Tag: media

Interview with a legend

Johnny Wilson, the former editor-in-chief of Computer Gaming World, is one of my all-time favorite people in the game industry and one of the individuals I most respect on the planet. He’s written one very good book with Rusel DeMaria on the history of the industry, and I’m hoping to get another one out of him for Castalia House.

Like a lot of the old school game industry people, Johnny is more than a one-trick pony; in addition to being a professor at DePaul University, he’s also a theologian and a pastor. The whole Gamasutra interview from 2012 is fascinating, but in light of #GamerGate, I found these two answers to be particularly prescient.

Was there any moment that made you realize game journalism had finally reached the main stream?

Considering the shoddy state of mainstream journalism today (even some once-great newspapers are pure sell-outs), I guess we reached that bottom rung level a long time ago. I know that when I was editor, I had definite ideals of serving the reader, avoiding conflict-of-interest, and getting behind the corporate facades and into the real stories. The truth is that I don’t know of any modern publications—analog or digital—that have those ideals.

Do you think game reviews with percentages and stars somehow cheapened game journalism?

No, I think the desire to get the “first” coverage cheapened game journalism. In the pen and paper world, we used to talk about “shrink-wrap” reviews. I know that some of the early pioneers in the hobby game magazines would talk about popping the shrink-wrap, looking at the components, reading the rules, and writing the review without even pushing pieces around. My feeling was that European publications, because they had a more competitive environment (and efficient distribution system), rushed reviews to press. That doesn’t really serve the reader at all.

My argument with, for example, PC Gamer’s percentage system wasn’t that they used percentages, it was that an astute reader would notice that the magazine (at least, during the Gary Witta era) always had some sacrificial lamb of a product that they rated in low percentage ratings. But, if you looked at those games, a lot of them were never released in the U.S. and certainly weren’t advertisers in that publication. At CGW, we didn’t have enough editorial space to deal with games that weren’t going to be released in the U.S. So, we wouldn’t even have touched those games. On the other hand, there were times that lousy games we might have been tempted to ignore were actually advertised in our publication. If they were advertised, I felt an obligation to review them. And I had more than one advertiser yell at me that I shouldn’t treat them that way after what they had spent. I shrugged my shoulders on one occasion and said, “Ironically, I probably wouldn’t even have assigned the review if you weren’t trying to get my readers’ attention.”

But, did our star ratings cheapen our review work? No. If anything, the stars sharpened our efforts. The reviewers suggested a number of stars and the editor covering that genre was expected to defend that star rating in the general editorial [OK, “Star Chamber”] meeting where we debated the ratings. The meeting often required a half-day or more of heated discussions before we approved those reviews to go to press. We didn’t discuss the reviews among ourselves as much before the star ratings were implemented. To be honest, I resisted the star ratings for as long as possible. I wanted the readers to READ the reviews. But, the bottom line is that I just kept getting hammered by readers that we NEVER gave bad reviews when I thought it was clear that we gave bad reviews. I eventually realized that our readership was becoming younger and more casual and, as a result, we had to spell out what we really thought.

The world wide web was the death of game journalism. There simply isn’t any reliable metric to determine which site is really reliable and which journalists are legitimately trying to do their work and which are merely “fan boys” getting their dopamine fix by slamming people and using “tabloid” style headlines. It always makes me nervous when I read reviews on the web because I don’t feel like I can trust anyone to have played the game all the way through.

Go read the reviews from the older CGW issues sometime. The difference between the level of expertise and the depth of knowledge possessed by the writers then versus the writers of today is astonishing. The dirty little secret of the SJWs in game journalism today is that they don’t actually know very much about games, which is why they always lean towards using their nominal game reviews and articles as a platform for non-gaming issues.

I wrote for both Electronic Entertainment and Computer Gaming World, and writing for the latter was always rigorous. Chris Lombardi not only sent my first review back to me for re-writing, but rejected an article on games as the realization of the Wagnerian concept of Total Art that later appeared in a BenBella SmartPop book. The most notable thing CGW had that most modern game sites lack was integrity.

No male space goes unmolested

However, I suspect this is less about a commitment to women in technology than a cynical, Sarkeesian-style opportunistic grab for cash:

Talk about a cool dude: he once stopped a sulfuric acid leak with a piece of chocolate, and dismantled a missile using a paper clip. The 1980s US television character, secret agent Angus MacGyver, could do it all. And in 2016 his successor will be a woman, if a US engineering association has its way.

Late last month, the National Academy of Engineering launched what it called “The Next MacGyver Project,” aimed at coming up with ideas for a scripted TV series featuring a female engineer as the leading character.

