Jake

Idle Thumbs 99: "I'm Blown Away"

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Wow, what a post. That made me think!

What did it make you think about?

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What did it make you think about?

I can't speak for that guy, but I will speak for myself! The part where you said, "Once I decided that it is never ok to be angry, I just stopped taking any actions while angry" made me think about what if there was a guy who, if you made him mad, he just went boneless for ten minutes or until you left the room? Then he'd pick himself up and go about his day.

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I can't speak for that guy, but I will speak for myself! The part where you said, "Once I decided that it is never ok to be angry, I just stopped taking any actions while angry" made me think about what if there was a guy who, if you made him mad, he just went boneless for ten minutes or until you left the room? Then he'd pick himself up and go about his day.

Like a fainting goat. That would be awesome.

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What did it make you think about?

Sorry to be so brief, I'm a bit frazzled lately.

 

The main part that I found intriguing was that seeing a complex social process in a game actually affected your outlook on politics and life. It's sometimes fun to pretend that online/game stuff isn't "real" and this sort of thing is a bit of a wake-up call that, no, everything one does as a person is a real thing. Also it takes a bit of guts to admit to having been a randroid (or just being young ;) )

 

I hope to get back to this later more coherently.

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Sorry to be so brief, I'm a bit frazzled lately.

The main part that I found intriguing was that seeing a complex social process in a game actually affected your outlook on politics and life. It's sometimes fun to pretend that online/game stuff isn't "real" and this sort of thing is a bit of a wake-up call that, no, everything one does as a person is a real thing. Also it takes a bit of guts to admit to having been a randroid (or just being young ;) )

I hope to get back to this later more coherently.

It's possible that I get this type of self-reflection feedback from computer games and their communities because I am willing to feel that they are more significant than they actually are. If my game experience shows me something that makes me feel less capable, I probably just go "Oh, it's just a game."

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In reference to large quantities of low-level simulations averaging into noise and lacking the ability to display the complex experience of the individual:

Theres an iphone game called "Artificial Life" where these little protozoa swim around in a petri dish. They each have a set of 10 or so genes that are instructions for behaviour. The interesting part is that they mate with each other and produce an offspring that has half of each parent's instructions. You can click on one and change it's program and then see how well it survives.

I think that the game suffers from the same design flaw as SpaceBase and SimCity. The two ways I've found to enjoy the toy/game is to use marker numbers in the instructions of an individual (like saying "move toward relatives when 33 units away" and "eat food when hunger reaches 33") and then following it around until it dies. Then much later, after I've been doing this for awhile, using different marker numbers, I'll come across a distant offspring of one of my creations and it will have a mixture of my instructions and randomly generated ones. You start to see the NPCs as sets of instructions that have managed to survive multiple generations rather than individual lives. When I see some of my instructions, I look at the ones mixed in that I didn't write and speculate on which combinations of instructions have increased their survivability.

After about 10,000 in game years, you start seeing clusters of colors forming in the petri dish. You can click on various individuals in the cluster and they will have reached a certain level of homogeny in their instructions. I've seen some fascinating survival strategies emmerge.

So my point is that I know of a way to display meaningful threads in games with large quantities of low-level simulations, it requires the behaviors to be self-replicating. In other words, it requires genetic algorythms:

Allow the player to place markers on behaviors and then give them a way to recall those markers.

In Artificial Life, it would be great if you could lower the visual opacity of everything without the selected marker for example. This would allow you to see patterns.

I find this problem interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing how Edmund McMillen deals with it in Mew-Genics.

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Is there no episode this week because of GDC shenanigans?

 

Yep, they tweeted about it... late last night(?) I think. PAX + GDC means no episode this week, as well as the possible death of one or more Thumbs from exhaustion.

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Ah man, what the hell am I supposed to do with my ears today, they've been restless lately as it is, I can tell as they've been twitching a lot and wax productivity has gone up 50%

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I find this problem interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing how Edmund McMillen deals with it in Mew-Genics.

