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Jake

Idle Thumbs 101: Introduction to Video Games

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Something unnecessarily sarcastic about people expressing their opinions on an extremely personal and worthwhile issue.

It's not easy for people to raise their issues with representation in video games, because it's often met with a dismissive, even angry, attitude. Just something to keep in mind.

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Oh, incidentally, the reason that BSI is less tense than Bioshock and Bioshock 2 is that a splicer really could come around the corner at any time. (Not sure if this was brought up on episode 100 or 101, but whatevs.)  Like System Shock, new enemies randomly spawn over time. Infinite, by contrast, has (big, chaotic) combat sequences, and then you kill the last enemy and you're done and can poke around to your heart's content without danger. I'm not sure if this is better or worse, but it's definitely a meaningful difference. And that I did go and poke around between combat sequences probably contributes to my not feeling it was overstuffed with them. If anything, for much of the game it felt positively combat light, though most of the big setpieces with skyrails and such were thrilling, mobile, and kinetic. My main complaint is that the guns and their upgrades were not particularly imaginative, made worse by the split between Founder weapons and Vox weapons despite the two being largely interchangeable. Certain guns were reasonably satisfying to use, but the vigors were much more fun. (And, alas, not usable on a skyline.)

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I've seen this argument elsewhere, and I think it's a misunderstanding/misrepresentation of what the ending is actually presenting.

 

They're not just moving to another reality, but actually replacing Booker at the moment he undergoes the baptism and chooses to become Comstock. When he's drowned instead, that choice is never made and no universe containing Comstock is ever produced to branch into a quantum infinity of Comstock-universes. The tears are, after all, repeatedly presented as also accessing other times, particularly when it comes to music, but also in, say, the scene where Elizabeth opens one onto a movie theater advertising a Star Wars film. But they have to have a Booker that's willing to make that choice.

 

I'm not saying it's perfect, but I think it hangs together well enough. Insofar as these sorts of stories ever do.

 

On an unrelated note, I highly second the earlier recommendation of Nier. That game is fantastic.

That makes no sense to me

 

The game makes it pretty clear that when you go to another universe, you don't inhabit the body of your alternate self. So, Rosalind Letuce actually encounters her alternate male self rather than taking that Letuce's place when she enters his universe. So I don't understand how they could be "replacing" Comstock in the way you're suggesting. Plus, even if they did, wouldn't there still be an infinite number of slightly different universes where Comstock isn't replaced? I don't know, I don't think the "rules" of the B:I universe are very clear or consistent.

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Because Magical Elizabeth Powers.

She's basically a god at the end of the game, with all her powers unlocked. Pretty deus ex machina but whatever. Welcome to crazy fantasy sci-fi.

 

They pretty much exactly explain it in the game like malkav does, here.

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A note on the merits of finishing games prior to their assessment: I felt the last act of Bioshock (the first) was awful. The boss is silly, the locale doesn't inspire, the end cutscene is silly and the game's mechanics wear out their welcome. The game should have ended with the golf club scene. 

 

My view of the game was tempered on the completion of the game. I know for a lot of games, you could say "I get it, this game is the same thing over and over", but I think it is worth pointing out the exception, because it is nice to think that some games are interesting enough to warrant completion.

 

As for Infinite:

I would make the argument that the beach scene is much stronger than the introduction. The opening act is great, don't get me wrong, but it feels like a fun Disneyland ride. That beach scene, felt much more genuine and alive. There wasn't a special event, people were minding themselves, it didn't feel "yellow brick road"-y, it was content to simply exist and it was great. It didn't hurt that Girls Just Wanna Have Fun is the greatest pop song ever written.

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Well, I'm glad you got the completely wrong impression because I very much never said that. I'm speaking about my own personal goddamn experience and very explicitly avoided ever speaking for anyone else, it was all about me, me, me.

 

Your response is why I almost just didn't post and now I regret posting.

Mh, but you said [...]. And I think my [...]. But [...] unspeakable [...] cake [...]. [...] ...

Arguing-shmarguing. Rather a cat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g85wBkhFhjo

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The German voice reminds me of the German voice that the comedian Ross Noble does occasionally. And now this post is irrelevant because I can't find a clip of this on YouTube. 

 

Also I had a dream that I was listening to Idle Thumbs and they were talking Geordie.. bizarre. 

