*lowers cudgel*
― star wars ep viii: the bay of porgs (bizarro gazzara), Tuesday, 10 April 2018 12:44 (six years ago) link
devvvine’s link is much better than mine btw, everyone should read the whole thing. I’m now curious about what a national union for developers in games might mean for developers, period.
― El Tomboto, Tuesday, 10 April 2018 15:17 (six years ago) link
"MacLean raised concerns of unions controlling the jobs developers take, the projects they work on, and potentially force companies to be understaffed." lol this is classsssssic union-busting rhetoric, based around confusing people about what labor contracts actually look like. you negotiate over conditions of work, you don't magically become the owners and management of the company (sadly).
― explosion from DOOM courtesy of id software (Doctor Casino), Tuesday, 10 April 2018 17:43 (six years ago) link
i know i'm violating the principle of the thread here, but man speaking as someone who's loved jimmy maher's writing up until now, this series he's doing on civilization is excruciating. he's been regurgitating fukuyama for months now. god, i hope this isn't a shark-jump.
― Arch Bacon (rushomancy), Saturday, 12 May 2018 16:30 (five years ago) link
I’d buy an album titled Regurgitating Fukuyama
― El Tomboto, Saturday, 12 May 2018 16:38 (five years ago) link
i googled "jimmy maher civilization" since i had no clue who he was, and the first thing that comes up is a post with a ludwig von mises quote at the top
― obviously DLC (Karl Malone), Saturday, 12 May 2018 16:41 (five years ago) link
oh, that's probably the post that prompted you to bump this, rushomancy! it does look excruciating. he was good in the past, i guess?
― obviously DLC (Karl Malone), Saturday, 12 May 2018 16:43 (five years ago) link
Fukuyama is pre-regurgitated iirc
― hepatitis groan (Noodle Vague), Saturday, 12 May 2018 17:24 (five years ago) link
most of his writing is good, yeah. his series on tetris is pretty great.
― Arch Bacon (rushomancy), Saturday, 12 May 2018 17:26 (five years ago) link
Had no idea Francis had written a book about Tetris, very interested in his lapsed neoconservative take
― El Tomboto, Saturday, 12 May 2018 17:33 (five years ago) link
https://www.themillions.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/570_AmisTop.jpg
― Arch Bacon (rushomancy), Saturday, 12 May 2018 17:37 (five years ago) link
otm. he's usually a solid in-depth historian of pre-web games/computing culture, but this series on Civ has been painful, a liberal amateur history of everything that has happened. Started just fine when he was on home ground - business and personalities at Microprose, the narrative of development - but just flat summarising of ideas over the last few articles.
― woof, Saturday, 12 May 2018 17:40 (five years ago) link
haha i've been trying to push back in the comments and i do appreciate him engaging with me but he ultimately concluded that we were talking past each other and that's kinda true because our premises/paradigms are soooooo different.
― noel gallaghah's high flying burbbhrbhbbhbburbbb (Doctor Casino), Saturday, 12 May 2018 17:45 (five years ago) link
he is unbelievably worth reading on video games though.
― noel gallaghah's high flying burbbhrbhbbhbburbbb (Doctor Casino), Saturday, 12 May 2018 17:46 (five years ago) link
in its worst moments, the civ series reminds me of precocious high school student essays on world history. huge armchair theories that explain everything, timeless correspondences where x always gives rise to y, economics/colonialism sidelined or inconsistently treated.... massive revenge of the grand narratives. he's so good on video games though. the best moments of the civ series still let that peek through, whenever he gets back to the actual game and tries to close-read the stories its mechanics are telling, he's on more solid ground. the first half of the most recent one on the game's economics is pretty good at doing a takedown of overly broad cross-time generalizations based on this game. maybe he's having second thoughts.
― noel gallaghah's high flying burbbhrbhbbhbburbbb (Doctor Casino), Saturday, 12 May 2018 17:49 (five years ago) link
The idea to show the ideological premises of something like Civilization is awesome, but the last posts it's been more about explaining what he himself thinks about the world that Civilization doesn't explicitly agree with. The one on Religion was when I got off.
― Frederik B, Saturday, 12 May 2018 17:59 (five years ago) link
haha yeah I saw you there Dr C (thinking "hmmm is that the ilxor or another Dr Casino?"). He's so good natured, but it's a hard gap to cross.
