Ep. 181 - All Six Of Them, with Ash Parrish

yeso

this is a compliment btw. Mortal Kombat 3 at the buzzer lmao

yeso

Then immediate transition into insane lightning round rules: “I will not allow creature names unless there is only one of that creature”

Sorry for the real time posting put this is really getting me rn lol

esper

jaws

esper

I did several spit takes at this one, some of your best work.

yeso

the smash cut to that photo of brandon then to sonic seems very accusatory

Gaagaagiins

Sonic is both roundly round and pointedly pointed. What does this say about his capacity for human-centric romanceability?

also obligatory Sonic ’06 joke

esper

Gaagaagiins i think i watched a documentary about this topic once

wickedcestus

While I think Mario Galaxy being a baby’s toy is the least of its problems, I especially don’t understand the argument that it would appeal to non-game-players. Maybe Ash has specific anecdotal evidence that counters what I’m about to say, I don’t know, but as a person who has played games my whole life, even I find Galaxy’s movement unintuitive. I could never get the hang of determining which way you need to point the stick when circumnavigating the orbs. I remember in an Iwata Asks talking about 3D Land, they specifically said that they found a lot of new players had trouble with the 3d Marios (the Galaxies being the most recent at the time), and 3D Land was meant to bridge that gap between 2d and 3d.

I am a dead-to-my-bones Mario fan, but Galaxy, from its visual design to its levels, just misses me completely. There’s no feeling of exploration - you are just taking pre-determined sky-highways straight from one small orb to another. Talk about a boring “liminal space!” (had to look that word up, lol.) I guess I can understand the argument about the music, even though again personally I don’t like it.

Anyway yeah I think it’s funny when a guest mentions a game that’s sorta an IC punching bag, and then everyone goes “woah!!” and then the guest is like, “what is wrong with you guys? this is a critically acclaimed game” and then everything sorta calms down. It’s like they’re entering some weird world where the perceived value of all games is reversed, but no one mentioned it and they just have to find out by naming games and seeing how people react.

Also this week’s lightning round was hilarious. The more IC is like a game show, the more fun I am having.

Gaagaagiins

esper It takes a lot to leave me in a position where I can’t riff back, so, bravo, this is a powerful joke

exodus

I played Galaxy for maybe 15 minutes and extremely did not like it, but this was also at the height of Nintendo doing things I did not like (they’ve scaled way back on that stuff), so I didn’t feel like I should weigh in, but I’m glad we at least dissected it somewhat. I truly had nothing to say about Galaxy other than I played it once and didn’t like it.

One fun element of this extra game show-y episode is that we all got homework, which meant ash got to “get” us with a question again, and I was able to answer frank’s question definitively within about 10 seconds (and then we talked about it some more). My question was just about genesis games again (not really but kind of).

We just recorded the next episode so this is fresh in my mind! It was a good one, and Merritt Kopas is in it.

gsk

exodus We just recorded the next episode so this is fresh in my mind! It was a good one, and Merritt Kopas is in it.

I feel like I mentioned this somewhere in the forums and I’m asking again, not as a gotcha or in order to put any sort of pressure on you specifically, but because I genuinely want to know: Merritt was recently publicly accused of abusive behaviour by more than a few people, and yet a ton of people that I would’ve expected to be more wary seem to be completely oblivious—did they adequately address these accusations somewhere, and I simply missed it, or are people simply unaware (or choosing to turn a blind eye)?

edit: here’s a basic summary, there’s undoubtedly more recent info out there: https://forum.waypoint.vice.com/t/tw-sexual-assault-alec-holowka-accused-of-sexual-assault-by-zoe-quinn/23664/36

saddleblasters

exodus re: Jonathan Blow, did you (or anyone else on here) know him pre-Braid? Was he always like this?? It’s bizarre to me how he is so often portrayed as this genius artist who lives an ascetic life in order to make profound works that contemplate the human condition. Did all of that go to his head? Like, sure, he’s reasonably intelligent, but he doesn’t really seem any different than most of the nerdy white videogame guys I know irl who took computer science classes in college (other than being a lot more successful).

exodus

Not pre-braid, but around braid? He was like the kind of programmy guy who was into meditation and tantric yoga and thinking about whether shoes constrain us kind of dude, and I would say he was mostly always like this but it just didn’t come up as much in general discussion in 2005 or whatever, so he wouldn’t be out there parading it around. It’s a situation where the times changed and he found himself very cranky about it, if I had to reduce it to something.

Gaagaagiins

The commercial mystic/new age dork to mundane “radical” “unbiased” “centrist” (read: moderate to far right) status quo defender is quite the cultural pipeline

yeso

another angle on the kind of blue of videogames: a young John Coltrane played on that album, so I wonder what epochal masterpiece featured both a currently-renowned developer + a lesser known up and comer who would find their own success later….

exodus

WELL, it may not surprise you to learn given my cavalier mention that I had no idea about this and will now look into it. Gaaaaah

Update: dang, this is some really deep stuff and not very easy to parse, but levies a lot of accusations of bad behavior, so now I have to talk to some people and figure out some stuff. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, stand by.

dylanfills

Syzygy I LOVE that Blazing Beaks. Really cool roguelite with interesting power-ups, abilities and load-outs. Twin Stick shooter (or top down, whichever one Hotline Miami is) that frequently goes on sale on switch as well

exodus

So I wanted to update on this Merritt thing - like I said, I wasn’t aware of this stuff beforehand. After it got brought up here I did a lot of internet looking-around and talked extensively with two neutral (as one can be) people who are familiar with the original 2014 allegations (linked above) and the more recent mentions (which are about bad tweets rather than abuse) and came to the conclusion that this is very complicated, and requires a real knowledge of and fluency in that particular scene at that particular time.

