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Geeze...they seem so...Canadian. I think maybe one of my older albums by them was off a Canadian label or something. I don't know. Canada should claim them, anyways.

Yes, I'm looking for a way to make my meager portions available to the masses without crippling me financially. Epitonic.com has good music on it, but it seems like they have deals with labels, which I will certainly never be on. The Canadians... was my nearly clever way of saying They Might Be Giants. Flood was the first album I ever purchased, and I have most of their albums since then and one before then. I still need Mink Car.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it seems as if mp3.com might be shutting down soon. This is terrible for a great deal of unsigned musicians, even me and my crappy music. Mp3.com doesn't talk about this at all, though maybe as a platinum uranium member(or something), you already know.

Great music, by the way. You smack quite a bit of the Canadians Who Could Be Taller Than Average, which is a very good thing. If you ever need someone to scream like a banshee just to add more insanity, drop me a line.

My thoughts:

1)There should be a weekly or monthly or something intelligent discussion about adventure game design on the adventure-related talk section of the board. This increases seriousness and will hopefully elicit questions in designers' heads like, "Why am I doing this?"

2)There ought to also be a place somewhere that can support intelligent discussion about game theory in general. If I can't find one in the next couple weeks, I'm thinking I'll make one. This would probably start out as invitation only, and if things worked out, we might open it up. There would be a price of admission though, like submitting a thought-out essay on some facet of video games. It would probably come down to if I like it, then you get access to the boards. And continued access only comes from being apart of some good discussion. Anyways, all this is hypothetical of course, and no one will hear about it for a while even if it actually happens. Which it could very well not.

The discussion on these boards definitely needs to happen. It's probably better for it to be adventure-game-centric, as to keep people focused on the task at hand. If we have people questioning their theory of language because of the varied interpretation of the same hypertext, or something like that, no one's going to get around to making games.

Yay for more responses.

I don't know about my take on art v. entertainment in video games. Maybe that could be a discussion topic. As soon as we could get moving graphics on screen, we recreated ping pong. Ping pong has very few artistic qualities, in my opinion.

I think my bone to pick with the present state of video games is that literature and film both have works aimed at entertainment primarily. They also have works aimed at other things, greater points, identifiable complex characters, strong aesthetics and the like. As a by-product, these works may be entertaining. It seems to me that video games have only the entertaining. Most of the deepest and intelligent video games would barely rise above pulp fiction if they were literature.

Mayhaps I am pretentious. Mayhaps what I associate with "art" is just a different kind of entertainment. A lot of the game theory discussion that's occurred on this board through the years has centered around puzzle design, which makes sense, what with puzzles being the main interaction and conflict in adventure games. I would like to be able to ask questions about why we throw obstacles in front of our players. Do they further the plot? Develop characters? Flesh-out a theme? Get in people's way?

I would love for one of the discussions to be about the short-comings of the adventure game genre as a whole, and(here's the prescriptive part for goldmund) what can be done to change that. Well, I shall stop typing now because otherwise I, uh, won't stop typing.

Good to see people interested. I figure we(or I) should get on this post-Mittens. I'm thinking of starting some kind of art/gaming site, but I'm going to need to figure out how much time that would take from me. Forming something separate from AGS seems like a good idea in that it makes way for more in depth conversation, I think. But that also might mean taking the discussion away from people who are actually making games, and result in a bunch of people who sit on their arses and theorize, like me. Well, anyways. I will ponder for a little while.

Thank you Las, 'twas a good read. I'm not certain what a squizz is, but I'm sure it's something Australian. I hope you've played the Shenmue series. If not, you must. Just not the crappy English version of Shenmue 2.

Somehow I forgot one of the better resources: www.gamestudies.org. Quite amazing it be. An intelligent interview with Tim Schafer and everything. They couldn't spell his name for a while though.

I also forgot to ask the question: would anyone be interested in forming some kind of intelligent video game discussion group if none already exists? I need an outlet.

I've been catching up on the recent controversies(which come and quickly go for those who've never seen one here), and I realized I would love to have a board with Las and Helm0r and Scid and Goldmund(despite never actually communicating with him in any way) and Phil and Mostly and many others. As someone who has sort of been around for a while, I know I would like to have a place where I can have tantalizing discussion. This is certainly not because I dislike any newer guys, but only because I really don't know them at all. I'm sure I'd like a bunch of new guys, but I'm very lazy.

