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Unread postby U-Rat » 25 Mar 2008 07:35

Hi!

I could say the usual "Hello! i'm the new guy!", but you already know that as it's my first post here.

I love the site, I share most of the ideas about the new generation of gaming in general, I am an arcade fan as well...

I am reading the articles for some time now, I decided to participate a bit here so I registered.

I don't want to go "off topic", so I'd say that my first feedback will be the following:

There is no "Introduce yourself" topic in the "Welcome" section...

Cheers!
[*insert here one of those smart-ass quotes you usually find on smart-ass websites*]
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Unread postby icycalm » 25 Mar 2008 07:44

Fixed.
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Unread postby Doctor Fugue » 01 Jul 2008 13:09

Thank you, icycalm, for producing an excellent site. I have been enjoying the reviews, especially since I do not have the opportunity to play many of them. The reviews dispense with merely giving an impression of a game... they tell me exactly what exists in the games.

I have also been enjoying the essays. My grounding in philosophy is weak, but I look forward to digesting the ideas. I have a little knowledge of Godel (sorry, I don't know how to put an umlaut there), and also whatever bits that have stuck with me from courses in logic and the philosophy of math. So, I appreciate your inclusion of excellent quotes.

I am trying to be brief, but failing. I just wanted to let you know that someone else out there is reading what you have written, and subsequently been entertained enough to continue reading further essays.
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Unread postby CowHerd » 25 Aug 2008 23:24

The site is lovely: proper criticism that's interesting to read. I like it a lot.

One improvement I'd like to suggest (which you may think is too much of a chore to bother with) would be to show all the different names a game has been released as in the Reviews Index. For example, once you click into the review for Power Smash 3 it says on the side-bar "Also known as Virtua Tennis 3", but there's no way of knowing this when you're just browsing through all the reviews.

But it's a nit-pick, not a massive problem. Perhaps the majority of your readership is more familiar with Japanese titles than I am...
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Unread postby icycalm » 25 Aug 2008 23:28

If you scroll down the reviews index you will also see "Virtua Tennis 3". Clicking on it will get you to the same review.

Same goes for all games in the index.
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Unread postby CowHerd » 26 Aug 2008 01:02

I'm well smart I am.
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Unread postby EightEyes » 25 Sep 2008 06:53

G'day all.

Great site you have here - top notch. It's heartening to see this level of discussion about games. They're the oldest and still one of the most important forms of expression, and yet just as they're entering a particularly interesting patch, the level of conversation about them is the sort of stuff you'd find at a boat show.

Just thought I'd say hello - I've wandered over as a result of a partially interesting discussion in the wake of Action Button's manifesto.

I'll chip in something a bit more specific once I have something intelligent to say.
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Unread postby raphael » 12 Dec 2008 15:10

I enjoy very much the way the site is going these days. Very interesting threads and last reviews are amazing (especialy "Spacewar!", "Tekki" and "State of the gaming media").

I couldn't be happier.

Just to make a little remark about the main page: the 'videogame art' reviews now don't show stars anymore. No problem with that. But it makes it harder to tell (in a quick view) that they are reviews. Before that, you could tell reviews from the rest because of the stars, and could even spot the best games in the blink of an eye. I don't know, maybe you don't want the 'videogame art' articles to be treated like reviews and more like manifestos, but still, I don't think you want them to be identified like regular articles.

Anyway, not a complaint here. I just noticed this made browsing a little less conveniant.

This said, the main goal of this message was to say how much I enjoy everything I read and what's going on here.

Establishing the basics of critique and reflexion on videogames is a much needed work. But it's quite a big task and takes a lot of time, dedication, and some cleverness. I was long afraid nobody would find enough money to do it, and even that the game companies would try to control it. Making it all impossible.

(of course not counting the attempts of dumbass university salarymen not even willing to try and know the subject).

I am glad I was wrong. You proved your determination. And the simple fact that this website is still running, and running forward, is just great and promising.

If I inflate your ego, I must say it's unintentional. You'd better understand it like encouragements. And after all, with a big ego should come great self-demand.

Cheers.

P.S.: You can be sure I buy your book as soon as I can. If not for its still unknown qualities, at least to pay a little for the work that has been done already.
Last edited by raphael on 19 May 2010 23:50, edited 3 times in total.
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Unread postby icycalm » 12 Dec 2008 20:56

raphael wrote:Just to make a little remark about the main page: the 'videogame art' reviews now don't show stars anymore. No problem with that. But it makes it harder to tell (in a quick view) that they are reviews.


