T w e n t y S i d e d
Wow. Diecast number 291. This brings us very close to 300, which is a number of no special significance whatsoever. Still, we’ve made a lot of these dang things, haven’t we?
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast291
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes:
00:00 Real Estate and Grandpa Gilbert’s House
To learn about the foreclosure I alluded to, you can read The Twelve Year Mistake. To find out about my stepfather, read Groundskeeper Dave. To find out about who Gilbert is and why I care, read my 2014 post about the man himself.
Or just skip this section. I’ll admit it references a lot of obscure Shamus-lore and relies of the listener having a good grasp of my backstory.
I probably should have taken pictures of Gilbert’s house, but I was pretty caught up in the moment. Ah well.
12:05 More Satisfactory!
And now, here are some shots of Paul’s base:
34:12 Teardown
This is really exciting. I hope we get more of this in the future. Screw photorealism, I want more dynamic environments like this. Amazing.
Link (YouTube) |
38:37 Mailbag: Amazon Game Studios
Dear Diecast,
So, apparently Amazon Game Studios is now making a MMORPG called “New World”. I heard about it for the first time yesterday and was curious to get your impressions of this thing.
Jennifer Snow
You know, I don’t think I gave this thing enough credit during the show. New World isn’t really medieval fantasy. It’s set in the 1700’s. Imagine if, instead of the Americas, Europe sailed west to find an island full of monsters and magic. That’s this game. So I guess’ it’s more Enlightenment era fantasy?
I don’t know. The website has zero to say on the gameplay besides the fact that there aren’t any classes. I guess I’m just incredibly jaded because I’ve seen SO MANY grandiose MMOs come and go without making much of an impression.
ALSO: I looked at the Careers Page at Amazon’s studio. They are hiring for a LOT of different positions. Programmers, modelers, concept artists, and several different kinds of managers. You know the one thing they’re NOT hiring? Writers. It’s entirely possible they’ve simply filled all the writing positions. It’s also possible that this is yet another studio that thinks you can just hand the writing duties off to who ever happens to be in charge.
EVERYONE thinks they have the most brilliant idea for a book / movie / game. A very small number of those people actually have a good idea, and an even smaller number of those people will know how to turn their ideas into a usable script.
As I keep saying, you don’t need a good story to have a good game, but it seems to be common that people with bad stories are the ones most likely to burn tons of budget / screen time on cutscenes.
I guess we’ll see what Amazon’s creative priorities are later this year.
46:10 Mailbag: Walkie Talkie
Dear Diecast,
I was looking over some Ludum Dare entries by Daniel Linssen and was blown away by Walkie Talkie. If you aren’t familiar with it, Walkie Talkie is a chatroom where every message you send becomes a platformer level. I’ll add a link to a video showing it off[1].
Do you guys keep track of Ludum Dare? If so, what’s some of the most impressive things you’ve seen?
Vale,
-tmtvl
Link (YouTube) |
50:16 Mailbag: “Too Much” Gaming
Now, since you play games as both a hobby and a (part time?)job, it would be weird to bring this matter up. But has your gaming habit ever conflicted with your life? I am a college student, and in my head, game-craving clash with studying really hard. When I open a book, I want to play game. And when I play game, I want to study. I try to have a fix amount of time each day for gaming, but it only last a couple of days before I go over it. I have this trouble for a long time and I can not settle it no matter what. I find so many online advices and try to apply but none of them work.
I don’t know if my case can be considered game addiction or not. If I play game for 5 hour a day than I’m satisfy and can spend the rest of the day to do other stuffs. But of course 5 hour is still a lot. And when I try to lower it (say 3 hours), the craving come back. I don’t know what to do. It drives me crazy.
I know you’re not a therapist or a consultant, but I like your opinions (most of them), and I hope perhaps you can give some insight to my problem. But it’s still cool if you don’t.
And to other people who read this. Please don’t reply with variation of things like “You should try harder”, “You should be more determined with you life”, “You should have priority with your life” etc. If those advices work then I would not have this problem to begin with.
