LRRcast - Guilty Pleasures Part 2

Talk about this week's LRRcast and what you'd like to see in future ones.
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Graham
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LRRcast - Guilty Pleasures Part 2

Postby Graham » 03 Apr 2015, 10:00

James, Beej and Ian share their "guilty pleasures" and discuss the whole concept of guilty pleasures in general.
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Eric the Orange
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Re: LRRcast - Guilty Pleasures Part 2

Postby Eric the Orange » 05 Apr 2015, 02:05

I totally understand not telling people your into stuff because they will probably take it the wrong way. for example I like JRPGs. Now modern JRPGs are filled with what I call "Otaku Bait". games that Pander to Otaku with tons of fan service and what not. Hyperdimension Neptunia is a good example of this kind of game. So when you tell someone who has a passing knowledge of Videogames, "I like JRPGs", they think your a pedophile.

Or even a more general case the way most people think about videogames in general. Now in the 80s and 90s videogames were considered Kids stuff, and if you were older than 10 you shouldn't be playing with them. The PlayStation attracted a whole new group of people, and suddenly it was ok for a teenager to play video games (which kind of hit my insular, "No these are ours, not for you" reflex when I was 14. luckily I grew out of that). But now many older people or just people who don't play games associate Videogames with violence and school shootings. And that people who play them are messed up in the head and dangerous. Luckily that is changing with the rise of casual phone games getting people into games. Though I feel that If you told someone that playing solitaire on their phone counts as a video game they would probably say that it doesn't count.

The same idea could be put towards groups. Like for example If I were to say I'm a Muslim, or a Democrat. People automatically associate those groups with certain Ideas in their head and then judge you based on them.

So to wrap up my rambling, I understand not telling people certain things about yourself because you don't want them to judge you for it.
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Re: LRRcast - Guilty Pleasures Part 2

Postby VectorZero » 05 Apr 2015, 04:14

There's a beautiful passage in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age on hypocrisy. Spoilered for being somewhat off-topic, but the discussion immediately made me think of this:
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You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others-after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism? … Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others’ shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour-you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.

We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy,” Finkle-McGraw continued. “In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception-he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it’s a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing.”

“That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code,” Major Napier said, working it through, “does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.”

“Of course not,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It’s perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved-the missteps we make along the way-are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power.”
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Re: LRRcast - Guilty Pleasures Part 2

Postby mtvcdm » 05 Apr 2015, 22:21

It really does feel like a guilty pleasure liking sports in a geek-culture setting. I think what happened was that Madden got so big that it attracted folks that basically play nothing but Madden, or NBA Live, or FIFA, or whatever else EA Sports puts out, and a whole jocks vs. nerda thing broke out and, to a large degree, each will now only reluctantly be seen with the other. Even here, there's only ever been one true sports game streamed on LRL, Sega Tennis 2K2, and up to that point, any time I'd bring it up, the first game suggested was always Barkley: Shut Up And Jam Gaiden. Which is a JRPG more than anything else.

So, being a total sports nut, it does feel like something I need to mostly hold back on. Even though I'm not a Madden fan either (EA got real complacent with the franchise once they realized it'll be a best-seller no matter what) and prefer more arcade-style titles- The Bigs, Sega Soccer Slam, Super Dodge Ball, Base Wars, most stuff from the 8- or 16-bit generations. If I wanted a simulation, I'd just watch the actual game.
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Re: LRRcast - Guilty Pleasures Part 2

Postby Eric the Orange » 05 Apr 2015, 23:52

mtvcdm wrote:So, being a total sports nut, it does feel like something I need to mostly hold back on. Even though I'm not a Madden fan either (EA got real complacent with the franchise once they realized it'll be a best-seller no matter what) and prefer more arcade-style titles- The Bigs, Sega Soccer Slam, Super Dodge Ball, Base Wars, most stuff from the 8- or 16-bit generations. If I wanted a simulation, I'd just watch the actual game.


NBA Jam is awesome.
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Re: LRRcast - Guilty Pleasures Part 2

Postby My pseudonym is Ix » 06 Apr 2015, 00:19

I have kinda the opposite problem. Fellow sport nut here, but from across the pond and my sport of choice is rugby union (I will fight anyone who says it isn't the greatest pastime human beings have ever invented). Unfortunately, rugby is a very complex, multifaceted sport and making a game out of it is very difficult- moreover, there isn't a vast amount of money in it so what you end up with is a lot of smaller studios making mediocre attempts at a game every couple of years or so, none of which are really much good. So I've kinda gone cold on sporting games in general.
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Re: LRRcast - Guilty Pleasures Part 2

Postby VectorZero » 06 Apr 2015, 04:31

My high school had an x86 in one of the maths classrooms along with a copy of Lakers vs Celtics. Lunch break was endless winner-stays-on tournaments. Good times.
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Re: LRRcast - Guilty Pleasures Part 2

Postby Master Gunner » 06 Apr 2015, 12:10

James's comment on DDT made me realize what my actual guilty pleasure would be - smoking.

That in turn made me think about why do I feel guilty over every cigarette on the rare occasions that I do smoke, but I almost never feel guilty over drinking - an activity that I partake in far more often, and is also harmful to both myself and society.
The answer would be, of course, that while society has moved to be more open about the harms of smoking and is increasingly stigmatizing that activity, drinking remains socially acceptable in most circles.
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Re: LRRcast - Guilty Pleasures Part 2

Postby RoboNixon » 08 Apr 2015, 07:29

I love reading the Halo books, particularly the ones written by Karen Traviss. They get into the minds of Spartans and what creating super soldiers by kidnapping children and forcing them into service means about society. The guys discussed people seeing the worst of a thing, and that's definitely true of the Halo gaming community. People assume because it's Halo that it's all mindless, but there is a great, well thought out narrative underneath all the tweens yelling slurs online.
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