Gormongous

Fixed it!

It is too quiet in my apartment now that I finished reading that review. I bought the PDF of the game a while back, because I have an interest in collecting indie RPGs with interesting conflict-resolution mechanics, but I might buy the physical version, because reading it shows me such a powerful teaching tool. I know two people in the city where I live who would play this game with me, maybe three. There'd be four, but one moved away. I don't know if I'll ever get around to asking, not least because the one who I know for a fact is the richest of us has the potential to be a harder man than Brendan. I'm stressed just thinking about it.

I'm not exactly sure what evidence you want. I don't think there's a forum out there where people who are involved with #GamerGate openly discuss their hatred of women and free speech under their real names. Beyond investigating people like Yiannopoulos and Cernovich, who are prominent public figures that #GamerGate has chosen to represent them when convenient, the method by which I see the face of #GamerGate is simple. I ask myself, what happens to people who speak out against #GamerGate? The answer is, every single one of them is attacked and harassed in the most brutal possible ways that the internet permits. It might be possible to look at such thugs as only nominally connected to the "consumer revolt" that is #GamerGate, but aren't they actually the core around which the rational facade has been built? I mean, the thugs were there first and are still the ones dictating what #GamerGate as a whole says and does, if only in reaction to the thugs' attacks and harassment. Any truly rational movement would recognize that they have been hijacked (and in this case, always have been hijacked) and do everything they can to distance themselves from the thugs, even if it means disbanding the movement itself, but instead they are content just to ask us again and again to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, while that man points a gun at the head of whomever disagrees with them. Even when it's pointed out that being nice and making donations to Quinn and Sarkeesian is good PR in addition to basic human decency, they refuse. As far as I'm concerned, all that makes them entirely complicit in the thugs' behavior. Kris Straub said it a week ago: And not to dredge up Godwin again, but it's really convenient to have a private army of Brownshirts who have no formal ties to the Nazi Party but just happen to destroy the property and threaten the lives of anyone who publicly criticizes said party. Don't forget that the Nazis (#GamerGate) pushed a platform of economic renewal (ethics in journalism) and saw early successes due to their opponents' disorganization and fear, but in the end, the solution to "economic" ("ethical") problems was and always had been the eradication of Jewish (progressive and feminist) influence in German society (video games). That sentence is basically Reactionary Movement Madlibs, so enjoy. Side note, I've spent three days now wracking my brain for a technical term I used to know that described the conspicuous expenditure of wealth on the less fortunate solely as a means of acquiring prestige. It's "evergetism," goddammit.

I have seen all three of those things called out as "bullying" and "harassment" by dozens of people from #GamerGate on Twitter. In one instance, which I can't find again, someone asked what #GamerGate thought its ideal would be for a gaming website and one guy wouldn't stop tweeting really hostile and histrionic things at him. It lasted for several attempts to get the guy to calm down and clarify himself, until finally the person who asked said that this wasn't a conversation and they were going to block the guy. He immediately posted in all caps about how asking a question and then "censoring" someone for their answer was a "classic example" of how gamers get bullied nowadays. It was unbelievable.

Ah, #GamerGate... It's No True Scotsman: the Ideological Movement. Seriously, I think a reason that people are getting tired of dealing with all of this, beyond the culture of fear and violence that it's spreading, is that supporters of #GamerGate are largely impossible to debate. Anything that currently reflects well on them is part of the movement, anything that currently doesn't isn't. That's probably the biggest issue I have with CustooFintel's questions, because he asserts that the reasonable claims represent the "true" #GamerGate and unreasonable claims represent the extremist fringe. Why isn't it the reverse? Crazy shit like Zoe Quinn the puppet master, dozens of journalists conspiring to push a message like "gamers are dead," and Anita Sarkeesian faking the threat to shoot up a school probably represents #GamerGate better, because those things are more in line with its documented actions over the past couple months, and the rational-sounding stuff about ethics is just the marginalized fringe of the movement that only serves to distract from its actual consequences.

How do these people not see that there's no easier way of validating the disdain that mainstream culture and media has of their movement than doing exactly what a person admits they've spent weeks afraid of being done?

