Tag: games

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.”

Brad Wardell sets the record straight

This response to a multi-faceted attempt at character assassination is one of the reasons it is so important to support #GamerGate even if you are not a hardcore gamer:

Recently game designer Damion Schubert wrote a blog criticizing some recent reporting by Breibart regarding how sloppy reporting had hurt my career. In his criticism, Damion had used a hit piece Kotaku had published on me as evidence that the reporting done on me had been reasonable.  In response, I went through his blog to point out the various factual errors the Kotaku article had made by relying on only a single, biased source along with carefully selected court documents to create a narrative that had nothing to do with reality.

Damion and I got talking after my post and in which I was able to show him more material that demonstrated how ridiculous the original Kotaku article had been.  In the 2 years since the Kotaku article, no one who has gotten to see some of the actual details of the frivolous lawsuit that had been filed against us has not been convinced that the original case and the reporting of it was a travesty.

Damion has followed up with this post retracting his original blog.

Out of respect for Damion, I’m going to update this article to be a more generic response to those who continue to harass me or my employer regarding the unsavory lawsuit that was inaccurately reported on back in 2012.

A brief recap

Stardock is a consumer software company that was founded over 20 years ago.  For 20 years we’ve made award winning games and software used by millions of people.  I incorporated the company in 1993 as a college student to help pay for school. Eventually, it succeeded beyond my wildest dreams and became my full time career.  Today, it is possibly the oldest independent game company with more than 50 employees.

In 2012, I was best known for things like:

    Gamer’s Bill of Rights
    Designer of Galactic Civilizations
    The publisher of Sins of a Solar Empire
    The CEO who had promised (and delivered)  the sequel and its expansion to Elemental because we were disappointed that a Stardock game was released in a poor state.
    The designer of programs like Start8, ObjectDock, WindowBlinds, DesktopX, ModernMix, etc.

In short I had a good reputation.

At this point, #GamerGate is about more than games now. It is a Schwerpunkt in the ongoing cultural war for the West. And the gamers of #GamerGate are the only defenders of freedom and Western civilization who are counterattacking and causing enemy casualties. That is why it is more than important, it is vital to see non-gamers joining the cause rather than sneering from the sidelines.

Because if the pinkshirts haven’t come after you and yours yet, they assuredly will so long as you have not submitted to them. Consider these tweets from Chris “Sparklepunter” Kluwe in which he announces a personal boycott and tries to threaten Brad Wardell’s employment due to his support of #GamerGate:

I will no longer be purchasing anything from Stardock due to their CEO @draginol’s stance on #Gamergate and “SJW”s.

Which is a shame, because I REALLY like Sins of a Solar Empire. Sorry,
Stardock. Get a CEO who understands empathy, and we’ll be friends.

As a longtime game reviewer, I already have copies of Sins of a Solar Empire as well as Galactic Civilizations, but I will commit to buying Sorceror Kings when it becomes available. If you are a gamer, I would encourage you to buy a Stardock game today. I can attest that they are good, solid strategy games.

Great Minds of the SF/F Left

This was the response of the author of science fiction’s longest ode to the passing of gas to this simple observation on Twitter: “If you are anti-#GamerGate, you are no longer a gamer. You may play games, but you are not a part of gaming culture. You have rejected it.” Never forget, these are the individuals in the SF/F community who genuinely believe themselves to be our moral and intellectual superiors.

John Scalzi @scalzi
If anyone tells you who gets to be a “real” gamer or not, they are stompy whiny little babies throwing a tantrum and you can ignore them.

Tiffany Reisz @tiffanyreisz
If you game, you’re a gamer. If you write, you’re a writer. If you fart, you’re a farter and maybe slow down with the beans, okay.

Trinity Bergman @TrinityBergman
How did you know about the beans??

Tiffany Reisz ?@tiffanyreisz
I made chili today. I KNOW ALL ABOUT THE BEANS.

richfletcher @richfletcher
And: if you hate, you’re a hater.

D L Owens @keikomushi
I hate beans.

Tiffany Reisz @tiffanyreisz
#farts

DangerIck @RangerRick
I am *at least* one of these things. Disclaimer: I had Thai for dinner.

Tiffany Reisz @tiffanyreisz
I had chili. You’re in a safe space. No one judges you here.

Duncan Ellis @DunxIsWriting
“Luke, I am your farter.”

Tiffany Reisz @tiffanyreisz
Butt Solo #starfarts

Marcos Astorga @GMarcos69
I fart more than i game or read so I guess that makes me a member of #Fartgate.

Tiffany Reisz @tiffanyreisz
It’s about ethics in farting.

