Not a bad article on the whole, though I find some of the lists a bit weird - I don't quite get the Pikmin/Sims connection, and in gameplay Eternal Darkness is closer to Zelda than Resident Evil - zombie games are not a homogenous form. I also question the sports section, with its lack of warning about going backwards, and note that including Crystal Chronicles on a list for non-expert shoppers is an invitation to a total fuckup.
But basically a good methodology, and one that should be extended more sensibly.
The funny thing here is, I don't think you could have managed a more anti-Semetic statement if you'd been trying.
Except with girlfriends. You don't get them giftcards if you're expecting to find your princess in the castle. In return, I expect her.... to give me a gift card.
Or a sexist one, at that.
actually, the whole post
Or a selfish, assholish one at that. Personally, I hate getting gift cards. Why? Because it means that someone doesn't know me well enough to have an educated guess about what I might want. It's a "I hear you like those book things! Here's a Borders gift card!" present. Or a "Oh, you got me something... I guess I'll buy you a gift card." It says that you didn't care and didn't want to put any effort into the present.
Some of the best presents I've ever gotten were things I didn't ask for that someone saw and thought "Oh, neat, he'll like that."
Yes. This is clearly because Microsoft couldn't meet demand. After all, it's not as though they're one of the richest corporations in the world. It's hard for them to do a coordinated launch of hardware like this - they just don't have the money to mass produce.
In seriousness, I have zero doubt that the 360 is going to be in more stock than they're hyping. They've predicted 3 million sales in the first 90 days. With a Christmas season, figure 2.5 million of those have to be in December. Which gives you an idea of how much they need to ship in December. I expect a lot of XBoxes to come in around 12/18.
As someone who's been lukewarm on the Final Fantasy series, this may be the game that gets me to believe that maybe the beatings will stop. Honestly, a lot of this sounds like the influence of Enix over the company - the loss of random encounters, a faster-paced battle system, and a system based on player timing are all traits more associated with Enix games. Which I've mostly though superior to Square games over the years, so this works well from my perspective.
I would be shocked if this article is reporting things accurately. My guess is that Jimbo is talking about one of two things that have been being floated for a while. There's a proposal with code that is still generally unsatisfying to the developers to have an article verification system - basically, particular versions of articles would get rated as very good, so that articles that are the subject of continual edit wars between the sane and the crackmonkies could be read in the sane versions.
The other thing he might be talking about is the idea of a stable version, which would exist alongside the normal version, and just have the "good" versions of articles.
Or he could be talking about a combination.
What I do know is that if there is a major change brewing about how Wikipedia is working, it's not a change that Jimbo has told anyone about. And I don't exactly trust Reuters to know a whole lot about how Wikipedia works, so.
I'm trying hard to think through grandma's logic here. I'm getting something like, "Well, I was OK when he was having sex with prostitutes in a stolen car and then shooting them to get his money back, but now that I find out you can take out the murder and the car theft, I don't think I can support this game anymore."
Yes. It's dreadful for a continuing storyline. Which is why Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Alias, Lost, Veronica Mars, Gilmore Girls, and Babylon 5 all sucked.
Oh.
Wait.
DAMMIT!
Price control?
on
HD-Less PS3?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hm. This seems a bit of an odd move, unless they're dropping it to try to get back below the $400 price point, in which case it makes total sense.
I knew about the website. Basically, it was created by the author of this article (Mr. Poppinfresh) back in the days when Lum the Mad was the main MMOG rantsite. While the main LtM community slowly morphed through various iterations (Slow News Day, the first, being the only one with any sort of official sanction from Lum, then Player2Player, then Waterthread) Corpnews existed as the occasional B-site, kept alive mostly through the zeal with which its members believed that they were the heart and soul of the community around a site that died in 2001. When Waterthread died, the community moved onto F13, with the Corpnews people declaring the whole affair dead and resurrecting Corpnews because they were the true heirs to the long-dead site.
