Gormongous

It's been out for at least a couple years (and even has an Arthurian-themed expansion). Maybe it was out of print until recently?

No, please change the topic. What about the playthrough differed from the trailer? They were of a piece to me.

Yeah, I was going to post something about the susceptibility of the human brain to anecdotes, meaning that you only need one case of an "attacker" being abused by a "victim" to upset the entire narrative in the eyes of most people. That ties in with the article on "perfect victims" Problem Machine posted above.

I think one of the biggest things fueling #GameGhazi among more "reasonable" people was the belief that shoddy journalism was due to some outside force and not just people doing a bad job of what they do. In those situations, it's hard to point out that all A is B but not all B is A.

Yeah, I can't decide if their inability to see the internet hate machine as the strongest force for censorship is an extreme lack of self-awareness or a deliberate attempt to troll. Or both.

I didn't mean for my post to sound like I was saying that perfect historical accuracy is impossible so any effort towards it is pointless. I more just meant to say that historical accuracy as a central goal or justification for a creative decision feels empty to me because it's always limited and therefore defined by other more relevant and important decisions, like a creator's willingness to do the work or the demands of the narrative. Whether it's genre or mainstream fiction, it still feels to me like describing the position of a chair in a room by saying everywhere the chair isn't. Yeah, this is definitely my last comment on this, but I do get what you're saying. It must be frustrating to have this conversation going without direct input from people actually in the know. I just wanted to point out that it's two very different things to say "We're making a game about the experience of a white dude in Wyoming in 1989" and "We're making a game about the experience of a white dude because it's Wyoming in 1989." I'm glad the former statement is more the case here, as if there were ever any doubt.

Yeah, I think that fictional works, even (and especially) historical fiction, demand a certain degree of intensity and hyperreality, which in turn demands that the creator discard whatever factual elements distract from the historical "truth" that the creator intends to highlight with their choice of setting. It's an in-depth process that must take a lot of work, because you have to know what there is to know what to leave out. I remember (someone talking about) Hilary Mantel talking about making her own card catalog of Thomas Cromwell's actions and writings from day to day?

She's one of those people that quits all the time. It used to be that she worked under pseudonyms while officially in retirement, but I think the internet enables people to figure it out too quickly now. She also claims not to speak English, presumably for several different reasons, but has sung songs in English with virtually no accent on several different albums, so...

I really don't want my comment to reflect on Firewatch, which I'm sure has the most consideration put into all these decisions, but I do think historical accuracy as a top-level goal is bunk and a creator just needs to make decisions that work for the story they want to tell, however "real" they mean it to be in the end. Otherwise they're just chasing a chimera, and not even a particularly interesting or worthwhile one. Even well-written TV shows with authentic historical settings have instances that even entry-level specialists find distractingly inaccurate (I'm thinking of Deadwood trying for period swearing but opting not to use it because everyone sounded like Yosemite Sam, or Mad Men using modern business lingo because period lingo sounds folksy and imprecise). There's just no way to catch everything, please everyone, and do good work, so I really don't get when anyone spends much time at all dwelling about the historical accuracy of a work independent from the narrative and mechanical choices that inform it. If they do dwell on it, what they usually mean anyway by "accuracy" is "details conforming to the average person's impression of how it must have been," which is a weirdly specific yet underwhelming ambition for a story to have. Assassin's Creed is particularly baffling to me because it's terrible history and terrible storytelling, so when the developers talk in interviews, it's like they're having it both ways, with one hand washing the other. They had to mess with historical details seemingly at random for reasons of story, and they had to make the writing odd, abortive, and overblown for reasons of history. If the story you're telling doesn't work with the historical setting you want, that's fine, but change the setting (or at least part of it), not your story. I don't think the decision to include genre elements makes a bit of difference in terms of how a good writer handles historical detail. EDIT: I'm still not happy with this post, but hopefully it's better than the much-more-insufferable first draft, which focused mostly on how the past is already fictionalized into narrative by means of history, so the functional difference between the historical settings of (for instance) Gone Home (as history) and Harry Potter (as alternate history) is vanishingly small, beyond what directly relates to the plots of each.

Complete tangent, but I remember buying a used copy of Low from a CD store and finding an insert inside advertising Bowienet, which ran from 1998 until the mid-2000s as the only ISP that gave you firsthand access to David Bowie through email and chatrooms. Good on him for figuring out how to get onboard the internet thing before a lot of people, but of course he lost interest in being the proprietor and figurehead of such a mundane business.

