Gormongous

I think there was an issue where August Never Ends, but the way that forums are built means that you either make a conscious choice not to read a given thread or you make the unconscious choice to keep checking in, that encouraged unhealthy levels of engagement and emotion in this thread. I wonder if it would be different now that we've been living in a post-GamerGate world for over two and a half years, or if the fact that we live in a post-Trump world means that it'd be even worse.

Hah! It's hard to name things, for sure, but when you have to have a section on your website that's basically "Who the fuck is the guy we named our game after?" your branding attempt might be on shaky ground...

I'm tempted. How's the shooting model? Is there a game that the moment-to-moment gameplay resembles?

"Cuties" is in fact a brand name used to sell two types of mandarin/sweet orange hybrids: Murcott mandarins, also known as tangors, and clementines. The former hybrid dates from 1916 and the latter from 1902. A constant supply of Cuties is able to be stocked in stores because of the nearly year-round growing season between the two. Interesting, while looking this up, I found out that tangerines are considered by some to be part of, by some to be related to, and by some to be separate from mandarins. There are arguments for all three positions, but no final decision because the genetics of tangerines and mandarins aren't sufficiently understood.

Your Name finally came to theaters in town and I saw it. It was lovely, through and through. Honestly, I used to worry that Shinkai Makoto didn't seem to be growing as a storyteller like he was growing as a visual artist and director: the only movie he'd made that didn't drink deeply from the well of youthful nostalgia, mature regret, and the irrevocability of time was Children who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below, easily his most derivative, boring, and empty. Even after seeing Garden of Words, which was a beautifully compact and restrained story, I was prepared to respond to all claims of Shinkai being the next Miyazaki with the more prudent assessment that he'd already run out of juice and that 5 Centimeters per Second was his high-water mark. I'm happy to be wrong. Your Name not only continues the tradition of Japan making body-swap stories that are actually good (for more evidence, see the TV series Kokoro Connect, which is incredibly underrated) but, more significantly, it shows that Shinkai has vastly improved his own ability to drive home themes through his characters and the actions that develop them. As good as 5 Centimeters per Second is, its power trades on the universal resonance of certain premises and moments: the ill-conceived trip to visit a friend, the realization that the object of your crush is not going to return your feelings, the flash of recognition of an old love who's forgotten you. We don't need vividly realized characters to sell these things to us because we've all been there... or have had friends and family who've been there, at least. Body-swap framework aside, Your Name also has these premises and moments, but they're fitted seamlessly into a story and characters that can all stand on their own. You'd think that we wouldn't get a great sense of who Taki and Mitsuha are, since we're dividing screentime between the two of them and each has their screentime divided between the two persons alternately inhabiting their body, but Shinkai demonstrates that economy of direction was not just a one-off experiment of his in Garden of Words. We see who these characters are, and who they become when they're someone else, in brief but lovingly detailed vignettes that simultaneously speak to the commonalities and to the specificities of human experience. It's so good and, while it's not my favorite work by Shinkai because the pessimism and loneliness of 5 Centimeters per Second appeals to me so much, it's definitely his best, no question about it. It deserves every ounce of praise that it's gotten and, Shinkai's stated desire that neither the movie nor the praise exist, it's one anime movie that virtually everyone should make the time to see.

Apparently, from what I've seen on the forums, they're extremely proud of the work they do in those portrait packs. When the Mediterranean portrait pack launched and the characters displayed with it looked terrible, like the unholy union between a vampire and a clown, several of the artists came onto the forums with fists swinging about how they worked hard and Paradox was doing its fans a favor by letting them buy this sort of thing and really the faces don't look so bad if you look at certain other games...

I had never read the book (or any of Le Carré's books) and enjoyed the movie immensely, particularly its hyper-austere direction. I had the final twist spoiled for me (although, honestly, I feel like it was already spoiled for me by casting) but nothing else, and I only had a mildly pleasant amount of difficulty following the plot.

