Tag: games

Wargaming reveals weaknesses

A USMC ops planner’s experience explains the key benefit of wargaming:

Back in May of 2012, I was holding an Operational Planning Team for a Major Pacific OPLAN. This was a big event. We flew in over a hundred participants for almost three weeks of work. I fought with my boss, the G5, over several key points about this OPT and I eventually was able to do things how I wanted. I spoke directly with the CG everyday during the OPT, with three formal briefs to him. Because we were a Joint Force Land Component Command for this OPT, we had players from all services and Special Forces (which is basically it’s own service.) I had interagency players, a full Red Cell, Green Cell, and Red Team. This was the biggest non-exercise event I witnessed in my three years at the MEF. And it was my FIRST OPT and first opportunity to be on the dot for a critical event. I routinely worked bast 1900 and worked past 2100 twice during the three weeks. This was BIG and IMPORTANT and we only had one chance to get it right. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I am smart enough to get help from smart people. I leaned heavily on three key personnel who had been around awhile and knew what they were doing. And they were great. We got through Problem Framing and Course of Action (COA) Development and were ready for the COA Wargaming step. The CG had settled on one COA, and we were testing it to see if it worked. COA wargaming is another area I fought with Col XXXX on and one. He agreed to let me run it my way and get out of it what I thought I needed.

So, we started the wargame. On the second (SECOND!!!) turn, the Red player took his turn and we were all face with the extremely obvious and extremely uncomfortable realization that our one and only COA was untenable. The result of 2 1/2 weeks worth of intensive work had just failed catastrophically in front of the audience. In the middle of the uncomfortable silence, broken by teeth sucking, I looked to the three officers who had been helping my so much throughout. All of them slumped their shoulders and looked away. One of them actually walked out of the back of the room. I was faced with the uncomfortable realization: “No one is going to save me.” This is the real world. There isn’t an answer in the back of the book. There is no instructor stepping in to bail you out. You are on your own and it is all on your shoulders. I looked out at the OPT and realized that my reputation, this entire event, the time and energy of over a hundred people sat on my shoulders and had no opportunity to start over and fix it. This is what it means to be a planner. It is all on you.

So, I used my favorite OPT tactic and said, “Everybody take 10!” I grabbed my two trusted agents (LtCol XXX and Maj XXX who worked closest with me, LtCol XXX will come up again in three slides) and went into the back room to discuss what we should do. They were both a little shell-shocked and no help. So, I fixed it. The problem, as it turned out, was timing. I adjusted the timing and changed the character of one force and its mission. And we recocked the wargame with the new COA. And it worked. It worked so well that, with minor modifications, it went into the plan of record. We have since referred to that wargame as the most successful COA wargame ever, because it identified a critical flaw in the COA and we were able to adjust the COA to opvercome the flaw.

The challenge, of course, is that people have to be willing to accept the information produced by the wargaming session. In vast bureaucracies like the U.S. armed forces, they are much more likely to sweep any uncomfortable information thus gathered under the carpet and pretend everything is fine, because in most cases the real world test will never come and the planning flaws will remain undetected.

It is eminently clear that the Obama administration does not have anyone advising it who is well-versed in wargaming, or rather, it is not listening to anyone who is.

Escalating #GamerGate

A veteran game developer, Brad Wardell, who unlike Zoe Quinn actually has a fair amount of game development experience, weighs in on #GamerGate:

In my mind, the balance of wrongdoing is heavily weighted on the opponents of #gamergate.  Mainly, because its opponents have had a long head start of character assassination and harassment. I know some of my friends in the media will be appalled by that but that’s mainly because they haven’t seen the shit storm directed at anyone who dares not support the “social justice” narrative for the past few years.

Without the August 28th mass “gamers are dead” article series on multiple sites, none of this would have happened. Let’s remember that.  It was a tempest in a teapot before that.

Every major escalation I’ve seen in this industry conflict has begun with one side mass misrepresenting others with a very broad brush.

The anti #gamergate people are the ones who brought me in

One thing to make clear here: The pro-#gamergate people didn’t ask me to stand up for them. They made no demands on me.  All I did was, as game developer, was tweet that I like gamers and don’t like seeing gamers misrepresented.  For that, the anti-#gamergate people started smearing me. (SJW logic: Make up allegations, use allegations as evidence, repeat).

