sanitize and canonize

this puzzle totally defeated younger me: >go east As...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:06:46 -0700

this puzzle totally defeated younger me:

>go east

As your feet touch the grass you sense a strange motion around you. Looking down, you watch with horror as the grass begins to ripple and writhe with vegetable indignance!

Angry green stalks whip around your legs, pull you to the ground and drag you, kicking and screaming, back to the paved surface of the Lancaster Walk.

A chorus of offended little voices subsides as you regain your footing.

now playing

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:20:26 -0700

Did a bit of cleaning out my backlog of browser games. Some highlights: No-One Has to Die is a cute browser-based puzzle game by Stuart Madafiglio; its shallow branching story is neatly integrated into the puzzle. Ending is an abstracted puzzly roguelike by st33d; there’s intentionally no wait action, which might be the only way to keep it a puzzle? To me it just feels like arbitrary busywork replacing the wait, which isn’t awesome.

Less progress on my shooter backlog; I haven’t even got to Dishonored yet, to say nothing of Bioshock Infinite. But that hasn’t kept me from the commentary. Rab Florence says why are we so defensive all the time, that Infinite’s violence is more necessary & worthwhile than a hundred other games that weren’t being jumped all over last week (or was it the week before?); Tim Rogers says the violence gets in the way of having a nice look around, among half a dozen other things: the most interesting, to me, was when he went off on a whole tangent about how obviously they were trying for an American Ico but got scared off and just made Elizabeth invincible, but if they had, here’s how he would have done it. In great detail! I’m not sure why book or movie reviews that talk about the book or movie they wished they were reading or watching instead make me angry but when it comes to games it’s a useful and entertaining design exercise.

And I played a bit of Torchlight II; it was on sale, and they’ve just released their editing tools. I promised myself that before I make any more random dungeons I’ll look at how Torchlight does it, though I don’t think I’ll be doing any in the near future. They played up their traditional stats-and-skills system as a contrast to Diablo III’s streamlining, and it angries me up all over again. If only D3 hadn’t dropped the ball on the story and the auction house and maybe the servers! Torchlight’s pretty fun in all the moments when you aren’t spending skill and stat points; it’s a worthy Diabloalike. Bonus points for the pet alpaca.

When I miss my stop

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:29:50 -0700

embassytown:

whenonbart:

… but why use a DC Metro train for a BART graphic … surely there are plenty of BART gifs in the world XD;

Because DC’s Metro is the best!

sanitize and canonize: more definitional bullshit

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 23:52:54 -0700

sanitize and canonize: more definitional bullshit:

charmian:

You know, I definitely did play Candyland as a child, but I don’t remember anything about the gameplay! All I remember was that it was candyland, and nothing about whether I won or was good or bad at the game. So maybe that is your point, ha.

So your argument, perhaps, is a descriptive (not sure that is the correct term…) one? These things are games because the people who play them are gamers and they arise from the culture of gaming? [Though arguably this is not necessary: what if a “non-game” is instead played by non-gamers?]

Unpacking your last paragraph: so what is it that they have in common with AAA games? Isn’t the debate that they *do* have something in common? (in other words, indie game-makers are arguing for the title of game, thus claiming commonality?) Or do you mean that AAA games are often story-heavy, or do sometimes use the same techniques used by the indie games? Meaning that the gameplay does not line up with the politics because they are in fact similar to the AAA games? Although perhaps that is foreordained because the toolbox you speak of was invented by mainstream gaming.

I’m fairly permissive when it comes to what is a game; basically, any interactive entertainment, even if it doesn’t have choices or a victory condition. I think descriptive is right: they’re games because gamers and non-gamers alike know what you’re talking about when you say the word.

I’m arguing the latter: that the new indies are like AAA games in promoting story and scripted experiences over gameplay. Things are muddied a little because there’s an older indie movement who defined themselves in opposition to the big publishers by making low-fi mechanics-heavy games—back to the roots, real games, etc—and so there’s confusion about who’s in the inside and who’s on the outside and who’s actually fighting whom.

