Jake

Idle Thumbs 99: "I'm Blown Away"

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The thing is I love competition. It's why I don't play a ton of online games (namely shooters which I still love) anymore that are competitive because I have more time committed to other pursuits. But I like to try to be really good at the games I play. Which is why back in the day I would play Quake 3 a ton or Counter-Strike a ton. Where I'd be averaging probably 25 hours a week which obviously isn't the most extreme in hours compared to some, but also way way more for a single game than I do these days.

And I will say that when I played on a pub, or a I played with strangers I would never ever talk on coms or rarely even type stuff. But for example when HardOCP had a Counter Strike server set I would always play there and a natural community sprung up around that game and when we'd play there it was what I'd dub friendly competitive. Meaning we all knew each other via our handles and we'd all play seriously so we would talk the occasional smack. And when I play a game with a friend on XBox Live now or just in the same room I do talk a lot of smack where if someone who was a stranger were to walk in they'd probably be a bit shocked as I jokingly am yelling "TAKE THAT YOU PIECE OF SHIT!"

But I've never bene the type to ever rage in the freakout mode about belittling people. The closest I probably get is calling someone a dumbass in Battlefield games as they take off with a transport and leave half the team behind. But you know, racism and what not always was a thing I thought was awful and stupid so its just weird that people are like that online.

And in regards to the episode, one thing that I still can't over about the new Sim City is that the size of the grid you can build in is so fucking small. As Chris pointed out some of the bigger things to build literally can take up a fourth of your map space. It's just a shame really.

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I've noticed that occasionally you'll see people talk about games that "ruin friendships", games like Neptunes Pride or the board game Diplomacy. I've never come across this problem, so I brought it up to a friend of mine. He came to the conclusion that if playing games with your friends makes you hate each other, you probably weren't very good friends to begin with. Getting mad at your friends is fun if it's in a context where it's understood that it's not meant to be taken personally.

I disagree with this. Yeah, sometimes playing a game competitively will expose behaviors of your friend(s) that you never knew before. If you're willing to say a new grievance is worth ending a friendship over without attempts to work through that grievance, well, I'm not exactly sure what to say to that. I've definitely run into instances of my friends doing despicable things when we play games, but I'm willing to apply that newfound negative aspect to the event that triggered it. For example, when one of my friends picks Pikachu in Smash Bros. I know exactly what to expect from him and will compartmentalize that frustration and anger to the time we are playing.

 

Also "ruin friendships" is generally hyperbole to talk about how angry people get at one another over something. If something is actually 'ruining friendships' regularly by its very design, is the game healthy to play?

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Listening to the episode again, it's really interesting to hear everyone struggling to express their feelings about a game that is both really exciting and really disappointing. I've had that relationship with the Total War games for the past decade or so. After Rome: Total War, every installment Creative Assembly's released has been broken in some major way, but I've played every single one, wearing my love/hate relationship on my sleeve all the while. I think that might just be the way it is with really ambitious games.

 

Also, now that Nick's officially here, you guys can talk about Crusader Kings II on the podcast! Surely John Q. Video Games has played Paradox's best yet.

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Also, now that Nick's officially here, you guys can talk about Crusader Kings II on the podcast! Surely John Q. Video Games has played Paradox's best yet.

 

Second this!

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I was more responding to Jake jumping all over competitive game players as assholes and wasn't clear in delineating that there is an intensity/communication style that can come out in a really competitive match that doesn't mean anybody is picking on anybody. Like, if I see Pudge on the map, hiding in the trees in our jungle for let's say .1 seconds. Like he blips on the mini map and then goes away, into the fog of war, I know I have about two seconds before he hooks my buddy Pierre and kills him. So if my intensity spikes and I say "FUCK GET BACK," I'm not saying "Pierre, you dumb piece of shit, why are you standing there." My brain is just firing off a frightened warning within a game that produces a lot of high-anxiety moments.

 

I took umbrage (and this really seeded in MANY conversations I've had with Jake about this) with the broad statement that is essentially "You guys are bullies; why can't you be nice," which just feels uninformed. The guys I play DOTA with are some of my closest friends. If I ever felt like I was belittling anyone or someone logged off and felt guilty/bad/whatever because of anything that came out of my or one of our friends' mouths, I'd probably quit the game forever. 