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During the sc2 part there were a couple common misconceptions, and maybe you guys already know this but I'll put it out there anyways:

 

1. The ranking into silver, gold, platinum etc, including splitting players within those into divisions, it's all an entirely cosmetic mask placed on top of the match-making system.  The way it works in reality is each player has a hidden Match-Making Rating, MMR, which determines who they're placed against, and is added to and subtracted from when winning/losing.  Playing those placement games against AI has some effect on it, and it's mostly separate for your team multiplayer and 1v1 multiplayer ladders.  So really, even when you get a win and become promoted to the Diamond ladder, you're actually not playing anyone different than if you had gotten any other single win, same goes for when you get demoted from a lost game.

 

2. On the loading screen where it says "slightly favored", "favored", "equal match" or whatever, those aren't actually accurate representations of each side's MMR.  The way those signs are generated is by the number of points you could gain from a win in that match, so if you have a bonus pool you're actually probably going to see every game you play with your opponents as 'slightly favored' or even 'favored' regardless of your relative MMR.  It's even possible for both players in a 1v1 to see the other player as 'slightly favored' or 'favored' on the loading screen if both players have a bonus pool, I'd even say that's a common situation.

 

If you didn't know these facts the ladder might seem like a turbulent sea of skill-inequality, but it's actually more gradual because every match is made by finding someone with near your MMR.

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The reason they're white straight dudes isn't to represent actual real-world straight dudes in a legitimate and realistic way, it's because it makes it easier for the audience of white straight dudes to slip into whatever power fantasy or fictional character IS being presented.

Edit: oh whoops, I missed a whole page of posts and now this is floating out in the thread without proper context. Oh well.

Edit 2: it seems castorp has already said this also.

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It's not easy for people to raise their issues with representation in video games, because it's often met with a dismissive, even angry, attitude. Just something to keep in mind.

 

I didn't want to say anything, but yeah. I don't like annoying people by talking about my sexuality, but I find that talking about it also helps me deal with it a little.

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Sorry.

I have no problem with the discussion, it's just that it ends up being same argument with the same couple of people who only seem to end up on the other side because they don't agree ENOUGH with everyone else. 
 
I'm with Adam
 

To be perfectly clear, I don't want to see consensus building, prescriptive diatribes or agreement on The Right Way Forward, whatever that is. I want to see 500 (or 50,000) game makers, all with different ideas about how to make something interesting and new for a new audience, arguing about how to make great art, with vigor and passion, and complete respect for everyone's right to be part of that discussion. I want to see the great works they make to back up their rhetoric. Because the thing we have in common, this need to make more games better for everyone, binds us together with far greater force than the things that we think divide us.

 

Emphasis mine.

 

Also, I really like that picture of Hugh Laurie and the Pause Theme from Battle Toads.

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Starcraft leagues are essentially lagging indicators.  Breaking into a new league is still a measure of skill progression.

 

You will match against Diamond players before getting to diamond yourself.  It can indeed be a rush when your MMR jumps high enough that you start seeing matches with leagues you've never seen before.

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Hold on, how did this turn into a conversation about representation in games? My post last page that sparked all this was about games criticism, not games themselves. I'm all for having queer black women as protagonists or whatever, and am totally fine with playing as them. Games are an artistic medium, and the creator should make the protagonist whatever type of person fits their story, not the type of person they think will sell games to straight white dudes. This seems completely self-evident in a world where we want games to be accepted as legitimate art.

However, I don't think that extends to game criticism in quite the same way. I agree with shammack, in that I don't think gender or race or what have you are the determining factors in what your taste in games will be. I'd much rather read a review from someone who has a track record of having the same taste as me, and who happens to be a latino trans-women, versus reading a review by a straight white dude who thinks Call of Duty is the pinnacle of the FPS genre. For this reason, I think special-interest games journalism is kind of a dead end, unless you're a person who's super into the politics of supporting demographic x in the games journalism industry.

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People with different backgrounds will inevitably have different things to say about any given piece of culture. I'm interested in what people of other backgrounds have to say, and so I think non-majoritarian-culture criticism is important. I'm actually not that interested in reading criticism from people who think just like me; I read games journalism to get new perspectives on media, not to have my own perspective validated. I don't really use games journalism as a buying guide, though, and if I did I suppose I would be more interested in finding a critic who thought just like me. 

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That makes no sense to me

 

The game makes it pretty clear that when you go to another universe, you don't inhabit the body of your alternate self. So, Rosalind Letuce actually encounters her alternate male self rather than taking that Letuce's place when she enters his universe. So I don't understand how they could be "replacing" Comstock in the way you're suggesting. Plus, even if they did, wouldn't there still be an infinite number of slightly different universes where Comstock isn't replaced? I don't know, I don't think the "rules" of the B:I universe are very clear or consistent.

Think time travel, not parallel universes. Yes, parallel universes are a big part of the (very handwavy) SF elements of the story, but they're not the only one and it's been established before that point (i.e., the visit to future Elizabeth, for one) that the tears and Elizabeth can open on other times as well as other worlds.

