CuriousCat Archive Page 199 of 202

  1. any opinions on universal basic income in relation to welfare?

    I haven't followed what the arguments are for it, but I'm generally in favor of UBI.

  2. what do you think on kubrick?

    I don't get the appeal.

    I understand that all the strange decisions Kubrick made were intentional. That doesn't mean I think they were good.

  3. What do you think of the moral panic surrounding "games cause violence" coming back? Can games ever escape this stigma?

    It's not a comeback. The NRA has always used games as a scapegoat. Their argument is louder now because they're having to shout over students demanding gun reform after watching their classmates die, and also there's a disloyal egomaniac in the White House who will latch onto anything that means he doesn't have to write new policies. But whenever this quiets down it will only be a matter of time until another sympathetic politician is in office who will repeat the same arguments the NRA always makes.

    Games can't escape this stigma because we, as a society, and especially gamers, are unwilling and possibly incapable of actually discussing the issue. I'm reading a book on propaganda right now that talks about how certain arguments are designed to appeal so strongly to your emotions and core beliefs that they overwhelm your ability to think rationally about them. This kind of "affective override" is what propaganda depends on, appealing to ideas like "freedom" or "the state" or "the troops" in a way that makes it impossible to have a reasoned discussion about them. This affective override is why our society can't have a real debate about healthcare or abortion, and it's why we can't have a real debate about violence in video games.

    Part of this is the fault of politicians who appeal to strong emotions hoping to censor games, a big part of this is the fault of the NRA for appealing to strong emotions to shift attention off themselves, but a lot of the blame lies with gamers as well, who both appeal to strong emotions and *get really emotional* about any discussion of violence in games. Games writers and YouTubers often write screeds about anyone discussing game violence, getting their readers and viewers all riled up, and gamers seem really eager to GET riled up. And, frankly, this conversation isn't going to be laid to rest until people at large - and gamers especially - can read an article that discusses how a given shooter condones mass violence and whether that should be unsettling without getting all bent out of shape about it.

    The fact is, as long as people get so worked up about violent video games, the NRA is going to keep blaming games for school shootings, because it is a guaranteed way to turn a conversation about how cheap and freely-available assault weapons are into the same argument about DOOM we've been having since 1991.

  5. Yay for another WPR listener! Which one of their joke domains do you like, if any?

    [whereiswaypoint dot info/list]

    bazinga.zone

  6. Same person who asked about consequentialism vs. deontology:

    I'm curious what your thought process is on how deal with the fact that the two frameworks both (at least purport to) apply to everything--interpersonal relationships, societal systems, what have you--and so are, by their own terms, mutually exclusive because they define what's right in fundamentally different ways. Since you say they each works better than the other in different contexts, what's the criteria for judging this? If it's that contextually applying rough ideas of one over the other (or potentially even amalgamations of both, however that might work) nets on the whole more positive results than otherwise (say), that seems to just be consequentialism. And I don't see another way to understand what you mean by "make sense in different contexts."

    (I'm not aiming at a "gotcha" or anything here; I'm just curious about your ethical views.)

    Well, one of the reasons I haven't used the terms deontology or consequentialism in my videos is that I'm not actually well-read in Kant and Demonsthenes. In my experience, in casual conversation "deontology vs. consequentialism" translates roughly to "intent vs. impact," which are the kinds of words I use in my videos. Some people put my arguments into philosophical terms, so those are the terms I use them when responding to them, but I confess I haven't done a deep dive into the theory.

    So if consequentialism considers both intent and impact, call me a consequentialist.

  7. You've intimated (as far as I've interpreted what you've said, anyway) that you favor consequentialism over deontology. Do I have that right? In either case, why?

    Both deontology and consequentialism make sense in different contexts. What I find is that most people default to deontology for everything and are bizarrely unfamiliar with consequentialism.

    I think deontology (at least in the rudimentary way most people use it) kind of breaks down when you start dealing with large systemic problems or public figures who impact our lives but whose intentions are never going to be known to us.

    Obviously deontology is very important for interpersonal relationships. You don't have to pick one. You just can't ignore either.

  8. Which multiplayer games have great community management? What are their best ideas?

    All I know is the answer isn't Smash!

  9. Rocket League: Yea or Nay?

    It seems legit.

  10. Hi Ian, any opinions on the current rise if the alt right in europe ? I again get the impression just like with most cultural issue america starts the song and western europe sings along wich also makes me sometimes doubt that anything can realy change unless the US changes. Bannon actually gave a speech in my country last weekend prising the achievements of our conservatives (they are the electoral majority)

    I know the Far Right is on the rise in Europe, but I don't know enough to speak on it.

  11. Do you have thoughts on Paul Thomas Anderson generally?

    He's very talented. I don't like his obsessions. I think he's probably a terrible boyfriend.

  12. Favorite place to eat in Roxbury/JP? Ever been to Burritos Pizzeria?

    Fav place to eat in JP *was* Bukhara but the health department just closed it down. Hope it reopens soon.

  13. Not the person who asked you the last question, but don't you think that a less horrible capitalist democracy will inevitably lead to the same problems, or other, equivalent problems that come from the capitalist mindset?

