BFrank

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Posts posted by BFrank

  3. Posted

    All great points, all agreed.

     

    And FWIW, I feel a little bad that I picked today to dog her on a forum for purely intellectual stuff. I really and truly hope the people who've threatened her see severe legal consequences. Death threats should be taken seriously and I hope in the future that we see more cops knocking on doors in response to these situations.

  4. Posted

    Now it is true that there is room to quibble with some of the conclusions reached on occasion. But I think not liking a particular reading or argument she provides about whatever segment of a game doesn't really invalidate the clarity she brings in showing how these sexist thematic elements in games exists.

     

    Like I said, she clears the low bar very easily. She cleared it in the first 10 minutes of her first video. 

     

    I mean, if you're saying 'she's making these videos for babies who need 8 hours of content to be persuaded of the most obvious thing ever', then that's fine. Depressing, kinda, that people would be championing it. But if that's all she's shooting for, she got my agreement right away.

     

    I suspect she's hoping for more than that. I just don't think she's insightful enough to get there.

  5. Posted

    I see what you're saying, but what is her hit:miss ratio?

     

    Couldn't possibly quantify that, it's just my overall sense. She was clearing the low bar ('there's some gross, sexist shit in video games') very easily, but most of her attempts to say anything beyond that rested on what seemed to me to be very iffy readings of the games in question.

     

    Sometimes she strikes me as being more in the mold of a Salon.com essay on 'How to Win the Debate at the Thanksgiving Table'. It's not really there to convince anyone who isn't already convinced, it's a catalog of ammo for an argument with douchebags. 

  6. Posted

     I can't help but notice that a lot of people are, 8 videos later, still complaining about her evidence being "cherry picked" despite the breadth of games covered at this point. That's weird. You can complain about cherry picked evidence in, say, political or economic disputes. However when someone is analyzing thematic elements of a work or multiple works, complaining about the evidence being cherry picked makes no sense. If you're able to find enough examples you have successfully identified a thematic element.

     

    As someone who continues to have this problem with her (and I hope her popularity leads to someone better coming along to pick up the torch), I'd argue that the charge of cherry picking is much, much more relevant in art/cultural criticism than it is in politics.

     

    At least in politics and economics you've got some hard, objective facts to work with. In criticism, you have to build the case that you're creating the best possible context in which to understand something. So you absolutely can't cherry pick, you can't just throw out 30 examples of a phenomenon when 7 of them are being mislabeled or fudged in some way. You have to be intellectually honest to a much higher degree because you need the reader/viewer to trust your judgement and trust that you're playing fair. I can't talk about Gertrude Stein in the same way I talk about the prison population or the minimum wage, there aren't facts and figures that will get me very far.

     

    Basically, criticism requires an insanely high hit to miss ratio. Cultural critics can come to all kinds of conclusions that I'm not on board with and I'll still enjoy reading what they've written, but when the process of getting there seems haphazard or lawyerly ('look at all this evidence, it speaks for itself'), the whole thing comes to a dead stop.

  7. Posted

    I want to engage in a discussion here but you'll have to elaborate more in your posts. Brevity is cool and all but after this back as forth I am not confident that we understand each other at all.

     

    I was trying to say that it's a bad way to engage in a discussion. I don't want to derail a big thread over a minor point, but it rubbed me the wrong way and I said so in the least provocative way I could think of.

  8. Posted

    Read the post I was replying to and tell me that it that's not what we're dealing with here.

     

     

    Done and done. Sincerely.

     

    Which isn't to say I endorse all of it (at all). But it seemed on topic and fair game, as far as those concepts go.

  14. Posted

    I think the message has gotten out among pubsters (like me) that using the voice comms for 'missing' and 'such and such power is on cooldown for 15 seconds' work a whole lot better than using your mic. The same thing has happened in TF2 over the years. The voice chat ends up being used for socializing more than coordinating, and tactical elements like 'sentry ahead'/'uber'/'spy' are better communicated using the in-game prompts.

     

    I suspect that half the Dota people I play with auto-mute everyone, which is an impulse I understand. I'm sure the dynamic is different when you queue with a regular group.