I think it's fair to point out what appears to have constituted "doing something about it" to the different parties involved. For some, it's manifestos; for some, it's domestic terrorism; for others, well...

Yeah, it's funny that in Civilization V, religion is more specific and individualized, but you're even less likely to fight wars over it. It's like they generalized it in a different direction instead. I could imagine, maybe in the only occasionally-working multiplayer, one nation taking on a religion of another just because the bonuses are so good, but the culture and revenue they'd be giving up makes it a marginal case, and never one that an AI would make anyway.

I have to say, the first thing really to make me smile from everything that's happened has been the latest Daft Souls podcast, where Gav Murphy gradually wears down Matt Lees with jokes about starting a fight club to fix all this misogyny shit until they're both talking about it half-seriously by the end. It starts around 56:15. Sorry if this is off-topic, I just needed to feel good about all the hate for just a little while. Yeah, there's definitely hints of an awareness in his response that any concession to the reasonableness of #GamerGate claims just ends up fueling more harassment. I admire him for trying to take a more moderate stance, but I don't know that the people who're cheering about "winning" this mess will read it as that.

I think Tegan's argument might just be that using (often assumed and/or anecdotal) demographic data from real life to justify a narrative decision in fiction is pointless. Narrative decisions need narrative justifications, otherwise it's just lazy writing. Note that this does not preclude there being an excellent narrative justification for Henry being the race and socioeconomic class and occupation and whatever that he is. In fact, it's very likely that smart people like Sean and Jake and Chris have done just that several times over already. But it'd be silly for them (or anyone) to say, "Eighty-eight percent of hikers in the Pacific Northwest from 1991 to 2004 were white, therefore our protagonist ought to be white." Not that anyone said that, either.

Well, there were actual nephews, which was a fairly common and acceptable practice so long as the sons had clerical training, and then there were "nephews," if you know what I mean.

I was curious enough to look this up, and multiple sites confirm that it probably comes from (mocking) nicknames given to people who played popes in pageants or were just haughty and pompous.

If your dad was the pope, then you... he wouldn't... argh.

Apparently the press was supposed to turn the other cheek together as one while several of their number were brutally attacked on entirely baseless grounds. How does that happen, exactly? Do they all start writing gentle but chiding articles, saying that they know their detractors have good intentions and that they'll defend to the death the rights of some to slander them and the rights of the rest to stand aside doing nothing? Honestly, I'm almost done being shocked by all of this. What #GameGhazi has proven to me is that the vast majority of the reading public and even a small minority of journalists have no idea how journalism is done, but have very high standards for it nonetheless.

Heh, my criteria were really just 1) Japanese designer, and 2) tiny box. They both fill the same kind of space in a night, though.

That was my revelation after I went to bed last night. For people obsessed with hypocrisy, there's an awful lack of self-awareness here. Writing an op-ed piece in which you mention a friend is corruption, but anonymous threats, false-flag operations, and mob violence in order to force members of the independent press to resign are not, apparently. Whatever happened to being the change you want to see in the world? Oh wait, wrong movement. The motto here is "Save the vidya from... something? Save the vidya from anything that makes me uncomfortable." I got worn down reading some of the replies to Burch, because when he points out that he's committed much more egregious acts of "corruption" than any of the women and supporters of women harassed thus far, there were basically three kinds of responses: 1) "You're not a real journalist or developer, so we don't care about you," 2) "You're a not a very good journalist or developer, so we don't care about you," and 3) "Well, we didn't know about that, so good job hiding it until now and we'll get on it right after we finish over here." I especially love how these insecure babies try to defend that vetting the lead writer on a AAA game and a former Destructoid employee is not nearly as important as vetting an indie games designer who releases her games for free. Also, I never get sick of these people saying, "This is not about Zoe Quinn!" because they realize their fixation on her is damaging their credibility, but continuing to populate their arguments with liberal amounts of hearsay and conjecture about Quinn as "proof" of the state of games journalism because it's the only thing they've investigated with any thoroughness. Also also, when I last posted that someone would just accuse mainstream media of being corrupt too if people pointed out that the Guardian didn't find anything suspect in Jenn Frank's piece, I didn't realize that my prediction had already be fulfilled three and a half hours ago already. Like Hermie said, if the Guardian of all papers doesn't measure up to these little monsters' standards of ethical journalism, there's no hope for them ever to establish a reasonable discourse with reality. Fortunately, it probably also means that their demands are impossible to satisfy and that their movement will keep discrediting itself until it disintegrates, but that's cold comfort to those currently under attack. Here is the first tweet that he made after he retweeted Jenn Frank quitting. It ends thirteen hours later with him retweeting Darren Nakamura about Destructoid reviewing BL2.