    After typing i noticed how edgy it sounds, but i really don't think there's a lot of room for improvement under capitalism, in the sense that you can't change a square into a circle and vice versa. One mindset leads the other, profiting from other's labour leads to someone up and someone down, the people being up look on the people down as if they were barely humans, which leads to horrible social dynamics and weird ideas of property and individuality, etc..

    Well, no amount of reform is going to make capitalism not shit. Let's be clear about that.

    But we know from history that it can be more egalitarian than it is. Speaking purely in terms of wealth distribution, the heavily-regulated capitalism of The Boom Years was economically prosperous, had more unions, had more small businesses, had far less wealth disparity, had greater competition between businesses, etc. etc. etc. Before regulations started to go lax in the 70's and then Reagan taking a hatchet to the economy in the 80's, it was obvious that we are capable of having a MORE economically just system than we have now simply through reform. Certainly many other capitalist nations are more egalitarian than ours.

    An underlying problem with capitalism is that its basic structure seems to trend towards greater and greater wealth disparity. Capitalism incentivizes businesses to erode regulations and pool money into fewer and fewer hands. To keep it in check we basically have to think of the government as being in a constant arms race with its own economy, revising regulations when businesses find loopholes and regularly voting out politicians who cozy up to lobbyists.

    Reform seems nearly impossible these days, but it still sounds more likely than implementing another economic system entirely. I'm not up on my socialist theory, and if someone can point me to a viable means of turning the US into a democratic socialism, I'll change my tune. I mean, I'd still have questions about what a long-standing 21st century socialism actually looks like, and how many of the problems of capitalism are caused by capitalism and how many are problems with how humans relate to power, and whether people will try to slowly erode socialism into capitalism the way they try to erode capitalism into worse capitalism, but those are problems I'd like to engage with.

  14. What is your most conservative/least progressive opinion?

    I think making a capitalist democracy less horrible is more feasible than implementing a socialist democracy, so while I don't like capitalism I'm willing to take a stance of "it's what I have to work with."

    That's as conservative as I get, fam.

  15. Bob's Burgers is such a wonderful little show. I remember being very cynical about ir when it was announced because it was kind of marketed like something in the Seth MacFarlane line of animation.

    But now I love it and it's there with Steven Universe in what I consider to be Wholesome animation. The relationship dynamics between the members of the family give me a warm feeling inside, they could so easily be portrayed as cynical and mean spirited, but instead they're shown with love and fondness.

    Bob Chipman has a video about the show in which he says that the family is composed entirely by kind of frustrated creators trying to find an outlet. It's very interesting.

    None of this is a question but I agree with all of it!

  16. What is your favorite bridge? And why?

    My high school had a small little wooden bridge surrounded by bushes and little trees off to one side of the quad, and that's where me and my friends hung out. It was clear that at some point in history there had been an artificial stream or something that ran under it, but by then it was just a tiny, freestanding bridge with its own micro-garden around it. The trees cut us off from the rest of the school, and being a bunch of socially awkward nerds I guess that was to our liking. I think we were known as The Bridge Group (though in my head I called us The Bridge Crew).

    Sometime after I'd made my way into different friend groups, the school renovated and ripped the bridge and the plants out and paved over the whole area. Bummer.

  19. Which game has had the biggest emotional impact on you?

    Dunno if there's a biggest, so here are just some:

    Basically all the games in Story Beats were there because they made me feel things I wasn't expecting to feel.

    The opening sequence of Blue Lacuna.

    The ending of Tales from the Borderlands.

    Episodes 2 and 3 of The Walking Dead, and the ending.

    Most of my beautiful trashbaby Life is Strange.

    Recently, I was very surprised by how affecting Iconoclasts was.

    The same week I played Iconoclasts I worked my way through Celeste, and it was unexpectedly a game about self-doubt and depression and anxiety, and it was exactly what I needed during a rough time.

    Saying goodbye to Glottis and then driving off with Meche at the end of Grim Fandango.

    The briefcase exchange sequence in The Last Express.

    There are more, I'm sure, but that's what comes to mind now.

  20. Silly question: what internet meme would you like to see come back to the mainstream if possible? (Mine would be such Doge, wow)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpxDuNFBVj8

  21. You specified that you "loved the first two seasons of The Venture Brothers" Did you just stop watching after that? Or do you think the show got worse after season 2 (& if so, why)?

    Well, season 3 was kind of a mess? The final two episodes were great, but everything up til then was just... weak. The moment-to-moment dialogue just wasn't as clever or funny anymore. The series got waaaaaaay too into its own lore (there was an episode in season 2 that made fun of the idea of Master Billy Quizboy needing a backstory, why on EARTH did they feel he ACTUALLY needed a boring-ass backstory?!). They kept setting up themes that they didn't follow through on. Their debt to Jonny Quest kinda crossed the threshold from gags and homage to characters from JQ just showing up and, like... that's the joke... Dr. Zin is in this episode... that's the whole joke, ha ha. And for a season weirdly interested in continuity it threw out a lot of themes set up in the previous seasons, like the idea that The Monarch doesn't actually hate Dr. Venture, he's just really into having an arch-nemesis, and the moment Dr. Girlfriend told him to make a truce and he started his feud with Phantom Limb, he didn't give a shit about the Ventures anymore, but then they just retcon all that away in season 3 to restore the status quo of Monarch-vs-Venture.

