By Kieron Gillen on July 5th, 2009 at 12:34 pm.
Sundays are for waking up and finding a Jim in my front room. And now, while he makes his way the long, painfully hungover road to Bath, I turn to writing a short, painfully hungover Sunday Papers. That being, a weekly round-up of interesting games-related material that came to my attention in the last week presented in a list form, without a pop-song which came to mind first thing in the morning and has proved oddly soothing.
- Occasionally you hear about something which is so splendid, my only urge is to rip it off. Sincerest form of flattery and all that. Anyway – Ben Abraham started playing Far Cry 2, with one subtle change. If he dies, he’s dead and has to delete the save game in the Iron Man style. Clearly, this changes the way the game plays out, and the stories which result and using it as a source of writing rather than just increasing player difficulty strikes me as somewhat fun. Go read here. It’s inspired others to follow. Go here or here. When game over means game over, everything changes. What games do you think would make a good experiment for this kinda thing? STALKER struck me as possibly fruitful…
- IncGamers interview have a great interview with Sean Cooper about his time at Bullfrog, specifically about the ever-awesome Syndicate. Strong stuff. Also worth remembering what Mr Cooper is up now in the field of webgames. Also, him teasing of doing something Syndicate-like as a webgame is just cruel.
- Larrington pointed me in the direction of this – a Gamasutra Op-Ed from Brandon Sheffield urging developers to actually play some games occasionally. It’s one of the things about the industry which is always notable – Jim often talks about how no high-position MMO designer he’s ever met has actually played Eve to any degree. When asked, they mention someone on the team has – but it’s not surprise that the ideas don’t cross over when the people calling the shots simply don’t know about them in anything but the most abstract terms.
- Taking a break from his always entertaining mini-essays on diverse topics, Tei pointed out this little piece on the Conversion rates of Immortal Defence in a comment thread. That being, the percentage of people who play the demo who actually buy the game. For people thinking about the P-word, there’s some fascinating stuff. As the developer says, he’s no way of knowing whether the drop in conversion rate happening the same time the first actual torrent of the game appears is coincidence or something else. But it’s worth thinking about.
- Sean Sands over at the Escapist on why he’s not a journalist and why that’s actually fucking awesome.
- Greg Costikyan at Play This Thing writes about Grey Ranks, the narrativist pen-and-paper RPG where you play teenage members of the Polish resistance during the doomed 1944 Warsaw Uprising. I actually went and bought it.
- Away from games, into the world of games strictly, but I think somewhat relevant to any net-game, Danah Boyd presents the notes on a speech about the politics of class in social networks, specifically looking at which sort of students go to MySpace and which go to Facebook, and what that actually means. Great piece, in such it verbalises things which we’re already aware of, but probably not consciously.
- So, I roll over, force my disobedient eyes to open and see the copy of Ennis/Snejbjerg’s Dear Billy which I’d bought yesterday sitting on the side. In my usual highly impressionable state, I find myself singing PJ Harvey’s wonderful C’Mon Billy. Going down to make tea for Jim and I, I need to hear her actually sing it, so lob on the album it’s from, To Bring You My Love (Spotify link), which is the perfect level for the hangover – a hangover so sharp that even touching the Lady’s copy of the first Mars Volta album makes me physically wince, due to me visualising what it actually sounds like. Anyway, Peej is great, and the low-rolling gait of Meet Ze Monsta reminds me of an awesome BBC performance from back in the day. And now I’m going to sit here and play Blood Bowl until I feel human.
Failed.
05/07/2009 at 12:35 Anon says:
interesting articles as usual. you should try posting a pop song o.o
05/07/2009 at 12:58 qrter says:
PJ Harvey is superbest.
05/07/2009 at 13:04 qrter says:
Ah, the Youtube videos of that Grey Ranks RPG are what I like to see – middle-aged men with beards talking about their hobby!
In about ten years I will join their Bearded Ranks and we will unite and role play everyone into submission.
(The game sounds very interesting, btw!)
05/07/2009 at 13:04 Alex says:
my iMac flags the inGamer link with Sean Cooper as having Malware all over it.
Is it worth losing a computer to read?
