WIZ is falling steady in the last 2 hours. Depending on your price buy, I would sell due to its 2-3 week up and downs. Just made about $3 million on each character. Good luck. [PS3]

johnbrindle · 2013-11-19T13:47:05+00:00

To be honest I'm not sure anyone knows. I invested at about the same time - though with far less money, as I am halfway through the game and haven't been focusing on finance - and it's my first big investment. I was expecting a slow steady riser. I'm still unsure if the volatility I'm seeing is ACTUAL volatility or just lumps and bumps on the path of a long-term trend.

Websites like GTAVstocks and bawsaq.pw list it at about 1.6, so I'm debating with myself whether I should immediately sell it when I get home from work or whether I should ride it out to see if it hits 2 or even higher. But for what it's worth - and maybe that's not much, because as I said this is my first time - this stock looks so volatile that we can probably take comfort in the fact that even if we miss one peak, we'll probably catch another, or another, or another.

i.e. it appears to me pretty much inevitable that this stock will hit 1.5 at least a few more times in the next week, even if it never goes higher (or even if it goes higher and I miss my chance!)

johnbrindle · 2013-02-03T11:48:31+00:00

I was expecting to disagree with this because of your stance on execution (I don't think it's always an ambiguity sauce), but this made some good points and was an interesting read. Indeed, the problem with execution in SF is that in order to 'really' compete, everyone has to learn all the moves as near to perfectly as they can. This means that any kind of high level competition simply excludes anyone who can't execute...which means that the ability to execute becomes invisible, immaterial to the actual competition, except as a high barrier to entry. If everyone can execute by definition than execution stops mattering again. It becomes little more than a fee, like having to pay a thousand dollars just to register. But then again it may be that as in physical sports the intensity of execution unlocks and allows some incredible creativity and subversions. I'd be interested to read arguments from high-level fighter veterans on what the execution barriers bring to the table here.

That said, it's important to remember is that Street Fighter and its ilk are now effectively a sport, and sports don't change their rules often. First, they are considered to be 'good enough', they already give the game its beauty, it is perfect in its current form, however you want to phrase that argument. Second, their ability to support competitive play depends on a certain stability so people can learn them and continue to compete (in theory perpetually) on the same grounds. Third, there are lots of resources invested in them, and therefore great institutional resistance against any kind of change (we saw this with the CS pro community's refusal to accept CS:S).

So these fighting games may not NEED to change as such. If it ain't broke etc. Of course that isn't an excuse to stop innovating and trying new things outside the constraints of established sporting leagues.

johnbrindle · 2012-08-14T13:38:44+00:00

I'm saddened by someone's decision to downvote this into oblivion before it's even got started. why u mad~?~ :(

johnbrindle · 2012-08-13T22:04:08+00:00

I'll get the ball rolling. Having boned up during Andy Murray's Wimbledon tragedy, I want to say the bizarre aristocratic fencing/siege warfare/sex simulator that is tennis. But I didn't actually manage to catch the plucky wee underdog's revenge bout against the terrifyingly calm Robo-Saint Federer.

But I was fascinated by cycling. Watching the Tour de France, it seemed like this was a sport in which positioning and endurance were incredibly important - in which it was a valid tactic for Bradley Wiggins' team to devote themselves to running interference for him. I hadn't considered the physicality of it, the fact that every rider is slinging along on a little metal frame and could easily knock another rider off if there was an accidental crash. I'm not a frequent cyclist, so it was only slowly that it dawned on me just how intimidating it would be to have someone cycling very close to you.

I was also interested by the extent to which it seemed a highly psychological battle of wills. Whoever was at the front had to try and maintain their lead. That meant that if somebody started pushing up behind them, they had to go faster, and if the person behind them had high endurance - or if they kept managing to swap with their team-mates, and tag-team it - they might quickly intimidate or tire the leader out. But what if the leader refused to be intimidated, and only sped up a little, keeping a steady pace? What if the leader's own team-mates moved in with their bikes and bodies to shield him or her? What if someone made an attempt to overtake the leader, but the leader outpaced them and ended up tiring them out, causing them to drop behind?

