Hmm. I dunno how I feel about the camera scripting, makes me feel disconnected in a way. I like that they are sticking to 2D gameplay.

In comparison to other fighting games, back in the day I found MK to be a lot less subtle about how capable the player is, whereas in SF the skill came in the details, which is taken to an extreme in smash bros where you don't really understand why you are getting owned unless you're pretty experienced already.

Also: Noob Saibot  

Perhaps most important is their peers' possession of "sex appropriate" toys (see above, again). Ads for toys on TV are very much directed at a certain sex. For instance, in almost every case a boy's toy ad has a male narrator, while a girl's toy ad has a female narrator.

My room mate in college was an advertising major and I read some of the books he had. There was one professor who was sort like an ad guru who was a huge critic of the industry and he recommended a book for his class about advertising approaches for children, not as a textbook but as something to be studied critically.

Well I read that book and I've come to the conclusion that advertising to children, especially on TV, is extremely unethical. If you think violent videogames are damaging, it's nothing close to the damage ads do. The book talked about how to increase nag factor since it has a direct correlation with ad effectiveness and how to target and shift a child's interests into specific ads purely using colors (blue = male, pink = female, and yellow or green are gender neutral) since colors are universally recognizable (as long as you aren't color blind) and parents predetermine color dominance since birth. If you go into a baby goods store, all the female clothing is pink and male is blue, and if you are an infant and you are inspecting your own body and you see you are covered in blue, you automatically make an association between yourself and the color blue.

As an aside, I think these associations should be further studied.

[@Peirog]

@Peirog: It's far-fetched to assume everything is genetically determined, therefore genetics must have no influence whatsoever?

Asperger's Syndrome causes children (and then adults) to become obsessed with particular types of activity.  Quite often they will become obsessed with computers and programming.  It's not that there's just as much chance they'll become obsessed with impressionist painting - it's that computer programming matches so closely the type of activity that appeals to a typical child with Asperger's.  Asperger's Syndrome is almost certainly genetically based (not found the genes responsible but it can be seen in family histories.)  So in that case I would say that a child born with Asperger's Syndrome is pre-programmed to enjoy certain types of activity.  It also just so happens to be four times more common in boys than girls.

I don't think we should introduce psychological disorders into this discussion.

Also I should probably rephrase myself so I'm not so absolutist. I mean, men and women do have genetic predisposition to certain types of activities, such as hunting in the case for men since our bodies are genetically more suited for it, and the female stereotype of loving shopping could be attributed the the gatherer side of the equation where women are genetically better suited for finding things out in the wild, but I don't think things like engineering or mathematics are male specific, the same way art or fashion are female specific. Those sort of connections are purely societal and each of those activities benefit from the different perspectives a male or female would add.

Am I the only person who has watched something when they were young and now having watched it again noticed how dirty it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWsY_TwNdJs

I think it's pretty far-fetched to assume that a person's interests are pre-programmed into them because of their specific genetic base and hormonal cocktail. Everyone's interests in my opinion are based purely off of their experiences, and whether surrounding that experience you have a positive reaction or a negative one. If you were never formally exposed to something it only gets harder to like it with time. Everyone wears nostalgia goggles.

It's also dangerous to believe in something purely by observing generalities because you are merely observing the effect and not the cause.

You should make a compiler that outputs board games then.

ACtually this whole thread reminds me of Robin Hunicke's rant at IGS this year.

Why not just make it an animated gif?

I thought it might be a bit too distracting.

The thing about games is that making a game is part art and part engineering.

Even back in my high-school CS classes there was an extremely small percentage of women taking those courses and my college experience confirmed that observation even further.

I'm a white male so I can't really relate to any obstacles standing in the way of women and game development. All I hope for is more of them working in this field in the future since all of the projects I've worked on with women have been made better by their particular perspective.

It's just that people don't want to recognize stuff like Farmville as indie games.

/doubletake

AFAIK it's a documentary.

what do you mean no one has called them out on it? check their wikipedia page. they were even sued over it, and gave a guy whose game they cloned 7-8 million dollars in an out of court settlement.

hmm, probably what I meant to say is that it hasn't been very public. There are tons of people (if not most) who don't know about that.

Even Farmville was a clone of Farm Town, and by clone I mean pretty much an exact copy from the art style to the interface design. Here's a screenshot of Farm Town:



What Zynga is best at is marketing and business, and I'll definitely give them credit for that. They can take any game and put in a whole micro-transaction layer like they did with Farm Town. They would probably make the ultimate social game consultant firm, but of course it's much better business to hire a bunch of programmers to clone whatever you'd be consulting for.

I'm surprised no one has called them out on their game "design", and I wonder what they'll create once they are forced to make their own original games (which I'm sure they are working on right now).

I opened all the links into tabs, and I'm still working through them all.

Edit: Done.

I finally pushed myself over the edge and hopped onto twitter.

I just marathoned through this whole thread and added everyone (Indie LUV).

Here's mine if anyone would for some obscure reason be interested:

http://twitter.com/lachrob

It was your choice to do it, or, at least I was lead to believe so purely on the fact that the quest was introduced as an optional one (stranger quest versus a storyline quest).

That might be the message the developer was going for but I have an inkling I'm giving rockstar too much credit considering that completing it is the only way to get the credits to roll.

[RAINBOW MAGIC]

I was thinking of following suit and keeping a constant avatar but now I've decided to pull some


RAINBOW MAGIC

and shift the hue in my avy.

->

I'll probably keep messing with the colors whenever I get bored.

This is what I got when I clicked that link.



stuff like this would prevent anyone below a high-school grad education from joining.

You can make pong in javascript pretty easily. You can use it as a check by making you play against a wall and you are required to do a set number of bounces to qualify as human.

How about at first something simple like turning off custom signatures until you make 5 posts.

I guess that wouldn't stop them from registering but if you took out the signature field any bot would error out I assume.