Merus

So Super Mario 3D World is pretty neat.

One of the things I like about Twitter is that the character limit really makes it hard to fill other people's feeds with long diatribes, and if you start arguing or get angry you start running up against the character limit and have to work out how to edit down. I think I agree that 140 is too short but I wouldn't mind a social network that forced you to put a cut after a certain amount of characters.

Right, well for your purposes I'd probably steer you towards the How to Host a Murder games if you're starting from zero. The format of these is that each player (you have exactly 8) has a list of things they've discovered that they have to share, and a list of things they're trying to keep quiet, so you do kind of have to roleplay a bit. You don't have to dress up and do the accent, but you do have to play a character. Murder mystery games generally don't work if people aren't willing to participate. Most people seem to agree that a good murder mystery game has a good mystery at the heart of it; the solution should be solvable, should make sense as a thing that people do, and should be the most sensible explanation of the clues provided. It also needs to work as a game, so players should have some agency and their actions should contribute to the resolution. I'm told the best of How To Host a Murder are The Watersdown Affair, Last Train From Paris and A Matter of Faxe. The big weakness of How To Host a Murder are that they tend to be a bit long, about 4 hours. Many players don't like that the murderer doesn't need to lie through their teeth, either, but if you and your friends are starting from zero this is probably an advantage. If you really like the idea of making one of your players lie the entire night, I can do more research.

I'll give this thing a go; it's beta software so I guess things will improve (Twitter went a long time without retweet functionality). Invite please!

We Hunted The Mammoth is in my RSS feeds. Good luck to any dipshits that try and take on the commenters there; they eat the worst of the worst for breakfast.

Oh well look who finally showed up to the party.

Hah, apparently I'm in the permanent moderation queue at Rock Paper Shotgun. Guess I've been stroppy/bitched about John Walker one too many times.

Arkham Horror has nothing on Carcassonne.

Yeah, once I realised that you're talking about 'corruption' here and about labour in games in the Video Games forum, it became clearer that your position is strongly anti-capitalist and we weren't picking up on the difference in assumptions. The art vs commerce question is incredibly difficult in games, because it's always been a hobbyist medium with a capitalist streak. It's simultaneously radically participatory and aggressively commercial in ways that confound both art critics and shareholders. The biggest game in the world was made by a guy doing a hobby project and he's a multi-millionaire. CCP games made an MMO that was what they always wanted to see, and it's one of Iceland's biggest companies. CEOs of gaming companies take turns proclaiming that they're going to focus on making "great games" at the expense of profitability. Major players are routinely outclassed, and even humiliated, by hobbyists who build on their work, and this is normal and expected. Entrenched powers get blown away every five years. The games industry is fucking weird in that capital only ensures you'll break even, but market leadership can't be bought at any price - no matter how many ads you buy, it won't stop a Minecraft. I also note that games journalists obsessed for years over when a game with a strong artistic statement would gain mainstream recognition, but what ended up doing it was the industry making fuckloads of money.

Probably that the only reference point we have for humans in this art style is Henry's arms. The skinnydipping teens are too far away to be seen so we don't really know what people look like in this art style.

I think also the focus on having a deep and meaningful conversation signals that the game is going to be a little heavy-handed when it comes to player agency.

I wonder if it helps to explain patriarchy as "we both agree that this is wrong, correct? That it's got a lot of problems. So here's the question: if this is so obviously problematic, why is it normal? When exactly did we decide that we weren't going to notice this and say 'that's the way the world is'? I didn't make that decision, but someone did, and they've managed to convince everyone to go along with it."

It's imprecise to use 'systemic corruption' to describe a highly commercialised industry in which the major corporations use every avenue available to attempt to influence thought leaders. A corrupt industry is one that suspends its ethical standards for money, not one in which there are holes in their ethical standards that haven't yet been patched. Honestly I also think that the worst-case scenario here isn't particularly worth worrying about: at worst, game journalism is a third-party advertisement of commercial products, and consumers will have to rely on product reviews to determine whether that product is any good -- just like most other kinds of products. The artistic standards of the industry would definitely decrease, but people don't seem to be referring to cultural critics like Brandon Keogh or Anita Sarkeesian when they talk about corruption, they mean sites like Gamespot or IGN. So the cultural critics, who make the most difference in discussing non-commercial games and the artistic side of the medium, probably won't go away.