05/07/2009 at 13:05 Legandir says:
Playing game where game over means game over could be interesting. PC makes saving very easy and sometimes its hard not to quick save when you know you might die soon.
05/07/2009 at 13:06 Vivian says:
If it’s not on ‘Rid of Me’ or earlier it’s not really worth listening to – last album before all that fucking ‘jeeeeeesssss-uh-us’ crap started getting in the way.
05/07/2009 at 13:32 mrrobsa says:
@ Alex: It’s worth losing an iMac for.
05/07/2009 at 13:32 Freudian Slip says:
Fallout 3 would be a good one to play a Game over = Game Over. Would make that Salsbury Steak taste that much sweeter.
05/07/2009 at 13:38 Willy359 says:
One life only sounds like an interesting experiment, but I think the guy’s watering down the experience by choosing a game that he’s already played five times. He already knows exactly where all the dangers and rewards are, and what the optimum strategy is for surviving. I’d like to see someone take on a game spoiler-free.
05/07/2009 at 13:47 RagingLion says:
I remember perusing through the X3:Reunion forums once when I was playing that game and reading someone say they did just that, in that they would restart the game whenever they died. Definitely can add to the sense of immersion and role-playing if you have the patience and time to deal with the frustration. Actually in X3 you can probably stay reasonably safe once you’re 15-20 hours into the game, but that’s still quite a commitment.
05/07/2009 at 13:51 LionsPhil says:
“Jim often talks about how no high-position MMO designer he’s ever met has actually played Eve to any degree.”
That would seem self-evident. Any high-position designer who actually does their job is not going to have the hours upon hours required to sink into an MMO that prides itself on being almost as slow and dull as actual space travel.
05/07/2009 at 14:02 Abhishek says:
Re: permanently dying in games, you should check out the Livin’ in Oblivion blog. Basically, the guy roleplays an NPC in Oblivion and dying even once means the character and blog come to an end.
05/07/2009 at 14:07 bookwormat says:
Sean Cooper is doing flash games, not web games. Flash is a good software platform, but it is not really part of the world wide web.
05/07/2009 at 14:07 Skye Nathaniel says:
I’ve always been drawn to the permadeath thing, especially in the case of full and true game over. Unless it’s self-imposed, you usually find it in roguelike or dungeon crawley types, although I read once that Kojima originally wanted Snake Eater to be that way.
05/07/2009 at 14:26 Him says:
Permadeath eh? Sounds like the Baldur’s Gate Ironman challenge all over again. Only with guns.
05/07/2009 at 14:32 MrBejeebus says:
The Far Cry 2 article is quite good.
And you forgot to say RIP billy mays – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkJE5YdKbdg – very sad
05/07/2009 at 14:44 ABD says:
I often play games and then delete them after dying once. Though that’s just a testament to either my limited attention span or short temper :) I do enjoy playing Diablo 2 Hardcore every now and again, I cry every time… :p
05/07/2009 at 14:52 Howard says:
As to playing games with only one life, this is called playing a game in “IronMan” mode and has been around as long as gaming. Morrowind and the Might and Magic series are rife with attempts to do this. It really tests your ability to use all the features of the game to the highest and can be very rewarding.
05/07/2009 at 14:53 Taillefer says:
Sean Cooper sounds a little unhinged. Nice interview though.
05/07/2009 at 14:57 Telemikus says:
Yup, permadeath experiences are something I’ve played out many times in games. For me first and third person shooters games are nothing without tension and intensity, and that’s exactly what the permadeath experience brings. Sweat, twithching, palpitations and inordinate amounts of squinting at bareley recognisible pixels in case they were …. moving?. All of this is often missing in the quicksave era.
It was Doom and Quake that originally started me off on this, but i’ll admit that I’ve never had the balls to do it on a game I’ve never played.
05/07/2009 at 15:04 Paul Moloney says:
“Larrington pointed me in the direction of this – a Gamasutra Op-Ed from Brandon Sheffield urging developers to actually play some games occasionally. ”
Isn’t it John Carmack who hasn’t played a new game in something like 10 years?
P.
05/07/2009 at 15:09 Novotny says:
This dead means dead thing is quite common in sim gaming communities.