    I gave up after the first episode of season 4 was more of the same. I watch an episode now and then, and I know a lot of people say it's gotten really brilliant lately, but it always feels like the stuff that bothered me about season 3 is still there.

  22. Any impressions or thoughts regarding "A case of distrust"?

    Heard of it. Haven't played it yet.

  23. You've talked about Lucasart games a fair amount and they are awesome. Any favorites from the other side of the aisle at Sierra?

    The first Gabriel Knight is genuinely great, though it suffers from some of the Sierra design problems that plague a lot of their games. I don't actually like a lot of the design of King's Quest VI but I love the world and the characters and the tone. I tried to watch a Let's Play of Gabriel Knight 3 and partway through thought, wait, I think I actually want to play this. Like, it's an ungainly mess but I think there might actually be some rad stuff in there.

    That's all's I got, fam.

  24. Why should we hate Elon Musk?

    The best reason is because he treats his workers like shit, but even the idealized version of Elon Musk the world seems to believe in perpetuates the broken idea that "ethical capitalism" will solve all the worl'd problems.

  25. Have you seen Austin Walker's NYU Game Center lecture? What are your thoughts on the central question: will games save us?

    I have. Games will not save us.

  26. Apparently when Yahtzee was on the Adventure Game Studio forums there was a huge backlash against him, as he was constantly shitting on other people's adventure games. Did you witness this happen?

    I wasn't really on the AGS forums, I just played the games. Given that he's made a career out of shitting on games, I can't say I'm surprised.

  27. Have you ever been truly offended by content in a video game? How about in a movie?

    I have found many games and movies to be morally repugnant or actively insulting, but I don't remember actually being personally offended by them. Honestly, most people saying a work is "offensive" are talking about the first thing anyway.

    Unless there is some perspective I've failed to consider (in which case, link me to it), I'm pretty confident the philosophy of Django Unchained is "the reason slaves didn't overthrow their masters is because 999 out of 1000 weren't exceptional enough, but the real villains are house slaves, not white slavers." I'm pretty confident the philosophy of Phantom Thread is "genius men deserve to be as domineering, fussy, and cruel as they want, and to surround themselves with gorgeous women who have no lives, ambitions, or desires except to please genius men, but don't worry, deep down she's into it, and, though she gets none of the credit and holds none of the profits, she secretly holds all the power."

    I would say both of those philosophies are deeply offensive, but, like, my feelings aren't hurt by either. Your average military shooter openly embraces the military industrial complex and endorses the War on Terror, which is similarly offensive, but my feelings aren't hurt them. One of the things about being a cishet white dude is none of the things about life that are legitimately offensive can offend you personally. It's probably why we make up so many things to get offended by.

  28. Favourite feature-length anime movie?

    Tokyo Godfathers. Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke battling it out for second place.

  29. What's your favorite cereal?

    Gingersnap granola.

  31. Top five favourite non-alcoholic drinks. Go.

    Maine Root root beer.
    Purity Organics grapeade (which they don't make anymore but their peach juice is good).
    Hot chocolate.
    Guava nectar (brand irrelevant).
    And there used to be this mocktail at Julian's in Providence called The Chrissy Wolpert Goddammit The Third, which is also not on the menu anymore. I don't remember what was in it, but it was tasty.

  32. Who REALLY shattered Pink Diamond?

    Yellow Diamond. I don't think that's supposed to be a secret at this point.

  33. A Kickstarter to revive Daria

    Daria would never work outside the context of the late 90's/early aughts.

  34. My daughter (10) got me into "Undertale" recently, and I must say the games narrative structure and fourth wall shattering blew my mind at times. Do you think games like "Undertale" and "Minecraft" proves that "the industry" appreciates young audiences intelligence and capacity, or is the situatation quite the opposite?

    Seeing as both of those were indie games made (or, in Minecraft's case, initially made) by a single developer, I don't know that it says much about "the industry" at all. My hope is that "the industry" is LEARNING something about the intelligence and emotional sophistication of young audiences from them.

  35. How do you feel about horror games in general? Some of them are very close to adventure games, being story and puzzle focused (a Forbidden Siren here, a Silent Hill there) Would you consider playing through any of these and making videos on them?

    My problem with horror games is that I don't enjoy fear the way a lot of people do. I've considered playing Soma on Safe Mode because the themes sound interesting to me, but, in general, horror not an emotional experience I want to seek out.

  36. Sorry you're getting shit from gamer bros, what kinda music do you listen to when you're sick?

    If I am in a general music-listening mood and want something that makes me feel better, I usually end up with hyper-catchy pop rock like the first OK Go album, Cake's Comfort Eagle, and, recently, Weezer's White Album.

  37. What do you think of the Resident Evil series?

    I've only actually played Code Veronica, which wasn't very good. I have a copy of RE4 sitting around that I should play one of these days.

  38. Although I don't like to dismiss certain games as "not a game", I feel that some genres play to the strengths of the medium far better than others. Like when I see David Cage games or Uncharted I think to myself "what does this game do that couldn't have been done in a film?"

    What's your opinion of this?

