Idle Thumbs 77: Our Neighbor Scoops

[Jake]

Consider it dropped.

Idle Thumbs 77: Our Neighbor Scoops

A fun outing to the city takes a turn once Jake and Sean run out of food. Chris gets more than he bargained for when he brings home a new pet. TV-MA

Games Discussed: Torchlight II, Diablo III, FTL: Faster Than Light, Tokyo Jungle, Toe Jam & Earl, Smuggle Truck, Cow Clicker, Pyst, The X-Fools, The Oregon Trail, Number Munchers

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[SecretAsianMan]

Oh man, Number Munchers?! I can't wait to hear this episode! (That's not sarcasm by the way)

[thainatos]

Toky Jungle GOTY.cx 2012.

[Henroid]

Oh boy, Torchlight 2 discussion! Which started out like... how I didn't expect at all. Questions time! Chris, since you're the more Torchlight savvy of the gang, does the soft-targeting with the mouse feel really odd in part 2 compared to the first game (or any game)?

And what are you guys playing more specifically in Torchlight? Like what skill trees appeal most to you Sean / Chris?

[soggybagel]

Holy crap! Scoops Klepek crossover!

Also I normally listen to the whole cast, digest it, and then write a response to the episode but I wanted to do this before I went to bed and forgot about what I wanted to say.

In regards to Chris's approach to games where he is not victory driven (though as noted he enjoyed winning) but rather merely existing in the simulation. I.E. his sense of disappointment when a really good game of Civilization ends because you hit the end state, where as you wish you could simply continue playing and basking in not only your own glory as a civilization, but essentially marveling at how awesome everything is. I am generally the same way. I like games that have end states but I know exactly what Chris means although not in regards to FTL because I have not yet played FTL. But I know the feeling he is expressing.

And I to tie this to a previous discussion on the boards, I think a game or series of games that does this really well right now are sports games. Not the most popular type of game around these boards, but to me a perfect example is the NCAA Football line of games. You can (and this is something I've done) take a smaller non powerhouse football program and over seasons of recruiting (The recruiting mechanics in the modern NCAA games are pretty hilarious and very RPG like. Effectively you get points you can assign to recruiting tasks. Like a player visit, or calling a prospective recruit. From there you can sell them on your academic prestige of the school or the opportunity to be on national tv. And you get boosts in recruiting through specific recruit pipelines. So if you're a school like the University of Texas it will be easier to recruit Texas kids and kids from the surrounding states.) you can build your team up. And at a certain point if you've done your job its really easy to get the best team, win a national title (effectively the end game of the game) and continue to do so. But you don't have to stop. You can kind of bask in your powerhouse program that you built from nothing. You can always start over but it doesn't force a restart right away.

Just had to kind of get that out there since it was on my mind and I'm going to bed.

KEEP ON CASTIN

[Shaneus]

FYI, I'd *probably* consider alt-Scoops mentioning the last animal and that it relates to the story in Tokyo Jungle as a minor to major (depending on how much you want to get into the story) spoiler. You've been half-assedly warned. I think it was shortly after the 45 min mark, but can't pinpoint it.

[Sno]

Oh god, Pyst... I remember seeing copies of that thing in stores as a kid.

[Roswell47]

WOAH! Hearing Patrick's voice all of a sudden surprised the hell out of me.

[Video Gone]

Oh man, an "and in the game" reference! I don't even need the Rock Paper Shotcast to come back now.

[Badfinger]

FWIW we are friend with those guys and like them very much.

Since I brought up the internet fan feud in the last thread and have taken long long enough to respond that it's rolled over to a New Cast, I'll reply here. I figured this would be the case since there's been enough crossover you can pretty much tell. They reference you, you reference them. Also you're all adults. Not that something like that would prevent the internet from making wild assumptions and accusations based on where you breathe during a sentence.

I was surprised and pleased to hear Patrick make an appearance on this cast, it was awesome and I laughed. Tokyo Jungle is insane.

[Roswell47]

On the topic of satire in games. Could Braid be considered satire, both thematically and mechanically? It plays it very straight in both of those categories (Too straight on the theme side if you ask me). I might just be a stupid person who doesn't understand what satire is.

[Badfinger]

Parody is Mel Brooks making Men in Tights, and Tina Fey impersonating Sarah Palin.

Satire is Groucho Marx making The Great Dictator, and the Colbert Report.

Satire is sometimes mocking a form or style, but it's not necessarily for laughs. You could possibly suggest that Spec Ops: The Line is a satire of modern military shooters. I'm stretching the bounds of comparison here, that's probably a dumb thing to say.

[gregbrown]

Now I can't stop thinking about J. Allard's Zunebase, where he lurks to this day.

[Scipio]

I haven't played it, and am pretty much only bringing it up because I happened to read about it a couple of minutes after finishing the cast, but do you think introversion's prison architect could be looked at as systems driven satire? Say if running a prison that kept inmates happy lead to a negative public image, or making it easier to profit off a badly run prison or whatever. (I have no idea if the game could do this or not)

Edit: The Tropico game's could probably be read as satire in a few ways as well.

[Chris]

Holy crap! Scoops Klepek crossover!

Also I normally listen to the whole cast, digest it, and then write a response to the episode but I wanted to do this before I went to bed and forgot about what I wanted to say.

In regards to Chris's approach to games where he is not victory driven (though as noted he enjoyed winning) but rather merely existing in the simulation. I.E. his sense of disappointment when a really good game of Civilization ends because you hit the end state, where as you wish you could simply continue playing and basking in not only your own glory as a civilization, but essentially marveling at how awesome everything is. I am generally the same way. I like games that have end states but I know exactly what Chris means although not in regards to FTL because I have not yet played FTL. But I know the feeling he is expressing.

