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Chris

Idle Thumbs 115: Robot News

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It's only a matter of time until that's the only kind of news there is.

Idle Thumbs 115:

 

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Robot News

Can a video game facilitate the highest expression of skill and competition, as well as the most menial of tasks? Can it show us the way towards harmony between all nations? Can it unite far-flung strangers in spectral pottery-spinning? None of this will matter when the robot army crushes our skulls beneath their feet.

 

Games Discussed: Viscera Cleanup Detail, Civilization V: Brave New World, The Last of Us, Half-Life 2, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Catherine, Super Street Fighter IV, Marvel vs. Capcom 3

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Chris sold me on this Civ 5 expansion. I require it, there is nothing else that will satisfy me.

 

Anyway back to fortifying my doors and windows for the robot insurrection.

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I'm picturing Sean's dad is a Ren & Stimpy interpretation of a big angry american.

 

558cda5d7d2c53a86ff48a1754db2449.png

 

Also this was a great episode!

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The Marvel vs Capcom 3 finals were great, I'm glad Nick saw them and talked about it on the cast because they were so exciting but no one seemed to be talking about it. I also had the same experience of at first watching it and thinking what is this long combo and super spamming bullshit, but then after watching it enough with commentary you start to understand the underlying strategies. Justin Wong's comeback run starting with his match against ChrisG was particularly fascinating since his team was unconventional and used supposedly underpowered characters like Storm and Akuma, and he often had to rely on single character fighting game basics to pull off his comeback victories. 

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You know what's weird, and great, and weird? Mentioning that you tuned in for "a little Smash Brothers at EVO" sounds as natural as someone asking if you caught The Local Game last night and you answered that you caught just a couple of minutes before halftime.

 

Maybe it's just my own entertainment habits, but watching video games being played on the internet is now just another competitive event you can tune in to see.

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I like that it can mean precisely Ten Thousand.

 

One of the professors in my department loves to "catch" people on that in their papers and presentations. It's effectively cured me of ever using the word again.

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I hate to be this guy but boy howdy did The Walking Dead get spoiled for me. I know it's been out a while and I've had it for months now and never got passed episode 1 so I didn't mind too much, but I'm normally pretty good at avoiding spoilers altogether. 

 

Just a warning for those out there who (for some ungodly reason) post/read in the thread before listening to the episode The Walking Dead gets spoiled when they start talking about Steam trading cards. And, just for the record, I don't want this post to sound bitter or pissy because I actually didn't mind too much, it really annoys me sometimes when podcasts dance around games that have been out for months to avoid spoilers and I just sit there screaming "IT'S BEEN OUT FOR 56 YEARS, JUST TALK ABOUT IT ALREADY. TOUGH COOKIES TO EVERYONE WHO HASN'T PLAYED IT YET." 

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I love commuting with a ridiculous smile on my face. :tup:

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One of the professors in my department loves to "catch" people on that in their papers and presentations. It's effectively cured me of ever using the word again.

 

I'm the same way with the word decimate.

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'm the same way with the word decimate.

Damn I was about to mention that word. DAMN.

 

It's fun to correct people on these things because I hate pedants but I like pretending to be one. U:

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I was thinking about the height thing in a first person game, since it was something we discussed during the stream. My best guess is it became a convention because you spend so much time in these games picking stuff up off the ground, and this just makes it slightly easier to do so.

 

This ties nicely into the Tom Bissell conversation, and the discussion you guys had about smashable pots in games. Tom Bissell's compares seemingly weird game decisions to night scenes in movies. If we were seeking out true fidelity to life we wouldn't see anything, but instead there is always lighting in night scenes in movies so the audience can see what is happening. That's an artificial construct that we've all internalized and accepted. His argument is that we should extend that same courtesy to games. We can agree or disagree with that value judgment, but I think it makes the accusation that he is simply being an apologist for bad game design ring hollow (although I also liked that Medium piece).

 

Part of what I found so interesting about Bioshock Infinite is it tried to solve so many problems that previously existed in older Irrational games, and in the process of doing so created a bunch of new problems. I appreciate that sort of messy, ambitious project as much as I appreciate a very compact, tightly constructed experience like 30 Flights of Loving. Put another way, I don't pick sides between A Portrait of an Artist and Finnegan's Wake.

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I don't think anyone's saying that Tom Bissell is simply an apologist for bad game design. Well, someone somewhere probably is, but  I think the thrust of the Medium article is that Bissell's (and by extension, games journalism's) willingness to wallpaper over the little things that don't work, in order to highlight the big things that do work, is sometimes even more detrimental to the critical discussion.

 

Bissell always sees the big picture, sometimes strikingly so, and it's what's made me love his writing, but he does occasionally miss the forest for the trees, even if it seems a little petty to call him out on it, like Sean says. Still, there's tons of critical discussion about night scenes in films, but there's very little (that is critical, at least) on all of the "gameisms" that pervade AAA games, so I think the Medium article is well taken.

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Watched the video stream. The point where Sean dropped the bucket almost killed me.

 

It's around the 9 minute mark

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I hate to be this guy but boy howdy did The Walking Dead get spoiled for me. I know it's been out a while and I've had it for months now and never got passed episode 1 so I didn't mind too much, but I'm normally pretty good at avoiding spoilers altogether.

 

And you know what else? It could have been edited out with a dubstep vocalized "Video ga-aaa-aaames" and a link to the Phaedrus Group. But it wasn't.

 

IT WASN'T.