    This is kind of what the last episode of Story Beats was all about.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyhrKPLDCyY

    The difference between playing Uncharted and watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is that watching Indy swing on a rope above a canyon and doing it yourself are simply different experiences. It's not really a question of which is better or worse, or which is most suited to a given medium. By making that beat interactive, you change it in a fundamental way. It accessed different sets of emotions, and it creates a different kind of empathy with the protagonist.

    When I hear people say that one game plays to the strengths of a medium better than another (and maybe this doesn't apply to you) I notice that they tend to mean that a given game centers interactivity more than another. Brendon Chung's Quadrilateral Cowboy is *more* suited to video games than Thirty Flights of Loving. But, me, I don't see the value in getting hierarchical about it. I don't think something is more or less game-like depending on how much interactivity or how many systems it has; The Walking Dead is like 90% a non-interactive movie, but that 10% of interactivity changes EVERYTHING. I'm most interested in what interactivity is DOING than whether or not there's enough of it to justify not being a film.

  39. What's your fursona?

    Marmaduke

  40. Saw down below that you never played Ace Attorney, do you play visual novels at all? I figured you would considering your interest in narrative games

    I just never had a Game Boy. As for other visual novels: https://curiouscat.me/InnuendoStudios/post/296678632

  41. Best Kirby?

    Mario Odyssey

  42. You mentioned that you dislike South Park. What do you think of the adult animated sitcom genre as a whole?

    I grew up on The Simpsons, have an undying love of Daria, loved the first two seasons of The Venture Brothers, adore Bob's Burgers, BoJack Horseman is one of my favorite shows... I'm into it. I wouldn't really say that The Venture Brothers and Bob's Burgers are in the same genre, they're just both shows that are animated.

  43. Don't know if you've mentioned this or talked about this before, but what's the history and significance behind the name "Innuende Studios"?

    Answered here: https://curiouscat.me/InnuendoStudios/post/336810380

  44. I love your videos, but I have to admit that I have played very little "choose your own adventure" games like "the walking dead" or "life is strange". And the reason why (and your videos contributed to this in large part) is that most of them seem to me like they're actually just about nihilism and anomie mistaken for "the harsh truths of life". Because apart from the usual complaint that most of the choices throughout the game don't really matter, they're also (it seems to me) telling you not only that you always have to make tough choices, but also to watch everything and everyone you didn't choose burn and cry "why didn't you pick me instead?" and that the key to strength and maturity is burying your emotions and becoming numb to the horrors and tragedies you come upon.

    How wrong am I in this assumption? Am I just misjudging the whole genre for the games you talked about?

    That's really only true of the post-Walking Dead Telltale games. And if you haven't played Tales from the Borderlands, your life is an empty husk.

  45. Do you think Life is Strange (the first one, since you haven't played Before the Storm) would have been "better" (in a relative sense) if they had properly addressed the supernatural factor? Or do you prefer it being kept vague?

    What works about Life is Strange has nothing to do with where Max's powers come from, so I'm fine with it being vague.

  46. Is there a danger of certain types of debating the Alt-Right that cause a double-down effect, where people already in the camp become incensed, and therefore more committed to spreading the word?

    In particular, videos that "own" the Alt-Right?

    Yes. Sometimes. It's complicated.

    Mockery is a useful and often necessary tool for disempowering reactionaries. I pointed out in Why Are You So Angry that GamerGate's popularity started dropping after Stephen Colbert made fun of them. Far Right types are extremely self-conscious about being seen as fools, because fools aren't the status quo, and they want to be the status quo more than anyone. Also, I think we over-focus on how the people we're mocking are going to feel about being mocked. Sometimes we mock to built solidarity with our allies, or just for the catharsis of it, and that is valuable in and of itself.

    But also, yes, mockery will piss off many of the people being mocked. I'm not sure about the Alt-Right doubling down (once you're in the Alt-Right, where is there left to double down TO???). But some people who are Alt-Right leaning may push themselves further in that direction, and the ones who are inclined to harass are going to target folks who make fun of them.

    Problem is, part of what makes people double down is the dissonance between what their beliefs mean to them and what they apparently mean to other people. That happens when you mock them, but it also happens when you calmly and logically explain why their views are irrational and contradictory. Mockery may get them more heated in the moment, but I suspect how much dissonance they feel follows how much sense your argument makes.

    My main beef with "owning the Alt-Right" videos is when they play into the Alt-Right's hands, which I covered in the last Alt-Right Playbook. If you mock the Alt-Right without accidentally making them look better or spreading their message, I'm not sure how much more dangerous it is than speaking calmly and clearly. And not explaining why they're wrong isn't an option, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  47. I've been feeling some kind of "Trump fatigue" for quite a while. As in, whenever I hear someone ranting about his statements on North Korea, or video games and violence, or anything else, really, my first reaction is "please stop". It's especially true about all the sketches that consist of making fun of Trump tweets or calling him an "orange-haired buffoon". It's weird to me because I hate everything that he represents and I know it's necessary to fight against it, but I've just grown tired of it. It seems like such an easy target that all the satire in the world sounds pointless; there's just nothing subvervise left to say about Trump.
    Did you feel anything similar? What are your thoughts about it?

    Yes. Fatigue is normal, and inevitable, and strategically advantageous to people like Trump. Shock and outrage can only sustain us for so long when there's so much horrible news and horrible behavior. I feel alternately overwhelmed and bored.

