The International Committee of the Red Cross have called for video games to punish crimes committed in battle by adhering to real-life international war conventions.
“The ICRC believes there is a place for international humanitarian law (the law of armed conflict) in video games,” the organization that works worldwide to provide humanitarian help for people caught in war zones said in a statement on their website. “The ICRC is concerned that certain game scenarios could lead to a trivialization of serious violations of the law of armed conflict,” they added. “The fear is that eventually such illegal acts will be perceived as acceptable behavior.”[…]
Bernard Barrett, a spokesman for the organization said they were not trying to censor games or spoil people’s fun, but rather, “make clear that there are rules in battle and that certain acts are illegal.”
I can’t imagine I’m the first game designer to read this and think, “hmmm, what if the Red Cross was taken over by liberal fascists and started behaving like liberal fascists usually do….”
GTAV is a sensational video game and a marvellous feat of technical engineering. However, as always with Grand Theft Auto, controversy has not been far behind the adulation.
The series penchant for carnage and violence is well known, as you may expect from an “open-world” game about criminality that gives players carte blanche to cause havoc in its facsimile of the United States. Set in Los Santos, a twisted vision of Los Angeles, V is Grand Theft Auto at its most barbaric; torture, cannibalism and murder featuring in its nihilistic milieu.
There has also been much discussion about how GTAV treats women. That GTAV is misogynistic is a defensible position. Women in the game are either bit-part players or set dressing: strippers to throw money at, prostitutes to pick up.
There are three lead characters that players can control in the game: all male. The women characters are often leered at or cast as nags. One of the player characters daughters has “skank” tattooed across her back, one mission has you chaperoning a paparazzo as he tries to photograph an aging actress’s “low-hanging muff.”
At one stage during my play-through of the game, I had a barrage of these aspects which made me feel deeply uncomfortable. I commented to a friend that I was concerned about the treatment of women within the game, that there were few female characters drawn with any depth and that it felt a deliberate decision to avoid an attempt to do so.
I was the first second nationally syndicated game reviewer, and it is a little sad to see how grotesquely standards have fallen since I ended my game review column. There are two ridiculous points here as well as a remarkable failure of observation.
Torture, cannibalism, murder, and nihilism all get a pass. But the treatment of women, well, that makes gamma boy feel uncomfortable.
The game has earned over $1 billion already and received a 98/100 critical reception. It is one of the most successful, best-reviewed games in the history of the game industry. Does the reviewer think that removing one of the GTA’s most well-known attributes is actually going to improve either its sales or its critical reviews?
The reviewer fails to observe that the deliberate attempt to draw female characters with any depth is done so because that it precisely what its young male audience wants. They are sick of women relentlessly trying to control them. They are sick of women drugging them and punishing them because they don’t behave like little girls. And GTA V, like its predecessors, allows them to escape a ruthlessly feminized world in favor of one that, if nothing else, allows them to behave in an unapologetically masculine manner.
The success of GTA V is because it is misogynistic. It is what games are supposed to be: it is escapist. The Telegraph reviewer writes: “Games will not be able to take its much coveted place in mainstream culture while these type of people get to dictate anything. Good riddance to them when they are finally cast off.”
And the day that happens, the game industry will begin to die. Instead of great games like Doom and World of Warcraft and GTA 5, it will be Spamville, and Mafia Clicks, and Words with Friends, and 50 Shades of Necrobestial Rape Fantasy until the industry collapses amidst general bewilderment. If the McRapies ever replace the likes of Rockstar and Romero and me in the way that this guy has succeeded me in the mainstream media, (and McRapey has been trying to establish himself in the game industry), that’s exactly what you’re going to get.
Development is proceeding apace on First Sword, as we’ve now got the gladiatorial schools operational in a rudimentary manner, which means that the various gladiator statistics and portraits are now accessible in the game. InSelenoth, orcs are even more fearsome in the arena than they are on the battlefield, because the superior human unit discipline can usually be relied upon to carry the Amorran and Savondese forces through to victory can no longer be utilized to compensate for the greater size, strength, and sheer aggression of the orcs.
And in the arena, there is no ranged combat, which means the human gladiator isn’t merely concerned with the threat posed by swords, axes, daggers, and warhammers, but has to deal with the very real threat of having his face literally bitten off by his opponent. Not all ludi are willing to feature orcs, as in addition to them being nearly as dangerous in training as they are in the actual arena, the spectators tend to be harsh on defeated orcs and it is the rare orc indeed who is granted missio by the favor of the crowd.
