Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Jordan Stokes, and Matthew Wrather overthink the fifth anniversary of this podcast, Garage Band-ization, and the political economy of Triton’s Kingdom.
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Your Panel
- Matthew Belinkie
- Peter Fenzel: @fenzelian
- Mark Lee: @goestotwelve
- Jordan Stokes
- Matthew Wrather: @mwrather
Further Reading
OTI Picks
- Belinkie: Star Wars #11
- Fenzel: Bunraku (2010)
- Lee: Wing Commander 3: Heart of the Tiger
- Stokes: The Worm Ouroboros
- Wrather: Not a Pretty Girl by Ani DiFranco
Rejected Titles
- Welcome To The First Podcast Of The Rest Of Your Life
- If You Like Musical Parodies And Falafel
- I Had To Pay My Cable Bill In The Middle Of The Episode
- Our Method Is To Just Hit Record
- Throwing Good Death Stars After Bad
- We’ve Talked About Everything Before
- An Ambitious Failure Of A High Concept Action Movie
- A Region Of Unknown Size In The Dystopian Puppet-future
- Gather Ye Mushrooms While Ye May
- You Are A Giant Weirdo Beyond The Scope Of Weirdos
- The Rise Of The Puritans Put A Real Damper On Things
- That Would Be Great Fun…for Me
- The First Part Of Making Something Awesome Is Showing Up
- Just Stay Alive And I’ll Answer The Phone
- A Love You Anyway Button
- Garage-bandization
- Aquaboogie
- Ani Difranco, Righteous Mer-babe
- Auto Tune Is A Collateralized Song Obligation
- You’ve Got To Keep The Devil Under The Sea
- Scatchat
This episode went further off the rails than any other episode I’ve listened to, and it was EFFING BEAUTIFUL. Long may you ride!!!
Wing Commander!!!!!!
Wing Commander completely blew my mind when I discovered it. I bought it in a discount bundle around ’95 (WC1,WC2, Space Quest, Encarta, that sort of stuff) Up until then my gaming experience had been entirely side-scrollers and Zelda.
It was doing stuff then that no one else was, and that seems to have been influential in game evolution since.
Qualified successes and Qualified failure:
-Success or failure at certain points would determine which campaign path you were sent down, with corresponding Offense or Defense storylines.
-Ejecting was always an option, but had consequences.
-Losing wingmen impacted the storyline
-Defeating (but not destroying) a “named enemy” meant you might face them again later (Redclaw in WC2)
Early achievements system – Medals etc.
Objectives! way too many games (still) are overly scripted in their mission structures, or pretend to be non-scripted by obscuring the objectives. WC made the objectives clear (scout, destroy, escort). But let you make important in-game choices about accomplishing them. For example a mission might require you to scout at waypoint 1, scout and destroy enemy at wp2, and escort a transport from 3 to 4. So not only did you have the decision of whether or not to fight the enemy at wp1, but you also had the option of performing the escort mission first. Then managing the other 2 objectives according to your remaining fuel, shields, and missiles.
The AI had it’s own set of objectives as well, and reacted fairly well to balancing objectives and threat management.
The game menu lounge: They made save/restore, next mission, even combat practice all diegetic. Yeah there was a limit to the interaction options, but this had to be an influence on advanced storytelling lounges like Starcraft 2.
In short, yeah I’m buying WC3 tonight. Thanks Mark.
Woohoo!
While talking about Wing Commander on the podcast I became intensely nostalgic for the bygone heyday of space/flight simulators and started shopping for joysticks. Rambler, do you still have a proper joystick? I haven’t had one since the last F-15 plastic wannabee I had in high school stopped working.
Let’s keep talking about joysticks and flight simulators.
I never achieved the full nirvana of having a full 3-piece stick, throttle, and pedals setup, but got pretty damn close with my 2-joystick setup that I used for the Longbow helicopter simulator. I still long for the feeling of graceful movement and military muscle I got when slamming the throttle full blast, tilting the helicopter nose down, and unleashing a barrage of rockets on North Korean scum.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmtk3ytwCSI
Anyone else with me on this?
My old joystick and old gravis gamepad are tucked away in a nostalgia box. The real problem is that I don’t have a port to plug them into anymore.
I’ve had mixed results with USB emulating for old games. Dosbox has handled most of the combinations I tried (but as of the last time I tried) kills off the sound on Wacky Wheels… which is a major downer.
Good lord, Wacky Wheels. I remember playing that obsessively back in the day. I haven’t thought of that game in years!
For the uninitiated, or just the nostalgia-seekers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vVIiKp6xMs
Field of Dreams blitzball is simply amazing. Field of… dreams.
If you build it, Sin will come.
You’ve Got To Keep The Devil Under The Sea:
When you swim through the octopus’s garden
You better watch your tail
I beg your pardon
Swim the straight and narrow trail
When you swim with Neptune
You’ll never swim through pee
And you gotta keep the devil
Way down in the sea
He’s got storms and thunder
At his command
But you don’t have to wonder
Hold onto Neptune’s hand
And we’ll all be safe from Satan
I think you’ll agree
But you gotta keep the devil
Way down in the sea
All the seagull’s sing
About Neptune’s mighty sole
And they shield you with their wings
Keep you close to the lord
Pay no heed to temptation
For his fins are slippery
And you gotta keep the devil
Way down in the sea.
