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SedanChair posted:Are you really baffled? They despise women who criticize them or their hobbies. They hate and fear women. There's a definite tendency in current nerd circles for people to misconstrue attacks on things they like as attacks on themselves, for whatever reason. (It probably relates back to the marketing tactic of treating the consumption of a product as if it's foundational to personal identity; you're not a guy who plays video games, you're a gamer, because then we can sell you poo poo with "gamer" written on it.) It even happens on here, from time to time. I think Sarkeesian's kind of caught between three sides on that. On one side, there's that particularly bitter brand of Internet rear end in a top hat who's founded some or all of his identity on being angry at women; on another, there are hardcore gamers who resent critical analysis of their hobby, because they misconstrue it as an attack on themselves; and on the third, there's the idiocy of the modern American left-vs.-right "culture war," where she's automatically on several different poo poo lists because she is of necessity discussing several topics that are somehow considered left-wing. She thus became a focusing point.
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Jul 9, 2015 03:06
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Is there a chance that there could be at least a temporary moratorium on talking about Quinn, Wu, and Sarkeesian? Even if you were to assume that all three of them are exactly as their most negative detractors portray them, I'm not seeing why discussing it in the context of whatever value the "Gamergate" movement has is anything other than an ongoing group attempt to set records for the world's longest ad hominem attack.
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Jul 9, 2015 04:29
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Popular Thug Drink posted:If we stopped talking about the hateful and misogynist attacks on Quinn, Wu, and Sarkeesian, I think by default we would also stop talking about Gamergate. I'm kind of curious what would be left over, yeah. There's a shred of useful discussion to be had within its context; there's been a discussion going on about the oddly close relationship between developers and critics for at least the last ten years that I know of, because games journalism almost requires you to live in urban California while also not paying very well. I started writing about games in 2003 and pretty much everyone I know from that period is now working in games development or marketing, including me, because you can't live with five roommates with a two-room San Francisco apartment for your whole loving life. In the age of Patreon, Kickstarter, and other crowd-funding options, it would be a genuine boon to the larger community to have a fully independent critical body that can actually afford to pay its writers. The problem then becomes that Gamergate, as a movement, has repeatedly shown itself incapable of that kind of insight, and if it did take me up on that offer, any idiot who actually tried writing for them would get torn apart within a week for "bias."
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Jul 9, 2015 04:41
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Obdicut posted:I think the way people have responded to the sorry state of games journalism in general has been fine--I'm not talking about GGers, but ordinary people, who read reviews, filter for hype, listen to word of mouth, etc. Steam's new policy of allowing people to return games if they've only played a few hours of it and don't like it is probably more of a boon than any amount of games journalism could really be. "Journalism" is a broad brush that doesn't just involve starred/rated reviews, but actual long-form criticism, and that's a useful tool for moving forward with the medium. It'd also be helpful if you had people who could afford to stay in the games-review business for ten, twenty, thirty years, to help evolve its tools and language. Whatever you want to say about Roger Ebert or Pauline Kael as critics, they had an actual impact on the industry they were critiquing and that industry was the better for it. Obdicut posted:I do think you're right that they think that they want someone 'objective' to write about games, but there is no possible way to be objective about games, something inherently subjective. Even whether or not graphics look good is in the end a subjective stance. Right, that's one of the big problems: people online who say "objective" when what they want is "unbiased." There's a reason why, for example, every games magazine/website in the '90s/'00s who knew what they were doing would have a couple of guys on staff who were only there for sports games: they have a different audience and different goals, and a lot of your main writers are going to be big chunkety nerds who persist in calling it "sportsball." It's perfectly fine to want to have critics without strong bias. You don't want your RPG dork doing the primary review for a balls-out first-person twitch shooter. The problem with the Gamergate-era objection is that they arbitrarily decree certain areas of the game off-limits and label the discussion thereof as the product of "bias," which is the kind of thing you say when you don't know what the gently caress you're talking about. Sure, this is the kind of thing that can be misused. I want to say it was Bayonetta 2 on Polygon, where the reviewer raved about the combat, graphics, systems, and level design, and then knocked it down a few points because Bayonetta is a blatant sex bomb of a character. It's a reasonable thing to criticize, sure, but is it the difference between a C and an A+? Still, the point is to actually have that conversation. Uncle Wemus posted:Independent of what? What would a fully independent critical body like this look like? Do you mean not advertising for games they review? Or just critique on the actual business and labor side of games? One of the big problems for games media in the 2000s and forward has been that it's nearly impossible to monetize your publication without selling advertising to the same companies you're critiquing, and those companies can be difficult to deal with if you've been going after their products. It was rare to see such blatant passive-aggressive behavior as, say, Eidos getting Jeff Gerstmann fired, but I ran into more than one PR person who would be more than happy to remind you just who was in a position to squeeze whose balls. What would be useful, both for consumers and for the industry, would be a review organ built around complete independence, both from the games industry and from other similar networks. Right now, I think the industry's in need of a Pauline Kael or an Ebert, and that's the only way you get one of those: an uncompromising, largely shielded voice. In the past, you'd get that from newspapers, and now, you're probably only going to get that from crowd-funding.
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Jul 9, 2015 05:18
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Ddraig posted:The only reason she was a darling was because she was attacked. It's a huge feedback loop. Exactly. That's the central irony of Gamergate: without the initial, out-of-proportion reactions to Sarkeesian that would eventually become a Gamergate trademark, the best-case scenario for her was a regular column at the Escapist or something. She'd have been Jim Sterling in hoop earrings. Now she's a media icon. They created what they were hoping to prevent.
