Gormongous

Eh, you should try being from the South and hearing the mishmash of "Southern accents" that hail from Virginia to Texas in movies and TV. No one's got an ear for anyone else's region.

I will never get tired (by which I mean that I am already and always will be tired) of people deciding that now is the time for them to air their random, unrelated, and unflattering grievance about Zoe Quinn. This one's especially egregious, because all it tells me is that seven years ago, when Zoe Quinn was twenty years old, she was kind of dramatic and unstable, which tells me that she was twenty years old. Basically, no one's business, agreed.

That's hard to answer in a comprehensive way, but yes, I believe it's accurate to say so. Fascism came out of a manufactured narrative of dissipation and betrayal in the closing years of the First World War and then the Depression. In Germany, the narrative was that complacent politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen allowed fringe elements like Communists, unionists, and Jews to sap economic potential and then hijack the political process, leading directly to defeat and humiliation in a war that Germans had been told they were winning. The global depression that followed right afterwards was cast in this same light as the result of greedy self-interested radicals taking their fill now that they'd achieved their ends. Fascism was about using violence and force to circumvent a political process based on debate, concession, and consensus, in order to let the will of the people, which is manifest to and in their leaders, be expressed more fully. Italy's narrative that led to fascism is almost identical, except that there was no defeat, only humiliation when the Allied powers refused to fulfill irredentist promises made to Italy. All in all, it's a remarkably similar narrative to #GamerGate (a strong and healthy culture winning a war against those that would destroy it, betrayed by self-interested fringe elements that only pretend to identify with the cause, necessitating force be used to drive them out, nominally directed against corrupt power structures but really just about settling scores and beating up easy targets) but I've avoided using it because "Godwin!" is one of the favorite barks of internet dogs. I think reactionarism takes root whenever the status quo reveals itself to not be what it was hitherto understood to be, same as fascism, but the latter is more the principal means of expression for the former. It needs to be said, because it's such a loaded topic for the Western world in the modern age, but like I said to my students when I taught it last semester, fascism is incredibly seductive if you're already angry about... well, anything. It uses rhetorically powerful phrases to tell you that your gut's been right all along and the people with whom you disagree have just been lying. It tells you that all learning, all science, and all politics are just smoke meant to confuse and weaken you. It tells you that if you just listen to your heart (and to the leader whom your heart tells you to listen to) then the best possible outcome will always happen. It tells you that strength, not knowledge or justice, is the greatest human good, and that force expressed through that strength is what makes (and keeps) a state good. All these are "truths" that have been peddled to the right-wing "gamers" of #GamerGate piecemeal, but a half-century of aversion to discussing the tenets of fascism means that we can't call a spade a spade. "Fascist" is just an empty word that dirty hippies call police and businessmen without cause, which is my biggest issue with the Jacobin article. Even if the subjects of its criticism were listening, its language is fifty years out of date.

True neutrality means not getting involved, even if one is already involved and the act of removing one's involvement gives one party exactly what said party wants. Wait, I didn't mean to say "neutrality," because I meant "cowardice." Germany annexing the Sudetenland, "peace for our time," and all that.

No, I think you're justified. Now that Chris King is gone, Johan Andersson has become the biggest influence on Paradox's design philosophy, and he's focused on multiplayer to the point of myopia. Tuning a systems-based game of emergent narratives for multiplayer balance feels like a lesson in unintended consequences. Hundreds of events and decisions are nerfed or buffed to make sure that no one can upset the game just by getting lucky, meaning that i) there isn't the same potential for wild swings of fortune from some random event during a hunt, so it's a slower and flatter experience overall, and ii) the exploits that will always exist in this kind of game become all the more powerful for the ways they allow the developer's increasingly restrictive and prescriptive intent to be circumvented. I just played a 867 Byzantium start that was really fun, but I got bored around 1240 because there were no more challenges or surprises to be had. I have never failed to play a game to completion before, short of a corrupted save or a dynasty wipe. Still, for someone with a less than perfect understanding of history and the game's systems, I think there's twenty or thirty hours of fun to be had before everything I've written above becomes apparent.

