The Bard

Final Fantasy X is poop from a butt.

Jay, we have "primal," evolutionary emotions, but this is true of any biological organism. Part of what differentiates us is that we have a more developed frontal cortex, which allows us to consciously objectivise the things we see around us, speculate as to their interplay and internalise our evaluations, it is ostensibly our "rational" aspect. The magical thing (which entirely defeats the "rationality" "emotion" dichotomy as being just two arbitrary names for behavioral patterns) is that our frontal cortex is intricately linked to our limbic system and hippocampus (which are two parts of the brain associated with emotional response and storage of experiental data amongst other things) by way of the orbitrofrontal cortex. When our frontal lobe picks up external stimuli, it automatically correlates it to emotional information that we've stored in our mid and hind brain. The interesting thing is, when the orbitofrontal cortex is damaged on the side of the "emotional" brain, we turn into Hamlet, unable to decide, forever weighing decisions and speculating, unable to correlate them with anything we've experienced in the past. We are literally paralysed. Conversely, when it is damaged on the side of the Frontal lobe, we become impulsive to the extreme, completely unable to moderate our behaviour. The consonance of the two is indivisible. Our emotions are nuanced and informed by our experiences and the events in our lives. When we go to McDonalds and choose a Big Mac over a Chicken Mayo, it is informed by the heirarchy of rewards and emotions that our brain has come to associate over time with each of the stimuli it percieves, in this case, a whole host of considerations to do with the taste of the burger, the caloric content, the price etc. A person who has the ability to consider and heirarchise a greater variety of stimuli is somehow categorised as more "rational" even though his decicions are just as predicated on emotionality as ours are. Our nurture is our nature, because our nature as human beings is to be able to internalise experience very efficiently and allow it to define us. I know you weren't really speaking with a scientific discourse in mind, but it was kinda the only way I had to say what I mean. The way people traditionally think about emotion does it no justice : peace:

Musically it was really pretty. The vocals and the way they layered and repeated created a sort of hypnotic Animal Collective esque effect where I kinda just glazed over in a sort of trance like state. I should stop picking tracks that nobody wants to rate =p.

You presume that "quality" is an attribute independant of human interpretation. As if quality is some sort of Platonic abstraction to which worldly things conform to in varying extents. I think this is kind of ridiculous, since a work of art is made entirely to be interpreted. Therefore, any qualification of worth of a work of art that situates its "quality" outside the interpretation of an individual must necessarily be socially arbitrated; ie. a things worth is quantified by its overall value to society. Of course, my use of the word "arbitrated" was not coincidential, since social worth is entirely arbitrary, and subject to the discursive shifts in the zeitgeist through time; what is valuable to a society is contingent on the attributes of that society in any one moment in time, which is something that you can never ever holistically determine. And regardless of all this, society at large is not a sentient mass, its value is placed in the individual, who begins to differentiate from the moment he is born, and is thus evidently going to have a different nuance in perception from everyone else. To impose objectivity is to homogenise the individual, and take away the qualities that give them worth in the first place. Quality, or worth, cannot be situated outside the individual. Of course what you can do is get an idea of that persons socio-ideological position by virtue of the things that he comes to associate himself with, including works of art. I can get an inkling of a persons attitude towards the idea of love (as well as a whole host of other things) from whether they prefer the film Lost In Translation or Twilight for example. Of course, this assumes that we shared correlating interpretations of the two films, and didn't come to entirely different conclusions. The whole system operates on assumptions and analogies. And we all analogise differently because we've all had different experiences. About now, I assume you can see the lack of surety and finality there is in any work of art. Sorry dude, I really used to agree with you. Unfortunately, nothing that pertains to interpretation can ever be anything other than subjective. I think your ideas of quality are dependant on the verdicts of conoisseurs and critics of the specific mediums that you're talking about, which is fine and good, but a far cry from objectivity. Why do you think Ulysses is often classed as the best book ever written by literature scholars? It because the vast array of research that can be done into it eclipses that of practically any other text, and this is really the only (although not entirely) quantifiable measure of its worth (and even then, only to a very specific group of people). Everything else is emotional interaction. I guess if you situate worth in the amount of people that have an emotional response to something, then you're taking a populist stance, which we both know the shortcomings of. Inevitably, with art, there is no black and white, only infinitely expanding grey area, which is what makes it so great. Because the possibilities for exploration, interpretation and debate are almost endless. Hell, I just came up for an analogy between Call of Duty's multiplayer and the American middle class, but that doesn't tell me anything about some inherent quality the game has. Only that my brain is odd. Sorry for the long post, and also for the retarded language. Was writing an essay and this comment is just sort of a mental overflow from that.

