Author: VD

Making SF awards great again

Lela Buis comments on the new Dragon Awards:

I see today that DragonCon has announced they will give out awards in 2016. This is kind of a biggie. DragonCon is a huge convention, with an annual on-site attendance of about 70,000 people. The press release says the awards will be based on nominations and votes from all fans, not just attendees or members, through an open system. They’re apparently going to run this off their Website where voters can register to vote.

Contrast this attendance figure with WorldCon that gives out the Hugo Awards. Wikipedia lists 4,644 attendees and 10,350 who bought memberships to vote the 2015 Hugo Awards, which was a record for numbers. With DragonCon moving into the awards game, I’m thinking the Hugo’s are officially undermined. The Puppy scandal has not only disrupted the voting system, but it seems to have led to an inspection of the Hugo process where works are winnowed through a narrow review and recommendation system and onto the ballot.

While most people aren’t going to swallow the Puppies’ complaints of a vast conspiracy whole, their grievances do seem to have resulted in concerns about the fairness of the process. WorldCon has scrambled to provide additional controls, but it could be that their credibility is already shot.

Yes, indeed, I think the Hugo Awards might have just taken a few hits over the last decade or two. In any event, I’m sure the science fiction fandom community is every bit as delighted about people taking their advice and setting up a new and alternative award as they were about people taking John Scalzi’s advice to nominate and vote for the Hugo Awards.

I am registered to vote in the Dragon Awards and I would encourage you to do so as well. I’ll post my recommendations here the week after the Hugo shortlist is announced, in the event that any of you might happen to be curious about them.

The funniest thing is the way a self-appointed Hugo Defender immediately popped up to white-knight for Worldcon in the comments at Lela’s site. That, more than anything, tells you how fandom actually feels about the new competition.

You wrote: “…it seems to have led to an inspection of the Hugo process where works are winnowed through a narrow review and recommendation system and onto the ballot.”

What does that mean? The Hugo Awards are nominated by the thousands of members of the World Science Fiction Society. How is that a “narrow review and recommendation system?”

Whatever does it mean, Mr. Standlee asks, even as the rules are changed to protect the perceived interests of the Tor Books cabal.

Beamdog CEO statement on Baldur’s Gate Gate

Trent Oster, CEO of Beamdog, releases a statement concerning Siege of Dragonspear.

I’m Trent Oster, CEO of Beamdog.

First off, everyone here is ecstatic to have shipped Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear. Siege represents years of hard work by a dedicated team that we grew from a combination of home grown talent, original Baldur’s Gate modders and former Bioware developers.  Siege of Dragonspear represents more than 25 hours of new Baldur’s Gate gameplay, and more than 500,000 words of writing. I’m proud of our team for launching this great expansion.

We’ve received feedback around Mizhena, a supporting character who reveals she is transgender. In retrospect, it would have been better served if we had introduced a transgender character with more development. This is a lesson we will be carrying forward in our development as creators and we will be improving this character in a future update.

The last few days have showed us how passionately many of our fans care for our games. We’ve had a lot of great feedback from players who love the expansion and are having a great time experiencing the first new Baldur’s Gate story in 15 years. While we appreciate all feedback we receive from our fans, both positive as well as negative, some of the negative feedback has focused not on Siege of Dragonspear but on individual developers at Beamdog — to the point of online threats and harassment.

I just want to make it crystal clear that Beamdog does not condone this behavior, and moreover that it will not have the desired effect as we stand behind all our developers 100%. We created the game as a group, and moving forward we’ll work on the game’s issues as a group, which I believe is exactly as it should be.

We’ve received valuable feedback around some bugs we failed to catch for ship. We’re hard at work right now patching up the issues that slipped through and we’re striving to ship fixes and improvements quickly. We will provide a complete list of the issues we plan to address in our next update. Issues of note we are addressing are:

Multiplayer – We are acting on reports of multiplayer issues and hope to have this fixed in the next update.

Minsc – Minsc has a line which generated controversy. Looking back on the line, we agree with the feedback from our community, it has nothing to do with his character and we will be removing the line.

We hope all our players continue to enjoy Siege of Dragonspear and we look forward to providing an update in the near future.

Regards,
-Trent

This is, to put it bluntly, bullshit. It’s a feeble attempt at damage control. There is no apology for calling critics “small minded”, there is no apology to those who have been banned from the forums, there is no apology for the inept writing or attempting to cram Social Justice Games, as the responsible writer called them, down the throats of Baldur’s Gate fans, and most of all, there is no announcement that the Social Justice Game writer and creator Amber Scott is no longer employed by Beamdog.