    It means we need to rely on things other than shock and outrage. One reason I started The Alt-Right Playbook was to narrow my focus to an area that I could actually get my head around and where I felt my skills were useful. The rhetorical strategies of the Right is an interesting enough topic that I don't get bored and a narrow enough topic that I can actually wrap my head around it. I try to stay generally aware of what else is going on in my country, but it helps to have an area where I say "this is my domain; it's OK to lose track of other stuff." It helps when I know people are focusing on those areas, too.

  48. i wanna ask you a smart and intelligent question but i honestly only ever want to use curious cat to ask dumb questions. Anyway do you think that television has surpassed movies in quality?

    No. I think most of us only pay attention to the shows we're interested in so we forget just HOW MUCH SHIT is on TV. Really brings down the average.

  49. What is the best German film you have ever seen?

    I liked Black Book? Parts of that are in German...

  50. Do you personally think late night comedians like John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, etc are helping people become more informed about the issues in America or do they have little effect?

    I don't think they're changing many minds on the Right, but they're making sure the Left understands the problems their facing (with variable success). That's more or less what I'm trying to do as well, so, yeah, I think it's a net gain.

  51. I have a friend who doesn't at all like the alt-right, but is rather receptive to the kind of people who lay down snarky pseudo-intellectual cover fire for them (Jordan Peterson, Been Shapiro, Dave Rubin, and especially Sam Harris). I think deep down, he's got some problematic perspectives about minorities (especially women), but he's convinced himself he doesn't. And while he frequently makes bad arguments, he doesn't make them in bad faith. I haven't managed to turn him around really, but I'm loathe to give up. My question would be, would persuading a friend like this require any difference in approach relative to what you lay out in The Alt-Right Playbook (which I take to focus primarily on trolls and bad faith actors). Or would it be the same approach, just with more patience and better chance of success?

    The biggest percentage of the problem is people like your friend. Something I hope becomes clearer as The Alt-Right Playbook continues is that, in terms of impact, there is very little difference between an argument given in bad faith and one repeated in good faith by someone who's swallowed bad rhetoric. And, as far as strangers on the internet go, most of the time we can't tell the difference without effort, and that effort is rarely worth expending.

    You are able to tell the difference because the troublesome person is your friend, and you know what he's about, and you're someone he may to listen to. Most of my advice is The Alt-Right Playbook so far has been "do not engage," and, yeah, that's mostly for strangers. I think engaging is valuable in your case, but I still don't know what KIND of engagement is effective. If he cares about you, and he trusts you, you are in a position to reach him. I know that much. I just still don't know what works.

    Wish I had more to say. My best guess is to try presenting information outside the context of an argument. Just make it clear, day by day, what you believe and why you believe it. Don't try to win an argument, just try to give him an idea of what the world looks like from your perspective. If he's got one frame for looking at the world, he can't just be told that his frame is wrong, he needs to be presented with a different one. Sometimes that just means existing in his presence and showing him your frame.

    I'm trying to figure out something more actionable, but that's what I've got so far.

  52. I wanna talk about auteur theory for a moment, because I have what I consider a rather unique take on it and I wondered if you could share you own thoughts.
    Essentially, it's what you might describe as a kind of "Communal Auteurism" which is to say, an effort to depower the notion of auteurism and bring it back to a kind of folkloric state in which individual stories are owned by individual people as part of a wider community of authors.
    What I've always objected to, in regards to auteurism, is the notion of being an auteur as a status symbol, i.e. "I am an auteur, therefore my work is inherently better than yours", whilst I also believe in the idea that every work is a self portrait, and that the art cannot be fully seperated from the artist because art isn't made in a vacuum.
    So my solution would be to just accept the idea that everyone can create stories, and that everyone has their own voice inherently, and that no-one's art is inherently special because of the uniqueness of the voice behind it.
    In a sentence, it's basically this "You being an artist, in and of itself, does not make you special. The only thing that make you unique is that you're you".

    Art doesnt come from nowhere, it comes from people, and auterism should be a sign of recognising who those people are, rather than a symbol of status.

    This line of thinking is probably flawed, but I do wonder what you take might be.

    So, there's sort of two aspects to auteurism I think we're grappling with here.

    As I'm fond of saying, I spent an ungodly amount of time in art school. And the folkloric notion of auteurism is actually pretty standard. I mean, we didn't really think of each other as "auteurs," because most of us weren't filmmakers, but the idea that everyone has a voice, everyone has something to say, everyone is trying to find a way to communicate in a way that is authentic to them... that's pretty standard. I lived a while in an artist community, and the attitude was similar. This is maybe a bit easier to achieve when you aren't working with films as compared with other films but many different artists working in many different media.

    But, while "your art is special because it's yours" is a good baseline, we can't escape the realities that a) some art is better than other art (which is undeniable; a single artist probably makes worse art in college than they will ten years later) and b) some artists are more auteurist than others (their work is more expressive of a particular mindset). And once you have both those realities, you run into the fact that some folks are better auteurs than others.

    But that's looking at how auteurs function in the community of artists. I think the other aspect of auteurism we deal with is how auteurs relate to the world of audiences and critics; people who consume their work but are not part of their artistic community. And I think, in that context, the cult of personality that arises around auteurs may be kind of unavoidable.

