#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Is there anyone who specializes in texturing very high poly count STL files who might be interested in tackling our pair of orcs? If this is solidly within your bag of tricks, please contact me. At this point, we’re looking for volunteers.
If you want to see Orc Gladiator #2 soon, sign up for Castalia House’s Game Development newsletter. We’ll be sending out the first one within the next two weeks, we’re just trying to nail something down before we can announce it to the subscribers.
Sam Roberts of Reaxxion carefully considers Anita Sarkeesian’s list of recommendations to “make games less shitty for women”. This was #3 on his list of eloquent, well-reasoned, and above all, illustrative responses:
Have female characters of various body types
My response: No.
The temptation is always to say that Ms. Sarkeesian misrepresents the
gaming industry, that there are actually plenty of female-friendly
games, or that characters like the ones above are “strong women”, whom
feminists should love. This is the wrong answer. By making this
argument, you’re implicitly agreeing with Sarkeesian and her like that
games need to be feminist-friendly; you’re just disagreeing on how
feminist-friendly they are right now. And once you’ve agreed with her
there, you’ve given her the power to dictate what is and isn’t allowed.
After all, who’s going to know better about what games are
SJW-friendly—you, or a women’s studies major?The only response is this: If you don’t like games with big-boobed girls, don’t play them.
There is nothing to discuss. I speak only for myself, but my opinion happens to be shared by nearly ever game designer and game developer in the industry, regardless of whether they are Left, Right, or somewhere in the middle. We make the games we want to make. We play the games we want to play. If Anita Sarkeesian, or anyone else, wants to see different games made, then she is welcome to make her own. We’re not going to do it.
Frankly, these ladies all look a bit beefy to me. Where are all the slender, snake-hipped girls with cheekbones you can shave with and BMIs of 17? Surely this is the rankest misogyny by bearded, round-bellied patriarchs!
Anita Sarkeesian is not, by her own admission, a gamer. Nor is she a game developer, let alone a game designer. Kotaku quoted her as follows:
Sarkeesian mentioned her time in grad school, which I believe was the same time she was saying in that clip that she wasn’t a fan of games. “If you asked me at the time, I would probably have said I wasn’t a gamer,” she said. Under her breath she added: “I don’t even know if I want to say that now, but whatever.”
She’s not a gamer. She knows nothing about games. She is a classic SJW entryist, invading a culture to which she does not belong in order to change it according to her principles. Her list of “improvements”:
“Eight things developers can do to make games less shitty for women.”
My response, as a professional game developer, is simple and straightforward. Go to Hell. I don’t tell Anita Sarkeesian how to publicly media-whore herself for a living and she has no business telling me or any other game designer how to make the games we wish to make. Only one point would even theoretically improve any game in even a minor way, and it could be applied equally well to TV and movies, namely, point 6. What is the point of motion capturing a giraffe if you’re trying to portray a cheetah?
If she thinks my game, or any other game, is “shitty for women”, that’s her right. And it’s my right, and the right of every other single game designer and developer in the industry to tell her that I don’t give the smallest quantum of a damn what she thinks. It is also our right to continue ignoring her recommendations as we go about making the games we want to make rather than the games she would prefer made.
I am, however, willing to implement one of her suggestions. We will implement her point #7 in First Sword if Anita Sarkeesian volunteers to submit to a physical but non-sexual beating and have the painful sounds she makes in the course of that beating recorded. Solely in the interests of verisimilitude and making games less shitty for women, of course. That’s not a threat, it is merely an offer. She can, of course, refuse, and thereby inform the world that her commitment to her cause is rather less than total. Then we will continue doing exactly what we were doing before she started trying to tell us what to do.
However, her points do serve to demonstrate the utter futility, the utter idiocy, of giving in to her demands. First the complaint was that there weren’t any women. Now the complaint is that there aren’t enough women, they aren’t dressed right, they’re the wrong color, they don’t walk in the approved fashion, they make the wrong noises, and so on. It never ends.
Any game developer who is dumb enough to think the demands are going to stop there simply hasn’t been paying attention to anything that has happened in the last 50 years. Just say no to SJWs. Just say no to non-gamers trying to tell game industry professionals how to do their jobs.