This simply isn’t good enough, Mr. Oster. It doesn’t indicate that you understand in any way what the core problem is or why so many fans of Baldur’s Gate were appalled by what your company did with the license.

Here is my advice: get rid of Scott and whatever other SJWs are waging their little cultural war on gamers at your expense, hire some better writers, and publicly assure fans of the series that you will not continue to utilize the Baldur’s Gate license to add diversity, preach about refugees or other current political issues, or advocate for social justice, and I’ll be happy to buy your games.

If we want to get preached at, we’ll go to church. If we want to get lectured, we’ll go to college. A game is no place for SJW culture war campaigns.

This is the damning bit: “we stand behind all our developers 100%”

Too bad. We stand against them. Because they stand against us.

UPDATE: Steam is accepting refunds from those who purchased the game or the Enhanced Editions and are unhappy with Beamdog’s public statements.

Steam accepted my BG:EE refund request after forum ban with more than 2 hrs played

Explained I had more playtime and I was aware of that, and that I would have been glad to eat the mistake had I simply made a bad purchase – but that after being banned on their forums and called a ‘harasser’ for no good reason than disagreeing that I’d had enough of the company.

BAM, refund approved within 30m, despite it being 9:30pm on a Wednesday.

Tomorrow, I’ll be drafting an open letter that contains relevant elements of various digital distribution platforms ToS’ that everyone can copy and send to Steam, Amazon, GoG, GMG, and all the different platforms Beamdog is selling their product on, along with detailed information including archives and screenshots which are now deleted, showing a conscious attempt on the part of Beamdog to manipulate user reviews across various platforms. Which violates EVERYONES policies, basically.

ADDENDUM: This Q&A says it all about SJWs in games. “Killer” is right. From an interview with a former senior writer at Bioware:

What is your least favorite thing about working in the industry?

Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games. While I enjoy the interactive aspects of gaming, if a game doesn’t have a good story, it’s very hard for me to get interested in playing it. Similarly, I’m really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly — I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don’t like tactics, I don’t like fighting, I don’t like keeping track of inventory, and I can’t read a game map to save my life. This makes it very difficult for me to play to the myriad games I really should be keeping up on as our competition.

If you could tell developers of games to make sure to put one thing in games to appeal to a broader audience which includes women, what would that one thing be?

A fast-forward button. Games almost always include a way to “button through” dialogue without paying attention, because they understand that some players don’t enjoy listening to dialogue and they don’t want to stop their fun. Yet they persist in practically coming into your living room and forcing you to play through the combats even if you’re a player who only enjoys the dialogue. In a game with sufficient story to be interesting without the fighting, there is no reason on earth that you can’t have a little button at the corner of the screen that you can click to skip to the end of the fighting.

Dani Bunton wept.

Trump is still the only option

It’s not Trump vs Cruz at this point, it’s Trump vs Ryan. Matt Forney explains that Cruz is just Ryan’s stand-in at the moment:

While Ted Cruz and his fanboys might fantasize about him winning the nomination in a brokered convention, it’s not likely to happen. Beyond Cruz being ineligible to serve due to being a natural-born Canadian, he’s widely despised by his fellow Republicans for his habitual dishonesty and abrasive attitude. The only reason he’s currently racking up endorsements from party insiders like Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham is because they want to use him as a club to beat Trump with.

GOP establishment hacks have begun floating the idea of nominating House Speaker (and 2012 vice presidential nominee) Paul Ryan as a compromise candidate at the convention. Not only would this represent an unprecedented insult to the party’s base, nominating Ryan would guarantee a Democratic victory in November. The Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan brand of Republicanism is so repulsive to voters that not only did it lose them the 2012 election (an election they should have won due to Obama’s unpopularity), Ryan’s own hometown refused to support him.

In any event, Donald Trump and his supporters will need to turn the heat up after his loss in Wisconsin in order to thwart the GOP establishment. Voting for Ted Cruz will ensure that the nomination goes to Ryan, Romney or another Wall Street-owned company man who will both disregard the interests of the American people and lose to the Democrats. If you’re serious about pulling up the floorboards of the GOP to expose the rot within, Trump is your only option.

It’s rather remarkable that so many Republicans would rather lose to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders than simply get on board with Donald Trump. C’est la vie, as it has been said by others before, at this point, all politics in the USA is little more than laying the groundwork for Round Two.

I wanted to like Paul Ryan, but he’s been an unmitigated and shady cuckservative for nearly as long as he’s been on the national scene.