It felt like you guys were arguing two different things (which you said in a later post here). I think Jake was commenting on the perspective of the LoMa communities as a whole, and you were commenting on your personal engagements and explaining yourself rather than comment on the big picture. I get what you're saying about intent of aggressive commentary and how it's just a result of the tension, but I guess I want to know why the tension is so high. Why it has to be so high. As much as people say that the matches are long I just can't buy that as a reason for some reason. It makes me loop back to taking things more seriously than they should. Tension in video games has existed for longer than LoMas, and something about LoMas has transformed it into something unhealthy I feel. And I really don't want the answer to be the mechanics of the game because we get into how video games actually do negatively impact people (a long philosophical discussion). I think the answer is in how the communities shaped these games and the way they are "meant" to be played.

 

I played DotA ages ago before these became individual games. The guy who brought me and people from our community into it was very much that kind of personality, berating us and generally being an asshole, even in our first match. And most people we encountered in these games were like that. It actually reached a point where we got banned from a couple circles in the grand DotA community (there was a plugin that somehow allowed this over Battle.net) because we were "noobs." We barely got chances to try and improve our know-how with the game. So I guess I'm in on this whole conversation with a heavy bias of having been a 'victim' of the ugly side of this kind of game.

 

One thing you were sort of getting to is something I agree with though - when you're amongst friends, you get more relaxed about how you speak and there's general understood context there (like saying, "FUCK GET BACK" among friends is different than among strangers).

 

Edit - By the way I'm totally cool if this results in "agree to disagree" because there's some fundamental differences that may not come down to 'right and wrong.' I just dig sharing views and trying to understand things.

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Listening to the episode again, it's really interesting to hear everyone struggling to express their feelings about a game that is both really exciting and really disappointing. I've had that relationship with the Total War games for the past decade or so. After Rome: Total War, every installment Creative Assembly's released has been broken in some major way, but I've played every single one, wearing my love/hate relationship on my sleeve all the while. I think that might just be the way it is with really ambitious games.

 

Also, now that Nick's officially here, you guys can talk about Crusader Kings II on the podcast! Surely John Q. Video Games has played Paradox's best yet.

Well that's the very nature of what it means to be disappointed doesn't it? Disappointment comes with expectations of doing better. I was glad to hear the discussion on SimCity this time around because it felt like they were trying to avoid being negative last week.

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Also to be fair, it can take awhile to understand game design flaws for complex strategy games and/or simulations. Master of Orion 3 comes to mind as another game that is basically universally regarded as terrible now, but when it first came out it had a lot of positive reviews. It was another game that had so much going on that it was difficult to understand there were serious problems with the game. When games reach a certain complexity level it just becomes very difficult to gauge what's working and what isn't so it is easy for your initial impression to be very positive because whatever you don't understand you interpret as you just not having fully learned the game yet, rather than a fault of the game. I'm glad for the most part the genre has largely backed away from that level of complexity thanks to the influence of i)S and board games, although some games like those made by Paradox, and city-builders necessarily retain a certain amount of complexity.

Another problem with evaluating strategy games is it is hard to tell how long you need to play the game for. Generally speaking, you probably don't have a very good handle on things after just one play through.

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I disagree with this. Yeah, sometimes playing a game competitively will expose behaviors of your friend(s) that you never knew before. If you're willing to say a new grievance is worth ending a friendship over without attempts to work through that grievance, well, I'm not exactly sure what to say to that. I've definitely run into instances of my friends doing despicable things when we play games, but I'm willing to apply that newfound negative aspect to the event that triggered it. For example, when one of my friends picks Pikachu in Smash Bros. I know exactly what to expect from him and will compartmentalize that frustration and anger to the time we are playing.

 

Also "ruin friendships" is generally hyperbole to talk about how angry people get at one another over something. If something is actually 'ruining friendships' regularly by its very design, is the game healthy to play?

So either I suck at writing (which I do) or you suck at reading, because what you just said was basically what I was attempting to say. Obviously "ruining friendships" is hyperbole, but I still get the sense that some people have more trouble with the "compartmentalizing frustration: thing. I've definitely read posts along the lines of "we can't play this game anymore because we always end up hating eachother when we do" and I'm always slightly confused, since my experience with games is so far from that. If the rules of the game allow for or even encourage tricky plays or "backstabbing" how can you personally fault someone foe using those? And furthermore, why would you expect them not to? I'm going to stop now because I think I'm rambling. I'll probably come back and edit this for clarity when I wake up.

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Remember the Novint Falcon? Portal with the Oculus Rift and Novint Falcon support would probably be cool, but also a total barf-fest.

Didn't Chris mention once on the podcast that he had a Novint Falcon?

 

As far as how Oculus will work with TF2 I imagine it'll be like head tracking in Arma. You can control where your head is looking with the Rift but your cross hairs are still controlled by your mouse. If that's how it is it could be a HUGE advantage and might convince me to get one. Plus, I want that hat. I need more hats.

