rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

OK I know nobody reads this thread - and as far I can tell there's no "serious games" etc. thread, but the video lecture by Jesse Schell here is awesome. The second half in particular is fascinating and terrifying, you gotta watch it. (The Sirlin text is pretty ignorable and not a particularly good summation.)

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2010/2/22/external-rewards-and-jesse-schells-amazing-lecture.html

interesting so far!

yeah, everyone here should watch that video

He sounds like Mitch Hedberg.

http://www.call-to-adventure.com/?p=704

i liked this but it also made me a little sad. probably full of untruths passed off as truths but i'll leave that to the aspie rubes to pick apart.

How many of you are still playing Portal? How many of you still love your girlfriends? And now how many of you are ready to admit to yourselves, in a whisper, that you’re liars?

o_0

man, i can just barely read that; it's so thick with HEAVY MEANING and counterintuitive points that i don't agree with/sympathize with at all

I mean: "What is it about gaming — the compulsive, strung-out bender sessions — that makes it so humiliating? Could it be that I was pressing buttons to make scantily clad women and heaving, hormonal man-beasts pummel each other over and over again? Was it the number of hours that I spent playing that was so shameful? Starting at 8:00pm and then fighting till 4:00am? Is it the compulsion?"

uh, i'm totally happy telling people i spent all night playing whatever i played if i did; you're a gaming journalist and you feel weird about it? maybe time for more meds?

self hate is the ugliest of ugly

remind me how watching tv all night is any less depressing than playing games. or reading L. Ron Hubbard. or playing d&d. or riding a stationary bike.
you're not watching porn or eating tubs of ice cream or cutting yourself; you are engaging in an activity that pacifies your heart. just keep swimming

wait swimming what? am I doing it wrong

joeks

gotta think I cda learned sanskrit w/all those self-hate-filled 700 hrs of SFIV tho ;_;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmyUkm2qlhA

That article makes me glad I haven't yet started a gaming blog to pour out my depression to the world. Self-hate is for your self!

and c'mon Cozen, if there was something more enjoyable and fulfilling than FADCing into Ultra a thousand times you probably would have or will pursue it

Okay, let's go back to that Jesse Schell presentation that Nhex was talking about here:
http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2010/2/22/external-rewards-and-jesse-schells-amazing-lecture.html

Where he posits a strange future where you "Get Points" at work by getting your reports done and becoming more adept at the programs you use.

So here I am downloading this now:
http://www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero

the singularity is coming!

I liked that Schell lecture, too.

I've played it for like three people now; i think he's spot fucking on

Yeah, it's got that McLuhan insight but the tone is tailored well to his audience.

UGH HATE

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/toddler-dies-mistaking-gun-wii-controller/story?id=10056190

Cheyenne Alexis McKeehan of Norene, Tenn., shot herself Sunday night after her stepfather left his loaded Smith & Wesson handgun out on a table, Wilson County Sheriff Terry Ashe said.

...

"The unfortunate thing is that this Nintendo game called Wii had what looks like a solid black, basically automatic-looking type mechanism that operates the game," he said.

NO YOU FARTKNUCKLE THE UNFORTUNATE THING IS THE FUCKING DIPSHIT OF A DAD LEFT A LOADED HANDGUN ON A TABLE WITHIN EASY REACH OF A TODDLER

How many of you are still playing Portal? How many of you still love your girlfriends? And now how many of you are ready to admit to yourselves, in a whisper, that you’re liars you've already GISed my name to see if i am hot or secret fattey?

how i would have ended that article

wtf @ that article dyao posted

That sheriff is like the dumbest person on Earth

If this leads to the Wii being banned I'm all for it.

i can't find the Black Isle alumni thread, but here's an interview with Obsidian's Chris Avellone done by sometime ILG-er Chris Dahlen:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/avc-at-gdc-10-an-interview-with-alpha-protocol-cre,39091/

worth watching, not reading but clever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIZVCCJxIQ4

neato

anyone got a list of these BRUTAL & FILTHY games so we can poll them?
http://www.complex.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/tracychriscover_large.jpg

(pause)

Brian Ashcraft: Child Porn Advocate

jeez that article links to some deeply heinous shit

lol @ child porn advocate

guy's a sleaze. i know i've posted this x times before, but nearly every story he posts is about some creepy underage-looking model/popstar/videogame character. also, he can't write, which doesn't distinguish him from the rest of kotaku.