So, basically, it's a myopic vanity project. Which differentiates it from... virtually no other gaming sites.
(Full disclosure: To my knowledge, I am pre-banned at Corpnews. That is to say, my username was banned from forums prior to my even registering.)
Steak and Blowjob day, on the other hand, got saved, while Kerry still lost Ohio. Something to be said for picking battles where you make a difference.
And strangely, I haven't seen you back since the election. Wonder why.
I cannot express how honored I am that there's an entire Slashdot post moderated at +2 devoted purely to lies and false insinuations about me.
While we're clarifying the record, let's note that you fled Wikipedia just as an arbcom case was accepted against you in which you no doubt would have finally been sanctioned for the unending stream of personal attacks and trolling that you were submitting me to.
As for the apparently valid information, Peter Yarrow's conviction had nothing to do with the dissolution of Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Alternate explanation: At $250, the system hasn't generated enough interest among anyone but the die hard gamers. Sony won't crack that market at this price point. They need to make a price cut, and are going to have to wait on that - they can't cut price six months after release to get the Christmas season without a backlash. Which means that the PSP is going to have a very rough first year.
So because some of the world's most prominant philosophers think Derrida is bad, he is? I suppose pointing out that it would be trivial to find 20 of the worlds most prominant philosophers who have written articles about and supporting Derrida would be foolish?
And you misread what I was saying as an attack on the scientific method. I can't imagine an emotional/non-mathematical science either. You confuse identifying something with having a solution, or thinking a solution is possible. Coming up with a social system that doesn't privledge fact and rationality from within a social system that privledges fact and rationality is hard. About as hard as solving the Navier-Stokes equation, I suspect. Also, it is not that this system puts women at a disadvantage. It puts femininity at a disadvantage. The distinction is important.
And I didn't mean that the responses to Sokal were hard to write so they weren't written. I meant that they were hard to write and so they weren't any fun and didn't get any coverage in the popular press.
And, still, the relevence to what I said initially about video games is missing, btw. Feel free to pipe in any time.
Cultural studies professors did and have written responses to Sokal's attacks. The problem is, the things being written in the various fields Sokal attacks are hard. It's not surprising that their responses are also hard. The fact of the matter is, Sokal is basically taking a bunch of hard stuff and, among other things, complaining that it's hard and he can't understand it. This criticism would have no weight at all if applied to, say, physics. What is it about philosophy that makes the "It's dense and incomprehensible" argument valid when it's so manifestly not in any other field?
As for specific examples, is there one you particularly like? Perhaps the fluid mechanics one that Dawkins harps upon. Fine. The issue there is not particularly one about scientific concepts, but about scientific methodology, and, more generally, about the degree to which science is seen as one of the highest and most valued forms of truth in society. Scientific truth is, for the most part, viewed as being definable, numerical, constant, etc. These are also the traits typically associated with men when arguments are being made privledging men and masculinity - they're more rational, more logical, more consistant. The point is not one about how scientists are mean to fluid and thus to women, as Sokal would have it. Rather, it's a point about the fact that we consider problems "hard" and, well, "problematic" when they're difficult to pin down with numbers.
There's an added point that's not being made, but that easily could be about the fact that the term for turbulence and other studies of things where there is no feasable way to offer a numerical/mathematical description is chaos. Yes, the term is being appropriated and given a different meaning, but it's still worth going "Hm" about the fact that science calls things it can't readily quantify "chaos." And let's also add to this the degree to which women do not get advanced degrees in science - again, often because of stereotypes reinforced during high school about how they're not rational, not logical, and not consistent.
The point, then, is not a point about fluid mechanics at all. Instead, fluid mechanics is being used as a metaphor - a literary device, that is - for a comment about gender roles and the privledging of a particular kind of knowledge over emotion, which is associated with femininity.
Which all still fails miserably to answer the question I asked last time - if you only hold Sokal's critique as valid insofar as postmodernists are talking about science, why was it relevent to my advice to read the current debates within video game studies?
