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Jake

Idle Thumbs 139: Happy News Year

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I have to agree with Sean on the Spelunky talk. I think at this point it has exceeded Far Cry 2 and DOTA as the most talked about game on the cast. I can't help but empathize with Chris though because the same thing happened to me with Minecraft. That game destroyed me for months at a time (and continues to do so 2 years later) and I still feel guilty every time I choose to play it instead of one of the other dozens of games on my backlog.

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I have to agree with Sean on the Spelunky talk. I think at this point it has exceeded Far Cry 2 and DOTA as the most talked about game on the cast. I can't help but empathize with Chris though because the same thing happened to me with Minecraft. That game destroyed me for months at a time (and continues to do so 2 years later) and I still feel guilty every time I choose to play it instead of one of the other dozens of games on my backlog.

 

The thing is, that's happened to me quite often, but the guilt quickly wrecks my enjoyment of the game, within the space of a few weeks, so that it's never as bad an addiction as Chris has.

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As far as collaborative editing like in The Witness, the closest widely-available thing I can think of is Clara.io, a free (for now) web-based 3D modeler, texturer, etc like Blender/Maya/etc. Unity needs to buy/partner with them.

 

For example, real-time collaboration:

 

 

Rage dev tools also had multi-user editing, a necessity for their crazy universally-unique megatexture folly.

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I am confused by the talk about escapism in video games.I can't remember the precise wordings as I listened to it yesterday, but to my recollection they split escapism into two categories, pure escapism and just escapism.

What's the difference between the two? Aren't all games a form of escapism? I guess examples would help? 

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It wasn't us splitting escapism into two categories, it was more of an issue of authorial intent: ie, creating a game that is meant to be escapism and one that turns out to be escapism in consequence of its design.

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I find the concept of games as escapism to be kind of dubious. It suggests a division between your everyday life, and your life while you are engaged in leisure activities like playing games, watching movies, reading books, etc. that heavily implicates leisure activity as an inauthentic expression of who you are. As Sean said on the podcast, playing games with his wife has improved the quality of his marriage; that has concrete social value, and that sort of self-improvement seems like the opposite of trying to escape from your life.

 

It's of course possible that unhappy or depressed people can use things like games to avoid dealing with issues that are causing them pain, but it's the attitude that is escapist, not the medium.

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The majority of the first 15 years of my gaming life was escapism from my parents and soap operas.

DAMN THOSE UNSKIPPABLE CUTSCENES AT DINNER TIME

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I thought the question was simply "Why make games?" With some speculation as to what the answers may be. Are games made to change someone's perspective? Are games made to express one's own perspective? Are games made to be sold for currency? Are games made for the sheer enjoyment of creativity? The answer is yes for all of these. But the inquirer assigned additional significance to the idea that games may be able to change people's perspectives. Is it possible to change someone's perspective by making a game?

Let's consider Sean's DayZ story in this context. In the game he was coerced into an increasingly vulnerable position. It seems to have affected him, not necessarily by changing his mind, but by expressing a circumstance in which he could test his perspective. I thought that his explanation of how some players are always on the hunt because it keeps them in an alert state, and his admission that it was a survival-strategy he could empathize with is a powerful argument that games have the capacity for meaning. Especially when you consider that here is a story of a victim associating the traumatic event with a survival-strategy rather than an individual. Plus, you have the antagonist looking at themself from te perspective if the victim and realizing that their's was only one of multiple relevant truths. Seems meaningful to me.

So then we can consider what the artistic intention was. Did Dean Hall want to express that particular interaction? Maybe he just wanted to provide a medium in which it could take place.

What about Sean? Why did Sean create a storify thing and report his experience? I ask because the results reminded me to see cause in behaviors and circumstances rather than blame individuals. It's not visually stimulating like rioting, but I would argue that it moves me a step closer towards achieving a just and compassionate society.