I had no idea Team Meat was doing this. It sounds like a fairly novel way of addressing some of those gameplay challenges, I'll have to keep up with it.

Ninja edit: I wonder what role thematics has in all this. Is there an inherent disconnect when a game is presenting you cats or protozoa as opposed to humanoids? Or does it work better because the game is being more honest about the limits of its simulation? Part of the reason I never got much into the sims was because the sims themselves were so brazenly inhuman, there was always an off-putting level of dissonance going on. Oddly enough, I empathize a lot with the humanoids in DF, but maybe that has as much to do with graphical fidelity (or lack there of) as anything else.

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Yep, they tweeted about it... late last night(?) I think. PAX + GDC means no episode this week, as well as the possible death of one or more Thumbs from exhaustion.

 

Especially seeing as it appears to be they've reached a 100th episode, I'm glad they aren't recording it in sub-optimal conditions.  Maybe they got the chance to toss a couple conf-grenades in the mix as well.  Time will tell.

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Clearly this means there is going some jaw dropping 100th episode, now-syndication-ready ultra-spectacular, one so great you couldn't even get your hopes high enough

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I had no idea Team Meat was doing this. It sounds like a fairly novel way of addressing some of those gameplay challenges, I'll have to keep up with it.

Ninja edit: I wonder what role thematics has in all this. Is there an inherent disconnect when a game is presenting you cats or protozoa as opposed to humanoids? Or does it work better because the game is being more honest about the limits of its simulation? Part of the reason I never got much into the sims was because the sims themselves were so brazenly inhuman, there was always an off-putting level of dissonance going on. Oddly enough, I empathize a lot with the humanoids in DF, but maybe that has as much to do with graphical fidelity (or lack there of) as anything else.

 

I'm not suggesting that Team Meat will be putting markers for behaviors in cats, I have no idea how they are going to deal with the issue. Here is the blog post that makes me think that Mew-Genics is going to be the type of game where influencing behaviors and then trying to follow their trail of causation is part of the motivation to play:

It's the FEB 23 post 

 

In reference to the symbolic importance of the NPCs, that's a great question. I can tell you that when I am playing with Artificial Life, I struggle to find ways to use the optional instructions and variables in order to represent human society. The protozoa have variables like "Distance from the sun" (it kills them), "distance from relatives", "distance from predators", "hunger", "desire"( which I believe is the ability to reproduce), "life" and "sleepiness". The protozoa that sleep a lot I associate with laziness. One time I had a culture where the lazy protozoa took over. Their prioritized behaviors were to sleep in a hiding spot where they couldn't be attacked and to go search for food when their life was low. I immediately interpreted this in reference to human behavior. Here was a culture of people who just stayed in their house and only went into public when they needed food.

I think that it may help the suspension of disbelief when the organisms are represented as simple creatures. When that is the case, I tend to extrapolate the results of their behavior to fundamental behaviors of more complex creatures. It may be easier to go from simple to complex when interpreting. I can see how the complexities of people-behaviors could nullify the significance of a simulation based on simple ones. It requires a lot more personal rationalization for their actions and eventually seems over generalized. 

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[picture of lame gaming setup]

This set up is named simply 'The Breckon'

 

You call that a proper gaming setup? Pfft that's just lame. Now this guys has it figured out:

 

 

(Might contain Bioshock infinite spoilers!)

 

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Valcan_s is my favorite poster on Shacknews. He REALLY likes video games and video game graphics. 100% passionate.

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i feel like if i ever played DOTA2 with any of you guys i would either just never want to play with you again or i would tell you to "fuck off and don't tell me what to do" and you wouldn't want to play with me again, i hate people who take games too seriously and feel like they have the right to tell me how to enjoy myself, i am fine with people suggesting tactics or just asking people to follow them or whatever but angrily commanding people to "JUST DO AS I SAY!!" is just rude and will either be ignored or actively defied as much as possible

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