Well then I'm even more baffled. If you're not extending Sokal's critique to non-scientific concepts, where did this discussion even start? Because I certainly didn't bring in the science. I was saying that, before doing literate readings of video games and declaring that you've got something going, you should probably read the existing conversations on video games within the academic community. So I don't see how Sokal's attack on the flawed understanding of science is relevent at all.
Then again, I also notice that you're trying to make a straw man whereby, because Sokal didn't understand what he was reading, all scientists and mathematicians didn't understand. Which is an odd leap, as I know mathematicians who can and do understand Foucault. And, actually, furthermore, I should probably note that philosophers and political scientists are two groups of people for whom I have tremendous respect, and the fact that the can't understand the latest physics research must mean that it's all bunk too.
Yeah. if only Marxism were enduring in any sort of politically activist way in the academy.
As for Sokal... he presents out of context quotes and dismisses the rest of books as "unintelligible," when in fact he means "I didn't understand them." And he accuses people of intellectual fraud when, in fact, he's the one who has deliberately and knowingly tried to publish fraudulent results. Minimal does not even begin to describe my sympathy for his cause.
How much Derrida have you read? Foucault? Lacan? Deleuze? Althusser? Zizek? Adorno? Benjamin? How many of these people are you dismissing entirely based on a secondary source who's deliberately published false information in the past?
Hm. I didn't realize Dawkins was so blithely pro-Sokal. You'd think that he'd have a bit more sympathy for the fact that it's just as horrible (If not moreso) to deliberately send erroneous information to an academic journal than it is to fail to catch said information.
As for Sokal's book, having read it, I have to say, his utter failure to understand most of the theory that he's criticizing doesn't do any wonders for his argument.
As an academic doing work on video games...
on
Literate Gaming Analysis
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This isn't bad, for an non-peer reviwed fan journal. But if "literate thought about video games" is something any of you are seriously interested in, you need to join the conversations that already exist in academia. You need to read the ludology/narratology debate - Janet Murray, Espen Aarseth, and the like. You need to read other theory too - Lacan, Zizek, some Marxist theory - other stuff that will let your thought about video games fit in with literate thought in general. And you need to do more than run a fanzine - your work needs to be read by independent people who have no ego invested in the project.
Which is not to say that you guys don't have a good start. You're noticing the right things in video games. Your writing style is clunky at times, but that's certainly no crime in academia. But right now, you've got a bunch of cool observations about video games that you haven't learned how to connect into academic thought yet. For that, you need to read the guys who are already doing this.
(And you do all know about gamestudies.org, right?)
I just went to Moto tonight, and I have to say, I was impressed. Not all of the courses were great. I could have done without the carbonated orange. But many of them - New York Strip with braised pizza and garlic, french fry chain with sweet potato pie, and the three ounces of donuts were amazing, inventive, and like no other food I've had.
The strip steak was three straightforward slices of strip steak, with braised greens flavored to taste like pizza. The forks had garlic impaled on the ends to just give the whole meal a scent of garlic. The french fries were a chain of sweet potato french fries served with at two-dimensional sweet potato pie. (Just a sauce, basically.) And the donuts were a sweet drink.
If you're a foodie at all, this is a cool restaurant that does stuff nobody else does. Yeah, it's pricy. But it's an experience.
$240 is for the eighteen course tasting menu paired with wine.
There are three menus - a five course, a ten course, and an eighteen course, priced at $65, $100, and $160 repsectively. Each of those can be paired with wines for $40, $60, and $80 respectively.
So it is possible to eat, if not cheap, at least in the realm of "fairly nice" restaurants.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a bad article on the whole, though I find some of the lists a bit weird - I don't quite get the Pikmin/Sims connection, and in gameplay Eternal Darkness is closer to Zelda than Resident Evil - zombie games are not a homogenous form. I also question the sports section, with its lack of warning about going backwards, and note that including Crystal Chronicles on a list for non-expert shoppers is an invitation to a total fuckup.
