Dely Apple posted:

http://tindeck.com/listen/bkyh

Falsum posted:

I like how in that picture she still sees herself as some bastion of virtue; that if she cheats on someone anyone can instead of her realizing she just might not be that good of a person.

According to her definition she's a rapist. According to the legal definition she isn't. So really she's not a rapist but she's a hypocrite and also a really bad person that put her SO at risk of catching STDs.

Mattjpwns posted:

Rad Tad posted:

is that where your dick splits into 16 bits?

Danger Mahoney posted:

boy deserved to catch something for being a bitch.

The Taint Reaper posted:

You know what identity politics really have no place in videogames, you wanna know why??

They make sure nobody can have fun.

The Brown Menace posted:

basically people who literally write words about video games for a living, and nothing else, consider video games to be too lame for their time and attention

this should give you some perspective about their sense of self-importance and sense of respect for you

Parallax Scroll posted:

someone summarize this poo poo

The Brown Menace posted:

basically people who literally write words about video games for a living, and nothing else, consider video games to be too lame for their time and attention

this should give you some perspective about their sense of self-importance and sense of respect for you

big duck equals goose posted:

More walking simulators for the disabled please...

01011001 posted:

Paladinus posted:

Isn't Gone Home only 20 dollars? Patreon money should be enough.

dMastri posted:

http://dangolding.tumblr.com/post/95985875943/the-end-of-gamers

zoe quinn is the rosa parks of our age

Paladinus posted:

To be fair, many niche games are very pricey. Those are mostly war games and such that only a thousand of autists on the whole planet would want to play, so unless they cost at least $30 there's no way for developers to make any money. Those war games provide autists with hundreds of hours of gameplay, though.

Proteus4994 posted:

i just don't really get game journalism

if you want previews/trailers/whatever just go to the dev's webpage

if you want to talk about games use reddit or twitter or one of the other million ways to talk about games

if you want reviews, use steam reviews or blogs (yes steam reviews mostly suck but i wouldn't say the signal-to-noise ratio is any worse than any gaming site)

like, seriously, why do you people even visit destructoid or kotaku or giant bomb or whatever? there is literally no reason at all

MrQwerty posted:

If you want to make a real legit point against Zoe Quinn and her supporters or the other side and their supporters bring up Dani Bunten.

quote:

Earlier this year, when Twitter released its quarterly financial results, CEO Dick Costolo was asked whether the platform would ever implement a Facebook-style filtering algorithm, he hedged his answer by saying he wouldn’t “rule it out.” According to some recent comments from chief financial officer Anthony Noto, however, the company is doing a lot more than not ruling it out — it sounds like a done deal. And while that might help improve engagement with new users, it could increase the dissatisfaction some older users feel with the service.

At a financial conference on Wednesday in New York, the CFO provided some hints about the feature roadmap that new head of product Daniel Graf — who came to Twitter from Google in April — has in mind for the service, a list that includes better search and a move into group chat. But he also suggested that the traditional reverse-chronological user stream could become a thing of the past, as the company tries to improve its relevance. As the Wall Street Journal put it:

Twitter’s timeline is organized in reverse chronological order… but this “isn’t the most relevant experience for a user,” Noto said. Timely tweets can get buried at the bottom of the feed if the user doesn’t have the app open, for example. “Putting that content in front of the person at that moment in time is a way to organize that content better.”
An unfiltered stream is a core feature

This might seem like a small thing, similar to Twitter’s move to insert tweets that other people have favorited into a user’s stream if there aren’t any recent tweets to show them. But as the controversy over that feature shows, the Twitter chronological-order model is at the core of what the service offers for many users — and a number of them have specifically said it is the thing they like most about Twitter when compared to Facebook.


The most recent example of how stark the differences can be between a filtered feed and an unfiltered one was the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. and how that showed up so dramatically on Twitter but was barely present for most users of Facebook. As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted, that kind of filtering has social consequences — and journalism professor Emily Bell pointed out that doing this makes Facebook and Twitter into information gatekeepers in much the same way newspapers used to be.