Again, in practice everyone’s pretty chill and more focused on making awesome stuff than picking fights.

royalboiler: Me and my pal Emily Carroll did some short comics...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 22:53:32 -0700

royalboiler:

Me and my pal Emily Carroll did some short comics based off the same Betty and Veronica short— up here

sanitize and canonize: more definitional bullshit

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 01:04:55 -0700

sanitize and canonize: more definitional bullshit:

charmian:

mirrorful:

Raph Koster brings up the mechanics thing and makes Robert Yang really angry; he sees the whole “what is a game?” question as an move, perhaps unintentional, to keep people marginalized and step on their political message.

Andy Schatz, creator of Monaco, points out that indie games are all…

Ah, I recall Tadhg Kelly was talking about this too. I think zine is a terrible word for it, but while I don’t think people who play for the story and are ‘whatevs’ about the gameplay are as much of a minority as he believes they are, I have sympathy for his formalism. Maybe it’s because I’m a pretty marginal gamer (barely a gamer), who often doesn’t really play games for their gameplay or mechanics. If it makes me a non-gamer then so be it and bring me my non-games. (Interactive art seems to be a fine title for non-games? Software art? )

Yet the “non-games” actually seem to be parodying or working off the conventions of indisputable games, and might not “work” if the player was in fact not a gamer conversant with that ‘vocabulary.’

I suppose you could see this like the moment where the novel ceased to be solely a popular entertainment and capable of being the dominant art form, and started to have its self-conscious avant-garde, or you could see it as the difference between crafting things for function and as art (whereas if one uses the techniques of woodworking to make a sculpture, that does not make it really the same as furniture.) .

I read that Kelly article! There must be something going around; during GDC Mark Rosewater was arguing that Candyland isn’t, strictly speaking, a game. It feels like a game while you’re playing it. Not a very good game, but so much of the experience is in taking it out of the box and sitting around a table moving pieces in turn. If Howling Dogs came on a DVD in a green box and said PRESS START at the beginning, only game devs with turf to war over would say it’s not a game.

It feels like this distinction matters a lot more to the people making the games than the people playing them. When I’m playing games, what matters to me changes on a game-to-game basis: some games I skip all the cutscenes to get right back into the action, some games I slog through tedium (or use cheat codes? very occasionally) in order to see the story to the end. The fact that “non-games” use the vocabulary of games wouldn’t be a paradox to the people playing them; almost all of them have a foot in each world, if they even perceive separate worlds to begin with.

But when I’m making games… even then! It feels like there’s a toolbox full of pieces of games that have already been made, and you sort of choose the ones that best fit what you’re trying to do, customizing them or making new ones as necessary; whether a cutscene or a QTE or whatever makes your game less gamey is something you yell at each other during design meetings to justify aesthetic decisions you’ve already made, really.

So on this point, I think I have to agree with the zinesters! I agree that’s a horrible name.

I still have a nagging suspicion that low-interactivity story-heavy indie games have more in common with AAA games than they’d like to admit, and that maybe ‘not a game’ is an intentional troll to make their perceived gameplay line up with their politics. If anybody actually looked at gameplay through this weird lens.

more definitional bullshit

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 10:20:26 -0700

Raph Koster brings up the mechanics thing and makes Robert Yang really angry; he sees the whole “what is a game?” question as an move, perhaps unintentional, to keep people marginalized and step on their political message.

Andy Schatz, creator of Monaco, points out that indie games are all growed up: “It’s not so much that indie culture has changed, but the industry has moved in the direction that we’ve been trying to push in. Which is really cool. Like I said in the IGF intro, we’re not The Clash anymore. We’re Green Day.”

I’m with them, temperamentally if not professionally. I was raised on Mario and computer games of the old old school, and yet by the time I was out of college and actually making games, the world of games was different. AAA games desparately wanted to be legitimate, and that meant being like movies. Regardless of brow height: critics and scholars knew how to deal with story, and would fudge their way around the actual experience of play in order to extract a narrative. Back then “but is it art?” was the tiresome and useless definitional question used to generate more heat than light. And so people turned to pixel art and cheap tools like Flash and Game Maker and made games that were about all the things they thought had been lost: jumping on heads and random dungeons, strict tests of reflexes and serendipitous interactions between independent objects.

