Idle Thumbs 94: Readers Like You

[seamus2389]

Planescape:torment was a game where you played as a character who had a past you discovered throughout the game but he did have amnesia and didn't know his own past.

[soggybagel]

A couple things. Obviously I'm here posting because I love Idle Thumbs, but I have to say this episode confused the hell out of me. Maybe it was because I was tired and slightly distracted at the time while listening but there were multiple times that I got irritated or confused because you guys started to talk about a game or were describing things that made no sense to me since I had no context (having not played the games) and the descriptions just befuddled me. "When you acquire a spouse, they become part of your inventory, but they can be a zombie wife." I may be paraphrasing here because I listened to it last night but I just had no fucking clue what you were talking about. And this is something I love about you guys because this is who you guys are and its why I listen but I think it was Jake who was going to make a comparison of how Film attracts a lot more people from wider professions than game development, but he gets cut off for a second, then it is never returned to. Maybe I was just in a bad mood but I was getting annoyed by that stuff last night.

Sorry. I just had to vent about this.

I do want to really applaud you guys for discussing always on internet requirements and the pitfalls of such implementations. Especially in the way that these platform holders and developers are basically operating on the basis that the infrastructure and tech is about ten years ahead of what it really is out in the real world (I.E. North America in this specific situation). As far as real world scenarios, something that I find extremely frustrating is that EA will shutdown legacy servers of older sports games.

SEE: http://www.shacknews.com/article/77220/madden-nfl-11-fifa-11-servers-shutting-down , http://www.shacknews.com/article/72913/ea-shutting-down-online-for-more-games

This is frustrating namely because EA chooses to run their own servers and implement their own online pass on top of Xbox Live's requirement to pay for Gold access. Now, I'm an avid sports game player and for a lot of them I do abandon them after a year or so when the new iteration appears. Games like Madden and NHL I move on. SO I'll admit I'm one of those "who cares its an old game" for those series, but it does bother me that an older boxing or MMA game, Burnout's, and Need For Speeds are shut down. Because sometimes with those games I get an urge to play and want to call up a friend and say "let's do a round/race or two" but you can't. Because its SHUT OFF.

Lastly, I know you didn't explicitly state this in the cast but I do want to thank Chris for always being an ardent defender of the liberal arts in colleges. Increasingly I see that many people tend to devalue and belittle the liberal arts and I know you've in the past defended them. I was a history major and you (if I recall correctly) a music major. It's just that I tend to hang out both in a literal real world sense and an online sense with people who come primarily from a programming/engineering/hard science background and beyond the jokes about income they often view a History degree or Music degree or Philosophy degree as a waste of time. But I what I saw was that those in the engineering track at my school had one or two opportunities to take a "fun" class in their first two years but then were shepherded down a very strict curriculum while I was able to take a wide breadth of classes that I don't regret for a second taking. And as you all pointed out, this is something that people can bring to the table that is many times unique in an industry like the games industry.

P.S. I'm going to relisten to the pod today as I may have just had a cloudy head last night.

[mikemariano]

you guys started to talk about a game or were describing things that made no sense to me since I had no context (having not played the games) and the descriptions just befuddled me. "When you acquire a spouse, they become part of your inventory, but they can be a zombie wife."

I don't think you actually missed anything; I've only played the original King's Bounty and Heroes of Might and Magic II and the features you paraphrased aren't part of the core gameplay of the series and were equally unfamiliar to me. They never actually talked about how the Heroes games play.

But they did describe the game they were talking about (Clash of Heroes), which doesn't seem to be anything like the Heroes series.

I'm trying to think of a good description of Heroes of Might and Magic. You pick a Hero, take turns with other computer controlled heroes, run around a map, get some ore, hire some sprites, and have all your guys die in battle?

[Chris]

A couple things. Obviously I'm here posting because I love Idle Thumbs, but I have to say this episode confused the hell out of me. Maybe it was because I was tired and slightly distracted at the time while listening but there were multiple times that I got irritated or confused because you guys started to talk about a game or were describing things that made no sense to me since I had no context (having not played the games) and the descriptions just befuddled me. "When you acquire a spouse, they become part of your inventory, but they can be a zombie wife." I may be paraphrasing here because I listened to it last night but I just had no fucking clue what you were talking about. And this is something I love about you guys because this is who you guys are and its why I listen but I think it was Jake who was going to make a comparison of how Film attracts a lot more people from wider professions than game development, but he gets cut off for a second, then it is never returned to. Maybe I was just in a bad mood but I was getting annoyed by that stuff last night.