That's not quite what I'm driving at. What I'm saying is that an unbiased reviewer would necessarily assume that games, like any other work, have to prove themselves worth writing about. To pluck an example out of thin air, let's take Alien: Isolation. No-one knows if it'll be any good. It's an adaptation of a property that has a very spotty history, it's not doing anything mechanically unique, and it's not timely because it's not out yet. If it is bad, its impact on the world will be, probably, non-existent. A game that no-one will remember in a year is not news. An unbiased journalist would conclude that it's not yet worth a story, not until either something actually newsworthy happens, in the same way that an official set visit of Guardians of the Galaxy to get a feel for whether the movie will be any good when it comes out is not actually newsworthy. However, the audience is there and they don't want news or journalism. They want deets about the product they are emotionally invested in, to stoke their anticipation. The moneymen would very much to stoke that fire because it means ad spend during the crucial opening weeks will be more effective and have to do less work. Both sides have a reason to want non-news: gamers want validation of their investment by showing all the cool things that are coming in the future, the next hip product, and publishers want to build awareness through over-promising. I mean, say what you will about Apple fans, but a lot of that obsession is built on a thing they actually have.

Yeah, but that's not SJW censorship, that's Apple. Which goddamn reminds me that I had a really good devil's advocate argument for Apple's censorship policy and I forgot it. (Also Left 4 Dead 2 got reclassified in Australia, so that's interesting. We've fucked with Valve so much.)

I thought Yoko Kanno quit?! Well.

I suspect there isn't a lot of corruption in the games press because when there are actual, straight up examples of corruption, basically everyone moves. That does not happen if everyone else is doing it too and someone got caught. The problem, as someone put it, is that the games press cannot be objective because their editorial position is that AAA games are worth writing about.

I think Matt Lees said it best when he noted how depressing it was as a journalist that people are so willing to believe that you're corrupt that they'd rather side with MRAs than accept that you might be trying to do a good job.

I find this less convincing when I remember that the Guardian had their everything confiscated by UK authorities because they stood by Greenwald. If the sites in question wanted to demonstrate that they weren't just regurgitating PR releases, I can think of no better way of doing it than taking a stand for their journalism.

Treehouse didn't re-localise it, so it retains the British voice acting. So everyone sounds British.

I have no money and also it takes someone with significant moral fortitude to apologise to someone else when they also feel like a victim. They got played like a fiddle, and I think it's revealing how gullible the YouTubers got when the spectre of journalistic integrity got raised. There are a bunch of new people on my list to not take seriously; it'll be a long time before I assume that Jesse Cox is speaking from a position of clarity, for instance.

As angry as I am, I guess I'm not as sarcastically angry as MrHoatzin: (he is running afoul of Poe's law, guys, calm down)

I know Danielle's had her heart in her throat over this; what does that say about the kind of protection Polygon can provide its writers? (Then again, it's not like The Guardian did any better for Jenn Frank.) Edit: turns out Danielle was right to be worried; there were apparently efforts to try and doxx Patricia, which would almost certainly have led to her being doxxed as well. Dodged a bullet there, Mints. We've also learned that Twitter will stand by and do nothing while this harassment goes on. I think it's worth discussing, as an industry and community, establishing our own social network that's a lot less awful. (I've always wanted to see someone take the idea behind Reader, and polish it up to a mirror sheen, where everybody has a feed, including websites, and you can re-syndicate things from other people's feeds. Like a Twitter using RSS feeds.) The thing that makes me angry, still, what makes me livid, is that Twitch got bought for $1B by Amazon, and the very next thing we did was turn on each other while everyone watched - and I say we because we also have proof that many of the #Gamergate people weren't MRA misogynists, they were being badly mislead. What a great way to celebrate a big milestone in video games being relevant. I would write an angry blog post if I had a blog that was in any way current and I thought the world actually needed another fucking blog post on this thing, fuck it all.

Sooo..... ...Zoe had evidence that Jenn Frank and Mattie Brice were being targeted by these shitheels while the harassment was going on? Edit: the biggest losers here, I think, other than all the people who were senselessly attacked of course, are the gaming enthusiast websites. We've seen that they're neither willing to make their ethical stance clear, nor stand by their writers. People who were tricked by 4chan into #Gamergate are going to be looking askance at those websites and their lack of response. People horrified by #Gamergate will remember how those websites stayed silent, or posted mealy-mouthed thinkpieces, when generalist sites like Badass Digest and The New Republic took strong and clear stances.