But basically a good methodology, and one that should be extended more sensibly.
Hannukah is about giving family members money
The funny thing here is, I don't think you could have managed a more anti-Semetic statement if you'd been trying.
Except with girlfriends. You don't get them giftcards if you're expecting to find your princess in the castle. In return, I expect her.... to give me a gift card.
Or a sexist one, at that.
actually, the whole post
Or a selfish, assholish one at that. Personally, I hate getting gift cards. Why? Because it means that someone doesn't know me well enough to have an educated guess about what I might want. It's a "I hear you like those book things! Here's a Borders gift card!" present. Or a "Oh, you got me something... I guess I'll buy you a gift card." It says that you didn't care and didn't want to put any effort into the present.
Some of the best presents I've ever gotten were things I didn't ask for that someone saw and thought "Oh, neat, he'll like that."
Yes. This is clearly because Microsoft couldn't meet demand. After all, it's not as though they're one of the richest corporations in the world. It's hard for them to do a coordinated launch of hardware like this - they just don't have the money to mass produce.
In seriousness, I have zero doubt that the 360 is going to be in more stock than they're hyping. They've predicted 3 million sales in the first 90 days. With a Christmas season, figure 2.5 million of those have to be in December. Which gives you an idea of how much they need to ship in December. I expect a lot of XBoxes to come in around 12/18.
As someone who's been lukewarm on the Final Fantasy series, this may be the game that gets me to believe that maybe the beatings will stop. Honestly, a lot of this sounds like the influence of Enix over the company - the loss of random encounters, a faster-paced battle system, and a system based on player timing are all traits more associated with Enix games. Which I've mostly though superior to Square games over the years, so this works well from my perspective.
I would be shocked if this article is reporting things accurately. My guess is that Jimbo is talking about one of two things that have been being floated for a while. There's a proposal with code that is still generally unsatisfying to the developers to have an article verification system - basically, particular versions of articles would get rated as very good, so that articles that are the subject of continual edit wars between the sane and the crackmonkies could be read in the sane versions.
The other thing he might be talking about is the idea of a stable version, which would exist alongside the normal version, and just have the "good" versions of articles.
Or he could be talking about a combination.
What I do know is that if there is a major change brewing about how Wikipedia is working, it's not a change that Jimbo has told anyone about. And I don't exactly trust Reuters to know a whole lot about how Wikipedia works, so.
So because the store will make money if I sell them my system, I should not sell them my system?
Because...
Ummm...
I want my local video game store to go out of business?
I'm trying hard to think through grandma's logic here. I'm getting something like, "Well, I was OK when he was having sex with prostitutes in a stolen car and then shooting them to get his money back, but now that I find out you can take out the murder and the car theft, I don't think I can support this game anymore."
Yes. It's dreadful for a continuing storyline. Which is why Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Alias, Lost, Veronica Mars, Gilmore Girls, and Babylon 5 all sucked.
Oh.
Wait.
DAMMIT!
Hm. This seems a bit of an odd move, unless they're dropping it to try to get back below the $400 price point, in which case it makes total sense.
I knew about the website. Basically, it was created by the author of this article (Mr. Poppinfresh) back in the days when Lum the Mad was the main MMOG rantsite. While the main LtM community slowly morphed through various iterations (Slow News Day, the first, being the only one with any sort of official sanction from Lum, then Player2Player, then Waterthread) Corpnews existed as the occasional B-site, kept alive mostly through the zeal with which its members believed that they were the heart and soul of the community around a site that died in 2001. When Waterthread died, the community moved onto F13, with the Corpnews people declaring the whole affair dead and resurrecting Corpnews because they were the true heirs to the long-dead site.
So, basically, it's a myopic vanity project. Which differentiates it from... virtually no other gaming sites.