I conceptualize the problem with the Steam store like this: are basic requests made to non-specialist customers more or less likely to go awry? If I tell my mom or my non-gamer friend to go to Steam and buy me the newest Call of Duty, am I liable to get what I want? In my experience, having spent last month trying to explain to a friend how to get the best version of Myst on Steam via text, the answer is no. It becomes almost impossible if you are wrong about or don't know the exact title of the game that you want. As clyde points out, the user-driven and algorithm-compiled tagging system for genres is nearly useless. Searching for any term except the exact title (and, often, even searching for the exact title) results in a confusing list of professionally developed games, amateur or indie games, asset swaps and scams, and non-game material like soundtracks and wallpaper packs. The storefront's recommendation system tends to drive you to unrelated but currently popular games. It's a mess, and that's if you aren't concerned about accidentally paying someone for a game that's not playable, that's been abandoned before being feature-complete, or that has stolen assets. I laud your abundance of good faith, clyde, but from my perspective and the perspective of others, we're trying to get rid of a huge pile of shit stinking up the room and you don't want us to get rid of it because you think there might be gold somewhere in the shit, because you've found gold there sometimes in the past. There may be gold, but there's certainly shit, and I guess which is more deserving of our attention and efforts is a matter of opinion.

That's amazing, Rodi. Congratulations!

One of the unfortunately more effective ways to handle that is to let the algorithm flag everything sketchy and then to have either a developer- or staff-initiated review for false positives. The vast majority of people who make asset-swapped scams or repackaged ROMs don't even try to get their claim reviewed: they were just looking for a quick buck and entering a lengthy arbitration with the digital storefront isn't worth their time. Of course, that depends on Valve actually hiring someone to handle the reviews and not just dumping it on their unspecialized and overextended customer support staff, which I seriously doubt that they'll do. Valve seems to prefer mediocre automation to human-based specialization in almost all circumstances.

As a non-inclusive list, the privilege of having the ability, the resources, and the connections to be able to research the game you want to play elsewhere before having to go to Steam to buy it; the privilege of not needing to worry about being substantively inconvenienced by the time you waste finding a game or the time or money you waste playing it; the privilege of championing artistic expression over the concerns and needs of the people consuming it and paying for it. Maybe "entitlement" is a better word that "privilege," because it's less systematic in origin than the privilege of race, socioeconomic status, gender, or orientation, but I do think that it's an exercise of privilege to say that semi-broken "amateur" games deserve the same visibility and billing as professional games with ongoing support on a commercial storefront run by a private business with millions of customers, because you're willing to do the rest of the legwork yourself. I'm trying unsuccessfully to find a four-page interview that Sterling did with TheMarySue or something about his growth from consumer-rights shithead to outspoken feminist and social justice advocate, and his own feelings about coming out as bi in the age of GamerGate, but Google is repeatedly failing me. He comes across so much better in writing, too, but YouTube is the way of the future.

Interesting idea, respected or promising developer, ethical business practices, popular series, organic interest by users, major updates changing design, discounted and on sale... I could go on. I'm more confused about your argument. Are you saying that Valve should promote all games equally, regardless of their circumstances or content, or that it's impossible for such criteria to be fair and therefore no promotion should happen at all? I read your Tumblr post and you also seem to be against the idea of broad genre categorizations, so what is your ideal presentation for the Steam storefront? A randomized list (because an alphabetized list would give unfair visibility to games beginning with A, B, and C) of almost ten thousand works of gaming, art, and software? How does either Valve or the customer benefit from even less curation than already exists? It feels like a lot of people against more aggressive curation in this thread, whether automated curation by an algorithm or curation by a dedicated staff, seem to be fine with letting Steam become an unnavigable ocean of titles to the average customer, rather than permit the chance of any bias entering the storefront's presentation. That feels like a very privileged position to me.

That's an excellent point and one that didn't occur to me.

I guess, to sum up my issues with your argument, I think there are a lot of problems with your twin assumptions that Digital Homicide are making their game in good faith, not just trying to net a quick buck with a slapdash product, but that Hernandez and Sterling aren't reviewing that game in good faith, because you don't think they're trying hard enough to enjoy it. It also feels like you're being very restrictive in your implicit definition of "good faith" in reviews: if a reviewer is too irreverent or shows too much glee in denigrating a game that they think is bad, it's "performative" and therefore somehow less valid than a more po-faced approach that presumably reaches more directly for authorial intent. Overall, I am uncomfortable existing in a conversation where you are willing to discount Sterling for his hyperbolic speech and mock-fascist imagery while blasting demons with shotguns in a game called Devil's Share that's made by a company called Digital Homicide, let alone one where the phrase "hit job" is thrown around to describe the work of writers I respect just because they're not sufficiently in awe of a $0.24 game that seemed fairly tedious to play, as I watch your video. I've felt very weird here, having to come down so strongly on the side of Valve's right to curate its own storefront as actively as it sees fit, but I'm just trying to think of a system that benefits all people who want to play games, not just those of us with lots of information and specific tastes. If it's possible for someone on Steam to get Action Alien when they're looking for Serious Sam because they don't know the name, that's a bad thing, in my opinion. If outsider and alternative games like Mountain or thecatamites' work disappear from Steam, in the extremely unlikely scenario that the "game police" start pruning actual games to which people are giving good reviews and not just games that are criticized for being broken or having stolen assets, their fans (and people who want to become their fans) will know to find them on itch.io or wherever. If Steam continues to be flooded with semi-playable and unplayable cruft, what are the people who just want to buy and play a popular game that works going to do? Do we just tell them that they're lucky to have the chance to play a game that hundreds of people have already decided is bad and not worth their time? Again, being able to find worth or enjoyment in something does not make it enjoyable or worthwhile, especially in the eyes of others. It's better to ask why something should be on Steam, rather than why it shouldn't.

