lol

[Afterburn]

Man, I already miss Recap. What a fucking prickish way to end his run here that was. He managed to make me so mad at him that I actually banned him.

When was this? I had no idea that Recap was banned.

[icycalm]

http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?t=2784

[Warden]

Leigh Alexander is an old favorite for lols, but this article takes the cake.

Another inhibitor to greater commercial and cultural viability for art games is the difficulty in reaching mainstream audiences. Tale of Tales actually hopes primarily to reach non-gamers through work like The Path, but explains why that's a complicated proposition: "The main thing that seems to be blocking this progress–if we're allowed to call it that–is the difficulty of approaching markets outside of the market for games," they say.

"The games industry is very well organized and very successful within its own ecosystem. But it has optimized all of its systems and habits for internal use. As a result, only gamers like games. And everybody else doesn't understand them or is even disgusted by them. Which is problematic for us. Essentially, we make games for non-gamers—and, in general, non-gamers hate games."

Let me get this straight. This developer wants to reach non-gamers with their non-games, but then is sad that their non-games are hard to sell to non-gamers (or even gamers, for that matter)? Holy shit.

http://kotaku.com/5234167/the-path-for-art-games

[Afterburn]

What I don't understand about the gaming industry's burning desire to break into the non-gaming market is how they think they are going to convert these non-gamers into gamers. With non-games?

Gaming, just like any form of entertainment, is pretty much a niche. There are only so many people who will enjoy games. The rest of the population will have no interest in them, no matter how you wrap them up and present them. This applies to music too. The highest selling album of last year (Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III) sold 3 million copies. That might sound like a lot, but the population of the United States is what, 300-something million? That is 0.01% of the population! (I know people didn't just buy Lil Wayne's album, that many people bought many albums by many different artists, but the point is games, just like music and movies, aren't bought by everyone, there is a limited market for all these things.) I just don't know where this expansion that the gaming industry wants is supposed to come from, because you might fool non-gamers into playing Wii Sports for an hour or two, but then they just, well, stop playing.

[Lochlan]

That is 0.01% of the population!

3 million is 1% of 300 million.

[Afterburn]

Yes, yes it is. I forgot how to read a calculator briefly. Thanks for pointing it out.

[warken]

http://lostgarden.com/2008/07/soul-bubb ... eated.html

Get ready for your head to explode, because the amount of profound backwardness is stunning. The article says if games are about learning skills, the secret to developing good games is to watch inexperienced people (which the author calls "real users" lol) play the game and adjust the difficulty to meet their needs, thus lessening the amount of learning. Also, expert reviews are for no one since they ignore all those "real users" out there. Here's a nice quote to help shift your brain into nonsense mode:

As for the current review industry, it is built on the unstable foundation of expert opinion in the absence of actual player observation. As games evolve and become ever more about first time learning experiences, the traditional game review will become increasingly irrelevant. It is arguable that they've already stopped informing most buying decisions and now serve as little more than entertainment for the hardcore niche. As the value proposition of reviews falter, the vast, churning, capitalist forces of creative destruction will replace them with a much richer set of game criticism that offers real value to its readers.

Let's all embrace the new evolution of games; the kind that render expert opinion useless and cripple the evil "hardcore" establishment.

[Molloy]

http://www.neo-geo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=196192

Rev. Stu responding to criticism of his article.

Hello idiots!

[icycalm]

Their criticism might be largely idiotic, but Stu's article is still worthless. Its format, its purpose, and all the way down to the details -- worthless trash. And lol at Metal Slug 7 being a "breath of fresh air". If you are a retarded non-gamer, maybe.

So, yeah. Stuart Campbell, lol.

As for warken's link :( Baudrillard's prophecies are well on the way to becoming realities:

Everywhere the disposition of force and forcing yield to dispositions of ambiance, with operationalization of the notions of need, perception, desire, etc. Generalized ecology, mystique of the "niche" and of the context, milieu-simulation right up to "Centers of Esthetic and Cultural Re-Animation" foreseen in the VIIth Plan (why not?) and Center of Sexual Leisure, constructed in the form of a breast, that will offer a "superior euphoria due to a pulsating ambiance... The workers from all classes will be able to penetrate into these stimulating centers." Spatiodynamic fascination, like this "total theatre" established "according to a hyperbolic circular disposition turning around a cylindrical cone": no more scene, cut-off point, or "regard": end of the spectacle as well as of the spectacular, towards the total environmental, fused together, tactile, esthesia and no longer aesthetics, etc. We can think of the total theatre of Artaud only with black humor, his Theatre of Cruelty, of which this spatiodynamic simulaton is only an abject caricature. Here cruelty is replaced by "minimal and maximal stimulus thresholds," by the invention of "perceptive codes calculated on the basis of saturation thresholds." Even the good old "catharsis" of the classical theatre of the passions has become today homeopathy by simulation. So goes creativity.

