Idle Thumbs 99: "I'm Blown Away"

[melmer]

I remember having a joystick with a mini throttle lever when I played xwing alliance. That was the best! I also remember smashing the shit out of my knuckles when the joysticks suction cups would give in during a frantic dog fight

[melmer]

This set up is named simply 'The Breckon'

[Henroid]

I call it, "the right way to play Mechwarrior."

[Professor Video Games]

This set up is named simply 'The Breckon'

 

What's going on with that center monitor? It apparently contains a second, smaller monitor inside it?

[Jake]

What's going on with that center monitor? It apparently contains a second, smaller monitor inside it?

Built in speakers. Please.

[subbes]

This episode confirmed Sean's place at the top of the Thumbs Testosterone leaderboard.  

 

so manly

[Sean]

This episode confirmed Sean's place at the top of the Thumbs Testosterone leaderboard.  

 

so manly

 

I'm on pills for that now.

[sLiPdIsCo]

I'm on pills for that now.

Did Nick steal some? He seemed extra violent. Threatened to maul Chris for talking ill of Civ4.

[Henroid]

Nick is just the bottled-up eventual-serial-killer of the show. He mutters in anger, he threatens his friends over imagined slights.

[Gormongous]

He suffers from protracted and abusive fugues that leave his friends frightened of him...

[Henroid]

Oh no wait he's just roleplaying what he's doing in competitive online games.

[sLiPdIsCo]

He's on PED's. Roid rage.

[Urthman]

What was hilarious to me in this episode is how a month ago you guys were marvelling at the breadth of data available (and the cool visualizations) playing the Sim City beta.  You guys were all, "The Mayor of CoolCoolTown has the greatest data collection of any municipality ever."

 

Then this week, it's all, "With each Sim doing his own thing, it's impossible to predict how it all adds up.  You have various inputs and outputs that don't match up and you just can't figure out what's going on and what's causing what."  In other words, just like a real-life mayor.   Your description of businesses building shiny new buildings, failing, and immediately another business comes along and builds another new shiny building sounds just like real life.

 

In fact, I wonder if the problem of simulating individual Sim behavior and getting it to behave, in aggregate, the way a real-life city behaves is beause in real life we don't have a very good idea of how individual behavior sums up into the macro-level effects we see in cities.  And when we do things like raise taxes or change zoning laws, we can't always predict what will happen, we don't know for sure how much of what happens is a direct result of our policies, and we aren't sure if maybe something nefarious is going on, with money we thought was going to infrastructure just disappearing (remember all the tax breaks in the 90's that were going to bring broadband to every home in America?)

[Henroid]

Roid rage.

Hey!

[Brannigan]

Hey!

ugh I have a serious case of Henroids

[melmer]

May i suggest

[Badfinger]

This set up is named simply 'The Breckon'

Those monitors aren't even all widescreen, and they're all resting on a table instead of a locking monitor arm angled appropriately to smash their photons directly into my eyes.

 

How can I even hope to compete with a subpar setup like that?

[The Devil Tesla]

[Professor Video Games]

 

I was running on a treadmill this morning and

commercial came on and all of a sudden there I was laughing like a damn idiot (also the reason I don't listen to this podcast while doing any sort of weight lifting).

 

I guess I don't watch enough TV because I thought the episode title was just from you guys bullshitting. Good god...

[osmosisch]

In reference to this:

 

Riot also seems to have this as their main priority:

 

http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/riot-knows-it-cant-change-toxic-behavior-in-league-of-legends-thats-why-its

http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/24/4140968/league-of-legends-riot-games-player-behavior-pax-east-2013

 

Their social/player behaviour group has really been making strides lately. Interesting/notable might be that they are definitely against the 'island of assholes' system that Valve is trying, with the argument that it reinforces their bad behaviour rather than steering them away from it.

 

This is a good point -- I wouldn't say anyone I play with regularly is unsportsmanlike at all, despite any energy they bring to the game. 

 

I also think Valve cares about this, having talked to members of the team quite a bit. They regularly move thousands of players to the low-priority queue where they will wait extra-long to connect to a server and once there can only play with other low-priority players. They've also instituted a decent commendation/report system that I know is used extensively on their end.

 

In terms of DOTA it's also important to remember that this game is still in very active development so I don't think the ship has sailed on more formalized, design-driven solutions to the "community issues." 