Marilyn Holt @merlintheholt
beans, beans, the magical fruit…

D L Owens ?@keikomushi
One of the easiest ways to make new friends is to discuss bodily functions. We all appreciate it on some level.

D L Owens ?@keikomushi
In this regard, farts bring people together. 😀

Brilliant. While McRapey claims anyone who classifies gamers is to be ignored, genuine gaming professionals and executives in industries that sell into the games market are constantly analyzing who is a real gamer or not, because if you are going to make a high-powered CPU or an expensive graphics chip, you are not going to sell very many of them to the Farmville and Candy Crush Saga aficionados, regardless of how much they play those games.

It’s not that one can’t make money on casual games, it’s that the people who play them don’t consist of a market that a) spends much money per person or b) consists of a coherent and identifiable culture. This is why, despite its popularity, we are unlikely to see Tor Books publishing a line of Farmville novels any time soon, Rovio’s success in turning Angry Birds into a brand notwithstanding.

Gamasutra notes 15 Factors of Classification distinguishing hardcore gamers from non-gamers: “Hardcore gamers are clearly different from casual gamers, and the characteristics of hardcore and casual gamers will also be different from those who are generally uninterested in interactive entertainment.”

One could usefully define a “real gamer” as a player of games who plays 20+ hours of PC/console games per week and spends or consumes more than $500 on games and game-related products in a year. For example, the NPD Group describes “core gamers” in a similar manner: The NPD Group describes “core gamers” as any individuals who spend more than five hours a week playing games on a home console such as the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, a Windows PC or a Mac. By these standards, there are currently over 34 million core gamers in the United States, and they are playing video games for an average of 22 hours every week.

4GW and failed narratives

#GamerHate is just chock full of “gamers”. A bunch of anti-GamerGater’s predictably responded poorly to this assertion:
If you are anti-#GamerGate, you are no longer a gamer. You may play games, but you are not a part of gaming culture. You have rejected it.

Zaid Jilani ‏@ZaidJilani
@voxday i will 1v1 u in any game of your choosing while quoting statistics on the dwindling white population of america

Vox Day ‏@voxday 9m9 minutes ago
ASL live on VASL. We can record it for posterity. You choose scenario, I choose side.

Zaid Jilani ‏@ZaidJilani
wtf is asl and vasl

Vox Day ‏@voxday
ASL = Advanced Squad Leader. VASL = Virtual Advanced Squad Leader. So, what scenario shall we play?

Zaid Jilani ‏@ZaidJilani
what the f is this crap you dont have starcraft?

Yeah, those #GamerHate guys are simply hardcore gamers-4-life. The same assertion prompted Chris Kluwe aka @chriswarcraft aka Sparklepunter to decide that it would be a good idea to attempt to DISQUALIFY me.

ChrisKluwe @ChrisWarcraft
Hey #Gamergate’rs, you cool with letting a self admitted white supremacist speak for your movement? Just curious.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@ChrisWarcraft I’m an Indian, Sparklepunter. Feather, not dot, complete with tribe. With one-quarter Mexican heritage to boot.

I do find it amusing how the pinkshirts just can’t stop walking right into their own racist assumptions. Especially how they will deny the undeniable rather than question their own belief that the magic red people can’t possibly disagree with their petty white fascism. They’re not only attempting to deny my Native American heritage, some are even trying to deny my Mexican heritage, which would certainly surprise my great-grandfather, the Mexican revolutionary, and my great-uncle, the well-known Mexican-American artist.

It is also interesting to observe Kluwe’s foolish resort to the self-admitted lie. I’ve never admitted any such thing. NK Jemisin told precisely the same sort of lie, although she lied about me being a “a self-described
misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole” rather than being “a self admitted white supremacist”. Again, I have never described myself as any of those things. Of course, if we know one thing about the pinkshirts, it is that they have a problematic relationship with the truth.

In any event, what Sparklepunter is trying to do is to “fix-and-freeze” the opposition, in order to DISQUALIFY me, and through me, #GamerGate. But not only is his attempt to do so inept, but the very fact that he made it at all demonstrates how the gamerhating pinkshirts are overmatched. It’s an intrinsically 2GW way of thinking, to make contact, then call in for fire support. But even if he did manage to somehow completely disqualify me – a dubious proposition in light of more than 10 years of failed attempts that have only seen my site numbers grow – it wouldn’t matter any more than a USAF drone strike killing yet another “al-Qaeda Number Two”.

In this regard, #GamerGate and the response to it has been a fascinating illustration of 2GW vs 4GW. And it is an illuminating lesson concerning the truth of William S. Lind’s statement, “almost always, the state is losing.” In this case, applied 4GW marks the end of the media’s ability to control the narrative.