Evert time this comes up I feel compelled to point out that the floor shooting scene here (from Nemesis) was the money shot in the Underworld trailer - the trailer ends with a recreation of this shot. youtu.be/2_IoL7g5Ub8

Been thinking about this a lot recently. I think half of it is that people just repeat what "content creators" say, and the other half is that if a content creator says something people feel emboldened to agree, while the people who disagree become sheepish.

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not sure who needs to hear this, but I think they need to start putting Karnov in games again

Hey, some pretty good games in here. Go buy this, it's like $13 and you get 13 good games, largely horror, but some other great stuff too.

There's a reasonable argument to be made that Dick Cheney is the most responsible out of anyone for the current state of the US. So much of the bullshit today is rooted in invoking terrorism, the AUMF, etc - you can draw a straight line from Trump sending troops into Chicago back to Cheney.

I don't know how critics are supposed to deal with gamers being so sensitive. www.resetera.com/threads/demo... The people in this thread are freaking out because one review, which wasn't even scored, is "mean-spirited" - which just means it reads negative. That's not allowed!

Every time one side in this dispute threatens to look slightly redeemable some new revelation emerges. These are what many people would consider the "good guys" here lol.

One trend I think people don't talk about enough is story-based games that don't have much interest in earnestly trying to tell a story, but also aren't (and aren't trying to be) effective satire or outright comedy. People like it when story-based games try to tell a good story!

I recently learned of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" Neat encapsulation of the arc of steam developers pushing people to wishlist games

Some of the reaction to Elden Ring was bizarre and reeked of people either stuck in their ways or feeling threatened and not wanting to admit that the game excelled in ways theirs did not. According to some western video game literati every individual component of the game was bad!

I accidentally picked up a scifi romance book and I don't think people are ready for the conversation about how women who write romance are more sexist (against women) than men.

More excerpts jmargaris.substack.com/p/on-the-str...

Check it out Australians!

"Ogre Magi will remember that"

A long hard look into "player fantasy" rhetoric, including: Power fantasies Is calling Ico an "emotional fantasy" helpful? Psychographic profiles And, most importantly: Should a Ninja ride a surfboard? open.substack.com/pub/jmargari...

Coming soon

Prime game filled with federation people talking doesn't inspire me but, I'm going to be real here, the footage I've seen has been fine? The problem with Other M and the Tomb Raider reboot was they made the characters more emotional and less capable. I don't see that happening here.

I like that this guy really went for it with this comment. Take no prisoners!

Rough week for the concept of meritocracy.

This seems like a good time to promote my blog "On Unfriendly Games - It's OK to be a Little Prickly" (As a side note, the Navi-like NPC or the constantly-self-narrating main character has been the norm for like 10+ years now) jmargaris.substack.com/p/on-unfrien...

This lady is absolutely crashing out on Substack because she uses social media to drive clicks to her Substack. She's posted like 100 comments there wailing about her 3 day suspension and in all of them she conveniently obscures what she actually posted and frames it as "I said Cash was cool."

Episodic probably would be a mistake were the game just middling - it only works to create watercooler talk if enough people are engaged. But betting on yourself makes more sense than trying to hedge your bets against releasing something mediocre. (That's my entirely post-facto rationalization)

When the first episodes released probably 95% of the discourse around the episodic structure was that it was a mistake! Kudos to them for doing what they thought would work and more proof that nobody knows anything.

I'm no VR expert but to me this is a big problem with Steam Frame: I read a headline like "Steam Frame is a new approach to VR" and then all the bullet points are things like "it's comfortable" or "it also works with non-VR games." Hasn't every headset in the past 10 years said this?

Almost got tricked into doing some discourse but cooler heads prevailed.

I think one reason the Telltale style of game fell off is that over time players were trained not to believe this. You can only see "X will remember this" so many times before you put together that X didn't actually remember anything in any meaningful sense.

Revisiting an old opinion is fine but this video comes off as very weird: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtHq... The narration, music and production is like it's a Ken Burns civil war doc. It doesn't really get into what prompted this change, and the use of "our" is...wrong?