If you think you might be interested in supporting the First Sword kickstarter, or want to otherwise support what we’re doing on the game front, please sign up for Castalia House’s Game Development newsletter. All you need to do is enter your email address, no name or anything else is required. I think I can assure you that it will be, in the long run, even more significant than Castalia House. If Castalia was the first step, this is the second.
This is entirely separate from the New Release newsletter, so even if you subscribe to that for the books, you’ll need to sign up separately for the Game Development one. As with New Releases, you can expect we’ll be occasionally giving away free stuff to subscribers, although what that might be, I can’t possibly say. And obviously, there will be no spamming or selling of information.
Among the other benefits subscribers get is the chance to have first crack at all pre-Alpha, Alpha, and Beta testing. And just to show you the sort of thing we’ll be showing subscribers, here is a glimpse of a Warhammer Fantasy Battle-style tabletop we’re assembling. We’re still in the process of getting the miniatures into 3D; right now the High Elven Spearguard and the Elven Archers are complete and we’re working on Goblin Archers and Elven Cavalry. Eventually, this battlefield will feature nine regiments; the regiment featured below is the same one that can be seen on the right side of the stockade in the image above. The terrain will not normally be flat green, that is merely a toggle to show the extent of the playable “table”.
You will probably notice that these screenshots have absolutely nothing to do with gladiators. That’s because what we are designing is a 3D miniatures playing system. First Sword is only one of literally scores of games that we intend to be playable in our system. Anyhow, if it’s potentially of interest, sign up for the newsletter.
First off, please do not post OT comments early in a thread. That is implicitly saying “because I don’t care about X, I think everyone should be discussing Y, which is of more interest to me, instead”. You can certainly discuss Y if you like, by all means, but do so on your own blog. If you want to bring something to my attention, then email it to me.
Now speaking of bringing things to people’s attention that may or may not be of interest, Alpenwolf is in the process of preparing a major kickstarter for First Sword. It will take place in the April-May timeframe, and I hope the Dread Ilk will support it with all their well-renowned and oft-feared staunchness. As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve expanded the concept of First Sword to encompass a spectrum of gameplay formats for reasons that will eventually become clear. Among the various questions I’ve been wrestling with is the best way to keep everyone informed about its progress, since, as with Alpha Game, the development of a game is a highly specific subject in which not everyone is likely to be equally interested. The options are to post all of the development-related posts on the currently dormant Alpenwolf blog, to post them at Castalia House, or to post them here. Obviously, major announcements will be posted here, but I am aware most readers here are not interested in multiple gamedev-related posts per week here.
So, I’m leaning towards doing them at Castalia, since we want to build it up as more of a destination site, we already sell some games there, and we have one game designer, Ken Burnside of Ad Astra, already blogging there. I’d also like to let those of you who are on the Castalia House New Release newsletter list know about our upcoming Game Development newsletter. Please note that if you are subscribed to the former newsletter, you will NOT be automatically subscribed to the latter. We don’t spam and we don’t cross-mail either. However, we will be accepting subscriptions soon and will also provide a signup link to the new newsletter when we send the next New Release installment out. Anyone who is interested in any type of gaming from tabletop to tablet is going to be extremely interested in what we’re doing with First Sword, because it is not only a game, it is a game engine designed for a high degree of modding capability. As the image of Gragbol Man-killer, Orc Gladiator #1 will no doubt inform tabletop players, First Sword is the first example of a game system that will be playable on the physical tabletop, as a Vassal module, on a computer or mobile device, or as an ongoing campaign game.
This multi-tiered approach has long been a vision of mine, as the original version of Rebel Moon Revolution was designed to be both a 3D tactical shooter and a 2D strategy game. We created two levels of AI for precisely this purpose, dividing them into TacAI and StratAI so that the StratAI could be replaced by a human player moving 2D counters around on a map that was essentially the top-down version of the 3D environment. The movements served as triggers to send orders to the TacAI that replaced the orders otherwise provided by the StatAI. In retrospect, I doubt we would have been able to successfully pull that off even if GT Interactive didn’t go down the drain (taking both Fenris Wolf and Rebel Moon Revolution with it), partly due to time constraints and partly due to the fact that our StratAI programmer contracted cancer and died. But we are going to be able to pull it off here, because after learning from my past tendencies to design more than I could reasonably produce and bringing in some very smart and experienced new development partners, we’re applying the concept in a much simpler, much more easily accomplished fashion.