    The more recognizably a work is the product of a single vision, the more, well, BRANDED it is. It's easier to be a fan of, it's easier to analyze, it's easier to market. It slots well into existing cultures of celebrity, criticism, and distribution. Trying to imagine how "communal auteurism" scales up to Hollywood levels is like trying to imagine what the film industry looks like post-capitalism. I literally can't visualize it!

    I think it's good for us, as individuals, to reign in our reflexive praise of auteurs, but I think we're limited in how much auteurism can be redefined in culture at large.

  53. Have you seen any of Satoshi Kon's movies? What do you think about them?

    Watching Tokyo Godfathers for the first time was one of the most purely joyful experiences of my life. (I've maybe ranted about this in Twitter a few times.)

    I've also seen Millennium Actress and Paprika. I get that most people love his hallucinatory dreamscape stuff more than Tokyo Godfathers, but it's still my favorite. I got one of my boos Paranoia Agent on DVD for Christmas, and we're going to watch it together after we finish this season of Better Call Saul.

  54. What game from your childhood had the biggest lasting effect on who you are today?

    I've been staring at this question for days.

    Honestly, I can tell you exactly when media first had an impact on me, and how it changed me. I was a sophomore in high school, and, up to that point, I'd never had anything you could call "taste." I think my favorite movies were Men in Black and Independence Day. Both fine popcorn movies, I might add, but good popcorn was the beginning and ending of my interest in media. I didn't have a sense that there WAS much more to look for. I saw Wild Wild West in theaters and, since I couldn't articulate anything wrong with it, I told people it was good, even though on some level I could tell it wasn't. My favorite band was probably blink-182.

    But then my family took me to see a community theatre production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia with my friend Elise playing Thomasina, and it kind of blew my mind. I don't want to overstate the absolute value of this play. (I know it's trendy for theatre nerds to dunk on Arcadia, but I think it's genuinely great.) It's more that having your mind blown by a piece of art was a concept that I'd heard of, but it had never happened to me before. I mean, I figured enjoying Men in Black WAS that experience. I didn't know there was more to art than being capably entertained for a few hours.

    Arcadia was the first time I was moved artistically and intellectually, and I immediately wanted more.

    I asked all my friends what their favorite mind-blowing art was, and worked my way through their lists. I watched Memento, Fight Club, American Beauty, Pi, Twelve Monkeys. I started listening to Radiohead, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Blonde Redhead. I read the scripts for Wit and Proof, and saw a production of As Bees In Honey Drown that I adored. I read Vonnegut for the first time, and Carl Sagan, and Tom Robbins.

    I can't stand by all this stuff anymore. Fight Club, American Beauty, and Tom Robbins seemed a lot more brilliant at 15 than they do at 34. But, honestly? I can't point to any games that had the kind of effect on me that all the art I consumed sophomore year did.

    Part of this is that I feel most of the really interesting stuff that's happened with games has happened since I've been an adult. Growing up with LOOM, Myst, and Monkey Island obviously calibrated my taste in games, and got me thinking of them as a narrative medium, but the most interesting narrative games I've played are from the last fifteen years: your Gravity Bone and Dear Esther and Blue Lacuna. The first thing I ever wrote about games was about using masocore games like Jumpman and Give Up Robot 2 to process an abusive relationship and confront my fears about failure, but I played those in my twenties. My love of Smash has completely upended my thoughts about sports and spectatorship, but I didn't even own a GameCube til I was 31.

    The most impact games of my childhood had on me was to change the way I think about games. The ones that change how I think about LIFE are newer.

  55. Hey Ian. I watched your Walking dead video (good work) and I was wondering if any of your thoughts on the series have changed with the release of season 3. Especially the reflections of the endings of season 2.

    People keep asking me about Season 3 of The Walking Dead, and about Life is Strange: Before the Storm. I haven't played either because I have a Mac, and neither game has been ported. My hope is to, sometime soon, get a new PC laptop that can actually run games, but I need to build up savings first. I would love to play those games, so it's whichever comes first, Mac ports or a new PC.

  56. I'm not sure if ocarina of time used to be that good, but it definitely isn't that good now.

    this still isn't a question

  57. Does cumin or rosemary taste good on Tofu? What about turmeric?

    Tofu doesn't have a strong flavor of its own, so basically any seasoning can work depending on what else it's being cooked with.

  58. CN: Discussion of bigotry, genocide, toxicity, violence etc.

    I think the depersonalised nature of online interactions can lead to any discussion becoming incredibly toxic from all directions.

    A good case in point would be the (thankfully very small) handful of militant vegans

    (or possibly just concern trolls)

    who will literally tell people with food allergies that they would be better off dead because they can't switch to a vegan diet.

    When the food allergy community responds to this in disgust, innocent vegans catch the tail wind and feel like their under attack, which only draws them towards the aforementioned extremists/concern trolls.

    You see this everywhere.

    Another example would be how much of the online left/social justice/whatever community has been drawn away from talking specifically about feminism and women's rights as of late.

    This is partly because of the actions of gooblegorpers et al., partly because it's really more relevant to talk about gender liberation more generally and how it relates to non-binary folks, trans men, and even cis men as well.