Sorry. I just had to vent about this.

I do want to really applaud you guys for discussing always on internet requirements and the pitfalls of such implementations. Especially in the way that these platform holders and developers are basically operating on the basis that the infrastructure and tech is about ten years ahead of what it really is out in the real world (I.E. North America in this specific situation). As far as real world scenarios, something that I find extremely frustrating is that EA will shutdown legacy servers of older sports games.

SEE: http://www.shacknews...s-shutting-down , http://www.shacknews...-for-more-games

This is frustrating namely because EA chooses to run their own servers and implement their own online pass on top of Xbox Live's requirement to pay for Gold access. Now, I'm an avid sports game player and for a lot of them I do abandon them after a year or so when the new iteration appears. Games like Madden and NHL I move on. SO I'll admit I'm one of those "who cares its an old game" for those series, but it does bother me that an older boxing or MMA game, Burnout's, and Need For Speeds are shut down. Because sometimes with those games I get an urge to play and want to call up a friend and say "let's do a round/race or two" but you can't. Because its SHUT OFF.

Lastly, I know you didn't explicitly state this in the cast but I do want to thank Chris for always being an ardent defender of the liberal arts in colleges. Increasingly I see that many people tend to devalue and belittle the liberal arts and I know you've in the past defended them. I was a history major and you (if I recall correctly) a music major. It's just that I tend to hang out both in a literal real world sense and an online sense with people who come primarily from a programming/engineering/hard science background and beyond the jokes about income they often view a History degree or Music degree or Philosophy degree as a waste of time. But I what I saw was that those in the engineering track at my school had one or two opportunities to take a "fun" class in their first two years but then were shepherded down a very strict curriculum while I was able to take a wide breadth of classes that I don't regret for a second taking. And as you all pointed out, this is something that people can bring to the table that is many times unique in an industry like the games industry.

P.S. I'm going to relisten to the pod today as I may have just had a cloudy head last night.

We were kind of tired and out of it on this episode, which might explain some of the goofiness.

[Chris]

I don't think you actually missed anything; I've only played the original King's Bounty and Heroes of Might and Magic II and the features you paraphrased aren't part of the core gameplay of the series and were equally unfamiliar to me.

Sorry, that was specifically only in reference to the new King's Bounty games.

[feelthedarkness]

I'm glad the world is finally get hip to Breckon Face Binding.

Also, re:game preservation in the face of always on DRM/servers: if it's worth caring about, some nerd will hack up a fix. Some people hacked up sort of working Star Wars Galaxies servers, and all the charm in that game was the stuff other users created.

Double Also: That's a major concern in the digital humanities/museum field, but it goes far deeper, like what happen in 25 years when the codecs that encoded music are lost, or even the OS needed to install a program to play a disc.

[Chris]

I'm glad the world is finally get hip to Breckon Face Binding.

Also, re:game preservation in the face of always on DRM/servers: if it's worth caring about, some nerd will hack up a fix. Some people hacked up sort of working Star Wars Galaxies servers, and all the charm in that game was the stuff other users created.

Double Also: That's a major concern in the digital humanities/museum field, but it goes far deeper, like what happen in 25 years when the codecs that encoded music are lost, or even the OS needed to install a program to play a disc.

I think there is a difference that results from one of those two situations being essentially intentional in its obsolescence, and the other circumstantial.

People can plan for things like codecs being potentially lost, by keeping well-constructed archives of codecs, or something. That's not to say that WILL happen, just that it is totally foreseeable, with a solution that is at least legal and legitimate. But having to say, "Well, someone will release a [likely technically illegal] exploit that'll make it no big deal," just kind of sucks. It relies on publishers--which may very well still be around in some form by the time this matters, even if they've been absorbed by some other company--deciding to turn a blind eye. I know that kind of thing is a problem in the film archiving world as well, but with digital stuff there aren't any of the scapegoats that come along with needing to physically store aging film reels or whatever.

