The game of the year

Nero’s beautifully brutal review of Bioware’s Dragon Age: Inquisition:

With BioWare’s reputation established in the early 2000s by middling but commercially popular, if somewhat buggy, releases such as Baldur’s Gate and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, BioWare was, at least a decade ago, strongly positioned to achieve sustained success at the “average games that perform well with customers” end of the market. (To be fair to both of those titles, they have very enthusiastic fan bases.)

But the company in recent years has become… well, a bit of a running joke. Most gamers say the rot set in around 2009 or 2010, when BioWare was acquired by Electronic Arts. Perhaps it was a talent exodus, too much managerial interference or a failure to keep the creative teams fresh. Either way, BioWare’s ability to release artistically accomplished–and even, some reviewers say, technologically competent–games began to evaporate.

There is also a suggestion that BioWare’s games became unduly politicised at around the same time, pandering to what some call the “social justice” narrative, awkwardly shoehorning minority characters and progressive messaging into its plots and meddling with storylines to push political agendas that have never resonated with ordinary gamers. Practically every release from BioWare now contains dozens of gay and lesbian romance storylines or sex scenes, which many young gamers find baffling.

2011’s Dragon Age II unexpectedly bombed with consumers, despite, of course, the rave reviews from mainstream game news sites, who need only get a whiff of a paraplegic lesbian in an ill-fated love affair with a black transsexual to award a game full marks. Mass Effect 2 wasn’t a critical success with ordinary gamers either; they called it “filler” and said it was “uninspiring.” It, too, bored players with politics.

And then of course there was the extraordinary failure of imagination in Mass Effect 3, the ending of which has gone down in gamer history as one of the most needless creative failures in the history of the industry. The games press, needless to say, denied there was anything wrong with Mass Effect 3, scolding gamers for being “entitled.”

But if entitlement means expecting a sensible and narratively satisfying resolution to an expensive, immersive video game, most consumers will be happy to admit that they are guilty. Many of BioWare’s customers wondered whether more time could have been spent on a satisfactory ending and less on irrelevant lesbian sex themes. 

Don’t be fooled by the reviews. As Nero notes: “That reviews of triple-A games by professional journalists are likely to
bear no relation to their reception by fans has become a truism of
video game journalism.”

I’ve never been a BioWare fan, so their ongoing implosion is of little interest to me.

A step forward

This attempt by the Dutch anti-nationalists to crack down on Geert Wilders is actually an encouraging step on the European front. It means the multicultis have lost their popular support, the deception game is over, and they are now being forced to resort to naked force and open speech policing in an attempt to silence the opposition’s leadership:

‘The public prosecutor in The Hague is to prosecute Geert Wilders on charges of insulting a group of people based on race and incitement to discrimination and hatred,’ prosecutors said in a statement.

‘Politicians may go far in their statements, that’s part of freedom of expression, but this freedom is limited by the prohibition of discrimination,’ it said, adding that no date had yet been set for the trial.

In a written statement, Wilders says he ‘said what millions of people think and believe.’

Wilders says authorities ‘should concentrate on prosecuting jihadis instead of me.’

‘I do not retract anything I have said,’ Wilders, whose Party for Freedom (PVV) is leading opinion polls.

‘In my fight for freedom and against the Islamisation of the Netherlands, I will never let anyone silence me. No matter the cost, no matter by whom, whatever the consequences may be,’ he said.

Once they resort to the use of force, so can their opponents. If Wilders is jailed for nothing more than defending the Dutch nation against their invaders, many of his jailers will not likely survive for long. After all, if a Dutchman is going to be imprisoned for his thoughts, he may as well be imprisoned for his actions.

Anti-game is anti-human

A fascinating article on the anti-GamerGate focus on narrative and how that anti-game perspective is intrinsically anti-human:

Life doesn’t have innate structure, even if you can awkwardly cram cylindrical tropes through square holes to try and illustrate relationships between things you experience and media you consume. But this gets even worse when examining other media. Films and novels are heavily rooted in narratives, because they must have a plot to carry them forward, excepting some very experimental films. Some songs carry a narrative, but you can’t have music that’s just someone talking. That might qualify as poetry, but even some poetry isn’t narrative, merely descriptive. You can have music without a narrative, and for centuries this was the most popular form of music. Likewise, games are another medium which can exist without any narrative at all. Just as music can be art merely for the composition, a game can be beautiful for its game mechanics.

