Devs are pro-GamerGate

This interview with an anonymous AAA dev from a Sony studio expresses very much the same sentiments that I have heard from more than a few other devs in the industry:

TechRaptor: What do you think about GamerGate the movement? The things they tend to tackle—corruption, censorship—are those big industry problems from your point of view?

Developer: I have always seen Gamergate as a group of passionate people rallying behind the platonic cause for honesty and accountability. While the Gamergate movement did have a rocky start to begin with, I feel the Gamergate movement has become quite clear with its intended mission. The video game industry has always been both a global community and very tight-knit. Because of how close we are and that we are an entertainment-based industry, it does allow of nepotism and corruption when money is on the line. These are large problems that I feel any entertainment-based industry has. But, what is unique about the video game industry is that we have consumers willing to speak up and demand that we strive for a better way.

Unfortunately, there are individuals who don’t feel comfortable about changing how they do things, especially when it works out so well for them in the past and the present. To those who fight against Gamergate, I can understand the feeling when a large amount of people are saying how you do your job is wrong. Within the game journalism part of our industry, it does seem like the Wild West. Media companies will make deals and write articles that help them grow and keep their employees. However, that stubbornness or misguided grandstanding doesn’t improve the industry or game journalism as a whole. The corruption and censorship that Gamergate is fighting against is after years of such “deals” and how some game journalists have their ingrained mindsets. It is an uphill battle, but it needs to be done.

TechRaptor: Does that corruption impact your ability to create or put undue limits on your projects?

Developer: I am blessed to be in a position where it mostly doesn’t affect our work. We don’t make games so that a gaming website will like it. We make a game so that our fans will like it. In truth, our biggest and most important critics will always be the people that buy and play our game, not the journalists that cover it. However, we always look at reviews and how it is received. If a review is biased against us from an ideological standpoint instead of the content of the game, then that can theoretically cause unnecessary issues for future projects.

TechRaptor: Something that has come up a lot in recent months is the move towards political correctness, is that something that is considered a lot in AAA and taken seriously when making games?

Developer: Political correctness as an issue is mostly addressed on a project-to-project basis. I have seen projects that have bowed to the ideas of political correctness and others that have thrown caution to the wind. Regardless of the project, its has to be considered in some fashion. Ideally, a project can make systems and characters great enough that it doesn’t need hit against the political correctness attitude. In the projects I am been a part of, the political correctness has either been glanced over or it has tailored a project in some degree. Political correctness can become a balancing act, but an act we shouldn’t have to deal with. However, I have seen that affect the Indie scene alot more than the AAA scene. Political correctness has never stopped a project from making a great character or gameplay feature that I have been a part of, and it never should.

Political correctness and thought policing have NO PLACE in the game industry. Neither do SJWs.

Thus spake the Prophet of Doom

John Derbyshire observes the culture from the conservative dustbin:

Our culture has continued to slide giggling into the pit. It is now thirty years since you last heard anyone hum a tune from a current popular song. Concerts of serious music rarely include anything less than half a century old. Very few of us could name a living painter or architect. Entire years pass when no American outside the academy spontaneously quotes a line of verse written by any American poet younger than Elizabeth Bishop (b. 1911), or a British poet younger than Philip Larkin (b. 1922). The middlebrow novel is slipping into extinction. Movies are an extension of the comic-book industry; only TV drama shows occasional flashes of brilliance. The churches are branch offices of Globalist Multiculturalism, Inc.: the Episcopal church in my sleepy, 360-year-old Long Island town advertises Misa en Español.

Forbidden by Supreme Court decree to test job applicants for ability, employers demand college degrees as proxies, obliging parents either to beggar themselves or to see their children loaded with debt after four prime young-adult years learning nothing much. The colleges themselves are hotbeds of Cultural Marxism, padding out their prospectuses with intellectually worthless Grievance Studies courses, awarding degrees to illiterate black athletes, and writhing in frenzies of agonized self-abasement when someone is seen wearing a hood on campus.Police and Fire Departments, to avoid diversity lawsuits, allow black female cadets to walk through their test fitness runs. Other working- and lower-middle-class employments are sold off to low-bidding H-1B visa holders or illegal aliens. Homosexuals can pretend to be “married,” and if you peaceably express disapproval you will be hounded from your job. Submarine crews are co-ed.

