Tag: games

Mailvox: the plus side of pay-for-play

In my opinion, Cinco didn’t think this one all the way through:

I recommend you do what Valve did get rid of the +5-8% advantage, and just offer loads of different skins/models for people who want to play the game more than casuals/fund the kick starter.

Now, T11 is the most successful game of its kind out there; so why would we want to simply turn up our nose at what quite clearly works very, very well? What most non-game designers don’t seem to understand is that a perfectly “fair” game in which no one can buy any advantage is actually going to be considerably more unbalanced, in practice, than one where you give people a reasonable means of compensating for their lack of time to develop mastery.

Let me give you an example, do you think you would have any chance against me in ASL? I’ve got thousands of hours in over more than 30 years, if one includes Squad Leader, Cross of Iron, and Crescendo of Doom as proto-ASL. You’ll need a hefty advantage or be an Ender-style natural just to make it a game of it at all. The objective is not to maximize the advantage those who are willing to spend time rather than money on acquiring mastery, but rather, to provide for the broadest possible range of interesting and challenging competition for everyone.

Or for another example, take Maddens, with which I have been down since 1992. I haven’t played it seriously in years. And yet, I have repeatedly demolished younger players who play it incessantly and consider themselves to be very good; one twenty-something game artist who works for a studio I know was absolutely shocked when he challenged me to a game and I beat him by 70 points even though he had a higher-rated team. Ender finally beat me for the first time when we played a game on Madden 25, a version I’d never played before with a team whose playbook I didn’t know, and he still needed me to miss two field goals in order to eke out a win with a last-minute score.

Not only will the game be more fun for the lesser player if he can purchase a chance of being able to compete with the best, but more importantly, it is more fun for the best players too. I almost never play ASL without giving my opponent the strongest balance, because otherwise the game tends to get rather tedious for me. (Ender consciously tries to take advantage of my tendency to get bored and mentally check out before the end game.) The fact that the likes of Zynga go way too far – unsurprisingly, since they were never gamers – does not mean that the mechanic of substituting money for time is entirely useless for play-balancing purposes.

What about the potential problem of piling the purchasable advantage on top of the time advantage? Please, that’s hardly even worthy of being labled a design challenge! It’s easy to focus the monetary advantages towards game mechanics that will favor the less experienced player against the more experienced player, rather than vice-versa or on a horizontal competition. The fact that a mechanic is poorly implemented (especially in games for non-gamers), does not mean that it should be dismissed.

Kickstarter rewards

So, here’s a thought. We’re looking at doing a Kickstarter for a game, quite possibly in coordination with another gaming organization, which will likely be of considerable interest to wargamers of various genres. This is not First Sword or any other combat management game, just to be clear.

Having looked at various game kickstarts, successful and unsuccessful, I haven’t been terribly impressed with most of the rewards. I’ve got a few ideas, but since this is one of the communities that would be most likely to harbor a supporter or two, I’m interested in knowing what sort of rewards might be of interest to you.

We’re just brainstorming here, so go ahead and throw them out. I won’t say anything more about the game, except that it will be multiplatform.

Female Supremacy: The Endless Quest

It seems Martin van Creveld may need to reconsider the title of his forthcoming work for Castalia House in light of how feminists are not even pretending feminism is about equality anymore:

Girls write more complex programs and learn more about coding than boys when it comes to making computer games, a study has found.

A group of 12 – 13-year old pupils spent eight weeks developing their own 3D role playing games as part of the University of Sussex study. Dr Kate Howland and Dr Judith Good developed Flip, a programming language which uses a simple interface to help the pupils string together scripts, basic programs which trigger a change within the game, such as a message popping up once a treasure chest is opened.

The girls used seven triggers within the games, almost twice as many as the boys of the group, and were much more successful at creating complex scripts with two or more parts and conditional clauses. Boys had a tendency to build their triggers around when a character said something, the most first and most simple trigger the class learned. 

The games were created using software made available with fantasy game
Neverwinter Nights 2, while Flip also translated the programs into English
to help the students understand the scripts they’d created.

In other words, if adults dumb down a male activity and require girls to do it, the female interest in doing well scholastically and obediently pleasing their authority figures will cause them to outperform boys who just want to shoot people and blow things up.