A classic game that can qualify as art based on nothing but core mechanics.

One of the major problems with game criticism—the “subjective” kind that many detractors say is unacceptable—is that it is rooted in Narratology. Instead of focusing on the mechanics, and commenting on how well they work together, critics focus on the narrative and what the mechanics mean for the story, not what the story means for the mechanics, or even if the developer had the intention of making such a statement.

Personally, I love it when a game merges story and mechanics. In fact, I think the best way to tell a story is through mechanics, and not exposition or traditional narrative delivery. But that concept has been rejected by critics, opting to use Narratological deconstruction and insisting that this is the only way to evaluate media. When games naturally don’t pander to this benchmark, they receive failing marks. There’s a bigger reward for developers catering to this cabal of “journalists” than for catering to the actual audience. When the standards of the reviewer and their audience differ so greatly, the reviewer cannot be said to speak for their audience. Despite this flawed approach, proponents of New Historicism insist that all media must be evaluated this way. It conveniently allows them to cite Post-Structuralist reasoning to defend themselves from criticism of their methodology, since the reviewers subjective opinion and any conjecture they can express are consider to be at least as important as the media being judged, no matter how self-evident it is that the reviewer has missed the point.

Papers, Please tells a compelling, interactive story using its mechanics.

To a degree, it’s inevitable that this outlook supports “experimental” titles that don’t really fall into the bounds of “games.” It’s not a medium they’re capable of properly digesting, so content has to be restricted to something they can process. Funny, you never hear the opposition supporting non-narrative films, but they do support games that are top-heavy with narrative. It’s not actually about something “new” or “better.” It’s about something “different.” Labeling it “experimental” is the only way it can get a pass in the wrong industry. If held to the standards of a medium it actually belonged in–one with Narratological standards–it’d fall apart.

Ultimately what these ideas boil down to is an overarching philosophy called Anti-Humanism. This social theory comes as a reaction to Humanism, and the belief that it was too idealistic. While Humanism is all about free will, placing humanity and human actions at the center of life, and using rationality and reason alone to reach moral decisions, Anti-Humanism detaches humanity from inherent meanings (via Post-Structuralism) to “de-center” subjects and remove their agency. In other words, you yourself lack free will, since you’re a product of the world around you, and working towards an ideal self is futile. Interestingly, Nietzsche (credited as a “founder” of Existentialism, a philosophy that places great emphasis on human agency and the absurdity of life) often criticized humanism for being a form of “secular theism.” Anti-humanism finds itself equally religious in practice, but with a much more oppressive set of goals.

Gaming is the natural enemy of anti-humanism. When you play games, you yourself have personal agency. Only a player truly has free will inside of a game. You are playing by a ruleset, but you have choice within that ruleset, and likely have goals and motivations. These are informed by your situation and by the gameplay systems, but some of the highest-praised games have allowed you to set your own criterion for success, and provided you with a system open enough to facilitate that. Many strategy and 4X games are good examples of that. The belief that all humans are free and equal is a core tenet of Humanism, which Anti-Humanists reject.

The idea that the average individual has agency, of course, is anathema in the world of the Social Justice Warrior. Because then he would be responsible for his actions… and his failures.

Negative interest rates

One more check in the ICE box. Zerohedge cites Goldman Sachs concerning the surprise announcement of NIRP from the Swiss:

The Governing Board of the SNB surprisingly announced this morning that it will introduce a negative rate of -0.25% on sight deposit account balances at the SNB. The SNB’s target range for the three-month Libor was also widened from 0.0% – +0.25% to -0.75% – +0.25%. In our view, today’s rate decision simply underlines the determination of the SNB to enforce the minimum exchange rate target for the CHF against the Euro.

1. This morning, the SNB surprisingly announced that, on January 22, it will introduce a negative interest rate of -25bp on reserve holdings from banks at the SNB, above a threshold of 20 times the minimum reserve requirement. The SNB’s target range for the three-month Libor was also widened from 0.0% – +0.25% to -0.75% – +0.25%. Over the last couple of days, the CHF has traded very close to the 1.20 level on the back of rising market volatility. The subsequent demand for safe investments attracted large capital inflows into Switzerland, eventually prompting the SNB to react.

2. According to the SNB, the measure is aimed at making investments into CHF less attractive. Although it is only banks that will have to pay the negative deposit rate, banks will pass on, to some extent at least, the negative rates to customers. It is noteworthy in that respect that some German banks – in response to the ECB’s negative rates – have also started charging some clients negative deposit rates.