There’s some dude in South America who played Silent Hunter 3 in real time. The game ran continuously for months, he basically pretended he was at sea for the duration. If the ship was attacked while he slept, he had to get up and defend it.
05/07/2009 at 15:10 Novotny says:
Damn italics thing didn’t close.
05/07/2009 at 15:21 PHeMoX says:
@: “Actually in X3 you can probably stay reasonably safe once you’re 15-20 hours into the game, but that’s still quite a commitment.”
Too some extent yes, but not if you’ve decided to play the game pirate style, hunting for ships and all that. 15-20 hours in the game should mean you’ve got a reasonable ship and some firepower, but if your first objective wasn’t planned in a ‘get rich fast’ fashion, it will surely be a huge challenge!!
I was never that good at space battles in X3, but there can go lots wrong early on. Of course, because the game’s open ended anyway, it sort of doesn’t make much sense to go the ‘game over – restart’ way.
05/07/2009 at 15:24 AndrewC says:
@ novotny: Ah, so that’s what was bothering about this permadeath thing – it is an emanation from the unholy desire to treat games as not-games.
And good lord, what if you died because of a bug or a glitch, or a deliberately unbalancing design decision made in response to the standard quicksave/load style of modern gaming? ARGH! it would make a gamer a not-gamer pretty fucking sharpish.
05/07/2009 at 15:24 Tim James says:
PC gamers just now learning about the history of permadeath on their platform — is this what it’s like to be old?
05/07/2009 at 15:32 Lucas says:
One of the most serious annoyances is when I’m playing a game that I can just plainly tell the developers didn’t play themselves. That sucks.
To cite a counterexample, I seem to recall that the Deus Ex devs played and polished it for a crazy long time (like 6 months?) before the release. It shows!
05/07/2009 at 15:34 Mr Popov says:
More games need the persistent world features of Dwarf Fortress to really make Iron Man challenges more rewarding. That way after you die, you will have left a lasting impression on the world for your next character.
05/07/2009 at 15:36 Muzman says:
Some of the Thief Ironman playthroughs are good for a laugh.
I suppose it’s just delving into fannish cliques, but old school metagaming is probably worth a closer look in this age of achievements and so on.
A Stalker one sounds cool. Some sort of metagaming facility in highly emergent exploratory games might be an interesting way to do it. It tracks your progress and so on in each attempt so you can plan better next time.
I always wanted something like that for Stalker, so that it’s more like the book. Gotta see how long you can last, how far in you can get etc. A kind of sci-fi Man vs Wild.
05/07/2009 at 15:53 Mike says:
Hearts of Iron 3 gave out a more in-depth preview of the upcoming game in AAR form.
05/07/2009 at 15:54 AndrewC says:
Also the quicksave/load thing is not just a shortcut for our lazy modern selves, but also a means to encourage doing more flamboyant/risky/heroic/foolish things – which are more fun.
Deep at the heart of it, I think what powers the permadeath thing are the instincts of turtlers, who are the worst people.
05/07/2009 at 15:59 Kieron Gillen says:
Howard: The idea isn’t an Iron Man game. It’s the writing about it.
EDIT: And I’ve edited to the post to make that clearer. As if the RPS guy who plays Rogue-likes isn’t aware of permadeath.
KG
05/07/2009 at 16:04 qrter says:
I think Far Cry 2 lends itself so well for a ‘permadeath’ approach because of how the game handles death, the buddy system – being saved by your buddy, the possibility of your buddy dying, will you save your buddy, etc.
(Sorry, sound like a malfunctioning Twiki in that paragraph..)
Other games are less interesting in that aspect, I’d say.
05/07/2009 at 16:08 Mike says:
KG: The writing’s interesting, but I think the experiment’s flawed. It’s not so much an exercise in irreversible decisions, merely irreversible death.
The idea of irreversible decisions is more interesting – playing KOTOR though, for instance, and never being able to see another path by reloading would be a better example. The game might remember your choice if you reloaded, and force it without choice the second time through. As it stands, I think Ben’s just going to give himself a heart attack with it. :P
05/07/2009 at 16:10 Smurfy says:
Isn’t it obvious why those people don’t like MySpace? Because it’s poorly designed, slow to load, and allows idiots to redesign their pages into an even worse shape and then shove annoying music on top. There are boxes all over the place and it’s a mess.
