Tag: games

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.

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!

Sparklepunter (Chris Kluwe) and McRapey (John Scalzi) were chortling on Twitter the other day about how the “idiots” of #GamerGate had “no clue” what they were in for. And then, the pinkshirts pulled out the most fearsome artillery in the mainstream media….

That’s right! A NEW YORK TIMES article! So what do you think about THAT, bitches?
(Um, wait, isn’t that sexist?)
(SHIT! DELETE TWEET, DELETE TWEET DAMMIT!”)
What do you think about that, evil gamerhate death threaters!
(That’s better.)
That’s right, a NEW YORK TIMES article entitled “Can Video Games Survive? The Disheartening GamerGate Campaign”:

FOR
more than five years, almost every word that I’ve written
professionally has been about video games. I used to cover things like
presidential campaigns and prison reform. But at some point, video games
began to seem as consequential as those subjects, if not more so.

As
they became more popular, more profitable and, most important, more
powerful as a means of creative expression, video games started to feel
to me like the Internet had in 1999: a technology on the verge of
washing over our culture and reshaping it wholesale. Millions of people
of all ages were playing games. These were boom times, and thanks not
just to the mega-studios that produce things like the Call of Duty
series, but to countless small, independent developers as well. Game
design began to be taught in art schools alongside theater and
sculpture. The interactive age had arrived, and video games were its
most promising entertainment.

Translation: newbie journalist discovers games market, reviews some games, and now thinks he’s an expert. Also believes that all the johnny-come-latelies attempting to make a buck off the huge and growing gamer population are indicative of more than trivial parasitism. Speaking as someone who has professionally lectured on game development and game design at a technical institute in Europe, those game design degrees from art schools are completely worthless. (Something I point out in my lectures, by the way.) They are almost always taught by people with virtually no experience in the industry and none professionally designing games.

And then came GamerGate. Over the past few weeks, as this inchoate but
effective online movement has gathered momentum, I’ve begun to wonder if
I’ve made a horrible mistake.

He did. He chose… poorly. He lined up with the pinkshirts against the players. If you are anti-GamerGate, you are no longer a gamer. Period. You may play games, but you are not a part of gaming culture. You have rejected it.

It’s the players who enjoy this culture, even as they distinguish themselves from the worst of the GamerGate trolls, who truly worry me. If all the recent experimentation and progress in video games — they’re in the permanent collection at MoMA now — turns out to be just a plaster on an ugly sore, then the medium’s long journey into the mainstream could be halted or even reversed.

Given what the mainstream presently represents – ideological domination by SJWs, thought-policing by pinkshirts, kowtowing before feminists and sexual freaks, and relentless parasitism – that sounds like a very desirable result indeed. Who gives the smallest fleck of a fly’s shit about video games being “in the permanent collection at MoMA”. So fucking what?

Other game designers, journalists and cultural critics have been threatened, or have faced hacking attempts on their online accounts, from email to social media to banking. Video games are unquestionably poorer than they were two months ago when this strange and disheartening series of events began. Talented people are quitting. If this continues, the medium I love could go backward into its roots as a pastime for children.

The game industry didn’t need those no-talent ideological parasites before. It doesn’t need them now. And the game industry could do a lot worse than go back to its roots, which happened to produce some of the legendary classic games that are just as fun to play today as they were two decades ago.

To me, these anti-intellectual players, who want games to be “just games” and want criticism of them to be devoid of things like political and social context, are almost as worrisome as the horrifying, and criminal, actions of the harassers.

Of course it is worrisome to him. Games that are just games have no need of parasites like him trying to make a living about talking about them. Given his endorsement of inept pinkshirt-games, he’s clearly incapable of expressing an opinion about gameplay that any gamer will feel any burning need to know.

She’s [Leigh Alexander] more discouraged by her peers at websites that took two months to denounce GamerGate. Others have yet to make a statement at all. Some of the participants in the community of intelligent writers and designers who think and talk about video games in print and online, on websites and social media networks and podcasts, are being cowed into silence. In particular, if the large companies that make video games remain quiet, they risk allowing GamerGate to win the debate over whether diversity — of people, of ideas, of games themselves — has a place in their culture.

If the large companies that make video games are dumb enough to attack their core market, they will die. Intel and other companies are withdrawing their money from anti-GamerGate media companies like Gawker because they would like to continue selling their products to gamers. This is all the more true for the big game companies, which would also face an internal rebellion because many, if not most, of their employees are GamerGaters or at least sympathetic towards GamerGate.

(Let’s not forget, Leigh Alexander is not only the person who declared games to be dead, but also told an indie game developer: “Be careful with me. I am a megaphone, I am much less kind than Rami and I won’t mind making an example out of you.” For the record.)

@Nero commented that the people at one big company are “split right down the middle” on the issue. I’ve spoken to a few high-level people in the industry myself, including two “name-on-the-box” designers and one CEO, and they are definitely NOT anti-GamerGate. I would say that the most common opinion is one of indifference, mostly because the mainstream media’s opinion is totally irrelevant to them. But they do recognize one thing. #GamerGate is the gamers. Anti-#GamerGate is not. And at the end of the day, 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 and you are no longer a part of it.

Anti-#GamerGate is #GamerHate.

I’ll leave the kid’s actual Twitter address out of it because he obviously doesn’t know any better, but I suspect some of you will find this as amusing as I did:

    Feminist Frequency ‏@femfreq
    There are not two sides to this. This is a war on the women, critics, and feminists who care about making gaming more diverse and inclusive.

    Vox Day ‏@voxday
    @femfreq We like our games the way they are. You want different games, make your own damn games.

    Elijah @elijah
    yea make your own games unless your @zoequinnzel or @Spacekatgal than don’t cus reasons or ethics, yeah ethics

      Vox Day ‏@voxday
    Let them make whatever they want. No one cares about that. I certainly don’t.

    Elijah @elijah
    I know right why cant games continue to revolve around my entitled white maleness???

    Vox Day ‏@voxday
    I’m an Indian, Elijah. Feather, not dot, with an actual tribe, casino, and everything.

    Elijah @elijah
    @voxday Yo i’m sorry man I shouldnt assume that if someone says something stupid that they’re white that is racist

Hey, I don’t make the rules. I just play by them. If they hand you a hammer, it’s only polite to hit them with it. What else is it there for? But it certainly is amusing to see how fast they shift into reverse.

By the way, all members of the Dread Ilk have my formal permission to use the term “Redskins” in the context of the Washington football team. I take no offense at it, and you are certainly welcome to cite said permission in the event of an SJW objecting to it.