In other words, I was not/am not trying to use #gamergate to get a pound of flesh. You want me to quit throwing in the misdeeds of the SJW crowd in SJW faces? Then tell them to quit character assassinating me.  Because, let’s face it, I have a large, heavy, blunt instrument in the form of having been falsely accused of sexual harassment and having won that case so thoroughly that the plaintiff had to publicly apologize. You don’t get more clear cut than that in the legal world.  I’d be delighted to just talk about games, tech, etc. But if you’re going to suggest I’m some sort of misogynist or rapist or sexual harasser then yea, I’m going to use the 800 pound mace that SJWs carelessly crafted for me.

And for those truly concerned in the gaming media: If you want to do “the right thing” (even if it’s two years late): Feel free to have the articles and threads that smear me set to just not be indexed by search engines. Is that really asking for a lot? No censorship. No retractions. No apologies.  Just make it so that new harassers aren’t born every time someone looks at the first page of Google results on us. I’ve been doing stuff 20 years, I’ve helped invent a number of the technologies you guys use on your PCs every day. But it’s all crowded out because the media chose to use me as a cartoon villain to push forward an agenda. Thanks for that. I just love having to discuss the Kotaku article every few weeks with some investment banker or enterprise customer. I really enjoy having to answer awkward questions by extended family. And the occasional random “You fucking shit lord, I hope you die in a fire!” emails I get are just..well they’re just so heart warming. Thank you for that.

The double standards

When I see a Ben Kuchera arguing for the deletion of threads because they might encourage harassment of game developers, I ask, where was he when I was taking a beating on nearly every gaming forum for something I didn’t even do? Oh that’s right, he was helping spread it!  Yea, thanks for using an image that shows a claim that I asked my female employees if they enjoyed tasting semen. And you know what? I didn’t hold any of this against anyone. I didn’t send PR people to demand threads removed. No DMCA messages. But it’s pretty infuriating to see calls to censor discussion based on “harassment” when they had no problem when I was the target.

Except, of course, in my case, I hadn’t actually done any of the things I was alleged to have done. No, I’ve gotten to fry for the past couple years in countless threads across the net.  I also want to point out that even though we won, and we got a public apology, some don’t consider that enough because apparently we were supposed to demand the plaintiff admit in writing to committing perjury. So even mercy is frowned upon by these people….

Let me preface this: NO ONE can survive detailed scrutiny. This is doubly true if the person doing the scrutiny is not giving you the benefit of the doubt.

Historically, the activist columnists in other industries have gotten away with trashing their opponents. It’s easy to lampoon the Tea Party people, for instance because their core base aren’t very technical and have no real means to strike back.  Same was true of the Occupy movement which got overrun by SJWs and was easily dismissed soon after.

But gamers are technical. They do have the means to fight back.  I’m sure it never occurred to the columnists who wrote “gamers are dead” that their targets would be able to effectively return the favor. Those who have had great success cherry picking and editing quotes/emails/tweets to create a false narrative of their opponents never dreamed that doing so would come back to haunt them.

I am very loosely acquainted with Brad, having spoken to him a few times when he was at Stardock. He’s a smart guy and he’s perceptive too. However, I think he’s making one mistake here, the same mistake that most people in the SF/F community have made over time, which is thinking that being reasonable and moderate and fair to the other side is an option. It is not. There is absolutely no evidence supporting that belief… one can’t even call it a conclusion. Fantasy would perhaps be the better term.

We’re not dealing with reasonable people here, we are dealing with psychologically damaged people who want to utterly trash and destroy the things we love due to their envy, their mental instability and their evil, twisted ideology. They’re not going to stop simply because they’ve been shot down once or twice. Failure doesn’t demoralize them because it is their natural state. They’re simply never going to stop until you have submitted to them and they have destroyed yet another predominantly male bastion.

Understand that I’m not considered an extremist because I’m a hot-tempered angry person given to historically unusual positions, but because the Social Justice Whores all realize that I am immune to their influence and I am therefore a threat to them by demonstrating that their victory is not inevitable Progress and one need to cower before them. Unlike most of their targets, I can take every accusation of sexism and racism and homophobism and religionism and inequalism and bigotism, laugh at it, and refuse to be swayed by it. What they call an extremist is nothing more than an individual who will not submit to them and dutifully confess that black is white and gay is good and two plus two is five on command.

As Instapundit says, we have to punch back twice as hard. Trash back twice as hard. They’re not used to it. They can’t take it. They freak out when we simply point out the observable fact that Zoe Quinn aka Chelsea Van Valkenburg is a slut, and, allegedly, a whore. They go ballistic when we observe that Anita Sarkeesian is a complete fraud who knows virtually nothing about games. They are furious when we note that very few people read most of their award-winning works and that there is little science in their “science fiction”. We don’t have to assassinate their characters because they don’t have any. And they can’t handle the truth, which makes it our most potent weapon.