Naturally, this not-at-all cherry-planted-watered-and-carefully-harvested discovery completely supersedes forty years and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of economic activity created by young men who never had to be taught or encouraged to do anything. Many of us old school developers were actively discouraged from doing what we did; some of us don’t even have college degrees of any kind.

Did you even need to see the names to know that the “scientists” were women? This is precisely why the big push to get more women in STEM is certain to fail. Even when they manage to shepherd women through the educational process, most of them turn out to be more interested in fashion and thought-policing than they are in, you know, anything that resembles actual science.

There is no welcoming committee

On his personal blog, Castalia House blogger Jeffro observes that the younger generation is learning, often to its dismay, that life isn’t quite as simple or welcoming as they were taught it would be by their SJW indoctrinators:

I found out about this sort of thing the hard way talking to a younger dude that was like this. He was edgy and cool, but his brain was somewhat colonized. He somehow got to talking about this thing that happened at his high school… some kid had worn a shirt that was deemed to be across the line by his type and they’d rallied and made it clear that nobody could do that there. I was surprised that he could be so positive about doing something like that. I said, “that’s the difference between my generation and your generation. People like you at least had the sense not to attack free speech back when I was in school….” This assertion that he was basically a product of his times rather than some stripe of free thinker put him into a rage. He started screaming and cursing at me for several minutes. (Yes, he thought himself the voice of tolerance and reason, of course.) It was then that I realized that this “flaming” stuff you see online… it’s not just a product of anonymity and technology. No, some people really are like that….! They actually can’t respond to a difference of opinion with anything but rage.

—

On being “welcomed” into the hobby — No no no no no! You have no idea how clueless you are. Honestly. It just isn’t like that at all. If you think anyone is going to roll out the red carpet for you then you don’t know anything about gaming. Do you have any idea how merciless competitive chess is? How hard it is to find an opponent for a wargame? Have you ever interviewed people to see if they’d be a good fit for a wacky roleplaying campaign concept you want to try out? Have you ever run a demo at a con and felt the pressure of having to be at least as interesting as the people running a dozen other tables…? Have you played games that other people want to play and then been disappointed that they never reciprocate and play the stuff that you are into…? There is no welcoming committee.

I have to laugh at the idea of being “welcomed” into Advanced Squad Leader. To put it into perspective, the vastly simplified Starter Kit rules are still 12 pages, which doesn’t even count the various charts and tables. A lawyer friend once perused the ASLRB and declared that a law degree should be automatically conferred on anyone who demonstrates competence at the game. There is simply no amount of warm fuzzies that is ever going to compensate for having that volume of information thrown at you, and that doesn’t begin to take into account that you’ll find yourself facing some of the most viciously competitive hardcore gamers once you do command a basic grasp of the rules.

In any activity where the difficulty is part of the enjoyment derived, the very concept of a “welcoming committee” is not so much irrelevant as completely backwards.

I need to see if I am still a member

Before I resign from IGDA:

In a sign of how frenzied, panicky and intolerant the games industry establishment has become over the legitimate concerns of ordinary gamers, the International Game Developers’ Association branded some 10,425 Twitter accounts, including those of journalists, as harassment “offenders” in a humiliatingly ill-conceived attempt to provide a “blocking tool” to its members.

The blocking tool, which has been widely mocked online for its lack of sophistication and “blanket ban” approach, was assembled by Randi Harper, a persistent online agitator. The tool prevents users from seeing not only the tweets of users Harper has decided are implicated in harassment, but also many accounts who simply follow those users, by blocking a list of thousands of users with the use of an automated “bot.”

So indiscriminately has the block list been compiled that the IGDA’s own staff appear on it. Roberto Rosario, chair of the IGDA in Puerto Rico, is named on the list. In an acutely embarrassing moment for the Association, Rosario, who is not a GamerGate supporter, publicly threatened to resign unless his name was removed or the bot was disavowed.

