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Topics Discussed:
- Frank's role at the NYU Game Centre
- Frank's Hoplite obsession (#hoplife)
- Emergent puzzles and early game variety in roguelikes
- Games reflecting on reality
- Push your luck in roguelikes
- Feeling smug vs AIs
- Turning your brain into a machine
- Frank's introduction to procedural content through his background in the visual arts (to hear more about Frank's history, listen to his interview on Idle Thumbs)
- Homage to New York
- Synecdoche, New York
- Post-modernism in game design
- The culture gap between arts/humanities and science/engineering, and how games bridge the gap
- Watch some of Frank's online talks: Games As An Aesthetic Form, Hearts and Minds, Go, Poker and the Sublime
man, this guy is the king of the materialists! making games to spite the universe?
ReplyDeleteIt is fun to return to these older episodes (though I'm still on my first listen from ep.1 up) to see how far we've come. Less than a year later AI beat the grandmasters in Go.
ReplyDeleteThe tactical side of gaming is something I'd say even FPS has. It's not as deep, but the time limit is split second in some instances and that makes it as critical to get it right. A few friends have almost an uncanny ability to call out events in some shooters: They see a death notification pop up and are aware where that happened, and can instantly tell that the opposing team is trying to do this or that.
The skill is pretty transferable to slower games, as the same friends spend inordinate amounts of time with Europa Universalis, roguelikes and board games as well. But they started out with FPS games and honing the split second decision-making, branching out to deeper and more sprawling option trees of 4X strategies and roguelikes.
Fascinating! I love this episode. :)
ReplyDelete