I'm also just a bit uncomfortable all the implications of what TotalBiscuit says to that effect, about the duty of critics and journalists being to protect the arbitrarily defined community of "gamers" from bad press and the bad feels that come with them. It would be a nonsensical ethical stance to have in any other medium, but somehow it makes sense that gamers feel they deserve to feel good always.

I think it's perfectly okay to write an opinion piece about how gamer culture seems to be suffused with this mix of anger and consumerism that isn't representative of most people that actually play games, if that's how Leigh Alexander really feels about it and a site is willing to publish it. It's only an opinion, after all. The strange thing to me is that so many people feel so threatened by how one person feels that they try to hurt and silence her, rather than just read something else. If Alexander's opinion of gamers is so dangerous and toxic, why haven't there been more (or any) efforts to engage her on those opinions in good faith? I mean, you certainly aren't, comparing one opinion piece by a niche journalist writing for an industry site to a years-long legal campaign by a lawyer to outlaw multiple games.

Yeah, excellent observation. Having read the book for the first time at the age of twenty-three, it meant something a little different for me, but I still loved it.

Yeah, I know what you mean, but for #GamerGate, "journalistic ethics" means exclusively "not having an opinion about the subject of the article," which would make for the most terrible opinion piece ever, so I can understand caricaturing one's stance to highlight that.

Yeah, I'm really baffled by parts of his argument. Some of it is just having a half-formed opinion, of which we are all guilty, but some of it is also moving the goalposts back and forth so his position, whatever it may be, is always on the side of gamers, whoever they may be. TotalBiscuit starts out talking about the duty of games journalists to interview both sides, because a one-sided narrative is harmful to the unity of gamer culture. When Chris successfully rebuts him that the ethics of journalism require neither events reporting nor opinion pieces to have a point/counterpoint format, TB shifts to arguing for the need for games journalists to be consumer advocates who reflect the interests and opinions of their audience, which he naturally assumes is the 18-to-25 "core gamer" demographic, and goes on to contradict his previous set of points entirely by asserting that games journalism should come from the perspective of gamers. Chris, of course, responds that there are different types of games journalism, which TB blows past because it's really inconvenient to both arguments he's made thus far, and it all devolves precipitously from there. By the end, TB is arguing that games journalists need to protect gamers as a community and culture from negative attention in the mainstream at any cost, which is quite possibly the furthest thing imaginable from "balanced" reporting and reveals to me his roots as a YouTube pundit to an embarrassing degree. I don't blame Chris at all for disengaging, because TB clearly thinks that his own ad-hoc system of ethics he's developed doing videos over the years should be broadly applicable to anyone reporting on any kind of news in gaming. And Jesus, when will I stop hearing the complaints about Leigh Alexander's "the term 'gamer' is dead" editorial? The more that people try to refute it with these myopic arguments for their own relevance, the more they prove her right.

I'm having trouble viewing the whole thing, including this specific quote. Is there a better way to view the conversation, asinine chiming-in by the GG boys and all, than just clicking on the inciting tweet? Also, TotalBiscuit shows as firm a grasp of "balanced" with regards to events reporting as he does to "ethics" with regards to Steam Curation. Apparently, you're not allowed to say anything pejorative about a group unless your article includes not just a quote but an entire interview from that group, no matter the relevance of their full stance to the event in question. I look forward to all the New York Times articles where they interview members of ISIS before they decide it's ethical to call them "terrorists" in each article.

Can't you tell just from Ben X's reaction to it? Here, let's see it again:

I mean, the game dates to 1985, I think, so it's drifted in and out of print as Sherlock rises and recedes in the cultural consciousness. I remember describing premise of the game to my friend after I saw the Shut Up & Sit Down review, and he cut me off to describe perfectly the only case about which I knew anything, because he and his siblings had played it with his father when they were kids. Upon further interrogation, it seems some of the other cases were different, so each printing might even have a different mix of cases. It was pretty cool and keeps me from being crazy mad that I can't get a copy right this very moment. Also, you should make some waves in the CS:GO multiplayer thread here, Sean. I know it's better to play with people you know, but I haven't gotten into Counter-Strike since college and I know I'd like a regular group with which to be/kill terrorists.

