Tag: games

Nero lays down the imperial smack

Milo reports on one of the biggest freaks to ever orbit the game industry (which is not at all a low bar to hurdle), John Flynt aka “Brianna Wu”:

The gender history of game developer and pathological attention-seeker Brianna Wu would not ordinarily be the subject of public interest, but Wu’s critique of the GamerGate movement has relied heavily on identity politics and her insistence that she represents women in the video games industry. (We are using “she” and “her” as a polite courtesy in this report.)

Yet Wu was not until relatively recently a woman at all, and her legitimacy as a speaker even for the transgender community is in doubt since, as we can also today reveal, she was banned from a transgender forum after less than a year for unacceptable behaviour–not an easy thing to accomplish in a community well-known for its aggressive online conversations.

Wu was permanently stripped of her moderator status for abusing her position, according to another moderator, in a sign of what was to come in a long internet career of dissembling, bullying, smearing and panicky deletions as Wu has lurched from self-induced digital crisis to self-induced digital crisis over a period of more than a decade.

Wu, who has been engaged in an exhaustive press tour in recent months writing op-eds in a handful of online outlets, claiming that her life is in danger and that she is standing up for women in the games industry, is in fact, we can reveal, merely an unstable internet troll with a long history of mendacity and emotionally disturbed online outbursts.

Perhaps the funniest thing about Wu’s erratic behavior is his insistence that anyone in the game industry gives a damn about his game. We see them come and we see them go. It’s not necessary to pay any attention to it at all; we know it’s going to sink out of sight no matter what hystrionics he attempts to throw in order to get someone, somewhere, to play it.

And Nero didn’t cover the half of it. Such as this spectacularly inept attempt to attack himself; Wu forgot that he was logged in on his own account, Spacekatgal, then posted a weirdly specific question. Notice that my point about using style to detect frauds is fully applicable here. It would be obvious that he had written it even if he hadn’t been dumb enough to sign his own name to it.

Yeah, we did

The Special Victims Unit episode on #GamerGate turned out to be a little more awesome and subversive than anyone in #GamerGate was expecting. You can watch the end of it here.


“I’m out!”


“You said if you gave up, they’d win.”


“They already did.”

True. The Ralph Retort has a recap and video clips as well as a download link to the entire episode if you’re interested:

As I said, the other side was mighty pissed. Zoe was whining because the developer ends up quitting at the end. All that bullshit, and this is what pisses her off? I should have know a deceitful tramp like her would take that away from this farce. I’m tempted to think the writing staff was just trolling everyone. That’s how fucking nuts this thing was. 

Of course the show took considerable license, given that it portrayed a woman who isn’t a game developer, or even a gamer, as a game developer. Anita Sarkeesian is an activist con artist and nothing more.

As usual, the left-wing media turns reality on its head. They love to portray female game developers making games for men, when the reality is male game developers cranking out games like Cooking Mama, Candy Crush Saga, and Kim Kardashian Hollywood. Hell, I’m one of the archdevils of #GamerGate and I designed Hot Dish for THQ, which was very popular with women.

Sadly, for the villain, the producers went with Generic Evil Blond Guy rather than anyone readily identifiable as any of the major #GamerGate players. It would have been so much more awesome if he had been a British homosexual with fabulous hair. I can’t believe they didn’t go there. So disappointed.

The very special victim of #GamerGate

They have really dragged out this Sarkeesian thing considerably further than I ever would have imagined. It’s beyond parody at this point.

It’s a long-established tradition for TV shows to draw inspiration from real-life events. NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” is no different, and Wednesday, February 11, sees the crime drama series tackle Gamergate in an episode entitled “Intimidation Game.” The plot centers on the online harassment and kidnapping of a game developer, Raina Punjabi, modelled on controversial feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian.

NBC’s trailer opens with Punjabi discussing the threats she’s received with police. She is set to attend an important game launch but has become the victim of an online harassment campaign. Punjabi insists that she will attend the launch, however, because not only is it a massive international event but also she refuses to give in to online hordes of anonymous, misogynistic trolls. During the conversation, terms like “swatting,” “doxxing,” and “dark net” are referenced, with one detective pointing out that online threats are “not covered by free speech.” The dialogue is embarrassingly clumsy, written for an audience not familiar with Gamergate or the more complex workings of the internet.

