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Jake

Idle Thumbs 91: The Clapper

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Mega McCheese confirmed?

I usually avoid spoilers for things I'm already on board for. At the same time my memory for things I'm not interested in is so tenuous. I heard a spoiler on the Giant Bomb GoTY discussion that at the time made me write off Assassin's Creed 3*, but I can't remember it at all now.

*In terms of the plot going anywhere interesting, not in terms of the gameplay being fun.

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Please, for the love of God, leave the making fun of random weird internet people in the past. It is why I could not stand GFW Radio and I really expect better from the Thumbs. I can feel my brain being strangled. What a colossal waste of time. I suppose I should be thankful it only lasted a minute instead of 20+ like on those old shows.

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Thanks for reading my reader mail on the podcast, guys. In retrospect, I probably should have reproduced more of Bissell's argument, but you all reconstructed the lion's share of it on your own. Basically, Bissell's beef is that this cultural aversion to spoilers prevents good gaming criticism from happening, at least without copious hand-wringing and fan outcry. He would rather gamers police their own content pending sometime in the future when it becomes recognized that plot twists are only the smallest part of a game's appeal.

Myself, I avoid spoilers for media I plan to consume, but always keeping in mind that, if knowing the plot ruins a game or movie to the point where I won't bother watching it, I'm probably better off knowing and not bothering.

I think this is a really interesting argument, mostly because I literally could not care at all about spoilers. They mean almost nothing to me, so I'm pretty constantly surprised by the amount of carping that goes on around them. I can think of probably 3 cases where knowing a spoiler would have hurt my enjoyment of something, which is probably an indictment of those things.

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I think this is a really interesting argument, mostly because I literally could not care at all about spoilers. They mean almost nothing to me, so I'm pretty constantly surprised by the amount of carping that goes on around them. I can think of probably 3 cases where knowing a spoiler would have hurt my enjoyment of something, which is probably an indictment of those things.

For most games I tend to agree regarding narrative spoilers. I'm also the kind of person who reads plot synopses of T.V. shows so I can find out who dies beforehand and decide whether or not to keep watching the show accordingly. =P But how do you feel about "mechanical" spoilers and/or puzzle spoilers? (Mechanical spoilers meaning things like, "the A.I. seems really good but if you use this one particular obscure tactic they fall for it every time!"...and now when you play, you've got that tactic in your mind and didn't even have the fun of figuring out for yourself how to break the game...or as another example, all that Ant-Lion stuff discussed on the cast)

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For most games I tend to agree regarding narrative spoilers. I'm also the kind of person who reads plot synopses of T.V. shows so I can find out who dies beforehand and decide whether or not to keep watching the show accordingly. =P But how do you feel about "mechanical" spoilers and/or puzzle spoilers? (Mechanical spoilers meaning things like, "the A.I. seems really good but if you use this one particular obscure tactic they fall for it every time!"...and now when you play, you've got that tactic in your mind and didn't even have the fun of figuring out for yourself how to break the game...or as another example, all that Ant-Lion stuff discussed on the cast)

That's a really good point!

Most games are not mechanically dense enough for this to happen. You have to understand the majority of the mechanics or you can't progress through the game. But to answer your questions, learning about a mechanic in a game second hand doesn't hurt my enjoyment of it at all; in fact, many times I wouldn't know about interesting mechanics without reading about them somewhere else because I didn't figure them out on my own (first thing that comes to mind is killing elites in Halo before the grunts to make the grunts run away, something I had to be told about to figure out. I'm sure there are better examples than that. I mean almost everything in Dwarf Fortress counts, so there you go).

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There's a definite difference between a game slowly "unlocking" a language as you hear it as Shawn described vs. actually learning what those words mean. I'd be very interested in a game that actually gave us some sort of fluency in a foreign language. Did anyone pick up any Italian from Assassins Creed II?

Then again, Chris managed to read the Fez glyphs. I've been playing Ultima games for decades and still can't read city names in runes.

Many times I wouldn't know about interesting mechanics without reading about them somewhere else because I didn't figure them out on my own.

Or you could be like my friend who didn't think to use the gravity gun during Ravenholm in Half-Life 2 and get angry! He resented the fact that there was a "particular obscure tactic" and was less inclined to play the game because of it.

Please, for the love of God, leave the making fun of random weird internet people in the past.

Also, Shawn talked about doin' it and I am uncomfortable with that.

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Did anyone pick up any Italian from Assassins Creed II?

Only "requiescat in pace", because he said it SO MANY TIMES.

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There's a definite difference between a game slowly "unlocking" a language as you hear it as Shawn described vs. actually learning what those words mean. I'd be very interested in a game that actually gave us some sort of fluency in a foreign language. Did anyone pick up any Italian from Assassins Creed II?