I thought Mirrors edge was great in some ways, incredibly frustrating in others. Everyone should play it though, because it presents a very unique experience. I got it for a fiver, and its more than worth that, if not more.

That sentence makes no sense.

Love that the video is set to the music from The Shire in LOTR .

Not in London they're not . I paid £80 a week for halls in first year, bills included. Paid £85 a week in second year (private) without bills, and this year I've been paying £110 a week with bills, although we have no fucking central heating.

Yah, but London is well expensive . Think I'm gonna have to ask uni to put me in halls, since this is kinda an emergency.

Well, that's just retrofitting the properties of Nolan's Batman universe to the old canon completely unnecessarily, whereas they could just create a new character. All the villains in the movies so far have been fairly adherent to what they were in the comics.

Getting evicted from property by (apparent) order of council, because the place we're staying is a commercial area and not designated to be leased to the public. Which means that the agency is so far up shit creek that we're going to rape them of every penny we can get (well...at least the admin fees and deposit =p). On top of that they haven't put our deposit into a protection scheme, which is a fineable offence. Only downside is that I gotta find another place to stay before the end of January =(.

Of course, this all depends on what you mean. Brawl is better fanservice, just because of all the content contained within that little disk, but if you're talking about the actual game present under that mire of superfluous content that I got bored of within the first week, then Melee is a far far superior fighter. Don't get me wrong, Goron 3 and I were so fucking excited when Brawl came out, but it was simplified to the extreme, stripped of all the things that made Melee one of the best fighting games around. Its like if they took cancelling and combos out of the sequels to Street Fighter 2, rather than develop on them even further. I've talked about the concept of emergence; how a simple set of rules can lead to a great deal of complex possibilites, and this was most definitely the case in Melee, and was dumbed down in Brawl, so you couldn't really combine the elements for greater nuance of play. The creator of the game, as well as the hardcore community that developed around the series all agree that Melee is a far superior game. Hell, I play Melee with my mates whenever I go home to Manchester, yet Brawl has been sitting there gathering dust for a couple of years. No depth at all.

Killer Croc? Does he really have a place in Nolan's universe? This seems like bullshit.

That shit was pretty janky at times, but when you got it to run properly, it was an incredible experience. Clear Sky looks even better with all the updated dynamic lighting and DX10 particle effects actually adding to the creepy-as-fuck atmosphere, rather than, in the case of FEAR, detracting from it. Actually, STALKER was one of the most frightening games I've ever played, when you went into the underground bunkers filled with the most insane, radioactivity-addled monstrocities. Like that one monster that basically had the effect of pulling you out of your perspective, and drawing it towards itself before putting it back in your body...it makes you relieved to get back to the surface, even though its this destroyed, radioactive wasteland, you never know what lethal shit you're gonna run into.