But for the stable owner who is brave enough to accept the risks, the rewards can be significant indeed.
Two days ago, I referenced one of our previous game innovations in discussing the latest one, which naturally inspired the sort of individual who firmly believes their ideological opponents cannot possibly have ever accomplished anything of note to leap in with his ignorant version of events:
Vox: It will probably surprise no one to discover that the primary response of the forward-thinking futurists was to declare their opinion that First Sword was unlikely to sell enough ebooks to matter one way or the other, as if the universal adoption of 3D hardware texture-mapped acceleration that Big Chilly and I introduced in Rebel Moon, and the 16-bit color we introduced in Rebel Moon Rising, had anything at all to do with how many copies of those games were sold.
Obvious: It’s really too bad that the game POD had full MMX support and was released a full six months before Rebel Moon Rising.
First of all, if one was to go by the publicly available information from IGN and GameSpy – which is wrong, by the way – one would learn that RMR was released by GT Interactive on December 22, 1996, which is obviously before POD was released by UbiSoft on February 28, 1997. But the fact is that both games were actually released together for the first time on the same CD by Intel on January 8, 1997. However, the following YouTube video should make it clear that not only were both of us incorrect, the entire MMX-related discussion is irrelevant as I’d forgotten that Big Chilly and I actually introduced both 16-bit color and dynamic lighting in Rebel Moon, which was released as part of the original VL bus 3D Blaster package back in November 1995.
I don’t know what possesses these people with the desperate need to denigrate everything I do, but history tends to render their efforts pointless. I have little doubt that if in-game digital sales are successful and become standard in the industry, the anklebiters of tomorrow will do their best to deny that I had anything to do with it, let alone came up with the concept. Anyhow, this sort of thing suffices to indicate how the Left’s revisionist instincts penetrate even to the pettiest micro level.
I was wondering how I’d managed to forget that we had the advanced lighting model in our first game, and I realized that I tend to think of the dynamic lighting in terms of the laser effects. The colored lighting is so much more effective when the lasers light up the corridors as they fly back and forth, that since the first one was lacking that particular application of it, I assumed that we’d been still using the same 8-bit palette that everyone else had been until then.
One bit of trivia that might be interesting; we were also the very first to discover the reason for the huge gap between expectations for MMX and the disappointing results. And by very first, I mean that I was the one who had to call Intel and give the guy managing the project the bad news. We couldn’t figure out why the game was running at about one-quarter the Intel-estimated frame rates when Big Chilly decided to simplify things as much as possible and simply blit a black rectangle.
I still remember his eyes narrowing in suspicion as he stared at the results, pointed to them, and said, “now why does that number look familiar?” It was because it was precisely the same as the speed limit of the PCI bus. It quickly became clear that Intel had produced a very fast CPU capable of processing graphics at four times the rate that the communications bus on the graphics card could accomodate them. This had a huge effect on everything, because it meant that we couldn’t use the higher resolutions for which we’d been creating the art, but had to back it all down to the same resolution we’d used previously with the Creative Labs card.
The game still looked pretty enough and got a decent review from CGW, but it wasn’t anywhere nearly as graphically beautiful as it should have been, even considering that it was a 2.5D game.
And that wasn’t our only contribution to the MMX project. I was also responsible for killing what was intended as Intel’s original marketing slogan for it: “On the ‘Net/Off the ‘Net”. But that is a story for another time. And on a tangentially related note that no one but Big Chilly will grasp the connection, SWEET BILLY GATES but the insanity of certain console makers truly knows no bounds.
“The new Oddworld game New ‘n’ Tasty is coming to every platform in the current generation and even the next generation but not the Xbox One. It’s not that developer Oddworld Inhabitants isn’t porting the game. It’s not that they hate Microsoft or the Xbox One. No, it’s that Microsoft has taken an anti-indie dev stance with the Xbox One. While the game industry is moving to Kickstarter and self-funded shops, Microsoft has decided all developers must have a publisher to grace their console.”
This Xbox One launch is reminding me more and more of the Sega Dreamcast.
This seems as good a time as any to announce the forthcoming release of First Sword, the first combat management game. Digital Book World was particularly interested in one of the innovations the game is introducing:
For publishers looking to diversify their ebook sales channels, here’s an idea: selling ebooks through in-game stores. Alpenwolf, a small, international game-development firm is going to test this idea with a game it releases in November this year, First Sword. The game is a “commentary-based management game,” according to one of its developers, Theo Beale, who is also an author, musician, former game reviewer and game journalist.