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Also, I rarely played SC2 online because I got too nervous. Which is stupid. But I did. I played enough to really enjoy watching high level play though. Its fascinating.

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Hold on, how did this turn into a conversation about representation in games? My post last page that sparked all this was about games criticism, not games themselves. I'm all for having queer black women as protagonists or whatever, and am totally fine with playing as them. Games are an artistic medium, and the creator should make the protagonist whatever type of person fits their story, not the type of person they think will sell games to straight white dudes. This seems completely self-evident in a world where we want games to be accepted as legitimate art.

However, I don't think that extends to game criticism in quite the same way. I agree with shammack, in that I don't think gender or race or what have you are the determining factors in what your taste in games will be. I'd much rather read a review from someone who has a track record of having the same taste as me, and who happens to be a latino trans-women, versus reading a review by a straight white dude who thinks Call of Duty is the pinnacle of the FPS genre. For this reason, I think special-interest games journalism is kind of a dead end, unless you're a person who's super into the politics of supporting demographic x in the games journalism industry.

 

The thing is, based on the pretty evident patterns of this industry and the coverage surrounding it, without concerted advocacy it's pretty hard to imagine any significant change in makeup of the bulk of the people writing the reviews and making the games. It's been pretty much the same people with mainly the same general outlook making up the bulk of the discourse for quite some time now, with exceptions largely around the margins.

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The thing is, based on the pretty evident patterns of this industry and the coverage surrounding it, without concerted advocacy it's pretty hard to imagine any significant change in makeup of the bulk of the people writing the reviews and making the games. It's been pretty much the same people with mainly the same general outlook making up the bulk of the discourse for quite some time now, with exceptions largely around the margins.

Definitely true, but I feel like that topic and the topic of curated reviews have very little to do with each other. Saying "I'd like reviews curated by a woman" (or a gay person, or whatever other underrepresented minority) is sort of missing the point. What it sounds like you guys were talking about on the podcast, and what I think would be cool, is if there were critics with a large enough body of work that you could get a real feel for their tastes, and how they compare to your own. This would allow you to read their reviews with a little more perspective, and possibly make those reviews more rewarding and informative for the reader. But as I said before, I don't think having that window into their tastes, and either agreeing or disagreeing with those tastes, has anything to do with what race or gender they are.

Would it be nice to have more women and minorities in game making and in games writing? Yup. Would it be nice to have Ebert-style curatorial reviewers? Yup. Do the two have much to do with each other? Nope, IMO.

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What's funny about Infinite is that to me it's extremely obvious that

 

Killing Booker in his own timeline does NOT end the other timelines, only his. Because there are an infinite number of realities, ending even a key point on one can't remove all the others because Booker still exists prior to that. That means there's a possibility that branch can be created again. It's the essence of futility.

 

And even though it's completely obvious, I'm probably wrong!

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Man, the new Wuxtry kills me. When the higher melody of "video games" comes in it's just ABSURD. I love it. Also, for business, I signed up for Audible and got Wolf Hall, so tell them their ad money was well spent.

 

As for BSI and the racism and the exceptionalism. After the ending I had an oh wow moment, thinking about Slate's reaction to the museum, and his disgust at Comstock inserting himself, celebrating the killing, when "he wasn't there." Ahh, but we learn he was. The celebration and the ugliness is a story he tells about himself, or like the intro says the way we fill in gaps of a world we can't reconcile. The whole structure exists, all these robots and guards, to protect him from himself. The baptism, the quantum state between damned and divine (ah ha!) washes away his sins, and with a wave of a hand converts his brutality into legend, but it's not that easy.

 

Absolving himself of his crimes in this manner, a failure to really think on what he did (America has done) leads to a society of such brutal inequality, built on guaranteed spiritual forgiveness and myth. I think in some ways the game is a bit more coherent than people give it credit for, but it requires you to finish it, and take in a bit of hidden voxophones.

 

Sidebar: I stil enjoy the physical activity of FPSs, though I don't disagree with the cast and people's complaints about them. 

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I think that a person's background is definitely going to have an influence on how they perceive a piece of media. And there's an unfortunate tendency where, if someone's background causes them to appreciate a certain work more or less than they otherwise might, they often get dismissed as "pushing an agenda." Just look at how things turned out to recommend a game where you play as a lesbian a while back, and that's on a site that's already pretty left-wing as far as gaming journalism goes.

 

...Good response by the way, Chris.

 

 

On an unrelated note, I highly second the earlier recommendation of Nier. That game is fantastic.

 

*fist bump*

 

and the music in that game oh my goodness

 

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