Content This Week

By Shamus Posted Monday May 9, 2016

Filed under: Notices 180 comments

This blog has a really steady posting schedule (exaggerated, magnanimous bow) so when it’s interrupted I think it’s a good idea to let people know about it ahead of time:

  1. No podcast this week.
  2. No Spoiler Warning this week.
  3. No column this week.
  4. As far as I know, Rutskarn’s content should proceed as usual.

Some of my recent columns have been about crunch, which is funny because they were written under conditions that – if someone else had been imposing them on me – would have been considered pretty egregious crunch mode.

I roll out of bed in the morning and start hammering away at making content. The weekly column. The Diecast. The post for the Diecast. Spoiler Warning. The Spoiler Warning posts. My duties for Good Robot. Keeping up with moderation and reading the comments. Editing the Mass Effect post for the weekThe series is already written, but I still need to format them, add links, gather screenshots, tag the screenshots, proof them, and address various points people bring up in the comments.. Editing the LOTRO post for the weekLike Mass Effect, the words are already written. It’s just a matter of formatting.. Keeping up with correspondenceI’m super-bad at this, and tend to answer emails in weekly bursts.. Managing the various back-end systems for the blog, the website, and my Patreon.

On top of that is the creative work I do that doesn’t usually end up on the blog: Making music, coding experiments. And then there’s playing videogames. Which – while not technically work – is something that needs to be done if I want to feed the content mill.

All of that together eats about 70 hours a week. I’m not complaining. This is self-imposed and I’m not looking for pity. I do this because it’s fun, and I’d rather do this than have a boring programming job that only eats 40 hours a week.

Like I’ve said in my articles: “Crunch” isn’t that bad if it’s done voluntarily, and in pursuit of your passions. Maybe we need a different word for “I’m spending a lot of hours on this but it’s okay because I’m really into it and I’d rather be doing this than something else”. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to put this behavior under the same umbrella as a job where you’re obligated to work 70 hours a week all the time because some numb-nuts thinks they’ll get more work out of you.

It’s Time to Goof Off

Why did a BEACH become the universal symbol for relaxation? It's hot. It's loud. It's usually crowded. You get wet sand inside of your clothing, which is the opposite of relaxing. It's expensive to go there. It's too bright to use a screen, which is bad since screens are where entertainment comes from. And if you're a white person, you might accidentally roast your flesh with solar radiation. And there's the risk that you'll be filled with existential dread over the fact that you'll never again be as young, as beautiful, or as fit as the people around you. Ugh. You guys go down to the beach without me. I'm going to hang out in the hotel room and stare at the ceiling.
Why did a BEACH become the universal symbol for relaxation? It's hot. It's loud. It's usually crowded. You get wet sand inside of your clothing, which is the opposite of relaxing. It's expensive to go there. It's too bright to use a screen, which is bad since screens are where entertainment comes from. And if you're a white person, you might accidentally roast your flesh with solar radiation. And there's the risk that you'll be filled with existential dread over the fact that you'll never again be as young, as beautiful, or as fit as the people around you. Ugh. You guys go down to the beach without me. I'm going to hang out in the hotel room and stare at the ceiling.

But despite how fun this is, I do need to let off the throttle every once in a while. So that’s what I’m doing this week. I’ll still post Mass Effect, and there’s a Good Robot patch in the works, but other than that I’m generally goofing off. I actually had a breakthrough with my music recently, so if the productivity bug bites I might turn that into a new installment of Bad and Wrong music lessons.

But! Before you hit the back button in search of someone to fill up your insatiable need for content, you could help me out by suggesting some column topics. I don’t always use them directly, but having people ask questions is always a great way to get the wheels turning.

Note that since I’m putting up columns on my site, I have more leeway in what topics I’ll cover. The Escapist never imposed any demands on me with regards to article content, but I always felt like talking about stuff that would drive traffic was the Right Thing To Do. So I tried to talk about newer games and current events, and I tried to go easy on the technical stuff. But now I’m free to write about the obscure and esoteric.

So that’s what we’re doing this week: Nothing.

I just realized I wrote half a column about how I don’t have time to write a full column. (Facepalm.)

 

Footnotes:

[1] The series is already written, but I still need to format them, add links, gather screenshots, tag the screenshots, proof them, and address various points people bring up in the comments.

[2] Like Mass Effect, the words are already written. It’s just a matter of formatting.

[3] I’m super-bad at this, and tend to answer emails in weekly bursts.



From The Archives:
 

180 thoughts on “Content This Week

  1. LowercaseM says:

    Enjoy time spent enjoying, rather than worrying or working (as much)!

    Topic Idea;
    * How far is too far for subverting (or savaging) the tropes of a genre?

    -m

  2. Halceon says:

    Half a column is not a full column. The assertion holds.

    As for topic ideas. Why are so many games about games these days? And why are so few of them good?

    1. Deoxy says:

      My wife will spend 20 minutes telling me why she doesn’t have 5 minutes to do something…

      Yeah, I think I know why, OK?

      1. Matt Downie says:

        In the long run, you can reduce your workload more by lowering people’s expectations of you than you can by doing work.

        1. Mistwraithe says:

          A plan which every child, everywhere, has attempted to implement, often for years before grudgingly conceding defeat.

      2. Lanthanide says:

        Yeah, but 20 minutes of talking is like 1 minute’s effort of doing things. So it all works out.

    2. Alex says:

      “Why are so many games about games these days? And why are so few of them good?”

      Because it’s video games’ equivalent to the worst sort of Oscar bait. A game about games can be a good excuse for a mechanically sound video game (a Tycoon game, probably), but more often a game about games is simply a narcissistic attempt to treat your medium (and by extension, yourself) as an Important Subject.

      1. m0j0l says:

        Agreed. Lumped in the same category as ‘novels where the main character is an author’ or ‘poems about how sad poets are’.

        1. Mokap says:

          I never understood why poets kept on writing poems if it made them so sad. Are they really raking in all that poetry dosh?

          1. Syal says:

            “Wait, you write poetry? I’m sorry, I don’t think there’s a place for you here at Burger Shop.”

            That is to say, once you go poet, you can’t forgo it.

      2. Parkhorse says:

        Game Dev Story, while mobile, was pretty good.

  3. Grudgeal says:

    I just realized I wrote half a column about how I don't have time to write a full column. (Facepalm.)

    At least with this one you don’t have to do any research into the subject matter…

    Well, much research anyway.

    1. Screenshots. It takes less time because he doesn’t need screenshots, or clipart, or stock photos. One article about a video game takes multiple hours of game play in order to refresh the brain about content and find appropriate screenshots for said content.

  4. Da Mage says:

    A topic: What do you think of Vulkan, the new graphics API that they are intending to replace OpenGL with.

    1. Jsor says:

      They’re not intending to replace OpenGL. OpenGL is still the go-to for application-level development. Vulkan is meant as a backend for graphics middleware like game engines. In a way it’s sort of a “you want to write your own OpenGL” thing.

      Most developers like Shamus probably won’t find Vulkan very fun or fulfilling because a lot of it is spent telling Vulkan a bunch of minutiae that you need a team of very experienced engineers, and a wide array of testing hardware, to get right.

      The most exciting thing about Vulkan is really that it can be used as a backend to create graphics libraries that are much less insane and stupid than OpenGL.

  5. Some of my favourite posts you have written are the auto-biographical ones, you have a natural flair for storytelling and tackle some very difficult topics with articulate fluency. Though I do fully appreciate that you might not really want to talk about any more of your personal life and history, it would be fantastic to read more “Interesting Tales from the Life and Times of Shamus Young”.

    1. Part of this is having teens. We both shared stories until the kids hit the age where they really prefer to write their own stories (quite literally. The older two are both writers and actually have their own following, which is kind of awesome in and of itself.) Youngest is rather private and not so keen on having stories shared, so there is that as well.

      That said I really think he should tell the most recent story about our continued bank drama. Conclusion, PNC is evil.

  6. Jonathan says:

    At one point, I asked and you answered that you liked the Descent soundtrack. A few years ago, you mentioned Lindsey Stirling. I didn’t care for what I looked up at the time, but my recent Pandora playlist (originating on Two Steps From Hell) has her come up quite a bit, and I like what I hear. What other musical artists & sources do you like?

    Will you ever play Descent: Freespace & Freespace 2? Unless something’s changed, they’re still the best space combat piloting sims* in all areas (gameplay, sound, plot). There are a couple of fantastic FS2 mods that reshape the game and tell even more stories.

    *Albeit ones that ignore inertia and “lasers are forever”.

    Why haven’t I heard of a learning AI for RTS games? I proposed one a decade and a half or more ago on some Westwood forum, and haven’t seen anything like it:
    -Make a big (400+ entry) table of different combinations of units (2 rocket launchers + 1 tank; 2 tanks + 1 Disruptor, 4 disruptors and 20 tanks, etc etc).
    -Have the AI select randomly among the table (given cash & tech tree limits), and track each combination of units for:
    +Damage caused (by unit cost?)
    +Time spent alive and in weapons range of an enemy
    +Whether the game was won or lost
    -Based on those factors (damage, durability, overall success), begin weighting AI unit choices so that the successful unit combos are up to 5x more likely to be selected than failures.

