Idle Thumbs Progresscast #9

[miffy495]

I would treasure that card forever if I'd found it. I'm gutted on your behalf on hearing that you lost it.

[vogon]

at first I thought it was "bikes and awesome friends rule [n.]" and I was on tenterhooks wondering what the "bikes and awesome friends" rule was.

[Chris]

  vogon said:

at first I thought it was "bikes and awesome friends rule [n.]" and I was on tenterhooks wondering what the "bikes and awesome friends" rule was.

I still am

[Squid Division]

hm, is it the 'bikes-and-awesome-friends rule' or the 'bikes, and awesome-friends-rule'?

[Salacious Snake]

  vogon said:

at first I thought it was "bikes and awesome friends rule [n.]" and I was on tenterhooks wondering what the "bikes and awesome friends" rule was.

This is exactly why Magic sucks… it's full of poorly explained special case rules and you have to stop playing every 2 minutes to figure out what the hell the bikes and awesome friends rule is or whatever.

That kind of rules creep is inevitable with collectible games, and that's why I don't play them.

[vimes]

  Squid Division said:

hm, is it the 'bikes-and-awesome-friends rule' or the 'bikes, and awesome-friends-rule'?

I would go for the 'bikes and awesome friends rule' rule, that would somewhat cancel the effect of any card whose illustration doesn't feature some sort of cycling contraption or friendly display.

That being said Vampire The Eternal Struggle is the only collectible card game I played more than twice and I enjoyed thoroughly. It features only one currency, it's a very social game with lots of talk and negociation, the vast majority of rules are dead simple, the theme serves the mechanics very well and it supports for a wide range of playstyles.

The only aspect are the very dull combat system and the fact that, for beginners or intermediates, the rules of certain powerful cards are immensely intricate... it's difficult to keep track of those and not be surprise torpored by them.

We tried to remediate to that aspect (as well as randomness) by integrating some deck-building phase (either through pre-game auction game or in-game) but it never worked out because the playstyle rarely compete for similar cards.

In the end, sharing the decks and explaining 'exotic' cards before starting was the most efficient approach... but it didn't solve the unlucky draw.

Some friends argued that it's inherent to the genre and that it's not supposed to be chess; e.g gambles are meant to be made but I don't agree.

[vogon]

  tentaclesex said:

This is exactly why Magic sucks… it's full of poorly explained special case rules and you have to stop playing every 2 minutes to figure out what the hell the bikes and awesome friends rule is or whatever.

That kind of rules creep is inevitable with collectible games, and that's why I don't play them.

for what it's worth, Magic has continuously tried to improve itself on this front. in Magic 2010, they revamped a lot of the writing to be more uniform, and they have standardized rules on which mechanics are frequently-used enough to be used without reminder text and which ones aren't.

that said, I keep a running tally of the number of games of Magic I've played in a row without any hint of rules lawyering, and I don't think it's ever gone above... 5?

[Urthman]

Kickstarter funded and suddenly Famous has a sweet new computer. Hmmmm.

Actually, this is completely legit if you bought it program the postcard-signing robot.

[Urthman]

Sean, hearing you're new to Minecraft, I wanted to recommend that you check out one of the really huge forum community servers, like some of the ones run by Reddit or MetaFilter or Penny Arcade.

I love exploring the natural world of Minecraft. I love exploration games in general, especially games like Assassin's Creed that give you fantastic environments to discover. But no game experience has left me slack-jawed with amazement like wandering around the vast cities, castles, volcanoes, cathedrals, statues, life-size reproductions of the Link-to-the-Past map of Hyrule, towers, greenhouses, Menger sponges, caverns, aqueducts, that Minecraft players have built. Screenshots and videos are not the same.

And unlike Assassin's Creed, you can look at these things and think, "I have an idea of what it would be like to build that. I could build that. Except I could never build that."

One amazing server that you can easily download a copy of is the TwentyMine (run by Shamus Young's forum community). Grab a 900MB copy of one of their hourly backups. You could wander around for weeks and not see it all.