But it wasn’t that long ago! Maybe the indies have won, or been coöpted—and Minecraft’s certainly done a lot—but it still informs a lot of my thinking about games. To the extent that people are defensive about mechanics and gaminess, I suspect that’s where it comes from.

[simultaneously, it seems, we’re having a critcal backlash vs. bioshock infinite; i’m not sure if or where that fits in to anything.]

[dan cook has his own take on the history, which feels oddly focused on how games have been professionalized]

You Lookin’ at Me? Reflections on Google Glass

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 15:40:54 -0700

You Lookin’ at Me? Reflections on Google Glass:

Jan Chipchase talks about some of the research he and his firm have done about Glass-related issues, in particular around how people react to other people wearing them. It’s interesting, though there was a (slightly tangential) bullet point that surprised me:

In-ear or close-to-ear (inductive) audio changes the wearer’s enjoyment of food and drink — a problem for an otherwise prime use case: Watching movies at home, where snacks and beverages might naturally be consumed.

Is this really a thing? How does it change?

I’m kind of torn on the whole Twine thing. Howling Dogs...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 13:20:26 -0700

I’m kind of torn on the whole Twine thing. Howling Dogs was admittedly pretty great, and text IS awesome. To the extent that people try to set up a twine-vs-parser IF dichotomy, they’re just coming at the NOT A GAME thing from the other direction, and fuck you?

I do appreciate the Hypercard shout-out. There was a time, a few years back, when I was convinced that Flash was the new Hypercard and that the same kind of DIY punk rock ethos that the Twine folks call for now could be found in places like Newgrounds.

For me personally: I love mechanics and simulation, and the power of parser games to do that simulation at a symbolic level is really, really cool. This Inform 7 sample warms my heart. (a turn later, it room temperatures my heart.) The fact that that kind of parser + world model—things resting on other things, and so on—has its roots in super early AI research is just icing on the cake.

I’ll also say: it has never been easier to make games, Twine or no Twine; choose the right tool for the game you want to make. “Learn to code!” is not good general life advice, but if you want to make games it’s absolutely worth doing. I complain that the code quality required to make a game is shamefully low, but that’s a snobby aesthetic objection; from a barrier to entry point of view, it’s awesome.

Yglesias does San Francisco (though folks on twitter point out a...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:00:51 -0700

Yglesias does San Francisco (though folks on twitter point out a more elegant comparison); it’s basically another chance to ride his BUILD MORE HOUSE hobbyhorse, though I was struck by this:

For San Francisco to be as dense as Manhattan, it would have to house 3.2 million people instead of 805,000.

We talk about a good game about how we want to be New York, but that’s a lot of catching up to do.

"As unbelievable as [White Dude Super Detective (WDSD)] characters are, they would become infinitely..."

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:17:46 -0700

“As unbelievable as [White Dude Super Detective (WDSD)] characters are, they would become infinitely more so if their race or gender were changed. In The Mentalist, WDSD Patrick Jane once grifted clients as a fake psychic, but now works as a hard-to-control resource for the California Bureau of Investigations. What if the Jane character were a Latino ex-grifter? Would his arrogance and propensity for sneaking into suspect’s homes and accusing wealthy businessmen of impropriety read as quirky and charming? Would anyone believe that a police force would allow such behavior? Could the Scotland Yard of fantasy be down with a coke-addicted black Sherlock—no matter how clever? The San Francisco police department abides Adrian Monk’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, as the FBI allows Perception’s Dr. Daniel Pierce to assist on cases, despite his unmedicated schizophrenia and paranoia, which results in hallucinations. Could a black woman be cast in those roles to the same effect? I submit, that even in the fictional worlds of literature and television, race and gender matter. Belief can only be suspended so far. And this archetype is reliant on power that comes with white maleness in American society.”