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Jul 9, 2015 05:24
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Pandemonium posted:Because I don't care enough to post day in and day out about this stuff... I've only just started posting in this thread today, and I likely won't continue because it's clearly full of people who made up their minds about Gamergate after reading a Guardian article or something. See, that's the fun disconnect. I can't speak for anyone else here, but I made up my mind about Gamergate by listening to Gamergate. As a movement, it has the rhetorical impact of a three-year-old resisting bedtime, and as soon as its adherents realize they were very deliberately turned into Milo Yiannopoulos's personal right-wing hand puppet, the better off they're going to be. Pandemonium posted:It's important because Anita has been toted by MSM and big news sources as an important figure in video games, yet she hasn't the first clue about the games she is critiquing, not to mention her draconian, sex-negative views of the female body, her ridiculous anti-violence stance (with echoes of that 90s lawyer), etc. etc. I think it's hilarious that this type of lazy criticism is held up as worthwhile. Basically it's a kind of schadenfreude to laugh at people who actually know what they are talking about rip apart her criticism. Most of why it's held up as worthwhile is because people would rather make Flash games about beating Sarkeesian up than actually debate Sarkeesian in the marketplace of ideas. It's only hilarious because attacking her gave her a wider platform than she could ever have accomplished on her own. You can go after Sarkeesian's arguments fairly easily; she cherry-picks her data much of the time, I don't care for her "thirty negative examples in a row" script style, she has a tendency to elevate indie games while ignoring or minimizing anything people might have actually heard of, and yeah, she doesn't know as much about video games as one might expect from someone whose criticism encompasses the entire medium at once. By the same token, she isn't wrong: game designers have been conditioned by years of experience to treat plots as an afterthought and they tend to fall into toxic patterns, many of which relate back to female characters. At the end of the day, Sarkeesian's point is that there's nothing keeping developers from trying a little harder. Granted, she's a modern-era Tumblr liberal feminist and she's way more focused on the negative side (lady, you got them to put pants on Mileena, how about you focus on that for a while and not bitch about violence in DOOM 4), but overall she's had a neutral to positive impact.
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Jul 9, 2015 05:48
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Uncle Wemus posted:Idk isn't "have that conversation" by that method kinda like how PETA wants to "have that conversation" by calling pets slaves? Not even slightly. It would be genuinely interesting to discuss the appropriate level of critical impact that one should ascribe to character design, plot, and script in a video game, which are generally the areas where "social justice" concerns exist. The Gamergate approach to this question is to say "shut up, it doesn't matter, gameplay is all, make your own games" which strikes me as aggressively dumb. Uncle Wemus posted:Also PR people sound like the mafia. Some of the dumber ones see advertising as paying for a service that includes a review score and don't quite understand how the arrangement is meant to work. Others will, rightly or wrongly, wonder why they're indirectly subsidizing a news organ that is dragging their name through the mud. Either way, it has a bizarre impact on mainstream games coverage, or it used to.
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Jul 9, 2015 06:00
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Pandemonium posted:Except she has not accepted the $10,000 to charity thing Milo offered to debate her, nor has she ever responded to any form of criticism whatsoever. That's what irks her about me. I wouldn't debate Milo either. It would be approximately as constructive as the Ken Ham vs. Bill Nye debate, because Milo is a Breitbart contributor with the ethics of a rabid jackal. Sarkeesian got dissuaded from full back-and-forth participation in the marketplace of ideas real drat quick when most of her early interactions with those who disagreed with her came in the form of rape threats. You see how interested you are in a good old-fashioned back-and-forth exchange with a dude when his idea of an opening salvo is talking about places on you that would be improved by his dick. Violet_Sky posted:I think these people are the new "right-wing", or close to it. They don't realize it yet, (Partially due to the stereotypes of "right-wingers" in the U.S.), but these people share similar views to Fox News. It's sort of like that. One of the things I find interesting about the current media landscape is that, in an age where you can bury yourself up to the neck in information pretty much as will, there's a strong market in selling pre-packaged narratives. You can get immersed in a media bubble very easily without noticing it, and it takes work to break free. Gamers come with a bubble of their own, because there's an interesting divide at work here that I've talked about on SA before: if you are the kind of person who is invested enough in video games to talk about them on an Internet message board, you are more invested in the hobby than a good 80% of the people who pursue it. There is a massive silent majority of video game consumers that drives most of the money in the business and they're very difficult to monetize because they don't pay a lot of attention. Nintendo is basically still in the game specifically because they appeal to that demographic, which is typically referred to as the "casual" market. As such, there are a ton of little issues in the video game industry that seem like major concerns if you're an enthusiast, but are virtually unknown outside of those circles, such as on-disc DLC. What Gamergate has done, through Milo Yiannopoulos and Adam Baldwin's early manipulations, is sell a bunch of easily-manipulated millennial stooges a new media bubble, and it was easy because they're already in one: you are special, your opinions matter, and your precious hobby is under attack by a bunch of fun-hating, sex-hating feminist shrews. It's a power play; it's a couple of right-wing culture warriors inciting and aiming an angry flash mob towards a perceived political target. It falls apart given the slightest scrutiny, of course, but that was never the point.
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Jul 9, 2015 06:14
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Clarste posted:Wait, I thought they hated it when women made their own games? Part of the key of the rhetoric is to mislead the observer into thinking there was ever a win condition.
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Jul 9, 2015 06:18
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Fluo posted:This has always been a thing in media. I don't know if I'd go that far. I'm in my 30s, and when I was a kid, you got everything from your local newspaper, radio, and TV news, with time out for "60 Minutes" and other in-depth shows. When cable showed up, you could add CNN to that, and maybe C-SPAN. There weren't as many sources to choose from, even when people started getting the Internet. Now you can swaddle yourself from dawn to dusk in a personal avalanche of hand-tailored news and views that in no way challenges your preexisting convictions: Fox News on the TV, right-wing blogs on your tablet, hardcover books from Savage or Levin or Limbaugh on your coffee table, and if all else fails, it takes a computer-literate individual maybe thirty seconds to find a halfway-decent echo chamber in which to discuss his or her beliefs. Humans may have naturally surrounded themselves with bubbles before, simply by virtue of who they hung around with, but it's become easier than ever for those who are so inclined to generate and hide within their own portable reality. Movements like Gamergate aren't just a bunch of anonymous assholes; they're selling ideological real estate to people who really want to believe.