05/07/2009 at 16:29 Bhazor says:
I’ve always thought X-Com (where you could lose the mission but carry on) would be great for an ironman/permadeath run.
Plenty of narrative potential as well with it’s individually named characters, mental states and slow methodical pace.
I’ve tried it myself a couple of times but I was too much of a wimp to stick to the rules after about the third mission and began to rage quit and reload. Still it was tense while it lasted.
05/07/2009 at 16:39 qrter says:
I’m finding the Far Cry 2 writeup by Ben Abraham (the original, so to say) a rather dull read. It feels a bit like watching someone else play, it’s all a bit “and then this happened, and then this, and then this..”, regularly punctuated with saying “this is really tense!” instead of communicating the intensity of the experience itself.
The one by Nels Anderson is much better written, he adds a bit of flavour to the text, some personality.
05/07/2009 at 16:42 Matt W says:
Smurfy:
So what you’re saying is, it’s not that whether you use Facebook or MySpace is generally indicative of underlying class divisions, or that Facebook users tend to be better-off suburbanites who often treat typical MySpace users with a mixture of condescension and derision to cover the fact that they secretly fear cultural offshoots that they don’t understand – it’s just that MySpace users are idiots who don’t like Facebook because they’re not sophisticated enough to understand its inherent superiority?
Glad we cleared that up.
PS WHOOSH.
PPS Most interesting thing I’ve read all week, incidentally. Thanks for the link :)
05/07/2009 at 16:45 anonymous says:
We don’t put up with that kind of racism around here, Smurfy
05/07/2009 at 16:56 Howard says:
@Kieron: Fair play, that wasn’t clear. Sundays are for nursing hangovers and looking at shiny pretty things not cogent thinking =)
05/07/2009 at 17:01 Ben Abraham says:
@qrtr: It’s tough getting the balance right between narrating the interesting bits and just plain retelling the things that happen. I’m definitely erring more on the side of “keep it to just the more interesting bits” as I’m progressing. Thanks for the feedback.
05/07/2009 at 17:33 Tei says:
hehehehe….
05/07/2009 at 17:48 Tony says:
Let me just say that modded STALKER ironman-style is fucking impossible.
Well, modded with AMK and a few others.
Hell, even “one extra life per level change” is still pretty difficult. It’s very, very easy to die. I’ve died enough from lucky shots or insufficint blowout cover more times than I can count.
05/07/2009 at 17:53 Kieron Gillen says:
Howard: Yeah, could have been clearer. I was working on the assumption everyone knew about IronMan stuff, so they’d realise that wasn’t the interesting idea. I am, of course, mentally broken today. But I still won my Blood Bowl games, so Winnah, etc.
KG
05/07/2009 at 17:54 Bhazor says:
It’s good to see another indie not ashamed to admit piracy hurts. Certainly the drop off for Immortal Defense is brutal. (Kieron, it’s spelt Immortal DefenSe. Remember that respect for the colonies costs nothing)
Going back to Far Cry 2 now all the shouting has stopped is like finding a brand new game. A game with lots and lots and lots of fun explosions and equally fun accents.
Well I just found a blog all about tables and table like things through one of those Far Cry 2 play through blogs (bigapple3am). So that’s nice, thanks Gillen.
Thillen
05/07/2009 at 18:11 Andrew Zalotocky says:
Danah Boyd’s article is risible. She makes lots of assertions about why people act in a certain way but does not provide any hard evidence to back up her claims. There are lots of quotes presented as anecdotal evidence, but no statistics on how many people said what. There’s no information about her methodology that would let us judge whether her research was carried out in a sufficiently rigorous manner to even allow that kind of analysis. Boyd was basically conducting a glorified opinion poll, and polling must be done very carefully to avoid skewing the results with a biased sample or leading questions. That’s assuming she even followed a consistent approach when “talking to American teenagers”.
Her conclusions about “white flight” and class are left-wing boilerplate that could have been generated with a ZX80. It’s what trendy lefty academics say about everything.
