MrHoatzin

Next up: Disney accidentally acquires own umbrella company.

I feel sick. I don't even know why.

I was totally thinking of The Wire as an example of a kind of story that this manner of character redundancy would require. Not every character in the world needs to be like that tho. Just the important ones that you can accidentally kill or fail to save in some sort of an emergent scenario or something.

Far Cry 2 solves this by building in NPC redundancy. All the named mercenary friendlies are interchangeable for the purposes of the story and if any one of them die, the next one will step into their role for the next mission. It would be an efficient method of handling player's ability to fuck up in the context of a more elaborate story: write it in such a way that there is a group of backup people who can fulfill a story role, then don't put them all within a grenade blast radius in situations where the desirability of their murder is ambiguous. This kind of thing requires some deft narrative-smithing, but it sounds simpler to execute than a full-on branching narrative and it can be just as compelling.

Subtlety can work on many levels. You can have something that is very crassly and straightforwardly written, but that communicates its full intentions subtly on a completely different level. Like, I dunno, propaganda or marketing. They preconditions people to think in a certain way by repeating certain blunt themes ad nauseum in the culture at large. People are oblivious to the extent their opinions and behaviors are modeled on these subtle outside influences and how much they're "their own". On the other hand, you could argue that marketing and propaganda are the exact opposite of subtle.

Islam has been under the boot of the West for quite a while. It is kinda natural for Abrahamic societies to get crazy patriarchal under duress. It is important to remember that for most of the Middle Ages (Islamic Golden Age) and later the Ottoman Caliphate, Islam had the most progressive societies on the planet. It is not inherently like this. Do you see any sign of a home-grown reaction to this atmosphere of bullshit? Some kind of Islamic feminism or something like it? It is hard for these kinds of grass roots uprisings to be effective in authoritarian systems, but I get the impression that the cosmopolitan urban society thinks of itself as under occupation from the theocrats.

I find the idea of a natal language as something discrete and different from the native language extremely fun.

It is funny to hear you talking about what a huge kick to your lives and weltanschauung the Kickstarter was before it even went up. Even though we have been working on the new Idle Thumbs logo since fall of 2011 and I am on the Kickstarter page as one of the "value-added" features—I didn't know ANYTHING about the Kickstarter until A DAY before it went live when Jake offhandedly mentioned it in an aim chat. Can't wait to check out that logo t irl.

Ditto. I keep thinking the problem would be solved with a better RSS utility, something that wouldn't present all that content in a level playing field, with count of unread posts, but that would let certain fast-updating things expire and sometimes keep track of just whether the site updated or not and send you to the last unread post (say for web comics for example). Ugh. Whenever I start down that rabbit hole I remember Slavoj Žižek's observation about American attitude towards discipline: chocolate-flavored laxatives. The solution to your constipation is not to moderate your chocolate intake, but to eat more of this new and improved kind of chocolate... All of those toys that are supposed to cut off the internet are generally impossible to implement in my case—since everything I do needs internet to work/is the internet. Maybe I can dupe Hobo Lobo into local staging, unplug the internet, and work that way. Hmm... Anyway, yeah, fuck the internet. And fuck social media, the most horrible of internet drugs. I kinda feel like old-timey forums that focus on some kind of common interest of a community (e.g. this one) are a lot healthier than monolithic centralized clearinghouses of status updates, but I have yet to really figure out my take on all that.

Oh, hah, I noticed the same typo before you guys toothed it up. I briefly thought he was bringing up this kind of molarity before my brain properly kicked into gear and reaffirmed the context I was in.

Aw dang! Shame about The Wire bit—that kind of comprehensive inter-factional narrative would be perfect for a sneaky game where you break into places and partake of people's private documents and conversations. I guess this is not that game. I have been enjoying the environmental stuff so far tho. If the world ends up feeling anywhere nearly as rich as that of Arx Fatalis (another ultimately shitty story with a rad world), I'll be happy.

Just got out of the sewers and am wandering around the safehouse distillery. I think I might be expecting The Wire-level macro plot from this game. How disappointed will I be? How much should I lower my expectations? Also, I am starting to realize that my annoyance with PS3 games is largely due to not being able to read any of the interface or the narrative or see which way distant guards are facing on my quaint tube-based televizing machine. As much as I enjoy pointedly not participating in consumerism by holding on to it, it is starting to be a liability to my participation in culture. Keeping it real is hard on the eyes! Plus PS3 and PS2 games on CRTs don't look that drastically different from one another…

Anyone know any reason I shouldn't get this for the PS3 (that being the only computer in the house that can play this game)?

This thread was a pristine wonder for three whole years! Stop commenting in it!

Defcon hit a high watermark in shocking subtlety. It would be hard to get there again. Plus, this is the first time that they've actually hired an artist. Let them play around. One way or another, I wish they were more resolute and deliberate with their decisions—or rather that the final impression of whatever they settle on is strong.

Ahem.

