Escapist Podcast: 040: PAX & Star Wars Kinect

[The Escapist Staff]

040: PAX & Star Wars Kinect

This week, we recap our experience at PAX. We also discuss the Star Wars Kinnect game, whether you should care about the creator or only the creation and the liability of behavior in an online space.

Watch Video

 

[-Dragmire-]

Favorite Cookies=Maple Cookies

Spoiler

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Art Sandwich: Lasagna Sandwich(description by layer)

Single side toasted bread(toasted side up, soft side keeps toppings from escaping(temporarily)
cheese
Lasagna sauce/filling
single layer of lasagna noodle
Lasagna sauce/filling
Single side toasted bread(toasted side down, soft side keeps toppings from escaping(temporarily)
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To make any sandwich into douchey art, place the sandwich onto a chair(no plate) in the corner of a room(either the chair or the wall color should be white but not both)and take a greyscale picture of it.

Try different angles and distances to find the best combination suited for your strange strange statement.

It's filled with delicious pretentiousness.

______

I can't concretely state where I would draw the line in the more negative subjects... Blurry lines hurt my eyes and brain. I imagine all potential cases in the future will have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis as no one line could cover all or even most grey situations like suicide as a result of online greifing.

 

[Eric Morales]

I'm all for voting with your wallet, in theory at least. Let's put aside the whole prisoner's dilemma problem that your purchase is absurdly unlikely to make a difference and assume for a second that your purchase could determine whether a game was a flop or a hit. If Fez fails will the developers know it was because this guy was kind of a jerk? It gets even more difficult when you're dealing with complaints from all sides.

Let's say for example that Mass Effect 3 had been a flop. What lesson would BioWare and EA have internalized? Would they assume it was because of backlash over day one DLC, or the inclusion of gay characters? Would they decide that it was too much of a shooter, or too much of an RPG? It seems so hard to be sure that your intended message will get across.


Also, whenever the issue of good stories being made by jerks comes up I can't help thinking about Lovecraft. Dunwich Horror, Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness are probably some of my favorite stories ever but my enthusiasm is kind of tempered by knowing that the guy was almost comically racist. Hell, Germans were a bit too ethnic for him.

 

[Rassmusseum]

Haven't listened yet, but one thing: you have the cast listed as Susan, Justin, Steve, and Greg, but then you list the Twitter handles of Susan, Justin, Greg, and Paul.

 

[Dastardly]

040: PAX & Star Wars Kinnect

This week, we recap our experience at PAX. We also discuss the Star Wars Kinnect game, whether you should care about the creator or only the creation and the liability of behavior in an online space.

Watch Video

Favorite moment: Susan saying (about a hypothetical user threatening to kill themselves), "Good. Film it." Just the way she said it, I swear a cold breeze blew through my apartment.

About that whole thing, though, the line is even harder to draw when you consider that the same action can have different consequences depending on the victim. One person, you say, "Go die in a fire," and he shrugs it off... the next guy, you say, "Hey, if the chance comes up for you to die in a fire, at least consider it for me, okay?" and he's found burned to death the next day.

It's a lot like murder versus attempted murder -- should the Attempted Murder Guy get a lesser sentence just because he got lucky (or screwed up)? How many people drive home drunk and don't hit anyone or anything on the way? So do we punish the action or punish the consequence? And, as you all mentioned, do you also punish the instigator?

This is the reason I think civil court doesn't require the cut-and-dry circumstances of criminal court. If you do something stupid, and it's not necessarily criminally stupid, but it does lead to horrible unintended consequences, civil court exists so that the victim has a form of redress without the rigor required by criminal court.

I say let people sue for it. The internet has become so much a part of actual life that it's high time we considered it a bit more like actual life. Sometimes you do something stupid and get away unscathed, and sometimes you kick off the Apocalypse. Either way, the consequences should find you.

Privacy is cool. It's anonymity that can so often be dangerous. The internet is like a new country, and we're all trying to establish who has jurisdiction there. The first thing we need to deal with is the complete facelessness of the internet. In the real world, we can all have a certain expectation of privacy, but there are also mechanisms in place that ensure we're accountable for things we'd rather not be...