On being underwhelmed by economists

One of the things I’ve learned about the internet is that it has a way of stripping the intellectual glamor from those one had reason to respect for one reason or another. I discovered that Thomas Sowell was rather less bright than I’d believed when I had a direct personal encounter with him over Michelle Malkin and Pearl Harbor. And it was disappointing to learn that Thomas Woods is considerably more conventional, and considerably less serious, as an economist than I’d imagined him to be.

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
Free trade advocates don’t realize
they’re supporting a failed theory that never applied to modern
economies or technology in the 1st place.

Bent Nail Retweeted Supreme Dark Lord@ThomasEWoods  free trade failed Tom…just like the non-aggression principle .only works if all comply.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
No, it doesn’t work at all. Free trade is totally incompatible with having a nation.

Tom Woods ‏@ThomasEWoods
No, that’s completely wrong. Why not block out the sun? It’s not playing fair, giving all that light for free!

Tom Woods ‏@ThomasEWoods
“Having a nation” = “forcing people to pay higher taxes to the sociopaths who oppress them.” Got it.
Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
I mean literally having a nation at all. With true free trade, HALF of Americans under 35 will have to emigrate.

Tom Woods ‏@ThomasEWoods
Especially the US lightbulb industry, which deserves to suck at the proverbial teat forever. Nationhood demands it

Woods is a good Austrian, in the economics sense, but he’s obviously in over his head here. I am entirely confident that he has literally never considered the obvious consequences of free trade from a labor mobility standpoint, despite the fact that labor mobility is a necessary component of free trade from theoretical, logical, and empirical standpoints.

In fact, with a very few number of exceptions, such as Gary North, who rejects the core concepts of “nations” and “borders”, I daresay that fewer Austrian economists understand that their free trade dogma is absolutely antithetical to the survival of Western civilization than libertarians grasped that their open borders policy was self-refuting twenty years ago.

I find it amusing because the conversation usually goes like this:

FREE TRADER: Free trade is good! Just look at how domestic free trade has benefited the US economy!

VOX DAY: Very well. Now look at US labor mobility rates.

FT: (stricken look) Um, labor mobility isn’t necessarily part of free trade.

VD: Yes, it is. But more importantly, it is observably part of the US economy.

FT: (wide-eyed horror, crash, reboot) Why not block out the sun? Japan! 1970s automakers! Ricardo! Smoot-Hawley!

They literally have no comeback for this argument, because most of them are unwilling to openly declare themselves anti-American globalists who don’t believe in nations, let alone national sovereignty, let alone the US Constitution. And that is the only rational response that remains to them if they are going to retain the free trade dogma.

I have yet to hear a single free trader even TRY to respond to my point that if the international economy was opened up to free trade to the extent that the domestic economy is, US labor mobility indicates that nearly half of all Americans would be forced to emigrate by the time they turn 35.

Free trade. Nations. Pick one.

Mississippi stands firm

The governor doesn’t hesitate to sign a religious liberty bill:

Mississippi’s governor signed a law on Tuesday that allows public and private businesses to refuse service to gay couples based on the employers’ religious beliefs.

Gov. Phil Bryant signed House Bill 1523, despite opposition from gay-rights groups and some businesses who say it enables discrimination. Some conservative and religious groups support the bill.

The measure’s stated intention is to protect those who believe that marriage should be between one man and one woman, that sexual relations should only take place inside such marriages, and that male and female genders are unchangeable.

“This bill merely reinforces the rights which currently exist to the exercise of religious freedom as stated in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” the Republican governor wrote in a statement posted to his Twitter account.

The measure allows churches, religious charities and privately held businesses to decline services to people whose lifestyles violate their religious beliefs. Individual government employees may also opt out, although the measure says governments must still provide services.

“This bill does not limit any constitutionally protected rights or actions of any citizen of this state under federal or state laws,” Bryant said. “It does not attempt to challenge federal laws, even those which are in conflict with the Mississippi Constitution, as the Legislature recognizes the prominence of federal law in such limited circumstances.”

Other states have considered similar legislation. North Carolina enacted a law, while governors in Georgia and South Dakota vetoed proposals.

Meanwhile, Paypal decides it’s a good idea to play politics in North Carolina:

PayPal has canceled its plans to open a new global operations center in Charlotte, following passage of a North Carolina law that prevents cities from creating non-discrimination policies based on gender identity.

The measure also mandates that students in state schools use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender when they were born.

On March 23, North Carolina, in an emergency session, passed the controversial Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act. 

It’s always educational to see how corporations are willing to virtue-signal on certain issues, while cheerfully doing business with some of the worst regimes on Earth at the same time.