    Boom, you have a slowly learning skirmish AI that stops doing stupid things that always fail and gradually adapts to the individual human it opposes. If you shift strategies to counter what it usually does, it’ll start shifting to a more successful counter-strategy.

    This *seems* easy.

    1. Syal says:

      Assuming a similar AI for tactics used, which I think would be as or more important in most strategy games, it’s basically selecting for the most frustrating experience for the player. “Oh, you have trouble dealing with rocket men? How about nothing but rocket men forever.”

      EDIT: Although, if the computer had a page where you could also look up those stats for what its side had the most trouble with, it might make a pretty good learning tool.

      1. Jonathan says:

        If the table has 500 entries, it’ll take a few hundred games to shift substantially in an “all rocket men all the time” direction. The goal is to get to an AI that can provide an actual challenge, without shifting to “cheat” difficulty levels that give it extra resources. A challenging opponent requires learning and adaptation, and discourages picking one strategy and following it every single game.

        If you want to just mass tanks and rush every game, or boom to Imperial age and do a Goth flood for a brainless comp-stomp, it’d be easy to turn off the adaptive AI.

        1. Echo Tango says:

          That also means it’d take lots of games to move from “horrible AI that’s easy-mode LOL” to “sort-of challenging but only sometimes”.

          1. Jonathan says:

            Yes, although that wasn’t such a problem when I was back in college.

            I suppose it could be pre-seeded with data from the testing phase before release, or from the first two weeks of play before it starts individualizing.

      2. MichaelGC says:

        Dunno about forever buuut … I think it’s going to beee a long long time… ♫

    2. Falterfire says:

      I don’t think it’s terribly productive to discuss exact implementation details on a non-expert forum, so I won’t comment on your proposed system design, but I don’t think the general idea is as helpful as you think it will be.

      The problem with implementing really strong AI for multiplayer games is that it’s expensive, and most of your players will never see what you’ve done. Very few players play at the highest level or even just play enough games to recognize the impact of a learning AI.

      To give you an idea of the numbers, only 35% of players completed the campaign for XCOM 2 (25% of players completed it for XCOM:EU). Only 1% for either game completed the campaign on the highest difficulty level. That’s for a game that is primarily about single player. For Grey Goo, a recent Real Time Strategy game, only 9% of players completed the campaign at all (And only half of a percent did it on hard). [NOTE: These numbers all based on Steam Achievements]

      I’m not saying there are zero players interested in a top quality AI capable of learning and adapting and becoming more skilled the more games it plays, but I don’t think there are enough to justify the expense. It would be an interesting thing to build to see what happens, sure, but I don’t think it makes sense as a thing to dedicate development time to.

      This is especially true given how much single player focus tends to given towards a campaign, which usually features missions with a decent amount of scripting which would hinder AI development. Any game with a meaningful ‘skirmish’ mode likely has a multiplayer focus, and resources will be directed there instead of towards AI.

      1. Turner says:

        To give you an idea of the numbers, only 35% of players completed the campaign for XCOM 2 (25% of players completed it for XCOM:EU). Only 1% for either game completed the campaign on the highest difficulty level.

        While a valid point I would counter that a possibly (I don’t know that anyone has done the research) large set of players that did not play on the hardest difficulty level were turned away by the difficulty being introduced by ‘cheating’ rather than harder AI, I know that I personally found the way XCOM:EU increased difficulty through buffing health and damage of aliens while nefing your own soldiers to be a turn-off.
        I actually went into the .ini files and modded the difficulty levels so that I could have the ‘unshackled’ alien AI (basically they take advantage of things when they can instead of forgetting they have grenades when all your soldiers are clustered together) while still having what I felt were balanced stat levels across the board (I mixed and matched the various difficulties to fine tune the opposition to be a fitting challenge for myself).

        I also think I would be remiss not to mention the extremely popular (endorsed by the developers) mod “Long War” which increased difficulty tremendously by giving the aliens better AI and improving tactical options across the board. The popularity of that mod alone I feel makes a good case for there being an audience for difficulty that requires you to out-think a legitimately difficult opponent on an even playing field.

        NOTE: I do agree that the costs of developing worthwhile opposition AI would likely outweigh the profit to be gained by doing so especially when it’s likely that the illusion of powerful AI could be more easily achieved through clever scripting. (While not in a comparable genre I remember reading somewhere that the highly praised AI in F.E.A.R. was basically smoke and mirrors with scripting and sound/vocal queues)

      2. mechaninja says:

        I finish the last few levels of every RTS I play (which mostly means starcraft/warcraft with some kind of god mode/cheats, because I get bored of trying to figure out whatever puzzle the devs want you to solve to survive the first 10 minutes or whatever.

        So even of the folks who “finish”, there are probably some who don’t really finish.

    3. Xeorm says:

      It’s not a very good idea for more than a few reasons that may be non-obvious.

      Self-improving stupid software like the type you mentioned (where it learns by random tries and gradually improves towards an ideal) requires a lot of games. Even for simple tasks, it’s 100s of tries. For something like a complex strategy game that you want to be competitive, you could easily take 1000s. No player is going to want to play against a bone-dead AI for the first few bits of gameplay before it has become at least competent, much less the 1000+ games to be an actual challenge.

      As well the AI developer’s goal is not to beat the player – it’s to provide a challenging and entertaining experience for the player. Certainly some games they are one and the same goal, but a number of RTS’s aren’t like that. A quick example is that in a 3 person FFA, the obvious AI play is to gang up on the player. This gets worse if you’re trying to add a bit of personality to your factions, like the civilization or paradox series of games. Is Spain allying with you because you have the same religion a good strategic idea? Most likely not. But it does help the game feel less like a spreadsheet and more like you’re playing with Spain.

  7. krellen says:

    Write about System Shock (2).

    1. MrGuy says:

      Or System Shock 3! If “they” were to make another one. Who would you want developing it (if you could give the IP to whoever you want)? What would the gameplay be like? What woul the major themes be? What would you add (or remove) from the SS2 gameplay?

      Or would you rather they never make SS3? And if so, why not?

    2. arron says:

      +1 here. I don’t think we’ve had a really in-depth treatment on this from Shamus. And perhaps what Shamus might do if he were to design and develop System Shock [1/2] from the ground up again to his ideal game either as a remake, or a Spiritual Successor that uses the same basic game design mechanics, but takes the story/setting in a completely different direction like Bioshock did. That’s got to be worth a short series of articles.

  8. KingJosh says:

    Well, we can never have enough Mass Effect content. Write about Mass Effect stuff? (Ducks for cover.)

    1. MichaelGC says:

      As it’s ME3 that should really be: “Ducks for cover but instead vaults over the chest-high barrier and stands there awkwardly taking damage and cursing the awesome button.”

      1. KingJosh says:

        I got an Xbox 360 last week. All three ME games were included. I’ve never actually played any of those games, ’cause I didn’t have a gaming PC when they first came out.

        I’m kinda terrified to start the series, at this point!

        1. JohnnyComeLately says:

          Mass effect 1 can be hard to get into if you’re used to more modern shooters but the trilogy is really great. Like one of the best gaming franchises out there.

    2. To build on that: What would you want from Mass Effect Andromeda? Besides it being just more Mass Effect 1. What should “they” keep from the trilogy? Bring back that was left out? Newly introduce? And for a lark you could contrast that with what you suspect EA will most likely do.

  9. arron says:

    I don’t know why a beach is seen as relaxation either. If you take the sea away, you’ve got a desert, and that’s far from fun. Or if you take away the beach, you’ve got a quay.

    You’re probably missing both power and internet so chances are you’ll be stuck wondering what’s going on given that your devices will be close to not working. Sand and sea salt gets into everything, so the first thing you do after beach is to rinse everything off and shower. Each time I’ve been to the beach, it’s all the stuff that is around it – restaurants, piers, games, oceanariums, arcades etc. that make the seaside worth going to.

    Funny I love beaches and the seaside, but it’s not a terribly exciting place for a hardcore geek to be at :)

    1. Ranneko says:

      Is it a beach or is it a tropical island somewhere?

      I mean the beaches pictured rarely feature people, which leaves either gentle lapping of waves at a calm beach or the more energetic roar of the surf at a good ocean beach.

      It has the distinct advantage of being exotic and far away, so it has the connotation of travel and free time and therefore the opportunity to spend large stretches of time to yourself relaxing.

      Without the island element then it’s just a trip to the beach, which isn’t nearly so special, at least not to me, which may have something to do with growing up in a coastal city.

    2. Fade2Gray says:

      Actually, deserts sound like much more fun than beaches. There’s less wet sand, fewer harsh reflections of the sun, fewer people to constantly annoy you, its quieter, and the night sky is amazing. All pluses in my book.