    But really a lot of it is because "women's rights" has become something of a shibboleth in the Trumpian age and bigots of all stripes will use it to smuggle racism, transphobia, and other such prejudices into the discourse.

    Even more extreme is what I see with Israel and Palestine, where I feel pretty much anyone even vaguely reasonable has been driven away by the extreme anti-semetic holocaust deniers on one side and the people who think "Palestinian children being blown up in their schools is good, actually" on the other.

    I mean, that and the sheer sense of hopelessness engaging with that situation tends to instill in people, which may well just be the same thing.

    I dunno, I just feel online discourse tends to lead to a perverse form of "both sidesism" emerging (stirred up by concern trolls and culture jamming) which tends to make it harder to engage on important issues in amongst the noise.

    Occasionally, with issues like mass shootings I do feel that pretty much everyone who isn't either delusional or acting in bad faith winds up falling roughly into the same camp.

    But the binary code of the internet seems to really force discussions into false dichotomies and it can be extremely frustrating.

    What do you think?

    I dunno. The internet is extremely polarized; the internet is extremely centrist. The internet cannot foster nuance; the most nuanced takes are online. The internet spreads misinformation because it doesn't fact check; the internet fact-checks news orgs better than they fact-check themselves. The internet commodifies relationships; half my closest relationships are either online or began online. Toxic communities foster online; the opposition to toxicity organizes online.

    I feel less and less capable of making any sweeping statements about internet culture. It feels like the internet is everything about human nature, all at the same time, at the loudest possible volume.

  59. Are you familiar with the You Are Not So Smart podcast? They just had an episode on Tribal Psychology, and that is kinda relevant to what you're doing with the Altright Playbook.

    Oooh, looking at these episode titles, this looks pretty up my alley. Thank you!

  60. Have you heard of the First Online Global Conference on Professional Indie Game Development? And if so, what are your thoughts on it, if you have any? Because I've noticed that the conference has gotten a lot of disdain from Brianna Wu for it's lack of diversity concerning the interviewed developers they chose to speak for the conference in its early stages of planning. And while I sort of agree with her, I think it's unfair if what the conference's creator Gabriel Dal Santo said on the matter is true, that he had contacted over a hundred developers and these were the only ones who had the time to be interviewed in time for the conference (Because it seems like most of them are pretty well-established in the indie community, like Ryan Clark, Mike Bithell, and Edmund McMillen, just to name a few. And it seems like they definitely would have the time to commit to this compared to struggling or less-known developers).

    I don't know much about that conference, I'm afraid, but a lack of diversity is almost always a failure of planning and priorities. If only white men could agree on the time constraints, then they should have planned further in advance. If they contacted 100 people and mostly white men responded, they should have contacted 200 people, or had fewer of their original 100 be white men.

    If you want a diverse sampling of speakers (which is to say, a sampling of speakers that *accurately reflects the world we live in*), you have to actively make it a priority. You have to know what factors prevent female and trans* and POC speakers from attending more conferences and actively try to accommodate them. If you don't prioritize them, you will always end up with mostly white dudes instead, because white dudes always have the fewest barriers. It doesn't take malice, just a lack of forethought.

  61. do you have any favorite tofu recipes? or anything that can replace eggs? I've been trying to go vegan but i really really need my eggs in the morning

    I do a breakfast scramble of tofu, green beans, garlic, and red potatoes. Main seasoning is, like, A LOT of sage, but throw in thyme, marjoram, and/or rosemary if you've got 'em. Add salt and nutritional yeast afterward.

    Tricks for tofu include throwing some cornstarch in the frypan to make it crispier, freezing and thawing beforehand to make it a nicer texture, or pressing it for an hour or so under some heavy books to get the water out and make it firmer (a must if you're baking or barbecuing it).

  62. What is your equipment specifications for recording? I plan on getting into video essays myself and was wondering what microphone and audio interface you use to get the quality you have and how you record it? Thanks! Love your videos.

    My setup is bad, don't use it. (It's a Shure MV5 USB mic with no pop screen.) For a while I had access to my college's sound studio, which is why everything from the first Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood til It's Not Easy Being Blue sounds so good, but those times are over.

    I started a Twitter thread asking for good mic recommendations before I got a deal on the Shure, which turned up some good advice: https://twitter.com/InnuendoStudios/status/809801079143731200.

  63. Have you played Tony Tough 2? Maybe the first adventure game I ever played. Unfortunately I haven't been able to install it to my new laptop to see how it holds up.

    I haven't played it, but if you can't get Tony Tough 2 working on your laptop, Tony Tough 1 works with ScummVM. Might tide you over!

  64. Have you played Hiveswap yet, and are you framiliar with MSpaint adventure/Homestuck in general? Thoughts on them?

    One of my boos got into Homestuck in a big way last year. I've never read it myself, and I feel like the more she describes it, the less I understand what the fuck she's talking about. We're planning to play Hiveswap together, but we haven't made the time for it yet.

  65. have you ever played lisa: the painful?

    Not yet, but it's on my list. You're like the fortieth person to recommend it.