The impetus for Twitter to filter is obvious: the service needs to show growth in both number of users and engagement in order to satisfy investors, and finding relevant content as a new user can be a challenge, which is why the company recently updated its so-called “on-boarding” process.

The reverse-chronological feed has already been tampered with by features like Twitter’s conversation threading, which connects responses in an attempt to show users an entire discussion — another feature that some users love and others hate. But moving to a totally filtered “relevance” approach would be a much more significant move, even if Twitter provided an opt-out or allowed users to turn it off. And it could change the nature of the service dramatically.

Tei posted:

Anyone that know anything about computers know a filter is completelly retarded poo poo.
- The people that you want to stop will jump over it
- Everyone else life will just become slighly more lovely

BluPotato posted:

Oh no. Someone quit their fake journalism job because of crazy people. I guess the terrorists have won. *yawn*

Powercrazy posted:

Where's the misogyny though?

Slate posted:

Slate readers are over, declining—a dead demographic.

Why on Earth would I start a column with this thesis? There is no faster way to alienate my audience—that is, the people who pay my bills. And yet, this is exactly what writers at not one but half a dozen online gaming publications did to their audiences last week, and it points to a significant shift in the business of gaming. Gamers are not over, but gaming journalism is.

Some background: Recently, there were some egregious incidents of harassment in the gaming community, as I covered in a previous piece. The harassment story quickly spiraled into a much larger fight, clumsily dubbed #GamerGate, between an angry, mostly anonymous mass of gamers and the gaming press. The fight blew up on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, gaming sites, 4chan, and elsewhere last week. With rhetorical shrapnel flying everywhere, one ironic low was achieved when popular and resolutely positive gamer Steven Williams, aka Boogie2988, found himself simultaneously maligned as a brainwashed feminist by self-declared men’s rights activists and fat-shamed by self-declared social justice advocates. Another low was when thoughtful freelance gaming writer Jenn Frank decided to leave the field altogether after being unfairly singled out for relentless criticism.

Trying to sort through GamerGate is like sinking into quicksand, but the general tenor of the discussion has been: A fair number of gamers hate the journalists who cover them, and the journalists hate them back.

The biggest problem with all these claims that “gamers are over” is that they are demonstrably untrue.
The attacks on the press have ranged from well-reasoned to offensive to paranoid, but the gaming journalists unwisely decided to respond to the growing, nebulous anger by declaring that “gamers” were dead. Such articles appeared concurrently in Gamasutra (“ ‘Gamers’ are over” and “A guide to ending ‘gamers’ ”), Destructoid (“There are gamers at the gate, but they may already be dead”), Kotaku (“We might be witnessing the ‘death of an identity’ ”) and Rock, Paper, Shotgun (“Gamers are over”), as well as Ars Technica (“The death of the ‘gamers’ ”), Vice (“Killing the gamer identity”) and BuzzFeed (“Gaming is leaving ‘gamers’ behind”). These articles share some traits in common besides their theses: They are unconvincing, lacking in hard evidence, and big on wishful thinking. A good number of them link to an obscure blog post by academic Dan Golding, “The End of Gamers,” which argues, again without evidence, that “the gamer identity has been broken” and that the current unrest “is an attempt to retain hegemony.” Kotaku writer Nathan Grayson linked to a similarly obtuse piece of academic argot (“ ‘Gamer’ is selfish ... conservative ... tribalistic”), which in Grayson’s words “breaks down the difference between ‘gamer’ as a manufactured identity versus loving games on multiple levels.” I’ve written essays comparing games to the work of artist Kurt Schwitters and poet Kenneth Rexroth, and even I can’t muster this level of vacuous self-importance on the subject.