I find it rather amusing that despite all of the frequent efforts to “out” me, no one ever figured out one of my alternate pseudonyms despite my use of it in one of the game industry’s leading publications for my monthly column there. I mean, surely you never imagined that Vox Day would be the only one I use…. Anyhow, for those who are interested, here is another screen shot of First Sword in action.
This is a pre-Alpha screenshot of a combat between two equally matched fighters. There are about 5,000 messages in the commentary system, more than 10x more than the leading game of this type, which allows for a wide variety of complicated narratives in describing the various arena battles. In this particular screenshot, the stipex, Honorius, has just managed to score a reasonably damaging hit on Trebonius, the hoplomachus.
First Sword is a free-to-play game available for Android, iOS, Blackberry, Facebook, and web-based browser in November, 2013. In directly related news, I will soon be posting a call for authors interested in selling ebooks of all lengths through the in-game retail medium described in the linked article.
Have you ever met the group at Game Informer? I could ask many questions, like how y’all mixed (as they come across as SWPL in their mag) but not really that important and probably boring anyhow.
We got along exceedingly well. Paul was Big Chilly’s younger brother’s best friend, so I used to see him all the time at Big Chilly’s house when we were in high school. Andy and Paul usually came to our parties at the Digital Ghetto, and I still have pictures of me at one of Andy’s band concerts. Big Chilly and I didn’t actually mix with them all that much professionally, however, since they were console and we were PC. I don’t think they ever wrote about our stuff, whereas CGW did, although they knew all about it and sometimes played the pre-alpha stuff when they were over.
In all the years I knew them, and hung out with them, I can’t remember once ever discussing anything political with either Andy or Paul. We talked about games, music, girls, and botany projects, but never politics. I suppose we all had too much in common.
If I recall correctly, Andy made some noises about me writing for GI ages and ages ago, but since I was in the St. Paul Paper and nationally syndicated in my own right as a game reviewer at the time, it wasn’t something that ever interested me. To be honest, we tended to think of their magazine as a cool little thing, but not a truly big deal like CGW or Electronic Entertainment. I wasn’t always clear on how it was different than, say, Nintendo Power. I remember it being really, really, thin, actually, since it was put out by a game rental operation or something like that.
It’s amusing that Andy is a bigger deal in the industry than any of us now, although Micron is doing well as the audio director at Epic. I’m absolutely pleased for Andy. He did a remarkable job in building up that magazine from almost nothing and he’s one of the few people about whom I have literally nothing negative to say. I mean, quite literally, nothing.
Paul was a very funny guy in a quiet way. The kind of guy who would say something with a totally straight face and you’d suddenly start laughing a few moments later when you realized what he’d said. He was also astonishingly good-looking and somewhat embarrassed by it. A funny story about him: Joel West, the Calvin Klein model, was a friendly acquaintance of mine and accompanied me to the Game Informer offices one day. After meeting Paul, Joel told him he could have a lucrative career in modeling and should consider coming to New York with Joel to meet with Calvin Klein.
Paul just looked at him as if he was completely and utterly insane. He didn’t even say anything, he just snorted and shook his head. Joel didn’t try to argue with him, Paul was clearly no more inclined to pursue a career in underwear modeling than one in infant cannibalism. His ALS and death at 38 was just ridiculously tragic and unfair.
The fourth image is the one I find most amusing. Unless you play ASL, you can’t truly appreciate the level of awe with which ASL players are regarded in the wargaming community, or understand the suspicions which other gamers tend to harbor concerning wargamers. On the one hand, the ability and commitment required to master a game of its encyclopedic complexity is, quite rightly, deemed impressive, bordering on insanity. On the other, there is an idea that the average ASLer is just a little bit too enthusiastic about those 8-3-8 assault troops, especially if he happens to have sprung for those cool black counters provided by Heat of Battle. For some reason, people who grasp that playing WoW doesn’t make you an elf don’t always seem to understand that playing the role of a German tactician doesn’t make you a Nazi.
I tend to find it more than a little amusing that the only site from which I’ve ever been banned was the wargame site ConSimWorld, when, in response to a discussion about the “right-wing” Nazis, I posted the complete text of the Munich Manifesto.
But I was rather proud of Ender this morning. When I showed him the latest version of the forthcoming Selenoth-based game, he immediately identified the 1981 Avalon Hill game from which I’d taken the basic hit-damage mechanism.
