itsamoose

Well I'm certainly no expert, but Gorm I'd like to see you stay in the thread. I'll admit that I sometimes push your buttons a little bit in order to get you to elaborate on something, but as I mentioned before that is more a result of me not being satisfied with general words being used as a stand in for discussing specifics. I'm sorry if I've upset you--my intention is to get an elaboration more than anything else. So back on the topic of food, I recently moved from Massachusetts to California and I've spent the last couple of months trying all types of restaurants in my area. I work with a couple guys who are foodies (for lack of a better word) and they've introduced me to a number of dishes that I'd never even heard of before, and styles of food that from my experience just don't exist on the east coast like Vietnamese and ethiopian dishes. They told me the two things they look for in a restaurant are first if the people making the food are of a particular nationality, and if people of that nationality are eating the food. Thinking back about all the restaurants we've tried, the quality of the food usually had more to do with the freshness of the ingredients than the ethnicity of the cooks or even the clientele. From my experience, with cooking in particular, I've always seen it as more of a skill than the product of experience being around something. Perhaps you would be a better judge of whether or not a particular dish is good or not, but I grew up in a family of Italians and though I've been given literally lectures on how to make a good sauce, I don't have much experience actually making sauces. I'm sure there are concerns regarding identity and the like, which I couldn't really speak about personally, though I wonder if the ethnicity of the cook is just something that people immediately grab on to as a determining factor in their enjoyment of food they have extensive experience with.

Nevermind

Gorm, this is going to sound like a provocation but I don't mean for it to be, but does personal agency play any role in these considerations? No one is denying the fact that various cultures have been subjugated by western powers and their people devalued. Is a white lady cutting up a hot dog to throw in her food, or a white chef making shitty collard greens ever just that? Why does everything have to be judged based on what the society it exists in thinks of it, or the prevailing cultural attitude? I mean if society judges a white person differently than a black person for doing the same thing, I don't see how that makes the white person shitty for engaging in that activity. That seems to me to be such an obvious problem with the society, and not with the individual. I mean you've asked a number of times in this thread why white people get upset when they get labeled a racist for doing something they assume to be innocuous, and I just can't understand why you would think they wouldn't have this reaction. It seems like the one constant in all of this is that because white people have been shitty to other cultures in the past, then it is impossible for white people today not to be. Also, and this is a pet peeve of mine largely in the thread, could we just stop using the word "nuanced" to describe something and instead just describe the actual nuance we're talking about? I feel like that word just gets used in lieu of an actual argument being made, or as almost a way to browbeat an opposing viewpoint.

I had to read that article a couple times, at first it almost seems like a satire of the position it holds. This article takes on the racial and cultural dynamic with respect to white and non white people, but to be honest I hear this kind of stuff all the time from my italian grandparents and relatives. Every family gathering has at least 2 hours of conversation about how only "real" Italian people know how to make a good sauce, pizza needs to have tomato chunks or it isn't good, and so on. I can understand the frustration here, but I still can't get past the idea that any particular group of people "owns" something, and in that article ownership seems to be a stand in for the complaint that the food they ate just wasn't very good. I mean would this article not have been written were the food as good of a quality as they were accustomed to?

I wouldn't necessarily characterize gamergate as libertarian, but they do take on that bent when it suits them. They're all for free speech when someone agrees with them, and totally against it and attempt to rationalize or downplay fear tactics and threats when someone says something they don't agree with. I'd definitely say their a political movement at their core, but giving them a label like that to me suggests a coherence that doesn't actually exist. Oddly enough, I think Gamgergate's ideology has a lot in common with the idea of (assuming that is the right word). Their goal isn't to prove their point, but only to disprove or cast doubt on yours.