The claim that “Choice isn’t about features of [sic] functionality” is particularly laughable. Of course there are many factors that will influence a person’s choice of social networking site, but to suggest that features and functionality will not be a real concern for anybody is ridiculous.
A serious analysis would attempt to identify all the factors that affect the choice and the relative importance of each one. Boyd’s article does not offer anything like a serious analysis.
05/07/2009 at 18:18 toonu says:
You bought bloodbowl then, thus supporting that sort of pricing. And I thought you knew better!
05/07/2009 at 18:20 Gap Gen says:
Andrew Z: She links to a quantitative analysis of the same issue at the bottom. It’s here if you don’t want to trek back and find it.
05/07/2009 at 18:30 Muzman says:
The fact that it’s a short talk about one small finding of one aspect of her phd is worth noting too
05/07/2009 at 18:32 Gap Gen says:
Yes, it’s a talk and not a paper, and as such it shouldn’t really be packed with data.
05/07/2009 at 18:42 Kieron Gillen says:
Toonu: I found a site selling it enormously cheap and said fuck it. I suspect it’s a grey market thing, re-selling of codes from another, cheaper territory. Paid about 13 quid.
Andrew: It’s not an article. It says exactly what it is at the start of it. And… oh, other people are saying stuff.
KG
05/07/2009 at 18:52 Heliocentric says:
I used face book at first because of the superior privacy settings (i have cute childs i want to share pictures with my friends, not the internet) and them abandoned the whole spammy nonsense. Its my friends fault, too many third party plugins.
05/07/2009 at 19:04 arrr_matey says:
Escapist column about games journalism makes me angry. He sets up a completely strawman argument about how “journalism” is inherently boring and stodgy while “writing” is fun and yay! The last thing I think game writing needs is more fanboy-ism.
05/07/2009 at 19:11 Him says:
Bloodbowl for £13?! How did this escape LewieP’s attention?
05/07/2009 at 19:11 john t says:
I propose a more hardcore method of playing Far Cry 2.
If you die in the game, you actually have to kill yourself IRL.
I think it would take it to the next level.
05/07/2009 at 19:16 Vinraith says:
@Him
What!? Where?
05/07/2009 at 19:19 Heliocentric says:
Iron man any wide open game is awesome. In oblivion or morrowind you’d have to ban invisibity or chameleon at 100%, and all sorts of enchantments. Stalker would be excellent, that game already hates you. I used to play bf2 mod reality mod, sometimes obscene spawn times on certain releases would lend and iron man type attitude to proceedings.
In pr helicopters can take 20 minutes to respawn, being a transport pilot was a very careful matter, ambushes were actually scary.
05/07/2009 at 19:39 Matt says:
Guys if you ahven’t already linked to this you must check out Glum Buster:
http://www.glumbuster.com/
It’s an amazing free ware (well, charity ware, no donation required to play) game that seems to have gone under the radar. Platform/puzzle esque, can’t really be described without being played. Check it out!
05/07/2009 at 19:43 Matt says:
Hi RPS guys, if you haven’t already seen this I highly recommend you check out Glum Buster:
http://www.glumbuster.com/
An incredible freeware (well, charity ware but no donation necessary to play)pixel art platform/puzzle game which is deeper than can be described here. It seems to have disappeared under the radar, but should definitely been given a try.
05/07/2009 at 19:43 Matt says:
Sorry for double(triple) post, i.e. crash fail
05/07/2009 at 19:49 Xercies says:
@Bhazor
He only shows the conversion rate between demo downloaded and sales…which explains nothing really so how can piracy hurt. He should have put actual sales to piracy rate then we could have known if it hurt him enough, the percentages there are murky at best because a lot of people could have bought the game and not have downloaded the demo.
05/07/2009 at 20:00 Psychopomp says:
I tried a permadeath game of Deus Ex once, on normal…
Made it to the top of the Statue of Liberty, before I managed to forget about those gas mines.
Sad day.
05/07/2009 at 20:06 LewieP says:
@KG
Was buying bloodbowl from said site much hassle?
