Tag: games

The Top Gaming Blogs

As one of their Game and Book experts, one of the things Recommend has asked me to do is to identify and vett various other experts, particularly in fields I am qualified to do so. One of the first experts I recruited was the indefatigable Jeffro Johnson of Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog, who is also one of the two star bloggers at Castalia House, because there are very, very few people who know as much about role-playing games as he does.

Jeffro immediately grasped the utility of the Recommend system, so much so that I have already had to urge him to slow down and pace himself. But among the score of recos he has already posted, he has created an interesting list entitled The Top Gaming Blogs of 2014, which is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in games. Lewis Pulsipher is on there, of course, but there are a number of other sites with which I was previously unfamiliar.

The other new Recommend expert is less known for his excellent game design than for the fact that he is Archon of The Escapist, but regardless, he qualifies as a Game Expert twice over. He’s got his first reco up and it’s a good one on the classic X-Com: UFO Defense.

If you’re not on Recommend yet, or if you’re on it but haven’t really started using it yet, I’d encourage you to give it a go. They haven’t even officially “come to America” yet; but have already achieved pretty solid penetration in their native France. I don’t know if it is going to grow into something Twitter-big once they enter the US next year, but it is going to be significant. They’ve now got the five-rating system in place, which was a needed improvement, and they’ll have the Android app out in the near future. And, in due time, a proper game-style Achievements and Leveling system.

They’re also working on the expansion of the categories; there will be gun categories, among others, and I will be looking for experts in a variety of new categories soon. But we’re only looking for serious and proven expertise, not merely serious interest. For example, Jeffro, Archon, and I are all able to rapidly post recos because we have large quantities of our own previous writings on the subject from which we can draw. But that’s merely an indicator, it’s not an absolute requirement. In any case, if you think you’ve got that kind of expertise in something, then by all means, make your case in the comments here.

Jeffro demonstrates his depth of knowledge in this post, in which he wonders why so many of today’s gamers and game designers are not merely ignorant, but don’t even know they’re ignorant:

Why is it that Gygax had a diet of fiction that spanned more than half a century, but the designers that followed him and the younger generation of gamers that played his stuff did not for the most part? What kinds of things do we fail to see simply because we’ve never bothered to survey the past…? And what the heck happened during the seventies to turn everything upside down? Something happened. The fact of it doesn’t require a conspiracy theory to explain it, but it does make me wonder about what all’s gone on since.

Remember: people that haven’t read from the Appendix N list tend to assume that Gary Gygax was a weirdo for using the term “Fighting-Men” instead of something like “Warrior.” They will even go so far as to say that the reasons for his word choice there are unknowable. It’s a small thing, sure… but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. These people are not only ignorant, but they don’t even know they are ignorant. They are simply not equipped to make an intelligent critique of classic D&D, much less assess Gygax’s contribution to gaming.

That “Wisconsin Shoe Salesmen” precipitated a watershed moment in gaming history. His influence is not confined to tabletop games, but spills over into computer gaming and fantasy in general. While many tropes of classic D&D have by now become ubiquitous, the literature that inspired them has since dropped into obscurity. This is interesting and bears further investigation. 

SJW review of games

It seems to me that just as we have a useful metric for dividing Blue SF/F from Pink SF/F, it would be helpful to have one that allowed people to summarize, in a single number, just how SJW a game is. Here is an initial pass at a points list, with 0 equaling not at all SJW and 10 indicating full SJW.

+1 has homosexual or bisexual character
+1 per token Black/Hispanic/Asian
+1 has Magic Negro and/or Saint Gay
+1 contains left-wing political message
+1 core plot concerns left-wing political message
+1 protagonist or sidekick are kickass waifu
+1 female developer mentioned in marketing and PR (see: J. Raymond, Z. Quinn)
+1 takes shots at Christianity or traditional Western morality

Any ideas for improvement? I was considering “+1 produced by Bioware”, but that seemed too obvious and redundant.nt

SJWs are out to destroy games


That’s not hyperbole. That’s not an exaggeration. That is exactly what their long-term objective is; that’s what they mean by asserting that the game industry needs to be “transformed”. They can deny it it all they like, but there is absolutely no question that their true objective is to prevent gamers from being able to design, develop, play games without their approval.

If you want to see where SJWs want to take the game industry, look at the publishing industry, where the company that publishes “Beautiful Me:
Essential Health: Strong Beautiful Girls” has announced “we dropped the ‘For Boys’ from the series name [Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys] and we all agree here at Abdo that it was a very smart idea”.

Give into the SJW entryists and soon it will be deemed as out of bounds to make games for boys as it already is to publish books for boys.

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.