sus

Well-known member
Disco Elysium looks cool. I would need a Windows bootcamp partition for a mac to play it though.

I think someone like you would gain a lot of insight going into gaming with the sort of analysis you do. I more or less grew up with it, so I;m sure you will spot things that I'm too accustomed to to identify properly.

Anyway, I would recommend Bioshock, any of them, as that franchise is probably the one I admire the most. Less addictive in the ways I was describing Borderlands and Fallout, but also a far more interesting world.

Minecraft is among the best games of all time, in my opinion. Marvelously singular and influential, and also conducive to intelligence in ways that most other games are not. You can design logic gates and build elaborate machines in that game.

That is another point in favor of Fallout, Borderlands, etc: they require intelligence to be good at. A ton of stats and numbers to keep track of, stacking various conditional multipliers, etc.
It seems like Bioshock, MassEffect, Fallout, RDR2 are all gonna be on PS4 and ostensibly not Switch, so even tho DiscoElysium's coming out on Switch soon, PS4 might be my best move.

My friend who is pushing the Switch direction is really into the interpersonal dynamics, doesn't care about graphics or world immersion. I haven't played much but like you Stan, it seems like world immersion is one of the biggest things for me.

I tried getting into Minecraft and just couldn't... care? Not sure why.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
My understanding of "grinding" is it began as a term for skill-building, e.g. chopping down yew trees all day in Runescape. Stuff that's boring and repetitive but levels you up. Def another good vocab word/games metaphor
Another robust takeaway from my gaming experience: the vocabulary.

Rendering, clipping, first-person/third-person, spawning/respawning, meshes, textures/skins, etc.
 

sus

Well-known member
I think things are net improving. Life may have been better [qua less alienating] earlier on, but only for the parochial and enfranchised.

edit: bracket text
I will say, for us media folks, even plebs are more enfranchised than the royals of the 19th C.

I can listen to a million songs, read a million books, watch a million films, all for free, on-demand, whenever I want.

The best a Napoleon could do would be pay an orchestra to full-time follow them around while traveling—and even then, the tuning time on instruments, the limited repertoire of both sounds and songs... Not so hot!
 

sus

Well-known member
Another robust takeaway from my gaming experience: the vocabulary.

Rendering, clipping, first-person/third-person, spawning/respawning, meshes, textures/skins, etc.
Someone on Twitter recently asked whether "lag time"—that kind of suspended phenomenological state while something freezes or loads—existed before computers.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
It seems like Bioshock, MassEffect, Fallout, RDR2 are all gonna be on PS4 and ostensibly not Switch, so even tho DiscoElysium's coming out on Switch soon, PS4 might be my best move.

My friend who is pushing the Switch direction is really into the interpersonal dynamics, doesn't care about graphics or world immersion. I haven't played much but like you Stan, it seems like world immersion is one of the biggest things for me.

I tried getting into Minecraft and just couldn't... care? Not sure why.
Yeah world immersion I think is one of the more unique aspects of video games, as opposed to other narrative media.

And yeah Minecraft doesn't make the effort to reach out and steer the players attention. More or less on your own, which is what distinguishes it from the sort of work-adjacent structures of some of these other games that involve exhaustive and explicit guidance and incentive capture.
 

luka

Well-known member
I think this is key in understanding why people feel a natural aversion to describing real life, or real life situations, as games.

They take it as, "The only thing that matters is maxing out your points within this narrow set of challenges/agencies"

(Fair enough, it's often used that way, like you say, to cut off all the other potential objects of optimization, e.g. ethical. It's a truncation of the holistic optimization problem that is "life" for some narrower, value-obvious problem)
exactly right. well put.
 
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Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I will say, for us media folks, even plebs are more enfranchised than the royals of the 19th C.

I can listen to a million songs, read a million books, watch a million films, all for free, on-demand, whenever I want.

The best a Napoleon could do would be pay an orchestra to full-time follow them around while traveling—and even then, the tuning time on instruments, the limited repertoire of both sounds and songs... Not so hot!
This seems to be overlooked by almost everyone. Virtually everything I want is freely available online, although I did have to steer desire a bit to arrive at this position.
 

luka

Well-known member
This seems to be overlooked by almost everyone. Virtually everything I want is freely available online, although I did have to steer desire a bit to arrive at this position.
im not sure this is overlooked it is just that those of us who lived through this transformation found that in its wake everything lost its value.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
@suspended it seems we've arrived at the post-Fisher stage of Dissensus. The left beyond anti-capitalism, the exiting of capitalist realism, etc.

Which isn't to say everyone else has caught up. Pioneers before settlers. Thoughts?
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
im not sure this is overlooked it is just that those of us who lived through this transformation found that in its wake everything lost its value.
True, I think there is just a sort of adjustment to be made in the wake of the obliteration of rarity, the end of "the search".

I went to a little presentation Alan Licht gave at the Monadnock in Chicago, where he mentioned how the search for a record is no longer the robust experience it once was.

NFTs may reintroduce this rarity in surprising ways, but even still I think an adjustment is underway, in terms of how we appreciate value.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Anyway rarity is an exogenous factor of the value of something. Now value is more primarily endogenous, regarding the things that were once rare but are now replicable and freely accessible.
 

sus

Well-known member
im not sure this is overlooked it is just that those of us who lived through this transformation found that in its wake everything lost its value.
The end of media's value as commodity

The beginning of media's value as stimulus

And I'm so on-board, chug-a-chug-a-choo-choo!
 

sus

Well-known member
@suspended it seems we've arrived at the post-Fisher stage of Dissensus. The left beyond anti-capitalism, the exiting of capitalist realism, etc.

Which isn't to say everyone else has caught up. Pioneers before settlers. Thoughts?
Hail hail

Things are messy and chaotic now, but that's what happens during epoch-defining transitions, see also the industrial revolution

Change is turbulent, but the macro-trend is on-point, and I trust society to figure shit out as we go

That's how it always works: novelty comes, disrupts order, and a new order must anneal around it
 

sus

Well-known member
A world whose order was never disrupted would be a world in which all the inequalities and injustices of status quo stand

Turbulence = opportunities

Crash-only thinking: you lean into the crash, learn what you can, and accelerate out
 
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