It's just so sad that "The Tomorrow Children" is a PS4 exclusive, even though it appears to be a free-to-play nightmare, there is something about the idea of building communism (or anything) in a simulation. In fact it's a much better aspiration than "beating" a game, trophy "achieving", competing, speed running or collecting.
I strongly suspect that watching racing leads some drivers to drive more aggressively and recklessly.
Then they'll go home, play Call of Duty, go into work the next day and shoot their boss?
I may be being facetious here but how different is what you described than people who blame violent films and games on real instances of violence?
Many people drive drive every day. So a better analogy with Call of Duty would be people who handle guns every day. And I suspect soldiers and cops, NRA nutters and gang-bangers absolutely use some opportunities to channel their movie/CoD fantasy at times. Opportunity being the main enabler and lack of opportunity the main deterrent.
Growing up with Schumi winning titles for Benetton and Ferrari, at some point I decided that Formula one and all racing is a pointless stupid "sport", being a race fan you had to spend hundred bucks a day on the for profit cart tracks that sprung up in every city. I strongly suspect that watching racing leads some drivers to drive more aggressively and recklessly.
But it is an interesting entry point to contemplate driving physics, strategy, risk taking and all that. I greatly appreciate the open minded approach Danny and Drew take. Also I'm perfectly happy to listen in on racing and F1, only occasionally catching the race when flipping channels.
Listening to the podcast first my interest was piqued, Nintendo and Nvidia that's a win-win, because they have been pouring money into their Nvidia Shield, and the Shield Tablet and streaming for some time, without commercial success. Nvidia tech seems a generation ahead of the industry, though Shield Tablets have even been recalled due to battery overheating. Nvidia also has been touting XBox 360 performance with their mobile chips which are anywhere between 4.5 and 15 watts. That is impressive in a way, but still there is a huge gap to ~150 W consoles. Even if you double or half those numbers twice for the genrational jumps they are still not that close. Skyrim (2011) tells the tale, in 30 FPS probably.
I don't understand how they could get it to work like the Wii U with the screen pad as a controller running on a TV, seems impossible if the CPU is in the tablet. There won't be a touchscreen+TV mario maker on this transforming monstrosity.
Grandmothers and women in general really good at that: pretending to care! Surprisingly that doesn't translate at all into a desire to play, after all playing is pretese of sorts. Pretending to be a hero or this little figurine on the screen, or the commander of an RTS army.
This has nothing to do with gambling, which is a whole different psychological exploit and actually isn't a play at all, in a sense of play-pretend. Exploitative games often combine gambling and play to some degree, thus sullying the experience, but we should be careful to not conflate the fascination of being someone else and the fascination with random, surprising outcome, particularly if one doesn't have a mathematical understanding of randomness, but some naive notion of luck, fate and similar nonsense.
As gamblers we imagine us, ourselves winning all the time, in games we project us into a different virtual circumstance. To put it bluntly the directions are reversed: as gamblers we project events in which we win big into reality, while as gamers we project ourselves into the events of a game.
Somewhere there is also a middle ground of puzzle, sudoku, match three, solitaire type stuff of distraction/mental challenge, which is still appealing to grandparents, but the appeal of puzzle games instantly wanes when someone is watching.
Certainly without those years of early access, and the millions that the game raised upfront, it wouldn't have fine tuned economy, clever choices, balanced weapons but this game also from the start had too few ideas (and plenty of ideas got thrown out).
Ultimately it fails at trying to square the circle of creating tight gameplay in a procedurally generated world. There is no emergent gameplay what so ever, liquids are boring NPCs mainly ignore one another. There is no scarcity, no conflict, no content.
The execution is alright, this game could have used somebody more imaginative or ambitious at the helm. It's pretty obvious that they sat on the money for all those years and used it to create other perhaps better games, Starbound just got some finishing touches some trim and a handful of missions.
Giving developers money upfront seems to remove some of that do-or-die motivation that is perhaps required to create anything of worth.
@mostlysquares: I'm personally excited for how VR could be applied to exercise and travel markets. 360 degree bus tours of foreign countries? Running through the streets of a famous city while on my treadmill at home? Sign me up.
The lack of forward movement makes treadmill exercises insufferable and instinctually stupid, to the point that I don't think people exist that use these regularly at home. It's different in public...
VR could help potentially, but sweat and headset weight will make it very messy, probably have to wait for a waterproof model.
There were some projects developed to "cure" child obesity that combined some kind of excercise rig with a video game console. They all failed miserably, perhaps obviously but actually for various reasons, biggest of them being the actual cause is bad nutrition.
I can't disagree with the comments made about Trump on the podcast but I really dislike the way it was said. Honestly I feel the reason that guy has so many supporters is because the people that are against him express their stance in a very superior, we need to educate the dumb masses, way. I think treating other people like that just creates more segregation and increases hatred on both sides of the debate. No matter how uneducated a group of people might seem they should still be treated as equals and not someone that needs to be saved by the enlightened. I know that doesn't work in every situation but that's my two cents.
Now I'll go back to never talking about politics...
This.
I fell off 8-4 Play over a year ago for no real reason and this was my first one since. If I wanted to listen to people -- who don't even currently live here at that -- fanning themselves over Trump instead of discussing Japan, games, and Japanese games I'd just watch the news.
Plenty of rich candidates ran for president, but we see billionaires win elections in deeply troubled countries, like the Ukraine. Hence the worldwide concern.
There is nothing valuable or intelligent one can say about a candidate personally, it is a failure of the system that election debates are so personality driven. Aren't they merely representatives, after all? As a consequence elections are won by charismatic face-men. Interesting political discussion that deals with the intricacies of influence, economic cause and effect, solutions for the various challenges are completely drowned out by a base desire to attack candidates (ad hominem).
Even folks who know better are tempted and encouraged by the media to sink to this lowest level of discourse, judging other people.
I suspect political debate is fine (even though its often a taboo subject at family gatherings, say), as long as it isn't about personalities.
Jeff used to be a somewhat level-headed individual, with a cautious approach.
New judgmental and opinionated Jeff I don't like, asserting truly ignorant statements about aspartame with ridiculous arguments, like "they tested the shit out of it". I think Dan, Drew and Brad need to step up and call out his BS. That's just a thing that happens people get caught up in their own BS-rhetoric, but then someone close has to step in.
It took the cigarette industry 50 years of deliberate protraction to admit that cigarette smoke causes cancer. And the sugar industry has yet to admit, that increased sugar content of "ready to eat" products, such as snacks, fast food and convenience products, is responsible for both the obesity and type-2-diabetes worldwide epidemics.
The effin' Soda industry is squeezed from all sides, for causing Diabetes type 2, obesity, Mountain Dew mouth and cancer with Aspartame, which was shown in independent animal trials as early as the 80's, but the Reagan government deregulated the shit out of that. Soda makers would never give up anything if there wasn't enough reason.
Whatever the FDA recommends, goes directly to WHO and many governments save themselves the trouble "If the World Health Organizations says something is safe to consume X kg a day, it's probably safe".
Anyway even if we had artificial sweeteners that were safe in any dose to consume, they still don't correct the morbid habit/behavior of eating too much sweetened stuff, just like vaping doesn't break nicotine addiction.
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