And I to tie this to a previous discussion on the boards, I think a game or series of games that does this really well right now are sports games. Not the most popular type of game around these boards, but to me a perfect example is the NCAA Football line of games. You can (and this is something I've done) take a smaller non powerhouse football program and over seasons of recruiting (The recruiting mechanics in the modern NCAA games are pretty hilarious and very RPG like. Effectively you get points you can assign to recruiting tasks. Like a player visit, or calling a prospective recruit. From there you can sell them on your academic prestige of the school or the opportunity to be on national tv. And you get boosts in recruiting through specific recruit pipelines. So if you're a school like the University of Texas it will be easier to recruit Texas kids and kids from the surrounding states.) you can build your team up. And at a certain point if you've done your job its really easy to get the best team, win a national title (effectively the end game of the game) and continue to do so. But you don't have to stop. You can kind of bask in your powerhouse program that you built from nothing. You can always start over but it doesn't force a restart right away.

Just had to kind of get that out there since it was on my mind and I'm going to bed.

KEEP ON CASTIN

This is a good point! You should email it to [email protected]

[Flynn]

On the bit wars: Gigaflops (or GPU terafops) of all the buzzwords are probably the most legit if you had to pick only one. When Sweeney's talks about how much hardware he needs to move on to a new rendering tech, he drops 2 teraflops as the next threshold. http://www.gamespot.com/features/tim-sweeneys-crystal-ball-dice-2012-6350174/

[gregbrown]

The Oregon Trail and educational games discussion—both during this episode and in last week's thread—was superb. This is actually sort of a hot topic in the ed-tech community, along with a wider understanding of how to best teach subjects. (This post turned into a barfing-out of vaguely-related thoughts, oops!)

I'm mostly familiar with it from the math angle, where the Khan Academy's approach has been both successful and polarizing: while it is allowing kids to proceed at their own pace and democratizing math learning in a way, it also apes textbooks and ignores a lot of the latest pedagogical research. An alternative approach championed by Dan Meyer tries to get students to become well-versed in stepping up and down the "ladder of abstraction", figuring out what questions to ask, how to ask them, and what's relevant in the facts of the situation.

Parallel to this discussion has been the discussion of how to teach programming. Again, the Khan Academy's approach has been kinda pioneering: to give kids an outright compiler for creating Processing programs. But again, there is well-founded criticism (in this case by Bret Victor) that they don't go far enough.

Math and programming have the advantage of clearly being outright systems of thought with their own language and internal logic, but Social Studies is rarely treated the same way, whether in textbooks or in an edutainment sense. And so we often turn to fiction, whether it's a systemic game or a non-systemic game or even the written word. There is some non-fiction that can capture an era's way of thinking, but it's so rare as to be remarkable: Solnit's River of Shadows, the opening to Caro's LBJ bio The Path to Power, Perlstein's Nixonland.

Oregon Trail is particularly fascinating as a game because of its stakes are so small, yet they're everything: bring your own family full of no one special to Oregon, and try to survive along the way. We're not dealing with the fates of nations like in Civilization, or leading a special squad of soldiers in World War II. The anonymity is what makes it special, and what makes multiple playthroughs so appealing.

[Sententia]

The remix of Jake at the end was kind of great, well done you.

[Johnny Driggs]

I went camping at the actual, real-life Odell lake just last year. I should have gone snorkeling to confirm how accurate the game's depiction of wildlife is.

Also, it and Oregon Trail both take place at least partially in Oregon. Coincidence?

[Murdoc]

Did I miss the part where Patrick left or was he there silently the entire time?

Or were they just voice clips cleverly spliced in? (doubtful)

[Chris]

Did I miss the part where Patrick left or was he there silently the entire time?

Or were they just voice clips cleverly spliced in? (doubtful)

He was only there for the middle segment, he left before reader mail.

[Henroid]

The remix of Jake at the end was kind of great, well done you.

I disagree. I left the podcast running while I was getting to bed (I let the radio play when going to sleep, I'm weird) and it woke me up and creeped me out.

[Problem Machine]

Was it supposed to be a Diablo pastiche or was the resemblance coincidence?

[Merus]

Well, that question went exactly where I hoped it would!

I think Tropico is kind of along the lines of what I'm thinking about, where one of your goals is explicitly to embezzle funds from your island dictatorship and one of your key sources of funds is to manipulate aid from foreign powers by pandering to them. It's not how you're supposed to run an island paradise, but it's how it works in practice, and by carefully modelling it you're reflecting the legitimacy everyone says they're not giving this in the real world.

Anyway, this is Sweatshop, which I mentioned in the letter.

I'm glad Oregon Trail came up, because I think it's a great example of something I noticed when I was a kid and has never really been followed up. We had a board game called Cashflow, which was made by this "financial self-help guru" named Robert Kiyosaki. His motivation was the idea that people responded to games using their real-world behaviour as a starting point, so if you sat them down in front of Monopoly they'd make similar mistakes in Monopoly to the ones they made in the real world. My mum noticed that it was pretty easy to get in a state where you couldn't really advance your goals, and would just go around the board living, essentially, from paycheque to paycheque. I thought the idea of game design that tried to express an idea in the real world, by encouraging the players to act in a particular way, was fascinating. Oregon Trail, even though it never came out here, sounds like kind of the same thing - it's modelling a real-world system and by getting players to understand the relationships between the things, they get a stronger handle on the system as a whole. Which is why I thought that games would be a good medium for satire - by saying "here is how the system works" in a pretty direct way, and then letting players loose in that to fuck with it as they will, you'd essentially have them build their own satires.

[elmuerte]

I disagree. I left the podcast running while I was getting to bed (I let the radio play when going to sleep, I'm weird) and it woke me up and creeped me out.

That only makes the remix better