  66. What was the motivation behind the media dumping out "The Death of Adventure Games" of the 2000s, when games in that vein were fine and well in Europe? And that's not even getting into the amount of adventure games that were built upon Adventure Game Studio. Or was the games media huffing the glue of hyperbolic exaggeration? Because I don't think that Telltale doing a Walking Dead game suddenly 'brings back Asventure Games', and completely minimizes and disregards the adventure games made before the Walking Dead games.

    This is a topic for a future installment of Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood, but The Death of Adventure Games is less about adventure games no longer being made, or no longer being good, but no longer being broadly popular or economically viable. Adventure games went from being one of the major genres of mainstream games to being a niche genre. You could make adventure games for the European market, or the kids' education market, or the casual market, but if you wanted to make an adventure game with broad appeal and even a fraction of a triple-A budget, no publishers would fund them. Which meant the kinds of adventure games that were most popular in their heyday were the kinds that couldn't get made anymore.

    There's certainly something to be said for the way we say "adventure games are dead" when we mean "adventure games no longer appeal to 18-34 American males," and this narrative does erase a lot of good games popular with audiences that are usually ignored by gamer culture. Still, there was a change that took place, and a type of game that never got made anymore, and in the years between the early 2000's and The Walking Dead, there was a certain itch that was very hard to get scratched.

  67. I was reading some of your questions, and I saw that you said that Malcom Gladwell was a hack? Can I ask why? I've always been fairly impartial to his stuff that i've head/listened too.

    Gladwell's stock-in-trade is to use compulsively readable prose to make up for weak arguments. Off the top of my head:

    - His famous article about ketchup talks about how Heinz became the most popular ketchup, and then mentions that Heinz ketchup activates all five types of taste bud, and then proceeds as though Heinz became the most popular BECAUSE it activates all five taste buds without ever demonstrating it.

    - His essay which argues that Korean pilots get in plane crashes because their language makes it hard for copilots to point out dangers extrapolates a massive, sweeping argument from about four data points. He seems to know his argument is weak because it's by far the longest chapter in Outliers, restating the same argument in increasingly dramatic language as though that will make it more convincing. (His argument has been thoroughly debunked by a Korean blogger: http://askakorean.blogspot.hk/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-and-airplane.html)

    - In another essay in Outliers - I forget which one - quotes a researcher saying that two sets of information are correlated. Gladwell then pops in to say, in essence, "correlation doesn't merely IMPLY causation, correlation IS causation!" I'm sorry, but that is hack work.

  68. Have you played Ace Attorney?

    No.

  69. Most of my close friends are centrists. Whenever we get into the subject of nazi's and why i think we should never give them a platform they just tell me: "Well that doesn't make you any better than them" I find this hard to react to considering it just makes me really angry, any tips on how i could debunk this counterargument?

    Tell them about Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

    Dunno if it'll change their minds, but it's the right answer.

  70. Are you a normal player or a futzer?

    Recovering futzer.

  71. I was reading through some of these answers because I have a sad and uninteresting life that has led me to this point and I saw that you said that people had told you that Warcraft was at least interesting from an academic POV and I wanted to ask what you meant when you said that, because when I watched it it was mind numbingly boring and I love picking apart the technique and structure of films.

    Someone told me that, if you go in without the expectation that it be good, it's at least interesting as a kind of passion project where passion didn't translate into quality. Sort of a "I can see how this happened, but how did this happen?!?!" I haven't watched it to confirm yet.

  72. Do you really hate tomatoes?

    Yes.

  73. Do you think the vegan community needs to do more to address the prevalence of eating disorders within it? I personally suffered from anorexia and bulimia for 12 years, and initially used veganism as a cover for my weight loss, and used it as an excuse to not eat with others for a long time. I think organizations like Peta, and certain "celebrity" vegans, using body shaming tactics to promote veganism only added fuel to that fire.

    I don't know much about the vegan community. I have been in community with many vegans, but never felt like I was part of anything larger than the people in the room with me. That's not to deny that there is a community or that it has trends and habits, I'm just not very keyed into it.

    That said, body shaming is trash in all contexts, and PeTA is also trash.

  74. Any ideas of how to stop my friends from unknowingly using alt-right dogwhistles like Pepe and cuck and other memes? I know for a fact that none of the people in my Discord group (with the exception of maybe two or three people) have more than the vaguest idea that these dogwhistles mean something far more than they let on. They don't really mean any harm by it. They just think they're silly edgy memes. I don't want them repeating these things in the wrong places and ending up catching the attention of recruiters or something. However, I feel like if I outright tell them they're using alt-right dogwhistles and they should stop using them, they'll just think I'm a paranoid ol' crackpot trying to take away their fun. What do?

    When I figure that one out, I'll be sure to broadcast it loud and clear. Right now, my assumption is that collecting and sharing some concrete evidence, maybe more as a general discussion than as an argument directed at a specific person, would be the safest way. But I don't know for sure.

  75. What to do when you want to date but you're traumatized and too afraid to touch anyone ever and all the written guides to the body language of dating and escalation of physical touch are written by PUAs and you're like "NOOOO THE FORBIDDEN TECHNIQUES"

    [EDIT]

    Okay, I answered this question assuming you were using "traumatized" metaphorically but I realize that was very possibly wrong, and if you're talking about how to flirt if you have actual trauma, I can't actually answer that, because my anxiety and PTSD never manifested in a fear of physical touch from people I liked.

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