Returning to the real world, the biggest problem with all these claims is that they are demonstrably untrue. A quick glance at financials shows that “gamers” are not going anywhere. If “gamers” really are dying, no one told the marketing departments for these publications, which continue to trumpet their “gamer” demographic to advertisers. What is going on instead is projection. As long as these journalists held a monopoly on gaming coverage, they could maintain a dismal relationship with their audience in spite of the fact that “most games coverage is almost indistinguishable from PR,” in the words of disaffected game columnist Robert Florence, who himself wrote about corruption in gaming journalism before quitting Eurogamer. But all that’s changing with the rise of long-form amateur gaming journalism and game commentating on YouTube and Twitch.tv, the latter of which was just bought by Amazon for $1 billion as the gaming press was declaring the end of gamers.

Game companies and developers are now reaching out directly to quasi-amateur enthusiasts as a better way to build their brands, both because the gamers are more influential than the gaming journalists, and because these enthusiasts have far better relationships with their audiences than gaming journalists do. (Admittedly, most anyone does.) This week, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto signaled a focus on hard-core gamers, and Nintendo has already been shutting out the video game press for years. As Gamasutra’s Keza MacDonald wrote in June, the increasingly direct relationship between gamers and game companies has “removed what used to be [game journalism’s] function: to tell people about games.” Another Gamasutra article cited game developers saying that YouTube coverage had far more impact than all website coverage combined.

I generally don’t read gaming websites because I don’t like sifting through rewritten press releases and underage toothbrush incest anime coverage to find one or two genuine pieces of content. Instead I go to affable enthusiasts on YouTube and Twitch, people like Ryan Letourneau (Northernlion), Michelle (TheRPGMinx), Nick Reinecke (RockLeeSmile), Daniel Hardcastle (NerdCubed), and the unfathomably popular Felix Kjellberg (PewDiePie), a 24-year-old gamer who has 30 million subscribers, the most viewed YouTube channel of all time, and makes $4 million a year off his channel by, more or less, playing video games.

It is understandable that online gaming journalists would be uncomfortable in this situation. The antagonism of the gaming press toward its audience stems partly from justified outrage at the horrible behavior of a small subset of it, but also from helpless resentment toward the entirety of the press’s shrinking audience—hence the self-defeating attempt to generalize the former into the latter. Rather than stressing that the vast majority of gamers are reasonable people who don’t harass women, hold reactionary, protectionist views, or start vitriolic online campaigns against the press, the websites trashed the entire term “gamer” and, to no one’s surprise, earned 10 times the enmity overnight.

These articles were additionally unseemly because gamers were being preached to by the very same people who have been commodifying them. As Florence said, so much of the game journalist’s job has indeed been glorified PR, and the rest is not reportage but cultural think pieces, like the ones that have earned so much opprobrium over the last week. Consequently, great, lesser-known stories—and games—fall by the wayside. Just one example: Stephen Lavelle, aka Increpare, is one of the most fascinating game designers around, but he has been largely ignored by the gaming press, even as he’s grabbed the attention of the New Yorker. I found out about him from Northernlion’s channel. (Disclosure: I have corresponded with Lavelle; I wrote to tell him how much I like his games.)

Maybe gamers don’t trust their press as much as they trust the enthusiasts because the press doesn’t seem as engaged with the games themselves. Compared with the enthusiasts, the journalists’ hearts aren’t in it. This isn’t true for criticism of other art forms. Sure, there are always hack writers, but Pauline Kael didn’t have to put together five hype-building posts about Destiny for every thoughtful review she wrote. Gaming journalists are caught between capitalist reality and their own frustrated aspirations to be serious cultural critics. But they cannot solve their problems by preaching about the death of their audience. That audience is dying only in that it is leaving them, a process the journalists have evidently decided to accelerate. Game journalists are rage-quitting their meal ticket.

Jiro posted:

Dat crotch physics....

horriblePencilist posted:

The Brown Menace posted:

also adam baldwin is just having a ball at this point

Tobias Grant posted:

Who's losing?

Joust posted:

No poo poo, just search twitter for use of the word 'cuck'.

Cyberball 2072 posted:

It's 2014, this cucking poo poo is everywhere.

Waltzing Along posted:

Has anything interesting happened in the last 2500 posts?

CCrew posted:

Holy poo poo 384 pages? At this point you guys are more obsessed with this than the weird nerds who reaction sent death threats.