Chris, there's a Minecraft adventure map that I think you would love. It's an exploration game that has all the stuff you love about games like Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed -- cool caverns and amazing architecture to climb and jump around on, secrets to find, exploration puzzles, logic puzzles, traps, huge machines to activate, a music puzzle, a 3D maze, parkour challenges -- with none of the stuff you hate (no lame combat, no painful dialogue, an optional story that you can ignore but might amuse you). It doesn't require any mods; it uses a combination of simple, clever tricks ("I wish I'd thought of that!") and fantastically complicated redstone & piston contraptions ("How could anyone design that?").

It's called The Tourist: a Playable Adventure in Paris

[Henroid]

  Urthman said:

Kickstarter funded and suddenly Famous has a sweet new computer. Hmmmm.

Actually, this is completely legit if you bought it program the postcard-signing robot.

I wouldn't mind the funds being spent for that. Because now we get to hear more of Sean's input on computer games. Assuming he buys some to use the computer for.

[Chris]

  Henroid said:

I wouldn't mind the funds being spent for that. Because now we get to hear more of Sean's input on computer games. Assuming he buys some to use the computer for.

Kickstarter funding wasn't used to buy Sean's computer.

[Urthman]

Sorry, Chris, I was just joking, but that's probably not funny to you guys. I hope you haven't had anyone hassling you about that kind of thing.

[Henroid]

  Chris said:

Kickstarter funding wasn't used to buy Sean's computer.

I didn't actually think it was. Just saying if it were, whatever. Video games. Computer games even.

[Chris]

  Urthman said:

Sorry, Chris, I was just joking, but that's probably not funny to you guys. I hope you haven't had anyone hassling you about that kind of thing.

Nah, I don't think so. Some folks are confused by us getting the amount of money we did, but I don't think we've had any real accusations of misuse.

[Nappi]

  Chris said:

Nah, I don't think so. Some folks are confused by us getting the amount of money we did, but I don't think we've had any real accusations of misuse.

Well....

[subbes]

  Urthman said:

MetaFilter

BEANPLATE BEGIN

I think you'll find that's actually a MeFightClub server, not a MeFi server.

Unless you've seen pb there or I'm totally wrong.

BEANPLATE END

p.s. add me as a contact on MeFi if you are a MeFite, and no sniping my future Idle Thumbs FPP which I swear is coming soon.

[vogon]

oh, yeah, also, Jake:

http://magiccards.info/query?q=!Vesuvan Doppelganger

it's worth somewhere between $2 and $8.50 now. so there's that.

[vimes]

Cool episode! I want to share my opinion about playtesting, but it will probably sound redundant when compared to Sean and Chris opinions.

My take is that, like prorotyping, playtesting is a fundamental tool that is often misunderstood and nowadays politically charged.

My idealistic view is that playtesting needs to covers both usability and design intent validation.

By 'design intent validation' I mean than content creator (LD, GD, writer) should be able to check that the 'objectives' they crafted their gameplay sequences to carry are actually perceived by the players.

The problem is that, if you're looking at a game from the 'product' perspective, it's very easy to confuse the two: ambiguity rarely serves a product and the mode of interaction are usually instant-giveaway of its final function.

Anyway, those 2 aspects might look similar, but they are very different. So much so, that I feel they shouldn't be evaluated at the same time nor have the same protocols involved.

I think it's a shame that LD and GD are kept away from playtesting (geographically most of the time); but to be honest, I've also met quite a few creative people who struggle to articulate what exactly they want to achieve through their feature/sequence and accept it when it fails. So, they resort to the unusable question : "Is it good/better ?" which I don't think serve creative iteration very well.

[Urthman]

  subbes said:

I think you'll find that's actually a MeFightClub server, not a MeFi server.

In my heart, any server on which cortex builds a scale model of Vatican City counts as a MeFi server.

I'm 'straight' on MetaFilter and happy to be a contact to any Idle Thumb.

[Cai]

Sorry if I already missed somebody else posting these, but

's the link to the videos of Chris talking about the Molyjam on the IndieGameCave channel. Good stuff! If there's a longer, uncut version of the interview somewhere I'd be interested in seeing it

I just love the whole notion of the Molyjam. The avant garde absurdity of it makes me feel pretty happy about the state of games as an artform.

Also I guess I just learned the correct way to pronounce "Mojang".