Tag: games

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?

I was wrong

I said it would take 24 hours for any indisputably factual information added to the Wikipedia page about me to be removed by Wikipedia’s political commissars. It actually took all of 26 hours and 21 minutes to have my views on economics and the fact of Psykosonik’s four Billboard-charting club hits to be removed by one Hullaballoo Wolfowitz, who is the self-appointed left-wing policeman determined to keep the page as negative and fact-free as possible.

That being said, I can see that those who were trying to edit the page and make it more factual made several errors that the more experienced Wikipedia editor utilized to his advantage. For example, the citation of the four Billboard hits was not changed from the original citation that mentioned only two, thereby permitting Hullaballoo Wolfowitz the excuse to claim that the information was false and needed to be reverted.

When playing the Game of Wikipedia, one cannot merely add the information on a contested site, one must also support every single statement with a correct citation. Moreover, the editors missed the opportunity to strip out all of the nominally negative “facts” that are based on the “unreliable source” of this blog, such as this:

Beale is opposed to feminism[22] and female suffrage, writing that “I consider women’s rights to be a disease that should be eradicated.”[23]

Always look at the citations. If it’s this blog or WND, you can “unreliable source” it and strip it out.

UPDATE: In case you truly didn’t believe John Scalzi thinks like a girl:

John Scalzi @scalzi
The hilarious irony of someone who goes out of his way to try to
irritate me complaining that he’s best known for trying to irritate me.

John Scalzi @scalzi
Pro tip: If you’re best known for annoying people, you only have your own life choices to blame.

Translation: There is one Wikipedia editor gatekeeping the page about me. There is another Wikipedia editor gatekeeping the page about him. Therefore, the narrative controlled by all of two people defines reality. It would be amusing that John thinks a three-time nationally syndicated columnist and founder of a four-time Billboard charting band is chiefly known for annoying him, if it weren’t for the fact that he doesn’t believe that at all. It’s just his usual passive-aggressive snark.

This demonstrates the essence of the Gamma delusion. So long as you can convince just one other person of your version reality, it must be real. The fact is that I’ve already passed up the blog that he once claimed was his legacy. Everything else in due time.

New frontiers in gaming

I await with amused interest the avalanche of articles declaring the pressing need for acceptance of homosexual incest in the game industry and the declaration that there is no place in the industry for the legendary Mr. Miyamoto.

Meanwhile, at Bioware, some poor disturbed gentleman wearing a dress is thinking, “incestuous homosexuality, how did we ever neglect to include that character option in Dragon Age? But maybe we could work it into the plot for the next Mass Effect!”

The legend confirmed

Atari’s legendary ET dump in the desert has been found:

A decades-old urban legend was put to rest Saturday when workers for a documentary film production company recovered “E.T.” Atari game cartridges from a heap of garbage buried deep in the New Mexico desert.

The “Atari grave” was, until that moment, a highly debated tale among gaming enthusiasts and other self-described geeks for 30 years. The story claimed that in its death throes, the video game company sent about a dozen truckloads of cartridges of what many call the worst video game ever to be forever hidden in a concrete-covered landfill in southeastern New Mexico.

The search for the cartridges of a game that contributed to the demise of Atari will be featured in an upcoming documentary about the biggest video game company of the early ’80s.

I’m of two minds about this discovery. While I’m glad to know the dump was real, (which I always assumed to be the case), I would have preferred for the cartridges to be left for far future generations to discover, just so their archeologists could come up with the usual cockamamie theories about the items they are uncovering.

One of the more amusingly wry gems of The Hermetic Millennia is when the ur-history of the Witches is mentioned in passing:

Mickey turned and turned again, and drew a large circle on the snowy ground with his staff. “Here is my circle of Power! Within it, all who walk tread lightly on their Mother Earth, leaving no trace when they die; and all goods are held in common; and all class-enemies, all enmities, inequalities, and patriarchy must be left outside, and cannot pass my ninefold wards! I call upon Jadis and Jahi, Phoebe and Prudence, Sabrina and Samantha, Willow and Wendy, to watch the sacred bounds!”

Menelaus went up to him, stepping into the circle, and said softly, “Uh. You do know all those people watching your sacred bounds are, um, made up from kiddie pixies and texts and toons, right? Make-believe?”

Mickey drew himself upright, which thrust his belly out even farther, and the scowl on his face was like a line drawn in a pie pan filled with raw dough. “Many records survived from the Days of Fire—the Final Archive listed nine hundred thousand references to the beloved Witch Hermione alone, not to mention Gillian Holroyd and Glinda the Good! Would you have us believe that the ancients devoted so much emphasis, effort, and attention to what they knew to be merely idle fictions?! Next you will claim that the warlocks Klingsor and Castaneda are unreal!”