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You can turn your head to turn in-game, and you can freely aim all over the generous field of view without altering said field of view -- the latter feels akin to playing an FPS on Nintendo's original Wii, albeit far more accurate. We're told that VR Mode will ship with a few other options for interaction with the game through Rift, offering variations on the way we played. The standard setup has look-dictating movement direction, meaning that innovative uses of Rift, like moving forward while shooting sideways (by looking sideways with your head, as shooting is mapped to the mouse), won't work.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/18/valve-hands-on-vr-mode/

 

I assumed it would be similar to Red Steel on the Wii, an inner boundary where you're just aiming on screen and an outer where you start to turn the character. I'm pretty sure Nick described it that way on the cast to. i cant imagine playing it with a mouse though

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I play about 50/50 solo-public matches vs friends matches. I use the mute button (frequently) when I don't like someone.

 

There's a bunch of etiquette about Dota that's still shaking out as it hits the bigger audience (including people like me, who only pub). The old guard, who I assume came from Warcraft, seems to think it's totally OK to demand a certain loadout from you and then throw a temper tantrum when they don't get sufficient 'cooperation'. They're playing their game, and they want to play yours for you as well.

 

Personally, I report people in pub matches who get too intrusive and rude, which happens all the time. There are definitely cool, flexible people who are willing to alter their gameplans to account for the quirks of their teammates. But it feels like neither 'side' has reached a tipping point. The whole thing is like a weird experiment in democracy, where some people try to shout down people who don't agree with them and others get practical and figure out how to get a win. But we're all stuck together for an hour, and that drives some players totally bonkers.

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I finally got around to actually finishing the episode.

 

Hey, Chris! You said Big Ben takes up a huge amount of space! That's actually not true. It's a really small object that you could probably easily fit into some corner where high density stuff isn't going to happen, anyway. That is, if you're using curvy roads. If you're using grids, then you probably don't have an area like that. I've got curves out the wazoo, so I threw Big Ben down in a small crevice. (Gross.)

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An obscure OJ Mayo reference? How many major league sports do you guys follow closely? :blink:

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An obscure OJ Mayo reference? How many major league sports do you guys follow closely? :blink:

 

You know, I didn't realize he was playing 30 min a night and averaging 13pts a game for the Mavericks when I made the reference -- which may still holdup because those are solid but not superstar numbers (and people assumed he'd be a star when he came out of highschool and did a shady bid at my alma mater USC).

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Like sLiPdIsCo and Jake have said, the high time investment and low margin for error mean that the average player can lose their shit a lot faster and feel a lot more justified for it. If more LoMa games can enable newbies on a large scale without it becoming a stigma, that's awesome. 

This is something that's always irritated me with LoMa games: they're designed in such a way that they are large time commitments that ultimately are won and lost in very, very short moments. Most problematic of all these turning moments are often somewhere in the middle of the game -- and then the game continues for another 10-25 minutes during which time one side is obviously going to lose no matter what, as those players get increasingly frustrated and blaming each other. It's a design that's excellent at making people tense and angry, and usually points that anger squarely at the weakest player, which usually means the newest player.

In my experience with the different LoMas, this seems most highlighted in Dota2 (because the micro of the game is so important, which makes it especially punishing to new players). This seems really weird coming from Valve, who normally do such an amazing job of making games accessible and welcoming for new players. But even though I had player a lot of LoL and was eager to try Dota2 with friends, it absolutely drove me away after a couple of games.

Normally, listening to the thumbs talk about Dota2 makes me wish I had gotten into it, but this episode did a good job of reminding me why I didn't.

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re: Dota 2 rage. 

 

I saw these dudes at PAX a couple of years ago talking about "The Game Makes the Community" 

 

 

They hate a bit on the Dota community and game (but it was a couple years ago... it's gotten a little better) but they make some interesting points. 

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That VR Aladdin thing did indeed suck.

As far as how Oculus will work with TF2 I imagine it'll be like head tracking in Arma. You can control where your head is looking with the Rift but your cross hairs are still controlled by your mouse. If that's how it is it could be a HUGE advantage and might convince me to get one. Plus, I want that hat. I need more hats.

I use head-tracking (via TrackIR) in ArmA, and it is great, and that's a game in which independent looking and aiming makes sense and is manageable. In the fast-paced world of TF2, I can't imagine that being an advantage or even really being particularly usable.

Aiming a gun with your face is weird, but that's kinda what they're doing for these things right now, as Mington quoted.

TF2 seems like the worst candidate for this sort of thing, but it's cool that the Rift will be working in the Source engine, and starting with a game that's free to boot.