05/07/2009 at 20:09 PJ says:
That facebook vs myspace thing is interesting, though I think seeing facebook as ‘upper class’ and myspace as ‘lower class’ is kind of anachronistic, or at least I’d like to think so. Social divides do exist of course, but they’re purely volitional; it isn’t like facebook is the rich folk’s golf club that you can’t get into if you’re black. People naturally group together with other people they are similar to – that pretty much sums up the whole of human history and I think we can agree that does tend to breed intolerance. But while this group-forming does happen even on the internet compared to the social paradigms we’ve had before it is far more inclusive; there is much more of an overlap between different social and cultural groups and thus more sharing of culture and ideals. Perhaps that happens at a slower pace than the author of that speech would like, but I think that a more gradual process is less likely to lead to rejection of different cultures wholesale and thus less major clashes between groups of different ideologies.
What interests me about it as a libertarian is that some people favor the ‘safer’ but more restrictive system of facebook while others prefer the greater freedom of myspace despite the greater scope for, well, butt-ugly-dom.
05/07/2009 at 20:17 Isometric says:
You all probably know about this already but i’m not sure if anyone has heard about this so i’ll post it anyway.
Sources on wikipedia pages so i was dubious but then the escapist confirmed it.
“It has been confirmed that Starbreeze Studios is developing a new Syndicate game for EA.”
20XX – Untitled Syndicate game (a.k.a. Project RedLime).
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/90609-New-Syndicate-Game-Confirmed
05/07/2009 at 20:43 ChampionHyena says:
Re: Facebook vs. MySpace
I talk to people with my mouth.
That is all.
05/07/2009 at 21:11 AndrewC says:
Like now, ChampionHyena?
05/07/2009 at 21:12 Klaus says:
Like Peet’s is more cultured than Starbucks, and Jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop, and like Macs are more cultured than PC’s, Facebook is of a cooler caliber than MySpace.
So a Peet drinking, mac using, jazz listening, lover of facebook? How many trendy points do you get if you do these at the same time?
I do have a guilty pleasure watching for the inevitable influx of undesirables. Yes, esteemed senior tell me all about twitter and these ‘tweets.’
Adultness, though? lol
05/07/2009 at 21:28 Thants says:
ChampionHyena: I see you’re a fan of irony.
Heres what an Ironman game of STALKER would go like: Left the starting point, killed by a patch of air.
05/07/2009 at 21:43 Psychopomp says:
@Isometric
HOLY CRAP I CAME BUCKETS
05/07/2009 at 22:21 Al Ewing says:
Yeah, I talk to people… WITH MY MOUTH. Oh, I’m sorry, did I just BLOW YOUR MIND?
05/07/2009 at 22:22 Al Ewing says:
I also have an iPod IN MY MIND
05/07/2009 at 22:37 Rohit says:
Yeah, I talk to people with my mouth…and I use Facebook when I can’t.
SHOCKING.
05/07/2009 at 22:58 Robin says:
Sean Sands must be completely oblivious to anything that’s happened in film journalism/writing/criticism/theory/piffling-semantics over the last 50 years, then. Seeking truth and new ways to look at a medium has the potential to change the medium.
05/07/2009 at 22:59 Gap Gen says:
On the £13 Blood Bowl thing, there’s a legally-grey system where countries where games are cheaper sell CD keys to people who live in expensive countries. It’s available on a lot of games, but I don’t know how reliable it is or whether it’s frowned upon by publishers enough to stop any CD keys sold through those sites.
Maybe a spot of investigative journalism for RPS to embark upon?
05/07/2009 at 23:12 Ashurbanipal says:
Isometric
posted on 1 Apr 2009
Hrm.
06/07/2009 at 00:30 Andy`` says:
Ashurbanipal: Says March 31st on the Escapist article, Wikipedia, and the GI.biz article which is the source for both sites. So either GI.biz runs at New Zealand time (except it says 14:00 BST for me, so it might reference the viewer’s local time instead), or it’s not a joke.
I hadn’t really paid attention to it until now though, of course. I give Apr 01 a wide berth. Such a horrible day to look at the internet, because truths get mixed in with jokes due to all the timezone differences.