This is so ludicrously absurd. What is next, NCIS featuring a three-part episode that involves the murder of a neurotic transvestite who calls himself Brianna Who? An epic fantasy HBO series entitled “The Saga of Yamanamama”?

Anyhow, I hope the bad guys are a team that involves a guy in a wheelchair, a television actor, and a handsome, athletic, forty-something game developer and novelist. That would be amusing.

Entryism in progress

Robert Conway at Reaxxion asks if  Magic: The Gathering adding a transsexual character is a problem:

Magic the Gathering has been a mainstay in geek culture since the 90’s, so it should come as no surprise that people are making a big deal about the addition of a new trans character, Alesha, Who Smiles At Death. The announcement came in the form of a short story on Wizards Coast’s website entitled The Truth of Names, and is not actually indicated on the card itself. In fact the only text besides the card’s ability is a quote: “Great death with Sword in hand”. The art doesn’t necessarily give you the impression that Alesha is a trans-person either.

The card’s back story, as detailed by writer James Wyatt, discusses a clan of people who earn their names in battle. The tale depicts an Orc who fights for the Mardu clan, which is lead by Alesha. During the battle the Orc questions Alesha’s gender, after failing to kill a dragon and claim his own name. The story goes on about the battle and eventually ends with other warriors detailing deeds that deemed the Orc worthy of the name. However at the end the Orc admits he has yet to figure out who he is and willfully acknowledges that Alesha is in fact a woman.

Certainly this news has caught the attention of SJW-friendly meadia such as Kotaku (archived link) and of The Mary Sue (archived link). To put it simply Nathan Grayson thinks it’s “pretty darn cool”. Not everyone is on board with it. Several IGN users have voiced their concerns as I’m sure many of our readers will do the same.

The answer is, ABSOLUTELY YES, it is a problem. It is a very serious and ultimately fatal problem that will eventually kill the game dead. It is a problem of such gargantuan and epic proportions that the only rational thing to do is to immediately stop playing Magic: The Gathering, and stop purchasing any of its related products, until the Alesha, Who Smiles At Death card is publicly withdrawn. The card is the gaming equivalent of a small but malignant melanoma.

One might as reasonably ask if the original decision to permit women to read Bible verses was a problem for the Anglican Church. Or if the original income tax, which was introduced with a maximum rate of 7 percent and affected less than 1 percent of the U.S. population was a problem for US taxpayers.

The point is not whether the addition of an overtly propagandistic SJW element immediately breaks the game. The first step never does. That’s because the first step is always only symbolic, a testing of the waters to see if the invasion of the SJWs is going to be resisted or not. When it is resisted, of course, there will be endless protestations of how it is harmless little thing, how it is “just this one brick”, and hand-on-heart vows of how there is, of course, absolutely NO intention of building a damn brick wall in the future.

The time to smack down the SJW entryists is when the camel first sticks its nose in the tent, not when it is already fully ensconced and defecating all over the carpets.

Be the dragon

At Alpha Game, I comment upon the importance of being the dragon, not the self-styled paladin and self-appointed dragon-slayer. But one part of the Loneliest Paladin’s twitterstorm was relevant here for its illustration of rabbitology:

MikeBrendan @MikeBrendan
Things I don’t get: why Ghaters would rally around Vox Day. Dude is the epitome of loser.

MikeBrendan @MikeBrendan
Not only did Vox get kicked out of SFWA for being a racist homophobic sexist dipshit, he took sixth place on a five person ballot.

Note that insufficient popularity with a small and specific group is equated with being “the epitome of loser”… by someone with no friends and not much of a life. Success, in the rabbit’s world, is something that depends entirely upon the level of acceptance by the warren. Everything else is irrelevant.

Rabbits don’t understand that wolves respect strength and loyalty, even when exhibited in causes of no interest to them. Rabbits fear strength and have no loyalty, so the concepts are alien to them. They genuinely can’t understand the concept of standing up for someone because that someone stood up for you, even if you don’t like him, respect him, or want anything to do with him. For all that they are herd animals, they are not team players; in their own way they are more ruthlessly self-serving than the most ideological self-sovereign libertarian.