It turns out that I, too, am on the block list. I was asked to join IGDA by its then-president at a big European games conference some years ago, which I subsequently did. I’m pretty sure that he’s not the president now, because he didn’t strike me as a complete idiot. I know I’m a member of  a European GDA, but it’s a different organization than IGDA, so I don’t know what my current membership status is with them. Expired, I assume, but I’ll have to check on Monday.

Another fuse uncovered now for me to light

SJWs on Twitter are just so easy. First, you toss the bait:

Vox Day ‏@voxday
It’s amusing to see anti-GG trying to coopt our positions. #GamerGate is of and for gamers. No anti-GG is a core gamer. They put SJW first.

Thus prompting the expected protestations and posturing. Notice how SJWs tend to communicate indirectly in an archly sarcastic, incredulous tone, then rapidly start talking nominally amongst themselves for your benefit. This sort of one-way performance communication is the way they avoid ever actually addressing the point or being pinned down and forced to answer questions. Here is a brief, but representative selection.

TieTuesday ‏@TieTuesdaySA
*looks at over 500 hours of stream time playin games* god i fuckin hate videogames

penguin725SA ‏@penguin725
My steam library with 800 hours of gameplay is ALL IN PROTEST HOW DID HE KNOW DAMMIT OUR SECRET IS OUT

TieTuesday ‏@TieTuesdaySA
and the hundreds of hours into Halo 2/3/Reach in highschool? I’ve been plannin this ruse for ages

GVOLTTheGVOLTTheGV– ‏@GVOLTT
High school? Hell, I’ve been playing games since I was in kindergarten.

St. Nicolas Cage ‏@PeeinMcKellan
I must have put 300 hours into Civ 5 in the span of ten months because I hate it so much.

St. Nicolas Cage ‏@PeeinMcKellan
I skipped class for a week to build a Minecraft server because I want to destroy video games forever.

And once they’ve dutifully stepped in it, you pull the trigger:

Vox Day @voxday
Seeing anti-#GamerGate people babbling about how many games they played is like hearing Nazis talk about how much they like Jewish food.

It is science. Please to fucking love it. #DreadIlk

Fifth Frontier War turn 1

Fifth Frontier War prelude

The expected Zhodani invasion has begun. As I suspected he would, their High Admiral has gone with a fairly conservative, broad front envelopment that is aimed more at methodically taking control of planets than hunting down and destroying the Imperial fleets or targeting a few specific Schwerpunkts.

Of the five distinct incursions, the most dangerous fleet is the Zhodani 1st Assault Fleet, as it not only packs enough punch to have destroyed one of my colonial cruisers and driven off the 120 system defense boats guarding one of my subsector capitals at Jewell, but also contains transports that landed two field armies bolstered by several armored divisions to secure the planet. About my only accomplishment was bloodying the 1st Assault’s nose a little while extricating my colonial battleship. My hope is to use it to either wreak a little havoc behind his lines or possibly distract one of his fleets. It’s not likely, given the requirement to plot up to five turns in advance, but perhaps I can force him to tie up the 65th Fleet in pursuit of it.

Fortunately, the extra reinforcements I provided the large Jewell militia prevented the Zhodani from claiming the planet in the first turn, so hopefully that will disrupt their schedule. The planetary militia has taken 70 percent casualties and the Imperial army corps stationed there was destroyed, but with the help of the elite Marines and some mercenaries,they managed to nearly eliminate two Zhodani divisions, including one of the armored ones.

In the north, the Vargr are unopposed and have already bypassed Dentus in order to land troops and take Kinorb. Three fleets have entered the demilitarized zone, but they haven’t done more than take out a scoutship or two. And in the south, the two Sword Worlds fleets blundered by launching without waiting for their troops, which means that even though I’ve only got the minor 213th Fleet to deal with both them and the Zhodani 67th Fleet. That means the Zhodani have only taken two planets when they probably expected to claim four or five in the first turn.

Now I can begin my own plotting; I’ve got my best admiral on Regina along with my main battle fleet, the 214th. However, I dare not risk them against the 1st Assault Fleet, which I now know has more than twice their firepower. The question is whether I use them to hold Regina after Jewell falls, if I throw them forward to slow down the Zhodani assault, or if I fall back and use them to pick off the weaker Vargr fleets while I wait for my reinforcements.