      1. Content Consumer says:

        I grew up in the western U.S. and there are a lot of deserts out that way. When I moved to New York, I fell in love with all the water and vegetation they have out here – try finding a tree capable of growing six feet per year in Wyoming! Y’all can grow crops and don’t have to put rain barrels at every corner of the house and pump your well dry to keep a lawn halfway between green and yellow every summer! – but having spent several years here I’ve begun to miss the desert. The quiet, the lack of people everywhere, the background hum of cicadas, the sheer stillness and emptiness of it. The smell of sage after a rain. Mountains… New Yorkers are really proud of their 5000-foot hills, but I miss towering spires of living rock.
        Deserts have a kind of stark beauty you don’t find elsewhere, and the more time I spend in this wonderful, lush, green paradise, the more I miss the harsh sand and nasty cactus of the west.
        Would I go back there to visit? Absolutely. For a month, even. Would I want to live there again? Probably not. I like the rain too much. :)

        1. krellen says:

          Living out here would be a lot easier if people would stop insisting on having the same yards people in the rain-lands do.

          And mountains are important. I could never find anything in Ohio because I had no landmarks!

          1. Content Consumer says:

            True story – when I first got here, a neighbor was pointing out some of the local landmarks and pointed out what he said was a mountain. I couldn’t see what he was talking about. “What mountain?”
            “That one, right there!”
            It dawned on me, he was talking about that hill over there.
            He looked at me like I was crazy, I looked at him like he was crazy. There we are, both looking at each other like the other one is crazy. Silence for like four seconds.
            “Oh!” I say, and move along.
            To this day, I’m sure he thinks of me as that moron who can’t see a mountain.

            1. Josh says:

              I had many similar conversations when my family moved from Denver (in direct view of the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains) to western New York.

              Though I’ve found that if you ever get the chance to actually show someone who’s only ever seen the Appalachians what the Rockies really look like, in person, they start to really “get it.” Not so much the other way around.

              1. Fists says:

                You should see what passes for a mountain in Australia, you’d probably call it a speed bump or a raised garden bed.

            2. Falcon02 says:

              Perhaps in your case it was an actual “hill,” but it always bothers me a bit when people from the west refer to the Appalachian Mountains as “Hills” because they are still technically Mountains. They are still quite steep, and are not easily crossed, they still exceed the various height standards. And still have a beauty all their own. They just aren’t high enough to exceed the Treeline.

              That said… I’ve seen been to the Rockies, I’ve gone to Rocky National Park, been to the top of Pike’s Peak, and spent a week in Dillon, CO and watched the sunrise kiss the nearby mountains. It is beautiful out there and if you gave me a choice of a view of the Appalachian Mountains or the Rocky Mountains, I’d pick the Rocky Mountains any day. They are simply amazing and I don’t actually have issues with people saying the like the Rockies or think they’re “Better.” They are certainly more inline with the “Quintessential” Mountains.

              However, calling the Appalachians “Hills” feels to me like calling a Corvette a “Family Sedan” (not a sports car) just because it isn’t the same as a Lamborghini or Porsche. Both the Appalachians and Rockies are “mountains” but they are in different classes of mountains… and the Rockies are certainly more impressive.

              1. Shamus says:

                UGH. I’ve got a friend that always bring this up. “Appalachian Mountains aren’t REAL mountains. They’re just hills, unlike our awesome Rockies.”

                It’s like having someone that keeps mentioning that their team beat your team in a sport you don’t give a shit about. Go away and stop filling up my brain space with this trivial bullshit.

              2. Content Consumer says:

                It’s all what you’re used to, I guess.
                If I lived in the Himilayas, I’d probably be laughing at those fools who think their Rocky Mountains are tall. Pshaw… 13,000 feet? That’s real cute, buddy… you go play on your little foothills now.

                My mother, who is from Guam, says that the Guamanians call their Mount Lamlam the highest in the entire world. But they measure from the bottom of the Mariana Trench. :)
                (how’s that for trivial bullshit?)

                Perhaps in your case it was an actual “hill,”Âť

                No idea. I’ve never bothered to walk up there and measure it. That’s just what it looked like to me at the time – I carried some preconceptions over from living out west, and ran headfirst into the general preconceptions people tend to hold out here. He was right – I am the moron who couldn’t see a mountain when it was pointed out to me. And so was I – it just looks like a hill to me. Neither one of us could see the plane truth. :)

          2. Funny thing. We officially live on the edge of the Allegheny Mountains. Lots of hills and valleys but not Appalachia level mountains. We have friends in Texas and Canada who come visit and are shocked at the windy twisty roads and ups and downs and cliffs and whatnots, and the fact that we literally live on a hill. But we know they are just hills, meanwhile our Texas and Canada friends are like, look at those mountains!

            And no, I have never been west of Ohio but I know our mountains are tiny. Which is part of why I am so surprised that people are impressed by them. Though I do hate being where it is super flat. Like Maryland where you have no frame of reference for distance.

        2. Agamo says:

          The quiet, […] the background hum of cicadas

          I have to say, cicadas are the very antithesis of quiet. I always have half a mind to torch the tree those assholes are hiding in whenever I pass one.

          1. Content Consumer says:

            It’s funny, the things you end up missing. :)

          2. Ronixis says:

            When I first watched Evangelion, I thought the sound of cicadas used in the show was being used as an unpleasant element of the post-apocalyptic future setting. I had no idea they were real.

    3. I find the beach to be very relaxing. The sound of the waves is calming, I love lying still and feeling the warmth of the sun on my skin, and my Nook tablet is bright enough I can read it in the sun.

      Of course, I’m more likely to go relax someplace like here but that’s cause I’m 6 hours from the coast.

      1. ehlijen says:

        I agree. The sound of waves is very soothing and paper books are perfectly readable in sunlight (when I want to read anything rather than just lie still and imagine stories or games of my own).

      2. Mephane says:

        As always, the problem is people. Beach itself is fine. :)

    4. tmtvl says:

      Being entirely too Japanese for my own good, I gotta say: if it comes to a relaxing vacation it’s gotta be either the beach or the mountains.

      Being slightly more universal: at the beach you’re disconnected from the world: No e-mails, Twitter messages, Hangouts calls,… to keep the stress up.

  10. MrGuy says:

    Glad you’re taking some time (relatively) away! Don’t worry about us. :)

    Topic idea: Most of us could probably rattle off half a dozen recent trends in games you dislike. Tell us about some trends (or maybe one trend) that you’re excited about in recent AAA games.

  11. Echo Tango says:

    Why isn’t there more variety in non-realistic graphics/aesthetics?

    I’ve seen Below, which has a sort of miniature/snow-globe look going on, and Return of the Obra Dinn has a weird green printing-press style. Other than that, it’s usually basic toon-shading for 3D, and pixely retro stuff for 2D. (I’m discounting stuff like Overwatch or Destiny, which is IMO realistic, but with holographic HUD stuff in the world.)

    1. shpelley says:

      One real short answer is “gaming engines.” Unless you are willing to spend the time and effort towards making a game engine (or modifying an existing engine extensively) to fit with your graphical style, you are better off sticking with one of the existing styles of games for the sake of stability usually. This is why some people can immediately pick out what game comes from what engine just by the look/feel of the game.

      1. Echo Tango says:

        Oi! Leave the answerin’ to Shamus! :P

        1. BenD says:

          “Not engaging” is not this community’s specialty. ;)

  12. MrGuy says:

    Last topic idea from me. Duke Nukem Forever. Half-Life 3. Compare. Contrast.

  13. Thomas says:

    I have been playing the Overwatch open beta this weekend, and I think that game is going to be fantastic. I’d be interested in your thoughts on that (its similarity to TF2, the craziness of Blizzard making a multiplayer fps, etc…). I also never got a chance to see the Spoiler Warning one-off episode of TF2 so if that ever gets uploaded to the YouTube channel it would be awesome. Glad you’re taking a well deserved break, enjoy!

  14. shpelley says:

    Hey Shamus, a couple of topics spanning multiple categories!

    Programming
    – Manager Time vs Creative Time: The struggle that causes (managers need to have meetings so they can do their job and creative people need long stretches of time to get anything done) Basically “my day is divided into half-hour to an hour chunks” vs “I need like 4 hours of uninterrupted programming to get this done”
    – The Programming of the Adult Entertainment Industry: Of all the industries, the adult entertainment industry comes up with some pretty interesting solutions to some specialized programming problems.
    – Programming in Media: Just a list of misconceptions and wildly hilarious depictions of what programming is like as portrayed by the media. Maybe some colour commentary on how it either hurts and/or helps people actually getting into the industry.

    Tabletop Gaming
    – “Pretend” to D&D to GURPS – A Sliding Scale of Complexity: A look at how, given a couple of common gaming situations, how a bunch of wildly different RPG systems (of your choosing, of course) tackle problems. Would be cool to do like a tag team with Rutskarn about this.
    – Your Ideal System: Would be kinda neat just to have a simple post about what YOU would consider your ideal RPG system. I’d love to see people bet on whether it’d be crunch heavy, story-focused, improv theater, whatnot.