I have a fair number of friends that are currently in or formerly served in the US military, and their reaction regarding the standards seems to suggest to me that the standards exist because someone decided they should. When the two women recently passed the Army ranger course recently I spoke to a couple buddies of mine who are ex rangers about it, and their opinion was that their gender was just something the media focused on. According to them, the fact that most of the women failed out wasn't really a big deal because the program is structured so that most people fail out, and the women's performance wasn't all that different from their class's. On a larger note, there have been a number of changes to how the US military operates recently revolving around transgender people, sexuality, women, etc. Since my circle of friends include a lot of service members, both men and women, The one constant I've found is that the only people who seem to have a problem with these things are those that have never served in the military.

I don't mind Richard Dawkins so much, though I am sometimes appalled at the things he suggests. To me he's kind of like the Ron Paul of pop culture (for those that don't know, Ron Paul is Rand Paul's father, a staunch libertarian and has a lot of good ideas like ending the war on drugs, ending private prisons, and reduced military spending, but also wants to do crazy things like go back on the gold standard). I don't think his treatment of Mulsims is any worse than his treatment of really any religious group, though he does represent a version of Atheism that seems to have adopted the same religious zealotry it is so against.. He makes claims like parents who know their child will be disabled should abort, but this all seems to be based on an idea that anything that doesn't absolutely hold empirical data above everything else is bad, and that everything should be treated as though it were some kind of math equation.

I wouldn't mind another conversation simulator, but I would prefer that stuff to be more dynamic or have new dimensions I had to consider as opposed to whatever it is I want to say. I'm a little worried after the response to DA2 that Bioware isn't willing to do more personal stories and it'll eventually become about saving the universe, Do people still play ME3's multiplayer? I got really into it for a while but eventually fell out for various reasons, and I'm looking forward to getting back into that.

One of us! ONE OF US!

I'm likely in a bit of a unique position here, in that I've played all 3 starcraft 2 games over the last few days. I picked up Legacy of the void to play over thanksgiving, and realized I only got about halfway through wings of liberty and only a couple missions into Heart of the Swarm after playing Legacy's prologue. At the moment I've played through wings of liberty and heart of the swarm, and am currently 10 missions into legacy of the void. It's been interesting to see how the games have developed over that time period, and so far Heart of the swarm seems to be the best campaign so far, mainly through the liberal use of Hero units throughout. This might not be a big deal on the lower difficulty levels (I've been playing on Hard), but the addition of a unit like that makes the combats much more manageable, whereas in the other two campaigns the battles seem to start and end very quickly often before you have the chance to respond, and they rarely get a chance to develop or change over time. With the addition of hero units your armies are more likely to push or get pushed around, battle lines to form, as opposed to the typical starcraft style where two armies meet and one gets destroyed. So far legacy of the void is quite good, at least in the gameplay department. The story is as hammy and ridiculous as ever, which I can certainly appreciate but for the most part I found this to be tiresome. Blizzard has moved away from the idea that upgrades are permanent (such as the evolution missions in HOTS or unit upgrades in WOL) and that added flexibility is a fantastic. In general, if you liked the previous games Legacy of the void is generally an improvement and something you'll enjoy as well. In playing through all these games I've gotten the sense that RTS games of this type have come about as far as they can and generally need a redesign from the bottom up for the current and next generations. I can see how few people are willing to engage with these games, as even something as simple as camera control is quite clunky and imprecise when compared with virtually any other style of game around today. In all the RTS games I've played, it just seems like no one has taken the time to sit down and ask why certain things exist the way they do, or why certain controls are implemented the way they are. After supposedly 10 years of iteration, even minor things that could serve to smooth out the gameplay (for example rebuilding lost units in a control group, auto-hotkey of production facilities, dragging on the ground to put units into a line vs selecting and moving them individually, etc) haven't been implemented. It seems like a few improvements were made from Brood war to WOL, but at that point the changes stopped and they began to rely on established ideas. This isn't necessarily something Blizzard is responsible for, as they generally are the best at making these kinds of games, it's more something that RTS developers have been reticent to change for whatever reason. The campaign levels have been quite good as has been pointed out, but this always seems to be based around the introduction of a particular unit. In missions where flying units are introduced there is little in the way of navigable ground, or that ground is littered with cliffs and narrow passageways in an attempt to highlight the unit. This style in my opinion tends to fall apart once you have access to the whole array of units, but Starcraft 2 seems to get around this by ending the campaign 2-3 missions later. As fun as the campaign missions have been, I've found myself making more or less the same type of army regardless of the type of mission, typically favoring the tougher units. I think part of the reason the lords management games have gained in popularity so much is first the large emphasis on combat as opposed to economy, and the great differences in how individual units operate. Ultimately I feel as though the dimensions of asymmetry, the mechanical depth, and focus of the gameplay have just become stagnant and cumbersome. While Starcraft 2 is generally the best at squeezing the most variation out of these things, I don't think you're going to get someone who isn't already sold on the formula interested. RTS seems to be the last genre where requiring the player to do busywork is acceptable, while most other genres have removed this kind of thing or improved their interfaces to accomodate it.

