Chris

Idle Thumbs 168: I Like the Hair

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Yeah, I always take stuff out if there's any risk of legal or interpersonal damage.

But in general one of the things I (we?) like about Idle Thumbs is how unvarnished it is, so I definitely err on the side of leaving stuff in. There have been lots of times I've had to resist the temptation of editing out failed jokes or dumb/erroneous shit from me, because I don't want to start getting in that habit.

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Ok, So this is really regarding last week's episode, but it's podcast-related.

 

I found Chris' Farting Skeleton dream evocative, but I'm not an animator, so I instead imagined it as a children's book, in which Chris learns a valuable lesson.  Here is a page from said "book..."

 

This is fantastic.

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I found Chris' Farting Skeleton dream evocative, but I'm not an animator, so I instead imagined it as a children's book, in which Chris learns a valuable lesson.  Here is a page from said "book..."

 

"Relax," soothed Allard, "We all know who farted, but it's rude to blame gas on the dearly departed."

 

I'm crying over here, this is so good.

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Here is a page from said "book..."

 

I love the skeleton, it has the right amount of friendliness and obvious creepiness, and the rhymes were a cool idea too.

I actually had started to roughly storyboard this dream too, don't know if anything comes out of it though.

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I love co-op gaming, but I think it's not great in the context of RPG systems. Borderlands is a good example of something that I should find appealing, but don't. The draw for Borderlands is I find the first person combat systems more appealing to engage with than a Diablo style game where you kind of just hold down the mouse, and auto-attack everything, and press a button occasionally to heal up and use an ability (I am simplifying a lot I know, but that is mostly how that style of gameplay feels to me).

 

Now, Borderlands isn't an amazing shooter, but it is a fun thing to play with friends. However I don't find it so fun that I want to play it all the time. But then if I don't and my friends are playing it, then they'll end up far ahead of me and there will be great level disparities, and then I'm basically left with two really unappealing options like: spend time grinding on my own until I catch up with them, or play with them even though a lot of the enemies will be able to one or two hit kill me, and I won't be able to contribute to the fight really. At that point the game feels more like work, and I give up on it.

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The shorter version of what I wrote is that co-op gaming should be more like Magicka.

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We need more Dota Today; I can tell Sean's bursting at the seams.

I 100% agree with the point about giving the fans a good show.  I'm surprised there doesn't seem to be a lot of blowback towards VG.  Plenty of people are complaining about the grand finals being bad, but nobody seems to be upset with VG themselves, who I think acted pretty unprofessionally.  I understand an early GG in your first couple games if your team is just getting steamrolled and continuing to play will only further destroy the team's morale, but the last game should absolutely be played until the base is broken.  I think they owe it to their fans and to the entire arena of people watching to see the last game through to the end, even if it's utterly hopeless.

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I love the skeleton, it has the right amount of friendliness and obvious creepiness, and the rhymes were a cool idea too.

I actually had started to roughly storyboard this dream too, don't know if anything comes out of it though.

 

Atte,

 

If it helps your storyboard, or the final animation....

 

Most of the elements of this art are actually on separate layers (in my master file).  

Example: here is Allard, isolated. 

If you want to leverage them, we can work together.

post-9222-0-89808000-1406313608.png

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I'm starting to see a other-player-dependency spectrum in both competitive multiplayer games and cooperative games. On one side of the spectrum you have games like Peter Molyneux's Curiosity where you know that other people are playing and somehow influencing the game, but your gameplay-decisions aren't really informed by how they are playing the game. On the other side of the spectrum, you have Lords Managements where you are painfully aware of what your team is doing, though you may have no control it. When I watched a gameplay video of Velvet Sundown, I knew that it would probably be a waste of my time because that game looks completely dependent on strangers playing the game well. When I play Titanfall, I don't really care what my teammates are doing even if they are feeding in Attrition and I barely notice what other players are even doing while I farm grunts. When I play Insurgency, the spectator-mode between spawns sets a tone where you want to play well and the way that people on your team are playing influences the decisions I make in my next life nearly as much as my last life does (because you are watching them attack certain positions and witnessing why they succeeded or failed. 

