Bartimaeus

This doesn't quite fit the thread, but a word of warning to everyone in the U.S.: Equifax, the second biggest credit reporting agency in the U.S., was hacked recently, and exposed private security information and the social security numbers of virtually every credit-owning person in the U.S., so beware of fraudulent charges and identity theft attempts. What can you do to preemptively protect yourself? Not much, because our country is retarded and uses a number we're all given at birth that cannot change and that is handed out like candy between different agencies as well as for job and banking purposes to confirm identification at the "highest" level.

There are varying degrees: for example, some people see the -isms as being a fatal character flaw - the person is irredeemable and not worth interacting with anymore. Alternatively, you could possibly see it as a sad reflection on some of the current problems/differences in and between different parts of society and possibly its (sub)cultures. Instead of immediately cutting that person out of your life and/or treating them like trash because of their views, you could provide a different perspective while backing it up with some sort of reason that appeals to them...so that you might influence their own viewpoint - and if it doesn't do anything, well, you tried. There are also definitely varying "reasons" behind -isms: some fall into the "I have no applicable reasons for my beliefs, and nothing you say is going to change my mind", but a lot of others are more of the "I think there are legitimate issues here with (x)" that a lot of us could probably agree are definitely problems...while making very different conclusions about them, their causes, and the ways to resolve them. You'll probably have an easier time appealing to the latter group with reason than the former, right? Meanwhile, if you yourself remain reasonable, they'll probably have an easier time of being able to bridge the gap in differences of beliefs and respect your viewpoint even when it's contrary to theirs. It's pretty rare that ideologues of any kind are any good at providing a decent discussion - regardless of whether one side is reasonable in their initial assumptions or not. ...I have no idea if any of this is applicable to the thread, because as mentioned before, it is indeed a dumpster fire and I have no wish to go back in. Furthermore, I'm not really one of the "reasonable" types on the internet, but that's mainly because it almost always feels like a total waste of time...but that's more about my own lack of patience and virtue than anything else. I am a little better in real life with these sorts of things, and I'm sure the same probably goes for most people when dealing with people we personally know.

Uh, wow. ...Glad I took Kareem Hunt late in my fantasy league?

Um...hmm. I don't ever visit the game-specific subforums: are they generally a flaming dumpster, or is it just that thread?

Me, I guess, because I can't figure out what this word is supposed to be...

The [.url] code is for making non-URL text link somewhere, like this. The [.img] code is what you were looking for, which just directly displays an image.

Well, technically, it's not necessarily video game-specific, but it's also not P&P-specific.

fixd

I have even more limited knowledge of the style than you (i.e. my opinion here is baseless), but it wasn't quite what I expecting for "ragtime", either. I decided to consult the YouTube comments to see if anyone had any similar thoughts. My only conclusion from opening up all of the comments and quickly scanning (and then searching for "rag") is that YouTube shouldn't have comments on videos that are more than anything besides mildly popular. No pearls of wisdom there, sadly.

Hm, what RPGs allow you to make a 10-year-old twerp as the main character?

Racist! (e: actually, real talk, he doesn't look thaaaaaat much like Mr. Fishburne - then again, I'm not sure if I've ever seen him when he was younger)

1. Developers really need to get a good handle on the player's intentions before locking them into something as important as a multiple game-long romance. BioWare, specifically, has shown no ability in being able to do this, and they're obviously not the only ones that have struggled with it (...even Obsidian have had their problems). @Valmy and 2. Yeah, it was pretty darned limited. The Mass Effects improved in this regard, at least.

Well, that was certainly a weird meshing of styles.

BioWare games are pretty horribly guilty of the second offense, going all the way back to Baldur's Gate 2. In Baldur's Gate 2, most characters of the opposite sex will literally not talk to you outside of a few pre-scripted one-liners (interjections) sprinkled throughout the game unless you commit to a romance with them...and if you try to demur, welp, that's the end of all of their conversations.

I don't feel that "[they] can't exist or will ruin the game" inherently, though: just that industry writing standards and constraints* are bad enough that there's a pretty darn good chance of making it worse. Characters usually make or break story-driven games for me: Undertale, for example, is highly character-driven, and the vast majority of the characters are well-written (although somewhat limited and not that fleshed out, Undertale being a pretty short RPG) and I like them (...there's one notable exception, but that's O.K.: just like in real life where you don't like every person, it's pretty normal to not like every character). Romances are a little different from normal character relationships, I think, though: simple friendships don't necessarily take that much to establish, but meaningful romances (i.e. not just a random hookup) do...or at least should, I reckon. I shouldn't be left confused by a game when I somehow entered not just one romance, but apparently two romances when all I did was just make some pretty normal small talk (Mass Effect). *Character writing problems may very well not be due to the writer themselves, but resource allocation on the overall project making it difficult for the writers to do things properly.