I read this article and it got me thinking more about my exposure to the idea that students are too sensitive, as if there is some new change in the way young people act. It's been a few years since I was on a college campus, and I'm probably the last generation of people who will have grown up without some kind of personal computing device constantly at their fingertips, so on some level I do see a sort of generational divide between myself (being in my late 20s) and people in their early 20s. Oddly enough, what got me to finally think that this has been blown out of proportion (after reading this article) is another I came across where people are upset about the shape of some novelty Reese's cup for Christmas. After coming across those two pieces within a short time frame of one another, I had a bit of a light bulb going off moment. These two things might seem unrelated, but I think I finally realized that any contention, regardless of it's magnitude, seems to get about the same level of exposure in the media. This makes the major things seem just as important as the minor things, and the major things just as trivial as the minor ones. I'm sure that there are certain elements of any controversy that are worth discussing, but looking back on it I think my frustration earlier was more borne out of my inability to recognize what was right in front of me. I'm sure young people over react about certain things, or get pulled into some righteous fury that ends up being targeted at the wrong person, but this juxtaposition really brought the whole scene into focus. These kids are trying their best to tackle issues like systemic oppression and equality of opportunity while living it out in their communities every day, and the adults who look down on this kind of thing are constantly losing their shit over the color of a coffee cup or the shape of a piece of chocolate.

There might be a good way in some situations, but I just don't see how a white lady walking down the street with (insert thing she could be accused of cultural appropriation for) could ever do this to the average passerby. How do you know she hasn't gone through a sincere conversion? To me the position that she is guilty of something, while it is entirely possible, views people as fundamentally selfish and deceitful, that they are guilty until proven innocent. You'll have to be a smarter person than me to figure that one out, and a lot of the time I just think it encourages people to assume way too much about someone based on their appearance.

I agree with the sentiment there Gormongous, but I think that Clyde is touching on is that it is simply not possible to do this. How do I vocally acknowledge the debt I owe for wanting to do something? And how do I do this in a way that is acceptable to whomever it needs to be? In some cases you might find a satisfactory answer like working with a native person or donating profits, but in most cases, in the cases involving people's personal choices it doesn't seem possible. You might do this to one person's satisfaction but not to another's, and the conflicts only get more complicated from there. The question isn't so much what is a sincere conversion so much as how is this communicated.

I can see how new members might not like the megathreads here, but really all you need to do is go back a page or so to see what the thread is about at the moment. If we didn't do this there would be a million threads here, because our conversations tend to go on all kinds of crazy tangents, but surprisingly most end up making their way back to the original topic. Plus we tend to make topics on broad subjects as opposed to specific events, and I personally think this might be a good counter to the typical trolling you see elsewhere since you get a lot of the same people going back and forth over something as opposed to that being diffused over more threads. You get a better sense of the personalities around here and, for me at least, I get a better sense of the things I would want to talk about with said group.