[Luftmensch]

One thing about the legality issue, the law often gives a lot of special considerations to archivists. Brewser Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, has had a lot of interesting experiences running a completely digital library, and dealing with weird copyright issues. I recommend listening to his Long Now Seminar, where he makes a lot of really interesting points about not just preserving the content but even the functionality of the internet. It's really fascinating stuff, he basically addresses (albeit inconclusively) everything feelthedarkness said.

[Gormongous]

I really enjoyed the discussion of self-discovery as a potential narrative beat in games. Jake downplayed its effectiveness in The Walking Dead, and though I can't speak to the series as a whole, I had a powerful interaction along those lines while playing the first episode. By accident, I stepped outside the drugstore before checking the back room.

I clicked on the black zombie trapped by the telephone pole and experienced this series of thoughts:

Oh hey, he must work at the pharmacy.

No, Lee's not looking at his uniform.

Lee's spending a long time staring at him.

Does Lee know him?

Lee's not talking.

Lee looks sad.

Oh God.

It's his brother.

Oh God

I thought it was a really daring choice. And then I walked into the back room and found the picture, so I'm probably in the minority who experienced things my way. But I really liked it, enough to tell my friends.

I think there is a difference that results from one of those two situations being essentially intentional in its obsolescence, and the other circumstantial.

People can plan for things like codecs being potentially lost, by keeping well-constructed archives of codecs, or something. That's not to say that WILL happen, just that it is totally foreseeable, with a solution that is at least legal and legitimate. But having to say, "Well, someone will release a [likely technically illegal] exploit that'll make it no big deal," just kind of sucks. It relies on publishers--which may very well still be around in some form by the time this matters, even if they've been absorbed by some other company--deciding to turn a blind eye. I know that kind of thing is a problem in the film archiving world as well, but with digital stuff there aren't any of the scapegoats that come along with needing to physically store aging film reels or whatever.

I have a friend who's very involved in the "gray market" for films that have seen no efforts to be released or preserved. Beyond films that interest no one at the moment and thus die a quiet death on a hard drive somewhere, there is a definite issue of companies that own the rights to films that they have no intention of publishing, but are fully willing to spend thousands of dollars fighting illegal distribution of anyway, just in case they decide the market is ready after several decades biding their time or whatever. It's an extraordinarily frustrating situation that almost totally relies on passionate people operating outside the law for conservation purposes, just like a lot of software pirates acting as "archivists". It's not really surprising, though. If there's one thing the capitalist system doesn't provide for, it's posterity.

[gregbrown]

MMO games are a more pressing archival problem, just because it's hard to recreate the sense of what it was like when the world was alive with thousands of people playing at once. I can't imagine how we could recreate EVE in 20 years.

AFAIK, the field of dance suffered a similar issue before video recordings, since dance notation varied quite a bit and left some elements up to the performer.

[Jake]

MMO games are a more pressing archival problem, just because it's hard to recreate the sense of what it was like when the world was alive with thousands of people playing at once. I can't imagine how we could recreate EVE in 20 years.

AFAIK, the field of dance suffered a similar issue before video recordings, since dance notation varied quite a bit and left some elements up to the performer.

MMOs are like actual wars or public events... hopefully people are just documenting them well. I'm sure it's nearly impossible, but if developers would occasionally just run massive demo recordings of a full 24 hours of a server, it could be kind of incredible to study.

[Luftmensch]

AFAIK, the field of dance suffered a similar issue before video recordings, since dance notation varied quite a bit and left some elements up to the performer.

Same with music, although accurate and consistent musical notation goes back quite a ways. I think it's interesting that, unlike dance, music notation was perfectly precise for most of its history. As far as I know lead sheets didn't even exist until after Jazz. It's pretty fascinating to me that even in literate societies (or at least societies with literacy), folk dance and music were entirely passed down by direct teaching.

MMOs are like actual wars or public events... hopefully people are just documenting them well. I'm sure it's nearly impossible, but if developers would occasionally just run massive demo recordings of a full 24 hours of a server, it could be kind of incredible to study.

With replay recording as widespread as it is, that'd be fantastic if someone did just record all of that. Going back to the Brewster Kahle talk I mentioned earlier, he said that the Internet Archive started recording all TV broadcasts in the world since so much of it was being lost forever, even though it was just data. From a history standpoint it's phenomenal: You can watch a full week of news from the week following 9/11. The whole 168 hours, uncut and annotated, from 19 different TV stations across the world. Here's a link.

