Farewell, Discount Thoughts. Hello, Discount Thoughts!

Well, this has been coming for some time. I haven't been exactly thrilled with jamming all these different kinds of content into a single blog, and I've felt a little pressed to make Discount Thoughts into only a blog exclusively about video games, which is not what I ever meant for it to be. So, I've decided to end Discount Thoughts in its present form and move to independent hosting, where I can have some freedom to experiment and branch out. That means leaving Blogger. This site will remain active in purely archival form for some time, but there will be no further updates, and comments will be closed. If you're seeing this in your RSS reader, it's only because I didn't quite switch the feed over correctly.

So what of the new blogs? Well, there are now three!

Discount Thoughts will be the home of my personal posts and everything that doesn't fit into the two subject blogs.
Conformational Flux will be the home of my posts on scientific articles and commentaries on science.
Ludonarratology will be the home of my videogame-related writing.

I hope you'll come along and enjoy the future at my new websites!
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Obligatory "Year in Games" post 2010

Well, it has reached the time of year when we harvest the crop of retrospectives, the best-of and worst-of lists that one can accuse of gratuitous iconoclasm, corporate servitude, or trolling as suits your fancy. I continue my habit of not naming a "Game of the Year", nor even a "Game (that I played) of the Year" because it's a hollow designation, and (rightfully) nobody cares. That said, since it is customary to roll out some kind of year-end wrap-up, here is one.

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In which I review Sparky Clarkson's reviews

Today The Escapist published an issue that's all about games journalism, and there are a number of fascinating articles. I particularly liked "1984 out of 10", a piece by Peter Parrish that examined the current game-reviewing scene through the lens of George Orwell's 1936 essay "In Defence of the Novel". It's a sharp take, and shows how the inflation of praise (not just scores) results in the apotheosis of mediocrity, and thousands of crummy games walking around with Metascores in the high 70s.

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Regrettable steps

So, the spam has finally gotten to be a bit too irritating. I am leaving anonymous commenting available, but the CAPTCHA is on for at least the time being to see if that suppresses the spam. I have also posted a formal Comment Policy, as well as a Page of Shame describing my most irritating comment spam. Sorry for anyone who is inconvenienced by the CAPTCHA: consider this post to be the place for leaving complaints about that or the comment policy.
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Choosing what to complain about

My review of The Saboteur has gone live at GameCritics.com (spoiler alert: I really liked it!) after a modestly torturous rewrite. It's a vastly larger game than any I've reviewed before at that site, which led to an enormous imbalance between my notes and the size of the review. I spent almost 48 hours in the world of The Saboteur, which means I have many pages of notes that had to be boiled down significantly before I could get anywhere near a readable size. Games like this are so large that reviews could easily become a ponderous, ten-page affair, and there are a number of sites that don't put any reins on that kind of approach. Those bloated, feature-counting reviews are, in my opinion, part of the reason that game criticism has been slow to grow beyond software criticism. Yet, games are software, and they often have bugs or shortcomings that become increasingly obvious as more time is spent with them. A game like The Saboteur has tons of little things wrong with it, and some of the other games I've reviewed had a few little things wrong with them. When I write the review, I discard most of those criticisms, but I can imagine somebody reading those reviews and wondering why I didn't talk about problem X.

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The ones I'll remember

It's the end of a decade, which means a vast array of retrospectives for video games and movies and whatever the hell else. Assembling a "best of" list for games is a tricky and probably futile task, especially for a one-man show like this site. Games take too long to play, are too diverse in their experiences, and are spread across too many expensive platforms for one man to sample everything that might be a classic, or even everything that other people think is classic. Besides that issue, many games that are awesome experiences at the time trickle out of your mind to be forgotten until you see the case sitting on your shelf. So this is not the definitive best-of-the-decade list, nor is it even my best-of-the-decade list. This is my best-remembered list. These are the games I think about when I play other games, when I'm reading books, when I'm watching television. They are the games that have stuck in my mind long after I removed the disc from the tray, the games I think of playing again at least once a week. I'm not sure they're the best games of the decade, or even the best games of their respective years of release, but they're the games I'll remember.

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A few things

I promise there will be actual content in essay form later this week, but I have to kick the week off with some housekeeping. Some of this is bad, and some of it is good (or I hope it's good).