― woof, Saturday, 12 May 2018 18:21 (five years ago) link
yeah he's thoughtful and considerate and meticulous and thorough and usually has a lot to offer on any topic he addresses - but here he just doesn't seem to have anything to say that fukuyama didn't say already, which is a disappointment.
― Arch Bacon (rushomancy), Saturday, 12 May 2018 18:45 (five years ago) link
the thing is that the series has gotten me to think a lot about that game! and the kinds of assumptions baked into all such games. like the idea that the tradeoff mechanic is between cash, productivity, science research, and "luxuries"... he chooses to interrogate different aspects of that but it's really striking that it's "luxuries" and not "infrastructure" or "essential social services" or whatever. something that's passed by me unexamined since age 10, playing hundreds of hours of that game, and now to my eye strikes me as a profoundly reaganite way of thinking about the thing, a bunch of unnecessary goodies that are just placating people. IRL people don't turn to civil unrest and overthrow the government because of a lack of "luxuries" so on its face the game's logic is goofy. so, y'know, this got me thinking about that.
idk eventually he'll be done with civ and back to, i hope, deep dives on all kinds of crazy old gaming software and hardware history. when he's working in his own field the armchair theorizing is nowhere to be seen - he has this close-grained attention to the interrelationships between business decisions, personalities, technological developments, game genres., etc., that's so fantastic. you can learn mountains from practically any random article on there.
― noel gallaghah's high flying burbbhrbhbbhbburbbb (Doctor Casino), Saturday, 12 May 2018 19:08 (five years ago) link
he is /unbelievably/ worth reading on video games though.
― Mahogany Loggins (bizarro gazzara), Saturday, 12 May 2018 19:11 (five years ago) link
Yeah, he is great. Still great.
― Frederik B, Saturday, 12 May 2018 19:25 (five years ago) link
You guys are fuckin’ nerrrrrrrrrdsI want Mordy’s take now
― El Tomboto, Saturday, 12 May 2018 19:29 (five years ago) link
https://kotaku.com/this-is-the-coolest-thing-ive-seen-in-vr-1826010054
interview with the creator of very cool psychedelic artsy VR
― Hazy Maze Cave (Adam Bruneau), Monday, 14 May 2018 19:19 (five years ago) link
ugh Tim Rogers
― Nhex, Monday, 14 May 2018 22:12 (five years ago) link
^
― bamcquern, Monday, 14 May 2018 23:39 (five years ago) link
tim rogers will tear this board apart
― ciderpress, Monday, 14 May 2018 23:54 (five years ago) link
I love Tim Rogers unreservedly and if he does actually publish a novel I will buy and read it
― valorous wokelord (silby), Tuesday, 15 May 2018 02:42 (five years ago) link
Also I think he is cuet
― valorous wokelord (silby), Tuesday, 15 May 2018 02:48 (five years ago) link
Xopher Wailord Barnett > Tim Rogers5/14/18 12:33pmI’m sick of seeing Tim Rogers’ pseudo-intellectual hipster face.
Tim Rogers > Xopher Wailord Barnett5/14/18 12:37pmyeah, me too
― obviously DLC (Karl Malone), Tuesday, 15 May 2018 03:00 (five years ago) link
i like tim rogers a lot and can understand why someone wouldn't
post an interview w a female game designer, get 7 posts trying to out-dog the dude interviewer. :-/
did anyone watch this video and see the other games that this developer made? they look amazing. Paloma Dawkins makes these games of psychedelic worlds with hand drawn trippy line art animation. she is partially funded by the NFB of Canada, something i have always held in high esteem for producing so many great (and personally experimental) works of art like the work of Norman McLaren.
her work is very collaborative - they have designers and artists and musicians, a lot of them students just making things to make new work. as a former art student myself, it's always cool to see cool new stuff coming out of the art school community.
― Hazy Maze Cave (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, 15 May 2018 15:55 (five years ago) link
the one about the universe full of hands sounds neat. it is her response to the election of 2016 and is intended to express a painful & emotional experience, with harsh sound design, a sensory-overload-driven overwhelming fps.