There can be little doubt that the development of the novel during the present period of civilization is going to seriously screw up future historians if Man ever passes through another post-literate period. Which, based on the present trends, looks increasingly likely.

The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again

In light of John C. Wright’s Unified Field Theory of Madness, perhaps we need an addendum to explain the Contrapuntal Certainty of Left-Wing Social Policies:

From Grand Theft Auto V to Saints Row 2 and Fight Night, many games let players choose between characters of different races. However, researchers have found that when white people play as black characters in video games classified as violent, the players were more threatening, offensive and racist in real life. Scientists described the findings as ‘disturbing’ because it is the first time the race of a computer alter ego, or avatar, has been linked to this change in behaviour.

There may be a third certainty beyond death and taxes, and that is the tendency of every left-wing social policy to deliver consequences that are the EXACT OPPOSITE of those expected and predicted. We have seen tax hikes that raise less money, we have seen a War on Poverty that increased the number of the poor, we have seen how multiculturalism increases social divisiveness, and now we are seeing that the proposed solution to supposed racism in video games actually increases racism in real life.

This should have interesting ramifications for the women who are incessantly crying for more female protagonists in video games in order to encourage more female involvement; at this point, one wouldn’t be surprised if that ended up leading to the development of online prostitution through video gaming networks.

How Coleco scored Donkey Kong

I ran across this interview with the driving force behind the Colecovision and found it to be fascinating. It seems incredible to think you could once get the rights to great arcade games like Zaxxon and Turbo for $5,000.

Bromley knew this title – which was hitherto unknown in the West – could be the game to propel his console into the public consciousness. He also knew he had to act fast. “A meeting was arranged for the next day,” he reveals. “I said I wanted the rights to Donkey Kong. I didn’t want Atari to find out about this game. After a lengthy conversation Makihara-san told me Yamauchi-san wanted $200,000 advance and $2.00 per unit royalty. It was around 10:00AM and Yamauchi-san knew that I needed to catch my train, so then he added the kicker: the US$ 200,000 must be wired to his account by 12:00 midnight, or there was no deal.”

The odds were most certainly against Bromley. “The most Coleco had ever paid for an advance for any license up to then was $5,000,” he says. ”Also, they never, ever paid more than 5% of their selling price; the worst case would be about 90 cents. Now because of the need to wire the money before 12:00AM Tokyo time, I needed to take the next available train. I would have to call as soon as I got back to my hotel in Tokyo which would be in the afternoon and therefore wake up Arnold Greenberg in the US, the only one who could authorise an immediate wire transfer. I was to call him at home, wake him up, and then ask him to wire $200,000 for a game he has never seen or heard of. If that wasn’t bad enough, he then has to agree to more than twice the usual royalty amount!”

Bromley stayed firm, spurred on by the fact that he knew that Donkey Kong would be a smash-hit once western gamers laid eyes on it. “Upon my return to Tokyo, I called Arnold Greenberg from my room – I was shaking a little,” he admits. “It was about 4:00 AM in the morning and I got: ‘Whaaaaa? Do you know what time it is?’ I referred him to a conversation we had days before with marketing and sales; we all agreed we needed a really spectacular game to bundle with the ColecoVision console to create an impact. I then told him of the conditions: $200,000 advance and the $2.00 per unit royalty. I said: ‘I have found that game.’ To my surprise all he said: ‘is it really that good?’ I told him that it was as good as Pac-Man. He asked what it was called and I uttered ‘Donkey Kong.’ Silence. For the first time I realized how silly the name sounded. What seemed like an hour later he said: ‘OK. Let’s do it,’ and said he would wire over the money as soon as the banks opened that day.”

It’s also an important lesson in what passes for Japanese business ethics. I had to laugh upon reading it, having run into similar issues with both Konami and Sega in the past. Fortunately, having studied in Tokyo, I was more prepared for them than Mr. Bromley was, although it’s hard to argue with how well it worked out for him. What a pity Coleco didn’t tough it out the way Nintendo did; the industry would have been the better for it.

Pink SF/F invades gaming

Not content with having all but destroyed SF/F, the ever-restless Pink Horde is now laying siege to the video game industry:

BioWare Montreal’s gameplay designer Manveer Heir received a standing ovation for his rousing “Misogyny, Racism and Homophobia: Where Do Video Games Stand?” talk at GDC yesterday. He challenged the industry to demolish the many stereotypes that exist in video games and accept “a social responsibility to mankind”.