3. It remains to be seen how effective this measure will be and the SNB will continue to rely on FX interventions to defend the minimum exchange rate. But the measure in any case shows the determination of the SNB to maintain the lower bound for the CHF against the Euro.

When currencies are getting too strong and interest rates are going negative, this is a sign that the central banks are fighting against deflationary pressures. To fight inflation, you raise the interest rate, thereby encouraging people to save. To fight deflation, you lower it, thereby encouraging people to borrow and spend. Or, in this case, since the negative interest rate is only being applied to banks, it is to encourage them to lend. That points to the fundamental difference between fiat money and credit money. You can print paper, but you can’t print borrowers.

The Swiss are trying to weaken their currency, which is strong against the Euro and the dollar, so they are trying to make it less attractive to investors in order to protect their domestic exporters. Russia, on the other hand, isn’t trying to export, but is instead attempting to bring in capital that is frustrated at earning so little interest in the low-interest Western economies.

Widespread NIRP will dictate the eventual end of the credit money system as well as the banks. If you’re being charged to save your credit money, you might as well pay someone to securely hold something more tangible.

How to lose to SJWs

Here is an example of someone who is on the right side, but doesn’t understand that you never win by spurning your allies:

I felt like talking about this topic because I’ve noticed the ease of which people will dismiss you, especially if you happen to be on the other side of the Anita Sarkeesian/GamerGate argument and you’re not a woman-hating bastard.

Honestly it feels like I’m supposed to just keep my trap shut sometimes.

Now let me get one thing straight. By “Other side,” I don’t include the sexists, the woman haters and those who argue in bad faith. I mean people who have valid critiques of Anita Sarkeesian and others like her. What I noticed from my petition post was the willingness of the people arguing for Anita to not even bother to ask what my own opinion on her were. Instead my post was met with “ugh” and Feminist Frequency videos. Not once was I asked, “Well why are you against Anita? Is there any particular reason why you don’t want her working on Mirrors Edge 2?” These questions weren’t even asked until I pointed out the fact that they were willing to automatically go in on the attack before even knowing what my reasoning was.

What he and other would-be moderates fail to realize is that the anti-GamerGate, pro-Sarkeesian, SJW side is not reasonable and is never going to be convinced by sweet reason. They have no interest in it and little capacity for it.

This is the same divide between dialectic and rhetoric that I keep pointing out to everyone. You do NOT fight a rhetorical battle with dialectic; in a rhetorical battle the only use for dialectic is in a rhetorical manner; it can be used to explode pseudo-dialectic poses, but that is the extent of its effectiveness. It is an intrinsically defensive weapon on the rhetorical level. This means you cannot win with it.

The primary difference between the Left and the Right is that the Left instinctively defends its extremists and the Right instinctively runs from them and leaves them out to dry. The latter is an appeasement strategy, and it works about as well as the infamous failures of appeasement we all know from history.

All appeasement does is signal to the SJW what buttons he needs to push in order to force an opponent to retreat. When you dutifully point out that “you don’t agree with everything X says” or “don’t include the sexists, the woman haters and those who argue in bad faith”, what you are accomplishing is not the inoculation of your argument from their extremist taint, you are telling the SJW exactly how he can rhetorically defeat you by painting you as the very sort of extremist you disavow. And remember, rhetorical victory is the entirety of their objective!

Embrace the extremists. Defend them. Refuse to permit them to be cut off and isolated. Allow them to play their role as the intellectual shock troops they are. That is how you win. Because if they’re not taking the incoming fire, you are. And the shock troops are much better equipped psychologically to take it and survive than the average self-styled moderate.

The cowardice of Hollywood

This is how to how to make a corporation kneel, submit, and behave, everyone:

With theater chains defecting en masse, Sony Pictures Entertainment has pulled the planned Christmas Day release of “The Interview.” U.S. officials have reportedly linked a massive cyber attack against Sony to North Korea, which is at the center of the Seth Rogen-James Franco comedy.

“We are deeply saddened at this brazen effort to suppress the distribution of a movie, and in the process do damage to our company, our employees, and the American public,” Sony said in a statement. “We stand by our filmmakers and their right to free expression and are extremely disappointed by this outcome.”

In announcing the decision to cancel the holiday debut, Sony also hit back at the hackers who threatened movie theaters and moviegoers and who have terrorized the studio and its employees for weeks.