- Tamara Winfrey Harris | Privilege And The White Dude Super-Detective (via herocountry)

This is something I thought about in Sherlock fandom a whooooooole lot. People were drawing genderswap fanart, as they do and as I love, but I didn’t think a female Sherlock was feasible (though a female John might be). In fact, I wasn’t sure a Sherlock with a different accent would work. ACD’s Holmes was a gentleman, to be sure, but he wasn’t as posh as BBC Sherlock and Mycroft seem to be in relation to modern British society — and he wasn’t as anti-social. The further you drive these guys out on the limb of eccentricity, the higher you have to hoist them on their privilege to make up for it.

(via genufa)

1) I hope someone linked the OP that really amazing Harlem!Sherlock gifset that I now no longer have XD

2) That said, what about Luther? Does he have absolutely no eccentricities? Or is he actually believable?

3) I like to think all these things will eventually be possible. And there’s already some headway, I like to think! You’ve got Kalinda as a Super Private Investigator on Good Wife; she does plenty of amoral/extrajudicial things, albeit because the lawyers hint at her to, and is generally celebrated as a badass for it. There needs to be more, and Kalinda isn’t the main character, but once you’ve seen that, you can imagine a show surrounding Kalinda, and so on.

(via embassytown)

1) I thought of that gifset! It was one racebend I really felt could work, but then you’re also changing the $SOCIETY variable…

2) I don’t know much about Luther. XD I don’t know much about Bones, either, other than it was loosely based on Kathy Reichs, and I don’t think of Kathy Reichs’ heroine as all that eccentric (though, I’m me XD; she’s plenty unusual).

3) I haven’t actually been precise enough: you can totally write a believable AU in which Sherlock was born a woman and still investigates crime. Some people do. She just can’t — won’t — have the exact same personality, because she’d have grown up and lived as a woman. I thought about this a lot because it was an indicative edge case, in fact: one that would tell you a lot about what it means to live as a woman, versus a man. But yes, in any case one imagines this changing, in fiction, and it is changing for the better even now. Among other reasons because we’re on a societal cusp where varying these factors does not produce a story that is un-swallowable by the average TV viewer, but is seen to give the story an “interesting twist” (eg. Joan on Elementary).

(via genufa)

I think there’s two parts to “belief can only be suspended so far.” I don’t think non-white/non-dude is incompatible with the Super Detective fantasy. As I see it, the thing that separates super from ordinary detectives is that Being Right is more important than police hierarchy or hippocratic oath or social skills or, really, anything. The fact that the consequences of failure would hit a woman much harder than a man in the equivalent situation doesn’t matter because it never comes up: having magic powers means they never fail.

Which is important! There was a time when House lost his powers, and all the fun went away: what was left was an arrogant junkie ordering his minions to torture people.

The other part of the Super Detective engine is that the audience has to be rooting for them: from the Lestrade POV, the show is a recurring nightmare, every week some asshole saying “I told you so.” And, contra Sabina and the OP, I think it’s this point where the detective not being white—or, particularly, not being a dude—would lose people. Or there’s enough of a fear there that they don’t try.

fool me twice, won't get fooled 'til next year

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 13:20:42 -0700

I am pro-April Fools! At least in its modern incarnation as a web holiday about making up stupid shit. Practical jokes aim for funny but fail into cruelty, which kind of sucks; the worst a web page can do is bore you. And, yeah, there are some cliches to grind down the world-weary. But in general: it’s a festival of publishing untruths, and it’s actually somewhat observed. I’m not going to hate.

The “people who are bad at funny shouldn’t try to be funny” attitude chafes a little. Most of the time, that’s true! But the point of holidays is to temporarily relax the rules, not to create artifacts of value for future generations.

Apparently they’re using this tech in the new Metal Gear...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:38:35 -0700

Apparently they’re using this tech in the new Metal Gear engine: you build clothes out of patterns (like real clothes!) then hang them on your characters. Their cloth sim is really convincing, too. “Oh my god I need this,” says Bradley, who’s already sculpted a lifetime’s worth of skate clothing. “But I will miss painting on wrinkles :(“

a-proposed-world: A proposed map for a future London. Even...