The two things are for pretty different purposes is why they're held to different standards, I think. Characters being unrealistically and conveniently located at taverns is clearly to service the gameplay, allowing you the opportunity to bolster your party and perhaps move the game forward if you were struggling. The "realistic"-ness of this design varies according to the skill of the game writers. Take Korgan in Baldur's Gate 2, for example: a crazed and headstrong berserker warrior is betrayed by his comrades, losing out on his favorite thing - money - and his response is to...uh, sit in a tavern and do nothing until you, an adventuring party, pay him money to hear his story and give him the opportunity for revenge? That doesn't make any sense: he should be out there bashing skulls already, especially seeing as he was clearly the strongest of his former group. Never mind that there's no reason that you, potential mercenaries for him, should have to pay him money for the opportunity to help him (...unless you roll high enough on your NPC reaction, anyways). Khalid and Jaheria, in comparison, have a pretty sound explanation for being at the Friendly Arm Inn: that was the rendezvous point they and Gorion set at a prior date, which works well enough as it seems Gorion had a plan and wanted to leave Candlekeep on a very specific night. What's the purpose behind writing character relationships and romances, then? In contrast to above, it very often isn't about servicing the gameplay at all, and instead presumably is meant to entertain the player in of itself, and sometimes to also move a part of a (sub-)plot forward depending on the specific game and relationship in question. Personally, I'm not being entertained if it all seems contrived, forced, and/or otherwise utterly farcical: its inclusion in the game has lost its purpose...or in cases like Mass Effect and Metro: Last Light where you have little to no input on the matter, it's actually made the experience worse than if it hadn't been there at all. Cringey nonsense in your game is a big net loss for me: it literally makes me not want to play anymore in some cases (particularly cases where the writing of the game is supposed to be a big draw like Mass Effect)...and so that's why I'd advocate for better writing and character/relationship development. I'm not going to read a book or watch a movie or TV series that I'm not enjoying - it doesn't even matter why, as long as I'm not - and it's the same for video games. And if some of your writing is so dreadful that it makes me not want to play your game anymore, I think that's a pretty serious problem worth consideration. It also, of course, goes without saying that some people are more forgiving of things they don't care much for: I'm not one of those people. Things that annoy me have the tendency to annoy me a lot. That should be obvious to most people by now in regards to both video games and a few particular members here.

Yeah, I realize what I said may have been confusing, but I was trying to get across that character relationships in video games are currently pretty crude, not that they would always be. Keyrock said above that even books and movies/TV often struggle with character writing and relationships, and that's certainly true. There's nothing inherently different about video games, I don't think, that makes character writing and relationships more difficult than other mediums: it's just that the reality of the industry as well as customer expectations are in a pretty bad state even compared to those other mediums, and it sadly shows. Now, as Gfted1 so helpfully pointed out (as opposed to, I don't know, creating a straw-man in a troll-like manner like he could've done so easily), no-one ever said that character relationships had to be perfectly realistic. They certainly aren't in books and movies/TV, but are usually more like...somewhat abridged versions of how you might expect relationships to develop between characters - movies/TV more-so than books. However, books have the benefit of occurring in your head where believability will at least partially be supported/depend on your own imagination, and in movies and TV, characters are performed by actual human beings, which is a huge benefit vs. what are generally stiff/janky and non-stimuli-reactive body and face animations. Furthermore, since books and movies/TV are very often character-driven experiences (if not sold entirely on exactly that), a lot more attention is paid to them than in games, where gameplay generally comes first. There's nothing wrong with that for a lot of games, but it does create a focus and quality issue (which can lead to player experience issues) when a particular game is nominally character-driven (such as Mass Effect) and yet just doesn't quite have the stuff to back it up like a work in those other mediums might.

Well, that's not quite what I meant. The NFL probably can make as many errors and tell as many lies as it wishes to during the investigation itself, but they still have to follow proper procedures in handing down suspensions (if I recall correctly, the NFLPA president *must* be notified/contacted before a suspension is handed down, for example) and the appeal process, which, from the sounds of it, they may not have done.

From the sounds of it, the Texas judge currently involved seems to be favoring Ezekiel's side, possibly as a result of procedural errors committed by the NFL leading to what the judge reportedly termed "problems of fairness". While the NFL does have the ability to suspend anyone for any reason, there is still a procedure that they're supposed to follow to do that, and if they screwed that up, Elliot may actually be successful here. Though Elliot might run into a Brady situation where the initial court case is successful, but is then appealed up and reversed for the next season... (e): Also, it has been confirmed that he will play week 1, as the arbitrator was too late to make a decision.