Has there been any push-back from the conservative movement against all this? Not so as you’d notice. It is difficult to name anything that the conservative movement has conserved … although to be sure, the English language is still spoken, or at least understood, in most precincts.

It sounds bad. It is bad. But it’s not over. We started with 11. We have a lot more than that now. These are not merely exciting times, they are fun times. We can shoot in literally any direction without fear of hitting a friendly.

Yeah, we’re outnumbered. So the fuck what? We aren’t outgunned.

As far as conservativism’s dustbin goes, who cares? Conservatives are worthless. They’re failures. They’ve conserved nothing. Now it’s our time.

They really hate the classics

When the pinkshirts in science fiction talk about wanting to destroy Campbellian SF, they’re not being ironic or kidding. They seriously believe that Pink SF is better and genuinely want to eradicate old school Blue SF/F because it is too outdated, offensive, and problematic.

I read the 100 “best” fantasy and sci-fi novels – and they were shockingly offensive. Why are so many of NPR’s list of best science fiction books so misogynistic, and why can’t we move past our nostalgia for them?

When
it comes to the best of anything, what do you expect? If it’s science
fiction and fantasy novels you want epic adventures and getting out of
impossible situations. But what you often get is barely disguised sexism
and inability to imagine any world where women are involved in the
derring-do.
At
the end of 2013, after a year of reading very little, I decided to
embark on a challenge: read all the books I hadn’t yet read on
NPR’s list of 100 best sci-fi and fantasy novels.
Nostalgia permeates the list. Of the books I read, there were more
books published before 1960 than after 2000. The vast majority were
published in the 1970s and 1980s. There were also many sci-fi
masterworks or what were groundbreaking novels. However, groundbreaking
30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago can now seem horribly out of date and
shockingly offensive….

Recent controversy

I’ve been acutely aware of the ferocious debate in the science fiction and fantasy community about representation (the recent controversy over the Hugo awards is a case in point), so I should have been somewhat prepared for this relentlessly depressing string of disappointing novels. But with the dogged determination of reading through the list, it really grinds you down. How can people actually defend the status quo when it’s so obviously awful? Putting these books on a pedestal, given how problematic the portrayal of women and other minorities, is surely part of the problem?

Frankly, from my vantage in 2015, it was just plain weird to read books where there were hardly any women, no people of colour, no LGBT people. It seemed wholly unbelievable. I know what you could say: it’s science fiction and fantasy, believability isn’t one of the main criteria for such books. But it is relatively absurd that in the future people could discover faster-than-light travel, build massive empires and create artificial intelligences but somehow not crack gender equality or the space-faring glass ceiling.

The consequence of the lack of women and the obvious sexism is that the books became very much like one another. My book reviews contained more profanity and I became a much more harsh critic of the genres I most enjoyed reading. They were all the same story of white guys, going on an adventure….

I can understand how many of the books on the list may have once been
groundbreaking but that doesn’t mean that they are now the best examples
of the genre. They have been supplanted, hundreds of times over, by
other authors that took similar themes but made them better and more
inclusive.

They genuinely believe throwing in a few men-with-tits and white men with colored skin – which is as far as their attempts at diversity generally go – somehow magically improves a book. Of course, the general public disagrees, as the continued decline in SF sales demonstrates.

It’s a start

Donald Trump continues to move the Republicans right on immigration:

Donald Trump would reverse President Obama’s executive orders on immigration and deport all undocumented immigrants from the U.S. as president, he said in an exclusive interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd.

“We’re going to keep the families together, but they have to go,” he said in the interview, which will air in full on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this Sunday. Pressed on what he’d do if the immigrants in question had nowhere to return to, Trump reiterated: “They have to go. We will work with them. They have to go. Chuck, we either have a country, or we don’t have a country,” he said.