In reading some of these responses I got to thinking about the purpose of status effects and damage types. They seem like a good, or at least easily understandable way to add some dynamism to the game but I think at a certain point this becomes cumbersome without a real benefit of it's own. In particular I'll give the example of Bravely default where there are maybe 5 or six disabling effects in the game, each with it's own spell or item to clear it. Now in these cases if you run out of that item, or your healer is the one hit by the effect that is typically the end of the fight, or it starts a back and forth where the fight becomes untenable. I can appreciate the aesthetic this creates, but I feel as though too much of this just creates redundancy or makes the random effects in the game swing wildly in either direction. This seems to be something that is fun to engage with when controlling a single character (planning 1 character times X status/damage effects). But when controlling multiple it becomes a chore, as well as muliltiplicatively more complicated such that it gets in the way of playing the game. In the case of damage types, I think strategy games usually get it down pretty well. Units have set benefits and weaknesses and rather than putting on a piece of gear to account for this, you must compose your army differently. I enjoy this because it quite effectively and simply translates the background math into the mechanical action and play space of the game. If your army is mostly comprised of say fire units you can tell at a glance it will be weak to ice attacks, and so on. I haven't found an example of rpgs and the like that translate this idea effectively without the player first having extensive knowledge of the game's mechanics.

I'm not sure the comparison to being downsized is fair, especially when the two parties involved don't have any kind of a contract with one another. Publishers work with press, and vice versa, because that relationship is mutually beneficial. When it stops being so, I don't see why ending it constitutes some kind of negative action. Yes press sites can help sell a game, but remember when devs showcase their games to journalists it is done entirely at their own expense. They pay for food, travel, lodging, people to handle the event, devs' time for interviews, or whatever expenses are entailed in the event. I don't know what to call these things other than gifts, it's just that press sites choose to only label physical things they are given as gifts which to me is disingenuous. Like Osmosich said both parties are free to do as they will, and you can make of that what you will, but I just don't see how this is anything other than one party choosing to no longer engage another. You might look at the situation and see callousness on the part of Bethesda or ambivalence on the part of Kotaku, but it's not like either party has crossed some ethical boundary.

In the case of Donald Sterling that is probably a fair assessment, the dude had a pretty shitty past. I still can't justify in my mind the link between personal statements and one's job. As Clyde pointed out jobs, particularly in the west, are a huge deal and more or less define your ability to survive. So when you call for someone's job as a result of one thing they said, it strikes me as the 21st century equivalent of calling for their head. I know a lot of the people who do this kind of thing are coming from a good place, but it's really just mob justice in the end.

I wonder if the whole calling for someone's job thing is because that is so often the response for public personalities. Donald Sterling, Paula Seen, that ESPN anchor, Charlie Sheen and so on that has simply been the response for all of them. Now those people being millionaires I don't think anyone is going to shed a tear, but for anyone not independently wealthy the same punishment could be devastating. This in particular drives me up the wall. Sure it's easy, and that's probably why it is done, but the idea that the way to defeat an argument or position you don't like is to destroy the person making it I just can't get behind.

Isn't that just what people do though? Try to paint themselves in the best light, always? If anything the onus is on kotaku to resist that kind of thing, publishers are just representing their interests in that case. As I understand it the situation now rests at a point where kotaku are no longer receiving gifts from these publishers, and I just can't make the connection as to how this is representative or in some way part of a question of ethics.

I feel like some of the pro kotaku positions come from the perspective of journalists dealing with a government. There is no contract between publishers and press, no formal agreements of any kind, so I don't quite understand why this is a question of right and wrong. Kotaku did something a publisher didn't like, so they decided they were no longer going to work with kotaku, spend the money to bring them to events, give them review code, etc. This doesn't strike me as a moral conundrum so much as just what happens when people do things you don't like.

The point about the apology illustrates my frustration perfectly. You express an opinion that someone finds offensive, for whatever reason, and the only legitimate recourse is to recant that opinion, apologize, and admit it is a wrong opinion. That kind of thinking simply does not allow for disagreement, and suggests that only correct or popular opinions are legitimate. It treats anything that offends you, for whatever reason, as illegitimate and unworthy of consideration. That is my frustration with this mode of thinking, and it is one I see as becoming more common. It simply gets ignored or excused by people that agree with whatever offense has taken place.

