Cyborg771

Only 1 man signed up in Tajikstan. Must be lonely there.

To respond to some of the repeated stuff I've seen. Yeah it's intended to get existing fans hyped, not as an ad. I guess if it's trying to "say" anything it's just "playing video games is actually this epic clash of titans" which is bullshit of course but sometimes in the midst of a game it can feel really important and that's what they're getting at with the visuals. In regards to the racial aspect, I think like half of the guys are supposed to be of asian descent but it's not super clear and I didn't actually count. Still not very diverse.

Have you guys seen the animation from Riot celebrating their latest world championship? It's a really slick video, but I can't help but notice that all the players are male. As far as I can tell these aren't caricatures of existing players (but I know nothing about the pro LoL scene so I may be wrong). It seems like if you have an opportunity to create 10 fictional players you could at least at a token female, but nothing. The pro scene for a lot of games like this are heavily male dominated but why make your content representational when you can make it aspirational.

I feel the same way about JonTron that I do about Mike Krahulik and a fair number of people I see discussing this stuff in public. They mean well and they think they're being even handed and reasonable. Anything hurtful they do is purely out of ignorance. I can't hate that too much because I myself was ignorant of a lot of this stuff until only a few years ago. He isn't particularly harmful in and of himself, he just provides harmful people with a rallying point unintentionally. It's disappointing but it doesn't stop me from being able to enjoy their work.

If you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go weep for humanity some more.

Yeah, that struck me pretty quickly. And why would anyone trust the ramblings of an angry ex anyways?

As somebody who has been avoiding discussion of this "scandal" like the plague. Is there actually any reason to suspect any wrongdoing on anybody's part or is it, as I suspect, a bunch of unsubstantiated bull-honkey?

I often struggle with this kind of thing. The answer of course isn't to ignore those we've offended, nor is it to bend to every outcry. Doing the former will do nothing to improve the state of the world, but the latter could lead to homogenized works too tepid to offend but too bland to inspire. How do we strike a balance between the extremes? How do we determine a valid criticism from an invalid one. Is there some mathematically determinable threshold for outrage? This isn't specifically about Vlambeer of course. This is true of all creative works.

Nazis do seem to have reached cartoonishly evil levels in the public consciousness.

Just as a counter point to this sentiment, I find Cracked to be better than most comedy sites on the web. For one thing they're pretty aggressive about fact checking and sourcing where appropriate. Buzzfeed and it's ilk have no problem spewing hearsay into the void so it's refreshing to see articles based on, and vouching for, science and research. That's not to say it doesn't have lazy and bad content, there's obviously a range, but it's articles are usually pretty entertaining and informative. The list format is obvious clickbait but it doesn't actually hurt the content itself. Some of the content (like videos and the podcast) don't adhere to the list format at all but they're still titled as such. Just my two cents.

I think the fundamental difference between something like Luftrausers and something like Papers Please is that in the latter the aesthetic is used for a narrative purpose, to tell a story that wouldn't work the same way with a different aesthetic. The perceived danger (I don't necessarily know where I fall on the issue yet) is that by CASUALLY adopting the aesthetic you risk weakening the cultural sentiment somehow, or it seems like you're disregarding the horrible things it's associated with.

I think you're underselling the value of a purely aesthetic choice. For one thing I doubt they're going to drop the heavy/medium/light dynamic that the series has always had, but even if they hypothetically did I don't think that would make character choosing much less valuable.

Honestly, this is what it felt like growing up in the west. The Simpsons, Friends, and dozens of other shows were generally on during my formative years. These were series that made hundreds if not thousands of cultural references throughout their runs. When I was very young I wasn't reading Poe, but I could give you a plot synopsis of The Tell-Tale Heart thanks to Lisa's Rival. I hadn't read Dickens but The Muppets Christmas Carol gave me the gist of that story. In the vast majority of cases my first introduction to cultural ideas wasn't their original sources but through references, or references to references. In some cases it was immediately clear that "oh, this is like that thing I've heard of" but in others it was years before I found out what a joke was in reference too. I'm sure we've all had the experience of watching something from our childhood and saying "Wow, I didn't get that joke at the time". It doesn't matter if you're from Europe or North America as far as I can tell. Also, I have no idea who Carol Channing is. The name sounds familiar but I couldn't tell you what she's known for. That's not just you.

The discussion of crossover stories and interwoven narratives got me thinking about a story structure I've been increasingly aware of lately but which doesn't seem to get a lot of discussion. For the sake of conversation I'm gonna call it "Narrative as Clockwork". It's the kind of story where the draw isn't necessarily the characters or emotions but unravelling the complex tapestry that the creators have set out for you. This was part of the appeal of things like Lost and Heroes although both of those fell apart due to poor planning. More successful examples include things like Primer and Problem Sleuth. It's not to say that these stories can't contain aspects of good traditional storytelling, just that they are an alternate flavour and are perfectly valid in and of themselves. They're almost like adventure games, trying to piece together clues to get the "whole story", or even just to understand the presented story. I really love these kinds of things, does anyone else have any thoughts?