http://insomnia.ac/essays/simulations/

[El Chaos]

http://www.rpgfan.com/editorials/2009/04-28.html

Let's take a trip back in time; let's say around 15 years ago, back to 1994. Final Fantasy III had just been released in the U.S. to much critical acclaim. RPG enthusiasts were gleefully exploring a new and vivid world with a large cast of diverse and colorful characters. The majority of RPG aficionados believe this to be the golden age of RPGs, when innovation within the genre was widespread and we didn't get 10 Tales games per year. RPGs were a niche type of game for a niche type of market, and nobody would've wanted it any other way. We liked to think and strategize battles in our games. We were not barbarians whose only thought was to shoot everything that moved in Doom. We liked to explore interpersonal relationships and connections among different characters. We were not mindless oafs whose only goal was to cut down or destroy anything blocking our path in Ninja Gaiden or Sonic. We were sophisticated strategists who fought battles with intelligence and cunning. We were not unthinking brutes that made lines in Tetris to watch the block exploding violently. RPGs were the sole property of gaming elites, and it was good. It was a veritable renaissance for gaming.

Bolding and underlining are mine.

[icycalm]

Stephen Poole answers the pressing question:

Can a videogame be like a poem?

Next up: Can a space shuttle be like a cabbage?

[mothmanspirit]

http://au.wii.ign.com/articles/982/982103p1.html

But the most important question you're probably wondering is: does the Konami code work? From what we can tell, no. We tried inputting it at the title screen and during gameplay, neither of which seemed to do anything. Longtime gamers know this code from Konami games on the NES. It would typically provide the player with 30 extra lives.

[taub]

Nintendo showing opinions of random people to a hall filled with "experts".

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-09 ... -dsi/50370

[EightEyes]

A "casual" review of Chess:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/06 ... ame-chess/

You couldn't make this shit up.

Nor could you find better support for leaving reviews to the experts.

[infernovia]

http://drjon.typepad.com/videogames/200 ... games.html

Suits’ project in the book is to define the word “game.” He takes direct aim at Wittgenstein for denying that such a task is possible. “Playing a game,” according to the grasshopper, is just “a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”

I thought about this one for a while, and I came up with many counter-examples. I thought perhaps I might be mistaken. But here is where I realized the what the author was actually saying:

What makes a foot race a game is the fact that its participants don’t allow themselves to use cars or bicycles, or to cut through the center of a circular track. What makes chess a game is the fact that the player doesn’t allow herself to simply reach across the table and pluck her opponent’s king from the board.

Good news everyone, games have rules!
Icy's post here http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?t=2809

Electronic games are above all games, that is to say "activities or contests governed by sets of rules"

I don't know how someone can take something so trivial and make it into a book. Plus, he is abusing language. Apparently, that's all it takes for it to be called a masterpiece.

[icycalm]

Plus, he is abusing language.

And I guess this abuse is so obvious that you do not have to explain it to us. This is the sort of posting/commenting attitude that I tried to get away from by setting up this place. It is the kind of comment that embarrasses me: you are giving excuses to outsiders to claim that the users of this forum are nothing but sock-puppets.

So do me a favor and STOP AND THINK before posting. Whenever I say that someone is abusing language I EXPLAIN WHY. Throwing about a cool sentence you saw someone else using is never the correct way to argue anything. It is how retards "argue".

[infernovia]

What I mean by abusing language is that he is essentially saying the same thing as "games have rules" except the commenter is getting away with many things. For example, he says that chess is only a game if we don't reach out and grab the pieces out of the board. But this is a lie, if we don't abide by those rules, it still would be a game, but quite a different one. Another thing would be actions that aren't considered games could be. For example, watching a movie linearly to find out the ending. Or enjoying working 70 hours a week because one is too proud to be helped out.

I agree that rules are the fundamental part of the game. So I agree with that part of the statement.

And here is where I am getting hung up on:

a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

What is unnecessary? Lets say that we take some type of medieval game with jousting or the arena where knights go after another. Perhaps one could consider them unnecessary, but it also keeps the warriors in the warring mood. Here it seems useful to me.

Parents play the quiet game with their child to illegally cross the border, necessary or unnecessary? If it is necessary, is it a game?

In childhood, aren't the games we play also necessary to build our mind? So aren't these games serving a purpose? And if this isn't a necessity, then what is?


I apologize for being convoluted. But those are the reasons that are forbidding me from accepting that definition.