The ironic thing is that based on his immigration policies alone, Trump is less of a joke candidate than the so-called “serious” candidates. The only reason he has become such a story is because all of the other Republican candidates are so absurdly terrible on the issue of the 40-year invasion of the country.

Trump’s actual announced policies:


Real immigration reform puts the needs of working people first – not wealthy globetrotting donors. We are the only country in the world whose immigration system puts the needs of other nations ahead of our own. That must change. Here are the three core principles of real immigration reform:


1. A nation without borders is not a nation. There must be a wall across the southern border.


2. A nation without laws is not a nation. Laws passed in accordance with our Constitutional system of government must be enforced.


3. A nation that does not serve its own citizens is not a nation. Any immigration plan must improve jobs, wages and security for all Americans.


And the big one: “End birthright citizenship.” 

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens if his support grows following this announcement, especially in light of his plan to require higher wages for H1B visa holders. But regardless, it is obvious that the romantic view of America as “the Melting Pot” is now dead. And notice that everything he is talking about could have been brought up by any of the other candidates, but wasn’t.

How media SJWs spin the anti-GG narrative

Matt Sullivan explains Gamedropping: How Journalism Outlets Reinforce a False Narrative Without Fact:

What does GamerGate have to do with traveling to Mars, Drake’s music, and George R.R. Martin?

You’d expect the answer to be nothing, because well, it shouldn’t have anything to do with any of those things. However over the past year we have seen many organizations, some of them Pulitzer Prize winning organizations, try desperately to make the claim that they are indeed linked.

We call this GameDropping.

GameDropping is a phenomenon wherein an author of an article mentions GamerGate even though the article contains nothing even remotely related to the movement. A few examples of this are The Guardian’s article “How can our future Mars colonies be free of sexism and racism?”, Pitchfork’s “It’s Time to Break Up With Drake”, and PC Magazine’s “George R.R. Martin: The Internet Is Toxic”.

Now one may think that GameDropping is rather harmless. Yes these articles have nothing to do with GamerGate, but the problem comes from the fact that when these articles reference GamerGate, there is either no source provided to what GamerGate actually is, or the source is a heavily biased opinion piece with little to no factual content.

In fact two of the above examples don’t reference sources at all, and the third references another article from the same publication which appears to be an interview wherein the author is interviewing themselves.

Now when readers of these publications read these stories, whether they be fans of Game of Thrones, or people critical of Drake, having no idea what GamerGate is, they now associate the name with something negative, having not been provided the facts, or a balanced article on exactly what the controversy is to make up their own minds. That information is conveniently left out, but the narrative is inserted.

The SJW’s first priority is always to push the Narrative.

Negotiation

buwaya August 15, 2015 3:31 PM  

I apologize in advance for the interjection of a marginally related matter – I have been over at File 770 bringing up the matter of a negotiated peace. It does not seem to have gone over too well for the most part, but patience is of course the key. Under the circumstances it seems to be the case that the balance of power (or risk vs return) seems to favor the puppies, so I was asking about what sort of concessions they would be willing to offer. I apologize for neglecting to check with you about the sort of concessions, in a concrete sense, this faction would be willing to accept.

The Supreme Dark Lord, Evil Legion of Evil August 15, 2015 4:16 PM

There is no need to apologize. As it happens, there are a few things we would be willing to accept in order to bring about a rapprochement in science fiction.

John Scalzi’s skull
Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s skull
The Toad of Tor’s skull
Jim C. Hines’s skull
Irene Gallo’s skull
Charles Stross’s skull
Phil Sandifer’s skull
Mary Kowal’s skull

Silvered and made into goblets, please. We may need four more, but I think eight place settings will suffice.

UPDATE: I am reliably informed that we actually have twelve SJW-bone table settings. So we will also require:

Steven Gould’s skull
Matthew Johnson’s skull
James Enge’s skull
Lee Martindale’s skull

We would also like to request a half-stanza from Byron’s “Lines Inscribed Upon A Cup Formed From A Skull” to be engraved upon each skull. As there are six stanzas, this will nicely suit the set.

Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:
   In me behold the only skull
From which, unlike a living head,
    Whatever flows is never dull. 

I lived, I loved, I quaff’d, like thee:
   I died: let earth my bones resign;
Fill up—thou canst not injure me;
   The worm hath fouler lips than thine.

Better to hold the sparkling grape,
   Than nurse the earth-worm’s slimy brood;
And circle in the goblet’s shape
   The drink of Gods, than reptiles’ food.

Where once my wit, perchance, hath shone,
   In aid of others’ let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
   What nobler substitute than wine?

Quaff while thou canst—another race,
   When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
   And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Why not? since through life’s little day
   Our heads such sad effects produce;
Redeem’d from worms and wasting clay,
   This chance is theirs, to be of use.

I believe it is a priori apparent that their skulls would be of far more utility to mankind if they were helping satiate the thirst of the Dark Lord and his guests than any other purpose for which they might be currently used.

Buwaya on August 15, 2015 at 1:33 pm said:

I have a response from [Day] requesting some people’s skulls, some of whom I don’t recognize. Seems unrealistic even for an opening offer, but its a start anyway

Camestros Felapton on August 16, 2015 at 1:02 am said:

New plan:
1. we get Mr Crocodile to bargain VD down to just one skull
2. we get a FAKE skull and turn it into a wine goblet & send it to VD
3. we persuade John Scalzi to run aound WorldCon with his T-shirt over his head and shouting ‘oh noes, where’s me head gone’ and wave his arms in the air like he has no head.
4. peace in our time

Felapton is the guy who did the Puppy Kerfluffle map, the latest version of which is below. I have to say, I rather like the cut of his jib.

The SJWs think they can outlast us

An SJW whose tagline is “exploiting extroverts for personal gain” is demoralized, wants to ban people obeying all the rules as “harassers”, but nevertheless insists that they’re going to outlast us:

Everyone says the Hugos will survive, and I tend to agree. I think the Puppy voters will get tired of throwing away their money in the name of making whatever statement they’re trying to make. They will also have a harder time maintaining the charade that their campaign is about anything other than self-promotion, because after this year there will be fewer neutral parties willing to appear on any slate. The nomination rules will probably be changed to make slates less effective, although I’m afraid that will make the whole process more confusing and could scare some potential nominators away. In the long run this will mostly be forgotten, but in the short term it probably means that at least two WorldCons are going to have their Hugos basically invalidated, and I don’t like that they have to make that sacrifice. In my opinion the harassment policy should be invoked against the Puppy organizers and they should be banned from the convention and disqualified from the awards on that basis. I get that the Hugo organizers won’t do this, they would argue that the integrity of the awards depends on strict adherence to the bylaws, not arbitrary decisions by administrators. I could make some counter arguments but I don’t want to go down that road right now. I will just say that when a group has a stated goal of disrupting the awards, it wouldn’t bother me at all if they were barred from participating.

I don’t think there’s any point in making predictions this year. With so many more voters than usual, anything is possible. The Puppies don’t seem to be expecting to win, but whether that means that non-Puppies win or it’s all no awards, who knows? Maybe there was a big influx of Chinese voters who wanted to support Cixin Liu and don’t know anything about Puppies. I’m not really invested in the results this year, I don’t have any favorites that I’m rooting for. I considered skipping this blog post too. But then I realized that’s what the Puppies would want. They want people, at least people who aren’t them, to lose interest. Well, voting this year was less fun and more of a chore, but I did it. Blogging about it wasn’t as much fun either, but blogging about the Hugos seems to be what I do, even if nobody ever sees it. If nothing else, it’s an affirmation that I’m still a part of the process. If I have to put up with a couple of down years before it becomes fun again, I can do that. So I’ll see you back here, same time next year.