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We need more Dota Today; I can tell Sean's bursting at the seams.

I 100% agree with the point about giving the fans a good show.  I'm surprised there doesn't seem to be a lot of blowback towards VG.  Plenty of people are complaining about the grand finals being bad, but nobody seems to be upset with VG themselves, who I think acted pretty unprofessionally.  I understand an early GG in your first couple games if your team is just getting steamrolled and continuing to play will only further destroy the team's morale, but the last game should absolutely be played until the base is broken.  I think they owe it to their fans and to the entire arena of people watching to see the last game through to the end, even if it's utterly hopeless.

 

I think that's a reasonable perspective, but it's not one I agree with. I think VG's only obligation is to make the best competitive effort they can, and if they don't see any path to victory with their chosen strategy I don't think they should be criticized for calling GG (if they made a mistake calling GG that's a separate issue worth debating, although I don't think that was the case in the finals). Stated another way, I think teams have a right to pursue boring outcomes, and if a competitive game frequently results in boring outcomes that's a game design flaw.

 

I do sort of think that teams should be allowed a limited number of substitutions like in soccer or basketball. I saw way too many games this tournament where it really felt like the match was over before it started just because of how the draft played out.

 

We do need more Dota Today.

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Grindy loot experiences where the entire game seems to be about sifting through tons of weapons to find those that have slightly higher numbers than the others has become so pointless to me, and has soured me on games that otherwise have good mechanics. It often just feels like a layer of tedium that you have to manage just to be able to perform well in the rest of the game.

 

It feels to me like it was more potentially important back in a game like Diablo 1, where you could find a staff and its spells could become your primary mode of combat, or a ring's strength bonus meant that you're using a different tier of armor. And it's way different from the mechanic's origins in pen and paper, where finding the simplest magic weapon was momentous and rare and meant +1 to accuracy and damage on top of the +2/3 you already had. If you're gradually incrementing your double digit damage by one or two over the entire game, and the enemies are also gradually getting more hp it seems like much less interesting than how Halo is for example.

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I think that's a reasonable perspective, but it's not one I agree with. I think VG's only obligation is to make the best competitive effort they can, and if they don't see any path to victory with their chosen strategy I don't think they should be criticized for calling GG (if they made a mistake calling GG that's a separate issue worth debating, although I don't think that was the case in the finals). Stated another way, I think teams have a right to pursue boring outcomes, and if a competitive game frequently results in boring outcomes that's a game design flaw.

 

I do sort of think that teams should be allowed a limited number of substitutions like in soccer or basketball. I saw way too many games this tournament where it really felt like the match was over before it started just because of how the draft played out.

 

We do need more Dota Today.

 

I disagree with you're disagreement! This was a 10 million dollar prize pool, 90% of which was put up by the fans.  

 

It's probably pretty obvious that I love sports quite a bit.  All sports, pretty much.  There is no other way to classify professional sports than entertainment.  And if you're an entertainer your responsibility is to your audience (fans, we call them in sports).  It's really cut and dry to me.  None of these kids would be doing this if the community didn't pack an arena and funnel millions of dollars (with NO OBLIGATION!) into the game simply out of enthusiasm.  Professional athletes in established sports know this and it's rare for an athlete to not care about the fans perspective of their performance.  I attribute most of that to the maturity of established sports. In the decades of being around there are veterans in the locker room who cultivate this attitude -- that we're here BECAUSE the fans are and we play FOR the fans -- and I believe it's one of the healthier cultural aspects of established professional sports.  

 

If you are an entertainer you do not have the right to pursue boring outcomes.  I have faith that, in the long term, that sort of behavior will get weeded out because peoiple who love Dota will simply stop being fans of certain teams (like VG), and as the audience grows and begins to out-scale the prize pool, sponsorships will become more important (and reliable) to the individual athlete (gamer) than winnings and being a boring player will simply be less lucrative (in that Razer wants to put their money behind the player that people pay attention to).  Nevertheless, Dota 2 is not there yet (prize pools dwarf sponsorship income, as they did in the early days of the MLB, NBA and NFL).  So in the short term -- in the burgeoning days of the sport -- the athletes DO have an obligation to the fans because that's where the money is coming from.  