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Jul 9, 2015 06:29
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Uncle Wemus posted:See this is whats more interesting to me, what would make GOOD games journalism thats not "tell me what i want to hear" Basically, you'd be talking about the equivalent of Roger Ebert: a smart, knowledgeable critic with a firm grasp of the medium's history who can state a firm opinion and back that poo poo up in a battle, so even if you don't agree with him you can see where he's coming from. The closest we've come so far is probably Kieron Gillen, because unlike some of the guys who tried to emulate him, he could talk at length about a game without completely disappearing up his own rear end. His piece on exploring Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows is a seminal work in the field. The current issue, to my mind, is the post-Yahtzee wave of idiots who mistake cleverly-delivered snark for critical insight. "Zero Punctuation" is treated like it's criticism when it's comedy, and that does about as much damage to criticism as Gamergate does. Dapper_Swindler posted:Milo impresses me in sad and disturbing way, simply because he seems to be the only conservative that i have seen that has been able to actually get younger people on his side. Its probably because he is able to hide some of his shittier opinions. it also probaly helps that he is gay so people dont think he is some super bigot. not defending the rear end in a top hat, i am just surprised he was able to tap into the internet vein when so many other like chuck and chowder get told to gently caress off, even by gg people. Yeah, Milo's subtle genius is that he, unlike our man Chuck, can actually walk amongst the flock of normal humanity as if he were one of them. He's the Clark Kent of the modern right-wing, except when he takes off the glasses he turns into a head case. Fluo posted:Well this is where cultures class. It's not about the existence of media bias or its use in the manipulation of its readers; it's about the ability to self-generate and personalize that manipulation to suit the individual's tastes. One's done to you; the other you do to yourself.
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Jul 9, 2015 06:41
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memy posted:He's got a point about not having all the information though It really doesn't. GamerGate wants to stick to some kind of retarded pretense that they have a point, and leaders, and a message. At the end of the day, they're stupid children who have only been allowed to persist as they have due to Twitter's lax rules and the government's slow response to the concept of online harassment. Every high-minded academic point they have serves entirely to camouflage their true motivations from everyone up to and including themselves, which appear to be the vigilant maintenance of video game culture as a bulwark for the protection, entertainment, and apparently near-constant arousal of men, and they're so awful at making their argument that they got their primary target elected to Time magazine's Hot 100. The error is in thinking that the argument is divided into GamerGate and "Anti-GamerGate," a theoretical left-wing cabal of equally driven left-wing protestors who favor the same tactics. It is not. It is GamerGate vs. a good 99% of the games industry, maybe 75% of the gaming press, and every fan who trends left of Richard Nixon. They hung themselves with their own rope in November or so and the rest of this is just poo poo dripping from their shoes.
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Jul 9, 2015 07:50
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Uncle Wemus posted:Didn't Randi Harper do some poo poo, and didn't people call for the Doom 4 guy to be fired for laughing at Jon and Anita's criticism of Doom 4? Randi Harper came up with the Good Game Auto Blocker, which saw a lot of use at this year's Game Developer's Conference. Fluo posted:Seriously though you're ignoring a large percentage of this. It boils down to Left Libertarian vs Left Authoritarian. With a little sprinkling of loud /pol/ vs loud WASP trust fund Conservatives. I'm not ignoring poo poo. GamerGate has, to paraphrase Achewood, failed with a focus and intensity that is normally found only in success. They're arguing that the right to not be criticized is a First Amendment issue, their list of prominent allies and supporters looks like an rear end in a top hat of the Day desk calendar, and their most noteworthy achievements involve bullying women. The one time they thought they'd managed to get somebody's advertising pulled, Intel turned around and pledged to spend $300 million hiring more non-white, non-male engineers. The games that have come out so far this year have all represented a slight but distinct slide away from the GamerGate position while somehow not ending the universe or criminalizing sex; half the mainstream games have a create-a-character mode, all the women in Mortal Kombat X are wearing pants, and they actively desexualized Lara loving Croft. There is no merit to the GamerGate position as indicated by the movement's actual actions. You can say whatever you like about what it actually means; you can say it's a volleyball team. As it stands, it would qualify as a hate movement if not for its stunning incompetence, and trying to dig value out of its positions is panning for silver ore in a septic tank; you should have known there was nothing there before you started. Fluo posted:So you have two sides who support the same thing as it's not exclusive to have both "ethnics in journalism" and "more diversity in the gaming industry". But to the left and right of the people saying these things get brought tagged to the fringes. So everyone Anti GG thinks racial segregation is good and all forms of violence no matter if its fiction is bad. Where as everyone on GG takes the redpill and are misogynist /pol/ posters. It's a simple easy narrative but sadly, like in the real world outside the internet hiveminds it's not just so. Don't be a tool. This isn't a question of judging GamerGate by its most extreme supporters; it's judging GamerGate by the only things it ever does. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 08:30 on Jul 9, 2015 |
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Jul 9, 2015 08:20
