Denial

I've just written a thing about this - but the short version is that it feels like the thing that needed to be said to encourage people who wanted to continue to attend PAX/ read PA or similar, but who were having qualms about doing so, to stop having qualms. However, it does hit a few bum notes. Most obviously, it talks about people being hurt and offended by the strips, and about the "debate" that the merch being issued/pulled caused, but it doesn't really acknowledge that people, largely women, were repeatedly threatened with rape and murder by people who thought they were upholding the honor of Penny Arcade. That's not exactly the same as debate. (Courtney Stanton did an amazing visualization/presentation of the abuse she got for blogging about deciding not to go to PAX, btw - slides here. Obviously, NSFW.)

Yeah - if anyone is saying that, Niyeaux, you should absolutely post a link. OTOH, if nobody is actually saying that the whole PAX event is a hive of rape and misogyny, it's probably not a good use of our time to imagine how ridiculous it would be if someone did. There are people who are saying that they don't feel as good about going to PAX as they used to, and/or that they no longer want to attend, and that is in part because of things like this. Rachel Edidin at Wired. A long-time PA fan, requoted by Ethan Gach. Lesley Kinzel, a long-time attendee. And to be fair to Mike Krahulik, he seems to be aware of this - his post when the merch was pulled described it as an "easy fix" to the problem that people had been writing to him saying that they, personally, would not feel as comfortable at PAX if there were a lot of dickwolves shirts on display. And, likewise, when he closed the book on the cis/trans thing, he said that he hated the idea that his Internet jerkishness might make even one person reluctant to attend PAX or watch PATV. It feels like he's maybe just stuck in a very geek-appropriate cycle of not wanting to feel like he looks weak - so, despite that sincere feeling, he still wants to make the point that he was actually right all along - by saying he would be wearing his dickwolves shirt to PAX originally, by making "The Sixth Slave" one of his nominated stand-out comics, by drawing dickwolves on request, and now with this. You get this kind of behavior in arguments about whether Ken is a cheap character, or whether the Asari are commendably gender-indeterminate or regulation hot bisexual alien women - people simmering over time, and then throwing out an "and another thing". The stakes are just higher in this case, I think...

Well, I don't think I did say that they shouldn't go because they'd be "supporting" PA. I said I wasn't sure it was a good use of resources for people with those objectives to travel long distances to hold panels at an event where they couldn't be confident that the event's corporate officers were not going to say something that would create a hostile environment for them - not just at the panels, but while getting to and from the panels, while walking around the expo and so on. I don't think that's really a question of whether they are supporting PA. It may be to some extent a question of whether PA is supporting them.

It's a possible avenue, but is it a good one for them? I mean, you're talking about somebody submitting a panel idea, getting it approved, possibly travelling across America to set up a panel at a convention which is being told to be hostile to the kind of points they are raising by one of its spiritual leaders, which may not be attended by anyone they could have a useful conversation with. That's a big ask with no guaranteed payoff...

Agreed - or at least, what is often called overanalysis is often either bad analysis, which is indeed pretty surplus to requirements, or worthwhile analysis outside the comfort zone or level of interest of the person calling it overanalysis. "You're overthinking this game" is certainly a surefire way to be told you're underthinking it... (Incidentally, the canonical explanation for the audiologs is I think

Wait for the sale?

It's interesting to see what's left of the different layers - the bouncy blobs, now called "Silacoids" are still around, and the black ooze still features in the environment design and the storyline, but it's completely at odds with the design of the core alien baddies and their technology. The textual justification being that the "Outsiders" are a scavenger race who co-opt technologies and races, which is also how the presence of Sectoids and Mutoids is justified. Being able to look at that Polygon article and see where things have survived or been welded onto is fascinating. Not many games wear their development on their sleeve quite like The Bureau...

