[PA Comic] Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - 101, Part Two

Dog

[PA Comic] Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - 101, Part Two

101, Part Two

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2015/04/15

Read the full story here

BrushwoodMutt

Well they have to start somewhere ^ ^

Plus I barely understood the second panel.

Muffinatron

BrushwoodMutt wrote: »

Well they have to start somewhere ^ ^

Plus I barely understood the second panel.

League of Legends reference.

wormspeaker

"What is and is not a server." That's actually a hard concept even for IT students to grasp because a computer can be a client and a server several times over at the same time. If you're hosting a Mumble server and also using Mumble to communicate, Hosting a FPS match and playing in that match, and maybe listening to Pandora you're a server two times, and a client three times at least. Not to mention all the normal Windows background services that make your PC both server and client at the same time. It's complicated. But that's not what those parents mean when they ask that question. They're concerned with server as a game term instead of a technical term.

Talyn Rahl

I actually laughed out loud at that punchline, loud enoug for my friend sitting next to me... Who was wearing headphones... To hear it and inquire as to the source of my mirth.

100% well played!

bwanie

that's probably because he was reading the same comic.

Gamer8585

I think the server question would be pretty easy to analogize to them: just think of it as the playground that your child is going to. Some can be public where anyone can come in and some can be private where only select people can join. Like any playground you really should keep an eye on your kids because unsavory characters are likely to be around (especially on public servers), or your kid might magically transform into an asshole.

Granted the analogy gets complicated when your kid needs to hop into other severs at the same time for other services (i.e. Voice Communication), but I think the idea of it being a playground still holds for the topic at hand.

bwanie

What i'm trying to say is, is that it's a valid question.

And of all the examples they could have chosen to portay the average parent's lack of computerknowledge i'm not sure why this one came up as funny.

or i'm missing something here...

Hargaad of Omnar

Thinking outside of the box, the real kicker is that there are youth out there who understand panel 2 but don't understand panel 3.

jothki

Gamer8585 wrote: »

I think the server question would be pretty easy to analogize to them: just think of it as the playground that your child is going to. Some can be public where anyone can come in and some can be private where only select people can join. Like any playground you really should keep an eye on your kids because unsavory characters are likely to be around (especially on public servers), or your kid might magically transform into an asshole.

Granted the analogy gets complicated when your kid needs to hop into other severs at the same time for other services (i.e. Voice Communication), but I think the idea of it being a playground still holds for the topic at hand.

And then you get the cases where a kid wants to host a Minecraft server, which I'd imagine blows a non-technical parent's mind.

ziddersroofurry

I don't know why I understood panel 2. I don't even play LOL.
I need to get outside more

Eat it You Nasty Pig.

haha panel two is brilliant

pjarvi

Even though I don't play LoL, tried once but got vote-kicked in the first 10 seconds of my first game and never went back, I still appreciate the gist of it.

forty

Actually, Jerry, Fatalities are about pushing buttons, and rote execution barriers for them stopped being interesting a couple decades ago. Hop back in that DeLorean and come join us in the present.

GDT1985

I think it is more fun to actually do the finisher, rather than just press a two-button combo that does it for me. But I'm not opposed to the easy tokens, for those that want to use them.

I don't think they should be available for real money though. But that is an entirely different matter.

forty

I got bored of moving to a prescribed distance and then pressing <left right down right back B> a long time ago. Turns out the game industry has come out with a lot of cool ideas since that time and that doing the same old shit wears thin after a while.

H3Knuckles

I don't really care about Mortal Kombat one way or the other, but...

I'm really a fan of the Smash Brothers/Dragonball Xenoverse approach to special moves. The caveat here is that I'm terrible at fighting games, but I just think it's more fun that way. I'd love to see a Street Fighter or Guilty Gear style game with that one change. I'd rather feel like I lost because the other person was quicker-thinking or knew the game better than because they were willing and able to sink a dozen hours into practicing a combination of buttons over and over until they could do it 100 times in a row without fail.

forty

Divekick proves that superfluous input execution barriers are not what make fighting games interesting.

Djiem

forty wrote: »

Divekick proves that superfluous input execution barriers are not what make fighting games interesting.

Absolutely. This is also true (IMO) of other genres like MOBAs and MMORPG/FPS/RTS: It's not the artificial complexity of the game that makes it interesting, fun, or competitive. It should really be about how good and solid the gameplay is at its core. I personally prefer Smite and HotS to LoL and DotA for that reason.

The Word of Bird

I think the whole point he was making with this comic is that what those parents needed and wanted to know, were actually different from the questions they were asking. They were stuck on certain terms, but there are more things they want to know, but don't seem to know how to even begin to ask. It's hard to really find out something if you first don't even know the terms your kids are using for them.