Idle Thumbs 178: CS Losers

[Chris]

Spandrel was it!

[tegan]

  On 10/5/2014 at 12:58 AM, NorthernBoreus said:

I was guessing the word was skeuomorph: "a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues from structures that were necessary in the original." Apparently it's been around since the 19th Century, but I think it became a popular term more recently because Apple applied that design philosophy a lot.

 

Thank you! This was bugging me for the whole episode because I was familiar with the word but also couldn't think of it.

 

 

[singlespace]

  On 10/5/2014 at 1:37 AM, tegan said:

Thank you! This was bugging me for the whole episode because I was familiar with the word but also couldn't think of it.

 

Ah skeuomorphism. I have a pet peeve with people using the term because it became a minor part of the general public's zeitgeist via the largely design ignorant press, hence what the general public thinks of skeuomorphism, if they're aware of the concept at all, is wrong. People will often conflate the visual aesthetic and presentation of an element with the actual form of an element, so you'll hear people talking about how bad skeuomorphism is with things such as rich Corinthian leather and 70s wood paneling, but they don't realize that even the most modern UX design using the flat aesthetic still relies heavily upon skeuomorphic cues.

[Jick]

  On 10/5/2014 at 5:03 AM, singlespace said:

Ah skeuomorphism. I have a pet peeve with people using the term because it became a minor part of the general public's zeitgeist via the largely design ignorant press, hence what the general public thinks of skeuomorphism, if they're aware of the concept at all, is wrong. People will often conflate the visual aesthetic and presentation of an element with the actual form of an element, so you'll hear people talking about how bad skeuomorphism is with things such as rich Corinthian leather and 70s wood paneling, but they don't realize that even the most modern UX design using the flat aesthetic still relies heavily upon skeuomorphic cues.

 

Isn't "a button" technically skeuomorphic?

[singlespace]

  On 10/5/2014 at 5:32 AM, Jick said:

Isn't "a button" technically skeuomorphic?

 

It is, though there are far more flagrant examples such as the arrangement of buttons and placement of typography on all phone dialers, the usage of virtual cards that act as physical surfaces regardless of how they're aesthetically presented, the shutter sound used in cameras, car doors being intentionally weighted even though it not only costs more to manufacture, but also makes car doors less safe.

[eot]

  On 10/4/2014 at 3:47 AM, prawks said:

For people into the analysis done in that CS:GO video, you'd probably love Rapha's breakdown of his Quake Live duel against Cooler:

 

 

It's far and away my favorite bit of e-sports (and not too long). Also, Quake Live *was* just added to Steam recently...

 

EDIT: Re-watching it, I swear every time I'm more and more amazed by the precision in that game and the level that they think at. If you haven't watched Quake duels before, basically controlling the respawns of items is everything (to strengthen yourself and choke out your opponent).

Yeah this video is fantastic, I recommend anyone with an interest in e-sports to watch it.

 

  On 10/4/2014 at 5:06 PM, Ben X said:

RPS recently linked to this Rapha match where someone else (the interviewer from that other video?) analyses:

Ah, no it's a different guy, but he does great analysis videos. I thought he'd stopped uploading new ones though, thanks for posting it!

[GraysonEvans]

here is the only time I have ever been good at Counter Strike. 

 

 

Which is never

[TheYoungCato]

You throw Pug into a random name generator, you're gonna get gold. In my Shadow of Mordor game, I had a captain named Pug the Pathetic. He tried to bully some orcs into serving him, they said "not in a million years" and beat him up until he ran away with his tail between his legs. He met his end when a geyser randomly exploded in his face and knocked him down, allowing me to catch up with him. Really, the only way this story could be more Far Cry 2 would be if the geyser exploded in my face instead.

 

 

  On 10/6/2014 at 2:30 AM, GraysonEvans said:

here is the only time I have ever been good at Counter Strike. 