(Head-tracking aside, I would be curious to experience TF on the Rift's display.)

edit: so basically what Nick said right after I unpaused the cast. I really shouldn't comment on these things midstream.

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You know, I didn't realize he was playing 30 min a night and averaging 13pts a game for the Mavericks when I made the reference -- which may still holdup because those are solid but not superstar numbers (and people assumed he'd be a star when he came out of highschool and did a shady bid at my alma mater USC).

My comment wasn't putting the quality of your reference into question - I actually think it was very appropriate - but since an important part of the podcast revolved around the perceived difference between the culture of competition in traditional sports vs. video games and you ended up dropping that reference later, I got curious about the Thumb 'involvement' in major league sports: I remember listening or reading you talk about the MLB and - I think - the NFL before, so I was wondering if you're all following all of these sports closely; and if that's a widespread thing in the gamer community or thumb staff.

Maybe that can inform the discussion: I wonder if sports fan witnessing the behavior of coaches in theses sports (abusing the refs and their own player sometimes) tend replicate or accept the same behavior in video games. Or if the overly critics of players based on partial metrics in Fantasy Leagues changes the way player evaluate their ally efficiency.

I don't know... that might be a bullshit line of thought, I'm not sure.

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Point 1:

 

PLAY CAESAR 3. Oh my lord I played so much of that game. It is awesome. It is not exactly a city builder ala Sim City, and more a scenario game. There's actually a campaign mode that's very reminiscent of traditional RTS campaigns, where you play with progressively more complex/difficult goals to attain to win the scenario.

 

 

So either I suck at writing (which I do) or you suck at reading, because what you just said was basically what I was attempting to say. Obviously "ruining friendships" is hyperbole, but I still get the sense that some people have more trouble with the "compartmentalizing frustration: thing. I've definitely read posts along the lines of "we can't play this game anymore because we always end up hating each other when we do" and I'm always slightly confused, since my experience with games is so far from that. If the rules of the game allow for or even encourage tricky plays or "backstabbing" how can you personally fault someone foe using those? And furthermore, why would you expect them not to? I'm going to stop now because I think I'm rambling. I'll probably come back and edit this for clarity when I wake up.

 

I don't know if you are a competitive person, but I am. When I do things with other competitive people, it can get kind of heated. I ENJOY competition. But, especially when I was younger, it was easy to let that run away from me and get very loudly frustrated at other people. I'm sure I had a few "take the ball and go home" moments across sports, games, and video games throughout my teens. Most of the time with sports with was with friends, and certainly you're playing card/board games with people you're friends with as well.

 

One of the things I think makes frustration/raging more prevalent/noticeable in LoMas is the nature of how you see the game. When you're playing CS (I actually played MoH:AA and CoD competitively), you see a first person view, and the only things you have vision of are the things your gun is pointed towards. In DoTA/LoL, you have a 3rd person isometric view, and real-time vision of everything your team can see on the map. You can very literally see a person casually walking to their own death 10-15 seconds before it happens. That can be a very frustrating experience (both directions). The nature of a small team, an omnipresent view of the map, and a guaranteed time investment means frustration has the propensity to build and burst much more quickly.

 

It's also directed frustration. If you're on a team with 15 other people in an FPS, and the top guy is going "UGH CAN'T WIN PLAYING WITH ALL THESE NOOBS" he's not raging at you. If you're on a team with 4 people and the guy with the most gold starts bitching "UGH CAN'T WIN PLAYING WITH NOOB SK. QUIT AND UNINSTALL" that's personal. It's personal because you're 20% of the team composition and they need you. But in CS you can quit mid-round and be playing another map or gametype in 30 seconds with no consequence. In LoMas, that's THE GAME you are playing. You can't just drop in ~15 minutes in to just do a little light CSing before dinner, and you can't quit and be replaced. If someone is being so abusive that you just straight close the client, YOU'RE the one who's in line for punishment for quitting. Also the team is now at a 25% manpower disadvantage (5/4) and even if you could have worked it out you're boned so you just let 3 potential non-jerks down.

 

It's also Dunning-Kreuger.

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I'ma double post to answer the sports thing (that other post is mad long): I love sports and also I love video games (and the competitive aspect of both). It's weird to me that people find it weird that you can like both things. They're certainly not mutually exclusive, just somehow stigmatized as being opposing ends of a social spectrum. Things I have had conversations about in the last 24 hours: Hanley Ramirez needing surgery and how the World Baseball Classic affects MLB, how boned the Flyers and 76ers are and how much I miss Andre Iguodala, the hilarious over-anticipation of the Blizzard card game, how medivacs are apparently overpowered (they're not, it's mutalisks no I'm not zerg why do you ask), and LoMas, LoMas, LoMas.