(Full disclosure: To my knowledge, I am pre-banned at Corpnews. That is to say, my username was banned from forums prior to my even registering.)
Online Smash Bros and a launch library consisting of all GC games as well as large swaths of the N64, SNES, and NES?
I could see this working well for Nintendo. It continues with their trend of fighting the console wars on their own terms. Not bad.
If you reread what I said, actually, I said that I made a difference in whether Steak and Blowjob day was kept.
Steak and Blowjob day, on the other hand, got saved, while Kerry still lost Ohio. Something to be said for picking battles where you make a difference.
And strangely, I haven't seen you back since the election. Wonder why.
I cannot express how honored I am that there's an entire Slashdot post moderated at +2 devoted purely to lies and false insinuations about me.
While we're clarifying the record, let's note that you fled Wikipedia just as an arbcom case was accepted against you in which you no doubt would have finally been sanctioned for the unending stream of personal attacks and trolling that you were submitting me to.
As for the apparently valid information, Peter Yarrow's conviction had nothing to do with the dissolution of Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Alternate explanation: At $250, the system hasn't generated enough interest among anyone but the die hard gamers. Sony won't crack that market at this price point. They need to make a price cut, and are going to have to wait on that - they can't cut price six months after release to get the Christmas season without a backlash. Which means that the PSP is going to have a very rough first year.
So because some of the world's most prominant philosophers think Derrida is bad, he is? I suppose pointing out that it would be trivial to find 20 of the worlds most prominant philosophers who have written articles about and supporting Derrida would be foolish?
And you misread what I was saying as an attack on the scientific method. I can't imagine an emotional/non-mathematical science either. You confuse identifying something with having a solution, or thinking a solution is possible. Coming up with a social system that doesn't privledge fact and rationality from within a social system that privledges fact and rationality is hard. About as hard as solving the Navier-Stokes equation, I suspect. Also, it is not that this system puts women at a disadvantage. It puts femininity at a disadvantage. The distinction is important.
And I didn't mean that the responses to Sokal were hard to write so they weren't written. I meant that they were hard to write and so they weren't any fun and didn't get any coverage in the popular press.
And, still, the relevence to what I said initially about video games is missing, btw. Feel free to pipe in any time.
Cultural studies professors did and have written responses to Sokal's attacks. The problem is, the things being written in the various fields Sokal attacks are hard. It's not surprising that their responses are also hard. The fact of the matter is, Sokal is basically taking a bunch of hard stuff and, among other things, complaining that it's hard and he can't understand it. This criticism would have no weight at all if applied to, say, physics. What is it about philosophy that makes the "It's dense and incomprehensible" argument valid when it's so manifestly not in any other field?
As for specific examples, is there one you particularly like? Perhaps the fluid mechanics one that Dawkins harps upon. Fine. The issue there is not particularly one about scientific concepts, but about scientific methodology, and, more generally, about the degree to which science is seen as one of the highest and most valued forms of truth in society. Scientific truth is, for the most part, viewed as being definable, numerical, constant, etc. These are also the traits typically associated with men when arguments are being made privledging men and masculinity - they're more rational, more logical, more consistant. The point is not one about how scientists are mean to fluid and thus to women, as Sokal would have it. Rather, it's a point about the fact that we consider problems "hard" and, well, "problematic" when they're difficult to pin down with numbers.
There's an added point that's not being made, but that easily could be about the fact that the term for turbulence and other studies of things where there is no feasable way to offer a numerical/mathematical description is chaos. Yes, the term is being appropriated and given a different meaning, but it's still worth going "Hm" about the fact that science calls things it can't readily quantify "chaos." And let's also add to this the degree to which women do not get advanced degrees in science - again, often because of stereotypes reinforced during high school about how they're not rational, not logical, and not consistent.
The point, then, is not a point about fluid mechanics at all. Instead, fluid mechanics is being used as a metaphor - a literary device, that is - for a comment about gender roles and the privledging of a particular kind of knowledge over emotion, which is associated with femininity.
