Allamorph

You look like you about to drop your mixtape and you know it fire.

You're probably right, but I don't think we had either the Android or the iPhone engines to work with back then.

It's only 7pm here, man, nobody's closed yet. I have the day off tomorrow, too. If it's sunny I may go into Seattle and do some personal shopping, but otherwise I'll probably be right here, keeping the Skype thing open for anyone who wants.

Another point that just occurred to me is that many of these tiny mobile games are simply platforms for testing out certain features of their particular medium. Take Flappy Bird, for example. Extraordinarily simple concept—tap the screen and make the little birdy go higher. Tap faster for higher, tap slower and it sinks like a freaking stone. And people would spend hours and hours trying to get high scores on this thing for the sake of ... I dunno, bragging rights, I guess, but if everybody knew how dinky it was, then what was the point? Really it was just testing out the touch-screen software interface in a gaming capacity. And a lot of innovation in the gaming industry comes from private-sector people just screwing around with tech. The main difference between now and years ago is that now developers have the ability to put their projects out in the public eye very easily by sending it to some sort of app store or other, and either market it as Free and just get exposure and feedback, or put a small price tag on it and channel the revenue off of that into whatever else they want. And in that context, it's not just that more games are being made, but the degree to which the internet has become a part of our daily lives has made these tiny games so much more visible than they used to be.

Can we make that word into the banner for the top of the site page?

Right, and that's sort of the point I was trying to make. Everything current always seems a little blown out of proportion because of market saturation. It won't be until we look back a few decades from now that we'll see all the good stuff without the crap clogging it down. So I'm not terribly worried.

It depends on your definition of what's good/great in gaming. And, really, the only way gaming companies know what's good is by what people buy. I dunno who all remembers the early 90s, but when I was growing up we were just starting to come out of the Arcade era. Back then, all the popular games were sort of like the mobile-based games now: simple, straightforward, coins for continues (unless you were on the Atari home console). Nothing was super complex or pretty or involved, but they were still popular, and people would still spend entire rolls of quarters just to get a high score on a machine. So companies made arcade games because the consumer spent their money there. And then came the console surge, and alongside it the handheld surge, and that was dominant for a while, although companies still supported some arcade style things for the holdovers. And then even later, when it became possible to use the internet for online play, MMOs surged, and then the online gaming community surged, and each different surge gave us its own specific brand of generic game: the 4-player vs game; the handheld platformer/movie adaptation game; Halo and the Call of Duty clones; the open-world sandbox goonery. So now we have something fairly similar, but which, when I think about it, goes straight back to the arcade-style. It started on Facebook (not mobile, actually) as little dinky time-waster games that didn't really have anything in the way of content, but provided a continual variation-on-a-theme and the option to spend money to get more of the same. Candy Crush Saga springs to mind. And this type of game attracted the Bored Office Worker crowd because it was something they could do to burn away the monotony during the day. Along with that kind of game came the microtransactions (for more levels or more play time or more little fripperies to get more points), and then the evolution of the paywall. And we bought into it. And because we bought into it, game companies thought to themselves, "Man, this is a really killer way to make money." So it spread to the console game, and the MMO. And we kept buying those games, and kept spending our money on microtransactions and paywalls and "premium content". And now here we are. Personally, I don't mind all the aspects of microtransactions. For instance, if all I'm paying for extra is cosmetic differences, that's totally fine, to me. It's a nonessential aspect of the game. Just a personal perk. Or, you know, take Borderlands as an example. "Hey, we found out that everyone really loved this game, so we made some new stuff for you, hope you enjoy!" That's totally cool with me. But when I'm straight up told that I have to keep buying the game to keep playing it, my interest is immediately shot. tl;dr — I don't think mobile gaming (or microtransactions) has ruined gaming. I do think that having to individually pay full game price for a bunch of different pieces of an incomplete game is utterly ridiculous, and I don't think it will stop unless we stop paying for it.