EDIT: I accidentally soiled this post. ¬¬

Well, son, you have an idea on your hands. Congratulations! Not only that but you've written it down. My own notebook entry for a similar idea would probably be something like… BAM! Now the real question is what do you do with this? This is where that conversation between the creator and the creation I described before starts. This might end up being the overall arch or a theme of a narrative or whatever. It boils down to what skills you possess that could help you turn this into a thing. The other idea—about poetry being affected by material considerations—is kindof DUH in my case as I am an artist and this shit NEVER LEAVES my consciousness. It helps that I have a job and do art on the side, so that I don't have to feel constantly compromised by the hustle of art. That said, I would be a lot more productive as an artist if I could free myself from having to sell my time to someone. ⬇⬇⬇

People sometimes talk about creativity as a domain of certain professions or talents or whatever—I just wanted to nix this notion as we're talking in abstract vagaries. I don't know where you're coming from, so I kindof plugged in something as a starting point. What are we talking about here, anyway? Like, visual ideas, aural ideas, narrative ideas? Is it just a matter of not having a technical jargon specific enough for your purposes? Have you tried quickly rambling your mind into an audio recorder? Trying to explaining your idea to someone, until you boil it down to its essence? Free association writing? The only time I have had ideas that leave that quickly and are lost without a trace is on drugs. Those ideas were probably not that great anyway (either way, writing down stuff SHOULD help regardless ). A lot of the time ideas lose their luster when they're banally flattened on the page—I dunno if it is experience or what that I use to figure out which ones are good and which ones are shit in that form. Sometimes the flattened version retains enough information to remind one where it is going, sometimes it doesn't. If it is a vague idea and the vagary is what appeals to me, I will try to describe all of these vague different aspects of something. I find that structure helps, I dunno... this may be getting too low level or something... may need to think about it. Maybe there is something important in there that I take for granted and can't see clearly from where I'm standing...

Or they could just make the world flat-out adventure-gamey. Go over there, distract the dude, grab his monkey and open the waterfall—that sort of stuff... only more suitable to be mixed up with action elements and with less dialogue.

Creativity is a concept invented by managers to describe solving problems they can't understand. You always hear about the "magic" "the creatives" do or whatever. Like most structures that come out of contemporary business thinking, it is super bureaucratic in as far that it invents a caste of people singularly responsible for a part of the process ("the creatives" are in charge of "making shit up"), and shortchanges everyone else who may have something to add. It is all about learning how to probe ideas that you do have, find out what it is that is awesome about them, and implement them. These are individual and separate laborious processes that require developing their own individual sets of skills. The longer I spend creating shit, the less I believe there is such a thing as talent. I mentioned this to a neurophysiologist of sorts and she was positively outraged that I would so flippantly throw nature (as opposed to nurture) out of the picture, so maybe I am full of shit. Maybe some people are predisposed to the kinds of observation and rumination that result in creative output. In any case, talent alone is nothing. You don't have to completely open up what it is that is awesome about an idea, just discover an interesting conundrum, riddle, or just a strong sensation that SOMETHING interesting is going on there. The more you re-digest a specific idea by implementing it multiple times (as sketches or versions or whatever), the more you come to discover what it is that it is hinting at. The process of developing ideas into tangible things is just as important as the initial spark—if not moreso. The conversation between the creator and the creation is ongoing. You never sit down with a fully-formed idea in mind and plop it out exactly as imagined. If your process is like this, you will be very frustrated and—more often than not—not make anything. My ideas come in form of sentences or little blurbs. I write them all down in a series of notebooks that I have been dragging around since high school, and then I let them be. When I want to make something or need a wrench to throw into whatever project I am currently working on, I look through my old ideas and see if anything bites. This is somehow tangentially relevant maybe. Every now and again, I go back and reread the whole WHAT IS ART semi-spinoff discussion.

It is terrifying to see how Lee Petty and the art team are all freaking out, while Schafer is sabotaging them with grand ideas like an unreasonable client, as if unaware of how much money they have to work with. Scary how fast they seem to have to work to make effective use of the money—and that it is everyone except for Tim who seems to be minding the budget. I'm also excited that Peter McConnell is on board for the music. I dunno if his name was previously mentioned in the context of the project.

Variable graphical fidelity targets can give us some potentially interesting new gameplay styles. Less fidelity per character, but now with 400 characters on screen because you didn't spend all your processing power on reflections on wet hair or whatever. The upcoming generation of designers have been refreshingly eager to explore this space so that is something. Also, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to think of this alleged open world HL3 as a sort of STALKER game? It would kinda work.

That sure is an elaborate opinion on light bulbs. And I read it. The whole thing. Studiously, even. I feel like I need to reward myself for that. Aaaaand—ah, what the hell—you deserve it! Wear it proudly. All of these Kickstarter rules are probably for the best. At the same time, I hope that they enforce the spirit of the rules rather than the literal word. It is interesting how everything in capitalism seems to gravitate toward peddling tchotchkes. Even Kickstarter when it functions correctly (as in, in the spirit of its founding vision) is all about producing a whole gamut of increasingly more precious tokens of support for whatever the main goal of a campaign is—this aspect of it is what everyone has had the most trouble getting right. It is interesting to reflect on. Seems like a good rule of thumb is that lower tiers shouldn't get tangible things.

I made some horrible internet decisions as MC Kingsley—so I initially planned explicitly not to fold Mr Hoatzin back into my other selves—and then I did. Because discipline is hard.