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Dominic White posted:We need to drop review scores. They apparently break peoples brains - see the woman who got death threats for her 9/10 review score of GTA 5 on Gamespot, as opposed to the obvious 10/10 that it was meant to have. There's also the effect of Metacritic, where arbitrary scores from critics are used to determine bonuses and other developer incentives. It's all part of the same incestuous loop of money. I've been in favor of dropping that poo poo for the better part of the last ten years. There should be a gentleman's agreement in play, however; the reviewer drops the numbered score, but the reader must agree to read and digest the entire piece. The score is a popular measure not only with Metacritic, but among dopey readers who skip to the end to get upset. Dominic White posted:We need fewer day-0 reviews out. Let games be released and reviewed as the product that exists on shelves. This should stop messes like Polygon's rolling Sim City review that failed to mention that the game was entirely broken at launch until it was amended. The hype machine in general needs to be broken - less regurgitation of press releases, more focusing on what's actually out now, especially stuff from smaller outfits that can't afford huge marketing budgets. It'd be useful if people did more post-mortems or checked back in with a game several times following its release, particularly in the modern day when patches and content updates are reasonably common. The old review structure is getting long in the tooth, but there isn't anyone who makes enough money to care enough to challenge or revise it. That said, in the current sales environment, 0-day reviews are important due to the extremely front-loaded nature of video game sales. With the exception of rare "sleeper" hits, a modern game makes a majority of all the money it's ever going to make in the first two weeks of its release. Once that hype dies out, so does the game. As such, if you consider a review to be primarily useful as a determinant of whether or not you want to buy the game, the review's utility and exposure is sharply limited by that same dependence on the release window. I'm not sure that's a problem to be fixed so much as how software marketing in the 21st century happens to work. Obdicut posted:I agree with this, though the question is how much will this actually be better than 'citizen reviews', like, someone who doesn't do it professionally but writes up a good review of a new game? RPS is one of the only places I can think of that actually has stuff I'd elevate above just searching for reviews of a game by users on metacritic until I find one that sounds sane. The value of a professional review is that it has an editor (this is super underrated), and its author has a theoretically higher degree of knowledge about the game and its background than the citizen reviewer. One of the odd things I've become aware of lately is that there's a huge divide between gamers and actual developers, or there seems to be; you have a very different view of the industry when you've been inside it for even a short period of time and have seen the actual process behind games development. The "citizen reviewer" is upset that Konami seems to be quietly divorcing itself from the console market, and perceives that as a (personal) betrayal of Konami's fans; the experienced professional can couch that in the context of the current Japanese development environment and its dysfunction, the increasing focus on the mobile gaming space, and the rising costs of triple-A development, particularly after Nintendo forced the eighth console generation into arriving early. Obdicut posted:This is absolutely true. GGers want restrictions and censorship on games journalism, couched in terms of 'ethics'. Even reporting on relationships, like "By the way I'm friends with the dude who's game I'm reviewing" is not necessarily an important ethical line but it gets treated as super-important. It's generally going to be a good idea to mention personal ties up front, or use that as an excuse to take yourself off a given project. That said, it's very easy as even a low- to mid-tier games journalist to have those ties, because you spend a lot of time in small rooms with strong drinks talking to dudes about their creative goals and current work, and they turn around and read your work in return. If you've got any social skills, you'll know enough dudes quickly enough that it'll impact the reviews, if for no other reason than basic politeness. bloodysabbath posted:"These AAA titles which have been in various stages of (pre)development for years sure were a decisive response against hashtag Gamergate, a thing that started less than a year ago." Speaking as somebody who goes to E3 every year as a professional, there's been a distinct and notable impact. Somebody got the triple-A side to start marketing, if not towards women, at least not away from them, and if it's not Sarkeesian then it's likely someone who had watched her videos. Her point can very easily be construed as "Hey, women would buy more of your games if you did this, this, and this," and that's the kind of thing that gets marketing's attention. Off the top of my head, look at MKX, Tomb Raider (specifically, how it's been marketed, even by comparison to the 2013 edition), Dirty Bomb, Dishonored 2, the upcoming Assassin's Creeds, Battlecry, or even FIFA. Sarkeesian's been on the scene and getting talked about since 2011, so right about now is when you'd expect to see the results of whatever impact she did have. Last year would've likely been when you saw the release of the last few titles that entered production beforehand, which makes sense since Watch_Dogs is basically built from the ground up to piss a Sarkeesian-type right off.
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Jul 9, 2015 16:39
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Obdicut posted:I just don't feel like, comparing most 'professional' reviews with dedicated amateur reviews, that the former really bring that much, with a few notable exceptions. That's a reasonable reaction to the current state of play. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there are very few game journalists even from the late '90s to mid '00s who are still on that end of the industry. For a long time, it was viewed, rightly or wrongly, as a springboard to a position as a developer, marketer, or consultant, rather than a position worth having for its own sake. There aren't any big voices in the field because anyone with any brains will leave it when he or she has the slightest opportunity, which has only recently begun to change with stuff like Giant Bomb, RPS, and a couple of guys like Jeremy Parish. It's a problem, which is why I suggested independent crowd-funding as a solution. I suppose the disconnect here is that when you say "dedicated amateur reviews," I'm picturing some half-literate forums spew from a 14-year-old with no critical thinking skills who types with his forehead, or a neckbeard ranting into a video camera in front of his shelf porn. I've been working with the general games-playing public off and on for long enough that I have a very poor opinion of the dedicated amateur. Powercrazy posted:KiA is a better indicator to me of what gamergate actually is. So the "movement" is entry-level sick burns against a straw man cabal of "social justice warriors," Reddit drama, and the occasional attempt to make money off of each other. You change that world, sunny Jim. You change it hard.
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Jul 9, 2015 17:14
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Ddraig posted:That's another "fact" that GamerGate both confirms and denies: Anita is both incredibly powerful, yet nothing at the same time. Yeah, she's utterly wrong about everything and totally without influence or respect, yet is simultaneously the standard-bearer and main face for a shadowy and powerful social-justice cabal that is going to take gaming's nuts off with a belt sander. It's the GamerGate version of that Eco quote that pops up constantly in the right-wing media/Freeper threads: through a "constant shifting of rhetorical focus," their enemies are at once too strong to be denied and too weak to be taken seriously.
