Parakeet vs. Phone posted:

There's probably also something to be said about games and movies being limited by being a visual medium. There's a book I've been meaning to read where the central conflict is two cultures trying to understand one another, and apparently the climax is them finally having a conversation.

That's cool, but it really wouldn't work well in big-budget film or in a non-indie game. Explosions and guns are visually thrilling, easy to understand and pretty universal, so they're going to be a big part of big budget games and movies for a while.

Alaois posted:

you'd think he would love the EA press conference given the amount of time they tend to focus on FIFA and Madden

Parakeet vs. Phone posted:

There's probably also something to be said about games and movies being limited by being a visual medium. There's a book I've been meaning to read where the central conflict is two cultures trying to understand one another, and apparently the climax is them finally having a conversation.

That's cool, but it really wouldn't work well in big-budget film or in a non-indie game. Explosions and guns are visually thrilling, easy to understand and pretty universal, so they're going to be a big part of big budget games and movies for a while.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

sports are bad too probably

.https://twitter.com/radicalbytes/status/960330762561056768

https://twitter.com/PopDetective/status/828418603556941825


yep. i mean at least he has point but yep.

sexpig by night posted:

Yea I agree that the interactivity of games makes the extremely glorified violence a bit more worth looking at critically than we would with movies. For movies I'd say it's mainly the politics of them that's the most toxic. It doesn't really matter how many heads John Bigdick Blastface explodes in Honor Of Freedom: The Snipening or whatever, it more matters that we present him as a heroic figure to emulate as he blasts his way through a country that he kinda shouldn't even be in for no real reason.

Alaois posted:

I don't believe him, mostly because I don't believe he enjoyed anything as a child or at any time in his life actually

Dapper_Swindler posted:

he was raised an evangelical apparently. it really shows. he dropped the beliefs but didn't drop the cultural memes.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

suffering is part of life. i mean sure we should try to midicate it the best we can, but with out some suffering, we wouldnt grow. plus animals(outside the intelligent ones(us. apes, dolphins) and hyenas) don't intentionally try to make things suffer. i mean i used to feel bad for feeding my frogs crickets. but crickets are basically mindless and just poo poo and eat and breed.

Alaois posted:

that makes so much sense i'm blown away i didn't know that already

Groovelord Neato posted:

i loathe guns irl but i like shooting em in my vidyas.

Parakeet vs. Phone posted:

And to nerd out about Steven Universe...I get why he would like it, it's basically doing exactly what he's preaching. Our heroes are fighting the good fight, trying to make friends and save their enemies and are all about love and peace...but the show's kind of big on showing how that works out.

Ghostlight posted:

https://twitter.com/radicalbytes/status/1005925675121958912

It's almost like it reflects society back at itself rather than creates society from whole cloth.

Groovelord Neato posted:

i loathe guns irl but i like shooting em in my vidyas.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

whats funny is the new wolfenstein games are pretty optomistic. a bunch of diffrent and divirse people coming together to save themselves and others from the nazis. BJ is interesting and developed character but he doesnt see that.

he just sees this.

https://twitter.com/radicalbytes/status/552299841356058625?lang=en

sexpig by night posted:

he's not wrong that the fact that almost every video game is based around violence with very rare exception is a little troubling and a general tone of "WE MADE TEN WAYS TO RIP A GUY'S FACE OFF AND FEED IT TO HIS MOM" that a lot of devs adapt should be questioned. The problem is he kinda does nothing with that point other than say 'this is bad'.

Max Wilco posted:

I know McIntosh wasn't the only person to complain about the difficulty names, but I honestly wish more games had creative difficulty names, as opposed to the generic 'Easy, Medium, Hard, Extra Hard'.

Max Wilco posted:

That's what sort of confuses me about the fandom, though. I'm not saying that all the community is like this, but I've heard stories about SU fans bullying people who did fanart of characters from the series, and that they harassed one of artists on the show to the point where they attempted suicide.


The thing with this tweet is that I can sort of sympathize with that sentiment to a degree. The other day I caught part of some show called Colony, and at first, I thought it was part of an episode of Walking Dead. However, it made me realize that there's a glut of media nowadays that all have this really dreary, glum, depressing theme to them, and it gets exhausting. Even with comedy shows, it still seems like with a lot of them, there's a veneer of cynicism to the humor. I'm not saying that nothing out there that's more lighthearted, but it seems a lot more uncommon. Like, I can't imagine something like Diagnosis: Murder, or Family Matters getting greenlit nowadays. I know those probably aren't the best examples, but they had a kind of tone in their material that you don't really see that much anymore.


Vidya Gaem gunz beat actual guns, since the cost of a video game is far less than most any firearm

Wolf: New Order was a really good game (Old Blood was okay; I haven't played New Colossus, but I've heard the campaign wasn't as good)

I know McIntosh wasn't the only person to complain about the difficulty names, but I honestly wish more games had creative difficulty names, as opposed to the generic 'Easy, Medium, Hard, Extra Hard'.

John Murdoch posted:

It rings hollow when games have taken a noticeable shift away from that kind of overstimulated 12 year old faux-macho bullshit in the past 5-10 years. No, those attitudes aren't wholly gone, but losing your poo poo about every single action game that gets announced at E3 must be tiring when you could instead be talking about the new Life is Strange game or doing literally anything else.