Cannabalt is an adult’s game. It embarrasses no one.

That article is ugh, but this is a really good summary of my instinctive dislike for that game!

gonna play the devil's advocate here and say i'm more disturbed that you can jail people for drawing gross cartoons than that there are people out there jerking off to said cartoons. i mean they're drawings, that's really nothing compared to, you know, the actually horrifying practices of child pornography that they are equating it with

but of course, to defend this stance means you have to go in with the pedos :( and brian ashcraft

xp haha, what do you mean?

xp haha, what do you mean?

Well, the whole article touched on something that I've been thinking about for a while. My issue isn't so much with Canabalt (which I played a few times and enjoyed) but with the reviews of it I read, and with its presence on game of the year lists etc. So much of what I read was about how easily non-gamers were converted to playing it, how smooth and non-cheesy and, well, grown-up it seemed, in theme and execution, how easy it was to learn...

I feel the same way about 'Passage' which I actually found v. affecting! It's just that I'm very conscious that Canabalt is 'showing' what 'Passage' is to 'talking about' - something that you use when justifying your hobby to people who don't share it. And while I understand that, for me, that's not gaming. That's the gateway drug to gaming, but it shouldn't ever be confused with the end product. The end product is that really deep engagement with ruleset, that staying-up-until-five-playing-Civilisation feeling, Braid with its stupid adolescent writing and really hard, unforgiving, honest, satisfying puzzles, Ninja Gaiden, Madden played on hardest with all its stupid unrealistic aspects and ai glitches and needless intricacies. If you've only got an hour a day to play games that's cool, I'm in the same boat! But don't tell me that Canabalt is the deepest pleasure the medium can give.

I sound like table-is-the-table on the gay thread!

re: the Ashcraft article, I'm as staunch a 1st-amendmentist as they come and I actually completely agree with Ashcraft's position in this circumstance. on the other hand it's the most gut-bustingly hilarious gaming blog tard revalation since Tim Rogers spent a few paragraphs talking about "hypothetically" wanting to s3X0r his sister in the middle of a review of like Gears of War or something.

re: Canabalt, I think a lot of the problematic writing stems from the fact that it was one of the titles that helped define and/or legitimize the iPhone as a gaming platform in a lot of people's mind (it certainly did for me, anyway). I still think it's a masterpiece (and still play the hell out of it), but every time I've tried to harangue someone into checking it out I end up explaining the whole experience to them and I completely see how that would sap the fun right out of any game experience - imo that moment when you suddenly fully comprehend the totality of a game's mechanics is (or should be) every bit as significantly impactful as a plot twist like who Keyser Soze is or w/e, and blowing that reveal for people is kind of a dick move.

Actually the more I think about that article the more stimulating I find it! Like: there really *is* something important to me in the idea of games being to some degree shameful - after writing that post I had a craving that's lasted all day to just say fuck it and play a videogame all night but I have too much stuff lined up tomorrow that I actually enjoy to just write the whole day off - to a degree it *is* a preserve of the unhappy and that is part of its texture. It's the feeling too, that people were talking about on the chatroulette thread, a nostalgia for 'the old weird internet' we grew up with, that wasn't safe at all but offered possibilities that the modern me-and-my-friends facebook net seems to lack. Like: maybe one day all games will be accessible to the people they want to reach but at that point they won't be for *me* anymore? idk idk.

Is there a specific term for "i resent the successful rise to acceptability of this particular type of otherness i have a sentimental attachment to"? Because it is a common feeling!

in music it's called "hipsterism"

haha! that's pretty otm

this feature is the inverse of the thread title: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/mar/21/tom-bissell-video-game-cocaine-addiction

ugh why did i read that

that is the worst thing I've read since Tim Rogers review of Braid

Worth watching, if only for the horrible UK tabloid hackery:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryH2WemACIM

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/03/22/the-alan-titchmarsh-show-on-videogames/

tsunami of violence

i want 2 be a games journalist so bad

or at least have sum1 pay me to write abt painscription drug abuse & playing atelier rorona for 80 hours

brother, i have the same dream

http://juxtapixel.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/theyre-just-videogames-right/

yes, it is another mini-autobio entry about what games mean to a man, but i liked this one more than the one about the cokehead. also I can identify really strongly with some bits here, especially delivering passionate monologues to others about games (who do not understand it)