 

Gabe is on the record having said that he believes someone who is mentoring, helping their team enjoy the game, and raising the "fun" level of a match (which you can now rate your matches from "horrible" to "awesome" at the end, btw) should somehow be rewarded within the game while trolls and douchebags should have to pay out the ear to get in.  

 

Like most problems, I think Valve is trying to solve this purely through well-designed engineering, so I'm skeptical about where they'll end up, but I think their hearts are in the right place. 

 

I'd also like to try to assuage the end of your comment here on the forums -- I believe there are currently PLENTY of opportunities to play with good people (you're on these boards for instance!) and the game can be super rewarding when you're playing with a regular group of online friends.

[Freaksaus]

It was nice hearing the cast talk about playing LOMA games with controllers and then finding this:

 

Yes, that is a guy playing LoL with a racing wheel.

[mikemariano]

Yes, that is a guy playing LoL with a racing wheel.

 

Ha, excellent first post.

 

I wonder if there are LoMa players who demand to know the controls, keyboard layouts, and system specs of the members of their team.  "This team is Cyborg mouse only!"

[salty-horse]

Some of the quotes from the SimCity 2000 manual are actually by Neil Gaiman. Full text on his website.

I think the essay was inspired by the Sandman story "A Tale of Two Cities".

[clyde]

I am really enjoying the discussion about LoMa games and player behavior. I think that the environmental psychology of multiplayer game mechanics is incredibly relevant to so many of my interests, especially public policy.

I know it gets mentioned frequently, but I still have to give thanks to the quality of responses on these posts. Someone even referenced the Dunning-Krueger cognitive bias to explain player behavior.

Playing Super Monday Night Combat and Awesomenauts has demonstrated to me that the "feeding" mechanic creates an environment of exclusion. I can't blame the harassment on individual players anymore than I can blame dehumanization on individual students in the Stanford Prison experiment. In my view, the ability to check the score board to see how many times a teammate has died and the understanding of how that levels the other team up to the point that your team can no longer compete is not going to cause toxic behavior, but it's going to make it far more likely. That said, I enjoy those games very much.

Time for some far-fetching extrapolation:

I used to have a temper, but I rarely sucumb to it these days. Once I decided that it is never ok to be angry, I just stopped taking any actions while angry or justifying the need for it. But playing Super Monday Night Combat made me furious 20% of the time. I just bang on the desk and shout, I don't communicate my frustrations with other players, the only thing I might feel guilty about is waking up my cats. At first, my reaction was that i should stop playing the game, but then I started thinking about how this was such an amazing opportunity to expose myself to my own capacity for anger and accept it. Going into a match is an entirely voluntary decision that I can make at my own convenience. I can wait until my lady friend is away, the cats are asleep and I don't have to actually speak to anyone for 30 minutes plus the 20 minutes that it takes for my anger chemicals to stop influencing my brain. Then I can watch as the Assassin on my team continually fails to kill a group of three or observe the Support refusing to heal. For the first 200 hours of play-time, this would really piss me off.

To me, one of the best things about games is that I can experiment with techniques, knowledges, and perspectives without much risk. In Super Monday Night Combat, over time, I saw that I would perform much more poorly when angry and that I would feel miserable afterwards. I've now become skilled in maintaining my cool, assessing the weakness of my team as a whole and trying to patch teamwork holes. A simple example of this would be following the player with the most deaths so that they can't get ganked as easily. You think that winning with a skilled team feels good, you should experience winning with an unskilled team that manages to work together! These experiences have gone so far as to affect my political views. Whereas I once thought that extreme Libertarianism was a viable option, I now see it as a naive fantasy, the morality of it aside, cooperation is so under-rated.

I think that games have a massive potential to examine how environment can affect behavior of those who inhabit it. The debate over whether or not the game mechanics cause player behavior or if certain bad people are attracted to certain games is incredibly relevant to politics. Why does a no-broken-windows policy reduce crime? Are less crimes commited in neighborhoods with large trees because the criminals go elsewhere? Or are we as people far more susceptible to our environment and circumstances than we like to think? I think that multiplayer (and to some extent singleplayer) games allow for us as a society to rapidly prototype potential environments to promote positive behavior. And not only the physical environment, but the cultural paradigm. Do we as a society see the disabled as "feeders" that we wish would just uninstall? Do we see the poor as "noobs" who should know how to play? I think that a lot of us do and that it has an extrodinary effect on social policy.

Through design and quantitative measurement, computer games can experiment with architecture of the space and of the perspective of players and then measure the resulting interactions. It excites me.

[osmosisch]

Wow, what a post. That made me think!