Wangwang
I don’t know if my rambling answer will be of use to Wangwang. Even though we both play games, I don’t think I’m facing Wangwang’s problems. For me, food is the big thing I have trouble with, and that’s where I struggle with self-control.
Also, the game I was trying to think of was Conquests of Camelot.
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
The Witch Watch
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
Game at the Bottom
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Pixel City Dev Blog
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
While article isn’t on the front page, boss.
DAMMIT SHAMUS WHAT ARE WE GOING TO POST ABOUT NOW?!
In the ancient times, people would race to post “First!”
Not here, during the DMotR era Shamus used to do first comments on his posts which got people out of the habit.
I don’t know if it’s still running, but there was also a script that would add ~ five minutes to the posting timestamp on posts that only included the word “First” so they would show up much later and look silly.
A while ago there was a seminar about video game addiction here in Belgium, and it seems like it does affect people. It’s easy to say that it’s a problem with self control, but the same can be said about alcohol, tobacco, or drug addiction. I seem to remember there being articles in the newspaper about TV addiction a few decades ago, so I guess this isn’t much of a new phenomenon.
I think discourse around compulsive behaviour borrows heavily from the way we talk about drug addiction in an unhelpful way. I’m not sure that “videogame addiction” is a thing in the same way “heroin addiction” is. Obviously there are some people who play too many videogames and wish they played less because it’s interfering with their life, but the word “addiction” usually seems to imply some kind of underlying phenomenon. With heroin we can point at physiological changes and clear withdrawal symptoms, but is there anything there for videogames or is it just “some people find videogames more appealing than college and are bad at resisting temptation”?
Yes, there are clearly things there – and your failure to see that (that’s overly hostile, and I don’t mean it that way ad you’re more querying than dismissing, but my grasp of the English language fails me, sorry. Don’t take it the wrong way) is a great example of why it’s still not sufficiently studied.
Computer games are, to a large extent, built as Skinner boxes. They’re made to release a steady drip of dopamine, and so on. Different people have different triggers, but it’s still very true. Whether it’s the next killshot, the next legendary item, the next turn when your building I’d complete, or even the joy of seeing your city grow and work as an organic whole, games deliver specific small “win” conditions all the time. It’s more akin to gambling or weed addiction than alcohol or heroin, since there’s more psychological pressure and less physical withdrawal, but studies show a very definite addictive element to games. Like most other addictions, not everyone is equally vulnerable. I have no problem drinking a lot, or nothing at all, for long periods of time. With weed, I had to stop altogether because it became too central to my life. I don’t really feel affected by gaming all that much. Some people can have just an occasional cigarette, most people can’t.
Anyway, long wandering ramble short – yes, gaming can very much be an actual, measurable, quantifiable addiction.
What is the addictive element to games that has been measured and quantified?
I’m not at a pc where I can access Scholar, but there have been multiple studies showing brain function patterns and hormone level changes completely consistent with those of people addicted to substances; very similar to p.e. sex addiction, gambling addiction, sugar addiction, and others like them.
A distinction should be made here: there is (probably, I’m not a scholar on the subject) a difference between substance addiction, which creates physical dependence on a substance, and behavorial addiction, which is more about activities that stimulate the brain into certain moods by the release of hormones and endorphins, which people become non-physically addicted to. And there’s probably some overlap. But you can definitely get into a state wherein you value certain brainstates over fulfilling basic needs, and more psychological takes on game design (which gambling games have extensively studied and made use of) target those states, and as I recall, there is some evidence of genetic predilection towards dependence on brainstates over physical needs. There is a line that crosses from stimulation to predation, and it is fuzzy, different from person to person, and something civilization has struggled defining since the inception of gambling.