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Jul 9, 2015 17:17
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Nonsense posted:Who's Milo and why do Hellthreaders use first name basis for internet crazy people? Milo Yiannopoulos is a Breitbart contributor. He really despised games and the people who play them right up until he saw an opportunity to recruit a bunch of people for the culture war, at which point he suddenly became a standard-bearer. He didn't name GamerGate--that was Adam Baldwin--but he's one of the people most responsible for perpetuating and organizing it, mostly around himself. Speaking for myself, I have to Google him every time to spell his last name, so sometimes I just say "Milo." 7c Nickel posted:The problem isn't any particular use of the trope, it's how often it's used in the industry overall, and how that's often the only representation women get. Last of Us is reportedly pretty good about the latter. Yeah, that's a disconnect that Sarkeesian herself has with her work, and it's one that she should probably be more careful about. In her videos, it's about the frequency of certain tropes' usage, particularly with regard to female characters; when she's anywhere else, particularly Twitter, she'll go off about a given trope being used at all. It was kind of a thing earlier this year with Dying Light. Last of Us is very good about the latter, but you have to get a fair way into the game before it pays off.
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Jul 9, 2015 17:45
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Powercrazy posted:He's a click-bait journalist with a wierd last name. Would you prefer people referred to him as "nero?" The reason Gamergate is winning is because we have the prettier gay men @Nero  That's some Karl Rove levels of bubble inhabiting there, Cletus.
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Jul 9, 2015 17:49
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NutritiousSnack posted:Furthermore, most people disagree with basic feminist ideas. 60% of Americans are against abortion for example, in any circumstance. It's 50% and growing, actually. A lot of the middle-range feminist ideas are pretty reasonable. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a similar attitude to Obamacare in play: the individual tenets of the philosophy, when decoupled from it, have more widespread support than the philosophy itself, particularly given the tendency to construct the feminist perspective as a straw man.
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Jul 9, 2015 19:12
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NutritiousSnack posted:Cool a single Gallup poll. I remember this bullshit If you aren't at your limit on reading Boston Globe articles, here's another one: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/06/09/millennial-americans-rethink-abortion-for-good-reasons/ZCmZNJuCWKVr5brzVfaiuI/story.html Fewer women are getting abortions, but support for their legal availability has never been higher. NutritiousSnack posted:Lara Croft has been wearing a coat and pants for a decade now, with her breast size notable turned down. The advertising campaign for the 2013 Tomb Raider was about Lara as a scared, young girl, at the start of her career, with the stated objective by its developers being that the player should want to "protect" her. The iconic image of her from that campaign is of her treating her own wounds. The advertising campaign for Rise of the Tomb Raider is Lara as in recovery, dealing with her problems, and moving on: the character as a competent, practiced adventurer, with a lowered focus on her combat skills. She's literally shown in therapy, and climbing a dangerous mountain, appropriately dressed and ready for anything. I think the issue here is, again, one of dueling narratives. You're clearly fond of the version in which the "SJWs" are a powerless, voiceless minority, incapable of affecting any change except for slight annoyance. I'm fond of the one where I've been loving told by developers that the "SJW" contingent had some valid points, because women are a growing demographic and they want their games to be successful. Hence, as of this year, we have a ton of games where you can choose to play as a woman if you like, and in many of the returning franchises, the role of women has been played up and more attention has been paid to their character design. It's just loving marketing, dude. That's all. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Jul 9, 2015 |
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Jul 9, 2015 19:42
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ImpAtom posted:Even if, tomorrow, all traditional games journalists hang up the hats and give everything over to the new generation of bloggers and Youtube personalities, you're not actually going to see significant change. Hell, you know who is a Youtube personality? Anita Sarkeesan. She was doing Youtube videos long before she started talking about video games. If traditional games journalists go away then you're going to get people saying exactly the same things but in slightly different ways. You're not suddenly going to see a decrease in, for example, videos about feminism in games. If anything you'll see a rise because clicks, even hate-clicks, are what people are looking for. Yeah, we're actually in an interesting transitional period. The people who would've made their breakthroughs with 'zines or relentless personal networking back in the day are now making their bones on YouTube or Twitter, and as we see with PewDiePie, that's often enough. I have to imagine that you'll see some of these guys organize themselves as they get older, or do something like "Channel Awesome"; I also figure that traditional-style writing isn't going anywhere as long as the old journalistic apparatus continues to exist. The AV Club's done some decent games writing, for example. One of the issues GamerGate's caused has actually been a rapid slowdown in the response of academia to video games. There was an article a few months ago that a couple of universities had actually funded archival projects for early software, but the argument over GamerGate had caused enough negative press that their funding got revoked. I got the feeling that the people with the purse strings on that were just looking for a reason to cut them off, and it could as easily have been a suggestively-shaped cloud or an unfortunate run-in with Uwe Boll, but it's still a setback for a potential scholarly approach. It could only be healthy for tomorrow's designers if they could go to a college campus and play old '80s games for free all day, for example.
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Jul 9, 2015 19:57
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NutritiousSnack posted:Outside of low rendered tits, that sounds actually like the previous Tomb Raider games. Not really, no. Look up some of the magazine ads for the original PSOne series and Angel of Darkness, and watch a Let's Play of Legend or Underworld. They lean pretty hard on Lara as a sex object in most of those, even when the graphics really aren't up to the challenge (that old Tomb Raider III ad where she's topless looks really creepy now), and her primary character trait is a sort of cheerful, James Bond stoicism, even when she's mowing down four dozen mercenaries at once. The big innovation in the 2013 Tomb Raider is treating Lara as a character, with friends and motivations beyond "gotta get that artifact" or a desire for bloody revenge. It's a useful metric of the current market, when one of the single most sexualized characters in modern video game history is now somewhat layered and three-dimensional, and the star of a product that's marketed towards women. NutritiousSnack posted:Likewise devs have told how much they laugh at "SJWs" and how it's become more and more mainstream to mock someone using those terms. Of course they did, you blissful summer child. That's another fun part of the GamerGate bubble. They seem to think that sexualization in video games was always there because it was the product of game designers' unshackled creativity, when in fact it was usually there to get horny teenagers' attention, or less frequently due to horndog character designers. (I had a long conversation once with someone who worked on Dark Age of Camelot, who mentioned that they'd actually had to tart up some of the female character models and armor sets for the game's release in Asia because, without the promise of chain-mail bikinis, the game flat-out would not sell in South Korea.) The reasonable part of the "SJW" argument is that women are out there, playing these games, and you don't lose much if you try to make them feel welcome, both as consumers and as developers.