Thirty years after that cult series riveted TV viewers, “the objective here is not a MacGyver reboot, but to inspire a new generation of young women interested in science and technology by creating a strong female role model,” said Lee Zlotoff, creator of MacGyver.

The project is joint initiative by Adam Smith, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, and Randy Atkins, head of communications at the National Academy of Engineering.

“After an interview with Lee Zlotoff, Adam called me and proposed that we develop a TV show, and I immediately said yes,” said Atkins.

The name — “The Next MacGyver Project” — was suggested by Zlotoff, who has supported the project from the outset.

“I cannot say how many people told me they got interested in engineering after watching MacGyver,” said Atkins. “The idea to make a female lead character comes from Hollywood producers we met during the initial phase of the project,” Atkins said.

Yes, I imagine the idea for branding it “MacGyver” would have come from Mr. Zlotoff. I’m certain his commitment to inspire a new generation of women interested in science and technology – all six of them – by creating a strong female role model has nothing to do with the fact that he hasn’t had a hit television show since MacGyver.

It’s not enough for The Next MacGyver to be a woman. She should be a
black Jewish bisexual with Down’s Syndrome in a wheelchair. Actually, that would probably be a hell of a lot more entertaining than the usual grrrl power nonsense. Done right, it would be downright hilarious. Especially if she couldn’t really talk, but sort of made these moaning Chewbacca sounds that everyone could understand perfectly.

That, I would watch. And as long as she saved the day by turning her wheelchair into a nuclear reactor or whatever, it would be perfectly inspirational and millions of young girls would be inspired to continue avoiding science and technology like the plague.

Smells like disruption

Google appears interested in presenting an opportunity to competitors:

The trustworthiness of a web page might help it rise up Google’s rankings if the search giant starts to measure quality by facts, not just links. THE internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free “news” stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness.

Google’s search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. “A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,” says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

Considering what we’ve learned about a) the lies committed by corrupt scientific researchers, b) the inferiority and corruption of the U.S. educational system, and c) the proclivity for complete fiction on the part of the U.S. news media, it’s not difficult to predict that this will be a complete debacle if Google is foolish enough to implement it. If I were a competitor to Google search, I would be on my knees praying that they would follow through on this concept in the most extreme manner possible.

You know this is most likely an SJW-driven affair, because only SJWs would be dumb enough to risk a corporation’s entire business model in the interests of their ideology. If this is simply a genuine attempt to improve their offerings, Google will introduce it as an option for those interested in it and it will either succeed or fail on the merits of the implementation. If it is an SJW attempt to drive the narrative, it will be imposed as a replacement for the link-based system and people will rapidly turn to competitors who don’t seek to impose their reality on the masses.

I tend to doubt that the ABCNNBCBS cabal will be buried deep within the “truth-based” links due to their near-complete disassociation with observable reality. But you never know. Perhaps this is Google’s stealth means of taking on the mainstream media indirectly.

#GamerGate: the last redoubt

Nero has some important observations that those in other communities attacked by the SJW Left should take to heart:

In all of the distracting, hysterical, evidence-free and unfair allegations of misogyny and bigotry hurled at supporters of GamerGate, the consumer revolt that continues to surface outrageous misconduct in the video games press, something is being forgotten.

GamerGate is remarkable—and attracts the interest of people like me—because it represents perhaps the first time in the last decade or more that a significant incursion has been made in the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators.

Industry after industry has toppled over, putting up no more of a fight than, say, France in 1940. Publishing, journalism, TV… all lie supine beneath the crowing, cackling, censorious battle-axes, male and female, of the third-wave feminist and social justice causes.

But not gamers. Lovers of video games, on seeing their colleagues unfairly hounded as misogynists, on watching journalists credulously reporting scandalous sexual assault claims just because a person was perceived to be “right-wing” and on seeing the games they love attacked and their very identities denied and ridiculed, have said: no. This will not stand.

The key, as he points out is here: “Because hard-core gaming is overwhelmingly male—don’t
believe cherry-picked statistics that tell you women now make up 50 per
cent of gamers; they don’t, in any meaningful sense—and
because those men are often of a stubborn, obsessive, hyper-competitive
and systematic bent, it has produced an army finally capable of
launching offensives against the censors—using the censors’ own tactics, such as advertiser boycotts, against them.”

Keep in mind the Four Fs of Victory. Fight, Follow, or get the F— out of the way. And if you’re a concern moderate who has “concerns” or is “worried” or thinks one tactic or another might be “counterproductive”, shut the F— up. 


As history clearly shows, you’re the one who is counterproductive.