Max Wilco posted:

That's what sort of confuses me about the fandom, though. I'm not saying that all the community is like this, but I've heard stories about SU fans bullying people who did fanart of characters from the series, and that they harassed one of artists on the show to the point where they attempted suicide.

SgtSteel91 posted:

Imo, fans got too attached with SU being the cartoon with LGBT representation and get very, very upset when they think that representation in the cartoon or in fanworks is "done wrong" (e.g. they ship characters they don't like or draw characters the wrong skin tone)

Max Wilco posted:

The thing with this tweet is that I can sort of sympathize with that sentiment to a degree. The other day I caught part of some show called Colony, and at first, I thought it was part of an episode of Walking Dead. However, it made me realize that there's a glut of media nowadays that all have this really dreary, glum, depressing theme to them, and it gets exhausting. Even with comedy shows, it still seems like with a lot of them, there's a veneer of cynicism to the humor. I'm not saying that nothing out there that's more lighthearted, but it seems a lot more uncommon. Like, I can't imagine something like Diagnosis: Murder, or Family Matters getting greenlit nowadays. I know those probably aren't the best examples, but they had a kind of tone in their material that you don't really see that much anymore.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

i wanted to like life is strange but i disliked chloe. and the fact that she is only a nice person if she gets hosed up in a car wreck was kinda hosed up. like i get her character and stuff but jesus. as someone who has disibilites i hate the "magic jesus cripple" poo poo. its why i hate me before you or fault in our stars.

Zedd posted:

Life is strange and it´s prequel is a game series about Chloe getting hosed over at every opportunity, hard. And this is coming from somebody that still finds her grating at times.

John Murdoch posted:

It was a conversation worth having, IMO. There's ways to do flavor without calling people who want to play on easy little poopy babies.

Groovelord Neato posted:

we live in a pretty bleak time. we know the apocalypse is coming and are doing barely anything to avoid it.

DEEP STATE PLOT posted:

the best (?) part about being an evironmental science major is learning just how thoroughly hosed we are. it actually won't be a complete hellscape for many first world nations, but the humanitarian crisis that will result from vast swaths of the middle east, africa and south america experiencing the inevitable environmental collapse that's coming/already in progress is nevertheless going to either force the west to take in a shitload more immigrants than they are prepared to deal with or lead to an even larger rise in fascism than we're already seeing.

by the way, it will, without question, be the latter.

this isn't even getting into how hosed the oceans are and how hosed the nations that depend on them for food are. like, half the great barrier reef just died in the last two years. this is all poo poo we could have avoided decades ago but didn't and now it's too late, anything we do at this point is far far far too little to avoid any of these eventualities.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

pretty much. i mean in rome they had dudes beating the poo poo out of each other(sometimes to the death) in gladiator rings and they were viewed as celebrities.

business hammocks posted:

There’s absolutely no internally consistent moral rubric that would allow the deliberate extinction of an animal species in pursuit of an end to suffering, but how anyone can go far enough down that path to think about sharks and mosquitoes but not see humanity as way worse is extremely dumb and lazy.

Max Wilco posted:

The thing with this tweet is that I can sort of sympathize with that sentiment to a degree. ... However, it made me realize that there's a glut of media nowadays that all have this really dreary, glum, depressing theme to them, and it gets exhausting.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

yeah . its loving terrryfing and depressing.

Ghostlight posted:

Though not in the same sense that we would use the word. They were admired for their prowess, but being a gladiator of any kind was also seen as a low-class non-productive job that someone should be ashamed of, and almost as bad as being an actor. Some kinds of gladiators were even worse.

That's a strawman though. The article linked isn't about the deliberate extinction of an animal species - it's about allowing natural extinctions to take place, even though they might be anthropogenic; or, in more radical cases extincting predation by genetically altering the species. The internal consistency is that they do not see changing tigers from meat to soy as an extinction but an externally created evolution in behaviour, the same way that humans might choose to "internally evolve" as a vegan - except we are making the decision for them rather than for ourselves.
I mean, it's a batshit idea that won't reduce suffering in the world (because desire is the root of suffering), but it is internally consistent without autogenocide.

I think that's a valid criticism, but I think it's possible to make it without the implication that it's a result of media being made to "promote" these attitudes to people, like there's some kind of group that controls all media and uses it push an agenda on the populace. People make cynical art because they are cynical and art is fundamentally self-expression, and they consume cynical art because everyone enjoys being reassured they have the correct beliefs. It's a good time to peddle apocalypticism because everyone already believes the world will end, so indulging in heroic fantasies about coming out the other end as something other than baked slime is comforting.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

new doom and new wolfenstein(play as BJ's daughters loving nazis up in the 80s) also VR wolfenstein thing.

business hammocks posted:

I hope Commander Keen is born in this new timeline.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

well the twins were both girls. so idk.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Where's my grimdark, gritty Commander Keen reboot, Bethesda?!

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Where's my grimdark, gritty Commander Keen reboot, Bethesda?!

business hammocks posted:

The end of part 3 has Keen in a mostly-empty stadium accepting an award for from the remaining Vorticons he didn’t kill while liberating them.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

business hammocks posted:

One could be his mom. BJ is Keen’s grandfather.

Ghostlight posted:

It's a survival crafting open-world multiplayer game where you can play alone but also everyone you encounter is a real person.