Edit: Actually, I am re-reading the bottom now and it seems to be pretty accurate. The reason I am hung up on the definition in the first place is because I believe the bottom, thus this would be my complete lack of reading comprehension. That's probably why I am one of the learned men and not a philosopher.

So back to thinking about this idea again.

[Choking]

What Last to Blame does not do is review video games as products to consume. Last to Blame never takes the position of "rent" or "buy", but rather one of "thinking" and "feeling".

Sounds like a losing position to me.

http://lasttoblame.blogspot.com

[Evo]

Sundays are for sitting and compiling a list of interesting gaming reading from across the week, and finding myself remembering that the chatter by games journalists about a fall in standards is just ludicrous. We’d have been lucky to get pieces as splendid and varied as the ones gathered here in a whole year in the early nineties, let alone in a single fucking week. Wouldn’t it be good if someone would admit that games writing has never, ever been better than it is right here, right now?

His list of great games writing of the previous week that is so much greater than a whole years worth of the nineties.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/06/14/the-sunday-papers-72/

[Marcus]

I would love to see a more serious version of this article... perhaps as an Annual were the games of the last year are compared and awards are given to the most innovative and functionally appropriate designs.

I wonder what he thinks that means.

http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/stor ... de=5203736

[Mathis]

The link is self-explanatory.

http://www.hardcasual.net/2009/06/26/an ... gic-death/

[warken]

arcade games such as R-Type have contributed to the repression of male homoerotic desire since 1987. In future articles I hope to explore this issue more deeply, and highlight some of the ways in which modern video games have allowed men to express their desires for other men, and women for other women.

Author's note: While this analysis has focused upon the male homoerotic aspects of the game, it is important that these aspects could easily be explored in their misogynic symbolism.

http://www.gamecabaret.com/2008/02/repr ... -type.html

Man, is this real? R-Type is actually a lens revealing our repressed homosexual male desires; the spurts of energy discharging from the phallic R-9's hull. Oh and don't forget it's about hating women, too. What a trip (same goes for the rest of the site).

Take a look at the comments for bonus laughs. I'm convinced people who bother to draw these connections are just plain bored with video games or ashamed to enjoy them.

[Molloy]

Official Nintendo Magazine's rushed Wii Sports Resort Review
http://ramraider.blogspot.com/2009/07/o ... eview.html

[another Riposte]

Games do not succeed, developers do.

Games have no "essence." There is nothing right or wrong about a game and there are fundamentally no rules restricting how a game can be created. The game something created by developers to fulfill the goals of a developer which may be anything that a human may be motivated by.

The set of properties used to judge a game (mechanics, atmosphere...whatever) are just a collection of experiences and of no fundamental importance. Yes, it is good to refer to experiences when trying to do something that has been tried, but only so much. They are but weak guides when trying new ideas.

Gamers has also changed and the very idea of the game over time naturally. Players learn new things and forget old ones and that reshape the environment all the time. A game like "I want to be the guy" for example, loses its meaning without remembering the days of retrogaming. The language of gaming is changing all the time and no fixed rule can capture them all.

The most worthless idea is to think that a formula or a simple set of rules (eg. make mechanics and throw in some interface) can define all of games. If that happens, that is the end of the medium.

And it goes on.

http://forums.sirlin.net/showthread.php?t=2681

[El Chaos]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/god-h ... rospective

Scattered throughout God Hand are certain perfectly ordinary fodder enemies whom killing causes the music to stop, the sky to turn dark blue, a peal of thunder to echo around the level and the spawning of a terrible, spiny, lightning-fast demon with a massive health bar which will slaughter you unless you've got what it takes to bring it down.

There is no explanation for these terrifying things and they show up quite rarely. But Clover chose to put one in the first level. More than that, they put one in the first five minutes, and I have yet to see anyone playing that first level for the first time survive it. You're trundling along still learning or remembering the controls and this thing bursts out of the ground and savages you to death with ten elongated razor-sharp fingers. It's horrible and hilarious because for once the joke is on us.

(...)

Bad game design? Well, yes. But as we've already established, God Hand didn't give a shit. There's enough brilliant design in the game's combat to prove the team knew exactly what they were doing, they just didn't care. It's therefore arguable that Clover wouldn't have produced God Hand if they hadn't known they were going under.

Surely, a developer puts out one of their absolutely best games when they more or less know it's bye-bye with them.

And of course showing the player what the game's really all about in the first five minutes is not the utmost in honest, challenging game design, it's just plain "bad" game design. Hell, expecting the player not to sit down and breeze through it is just terrible. Next up I expect them to dumb down the entire thing so retards the world over can "appreciate" it... oh wait.

With these journ-lol-ists, the joke is always on us.