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I think the grand finals should also be cause for Valve to reconsider their playoff format. A team that's incapable of having a plan B if their chosen strategy doesn't work shouldn't be able to make the final. The NBA recently changed the first round of the playoffs from a five-game series to a seven-game series, in part to have at least one more game to sell tickets and broadcasting rights for, but also in part to make it more likely that the better team advances.

 

If VG had been faced with a best-of-5 or best-of-7 series somewhere on the road to the finals, I doubt they would have made it as far as they did. Regardless of the sport, longer playoff series require teams to make the sorts of adjustments VG proved incapable of in the finals.

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I think the grand finals should also be cause for Valve to reconsider their playoff format. A team that's incapable of having a plan B if their chosen strategy doesn't work shouldn't be able to make the final. The NBA recently changed the first round of the playoffs from a five-game series to a seven-game series, in part to have at least one more game to sell tickets and broadcasting rights for, but also in part to make it more likely that the better team advances.

 

If VG had been faced with a best-of-5 or best-of-7 series somewhere on the road to the finals, I doubt they would have made it as far as they did. Regardless of the sport, longer playoff series require teams to make the sorts of adjustments VG proved incapable of in the finals.

 

Yeah, I actually agree in principle.  I would like to see the group phase occur before the tournament to establish team rankings (ie: a few smaller lead-up tournaments) and then more best of 5's earlier.  I agree that VG would've had a better chance at being exposed.

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It's probably pretty obvious that I love sports quite a bit.  All sports, pretty much.  There is no other way to classify professional sports than entertainment.  And if you're an entertainer your responsibility is to your audience (fans, we call them in sports).  It's really cut and dry to me.  None of these kids would be doing this if the community didn't pack an arena and funnel millions of dollars (with NO OBLIGATION!) into the game simply out of enthusiasm.  Professional athletes in established sports know this and it's rare for an athlete to not care about the fans perspective of their performance.  I attribute most of that to the maturity of established sports. In the decades of being around there are veterans in the locker room who cultivate this attitude -- that we're here BECAUSE the fans are and we play FOR the fans -- and I believe it's one of the healthier cultural aspects of established professional sports.

 

So, in that case, I'm curious how you feel about the recent World Cup and Super Bowl blowouts. Do you think the entertainment value would have been even worse had Brazil or the Broncos been part of a sports culture that encouraged a forfeit?

 

I also like hearing how people feel professional esports fits into a sports/game/entertainment/hobby continuum. People seem to bring up chess whenever esports is compared to something unfavorable about traditional sports, but the fact that it's considered poor grace to waste your opponent's time and skill (potentially allowing future opponents to study them more than otherwise) if you honestly think that you can't win doesn't seem to come up as much when discussing the politics of GG.

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if you're an entertainer your responsibility is to your audience (fans, we call them in sports).  It's really cut and dry to me.  

Professional athletes in established sports know this and it's rare for an athlete to not care about the fans perspective of their performance.  I attribute most of that to the maturity of established sports. In the decades of being around there are veterans in the locker room who cultivate this attitude -- that we're here BECAUSE the fans are and we play FOR the fans -- and I believe it's one of the healthier cultural aspects of established professional sports.  

 

If you are an entertainer you do not have the right to pursue boring outcomes.  I have faith that, in the long term, that sort of behavior will get weeded out because peoiple who love Dota will simply stop being fans of certain teams (like VG), and as the audience grows and begins to out-scale the prize pool, sponsorships will become more important (and reliable) to the individual athlete (gamer) than winnings and being a boring player will simply be less lucrative (in that Razer wants to put their money behind the player that people pay attention to).  Nevertheless, Dota 2 is not there yet (prize pools dwarf sponsorship income, as they did in the early days of the MLB, NBA and NFL).  So in the short term -- in the burgeoning days of the sport -- the athletes DO have an obligation to the fans because that's where the money is coming from.  

I disagree with your disagreeing with his disagreement. (Or at least with some provisos I do)

I don't think there is the same idea of players primarily as entertainers in most pro sports I see this side of the Atlantic at least. Fundamentally we want our team to win and we don't care how they do it. I speak as a fan of a football team which was lauded for playing the most exciting football last season and who's title challenge ultimately disintegrated against teams who played 'anti-football' but who knows the majority of his fellow fans considers the way his team played as a prime example of tactical naïveté.