Implication requires intention - I can't imply something without meaning to do so, pretty much by definition. Implication is precisely something that somebody seeks to communicate without explicitly stating it. What you mean is that the inference was there, which is true, because you made the inference. Incorrectly, in this case. But don't feel bad! None of us are perfect all the time. In this case, though, the implication is pretty straightforward - I don't have an actual example what Ben Kuchera sees as an unreasonable response to the idea of length being a thing that informs purchases of games. In the absence of that information, all I have is how he characterises the behaviour: And then critics and developers shake their heads sadly at the unwashed masses who just don't understand QUALITY and ARTISTRY. That feels to me like something of a straw man, is all. It's always tempting to make people you disagree with sound like caricatures, but it's not usually conducive to a good discussion. If you're good with the Potter Stewart approach to this, that's fine. I'd just like a little more. However, I don't imagine we're going to get much further on this, and there's something else in that piece which I think is more interesting, which is the follow-up: I know, I know, claiming games are supposed to be fun is heretical to a critic. We don’t expect to go to Schindler’s List to like, enjoy it, but for most people the hobby of gaming is primarily about the pursuit of pleasure. We want to have fun, we want to be told a story, and we want to enjoy ourselves. That may not be true for everyone, or every game, but I’d argue that the idea of “fun” and “enjoyment” drive most game purchases. This seems like a really interesting way to approach the idea of entertainment. I mean, Schindler's List is obviously not a knee-slapping laugh riot, but it's a piece of film that people get something out of seeing. That something is probably (hopefully) different from what one might get out of seeing Spinal Tap, but it's well within the bounds of the emotional range we ascribe to leisure pursuits. I don't think many people are playing Gone Home or Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons out of a sense of duty, or because they have to (barring some game reviewers, I guess...), and the people who are talking about how much they enjoyed playing them are not lying. So... what's the distinction being drawn, here?

That's the other side of the coin - Gone Home, it seems to me, is about the right length _for Gone Home_. Obviously, that's going to vary between people. If you're not engaged by the story, it might seem overlong. But I think it would be hard to make the case that it would be a better game if it retained the same mechanics (i.e. no combat, no serious puzzling to solve, no other characters to interact with) but was ten hours long, say - that is, it was gated in such a way that you had to spend ten hours to get to the same narrative conclusion. I'd say that Thirty Flights of Loving is another example of a game that's exactly as long as it should be, to achieve its objectives. (But "bang for buck" is not wholly meaningless - although campaign length is only one part of that bang. I often find myself telling people that they probably shouldn't pay full price for a game, but that when it reaches $15 or so it is interesting enough to justify the purchase.) Looked at another way, the single-player campaigns of games like CoD are very short compared with, say Tales of Xillia. That's partly about the cost of generating a minute of gameplay, and partly about the amount of resource that goes into the multiplayer, but it's also about making the campaign the right length for the buyer - fulfilling an aesthetic criterion. Many to most of the buyers of CoD are going to want to play the multiplayer for most of the time they spend playing the game over its life, so the single-player needs to be pretty snappy - because for many players it's there to a considerable extent to teach them about what's changed in the control scheme, what the new guns are like and things like that. Obviously Activision wants it to be good - to tell an engaging story, to have relatable characters - and will spend a lot of money on that, but they are sensitive to the fact that for a significant chunk of their audience it's a long tutorial as well as a campaign. You can complain that the single-player campaign is too short or badly-plotted, or that the characters aren't relatable, and those can be valid criticisms, but they are probably less important than the same criticisms levelled at, say, Star Trek: The Video game for most of the potential buying audience. Whereas Mass Effect 3's multiplayer could be buggy and strangely balanced and have less variety, precisely because the audience were not primarily buying Mass Effect 3 for its multiplayer component - in fact there was much consternation that the development of the multiplayer would lead to a shorter single-player campaign and interfere with the delivery of single-player DLC. To look at a different medium for an example: I went to "The Drowned Man" recently - a theatrical event by Punchdrunk. They took over a postal sorting office - so, five floors, with a mix of small rooms and big empty spaces - and turned it into a Hollywood studio from the 1960s, then let the audience loose to wander. You got to spend 3 hours or so walking around the "set", interacting with the space, reading scripts, being grabbed by actors, following them around and watching set pieces. In those three hours I got maybe 20-30% of the main narrative, and a smaller percentage of the "audiologs and grafitti" level information - I could have spent ten minutes reading all the clipboards on the wall of the doctor's surgery, or all the letters from hopeful actors in the producer's office. Did I feel like I could have spent longer there? Absolutely. But in reality I would eventually have got hungry, and tired, and probably ultimately bored. Even if something is good for its genre, there's a point at which you start losing your audience. Good games design recognises where that point is.