  15. Posted

    IMO, Dota2's gotten significantly friendlier in the last year or so. I'm convinced that the introduction of ranked mode self-segregated a bunch of the hotheads and has resulted in a much more relaxed pub atmosphere. It's still an intimate game where your teammates can cause frustration, but at least I'm not running out of reports every week.

  16. Posted

    There are literally no basketball strategies that gamble on winning the game in the first quarter at the expense of the rest of the game. 

     

    There really are a whole host of explicit strategies where teams gamble on blowing their opponents out (or avoiding being blown out). Everyone I know who plays Dota immediately goes to 'it's like basketball' when they describe the strategy because there's such an emphasis on 'getting someone going' and how different the body types and roles are. Even the whole '1st position through 5th position' thing in Dota correlates strongly to how NBA teams think of their scorers and the amount of opportunities that you give to them.

  17. Posted

     

    Was VG's tactics a case of them falling back on what was familiar to them? or just to something recognised as a generically safe choice? 

     

     

    I think you see sports teams come out with a gameplan that minimizes the chance of a game being over by halftime, especially if it's something like an NBA playoff series. There's a recognition that your fans don't want to watch a half of foregone conclusions, and that any team good enough to compete should be good enough to make it interesting for at least a half hour.

     

    So, I'd call it bad coaching when you lose game 4 at the 14 minute mark. Elimination games are usually about keeping it close and giving yourself some opportunities at the end.

  19. Posted

    I dunno about that Alex game but think of it this way, that Deathwing could just as easily have been Hex, Polymorph, Shadow Word: Death, or any other number of hard removal spells. Just because you lose to a Legendary card it doesn't mean that was the only way you could have lost the game.

     

    That's definitely true. I'd say Hearthstone works hard to give you the impression that the rare cards are game breakers (that's how they make the money) even when they're a little less versatile than their common counterparts.

     

    People get off on delivering a 'humiliating' beatdown in that game and structure their decks around it, probably to their own detriment. The satisfying plays and the best ones frequently don't match up.

  20. Posted

    I love the total cheese cake look of the art in Dragon's Crown. I know the perception exists that all games are like this, but more now than ever this isn't really the case. Just like every game portraying women as hyper sexualized objects was bad for the medium, a video game industry where no cheese cake, no tittilation for tittilation's sake, exists also makes for a poorer medium.

     

    I think what you can give Dragon's Crown is that it's weird. It doesn't come off like a lazy attempt at leveraging sexuality to pander to an audience. If anything, that game's character design seemed like a heroic act of self-sabotage. They had to know people were going to be confused/annoyed by it and plowed ahead anyway.

  23. Posted

    Are we talking about the wheel that came with Mario Kart Wii, or is there a new one for 8? I tried the Wii one when that came out and couldn't get the hang of it at all; it seemed way too imprecise and the wheel was still basically only the same size as a Wii remote. And unlike an actual steering wheel, it doesn't re-center itself, so just driving in a straight line is a challenge. I guess it's possible to get used to it eventually, but it didn't seem any more intuitive to me than just using a controller.

     

    The wheel works the same in MKWii and MK8. I don't know about 'more intuitive than a thumb on a stick', but you've got more degrees of turning available to you than you do on a stick. If you think about how a typical race turns out, you spend most of your time drifting one direction or another anyway. Having a full 180 degrees of motion for those mid-drift adjustments is meaningful. Going absolutely straight doesn't end up being a thing that comes up very often.

     

    But I'm someone who tends to dive into 'controls with a learning curve' head first. If you've got a decade of Karting under your belt, it can be a hard sell.

  25. Posted

    How did Sonic ever get so popular though? The original games aren't that fun - I know a lot of people will disagree with me on that, but I always found them lacking.

     

    I got the first game as a mail in rebate when I picked up the Genesis, and I was obsessed with it at the time. Great music, incredible looking, and legitimately hip. I remember getting it and thinking that the Mario games were better mechanically, but the impression the first Sonic game left me with was really positive.

     

    It always seemed to me that Sonic became ever-more for children, while Mario drifted the opposite direction and became an 'all ages, everyone' kinda thing.