Tag: games

Never rely on a moderate

@totalbiscuit is one of the #GamerGate guys whose heart is more or less in the right place, but has never grasped the underlying issue. He released a joint statement with some other guy with whom he has been sparring. Most of the points are banal enough, but two require comment:

Diversity is important among game creators, players, and characters, and this is an important conversation that must be encouraged, not punished. Diversity leads to better stories, better stories lead to better games. If someone posts an article or video that you disagree with, the correct response is to write a comment, write to the editor, or create your own opposing article or video. It is not appropriate to threaten his or her safety, family, or anything else along those lines.

No. Diversity is not even remotely important among any of these people. Nor is it an important conversation that must be encouraged. It is simple SJW entryism and Totalbiscuit has fallen for it. If Diversity led to better stories, then SF/F would be better than the SF/F of 30 years ago. It’s not. It is considerably worse, by virtually every standard.

But yes, it is not appropriate to threaten people simply because you disagree with them. Or to spend hundreds of hours trying to hack their server; we are still seeing the hacker bounce off our security.

Gamers have endured attacks from the mainstream media for decades and we should be doing everything we can to bring that ignorance to an end, not further fuel it with incendiary rhetoric.

Again, @totalbiscuit is wrong. Only rhetoric can fight rhetoric. I cite Aristotle: “Before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest
knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For
argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people
one cannot instruct.”

In other words, you cannot use dialectic to convince anyone who cannot be instructed of anything. It will not work. Only rhetoric will suffice.

PS: Do to some various distractions, I will be posting my answer to “what can I do” tomorrow. In the meantime: join Twitter, follow, 1 #GamerGate retweet, 1 #GamerGate favorite. That’s a 10-second daily commitment. If you can’t do that, you can’t do anything.

SJWs devour themselves

Larry Correia is vastly amused by the spectacle of SFWA turning on an Campbell Award-nominated Asian lesbian:

Apparently a member of the literati SJW army—and super prestigious Campbell nominee for BEST NEW WRITER—has turned out to be a huge internet troll, with a bunch of aliases, attacking and tormenting people. Of course, those of you who read this blog or followed Sad Puppies are like, duh… They attack and torment Larry, and anybody who agrees with him nonstop, but not my friends… Benjanun Sriduangkaew did the unthinkable and used their regular SJW tactics of threats, insults, intimidation, and career sabotage against fellow SJWs, and that is super badthink!

Now, when you threaten, intimidate, troll, and try to sabotage the career of anybody who disagrees with the Social Justice narrative, then that is doubleplus good!

The SJWs are perfectly aware of their hypocrisy. They talk about how
Sriduangkaew was praised for “punching up”, meaning that it was okay for
her to use these tactics against non-members. Threaten somebody of the
correct sex and race, cool. Threaten somebody of the wrong sex and race,
bad. If you have a brain, you will find that sexist or racist, but you
are not thinking like a proper SJW. Anything they say isn’t sexist or
racist, but anything we do is. Simple.

As I’ve repeatedly warned, pointing out SJW hypocrisy is meaningless to any SJW. They aren’t dialectic. They aren’t rational or coherent. And deprived of any non-rabbits to attack, they naturally turn on each other. The funniest thing is, of course, that Benjanun Sriduangkaew was entirely correct to be cruelly dismissive of the likes of Jemisin and Rothfuss. At her best, Jemisin is mediocre; Rothfuss is painfully unreadable. He’s the Britney Spears of SF/F. I tried reading The Name of My Rose-Scented Wind or whatever it is called once when I was on the road and found myself turning to an Avalon Hill rulebook I’d previously read because it was more interesting. Rothfuss’s achievement is creating the only protagonist you would murder if forced to choose between him and Rand al’Thor. Larry also addressed #GamerGate:

This is one reason I’ve been enjoying the hell out of GamerGate. First,
it has been awesome having a great big group of people witness the same
bullshit that my industry has been dealing with for years. Second, SF/F
people tend to be squishy and polite, with a handful of outspoken
outliers like me and the rest of the Evil League of Evil, so SJWs have
run roughshod over my industry… But gamers? Holy shit. You really think
you can pick a fight with people whose brains are programmed to win?
Gamers will outlast, outthink, and outfight the SJWs. Tell a Gamer that
there is loot or XP in it, and he’ll grind SJWs to the grave.