Yeah, I wrote more above in my edits, and it covered some of what you wrote. Like you, I would at least be open to the idea of a game where the focal point is character writing and relationships and possibly romances...or not, if you choose. Well-written and interesting characters in video games are so rare that it would be certainly be at least worth trying out if a developer made a serious effort of it, and made a serious effort to have good and convincing voice-acting* (which is also sadly a bit of rarity in video games - even in AAA games, most of the time it's just passable with maybe just a couple of characters who are actually well-cast and well-voiced. I can think of only literally just a few games that I've played where the voice-acting was at least pretty good throughout, Broken Age being the most recent coming to mind, which was actually excellent throughout, the only game I can think of where that was the case). *Bad voice-acting is something that is a personal annoyance of mine, and is so much worse than no voice-acting at all for me.

Games aren't really a good medium for...actually, most relationships of any kind, not just romances. The reality of friendships, romances, et. al., is that there is generally some form of communication. It's not always important (and in fact, isn't the majority of the time), nor is it always verbal (and indeed, for people that know and are comfortable around each other, it often isn't), and there are usually breaks as people settle into a routine with each other...but when you're actually around a person for long periods of time, there's usually some kind of communication occurring between the two of you unless you are pointedly ignoring each other's existence. Games consequently have difficulty conveying meaningful relationships: there is rarely room for any sort of normal communication or small talk that would be requisite of most functioning relationships, there is almost never any meaningful nonverbal communication, and really, only the most "important" bits of a relationship are actually mentioned inside of the game itself. Everything else that you'd expect of a normal relationship you usually kind of just have to imagine yourself. This isn't necessarily the end of the world...but it does mean that gaming, as an interactive audiovisual medium, isn't really doing the job very well in of itself. It can also create odd and really annoying disconnects where the player intentions' don't match up with what the game thinks they are - in Mass Effect 1, for example, if you spend a little time to get to know your crew-mates/party members, with just the intention to learn more about them...the game will suddenly force a decision in regards to whom you want to romance. For a lot of players, this was perfectly fine (presumably because this is maybe something they had in mind, or at least were open to in the future), but for others, such as myself, who didn't even think they were flirting with those characters - never mind signalling clear romantic interest to the point where they're fighting over you - it feels like an utter farce. I literally just talked to them to get to know more of their story and personality: nowhere in the real world - besides maybe some kind of dating venue...and especially not a professional AND military setting like Mass Effect! - would this kind of conversation signal strong romantic interest. It felt like a joke, and I couldn't really ever take the game too seriously after. Another example is Metro: Last Light, where you meet a girl at the very beginning of the game for the first time, and all she does is repeatedly and condescendingly belittle you for like the ten, maybe fifteen minutes you're around her...and then you're separated from her for like half of the rest of the game. Finally, you meet up with her again...and she's madly in love with you. Uh, why? An even bigger joke than Mass Effect - especially because you have literally zero input on the matter - and it annoyed me so much that I just quit and have never returned. So yeah, I don't have a lot of respect for romance in video games as of now. A few games might do it a little better than others, but on the whole, it is still in a very, very early and crude state in video games..and I don't really expect that to change anytime soon. I will remain just a little open to the idea, though, in the event that someone actually manages to do it in a semi-believable and tasteful way. It doesn't help that the vast majority of games that might have various character relationships and possible romances are games where the overall focus of the game is on a lot more important stuff, and so they have a tendency to just feel irrelevant and/or tacked on...Mass Effect, for example, suffered horribly from this...but more low-scale and believable settings you'll probably run into the difficulty of creating an otherwise compelling game. A game that is focused entirely on creating semi-believable relationships might be interesting in that particular facet of the game, but would probably end up being little more than a visual novel in reality. And since the visual novel genre is seemingly dominated entirely by juvenile anime dating-simulators, I think there'd have to be a pretty serious paradigm shift in the genre for something like that to ever happen. (e): I've never played any of Telltale's games, but now that I think of it (and from what I've seen of a few of their games), their games might be kind of similar to what I'm thinking up here. Hmm. (e): And perhaps that Life Is Strange series? I've never played that either, but it might also be close to what I'm thinking of.

EE's suspension upheld. However, he may still play week 1 (it's not exactly clear: due to the fact that it took the arbitrator longer than expected to make a decision, it seems as though it might be too late for the suspension to kick in week 1, but again, it's not totally clear and there're conflicting sources on this), and there is also a chance of an injunction being handed down.

better too fast than too slow, right?