Edit: physiology is a developing field full of evolving tools and methods. A complete, quantified answer to “What is the addictive elements to games?” probably is not possible until we’ve reached the point where we can fully model the brain and run simulations to develop a standard response curve over a wide range of different brain types. However, one does not need to know thermodynamic principles to realize that a house fire is dangerous and destructive, and should be dealt with. Quantified results are a supporting argument, but decisions often need to be made without them.
Videogame addiction might have some differences from heroin addiction, fair point. However, in it’s most harmful forms it is extremely similar to gambling addiction which has been well studied and documented. I think the consensus is that there are physiological changes and similar cravings, if not quite the same physical withdrawal symptoms.
There have been times in my life where I have spent much too much time playing video games rather than doing vital, important tasks and I have definitely suffered for it. Despite that, I have never felt that I have a video game problem, if only because I know myself well enough to know that if video games did not exist I would have found some other way–reading, television, screwing around on the internet, etc.–to waste that time and sabotage myself. My problem is less a video game problem and more of a procrastination or avoidance problem. It’s easier to play games, leave blog comments, or engage in any one of a million distracting pastimes than it is to do or sometimes even just to think about big, scary tasks. With that in mind, I’d be willing to say that video game addiction likely exists but that the thing that drives video game addicts to video games may well be something other than the games themselves.
But what does that mean? You’ve already established that people can play too many videogames but you don’t think that definitively proves videogame addiction, so what is the thing that likely exists? Are you proposing that addiction is like schizophrenia where something distinct has gone wrong in the brain? Do videogames somehow create a chemical dependency like heroin does? This sentence doesn’t communicate anything without a definition for addiction, and the commonly-used behavioural definition (by which a person can be addicted to literally anything that harms them, agnostic to whether there’s any kind of underlying driving factor) has already been ruled out by your uncertainty.
“There have been times where I’ve drunk far too much and it has negatively impacted my life” and “I’m an alcoholic” are two very different things. One can be an indicator of the other and can lead to the other, but not necessarily.
There are addicts who manage to manage their addiction – most smokers, most obviously – and there are others who completely lose control (most heroin addicts, for example).
I do think we need better nomenclature for talking about this sort of thing. “Addiction” can mean a physical addiction, but it can also be used as a general catch-all for “thing some people do too much”.
My brother has a rental property. A few years ago, some tenants moved out and he discovered they’d nearly destroyed the place. Huge holes in the walls, destroyed carpets, weird stains all over the walls and carpets.
The curious thing is that there was one room PACKED with boxes. The boxes were filled with random stuff from goodwill. Mostly weird knicknacks and kitchen ware. This crap filled TWO DUMPSTERS. I can’t even imagine two entire dumpsters full of random yard sale crap, but that’s what it was. Evidently the wife of this couple went around buying whatever random shiny objects she could find, and then threw them into her hoard.
This person CERTAINLY had a set of behavioral problems. But I think most people would be level-headed enough to not blame goodwill, or flatware, or yard sales. They realize the problem is with the person, not with the thing the person obsesses over.
But for whatever reason, when we observe these same behaviors in regard to video games, the conversation frames this as a problem with the hobby.
My take is that anything that gives people dopamine can form compulsive behavioral loops. Sex, food, gossip, acquiring possessions, playing sports, alcohol, drugs, public validation / attention, gambling, winning at competitive activities, and probably dozens of other things I don’t even know about.
So I’d agree with the premise of “video game addiction exists” in the sense of “video games are yet another thing people can obsess over to an unhealthy degree.”
And as far as vices go, video games are amazingly benign. I’d rather be obsessed over video games than any of the other things I mentioned above.
I think the question being asked is less “are video games inherently addictive?” and more “are there certain video game design principles which are more likely to lead to dependence?”.
Among nuanced conversation, anyways.
Brain physiology is a complex thing. There are certainly people more susceptible to falling into compulsive behaviors than others, and you can’t save everybody from themselves. But it’s not a single on/off state. There’s a spectrum. So the question really is, do game designers have a social responsibility to practice good-faith design that doesn’t act as a gateway to compulsive behavior, for the sake of people who are borderline in danger or who, due to unusual stress, have been moved into that danger?