That would be incredible if the IA, for example, recorded full stretches of time of major events in WoW or other MMOs, especially the final weeks, and created a server where you could go on any time and play back a day or week or hour of the whole world on loop. Inevitably you couldn't interact with it, but my god, that would be the most incredible experience to walk in, read conversations in real-time, just follow someone's ghost. Holy shit, this needs to happen.;

[Chris]

MMOs are like actual wars or public events... hopefully people are just documenting them well. I'm sure it's nearly impossible, but if developers would occasionally just run massive demo recordings of a full 24 hours of a server, it could be kind of incredible to study.

That is an amazing idea.

[feelthedarkness]

With replay recording as widespread as it is, that'd be fantastic if someone did just record all of that. Going back to the Brewster Kahle talk I mentioned earlier, he said that the Internet Archive started recording all TV broadcasts in the world since so much of it was being lost forever, even though it was just data. From a history standpoint it's phenomenal: You can watch a full week of news from the week following 9/11. The whole 168 hours, uncut and annotated, from 19 different TV stations across the world. Here's a link.

Yeah, it's kind of wild compared to the original Johnny Carson Tonight Shows, and a lot of the earliest Dr Whos (dr whoms?), all lost to history. Though I guess they found a reel of some 1960s Tonight Shows clips and segments in a DOD warehouse.

I would have loved to see a tape of when "we" opened the AQ40 gates on Mannoroth. (first PvP server, 2nd server overall by seconds). A rare singular event, sort of like that recent Eve war, though the tape would be a slideshow of jerks.

[Problem Machine]

It actually strikes me that if you were to set up an MMO to do so from the start it probably wouldn't be too difficult to record them 24/7. I doubt most servers would generate more than a few hundred megs a day of just entity instructions. And then, considering the actual level of social interaction that happens outside of one's immediate social circle, it would be possible to have a fairly authentic replay at some arbitrary point in the future with just your circle of friends playing in the recorded demo-world. You could still buy things from other ghost-players via whatever in-game storefronts are set up, even.

I suppose you wouldn't be able to really participate in the inane chatter in quite the same way, but it would still be pretty authentic. And fake servers could be set up to just stream the demo data off of a central 're-enactment server' somewhere.

Dunno. Interesting idea!

[Badfinger]

For more on the fucked up US Internet situation, I recommend this Bill Moyers interview with Susan Crawford, who is really smart and just awesome: link

It'll make you mad about stuff. It touches on issues like what Luftmensch posted above.

It occurred to me that I should post this also. It had just been linked to me recently.

 

I am currently living in a place that has very good (and very expensive) internet access. I am lucky, and I know it and try not to take that sort of stuff for granted. I fervently hope that some day fairly soon the US government understands that the internet is now a Utility and not a Luxury. In places that have internet, the US should be right up at the top and instead it's kind of shitty and abusive.

[soggybagel]

I do think that the United States gets shit on a lot for its lack of high speed penetration across the country but then compare the US to a country like South Korea. The fact of the matter is that there is just way more ground to cover where as some countries like South Korea or Japan have the benefit of high density populations in a much smaller footprint.

Of course this doesn't excuse the fact that the US Telcoms drag their feet for upgrading infrastructure and look to nickel and dime consumers as much as possible (on top of the issues raised in the podcast in regards to content creators being providers). I do have friends and family that live in more rural areas of America though and something like an always on DRM situation can really screw them over though.

[osmosisch]

Has someone got a good photo of F. N. Breckon Esquire for me? On account of reasons.

[CaptainFish]

Great cast. I found it a bit weird that the "Rubber Chicken with a pulley in the middle" was lumped in with the "use monkey as a wrench" puzzle. The former is completely straightforward on it's face (use pulley on rope), it's just kind of clouded by a strange item, whereas the monkey puzzle doesn't makes sense even after the pun does it's work. It's, uh, pretty bad.

I really enjoyed the discussion of self-discovery as a potential narrative beat in games. Jake downplayed its effectiveness in The Walking Dead, and though I can't speak to the series as a whole, I had a powerful interaction along those lines while playing the first episode. By accident, I stepped outside the drugstore before checking the back room.

I clicked on the black zombie trapped by the telephone pole and experienced this series of thoughts:

Oh hey, he must work at the pharmacy.