I don't blame Chelsea for beating Liverpool, I blame our own players for getting sucker punched, by a team who knew 100% what they wanted out of a game & set about getting it as efficiently as possible.

So IMO Don't blame VG for how they played blame valve for designing a game which produces those outcomes, all the great sports are near unrecognisable from their original formats. I if valve wants it's players to be entertainers it's up to it to make the game reward them.

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So, in that case, I'm curious how you feel about the recent World Cup and Super Bowl blowouts. Do you think the entertainment value would have been even worse had Brazil or the Broncos been part of a sports culture that encouraged a forfeit?

 

I also like hearing how people feel professional esports fits into a sports/game/entertainment/hobby continuum. People seem to bring up chess whenever esports is compared to something unfavorable about traditional sports, but the fact that it's considered poor grace to waste your opponent's time and skill (potentially allowing future opponents to study them more than otherwise) if you honestly think that you can't win doesn't seem to come up as much when discussing the politics of GG.

 

Of course.  I think the structure of those sports is such that it's a rarity.  But it's like, pulling your first-stringers in a blowout.  It makes sense if you're in playoff contention and don't want injuries to impact your team, but more of than not, you'll see someone like Kevin Durant (basketball here), say, after being pulled in the 4th qr during a blowout say, straight out "I'm upset. I wish I could've put on a better show, played better. We/I let the fans down."

 

I think that's enough.  In this year's Super Bowl, a full on prison-yard-beatdown by Seattle, Peyton Manning (of Denver, for our readers not in the sports know) threw every single pass the Broncos attempted. No backup.  And this is a 37 yo man whose robot neck is one hit a way from putting his giant head in the cheap seats.  But he knows he can't sit down and doesn't want to.

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I disagree with your disagreeing with his disagreement. (Or at least with some provisos I do)

I don't think there is the same idea of players primarily as entertainers in most pro sports I see this side of the Atlantic at least. Fundamentally we want our team to win and we don't care how they do it. I speak as a fan of a football team which was lauded for playing the most exciting football last season and who's title challenge ultimately disintegrated against teams who played 'anti-football' but who knows the majority of his fellow fans considers the way his team played as a prime example of tactical naïveté.

I don't blame Chelsea for beating Liverpool, I blame our own players for getting sucker punched, by a team who knew 100% what they wanted out of a game & set about getting it as efficiently as possible.

So IMO Don't blame VG for how they played blame valve for designing a game which produces those outcomes, all the great sports are near unrecognisable from their original formats. I if valve wants it's players to be entertainers it's up to it to make the game reward them.

 

 

A great counterpoint is what happened RIGHT before -- EG got wrecked in 20 minutes.  But instead of GG"ing after one tower, those crazy sons of guns went into the Roshan Pit. It was a stupid, wild Hail Mary and they lost one minute later but EG Is a fan favorite for a reason -- they'll use the game's systems to try to pull of the improbable because they seem to care that people are actually watching. I think that's huge.

 

I'm not saying teams shouldn't try to WIN in boring ways -- that's fine. I'm saying if that doesn't work out you have to remember to try to put on a good show and do something worth watching.

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So, in that case, I'm curious how you feel about the recent World Cup and Super Bowl blowouts. Do you think the entertainment value would have been even worse had Brazil or the Broncos been part of a sports culture that encouraged a forfeit?

 

I also like hearing how people feel professional esports fits into a sports/game/entertainment/hobby continuum. People seem to bring up chess whenever esports is compared to something unfavorable about traditional sports, but the fact that it's considered poor grace to waste your opponent's time and skill (potentially allowing future opponents to study them more than otherwise) if you honestly think that you can't win doesn't seem to come up as much when discussing the politics of GG.

I think dota compares quite badly to many pro sports because they don't snowball in the way it does, chess is a good example of something where a early imbalance does tend to become greater as the game continues. I think it's telling perhaps the only other example within sports I can think of is martial arts where a competitors ability to fight is degraded as the bout continues doesn't have any stigma about someone admiring defeat & tapping out.