Speak until they silence themselves

Please don’t hit them, the Washington Post begs. After all, they are just little girls.

Jessica Valenti is one of the most successful and visible feminists of her generation. As a columnist for the Guardian, her face regularly appears on the site’s front page. She has written five books, one of which was adapted into a documentary, since founding the blog Feministing.com. She gives speeches all over the country. And she tells me that, because of the nonstop harassment that feminist writers face online, if she could start over, she might prefer to be completely anonymous. “I don’t know that I would do it under my real name,” she says she tells young women who are interested in writing about feminism. It’s “not just the physical safety concerns but the emotional ramifications” of constant, round-the-clock abuse….

Once a woman is singled out by a men’s rights group such as A Voice for Men, the misogynist Reddit forum The Red Pill or even just a right-wing Twitter account like Twitchy, she is deluged with hatred. The barrage, in addition to scaring its target, serves as a warning to onlookers. Jill Filipovic, a senior political writer covering feminist issues at Cosmopolitan, says she recently tried to persuade a friend to run for office. “There’s several reasons why I wouldn’t want to do it, but one of them is that I follow you on Twitter, and I see what people say to you. I could never deal with that,” the friend told her.

Many people can’t. Last year, abortion rights activist Lauren Rankin pulled back from writing online and, for the most part, from Twitter because the threats and insults were becoming so wearying. She continues to serve on the board of the reproductive rights nonprofit A Is For and faces off against antiabortion protesters as a volunteer clinic escort, but she no longer engages publicly. “I don’t like the idea that it seems like I was scared or intimidated away from the Internet,” she says. “But I think I’ve recentered why I do what I do, in ways that I can maintain my mental sanity. Unfortunately, that really doesn’t involve the Internet as much.”

Filipovic, the former editor of the blog Feministe, says that, although her skin has thickened over the years, the daily need to brace against the online onslaught has changed her. “I doubt myself a lot more. You read enough times that you’re a terrible person and an idiot, and it’s very hard not to start believing that maybe they see something that you don’t.” She also finds it harder to let her guard down. “I have not figured out how to spend all day steeling against criticism — not just criticism, but really awful things people say to you and about you — and then go home and 30 minutes later you’re an emotionally available, normal person.”

Meanwhile, the creator of Feministe, Lauren Bruce, no longer has an online presence at all. “I had to completely cut that part off in order to live the rest of my life,” she says. “In order to work, have a nice family and feel like I was emotionally whole, I could not have one foot planted in a toxic stew.”

#GamerGate has them on the run. They can’t take the heat. What they call “harassment” and “abuse” is seldom anything more than free speech answering free speech. They have a right to speak their piece, and we have a right to speak right back. We have a right to speak back with all of the contempt, disdain, and loathing that we feel for their insane and societally suicidal ideas.

Open up your hate and let it pour over them. Don’t think for even one nanosecond that they don’t deserve it every bit of the criticism, of the contempt, of the disdainful dismissal that overwhelms them. They are trying to destroy Western civilization. They are trying to destroy marriage and civil society. They are advocates of child murder. They are advocates of a philosophy that makes National Socialism look merciful and Communism practical and Fascism coherent by comparison. Do not hold back. Speak back twice as hard. Speak back until they fall silent.

Women are particularly susceptible to shame. So shame them relentlessly. Shame those who agree with them. Mock their white knights who rush in to save them. Above all, dignify their views and voices with all the respect you would show to a particularly noxious fart in an elevator.

Deactivate Olbermann!

Hitler will be disappointed.

A day after he engaged in multiple Twitter arguments and called Penn State students “pitiful,” ESPN suspended Keith Olbermann for a week. The global sports network released a statement Tuesday announcing the news, saying Olbermann’s actions were “completely inappropriate and [do] not reflect the views of ESPN.”

So much for saving the news media from the Brian Williams crisis.

A bad joke

Steve Sailer observes an almost inexplicable slam on a great American comedian:

Hope is of real value as a chronicle of a career. For even though Bob Hope’s work is no longer capable of holding the attention of modern audiences, it is still interesting to learn the details of how he turned himself into a star and then managed to stay on top of the mass-culture heap long after most of his less-driven contemporaries had vanished from sight. But Zoglin, for all his admirable thoroughness, inexplicably fails to emphasize the central fact about Hope and his career—one that not only goes a long way toward explaining why he was so successful, but also why we no longer find him funny.

Simply: He wasn’t Jewish.

