FtttG
User ID: 1175
As they have explicit win-states, I consider immersive sims a genre of video games, whereas sandboxes like Minecraft are more akin to software toys, per Will Wright's distinction.
I'd also dispute whether a game whose environment is wholly procedurally generated can be classed as an immersive sim, as the genre typically involves the simulation of a specific space rather than the simulation of a kind of space. System Shock 2 takes place on the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker, not on a generic spaceship whose constituent spaces can be arranged in any arbitrary order.
Five years ago I tried playing Deadlight, a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer set during a zombie apocalypse, originally released for the XBox 360 in 2012. The PC port was hopelessly broken and routinely freezed and crashed, so I abandoned it after half an hour.
I was curious if the devs had finally got around to patching it in the interim, so I reinstalled last night and was pleasantly surprised to find not only that they'd done so, but it's surprisingly absorbing and fun, to the point that I played about two-thirds of it in one sitting. At times the graphics are so stylised and the camera zoomed out so far that it can be difficult to discern exactly what you're looking at, resulting in unforeseeable deaths and trial-and-error gameplay, but the checkpoints are distributed so generously I didn't really mind so much. The player character is vulnerable and can easily become overwhelmed if there are more than two or three zombies, leading to moments of panic when you're trying to leg it and hoping your stamina metre will hold out long enough for you to scale a fence to safety. Cracking stuff.
What really lets it down is the writing. I've never really cared for zombie movies as a genre, and even the ostensible pinnacles of the genre rarely seem to transcend their fate as a collection of the same handful of tropes rearranged in subtly different patterns (I recently rewatched 28 Days Later and found that it has major pacing and tonal problems, with a flabby, aimless second act bookended by an iconic opening and strong conclusion; the only reason Train to Busan received the acclaim it did is because of people who want to claim they watch "foreign films" without actually venturing outside of their generic comfort zones; I will grant that Night of the Living Dead is a legitimate classic of indie cinema). But even given this remedial standard, Deadlight falls short, by virtue of being set in the US in the 1980s and yet very clearly having been written by a non-native English speaker who never bothered to ask an American-born person to spot-check his dialogue for idiomatic incongruencies. There's a bit where a character called the Rat Man asks the player character to rescue his son, in exchange for which the Rat Man will help the player character information track down his missing friends, to which the player character replies "an eye for an eye, huh". For fuck's sake — "an eye for an eye" does not mean "quid pro quo".
Update: having now finished it, it was serendipitous that I mentioned 28 Days Later.
Immersive sims simulate a virtual environment with a high degree of systems-oriented internal consistency, and unlike most games which do this (e.g. SimCity) they attempt to immerse the player in this simulated world by having them control a specific individual therein (typically from a first-person perspective), as opposed to having them observe the virtual environment from a God's-eye-view.
In general I vastly prefer genre tags which offer some kind of description of the game's mechanics: genre tags of the form "games that are like X" are useless because they presume familiarity with X, which is an intrinsically more insular naming convention than just describing how the game plays. Does anyone seriously think "Doom clone" is preferable to "first-person shooter", particularly when most FPSs have so little in common with the original Doom? I'd love if someone could come up with a better name than "roguelike" — I'd hazard a guess that the majority of people who use the term are unaware the term is a reference to a specific game, never mind having played it.
In the case of Prey, however, I'll grant that, based on the two or three hours I spent playing it, "shocklike" is a perfectly accurate description.
FtttG
19d ago
Meta: feature request
Is there a quick and easy way to type an em-dash here? If there isn't, might I suggest implementing Google Docs' solution, wherein two consecutive hyphens will produce an em-dash?
FtttG
19d ago
About to start Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, having previously enjoyed adored his novel Never Let Me Go.
In between reading full-length books I've been reading some of the Father Brown stories. So far I've read "The Blue Cross", "The Secret Garden" and "The Queer Feet". They're okay.
Sounds like my cup of tea, wishlisted.
Last night I gave Prey from 2017 a try, playing it for a few hours. It wasn't bad, but I agree with some people who argued it's so beholden to its immediate influences (System Shock 2 and BioShock) that it maybe doesn't really have much of an identity of its own. I like immersive sims, but the very fact of their relative open-endedness sometimes makes me feel a bit overwhelmed: I feel anxious that I'm playing them "wrong" unless I meticulously search every single drawer and container.
Just to emphasise that school shootings were very much a "thing" prior to Columbine and not limited to the US:
- Dunblane massacre (Scotland, 1996; 18 killed incl. perpetrator)
- Aarhus University shooting (Denmark, 1994; 3 killed incl. perpetrator)
- Eppstein (Germany, 1983; 6 killed incl. perpetrator)
- Dormers Wells (England, 1987; 3 killed)
- Sofia University (Bulgaria, 1974; 8 killed)
There were plenty I omitted because of low body counts, and the majority in that article took place post-Columbine (it's plausible that some, but far from all, were copycat massacres directly inspired by Columbine itself). I found your claim that "nobody" commits school shootings outside of the US particularly galling in light of the Dunblane massacre, easily one of the most notorious British crimes of the twentieth century (ranking up there with Rosemary & Fred West, Ian Brady & Myra Hindley, and the Yorkshire Ripper) and which was the direct impetus for sweeping gun legislation.