    Video Games
    – Graphics vs GameSpace – In-Depth: An actual, in-depth article about this topic. Maybe show where different sweet spots you feel are between different genres (including maybe some counter-examples).

    ————————————

    Hope you like any of these!

  15. Corsair says:

    I feel like you kinda need to justify the name of your blog – Rutskarn is helping, but this is your site and I think the last time you talked about tabletop games I was still in my teens.

  16. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Write about the official death of piracy* and (hopefully) the death of drm that will follow.

    *Thats not a joke:

    The founder of notorious Chinese cracking forum 3DM is warning that given the current state of anti-piracy technology, in two years there might be no more pirate games to play.

    1. Ninety-Three says:

      Write about the official death of piracy* and (hopefully) the death of drm that will follow.

      Isn’t the point that piracy was killed by DRM? That means DRM is less likely to go away.

    2. Deoxy says:

      Unless there has been some ridiculous breakthrough in technology that I haven’t heard of, the only thing that might stop software piracy is lack of people interested enough to do it. Seriously, what in the world could have changed that would have this effect?

      (Note that I pay very little attention to any of this, as I don’t pirate, so maybe I really have missed something big…)

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Its all about cryptography.As computing power gets better,we can use ever stronger encryption,so that in order to decrypt stuff even when you have access to both the code and a semblance of a key,you still need loads of computing power to do it.So while it technically can always be done,we are reaching a point where realistically it would take too long,so no one would bother.

        1. Falterfire says:

          Cryptography is less about the power of the computers doing the encrypting than it is the advancement of the techniques used to implement the encryption. Encryption that’s far beyond the resources of any current computer to crack in a rational length of time has been available for quite some time, the trick is figuring out how to deploy it in a way that can’t be circumvented easily.

          As proof, I submit the SSL system that has secured HTTPS pages since basically forever. It’s been updated a few times, sure, but you don’t ever hear about “HTTPS cracked!” (With the notable exception of a programming issue with the implementation of a specific version causing the Heartbleed thing a year or so ago that was unrelated to the underlying cryptography).

        2. Deoxy says:

          If your computer can read it to USE it, your computer can read it for… other things. It might take developing a bit of a different method than is common now, but it’s like trying to keep people from keeping copies of stuff you let them see on their screen – if it made it to the screen, it can go elsewhere as well.

          Only significant changes in hardware could really do anything about that.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            You should really read about denuvo and crackers attempts to crack it.Theres no need for specialized hardware when this thing can stop them for weeks,months even.They dont even want to bother with it now.

      2. ehlijen says:

        Denuvo is being hailed as this breakthrough. As far as I’ve heard, the three big titles to use it so far are Dragon Age: Inquisition, Rise of the Tomb Raider and some EA sports game I don’t remember the exact name of.

        I’m told DA:I has been cracked, though it’s taken long enough for EA to still get all the initial buzz sales. The sports game and TR, last I heard, have been given up on by 3DM and no one else seems to be bothering.

        This is 100% hearsay, though, so make of it what you will. It appears cracking fame/interest might be just as tied to the initial release weeks as sales figures. If(!) that is true, DRM can definitely win this war.

  17. Cybron says:

    I hate the beach and don’t understand why people like it. It is the opposite of basically everything I want out of relaxation: hot, noisy, and and gets irritating particles everywhere.

    Give me a nice mountain retreat or even a lake over the beach any day.

    1. Syal says:

      You’ve got to go on rainy days when no one else wants to. It solves most of those.

  18. Ninety-Three says:

    I’m shocked to hear you spend seventy hours at this (I don’t mean to come off as saying “You’re slacking/inefficient/etc”). Looking at last week:
    An hour of podcast (not edited by you)
    An hour of Let’s Play (not edited by you)
    About 7000 words of industry column + Spoiler Warning words + Mass Effect column
    Editing a couple thousand words of already written LOTRO column
    Reading about 900 comments (plus however many spam posts you had to delete)
    Misc management (email, site maintenance, etc)
    Good Robot

    I’m curious as to how that adds up to 70 hours. Are you putting in 40 hours per week into Good Robot? Is misc management a way larger task than I imagine it to be, or are you reading and deleting thousands of spam posts?

    1. Shamus says:

      It generally takes about 6 hours to record the Diecast + Spoiler Warning. +6
      Diecast post always needs a bunch of fussing. Not even sure where the time goes. +2?
      I have to watch each episode of Spoiler Warning as Josh posts it to refresh my memory about what we discussed. Then I write a post to go with it. This might take 20 minutes or 2 hours, depending on how long the post is. Let’s say +3 a week.
      The column takes half a day to develop a topic, write, edit, gather images, format, etc. More if I need to research. +6
      Mass Effect takes a lot of hours. Just shuttling through footage looking for a required screenshot can eat a ton of time. And of course I often do re-writes or additions in response to comments. +4
      LOTRO is pretty light. +1
      Good Robot meeting happens every week. +4
      Reading and replying to comments is over an hour a day. +8
      Back-end stuff is really variable. Last week I spent like 8 hours scanning archives and adding new entries to the “More content” banner at the bottom of the post. There always seems to be tasks like this to do. Updating Spoiler Warning playlists, updating WordPress, updating plugins, dealing with dumb Patreon bullshit, updating the Spoiler Warning page. +6

      That’s a 40 hour work week right there, and I haven’t touched Good Robot, made music, read any news, or played any videogames yet. (Again, I realize games aren’t “work”, but they are hours that are spoken for.)

      1. Ninety-Three says:

        Wow, how on Earth does Diecast + Spoiler warning take 6 hours? Is there three hours of cut content every week, or is it just dealing with the perpetual technical difficulties associated with streaming + recording + group call + whatever paperclips-and-chewing-gum technologies hold the whole thing together?

        1. Shamus says:

          We need to go over the news of the week and figure out what we want to talk about. If we’re going to talk about news X but not all of us have read it, then the people who haven’t heard about X need to skim a few articles. We kind of discuss each possible topic for a few minutes to see if we actually have anything to say about it. We also catch up with what everyone is doing in their personal lives. And yes, it always takes a super-long time to get the recording going. We need to do sound checks, lag checks, get the room tone, make sure the stream is working, etc.

          Plus, it’s a voice chat with five people in it, which means there’s a strong “herding cats” effect going on.

          Now that I think about it, it’s probably closer to 5 hours on a normal week. Anyway, the whole list is pretty rough and individual tasks can eat more or less time as things change.

          1. shpelley says:

            The Spoiler Warning crew does a great job coming off as though it is very conversational and topics emerging naturally, but it takes a lot of work to do that. “No effort has been spared in making it appear no effort was put into it.” That’s why the best comedians always look like they’ve “gone off script” when they do their best work.

          2. Ninety-Three says:

            Ah, that makes sense. Say, what service are you using to stream gameplay to everyone during Spoiler Warning? I remember a few years ago you were on Twitch, and complained when they made that big technical change that added about 30 seconds of delay to the streams, did you ever find a better solution?

            1. Shamus says:

              It’s a private service set up by a friend. It’s JUST video streaming on a super-good connection. It only supports our small group.

          3. Peter H. Coffin says:

            ‘cept for the odd weeks When Something Happens and we get to Yakkity-sax through some horrible grind that’s not interesting to viewers or redo a whole second because SOMEONE forgot to pick up a quest before heading into the sewers… That could easily add a couple of hours to a recording session.

            1. MichaelGC says:

              Good point – I wondered at the time, actually: how long was the final recording session for KotOR?

              1. Shamus says:

                The whole play-through was just short of 24 hours. I imagine there would be maybe another half hour of extraneous stuff cut. (Dead spaces between episodes, fast-forward bits, etc.)

                1. MichaelGC says:

                  Aye right – and the final episode was 60 mins, and if I remember rightly included a fair bit of montagery, but I think you were all determined to get it done even though you were already doing two weeks in one. Campster didn’t even make it to the end – I think you left him passed out in a corridor somewhere on the way to Malak…

                  So I’m guessing the Diecast + SW ran a bit long that week!

                  1. Josh says:

                    The total length of the recorded footage for that last session (which also included one or two episodes of finishing up the Rakatan planet) was 2 hours 39 minutes. And that doesn’t include stuff bandicam doesn’t record, like the pre-rendered cutscenes. So yeah, about three hours for that final session.

                    1. MichaelGC says:

                      Thanks! – both for letting me know, and for putting in the time to get the show done originally. It is all much appreciated. Looking forward to FO4!

        2. kdansky says:

          Podcasts are a lot of work to do properly. One hour of content easily translates into 5 hours work, split between organisation, preparation, research, rehearsal (not exactly scripted, but you want to give everyone the list of topics and let them think about it), and of course editing (which takes always at least twice as long as the actual content, because you have to consume it in full while making edits).

  19. Daemian Lucifer says:

    I hate beaches.Especially sand beaches.Because they stand between me and the sea,which I like.