This is a long game and will last at least 26 turns, with 50 being more likely. So, I’ve decided the key at this point is to preserve my forces until my reinforcement fleets begin arriving from the galactic core. So, my inclination will probably be to destroy the Vargr and reclaim Kinorb, leaving it up to the various planetary defenses and the land forces to slow the advance they cannot possibly stop.

This is what happens when you don’t retreat

A journalist is astonished by what he finds by peeking under the rock of #GamerGate:

One of the most stunning experiences I have had so far, while keeping in contact with the community after the publication of my first story on them, has been to discover that GamerGate feminists are real. Despite what a person would assume after being constantly bombarded with the narrative of their misogyny, do-it-yourself feminism is an everyday aspect of the movement. The only condition to that statement is that the feminism which GamerGate represents is the type that becomes offended at the suggestion that women need help to achieve what a man can. It is the type of feminism that believes in promotion by merit, not quota, and where the women are themselves individually powerful enough not to require leadership to assist in determining what they are allowed to think or say.

That goes back to the cumulative character of the people who make up GamerGate. It would have been easy for any of them to eschew the label and enjoy the comfort of being a less persecuted human being. Instead, the character of the average gamer-turned-media-activist tends to be such that they stand directly in the line of fire, knowing that the temptation to disassociate from the movement is the primary means through which a corrupt confederation of clickbait media institutions and Social Justice charlatans intend to dismantle it.

That is how I went native; by becoming convinced that these people represent the highest ethical standard, and through watching them put their personal reputations in harms’ way on principle.

This is why you don’t cry and apologize when attacked. This is why you don’t back down when one vicious name after another is hurled at you. This is why you spit in the ugly face of the SJWs when they offer you the carrot and threaten the stick. This is why you don’t step aside and leave your ally’s flank exposed when they are targeting him and not you.

Because others, less willing to stand in the line of fire, find themselves inspired by your example. Every time you stand there and take a shot without flinching, you cause one, or two, or ten other people to realize that they can do it too. Every time you refuse to submit to the enemy, you make ten, or twenty, or one hundred other people see that defeat is not inevitable.

Don’t back down. Don’t apologize. Don’t disassociate. Don’t despair. Remember, the Reconquista began with a single little battle in northernmost Spain. It took 700 years, but eventually, Spain was once more Christian and free. You’re not given a spirit of fear, so don’t be afraid. We will win in the end.

SJWs hate science too

One of the most important things to understand about SJWs is that there is no end game for them. They exist to complain; if you submit to their demands and give them what they claim to want, they will promptly produce new and even more ridiculous demands. They are salami-slicers, which is why you cannot give into even the most reasonable-sounding, polite requests for fairness and justice and appeals to your better nature and human decency.

Doing so will only signify your weakness, which will cause them to make every more insane demands in ever-more demanding ways. The only thing that is important to them is their pinkshirt agenda. Consider the SJW response to the historic news that the European Space Agency landed a spacecraft on a comet earlier this week:

I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing. That’s one small step for man, three steps back for humankind.

Yesterday the European Space Agency landed the Philae spacecraft on a comet, a powerful step forward for humanity and science alike. However, slightly before the big moment, coverage of the event reminded us how much progress remains to be accomplished back on Earth.

A number of the scientists involved on this incredible project were interviewed in the hours leading to contact by Nature Newsteam. One of those Rosetta scientists was Matt Taylor, who chose to dress, for this special occasion, in a bowling shirt covered in scantly clad caricatures of sexy women in provocative poses.

“This is going to be a very long day but a very exciting day,” said Taylor. “I think everyone should enjoy it because we’re making history.”

No one knows why Taylor chose to wear that shirt on television during a massive scientific mission. From what we can tell, a woman who goes by the name of Elly Prizeman on Twitter made the shirt for him, and is just as bewildered as he must be that anyone might be upset about her creation. But none of that actually matters. What matters is the fact that no one at ESA saw fit to stop him from representing the Space community with clothing that demeans 50 percent of the world’s population. No one asked him to take it off, because presumably they didn’t think about it. It wasn’t worth worrying about.