06/07/2009 at 01:12 LewieP says:
@Gap Gen
I just did a blog post about it, although I’ve not done it yet myself. Did by a working L4D serial from them to test the water, but I’m not really interested in Blood Bowl…
06/07/2009 at 01:17 Gabanski83 says:
Will there be a Blood Bowl: Wot I Think article on the way soon, please? I’m tempted to get it, but I want to know if it’s worth £40/£13/whatever amount I can find it for right now.
Jesus though, £39.99, digital download only, and no boxed version for a few months? Takes the piss, that does.
06/07/2009 at 01:51 drewski says:
I thought the MySpace v Facebook thing was really interesting.
Personally I use Facebook because my friends do. When none of my friends used either, neither did I. When a few jumped on MySpace, I got one too although the sparsity of contacts there meant I didn’t visit often. Now everyone’s on Facebook, so am I.
I’m still on MySpace, but I only really use it for bands. And everyone I know who used to be on MySpace has now migrated to Facebook…
06/07/2009 at 02:23 wcaypahwat says:
I’ve found the choice of social networks comes down to age and geography more than anything. I have plenty of classy and not so classy ‘friends’ on all of them.
Having accounts on all the larger ones (myspace, facebook, bebo) and working in an internet cafe and breaching all sorts of privacy laws, I’ve noticed a few trends.
Bear in mind, im from australia, and these are personal, completly unscientific observations.
Bebo tends to be for the younger crown (under the age of 16 or so), and most folk from islander cultures (samoan, tongan, maori, etc)
Facebook seems to have a larger proportion of older folk on there, like some sort of e-family reunion. Which is bad because I say a lot of terrible things on there I wouldn’t want my grandmother to see, but oh well, she’s on her 6th husband already. My friends from my old backwater town seem to have migrated from bebo to here also.
Vampirefreaks is for 14 year old girls and pedophiles.
Myspace seems to be used more by the ‘alternative’ crowd, and is quite popular where I live, which is a very art and music driven type town.
Twitter is just a big media joke down here too. Im not sure I get it. Only one person I personally know has an acount on there.
Personally, I prefer using facebook, but only their mobile site which cuts out all the absolute crap spam from peoples ridiculous aplications.
06/07/2009 at 04:59 frymaster says:
“Howard: The idea isn’t an Iron Man game. It’s the writing about it”
to be honest I didn’t even know _that_ was thought to be new.
as mentioned earlier in the thread, there are some epic Dead is Dead story threads in the egosoft forums for x3:tc…
http://www.egosoft.com/download/x3tc/files/Squiddy_EN.zip
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=232789
06/07/2009 at 08:34 Kieron Gillen says:
Okay: Writing about an Iron Man game *of a game anyone gives a damn about*.
KG
06/07/2009 at 08:50 Kieron Gillen says:
PJ: Yeah – but that’s the point, and it’s also a *problem* if you’re a progressive technology-will-cure-all-sorts. I mean, Manchester formed solely of human interactions and became the prototype for all modern cities in terms of its design.
KG
06/07/2009 at 08:58 Gap Gen says:
LewieP: Yeah, it’s an interesting point, that some aspects of our economy are globalised but most are localised. I suspect that if prices did become normalised across all countries, you’d just see more piracy in the poorer countries. In this respect it’s not a good road to go down.
In terms of legalistic stuff, I’d be interested in a publisher’s opinion. Have they actually acted against these yet, blocking CD keys and the like? Or do they grudgingly admit that there’s little they can do about it?
06/07/2009 at 09:04 Gap Gen says:
wcaypahwat: There is a Firefox plugin that blocks applications from appearing in Facebook. But yeah, they are very annoying.
Facebook went down an interesting route of only opening to university students, which probably affected its style a lot. I don’t think Facebook is particularly mature per se, although I agree that by virtue of having less customisation it’s far less tacky than MySpace.
06/07/2009 at 09:24 Morph says:
Far Cry 2 seems exactly the wrong game to be Iron Man-ing, with the buddy get out clause. I think I died maybe once during the whole game when a buddy was not around to save me (on normal difficulty, but I’m not great at shooters). A FC2 expert could surely breeze through it without permenant death at all.
I enjoy reading about in-game experiences, but Ben’s are too much ‘I had a fight, it was tense, honest.’