I vaguely orbited that scene during the time of this stuff and know one person to whom basically all the things described in the author’s long post happened. The difference is the author of the post was the perpetrator, doing these things to the person I know. I saw the effects of this firsthand, which has me feeling, well, a bit overwhelmed by the question of how to take the allegations against Merritt. Without getting too far into other people’s business (which, goodness, you really do have to in order to even understand what’s going on here), it seems like a scene in which everyone was being very toxic to everyone and there were not a lot of clean consciences to go around. That’s of course not the most winning endorsement in itself.

We’re kind of in a spot between believing victims and believing the victims of those victims and potentially also silencing underrepresented voices by cutting the episode, which complicates things even further. There’s some stuff I shouldn’t get too far into but both people I spoke with said they didn’t think she had done anything to make cutting the episode necessary - the way and context in which they said it was convincing because - how shall I say - neither of them are Merritt’s friends. And re: the tweets as I understand she’s done a 180 on that now.

The conclusion we came to collectively was we’re going to run the episode since it is finished, but this is obviously not the position we want to be in or the kinds of decisions we want to be making so we’ll be doing more thorough investigation and making fewer assumptions before inviting folks in the future. I hope this makes sense to everybody, it’s just a wild situation to be in and required some real anthropology to get to the bottom of (which, frankly, I don’t think anyone fully can).

As always, any questions or concerns, please feel free to voice them.

Gaagaagiins

exodus I think that the decision to release the episode is a sound one, or rather, I think this sounds like overall the right approach, based on the amount of investigation that was undertaken and the position of the people you discussed things with. I respect that you all took the time to speak about the decision with people it is relevant to. They’re the sort of people who might be hurt or feel betrayed by whatever was going to happen after all.

In many cases like this, especially where inevitable it’s likely that releasing the episode will likely upset people and cutting the episode will likely upset people, the only thing approaching an effective approach is ensuring that whatever you do, it’s done with as much consultation as you can manage. That’s what I think anyway.

My only concern, and maybe this is something you’re already planning to do anyway, is how the context of the episode and its release will be communicated to those who aren’t reading the forum or apprised of the situation. Perhaps, if it’s not too late, a short introduction could be added to the episode telling people there’s some context about the recording/delay/release of the episode that listeners may want to know before listening to the episode. If that’s something someone on the show would want to record an explanation of, or put a request to go to the forums or read off a tinyurl link to the a post on here with a rundown on why/how the episode was recorded and what listeners may wish to be aware of while listening.

My main issue with a lot of how these sorts of things go is when the spread of information is controlled either too tightly (allowing people to get away with shit by cycling through new social groups constantly) or too loosely (letting sensitive information or rumours/lies spread), too many individual people making fractured, disorganized decisions. So my opinion is that the antidote to things like that is to make organized, clear, and principled communication on matters like this as visible as possible when one can ensure that you can deliver a fair, measured, and accurate statement. That’s my rationale in increasing the visibility on a more clear communique about what’s going on with the episode, anyway. As a chance to ensure as many people as possible are informed as thoroughly as possible.

altdrifter

exodus Thanks so much for this. I’m happy to see that you’re taking a nuanced approach and doing due diligence. It’s kinda depressing to see over and over again complicated interpersonal conflicts being reduced to the question of whether or not a given individual is an “abuser”, which imo is very unhelpful and reductive.

Gaagaagiins

altdrifter Good points. Really, I think a big reason I’m into the idea of sharing the information as visibly as possible is so that in general we are collectively moving more toward an approach where we actually begin to grapple with the harsh and unforgiving realities of interpersonal harm and conflict, rather than just reduce it to simple narratives of who’s right and who’s wrong, who we will be biased towards and who we will shun. I find in a lot of cases it’s abusers who know how to really take advantage of these sorts of adversarial social structures.

Justice should always come first, but there’s nothing productive in forming communities that have no real protocols for rehabilitation. Arguably, we could maybe prevent a lot of serious interpersonal harm from happening in the first place if people felt they could address or seek help for the harm they’ve caused by making smaller mistakes, before things spiral out of control.

JoJoestar

I was going to post about something else entirely but now I saw all this so I don’t want to derail the conversation.

This is all very complicated and I don’t understand it very well, and I guess I can’t dedicate the time Brandon has put into it just to barely understand what’s going on to came to the ultimate conclusion that he still doesn’t get it 100%. But I still find it important that he tried and he addressed the concerns.

To me, I think, that would be the meaningful part of it all. If there is this degree of transparency and willingness to communicate and engage in a conversation about what has been going on and the conclusions that have been found I feel like there is this degree of trust on the community being put forward that immediately turns into the opposite direction, trust from the community on the people calling the shots here. This is important, but also immensely rare on a society and culture that usually wants to avoid problems and nuances and talking about problems and nuances in general, so what I would like to say is: please keep doing it! I think it’s valuable.

That said, I think we as part of the community also have the responsibility of be just as careful and avoid fast and easy judgment. So yeah, I’m basically on the same boat as altdrifter here. This is a tough one, guys, so please don’t say stuff that makes the thread locked lol

If things calm down maybe I post the frankly not that important videogame related thing I was gonna share, but for now I won’t. Thanks for taking things seriously.

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