No one disputes that the Columbine massacre is the most infamous school shooting since the concept came into existence (in spite of its paltry body count, less than half of the Virginia Tech shooting), that it inspired numerous copycat crimes, or that it created a "script" for such massacres that many copycats have been following (consciously or unconsciously) to this day. But the concept of a school shooting did exist prior to Columbine. As to the question of their relative frequency within the US vs. without, they're so rare in absolute terms that the difference between the US and other industrialised regions is nowhere near as dramatic as the availability heuristic would have you believe. For example, there have only been two school shootings in the US so far this year, from a population of 330m, which gives us a per capita rate of 0.00061/100k. The total population of Europe is more than double the population of the US at 751 million. With exactly the same rate of school shootings in the US as in Europe, we would expect 5 school shootings to take place in Europe this year. Instead, there have been two school shootings with a combined body count of 21, along with a third in which one person was wounded but no one killed (and a fourth which Wikipedia classifies as a school shooting but really looks more like a political assassination which incidentally happened to take place at a school). Only counting the first two incidents, Europe's school shooting rate this year is 0.000266/100k; including the third, 0.000399/100k. Ergo, the US's school shooting rate is anywhere from 1.5 to 2.3 times more frequent than Europe's: a significant difference, but the idea that school shootings are some crazy phenomenon completely unique to the US and unheard of elsewhere is not borne out by the evidence.
FtttG
20d ago
Okay, notice when the shot happened: Tyler specifically waited for Kirk to badmouth transpeople before firing his shot.
As Brendan O'Neill pointed out, Robinson was 200 yards from Kirk. It's profoundly unlikely he was able to hear what Kirk was saying.
FtttG
22d ago
Occasionally I'll see a comedy bit which I don't agree with, but which is executed so well I can't help but crack a smile: https://instagram.com/reel/DM0ZSGfu6dk/
FtttG
22d ago
My colleague voiced the false flag theory a couple of hours ago. He jumped to the same conclusion after Crooks shot Trump.
FtttG
22d ago
On Substack, someone shared a clip where Charlie Kirk is on a campus and a person approaches him asking him in a rather hostile tone of voice why he's there, and claims that his presence on the campus constitutes "emotional violence".
People often point out when woke people use hyperbolic framings like this, in order to mock them for their perceived emotional fragility: "poor little snowflake, you think words are violence, boo hoo!" I don't think that at all. After all, if you've collapsed the distinction between words and violence (never mind words: if you've declared that a person being physically present on a location without opening his mouth can be an act of "violence"), it logically implies that you are entitled to respond with violence. They've reinvented the concept of fighting words using the idiom of therapy-speak. This is a particularly frightening component of the woke worldview which, in my view, does not get nearly enough attention.
All of this is doubly ironic, of course, because woke people for the most part ridicule the idea of needing a firearm for home defense and mock conservatives who think they're entitled to shoot anyone who trespasses on their property.
My aunt had a friend with a very high-pitched voice, to the point that, when he answered their landline phone, people would often mistakenly think his wife had answered the phone. She mentioned he was planning to undergo this procedure, although I don't know how it panned out for him.
FtttG
22d ago
Mid-2010s Scott would have written up a classic post called like "Beware Proxy Metrics" or some such.
I've many disagreements with trans activists but I really don't think this is like a hormones cause radicalization thing.
Nor do I. I'm confident the radicalisation pathway looks a lot more like "spending a lot of time in online echo chambers in which violent 'resistance' is seen as an urgent necessity" as opposed to anything to do with medical transition itself. That being said, testosterone does increase aggression - I don't know if we know for a fact that the shooter in Nashville had ever taken T, but given the demographic it seems likely, and maybe in the counterfactual world where she hadn't taken it, she doesn't go through with the shooting.
FtttG
22d ago
Sure, the people who get radicalised by online Trantifa fora are a heavily selected bunch, much like the lonely frustrated young men who get radicalised by incel fora or far-right fora. I don't recall ever even suggesting that the pipeline looks like "normal person -> trans -> assassination/mass shooting". While the proportion of people identifying as trans has shot up in recent decades, I'm pretty sure virtually everyone doing so is still "weird" on one axis or another. (I'm not including the NBs here.)
Yeah, that's the argument I've made whenever the topic comes up: defendants can use any ridiculous defense they want to. Pretty much everyone agrees that serving as your own defense attorney or taking the stand as a defendant are spectacularly bad ideas, but no one can actually stop you from doing either if you're really determined to. Multiple defendants have used the "Matrix defense": I don't believe anyone has ever used it and been acquitted (the closest they came was a ruling of not guilty by reason of insanity), but if someone really wants to, why stop them?
More than one?
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