Yeah, the game journos thought they could outgrind #GamerGate too. I always enjoy the SJW gift for self-contradiction. Even as they make fun of me for not letting go of 10 years of vicious and unprovoked personal attacks made on me by the Torlings beginning in 2005, and as they lament the terrible feelbads that TWO WHOLE YEARS of effective Puppy campaigns have dealt them, they insist that we’re going to lose interest and relax the pressure on them Real Soon Now. That’s why they want to ban us.

Are they mad, delusional, or is it just wishful thinking? Some combination of the three, I suppose. Meanwhile, Tom Knighton is beginning to sound like a Vile Faceless Minion. He just doesn’t care what the SJWs in science fiction do anymore.

 I’ve been one of those trying to argue that message fiction was a bad
idea.  I still think it is.  But now, I just don’t care what those
folks do. I believe in free markets, and I think the market will slap some of
these publishers hard.  They’ll either learn from it, or not.  Either
way, new publishers will rise.  Baen can’t publish everything, after
all.

 
So, I just don’t care.  They can write what they want to write, and
they can bitch about what they want to bitch about.  These days, most of
those who are so vocal aren’t much more to me than an ant crawling
across the ground.  A couple are significant enough writers that I’d
actually heard of them and read some of their stuff, but most of them? Nothings.  They’re the kind of thing I’d scape off of my shoe before stepping into my home, metaphorically speaking.

The Rabid Puppies are not going to stop because we’re just doing what we’ve always done. Grind until we level up, then grind some more. In the last six weeks I’ve edited two books, written a book, turned in four game designs, and none of those things were my top priority project. I don’t think I’ll have any trouble finding the time to put an annual list of Hugo recommendations together for the foreseeable future.

The SJWs don’t seem to be able to grasp that we can’t be intimidated or that every time they publish another stupid, slanderous, and inaccurate article, every time they libel us and call us names, they ensure that our morale and motivation stays at max. I don’t know about you, but at this point, I’m fired up and good for at least another decade.

Bomb threat at Airplay

How dare they! Threatening to destroy Milo’s hair is just like the Taliban!

masterninja ‏@masterninja
They called in 10 fucking bomb threats on #SPJairplay…10! The fucking desperation to uphold the narrative about #gamergate

Daddy Warpig ‏@Daddy_Warpig
They are EVACUATING THE NEIGHBORHOOD.
Police not treating it like a hoax.
#SPJAirplay #GamerGate

UPDATE: Milo provides the comments he intended to give before the bomb threat:

I just came off stage at the Society of Professional Journalists’ Airplay conference in Miami, Florida where we were discussing the failure of the press to report on #GamerGate fairly. Multiple bomb threats were called in to stop this event about ethics in journalism from proceeding.

Here are my prepared remarks, only some of which I managed to get to on stage….  Gamers have no social capital. In fact it’s worse than that: everyone hates them. The Right hates gamers because it blames games for real-world violence. The Left now hates them because progressives have come to accuse video games, bizarrely, of somehow being able to make people sexist.

What makes this scandal on the one hand a great story but on the other genuinely tragic and upsetting is that it represents not a culture clash but a kind of geek civil war. The people on either side of this debate are remarkably similar, and closer to one another than either group is to the rest of us.

That’s why it hurt GamerGate and anti-GamerGate to see their favourite celebrities start to pick sides. This was a family argument that became public and then escalated out of control.

But it was a family argument created by bad journalism. Bad journalism didn’t just report on GamerGate in all the shoddy and unacceptable ways you’ve already heard about. Gaming journalism started the whole schism in the first place, by insulting and ridiculing readers and handing its moral compass over to highly questionable people with axes to grind and wacky activist politics designed to divide.

Then it drove a wedge down the middle of its own base of readers by cruelly, and in the absence of fact or justification, calling one side the most appalling names, while credulously, assiduously and reflexively supporting some of the most obviously and ostentatiously unreliable people in the history of journalistic sourcing.

Even worse, the war was precipitated by people who don’t even play, or much care about, video games. Anita Sarkeesian admits, in footage you can find online but she’ll never acknowledge, that she’s not a gamer and doesn’t particularly like video games. That story changed dramatically when she was given space in the New York Times. She suddenly remembered a whole childhood she’d previously forgotten about in which not only was she a GameBoy addict but she was also, implausibly, very much aware of how Tetris was, like, really male-oriented. Or something, who knows.