06/07/2009 at 10:09 Thermal Ions says:
There’s a bunch of people who, since late 2007, have been playing Titan Quest using various self imposed challenge modes including:
- Naked Harcore (No Armour, Formulas, jewelry, scrolls, etc)
- 0 Death XmaX (one life only with XmaX difficulty mod)
- 0 Death Uber (one life only with Uber difficulty mod)
It makes for a fun way to replay a game, or in my case experience for the first time. I consequently didn’t get as far due to not knowing what’s ‘around the next corner’.
http://www.titanquest.net/forums/challenges/
06/07/2009 at 10:10 Richard Clayton says:
Sundays are for waking up and finding a Jim in my front room.
Kieron, that made me think of Far Cry 2! Was Jim staring at you or doing press ups at the end of your bed?
06/07/2009 at 12:20 Requiem says:
@Morph since the permadeath is self imposed there’s nothing to stop people self imposing a buddy ban as well, since you have to talk to the characters to activate the buddy rescue. Though I expect since this was an experiment about writing about playing ironman, people are more interested in the experience rather than the challenge.
Even with using the buddy system Far Cry 2 seems like a perfect game for a permanent death system, since so little of it is scripted and so much is random. I couldn’t imagine playing even games like Stalker, Crysis or the first Far Cry this way, since they are still far too based on a connect the dots approach and allow only slight deviances from the preset path.
06/07/2009 at 12:48 unique_identifier says:
i can’t believe i’ve listened to pj for all these years and never thought to look for some live footage.
06/07/2009 at 12:55 LewieP says:
Update on blood bowl:
Looks like Cyanide intend to blacklist any serials bought from G2play. I’ve contacted both Cyanide and G2play for responses.
06/07/2009 at 13:41 Duckmeister says:
The “Facebook vs. Myspace” article was great until she started speculating on the data she collected in the beginning. Talk about bias. There were so many things wrong with her conclusions. After a while, you could see her thought process through the writing, “Hey, let’s take what my fellow left-field ‘scientists’ believe, call it the ‘norm’, and expect everyone to go along with it!”.
And, of course, she then had to bring homosexuality into the issue, using the same tactic as described above. Shameless.
Otherwise (okay, maybe not PJ), great sunday papers.
06/07/2009 at 16:39 Azazel says:
I play Iron Man Internet. If someone leaves me a piece of negative feedback on a forum then I cancel my broadband subscription.
06/07/2009 at 18:25 cowthief skank says:
Azazel: You suck.
Are you allowed to re-subscribe with a different ISP, or is that it now?
Regarding a good game to write about Iron Manning (erm?): I think Deus Ex sounds pretty good.
06/07/2009 at 19:22 Telemikus says:
I find when in the openworld mode of GTA IV, that you can never play for long before someone tries to gatecrash your party.
This could make an peculiar iron man article, How about a Wall-e type study in isolation in GTA IV, playing in the openworld mode. Taking in the sights and sounds of New York, uncomfortable in the knowledge that sooner or later, some frag fried stranger is going to start getting curious about you, and decide to hunt you down. The rule is you can’t communicate with any fellow playing NY city dwellers, so that you remain a mystery to them, and must survive for twelve hours.
Naturally you’ll need to stay away from them in case their intentions are hostile. Fear and panic will set in as someone picks up you scent, and they start persuing you through the convoluted metropolis… Or it could be a awkward description loneliness and solitude… actually probabaly just that, but you never know.
06/07/2009 at 20:03 TRS-80 says:
Valve blocked a bunch of serials sourced from Thailand two years ago, and I found a thread about g2play and Steam from January this year.
06/07/2009 at 20:32 PJ says:
@ Kieron: Well, I’d say its actually only a real problem if you’re a technology-will-cure-all-right-this-second-like-magic-sort. Can you expand on your point about Manchester? I’m not sure I follow.
07/07/2009 at 09:16 Kieron Gillen says:
Manchester wasn’t planned, basically. It grew in a space of about 80 years as the first industrialised city in the world. Despite the lack of planning, the interactions of people lead to a classic city model – enormous poor ghettos, middle-class shop-lined streets and making it entirely possible for the two to never cross.
KG