oh man.  Eminent Domain? REALLY?

that could get interesting.

I understand the kneejerk "muslims bombed us, fuck those guys", but when you consider that part of the very REASON was their attempt to create a war and a sense of "us vs. them", it boggles my mind that people don't run at high speed into embracing liberal/moderate/average muslims, thereby making the radical/wingnut people using islam as their excuse even more marginalized.

The best thing to do in such a case, I would think, would be to integrate as much as possible, so any future attacks are killing muslims, jews, christians, atheists, and thereby strip away any sense of 'we are killing JUST the non-muslims' except to the truly wacky. 

also totally in line with this discussion, my friend just got back from DefCon and brought me a copy of Get Lamp. You need to see this, Dhex. The part where they are interviewing blind players of Infocom adventures goes straight to what we've been talking about.

That idea (grinding as sole expression of individuality & character) leads in to the world of the MMO as well, where the grind is the entire point of the game. Everquest, World of Warcraft, etc, all specialize in making the grind be the thing that really differentiates you from the other people who otherwise would look and act identically to your character.

and that particular Skinner Box is remarkably powerful (Says the guy who is still playing WoW due to the social connections, even though I don't enjoy the game-as-a-game all that much these days), and doesn't even have the melodrama or clear story arc that the JRPG usually does.

Dhex, have you ever played any of the earlier final fantasies? I'm thinking those had quite a bit of the melodrama & grinding, but they were played (I think) for the grinding, not for the drama. In fact, the whole nostalgia of those games for me was in going back and playing them again and doing all the crazy grindy shit that I never bothered with when I played it originally back in the day. (killing a million of those pink slime things to get the pink tail..i think i spent a week of bus rides to work just killing them over and over and over again.)

This has me thinking that the real issue is less about the melodrama, and more about the introduction of grinding into Adventure/RPGs as a method of immersion.

So I continued thinking about this, and I think the hyper-emotive Adventure that is not an RPG (aka, JRPGs) is the 'way of the future' currently due to the changes in display.

What made me think of this was a discussion of Cutscene vs. in-game and boxart vs. in-game on another forum. One example used was the boxart in an old Broderbund game (Deadly Tower) alongside the in-game graphics. And I had a minor moment of Remembering. Specifically, remembering when the Box Art really mattered. For games like Temple of Aphsai or the early Ultimas (first 4): that art was the kickstart to my imagination, and changed the way I viewed the graphics of the time. The gameplay was representation of my imagination, and so the 'stone faced' main character was ok, because I was layering tons of emoting and meaning and importance onto the game.  My internal landscape of The Bard's Tale or Wizardry was dramatically different than someone else's.

With Final Fantasy n+1, the graphics are sufficiently good that you are 'watching a movie', and in that case, having a blank protagonist to project your world onto doesn't work quite as well for a lot of people. It is in the proverbial uncanny valley, not of graphical quality, but in that place between make-believe-games where you have it all in your head, and the cinema, where it is all given to you on a platter.

So my hypothesis is that at some point in the future, as graphics top-out, and the experiential aspect becomes ascendent again, we'll see the 'blank protagonist' return to the fore, because people will find their internal landscape becomes the place where they're really playing the game, rather than watching the pixels on a screen exclusively.

It is also possible I may be overthinking this a hair.

I was thinking about this some more on my way home tonight. Last night I watched a VERY melodramatic movie from oldschool hollywood days, called "The Petrified Forest". It was an adaptation of a stage play, and it was super ultra melodramatic. but it made for a great experience as someone watching it, because I got to be heavily invested in the choices the characters were making.

Now if that is a game experience, it CAN work, but the problem is you are either stuck on rails without being able to really affect the game, or the developers have to do a pure binary tree (Bioware comes to mind, especially Jade Empire and Old Republic, where the whole game comes down to ONE choice at ONE point, and all other role-playing is thrown out the window), which is just a fancy hat for being on rails.

I think the real answer is to stop calling Final Fantasy type games "JRPGs" and call them Adventure games, which is really what they are.  Oh I long for the days when there were both "RPG" and "Adventure" categories in the software stores.