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Jul 9, 2015 20:19
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:You're naive. The issue isn't just that people are receiving death and rape threats and insults. The issue is that receive them in such volumes that they are unable to use Twitter. It is not a question of comfort, it is a question of functionality. Also, the threats and insults escalating to the point of "doxxing" and people stopping by the harassed individuals' workplaces, with the specific aim of silencing dissent. That ain't exactly the trademark behavior of dudes with strong faith in their ideas' validity.
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Jul 9, 2015 20:44
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Fluo posted:People who use it to disallow people jobs, It changes from a blocklist to a blacklist. If a dude is a public, avowed part of a half-organized Internet movement based around anti-social behavior, harassment, and outright bullying, d'you think that might be sufficient justification to think twice about hiring him or her for a collaborative position in a major media company? Especially when it would only take a little bit more digging to find someone with comparable skills who isn't an rear end in a top hat? Seriously, if you post with the #gamergate tag at this point and you want a job in the games industry, you're playing Russian roulette with a loaded Uzi, especially if you're loving dumb enough to do it on accounts attached to your real name.
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Jul 9, 2015 20:49
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NutritiousSnack posted:It's political tribalism on both sides at it's finest. Also not a "GG is all right wing, lol" or "Proud liberals vs evil leftist authoritarians" type dealio either. Apparently GamerGate is for everything, and made of everything, except what it was just accused of being. What's it for, clownstick? Difficulty: say something that isn't on this list.
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Jul 9, 2015 21:10
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Fluo posted:https://twitter.com/reverendanthony/status/507381413721939968 That seems like way more of a comment about how Burch never got poo poo on for his "ethical violations" to the extent of someone like Jenn Frank or even Felicia Day, despite having much more blatant ties; he used to work at Game Trailers and Destructoid, his sister's a professional VA, and he had enough stroke at Volition that they let him borrow the Penetrator for a "Hey, Ash" video. None of this is even remotely hidden. If you were actually going to go after somebody over "ethics in games journalism," Burch would be a natural target, but in the event people do poo poo on him it's to talk poo poo about his marriage breaking up.
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Jul 9, 2015 21:19
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NutritiousSnack posted:He was and is Anthony Burch has people come onto his Twitter to talk poo poo about his relationship with his (ex?)wife sometimes, and is still tight enough with Gearbox that he's credited as a writer on the third episode of Tales from the Borderlands. Compare that to anybody else on the GamerGate hit parade.
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Jul 9, 2015 21:27
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bloodysabbath posted:Because AAA games are totally super important vehicles for social issues that will Change The World (tm) Mass media is still important enough to be worthy of criticism and analysis. A triple-A mass market game can still have a social impact and a message, both of which are worth exploring and discussing. Arguing otherwise is just placing an arbitrary gate.
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Jul 9, 2015 21:31
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NutritiousSnack posted:Frank still writes for the Guardian and I can pretty much say the same as everyone else. You're pretty willfully dense about this, huh. O__O posted:Well now that you, the man with the objectively worst opinions about everything, is here and shown yourself to be anti-gamergate, the pro-gamer gate side can rejoice in the moral victory of being on whatever side you're not. He's not Vox Day, so he's still pretty safe there.
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Jul 9, 2015 21:32
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NutritiousSnack posted:Got any proof it's true? Especially since he was unemployed for awhile for stupid poo poo he said on twitter. Isn't the burden of proof on you there?
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Jul 9, 2015 21:42
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Campster posted:But what frustrates me (even a year on) is the group's claiming one thing while pushing a completely different ideology. I mean, just look a the latest posts in this thread: have we in the past 50 pages come close to discussing problems about games writing? Its funding model, its separation of content and advertising, the goals of journalism vs criticism and how "journalism" is an overly broad label applied to games writing, which pieces are particularly egregious and why... we're not talking about any of that, even as tangential issues. No part of this conversation has been centered around the supposed tenets of GG, because those tenets are illusory. Hey, I tried.
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Jul 9, 2015 22:51
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Why would it matter if Brianna Wu was transgender? What the gently caress does that have to do with anything? Again, it'd be nice if people would stop discussing her and Quinn, and Sarkeesian in any other context but addressing her actual arguments within the gaming space. If GamerGate actually is about ethics in games journalism, let's drag it back to that. Biggest problem, ethically: collusion between developers/PR and press is virtually required for timely reviews/event access. An independent gaming media outlet thus needs to either be big enough that it can't be sensibly ignored or focused on long-form criticism/postmortem reviews.