There's nothing I can do about it. I wouldn't want to add stars even if I could, because I want to drive home the fact that there is something special about these games compared to even regular five-star ones. I could try to make them stand out visually in some other way (like underlining or setting the font to bold, for example), but I haven't yet figured any such way that would at the same time look elegant.

maybe you don't want the 'videogame art' articles to be treated like reviews and more like manifestos


Why would I not want them to be regarded as reviews? It says "review" right there, at the top of the page. A manifesto is a "public declaration of policy and aims" -- nothing absolutely to do with reviews. I hope you haven't been reading too much of Tim's stuff. The only reason he called his top 25 games list a "manifesto" is because he was trying to hide the fact that it was merely yet another dumbass top 25 games list. The closest most websites come to manifestos is sometimes in their "About" pages.

university salarymen


I love this expression! I will be adopting it.

And after all, with a big ego should come great self-demand.


Yes, people do not realize this. There's a Nietzschean quote about this somewhere, but it doesn't look like I can find it right now.

P.S.: You can be sure I buy your book as soon as I can. If not for its still unknown qualities,


The hints I've dropped here or there are nothing. A single page from that book is worth more than this entire site. And I am not even exaggerating.
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Unread postby raphael » 13 Dec 2008 01:00

icycalm wrote:Yes, people do not realize this. There's a Nietzschean quote about this somewhere, but it doesn't look like I can find it right now.


I am sure I got it from reading his works anyway.

Why would I not want them to be regarded as reviews? It says "review" right there, at the top of the page. A manifesto is a "public declaration of policy and aims" -- nothing absolutely to do with reviews. I hope you haven't been reading too much of Tim's stuff. The only reason he called his top 25 games list a "manifesto" is because he was trying to hide the fact that it was merely yet another dumbass top 25 games list. The closest most websites come to manifestos is sometimes in their "About" pages.

I was only joking here.

university salarymen


I love this expression! I will be adopting it.

Actually it was originally a poor attempt at translating a french word that came out way funnier than the original. I like it too.

P.S.: You can be sure I buy your book as soon as I can. If not for its still unknown qualities,


The hints I've dropped here or there are nothing. A single page from that book is worth more than this entire site. And I am not even exaggerating.

My cinema directing teacher had a great ego too, and a mind matching it. He was so demanding with is grand book on Alien, that he finally died without finishing it.

Just to make a little remark about the main page: the 'videogame art' reviews now don't show stars anymore. No problem with that. But it makes it harder to tell (in a quick view) that they are reviews.


There's nothing I can do about it. I wouldn't want to add stars even if I could, because I want to drive home the fact that there is something special about these games compared to even regular five-star ones. I could try to make them stand out visually in some other way (like underlining or setting the font to bold, for example), but I haven't yet figured any such way that would at the same time look elegant.

Well there should be some suitable solutions. The stars clearly indicating the reviews are red, so anything else red (framing the picture, underlining 'videogame art' or something) would link them together without the need to explicitly write 'review' in front of each and every one. Or you could use 5 gold stars for the videogame art reviews. I think both solutions would be instantly recognizable. Not sure it is that elegant though, one needs to try.

P.S.: Funny how 'Art' is now written all over the site. You will sure get some attention with it.
Last edited by raphael on 19 May 2010 23:54, edited 1 time in total.
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Unread postby icycalm » 13 Dec 2008 01:10

raphael wrote:My cinema directing teacher had a great ego too, and a mind matching it. He was so demanding with is grand book on Alien, that he finally died without finishing it.


That's awesome! I should tell someone to search my laptop if I end up dying before I finish my own book.

Well there should be some suitable solutions. The stars clearly indicating the reviews are red, so anything else red (framing the picture, underlining 'videogame art' or something) would link them together without the need to explicitly write 'review' in front of each and every one.


Framing the thumbnail and/or underlining 'videogame art' would not look elegant.

Or you could use 5 gold stars for the videogame art reviews.


I can't use stars at all: that's the problem. For one thing, it would make most headlines take up two lines instead of one. Ugly. For another thing, where would the stars go? Before 'videogame art'? Not very elegant. After 'videogame art'? Even less so.
Last edited by icycalm on 13 Dec 2008 01:18, edited 1 time in total.
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Unread postby icycalm » 13 Dec 2008 01:16

P.S.: Funny how 'Art' is now written all over the site. You will sure get some attention with it.


It's intentional. The idea is to drive home the fact that good games are game art. Right now everyone else thinks the exact opposite. All games touted as art are, at bottom, terrible games. So I am hoping that when they see me calling stuff like Contra "art" they'll get a wake-up call.
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Unread postby infernovia » 23 Apr 2009 15:34

I want to thank those that have contributed to Insomnia for their excellent articles in their view of video games and its culture. Never before have I seen such clear, factual criticism of this industry and its genre. These articles made my vague disdain for some habits into clear criticism.