But only for those with the courage to stand up for it and wield it. So stop temporizing and thinking you’re going to somehow straddle the fence. Stop thinking that perhaps you can keep your head down and escape notice. You’re not. That’s the first step towards ultimate submission. Choose consciously and courageously, don’t let your fear of rejection make up your mind for you.

After all, being rejected by this collection of delusional neurotics is an absolute badge of distinction and good sense.

UPDATE: The SJW are now launching attacks on The Escapist due to its refusal to fall in line:

This is an attack by the Anti-Gamergate side. Kuchera was unable to browbeat Greg Tito into censoring the discussion, now that the corrupt journalists are losing this debate rapidly, the Anti-GG side is desperate to shut down the discussion.

They’ve already begun censoring on 4chan. They’ve turned it into a SJW hugbox, to the point where being politically incorrect in /b/ (the bloody POLITICALLY INCORRECT FORUM) is a ban worthy offense.

If you wonder why the Anti-GG side is doing this, the answer is simple:

They’re bloody terrified of losing their power.

For about 3 years now, they’ve had the privilege to attack, patronize, and demean others. They could insult people sarcastically, insinuate that all attempts to disagree with them were based on “racism” or “misogyny” rather than logic. Now with Gamergate being more popular and them being shown for who they are, they are absolutely desperate to end the discussion.

They’ve been painting us as the harassers, us as the doxxers and the “hackers”. You can all see now, that this is a lie. They’re a group founded on hatred, a clique desperate to retain their power and trying to censor the opposing side’s discussion.

Say what you will of us, but we haven’t been attempting to bring down sites for allowing the opposing side to speak.

So the next time someone says “We aren’t trying to silence you” or “we aren’t trying to take your games or websites away!” just know that it is a lie. It happened to 4chan. It’s attempting to happen here. We wont let them silence us.

GamerGate and Gameolist

A conspiracy of “Game Journalism Professionals” akin to the infamous JournoList is exposed by Sargon of Akkad:

And The Escapist publishes its Blacklist of game-related publications that are to best avoided as a result of their documented SJW-corruption and lack of journalistic integrity. It pains me to see both Gamasutra and Game Informer on that list; I grew up with the late Paul Anderson and I’ve known Andy McNamara since Game Informer was little more than a few pages of tissue-thin game advertisements.

Blacklist:
Ars Technica: 50.31.151.33
Destructoid: 23.29.115.146
Eurogamer: 94.198.83.18
Gamasutra: 192.155.49.228
Game Informer: 72.52.14.115
Gameranx: 65.75.153.171
Games On Net: 203.16.214.132
Gamespot: 64.30.228.81
IGN: 54.209.144.209
Kotaku: 23.235.43.192
N4G: 67.228.244.148
PC Gamer: 89.167.143.59
Polygon: 216.146.46.10
Rock Paper Shotgun: 80.87.130.179
VG247: 94.198.83.26

Milo Yiannopoulis has more at Breitbart:

High-profile editors, reporters, and reviewers from heavyweight gaming news sites such as Polygon, Ars Technica, and Kotaku use the private Google Groups mailing list, which is called Gaming Journalism Professionals or GameJournoPros, to shape industry-wide attitudes to events, such as the revelation that developer Zoe Quinn had a sexual relationship with at least one prominent games journalist — a journalist who had mentioned her and her products in his reporting….

The GameJournoPros emails appear to confirm widely-held suspicions that
video game journalists operate with one voice and collude on major
issues to distort coverage of ethics violations and to support figures
to whom they are politically sympathetic.

Defeating the fiction police

The cartoon is from here. One autistic indy game developer points out that he doesn’t think praising the talking dog for the content of his speech is helping him:

Those in the gaming mass media think they’re doing people like me a favor, but they’re not. They’re smothering me and others like me. I know now there is no way they will hold my game truly accountable for any flaws it might ultimately have because they’ll think that any dismissal or criticism of the game as a whole will be a direct attack on autistic people, and it quite clearly is not. When people do dog pile on games that cover issues like this (I won’t name names but I’m sure you can fill in the blanks), it’s because of how the subject matter is approached, not that it was approached at all. The flaws of these games have been in their inability to truly connect with the people who play them, not that they had the audacity to attempt something new. If I had come forward before this, I would have been made a pet of the ‘social justice gaming crowd’, a person they could throw around to show how diverse and righteous they are, all while shielding themselves from criticism. I would be given preferential treatment just like I always have. It never ends….