    1. Gruhunchously says:

      sand…coarse, rough and irritating…gets in everything…grrr

      1. Lanthanide says:

        But that was clever characterisation, since Anakin was from a desert planet!

  20. Collin Pearce says:

    I’m a big fan of the Final Fantasy series. Did you play any of them? I would love a Mass Effect style write-up of one of them.

    1. Syal says:

      It’s not as thorough as the Mass Effect retrospective (I don’t think the autobiography is even that thorough), but there are a number of posts on Final Fantasy 12 in the Long Long Ago. The Search bar is a lot faster than trying to find them by month.

      1. Shamus says:

        Ugh. The FF10 posts. Those are awful. Man, that’s something that needs to be re-written.

        Maybe when FFX comes out on Steam.

        1. Syal says:

          Oh man, I just realized if it comes out on Steam it might have the Dark Aeons in it and I might need to buy it again despite never getting past like the third Monster Arena boss.

        2. Retsam says:

          The traditional FFX eternal flamewar might very well give the Mass Effect one a run for it’s money. That’s got to be one of the most polarizing games of all time.

        3. Ask and ye shall recieve, apparently comming on the 12:th on Steam.

      2. Kathryn says:

        Shamus did indeed write about XII as well as X. The XII posts were kind of weird to me because, as I recall, Shamus didn’t like the fact that XII doesn’t do a bunch of things he hates for games to do. Like, he’s said before that he really hates plot doors (when you can’t go to a certain area for Plot Reasons), but he also complained that XII lets you go up against enemies that will curbstomp your party (e.g., the T-rex just outside Dalmasca. You’re really not supposed to attack it at Level 1. That’s why it’s passive – so you can get through the area without dying if you’re not ready to fight it). Seems contradictory to me. Maybe I missed something.

        It’s been a while since I read those posts, so I can’t remember now the other remarks that I thought were contradictory. I do remember suspecting Shamus had somehow missed that Vaan is the viewpoint character, not the protagonist. In some ways, it was like he played XII expecting another X. (PS, Tidus isn’t the protagonist either. Yuna is.)

        The complaint about the massive infodumps was totally legit, though. I mean, I like XII and will very likely buy a PS4 just for it if the remaster rumors turn out to be true, but I could not keep those frigging judges straight.

        1. Shamus says:

          I don’t care who we claim the protagonist is, it doesn’t excuse saddling us with such a lame, irrelevant character.

          Tidus is integral to the story, protagonist or not.

          Vaan is irrelevant, boring, and completely disconnected from the story around him. That’s fine if he’s a sidekick, or some fun flavor character you pick up late in the game, but we spend HOURS with the guy before the story gets moving, and then once it does you’re sitting there thinking, “Okay, eventually the plot will involve Vaan, to justify all the time it spent telling us his story.” And that never happens.

          1. Kathryn says:

            Yeah, the game really suffers from not having good character arcs. It is indeed a heavily plot-driven story, but that’s not much excuse for having basically nothing in terms of character development. The biggest problem character-wise is that the main six are always three pairs who happen to be temporarily traveling together, never a single party forming a coherent team. I think someone on this very site said something like, “There are characters in FFXII who have great arcs and development, but unfortunately, none of them are in your main party.” (I believe the same person also pointed out that Vaan is essentially C-3P0.) XIII has its failings, but the writers made a serious effort to give each of the main six a character arc and form them into a team – perhaps they learned from XII?

            (And yes, I liked XII anyway. I think what I liked best is that I am a completionist, and I felt that XII went out of its way to reward me for my playstyle. Most games give some sort of cursory reward to people like me who are, for example, compelled to fill in all the maps, but it’s usually just a minor treasure chest. In XII, however, there are several really cool locations that you would never go to if you were doing only the main plot, and they have neat treasures and interesting enemies. So I felt genuinely rewarded.)

            (edit: I also wasn’t left with the impression that we spent hours with Vaan…I haven’t played in a while, but thinking back, it feels more like we spent hours with Dalmasca/worldbuilding. Maybe I just wrote Vaan off as a zero immediately and paid no attention to him? If so, good instincts, me.)

          2. Jsor says:

            I’ve heard it described as “if Star Wars was told through the viewpoint of C3PO”.

          3. Benjamin Hilton says:

            I genuinely enjoyed Vaan because he scratched a really specific itch. To me the best heroes are the ones who become so by chance. For example I loved the story of Bioshock, until they revealed that the protagonist was originally from Rapture, at which point he became infinitely less interesting to me. I love the idea that he just found himself in this situation and had to deal with it.
            I liked Vaan because he chose to be a hero. Even Luke Skywalker, with his classic archetype story, was connected to everything from the beginning. Even had he not answered the call to action, he would have inevitably been drawn into the events.
            I’m about to say something positive about a transformers movie here, but go with it. At the end of the first act of the first movie Sam has learned about the aliens, and survived a battle between two of them. In the story, his involvement has been due mostly to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. At this point he could simply go home and forget any of this ever happened. In fact the girl with him wants to do just that, and she asks why he doesn’t. His response? “Twenty years from now don’t you want to say you had the courage to get in the car?”
            Vaan is in a similar scenario. Most of his early involvement is due to circumstance and his only connection is that a man the Princess Rescued was framed for the murder of Vaan’s brother among others. But to me it is, bar none, the most interesting kind of hero story. It’s the boy who decides that even though he is just a young human, he could still make a difference to a group of aliens. It’s the man who picks up the sword and runs towards the Dragon when everyone else flees, even though he has no hope of victory. It’s the Hobbit who leaves the safety of home, to help a band of misfit Dwarves reclaim theirs, despite the fact that someone so small couldn’t possibly influence such grand events. It’s the guy who aids the outcast Princess, because although she has other allies, one more certainly won’t hurt. It’s Finding yourself of the borders of Normalcy and adventure, and taking the hard road not because of destiny or circumstance, but by choice.

            I understand a lot of people find Sam in transformers just as unnecessary as Vaan, but to me this kind of hero is just the best. Sure Vaan’s writing can make him out to be boring, but if Shamus can forgive Tidus for being annoying, then I can forgive Vaan too.

        2. Syal says:

          I haven’t played XII, but being able to fight tough monsters is more related to DIAS gameplay than it is to plot doors.

          I remember FF2’s first quest took you past a strip of land that if you put a foot on, you would be up against monsters from halfway through the game who would destroy you. And then the starter quest town also had enemies from the halfway point that would kill you if you talked to them. It’s okay to have that stuff available, but you want to make it really obvious that you’re not supposed to be fighting it yet.

  21. Dragmire says:

    You deserve a break, have fun in your time off!

    Your description of beaches was pretty accurate for my experience in Cuba.

  22. Syal says:

    I’d like to see Calliope’s argument about it being the reader’s burden to make sense of a story addressed a bit more seriously than the comments did. In fact I’d like to see it addressed like that “why are barns red” scientific breakdown about how the universe will always make red paint cheaper than everything else.

    So. In a world where Jackson Pollack paintings are Art, why is Mass Effect required to make sense in a traditional fashion.

    1. MichaelGC says:

      I don’t know – it feels like to have that sort of debate properly, it becomes necessary to have it on its own terms, and that requires quite a lot of learning: you need to understand lots of meta-rules valid (or invalid) for all texts, and indeed for the discussion itself.

      The other option is to have the debate outside its own terms, and thus include the terms as up for discussion too, and this perhaps isn’t fair to the original material, as the argument will tend to become about something other than the game.

      PS I had not heard of this ‘why barns are red’ stuff, so thanks for that! :D

      1. Syal says:

        I only know about that barn one because someone on this site linked it a while back.

        I’m interested particularly in establishing those terms; “Why does a story need to make sense” is kind of like “why is 1 equal to 1 and only 1?” It’s so fundamental to the whole concept that it’s actually pretty hard to prove, because all the standard arguments assume it. So if you run into someone who doesn’t assume it, what do you say to convince them?

        But, I’m also the kind of guy who reads Supreme Court cases for fun. (90 pages of debate about who “the buyer” is when there’s more than one person involved in a purchase. It’s great.)

        1. MichaelGC says:

          Heh! – I do that too, sometimes, and it’s not even “my” Supreme Court! (Our Supreme Court – Britain’s – is younger than Rutskarn, so it’s understandably had less of an output interesting caselaw-wise.)

          PS I doublechecked to see if that was the first use of the phrase ‘younger than Rutskarn’ on this site and, surprisingly, it is not.

  23. Neko says:

    Topic Idea:

    Game genres. Genres you like. Genres you don’t like. Genres you get the appeal of but aren’t interested in. We see a lot of first person shooters – what’s less popular? Where did all the flight sims go? Genre cross-pollination (RPG elements, Roguelike elements, Facebook Games). What doesn’t neatly fit into any genre? How do game genres compare to film and book genres?

    But enjoy some mindlessness first.