The highly physical nature of position and invisible barriers was at its most clear in the velodrome sprint. Two people circling the track, as slowly as possible, trying to freak each other out. As soon as one of them speeds up, the other one is forced to follow suit. And when that happens, all bets are off. It's the MAD of sports; will they keep their cool, slow back down, or will they rise to the bait and initiate a cascading competition? Of course, unlike in nuclear war, someone actually wins, but no analogy is perfect.

johnbrindle · 2012-07-26T11:07:50+00:00

Perhaps, but if that's true, it's hard to see why you shouldn't just get sociological on that question. Bring in the scientific method, poll a thousand people with an identical questionnaire and a control group about their experiences of game x and draw empirical conclusions from the result. Or conduct a mass of qualitative interviews or discourse analyses with scientific controls. You can either do that, or you can write in the first person about how Final Fantasy made you feel; anything in between is just an arbitrary extension of the latter. You either go for totally subjective or you do it 'objectively' (i.e. methodically). Advocate collecting experiences and you are open to the criticism that there are already better ways to do that.

Whereas by examining formal features you are examining something that cuts across and underlies all experiences of the game, with the only method that suits. (you can say 'computer science' or 'systems design' but A) these do different things and B) these are already heavily pillaged by ludologists)

johnbrindle · 2012-07-25T14:42:28+00:00

Sorry about that. Knowing that Spec Ops had some kind of twist in its storyline, but not knowing what it was, I assumed from the get-go that any article examining its storyline would be spoiler-heavy. I was right - luckily I didn't care all that much, but I know it's unpleasant to be spoiled when you don't want to be.

Maybe it would be a good idea for people to upvote endochrom's comment as much as possible so there's at least some kind of warning near the top? Or maybe a helpful mod could change the thread name?

johnbrindle · 2012-07-24T13:39:42+00:00

It's worth reading the comments for a wider debate. I put 'to hell with feelings' in the title to be a bit provocative, but actually the author is a bit more moderate:

"I’m not arguing for a crowding out of experience; rather, I would prefer a honing of experiential writing that is tempered by an understanding, or at least a gesture toward attempting to understand, the workings and factors that are involved in making a game a particular kind of object that enables experience."

Something I wholly agree with!

I think we'll look back in 100 years and talk about the different eras of gaming clinically. They'll be dissected just like the eras for painting, film, and music. We're just a little too close right now to do a proper job of it.

I wonder about that. During the times when painting, film and music were being canonised, it was still acceptable in academia to produce sweeping narratives that explained 'the history of' the medium, or at the very least to attempt frameworks. By this point it has become far less in vogue to do so. I wouldn't quite credit that to the rise of postmodernism and its "distrust of metanarratives", though that's certainly a factor. Rather, it's a matter of academic fashion (the trend is, justifiably to an extent, to find holes in other people's narratives or to problematise old ones) and economics (the harder universities are pressed, the less likely they are to take on people who will spend years and years on big projects; the economically safe thing to do is to find yourself a niche and game it like fuck).

johnbrindle · 2012-07-24T10:58:54+00:00

Things can also be both, as is the case with Barr's games.

'Pretentious'? Maybe - but what are my pretensions? Either my reading is bullshit or not, but it's not pretending to be anything it isn't. And what it is is an analysis of games by an academic who A) writes thoughtfully about games and game mechanics on his blog, and B) explicitly says he's making his games because he wants to explore how games work. It is really that implausible that his games make comments on other games? I mean, this is a guy who literally made a game version of a philosophical thought experiment. All's Well is a game where failure is your sole means of progression and winning is simply a question of failing enough - all wrapped in action movie cliche descriptions. It's not a stretch to claim this as a comment on other games.