Which all still fails miserably to answer the question I asked last time - if you only hold Sokal's critique as valid insofar as postmodernists are talking about science, why was it relevent to my advice to read the current debates within video game studies?
Well then I'm even more baffled. If you're not extending Sokal's critique to non-scientific concepts, where did this discussion even start? Because I certainly didn't bring in the science. I was saying that, before doing literate readings of video games and declaring that you've got something going, you should probably read the existing conversations on video games within the academic community. So I don't see how Sokal's attack on the flawed understanding of science is relevent at all.
Then again, I also notice that you're trying to make a straw man whereby, because Sokal didn't understand what he was reading, all scientists and mathematicians didn't understand. Which is an odd leap, as I know mathematicians who can and do understand Foucault. And, actually, furthermore, I should probably note that philosophers and political scientists are two groups of people for whom I have tremendous respect, and the fact that the can't understand the latest physics research must mean that it's all bunk too.
Man. The standards for humor have really gone down lately.
Yeah. if only Marxism were enduring in any sort of politically activist way in the academy.
As for Sokal... he presents out of context quotes and dismisses the rest of books as "unintelligible," when in fact he means "I didn't understand them." And he accuses people of intellectual fraud when, in fact, he's the one who has deliberately and knowingly tried to publish fraudulent results. Minimal does not even begin to describe my sympathy for his cause.
How much Derrida have you read? Foucault? Lacan? Deleuze? Althusser? Zizek? Adorno? Benjamin? How many of these people are you dismissing entirely based on a secondary source who's deliberately published false information in the past?
Hm. I didn't realize Dawkins was so blithely pro-Sokal. You'd think that he'd have a bit more sympathy for the fact that it's just as horrible (If not moreso) to deliberately send erroneous information to an academic journal than it is to fail to catch said information.
As for Sokal's book, having read it, I have to say, his utter failure to understand most of the theory that he's criticizing doesn't do any wonders for his argument.
This isn't bad, for an non-peer reviwed fan journal. But if "literate thought about video games" is something any of you are seriously interested in, you need to join the conversations that already exist in academia. You need to read the ludology/narratology debate - Janet Murray, Espen Aarseth, and the like. You need to read other theory too - Lacan, Zizek, some Marxist theory - other stuff that will let your thought about video games fit in with literate thought in general. And you need to do more than run a fanzine - your work needs to be read by independent people who have no ego invested in the project.
Which is not to say that you guys don't have a good start. You're noticing the right things in video games. Your writing style is clunky at times, but that's certainly no crime in academia. But right now, you've got a bunch of cool observations about video games that you haven't learned how to connect into academic thought yet. For that, you need to read the guys who are already doing this.
(And you do all know about gamestudies.org, right?)
Well now, that makes it all so clear. That's why the only media player I can reliably play all my files in is MPlayer!
I just went to Moto tonight, and I have to say, I was impressed. Not all of the courses were great. I could have done without the carbonated orange. But many of them - New York Strip with braised pizza and garlic, french fry chain with sweet potato pie, and the three ounces of donuts were amazing, inventive, and like no other food I've had.
The strip steak was three straightforward slices of strip steak, with braised greens flavored to taste like pizza. The forks had garlic impaled on the ends to just give the whole meal a scent of garlic. The french fries were a chain of sweet potato french fries served with at two-dimensional sweet potato pie. (Just a sauce, basically.) And the donuts were a sweet drink.
If you're a foodie at all, this is a cool restaurant that does stuff nobody else does. Yeah, it's pricy. But it's an experience.
$240 is for the eighteen course tasting menu paired with wine.
There are three menus - a five course, a ten course, and an eighteen course, priced at $65, $100, and $160 repsectively. Each of those can be paired with wines for $40, $60, and $80 respectively.
So it is possible to eat, if not cheap, at least in the realm of "fairly nice" restaurants.