    1. ehlijen says:

      I second this :)

      Most of my favourite genres are (almost) dead these days outside the realms of small time passion projects. I would love to hear Shamus’ thoughts on why some genres went, others didn’t and yet others merged.

      edit:
      And also which might return or be created if VR does become feasible and affordable.

  24. Ciennas says:

    I notice a consistent trend in your critiques. You hated Fables 1&2, The Thieves Guild of Skyrim, almost the entirely of Fallout 3, and now most passionately Mass Effect.

    In all of these, you loathe characters who are lidicrously competent but only when the plot says so. Reaver, Kai Leng, Mercer.

    So my question: You’ve been given control of all the studios. How would you correct the big offenders of yesteryear, and how would you suggest implementing protections against such a thing?

    Surely a company could more easily correct a Kai Leng flash and insubtantial characters than it costs to hear about it forever more.

  25. Deoxy says:

    People will happily spend 70+ hours a week on a hobby they enjoy… you just manage to make MONEY doing so. That’s the real difference.

    1. BenD says:

      The stuff he adds to the hobby to make it produce income is absolutelly work, and some of it is not core to anything I think we’d recognize as a hobby. Like administrivia.

  26. LCF says:

    I have to congratulate you. Vanity is technically far above the level of the usual TV/radio dross. It’s electro-pop and sugary, but hey. It would get old fast if every-one were writing Dark-Industrial and Aggro-tech.
    Long cold Voyage is very, very nice.

    Have a nice rest!

  27. Joe Informatico says:

    Why did a BEACH become the universal symbol for relaxation?

    Between 100-150 years ago, through the combination of organized labour and rising prosperity, it became possible for the first time for working class people to even have “time off” away from the city factories where they had to toil 5-6 days a week. And in England, that meant the seaside. Thanks to the new rail network it was easy to hop on a train to Brighton or another seaside resort in the morning, and be back at home that night.

    This is also around the time in Western Europe and North America that the older calculus of “tanned skin = poor farm worker; pale skin = wealthy person of leisure” shifted to “pale skin = working class factory worker; tanned skin = wealthy person of leisure”, provided it was the kind of tan you could get from spending a lot of time at the beach or playing sports outdoors. Tans associated with manual labour (“farmer’s tan, trucker’s tan”) were still stigmatized. So “beach vacation” is now shorthand for the kind of upper-class lifestyle middle and working peoples have been told to aspire to. (I personally don’t get it either: my wife burns instead of tans and doesn’t sweat enough so she hates the beach, and while I like lying in the sun for a while, I can tolerate it for about 2 days before I go stir-crazy.)

    1. houser2112 says:

      Do a Google Image Search for “bathing costume 1900”, and tell me how that helps to avoid “farmer’s tan”. :)

    2. JAB says:

      Except, before the polio vaccine, beaches became associated with catching polio. So like a lot of other things, cycles [large numbers of people, small numbers of people] were involved.

  28. Joe Informatico says:

    Oh! Column suggestions! Actually, I really liked the anecdote you wrote in one of the crunch columns, about how the devs stumbled across an accidental gameplay innovation they all thought was cool (throwing bad guys through windows), but how it impacted the whole development/publishing/marketing process. I’d be interested in a column that explores any way the industry could accommodate those kinds of innovations while remaining profitable and consistent.

    It’s said “great art comes from restrictions” and I generally believe that, but I think artists need sufficient freedom to be innovative and creative too, and something discussing how you effectively balance the two would be interesting.

  29. Loonyyy says:

    I have a suggestion for a column topic.

    I remembering reading an old column discussing the implementation of AI, pathing etc. I think you were explaining it in the context of a stealth game, and mentioned a search system, I think it was the A* algorithm.

    I was wondering if you had anything more along those lines, I’m interested in the implementation of video game AI, for instance, I was watching some videos about bot design in old FPSes, I think it was a bunnyhop video. They mentioned that the bots originally would target the player and begin moving when they came in sight, some bots would mimic player movements, some would ramble the environment. Later you had bots following power ups, or following waypoints.

    I was wondering about the maths behind sorting the algorithms, and how say, the AI for Counter Strike bots work. When you start a server on a new map, the game will run an algorithm to determine the bot pathing. It’s usually a good deal less varied than the official maps, the bots tend to do the same things. What sort of logic and algorithm goes into designing how they move through space? I’m guessing that most of it’s designed to path the bots towards the player (Especially for the aim maps etc), and I know you can make a path attracting from one object to another, but how does that work with obstacles, how does it algorithmically deal with those, do they just decide on a separation to maintain between them and the obstacle? Do they know the map layout or are they just taking the quickest path that doesn’t go through an obstacle?

  30. The Mich says:

    I’m impressed to the point of envy by such an amount of productivity… go get that break sir, you deserve it! ^^

  31. WILLROAR says:

    Column Idea: What is XML and its primary uses/history?

    My experience has been within video editing in which its a handy but always evolving file format (XML is an agreed upon base but stuff like FCPXML muddies it) to transition video sequences from one program to another (from NLE to color correction software). So whenever I hear XML from the non-video production side, I’m completely confused by any context or use. I know us video guys didn’t invent XML but I haven’t a clue its mysterious origins.

    Aide from Good Robot design, it feels like we haven’t had much programming content in awhile. And of course we could all crawl through wikipedia and random tech documents but it is always more entertaining to hear from someone as well spoken and thorough as you.

    1. tmtvl says:

      XML is a placeholder until more people figure out YAML is just better.

    2. swenson says:

      XML is one of those necessary evil things. No one likes it, but we all end up using it eventually, despite our best efforts. Then we go home and stand in the shower for hours trying to wash off the filth. “UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!”

      1. shpelley says:

        I’d rather use JSON personally.

    3. Deoxy says:

      XML – everything is tagged, both before and after. If you are sending very sparse data (that is, most available fields are empty), then it’s great. If you want it to be human-readable with no familiarity with the specific format, it’s decent.

      For anything else, it’s crap… but it’s STANDARD crap, and having a standard is an amazingly valuable thing (example: 3.5″ floppies were still standard on computers even when 1.44 MB was LAUGHABLY small), so we put up with it.

    4. bubba0077 says:

      Computerphile recently did a few episodes on the origins and history of SGML/HTML/XML

      SGML HTML XML What’s the Difference? (Part 1) – Computerphile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH0o-QjnwDg

      HTML: Poison or Panacea? (HTML Part2) – Computerphile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYwEyjZcY

      EXTRA BITS: SGML HTML XML – Computerphile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJyXtXGYkJ4

  32. MichaelGC says:

    @shamusyoung:
    I really liked Civil War, but boy howdy does that movie fly apart under fridge logic.

    Feel free to elaborate at inordinate length! I’m loving what Marvel are doing with the MCU, and I thought Civil War was great, but the whole time I had this slight feeling of something lurking in the back of my brain which bothered me, and it’d be great to see it get the full ‘right, then’ Shamus treatment. (Er … as long as that wouldn’t be stressful nor flamewar-ey!)

    1. Matt Downie says:

      Civil War nitpicks:

      Every time we’ve seen Captain America, he’s been working for a government agency or the military. Why does he suddenly have a problem with the idea of some form of oversight?

      Why did nobody say: “Tony, the only collateral damage that was actually our fault was specifically your fault for creating Ultron. Everything else was just us trying to protect as many people as we could under difficult circumstances.”

      Why did Tony Stark have so much faith in some kid that he immediately brings him into a big superhero battle?

      What was Vision doing for most of that battle? He seemed to be hiding behind the camera the whole time.

      1. MichaelGC says:

        Yeah, that’s the stuff! :D

      2. David F says:

        For the first 2, I couldn’t say why it’s not explicitly stated in the movies, but I think they’re both right. For Cap, every time he’s had oversight, he’s had to defy them. To start with, he wasn’t allowed to do anything useful until he went off on his own to rescue those troops. Then he investigated and found out that Shield was making Tesseract weapons, plus the shadowy people above Fury tried to nuke NY. Finally, it turned out that Shield was completely infiltrated by Hydra. For Tony, it all started with him not noticing his business partner was selling his weapons to terrorists. Later the Mandarin had a personal bone to pick with him. Finally, when he tried to fix it all, he created Ultron. So they’re both right. Cap needs the freedom to do what he feels he needs to, and Tony needs someone watching over his shoulder to stop him from doing stupid things.

        1. ehlijen says:

          The underlying issue is the heavy handed move to force the required conflict between the two main characters.

          It’s the prestidigitation the movie does to force the issue to split the avengers apart: the proposed law is presented as a final document with no room for negotiation. How did that happen this quickly? Why did no one from the avengers get to have a voice in this or hear about it being done? Why is so much of the world so solidly behind this?
          Because the story needs it. If cap had said ‘hang on, before we sign, can we talk about subsection 12c?’, the conflict wouldn’t have been as dramatic as needed, and if the answer had been ‘no, no more talk’, the issue would have come across as too one sided for Tony to possibly still be seen as a hero.

          So the sane option (compromise and negotiation) was quietly left out and the drama turned to 11. It is a superhero vs movie after all.