The internet needs a bit of that, and a bit less of the Old West.

 

[Jachwe]

Being brief art is craftmanship. Any carpenter was called an "artist" because he knew the art of carpenting. Making a chair is an art. Nowadays society is so selfindulging it forgot the meaning. An elitist group added a facilitated nonsense meaning of the need to aquire a certain undefined level of aesthetics to the word to feel superior over the other artists. The common people took the bait and the word became bloated and cannot be reasonably used anymore because of its vague meaning.
So how to solve the problem? Acknowledge the word "art" carries the meaning "made by people" and thus only destinguishes crafted items like a woodeen chair from natural items like a tree stomp. Yes you can sit on both of them and they are made out of wood but a chair is artificial thus has aquired artistic value. The artistic value is about function and aesthetics the artist embedded into the artificial item by having applied his art on the material and changing the form of the item.

 

[Epilepsy]

When Susan said "There hasn't been an interview that hasn't made him look like a complete cock" I immediately thought Bobby Kotick. Admittedly not a game developer, but i can't think of a press conference that hasn't made me want to strangle him with his own ugly sweater vest.

 

[Farther than stars]

Before the podcast ended I had eating not one but two oatmeal cookies with raisins.
More the point, however, I strongly support a separation between artists and art, simply to embrace the sanctity of art and not let it be blemished by human fault. But I go so far in my opinions as to disagree with artistic awards, because it is my belief that they are far too often awarded more to the artist than to his work, which I believe instigates fame-seeking among creative individuals who leave the creative process on the sidelines.
As far as what actually constitutes art, I like the definition which one of my high-school teachers once gave me about literature, which is that: "Literature is something that causes you to think critically about something." So less to do with emotion and more with an intellectual perception, I think that the same idea can be applied to art, since I believe literature to be art among novels. And when I think of video games that are artistic I do indeed think of video games which left me bewildered even hours after I'd played them, or had even prompted me to right articles concerning my thought about them.
Also, I could talk all day about the philosophy of how actions are initiated and what legal reprecussions they should have, but then I'd never get any writing done, so here's all I have to say:
The bottom line is that if you are mentioned in someone's suicide note, there is not a jury in the world that wouldn't convict you as an accessory to suicide. Also that's the only way in which a person could testify after he or she had killed him- or herself. And since the internet basically has one big log of what has been said and when, I don't see why you wouldn't utilise that technology to enforce the laws that are already in place outside of virtual reality.
Now, if you read all that, go get yourself another cookie.

P.S. There was a lot to talk about, but then this was a pretty long podcast. Awesome!

 

[ACman]

I'm going to suggest that Susan hates Cliffy B.

He's the developer that I have noticed the most being a total social dick-tard publicly. And let's face it, his games don't have a particularly progressive view of women, or a sensible view of men for that matter.

 

[Draconalis]

My favorite part was

"Can you divorce yourself from a thing knowing a jerk made it?"

My immediate thought, "No... look at Micheal Bay"

And in response, the podcast

"Micheal bay"

For the record, he IS a jerk, as well as makes bad movies. You should have seen some of the shit he was saying during the Transformers interviews.

Paraphrasing: "Fuck you fans, I want flames on Optimus Prime"

 

[ACman]

Microsoft Word is not art.

A perfect word processor that could handle creating printed AND digital media PERFECTLY might be art but only if you consider a perfect printing press to be art.

Microsoft Word is not perfect. I would kill and gut the creators of MS Word for numerous (Auto-formatting) reasons.

 

[Emperor_42]

The star wars franchise has been taking a real beating lately with the kinect 'thing' and now these stupid voadafone adverts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rDbDy0xcxnw

 

[Farther than stars]

The star wars franchise has been taking a real beating lately with the kinect 'thing' and now these stupid voadafone adverts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rDbDy0xcxnw

I agree that that commercial isn't particularly funny, but at least you posting it reminded me of this one, which is freaking hilarious.
[link]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdcJVuylmsM[/link]

 

[Adventurer2626]

I am a sugar cookie. At least 15% by composition. I eat ALL the sugar cookies. Especially the soft ones with frosting. Mmmmmmm.