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There are differing schools of thought on criticism but I tend to hold the view that authorial intent is only one facet of a work because even with auteur-like control a creative work can produce meaning in others that was completely unintentional. Ultima Online, for example, was a game most likely designed with Lord British's intent of being a more manifest experience of his dream-world. He wanted people to feel what it would be like to inhabit that world and be a part of it and that is reflected in the inclusion of skills like bread-making and house-building long before any of those types of mechanics were included in other MMOs.

My experience with the game was very different, however. I documented a bit of that experience once but suffice to say it taught me more about how people in the real world put on the trappings of a ideal they hope to aspire to, and that desire to become who they want to be is so strong that they will escape into a place where it is more easily accomplished if they need to. That being said, I am sure my experience of the game is a very specific one that not indicative of how most people reflected on their time in that game.

I suppose the bigger question that this raises for me is whether or not having an intent for a game is a good idea. If I understood it right, Sean, would you say that having a clear goal is a bad idea?

 If I remember correctly you were moved by playing REAL LIVES, where you experienced what it was like to be born a poor African woman. Real Lives is a game whose main intent is praised right on the site: Simulating REAL LIVES Promotes Global EMPATHY. Would you say that game flipped a switch in you? I am curious to discover if you think Real Lives was a fluke in accomplishing its goal of trying to influence people. Or maybe it is better to say that the game influenced you but it was also a bad game?

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I imagine that instead of asking "Should I have intent when creating this?", a more effective assertation is "I see an opportunity to express my perspective in the way I approach and solve this specific design problem; and I'm going to give it the love and effort it deserves."

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I imagine that instead of asking "Should I have intent when creating this?", a more effective assertation is "I see an opportunity to express my perspective in the way I approach and solve this specific design problem; and I'm going to give it the love and effort it deserves."

This is why I like you.

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I don't know what you are all talking about. Any time I create anything it's with an eye towards brainwashing people to think the same way I think about controversial political issues. I thought that's what art is supposed to be.

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The notion that non-prose art is supposed to express a "message" is a complicated one. No doubt it can and does do so, but to the extent that it is a message that could be accurately boiled down into prose, I feel it tends to be doing something of a disservice to whichever medium it is. IMO, art is better when it is pushing at the limits of meaning (i.e. flirting with/being at the verge of incomprehensibility), and/or asking questions than it is when making "statements".

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Melissa hefted her rifle and aimed down the sights to check that the holographic crosshair was still working. Charlie watched her.“I don’t get it,” he said. “Aren’t we safe here?”

Melissa shrugged. Rick looked over at Charlie. “You don’t get it, kid.”

“What’s to get?” replied Charlie. “We have the EMP mines set up at the entrances and the thermal shield has been holding steady at 98% for three days. What is there to worry about?”

“These aren’t your average better humans, kid,” said Rick. “These aren’t just a pack of big dogs and pet men. When they come for you, they’re not coming with titanium mandibles. These are extruder equipped Geoweaver Hexapods.”

“A Geoweaver Hexapod? Is that anything like a quadrocopter?” asked Charlie.

Melissa laughed, then shook her head. Charlie turned towards her, a questioning look on his face. Rick spoke up again. “Quadrocopters haven’t been equipped with extruders since the tottering teens. A Geoweaver Hexapod was built to take information from GPS satellites and pinpoint your location across large landscapes on the ground before it’s halfway done with your house. Do you know what one of those can do to a man?”

Charlie shifted uncomfortably on the shelf he was sitting on. He turned his gaze back to the LCD screen that contained the readout summarizing the shelter’s defenses, poking desultorily at menu options to monitor the harmonics of the thermal shield. Inwardly, he resolved that no matter how many Geoweaver Hexapods they had to face that day, he was going to make it to the year of the PS4. Only then would he allow himself to weep for what humanity had lost.

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Oh wow, this is really cool. When I heard "Storify" and "tweets" I was picturing some clunky amalgamation of tweets. I didn't realize it let you add a bunch of text to explain things. Thanks for the link! "watched me eat a poisoned banana probably" is kind of poignant.

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