This was a thoughtful, funny, well-produced half hour about a game I've always liked, but now probably love.
I'm going to admit it: I found a few of the puzzles in this game a little challenging. Not to say it isn't a "walking simulator" in most respects, and I did "beat" the game without too much effort, but it's not exactly pressing a button to win. You have to, like, interface with the world to proceed and stuff, and you have to think about where to search, what to examine, and how to think about it. That's interactive.
When people say "there's no gameplay," my guess is they really mean to say "there's technically gameplay but it isn't challenging or complex enough for me"or"you can't affect the story in major ways so you don't feel a part of the experience."
While you can't affect the main story trajectory, you can define the smaller moments of dialogue in the game. Not everyone will have the same small moments. Those moments mattered to me. Not just the overall arc.
Trauma, escape, dissatisfaction, commitment... these are the themes Firewatch explores, I think successfully. And maybe you hate this kind of game. But just like hating pop art or impressionism doesn't make it "not art," hating Firewatch doesn't make it not a game.
I went through the same thoughts as Jeff trying to take off that plastic cover. It's by far the most stressful part of the process. It isn't intuitive, and the instructions in the Sony video are misleading. The "left thumb" isn't used to slide the cover. It's all about intense lateral pressure from the right hand, with that corner SLIGHTLY raised.
The first time you do it, it really gives you the impression you're going to snap the thing in half.
This is one of my new favorite shows, not just on Giant Bomb but anywhere. This week the trio (quartet with VoidBurger!) did a tricky dance through a loaded topic.
What gets me most is (yep) the hypocrisy of these policies. Greed propels content providers to take action, and that action has a scorched earth effect that leaves countless legal workers without a livelihood. These are the people who built their brand.
As for show recommendations, It would be cool to see Tamoor or Lucy to take on with the weird world of artifically-generated video content. You know: those bizarre YouTube or TikTok videos with the computerized voice talking over some video clip, sometimes with bizarre captions. I'm kind of in the Bakalar camp on this one: I don't understand what's going on there.
This was a fun episode and the conversation was much more focused this time around. It was smart to feature shorter videos. Also, the cutaways to flat Dan (tm) are priceless. Bakalar did a great job of explaining these ideas.
I wish the Fermi paradox had been outlined a bit better. They kept starting and stopping the video and so some of the finer concepts got buried, especially the idea that if advanced life naturally occurs throughout the universe, a percentage of civilizations would have been around long enough (long before us) to either (1) send out signals that we could (and would) have received by now, or (2) present visual evidence of being an advanced spacefaring civilization, e.g. visual evidence of star harvesters, artificial signals from galactic networks. (Evidence of aliens is not just about spacecrafts coming to Earth, which as the video pointed out, is pretty unlikely anyway in the absence of FTL since the universe is expanding and may never stop expanding).
The idea that advanced civilizations always die out before reaching a phase where these signals and cues would be observable? They can't be hand-waved away. Unless EVERY advanced civlization always evolves to a point where they learn how to be truly invisible to other life forms, it's a true paradox. My lame theory is that life fundamentally devours the life-giving forces of the planets on which they evolve. And then, inevitably, every civilization creates its own alien version of Twitter and accelerates the process of extinction.
Oh and everyone who hasn't yet should go out and read The Three-Body Problem. I think Dan might even enjoy that one.
Dan seeks full comprehension of concepts from the very beginning. He's not satisfied with holding a basic idea (e.g. moving dots and lines to signify oxidation) and letting the details fill in later on. He needs to visualize it "as it exists in reality." Like eating a large pizza in one bite. This impatience sometimes gives the impression that he doesn't know a lot, but I'd much rather learn a concept from Dan (after he's fully digested it) than most of my high school teachers.
Lucy drove a great episode with more stellar chemistry between the trio. I laughed! I learned! As others have said, the production is really fun, too.
If you drew a threatening doodle at work or school, red flags would get raised. The difference with emojis is they quickly take on multiple meanings, even if they weren't designed that way, so people are using them to say-not-say things they'd be afraid to put into words.Like punctuation, they help people hedge their bets & soften their blows. That's how I use them.
It's easy to imagine it would make a (legal) difference if an emoji gun faced left or right alongside people emojis in a public post - and where in a stream of emojis it appeared, and how many were placed there. And how different it might appear on an iPhone versus an Android phone. These are hieroglyphs in the making, but evolving so quickly.
This shadowy consortium is like the priests in ancient Egypt who hoarded the use of hieroglyphs. Determining intent is hard enough with traditional alphabet-based languages... imagine how tough it's going to be when we have 20,000 emojis... or 100,000. Or a million?
This was really great. I'm the perfect audience: I knew about Old, but I'm not tapped into Twitter culture so I'm JUST ONLINE ENOUGH.
The production (the clip from the "documentary," the tweet images, the fast-pace) are all just top-notch.
Tamoor requested recommendations for future shows, but that's the Always Online Paradox: those of us who are primed to be amused and educated by this show are the same people who lack the internet awareness to suggest topics for it.
It might be fun for each person to bring their own mini-topic each week, so they get a chance to take the center stage for a bit.
I'm intrigued by this show and will definitely check it out. Lucy and Tamoor's contributions to this site have always been thoughtful and rich. (Tamoor's ruminations about challenge and letting go in the second episode of Borne to Run are bloody excellent.)
I also like that no one quite knows what this is going to be.
Sustenance's comments