          If you allow for that, though, most of the rest hangs together about as well as any MCU can and sits well above the average in that field, gratuitous spiderman notwithstanding (he was fun, but also, why was he there? He contributed nothing to the central plot and ate a lot of screen time for someone who doesn’t).

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            Actually tony stank specifically says “Sign it,and we can tweak it as needed later.”

            1. ehlijen says:

              That’s not really how negotiation works, is it? Giving in completely first and then asking for changes and concessions?

              Who does that?

              1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                Someone who feels enormous guilt.

                1. ehlijen says:

                  Ie someone not considering the ramifications of their actions? I’m still not convinced that’s a reasonably example for the captain (to whom it was offered) to follow.

                  Either way, that line drop isn’t even close to acknowledging that the sanest option is negotiation, let alone a possible option. Once you sign a contract or treaty, that means you’ve accepted it as is. Negotiations are supposed to happen before that. That option would break the plot, however, so it’s quietly ignored. And that’s fine, the movie is good enough to entertain even so. But it is a plot hole.

                  1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                    No,a plot hole is when characters act differently from established in order to fit the narrative.Captain not considering negotiations,tony stank jumping in and deciding to tweak it later,thats all in line to how the two would normally act.

        2. Matt Downie says:

          Tony still has PTSD, never really resolved in the previous movies; this explains to some extent his overly drastic actions. Cap has good reasons to be paranoid about authority figures telling him what to do, given the whole Hydra thing.

          A shame these things weren’t really mentioned in the movie; they would have gone some way to make sense of the motivastions. Similarly, all you’d have had to do with Vision is show him being trapped in some kind of force bubble by Scarlet Witch and taking a bit of time to escape from it. Most of the problems are relatively minor; it’s just a shame they weren’t fixed in the script.

          1. Ninety-Three says:

            Tony still has PTSD, never really resolved in the previous movies; this explains to some extent his overly drastic actions.

            No he doesn’t. Tony still has unresolved PTSD like Tony is still being poisoned by the Iron Man suit (Iron Man 2), or like Tony decided that autonomous Iron Men were too much power and he should get out of that business (Iron Man 3). The MCU has never been great at continuity (New York got hit by ten 9/11s at once and the only evidence it ever happened, across the entire MCU and two shows set in NY is the occasional throwaway line to the effect of “Remember when aliens invaded?”), but Iron Man in particular has a bad habit of introducing these subplots then dropping them like a rock.

            1. ehlijen says:

              I never thought that Iron man 3 was Tony deciding that autonomous suits were too dangerous (if anything that was Avengers 2). Iron man 3 was Tony relearning that he is Iron man, not any given suit. Something he wanted (his relationship) was hindered by the suits, so he cast them aside. He didn’t need them, was held back by them even, and he could always build more if that changed.

              But the real kicker is where is PTSD in that movie came from: he nearly died alone in space trying to save new york from a nuke and an all powerful alien fleet at the same time. Now, in civil war, he is supporting the very government who launched that nuke in the first place.
              That doesn’t ring true to me. He of all people should know that that is not a good way to a safer world. But of course, civil war was all to happy to ignore any context of previous movies to force its premise into the story.

              (Btw, I’m ok with that. I prefer that each movie holds up entirely on their own, continuity be damned, than any of them only working as part of an overlong series).

              1. MichaelGC says:

                Yes – I’d assumed Tony was going to represent the anti-government, go-it-alone side, as that seemed to follow on from the seeming: ‘save the world at whatever the cost’ angle of Avengers 2. I guess then you’d have Cap & pals toeing the line, but perhaps not being too happy about it (yay, drama).

                But I guess they either changed tack, or just saw the logic differently – not that it really matters, I guess: as others have noted they didn’t do a great deal with the ‘whys’ once established. Or, once established and then re-established – this is perhaps a bit glib, but it felt like people’s motivations kept changing without that having much of an effect on their immediate actions and goals. Almost as if the motivations didn’t matter much … anyway, no, I need to see it again before I can sustain any kind of argument along these lines!

                (Which means I’ll have paid to see it twice, of course… Well played, Marvel, well played!)

                1. Supah Ewok says:

                  Look, I haven’t seen the movie yet (waiting to see it with family this weekend, after finals) but an entire city plus that speedster got blown the hell up directly due to Tony’s creating Ultron a year ago. The UN sanctions placed on the Avengers are even named after the event. Seems pretty obvious to me that rendering an entire city of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, homeless and jobless, is a big enough shock to cause a significant change in perspective. At least the nuke had the aliens to excuse it, what destroyed the city was Tony’s ego which has no excuse, and it totally makes sense that he’d be willing to place himself under the government’s yoke to limit himself in the future.

                  Cap on the other hand had already placed himself under the governance of an all-powerful government agency, SHIELD, and look how that turned out in Winter Soldier. Why would he want to be placed under the control of another organization? Particularly when that organization is the UN, where there’s not a more hapless, toothless mess of a political entity in the world.

                  1. MichaelGC says:

                    Right – I’m not suggesting these are crazy u-turns that don’t make a lick o’ sense! They just end up in places I personally wasn’t quite expecting, and actually perhaps it’s mainly that which explains the slight unease I felt despite liking the film a great deal.

  33. Dev Null says:

    A little Carroll for your holiday:

    There are certain things -a spider, a ghost,
    The income-tax, gout, an umbrella for three –
    That I hate, but the thing that I hate the most
    Is a thing they call the SEA.

  34. Here’s a question for you:

    How come in many games with complicated models, sometimes one side of it won’t have shadows at all. This happens a lot with hair textures and the inside of people’s mouths (if they have one), so it often looks like the underside of their hair or the inside of their mouth is GLOWING because it’s brightly lit when it ought to be dark.

    I’ve seen this in a fair number of games and it always drives me nuts. Why is this even a thing?

    1. Peter H. Coffin says:

      Mostly because stuff like that has “seen from” sides and “not seen from” sides, and no effort needs to be made to deal with the “not seen from” side, most of the time. So the hair gets lit from wherever, but since the hair is all there is (no scalp, no skull, no brain or sinuses) if you end up looking at the “not seen from” side, it’s just the inside of the outside, reversed.

    2. Peter H. Coffin says:

      You’ll also run into places where there are “surfaces” that are only viewable from one side ( and are transparent from the other), surfaces that are visible but insubstantial, etc. A lot of long-running games or games with long development cycles can be glitched to get you into places you’re not supposed to be and sometimes that’s really interesting. There’s often leftover testing environments and things along the periphery of game maps if you can find a spot where nobody expected you to fall into or a low spot that existed before the game changed a jumping mechanic or something.

  35. Falcon02 says:

    Topic Idea : Games as educational gateway/aides

    I know “Educational games” seem to fall into 2 categories “Bad Shovelware” (95% of the stuff) or “Grade school Nostalgia” (Oregon Trail, Mathblasters, etc.) Most of these have been designed as “Educational” first and “Games” second.

    But periodically we seem to get games that are designed first as “games” but with educational benefits and real world concepts.

    Kerbal Space Program is one of the greatest examples of this in recent years in my mind. It’s built as a game, using real world concepts. It’s helped raise interest in spaceflight, orbital mechanics, and has kick started people’s education in those topics. Many people have “self-educated” themselves on topics that were considered too difficult for most people. And for those who actually took classes (I was an Aerospace engineering major taking several semesters on orbital dynamics) it has helped to greatly raise their conceptual understanding of topic beyond the math and diagrams taught in class. All this from a game who’s focus is to be fun and interesting.

    SimCity is another example of this where people bought it because it was fun, but people used it to help teach and introduce people to topics of urban planning.

  36. Content Consumer says:

    What about, instead of individual column topics (that would still take work because you need to write them…) you could perhaps solicit work written by other people?
    I’m thinking specifically here of things like Shamus Plays, or Josh Plays, or Rutskarn’s adventures in Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim with Cahmel. I love reading things like that (and for that matter writing things like that too) and would love to see more of that here…

  37. I had been thinking the other day about the astonishing amount of content that’s been published here recently, and what a relentless schedule that must be. Enjoy the break, you have totally earned it!

  38. I would be interested in hearing about these coding experiments you allude to – those tend to be among my favorite posts here. I’m also curious about what’s been going on with Good Robot post-launch.

    Enjoy your break.

  39. NotSteve says:

    I really like seeing you talk about storytelling. Some possible questions:
    -What’s the best-executed story you’ve seen? What made it work so well?
    -What story had the best idea, but worst execution? What made it fail?
    -Are there any stories you think could only be told in video game form? Either ones you’ve played, or ones you’d like to see created?
    -What is a trope you hate? Let’s say you had to include in a story anyway. What would be the best way to handle it? (This is assuming it’s not one you hate just because it’s flat-out offensive, but one that could theoretically be handled well.)

    1. Zekiel says:

      I vote for these ideas! I love your (i.e. Shamus’) deconstructions of videogame stories (or story ideas, which I guess is perhaps more an appropriate length for a single column).

