Idle Thumbs BONUS: Ruination Online November 2017

[Chris]

Idle Thumbs BONUS:

Ruination Online November 2017
Enjoy this bonus episode drawn from the Idle Thumbs Patreon Ruination Online! Each month, we do a livestream where all topics have been posed by high-tier backers of our Patreon campaign: patreon.com/IdleThumbs.

Due to popular demand, we're releasing the audio of that stream to the main podcast feed for easier listening.

We'll be back with a regular episode of Idle Thumbs next week!

Discussed: live episodes, our favorite things, Patreon postcards, San Francisco sightseeing, muting your family, our (questionably) deep knowledge, something confusing about a thief and a genie, buying stuff for your dad, Twin Peaks, Jonathan Blow, FPS Myst, RPG Doom, "Let Us Melt" soundtrack by Jessica Curry, "Switched-On Bach" album by Wendy Carlos, game designers and job titles, platforming, Jodorowsky's Dune (Amazon, iTunes), escape rooms, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Eternal September

 

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[Cbirdsong]

Doom RPG was a thing made by id for pre-smartphone cell phones, but eventually it was ported to iOS/Android. It played like a more approachable version of something like Legend of Grimrock. Here is a hilariously overdone trailer: 

 

[atte]

There is a Doom Roguelike (and Derek Yu made a tileset for it!). Now the developer is making a sequel for it where you can apparently even switch between modern 3D graphics and ASCII!

 

https://drl.chaosforge.org/

https://chaosforge.org/presskit/jupiter_hell

[feelthedarkness]

has nobody tried a modern, ironic take on the john romero ad?

 

also, i bet "video game designer" would actually be a very useful skill in some kind of robot war for the fate of the earth? we'd probably need to abstract the battlefields, or use clever software to befuddle the enemy. 

[Problem Machine]

I think I remember in one of his GDC talks Jon Blow briefly talking about an MMO as one of the ideas he had toyed with for a followup to Braid. IIRC the concept of it was an MMO that required much more intricate moment-to-moment teamwork. It doesn't really seem like quite enough to go on, so I can see why he didn't pursue it.

[Hibbs]

First time poster, long time listener, had to add to this discussion.

 

MMOs already have a lot of cooperative puzzle solving in the form of raids. I'm mostly familiar with Destiny and Destiny 2 raids, where cooperation and puzzle solving go hand in hand with shooting lots of enemies. Going into the Destiny 2 raid blind with my 5 Destiny loving friends was probably my favorite gaming moment of the year. In most of the challenges, players have to complete coordinated tasks, taking turns jumping, shooting, running, and buffing to eventually defeat the big evil guy. Doing raids without a guide is the very definition of puzzle solving and coordinating as a team. 

[Crz]

  On 11/26/2017 at 10:23 AM, Problem Machine said:

I think I remember in one of his GDC talks Jon Blow briefly talking about an MMO as one of the ideas he had toyed with for a followup to Braid. IIRC the concept of it was an MMO that required much more intricate moment-to-moment teamwork. It doesn't really seem like quite enough to go on, so I can see why he didn't pursue it.

 

From his Practice Talk from 2014, at 27 minutes, He begins to discuss his next game, and what that may entail. He has been toying or prototyping "game 3" which - according to Blow - has about 40-60 hours of gameplay at this time.

[Problem Machine]

I don't believe that was the talk I was thinking of. I don't think the game he was talking about even reached the prototype stage, much less the very robust stage it sounds like he's talking about here, but was just one of many candidate games he considered after Braid but before he settled on The Witness. Is the game he's talking about here what turned into The Witness? I'm about to go to bed so I don't have time to watch an hour-long lecture right now, but I probably will tomorrow since I find his lectures fascinating -- though since his weird bothsidesing of the google memo I've been disinclined to follow him on Twitter. I guess the issue with thinking deeply about one set of problems is it often then makes you appear startlingly naive in your ignorance of other sets of problems.

[Professor Video Games]

  On 11/28/2017 at 8:21 PM, Hibbs said:

First time poster, long time listener, had to add to this discussion.

 

MMOs already have a lot of cooperative puzzle solving in the form of raids. I'm mostly familiar with Destiny and Destiny 2 raids, where cooperation and puzzle solving go hand in hand with shooting lots of enemies. Going into the Destiny 2 raid blind with my 5 Destiny loving friends was probably my favorite gaming moment of the year. In most of the challenges, players have to complete coordinated tasks, taking turns jumping, shooting, running, and buffing to eventually defeat the big evil guy. Doing raids without a guide is the very definition of puzzle solving and coordinating as a team. 

 

Yeah I wanted to mention these too. Though to some degree the "puzzle" is just that the game doesn't tell you what is going on or how things work and you have to figure it out through a lot of trial and error. Still a lot of fun but maybe not quite like an escape room. Once you've figured out how things work in a destiny raid there's still the matter of execution so they are replayable unlike a straight up puzzle though.

[unimural]

Perhaps this was clear, but my understanding was that the point of endless September was not that one point in time that ruined things. September was originally the shitty month because of a sense that the influx of new users, who did not know the norms and rules of behaviour, dragged all discourse down. And after that one point in time it was always September in terms of what the conversation was like. Every day of the year you had new users who did not understand the environment, instead of having a single yearly deluge.

 

The changes were not limited just to that, but it was both a sudden and constant change. The demographic aspects of the change occurred over a longer period time.

[Chris]

  On 12/2/2017 at 12:20 PM, unimural said:

Perhaps this was clear, but my understanding was that the point of endless September was not that one point in time that ruined things. September was originally the shitty month because of a sense that the influx of new users, who did not know the norms and rules of behaviour, dragged all discourse down. And after that one point in time it was always September in terms of what the conversation was like. Every day of the year you had new users who did not understand the environment, instead of having a single yearly deluge.

2

 

This is definitely what I meant to convey, but I may have done it poorly!