And speaking of rabbitology, see how the rabbits cry when their warrens are invaded and they learn they don’t possess the power they flaunted so foolishly:

GamerGate set out to writes its own story in Wikipedia – and to spread the dirt about the women who were its targets. These efforts were blocked by established editors under established Wikipedia policy. In retaliation, GamerGate planned an operation to get rid of its opponents – the “Five Horsemen” active in preserving objectivity and in keeping scurrilous sexual innuendo out of the encyclopedia. As a side-game, GamerGate also launched efforts to promote the idea that “Cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy of some Jewish academics to control the media.

The original GamerGate operation targeted the “five horsemen:” Ryulong, NorthBySouthBaranof, Tarc, TheRedPenOfDoom, and TaraInDC. All were sanctioned in the draft decision.

For months, these Wikipedia pages have been an escalating scene of daily – indeed hourly – conflict.

The Purge

Yesterday, ArbCom announced its preliminary decision. A panel of fourteen arbitrators – at least 11 of whom are men – decided to give GamerGate everything they’d wished for. All of the Five Horsemen are sanctioned; most will be excluded not only from “Gamergate broadly construed” but from anything in Wikipedia touching on “gender or sexuality, broadly construed.”

By my informal count, every feminist active in the area is to be sanctioned. This takes care of social justice warriors with a vengeance — not only do the GamerGaters get to rewrite their own page (and Zoe Quinn’s, Brianna Wu’s, Anita Sarkeesian’s, etc.); feminists are to be purged en bloc from the encyclopedia. Liberals are the new Scientologists as far as Arbcom is concerned.

No sanctions at all were proposed against any of GamerGate’s warriors, save for a few disposable accounts created specifically for the purpose of being sanctioned. The administrator who wrote, regarding Zoe Quinn’s sexual history, that

    I know other other allegations exist but will not state what those on WP are because that would be a BLP violation at the current time.

was not even mentioned. The many brand-new accounts who arrived in December with no Wiki experience, but possessing a curiously detailed knowledge of Wikipedia policy jargon, are unmentioned, save for the fact that the decision rests almost entirely on their proposals.

The extensive evidence of off-site collusion, which Wikipedia considers so improper that evidence must not be discussed on wiki but rather submitted in confidence, appears to have been entirely ignored. (I submitted such evidence myself, but received no acknowledgment or thanks; I have been told that much additional evidence was submitted.)

Notice how the upset rabbit appeals to “established editors and established policy” (better described as activist editors and self-imposed customs), despite the fact that the editors concerned were quite clearly VIOLATING Wikipedia policy, and doing so rather egregiously. What appears to have happened is that Wikipedia is finally beginning to act against the SJW thought police who make a practice of attempting to define the public narrative by exerting personal ownership over particular pages of interest.

Concept art

I’ll go into more detail on this at some point in the near future, but suffice it to say that the FIRST SWORD concept is expanding. Instead of being a simple combat management game, it’s going to be a cross-platform, cross-media game, and will be playable in various forms from tabletop to mobile. I’ve always been somewhat of a holistic designer, but this is the first time I’ve had the ability to do something I’ve wanted to do for seven years now, something completely new and different.

We’ve got a pair of good sculptors and a sketch artist, but we’re looking for some high-quality concept art for the various fantasy gladiators. It’s set in Selenoth, so we’re looking for Amorran, Savondese, and Dalarn humans, orcs, goblins, dwarves, elves, and trolls.

If you’re a serious sketch artist and you want to show us what you can do, send me a fantasy gladiator sketch. If we buy it from you, we’ll also send you one of the miniatures based on it.

RIP John Hill

I never met the man nor knew anything about him, but as a wargamer in general and an ASLer in particular, one can’t help feel a genuine sense of loss upon hearing the news of his death.

John Hill is most known as the designer of the extremely popular Avalon Hill board game Squad Leader in 1977. Hill founded Conflict Games Company in the late 1960s and owned a hobby shop, The Scale, in Lafayette, Indiana, for several years. Among his many titles were Verdun, Kasserine Pass, Overlord, Battle For Stalingrad, Tank Leader, Eastern Front Tank Leader and many others. He also designed Hue, based upon the fighting near the City of Hue in the Vietnam War.