 

 

Which is never

 

god I miss having a clicky keyboard

[DarthEnderX]

I love it when she does the accent.

 

She sounds like Janine from Ghostbusters.

[Henroid]

  On 10/6/2014 at 6:05 AM, DarthEnderX said:

I love it when she does the accent.

 

She sounds like Janine from Ghostbusters.

"I've quit better jobs than this. GHOSTBUSTAHS; whaddya want?!"

[coaxmetal]

Oh man this episode made me realize that I still try the Half-Life crouch jump in most FPS games, if I can't make a jump, without thinking about it. I'm sure it doesn't work anymore in just about anything,  barring CS, but I guess since HL1 was basically my first shooter that mechanic just got etched into my brain.

[axemtitanium]

I was gonna say CS:GOta Today (or CS:GOtato Day), but I was beaten to it. I can't wait for a Sherlock Holmes reprint to come out; Sean sold me on it fully, truly.

[Roderick]

It is perfectly unacceptable that we can't rewatch Danielle playing The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on Twitch in Her True Voice. Somebody turn back the goddamn hands of time.

[Nappi]

  On 10/6/2014 at 5:39 PM, Roderick said:

It is perfectly unacceptable that we can't rewatch Danielle playing The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on Twitch in Her True Voice. Somebody turn back the goddamn hands of time.

 

Turn'd

 

http://www.twitch.tv/patriciaxhx/b/572530767

http://www.twitch.tv/patriciaxhx/b/572538608

[Roderick]

[clyde]

Would the faux-retro aesthetic often present in small games be considered skeumorphic? After playing Bernband and Hernhand as companion pieces, I've been thinking about this aesthetic a lot. In Hernhand (which may be Jake Clover's first 3D game, I'm not certain) there is a distinct aesthetic of the creator's limited technical skill savored in many design decisions; for instance, the disembodied first-person hands pronounce their 2D-sprite construction by having the alpha-channel blacked out. So you are running through this 3D world with cardboard drawings of arms in front of you that aren't even cut out. Similar decisions are made throughout Hernhand and it creates this unique aesthetic that is formed as Clover mixes his 2D methods with the techniques that Unity advertises to its new users early on, and some tricks that Clover must have decided were high enough priority to look into the execution of within (presumably) the last few months. So playing Hernhand as a fan of Clover's previous work and as a new user of Unity is like getting taken behind the scenes of shadow-theatre to see how the 2D play has been performed in 3D space and like someone put twenty of the demo-projects from the tutorials together in one weird alien world. I see this as being the opposite of skeumorphism. All the seams are real in comparison to something like the the Media Molecule produced levels of Little Big Planet; LBP is supposed to look and feel like arts&craft materials. Interestingly, I would not describe the consumer-created content levels of LBP as skeumorphic, they (like Jake Clover) seem to have an aesthetic of making something work out of limited parts.

Tom van den Boogaart's Bernband, however, I would consider skeumorphic because it appears that a screen-filter was applied over the game to create a pixelated look. When you turn slowly, you can kinda see how the actual lines and colors of the world are first drawn in a middle-illusion that is divided into many more segments than the depicted resolution. It's similar to looking at an enlarged 8-bit game through a screen-door. It's very strange (and super cool). This aesthetic is consistent through multiple parts of Bernband's design. All of the characters are jagged, blockily colored, billboarding sprites that lerp smoothly through a 3D world at a much higher fidelity of smoothness than is implied by their giant pixelated depictions. It's really strange. While Hernhand is showing off its actual method of construction, Bernband hides its own with a technical knowledge of how to create a convincing illusion with the contemporary tools, but then goes to additional effort to imply the limitations of tools only capable of lower fidelity. The implication is not subtle at all and it makes me associate certain aspects of the game with 8-bit (culture?) while keeping things like movement and the architectural space as a clean, smooth modern. It had a really unsettling (but pleasurable) effect on me. It makes you approach everything in the world with a question of which nature it ascribes to. Maybe this is the experience people were having with 3D Dot Game Heroes. The thing that intrigues me is that the mix of (what I may be incorrectly referring to as) skeumorphic aspects with contemporary fidelity makes me curious about the types of familiarity that are being evoked; is it gaming nostalagia or is there something more complex going on like a recontextualization of those 2D 8-bit worlds into the realities of the concept-art from that era being post-processed into lower fidelity. A good comparison here would be film. I imagine that when people first watched colored film, they immediately extrapolated all the black & white films they had seen earlier as having been imperfect depictions of colored reality. The weird part here is that those 8-bit worlds didn't have 3D high-fidelity sources, but Bernband makes them feel like they did.