Yeah, the Japanese micro-games movement is great. The two I currently own, Love Letter and One Night Ultimate Werewolf, are getting more play right now than any other game in my collection.

And the sad thing is, if you point out to them that good journalism is built on reporters and critics being friends (or even just friendly) with the people about whom they write, they'll just claim that the entire edifice of journalism is corrupt and that they'll get to politics and finance once they're done purging the women from games. A campaign of hate waged by children, indeed. There's one tweet at the end of the link Flynn posted that crows about "winning." What a bunch of idiots with no self-awareness of their own hypocrisy. He later calls Jenn Frank a "toxic element" and then claims that if she truly loved games, she wouldn't back down under any harassment, so best to get rid of her now. These are just children (or men with the minds of children) getting their first (or nth) taste of being a bully. Pointing out to a bully that they're forcing you to hit yourself doesn't stop them from asking you why you're hitting yourself.

Again and again, we see that "corruption" to these people is the simple act of having friends in the industry about which they write or even having friends among their colleagues. Maybe some of these people would concede, however grudgingly, that journalists are allowed to have some friends, just so long as they have no connection whatsoever to the video games industry, but somehow I doubt it. In their eyes, the only way to be impartial seems to be having no distracting personal connections whatsoever in one's life, which is patently absurd. It betrays the mentality of someone who has little to no experience with jobs or with friends. I can't help but say again, what this is about is holding select women to an impossible standard in order for them to fail in terms that catch the eye of the mainstream. In practice, it's misogyny to its core. Women can't be trusted to be friends with men, they'll just seduce them. Women can't be trusted to be friends with women, they'll just collude against men. The only possible functions for women in a worldview that discounts their ability even to make friendships are seducer and betrayer. That's why these people want to "save" video games from such women by turning back the clock to a male-dominated industry. The longer their crusade goes on, the more obvious these motives are. Has there even been a single man who's been made a target by these people without first going on the record as sympathetic to women already under attack? How is that not the biggest red flag to everybody involved ever?

The really baffling thing for me, because my brain has somehow adjusted to the state of the world where this is now called out constantly, is that her attacker claims that she's pretending to be impartial when talking about an acquaintance of hers and that makes it corruption. Did he read the article? Jenn wears her position and connections in the industry on her sleeve. It's an opinion piece, there's literally no attempt at deception there. But presumably, and I say presumably because I have no idea how the minds of these people who attack her actually work, having any personal acquaintance with the victims of these hate crimes (which, in the case of this attack on Jenn, involves a single Twitter exchange where she shows compassion and respect for Quinn) disqualifies someone from having a publishable opinion on them. Only the components of the internet hate machine, who don't know Quinn and Sarkeesian and hardly consider them to be people in the full sense of the word, are removed enough from them to be able to provide comment. Ugh, this is the same damn thing I post with every twist and turn, really. It's not about corruption at all and everyone knows it. It's about hate against women, and the seemingly sincere belief of the haters that the only voices that should be allowed are ones that agree with them.

So one of the big plans surrounding the new DLC is to remove the assassination button and make plots the only way to kill other characters. There's a fairly reasoned thread on the Paradox forums that mostly involves people critiquing quite lucidly Paradox's design arguments that just pressing a button to make something happen circumvents the intended rhythm of gameplay (for instance, that is the case with giving gifts and imprisoning characters, but those haven't been removed in favor of expanding the plot system, even though mods have come up with good answers there). The real answer is, of course, that Paradox wants to push multiplayer CK2 on its playerbase and an instant-death button for someone's character, however expensive and chancy it is, has been deemed OP. Eventually, the lead designer shows up to state that he doesn't have answers to many of the posters' critiques, but it's Paradox's game in the end, so everyone will just have to trust them. Further comments that this was unsatisfactory were met with threats to close the thread. I really hate the way Paradox has been going the past year, both in their attempts to dictate mostly through the removal of features how people play a supposedly sandbox game and in their high-handed treatment of criticism about this from longtime fans. It was enough for me to stop playing EU4 when Johan Andersson's comments made clear what a mess he was making of that game, but now the same philosophy is becoming increasingly apparent with CK2, my love that I just can't quit. Even the official response to the Charlemagne DLC announcement has been disappointing, full of "We don't care what you want, we make the game we want to make and you'll like it." Sigh.