In 1978, Hill was named to the Wargaming Hall of Fame, receiving the Charles S. Roberts Award at the Origins gaming convention in Chester, Pennsylvania, on June 23, 1979.

As the developer of the morale model and the champion of the design-for-effect philosophy, he influenced a wide variety of games, both tabletop and electronic.

More than books

We have some new offerings in the Castalia House store:

Castalia House is a publisher of books, but we are also a developer of games. So that is why we are pleased to be able to announce that the Castalia House bookstore will also be carrying digital versions of various games we consider to be of high quality and potential interest to our readers in the new Games section. The first games we are offering here are published by Castalia House author Ken Burnside of Ad Astra Games, who contributed “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military Science Fiction” to Riding the Red Horse. Ken is also Castalia’s newest blogger, where he’ll be focusing on various aspects of game development, from general analysis and history to in-depth design and mechanics.

Our long-term goal for Castalia House is to become a major destination site for all high-quality Blue SF/F-related activity, including books, boardgames, and electronic games. This is another small step towards that objective.

The shills of anti-GamerGate

The media never bothers to look close enough at the situation to observe that a considerable amount of the objectionable behavior of #GamerGate is actually the work of anti-GamerGate shills trying to make #GamerGate look bad:

Leader ID 036072 01/02/15 No. 170287

So guy how many trannys have we helped drive to commit suicide? I think we should really focus on Brianna Wu. She is the head of the anti gamer cobra. She offs herself and the rest of the freaks will follow suit. 

A few hours later….

Leader ID 036072 01/02/15 No. 170532
>>170287

I can’t do this anymore.

I’m making myself sick with the comments I’m making in this thread. I honestly feel sick to my stomach. Transexuals don’t deserve to be bullied. Anyone who might have followed this tread please don’t do anything.

I just want you guys to stop harassing my friend Zoe and my friends at ghazi. I figured helping you guys look bad would help stop you. Please just stop bothering my friends and I truly apologize for the awful things i said about trans people. Can someone tell me how to delete this thread?

Remember, for rabbits, it is always about the appearance rather than the substance, and victory is synonymous with positive PR. Of course, it’s usually not hard to spot these provocateurs, since they are too solipsistic to effectively emulate their opponent’s patterns of thought and speech.

The idea that Brianna Wu is the head of anything was sufficient to expose this shill even before her confession. No doubt AC will be amused by the evidence of a rabbit accidentally overstimulating her own amygdala.

Notice how the rabbit apologizes for her violation of warren dogma, but not for the deceit she practiced upon everyone. Rabbits feel literally no shame about lying, nor do they feel any obligation to tell the truth. Never, ever forget that.

The blog star

It’s no slight to Daniel, Scooter, Mascaro, or me to say that Jeffro, of the Space Gaming Blog, has been the star of the Castalia House blog this year. He makes everyone up their game by starting each week off with an intriguing, in-depth post, and gives our four new bloggers a high level of excellence to aim for. And fortunately for everyone, he appears to enjoy blogging there:

I am not shy about pointing out how happy I am with how this is shaping up. I cover the full range gaming topics: vintage stuff, current releases, role-playing games, wargames, everything! I write in such a way that you can get something out of a post even if you don’t buy or play the game in question. I put things into the wider context of gaming history and touch on the literary antecedents of the games we play. And yeah, I occasionally get esoteric, but I try to stay readable and comprehensible to people that aren’t gamers. No matter what, though, I never stray from the voice of someone that actually knows how to articulate how these things work in actual play… and that just freakin’ loves to play the heck out of these things.

I have complained about how games are covered in magazine articles and so forth in the past. I am just so rarely satisfied with how “journalists” and commentators portray games and gaming in general. Voicing that sort of concern almost invariably summons a smarty pants type that sneers back, “oh, you’re just complaining; the best answer to this sort of thing is to go out show us the right way to do it.” Well listen here, bucko… I’ve done it now.

If you’ve enjoyed Jeffro’s exploration of Chapter N this year, don’t be shy about going to his blog and letting him know. What I particularly enjoy about his posts is the way he dives deeply into the game mechanical aspects as well as the experience; he represents the perfect blend of SF/F literature and gaming that is of particular interest to a game designer who occasionally dabbles in fiction.