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Jake

Idle Thumbs 82: An Ancient Evil Awakens

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oooh, so its an energy drink. YAGER BOMBSSS like totally awesome man

It's not an energy drink. It does tend to be caffeinated, but it's more along the lines of a carbonated soft drink like Coca-Cola, but with a weird, overly sweet citrus thing going on.

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what the fuck is mountain dew...is it like lemonade

i'll google it

It's like lemonade someone else drank first.

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Really great podcast guys, so much stuff in there. It was like halo taking off his helmet to reveal flaming skull stacking doll of content.

Oh man, and after all the Walking Dead talk I went home and played Episode 4. What bracket did I fall into at the very end? The 6%! I did not expect that at all as most of my decisions have placed me squarely in the majority thus far. But somehow I ended up in the über-minority at the end of ep4. So I look forward to seeing some of that extra attention paid in chapter 5. I fully expect my chapter 5 will trump everyone else's chapter 5's in terms of specialness.

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Great, great episode, gentlemen. Soul crushing at times, but great.

I think I share a similar frustrations to JP's: it really irritates me that I have to quote a very violent, very bloody game to showcase the fact that purposely finely tuned gameplay mechanics and systems can create layered effects on players' emotions and mindset.

It's not Hotline Miami's faults, it feels like it's confirming that the only thing's games are really good at is violence, and that we can't achieve similar level of aesthetics with non-violent mechanics. Or that it's not what people are looking for in games.

I wish I could say, 'here's a non violent game that achieves the same goals and took the internet by a similar storm that Hotline Miami'. It's not the case and that drags me down :/

About the structure of studios, I think you're right in saying that experiencing different models is salutatory. At least it was/is for me: it allowed me to tell which hindrances, processes, practices and relationships template are - let's say - unavoidable (i.e. you'll find them pretty much everywhere) and which one are symptomatic of certain structure, scale, culture, leader personality. That's the only way to figure out how much you can really handle the game development 'life style'.

Personally, I've never found better environment than being inside a 25-35 people team where you can just go to one guy to clear or figure something out. And it's a bummer when it goes beyond that for production reason and you know you won't be aware of everything that's going on in the game anymore.

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Oh man, Frog Fractions is pretty incredible.

Also it gives you the option after the credits to listen to any of the soundtrack with Goldblum noises overdubbed.

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Fun non-flaming alien-with-human-skull-inside story: the head on the original Alien had a human skull suspended in clear material.

alenhead2.jpg

It never really showed up on screen due to Ridley Scott & Derek Vanlint's beautiful cinematography, so they dropped the transparency when they made the cheaper and more agile suits for the sequel.

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This episode inspired me to write this semicoherent rambling about violence in Video games (being finnish, there might be some strange grammar).

Most games are about space. Controlling it and objects in it. Football is about how to get a certain object into a certain place while obeying the rules. Racing is how to control your object so it reaches certain coordinates before others. Those are about moving an object from place to place. Another gameplay concept of controlling space and objects in it, is tag. Tag is about contact, avoiding and achieving it. These basic ideas can be amazingly deep and wonderful or stupidly shallow and boring depending on the rulesets that surround them.

Pong is kind of a reverse shooter, you try to hit a projectile and send a projectile back in a way it misses the other player. So when you flip those mechanics again and use realistic graphics, it can become morally super suspicious fast. When you represent the real world in your game about those basic mechanics, things start to look violent pretty easily. I'm not suggesting games with focus on spatial control should always be abstracted (simulating reality can be a good choice for completely mechanics driven game too), just that the killing and destruction represented in video games today is a logical result of combining more or less reality based visuals that attract and fascinate us with simple but powerful spatial mechanics like tag.