[Badfinger]

  On 10/6/2014 at 6:05 AM, DarthEnderX said:

I love it when she does the accent.

 

She sounds like Janine from Ghostbusters.

 

As an East Coaster, someone thinking those accents are the same sounds crazy to me.

[Gormongous]

  On 10/7/2014 at 4:44 AM, Badfinger said:

As an East Coaster, someone thinking those accents are the same sounds crazy to me.

 

Eh, you should try being from the South and hearing the mishmash of "Southern accents" that hail from Virginia to Texas in movies and TV. No one's got an ear for anyone else's region.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I have to let you all know, there are many Irish accents. A lot really.

[Badfinger]

  On 10/7/2014 at 5:12 AM, Gormongous said:

Eh, you should try being from the South and hearing the mishmash of "Southern accents" that hail from Virginia to Texas in movies and TV. No one's got an ear for anyone else's region.

 

That was the omitted second part of the post that I couldn't really phrase - the fact that every place has crazy regional dialects. For example, most French sounds the same to me but French people probably cringe at French accents that are totally inappropriate.

[tberton]

  On 10/7/2014 at 5:12 AM, Gormongous said:

Eh, you should try being from the South and hearing the mishmash of "Southern accents" that hail from Virginia to Texas in movies and TV. No one's got an ear for anyone else's region.

 

I get the same feeling any time I hear a "Canadian" accent, as though there is such a thing.

[sclpls]

  On 10/7/2014 at 2:02 PM, Badfinger said:

That was the omitted second part of the post that I couldn't really phrase - the fact that every place has crazy regional dialects. For example, most French sounds the same to me but French people probably cringe at French accents that are totally inappropriate.

 

French people cringe at everything that is not a Parisian accent.

[Marek]

The e-sports videos linked here are fascinating. Wow.

 

 

I was just looking for some CS:GO gameplay footage and the first video I found was this tutorial. I played CS back in the day but never knew the stuff this guy explains in the beginning about recoil. I always thought recoil meant 'you always have to shoot in short controlled bursts, and you only use long burst in super close quarters'. What I never knew was that people actually move their mouse in opposite directions to compensate for recoil. Holy crap! This is surely CS basics, but it kinda blew my mind.

[Badfinger]

  On 10/7/2014 at 10:31 PM, Marek said:

The e-sports videos linked here are fascinating. Wow.

 

 

I was just looking for some CS:GO gameplay footage and the first video I found was this tutorial. I played CS back in the day but never knew the stuff this guy explains in the beginning about recoil. I always thought recoil meant 'you always have to shoot in short controlled bursts, and you only use long burst in super close quarters'. What I never knew was that people actually move their mouse in opposite directions to compensate for recoil. Holy crap! This is surely CS basics, but it kinda blew my mind.

 

Oh man, Frankie is awesome. He tends to be informative while being entertaining, and also he's really good at shooters. I've watched most of his DayZ videos. Crafts a pretty good narrative in a game without one.

[tegan]

  On 10/7/2014 at 9:44 PM, tberton said:

I get the same feeling any time I hear a "Canadian" accent, as though there is such a thing.

 

I still don't know where anyone ever got the idea that we say "aboot."