What was missing from his style? Even though Hope was a first-generation
European immigrant, there was nothing remotely ethnic about his stage
manner. He was among the few successful WASP comics of his generation,
and despite the fact that he hired such Jewish writers as Larry Gelbart
and Mel Shavelson, the jokes they penned for him lacked the sharp ironic
tang of Jewish humor that is to this day one of the essential
ingredients in American comedy.

During World War II, when Americans shared both a common culture and an
iron determination to prevail over their common enemy, such a comedian
could speak for millions of listeners from coast to coast. But that
America no longer exists, and the Americans of the 21st century demand
more from comedy than mere reassurance. That is why Bob Hope is
forgotten today, and will remain so. All he had to offer were punchlines
that no longer have punch.

As one commenter mentioned, this appears to be an attempt by the Dutch Teachout to curry favor with the inward-focused aging Jews who read Commentary and think Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce are the epitome of humor. Hope held up a hell of a lot better than either Allen or Bruce have, and Allen isn’t even dead yet. Let’s face it, the funniest thing Allen ever produced was his self-parodying, quasi-incestuous marriage.

I’ve never been able to stand what is described as “Jewish humor” myself; I disliked it long before I had any idea that the stupid sort of sex-and-toilet “humor” produced by the likes of Mel Brooks and the whiny tedium of Woody Allen had anything in common, let alone were claimed by a particular ethnic heritage. Later, I tried watching “Seinfeld” and completely failed to see what was supposed to be funny about Jerry Seinfeld whining all the time.

Joan Rivers could be amusing in small doses, but one of the main things I’ve noticed about “Jewish humor” is that it seems to have a strong tendency to beat a joke to death. “Hey, did you think that was mildly amusing? Let me repeat it three more times and that will make it HILARIOUS, right?” Well, no. That’s actually one thing I wish non-comedians would understand. If you told a little story and you found the reaction to be underwhelming, don’t repeat it. It’s not going to be any more amusing the second time.

Now, I’ve always assumed there was a great divide between those who found Monty Python amusing and those who thought Benny Hill was a riot. “Jewish humor” strikes me as being more akin to an American form of Benny Hill, as it tends to involve a lot of mugging and sexual themes.

Then again, the second-funniest comic in the world, Frankie Boyle (Simon Evans, two of whose clips are below, is the funniest in my opinion), utilizes a lot of sexual themes, although usually in a very dark way. “Watching gymnastics is just pedophilia for cowards.” But there is an enormous gap between that sort of black humor and Woody Allen whining to his therapist or Mel Brooks’s masturbating cavemen. I remember people talking about how funny Brooks’s History of the World: Part I was so I rented it one night; I don’t think I made it more than 15 minutes before ejecting the tape from the VCR in disgust. Keep in mind that this scene is supposed to be THE most HILARIOUS one from the movie. Notice, in particular, the repetition I mentioned; The very lame joke on French pronunciations is hammered home no less than TWELVE times at the very start. Yeah, that’s just fucking brilliant. Then contrast that sort of production, complete with writers, sets, and actors, with the following examples of Simon Evans utilizing nothing more than a microphone.

Of course, it’s pretty much pointless to view comedy as anything but subjective, something that is much more apparent when you live in continental Europe. German humor is freaking ghastly, it’s like black comedy without the comedy. Italian humor is bawdy and straightforward; they simply don’t recognize sarcasm at all. French humor is similar to Italian humor, although a bit more relaxed and less silly, and I haven’t figured out Spanish humor yet. It’s no surprise that English humor has such an impact on American humor; it’s not because they speak the same language, but because it’s broad-spectrum humor that is often appreciated by non-English speakers.



“I’m just a comedian goes first!” I would have loved to see Evans skewer the Jon Stewart Show, as Stewart, unlike Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, can be funny, but like Russell Brand, hides behind his comedian’s mask whenever his serious arguments fall short.

UPDATE: I found this pair of Twitter exchanges to be more personally amusing than the entire oeuvre of either comedian mentioned:

Vox Day ‏@voxday
I’m curious how anyone could have ever thought Woody Allen was amusing. The only funny thing he ever did was bang his ugly stepdaughter.

Jackie DeLister ‏@JackieDeeNJ
Yes, Annie Hall won the Oscar for no reason -_-

Vox Day ‏@voxday
So did Titanic. And it had more genuine laughs.

——–

 Vox Day ‏@voxday
And who finds Mel Brooks funny? This is said to be
the funniest scene of his funniest movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db3e8Qw9hhs … It’s BRUTALLY stupid.

Jackie DeLister ‏@JackieDeeNJ
@voxday Are you anti-Semitic?