That’s what SFWA never understood about me when they couldn’t figure out why I didn’t humbly lower my head and slink off the way a good rabbit who has been rejected by the warren is supposed to vanish. I’ve always been a gamer and a game developer first and foremost. It was more likely that I would go methodically through the entire SFWA directory like Michael Myers with literary taste than to even think about submitting to those ghastly little creatures. The thought literally never crossed my mind. The anti-GamerGate SJWs are making exactly the same mistake.

SJWs plotting entry points into games

SB discovered this excerpt from the Dispatch from the Queerness and Games Conference:

The first keynote of the conference was by Lisa Nakamura
on Social Justice Warriors in video game culture. She broke down what
seemed to be the ‘taxonomy’ of an SJW to better understand how people,
usually those actively against social justice movements, both see
themselves and what they want to get rid of. Some qualities Lisa listed
out: SJW framed as opposite to SWM or straight white male, a common term
used for a projected most privileged identity; fundamentally insincere
in their motives and use of ideology, while at the same time too sincere
and unable to take jokes or fit in; not native to the community,
foreigners from Twitter and Tumblr trying to immigrate to video games.
This helps identify not only how gaters treat people they assign as SJW,
but also how they see themselves: person vs ideologue; genuine vs
manipulative; native vs the opportunistic.

Wrapped up in this is how to
be a minoritized person that is a ‘true’ force for change, aka not a
fake feminist or gamer that wants social good, by the way of practicing
‘cruel optimism.’ Cruel optimism is that common response to inequality
that’s a mix of positivist individualism and ‘harsh reality,’ like for
more minoritized people to create games and THEN media will get better,
just sit back and wait and it’ll take care of itself. I feel like we see
this with the overabundance of girls in STEM initiatives and no
resources for those right now fighting against marginalization. Lisa
used the term ‘procedural meritocracy,’ that in order to earn respect in
gaming, you have to display exceptional skill. Basically the idea is if
men who spout sexist stuff online are beat in a video game fair and
square by a woman, they will include her based on meritocracy and
proving she’s not a fake geek girl.

This attitude doesn’t address that
the barriers to gaining skill are still very high for minoritized
people, and that this process ultimately turns the bullied into a new
bully; you climb the ranks so you can police the behavior of others,
essentially giving permission to those already at the top. The true
warrior looks like other gamers, talks like other gamers, and plays like
other gamers. The SJW doesn’t play by the same rules, or even worse,
doesn’t play the same games. This is hyperbolized by the codification of
certain games as worthy of getting paid for playing and not, and how
that is gendered, raced, etc. I think this is a pretty useful
perspective to have because it helps people frame how they talk to those
projecting the image of the SJW and better yet work to counteract the
qualities of being conniving interlopers by referencing their
credibility in the community.

This is classic SJW entryism in action. It’s not conspiracy theory, it is an actual, ongoing conspiracy on the part of SJW radicals to enter the game industry and prevent people from designing, developing, and playing the games they wish to design, develop, and play. This is why they have to be identified, confronted, and called out. They are actively planning to take over the game industry, just as they have nearly taken over SF/F and the sports media with their hyperpoliticization of it.

Do not tolerate them. Do not compromise with them. Do not seek to find a balance with them or meet them halfway. That is the core of their strategy, which they then rinse-and-repeat. They have repeatedly said that we are not fit for public discourse; very well, then do not engage in any discourse with them or permit them entry to anywhere we are.

If there is no place for us where they are, then there can be no place for them where we are.

Hotwheels explains the Nick Denton fraud

Or is it more wheels within wheels…. The founder of 8chan explains that the Nick Denton email and subsequent Facebok post are indeed fakes:

Time to cut to the chase: @Kingofpol’s leak is a fraud.