The strange area comes when you want to combine that gameplay with story, characters and an environment where you feel that at least some of your own morals and emotions should be present. A year ago I played Zelda 1 and I was surprised how much it still felt like a real adventure. A vital part of that sense was how the combat and enemies felt truly dangerous. I had to be cautious and at times try some desperate tactics to survive. The idea of a mass murderer that you should also empathise with has been discussed many times before, but the thing that keeps bothering me is that I can't seem to figure out how there could have been the same kind of tension and danger without using a mechanic that was most convenient to depict as an act of violence.

Also about JP's Hotline Miami comment, I don't think it is just another really violent game that happens to be well made too. Many games choose to represent the basic game of projectile tag as guns, bullets and guys exploding into bloody pieces while the core playing experience can be a quite mundane task of pointing and clicking stuff. Hotline Miami not just looks but feels frantic and aggressive, you can lose control of the situation no matter how carefully you try to keep things in order (as Chris well described in the podcast). I think the gore could be removed and the visuals abstracted into floating squares and the game would still feel violent.

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On the subject of email greetings, I have not had anything which inspired me to write an email as opposed to writing about it on this here forum lately, but my opening would have been

"Oh hi Thumbs,"

For separate but equal LoMa chat, League of Legends actually has 4 gametypes. They have traditional-style 5v5 LoMa, a 5v5 point capture gametype called Dominion (imagine Arathi Basin from WoW with equally spaced control points around a map, which having the majority of drains the other team's tickets), a 3v3 LoMa on its own special map, and then ARAM. ARAM is All Random All Mid, where once you are ready to go it automatically locks you into a randomly chosen lord. ARAM is generally played on Riot's tutorial map, which is very small and one lane only. You have increased EXP gain and increased mana gain. BUT, once you leave the fountain area you can't buy items until you die, and returning to the fountain doesn't heal you. It's fun as hell. Unfortunately, the standard 5v5 is the only one most people consider "real" LoL because the others are totally unique and interesting in their own way.

So basically, branching out into other game modes besides traditional LoMing in Dota 2 is extremely awesome and I hope it succeeds for them. There need to be fun/casual/easy ways to play around in these games without it being the super serious impossible game its presented to be.

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Yeah! I fucking loved Dominion when I still played LoL! A lot of people I talk to hate it. |:

|:

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to Sean: I have to agree with Twig here; I have yet to see a lord that isn't good in diretide. (And I've seen every character in the game played at least once in diretide.) I'm curious as to which characters you were playing, because some definitely require a different mindset, but the way Dota is balanced in general is that some characters need gold to get strong, some need just levels, and that balance is how roles like carry and support are determined. In diretide since everybody gets the same amount of gold and levels for the most part (theres very little difference) everybody gets the gold and levels they need to go at their full potential.

Also, its been almost a year now and you still don't know that the location where the candy bucket is located is the ancients spawn for each team.

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I feel like if I hadn't read about Halo 4 King of the Hill Fueled be Mtn Dew prior to listening to this episode I would have been slightly confused as to what you guys were talking about. I also thought the flaming halo skull was really dumb when I first saw it. It didn't fit with my mental picture of what the Halo aesthetic was supposed to be. To be fair, I have never actually played the single player portion of a Halo game, so my mental picture may have been more informed by the fact that the teaser trailer reminded me of Metroid Prime.

I liked Sean's point about how TWD can contain violence without being about violence, and I realized I can't think of many games for which that is true.

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What about that Hotline Miami, eh? I've been conditioned to wantonly murder top down sprites on sight.

It's quite something when a game can get you so into the zone that you can no longer differentiate between active input and zombie clicking the mouse to try and interact with something you have no control over.

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I liked Sean's point about how TWD can contain violence without being about violence, and I realized I can't think of many games for which that is true.

I kind of feel the opposite. I think the most games aren't about violence, they're about hemotechnics. When they're actually ABOUT violence, or at least address it head-on as with Hotline Miami, it's a breath of fresh air because a) it's more honest and B) it's more internally consistent.

I wrote about this a while ago as well: Cardboard Cutout Massacre 2012

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I kind of feel the opposite. I think the most games aren't about violence, they're about hemotechnics.