This is the sort of casual misogyny that stops women from entering certain scientific fields. They see a guy like that on TV and they don’t feel welcome. They see a poster of greased up women in a colleague’s office and they know they aren’t respected. They hear comments about “bitches” while out at a bar with fellow science students, and they decide to change majors. And those are the women who actually make it that far. Those are the few who persevered even when they were discouraged from pursuing degrees in physics, chemistry, and math throughout high school. These are the women who forged on despite the fact that they were told by elementary school classmates and the media at large that girls who like science are nerdy and unattractive. This is the climate women who dream of working at NASA or the ESA come up against, every single day.

That is the mentality that we’re dealing with in #GamerGate. What is significant about #GamerGate is that it represents the first time that a male-dominated community has stood up and collectively said: FUCK OFF to the SJWs utilizing their conventional entryist tactics. The hardcore gamers of #GamerGate would rather be attacked and publicly portrayed as evil, outdated, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, death threat-issuing, blood-drinking, serial-killing rapists than give another inch to the SJWs attempting to infiltrate and destroy the game industry.

And that’s why you should support #GamerGate even if you don’t play games. That’s why you should learn from #GamerGate’s staunch refusal to back down, its tactics, and its willingness to go on the relentless offensive against the pinkshirts.

They are the incarnation of Dickson’s fictional Chantry Guild. They will cast aside everything, games, books, tradition, religion, science, Western civilization itself, without hesitation, because they simply do not understand the intrinsic relationship between cause and effect.

What you can do, part 2

This is the second part of my response to someone who asked what they could do to help fight the SJWs. A few days ago, a #GamerGater named @Ignideus with less than 500 followers came up with the idea for #OpSkyNet as a prospective solution for the tendency of e-celebs to dominate the public discourse on Twitter. Today, it is the #3-trending hashtag on Twitter and #GamerGate has been re-energized as the leaderless, decentralized force that it is.

Larry Correia did little more than mention a few SF/F writers he felt had produced work that merited award consideration, and in the process, exposed the corruption and hyperpoliticization of the SF Awards process.

Yesterday, a non-gamer named RooshV announced the creation of Reaxxion, a pro-#GamerGate game review site for men. He writes:

My younger brother, who considers himself a gamer, gave me the
definitive push into starting Reaxxion. He plays Xbox, PC games on
Steam, and also some mobile games. He particularly likes games with long
and intricate story lines, telling me that gaming is just not about
pushing buttons to advance a level but to be affected on some level by a
compelling story, but now those stories are being perverted by people
who truly believe that men are evil and holding women down just because
they may want to enjoy a traditional story line with attractive women.

The infiltration of SJW’s into gaming may mean that my brother will
have to put up with their narrative in his games. It may mean that his
entertainment options become more limited because a developer was subtly
threatened unless he inserted another “empowered female” in a game
where such a character simply doesn’t fit. I’ve learned that unless you
fight back against these people, unless you spread awareness and develop
a megaphone as big as them, they will surely get what they want and
impact the culture in a way that hurts normal men who don’t subscribe to
their strange worldview.

Roosh isn’t a gamer, but he understands the importance of #GamerGate as the current Schwerpunkt, or focal point, of the SJWs. That’s why he’s stepped in with the sort of material assistance that only someone of his stature on the Internet can; the very name of the new game site is a gesture of contempt for those who consider themselves progressives.

Ingnideus was an unknown. Larry is a New York Times bestselling author. Roosh is Internet-famous, or if you prefer, infamous. But all three of them are taking what action they can take and all three of them are having a real impact.  What you can do entirely depends upon your capabilities, resources, and inclinations, but all of it is, at the very least, capable of mattering.

Most people who want to get involved are more akin to Ingnideus than Roosh. What that means is finding someone who is already leading the way by doing something and lending support to their efforts. Find a Schwerpunkt of interest to you and throw your weigh behind it. Many of you are already doing this with Castalia House, by buying our books, subscribing to our New Release newsletter, or in some cases, proofreading, formatting, narrating, and slush-reading. A few are assisting Alpenwolf, Joe and Kirk have been helping with the First Sword art. But we can always use more and we are far from the only independent writer, developer, publisher, site or blog that can use the help.