I would say there is. Engineers, doctors, and other professionals operate under a code of ethics that their projects and care will facilitate the public good, and not endanger the people. A code of ethics for game design is not unreasonable once it is established that there is something in game design to be ethical about. Public discourse must then determine what that code should be, and the way AAA skinner box design is going, the industry will have it forced on them sooner or later.
I remember the days when Jack Thompson was proposing a code to govern videogames, and the gaming community was having none of it. At the time I thought they were saying “Fuck you Jack, let people play what they want!” The thing I find most depressing thing about modern mobile-gaming discourse is realizing how many really meant “Let people play what I want.”
To be fair, anything Jack Thompson had to say should have been opposed due to Jack Thompson. Anything he’d propose would be fruit from a poisoned tree regardless of merit.
Conflating a populist trying to ride a wave of publicity in a moral panic over imaginary violence, with calls for oversight on the trend of modern big budget games drifting ever closer to gambling in order to squeeze out all possible profit from their audience (with no appreciable gain to the audience), is intellectually dishonest.
Engineers affix their seal on the plans for bridges to pledge that those bridges shall not collapse. Doctors swear to do no harm. Those who break these standards are held accountable (in theory, anyway). These are not considered restrictions on professional freedoms, but the protection of public interest. Predatory monetary practices in banking and the financial sector are likewise regulated. Videogaming is an immense industry with little in the way of unionization and regulatory oversight; there are no state boards setting ethical standards for publishers and developers. If they will not practice restraint on themselves, history shows that restraint shall be practiced onto them, often in more restrictive ways than if they had self-regulated.
Corporate overreach met with public regulation has been the back and forth of capitalist democracy since the inception of the United States. It is the natural cycle of the system.
You look at a world where Alice wants to make a game that Bob wants to buy and you say “No, that shouldn’t be allowed.” I didn’t like when Jack Thompson did it and I don’t like it now. I’ve given up arguing about this because god knows no one changes their mind on the internet, but I assure you I am being intellectually honest.
I’m sad because I value the freedom to make and buy entertainment, and for a while there it looked like the rest of gaming did too.
There’s a difference between saying “you can’t sell bread that contains traces of rat poison” and “you can’t sell bread that contains traces of corn”.
I’d say you should be able to sell bread that contains rat poison, but you should not be allowed to do so while stating or implying that the bread is suitable for human consumption. If somebody still wants to buy it, knowing that it contains rat poison, that’s on them.
But “bread with rat poison” is a bad simile, because very few people would buy it for other reasons than killing rats – and those who do end up eating won’t do so again any time soon.
A better comparison is this: should it be legal you sell soda with alcohol in it, labeled simply as soda, to kids, without oversight or control? If I start selling rum-coke as regular “cola”, do alcoholics get to complain? Should my brand be regulated around schools?
No, yes, and yes. Because the law has already defined what counts as alcohol and what you’re allowed to do with it. It already is illegal to sell booze to kids. The law has also already defined what counts as gambling, and lootboxes unambiguously don’t (give or take the grey areas of a CS:GO or trading card games where players can resell the loot). What you want is to change the law.
Apparently it would be unreasonable of me to conflate the anti-microtransaction faction with a populist riding a moral panic, but I’m just saying that every comparison in this thread has also been used by Jack Thompson. He’s especially fond of “alcohol to kids, studies show it changes your brain!” when arguing for a crackdown on something he thought was corrupting the youth. We can either take a principled stand in defense of the freedom of creativity, commerce and the basic liberal idea that Alice selling videogames to Bob is none of our business, or we can let it be controlled by whoever drums up the loudest moral panic. Just remember that if you take the latter option, it might turn out that the Jack Thompsons of the world are louder than you.
I had a roommate once that was addicted to video games. Not playing them, but buying them. Just like your yard sale hoarder. He’d buy hundreds of games at full price and never play them. Well he spent beyond his means. Not really what is normally thought of when someone says “video game addiction” but definitely a behavioral problem.