While we eventually hope to expand the concept to the full-blown multi-tiered squad-level combat game originally envisioned, in the meantime, we’re going to initially make this multi-tiered combat management gameplay work at the gladiatorial level. We’re putting together the various elements for the Kickstarter now, so if you’ve got any more thoughts concerning rewards you’d like to see, this is the time to throw them out there.
And finally, we’re happy to announce that the fourth issue of the Sci Phi Journal is now available in both EPUB and MOBI format at the Castalia House store. The first three issues have been very good and the fourth one looks like no exception. If you’d like to get caught up, issues One, Two, and Three are also available there. From a review of Issue #3:
“Suffice to say this is a thinking man’s SF magazine and is superbly chosen and edited by Jason Rennie.”
And as long as I’m in info dump mode, I may as well mention that ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT Book Two is progressing very well, I am ahead of the revised schedule, the cover is being designed, and the 850-page book will likely be published in November rather than December as previously announced. I can’t vouch for the quality myself, but I will say that the two early readers have said that it is better than A THRONE OF BONES.
Mendicant Bias has clearly read his Lind and correctly applied it to #GamerGate and society alike:
We have seen the most important and fundamental values of our society torn down and destroyed by vandals who used the tactics of cultural Marxism to subvert our society. We have seen abominations like gay “marriage”, no-fault divorce (read: his-fault), government-subsidised abortion and freely available birth control, and universal suffrage become “acceptable”—as if these cultural freak shows could ever possibly be considered “normal”. We have seen our most fundamental rights of conscience, association, freedom of thought, free exercise of religious belief, and freedom of action circumscribed, shrunk, and destroyed before our eyes. And we let it happen.
The self-aware man who looks at how this happened will come away with a certain cold appreciation for the tactics of those who imposed this ashen, burning Hell upon us.
When it comes to gaming, we have repeatedly seen how SJW tactics work. They have used the fundamental decency of the average Western gaming consumer against him, by browbeating him into believing that he is sexist if he wants “believable” (i.e. non-ridiculous) women in games, or that he is “racist” if he doesn’t want games to become some sort of absurd paean to multiculturalism, or that he is a misinformed idiot if he thinks that women can’t be just as strong and effective in an FPS game as men.
They are exquisitely good at shutting down dissent. They’ve had forty years to entrench themselves and become institutionalised. And they have succeeded. They did this by capturing the single most important and powerful level of war. The Moral Level of War
He also explains why #GamerGate has been uniquely successful in resisting the SJW onslaught when everything from the US Army to the churches have been overrun like France in 1940:
The cultural Marxists who brought us to this point have used the moral level of war brilliantly, up until now, by bludgeoning anyone who disagreed with them into submission through the threat of being branded sexist, racist, and other double-plus ungood things. To the SJW set, any deviation from “acceptable” modes of thought was and remains Badthink. Hell, they even have their own programming language! (Note the satire.)
But they grew overconfident, and made a huge mistake—giving us everything we need to destroy them, root and branch.
Until recently, gaming “journalists” had a lock on how the consumer viewed the products that they paid for. Games that promoted “social justice” narratives were given high reviews—but when the rest of us actually tried playing them, we often found them to be unplayable garbage, because they sacrificed absorbing gameplay and great storytelling for smarmy preachiness and painfully stupid messages about “tolerance”.
When #Gamergate first broke, the reason for this appalling state of affairs became perfectly clear: the gaming media were in bed, literally, with the very same game developers whose work they were reviewing.
Overnight, they lost their moral high ground in the eyes of thousands of gamers all over the world. And they have continued to lose that support as gamers have mounted a vicious backlash against their immorality.
