see those changes and I think the trick other than just putting up better, well thought out content is that they foster the community for it. The comments section are pretty well moderated with all the writers chiming in pretty regularly and feedback taken seriously. This obviously can't work for everyone, bigger sites just can't manage all their readers the way RPS have. That's probably why I'm not too cynical about how the Verge promised better but have fallen into all the same traps, I'm just sad that the Polygon seems to be headed in the same direction. I've thought pretty often about how to elegantly scale up a community without losing quality but no real solutions come to mind. The largest sites with quality content that I can think of are Ars Technica for tech and maybe Gamasutra for gaming but it's pretty industry focused so I'm not sure if that really counts.

As readers the only thing we can really do is vote with our hits. Luckily I've been having my cake and eating it too though; RSS and selective ad blocking let's me get the latest content from the mega sites while only supporting the ones with quality content. It's not ideal but until Flattr goes mainstream there's no real way to send a stronger message. It's kind of like voting third party, it might not effect much change but I'm still proud to make it clear what I really want.

BTW, while we're here we should share the sites with better content. I'm partial to the Penny Arcade Report, it's mostly editorials by Ben Kuchera, who used to run the gaming column at Ars Technica, along with links to articles from other sites that he feels worth highlighting. I wish I could also recommend the current Ars gaming column but it's clear Kyle is still learning the ropes.

Edit: oh man what's the point in sharing without links? BAM! http://penny-arcade.com/report/

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There seems to be this running theme that the gaming press and industry is the odd duck of entertainment and that other media have everything figured out. I think it's more that books, music, and movies have their own distinct audience with a different set of demands for content along with their own issues, for example, I still find most music reviews to be obtuse, impenetrable, navel gazing fluff. That's not to say gaming doesn't have incredibly glaring issues but it just always feels like an apples to oranges comparison, a different audience and a different industry obviously need to be handled differently.

I don't think it's entirely true in the sense of what is being claimed--I started to compare the game press to the political media when I started talking about the audience impact thing, but I did admittedly kind of meander off into that tangent and forget to actually tie them back together.

However, I do think the game discourse has something weird about it. Most criticism has at its root the emotional thrust and weight of the thing being critiqued; game discourse tends to value technical concerns and that ever-present vague steamroller of game evaluation, "fun," above all else. I think it does contribute to implicit limitations in how games are made and received. I also don't think that needs to be the case based on what games are.

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Re: The Binding of Isaac: I'm not a big fan of the nomenclature 'roguelikelike'. Sounds too much like a Zelda monster. Personally I like the term 'second generation roguelike', and I'm kind of trying to popularize that.

Also the exploit Chris talks about was one of my major complaints about the game, since it provides a system that's both highly time consuming and exploitable, the end effect is that if you want to play the game optimally you end up playing for an extra 15 minutes of tedium. You don't need Cain to do it though, any of the characters can do it just fine as long as they get a decent buffer of money or health.

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Chris, this is the second podcast in a row where you've brought up Kotaku. Their writers constantly update the site with the thinnest slivers of what could be called news. Their readers compulsively refresh the site, needing to react to those slivers.

Block them! Block all Gawker sites!

I've been much happier since I stopped reading up-to-the-minute gaming sites. I don't feel any less informed; if I want to know the release date of the new Luigi's Mansion or something news-ish like that I usually just go to Wikipedia.

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I'm pretty comfortable with what I think of as a "Roguelike". Maybe I missed the description, what's a Roguelike-like? That's not really anything I've ever heard before.

Second Roguelike

Roguelike Once Removed

Step Roguelike

Roguelike-In-Law

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Does anyone have a link to Nick Breckon's embedded journalism in Eve? Googling that term found no results.

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I'm pretty comfortable with what I think of as a "Roguelike". Maybe I missed the description, what's a Roguelike-like? That's not really anything I've ever heard before.

Second Roguelike

Roguelike Once Removed

Step Roguelike

Roguelike-In-Law

And if they release a bundle it will be called a Roguelike Squadron :getmecoat

I'm not in favor of second generation roguelike, if you really want to use generations then binding of isac would be more like a fifth generation of roguelike.

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So what I'm getting from your reply, Roguelike-like would be a game that has a lot of Rogue-like elements, but not enough/all of them that it truly is?

My question isn't about nomenclature per se, it's about what the name is describing.

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I was not really reacting to do concering the n-th generation roguelike.

Anywho, roguelike is loosely defined as a RPG with a randomly generated world and perma death.

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I'm pretty comfortable with what I think of as a "Roguelike". Maybe I missed the description, what's a Roguelike-like? That's not really anything I've ever heard before.