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:21:33 -0700

a-proposed-world:

A proposed map for a future London.

Even in the past it was the future!

What would you do: Part 2, the Island of Surpyc

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:33:33 -0700

What would you do: Part 2, the Island of Surpyc:

Dsquared’s at it again, choosing his own adventure in Cyprus’s bank disaster.

He’s got a new mechanic this time:

In this game you will need two dice. At various points in the game, chance will govern the outcome. When instructed to roll the dice, you should follow the accepted methodology:

Check both outcome to see which is the good one

Decide whether you really think you deserve a bit of good luck, whether I was wrong in setting the probabilities, in general whatever rationale for picking the good outcome you can think of

Go back later and see whether the bad outcome was really gruesome.

But there is a familiar face!

“I didn’t expect to see you again”. There’s a somewhat awkward silence between you and the occupant of the room, who is sitting on the edge of a desk drinking tea. It’s Maynard. “We didn’t part on the best of terms”.

“No, we didn’t”, he replies, guardedly. “And the fact that we’re back here working together shouldn’t be taken as a good sign. Either for our own careers, or for the problem itself. This situation has landed on our desks precisely because everyone with enough clout to wash their hands of it has done so.”

I don’t know if Argentina-style Greek default is canon or if it’s in IRL continuity.

Holy crap! Ancient Workshop (James Brown) is making an origami...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:40:30 -0700

Holy crap! Ancient Workshop (James Brown) is making an origami editor. As he says in his blog, it started out as a game in which you’re made out of origami, and the editor got more and more honest and then at some point it just became the game.

I’m impressed; I can imagine taking so many shortcuts along the way to something you’d call an origami game. And the translucent paper is a nice touch.

vexed nymphs go for quick waltz job

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 17:43:36 -0700

vexed nymphs go for quick waltz job:

I’m going to stick with the quick brown fox, but every so often font browsers try to get clever with a quartz sphinx. Microsoft’s jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz, while Adobe demands: “Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!” I judge it among the shortest of ‘em that actually reads like a sentence, if that’s any help.

There’s not a lot to work with at the expensive end of the Scrabble dictionary.

Powering Down Google Reader

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 19:11:00 -0700

Powering Down Google Reader:

charmian:

mirrorful:

google reader ;_;

Huh, I use it too. Anyone have any suggestions? I know there are others for Android, but I want something that I can pop up in Firefox.

The popular contenders seem to be feedly and the old reader; I’m leaning towards the old reader right now because it’s actually loading (though it’s taking hours to import my feeds) and because its interface (as the name would suggest) is comfortably greaderish.

Yglesias is taking the Marco Arment line that with Google gone we’ll start to see real competition and innovation in the world of RSS readers, which… it would be nice! They’ve got two and a half months.

Powering Down Google Reader

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:15:58 -0700

Powering Down Google Reader:

google reader ;_;

borgen

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:20:40 -0700

I’m watching Borgen. “It’s the Danish West Wing!” they said, and really, what else do you have to say?

(I’ve been reluctant to watch the American West Wing again; Bartlett’s America was refreshing when viewed from Bush’s America—or, really, from the wreckage of Clinton’s America—but from here in Obama’s America I fear that it would look remarkably timid. With a side of naive. But I still love the characters, and the walk-and-talk—in my head there’s a version of Game of Thrones with fewer whores and more walk-and-talk, and I’m watching the shit out of that show.)

But, yeah, it’s neat. I like watching political stuff from other countries, particularly since almost nobody is dumb enough to do it like we do. The multiparty stuff I sort of knew about, but it feels really weird to have people care so much about the Cabinet.

Also: there’s a dude who’s like the PM’s #1 minion, but I think he’s a civil servant and was there when she moved in? Ihni what his real job title is or what he’s doing. Also, they got an awesome troll-looking dude for the leader of the far-right Freedom Party, and he can be counted on to chortle gleefully and/or say something racist when the situation demands.