Looks at my gaming closet and my GOG games list.
Notes how many of them I haven’t played at all (some of them are still in shrinkwrap).
Starts to sweat.
Notices the “spent beyond his means” line.
Relaxes.
Seriously, though, lots of people buy things beyond their means, and buy things that they don’t use (clothes that they might wear once or might wear for an event that they probably won’t go to, little toys and decorations that are cool but have no use, etc, etc). That’s not necessarily an issue. For me, I do often buy games because they look interesting but end up not having the time to play them, so it isn’t really an addiction, but more an idea of “I should buy this now while I can find it and I’ll find the time to play it later), or things like that. So some of this might simply be poor money management, which should show up in general with video games being the most obvious waste of money.
I completely agree that gaming in general is a benign hobby.
Some of the monetisation tactics, though, are effectively remote brain-hacking. I’m not sure it’s fair to blame that stuff on the people who fall for it, any more than it would be fair to criticise them for falling for the Muller-Lyer illusion.
I don’t think it’s too hard to identify the manipulative games up front and just refuse to engage with them. Then again, I have a degree in cognitive science, so maybe the manipulation that is apparent to me is less obvious to other people.
I don’t think it takes a degree, but you definitely need some knowledge about the issue. Unless you’ve read about things like Skinner’s box etc. it’s not even obvious why slot machines are addictive(though I’m sure everyone has heard about gambling addiction at this point, so that they ARE potentially addictive shouldn’t come as a surprise).
And, as I’m sure you’re aware, “refusing to engage” with things that are addictive or otherwise bad for you is something most people are quite bad at, especially young people(who are still the target market for large majority of videogames). Everyone knows that alcohol can be addictive, yet teetotallers are a small minority. Everyone knows that smoking is very addictive, yet a lot of teenagers get themselves addicted. I consider myself lucky to have dodged that bullet, considering that most of my friends started smoking when I was at that vulnerable age.
Again, that doesn’t match my personal experience. When I was a young child, around 8, watching my father struggle to stop smoking, I remember thinking “Some things seem to be easier to start doing than to stop. I’m not going to start any of them unless I have a good reason.” And I stuck with that rule. I never smoked. I never had any desire to use recreational drugs. I didn’t start drinking at all until my last year of college, and probably don’t have more than two or three drinks a year.
I didn’t find the self-destructive pattern of the addictive behavior loop hard to identify as a child, and self-destruction has never held any appeal to me. I may not have known *why* slot machines were addictive, but I could (and did) observe the behavior of the people who used them.
Yeah, I was considering the issue as it’s been discussed in the past and how some people neglect their chores to play more games.
I kinda see the lootbox crap to be a different problem. It’s basically the age old problem we’ve had for years with gambling and games of chance, but now bolted onto the side of gaming like a great big slot-machine-shaped tumor.
I had a similar situation in college – when it wasn’t video-games it was reading books, articles, whatever. Definitely not “addiction”, but a symptom of other things. As a working adult with a stable job / career-path, the games are just a past-time, when I don’t have chores to do (fixing things in the house, getting the truck repaired, whatever). I had some second-hand (friends of a friend) experience with people who experienced what would be more called a proper “addiction” to video-games. Basically they kept working their crummy jobs to barely pay the rent, then spending 100% of the rest of the time playing World of Warcraft. That’s nothing like an actual physiological / physical addiction to some illicit substance, but still much worse than just procrastination.
Anyways, I guess that was a bit long-winded, but problem game-playing can definitely be overcome. The issue is gaining the skills, self-motivation, discipline etc, to take care of long-term things in your life, instead of procrastinating with distractions. (And I have very little advice on how to gain those things; I seem to have done it largely by just working hard and trying to get better jobs. /shrug )
Writer: the quantum superposition of job openings!
(I assume you meant to exclude “writer” from the list of openings.)