 I will explain why I trusted it, and then you can draw your own conclusions. I am releasing this information because I believe that it is more important that people know that this is a fraud than my own personal trustworthiness.

@Kingofpol told me about the leak on Skype. He showed it to me, and told me that it was Stephen Totilo, editor and chief at Kotaku who was the source. He told me that he had been speaking to Totilo for weeks, and that this was a confirmed leak from Denton. He told me how hard he worked for this leak, and I decided to help him out with a confirmation. He said that he was passing the information off to Milo, and that there would soon be a Breitbart story.

I found it hard to believe that anyone, even a drama queen like Denton, could be that melodramatic, so it’s not exactly shocking. But I also think it will be amusing if anyone thinks this will have any effect whatsoever on GamerGate. Death threats, media attacks, fake leaks, drinking the blood of innocents, it makes no difference at all.

To reiterate what I told a PhD candidate writing her dissertation on GamerGate who contacted me earlier today: It’s all about one thing
and one thing only: the right of gamers to design, develop, and play
the games we want to design, develop, and play. And we reject the
efforts of absolutely anyone and everyone trying to interfere with
that right.

A game developer on #GamerGate

Earlier this month, The Escapist featured a very good interview with developer Daniel Vavra concerning #GamerGate. Vavra is a co-founder of Warhorse Studios:

What is your definition of “gamer”?

According Encyclopedia Britannica it’s “a person who regularly plays
games and especially video or computer games.” I am ok with that. But
while I am not saying that match-three games are bad, playing them over
breakfast doesn’t make anyone a gamer. It’s silly that the same
journalists who insist on calling people playing such casual games
‘gamers’ are not reviewing those games in their gaming magazines. The
line between a “true” game and “casual” game is thin, but I guess that
everyone can see the difference between somebody who owns several
consoles and plays very often and somebody who plays Bejeweled on his way to work. Those people aren’t the same and the games for them are produced by different industries.

What is the root cause of GamerGate? Do you see it as part of a larger “culture war”? 

Over the last decade, media were taken over by people who think that
their ideals, opinions and way of life are superior to others and so
they have the mission to tell others how to live, what to think and what
to do. Those people have learned that there is a very easy way of
manipulating others with guilt and fake goodwill. They will tell you
that you should be ashamed, because you are privileged. You are white,
you are healthy, you are rich and it’s your fault that there are others
who are not as lucky as you. So you must redeem those crimes by doing
what those social justice warriors think will please those who are not
privileged enough. And if you don’t, they will jump on you and give you a
hard time…. And that is the root cause
of Gamer Gate. People had enough of those hypocrites that started to
inject their ideology everywhere while they do exactly the opposite of
what they preach to others.

Read the whole thing. The total contempt he feels for the SJWs attempting to stick the camel’s nose into the game dev tent is palpable, and he is very, very far from alone in the game industry. The key phrase is: “the games for them are produced by different industries”.

For some reason, none of the SJWs are concerned that there aren’t enough men playing Kim Kardashian Hollywood. Why are there no articles demanding that the developers of Kim Kardashian Hollywood add elements to the game that will make it more appealing for white male players? We all know that these demands for “inclusivity” in the hardcore market are nothing more than another SJW entryist attack.

#GamerGate is doomed… again

This may or may not be genuine, but it is supposed to be a note from Gawker Media’s Nick Denton. [UPDATE: despite the overly dramatic language, it is confirmed to be real.] I’m a little skeptical, but it is in line with SJW entryist tactics as well as some of the recent attempts at “tone-policing” we’ve seen – and ignored – within #GamerGate. And then there is this:

8chan.co @infinitechan
#GamerGate has no leaders, so you don’t have to trust me. I don’t confirm things lightly: what @Kingofpol has is 100% true.

In any event, this was supposedly leaked directly from a source at Gawker:

First and foremost I would like to say “Thank You!” to myself and for those who are more than willing to accept a bit of financial compensation in exchange for causing a disruption. I couldn’t have done it without you and I appreciate all your hard work.