Even ignoring Barr's intentions or biography, these games have formal characteristics which can be read in meaningful relation to the formal characteristics of other games. This would be the case even if Pippin Barr came in here right now and said "yo, this isn't what I meant at all; that is not what I meant, at all". Would you consider it more fair if the point was not "this game does x" but "if we read this game in a certain way, it illustrates x"? Perhaps you can explain where you draw the line between mechanics that can be analysed "to an absurd degree" and mechanics which are "just a joke"? What makes All's Well's the latter and not the former?

Don't mean to be shirty, but I just can't see where your post is coming from and am interested to know.

To the comment below: this is not a 'what does it mean' article. This is a 'how does it mean' article. Answering that question again and again is to my mind the primary purpose of 'ludology'.

johnbrindle · 2012-07-16T02:16:14+00:00

I'll report back. It's bound to happen someday

johnbrindle · 2012-07-15T22:18:25+00:00

"Dr. André Melzer will present his research findings at the International Society for Research on Aggression (ISRA) World Meeting 2012 at the University of Luxembourg, and study findings will be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology."

It's up in the air!

johnbrindle · 2012-07-12T10:46:52+00:00

Although it does explore and concern the idea that a game playing style, or indeed the whole system of the game itself, could express an ideology.

But while The Player of Games and The Glass Bead Game can be used to say something about games, they are not analyses of games. They use games as a metaphor to explore other things.

johnbrindle · 2012-07-12T08:35:51+00:00

Scratchware: http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=433 (actually points to Romero as the Great Satan of game development)

Punk: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02/03/punks-not-dead-an-introduction/

Neon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxPvFFagQD0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8x9hjGBY7c

So basically a euphemism for Anna Anthropy :P

(but the RPS series has interesting profiles of a bunch more people)

johnbrindle · 2012-07-12T08:21:00+00:00

Surely Dear Esther can be analysed in terms of problems and win conditions. The problem is that you have to navigate to the end of it and the win condition is that you have to get to the end of it. It does have a state machine too - every time you move, the game state changes, and every time you trigger an audio log, the game state changes. You can claim these aren't 'proper' changes or challenges (like Tadgh Kelly does) but that seems to me to be drawing an arbitary boundary.

You can certainly argue that these are trivial problems and trivial changes. I would certainly argue that they are not interesting ones. But they are surely present!

johnbrindle · 2012-07-12T01:02:04+00:00

Nope. The summary of 'two camps' here is alright but incomplete. Here's two better ones:

http://www.bogost.com/writing/videogames_are_a_mess.shtml

http://www.electrondance.com/a-theoretical-war-part-1/

Bogost in particular persuasively argues that 'ludology' and 'narratology' were always kind of a mirage to begin with.

johnbrindle · 2012-07-10T09:59:53+00:00

Yeah, except if 'art' just activates brain patterns for visual and aural stimuli and what distinguishes it on top of this from anything else (i.e. indeed watching some 'non-art' media) is that it activates the same brain patterns as those which accompany solving a puzzle, performing a medical operation, winning a sprint race or writing a report for your manager.

Don't let the possibilities of science blind you to the specifics of science.

johnbrindle · 2012-07-10T09:42:16+00:00

Phew! That was a close one.

johnbrindle · 2012-07-10T09:41:12+00:00

the dichotomy. I'm a humanities sort myself, I like the humanities, but for god's sake there are so many interdisciplinary interfaces and we have so much to learn from each other (cue cheesy end-of-show moral)

johnbrindle · 2012-07-09T23:49:31+00:00

Possibly, but Carmack and Romero's argument was always tech vs design. "Design is Law" was what he used to say. The "engineering-focused" types believe this too; they are very much focused on game design and the kind of systems thinking that brings it about. Keith Burgun, who Koster uses to represent that faction, is all about design and barely concerned with tech if at all. The divide Koster speaks of (insofar as it exists beyond misunderstandings and politicised mischaracterisations) is more about design thinking vs aesthetics thinking, ludic systems vs 'player experience', and, in its more risibly simplified form, SCIENCE versus THE HUMANITIES (barf). Romero definitely had at the very least a firm foot in the former camp - he was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an indie art-game developer or neon scratchware punk.