“They are hiring for a LOT of different positions. Programmers, writers, …. You know the one thing they’re NOT hiring? Writers.”
I’m not sure what the mistake is, but there seems to be one.
Thank you for your reply, Shamus and Paul. And thank for all the other reply in my original comment.
My NICKNAME is the combine lastname of 2 Chinese celebrities. And Wang is the most common last name in China.
When i tried to find your email address, I look for the mail symbol in the menu, then I tried the footer, then I read your instruction for comment. I even opened the old diecast to see if you include it at the end of the article. Yet somehow I never saw the email address in the diecast picture. I think the two die just hog all the attention.
Come to think of it, the e-mail address being in the header image means that screen readers for people with impaired vision won’t pick it up.
It was also kind of annoying the first time I had to type it the first time I used it. Since I’m used to copy-pasting email addresses, I had to double-triple-check if I had typed the right thing.
Although, it’s nice to have it in the header image. The image would feel very blank without it…
Yeah, but it also makes it harder for spambots to find. :)
Yes. It is also English slang for “penis”. But you didn’t have to know that.
Shamus, I do feel the urge to point out (and I say this with love) that maybe you should have at the very least alluded to what the joke was about? Especially after you have (correctly) identified the correspondence as penned by a non-native speaker.
As for the college vs. habitual gaming thing, I’d wager college is way easier to focus on if you know what your long term goal is and how college is going to help with it. Speaking from experience, it’s quite easy to graduate high school with no solid idea on what you want to do in life, and find yourself on the way towards a degree you picked on a semi-random basis and which you’re not even sure you’re going to need. This is probably especially true in countries were higher education is free(-ish) (not sure whether or not it is in China).
It was also a computer company. Which (if I remember correctly) once sponsored some sport clubs who then had T-shirts with “Wang” on them, to the amusement of some more childish spectators.
Random advice from someone else who feels like they overdo it with gaming here.
Look up a program called Cold Turkey. It has really helped me stop myself from overdoing it over the last number of years.
With regards to a life/gaming balance, I’ve found that certain games are much worse than others. In particular, watch out for anything that has “real-world” timers, whether those be daily login bonuses, or 3-month seasons, or what not. Those are red flags for anyone who struggles with balance in this area. Other red flags are the game being an MMO, or having a bunch of microtransactions, or not having a distinct ending. While these are not exactly the same thing as the game being more addictive than normal, they are warnings that are easy to identify.
My more general point is that being addicted to games is substantially different from being addicted to a game, but this distinction isn’t always obvious. WOW addiction is basically a punchline at this point, but a lot of people that didn’t have trouble with a game/life balance started playing WOW, and suddenly started having trouble. Thankfully, the solution for addiction to a game is a bit easier to implement: play different games. That keeps you occupied with a different fun activity, instead of forcing yourself to complete your taxes or something, and you will probably naturally find yourself spending less time playing games.
If you’re having trouble with games in general instead of a particular game, I’d start with a critical look at the rest of your life. Are you happy with how things are going? Are you under a lot of stress? Do you feel that your degree is a mistake? Not liking your life is a common reason to seek escape.
Since people are still commenting; memory palaces are a neat way to shake up studying. I can’t personally vouch for them making memorization easier, but I can vouch for them making really boring information a lot more engaging and more fun to spend a lot of time with. Forcing the creative side of the brain to deal with facts helps with focus.
In general I think mental health and addiction are often passed over as an issue, especially if it’s not a physiological problem. With more games being designed from the ground up to be addictive and monetised the problem is likely to get bigger before it gets better.
I eventually found the Diecast email, but for months (back on the old Diecast header) I was totally unable to find it. I propose it would be more findable if you put it in the text of the post near the top, something like:
Chris Franklin is correct. The phrase ludum dare is Latin and, literally translated, means “to give a/the game”. Thus dare is pronounced dah-ray. Why an event about making games is called Ludum Dare rather than something like Ludum Facere I could not tell you.
Because it used to be a forum rather than just a competition.