What are the chances of any quality games actually coming out of a Lucas-Disney-EA alliance? One in fifty quadrillion against? One in an Oom Quatbog shreksillion against?
Electronic Arts announced today it has landed an exclusive multi-year agreement to develop and publish games based on Lucasfilms’ Star Wars universe. EA said the it will create and publish Star Wars games for a ‘core gaming audience’ across ‘all popular platforms’ and genres. The EA studios creating those ‘core’ Star Wars games are Battlefield developer DICE, Dead Space developer Visceral Games and Mass Effect house BioWare.
The developers sound all right, more than all right, actually, but that doesn’t mean these EA games are going to be seeing the A-teams from those developers. In fact, given the way that the top dogs often move onto new projects after designing and/or developing their big hit, I would be surprised if the projects were even seeing B-teams assigned to them.
1. The Wardog’s Coin is finished. Marcher Lord is presently giving it the editorial polishing and then the novelette will be published in accompaniment with its B-side, Qalabi Dawn. With nearly 30k words between the two of them; it should be on Amazon for $1.99 before the end of the month. As with AMB, I’ll be sending out the ebook to those who have promised to review it; if you’re interested, send me an email with TWC in the subject and specify if you prefer epub or mobi format. The title novelette is about a Savondese mercenary who finds himself, and his mercenary company, drawn into the service of the elven king of Merithaim courtesy of an insufficiently researched contract. It is set in Selenoth and introduces a new perspective character who will be appearing in TAODAL: Book Two.
2. A Selenoth-based game will be coming out for mobile platforms towards the end of this year, such as Android and iOS. I won’t say anything more about it now, except that it’s going to be a very different sort of game than anyone is likely to anticipate, and it is going to contain one or two innovations that I expect to be of interest to various people outside of the game industry proper.
3. While Summa Elvetica was a failure in a way that the much less ambitious A Throne of Bones was not, I’m still pleased to learn that SE has its fans who are not put off by its unconventional approach to story-telling. Seeking the New Earth has posted a nice review of it:
The moment I knew that I did not merely like the novel, but loved it, comes here. I don’t want to spoil it, but I will say this: Marcus discovers evidence that leads him to write the Summa Elvetica, an official treatise on elves, for the church. And what he discovers actually made me cheer. Beale shows his mastery in showing, not telling, in that particular scene, and it lifts the rest of the novel from “pretty good” to “great.”
The conclusion of the novel nearly disappointed me. I thought Beale would go the hackneyed route of, “The church is shown the truth but chooses to ignore it.” Ah, but he has another trick up his sleeve to bring this story to a satisfying conclusion.
Oh! The story ended, but there’s almost a hundred pages left?
Beale actually wrote the Summa Elvetica. He wrote a treatise in the style of the medieval church. It’s included as an appendix. OK, that’s neat and all, but how many of us read medieval religious treatises?
Oh. It’s only a few pages. What else?
Beale includes two short stories set within the world of Summa Elvetica that shine more brightly than the novel. Honestly, the book’s worth the price of admission for either of these two stories. I’m delighted they’re included.
4. Koanic Soul has posted a review of A Throne of Bones, (warning: considerable spoilers) that is much more accessible and much less insane than one would ever have imagined. Frankly, I was disappointed, as I was expecting long treatises on the conjectured skull shapes and eye sockets of the various major characters. Or something like that. Based on the title of his post, it appears Koanic may have reversed the analogy below, but regardless, it’s nice to hear that TAODAR compares favorably with ASOIAF in one way or another.
My preferred form of stimulation is intellectual. Vox’s latest book, A Throne of Bones, is like a 2-day morphine high. Just buy it. If you need convincing, here my review. Vox Day is to RR Martin as a box of pastries is to a pot roast dinner. One may taste better at the beginning, but the other you wouldn’t mind eating for the rest of your life.
5. Speaking of ASOIAF, I was more than a little amused by this discussion on the Martin fan site Westeros.org, which is nominally about A Throne of Bones, but is more devoted to my various ideological and personal shortcomings by Martin fans who haven’t bothered to read the book before opining on the author. This comment about my discourse with R. Scott Bakker, in particular, made me laugh out loud:
“When you’re the condescending douche in an argument with Bakker you’re in trouble.”
Such is the burden of life as a superintelligence.One ignores at the price of being considered arrogant. One explains at the price of being deemed condescending.