For example, I knew that the mainstream magazines were terrible for game opinions but I never saw how they fundamentally contradicted the very concept of reviews. I did not pay attention to all of the basic information that these "journalists" lose the day after the release. And I simply went along like it was something to be accepted, and thus never thought clearly about the issue.

So thank you guys for compiling these articles and writing them.
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Unread postby shrimpus » 18 May 2009 04:36

This is addressed to Alex Kirkegaard,

I suppose that feedback could describe what I am attempting to place into words and then subsequently expell onto the internet. Truth be told I probably would have prefered to write a private message as the feelings I wish to express are somewhat personal. In the end other considerations trump what is essentially a modesty issue. Forums allow others to be touched by a thought and the harsh exposing light of multiple viewers forces a higher level of quality than the dark intimacy of a private correspondance.

I am writing this not because I want to comment on your site or comment on your philosophies and expositions, I am writing this because I am compelled to write this. You see the things that you have written touched parts of my psyche already fully formed and mature, and changed them.

I want to pause for a moment and actually explain why that is so important that I have been stunned into a rather dream like state and now feel forced to write an embarassingly heartfelt piece in front of a bunch of people I have never met before, not even digitally. You see I love to debate, argue and mince. What years and years of doing this in person and online is that you cannot hope to change the mind of your foe. The opposition in any contest is wedded to their thoughts with a fidelity that brides everywhere would kill to have from their grooms. The human mind is a engine that defines its world based on its own perceptions of how it should be. Top down, taking what it hopes and wishes to be true and searching for the evidence to back up these preconceptions. In most debates you do not even aim at your opponent. You aim at the judges or the gathered crowd. You aim at people who are either evaluating your form or gauging your deftness and rhetoric. Your opponent will never change his stance no matter how much the greater your logical arguments and no matter how eloquent your speech. His mind is already made up and there is nothing that you can do to change it. At best you can force a grudging, hostile and short lived retreat. The beaten will not really change, they will only recraft and reforge old arguments into new alloys and strike again from essentially the same position as soon as the next opportunity presents itself. I am no different, perhaps a little more self aware than the average person but that doesn't make that bias any smaller in my mind. I know on an emotional level I am right and that my foe is wrong and my rational conscious mind will do everything in its power to prove this gut reaction no matter how spontaneous and ill formed it was correct. This is unfortunately how the human mind works. There are only a few remedies for a bias held and confirmed. For it to be cut out violently by reality or for it to teased out through cunning words. Cunning is here a vast understatement. To take an immature bias, one that hasn't been tested and remove it takes cunning. To take out a mature fire hardened bias is nothing short of a miracle. I say this now with utter and complete conviction.

So now that I have hopefully related why this changing of my mind matters. And for this I give you thanks. You have redefined what game archetypes mean to me, you have changed my perspective on an industry and you have inspired me to rethink and revist things that I have abandoned. The last time a shift of this magnitude in my outlook on life occured it was the result of a man dying in front of me and the sensations that ran through my head as I worked out whether I was legally allowed to save him, and then whether it would get me in trouble with my boss. A humbling insight into the selfish nature of morality. The time before that was when I watched a major hospital attempt to kill a patient because he was too poor to pay them. Its not just about games, its about life. Its about understanding how a system works. The fact that your conversation is about what amounts to toys doesn't matter. The fact that your website and its articles have given me further insight into my mind and my culture matters a whole lot.

You have my thanks.

P.S. You could cut the interactive novel writers a bit more slack. They might not create good games but they create rich moments. Which are in their own way worth the creation and sometimes become art in their own right. Just not perhaps game art.

Jesus....

that was corny as shit.
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Unread postby icycalm » 18 May 2009 23:21

Yes, well, too bad most of what you said had nothing to do with the subject of the thread, not to mention that a lot of it was puerile exaggeration (all the "you can't convince anyone of anything in a debate" nonsense). And I guess you are one of those people who has trouble concentrating and writing in a coherent, intelligible manner (your writing style reminds me quite a bit of user Nervicide, actually -- check his posting history, which I have even considerably cut down and edited). But the thing is that, since I am the sole admin/moderator in this forum, I am obliged to read everything that gets posted here. So shit like this don't fly, I am afraid. When you spew out random off-topic shit you are basically forcing me to read it, and I won't stand for that -- I have better things to do with my time. So consider yourself warned -- do everyone (and above all me) a favor and keep your posts coherent and to the point. If that's too hard for you then simply don't post.
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Unread postby Beakman » 11 Jul 2009 05:36

Congratulations to Icycalm (and everyone involved) for this site. Reading your content is a pleasure. I was trying to point one review or commentary (or even a forum post) as my favorite but I couldn't.

I gotta admit that at first I was avoiding your philosophy related writings (I NEVER thought I would find a gaming site with such valuable content on the subject) but now that I'm getting some time to go through them, I can appreciate them as pure gold. It's really hard to come by someone with your ability to synthesize so much with such precision.