“Those who attacked us stole our intellectual property, private emails and sensitive and proprietary material, and sought to destroy our spirit and our morale – all apparently to thwart the release of a movie they did not like,” the statement reads.

A few hours after making the announcent, a studio spokesman said that Sony had “no further plans” to release the comedy, either on VOD or DVD.

Christians aren’t comfortable killing people who insult their faith and their Lord and Savior. That’s one reason most anti-religionists are so much more inclined to attack Christians rather than Muslims. But no one was actually harmed in the cyber attack on Sony; all that happened was some information that the studio would rather have kept under wraps has been distributed to the public.

Perhaps entertainment corporations would be more inclined to show civility and respect to Christians again if some of us applied the lesson we’ve learned from the supposed North Korean example.

It is, of course, vastly amusing to see a Hollywood entity complaining about someone else seeking to destroy their spirit and morale. Isn’t that exactly what Hollywood has been relentlessly doing to Western civilization since the 1960s?

It’s not easy to make the North Koreans look good, but Sony somehow managed it. They’re typical SJWs, paper tigers, able only to apply the heat but never to bear it themselves. No wonder people in Hollywood are always giving each other “courage” awards and talking about how brave they are. They are cowards and they know it.

If Sony had any balls at all, if they were truly convinced of their own rectitude, they would have released the film even if every theatre in America refused to show it. And the fact that they backed down after several sets of information were released makes one wonder what it is they are still trying to hide. From now on, we know that North Korea has an effective veto over Sony, if not the rest of Hollywood.

What a pity they didn’t decide to target The Hobbit(ses) for the desecration and war crime that Peter Jackson let his wife commit on Tolkien’s text. As with the Star Wars prequels, I saw the first one, and as a result, will not watch the second two.

Filmmaker Judd Apatow called it a “sad day for creative expression” and said, “When we cave to threats, it trains people to threaten us.”

As I mentioned on Twitter, I’ll take Hollywood’s tears over the impact this will have on “creative expression” seriously on the day it releases a movie that sympathetically portrays Nazis rounding up Jews or presents a powerful emotional defense of KKK members defending their families and community from the depredations of black Americans. Until then, their tears are best seen as nothing more than a complaint that a new party has forcibly insisted on claiming the same sort of veto power that Hollywood’s other interest groups possess.

Of books and games

Ken Burnside of Ad Astra Games chimes in:

So, one of my other gigs – beyond making Cool Space Combat Games, is
being a science checker for SF writers for Baen.  I got asked by Vox Day
to write a science article for their new anthology series “Riding the
Red Horse” – which released yesterday. In its first day of
release, it’s done impressively – it’s climbing up the paid Kindle
listings and is a category leader in Military SF and SF in general.

Ken’s “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military Science Fiction” is a must-read for any science fiction author. And check this out… Ad Astra is about to come out with the Traveller version of Squadron Strike!

From the most recent review of RIDING THE RED HORSE: “I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of mil sci-fi short stories and essays on war. Each
story left me wanting more of the universe in which it takes place (my
favourite of the shorts was the last one: “Turncoat” by Steve Rzasa,),
and each essay made me marvel at the genius of the respective author. I
wouldn’t consider myself a military theory buff, but the essays in this
collections certainly awakened a hunger in me to find out more and
explore the world of war-gaming.”

Ocean-front diplomacy

Never let it be said that Obama doesn’t think ahead:

President Obama announced sweeping changes to U.S. policy with Cuba on Wednesday, moving to normalize relations with the island nation and tear down the last remaining pillar of the Cold War.

Under the new measures, the United States plans to reopen its embassy in Havana and significantly ease restrictions on travel and commerce within the next several weeks and months, Obama said. Speaking from the White House, he declared that a half-century of isolation of the Communist country “has not worked.”

“It’s time for a new approach,” he said.

The history-shaping overtures come after more than 18 months of secret negotiations with the Cuban government of President Raul Castro. The final touches appeared to be arrangements for a series of simultaneous prisoner releases.

It’s probably one of the smartest moves of his presidency, if not the smartest. Cubans don’t vote for Democrats anyhow, and no one gives a damn about them anymore since they’re massively outnumbered by Mexicans now. It’s all upside for Obama; no doubt there are plenty of big-money interests just slavering to snap up Cuban real estate.

I’d be astonished if he doesn’t come out of it with a sweet post-presidential villa.