Bad news first: I've been getting pretty regular comment spam on this blog for about a month now, at a rate of about one post every half day or so. I don't know why anyone's bothering — most of the posts affected are at least half a year old — but it's still pretty irritating to click back to the blog every day to delete internet pharmacy ads written in badly formatted bbcode. Blogger doesn't give me a lot of options for dealing with this, and I'm not in the mood to migrate to some other platform. So as a first step I am turning on moderation for all posts more than 90 days old. The only kind of comment I will refuse is an obvious advertisement, but comments will obviously show up slowly on those posts. My other options are to block anonymous comments, which I definitely will not do, or to use a CAPTCHA, which I find to be annoying and have evidence is only moderately effective. Hopefully this will resolve the issue.

On the good side, my friend Ben Abraham, proprietor of the SLRC blog and organizer of Critical Distance, is going to be visiting GDC. Michael Abbott and David Carlton have already gotten him a pass, but since Ben is in Australia and GDC is in America, there's a rather expensive plane ticket to deal with. On the right side of the blog you can see a little widget for donating money to help cover the cost of that flight. I'd appreciate it if you could spare a few bucks to give him a hand.

If giving money to Ben doesn't sound like something you want to do, then I hope you'll find space in your budget to give a few dollars to Penny Arcade's annual Child's Play charity drive. Child's Play buys toys, books, and games for children's hospitals throughout the world to help make the lives of children with serious illnesses much less miserable. I spent a lot of time in hospitals myself as a kid, and the only parts of those stays that didn't suck terribly was the time I got to spend getting my ass kicked by the original Legend of Zelda. You can donate money, plain and simple, or you can choose your local children's hospital and buy something from their Amazon wish list. There are items on those lists that cost as little as $10 and will make a big improvement in what is usually a horrible experience, so please donate something if you can.

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Eleventy-one!

Discount Thoughts turned eleventy-one with that last post, which I think is an excellent time to shake up the structure of this annoying little site. I've decided to kiss the keywords list goodbye and revamp the links. I've replaced it with a non-exhaustive list of keywords and the most popular posts (relative to my other posts) from the last month or so. The list of papers (formerly headed as "Shameless Self Promotion") has been removed and will now exist only in this post. Let me know what you think of the changes.

"Solution Structure of Polymerase μ's BRCT Domain Reveals an Element Essential for Its Role in Nonhomologous End Joining"

"Dynamic Coupling and Allosteric Behavior in a Non-Allosteric Protein"

"Role of Structural Plasticity in Signal Transduction by the Cryptochrome Blue-Light Photoreceptor"

"Long-Range Dynamic Effects of Point Mutations Propagate through Side Chains in the Serine Protease Inhibitor Eglin c"

"Increased Rigidity of Eglin c at Acidic pH: Evidence from NMR Spin Relaxation and MD Simulations"

And some contact information, rendered in my native language:
Email : clarkson dawt emm double yew at geemail dawt cawm
Speak it to learn my address.

Also in this post: the Discount Thoughts lexicon!

bafmodad (baf mō dad) — In a video game, an object which is not of any intrinsic use but which must be obtained in order to advance the plot. The Medallions from Ocarina of Time are a classic example. The bafmodad is conceptually related to the cinematic MacGuffin. Term invented by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik as a corruption of the name of an actual item from Starfox Adventures.

cameralepsy — The repeated recrossing of a boundary between two camera fields of view. Generally occurs in games which have fixed cameras and camera-relative controls. If the smallest angle between the cameras is > 120 degrees, there is a high probability of a cameraleptic seizure, which can only be cured by ceasing to move or (in games like Grim Fandango) changing the control scheme.

disingenue — A person, often famous, who falsely claims that his or her bad deeds are due to the influence of poorly chosen friends.

magibabble — The fantasy equivalent of Treknobabble, magibabble is pseudoscientific, jargon-filled dialogue concerning technicalities of magical physics that will either cause the destruction of the world, allow the heroes to save the world, or both. Excessive use of magibabble is a particularly common sin of fantasy RPGs. The emphasis on jargon is a critical feature of magibabble. Ordinary myths and legends often hinge on some technicality of magic, but they are not examples of magibabble because the rules are explained in plain language. Magibabble is typically used to disguise plot holes or laziness.

tatropmr (tä trōp mər) — The Abstract Transcendental Realm Of Perfect Mathematical Relationships, a nonexistent place which is frightfully dull, rather difficult to comprehend, and not inhabited by natural laws. All those who fundamentally misunderstand the process and meaning of science are eternally condemned there. First identified by Paul Davies, also the first to be publicly damned to it.

the turtles — A key problem with many arguments for creationism or intelligent design is the turtles: specifically, the fact that they go all the way down.

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