[Well, That Was Interesting is our weekly look back at a few interesting and notable items from around the internet. Full credit is paid to authors with links to their full articles provided in an effort to highlight important ideas and interesting tidbits that don't always have to relate to the world of videogames. We provide our opinion on selected pieces and why we think they are worth your time, and you can follow the links to read the full articles.]
Welcome back!
It’s the heart of Summer, known in these parts as the dreaded Summer Drought, but thankfully the internet never dies and there have been plenty of interesting developments over the past week that we hope you’ll enjoy.
In this week’s Big Four we’ll be taking a look at the Pixel Art movement in videogames, and how it’s not just retro nostalgia but a permanent visual style. Also this week, opening on limited release in the United States is a little-known film entitled Snowpiercer, from South Korean film director Joo Ho Bong. Oh, and last week was the culmination of Steam’s Summer Sale, leading to Richard Cobbett digging deep into the darker mental undercurrents created by such things.
And finally, Facebook did something evil again. Quelle surprise?
The Big Four
Pixel art games aren’t retro, they’re the future
It’s an odd time when some of the biggest games around are not ones centered on the most realistic graphics, but ones that have the most stylized ones. Since the inception of the medium there has been a constant effort to inject more realism into these games (with a notable detour in the 90s) and if Tom Clancy’s The Division ever comes out and lives up to its early hype, then we’ll know how realistic games can get. However, there has been a growing movement to go back to a stylized art motif that used to be so prevalent in gaming, and many of the smaller indie titles are incorporating this “retro” look. Sam Byford over at the Verge gives his opinion on Pixel Art and why he thinks it is here to stay, and we welcome the return to style.
Why it took a Korean movie to craft a successful BioShock story
Last week – finally – the United States limited release of the dystopian film Snowpiecer, in which the last remnants of humanity have crammed into a half mile long super train as the world has frozen over. The poorer passengers have been crammed in the back of the train and subjected to horrible living conditions. With the rich live very detached lives towards the front of the train, and many of them are hyper surreal characters living in a fantasy gone mad. The world has a very dieselpunk aesthetic and is controlled by the seemingly divine engine master Mr. Wilford. Sound familiar? Well it sounds an awful lot like Bioshock to Danielle Riendeau, check out her piece on the comparisons between the two.
The sickening side of the Steam Summer sale
The 2014 Summer Steam sale has officially ended and wallets around the world have been decimated once again by the relentless hacking and slashing of price tags.
However, a recent statistic has been floating around the Twitterverse saying that only about 37% of owned Steam games have been played, and even less of those have been beaten.
Which, when you think about it, is a terrifying statistic.
Richard Cobbett, writing for Eurogamer, has presented what he thinks the causes is behind this phenomenon. We don’t want to spoil the article, but it depressed us no end because we agree with everything he has to say.
Enjoy!
Data Science: What the Facebook Controversy is Really About
Facebook has always manipulated the results shown in its users’ News Feeds by filtering and personalizing for relevance. But this weekend, the social giant seemed to cross a line when it announced that it engineered emotional responses two years ago in an “emotional contagion” experiment, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Since then, critics have examined many facets of the experiment, including its design, methodology, approval process, and ethics. Each of these tacks tacitly accepts something important, though: the validity of Facebook’s science and scholarship. There is a more fundamental question in all this: What does it mean when we call proprietary data research data science?
As a society, we haven’t fully established how we ought to think about data science in practice. It’s time to start hashing that out.
Before the Data Was Big…
Data by definition is something that is taken as “given,” but somehow we’ve taken for granted the terms under which we came to agree that fact. Once, the professional practice of “data science” was called business analytics. The field has now rebranded as a science in the context of buzzwordy “Big Data,” but unlike other scientific disciplines, most data scientists don’t work in academia. Instead, they’re employed in commercial or governmental settings.
Visual Stimulation
On an ironic note, we spent all of last week’s Well, That Was Interesting talking about the shift towards video journalism and more specifically YouTube journalism. So it is no surprise that this week we’ve stacked the visuals with this journalist. Enjoy.
YongYea’s Metal Gear Solid V – E3 2014 Analysis
Sequelitis - ZELDA: A Link to the Past vs. Ocarina of Time
Will the End of Net Neutrality Be Bad for Gamers?
SGDQ 2014: Metal Wolf Chaos speedrun by Murphagator
“Because I am the president of The United States of America!”
Extra Study Material
With so many indie games popping up - many of which are becoming smash hits that rival AAA titles – one could ask what sort of experience is it for a fledgling developer. Chris Plante chronicles Matt Thorson’s TowerFall from inception to smash release in “What It Feels Like To Launch An Indie Hit”
There has been a lot of coverage of Hello Game’s No Man Sky, and if you are asking if you are asking yourself just “what the hell is this game all about?” you wouldn’t be alone. Vlad Savov over at Verge has condensed all of the media hype into a good read on the upcoming space adventure, definitely give it a read if you are curios. “This is the most ambitious game in the universe”
Brian Kale
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