Seeing a new game get ravaged for supposed sexism, racism, homophobia,
transphobia, ableism, etc. seemingly every week makes me feel less
inclined to want to write characters like Tinker, Hannah, or the many
others who will be playable in our game. To these people and
publications, all I have to ask is: is this what you want? Do you want
people to be too afraid to make inclusive art? Because whether that was
your intent or not, it’s what’s actually happening. It’s hard enough
investing all your money and time into making a studio, working for
years on a game that will eventually be judged by both critics and
consumers without then also having to be worried that those same critics
will sensationalize your game in order to make a few more big articles.

My answer is that the game developer should do as Harlan Ellison has suggested that the author do: answer them with the mighty power of your pen. By which he means to ignore them and write or develop whatever it is that YOU decide you want your book, or your game, to be.

Some people have already complained that FIRST SWORD has no female gladiators.  Tough. There is no need for them and so we’re not going to waste any time or development resources on them. And if the Social Justice Whores don’t like that, well, they are welcome to decry the lack of female slavery in our game to their heart’s content; it’s not going to make any difference whatsoever to me or to how well the game does.

The only power the Social Justice Whores have over you is the power you give them. Look at VP and its continually growing traffic. Look at Castalia and the increasing number of books it is publishing. Both have prospered despite the best efforts of the SJWs to attack them. There is no reason to give them even the slightest ground; doing so only inflames and encourages them. So don’t do it!

Root them out wherever they have infested, slap down all their attempts to invade and influence, and resolutely ignore them when they are safely on the outside. John C. Wright explains how they, and a panoply of other evils, will be defeated:

I submit that victory shall be ours by using the same methods we used to overthrow the Roman Empire and replace paganism with Christianity.

First, we must pray. We must live differently from the pagans around us, according to standards of higher discipline, displaying more fidelity in marriage, eschewing divorce, assisting the poor and downtrodden, and living lives so holy that even the devils are amazed.

Second, by being willing to suffer public scorn, loss of prestige, position, and fortune for Christ.

Third, by being open, vocal, coordinated, and relentless in our efforts. Fourth, by staying on message and never giving an inch.

Fifth and last, by showing the imagination of man that no one can live in the craven airless cesspool of the mental environment of political correctness, but that men flourish and grow strong and brave, not to mention more sexually appealing, in the walled gardens of the Church and the battlefields of life.

Stay on message. Never give an inch. Stop trying to play moderate in the hopes that you’ll escape the heat. Stop trying to win them over by telling them that you’re not opposed to them when, in fact, you are. You cannot reason with the willfully insane.

Video Game Sex War

There’s a headline for you. It’s pretty obvious that the anti-game women are alarmed and in retreat when they are running to the international media for support simply because Zoe Quinn was exposed as a whore taking advantage of corruption in the world of independent game journalism:

Evil women are coming to take away your computer games. At least, that’s the message that a group of angry young men have been articulating on the internet in the past few weeks. According to them, these games – once a haven for socially awkward teenage boys – are being ruined by the monstrous regiment….

This online explosion grew from two separate, though connected, incidents. The
first was the success of a series of videos made by the blogger Anita
Sarkeesian, called Tropes vs Women, which explored the portrayal of women in
video games (generally submissive and for decoration). When she launched a
crowdfund appeal for the project in 2012, she raised $150,000 more than she
asked for, but also unleashed a vicious campaign of sustained harassment.
Hackers tried to gain access to her social media accounts and she was
bombarded with tweets and emails threatening her with rape and death. A few
weeks ago, she had to leave her home because she feared for her safety.

While this was going on, a game developer called Zoe Quinn also became the
target of abuse, when her former boyfriend posted online accusations of
infidelity: he claimed she had cheated on him with a games journalist. A few
impressionable young men decided that this was their opportunity to end
“corruption” in games journalism once and for all. They bombarded Quinn with
abuse and threats, insisting that their anger was about press ethics – she
had traded sexual favours for good reviews – rather than misogyny. It turned
out that the journalist in question had not even reviewed Quinn’s game.

While many of the men involved in these incidents are undoubtedly motivated by
sexism and sadism – there is a nasty trend on the internet to abuse women
per se – they are right about one thing: women are coming to take away their
computer games…. [A]s video games are increasingly subjected to the same cultural criticism
that is routinely applied to books, films and television programmes, their
developers are coming under pressure to change the way they portray women.
This, obviously, angers many of those who define themselves as “gamers” and
who feel threatened by the idea of such interference…. Games are growing up, whether gamers like it or not, and
testosterone-riddled male-power fantasies are bound to fall out of favour as
a result. The nerds are going to have to grow up and learn to live with the
invasion.