I don't like that post making me angry, so I'm going to try to be amused instead that he has to appropriate the concept of cultural appropriation from people of color in order to make the argument that left-leaning people, including people of color, are appropriating gaming from gamers. Never mind colonialism, imperialism, post-colonialism, or any of the other historical forces that make cultural appropriation an actual thing. It's #GamerGate, if a concept makes superficial sense and buttresses the movement, use it! Also, do feminists want to be gamers or kill gamers? Make up your mind! Okay, I failed at not being angry, so now I'm angry. I am so damn tired of Joe H. Caucasian claiming ownership and therefore representation of all gaming. I've been gaming since the second grade when I got a Sega Genesis. Even before then, I asked my mom to visit her friend Monica all the time, even though her son Tristan was a huge bully who beat the shit out of me, because Tristan owned an SNES and sometimes let me play it once he got tired of sitting on me. I have never not been playing games since. When I got a computer, it was only a couple years before my friends were having LAN parties every month. It didn't matter if you were white, black, Hispanic, guy, or girl. Everyone played and had a good time. And now some dude with clearly unresolved emotional issues surrounding his childhood wants to tell me that, because I'm a feminist now, I never was a gamer? How does that even hold up long enough to make it out of someone's mouth? It's the repeatedly selfish failures of imagination that make #GamerGate hard for me to bear from day to day, although that's because I'm not a woman and therefore don't need to fear for my life from these people. So many people seem to think the #GamerGate argument that it was right for them to spam Intel to pull its advertising from Gamasutra because Alexander said they weren't her audience anymore is airtight, because who else buys Intel products besides gamers? Well, I do (or I did) even though my belief that women shouldn't be treated like shit in order to make me feel better about being lonely as a kid apparently disqualifies me from being a gamer. I've bought (or directly influenced others to buy) four Intel processors in the past three years, but of course that doesn't count because it's politically inconvenient for #GamerGate. I'm politically inconvenient for #GamerGate, so they ignore my existence except when they want to speak for me in order to co-opt my actions. Fuck all this shit.

I do! It removes everything that I find interesting from the medieval setting and replaces it with po-faced fantasy stuff. But I'm sane enough to see why it works for so many other people (mainly, replacing obscure real-life history with a simpler and better-known fantasy universe) and made the base game so popular.

They did several hotfixes right away for Rajas of India, but didn't touch a lot of the major issues, electing instead to roll the planned patch for the DLC into the patch introducing changes for Charlemagne, the next DLC, which introduced a lot of bugs that Paradox is only fitfully patching... There's somewhat the feeling of a cycle starting here, if you know what I mean. Most Paradox fans trumpet how the mod community fixes broken stuff months before Paradox gets around to it, but you're right to say that the radical nature of the last two DLCs really destabilized that relationship, not just because most mods were invalidated by the timeline, legal, and cartographic changes, but also because Paradox kept promising to fix their own bugs soon, so many of the modders held off. The big mods (Historical Immersion Project, CK2 Plus, Game of Thrones) are keeping abreast, but there have been a lot of dead mods the past six months, and I don't really know if Paradox cares. They got their first big PR bump for the game with the Game of Thrones mod, but now they're pushing a vision more in keeping with EU4, and a lot of those changes are against the systems that allowed the Game of Thrones mod to work so well in the first place.

I just got back from a spur-of-the-moment game of Firefly with all three expansions, including the new one called Blue Sun. It's weird for me to have such mixed feelings about a game that I love and enjoy so much. I think it boils down to the increasing amount of time I've come to spend thinking about all games critically, not just the ones I don't like. At its core, Firefly is just Merchants of Venus with the most systematic, apt, and loving application of theme I've ever seen layered on top. Every single turn it feels like you're part of the show, even though it's just a bunch of random elements from the show and not anything narrative going on. The mechanics just fit together so perfectly. As the box says, you get a crew, get a job, and keep flying. It's great for fans of efficiency-engine gameplay, of non-confrontational game mechanics, and of sci-fi in general and Firefly in particular. I'm very happy to have it in my collection. The issue, I guess, is that I haven't ever been totally satisfied with how the eight or so games I've played have ended. No matter what scenario we pick, it always seems like everybody finally gets their ships right with crew and starts taking high-risk jobs here and there, then one player hits the goal a couple turns later and everyone else just feels like they've been left holding the bucket. The way the game seems to work is that there's no lasting advantage to filling out your ranks. The player who's managed to cut corners most effectively, who's managed to substitute gear for crew whenever possible, is going to have a lead that never disappears, even if other players with bigger crews are taking bigger jobs with bigger payouts. In the abstract, I'm fine with leaner crews being more efficient, but maybe the contrast of that with the theme is what leaves me disappointed, because the show makes me feel like a six-person crew of motley abilities should do just as well if not better than a ship with just a captain and his right-hand man, even if the latter two have the better gear. I don't think I have a point here, except to say that I wish this game lasted longer, but I'm not sure how to make that happen without simply making the playtime longer, and that's not really what I want when I want it to be longer. Also, the piracy missions from the second expansion are awesome, but the expanded board from the third expansion, which is even more awesome, makes it really unfeasible for anyone except a player who's chosen that one fast bounty-hunting ship to take them against other players, because no other ship can move far enough to catch up. The map feels too big! The jobs are too situational! There are too many options! I was about to win last game, but then the second-place guy came up from behind. Whatever! I want to play again soon.

