Tag: games

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?

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.