In other words, she’s admitting that those awful angry young men are absolutely correct. But speaking as a game designer who knows a fair percentage of the top game developers, these assertions are downright risible. I was at the offices of an extremely successful new game developer not too terribly long ago, and I would estimate around three percent of their employees were women. And in two days of discussions concerning what they were working on and what they were planning to develop in the future, there was absolutely zero mention of what might be of interest to women or female gamers. It’s just not their market, and therefore it is of no interest or concern to them.

My own game now in development, FIRST SWORD, came under some criticism from the likes of Manboobz and other petty SJWs a few months ago because I made it clear there will be no female fantasy gladiators. Historically speaking, female gladiators were the light comic relief between the real action; they were often set against midgets, for example. These complaints had no more effect on my design decisions than complaints about prostitutes had on Rockstar or complaints about scanty armor on female characters have had on every game company everywhere. But it is more than a little ironic to see that there are pinkshirts who will actually complain about the fact that I am refusing to design female slavery, in which women would be literally bought and sold as property, into a game.

The fact that there is now a large Lite Games industry in which women are the vast majority of the consumers doesn’t change what continues to appeal and sell to young men. You don’t need to tell me about the difference. After all, I designed Hot Dish for THQ, one of the more successful “casual games” played predominantly by women before Zynga rode the Facebook platform to going public. Some of the other options I came up with were a Wedding Dress game, a Bridal Party game, and a sorority-based game. I was literally years ahead of today’s pinkshirts.

But these casual girl games have as little to do with the current AAA shooters as the shooters do with the turn-based wargames that preceded them. Girl games are just another gaming genre, that’s all, and they will have as little effect on the design and development of games in other genres as has always been the case in the past. Now certainly, if someone comes up with a good mechanic in one of them that is useful in another genre, it will be copied and used. After all, Candy Crush Saga is simply a dumbed-down version of Steve Fawkner’s Puzzle Quest, thus allowing one to trace its design lineage all the way back to a turn-based wargame, Warlords, a CGW game-of-the-year which has probably been played by fewer women over the last 25 years than read this blog. But Call of Duty hasn’t changed how designers or players approach Advanced Squad Leader, and Depression Quest won’t change how they approach Call of Duty either.

The reason that the game industry is much less susceptible to the sort of pressure that Sarkeesian and Quinn are attempting to appeal is that whereas it is easy to write and publish books, it is much harder to design and develop games. And the sort of men who design and develop games are considerably less inclined to pay any attention to whatever it is that the pinkshirts are demanding today than the sort of men who used to write science fiction.

I find it all rather amusing. If the pinkshirts are already complaining about the lack of women in a fantasy gladiator game still in development, it should be downright hilarious to see their response to RIDING THE RED HORSE when it comes out in November.

But since we’re speaking of inclusiveness, this is as good a place as any to note that the Spanish (La Gravedad Mata) and Portuguese (Gravidade Mortal) versions of QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills are free today on Amazon. As is the immortal John C. Wright’s Awake in the Night.

UPDATE: Lest you doubt it, academic feminists are quite literally attempting to destroy the game industry in much the same way they have destroyed science fiction and fantasy:

Adrienne: Why do we see such tension between academics and game designers?  less of an issue with indies, but there are always some people in industry that have similar questions until industrial logic takes over later and how can we better intervene in industrial logics to disturb that process.  How can academics bridge the gap to the industry audience to help them do different work?  How can we disrupt the capitalist norms that facilitate this?

Deirdra: This is a hard, personal issue.  Getting attacked or having friends getting attacked hurts.  It’s hard not to feel personally attacked and to get to an academic spot where you take the personal out of it.

Andrew: Feels quite viscerally injured when someone like Samantha Allen is lost to the industry because the reaction to her by some gamers was so violent that it didn’t make sense to stay. Academia needs to push for more radical positions within the industry to help make things better.

If they think the reaction was violent already, they haven’t seen anything yet now that we actually know what they are up to. It is time for the game industry to declare war on academia.

Los revisores querían

If you speak Spanish and are interested in reviewing Una Estrella Brillante para Guiarlos by John C. Wright for Amazon, please shoot me an email with ESTRELLA in the subject. The translator, Emilio, explains why it made sense to use Mexican Spanish rather than theoretically more proper Spanish.

According to the royal academy of the Spanish language, the country
that speaks the most proper Spanish is Colombia. But large companies,
like Disney, use the Mexican translation for their movies or shows for
all Latin America, since it’s considered the most neutral by most Latin American countries. It’s easier to understand a translation to Mexican Spanish in Peru, Argentina, or the Dominican Republic than any of those
dialects elsewhere. So there’s an argument to be made, that if you want
it to be successful economically, it should have a Mexican translation.