I played Metro 2033 in Russian-- a language that I studied in college. It was great refresher on all the vocabulary for guns and also demons.

I agree though, I wish more games would include language fluency as some kind of mechanic. The only recent game that I can think of that did this was Fez, and I enjoyed it tremendously.

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On the topic of spoilers, personally I've found that more often than not, books ruin the film for me, not vice versa. The Princess Bride, as a novel, puts everything in such a different light that it'd be impossible to read the book and then enjoy the film the same way, and, at least for me, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was so much more complex and interesting as a book that I kept getting distracted by how much simply didn't happen that I had trouble just enjoying the plot for itself. It's not the same as a spoiler exactly, but it is a sort of knowledge and context that makes the experience less enjoyable than if I didn't know it before.

Damn, if I just go with that definition, the idea of spoilers just opens up into new crazy possibilities. If you're an animal rights activist, does the fact that chim-chim was punched on set "spoil" Speed Racer for you? Is that the same thing, and if not, what's the difference?

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If you are looking for more games like walking Mars and Mismata I suggest Ice pick lodges 2 games - The void (on steam) and Pathalogic (on desura)

Reading about them on Rock paper shotgun made them an insta-buy even though I have only played about a hour of each so far.

http://www.rockpaper...think-the-void/

http://www.rockpaper...art-1-the-body/

I would like to also recommend this excellent Let's Play of The Void. Even the soft-spoken commentator fits right in with ethereal atmosphere, and he manages to explain the game's systems very well while providing his own speculation on the game's narrative and themes, he shows off all the little details put in by the developers, and he knows when to stay quiet, and let the game speak for itself.

After watching it, The Void became my favorite game that I have never played. I'd like to hear the Thumb's take on it sometime.

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I played Metro 2033 in Russian-- a language that I studied in college. It was great refresher on all the vocabulary for guns and also demons.

I agree though, I wish more games would include language fluency as some kind of mechanic. The only recent game that I can think of that did this was Fez, and I enjoyed it tremendously.

I've mentioned this before, but the interactive fiction game The Gostak was entirely about learning a 'new language.' (It still used english pronouns but most other important words are invented) You then used the structure of interactive fiction to to explore the language on your own terms. Of course this would be a lot different if you were trying to actually learn a different language with it's own structures but I still found it interesting and fun. Perhaps if you were trying to learn vocabulary you could use this method to pick up major verbs and objects in their base form, and then learn how they're used structurally (conjugation and such) somewhere else. Or hell, maybe you could pick up more than you'd realize just by having familiar language structures to learn from.

What I really enjoyed about it, was it was all based on relative language, so by the end I had created what was essentially my own fiction based on how I imagined the words to act. For example, the titular phrase, "The gostak distimms the doshes", tells you what those words mean to each other but not definitively. It could easily be the baker bakes the bread, or the moon orbits the planets, each leading to a completely different fiction.

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So crazy that Rob Liefeld was mentioned, I was seriously revisiting this gem of a list the other day:

http://www.progressiveboink.com/2012/4/21/2960508/worst-rob-liefeld-drawings

Regarding the conversation about video games not doing a good enough job of portraying different life experiences than that of an able bodied white male, I think the argument is mostly correct about market forces and all of that. However, it doesn't explain it all entirely. Its true that the barrier to entry to publishing a novel or whatever is much lower compared to making a big budget game. Yet I would also argue that movies (and not just of the indie/arthouse cinema variety) tend to do a better job overall of portraying different life experiences than games do. I think the difference is that the movie industry has a much more diverse workforce than the typical video game company does. Although it is not the only way to solve the problem, I think a more diverse workforce would be the simplest, most direct way, and most likely way to successfully remedy the problem.

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If Mainichi is Japanese, then it's probably pronounced "My knee chee". Which would translate to mean "Every day". Seems like an appropriate enough name considering the content of the game.

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So crazy that Rob Liefeld was mentioned, I was seriously revisiting this gem of a list the other day: http://www.progressiveboink.com/2012/4/21/2960508/worst-rob-liefeld-drawings Regarding the conversation about video games not doing a good enough job of portraying different life experiences than that of an able bodied white male, I think the argument is mostly correct about market forces and all of that. However, it doesn't explain it all entirely. Its true that the barrier to entry to publishing a novel or whatever is much lower compared to making a big budget game. Yet I would also argue that movies (and not just of the indie/arthouse cinema variety) tend to do a better job overall of portraying different life experiences than games do. I think the difference is that the movie industry has a much more diverse workforce than the typical video game company does. Although it is not the only way to solve the problem, I think a more diverse workforce would be the simplest, most direct way, and most likely way to successfully remedy the problem.