And now various governors are getting into the act.

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today signed an executive order banning all non-essential state travel to Mississippi. The order requires all New York State agencies, departments, boards and commissions to immediately review all requests for state funded or state sponsored travel to the state of Mississippi, and bar any such publicly funded travel that is not essential to the enforcement of state law or public health and safety.

Round Two is coming. I don’t know which issue will set it off yet, but it’s increasingly obvious that Round Two is on the horizon. There is no nation any longer, and the sooner the various nations inside the USA go their separate ways, preferably in peace.

Wisconsin results

This is your post to discuss the primaries in Wisconsin today. Poll average has Cruz ahead by 5 and Sanders by 3.

Preliminary exit polls show 7/10 GOP primary voters support the Muslim ban in Wisconsin. I doubt this matters much, however, as I expect many Cruz voters would support it too.

The best place for incoming results is Decision Desk HQ.

Book of the Week

Stendahl, despite the Norwegian-sounding name, was a French writer who later moved to Italy and became very popular there. As part of my program to catch up on the great writers of the past I have not hitherto read, I began reading what is considered to be his greatest novel, The Red and the Black, recently. Some consider it to be one of the 100 greatest novels of all time.

I would not go quite that far, I think. While I haven’t quite finished it yet, I am three-quarters through it, and while it is indubitably an excellent novel, and one well worth reading, being remarkable for its attention to detail and its focus on the psychology of the protagonist, it is somewhat marred by what I consider to be its socio-sexual flaws.

It is this book, more than any other, that has convinced me that my socio-sexual theory of literature may be a significantly useful writer’s tool if it is ever refined and articulated. In any event, the Kindle ebook is only 99 cents, so it is absolutely worth the purchase price.

Also, I should mention that the Castalia House site is back up. If you’re not seeing it, just wait a little while, it just means your ISP hasn’t refreshed the DNS. We apologize for the inconvenience.

A recognizable response

Grimfate notes that Beamdog’s response to the criticism of Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear falls into what has come to be a recognizable pattern:

Usually if there’s a big uproar, the company will try to make things
right, try to save face and hopefully do something to appease those who
have decided not to purchase the game because of it. For example, the
ending of Mass Effect 3. Also, whenever an SJW complains about
something, the company seems quick to address the issue, such as the
butt thing with Blizzard’s latest game. So it’s interesting to see that
when there is an uproar AGAINST the SJW side, the company digs their
heels in, asking people to post positive reviews for the game instead
of, you know, addressing the concerns of their actual and potential
customers…

This is the tell. This is what informs gamers that a game developer is not on their side, and is sufficiently SJW-converged to stand their ground on the basis of SJW politics rather than artistic expression or creative freedom.

If you are the sort of organization that would immediately cave, (or worse, has caved) before a single SJW pointing-and-shrieking racist, or sexist, or goblinist, or geometrist, or whatever the complaint du jour is, you cannot expect people to take you seriously when you suddenly stand firm against tens of thousands of ordinary gamers expressing their disapproval of your design choices. Observe that the review ratings are consistent: 70 to 75 percent of gamers are openly hostile to Beamdog’s “enhancements”.

An SJW complains about a single character’s pose: “OMG! We are SO sorry! We will change it ASAFP! Do you like her new butt better? Is that okay? PLEASE FORGIVE US!”

Tens of thousands of gamers complain about smirking SJW convergence inserted into a beloved series: “Too bad, small minded bigots! You’re just a vocal minority and you’re BANNED!”

Moreover, if you are going to disrespect a much-loved classic of the genre by rejecting various elements of it and “improving” it, you really should understand that you are also rejecting its fans and that more people are going to actively hate your enhancements than are going to enthusiastically embrace them.

It’s a legitimate choice, although I would argue it is a foolish and self-destructive one. And while the developer has the right to make that choice, it is very important to understand that a deliberate choice is being made by someone inside the organization. It’s not like any of this is new, as the memelords well know.

Meanwhile, a longtime fan of the Baldur’s Gate series reviews Siege of Dragonspear:

Creating more content for a game that is in desperate need of a revival at a time when CRPGs are finally coming back into vogue was a great idea, and had I been a game developer, I would have jumped at the chance to do it myself.

Of course I was warned, both by friends and by readers of this site posting in comments on Dragonspear news articles I posted, that the game wasn’t going to be worth the money.

“They hired Gaider, you know what that means”

“Did you see how bad that stream was”

“You know they’ll screw it up.”