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I really appreciated Charlie Brooker's highly relevant take on Last of Us' gameisms from the interview he did with Cara Ellison:

 

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/15/gaming-made-me-charlie-brooker-part-1/

 

But isn’t it the themes that are letting us down, not the graphics? Crysis 3 is beautiful, but show a clip of it on TV and it would look a little ridiculous still. “Well… I just played through the Last of Us, which I thought was brilliant. Really really really enjoyed it a lot. But it is still… My wife plays Portal 2, plays things like that, and I got the Last of Us and I was very excited: ‘Right, we’ll play this together’. And she wasn’t having any of it. After five minutes – as soon as they start talking about ‘The Fireflies’ and… I think it was pretty much the first time I smashed someone’s head against a table. And I played through the whole thing anyway, regardless of her feelings on the matter, even though it’s a brilliant brilliant game, there is something that I can’t quite square. It’s one of the best stories that I’ve seen in games, but there is still a ridiculous amount of just non-stop peril that’s slightly divorced from the story and I know there’s a logical reason for it to be all going on in the story – you’d never sit through a film with that level of violence going on for so long – like this is the most mental film I’ve ever seen.”

“My theory is that video games are like speaking Esperanto,” Brooker says. “Video game players are like people who learnt Esperanto years ago. We all learnt Esperanto. And there’s all these brilliant Esperanto-language films available, to use a metaphor. They only make sense if you know Esperanto, they don’t have subtitles – but they’re brilliant. And we keep telling people how good they are. But there’s this learning curve which is that you have to learn fucking Esperanto. Because you only have to sit down with someone who doesn’t play Video games to understand how high the bar to entry still is.” Brooker goes on to talk about how his wife latched on to Portal 2 in a big way, and how conceptually it’s not a simplistic game, and yet she was willing to overlook the barriers to playing. “It’s not running and gunning,” he says. “It’s walking and thinking. She liked it because we were playing the co-op mode as well. It wasn’t like I was standing behind her going ‘no don’t press that button, you can’t open that door, no trust me that’s part of the scenery’.”

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Though, to extrapolate: the way you guys tend to interpret games leads me to think you've done a huge loop/barrel roll around the framing of the medium. (picturing the Chris who loved Diablo 2 but can't stand the same mechanics in 2012.)

 

Maybe it's owed to you guys working in games but all those niggles that aren't hugely bothersome to me are often brought up in the cast. Vending machines in people's homes, ladder puzzles, character height and so on. Stuff that designers compromise through necessity and gamers swallow out of habit. Which is why I find the cast so valuable; it does a great job of bringing to light aspects of gaming I had (through complacency) failed to think about. It also interestingly mirror's the reactions of my friends who don't play games. But in a more detailed manner than simple "that's dumb/nerdy/waste of time" (which is what i was going for with the awkward plane analogy)

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Hey guys, really sorry about the Walking Dead Season One spoiler. I reuploaded the file and the specific spoiler moment is now censored out.

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I hate to be this guy but boy howdy did The Walking Dead get spoiled for me. I know it's been out a while and I've had it for months now and never got passed episode 1 so I didn't mind too much, but I'm normally pretty good at avoiding spoilers altogether. 

 

Just a warning for those out there who (for some ungodly reason) post/read in the thread before listening to the episode The Walking Dead gets spoiled when they start talking about Steam trading cards. And, just for the record, I don't want this post to sound bitter or pissy because I actually didn't mind too much, it really annoys me sometimes when podcasts dance around games that have been out for months to avoid spoilers and I just sit there screaming "IT'S BEEN OUT FOR 56 YEARS, JUST TALK ABOUT IT ALREADY. TOUGH COOKIES TO EVERYONE WHO HASN'T PLAYED IT YET." 

I pretty much agree with all of that. I guess what kind of annoyed me was that it was spoiled in the midst of complaining about a spoiler. That's pretty stupid.

 

But yes, I really have no excuse for not having played it yet, and I suppose there's a good chance I would have had it spoiled for me by the card anyway whenever I do eventually get around to playing it.

 

 

Sorry Chris, Sean was correct. "a myriad of" is completely correct, in fact it is the use of myriad as an adjective that is questionable.

 

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myriad

I wouldn't say "questionable", just more recent. Both forms are thoroughly well-established.

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This is one of the best examples of the kind of excitement you can get from watching pro fighting game tournaments

If you haven't 'got hype' by the end of this match you need to see a doctor

Oh and, even I know its "a myriad of" ;) x

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I had never heard anyone mention the concept of taxing standing armies until your discussion of Civilization V. What a great idea. I'm looking forward to researching whether or not there is a history of trying to impliment this plan.

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I don't think anyone's saying that Tom Bissell is simply an apologist for bad game design. Well, someone somewhere probably is, but  I think the thrust of the Medium article is that Bissell's (and by extension, games journalism's) willingness to wallpaper over the little things that don't work, in order to highlight the big things that do work, is sometimes even more detrimental to the critical discussion.

 

Bissell always sees the big picture, sometimes strikingly so, and it's what's made me love his writing, but he does occasionally miss the forest for the trees, even if it seems a little petty to call him out on it, like Sean says. Still, there's tons of critical discussion about night scenes in films, but there's very little (that is critical, at least) on all of the "gameisms" that pervade AAA games, so I think the Medium article is well taken.

 

It's well taken (again, I did like the piece, and thought it made a lot of excellent points), but I also find a lot of the criticism of "gameisms" to be pretty dull and uninteresting. When Old Man Murray does it it can be insightful and well taken, but too often I see these sorts of criticisms falling afoul of Tom Francis's fifth rule for critical writing, "keep some perspective" (see http://www.pentadact.com/2013-07-01-five-things-i-learned-about-game-criticism-in-nine-years-at-pc-gamer/ ). I'm all for more critical writing, but the best thing to do is just write the criticism rather than wring your hands over whether a particular critical voice is having a negative impact on the medium. The wider the range of a conversation the better as far as I'm concerned.

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