Deutschland gegen Islam

The German and international media is going to have no more success disqualifying PEGIDA than the UK media has had in disqualifying UKIP or the French media has had in disqualifying National Front:

Its members have been dubbed the “pinstriped Nazis” and they refer to their demonstrations as “evening strolls” through German cities. But on Monday night, an estimated 15,000 people joined Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West, in a march through Dresden carrying banners bearing slogans such as “Zero tolerance towards criminal asylum seekers”, “Protect our homeland” and “Stop the Islamisation”.

Lutz Bachmann, the head of Pegida, a nascent anti-foreigner campaign group, led the crowds, either waving or draped in German flags, in barking chants of “Wir sind das Volk”, or “We are the people”, the slogan adopted by protesters in the historic “Monday demonstrations” against the East German government in the runup to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Associating themselves with the freedom demonstrations has given Pegida protests an air of moral respectability even though there are hundreds of rightwing extremists in their midst, as well as established groups of hooligans who are known to the police, according to Germany’s federal office for the protection of the constitution.

“The instigators are unmistakably rightwing extremists,” a federal spokesman said.

It was the ninth week in a row that Pegida had taken its protest on to the city’s streets in the eastern German state of Saxony.

Its first march, advertised on Facebook and other social media, attracted just 200 supporters. By last week the figure had risen to 10,000. By Monday night it had grown to an estimated 15,000.

Nine weeks to go from 200 to 15,000. At that rate, by the middle of next year they’ll be on the verge of throwing the traitoress Merkel out on her fat ass. Once the first anti-immigrant party takes power and people see how much better things are with the Third World flow going the proper way, the other electorates will rapidly follow suit.

That’s why you’ve got the English media freaking out about the rise of anti-immigrant parties in France, Germany and Sweden. Christendom will rise again. It’s absolutely ludicrous to ever count out a faith that began with just eleven frightened, cowardly men who abandoned their leader. Christianity doesn’t need numbers. It just needs the faith of a mustard seed.

Correia on guns, etc

An interview on guns in fiction:

Ryan: What are the common pitfalls in fiction where it’s clear that the author has never held or fired a modern firearm?

Larry: It isn’t just guns, but any topic where the
reader is an expert and the author is clueless. The problem is that when
you write something that the reader knows is terribly wrong, it kicks
them right out of the story and ruins the experience for them. Guns are
especially hard because they are super common in fiction, and there are
tons of readers who know about them.

Most of these really glaring errors can be taken care of with a
little bit of cursory research. Technical things can be taken care of by
a few minutes on the manufacturer’s webpage, which will keep your
characters from dramatically flipping off the safety on a gun that
doesn’t have one.

Beyond that, however, is the actual use of the gun. The character
using it should have a realistic amount of knowledge based on their
skill, knowledge, ability, and training. If you are gong to be writing
about a character who is a professional gunslinger, then you need to do
some research to make sure that person does what a professional
gunslinger would do.

And speaking of Larry Correia, Daniel somehow manages to abuse a writer at the Atlantic even more comprehensively than Larry’s customary prison-raping of various Guardian contributors in The Wrong Corpse and the Highbrow Coroner:

Noah Berlatsky at The Atlantic declares science fiction dead of terminal nostalgia:

    Poor George Orwell wants his panopticon back.

He also quotes an important fresh voice in science fiction that:

“we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.”

Then he spends the rest of the article writing about Marvel comic books and their related movies.

The thesis, that science fiction has lost its way in a retrospective swamp of camp nostalgia for Star Wars, Star Trek and comic books is a bait-and-switch, however:

    Science fiction is everywhere in popular culture, and it seems like it’s managed to be everywhere in the present by largely jettisoning the future.

Berlatsky has switched terms on the reader. He isn’t talking about science fiction as a genre, he’s complaining about pop culture, as if that has anything to do with the core idea factory of science fiction, which, and always has been, books.

It does not.

If the reader needs any more confirmation, the critic’s only example of a “current” science fiction writer whose ideas run counter to the prison of pop culture is…Octavia Butler, a prog-writer who has been dead for nearly a decade, and whose most prominent work is more than thirty years past its publication date.

The ironic thing is that Berlatsky may well have a credible defense in resorting to the example chosen. The corpse of the late Octavia Butler, as it rots and feeds the worms, is arguably producing more interesting, less noxious output than are the Pink SF writers giving each other awards these days.