“These negative stereotypes affect the identity of individuals in these groups. They affect the way people think and treat others in the real world, and perpetuate the social injustices that occur in these different groups,” he said, according to Polygon.

“We should use the ability of our medium to show players the issues first-hand, or give them a unique understanding of the issues and complexities by crafting game mechanics along with narrative components that result in dynamics of play that create meaning for the player in ways that other media isn’t capable of.”
femshep

He says it’s “very cynical” to assume the audience isn’t capable of embracing a gay hero or heroine, or “more exclusive women protagonists in games that aren’t glorified sex objects and actually have personalities beyond supporting the men in the game”, GamesIndustry International’s report added.

Realism arguments – ie that women weren’t soldiers in medieval times, for example – are “laughable” excuses, he said. Dragons didn’t exist either.

‘But the audience doesn’t respond as well to heroes who aren’t white males!’ – ie those games sell fewer copies. Hogwash, he argued. Those untypical games simply don’t have the investment the typical blockbusters do.

I’m not sure what is more astonishing, how the rabbits all follow the exact same script every time and pretend that it is somehow going to magically play out differently this time, or the fact that a fair number of idiots are going to buy into the insane argument. After all, what young male game aficionado doesn’t want to sign up to be lectured to when he sits down to commit mayhem on some innocent orcs or aliens?

This is only one of the many reasons I quit going to CGDC after it became GDC. Social responsibility? Fuck that. Games concern electronic entertainment, nothing more and nothing less.

And notice that all of Heir’s “arguments” are nothing but mere assertions, devoid of any evidence or even logic. It shows his complete divorce from sanity when he claims that basic historical reality is “laughable”. And speaking as one who has been involved in the financial analysis of more than 200 games, “investment” is not the sole determinant of a successful game; many a million-seller has been developed on a relative shoestring. Heir doesn’t understand that since dragons don’t exist, one can do what one wants with them. But taking a woman and making her a kickass ninja warrior necessarily means that she ceases to be a woman in any meaningful or recognizable manner, she becomes a man with cosmetic female attributes.

This has become clear to me after reading two David Weber novels. In his attempt to be sexually egalitarian, he has essentially removed all actual women from his books. There isn’t a single female character whose sex one could not change to male and have the change go almost completely unnoticed in terms of “her” behavior.

Why we don’t put girls in games

Yet another clueless wonder is yapping about the absence of the unnecessary from video games:

There is a point to including playable female characters in games. I’m aware that most of the people likely to comment on this article (go ahead and bleat about misandry, you worms; I’ll enjoy a tasty cup of your male tears) don’t see that, but I’m also aware that the vast majority of people who read this article do see it, and won’t bother to leave a comment because what I’m saying in this editorial seems sensible, practical, and non-controversial. Such is the way of the Internet. So I’m not going to bother writing out a lengthy justification of why we genuinely need female characters in video games for the good of the industry financially and artistically; if you honestly can’t understand it, go forth and educate yourself. If you feel that gaming is the one thing remaining to men and girls should stop spoiling it with political correctness, then please go boil your head because I see no point in debating with people incapable of basic logic and lacking humanity.

Having taken it as fact that there is a point to including female characters in video games, why on earth are we still hearing excuses for their absence in 2014? Because it is an excuse. There is no reason not to do it. You won’t alienate your existing market by acknowledging the existence of women. You won’t take anything away from your existing market.

I am a game designer. I am designing and producing a game that does not, and will not, have a single female character in it. This is not because I am misogynistic. This is not because I do not women to play the game. This is because putting women in the game makes no sense, violates the principle of the suspension of disbelief, and will not make the game any better as a game.

I am the lead designer of First Sword, a combat management game. The game has orcs and men, elves and dwarves. It has goblins and trolls. But it has no women.

Why not? Because the game is a gladiator game. Women cannot credibly fight as gladiators. We don’t put women in the game for the same reason we don’t put bunny rabbits or children in the game. Putting women in the game would be an act of brutal sadism, an act of barbarism even by pagan Roman standards. While the Romans did occasionally put female gladiators in the arena, they were there as a comedic act. They were occasionally matched against midgets, which the Romans apparently found hilarious.

We could, of course, throw out historical verisimilitude. But we’re not going to. Because we value that verisimilitude far more than we value the opinion of a few whiny women who don’t play the sort of games we make anyhow. And when we design a game with a particular female market in mind, we don’t worry about hurting the feelings of men who we know have no interest in that sort of game.

But the woman is right. There is no point in debating. We’re not interested in debating her. We’re not interested in listening to her. As it happens, we couldn’t possibly care less what she thinks one way or the other.