Issue : People : Sky Physics

There is an asteroid heading to Earth. We are not supposed to be in any danger, according to scientists. There is an Armageddon joke in here everywhere, I will not chase it. We were researching a weird bug about meteors the other day. Moon rotated one way, and a meteor shower rotated another.

The tester that found it called everybody over and sped up time with a slash command. We sat there, about ten guys, just watching a unnatural sky spin against the meteor shower, talking among ourselves about what was wrong with it.

The observable sky was up for debate. Should the meteor fall be going a different way? What about the velocity of the fall looks off? The color, should it be a deeper orange? the debate got heated, and we spent a long time after the talk died down just staring at the sky-fall. Things are different when you know something can be changed. The questions actually mean something.

The only thing that sucks is you stop accepting things for what they are. It's a sci-fi game, the writers and designers are probably doing the same thing. All in flux. There are a lot of other things to do in the game. I don't think the end user is going to take that much time to stare up at the night sky. The guy bugged it just to be safe.

The Protoculture Mixtape v.116 Issue : Games : Chondrite 

Issue : Games : The 4th Stage

Game journalism. What the fuck is it? I don't claim to be a games journalist. I don't claim to be a rapper either. Dylan. But I also don't claim that games journalism is a thing that you can pin to a wall, or blame for the woes of the industry. I mean it seems simple enough. Video game is getting ready to coming out. The people that make the game want other people to know about it. The middle man steps in and handles the transaction. Peanut butter meets jelly. What the problem is?

There are games dudes that report the news. This is happening, that happened, etc.. There are games dudes that report opinion, this might happen, that shouldn't happen, this is never going to happen, this is what we want to happen. And all of that is cool. Where am I going with this? Oh yeah, advertisers.

Say a traditional media journalist does a story on high gas prices and right next to the story is a giant advertisement for Shells new clean up the environment initiative. If the person keeping the lights on has a word in anything I don't even need to read that story, because I know what the nugget is going to be. Buy this despite that. I used to think that peanut butter and jelly could exist as their own sammiches, nay, were supposed to exist apart with the combination being a mutually beneficial plus. Now, not so much. I don't think it was ever like that.

It takes so much just to tell your friends about stuff you think is cool. Fuckin' dumb. And if you are wondering why that project eternity pic us up there then lean closer to the screen cause screw you its beautiful and peaceful and yes I had a hard time with marketing today and I just remembered I have pizza in the fridge. Oh yeah and Jobz.

The Protoculture Mixtape v.115 Issue : People : Impasse

Issue : People : Epiphanies

I don't even know if I enjoy playing video games anymore. I thought that for the first time today. I was sitting at my desk, writing a bug, thinking about picking up Dishonored, and the thought passed through my head that I might not even want to play Dishonored, I just think I do.

I listen to the guys talk about games all day long, I help make them all day, I read about them on break and at lunch, I play them when I get home, but I have never questioned if I even like them until today. A couple questions about what happened could be, why did it take me so long to ask a question like that? Or, what would I do about it if the answer to the question be returned as a no?

Well, Fuck. Now the question line branches doesn't it? We could go to the who would I be without video games place. We could go to the what would I do if not live in video game player land place. We could just ignore the question.

Maybe I have just been lying this whole time, saying I like games when I really don't, chasing them obsessively to prove a point that no one is really pressing me to defend.  Maybe the reason I have lived in games for so long is that you don't have to necessarily enjoy something all the time when you love it. Like a football player that can't remember when he didn't play, or a fisherman that just happened to live on the sea his whole life, but was never really fond of boats.

Anyway, I should get to playing Dishonored in a bit, I am also looking forward to working through X-Com, and Natural Selection 2 looks to be coming along nicely. Fall is always ripe with releases. Where does the time go?

The Protoculture Mixtape v.114 Issue : Games :  Arbitration