Clap.
Clap….
Clap….
I was thinking about the differences between LiveJournal and Facebook this morning, and I think that by the very nature of Facebook giving us the option to “like” or “comment” on a status, it incentivizes us to post things that people are going to like. The more entertaining we are, the more attention we get from our Facebook friends. (Of course, the semantics of the “like” go beyond just entertainment, but you probably see what I’m driving at.)
On the other hand, with LiveJournal, the very name inclines us to treat it more like a journal–a place to write down what happened to us, or what we’re thinking about, just for the sake of it. It doesn’t matter as much whether anyone is going to like it, because entertaining people is not the point.
This is why I decided to try to start writing more in my LiveJournal, because I realized that not everything I wanted to write really belonged on my Facebook, and wasn’t even something I was *that* interested in sharing. I still wanted to write it down, though.
The shift you noticed is between two modes of socializing (call them “emo angst” and “I just got promoted”) that occurs on individual social networks and the Internet as a whole. I’ve been online long enough to remember when the big social area of the Internet was USENET, and there was almost no commercial content or interests on USNET. You could talk about X-Files all you wanted, but there was no official X-Files page, much less a wiki, etc. J. Michael Straczynski was a pioneer when he went online to talk to fans about Babylon 5.
Rightly or wrongly, USENET was seen as by and for “just us”. You were expected to be “AchtungBaby77”, not “John Smith”. Nobody from the world of jobs or school or family was watching, and you could bare your soul, your deepest depression, your weirdest sexual kinks, your 150,000-word crossover between Star Trek and Bubblegum Crisis. It was 4chan-ic discourse before 4chan.
Now, everybody has to assume, a la Bentham’s panopticon, we could be watched at any time. Not just the NSA, but our parents, our bosses, our potential bosses, etc. It may make us behave better, but it is ultimately based on fear.
Right now, Tumblr is in a transition between the two states. There’s a small but vocal group of self-appointed “social justice warriors” who view it as their turf (to the point where they feel only certain people should use certain tags), and various other nerdy, quirky subcultures, who believe that the social space is theirs, and what is said there stays there. But capital and its marketing weasel agents keep worming their way in, finding those little subcultures and turning them into untapped markets.
This is why social networks boom and bust; certain people always want a place where they are more free, even if, like the Puritans, they are looking for the freedom to be more repressive.
Oh monkeys, where to begin? Between Stokes’ invocation of _The Worm Ouroboros_ and Wrather’s Ani DiFranco nostalgia, I knew this episode would speak to me on a deep, ridiculous level. Thanks, everybody. Go team.
Love your podcast!
Live Journal is still around and very much a thing. LJ isn’t in the public consciousness as much Facebook or Tumblr but maybe that’s a good thing.
Hi gents – I just had an OTI binge on a long car journey. Listened to a few episodes that had stacked up, back-to-back.
You know what: I also definitely prefer epiodes like this one, that do not have a movie to discuss, and just meander. For various reasons, I don’t get to go to the movies much at the moment, so when I have not seen the film in question, its a little bit alienating. (In fact, I think that’s why I let the podcasts stack up – I was not inclined to listen to another hour of discussion about something I had not seen yet). With TV shows, books, and especially 3 minute pop tunes, its far more likely that I am familiar with the pop culture entertainments being given the OTI treatment.
This has gotta be among my favourite episodes ever because you just let it flow, and it flowed towards ridiculous over-analysis of a children’s movie. This is my perfect storm: I love the more undirected rambly podcasts, I love political economy and I think the best topics for overthought are often children’s entertainment – specifically because the level of scrutiny they are expecting to be put to it so low! I think that whatever the formula is that determines quality of overthought, it is proportional to the delta value – the difference between the level of scrutiny applied versus the level of scrutiny deserved. For this podcast, the delta value soared, and I applaud you.
For future reference, if you want to end every podcast or every anniversary podcast with a discussion of a Disney movie, I would be totally fine with that.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/louispeitzman/how-well-do-you-know-the-little-mermaid
I second Cat.
Also, the episode of South Park you reference at the beginning is painful for me to watch, and I don’t even have a scrotum. But it’s soooo funny…
Matt, I thought of this when you were talking about Facebook: http://zenpencils.com/comic/129-marc-maron-the-social-media-generation/
(and a video form he made today: http://zenpencils.com/blog/zen-pencils-animated-video/)
“Le Poisson” may be played for laughs, but I do think that when you dig deeper, it actually is quite terrifying. We’ve been seeing fish that sing and dance and talk throughout the movie up until that point- one of the main characters is a fish! It’s borderline cannibalism, right???? And along those lines, I’m guessing we’re to assume that merpeople are vegetarian? Or is there an entire underclass of fish and crustaceans that are slaughtered for food? These things, they do matter.
Blast, I was behind on the podcast and didn’t get to give you a congratulatory message for the anniversary episode. Belated well-wishes, eh? Sorry. :(