 

To address the second part of your question also not addressed to me, I am fully in Sean/Chris's camp when it comes to recreational sports and acceptable behavior. Those are casual environments where the explicit goal is to have fun and play to the end of the game so you can go have beers, and a secondary outcome is winning. If you are getting shit-talked or berated by opponents (and ESPECIALLY by your own team) that is 100% unacceptable. I've had forum conversations about trash-talking in LoMas, and some people have attempted to compare that to psyching out/trash talking in professional sports. Somehow, that always attempts to justify people dropping racist and sexist epithets as "good natured ribbing" which boggles my mind.

 

But long story short - professional athletes are being paid to play at the highest possible level, and to win at any cost within the rules. If that means attempting to gain a psychological advantage through trash talk, then that's what they do. Recreational game players are NOT being paid to play, and in fact have explicitly signed a social contract (ToS and Riot's Summoner's Code, for example) to be respectful and exhibit good sportsmanship. That's compounded with the fact that athletes are physically there with each other, and gamers are thrown together by algorithm and will statistically never randomly play with each other again. If you have reached a common ground with an opponent where you can share good natured trash talk (no swears or slurs are ever good natured) and helps you enjoy the game a little more, have at it. "LOL NOOB UNINSTALL" is not good natured.

 

The way I think about it is that online matchmaking is Little League Baseball. You get grouped into random teams based on location with a very thin veneer of matching on skill, everyone is playing for a juice box and a ribbon, and anything unacceptable to yell on the field or in the stands at 13 year olds is also unacceptable here.

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My comment wasn't putting the quality of your reference into question - I actually think it was very appropriate - but since an important part of the podcast revolved around the perceived difference between the culture of competition in traditional sports vs. video games and you ended up dropping that reference later, I got curious about the Thumb 'involvement' in major league sports: I remember listening or reading you talk about the MLB and - I think - the NFL before, so I was wondering if you're all following all of these sports closely; and if that's a widespread thing in the gamer community or thumb staff.

Maybe that can inform the discussion: I wonder if sports fan witnessing the behavior of coaches in theses sports (abusing the refs and their own player sometimes) tend replicate or accept the same behavior in video games. Or if the overly critics of players based on partial metrics in Fantasy Leagues changes the way player evaluate their ally efficiency.

I don't know... that might be a bullshit line of thought, I'm not sure.

I don't want to speak too much for Chris, Nick or Jake but I think I'm the only one who really follows sports. I watch ESPN at the gym, probably read fifteen or twenty minutes of sports news a day and keep up on US baseball, football and basketball and the World Cup whenever that comes around. I know Jake really enjoys going to baseball games (our buddy Adam took us to down on the field of SF Giants batting practice last year and it was a highlight of my life as a baseball fan).

I don't really equate any of my fandom with sports to my enjoyment of DOTA -- watching sports doesn't invigorate me at all. I don't go nuts if my team wins, even my college, I don't hang any emotions on the outcome of the game. I experience it like a movie -- the drama of the situations, the curiosity of what will happen next. That being said, I don't reall pay attention to the competitive DOTA scene with much regularity, but having been to The International, it felt exactly like watching an exciting sports event. I thoroughly enjoyed myself but there was nothing wrapped up in it.

Playing a round of DOTA invigorates the same parts of my brain that playing sports does. I was on a softball team in LA for a while and we won the Burbank City Championship in a close close close game against the fire department (who were just BRUTES and hit like four homeruns in five innings) and my coworkers and I were really fired up. I'm probably the most competitive of the Thumbs, in general (although I think Breckon is secretly a mad man but has suppressed so much of his outward emotion that his insides are now cold and black) and I DO think competitiveness has the potential to be expressed in really ugly manner and is also such a powerful feeling for those who experience it that, uncontrolled, can be a real problem. But I think you can say the same about a lot of emotions.

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Excellent podcast, especially because it brought back memories of that weird VR Aladdin thing. Freaky. Speaking of bringing back memories, it has taken the triumphant return of Nick Breckon to remind me of one of the many reasons he's so awesome - with Nick Breckon on the podcast, we rarely have to go too long without hearing about a joystick or about X-Wing or Freespace or these other things I love deeply but which make me feel like a relic even at my tender young age. Truly this podcast now has a real dream team going.

I would really be interested to hear what some/any/all of you think about Sim City 4 if you decide to play it for next week's episode.

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Nick casually mentioning that he does in fact have a flight stick was the absolute best.

At least it's not a racing wheel.

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