I'm not as sure about the second part (partially because I can't find a good definition on Google, lol), but I would totally agree that a lot of games that use violence aren't so much about the violence. As they've talked about on the podcast a few times, "shoot something to make it go away" is a really simple and time-proven mechanic to build a game on top of, so we'll get thoughtful games stacked on top of a shooter. That's the disjunction that's really bothersome: the violence is central to the game, yet not where the passion and creativity is. It feels poorly-weighted.

I think The Walking Dead succeeds because it makes the violence peripheral, with the central aim of feeling other people out and trying to discern what they're thinking. As you noted, other games like Hotline Miami and Far Cry 2 choose the second route of addressing the violence head-on and actually being about it.

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I'm not as sure about the second part (partially because I can't find a good definition on Google, lol)

I'm just taking a guess here, because I've never seen the word before, but I would assume "hemotechnics" to be a portmanteau of "hemoglobin" and "pyrotechnics," referring simply to extreme gushing blood effects and the like.

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I kind of feel the opposite. I think the most games aren't about violence, they're about hemotechnics.

I think The Walking Dead succeeds because it makes the violence peripheral

I think that "about violence" may have been a bad choice of words, because I don't think that most game are about violence in a thematic sense. What I meant was more that games tend to have core mechanics that are inherently violent, and the ones that don't tend to avoid violence altogether.

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Well, the problem there is that the lived experience for most of us is the threat of violence, rather than violence itself, but games have quicksaves and such that make postponing or averting violence somewhat ineffectual as a thematic element.

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Well, the problem there is that the lived experience for most of us is the threat of violence, rather than violence itself, but games have quicksaves and such that make postponing or averting violence somewhat ineffectual as a thematic element.

I've never even really experienced the threat of violence in any personal and direct sense.

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I'm with JP Sniper 100% on his Hotline Miami feelings as expressed on the cast. Wanting to be respectful to what is clearly a good video game with uniqueish hooks, while still recognizing that what is is doing is scraping the bottom of the can.

Since Skyrim came out and then Dark Souls PC I have returned to my love of RPGs full force. I can't get enough. I even just borrowed FF13/13-2 from a coworker (I guess in an effort to stop liking RPGs :P).

To me there is a real difference in how I experience game violence when it is expressed in a form where the actual living things of our world are hurt as opposed to inhuman opponent things. And I imagine it will be a long time before I really understand my feelings.

I don't like games where "human beings" die or suffer. I find ubisoft's games get under my skin for this reason. For example, our patron saint of grenades rolling down hills, Far Cry 2, I really disliked killing guys up close cause then you had to hear them bleeding out... Or AssasCreed1 which I stopped playing after stabbing too many guys and having to hear them moan and roll around on the floor in pain. In FC2s case it made me play as a super cautious sniper type, keeping the bad guys as far away as possible.

I was really excited to play Monster Hunter on the Wii but couldn't get past the initial stages of hunting where I was tasked with killing these slow moving herbivore dinosaur things that were simply walking around in fields grazing with their young... made me feel sick.

I've explored how terrible the game Manhunt made me feel, and while Hotline Miami shared little with that game, I also made an association between the two before having played HLM. Something to do with grit and grainyness.

So non-violence as a game mechanic might not be the grail I am seeking. I like shooting toasters in the head the same way I love balling up a piece of scrap paper and tossing it in the wastepaper basket from 10 yards. I think that is a very human pleasure, the pleasure of throwing something so that it lands where you want it to. From snowball fights to Halos. But while the game I would like to make might certainly involve killing things, I still think that video game designers need to explore non-violent mechanics and find the fun in those.

Sorry, just thinking out loud here... I meant to look at what kind of non-violent game mechanics would be fun in an RPG style game and completely lost my train... I'll let you get back to your conversation.

before I go though, let me just say: GAMES!

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