Naturally, I didn’t believe them. Call it putting the nostalgia goggles on, but I couldn’t possibly believe Beamdog’s Baldur’s Gate expansion would be anything but a continuation of the same events and personalities that made the original so timeless and memorable….

After five hours with the game, I encountered numerous situations where a
combination of very poor writing and social justice pandering began to
weigh the game down. Technical and gameplay missteps were one thing, but
the sheer amount of modern 2016 Tumblr-level politics turned what was
once a grand medieval swords & sorcery epic into the equivalent of a
emotional teenage girl’s self-insert fanfic.

What a small minded bigot! Nevertheless, it appears the controversy has already broken through and hit the mainstream media:

The problem with Minsc’s dig at #GamerGate isn’t that it breaks the fabled “Fourth Wall.” After all, Minsc is already making a jump through the fourth wall with his delightful pet Spelljammer reference. Heck, Baldur’s Gate is just as happy to reference The Bob Newhart Show and Monty Python as it is murder and betrayal.

Rather, the problem lies in Beamdog’s level of respect — or lack thereof — for a character that is deeply meaningful to an entire generation of gamers. Minsc is the lovable hamster-toting warrior of both Baldur’s Gate titles. His legacy extends into novelization and comic books, and he’s been praised by just about every conceivable gaming publication at one time or another. He’s an intellectual innocent, a gentle giant.

With one quip, they’ve turned that great big teddy bear of a hero into a passive-aggressive tool to insult a portion of their potential customers. It’s a cynical decision, and a needless one. It’s intentionally sarcastic and insulting, stooping to the tactics that people consistently ladle onto anyone who has ever participated in the #GamerGate conversation, without offering any useful rebuttal.

Not only is it grossly out of character for Minsc, it’s a little bit of the Internet’s ugliness that quite simply didn’t need to be there. Where the transgender character is an expression of the developer’s intentions toward inclusion, Minsc’s dig is designed to exclude people with whom Beamdog disagrees. It’s trite, it’s catty, and it makes Beamdog’s other in-game statements come off as posturing rather than sincere.

Beamdog’s response to the controversy hasn’t been extremely constructive and suggests a very loose grasp on the heart of the problem.

The problem is that the amenable authorities think their best interests are served by pandering to the SJWs who put them in their untenable position in the first place rather than jettisoning them at the earliest opportunity. What every leader of an organization needs to understand is that the SJWs within have no loyalty to the organization nor do they harbor any concerns for it. The organization is only of interest to them insofar as it provides them with a vehicle for pushing their Narrative.

Give them the chance, and they will burn it all down around them in the interest of virtue-signaling without even a moment’s hesitation. And then they’ll move on to their next victim.

Cheap at the price

Critics complain Trump’s deportation plan would cost $500 billion:

Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s plan to deport all undocumented immigrants would cost between $400 billion and $600 billion and take at least 20 years to implement, according to a report from the American Action Forum.

The report estimates that there are currently 11.3 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. To deport them, these individuals would have to be apprehended, detained, legally processed, and transported back to the country they originated from.

In order to do this in two years like Trump has proposed, the report estimates that there would need to be 90,582 federal immigration apprehension employees, 348,831 immigration detention beds, 1,316 immigration courts, 32,445 federal attorneys to process undocumented immigrants, and a minimum of 17,296 chartered flights and 30,701 chartered bus trips.

“If the federal government were to remove all undocumented immigrants in only two years, it would require a massive expansion of the federal government’s immigration enforcement personnel and infrastructure,” states the report.

The report says that if the federal government began enforcing mass deportation, about 20 percent of undocumented immigrants would begin to leave voluntarily which would leave about 9 million illegal aliens in the country. Currently, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement only has the capacity to remove 400,000 undocumented immigrants in one year.

“That means if ICE were to operate at its current maximum capacity, it would take over 20 years to remove 9.04 million undocumented immigrants,” states the report. “To remove those 9.04 million immigrants in two years, ICE would have to remove 4.52 million immigrants per year. That is 11.3 times larger than ICE’s current maximum capacity.”

I can solve those problems easily. The answer is private enterprise. The AAF estimate claims a cost of $55,555 per individual deported. So, the cost can be cut to less than $100 billion by simply offering a $10,000 bounty on every illegal immigrant delivered to a station on the Mexican border. Assume that it costs $5k to do a quick identity check to confirm their status and transport them home.

That means the USA would be saving nearly $250 billion per year based on the $346 billion per year that illegal aliens cost as estimated by the National Research Council. Trump is not only right to call for deportations, but America can’t afford NOT to round them up and repatriate them.