That's true, & I think there's also been a trend towards ensemble casts in movies and TV, deliberately contrasting the many and varied people/roles/experiences possible. It's harder to do in Video games if you're in the mindset that players should play one character from start to finish, since you don't switch around perspectives a lot like in say, Mad Men. Makes me really interested for Double Fine Action Adventure since that seems to be one of the things they're setting out to explore. There's a tiny bit of it in Kentucky Route Zero, and I think once games/players get more accustomed to it, it'll actually solve a lot of the problem of diverse representation. If you make a game where switching perspectives is part of the play, you wouldn't want those perspectives to be identical, it's an incentive to diversify for the sake of making your game as interesting as it can be.

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I don't think switching perspectives in game is necessarily so important, though it is certainly a legitimate technique to convey that different people will have capacities in how they interact with the world. The Walking Dead did an excellent job of conveying subtle racial biases that you experience through the lens of Lee. Just stuff like that is valuable I think, and is completely missing in games where the protagonist just tends to be this blank slate.

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I don't think switching perspectives in game is necessarily so important, though it is certainly a legitimate technique to convey that different people will have capacities in how they interact with the world. The Walking Dead did an excellent job of conveying subtle racial biases that you experience through the lens of Lee. Just stuff like that is valuable I think, and is completely missing in games where the protagonist just tends to be this blank slate.

Or even, if you compare supposed blank slate characters, like Journey's red hoods to say, master chief, there's more diversity between them than between a lot of characters supposedly given a unique personality.

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What amazes me about rob leifield is that he pretty much never improved at all over the years. It's almost impressive

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A video game podcast that manages to cram Proust, Melville, Kubrick, The Empire Strikes Back, and Bedouin crab dinner all into one episode is pretty amazing.

The talk about discovering an ecosystem and learning and stuff reminded me a bit of Outcast, which wasn't quite as much about ecosystems but which did have the whole "you are thrown into this alien world and a lot of what's good in the game comes from moments of discovery and realization" thing going on. seamus2389 also mentioned Ice Pick Lodge's games which are very much like this too.

I tried Planetside 2 a bit during the beta and although I liked the epic scale and all that stuff, in the end it just felt like a round of Battlefield 1942 that I would never be able to win. The sisyphean nature of the thing really hit me in the gut as I stared into the possibility of spending hours capturing bases that will just be recaptured later, and so on. The Battlefield games have concrete end points when you win or lose - without that I think I'd find it hard to justify continued involvement, because as much as the individual moments can be neat, just to get myself into the game I'd have to accept that the whole thing would be pointless not just in the "I'm not getting anything else done" sense but in the ultimate "I can't even win" sense.

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Glad to hear there's a sequel to Neptune's Pride on the way. I hope they call it Neptune's Fall.

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The sisyphean nature of the thing really hit me in the gut as I stared into the possibility of spending hours capturing bases that will just be recaptured later, and so on.

That turns me off on Planetside 2 as well, although I do have to admit that the first few hours I played of it were really, really impressive. I'll probably still play off and on, but it didn't grip me the way Lords Management games seem to.

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I'd argue Battlefield games are equally sisyphean, they just include punctuation in the form of match score limits. Any multiplayer game is necessarily sisyphean, there is no true win state; the game ends when you stop playing. Which is generally why I prefer single player games because I do enjoy that feeling of success reached by accomplishing specific non-repeating goals.

Planetside 2 has certain aspects to it that can make you feel especially futile too. Attacking a base when both sides are equal and leaderless becomes a very clear lesson in attrition warfare. The first part of this time-lapse video is a good example of that:

Where I have found enjoyable play in Planetside is similar to where I found it in Battlefield: playing with a squad of friends all communicating with each other. And when that is the context I've had far more interesting engagements in PS2 since your squad tends to exceed a dozen players and can capture and defend small bases and outposts away from the frontlines of battle. Which is super gratifying.

The giant zerg balls (masses of players) are interesting to observe in PS2 but the lasting fun is playing with an organized group. (Which is why it's unfortunate so few on idlethumbs are interested in playing)

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Any multiplayer game is necessarily sisyphean,

True, but winning a Lords Management game feels like a tangible victory (you can even check in on how many games you've won or lost); Planetside 2 doesn't really have the same kind of structured winning conditions.

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Just as an aside, I always appreciate it when podcasts bring up something LGBT-related (in this case, Mainichi) and treat the topic with respect. So thanks.

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Just as an aside, I always appreciate it when podcasts bring up something LGBT-related (in this case, Mainichi) and treat the topic with respect. So thanks.

Seconded.

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Thirded.

A video game podcast that manages to cram Proust, Melville, Kubrick, The Empire Strikes Back, and Bedouin crab dinner all into one episode is pretty amazing.

Seconded, but with the amendment that any podcast that does that is delicious in my book. You Look Nice Today is that kind of podcast.

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