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Jul 10, 2015 02:12
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Dapper Dan posted:That's the real thing that's stifling creativity, the focus of money and review scores so people will only take the safe option to get a good score instead of taking a risk. Not exactly. There was a lot of talk about that a few years ago, when some studio or another (WB Interactive?) said they were tying employee bonuses to Metacritic score, but that didn't end up being much of anything. Inasmuch as there's a single real problem in the mainstream games space, it's relatively simple: triple-A games are too expensive to make. It's the same gradual arms race that's been a problem for several years now. Half the reason the Japanese games development scene has been imploding for the last two years or so is because they were in no way ready for this console generation (plus a few other things like the Japanese demographic crisis; it's harder to make video games when you don't have an infinite supply of 20-something code monkeys), and most of them would rather chase the considerably easier money to be had in the Japanese mobile market anyway. A lot of the go-to names in Western development have been doing okay, but they're extremely risk-averse because the kinds of games they deal in are multi-studio monstrosities with an eight-figure development budget. The focus on Metacritic is certainly a symptom of that problem, but it isn't the problem itself. When you're staring down the barrel of costing your company ten million dollars, not because you failed but because you weren't as successful as you had to be, you start looking for ways to make that as safe a bet as you can. You exploit the poo poo out of franchises, you go full-tilt lunatic with marketing schemes, you lean heavily on focus groups, you probably treat a disturbingly high number of your employees like poo poo, and you make sure that the product has as broad a potential audience as it possibly can. This is why it took Mass Effect three games to admit that female Shepard existed, why Naughty Dog had to fight to keep Ellie on the cover of The Last of Us, why survival horror was replaced with horror-flavored action games, and why BioShock Infinite was held hostage by its marketers until Irrational agreed to take Elizabeth off the front cover. It's why a disturbingly high number of mainstream games star a generic, well-muscled, brown-haired white guy with anger issues, age 19 to 35. Nobody wants to make a game that's not going to appeal to the 19-35 white male demographic, which is still the single largest market for mainstream games. That's had a ripple effect on the industry as a whole. Most of the video games that people like, that they want to play, and which keep them in the hobby are usually someone's passion project. They are, at the end of the day, what somebody wanted to make happen: what they wanted to play themselves, and what they were willing to work on for two to five years until it was real. For many of the games in the current triple-A space, they do not have that degree of inspiration. They are product, made to order to fill their publisher's needs or a perceived hole in the market. They're the crude equivalent to the PS2-era movie tie-ins that Activision or THQ would shovel out the door like coal. Watch_Dogs is a good example, or the last Halo game; you can have fun with them, sure, but there's a distinct spark missing. This is why a lot of big names have been quietly withdrawing to found small studios or pop up on Kickstarter. Indies are basically the future right now. You're never going to see mainstream development go away, because there are still some really impressive things you can do if you're willing to throw enough money at something (open-world games and MMOs will remain the near-exclusive province of triple-A studios for the foreseeable future), but the most innovative and interesting games you see for the next few years are all going to be from small teams on shoestring or crowd-funded budgets, which is also going to mean a lot more people talking about games that aren't boob-soaked shoot-'em-ups, which in turn is probably some measurable fraction of why GamerGate's supporters are as angry as they are. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 08:23 on Jul 10, 2015 |
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Jul 10, 2015 08:04
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The Droid posted:Because games journalists "generally" give said artsy/creative games an inordinate amount of praise in some people's eyes, which them annoyed. Some don't see many of these artsy/creative games as actual games, even. So when journos go around asking for everyone to have a moment of silence over the failure of the videogame equivalent of a bad, derivative, pretentious student art film, people get annoyed. I think people mistake that for pretentiousness when it's actually just novelty. When you play everything, you tend to go over a lot of the same ground over and over again, so when something comes out that's genuinely fresh, you overreact. I spent a lot of the 2000s as a games journalist and strategy author, and I know I was perversely grateful whenever I got to play something that wasn't a World War II shooter, Halo clone, or Tom Clancy-inspired military simulator. I was so far down the rabbit hole at that point that I liked loving Fugitive Hunter, which is a rightly-maligned game about fist-fighting Osama bin Laden.
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Jul 10, 2015 08:14
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Sephyr posted:I find GamerGate so misguided as to be bizarre. Like the MRA 'movement' they seem to overlap with substantially, they actions seem custom-made to undermine the goals they claim to want to achieve. "The rape of males in prisons and high incarceration rate is a tragedy! We better get crackin' on whining about Mad Max: Fury Road being feminist and western women being simultaneously insatiable sluts/stuck-up bitches who won't bang me!" That's pretty much the whole thing in a nutshell. GG as a whole has a mission statement, of sorts, in that it believes that current left-wing media notions of diversity, inclusion, and representation have little to no place in modern video game narrative; put another way, to paraphrase the "Honey Badgers" camp, video games as they currently exist are fine just as they are and require no significant narrative alterations. Further, from the GG perspective, a criticism of a game that revolves around its sexual, gender, or racial politics is automatically an invalid criticism, as these are left-wing irrelevancies. A critical review of a game should revolve entirely around its systems: control, gameplay, balance, innovation, physics, etc. There's some meat on that bone. The left-wing discussion of representation is easily parodied, often misused, and is often argued by a particularly obnoxious brand of online commentator. Further, many of the loudest voices in favor of that representation will proceed to deliberately ignore works in which it appears; there's been an ongoing discussion for years, for example, that fan communities will often minimize or outright ignore female or minority characters in favor of media and fanwork that revolve around white male leads. (The easiest examples these days probably come from the "shipping" community.) It's not hard to come away from a casual perusal of that discussion with the impression that they're complaining simply to complain, or that they've taken the recent concept of the "transformative work" too far. ("Transformative work": I am not getting what I want/need out of pop culture, so I will remake it until I am. Positive side: representation matters and people will find ways to get what they need. I knew a gay woman once who credited her survival of her adolescence to Buffy/Faith fanfiction, as she had grown up in a very small town and would have otherwise had little to no exposure to positive lesbian representation. Negative side: this is basically the academic interpretation of why "rule 34" is a thing.) All that said, the ease with which many left-wing commentators can be ignored does not mitigate their point. It's rare that video game writers and developers are actively sexist or racist themselves, after all; they simply tend to fall into bad habits due to the low priority that's often placed on character design, plot, and dialogue, and due to the demographics of STEM fields, development teams tend to be somewhat monocultural without much of a liberal-arts background. That's how you can get through a two-year development cycle on a project like, say, Far Cry 3 without someone on the team saying, "Uh, guys, we just made an Allan Quartermain serial from the 1920s with tits and swearing. Did we mean to do that?" The easy solution here is simply to help more interested parties break into games development, and for those developers who are already there to be a little more careful, and that's already happening. Basically, the GG perspective is swimming against the tide. There's more than enough room to attack the ideas in play here, or the specific arguments of their most visible proponents, but they're in the unenviable position of arguing against diversity and inclusion, which makes them look quaintly backwards. At that point, you can try to class up your argument ("I think it's perfectly acceptable that every female character in Watch_Dogs is a victim, because that's the specific artistic vision of its creators, and who am I to argue with that--"), retreat into weasel-speak, or attack the proponents themselves on unrelated issues. GG tends to go for that last one.