Credentializing comments

No wonder the mainstream media fears comments. This may also explain why so many trolls consider themselves to be self-appointed blog police. Although I doubt they have much effect here:

Ionnis Kareklas, Darrel D. Muehling, and TJ Weber, all of Washington State University, found that the comments on a public-service announcement about vaccination affected readers’ attitudes as strongly as the P.S.A. itself did. When commenters were identified by their level of expertise with the subject (i.e. as doctors), their comments were more influential than the P.S.A.s.

Online readers may put a lot of stock in comments because they view commenters “as kind of similar to themselves,” said Mr. Weber — “they’re reading the same thing, commenting on the same thing.” And, he added, many readers, especially those who are less Internet-savvy, assume commenters “know something about the subject, because otherwise they wouldn’t be commenting on it.” The mere act of commenting, then, can confer an unearned aura of credibility.

That news may be especially disturbing to those already skeptical of comments’ overall quality. Dr. Kareklas and his team were inspired by Popular Science’s decision to get rid of the comments sections on its website; other publications, like Pacific Standard, have done the same. And Tauriq Moosa memorably wrote at The Guardian that the comments section “sits there like an ugly growth beneath articles, bloated and throbbing with vitriol.”

If only those nasty online peasants would shut up, stop interfering with the flow of propaganda, and recognize that communication is supposed to go one way!

The article appears to ignore the obvious fact that most sites permitting comments are communities of a sort, and commenters, being members of that community, are often familiar with the other commenters and therefore know how much stock to put in the credibility of another commenter. I put stock in a commenter for the same reason I put stock in a media site, which is to say, his past performance. Why wouldn’t one trust a known expert, with whom one is familiar, more than a public service announcement from an institution known to be corrupt?

It never gets old

Seriously, it just doesn’t. Hitler finds out about Brian Williams’s proclivity to, shall we say, exaggerate his experiences:

While the best line concerns Sofia Vergara and Kate Upton, I genuinely cracked up at the last one. Watch the whole thing. Williams is done after this. There is no way he can possibly come back from it; literally everything he says is going to be immediately transformed into parody.

The tedious Thor

It would have been vastly more entertaining had Thor come out of the closet. The Fabulous Thor! His outfit was always a little camp anyhow. Turning him into a grim transgendered feminist fighting to impose equalitarian thought control is as boring as it is offensive:

Thor a woman? It’s hard to believe the most macho, overtly masculine character in the comic canon could possibly be reimagined as a broad. But that’s almost certainly precisely the reason Thor was chosen: as a fuck-you to so-called nerdbros from the achingly progressive staff of today’s comic book establishment.

This has led to some questions from comic book fans. Questions such as: will Wonder Woman turn out to be a tranny? Is the Incredible Hulk only incredible because he endured cruel fat-shaming as a teen but didn’t let his size define him? And shouldn’t Spider-Man be a gay latino?

That last one’s not a joke, by the way: in 2011, Marvel unveiled a bisexual Spider-Man that was half-black and half-latino, called Miles Morales, to the consternation and confusion of ordinary comic book fans, as part of its Ultimate series of character reboots. We’re told “erasure,” whereby people’s pasts are scrubbed out by those in authority, is a social justice issue. Well, right now there’s erasure going in the basic, canonical biographies of some of Marvel’s most cherished superheroes.

Captain America, too, is changing: he’s becoming black. Changes like this are designed to provoke readers, and they do–not because readers are racist or sexist, but because they understand that certain characteristics are intrinsic to certain characters. James Bond and Captain America are obviously white. It is a part of their personalities. Thor is obviously a man; to suggest otherwise is daft.

What sticks in the craw of the fans I’ve spoken to about female Thor is how utterly transparent the political posturing is behind the change. There is no good literary justification for making Thor a woman, they say–and the results have been execrable. You can write intelligent satire about masculinity without making a classic masculine icon into a girl, an observation that seems to have escaped Marvel’s writers.

Of course, what all of these transformations most strongly indicate is the fact that Marvel believes women and minorities to be totally uninteresting. Not only does it highlight the fact that women and minorities can’t create their own characters, but even pro-intersectional white men can’t manage to create them in a manner that interests anyone, least of all women and minorities.

It’s exactly the same thing as a communist government taking over a capitalist society. They don’t understand how it works or why it works, they can’t create it or maintain it, but they can certainly manage to run it into the ground.

This comment from the SJWs at IGN is hilariously inapt:

“Not only do these scenes subtly acknowledge and render inert the
concerns voiced by real life detractors, but they also paint the
character in a stronger, more resilient light.”
— IGN

Subtle? The only way Marvel could have handled it any less subtly was if Thor spent the entire issue reading The Vagina Monologues with Gloria Steinhem at Wellesley.