I hated the Belfrey Luna until my second character, when I had a material-heavy equipment build necessitating that I grind for titanite chunks, which has to happen as part of the Bell Keepers. I'm not very disposed to enjoying PvP, but the sheer number of fights in which I participated and how good-natured ninety percent of the participants were really made me have fond feelings for the area, even when I went through later as part of another covenant.

Yeah, you're entirely right to point out that finding the "reasonable/rational core" of #GamerGate is not done by taking all the most common claims they make and eliminating the unclear, unreasonable, and unachievable ones. The reasonable-seeming ones exist at least in part as a vehicle to push the acceptance or at least recognition of the unreasonable ones. It's a symbiotic relationship that's key to understanding #GamerGate holistically as a movement. The fact that individual people in the movement are willing to throw certain claims under the bus when challenged is almost irrelevant to determining which claims are important why.

The issue, which maybe makes opponents of #GamerGate seem intolerant of the entire movement rather than just its violent extremities, is that #GamerGate functionally doesn't exist beyond its violent extremities. To date, the only substantive things that #GamerGate has accomplished are the intimidation of a single advertiser on an industry website, the co-opting of an enthusiast website as a platform for harassment, the destruction of several independent journalists' careers, and the hounding of two developers and one academic from their homes. I'm not even going to bring up the unbelievable volume of lies and half-truths spread by the movement, because part of my point is that the rest is all talk. There are many people in #GamerGate saying that they don't support harassment, but the only thing their movement has accomplished is harassment. They are a figleaf for fascists and misogynists, so while there is still a point to engaging them in good faith, I shouldn't have to buy into their narrative as legitimate in order to do so. Elaborating to better account for your edit, when I say that #GamerGate has little tolerance for heterodoxy, I mean that if you don't agree with #GamerGate in every way, you are against them. There is a very specific set of beliefs and actions that are felt by them to characterize a member of that movement, going far beyond simply "ethics in journalism," and people who don't fit are treated almost as bad as the most vocal opponent. Campbell found acceptance, but I strongly suspect that if he made an issue of #GamerGate's racial politics and use of the N-word, that acceptance would disappear. I have seen multiple people on Twitter, suggesting that ethics in journalism are a problem but that the hashtag should be abandoned, being attacked relentlessly by people who otherwise agree with them, because any deviation from the party line is a threat. Reddit and 8chan threads are heavily policed against moderates in the same way. Conversely, the only thing that characterizes most of the people in this thread is an opposition to #GamerGate as a movement. Beyond (and within) that, there are many different opinions about the state of women and minorities in the games industry, and those conversations have always happened on this forum with maximum cordiality. In short, I don't think it's fair to call people intolerant for being intolerant of an intolerant movement, especially not when, as I've said above, there is no evidence that the movement has a physical reality beyond the harassment it has committed and continues to commit.

Quite frankly, no. So long as someone isn't an active member of #GamerGate, they're generally left alone by those who oppose #GamerGate. There are several examples of people and websites directly involved in the games industry being called out for their silence, but that sort of thing happens as part of a dialogue, not harassment like #GamerGate's interaction with Anil Dash. If they refuse to engage, that's the end of it. No one's lives get ruined by me or people like me for refusing to take a stance. Meanwhile, I oppose #GamerGate alongside people whose beliefs on feminism and journalism I sometimes disagree with. For instance, Twig's a great guy, but the Feminism thread on the forum is full of us disagreeing about stuff. If this were #GamerGate, one of us might hound the other out of the movement, but since we are both just people opposing misogyny and harassment, it's not even an issue. There's no reason for us to enforce orthodoxy because the only thing we all have in common is our belief in diversity without fear. I also take issue with the idea that banning #GamerGate discussions on certain forums reveals intolerance. What you've discovered is simply the paradox of tolerance. Tolerant people must be intolerant of intolerance, because intolerance threatens the existence of tolerance and the good it brings. It's not hypocrisy, it's a fact of life that reactionary movements have taught us time and again, since the Second World War at least.

I am truly impressed how Kluwe can use so many different insults, never repeat himself, and still avoid ableist language in every one. The man is an artist.