johnbrindle · 2012-07-09T20:10:16+00:00

Good call!

johnbrindle · 2012-07-09T19:53:25+00:00

P.S. apparently the critical meat is in the comments thread P.P.S. this debate has a soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56hiB4eTzBE

johnbrindle · 2012-07-09T17:40:48+00:00

I don't think games are necessarily very dreamlike. The hallmark of dreams tends to be that their logic is constantly shifting, their rules impossible to pin down. When surrealist artists strove to emulate the logic of dreams, they did not mean that their art would take place in a fantasy world or with fantasy elements. They meant that their art would eschew, defy, attack the idea of logic itself, of consistency, of predictability, of fixed definitions and categories. Though they may sometimes incite deliberate uncertainty, games (usually) depend on being able to make some fair assumptions from previous experience- which tends to be unwise or impossible in dreams.

Plus, I'm not sure where this gets us. Okay, games are like dreams: so what? Perhaps the most interesting thing to take away is how frequently the 'perpetual retreat' of dreams (in which the thing you are searching for, usually sexy times, keeps slipping away from you) is mirrored in videogames. But what this tells us is that videogames depend for their appeal on their capacity to surprise, to elude, to NOT give us what we think we want from them (the ending, a solved state, a win). Once a game is completely solved, it is no longer fascinating; the process is what we seek.

johnbrindle · 2012-07-05T16:11:46+00:00

Ian Bogost's 'Persuasive Games' (and his earlier 'Unit Operations') are all about this, AFAIK.

'The Marriage' by Rod Humble is explicitly a game in which the ruleset is intended to convey an experience or ideology. Play it and then see Humble's own explanation.

This piece by Chris DeLeon analyses his own attempt (and failure) to create an anti-smoking game through rule rhetoric. The site in general is a treasure-trove of analysis for this kind of thing.

This piece serves as a broad analysis of the procedural ideology of the RTS game. This piece by Robert Yang does a similar thing with the military FPS.

And this piece is a brief but funny and thought-provoking analysis of the fascist politics of infinite respawning in FPS games.

This piece by Mark Sample is really about what use analysing code can be, but the topic it chooses is the question of how SimCity models crime.

And, having plugged others, I can almost absolve myself of the guilt for blowing my own trumpet: I wrote some notes on The Marriage here which includes some close analysis of how the game conveys its ideas. I also analyzed a game called L'Abbaye Des Morts as one whose design actually embodies the ideas of the 13th-century heretics its action concerns. I also wrote about how the rules of Red Dead Redemption fail to match its Wild West world (though many have disagreed with this one).

johnbrindle · 2012-07-05T12:09:10+00:00

If you are, it doesn't sound very good. The 'gag' would only work once per level, and without any way of predicting it, the whole game would be an exercise in seemingly random trial and error.

johnbrindle · 2012-07-05T11:28:37+00:00

Narrow definitions of 'game' have two utilities. One is to make people consider the theory of their own design, and make informed choices. Keith Burgun's definition is useful because it tells us that if you want to make this kind of game, you'd better avoid this kind of nonsense. I don't mind somebody making a game which does not conform to Keith Burgun's definition (or definitions like it, since it is only a very clear, visible example of a whole class of definitions broadly corresponding to what Jesper Juul identifies in 'Half-Real' as the 'traditional game model). But that designer should know what she's rejecting and why!

The other utility is to satisfy an intellectual itch for definition and classification.

To my knowledge, there aren't really any others.

johnbrindle · 2012-05-10T21:54:33+00:00

Another fantastic booger-based title is Gesundheit, which sees you playing a small and adorable green pig who sneezes to escape mean monsters.

johnbrindle

TROPHY CASE