Of course, the action you describe is an act of love, which, if you buy a Freudian conception of love (which is sorta corroborated by contemporary neuroscience) being when the subject can no longer tell itself apart from the object of love (ie. feels what they percieve it to feel, vicariously), then yeah, it is a selfish act. And my use of the word "selfish" doesn't have negative connotations, its a simple fact of being human. We do, after all, experience life as ourselves, not through the perspective of anyone else; any attempt to empathise, is hypothetical. This is not to say that our judgement can't be spot on; a lot of the times it is. And by pleasurable feelings, I mean strictly to do with paradigms and belief structures or what psychology calls your "programming" (which everyone has). If your belief structure is centered around human altruism, its inevitably going to reinforce itself whenever you act in an altruistic manner. It works on the basis of pattern recognition; we percieve an event in the external world, and respond how we think we should. If this process results in the conclusion we predicted, our dopamine pathway in the nucleus accumbens is activated; we feel pleasure (which can range from, not even consciously noticable, incredibly subtle, to euphoric) and internalise the series of events which will then further inform how we act in future.

Totally, yeah. The thing is, I think theres something to be said for letting those feelings grow organically, because I think the human mind is sophisticated enough to know when its being duped, or when its learning is artifical. What I mean is that I think for these studies to be effective, they should inform how we bring up our children rather than a seemingly rigid four week crash course in heroism. Of course, Lehrer pretty much says that these are humble beginnings so... I also am kinda getting a sense of it usurping the sort of traditional upbringing model centered around the family and cultural heritage. Whether thats good or bad I'm not gonna comment on, but it does seem like it would have the effect of homogenising the actions of people who are taught this stuff...

Haha yeah, the Harry Potter shit was a bit eye roll worthy, but I donno, I think the purpose of the thing was to just create a register of people, fictional and real that have a tendancy to act "selflessly." Of course, I don't believe that there is any real thing such as selflessness, since everything you do and believe is moderated through the self. If you act a certain way, it is first and foremost because you have been trained to associate pleasurable or positive feelings with that action. And yeah, Achilles was a bit of a shit head most of the time.

Very yes. If you're a sucker for game design that doesn't smell like it came out of either Japan or America. But get STALKER first.

Just read this interesting article on neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer's blog about a new initiative operating out of San Fran (which kinda makes it seem more of a hippy ideal...) to use recent studies and discoveries in psychology and neuroscience to "create" a tribe of altruistic "heroes" who rescue kittes from atop trees and help their landladies carry out their garbage... The Hero Project So...its interesting, what do you guys think makes a hero? Is it some intrinsic qualities that we are born with or the way we are brought up, or simply the situation that dictates how we act?

Yeah, and on top of that, it's not even being made by Monoilth Soft . It's good from what I've played of it. Was initially intrigued by it when I was in my Eastern European games kick, and it definitely has a very distinct feel to it thats kinda reminiscent of S.T.A.L.K.E.R (which is an absolutely phenomenal game), except that its quite a bit more linear, and doesn't function on the same faction based politics/ in fighting. Very cool atmosphere though, which is something I'm a sucker for, and I think you probably are too guessing from what you said about Deadly Premonition. Its kinda too bad that you don't have a gaming PC, because that platform has a lot of games like that, which I'm convinced you would enjoy, for absolutely dirt cheap. (Metro 2033 is very much a PC game, and has its home on that platform)

Wonder how Lara Croft is gonna translate to the iPhone. Apparently the XBLA and PSN versions were supposed to be quite fantastic.

Well, Red Faction: Guerilla is a 9/10 game, so yall should get that asap. Jericho and Club are both bad, but Jericho is especially abysmal. It has a demo on XBL so try that first if you're considering. F.E.A.R 2 was one that I enjoyed, purely because the mechanics of shooting and the enemy AI, in true monolith fashion, were absolutely brilliant. Still, it fails to get any scares, because in the original, it was the more minimal desaturated look that emphasised a few key colours that gave the game its oppressive and slightly haunting atmosphere. They made the same mistake in the sequel as they did with the sequel to Condemned; the production sheen on it just detracts from what made it great in the first place.

You say peaked, I say crowned. Like one gnarly, pestilent turd.

That feature's online exclusive

Can't believe this is actually good. Gonna get it this saturday. One question; what's the online multiplayer like?