Willy

At Big Bad Con 2022, I subbed in (along with Shao Han) on a panel called Speak Loudly, Ready Your Blade: A Politics of Violence in TTRPGs as Sam wasn’t able to make it.

It’s been more than a couple weeks since then, so I’ve forgotten a lot of the details of the panel, but I figure it might still be useful for me to collect some of the things that I discussed at the panel. I’ll be mainly covering my own perspective, since that’s the part I’m most confident in remembering and not misrepresenting. Pam and Shao Han had really, really great thoughts on the topic as well though not sure if they have shared anything publicly on this specific panel. Regardless, they have thought about this topic a lot more than I have, so I’d encourage following them on social media since they do share their thoughts on games and violence there too.

OK so at a high level, the three big questions we tried to address on the panel are:

• What do we mean when we say “violence” in our games?
• Why is violence or acts of violence seen as an integral part of a gaming experience?
• How is violence a tool for a colonized body?

Below are the raw, rough notes that I made in preparation of the panel, corresponding to each of the big questions:

• A denial of personhood, a reduction of complexity, in the end you are meat and materials,

• A reminder of materials, that every move you make in the world destroys and creates, a reminder of relationships, that violence threatens them

• Violence is a relationship to the world, a corporation is a mech

• Colonized bodies have a relationship to violence defined, where violence can be deemed not violence by those it serves, there’s violence and then there’s Violence, to see it and say it for what it is is the practice of reclaiming violence but risks enshrining and reproducing it, to break cycles another violence is required, the violence of loss and peace of killing the self that sees the past

Pam and Sam already had a bunch more notes in the planning document already, so I had more than the above to work off, but this was the gist of what I personally wanted to add to the discussion.

I’ll get into a bit more detail on what I meant by the above notes, and some other stuff that came up in the back and forth during the panel.

Ever suspect the particle effects and shader-like visuals used in the attract mode intro of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle were a bit much for the GameCube's 2000-era Flipper GPU¹? You might be right. While it was certainly capable of some very impressive visuals with enough effort, Sonic Team had a different, more straightforward idea: Click 'read more' below to see an embed of the pre-rendered software-decoded MPEG color overlay they 'cheated'² with, combined with the audio track for your viewing pleasure.

1. ATi bought ArtX while they were working with Nintendo on the GameCube and used their tech to inform the design of the Radeon 9700 (and by extension, its successors up to but not including the r600/RadeonHD series, where they switched to the more heavily shader-oriented design we're more familiar with today). That's why the GameCube has an ATi sticker on it!

2. I could probably be a little more clear than cheeky about this: All computer graphics is cheating, it's just a question of how much and how clever you are about it. I'm posting this because I think this is pretty darn clever :P

occasionally on curiosity ops we're treated to sweeping vistas. we'll often see outcrops from a distance, sadly noting that the rover doesn't have the time or ability to check them out up close. fortunately, we do have the next best thing: the chemcam remote microimager (or rmi for short). chemcam is the instrument that shoots rocks with lasers - it does so to turn a small bit of rock into a cloud of vapor. that vapor has emission lines from the various elements in the rock, allowing us to sample the composition of any rock within a few meters of the rover. that vapor cloud is tiny, and chemcam has a 110 mm telescope to collect the light to pass on to its internal spectrometer. the upshot is when the laser isn't using the telescope, we can point it at the landscape around us. this is incredibly useful, because the resolution of the telescope allows us to see anything within 12 kilometers of the rover at higher resolution than we can get from orbital imaging.

during science planning last weekend i requested that we point it downslope to a butte about 500 m away. this butte outcrops along the northern edge of a large fan-shaped deposit, the greenheugh pediment. curiosity brought in 2022 working down on the pediment, but we never had a good view of this particular rock exposure. a bonus is that in the background, we can see another butte. this butte, named "western butte" was visited by curiosity all the way back in 2019. we're now about 2000 m from the butte as the martian crow flies - impressive to see how far we've come and how quickly things recede in the rearview mirror.

love that dude