I think I agree with the basic ideas and premises of that post, but if it was meant to be in response to the Atlantic article it completely ignores the specifics of the situation. First off, the guy in the video was being berated because of an e-mail his wife sent. He was being told he wasn't worth listening to because of something his wife said. I don't see how someone can reasonably justify that without twisting themselves into some ideological corner where the principle of the thing is all that matters, and anyone who sees it as having any merit at all is guilty by association. Second, she didn't tell the students they were children. She expressed a very common, 101 level idea in developmental psychology. Namely that play should not be structured, and that there is no evidence that suggests that should change later in a person's development. This has been a common theme of the field since the 80s at least, it's just not particularly well known, and developmental psychology is typically thought of being the domain of children who don't know better by virtue of it's name. In fact, developmental psychology has quite a bit to say about people much later in life--development is not something that ever stops--it's just that in most situations the study is focused on children for no other reason than it is easy to study children. I mean she even makes the point that this lack of structure extends to removing gendered barriers with the reference to a boy dressing up as mulan. I've read the e-mail a couple times through, and I can't see a situation in which someone could find it offensive unless they wanted to. The email is simply the observations of a developmental psychologist as they relate to play, the main thing seeming to be that the opinion she expresses is not (for lack of a better phrase) concerned about being tonally or opinionated in a way that is different from me. The students' response to this disagreement wasn't to confront the argument but to confront the person. To get them removed from their positions, to scream at them, and so on. I bet there is a situation in which what you are talking about makes sense, but this is not that situation. I think the assertion that he is using respect as a means of denying a person's humanity takes so many leaps of logic as to be pure speculation, and not a reasonable basis for the rejection of his position. I don't know if it's worth going over this anymore, but what bothers me about this style of thinking is that it is the very same thing we see out of gamergame, and often complain about. We often see something horrible done and see the specific actions as what constitute it being a bad thing, but if you read an article by one of their supporters or vanguards they always argue the principle of the matter as justification. While we may agree with the premises of the students, I don't think we can reasonably admit that a person not using the tone you would want them to use is enough to discredit their opinion.

The email really isn't that bad unless you want it to be. What she is saying is pretty standard in the world of developmental psychology, even mundane stuff. I know this sounds odd, but in the world of developmental psychology the idea that play shouldn't be structured at all is standard. She even takes the time to point out that her opinion is based on her professional understanding of her life's work. Could you be upset by it? Sure. Does that justify demanding aa person be fired, or removed from their position? She doesn't ask the students to be doormats about the issue, she urges them to express their anger at the idea rather than the person. Also, the man in the video's wife wrote the email, why does that make him not worth listening to? The idea that the students reactions are justified assumes the people they are talking to have the same perspective as then, and not having that is bad. Those reactions aren't about proving a point- they are to make yourself feel better. And you're right about the weeks thing, that was autocorrect.

I don't think it's fair to equate berating a professor for weeks because his wife wrote an E-mail with students not wanting to support a company who is active in the destruction of a third world country. I think you illustrate my frustration with this kind of thing-- it tends to view missteps as intentional, violent acts. I also don't think it's necessarily confined to the university campus either. Every time I go to breitbart I know at least half the articles will be berating well known liberals, and at Huffington Post the same will be true for well known conservatives. It's become fashionable to value a person entirely on one thing they've said or done, and there seems to be no upper limit on what the punishment for that is. People have been fired, marginalized, what have you, for having the wrong opinions, but Gap still makes their clothes in sweatshops, Exxon is still stealing land from poor farmers, and so on. I think at a certain point you have to admit this kind of activism is fundamentally selfish.

Like most other things, it has it's roots in slavery. Slaves were not allowed to read, but they were allowed to listen to scripture, which upon emancipation became the way most black people learned to read. There is more to it than that, but essentially the ubiquity of the Bible and white people's feelings about it basically made it the one type of knowledge that wasn't forbidden in the slavery era and moving forward. Basically white people had a problem with black people learning anything, for all the reasons you would suspect, but an exception was made for the Bible and Christianity.