I think it's a term useful to people who played a lot of NetHack (or perhaps even Rogue) for whom a lot of modern "roguelikes" seem nothing like Rogue and so the name feels inappropriate. Personally I'm ok with the definition being broader than it used to be; like "RPG" which used to have something to do with role playing but now just means something with a character you upgrade. Which is most games.

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Re: The Binding of Isaac: I'm not a big fan of the nomenclature 'roguelikelike'. Sounds too much like a Zelda monster. Personally I like the term 'second generation roguelike', and I'm kind of trying to popularize that.

Trying to deliniate generations is also dangerous to me. What is a third generation roguelike? Fourth? Fifth? Barf. Can we just say "it is a roguelike," and then have a conversation within that definition?

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Trying to deliniate generations is also dangerous to me. What is a third generation roguelike? Fourth? Fifth? Barf. Can we just say "it is a roguelike," and then have a conversation within that definition?

The people who insist on "roguelike-like" remind me of the people who are really alarmed by the "watering-down" of genre terms in general, as if they represent some kind of objective reality.

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Trying to deliniate generations is also dangerous to me. What is a third generation roguelike? Fourth? Fifth? Barf. Can we just say "it is a roguelike," and then have a conversation within that definition?

That's what I always try to ask people who complain about genre names and/or definitions, but it never works. It's like, no game can be defined by a single word or even phrase. But hearing that word or phrase evokes certain impressions, which you can then expand upon by actually researching the game in some fashion, or just talking about it (which I guess counts as research, in a way).

This is an ages old thing, so I'm sorry for that, but: most people who complain about genre names tend to be perfectly okay with the name Role-Playing Game, which is easily, objectively, one of the most ambiguous phrases to define a game. This drives me crazy. I have no problem with "RPG", but I wish people would at least be consistent if they're going to bitch otherwise. U:

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Regarding your discussion of the crane game/claw game, there was a really interesting Reddit AMA from an arcade owner a few weeks back, in which the owner went into a lot of detail about how the game works. According to the arcade owner, there actually are legal regulations for these claw games--he notes that California law requires that the claw actually exert enough force to grab something one out of every twelve attempts, and one in every fifteen for Nevada. Perhaps your friend who claims to be skilled at these is really just the claw machine equivalent of a card counter?

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I had the exact thought waiting to play Mann Vs Machine as Jake. I've played 600 or so matches of a queue system and never felt annoyed in Dota 2 but TF2 does it so poorly. Just the simple fact that it gives you a constantly updating queue time that never seems to be accurate is infuriating. Why be that precise with your predictions if it isn't going to matter? And the fact that you can't get back into matches you pay to queue into, even if you have a full 6, is inexcusable in my opinion. You're basically paying to 'get out of the queue and into the game' but if anything goes wrong you're stuck starting over. I've found that everything outside of actually playing MvM is extremely frustrating.

I've actually found there's a huge gulf between TF2 and more recent source stuff. TF2 has crashes and dropped games all over the place, the loads seem super slow, and it has never performed well (I don't have a great machine, but I've seen complaints of fps issues elsewhere too). Also the interface breaks on alt-tabs or even at random times. It reminds me that TF2 was this simple thing that a lot of stuff has been bolted on, whereas newer stuff like Dota 2 is so polished.

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TF2 gets increasingly unstable the more content they add. (That's yet another reason why I stopped wanting to play it.)

That said, never alt-tab Source games. At least not if you're not using borderless windowed mode. (TF2 still likes to break anyway, sometimes.)

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I'm pretty comfortable with what I think of as a "Roguelike". Maybe I missed the description, what's a Roguelike-like? That's not really anything I've ever heard before.

Second Roguelike

Roguelike Once Removed

Step Roguelike

Roguelike-In-Law

It steps into the realm of having qualities from a certain kind of gameplay but not being entirely that. Like how a lot of games have RPG elements, but aren't outright RPG games. There's no term that's been agreed upon for such splicing of game design / mechanics. Not that I can think of. It's probably better that way too, since there can be an actual discussion about the game and not just branding it with a term and being done with it.

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Chris, this is the second podcast in a row where you've brought up Kotaku. Their writers constantly update the site with the thinnest slivers of what could be called news. Their readers compulsively refresh the site, needing to react to those slivers.

Block them! Block all Gawker sites!

I've been much happier since I stopped reading up-to-the-minute gaming sites. I don't feel any less informed; if I want to know the release date of the new Luigi's Mansion or something news-ish like that I usually just go to Wikipedia.

Kotaku is the 24/7 news channel of video games. Which is the nice way of me saying it is garbage. It really surprised me last episode when Chris claimed that it's the site devs go to all the time. I'm hoping it wasn't meant to be spoken with any mount of authority, because if it's true, it means the industry's hands-on people are the ones who feed into the bullshit tangential video game "news" content.

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