Good enough for me. Emilio is also one of the guys who has expressed interest in setting up a new gaming review site, as is Caedryn, who posted the following comment yesterday:

If anyone is interested, I would really like to start a push for making and contributing to a blue gaming site. I have been putting around on making my own using blogger, but I run into a scope of just how much there is to cover in the industry for one person, and a realization of how relatively mediocre my writing ability is to carry a place on its own.

I personally have very limited experience on the blogging side of things, but I was a QA tester in college for a couple of companies and am working on a table top game independently as a hobby. So… very limited experience on that side as well past an obsessive desire to learn and dissect mechanics and writing.

I’d like a place for people who actually like games to be able to write about them without the need to feed into the industry and clickbait for revenue.

I’d personally want it to be a place for tabletop and video gaming or any other genres I may have missed that tie into such a framework. We could include gameplay/podcasts/whatever medium you’re into for providing commentary and reporting on news and events. I’d like to get a solid group of people together from the ilk to start talking about site design and structure and anyone initially interested in writing regardless of time dedication then branch out from there with requests for regular writers and so on.

If anyone is interested in writing at all or helping build the site, please send me an email at the account I’ve made for the project gammaphiedATgmail.com so I can get an email chain together to start discussion over this weekend.

This is a project that both I and Castalia House will definitely want to support. Castalia, of course, is inspired by the most famous game-related novel of all, Das Glasperlenspiel by Hermann Hesse. I don’t have time to head up the project, but would be more than pleased to help out, as I am willing contribute my old game review columns to serve as an archive of historical reviews. I’ve also been teaching a game development course at a technical institute, and I suspect some of the students might be very interested in getting involved.

In other news, one really has to respect the power of Instapundit. Last week, we put up a free novella. There were 848 downloads and it climbed to a respectable Amazon rank although I don’t recall what it was. Yesterday, Instapundit mentioned  that QUANTUM MORTIS: A MIND PROGRAMMED was a free download. It’s presently #1 in military fiction, #4 in science fiction, and #52 on Amazon.

The end of Kotaku et al

Observers are unimpressed with the gaming journalists’ hatred for their nominal audience:

Slate readers are over, declining—a dead demographic.

Why on Earth would I start a column with this thesis? There is no faster way to alienate my audience—that is, the people who pay my bills. And yet, this is exactly what writers at not one but half a dozen online gaming publications did to their audiences last week, and it points to a significant shift in the business of gaming. Gamers are not over, but gaming journalism is.

Some background: Recently, there were some egregious incidents of harassment in the gaming community, as I covered in a previous piece. The harassment story quickly spiraled into a much larger fight, clumsily dubbed #GamerGate, between an angry, mostly anonymous mass of gamers and the gaming press. The fight blew up on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, gaming sites, 4chan, and elsewhere last week. With rhetorical shrapnel flying everywhere, one ironic low was achieved when popular and resolutely positive gamer Steven Williams, aka Boogie2988, found himself simultaneously maligned as a brainwashed feminist by self-declared men’s rights activists and fat-shamed by self-declared social justice advocates. Another low was when thoughtful freelance gaming writer Jenn Frank decided to leave the field altogether after being unfairly singled out for relentless criticism.

Trying to sort through GamerGate is like sinking into quicksand, but the general tenor of the discussion has been: A fair number of gamers hate the journalists who cover them, and the journalists hate them back.

If you’ll notice, I don’t pay any attention whatsoever to all the new gaming sites and I have absolutely no idea why anyone else ever did. It is entirely obvious that none of them know anything about the history of games, and many of them are observably not very interested in games at all.

The decline of game reviews

Speaking of the declining quality of reviews, consider the implications of this superficially glowing review of McRapey’s latest book in USA TODAY: “Lock In cements the award-winning writer as one of the best in today’s sci-fi community”

That is intended as praise, but it is more correctly understood as an indictment of today’s sci-fi community. And this comment from an Amazon review made me laugh: “I was a little irked that the huge revelation in this book is basically
that computers can be hacked. I mean really? You put a computer in
someone’s brain and you are all like “Oh, that will be completely safe,
we have a ton of safeguards in place.” I think it was incredibly
ignorant (and anti-climatic) to think that no one would realize a brain
computer can be hacked just like any other type of computer. If you
have software it can be hacked.”

Wait, embedded computers can be hacked? MIND! BLOWN! I can only conclude that Mr. Scalzi’s technological genius sounds like a perfect match for the SyFy audience.