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I think events like The International could be better served by having an actual season played prior to the main event. A well-paced schedule can help players in a lot of respects, and there'd be a better idea of who is better than who, no nonsense like just one bad (or good) match making a decision.

Also, by stretching the matches over many months rather than in a week means commentators can have it easier.

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Don't you think that a lot of this criticisms stems from observations and analysis of other sports? While traditional sports are contained in a set time limit, Dota isn't. I mean, I completely agree with all of you who say that these teams and players are ultimately entertainers as well, and the grand finals were undeniably underwhelming. But when I look at the grand finals, all the problems that made it underwhelming weren't how unprofessional VG was by GG'ing out early, but rather all the mistakes they made in the game and in their draft. It's been stated (by the analysts) that VG is an explosive team that win or lose games in the first 10-15 minutes, so it looked like this was the inevitable outcome. They aren't NaVi or Alliance, but rather they have their own style. I guess I'm just saying, shouldn't we be criticising their play-making rather than supposedly giving up too early? Shouldn't we be criticizing them more for sticking to the same failing strategy throughout the grand finals, rather than their obligation to entertain? 

 

I also resent the idea that VG would have been "exposed" under a more stable format, because they beat a lot of amazing teams to get to the grand finals, including DK and EG, who were the favourites to take it all. They simply lacked the answers when facing Newbee.

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Of course.  I think the structure of those sports is such that it's a rarity.  But it's like, pulling your first-stringers in a blowout.  It makes sense if you're in playoff contention and don't want injuries to impact your team, but more of than not, you'll see someone like Kevin Durant (basketball here), say, after being pulled in the 4th qr during a blowout say, straight out "I'm upset. I wish I could've put on a better show, played better. We/I let the fans down."

 

I think that's enough.  In this year's Super Bowl, a full on prison-yard-beatdown by Seattle, Peyton Manning (of Denver, for our readers not in the sports know) threw every single pass the Broncos attempted. No backup.  And this is a 37 yo man whose robot neck is one hit a way from putting his giant head in the cheap seats.  But he knows he can't sit down and doesn't want to.

 

Interesting! Do you think it's entirely an issue of money, then, or is there a culture problem (or, as Codicier says, a design problem) where teams don't feel like they're playing for fans (or don't feel it's worth their time)? If it's the latter as well as the former, how do you work around that? I feel like a simple GG timer isn't the solution that'll actually stick.

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I think dota compares quite badly to many pro sports because they don't snowball in the way it does, chess is a good example of something where a early imbalance does tend to become greater as the game continues. I think it's telling perhaps the only other example within sports I can think of is martial arts where a competitors ability to fight is degraded as the bout continues doesn't have any stigma about someone admiring defeat & tapping out.

 

I take it you missed this year's world cup final?

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Interesting! Do you think it's entirely an issue of money, then, or is there a culture problem (or, as Codicier says, a design problem) where teams don't feel like they're playing for fans (or don't feel it's worth their time)? If it's the latter as well as the former, how do you work around that? I feel like a simple GG timer isn't the solution that'll actually stick.

 

I could be wrong, but being around the teams all weekend, I think it's a culture problem.

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A great counterpoint is what happened RIGHT before -- EG got wrecked in 20 minutes.  But instead of GG"ing after one tower, those crazy sons of guns went into the Roshan Pit. It was a stupid, wild Hail Mary and they lost one minute later but EG Is a fan favorite for a reason -- they'll use the game's systems to try to pull of the improbable because they seem to care that people are actually watching. I think that's huge.

 

I'm not saying teams shouldn't try to WIN in boring ways -- that's fine. I'm saying if that doesn't work out you have to remember to try to put on a good show and do something worth watching.

 

Okay, I think maybe we're closer in opinion than it appeared at first. I guess the question is if the game is in fact over, is there any value to watching the game play out? This is a weird thing, and this is where LoMas differ from sports which mostly have a fixed time frame instead of an objective to accomplish. The question is would that doomed game produce anything interesting to watch? Some people might think so, but others might find it boring. It's pretty ambiguous I think.

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