It's refreshing to find so many questions solved with such incisive views and it's outstanding to see this in a gaming site. Impressive what you've done here relating philosophy with games.

I'll be waiting for your book.
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Unread postby GIGS » 17 Jul 2009 05:17

Thank you for making this site! I have started on your reading list and it was tough going at first, but things are finally starting to congeal in my mind. It was really hard for me to see how Nietzsche's many sections related to each other, but each day the connections become clearer. It's really amazing!
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Unread postby Magnum Apex » 05 Apr 2010 09:44

This has been a long time coming, so I apologize for not saying it sooner, but thank you immensely for Insomnia. This is my favorite site on the internet.

I've tried to get other people to explore the site, but they tend to stumble onto something they're so offended by that they dismiss you and go away. Your article on Arcade Culture is always well received, but linking them to The Simulacrum Is True or the discussion of "Can Games be Art?" and other Childish Nonsense turns them away faster than I can stop them. Most of them can't seem to cope with your style of writing. I find their reaction unfortunate to say the least, since these people are fellow designers and developers.

At any rate, thanks again, and keep up the excellent work!
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Unread postby icycalm » 05 Apr 2010 12:11

lol, it's that bad, huh? What exactly turns people off from the simulacrum essay? The intellectualism? Or the Juul-bashing? I can see people getting turned off from the hobag or "Game Politics" essays, for example, but not from stuff like the simulacrum essay...
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Unread postby Magnum Apex » 05 Apr 2010 19:16

icycalm wrote:Or all the Juul-bashing?


It is mostly this one, actually. For example, one of my former co-workers, a graduate from MIT (I assume that's how he knows of Juul so well), actually disagrees with nearly everything Juul has said about videogames, yet still took issue with your bashing of him. It's a common reaction I see when I link people to your articles and discussions. They can't get over your bashing of someone, so they usually can't focus on everything else you're saying.
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Unread postby icycalm » 05 Apr 2010 22:32

fagots, lol.

See this is the thing with people of this kind: even if I somehow removed all the person-bashing from my articles (which though possible, would actually be a pretty hard thing to accomplish, and would eventually end up turning into CONCEALED person-bashing -- you know, the underhanded, hypocritical kind), they would still not manage to get very far with them. Because at the end of the day, game theory ends up leading exactly where philosophy leads. And philosophy leads to person-bashing. The world isn't an idylically happy merry-go-round, as the fagots would have it: it's a brutal fight for power.

But hey, fagots. Philosophy just simply was never meant for them (any more than it was meant for women, shopkeepers, Christians, cows, Englishmen, or other democrats).
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Unread postby Qpo » 17 May 2010 05:10

Swedish is my first language, English is a distant second.

The gaming culture commentaries from A Gamer's Guide to the Internet: Prologue to
Leave Ranking to the Experts are all missing links to some of the other gaming culture commentaries.

Two typos on the Masters of Controversy page:

IS GAMES ART?
Leigh Rogers bursts onto the intellectual videogeam scene with a revolutionary, paradigm-shifting observation: geams are indeed art! Just not all of them -- only the really crappy ones.


This site is amazing beyond anything I could have imagined before I found it. I dare not even start with the reading list just yet because of the impact this site has had on me in these last few months I've been frequenting it. Your commentaries, Schopenhauer's essays and Nietzsche's words that always makes me wonder how he can know me so well.

I am blown away, and very grateful.
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Unread postby icycalm » 19 May 2010 18:56

The typos are not really typos. They are a way of emphasizing how stupid the pseudo-theories of the pseudo-intellectuals are.

As for the sidebar of my articles, I fixed it for now, but this sort of thing happens all the time. Whenever I post a new article I have to edit manually EVERY SINGLE ONE of the old ones, to update them with the new link. It's a job that takes almost an hour, especially now that there are so many of them, so I usually wait until I've got several new ones before I go updating the old ones. In short: you'll see this happen again so don't worry about it.
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Unread postby icycalm » 02 Dec 2011 15:55

I don't know if it's happening to anyone else, but I've got so used to having to sign in here to read anything (remember that in the forum at least I am almost as much of a reader as anyone else), that when I browse other sites and click on stuff to read without having to sign in, I feel weird. Like really, really weird.

And then when I am at the bottom of a page in any other site, I keep trying to find and click the button that takes me to the top. That thing's incredibly handy, especially for long pages or forums, and it's a mystery to me that the more advanced sites like say Wired or whatever haven't adopted it.
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Unread postby El Chaos » 11 Dec 2011 16:39

I noticed that the topic's subject is nowhere to be seen in a thread's second page and onwards (only the subforum's name). It only appears in a thread's very first post, and only in that post's subject.
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