For those of you that might be quite puzzled at the moment I will clarify. As you may have noticed over the last couple months. there has been a
group of individuals eager to ruin my business endeavors at every turn for the sake of “ethics”. I would go as far as to use their preferred banner name. but afler the work of my new colleagues. I don’t see it continuing on much longer. Yes. the circus will finally be leaving town and business will continue as usual.

Over the past few weeks I had tasked my employees for finding a means to destroy that which has been rather resilient. You cannot simply “attack” their leader when they have none. nor could you shun the group as a whole without them using their rainbow coalition to mitigate any claims. Fortunately for myself. I figured it out. I found a way to, as they would put it, “Kill the Batman”.

It was there all along and oh so very simple. infiltrate the group and kill
them from the inside. The media parade that has been going on for weeks
now hasn’t done anything worth a damn. Time and effort thrown out the
window with needless articles over this shit show. None of it has made a damn bit of difference until now. Everyone is eager to throw themselves at mainstream outlets. but none of them are eager to spend the money they are already using to fix this problem the right way. So I had someone send out feelers looking for people to work on a “special project” for me. Those that made it through screening have been taking part in an effort to police the group from the inside, causing a wedge to be driven amongst them. Today serves as evidence of money well spent. they have begun to crack and their influential people are beginning to part ways with the group.

Eventually there will be such a small minority that it will just blow over and nobody will care.

It feels good and I am proud of myself. I am slaying a giant and there is
nothing they can do about it. How does one separate themselves from
people claiming to be “doing what is right for the group” by tone policing? You can’t and it will continue to be the dagger that kills this silly group of entitled brats.
-N. Denton

I’m sort of curious who are supposed to be these “influential people” who are beginning to part ways with #GamerGate. From what I’ve seen, more people than ever are lining up behind it as it becomes increasingly obvious that #GamerGate is not about harassing women given the fact that there hasn’t been any harassment beyond that supposedly directed at LW1, LW2, and LWu back in August.

#GamerGate concerns one thing and one thing only. People designing, developing, and playing the games they want to design, develop, and play. Everything else flows from that.

The thing is, it doesn’t actually matter if this is fake, real, or a real plant meant to sow discord. The lesson for #GamerGate is the same. Ignore the moderates, ignore the placators, ignore the tone-police, and keep doing what you’re doing. The only thing a 4GW organization has to do in order to keep succeeding is a) don’t stop, and, b) don’t centralize.

Mailvox: why C&C isn’t strategy

RD asks about strategy vs tactics:

I was browsing through some of your old columns on WND and came across
an article where you mentioned that one of the premiere, defining games
of the RTS genre, Command & Conquer, could could not actually be
described as a “strategy” game. You wrote:

“Like those video game
reviewers who insist on describing RTS games like Warcraft and Command
& Conquer as “strategy” games, the media consistently confuses
tactics with strategy.”

Would
you care to elaborate on this point? As a long-time fan of the C&C
series and the RTS genre, I am most curious to hear your justification
for distinguishing between tactics and strategy with respect to
describing RTS games. Also, what in your opinion is the best example of
an actual “strategy” RTS game?

The difference between strategy and tactics is pretty clear. If you’re trying to win a war, it’s strategy. If you’re trying to win a battle, it’s tactics. Even Wikipedia is useful in this regard:

Strategy (from Greek στρατηγία stratēgia, “art of troop leader; office of general, command, generalship”) is a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sense of the “art of the general”, which included several subsets of skills including “tactics”, siegecraft, logistics etc., the term came into use in the 6th century C.E. in East Roman terminology, and was translated into Western vernacular languages only in the 18th century. From then until the 20th century, the word “strategy” came to denote “a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills” in a military conflict, in which both adversaries interact. The father of Western modern strategic study, Carl von Clausewitz, defined military strategy as “the employment of battles to gain the end of war.” B. H. Liddell Hart’s definition put less emphasis on battles, defining strategy as “the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy”. Hence, both gave the pre-eminence to political aims over military goals.