Watch List: The X-Files — Old-school, baby. I remember my parents watching this at night when I was younger, and it probably helped spur my interest in the fantastic and bizarre. Never actually watched it straight through, so I'm going back now and picking up all the plot subtexts under each of the seasons. For being an episodic series, the complexity of the long-term plot was very well-laid-out underneath everything else, and the writers do a great job of going back and hinting at it again just often enough to remind you that it's there but you can't see it. Very patient pacing. I especially enjoy how the writers deliberately approach the paranormal topics as though no one believes they exist and yet clearly writing them as real; and it's very interesting to see Dana Scully come slowly around to believing that there may be something to Mulder's claims after all.Jessica Jones — I'm currently of the opinion that Netflix can just sit in Hell's Kitchen and do whatever they want and I'll love it. First they had Daredevil, which was extremely well-done but very dark, and now this series, which is just as gritty and brutal to its characters. Also it's got Carrie Ann Moss (a high-profile corporate lawyer who's going through a rough divorce with her wife) and David Tennant (River Song says, "Spoilers! ;) "), if that strikes your fancy.Legends — aka Sean Bean Doesn't Die. Story centers around FBI agent Martin Odum (Bean), who uses his Dissociative Personality Disorder to go deep-cover and infiltrate organisations or gain the confidence of targets as a vast array of different people he can "become": artificial personalities that the Bureau refers to as "Legends". But when a stranger's dying words suggest that Martin Odum is himself a Legend, Odum's life begins to spiral as he tries to reaffirm his own identity—or discover who he truly is.Read List Dune – Frank Herbert — Picked this one up when I saw it in the Barnes and Noble surge of reprinting old classics in hardback with gilt-edged pages. Didn't touch it for almost two years, then started in on it over the holidays. Interplanetary feudalistic politics, local mystic religious beliefs, and the Spice. Good times.1984 – George Orwell — Yet another classic I haven't finished. Dystopian future where the population has been brainwashed by the continual rewriting of history and the fear of the Thought Police. Good reading for duty days when I can't go home and have nothing to do but sit on Crew's Mess and be bored out of my mind. Not that the book is boring, by any means. Just that now I'm more qualified, I have less things to eat up my free time on duty. After I finish Orwell, I plan on going back for To Kill A Mockingbird.

If you want to bum around on Skype, give Petie or myself a nudge and we'll pull you in. Also, our sister site TheOtaku.com is having a last-minute copycat reunion chat courtesy of Adam (who likes to do things like that) if you're interested in that, too. I showed up for a bit yesterday and got to see some old faces I hadn't in a while, but the software seems to be quite out of date and is clunky, so keep that in mind. I apologise for the late start; I was engrossed in Netflix last night and went to sleep far later than I should have.

Well, that's a total of four people so far, which is enough as far as I'm concerned. My username is, coincidentally, my username, so if you want to drop me a message and let me know who you are, I can drag you in when I form the thing. Unless someone else forms it first. In which case I suppose it won't matter. Anyway.

IMMANOTOGAY

Good news, no one! I am not on duty on the 17th. I will most definitely be F5ing this place in another tab as much as I can that day ... assuming I don't stay in bed until noon or something. Hey, so, question. Is there any interest in a large-scale IM session that day? I have seen mention of the FaceBook chat deal, but since part of my deal has always been anonymity (and because I don't really feel like using my Thomas O'Malley alt much anymore), are there/can there be plans for something on another venue? I used to use AIM a crapton, but I think the last time I logged into it was maybe three years ago, about the time I lost contact with the Utah Crew. (Which ... isn't really applicable anymore since Beth is in Kansas now.) I am almost always on Skype, alternately pestering and not pestering Kei, but if there's a more preferred service I can adapt. Any other takers, or is the FaceBook too strong?

I'm still over here playing Omega Ruby.....

...you prefer to wield a book. I mean, to each his own.

I do, in fact, walk around with knives. Do you not?

Yes, Boo, we've established that the nesting is easily broken. Good job. +1 pat on the head.

I have another new toy. Would you like to guess what it is? I'll give you a hint: it's definitely not a knife. Give up? Ta-da!!!!

I'm sure if we doused it, the real one would come out, but I feel you'd not appreciate something so rash.

Last time I talked to Raiha was approximately ... criminy, three years ago, now? Must have been, I was still in Charleston at the time. Gavin might know something.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER I do, in fact, work on a nuclear US submarine which we are trying at some point in our lives to make seaworthy again (although entropy and the shipyard seem to want to fight us at every turn). We're close, we're almost there, but we've got a lot of intensive stuff to do here soon. So in the likely case that we're waist-deep in Hot Ops or Crit Ops, or (just as likely) I'm on duty that day, I might not make much of a showing. I will try, though. Also I'mma go poke Beth real quick.

I can probably put in a good word with Laura for you, Charles.

Are we not going to talk about that nonexistent nest of quotes I put up there? Because I didn't hit "QUOTE" that many times. I just hit Enter a bunch inside the quote box after backspacing all the quoted text away. I'm still not sure what happened. I can recreate if desired.....