If you actually read what I wrote - which seems like an increasingly forlorn hope on the Internet these days - you'll find I said nothing of the sort. What I said was that I don't know what Ben Kuchera means when he talks about mockery, because he didn't give examples. You gave an example of what you see as mockery - which is good! It's a step forward! - but didn't actually cite the elements of it that you saw as mocking. That's fine; you're not a journalist - you're someone on an Internet forum providing a data point, and I can listen to it if I want to and see if I agree with you that the disagreement is being framed in a disrespectful fashion, which Is what I would understand as being definable in this context as mockery. Although that still doesn't help me to know what Ben Kuchera thinks of as mockery. Which is where we came in. I just would have liked him to evidence some of the responses he, personally, was taking issue with. I think you might be a little defensive, there. If you feel like liking games with shooting in means people look down on you, that's a thing I can't really speak to, but I like games with shooting in and like to play them. I don't think I need to be ashamed of that, and nor should you. See above re: increasingly forlorn hope, but if you read what I said, it was: Plenty of people have said "It is a short game, and you will get more gameplay per dollar with other games, but it has other virtues", but that seems to me to be like saying "It is a game without shooting, and you will get more shooting with other games, but it has other virtues". I like shooters. There are many good games with shooting in them. Dear Esther is not a shooting game. Gone Home is not a shooting game. If you are looking for a shooting game, you should probably not go for Dear Esther or Gone Home (or indeed Spelunky, or FIFA, or Civilization). If you are looking for a game with 80+ hours of gameplay, you should probably also not go for Dear Esther or Gone Home, whereas FIFA or Civilization (or indeed Spelunky, which I've played the crap out of) might be a really good choice. Length is a game feature you might value over other features when making purchasing decisions. So might be the amount and quality of the combat in the game. It is possible for a game to have virtues which are neither related to its length or the amount or quality of combat in it. This seems so self-explanatory that I'm surprised it needs this level of explaining, but here we are and there it is.

(Of course, the other interesting thing there is that $x isn't exactly the _cost_ of a game on Steam. It's the largest amount of money the creators of the game want to charge for it/think they can sell it for, which is a slightly different thing.)

Right, so that's an example - except, actually, I still don't actually know what Ryan Scott said. "I don't think that's a useful way to assess the value of games" is disagreement, but it isn't mocking, or indeed scoffing. But I can go and listen to that exchange, and see if it fits my idea of mockery. "If you are complaining about the length of Gone Home, you are not really getting its value proposition, and are also probably not its target audience" is not necessarily mockery - it's just a statement. So, I don't know what Ben Kuchera has read, or encountered, which has made him feel that it's necessary to write a counterpoint piece. I'm not denying that he feels that this is the case, or that he has encountered material that makes him feel that this feeling is justified, but I have no idea why he's drawn that conclusion. If people are saying "there is never a good reason to make purchasing judgements based on the length of a game relative to its cost", then I definitely think that's a position that can and should be criticised, because it's a silly position.

Kuchera didn't cite a single critic or developer who mocked people who complained about it being too short. With that in mind, I have no idea what his metric for "mocked" is. Plenty of people have said "It is a short game, and you will get more gameplay per dollar with other games, but it has other virtues", but that seems to me to be like saying "It is a game without shooting, and you will get more shooting with other games, but it has other virtues". I don't think that's indie vs AAA, either. The best hours-per-dollar game I suspect in my collection right now is FTL - if you like what FTL is offering enough to gather up every element of the playing experience, you can easily put 100 hours into it. That cost me $10.