I will continue to pronounce it “loodum dair” because it just looks like it’s saying “we dare you to make a game in this timeframe”, which is fitting.
It could be that the reason Amazon has no writing jobs posted is that there are even more people who dream of writing for a video game than who dream of coding for one (how many people have you talked to who have this GREAT idea for a game but need someone to program it, versus how many programmers who have this GREAT idea for a game but need someone to write a story for it?)–so every employee in the division knows eight people who would give their left arm and accept any high hours/low pay conditions to get to write for Amazon’s game, and so they feel no need to publicly post those jobs.
That video about Teardown is actually kind of sad. They go over all of the amazing things this person has done, with lighting, and destruction, and smoke, and then at the end “oh yeah they’re making a game about key collection”. All of that awesome physics work and then their gameplay is the blandest possible option.
Not strictly true, there. If you check the latest video of the developers own channel, you can get a better idea of the overall gameplay. Basically its less about collecting keys that emergent planning, puzzle solving, and spatial thinking/awareness. Not to say it isn’t still tech-demo level, but you are underselling it a bit.
I hope so – I was just going based on what was in the video, which spent 9 minutes on the evolution of the physics tech and 5 seconds describing the gameplay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCuCQSyqeXM
here’s the link for the dev describing the gameplay in more detail (which is all I had to base my above statements on btw, I’m not going on any inside scoops or nuthin’)
I listen to the show since it began with Josh and the crew. I NEVER knew the email was in the banner.. why? Because it’s an image: I dont READ image. I barely look at them.
Putting the mail just under the reader might do the trick. Or, as I listen to the show from an RSS feed, having the email first thing in the comment: the first 2 line of comment appear in the RSS
Seconded. One doesn’t expect to find text in an image. If the email was right under the image (maybe in a slightly bigger font or something), it probably would have been fine.
Also, because I’m feeling pedantic right now: Campster’s pronunciation of Ludum Dare is indeed correct. It’s from latin, where “ludum” loosely translates to “game” and “dare” translates to “to give” (“to give a game”). This is actually where the “ludo” part of “ludonarrative dissonance” comes from.
The mailbag e-mail isn’t in plain text so that spammers’ bots can’t easily find it. It’s an attempt to prevent junk mail.
May I suggest a: “You can find the e-mail in the header image.” in each diecast post? That may alleviate the problem.
But they do that! I’m sick of “the e-mail is in the header” in the text of literally every other episode!
I’m honestly surprised at how many regulars turn it not to know – filtering out those “like and subscribe” messages like bosses.
I knew the diecast email was in the image. I forgot when I went to send you a message once. I went to your “about” page first. The bottom of the post second. The bottom of the comment section third. Then finally the header as the forth place I looked.
“About” page was also my first choice. Seems like the most intuitive spot to put it. Or make it an icon at the top.
Another point; sounds like it’s only in the Diecast posts, so if you’re not currently reading the Diecast page you can’t find the email.
I just saw something about Stadia going down in flame for want of interested devs:
https://twitter.com/tha_rami/status/1234148793530093570
Apparently, it’ll get canned before people even understand Shamus’ point on the lack of clients.
Any thoughts?
One of the things I find most shocking about New World is the PRICE . . . $49.99 for the deluxe edition pre-order. The standard edition is only $39.99 to pre-order.
That seems crazy low to me when most game companies are rolling out $150 collectors editions and even the base edition is $70+ to pre-order.
Yeah. This is the first time since Cyberpunk 2077 that I seriously considered the Extra-Fancy Edition.
I pre-ordered too, so if you feel like letting me know when/whether you plan to play New World we could hang out. You’re on my friends list on Steam so you can shoot me a message on there if you want something more direct, I use Steam to communicate with my guildies in DDO so I’m around.
What I wonder is how Amazon is planning to use an MMO to drive their revenue flywheels. That’s usually the explanation behind the various things they give away or seemingly undercharge for. But I don’t see how a video game drives business to their cloud or to their retail channels.