 

[Susan Arendt]

I'm going to suggest that Susan hates Cliffy B.

He's the developer that I have noticed the most being a total social dick-tard publicly. And let's face it, his games don't have a particularly progressive view of women, or a sensible view of men for that matter.

Nope. He's not necessarily my kinda guy, but he's decent enough.

 

[Tiddles]

When I see something brilliant from someone I loathe, like if Stephanie Meyer were to write a brilliant book, I tend to give it a shot. If it's good enough I'll forget that I can't stand the person who made. The first Fable game gave me that, I'm not a fan of Peter Molyneux but in the first game I forgot how he'd promised me the world and delivered a plain cheesecake. I still like cheesecake and while I'm eating the cheesecake all is well but when I'm finished I'll be just a little disappointed that I didn't get it with a bit of flavour and other nice things.

Is Ryan Lesser Susan's disliked dev?

EDIT: With Art the line between Art and Craft is really blurred. For instance if a car is particularly well crafter and revolutionises notions of vehicle design, you could argue that it doesn't transcend craftsmanship. Art for me is what a human creation that makes me question something about humanity in general. Gustav Klimt comes to mind because while I think how he composes his paintings is indicative of fine craftsmanship it's what is suggested by the entire piece that makes me call it art.

 

[Thespian]

I think everyone had good points on the Star Wars Kinect thing.

I am bothered by it because it requires no appreciation for the IP. With Family Guy and Robot Chicken parodies, it's funny because you react in a way that's "Oh hey! I remember that part! With that fish guy, who says it's a trap, it's nostalgic and I was a part of that in-joke!"
Whereas Star Wars Kinect is nothing more than "Take a scene, juxtapose with ridiculous context, voila."
Anyone could find it funny, you don't need to be a Star Wars fan, and the writers didn't need to appreciate the franchise to make it.

Let's compare all this with the Lego Star Wars music scenes. You know, when you found the Kaminoan disco, or the Gammorrean rock band. Those scenes didn't bother me, because they were genuinely funny without sacrificing anything. They weren't put on a pedestal, you had to go find them.
In fact, take the entire Lego Star Wars series. What is that if not making light of Star Wars, Lucas-funded and everything - But I don't think it annoys anyone nearly as much as Star Wars Kinect does. Because again, the tone of Lego Star Wars comes from appreciating the franchise, not just looking at it and saying "How we can ridicule in this in a way that will get us money?"

 

[FoolKiller]

When I see something brilliant from someone I loathe, like if Stephanie Meyer were to write a brilliant book, I tend to give it a shot.

She did. It's called The Host. Aimed at a more mature following.... and really, really good. And I hated Twilight so much that I couldn't stomach past the second book.

As for Kinect Star Wars, I found the dance part to be amusing. The problem is that the game overall is fairly weak in terms of responsiveness which is what Kinect is all about.

 

[blackrave]

Yeah, I totally understand Susan's comment on new Dr.Who fans
I played The Elder Scrolls back in Morrowind days
And only thing I regret is not being born earlier to play Daggerfall (I had to catch up later)
So when people now considers themselves veteran TES fans, because they previously played Oblivion...
AAAAAAAAAARGH!!!
It SOOO pisses me off.
Newsflash! You're not! Because if you'll check disc case of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, there is number four in it. That means there were at least 3 other games before Oblivion. Finish at least TES3:Morrowind and then we'll speak. And before making stupid assumptions or asking stupid questions read UESP (all of it) and all in-game books.
I know, I know, I sound like an old hipster, but I still remember the countless "we wantz dwarves in Skyrim" posts (when TES5 was still in development) that talked about stereotypical Tolkien and D&D dwarves, without any understanding of who and what were Dwemer (basically Dwemer was/are as much dwarves, as human miners are gnomes). And that's only one example.

 

[Goldjit]

CUTE CAT!!!

http://www.lulztruck.com/22439/hilarious-cat-face-is-hilarious/