Military tactics are the science and art of organizing a military force, and the techniques for combining and using weapons and military units to engage and defeat an enemy in battle. Changes in philosophy and technology have been reflected in changes to military tactics; in contemporary military science tactics are the lowest of three planning levels: (i) strategic, (ii) operational, and (iii) tactical. The highest level of planning is strategy, how force is translated into political objectives, by bridging the means and ends of war. The intermediate level, operational level, the conversion of strategy into tactics deals with formations of units. In the vernacular, tactical decisions are those made to achieve the greatest, immediate value, and strategic decisions are those made to achieve the greatest, overall value, irrespective of the immediate results of a tactical decision.

That’s the formal distinction, and it should be fairly obvious that most RTS are intrinsically tactical in nature. But there is also another way of looking at it, which is the one I actually had in mind, which is that strategy implies thinking and planning, whereas tactics implies acting and responding. Most RTS games such as Warcraft and C&C, involve considerably more of the latter than the former. Indeed, even if we disregard the fact of the old “grunt rush” tactic or the fact that success often boiled down to superior click speed, thanks to the “technology tree”, most RTS involve virtually no thinking or anything that can reasonably be described as strategy.

My old friend Chris, who has designed a few notable RTS games, is even quoted in the RTS article: “[My first attempt at visualizing RTSs in a fresh and interesting new way] was my realizing that although we call this genre ‘Real-Time Strategy,’ it should have been called ‘Real-Time Tactics’ with a dash of strategy thrown in.”

So, for both reasons, I don’t think it is possible for an RTS to be a proper strategy game. I actually designed an RTS, as it happens; the original WAR IN HEAVEN game was supposed to be an RTS. It would have been a lot better if we had gone that route too, but Valu-Soft wanted to chase Walmart with a DEER HUNTER-style game, which, as I have related in the past, backfired rather spectacularly when they foolishly hired the buyer who wanted it before the game was finished.

This is how you do it.

Since we’ve been talking about #GamerGate all day today, I thought we ought to actually talk about games too, which makes this the perfect time to post this article about one of the great, and massively underrated game designers, Steve Fawkner.

Fawkner released his first full game, Quest for the Holy Grail,
for the Sinclair Spectrum in 1983. “I didn’t know about publishing or
about how to get a game to the store,” he says. “So what I would do is
go to a gaming convention and take some copies of Quest for the Holy Grail in a snap-lock bag, with some instructions just printed out.”

He gave them away to attendees, free of charge, with a message at the
start and end of the game requesting players send $5 to fund the next
one. He didn’t expect to earn a penny, but Fawkner got 32 checks —
earning $160.

Encouraged by this unexpected success, he developed more games,
building up a mailing list of people who liked his work. He’d send them
games through the mail, and they’d pay another $5 for each title they
enjoyed. “It was extremely, extremely primitive, but it was kind of
pizza and beer money when I was a teen.”

Then one day in early 1989 he finished a game that seemed too good to
give away, either in snap-lock bags or through snail mail to his small
list of previous customers. Warlords combined two games Fawkner had been playing at the time: a strategy video game called Empire,
by White Wolf Productions co-founder and former Space Shuttle Program
flight designer Mark Baldwin, and a board game by TSR called Dragons of Glory.
A turn-based affair, it put you in charge of one or more clans — each
possessing heroes and citadels and soldiers — and asked you conquer at
least two-thirds of the map.

Fawkner thought maybe he could sell Warlords commercially.
“I sent it around to a few publishers,” he says, “and just got told no.
They weren’t interested in a game that was 90 percent finished by
someone they’d never heard of.” He also sent it to distributors, unaware
of the difference between the two. “They certainly weren’t interested
in something that didn’t come shrink-wrapped in a box.”

Almost ready to give up, Fawkner chased one last lead: Strategic
Studies Group (SSG) in Sydney. “They do strategy games,” he remembers a
friend saying. “OK, they’re tanks and planes and military kind of
strategy, but why don’t you send it to them?” Fawkner shipped a copy
off, and initially heard no response.