I think there's room for an RPG that is heavily into the melodrama, but there's even more room for the RPG which is not excessively melodramatic.

in Dragon Age: Origins, there are plenty of opportunities for melodrama, but there are also lots of places for the emotional content to get created as a result of individual player choice. Building up relationships between yourself and various members of your party, deciding you want to help this one, that one is a pain in your ass, etc, creates a real 'role playing game' versus 'theatrical simulation'. There are a couple of points of melodrama as big pivots for the plot, but I found them generally much less interesting than the little things that would go on in the course of the game.

When you have melodrama, you have fixed-point events that can only go one way or another. there's no room for subtlety. And that can make for a great gaming experience, but it's far from the only flavor at the table.

seriously though i only heard four or five minutes but who fucking writes dialogue like that?

I have a friend who SWEARS that Juno is one of the best movies ever and it's SUPER heartfelt and VERY funny and blah blah blah... (complete with the deep inhale alongside the hand held over the heart to indicate just how EMOTIONAL it makes you).

I watched about 10-15m of it once in passing and thought it was atrocious, but felt like the nicest thing I could do was to just shut my mouth and let it go. I'm getting (slightly) better at that.

Any of the various PC nerds on here given this a whirl? I grabbed it off steam on a whim, and am starting to do some reading about it. It looks like it's essentially EvE Online, but you're the only person playing.  Seems to have some potential if I can figure out how to play the goddamn thing.

Wait, you had to go to Coney Island before heading into Manhattan? WTF... where in Brooklyn were you coming from? Not that it really matters to be honest.

I think that had we been told "oh yeah you can't get there from here" we would've simply gone to another train.  It all started at the Ft. Hamilton stop for the N train.  Luckily I had a Sherpa with me.

Ok so I had my annual pilgrimage to NYC, and finally got to experience the awesomeness of subway construction.

"oh yeah, this train? you can't get on it going into manhattan. we have all the stops going that way roped off. You need to go all the way to Coney Island and transfer to another train to get into Manhattan."

I mean, swell, I got to see more of Brooklyn that I hadn't seen before, but that was pretty awesome.  Best part was the MTA dude at the station saying, "just go down to the next stop and cross over."  Which was a LYING LIE THAT LIARS TELL. And thus, a delightful New York Moment.

Also I learned that when a person from Brooklyn says, "Don't worry about it", that translates into conventional english as, "I want to cut your throat, but since I'm not going to talk to you or see you ever again, I won't do it."

The problem with that idea Dhex is that you call it a hobby, and I imagine he considers it a curse.

I had a conversation at lunch today where I tried to explain WHY these people do this. Their entire life/social view is predicated on gay being evil and something that will drive all of your friends, family & employers away from you, leaving you a wreck with nothing. So they figure out, after years of trying, that they're gay.

Imagine you're a pedophile (note: no, not the same as being gay, but for the cross-social-group purpose, I think it works).  Imagine you know that if you 'came out' about it, you'd lose your job, your family, your friends, everything. And you were TERRIFIED someone would catch you out being interested in children.  You'd repress it madly and wind up being one of the loudest voices decrying pedophilia as a horror.  And in the whole Return of the Repressed(tm) you'd wind up having compulsions that you would act on, until you eventually got caught.

On the one hand I feel terrible that they were brought up in that environment and couldn't see the door to the cage and got out.

on the other, they do enough damage that I don't really care at all, and enjoy it as they weaken the foundation of the things I consider socially abhorrent.

considering they've already had him tossed into a psych ward for 'observation' when he called in sick to work, i think the best thing he can do is just release everything (like he's doing) and GTFO of new york state.

I'm honestly more surprised that they didn't catch him at purchase #3 and stop him there with the '2 per customer' line. It's not like they can't see all the charges so far.

Insert the usual story here about Seagal's being choked out by Judo Gene Lebell.

and also the interview with Stephen Quadros talking about working on set with Mr. Seagal...

http://www.steven-seagal.net/forum/showthread.php?t=6673