Anyways, I'm not really a part of this community at all, so my feelings may be disregarded with extreme prejudice.

One of the main reasons for wanting to get with these guys, besides them being just plain cool, is because I want an outlet for discussion concerning video games as a serious art form. Does anyone know of such a magical place full of intelligent people delving into the potential of interactive narrative and the like? If not, I must make such a place. I am lazy though. Well, okay then. I'll share with you a few places I have been:

joystick101.org is an okay place for some decent articles/discussion. I haven't gotten involved really because discussion is sparse and slow.

insertcredit.com has some amazing articles, especially by Eric-Jon that treat video games as serious art, and tie in things like Japanese literature.

gamecritics.com is okay sometimes, but mostly an average gamezine thing.

Anyone found better? Anyone care? Thanks for listening. Or reading. Whatever.

Me me me.

if the matrices have taught me anything, it's to feel sorry for security guards. i mean, how would YOU like to go to work every day thinking you were doing the right thing only to be slaughtered by the time-bending kung fu good guys? every day! guh!

oh, and i think from now on unexplainable atrocities in filmmaking should be reffered to as "exploding vagina." ex. "The plight of security guards in the matrix films is an exploding vagina."

I must say, that the new Matrix did to me what the new Star Wars movies did. Or at least, something similar.

Like the great Helm0r said, the first film's plot has been done and done and done before. World-as-a-simulation coupled with robots-have-taken-over-the-world dystopian future. It had some style and some intelligence and some subtlety. That seems to have been removed from the latest film, much to my chagrin.

All in all, they lost me at the exploding vagina.

Hooray for a new Phil Reed game. I hope to make one myself, one of these days. If you need a tester, I am more than up for it. And I echo Helm0r echoing Scidalicious. Especially those Guitarman novel excerpts. Oh yeah.

Oh my goodness, I may have to go with you on that.

I mean...to actually put time into something like that. Megaman as an amatuer melodrama with Bryce3d-style animations. Truly, truly depressing. And funny too I suppose.

Someone "remixed" the video and added some sweet saber effects. It really looks amazing.

Go here.

Why thank you, and same to you.

Yay my team!

I was reading a rejection e-mail for a short short story I wrote last year, and realized that all but one place had sent me a rejection e-mail. So, just to check and see what place had never got around to e-mailing me, I went to the link(I keep all the sites I submit to organized with notes as to what I've sent and what's been accepted/rejected) and lo and behold my short story's sitting there in the prose section. Now, sure it would have been nice to get an e-mail informing me, but after much repeated disappointment, I really don't give a crap.

I don't even remember how I found the link to this particular e-zine thingy, but I think it's pretty funny that two other AGSers have stories there too. Have a look see. Mine's "The Luck of Charles Scott."

The only reason I can think of for the large amount of AGS stories is the involvement of Phil Reed, an extreme lack of submissions, or a combination of both. Though I must approve of Scid's story. Well....anyways.

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and if you want to see what Phil really does, go here. oh, and here.

I sent you a message on the messageboard thingy, but I don't really know if I did that right, so just in case my e-mail is john_a_campbell `at' hotmail.com.

Good topic here.

The two approaches to character you've chosen are spot-on. They're either the player's tool, or the set of thoughts/emotions/actions the player experiences the game through. I definitely prefer the latter, and that doesn't seem to prohibit interactivity, as you've shown.

I think the important thing to realize is that games do a crappy job with love because most are low-brow entertainment. I mean, when was the last time you saw a movie deal with love well?

Games try to quantify things just to make it more simple. Like the Sims has a satisfaction-meter, if I remember correctly. Anyone who's lived knows things don't work that way, just like the random fall-in-love-with-a-stranger used in video games and movies. It's just simple and we don't have to think about what the heck love actually is.

Anyways, I like the approach you're taking. It seems like realism could be heightened a lot if there were even just one peripheral relationship that could grow or not grow.

I have yet to play the Gabriel Knight series, but the only mildly decent portrayal of love I can think of off the top of my head is in Grim Fandango. We have Manny going after Meche with mostly selfish motives, but knowing she's a saint. She's angry at him and refuses him, but when he shows he actually cares, she reacts positively. It's not fantastically developed or even compelling, but at least it makes sense.

If you guys don't get anywhere, I could give it a try with the XP patch.