Maybe you should educate yourself, then, rather than basing your entire argument on a snap judgment of Jim Sterling and Digital Homicide and doubling down on the assumption that Sterling is a bad man who wants to take all your weird games away? Sterling regularly plays random games on Steam and gives reviews of them, both positive and negative. He gave a negative review of The Slaughtering Grounds, by Digital Homicide, because its assets were stolen or recycled, the gameplay was repetitive and boring, and the game was extremely pricey for the length and quality of the experience. Later, he found out that Galactic Hitman and Devil’s Share, two more games that he reviewed negatively, were also made by Digital Homicide under a different name, that of ECC Games, which is very suspicious on its own. Digital Homicide tried to get his reviews taken down with DMCA complaints about using in-game footage, which didn't work, and then they sued him for libel, slander, and assault with ten million dollars in damages, because he reviewed their game negatively and lost them revenue from among his fans. Digital Homicide even tried to crowdfund the lawsuit, again unsuccessfully, before it was dismissed with prejudice in court. The naked intent of the lawsuit was to silence Sterling in the short term and to hurt him in the long term for saying that The Slaughtering Grounds is less a game than a scam. He's not alone. Patricia Hernandez played Devil's Share and noted that the game had gotten over four hundred negative reviews in five days. If professionals and amateurs agree that the game is terrible, boring, and unfun, it sounds like something that maybe shouldn't be sold on Steam? There should at least be a conversation about it. I have to admit, I've been a little disappointed by how you've conducted your side of this conversation, clyde. It doesn't seem like you're open to the possibility of better curation being a net positive for customers and developers of games, under any circumstances, and now you're calling Sterling's review a "performance" so that it doesn't sound like you're criticizing him for writing a negative review. Why exactly don't you have any faith in Sterling? Because of his weird shtick, which I admit is off-putting? Because Valve invited him and Total Biscuit to consult, which incriminates him by association? Because his venue is YouTube and there's no serious criticism going on there? I don't always agree with Jim Sterling, but he has been a vocal and tireless advocate of social justice and human decency in games. He doesn't deserve the degree of disdain that you've been pouring on him for disliking a bad game and telling people so.

I think you're conflating the issue of fake games with that of gatekeeping in the indie and punk scenes of game design, clyde. In any system that's intended to screen fake games from the corpus on sale on Steam, how on earth would Depression Quest be accused as trying to swindle people out of their money? It's being given away for free! You're literally assuming about fake games what Trump assumes about fake news: that fake means "bad" and not "a slapdash or copycat product intended to deceive an audience, primarily for financial gain." It's hard to talk with someone intent on setting up those kinds of strawmen, especially when they're using hyperbolic and alarmist language like "game police" and "the purge." You sound like a GamerGater who's worried about the censors taking away his precious baby-killing games. As for the rest, if you're saying a system put into place to prevent customers from being scammed might be subject to abuse by people labeling nontraditional products as scams out of a sense of ideological or discriminatory conviction, that's fair, but it's not an argument to have no system preventing scams whatsoever. It's an argument to look beyond our own experience and definitions to identify a more robust system for sorting good-faith and bad-faith attempts to make money on Steam.

How do you feel about the efforts of Amazon to remove knockoffs and counterfeit products from its storefront? It's gotten to the point where cheap fakes have undercut actual artists and manufacturers so much that many of them are struggling to stay in business. Does Amazon have a responsibility that Valve does not and, if so, what is it (or is it up to the buyer to protect themselves from being swindled, as I did when I had to buy the box set for Star Trek: Deep Space 9 three times from Amazon before I finally got one that wasn't a Chinese bootleg that had been repackaged)? I also am really wondering if other people here have specific examples in mind of games that would be mistaken for "fake games" without good reason, have no other venue for distribution, and yet have a substantial artistic or entertainment value that the community would be missing out on. I love you, clyde, but the fact that you managed to have a couple hours of fun with a game that clearly looks like it was hoping to be mistaken for Serious Sam 3 isn't particularly compelling as an argument to keep these floodgates open. I had a lot of fun playing with sticks and branches in my backyard as a kid, but that doesn't mean that I'd be open to a company charging people money for sticks they'd found.