― Hazy Maze Cave (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, 15 May 2018 15:57 (five years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEu_9bKdKQk
i didn't have time to watch that interview last night. but just finished it, and wow! she's amazing
― obviously DLC (Karl Malone), Tuesday, 15 May 2018 17:17 (five years ago) link
the games definitely look interesting
― Nhex, Wednesday, 16 May 2018 06:43 (five years ago) link
Single Player As Local Co-Op
― Nhex, Tuesday, 10 July 2018 17:50 (five years ago) link
that is great
― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 10 July 2018 21:19 (five years ago) link
loved that, brought back memories of playing games with a friend on his dad's computer and splitting up roles, Elite especially where one person was the pilot and the other in charge of missiles/hyperspace/trading
― ( X '____' )/ (zappi), Tuesday, 10 July 2018 21:45 (five years ago) link
dont think i ever divided roles like that with people, but there was always a lot of tagging in and out
i think the original smash bros was the game that killed 'single player as coop' for my childhood crew, that game raised the bar immensely for how much multiplayer time you could sink into it without getting bored
― ciderpress, Tuesday, 10 July 2018 21:52 (five years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKn9yiLVlMM
id heard about this noclip documentary for a few weeks now. it's pretty good! making me curious about Morrowind
― Hazy Maze Cave (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, 11 July 2018 01:40 (five years ago) link
for me nothing will ever say "we built a world for you" like they have taken you from the imperial city-- first by carriage, then by boat-- to the east. to morrowind. we can remember it for you wholesale.
― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, 11 July 2018 07:18 (five years ago) link
i really wanted to like that bethesda documentary but after the 15th time it cut to the same shot of the parking lot of the bethesda studio i had to turn it off. there are some interesting nuggets of information in those interviews but i lost my patience waiting.
sadly, when i saw the phrase "Single Player As Local Co-Op" i assumed it meant the move where you're yourself and you try to use both controllers at once. like taping NES controllers to a table so you tap buttons on both controllers without them sliding around. which is a profoundly depressing activity as a young child, if you keep going with it
― Karl Malone, Wednesday, 11 July 2018 19:09 (five years ago) link
haven't watched that noclip doc yet. i remember that during oblivion development, bethesda's testing department was apparently one guy on a couch.
https://youtu.be/zvm0CN3tQFI?t=14m47s
― adam the (abanana), Friday, 20 July 2018 21:54 (five years ago) link
digitalfoundry doing a series on the evolution of water rendering tech in games
https://youtu.be/V4MMlKhJfGI
― ciderpress, Monday, 23 July 2018 19:56 (five years ago) link
Two Histories of Myst
― a film with a little more emotional balls (zchyrs), Tuesday, 24 July 2018 18:28 (five years ago) link
worth reading
― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, 24 July 2018 19:00 (five years ago) link
i never played myst or any of its sequels or remakes
― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, 24 July 2018 19:01 (five years ago) link
Me neither, but I've always found them/their success fascinating. The metanarrative about collective memory is the main hook of that article, for me.
― a film with a little more emotional balls (zchyrs), Tuesday, 24 July 2018 19:05 (five years ago) link
PC was my only gaming platform through most of the 90s. I played and loved Myst/Riven, and doom/quake, and all the lucasarts games. Author is otm, the rewritten history of that period is a really odd and probably unhealthy thing.
Rebought Myst recently actually. Made a start, and man I've got no idea how I ever had the patience for it first time around. I finished this thing! More than once! With no walkthroughs!
Actually, I probably do know how I managed that - it was a combination of long empty school holidays and the nagging guilt of having convinced my dad to actually spend £50 on it. Almost all the games I played back then were pirates swapped with friends but we couldn't copy CDs then, so paying up was the only way to play Myst (which only added to its appeal tbh). Having made that unprecedented investment, there was no way I could justify giving up a couple of hours in.
In fairness though I don't remember actually wanting to give up either - the atmosphere of that place was so compelling, and it really did look amazingly *real* at the time, I think I was happy walking back and forth flicking switches until something happened, just because it felt like a nice place to be hanging out anyway.
― JimD, Friday, 27 July 2018 11:59 (five years ago) link
yeah, cool article! could be more tightly edited but i like the big points about gamer metanarratives and their authorship. the inability for the canon to deal with the success of games that appear in the $9.95 bin near the exit at Staples, or even with things like successful catalog titles. the focus of all mags being the kind of "gamer" eager to drop fifty bucks on "gamer"-targeted titles the week of release, it's easy to overlook that in the aggregate, the game that may have blown the most minds in 1998 was.... myst, purchased for $9.95 at Staples. or whatever.
― This is a total Jeff Porcaro. (Doctor Casino), Friday, 27 July 2018 12:04 (five years ago) link