When Helldivers 2 released I was struck by how the loading screen is you shooting down to the planet - it's not a still image, it looks cool, and it plays heroic music. It doesn't offer real interaction but it's still SO MUCH better than a standard loading screen - people LIKE that screen!

At the risk of vague-posting I think if you disagree with someone's take you can just say why and what about it specifically you disagree with, instead of purposely offering a bad summary of their argument or not even indicating that you read or understood it.

I always go back to the example of that Youtuber who missed a tutorial shrine in Breath of the Wild and didn't know you could dodge until like 50 hours in. That that can happen to some people is what distinguishes a true open world game from an effectively-linearized one!

1. I'm very happy that Earthquake is in fact a ninja, I wasn't sure 2.A Texas ninja to boot! (Texas in "New Spain", lol) 3. Should a ninja ride a surfboard? THIS QUESTION IS THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING PLAYER FANTASIES!!

Finishing up my blog post on player fantasies and I found one note I'd left for myself on my phone: "Should a Ninja ride a surfboard?"

Me: "People don't seem that high on the concept of player fantasy so I don't have to go too hard on it" Me also: Writing blog post about problems with the concept, lettering them, running out of letters.

If you look at the Youtube comments under Enya's Boadicea they're all about this movie!

Watching the part where he talks about different ways of stitching together islands, identifies one approach as "garbage", and it's the approach I use. 🙃 (In my defense I have to stitch together islands that are procedurally generated at runtime so it's tough!)

Arcade cabinets with non-standard monitors pretty much all ruled - 3 screens wide, extra tall, etc.

In the new Zelda Musou there are basic daily-like (though not actually daily) missions you can do like "kill 10 Moblins" and they're called "Aside Quests" which I find very funny. That naming feels like low-key trolling.

I've always preferred "engrossing" to "immersive" in that they both imply that someone is rapt but the latter has weird baggage that the former doesn't, like the idea that visible UI is immersion-breaking.

Interesting thing about the new Naked Gun (which I enjoyed) is that I was able to watch it without subtitles and there was only one word in the movie I didn't get the first time. Which is so incredibly rare these days.

I have to say this is a lot more interesting than people arguing about yellow paint for the 100th time. It feels genuinely rare to have people weigh in with different well-considered opinions, rather than doing repetitive "discourse" or approaching game design topics from a culture war angle.

When I first played Tetris it was at a Mac store at the mall and I thought the idea was to build a structure that was big and impressive, so I kept losing in like 20 seconds. Did an absolutely terrible job of delivering on my player fantasy!

I'm glad I posed this question (and got responses) because this line of thinking is more common that I would have expected. Now that I consider that, it occurs to me that when I see people praise "fulfilling the player fantasy" it's rarely in a context that allows for back-and-forth.

I can see how player fantasies can make sense in multiplayer games wrt things like different roles, but you can find reddit posts like "my player fantasy is to be stronger than everyone else and solo carry the game" which...hmm... (Part of the problem there is players abusing dev lingo)

Weigh in nerds! Do you find it helpful to discuss "player fantasies"? Does the term fill you with disgust? Do you have a good handle on what it means?

I am writing something about "fulfilling player fantasies" in games. I would appreciate any thoughts people have on the subject (positive or negative - is this a valuable concept?), talks or papers discussing or popularizing this sort of rhetoric, etc etc

Last night I dreamt that I met Alec Baldwin and told him that 30 Rock was my favorite comedy and that I thought he was the world's most underrated comedic actor. Professional psychologists of Blue Sky: what does this mean? Serious replies only please!

In video games it's really hard to cleanly separate out who is responsible for the best aspects of a good game, so the people who end up getting the credit or give keynote speeches and interviews, get investment, etc, are often the people who self-mythologize.

Me playing a narrative video game in which the hot female characters immediately fall in love with my main character, a loser with no appealing qualities: "this is great writing!"