I'm not saying that they'd be immune to partiality. That's flatly ridiculous, no one's immune to partiality. I'm saying that, as a single person with a single job, they'd have to have a consistent approach that would be accessible to evaluation, modification, and critique. Surely that's better than the aggregate of the opinions of GamerGaters, "walking simulator" fans, peeps who only play Call of Duty sequels, and so on, right? The assumption (shared with so much of Silicon Valley) that aggregation removes biases rather than amplifying them is the big issue that I have with Valve's efforts to automate the processes of its storefront.

I don't think it's just the presence of store-bought assets that make a game a target of the "purge," as you call it. I think it's a combination of store-bought assets, asset swaps of existing games including Unity demos, and games "stolen" from other lower-profile storefronts; higher-end pricing that leverages Greenlight, Early Access, and reviews-for-keys campaigns to push the game onto the front page long enough to capture a few hundred or thousand sales; and hostile, cryptic, or even absent communications between developers and community. It's the combination of these (with blatantly swapped assets and "stolen" games foremost among them) that makes for a "fake" game (not that that term isn't awful and a really tone-deaf choice by Valve). My main concern is that, like pornography, scammy games intended to skim a few thousand bucks from unsuspecting customers for a week or two of work mostly need to pass a smell test that benefits the most from a real person whose job is to do the judging, not an algorithm synthesizing the part-time work of a bunch of self-appointed gaming experts or whatever the Explorers program is intended to comprise in its ideal form. As this thread has shown, people's tastes and standards vary so wildly that such a synthesis will probably be worthless, at best, or highly partial and unfair, at worst.

Why not? It's Valve's storefront, they can do whatever they want with it, within reason. Letting it degenerate into a libertarian wasteland of stolen and copied work intended to swindle low-information customers is not in their best interest... which is really what's most puzzling about Valve's actual response for me: they're reacting passively to a genuine threat to the integrity of their storefront as a place that people go to buy games instead of rolling the die and pirating them. Still, the reason that these games are showing up on Steam and not other "outsider" platforms like itch.io where a punk aesthetic is more commonplace is because Steam is geared towards impulse buying and mass consumption in a way that itch.io isn't, particularly in the way that "early access" works, and the makers of these "fake games" are taking advantage of that. I know it's a bad analogy, but it feels like some people here are arguing against the rights (and, furthermore, the social necessity) of businesses to curate the products they sell. A grocery store has a responsibility as a commercial institution to do more than make sure it's not selling poison instead of food and provide a locale for people to purchase this non-poison food. Who benefits from Valve not taking a more active hand in monitoring the quality of the games in Steam? The dozens of people writing negative reviews for Action Alien and Galactic Hitman, expressing confusion over the game they bought and frustration that they can't get their money back? "Caveat emptor because I don't want my freedom of choice restricted" seems like an unusual opinion to be voiced on these forums, but I'm sure it's out of an interest in the most good for the most people.

That reminds me that Analogue: A Hate Story has a separate storyline built around the player knowing the name and address of a single file that they normally don't know until late in the game and accessing it early and out of sequence. It leads to a dumb, tropey ending, but the idea there (that often there exists the potential to bring peace between two enemies, only no one realizes exactly when or how) is cool.

I believe that they nerfed a lot of the evade-stacking strategies, and tried to make it so that larger ships with diversified weapon platforms were more viable, but a quick look at both /r/stellaris and the Paradox forums suggests that combat is still flat and privileges quantity over quality.

Yeah, don't get me wrong, I'm excited that there are more peacetime options (and, especially, that they made factions actually do something) but knowing the belligerent way that Paradox AI behaves, especially in their "multiplayer first" designs, it's inevitable that you're going to have to spend a minimum of five or six hours in your average game drag-selecting several dozen fleets and watching them smash into each other, at some point, and they don't seem terribly interested in fixing that.

As I said in my comment on that review, they haven't really done anything substantive about the immensely tedious and fiddly process of waging war in the game, nor in the game's insultingly arbitrary and unthematic "victory" conditions, so I'm still giving it the side eye.

I also found the style of narration in Wizard People, Dear Reader nearly impossible to stomach, and I like Brad Neely's other stuff. I don't know why it bugs me with this one thing of his...