Quite frankly, while unity is a great resource and something you can totally explore, I would be hesitant to suggest you make your first few games in a 3D engine. The complexity of development far surpasses that of 2D games. I assume you have some level of programming ability, in which case look into some simple Java game libraries (I think libGDX is popular but not really sure) or if you're less confident about your coding then maybe Actionscript or Python to start.

Well that's because that was the market on Kickstarter. They probably don't show the military guys Doom 3 either. One piece of hardware can have many different use cases. As they've said before, the primary commercial market is still games because they are the industry best positioned to be creating immersive 3D worlds to explore. Honestly I'm not even convinced that games, at least the kinds of games we often play now, are a good fit for the rift. Movement, situational awareness, fidelity, and a bunch of other little things need to be sorted out first. I'm one of those unlucky folks who gets pretty bad motion sickness while using the device anyways so until that's unequivocally fixed I can't see the rift being used for extended periods.

Not to mention military applications. Before Oculus the biggest investor in VR technologies was the US military for training and simulation purposes. When I met some of the Oculus team at CES 2013 one of the guys I spoke to was responsible for military applications and dealing with officials. I'm not pro-military really (being Canadian and all) but anyone who thought that Oculus was going to be used purely for games wasn't really thinking it through.

I have utterly failed to get mad about this, the worst case scenario I can realistically see is ads integrated into some first party VR software. It's a hardware device and has been since day one, what's going to matter most is the software, and I highly doubt that it would be in FB's or OR's interest to put an artificial gate up where one doesn't currently exist. I think that if anything it going to "hurt" the future of VR as a technology it's all this mindless raging I'm seeing on reddit and twitter. I literally saw somebody suggest that Facebook would be selling our retina scans to advertisers... The bottom line is, VR is going to be what VR is going to be. If it ever has a potential to make big money then big money was going to get involved first. I'd be more worried if nobody bought OR within the next few years. Sure I wouldn't have guessed it to be Facebook but I don't hold the same negative view of them that the rest of the internet seems to. Side note, I really fail to understand why people hate the idea of trading their demographic data for a free service that has had an insanely massive impact on modern social interaction. Oh no, better targeted ads, the end times are nigh. NSA stuff aside because that's a rabbit hole I'm not prepared to venture into.

I checked the Miasmata casts and as far as I can tell it wasn't one of them. I don't listen to GWJ so it was either Idle Thumbs or some bizarre coincidence. This is gonna drive me crazy.

Is it just me or does Extraterrarium sound really familiar? I feel like I've heard the description before and my first guess was that it was from a Thumbs episode. I'm not sure why but I feel like it was the episode where they talked about Miasmata. I'll check it out some time tomorrow but thought I'd ask here in the meantime. Does anyone else remember this?

It literally means custom made for a single person though, not a group. Honestly I think it's a good usage of the term, it just isn't in line with the dictionary definition.Edit: Hey Chris. You said as much on Twitter when I asked before. I think it's a good word for what you're talking about, I just got some quizzical looks when I tried to use it among folks who don't listen to the show.

So I haven't played Banner Saga yet, but I checked out some clips of the early game on Youtube and I think I might understand what they were talking about. In the clip the game seemed to kind of shovel lore at you. A character would say something like "Thanks for killing that ruffian, he's part of a splinter faction that has rivaled mine for years. There was once a tenuous peace between our peoples until Ulfgar the Bedazzeled made off with our youngest prince's betrothed..." etc etc. It doesn't really flow naturally from the characters and feels like reading a wiki article. In a dialogue tree heavy game this seems like the sorts of things you'd let the character inquire about but instead they just front load it. Now this is a completely unfair opinion since it's based on like one conversation I saw, but if that's indicative of the whole game I can see it becoming tiring, and I generally enjoy lore heavy media.

"Bespoke i/biˈspoʊk/ is a British English word that means a clothing item made to a buyer's specification (personalised or tailored). For most non-clothing items, the term build to order is usually used instead, although the term 'bespoke applications' is often used to refer to custom software built by a company for its own use by a department other than the IT department." (From Wikipedia) When Chris says it he is usually referring to specific authored content, like a line of dialogue or character model. I asked him about it on twitter a few weeks ago. https://twitter.com/chrisremo/status/420017517004718080

Hello everyone, LTRFTW here, I've done a bit of skulking around the forums lately and I've finally decided to make an account. I'm an undergraduate student and aspiring game developer from Vancouver (the real one, not that Washington ripoff) and I've been listening to the thumbs since shortly after the Kickstarter. It's since become by favourite games podcast and the bane of my social existence. I've received confused looks when using Chris' unique definition of "bespoke" and none of my friends will engage me in discussions of robot news. I hope to find a new home here on the internet where these inside jokes won't fall so miserably flat. PSN/Steam: Cyborg771