Not sure if this is the place for it, but I seem to have happened upon a bunch of "preferred access keys" for the Infinite Crisis beta - as far as I can tell these don't let you in immediately, but they put you above people _without_ a key with the same qualities... (I got in fairly shortly after submitting mine...)

I think reviews _ought_ to mention the play time and the possibilities for replayability - those are important things to keep in mind when deciding on whether or not to make a purchase, especially in the knowledge that the game will at some point be available for $5 in a Steam sale, almost inevitably. I think that as a game it is so unlike the traditional run of first-person games that these are things worth noting, as likely to be contrary to expectations - but I think these are arguably strengths rather than weaknesses. Building in replayability and length are marketing necessities for many games seeking to justify their price tag, and can impose damaging constraints on the artistic freedoms of the creators. Non-expert press review here:

Man, I thought for a moment you meant a mobile version of Omikron: The Nomad Soul. Which would have been belter, but very ill-advised. Has anyone suggested Lords of Midnight? A remarkably faithful adaptation of the ZX Spectrum original. Mike Singleton, the creator, originally planned to make an undated version with new mechanics with Chris Wild, the programmer, but when Singleton died Wild decided he had to release an unchanged version (barring the art, which is now line rather than pixel) as a tribute. It holds up incredibly well - the enemy AI (basically a set of If/If not, thens and a set of paths for each army) feels weirdly alive, although of course it's easier to represent implacability.

For reference, yes - the two chapters of "Burial at Sea" will go for 1200 Microsoft points each, according to the press release - i.e. about $30 all told. If you are convinced they will be worth it, you save money by buying the season pass and never playing Clash in the Clouds. That said, I'm increasingly cynical about the wisdom of ever pre-ordering anything...

It's a little baroque - the 4-player game can take about 8 hours - but the big, grown-ups Game of Thrones game is really good. Several interlocking systems and a lot of politicking and backstabbing - the different lords have different but balanced strengths (the Starks have lots of territory but few resources, the Greyjoys are psychotically good in a fight but have little room and cannot expand without making enemies), and there is a counter that represents the growing threat from the North, which has to be fought off by all the players together. So, big and expensive and time-consuming, but worth playing. Not sure I'd recommend it for a light user, though... Cosmic Encounter is great, as long as you don't feel too strongly about game balance... haven't played that in _ages_. Race for the Galaxy and Lords of Waterdeep are now on my to play list.

I'm about 40 hours in, taking it slowly and doing all the side quests I can find, so I can solo the harder parts, and I'm finding the combat is getting better - which may be partly just that I am dying less now I have a couple of elite abilities. It's still a little spammy, but wilth seven attack slots, a couple of which are going to go on active buffs, you're always going to feel like you are going knockdown, small attack, small attack, rage bar (or in this case weapon resource on target) filled, big attack to some degree. I'm playing with a modified Crusader build, and it's interesting that some monsters I can just burn through, now I have some high-damage attacks, but others I have to work to debuff... And pretty much the whole thing outside the combat and the crafting (the basics of which are laid out in two starter quests, but does need some more explanation, definitely) I'm impressed by. I think it's a game you'll need to go outside the game itself to fully get, though - whether that's finding out how to craft or researching builds in the forums or looking for puzzle answers on the fake websites they've put up...

I found myself trying to justify the section of the ending, and came up with basically this:

To be fair, the guy I'm with Marek on this one as well - I think there are enough games that do things like action, combat and puzzling to make it OK for this one to do none of those things. What it did do is far rarer and far harder to pull off. I'd played the original mod to death, so the mechanic was pretty familiar, but moments like really did make a difference.

Here's a three-use my link to registration in the closed beta.

(I mean, when it came out.)

I think that comment is probably a joking reference back to a very similar comment made about the original game...

Man. Play that backwards and you've got Dead Aliend.