The people GamerGate calls “social justice warriors” – the feminist activists, bloggers and so on – annoy gamers in part because so few of them really give a damn about gaming. Some call themselves “developers” without having ever released anything of substance. The press doesn’t know, and doesn’t bother to find out, how credible these claims are.

George Martin, Hugo commentator

Old Rape Rape prognosticates and explains why the Campbell should predict the course of the Hugo Awards evening:

If Wesley Chu takes the Campbell, as he should, I think we will be in for a fairly reasonable night in Spokane. There will be some winners from the slates, and some categories will go the No Award, but most of the rockets will actually go to deserving work. If Chu wins, I think the vast majority of the fans in the auditorium will be more happy than not by night’s end.

If No Award wins, however… if No Award takes the Campbell, it will represent a huge and ominous victory for the “nuclear option,” for the faction of fandom that wants to destroy the village in order to save it. A victory by No Award in this category will signify that the voters decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and will likely betoken a long ugly night ahead, with category after category going to No Award. Myself, I think this unlikely. I think the hardcore “vote No Award on everything” voters are a small (if noisy) minority. But I could be wrong. It could happen.

And what if one of the four Puppy finalists takes the tiara?

That would represent a victory for the Puppies, certainly. But even there, certain distinctions should be made. Rolf Nelson was a candidate of the Rabids, but not the Sads. A victory by Nelson would be a singular triumph for Teddy Beale and the most extreme elements of Puppydom… and could suggest even worse results ahead, up to and including VD actually winning one or both of the Editing Hugos for which he is nominated.

Kary English, on the other hand, represents a much more moderate side of Puppydom. Though initially put forward by both the Sad and Rabid slates, VD later dropped her and removed her from his suggested ballot entirely when English put up a couple of blog posts that distanced herself from the Puppy party line. English is also a Hugo nominee this year, for her story “Totalled.” She’s the strongest writer of the four Puppy finalists, and in any normal year would be Wesley Chu’s toughest competition. This year? She could well finish last, since some trufans will not forgive her for being part of the slates to begin with, and the Rabids will not forgive her for breaking ranks. Myself, I think English deserves better. While I don’t think she is as good as Chu at present, she is plainly a talented new writer, and not unworthy of a Campbell nod. I would prefer a Chu victory in this category… but I’d rather see English take the tiara than No Award.

Oh, and while we are crunching candidates here, Eric S. Raymond warrants a few words. A candidate of both the Sad and Rabid slates, Raymond was nominated as one of the field’s best new writers on the basis of a single published story, the thinnest resume in the entire history of the Campbell Award. Maybe if that story was the greatest short ever published in our genre, that would be warranted… but it’s not. Even Raymond himself expressed incredulity at his nomination. Given how little SF he has produced compared to Chu and the other finalists, one might think that Raymond would be the longest of long shots. Ah, but there’s another factor. However much a neophyte he may be as a writer of science fiction, Eric S. Raymond is a well-known figure is the gaming world. Should Raymond win the Campbell, despite his shaky credentials as a writer of fiction, it would suggest strongly that large numbers of gamers had purchased supporting membership to vote for him. (Whether those gamers were Gamergaters is another question entirely, and one that cannot be proved. So far as I know, Raymond has not been a part of the Gamergate controversy).

Seems reasonable enough to me, although he left off the fact that I had ESR first on my recommended shortlist, not Nelson, which would even more strongly indicate that things were heading in a Puppy direction. And, of course, ESR is not famous in the game world, but in the general computer world, the open source community in particular.

My personal expectation is that Chu will take it, but that it will mean rather less than Martin is assuming. Of course, the Puppies outperformed in the nominations and the most logical take on the new voters is that they are, in fact, new voters from outside the Worldcon community, especially since so many voted after July 24th. But however it turns out, we’ll be celebrating the historic exploit that was Puppies 2015.