This is a very, very important lesson to absorb. You cannot win at the moral level of war when crippled by ambiguous values and a lack of moral confidence. This is why the Christian churches that compromise their principles and turn against their own historic values rapidly collapse. Defeat at the moral level of war destroys an institutions raison d’etre; once robbed of its core reason to exist, an institution ceases to grow and rapidly begins to decline.
Mr. Lind and I had a conversation about #GamerGate. He recognized it as an obvious manifestation of 4GW, so it’s interesting to see that the students of 4GW see it clearly as well.
Ken Burnside has a very useful, and timely, piece on game development, as opposed to game design. I’m much better on the design side than the production side, so it’s very useful to be given this sort of reminder of the necessity of playtesting:
The middle 20% of the work is sending a draft of the game out to playtesters, and processing feedback. This is where explanatory diagrams are drawn and the first in-text-flow examples get written. And rewritten. And re-done. And re-re-done. The back half of this 20% is taking the feedback from playtesters…most of whom don’t document everything they did to solve a problem. Or will send you heated emails because the game blew up on them after they played it for two hours, and now their friends don’t want to touch it ever again. This is the part where the developer feels “picked on” a bit. Just remember:
Everyone who ever told you your game sucked, but told you what it was about it that sucked, just helped you make it better. You, as a developer, need to figure out how to resolve this issue, and you need to figure out how to differentiate between “The game sucked…” and “The game isn’t one I’m interested in.”
The worst kind of playtesters are the silent ones. I put playtest material up on the Ad Astra Games Patreon specifically to weed out the silent playtesters. These are the guys who download the game, and maybe skim it once, and otherwise let it sit on their hard drives. I would much rather have playtesters tell me the game sucked than download it, decide it sucked, and never tell me so. 🙂
You will want two separate rounds of playtesting in an ideal situation – and you really want to get playtesters who don’t know the author of the game if possible; they’ll come in with things they know from knowing the designer, rather than hit the game up from scratch. The second group of playtesters gets a draft that incorporates any feedback the first group gave you, and ideally doesn’t have any overlap with the first group.
If you have the time, you want to take any feedback from the second group, incorporate it into the draft and put it in front of the first group and see if the two different revision passes shake out any other “Oh, that’s what that means…” moments. This 20% of the work can take up most of the time.
Most technology companies are SHOCKINGLY bad at use-testing; game companies, for all it may seem that they don’t do much playtesting, are actually much better than the norm. I was amazed when I found out that in a company of over 150 people, precisely ONE person actually used the product that was the bread-and-butter of the company’s market.
Even a program as hoary and well-used as Adobe Reader occasionally shows strange signs of insufficient testing. I prefer to look at files at View/Zoom/Fit Height, but for some reason my documents were opening at 100 percent, which meant that I could see about one-third of the very high resolution images I was reviewing. I went into Preferences, found Page Display, and in it, the Zoom selections, where my options were Fit Width, Fit Visible… and Fit Page. Where is Fit Height?
Now, I’m not an idiot. I correctly guessed that Fit Page, which is NOT an option under View/Zoom, was the functional equivalent of Fit Height. But how is it possible that a program that approximately 11 hundred billion people have used still has basic inconsistencies like this? It’s not like Adobe doesn’t have the personnel to deal with this sort of thing.
Anyhow, I’m hoping to avoid as much of this problem as possible. One of the things we’ll be announcing this spring is our first miniatures game, which will also be called First Sword; it is a fantasy version of the 1977 Avalon Hill game Gladiator, only with a streamlined card-based combat system. (This may or may not be mildly revolutionary in the We the People/Hannibal sense, regardless, it’s not a common mechanic.)
I’m preparing a VASSAL module to test the system, so if you happen to be familiar with either VASSAL and Gladiator (or preferably, both), and you’re interested in helping me test it, send me an email with PLAYTEST in the subject. I’ll probably have the combat mechanic ready for testing in about two weeks; that, the campaign rules are the only elements that really require heavy testing of the miniatures game. The electronic combat management game, on the other hand, will require a bigger group of playtesters, but we’re not ready for that yet.
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.
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.
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.
