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1.) Tali'Zorah vas Normandy. Total mega-hottie. I'm sorry, but I just love the combination gas mask, robotic features, and slight build. HOT AS FUCK.
2.) SHODAN. Insane reality bending AI which is both seductive and psychotic. Hot stuff.
3.) Batman. Who doesn't love Batman?
4.) Segata Sanshiro. Best mascot ever.
5.) The Maxx. Complicated, interesting character who I just wanna give a big hug. -
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Too many to list, really. I like them all! Influential to me as a writer are Asimov, Heinlein, Giger, Dali, and Eno.
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No! And now it's time for a lecture! For the tl;dr crowd: I don't think videogame violence is a big deal.
Violence in media is more widespread than just videogames, you just have to look for it. Can you think of a show, book, or movie that has no physical violence of some kind? No shoving, punching, wrestling, or otherwise brawling whatsoever? These pieces of media are few and far between, and for a reason.
Violence is the easiest way to communicate conflict. Conflict is a fairly simple thing to rationalize: it's when somebody has a goal, and something is preventing them from reaching said goal. Let's say you want some coffee, but a number of things are wrong: your coffee maker is broken, you are out of coffee beans, you have no decent mugs. Your resolution of this conflict is to just go to coffee shop.
In layman's terms, it goes Goal > Obstacle > Conflict > Resolution. It even applies to literature, with the standard bell curve of Rising Action, Climax, Resolution.
Now, violence in videogames is there for the same reason that violence is in anything: it is the cheapest, most effective way to show conflict and resolution. After all, when the obstacle is a bunch of mooks, the goal is a door, and your resolution is a gun, of course violence is going to happen.
The reason why this is the case is several-fold. First, it's difficult to construct players a truly emotional and engrossing space to play in, which is what your game needs to do if you want to make it a game, not a toy or "artist statement." Saying that you have to kill a bunch of dudes is much easier than saying you have to overcome an abstract (to the player) fear of failure or disappointment. This is because, in the end, we are playing characters that are not us. This leads to character quirks being abstracted into gameplay terms to construct a meaningful impact on the way the player approaches the game.
Second, people are violent. There's a lot in that, but there's two kinds of violence - emotional and physical - and people are always performing one or the other on each other. This may be sexist, but men tend to lean towards the physical, while women lean a little more towards emotional. They are hardly mutually exclusive, though. After all, physical violence leads to emotional trauma, and emotional violence can lead to physical altercations. Anyway, violent videogames provide an outlet for the physical portion of your urge to violence, much in the same way that a summer blockbuster would. It's calming.
Third, games are parodies, both of themselves and of our culture. Look at the sociopathic behavior of people on Modern Warfare 2 for a great example. Hackers playing merely to piss people off, kids throwing around homophobic and racial slurs, and murderously angry young adults all gather together to stab, shoot, and explode each other. It's almost grotesque how much it reflects our degeneration in manners, despite the overall improvement of our society in a ton of areas. I think ultra-violent games, like Painkiller or the upcoming Bulletstorm, are great relievers of that violent urge mentioned above AND stunning parodies of our obsession with violence and rudeness.
In the end, playing a game won't make you go shoot somebody, any more than reading Catcher in the Rye will make you murder the President. Correlation does not imply causation. After all, maybe they play violent games as a way to "purge the urge" and keep from killing everyone! For drastic physical violence, it's easy to point at violent media as a desensitization factor, but it's really a number of complex factors that range from mental health issues to emotional relationships to political beliefs. Somebody doesn't turn into a killer overnight.
Oh, and videogames are hardly realistic enough to be "murder simulators." -
Popular bands/artists, like My Chemical Romance or Ke$ha, are a total guilty pleasure. I know people will make fun of me for listening to them, but I tend to like at least one album or song from a musical artist, so whatever.
Other guilty pleasures include terrible games (like Operation Darkness) that I think are great and big juicy greasy unhealthy hamburgers that make me fat. -
Tie between psychedelic, post-rock, and ambient. Favorite artists include Mogwai, A Silver Mt. Zion, The Album Leaf, Do Make Say Think, Sigur Ros, Cocteau Twins, Planet Boelex, Boards of Canada, and various small-time freelabel artists from Kahvi.
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German question of the above!
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The wording is a little weird on this question. Do you mean "What food do you find aesthetically pleasing but do not like to eat?"
If that's the question, my answer is the same as yours. Fish. I love fish aesthetically. They are beautiful animals, they have an extraordinarily clean-looking presentation when cooked, and can be done any number of ways. However, I absolutely hate the taste of fish. My dad is the only person who has ever cooked fish in a way that I liked, and it was with a sort of maple sauce on a cedar plank.
Alongside fish are: clams, which I think are adorable but are really gross; mushrooms, which have a good flavor but a terrible texture; fresh tomatoes, which are a perfect set piece but I don't like the flavor of fresh (dried is a different matter); and pickles, which look cool on a sandwich but I absolutely despise (I hate anything pickled). -
I will teleport out there RIGHT AWAY using my awesome magical powers.
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It's so adorable!
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As if you even needed to ask. Videogames!
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There's a lot of them!
- Scritching or touching in general. I'm fine with physical contact with people I know (hugs, back scratching, pats on the shoulder, whatever) but I'm really not a physical person outside people I trust. Even then, it's sort of dependent on my mood. While this affects everyone, furries tend to be more touchy-feely than normal people, so it bothers me more.
- Constant sex talk, or sex with strangers. This just... grosses me out. I don't ever want to see someone post about how they'd fuck me or Dragonmaw or any character of mine (which has happened in the past). I mean, if it's someone I like, cool, but once again it's the whole intimacy thing. I really don't like it when strangers try to be intimate with me.
- Misunderstanding of "drama". This is a popular one, but it really bothers me a lot because furries seem to mistake conflict for drama. They are not the same thing. If someone disagrees with you and it turns into a heated argument, that's not drama, it's just an argument. Likewise, if someone says they don't like you or blocks you or somesuch, that's just them making things clear. It seems like furries have this intense aversion to conflict and will do anything necessary to ease it away. While this is commendable in theory, conflict between people is inevitable and grievances have to be aired out before they can resolved.
- Memes. Furries beat memes to death.
- Roleplay comments on an art submission. Even worse when someone else roleplays with them! Always creeps me out, without fail. -
This is what I hear! Or, at least, that I give good hugs. Byproduct of being so big, I suppose.
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No! In fact, ASK ME MORE QUESTIONS.
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I've got a few.
-Twitter is a favorite (thanks to the whole delayed-IM factor).
-Wikipedia and TVTropes are great reading while bored.
-Backloggery consumes some of my time thanks to my huge game collection. Also helps that the interface rocks.
-TIGsource is my favorite forum. I also moderate their IRC and host the community podcast, so I have incentive to post there.
The four sites I visit absolutely every day are Gmail, Furaffinity, Livejournal, Twitter, and TIGsource. Everything else is on a "as I remember" basis.
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Dragonmaw’s Bio
INDIE GAME RAWR
