Machinarium, no question.

I hate the dubs too.

They just feel wrong. I'd rather have the voice acting supervised by the actual director of the film, thanks. At least that way you get to hear the characters as intended, and not Japanese girls talking in extremely broad American accents ("Hey Maaawwwm, wait for me!") or Phil Hartman using Gigi as a vehicle for his own wisecracks (and changing the end of the film to boot; the cat is supposed to stop talking at the end of the movie, that's the fucking point).

Bottom line: it's somebody else dicking around with the movie after the fact. Okay, I realise the necessity of doing dubs so children can enjoy it, but Miyazaki is a good enough director to be worth seeing the films as they were actually intended, if you are able to. And he's sure as hell good enough for Disney to resist the urge to "improve" his scripts, thanks.

I liked Howl too, although it was definitely a bit messy. But I still liked it because it was one of those movies that tells you exactly who the director is; it couldn't possibly have been made by anybody else. Not their best work, but almost a kind of manifesto for their whole career. Eyes Wide Shut was a bit like that too.

Late-period Miyazaki has got this obsession with physical deformity, outrageous fluid dynamics and downright spookiness that my eyes can't get enough of regardless of whether the story hangs together or not.

Yeah from what I gather his son's work isn't so hot. But Howl's Moving Castle was directed by the man himself.

Considering Miyazaki was supposed to have retired before making Princess Mononoke, any more films we get from him at this point are a bonus that we should be very thankful for.

I always found delta time such a pain to use.

With most of the stuff I've done (2d games) rendering is far more time-consuming than logic, so I tend to just run the logic at a higher rate and render a frame when appropriate.

New Zealand is very nice.

But there aren't any big cities (Auckland may have a million people, but it's still more like a lot of small towns all in one place). There are a handful of smaller cities which we've all been to, a whole lot of pokey little towns, and beyond that there's nothing but ocean in every direction. The vast continental US seems to hold unlimited opportunity by comparison.

Ah. When I talked about being unable to alter the course of events, I didn't mean to imply that we are completely passive. We are all very active and interesting little bundles of matter, and nothing is going to stop us from following our cute animal urges. We can amuse our processing centres with intellectual puzzles like this, but when it's done, we're still going to get down and do our shit, same as always. I still make video games, after all. It's part of my wiring.

It's just that it wouldn't actually initiate anything, we'd be running through our motions just as regularly as the NPCs in that Final Fantasy game. And I think I'm okay with that.

I don't think looking beyond the big bang is really helpful - it's just too unknown; possibly unknowable. To me this is really just a question of what is going on in the meat in our skulls, what we know about mechanics and physics and chemistry. And why, knowing all that, we still believe that there might be anything else going on in there beyond what we know about cause and effect in all other physical things. I have to be prepared to believe that my "decisions" are just chemical and electrical reactions happening in a slab of meat, as predictable as an aspirin tablet fizzing in a glass of water.

I'm agnostic on whether there is some non-corporeal aspect of consciousness, and that maybe this manifests itself through quantum irregularity, even (Lucaz - Salt is right, if we can detect it then it is affecting us). But lacking any strong evidence for that, I'm prepared to at least acknowledge the more probable conclusion that I really do have no true agency.

And having thought about that for a few years, I think I'd be okay with it.

Nope, for one God could know all possible futures, branching everytime a decision is made. Another way to see it is that God is part of a higher dimension which isn't restricted to the same time constraints as we are. Therefore it is not at a specific point of time but rather at all points together. In such a dimension causality is no longer valid and therefore Determinism cannot be thought in the same way you can in our dimension.

In the first case, it doesn't alter the core assertion that this god wouldn't know what was going to happen next, but simply be aware of all the possible outcomes. In the second case, with time viewed as another dimension, the universe is no longer deterministic - it is static. All human events would still be fixed, and so the concept of sin is rendered meaningless.

I don't want to get too far into this, because I'm not religious so for me it's a purely academic discussion, but it still seems logically sound as far as I can see.

That is fatalism.

Not sure if I see the distinction there. Free will being illusory is a distinct possibility - perhaps even the most likely one, given the available evidence. But I don't see any reason to question that I am alive; that I enjoy experiencing being alive. I don't think that makes me a fatalist in the conventional sense - or at least I don't see what marks the distinction between determinism and fatalism in this case.

Having spent most of my life living on a small island with a very small population (New Zealand), as well as a few years living on an equally small island with a huge population (Japan), and having visited the US precisely once, I find it hard to imagine becoming bored of the US. We had a great week exploring San Francisco and could probably quite happily spend years in that city. And if we ever got bored... those huge highways stretching out in every direction...

Well at least I'd say if you got bored living in the States, you'd get really bored living in New Zealand. But everybody should get out and see some other cultures, for sure.

Yeah, I don't believe in unconditional support, but it was pretty surprising to hear somebody openly calling for his assassination on the street. And "nigger" too! It's probably the single most offensive thing anybody's ever said right to my face.