“Six weeks later, I got a phone call,” he recalls. SSG co-founder Ian
Trout confessed that his company had thrown the game out because it had
knights and dragons in it, but they gave it another look after his son,
Alex Shore, found the Warlords disk and dug in. “I owe Alex a
huge debt of gratitude for actually finding my game in the garbage and
playing it,” Fawkner says. “Because SSG published it. It reviewed really
well, sold I think tens or hundreds of thousands of units and did very
nicely.”

Steve’s a modest man. Warlords was also CGW’s 1991 Game of the Year. It’s still such a good game that Ender still plays it from time to time when he isn’t playing Fantasy General or Civ5. Warlords 2 was even better, although I thought 3 and 4 lost a bit of the plot, being too influenced by the newfound popularity of the RTS genre.

But then to come back with Puzzle Quest, which started the whole Puzzle RPG craze, was simply amazing. Anyhow, notice that not only did no one ever welcome to the industry with encouragement and snuggles, but despite the massive respect with which he is regarded by veterans throughout the industry, he still has to scratch and claw to find the money to make the games he wants to make.

I still have my original boxes, manuals, and disks for Warlords here in my library, an honor I convey on only the very best classic games.

#GamerGate is dead. Also, defeated.

If pinkshirts were doctors, they’d be following the patient down the hall, past the admissions desk, and out the front door of the hospital, all the while shouting “Time of death is 8:42! Hey, slow down… time of death is 8:43!”

And this idiotic claim is downright hilarious: Female PC gamers outnumber male ones, and attributing that to the rise of casual gaming “is empirically false.”

It’s impressive. That may be the single dumbest article on games I have ever read.


Although this tweet from MTV News is amusing: “#Gamergate suffers an ultimate defeat with Anita Sarkeesian’s appearance on #ColbertReport”

Not just dead and defeated, but ULTIMATE defeated!

Fifth Frontier War prelude

Ender is finally satisfied with his modifications to my VASSAL module so we commenced with the setup and are ready to begin. I’m the Imperium, in red, and Ender is the Zhodani, in blue. Ender was openly contemptuous of my setup, but his confidence was a little shaken after my observation concerning the way in which my ASL style has more than a little in common with the approach recommended by the Maneuver Warfare Handbook, namely these two points from Chapter One:

Maneuver
warfare means you will not only accept confusion and disorder and
operate successfully within it, through decentralization, you will
also generate confusion and disorder. The “reconnaissance pull”
(see Chapters II and III) tactics of the German Blitzkrieg were
inherently disorderly. Higher headquarters could neither direct nor
predict the exact path of the advance. But the multitude of German
reconnaissance thrusts generated massive confusion among the French
in 1940. Each was reported as a new attack. The Germans seemed to be
everywhere, and the French, whose system demanded certainty before
making any decisions, were paralyzed…..
Instead
of a checklist or a cookbook, maneuver warfare requires commanders
who can sense more than they can see, who understand the opponent’s
strengths and weaknesses and their own, and who can find the enemy’s
critical weaknesses in a specific situation (which is seldom easy).
They must be able to create multiple threats and keep the enemy
uncertain as to which is real. They must be able to see their options
in the situation before them, constantly create new options, and
shift rapidly among options as the situation develops.

Anyhow, this setup should definitely keep the enemy uncertain and cause an amount of confusion, because beyond setting up a doomed Schwerpunkt at Jewell and fortifying Regina, I don’t even have a plan. No matter what he guesses, he’ll be wrong!

However, unlike the generals firmly stuck in 2GW, Ender has an open mind. When I mentioned the similarity between my style and 3GW (he’s read ON WAR so he is up on the post-Westphalian generations), he commented: “Yeah, when you set up you just throw your counters all over the place and I have no idea what you’re even trying to do. Then they run around like their pants are on fire until you spot a problem and go after it. Maybe that’s why I’ve lost about the last 15 games.”

This quote, in a nutshell, essentially summarizes my tactical perspective, in both wargames and life: “The defense thus assumed a very aggressive and potentially offensive character.”