  40. Tektotherriggen says:

    Is it bad that I read your beach rant in the style of Anakin in Attack of the Clones?

  41. WILL says:

    If you want an easy way to generate content, you may want to look into streaming. It’s not exactly the most complicated way to generate content, and I’d probably watch a Josh and friends stream anyway.

    Really, I just want more Spoiler Warning streams.

  42. ThaneofFife says:

    Shamus,
    I’m going to build off of the System Shock folks with two possible questions for your column.

    (1) As someone who can’t get into the System Shock games because of the dated interface & graphics, I’d like to know what is it about the series that makes it great?

    (2) The second question relates to story-telling and (forgive me) ludo-narrative dissonance. I played through the main story in Bioshock Infinite about six months ago, and strongly felt that it was hobbled by being an FPS instead of an RPG. I mean, it seems like it had the potential to be one of the best games of the decade, even though the final game really, really wasn’t. So, how would you make Bioshock Infinite a better game, assuming that you keep Columbia and the main NPCs? Would combat be entirely optional? Would it be a stealth-first game? How would you tweak the story? Would you add multiple endings?

    TBH, now that I’ve written this, the second question/set of questions interests me far more than the first.

  43. Arstan says:

    As starcrafters say: good luck and have fun)) or gl hf))

  44. Christopher says:

    If we’re just suggesting any topic here, I want to see you write something about Spider-Man. I got the impression you’re a fan, and so am I, and I would want to read it if you’ve got something to say about him.

  45. Fade2Gray says:

    I’d love to see you do a Mass Effect style deep dive analysis of the Witcher games. What worked. What didn’t work. I realize they build on already existing novels, but that would be part of what makes the analysis interesting. How well does the story in each game hold up in absence of the novels?

    I’ve seen a lot of people say each new Withcer game is better than the last, but I think the story in each game is interesting for it’s own reasons. Geralt trying to piece together his life and make since of his fame/notority in the first game (plus the crazy time bending in the finale). The divergent story telling from radically different perspectives in the second game. The series of great vignettes in the third game (the Bloody Baron alone could merits several weeks of commentary).

  46. Ninety-Three says:

    I think being free from The Escapist is a great chance to do a dedicated Shamus Mailbag. Like the Diecast mailbags, only because it’s just you answering, you can answer questions with one paragraph, instead of a sprawling fractal tangent that takes twenty minutes to get through.

    Not that I mind the sprawling fractal tangents, Diecast discussion is good, it just makes the Diecast a poor format for actually getting questions answered.

  47. John says:

    I’d love to see a post or series of posts on graphics programming. (Suggested title: “Graphics, Man. How Do They Even Work?”) I’m thinking of a broad, language-independent look at basic concepts.

    I took my first programming course in elementary school and spent hours in junior high writing choose-your-own adventure style games in BASIC. Then, in high school, I realized that Prince of Persia was written (in frickin’ Assembly) by Jordan Mechner, who is my approximately my age. It’s terrible to realize at age 16 that you have wasted your life. (I sound bitter, don’t I?) Later in life I did some academic (statistical) programming. But I’ve never been much for GUI or graphics, despite my interest.

    1. Stormkitten says:

      If you haven’t seen it, this series covers some of the concepts.
      Project Hex

  48. Alex says:

    I’d like to see an article about your Kerbal Space Program, if you’ve got any cool-looking spacecraft to show off.

  49. Brian says:

    Column idea: Reflection on situational horror. I was watching a LP Of VtM: Bloodlines and thought about discussion some years ago about Shalebridge Cradle (Thief 3) and Ocean House. For the column: how have they aged and what other examples of the horror made possible by a non-horror (wibbling in terms of VtM, but the rest of the game is of a markedly different tone) exist these… ten? years later?

    I tweeted this at you just as a random thing — but a space for elaboration seldom goes amiss.

  50. RCN says:

    Column idea: RTS? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of you writing about Strategy Games other than Starcraft. The genre has been in a lull these past few years because: a) they are expensive to develop; b) they are considered “niche” and c) Tower Defense/MOBAs/Clash of X seems to cover the same basic gaming market while being much more profitable through “fremium” formats and much cheaper to develop, or at least each cover a particular “itch” from an RTS gamer (TD covers planning, MOBAs cover micro and Clash covers communities and base-building).

    But there are a few contenders showing up in the near future, like Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War III, Total Warhammer, Ashes of the Singularity, Ship Breakers and the ever-looming gossip about a new PROPER Warcraft. Not to mention that the release of Age of Empires II HD revived the AoE community and its been so successful the game is even getting expansions… almost two decades after it was first launched.

    Do you have any thoughts on the subject? Because Strategy is my favorite genre and it’s been saddening to me how neglected the genre has been in lately (especially compared to how much love it got in the late 90s). It seems like the last time I got anything worth playing in the genre was in Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire.

  51. Alchemist64 says:

    Topic ideas, Strategy Edition!

    What are your thoughts on the 4X Genre and how it has progressed over your time as a gamer?
    What do you think of the influence of Paradox games on other recent strategy games (i.e. there are now several in-development indie 4X games that cite Crusader Kings II as an influence)?
    Where do you think strategy games are heading?

  52. Mephane says:

    Column topic ideas:

    – Skinner box game design – analysis, critique etc.

    – Character stats vs character looks – Why do I have choose between looking ridiculous or having terrible stats?

    – Terrible antialiasing, color banding etc. – Why has graphics devolved in certain areas in the recent decade?

    – Black Desert Online. I know you have tried it, but you never shared your opinion beyond possibly a few inconsequential tweets.

  53. Tektotherriggen says:

    – Has making Good Robot given you any insight into why the AAA industry sometimes does the BS it does? E.g. you said you hate the way Dark Souls always makes you repeat big sections of the game, yet you made the (presumably deliberate) decision to make Good Robot players always restart from the beginning. Do you now have more sympathy for the Dark Souls kind of punishing gameplay?

    1. Zekiel says:

      I’d love to know this too – as someone who is a bit disappointed that I can’t keep progressing in Good Robot without replaying large(ish) sections of content again and again.

  54. Humanoid says:

    Josh! Stellaris stream! You know you want to.

  55. Cordance says:

    Do you have any insight to the GTX 1080? This is probably a diecast question but Im curious if you know how it will change things “under the hood” so to speak. I know you havent looked at high end graphics for a long time is it going to make it more “accessible” to non AAA people.

    Im curious about level design vs procedural and if you try to combine the two do you end up with a masterful art form or an unholy union of the two. How complex can you make a game before you start to see the seems stitching it together.

  56. Yummychickenblue says:

    What do you think of remakes? We’ve been seeing a lot of them the past few years, arey good for video games as a whole? On one hand they give new players to experience classic games with today’s graphics on the other hand it doesn’t really drive the industry forward much.

  57. Muspel says:

    Clearly, the solution is to draft your children into writing columns for you while you’re on vacation.

    1. Snort. They are all too busy writing their own stuff for their own audience, and working. But, they will be gratified at your suggestion.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        You can always pull the parenting blackmail:
        “As long as you live under my roof you will write stuff for my blog!”

        Or the better one:
        “I brought you to this world,so you have to write stuff for my blog!”

  58. MichaelGC says:

    Well, no need to rush on the ebook if you were planning on a simultaneous release:

    http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/05/mass-effect-andromeda-officially-slips-to-beginning-of-2017/

  59. NoneCallMeTim says:

    Hope you have some good time off. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I have a load of assignment deadlines coming up, so am making up for those hours.

    About a question:

    I have been playing strategy games recently, specifically the Total war series, and was thinking about AI.

    Tha AI in the game is based around units which are guided more or less in formation, but then there is an individual AI for people when they hit an obstacle.

    In a game, they set limits on the number of troops.

    This got me thinking:

    If you wanted to design a game with thousands, or tens of thousands of troops, what bottlenecks would you face, and how to overcome them by altering the system, as the number of troops increased?

  60. Galad says:

    “I just realized I wrote half a column about how I don't have time to write a full column.”

    This is still some interesting insight into your work life that we audience members don’t usually see, so it’s no worse than the usual column.

    When you get back, please feel free to mention on twitter or some such about how you actually goofed up from the fun, however perma-crunching job of blogging :) Finally, I can catch up on the final episodes of the SOMA season.

  61. Zak McKracken says:

    For lack of other contact avenues:

    I just tried, just for fun, to access this site via https. That gives me a warning about an unverified certificate. Apparently this one is listed for *.hmdnsgroup.com. But then, this kind of thing is reasonably frequent these days, with people just rolling their own.
    So I continue, and it sends me to a neutrally-styled almost empty page with a 404 message, suggesting that I contact the shamusyoung.com webmaster at [email protected]

    What’s this? Is someone actually hijacking the connection, or has this “just” been badly configured by your webspace provider?

    I’m by no means an authority on this but I think https certificates can be fairly easily obtained for free these days via Let’s Encrypt. I’d be thrilled if https became an option here (but yeah, I’ve no real idea how much effort that’d be to actually put in place).

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