On the other hand, one of the things about the place that I found really entertaining was the way that people would just pronounce their opinions loudly to anybody who happened to be around. That same day, we saw a big noisy argument kick off between two strangers on a bus.

We just keep our mouths shut, and nobody knows we're foreign.

Oh, and I should add that I don't really find it depressing to think that free will might be an illusion. I don't really mind if I'm not truly an agent in the universe. I might not be able to make true choices, but I am experiencing reality. The world is an interesting place and I'm glad to have the opportunity to enjoy and observe it, and that doesn't change even if it turns out I can't actually alter its course.

It's good enough to be alive and be a part of the evolving pattern of life, isn't it? Perhaps we have no more agency than a rock or a cloud, but at least we get to appreciate everything that's going on in a way that a rock can't.

The Chaos Engine, and I dip my toe in here, but these forums are a bit too active for me. Actually pretty much all forums are a bit too active for me these days. In fact even my email inbox is too busy. Thank god I don't have a facebook account.

Anecdote time! This is from when we went to GDC.

We were walking down a street full of homeless people, something we don't see much of back home. My girlfriend asked if I thought Obama would do anything to fix this. I said probably not.

Just then, some total stranger walking by at the time says to us, "I hope somebody shoots that nigger Obama". We were pretty shocked, to put it mildly. That's your president, dude. And you just spout that shit at people as you're cruising past? Do we look like fucking Klan members to you?

Thinking about that guy still creeps me out.

Ooh, good topic; wish I'd got here sooner.

It's something I've given some thought to as well, and my conclusions line up pretty well with what Paul Eres has been saying. Again.

If we accept that the brain is physical, then either it's deterministic or you're hoping that some kind of quantum diddling will provide the necessary "magic" to supply you with free will. Anything beyond that and you're talking about "soul" or "spirit" or some other such word that basically translates as "gosh, I hope I do have free will after all".

Unless you go with the idea that physical events do actually occur spontaneously. But that seems like wishful thinking to me. Sure, you can roll a die to make a decision for you. But oh no, the results of the roll are deterministic too. Given the same person in the same state of mind in the same place at the same time with the same die, you'll roll the same number. Unpredictable, sure... but as Paul says, that doesn't negate causality. If the roll wasn't deterministic, then where were the truly random (read: spontaneously occuring) forces acting on it?

So I fall pretty heavily into the "free will is an illusion" side of the argument. Just 'cause you feel it, doesn't mean it's there.

The idea that "deliberation" produces spontaneous decisions is just begging the question. Why should it? Because it takes time to process your thoughts? An algorithm takes time to process; that doesn't make it non-deterministic either.

As an aside, while pondering this issue one day it occured to me that a God that knows the future is fundamentally incompatible with Christian theology. Because to know the future implies a deterministic universe, which negates the free will of the individual, which makes the concept of sin completely meaningless. So, if you do believe in sin, then it follows that God doesn't know what you are going to do next. I know that arguing about religion is mostly pointless, but this is one case where "belief" isn't excuse enough for you to have it both ways.

Ha, never mind the terrible picture of me, Macka will be spewing that somebody finally caught her full in the face with their camera.

All the GDC photos we're in show us looking terribly out of place. And most of our photos show us slipping away to explore the city on our own. Perhaps next time we will be feeling more GDC-ey... this time around I think we were mostly too busy discovering America.

I'm saying that not emphasising uniqueness is not just a Japanese thing - rather that our emphasis on uniqueness is derived from western artistic philosophy. Most kinds of "folk art" (read: non-western tradition) don't really look for unique individual expression, more of a continuity and refinement of traditional forms. As I say, a tree is beautiful without being unusual - so I'm not sure if I still believe that art needs to be unique to have value. I used to, but now I think that might be a bit of a red herring.

This all probably sounds really tangental to the topic of discussion, but I do feel the influence of this tradition in Team Ico's games (and western influences as well, I should add).

The Japanese have always been awesome at capturing that sense of natural truth.

I guess that's what you get from an artistic tradition that values harmony over the ego of the creator. After all, it's really only the western artistic tradition that treats the individual self-expression of the artist as primary. But it's a position that's often taken for granted whenever we discuss the topic of art.

Such as, we don't even really question the value of originality. It's assumed to be naturally a good thing - but it's really just the influence of our western artistic philosophy that leads us to make that assumption. We want our artists to be heroes, so we build our myths around the artist as a struggling, isolated genius.

But a tree is beautiful, yet it is so similar to the other trees. It's a unique example of a tree, but its value isn't its uniqueness; it's the honest embodiment of its treelike nature that makes it resonate with us. Artists don't need to impress us with their cleverness or originality... they just have to find that resonance.

From Wikipedia:

Movie director Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) has cited both Ico and Shadow of the Colossus as "masterpieces" and part of his directorial influence

'Nuf fuckin' said.

Another World.

Hey, no fair, that game was already made in MS Paint!

You are SO going to burn in hell for that.

I played Fairlight when I was very young and I thought it was a really cool, interesting and arty game. It's sickening to hear that Bo Jangeborg was screwed over it. What a cock.