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Jul 10, 2015 17:19
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John Quixote posted:I can't believe this is still a discussion. Everyone on every side of this discussion is just being silly. Why are people complaining about journalistic ethics in an industry that has none, that is a glorified advertising industry where game stores and the like own the most widely-read publications? There's a bigger problem that everyone's ignoring. Yeah, that's a valid point. I've said it a couple of times in this thread, but the major problem with games journalism is that it doesn't pay poo poo and isn't well-respected, so anyone with any sense will eventually leverage their connections to get a production or PR job in the games industry. Of all the people in journalism that I met when I started in 2003, I don't know anybody off the top of my head who isn't at least a consultant now. A truly independent, well-funded critical organization would go a long way towards establishing and promoting actual ethics in the system. You need to have people who can afford to be journalists and critics for ten or twenty years, because that's how you build a foundation. As it is, games journalism is your internship for a career in marketing. The ethical problems are a direct corollary of that and aren't necessarily the problem by themselves.
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Jul 10, 2015 17:31
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John Quixote posted:Thanks for the well-written summary, Wanderer. I guess when I said the normal, not-creepy-stalker people side was being silly too...I guess I just don't have faith that GGers will change. Like you said, I think they'll push against the tide until they erode. I just don't understand the point of even giving those types the time of day. It's never so much that anybody gives them the time of day, as they're typically disruptive children, as that they force their way into the discussion. An important corollary, which I've mentioned before in this thread but don't feel can be mentioned enough, is that they would just have been a bunch of vaguely dissatisfied prats on Twitter until the Zoe Quinn debacle, at which point they were deliberately organized into a "movement" by Adam Baldwin and Milo Yiannopoulos. GG is very much a right-wing hand puppet, aimed at an area of human endeavor that had not traditionally been a political battlefield before now. Talmonis posted:FarCry 3's biggest problem was the absolutely unlikable main character. I loathed the fact that I was the whitest whitebread loving fratboy to ever walk the planet. Why couldn't I have been a Maori guy returning home after living in the states for college to find that pirates have taken everything? Someone who was already a part of the culture coming home wouldn't have made me nearly as angry. Secondly you had Citra, who they decided to have rape you while you were stoned out of your mind on poisonous mushroom dust. That entire scene and aftermath was pretty repulsive in it's gratuity, not to mention that it treats rape not even as a joke, but as something sexy and desirable. hosed up. If you get the chance and haven't read it, a Google for Far Cry 3's writer, Jeffrey Yohalem, will get you to a controversial interview he did with Eurogamer a while back. The general idea he had was that Jason Brody is a deliberate send-up of the "white savior" archetype, in that he's a clueless wonder who spends most of the game ripped off his tits on jungle drugs and who's systematically manipulated by everyone on the island. There used to be an argument over that, whether Yohalem actually set out to tell that story and kinda botched the execution or he saw the pushback against it coming and was using the old "it was a parody!' defense. I could go either way.
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Jul 10, 2015 17:56
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Obdicut posted:I can see that being the attempt. The mechanics of the game, kind of interestingly, undermine that--that the tattoo mystically appears on him and he gets more and more powerful. As well as the endings not really fitting with that except for the 'bad' ending, kinda. A lot of the game makes more sense if you assume Jason isn't necessarily a reliable narrator. I don't think there's a moment in the story where he isn't drugged, concussed, post-traumatic, or in mild shock.
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Jul 10, 2015 18:18
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Radbot posted:Why are people talking about this stupid video game poo poo when the same discussion can be had in a much more intelligent, tangible way re: Carry That Weight, the Columbia rape situation, etc.? It's not the same discussion. The "GamerGate" thing has a lot more to do with a specific organization carrying out harassment campaigns on behalf of a particular agenda within the video game industry, and while it isn't more than a stone's throw away from topics like institutionalized sexism and rape culture, it's its own argument.
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Jul 10, 2015 18:21
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Radbot posted:I'm going to go out on a limb and say that maybe, JUST MAYBE, reducing actual rapes is more important than "integrity" in video games "journalism". We can be concerned about both. I understand that you think this is an irrelevancy, but it's a discussion of a separate front in the culture war that has, so far, only avoided the causing of actual, physical harm through sheer dumb luck. Trying to angrily insist that it's irrelevant in the face of a separate, more severe problem doesn't really do much but make you look like you're trying to edit the discourse. Sephyr posted:Long story made short? GG is a flimsy, dumb idea made infinitely worse by both opportunistic hacks (Milo Yannapoulos, Jack Freaking Thompson) and eager little bile stains that populate Reddit and 4chan. The fact that some of its targets might be jerks does not excuse their antics or viciousness in the least, and even the small grains of truth you could find among their grievances are not helped by their actions, or in fact, b their existence. I have often thought about how it would be a warmer world on the whole if GG and its like were to pursue actual criminals with the fervor with which they go after a Brianna Wu or Randi Harper: if they turned the same amount of lunatic energy towards digging up information on corrupt bankers or abusers. It'd be vigilante justice, of course, but at least it would be an objectively more worthwhile target than obscure game developers who were mean on Twitter.
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Jul 10, 2015 19:33
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