Given the rather limited enthusiasm with which Lock In has been greeted by his fans (it only has a 4.1 rating on Amazon in its first week),  I’m wondering why Tor Books has put such a big marketing blitz behind the book. I’ve heard rumors (and seen some indications myself) that they are experiencing difficulties, and certainly it isn’t a good sign that their bestsellers for the last three years have either been game tie-in novels or Orson Scott Card novels first published three decades ago.

My surmise, and at this point it is nothing more than that, is Tor Books desperately needs Scalzi to have a Larry Correia-sized hit in order to make up for all the award-winning drek it has published that hasn’t sold. Hence the outsized push, which McRapey’s book doesn’t appear to be able to support. I expect it won’t be too long before we start hearing more about this, probably in the next 6-9 months.

The usual suspects may now commence with their customary accusations of jealousy. Go ahead, my little friends, you know you want to. Go ahead and get them out of the way so the rest of us can proceed with the discussion. Anyhow, to return to the subject of game reviews, I see Breitbart has a good summary of the Quinnspiracy and #GamerGate:

The enduring effect of #GamerGate is obvious: the gaming media has destroyed its reputation and its relationship with readers, who will never again trust it on any issue beyond which power-up is most likely to get you past level 17. By blaming its readers and burying its head in the sand, the politicised bloggers who previously influenced the opinions of millions have voluntarily given up their authority to rabid, single-issue campaigners who silence criticism and sleep with journalists and peers to get ahead.

This is a subject I’ll return to in a later column: a brief history of corruption in video game journalism needs to be written. In the meantime, those of us with some critical distance from the chaos can only sit back and marvel at how wide-ranging and fundamental the damage to the indie games industry has been these last two weeks. There are now two, bitterly opposed factions in the industry. Journalists and activists, who care more about gender politics than the video games they are supposed to be reporting on, and gamers, mocked, derided and bullied… but unbowed.

Video gamers, and video game culture, will never be the same again.

That certainly sounds more than a little familiar, doesn’t it?

A female dev on the Quinn debacle

Gabriela Knight points out that the actual bias in the petty game development scene is very different than the anti-female one highlighted by the SJWs who have infiltrated the independent games media and are trying to save the near-nonexistent career of alleged indie games whore Zoe Quinn (or, apparently, Chelsea van Valkenburg):

 I’m a female indie dev. I’ve done art on about half a dozen games, one
of which was moderately successful. I’ve had varying degrees of
interaction with the journalists and developers involved in the latest
controversy du jour, as well as many others who are part of this culture
in ways that have not been publicized but are far more insidious than
Zoe Quinn sleeping with people for publicity. I was raised religious and
hold fairly conservative views politically (I feel I should declare my
biases ahead of time). This is as much personal detail as I am willing
to share. I wish I had the kind of courage to speak openly about this as
a few others have dared to, but I simply don’t…

Despite (or rather because of) all of the pontificating by left-leaning social justice types in the game industry about oppression, the easiest way for talentless hacks to break into the indie gaming industry is to associate with the sort of hipster liberal types that are getting all the publicity for their oppression. And worse yet, they get in over people with actual skills. I had a friend in college who was an amazing 3d modeler trying to break into the industry. She was turned down repeatedly and had to settle at a shitty mobile game company making cow clickers that no one cared about. Meanwhile Zoe Quinn is able to get hired by Loveshack solely because of who she knows (and sleeps with). But this isn’t about Zoe, her scandal is just a microcosm of the widespread corruption and nepotism in this industry. Another example is when the IGF allowed Fez to re-enter the competition (even though it had been there before) just because of Phil Fish’s connections to the festival organizers. These are not isolated incidents, and one need only look at the unprofessional interactions between journalists and devs on social media, at cons, and elsewhere to see that any semblance of professional barriers between these people don’t exist. It’s already apparent from their interactions that they form a very strong clique.

To be part of this scene while holding the religious and political views that I do is very difficult. I generally keep it close to my chest because the few times I’ve said even simple things like “I can’t make it to the thing on Sunday because I’m going to church” had led to all sorts of derision and mockery by other people in the industry. I shudder to imagine the blowback from their clique if I told them about how I voted yes on Prop 8. Just look at the way Doug TenNapel’s Kickstarter was lambasted by people in the industry (led by Ben Kuchera) because he dared to have a (non-liberal) political opinion. The creator of Earthworm Jim was only barely able to reach his Kickstarter goal, which was relatively modest compared to most of the others I’ve seen. This is just one example of how only those who toe the social justice line are allowed by the press and the devs’ clique. Even those who just try to keep quiet and uninvolved are often called out for not doing enough, or being a poor “ally.” To succeed in this industry you have to meet the standards of this clique, when it should be about meeting the standards of gamers. But when it’s impossible to get any publicity or work without meeting the standards of these self-fellating sycophants, that’s near impossible.