Also, with regards to why castles are the premise but not the core of any castle-building game, I wonder if it's just the natural process of trying to design a fun game. I mean, if the simulation of medieval warfare is sufficiently thorough, then castle-building is a solved problem. Given any kind of terrain, there is an existing design (or at least an existing design principle) that will defend that terrain optimally. The choices to complicate that are to introduce gunpowder (which defeats the point of a castle-building game, both figuratively and literally), to kneecap the simulation (which the Stronghold games seem to do as well), or to place stricter limits on the actual building of the castle. I imagine that it would be hard for a team not to expand the point-buy system that Rob and Troy float into a full economic model and then have that suck away a lot of their development resources and gameplay focus.

I keep having to remind myself that Kaiba's personality from Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series is not actually canon... although it's not too far from the truth.

The issue isn't that they're exclusive. I don't doubt that the vast majority of people who constitute #GamerGate would love it if everyone who plays games declared their support. The problem is if you don't agree with them (or even if you want to remain neutral, whether out of scruples or fear). In those situations, as the storify Flynn posted on the previous page shows, you immediately and irredeemably become the enemy, and that passion that Campbell praises is made into a weapon to punish those people who don't find #GamerGate inviting despite its members' best efforts to be so. None of what he says surprises me. For instance, I can say that almost all fundamentalist Christians I've met in my life are the most loving, caring, and understanding people in the world, so long as you agree with every word they say. I don't see much of a difference here. #GamerGate has shown very little tolerance for heterodoxy unless it's the superficial kind that can be used to score points.

I saw the same thing and agree with you, but I can understand not wanting to identify with any Japanese artist too early in production. There are very specific expectations for any project with manga influences that I'd want to avoid even if I were really making Dominion Tank Police: the Video Game.

Rob: In this fantasy version of the crusades, you have to convince people to come to your castle. Me: Yeah, that's authentic. Rob: The main way you do this is with beer. Me: ... I've long suspected that the Stronghold: Crusader series wasn't meant for people with any interest in or knowledge of the historical crusades, but this show confirms it for me. On the other hand, Lords of the Realm seems to captured the spirit of Bisson's "crisis" thesis over a decade before he wrote it. I know which one I'll be checking out someday...

I was really surprised when my advisor invited me over to play Fury of Dracula and I was able to communicate more knowledge of the Dracula mythos having seen Dracula: Dead and Loving It than he was having seen the original movie. So basically, yeah.

That thread begins excellent, with Singal's comment putting up a high bar, and then devolves rapidly into angry talking points from people who only read the first couple paragraphs of the thread. Why is it that every time someone gives the straight dope about the experience of being a journalist -- with its poor pay, tight deadlines, and many moral gray areas -- brigades of commenters come out to clutch pearls and cry yellow journalism, as if everything they know about the profession comes from All the President's Men? It isn't just #GamerGate, but it's bad there in particular. Also, I made the mistake of going too far down the page and had to stomach people protesting about being called "anti-feminist" when they're really "anti-SJW." As they say: I have been all over the spectrum of feminist belief in my life, from somewhat anti-feminist as a freshman in high school to a staunch third-wave feminist now in my late twenties. Even when I hated the movement because I was jealous of women and the attention they got, I never met a single person who fits this person's description of a "social justice warrior." Quite frankly, and I know this is anecdotal, but I do not believe they exist. I believe they are a boogeyman invented by and traded between insecure misogynists who do not want to accept that their misogyny makes them anti-feminist or even anti-women. I believe this because those whom I did meet were many people whose chosen identities and personas I ignored because I had more pejorative words that I thought fit their behavior better, but in hindsight what invariably was happening was me not understanding why someone wouldn't be happy with or complicit in the way I saw the world in general and them in particular.I can't help but feel that people who talk like the person I quoted are the same as I was. I mean, he's obviously implying that feminists should never disagree with each other or any other woman, else they're a traitor to their movement, right? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the true feminists are ones that don't challenge his own beliefs. Just "people," he calls them in his post. He makes a distinction between SJWs and people.

The typical reason for an allusion to Prospero from The Tempest is to illustrate the end of an era. The magician is putting away his tricks and laying down his staff, even though there is no one to replace him, because he is old and tired. I don't exactly know how that theme resonates with being a psychic detective looking for a missing kid, but then I haven't had a chance to play the game.

In the vein of pirated Star Wars subtitles, pirated Yu-Gi-Oh! subtitles! And those are just the ones with Kaiba in them.

This thread had ironically become the most depressing one on the forums, at least until #GamerGate picks up again.