Yeah, I wasn't able to get back and post my own opinion, but I had a friend in college who was self-medicating anxiety and depression with extreme amounts of alcohol, and there was no way in the two years that I tried to intervene that I could get him to recognize the incredible destructiveness of his behavior to himself and his relationships. I just stayed around, trying my best to be a good friend but also to give him little pushes whenever he'd have brief moments of clarity about his alcoholism, but it never really resolved, and I had to give up when we graduated. It was incredibly hard and it gave me no advice for you, Archie.

Steam is running a sale on all Paradox-published games until Tuesday. Crusader Kings 2 and most of its DLC is 75% off, with everything else on sale for 50% off. You can get the game and every piece of DLC ever released for it for forty bucks. That's tremendous.

I could swear that Fallout: Tactics had an "auto-disarm all mines spotted" button that you could toggle on and off for individual characters. Maybe it's too hard to code, or maybe they didn't play Fallout: Tactics for the bastardization of the original franchise that it represented.

I am a terrible driver, so I'm especially afraid of multiplayer, but the excitement of everyone here makes me wonder... Right now, I am shocked by how perfectly this game fills the same need as Crusader Kings 2, except that I don't understand Euro Truck Simulator 2 backwards and forwards to the point that I can beat it to death with any character at any start date. I had a rough first half-dozen hours because I chose Iveco as my favored brand and quickly discovered that the starter models have about the same horsepower as my Ford Taurus, but now that I've got a Volvo FH16 Classic with 600 hp, I'm completing long hauls like Luxembourg to Wroclaw with time to spare.

When I got back to America after living in Greece, the first thing I ate was Mexican food. The second thing I ate was Taco Bell. Like Syn said, they are separate kinds of food, although I have soft spots for both. Soft spots because of both?

Well, I chipped in my two cents, too. I thought about putting my academic affiliation to the fore as well, but I liked it better just as a letter from a consumer who has only owned computers with Intel processors for the past twenty years.

Oh no, don't get rid of it. It's yours now, make it better than McElroy ever could. I have never had a more surreal experience than when I was driving a long haul through Louisville, KY and saw the massive fiberglass letters "Yum!" rising out of the early morning mist. That's right, the stadium is the Louisville KFC Yum! Center. It was possibly the ugliest thing I have ever seen.

The bigger the con is, the more careful they are about stuff like that. I still remember back in 2004 at my first anime convention, when the security surrounded me and escorted me to the weapons-check booth in order to get my giant cross cleared. Note that they didn't ask about possible contents or try to open it up, they just wanted their head of security to give the okay on a six-foot PVC cross wrapped in cloth, which its six-foot two, hundred and fifty-pound bearer could scarcely carry. It was deadly serious. For reference, the cross looked like this:

That's so cool that you live in Dallas now, Twig. When I come home for the holidays, maybe we can have a metroplex Thumbs hangout.

It's a movement about accountability that doesn't understand accountability, a movement about ethics that doesn't understand ethics, a movement about respect that doesn't understand respect... I could go on.

Your response got me to click on that link. I don't even know what to think. His conviction that "Social Justice Warriors" are a cohesive and coordinated movement with a distinct agenda, rather than just a bunch of people with progressive social and political values, has led him to act like a paranoid maniac even towards people sympathetic to him. How do you even engage with someone who is not only on a witch hunt, but believes himself to be part of a small group of non-witches that remain in a society that's been taken over by thousands upon thousands of witches? Honestly, near the bottom of the initial post he begins to sound like someone who is struggling with mental illness that is being exacerbated by his deep identification with #GamerGate. I wish there were a way to engage someone like that, but negative proof is a hard thing to come by.

I'm only five minutes into the episode, but already I can say with certainty that Sean has totally absorbed Justin McElroy's "Oh no" into his personality and now just does it unconsciously. I know I take up people's mannerisms all the time, we all do, but it's engrossing to see it happen so blatantly with someone so notable to me.