No, Lee's not looking at his uniform.

Lee's spending a long time staring at him.

Does Lee know him?

Lee's not talking.

Lee looks sad.

Oh God.

It's his brother.

Oh God

I thought it was a really daring choice. And then I walked into the back room and found the picture, so I'm probably in the minority who experienced things my way. But I really liked it, enough to tell my friends.

I feel like a lot of that part of episode was written/choreographed in an interesting way. Specifically in how it avoided matter-of-fact or humorous direct descriptions of clickables in favour of, what felt to me, like a personal monologue. A lot of the stuff Lee says is something that's pretty much only meant for him as he goes through that experience, rather than just entertaining/informing the player.

[Argobot]

A lot of the stuff Lee says is something that's pretty much only meant for him as he goes through that experience, rather than just entertaining/informing the player.

Agreed. I think the Walking Dead does a fair job of presenting this character who a background that isn't immediately known to the player. It works great in the first episode, and while the importance of Lee's background does disappear in later episodes, it makes narrative sense for this to happen. If the game was still making oblique references to Lee's past in later episodes, it would have felt too overblown.

[tegan]

Regarding the "kids are better at adventure games" thing, I was much better at the original Monkey Island as a kid, right up until the point where you had to get past the piranha poodles. I didn't figure it out until I played it on SCUMMVM years later when I was old enough to know how to cook and knew enough French to kind of sort of translate "Caniche Endormi."

[specq]

The Danny Glover story reminded me of the Italo Calvino story "The Naked Bosom" from Mr. Palomar.

Not that you were trying to check out a topless Danny Glover, but it is just an amazing story about the futility of trying to have any encounter with another person without room for ambiguity and misunderstanding.

If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. Indeed I registered solely (mostly?) for the purpose of saying so.

[sclpls]

Although I didn't write in stating this, since it is a topic out in the open now I will also cop to having a difficult time distinguishing between Jake and Sean's voices.

The conversation about preserving games makes me think about my theory that future civilizations (say, 500+ years) will know more about the Romans, for example, than they will about our current era. That's because digital media is easy to transfer around, but it is total shit in terms of preservation. I have a number of CDs from when they were first released as a medium that just don't play anymore. Plus, CD players will eventually be as obsolete as cassette decks. Hard drives fail. The sub-optimal solution that we rely on is to just keep copying everything, which is what digital media is good at. Who knows what happens when human beings invent new mediums that we rely on though. Maybe we preserve all this digital junk, but maybe we don't... either way there are probably some enormous chunks of social knowledge that get lost in the process.

I realize this is all way beyond the scope of games that require you to be logged into a server, but that topic did spark up that bigger topic in my mind, and it is something I think about a lot.

[mikemariano]

In regard to Jake's observation of the civilization name in Myst changing from "Dunny" to "D'ni", Neal Stephenson's novel Reamde is partially about an MMO called "T'Rain" and its overuse of apostrophes.

 

There is a section (partially readable in Google Books) in which a linguist is horrified by their arbitrary punctuation.

[Chris]

Although I didn't write in stating this, since it is a topic out in the open now I will also cop to having a difficult time distinguishing between Jake and Sean's voices. The conversation about preserving games makes me think about my theory that future civilizations (say, 500+ years) will know more about the Romans, for example, than they will about our current era. That's because digital media is easy to transfer around, but it is total shit in terms of preservation. I have a number of CDs from when they were first released as a medium that just don't play anymore. Plus, CD players will eventually be as obsolete as cassette decks. Hard drives fail. The sub-optimal solution that we rely on is to just keep copying everything, which is what digital media is good at. Who knows what happens when human beings invent new mediums that we rely on though. Maybe we preserve all this digital junk, but maybe we don't... either way there are probably some enormous chunks of social knowledge that get lost in the process. I realize this is all way beyond the scope of games that require you to be logged into a server, but that topic did spark up that bigger topic in my mind, and it is something I think about a lot.

There's also going to be way more stuff in total than there was during Ancient Rome. You could probably make arguments in either direction about this, but it seems like it's going to be an incredibly difficult problem for future generations to sort out which cultural artifacts in our practically infinite store of ephemeral cultural artifacts are actually the ones that speak to our culture most importantly or effectively. Getting a holistic view of all this bullshit is going to be tough.