General

  • Support the good. Don’t support the SJWs in any of their flavors.
  • Get on Twitter. Tweet once with #OpSkyNet. Retweet and favorite one #GamerGate tweet per day.
  • Email one Gawker (or other #GamerGate target) advertiser per week.
  • Join Recommend. Write one Game- or Book-related reco, good or bad, per week and I’ll add it to the appropriate list. Be sure to follow me first so I will see it.
  • Try an indy game from a #GamerGate developer.
  • Submit an article to Reaxxion. 
  • Speak out. Do a blog post. Tell a friend.
  • Stand by those under attack, especially if you don’t agree with them. The primary SJW tactic is 3rd Generation. They cut off, isolate, then swarm. They can’t do that if you refuse to permit them to separate you from their target.

Castalia House

  • I’m ridiculously behind on submissions. We need new slushreaders and probably someone to manage the process.
  • PR. We haven’t sent out a single press release to anyone yet even though we have a pretty good story to tell. We’re too busy producing to talk about it.
  • Bloggers for Castalia House. Mascaro is too busy now and Jeffro has needed to take a few weeks off due to burnout. It’s difficult doing one quality blog post per week; many people can manage one or two, but consistency is the key.
  • PDF Layout. LL is getting up to speed on this, but we have a pretty big backlog already and we are contractually obligated to get some of our newly signed books out in print.

Alpenwolf

  •  Art. We’re doing all right for code, I think. (Markku, correct me if I’m wrong) but we could use additional art help. 
  • PR. We don’t need it yet, but we will.
  • There is probably something else I’m missing.

Why bother? Who cares about random guys living in their mother’s basements fighting for large pixellated breasts sporting chainmail bikinis in their games? Nero explains why he, a non-gamer, is following the battle:

GamerGate is remarkable—and attracts the interest of people like me—because it represents perhaps the first time in the last decade or more that a significant incursion has been made in the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators.

Games are merely the current battleground. TV is already lost to the SJWs. Movies are lost. Literature is largely lost. Genre literature is all but lost. Remember, this is the mentality we’re up against:

Humphrey, the former Subway worker, had been living with her uncle before she lost her job. She now bounces from couch to couch in her circle of protester friends — a sacrifice she said is worthwhile, because what is the point of working when she says she could be killed any day because of the color of her skin? Now, she said, standing at the Rowan Community Center on a run-down block in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of St. Louis, “I sleep, eat and breathe this.”

Sure, that sort of commitment easy for someone with no talent, job, or responsibilities, who has literally nothing else to do to throw themselves into something 24-7. But we’re not talking about that level of commitment, but rather a small and spare-time, but persistent one. My perception, and I could be wrong, is that far too many people on the Right are overly concerned that someone, somewhere, might profit from their assistance whereas there are no shortage of volunteers on the Left who don’t care at all about that. (This may, admittedly, be due to their general failure to grasp the concept in the first place.) Did Joe Farah benefit from my contribution of more than 500 columns to WND? I should bloody well hope so! What would be the point if he didn’t? I didn’t give him money, I gave him 30 minutes per week, and I remain pleased to see what effective use he made of it.

The Catch-22 is that there is never any money involved in getting something started from nothing, which is why it is hard to start anything without the approval of the SJW gatekeepers who have successfully infiltrated the foundations and the large corporations. There is only one way around this, which is for the talent of the right to be willing to follow the example provided by the Free and Open Source crowd.

This sort of thing should never be seen as a job, but a contribution to the cause given out of a positive spirit. It might turn into a job one day, but it probably won’t. And if you’re worried that Castalia, or Roosh, or the guys at Recommend, or might one day end up making a buck due in part to some of the time you’ve put in, consider this: Would you be here in the first place, reading this, if I has been unwilling to write columns or blog posts without being paid for my time?

Anyhow, those are my thoughts. Some of you will have additional ideas, and feel free to throw them out here. This is an open discussion, so brainstorm, don’t critique. And above all, one thing is clear. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t expect direction and management. Adopt a Fourth Generation mentality. Ignideus is the Leader of #GamerGate, Roosh is the Leader of #GamerGate, I am the Leader of #GamerGate, and so can you.