Probably in-game purchases, from the pre-order descriptions we already know there are cosmetics and emotes available.
They may also just be looking to put their game studio on the map, the only thing I know of that they’ve made so far was that weird Grand Tour tie-in game. Everyone who plays New World is a customer who now knows Amazon Game Studios exists and may purchase whatever else they make.
It seems like they don’t have any plans to launch a Steam competitor client, though, because you can buy New World on Steam, and frankly video games are one of the few things that I won’t buy through Amazon (the other is clothing) because they don’t have decent software staff to support it if there’s a problem. I have a friend who bought software on Amazon and spent over an hour on the phone with customer service when the download would not work, only to find out after an HOUR that the problem was that Amazon’s download client was bugged and wouldn’t work AT ALL with Windows 10 (this was about a month after Win 10 came out and people started upgrading). I’m sorry, but that’s a pretty significant problem for your customer support staff not to know about.
As if AMAZON game studios was able to deliver a good game. Please… This smells like, “hey, this video game thing sure is popular, let’s make our own.”
That’s what they do, and a lot of the stuff they make on their own is AMAZING. They have some REALLY good Amazon Originals, for instance.
I don’t know if they’ve made any mobile games yet, but since the Kindle Fire can play games like any other tablet or mobile device, it’d make sense for them to at least make some mobile games of their own.
Plus, upper management at Amazon is a bunch of geeks on rocket skates. Jeff Bezos himself is a flat out geek. I don’t know that Bezos plays video games much, but he’s plugged in to geek culture in a way that a lot of CEO’s aren’t.
They do at least have some mobile stuff with their “Amazon Coins” system. If you don’t know what that is, Amazon Coins is an in-app-purchase currency so that instead of buying stuff from the store of every damn little freemium mobile game and giving them your CC info, you just buy the coins from Amazon and you can use them as game currency in a wide selection of games.
Plus Amazon either owns Twitch or is partnered with them very heavily, so the whole Twitch platform is a big deal for them.
Amazon straight up owns Twitch. Which is why I’m quite hopeful about New World. If they have good inter-studio communication, they can use Twitch’s expertise on what makes for an engaging game, and they could leverage that for the way the game’s being developed.
Cool. That also explains why they haven’t gone full on Amazon Games storefront . . . because Twitch covers that.
…now I’m curious when Sony started making games. Did they make any prior to the Playstation?
Actually, yes. They had a partnership with Sega before they spun up SCE for handling their own video game ventures with the PlayStation.
I feel like I’m becoming a broken record here, but this is a big part of the appeal of Noita for me. The game eschews photorealism for (what I consider to be) a beautiful stylized art style and making as much of the game as possible react to real physics. Granted it’s 2D because a lot of that physics is fluid physics and that’s still too much work to simulate at that level for a reasonable 3D, game so Teardown also seems pretty interesting.
Just wanted to inform peeps that GOG.com right now has a midweek sale on the first three Thief games for less than a dollar each. ?
https://www.gog.com/promo/20200304_midweek_sale
Shamus, your “failures as a person” as you call them, are so very cute, and I’m glad Isaac left them in the diecast :)
Re: Wangwang’s question. Paradoxically enough, sometimes the safest course of action is to let your infatuation with gaming (or anything, really) run its course, while taking care not to let it ruin the most important other aspects of your life (such as any higher education, job, or significant other you might be taking care of, for example). I used to game for an average of about 7 hours a day, now I’m more of a 2 hours per day person. I don’t like games any less than I used to, it’s just that what I’ve left to play has a higher barrier of entry, AND that my priorities gradually shift, so that I’ve less time left to game nowadays. Visiting an actual, real-life therapist should also help, assuming you can afford it, and that they’re not terrible at their job, which is true for most of them, and you can usually judge whether they’re suitable for you in two sessions or so.
I hope this helps, at least a little, and don’t forget that I’m just another internet rando, who knows nothing much, if anything, about your life circumstances :)