Women And Gaming

Let’s be completely honest: most women don’t play Quake III. Most of those few women like me who actually like first person shooters, grand strategy, space sims, and all those other genres that make up “core” gaming don’t care if they can play as a female protagonist, or if the girls are wearing skimpy outfits, or if you have to rescue the princess. They like the exact same things as men who like those games, and they just want good games, nothing more nothing less. And most of them feel that all this rambling on about representation is distracting from the real issue: big developers and publishers are making shitty games for mass appeal instead of the kind of awesome games we played growing up. When you distract from that to rant about what is literally imaginary misogyny you’re hurting women like me who just want good games.

Notice that it’s all the same lunacy that we’ve seen in the SFWA, only not quite as out of control because there are more barriers to entry. Quinn-van Valkenberg tends to remind one of a female John Scalzi, albeit with less talent for self-promotion. Game development is hard work and requires some logical thinking as well; it’s not just a simple case of scribbling a few short stories, sending them to a female friend who will publish them in some barely qualifying market, then calling yoursef a writer and spending the next twenty years going to cons, talking about books you’re never going to write, and relentlessly trying to push the industry leftward. The SJW problem in gaming and their tedious, decades-long crusade for More Women tends to revolve around the journalists because that’s the one area where absolutely no talent or mastery of the subject is required anymore.

I thought this comment from an interview with her ex-boyfriend was more than a little amusing:

“*IF* (that’s strong emphasis) Zoe came out and confessed about all of her wrongdoings, what do you think would happen and do you think things would change?”
See: Hugo Schwyzer.

The Rageaholic points out that the real problem isn’t that Zoe Quinn is an ambitious whore, she is merely a symptom of corruption in game journalism. The real problem is that such whoring is, apparently, a genuine career path in independent gaming, and, presumably, videogame journalism. As he correctly declares: “The term ‘videogame journalism’ is a misnomer.”

Kotaku and the Quinnspiracy

Despite having been involved with the game industry in various ways since 1992, I’ve never given a damn about Gawker media and its Kotaku site. It mostly strikes me as a sort of Gamers Lite site, more dedicated to pageviews than games, and full of the sort of “gamers” who wouldn’t know the difference between War at Sea and World in Flames. And while in some ways they are properly representative of the new breed of meaningless repetitive game with nothing but cartoon graphics that I, for one, can’t bother playing, it’s simply not the sort of site that I have ever bothered reading. I’m more interested in the latest VASSAL mod.

As for Zoe Quinn, she’s the same sort of no-talent nobody that has been getting serially promoted for simultaneously possessing a vagina while feigning an interest in games for as long as I can remember. I’m old enough that I can remember one of the early girl game pioneers, Brenda Laurel, putting her hand on my leg and expressing an inordinate amount of interest in whatever I was saying back when CGDC was still at the Santa Clara Westin, the only thing that is different now is that a) Laurel had genuine talent and b) the Johnny Wilsons and Chris Lombardis and Mike Wekslers and Terry Colemans of the gaming media had integrity.

However, with the exception of Computer Gaming World and my original game review column, (the second nationally syndicated game review column, I should note), gaming journalism has always been more or less corrupt. Even its better magazines, such as Game Informer, began as marketing vehicles. Unlike most game reviewers, I never accepted anything except games for review from anyone, certainly not sexual favors, and I never gave any game a favorable review that didn’t fully merit it. That’s why I was the only game developer permitted to do reviews in CGW.

However, Quinn and her foolish supporters are going to learn, as Nixon did, that the coverup is worse than the crime. Not that I would have been inclined to take her seriously anyhow, but whatever credibility she had with those less experienced than I am will be shot by now. Certainly Gamer Headlines seems unimpressed.

Speculation turned to accusation yesterday, when Zoe’s ex-boyfriend make a post on his own blog, accusing her (with proof) of cheating with a number of prominent industry figures. Among them was current Kotaku writer Nathan Grayson, apparently solicitating sexual favours for positive press.

Pretty simple, right? The developer in question loses credibility, along with the gaming publication that allowed such a massive breach of professionalism occur. Except the rabbit hole has been going further than that. Not only has she been swapping blow for positive press, but also leveraging her sexual connections to stamp out anybody critical of her, most notably the organisers of ‘Women’s Game Jam’, who accuse the indie developer of encouraging a press blackout on the charity Jam to promote her own similar event.

Seriously, who are these nobodies? Some guy whose one game sold 200k copies and a woman who begs for money to make videos complaining about games are supposedly figures of note?