Reyturner

The latest A Life Well Wasted is actually a really good companion piece too all this. Also: ERMAGERD A LERF WERR WERSTERED!

I'd say the number of finished products under your belt is the only really good metric. Everyone has a moleskine note book full of wonderful brilliant ideas that have never been put to any kind of test. All you can do is design really bad stuff and have it torn apart by people who know what they're talking about and keep doing that until they stop tearing it apart. The environment that a lot of designers are in is one where too many people are either unwilling or unable to call out bad decisions being made by their colleges (you don't want to burn bridges after all). When you consider that the average career in game is about 5-7 years, of course a majority of people who basically started actually doing their job in year 3 (if they're starting their career doing something like QA) aren't going to be top of their field by the end of those 5 years. Game designers need to design games, badly, for a long time. Asking them to learn on the job and building a business model around publishing whatever they come up with regardless of merit is a perfect storm for producing crap. If I could give aspiring game designers one piece of advice it would be design games before you work in games, ESPECIALLY if you're only inroad is QA.

Except that there are apprenticeships, certifications, dispassionate peer reviews and a hundred other ways of measuring your expertise or the expertise of others. You can wash out of an art college. Have you ever heard of anyone washing out of the diploma mills that pass for game design schools who didn't just quit? For game designers, unless you're 100% responsible for every aspect of the project or you've actually go some experience to measure your progress against, you have very little idea if what you're doing is any good.

To expand on this, I think there is a big problem with kids doing the following steps: 1. going to "Game School" and achieving enough to get a diploma (or no school at all) 2. getting a job in QA 3. doing simple design tasks, for free, helping other designers who followed the same path. 4. defaulting into a design job because there's an opening. If that guy happens to be super talented then great, but far more often he/she doesn't know what they're doing and they end up learning most of their craft on the job. If they're lucky they end up on projects that are successful and they get to do it again and again and, eventually, they might end up being good (or they might just reinforcing the same bad habits). I've never seen any really good mentoring or training for designers anywhere that I've worked, mostly because it is an incredibly difficult problem to solve. Things like the Amnesia Fortnight and Personal Development time being scheduled are probably the best thing, but so many studios undervalue that kind of experimentation as it doesn't immediately result in product that they can sell. Designers have to have the freedom to try, fail hard, try again, fail again slightly less hard, and learn their lessons. Right now, most just stumble through and maybe get good and or maybe their mistakes are covered up by others and it is really a crap shoot as to whether you're going to be able to develop your craft or not. It's bad for the designers and it is bad for the studios. Now there's going to be a lot of people going "That's what I did and that's what 90% of successful designers that I know did so clearly this is all wrong" but I think they are suffering fromt he same selection bias that people who think they made good while following The Secret are.

I don't think a more successful person would have said the things he said (mostly because really successful people don't spend a lot of time criticizing others in the first place), BUT, he makes some good points. There is a lot of bad design out there because design is such a fuzzy and ill-defined skill and a lot of designers wind up in their positions because they don't have art or programming skills (frankly, you could replace the word Designer with the word Producer in this article and it would still be as true). I think there are a lot of egos out there that are being persevered by the fact that it was Richard Garriott that said this, and not because the thing he's saying are wrong. I've worked in several of studios that ended up either majorly downsizing or outright closing in the last few years where these issues were part of the problem (it wasn't all the economy). I think it's also why the mid-tier studio is dying out: it is way too easy for outstanding AAA studios to find and hire the top tier talent and way easier for outstanding developers to just go it on their own. People who are good don't have to work at studios that aren't (at least not for long). This is way reductive, but I think it is more true than a lot of people are comfortable admitting.

Hey, your right. It's almost like they're making a Saint's Row game.

Journey is possibly the most beautiful game. It's hard to imagine it being created by people.

re: The Castle Doctrine I think it's appropriate to force you to be a male character, precisely because it is about the paranoid macho rugged individual dog eat dog mentality that leads to laws like The Castle Doctrine or Stand Your Ground laws. Male-ness and protecting "what's yours" (including your family) and conversely, striding into the world and taking what you will by your own strength and resourcefulness are inherently linked in modern society (and in America especially). The Castle Doctrine (the law, not the game) exists to satisfy an ideology, that a MAN should have the right to use deadly force on an invader of HIS property (because a man should fight is shown battles and so on and so forth) , not because there is an epidemic of home invasions that is only held at bay by heavily armed home owners with a licence to kill. That it also puts you in the roll of the marauder further highlights the absurdity of that macho worldview. On one hand, if you're not prepared to turn your home into battlefield then anyone can and will walk in the front door, kill your family and take your property. On the other, any sign of weakness in your fellow man can and should be exploited, because it was his weakness that allowed you that opportunity. These are rolls that society projects onto all males and the game itself is born from the creators own feelings of fear and paranoia, so The Castle Doctrine featuring exclusively male avatars is perfectly valid in my mind, even if it isn't a narrative about a specific man (in fact, if it was, I think it would lessen the impact of the game).

It comes down to the power / privilege relationship. The underdog or the peer can say anything, where as the one on top comes off a bully.I think that's why a lot of brodudes hate being opinionated in a way that is different from me; they are never the underdog. They treat the people lower down on the privilege ladder like they treat their peers but they don't consider the power relationship. It's also why they fall back on "get a sense of humor". Louis CK is one of the most talented and hard working comedians working today, but he presents himself as a lucky shlub. When he tells people the secret of success is to work hard and to not be an asshole it comes off a lot less gross than if Donald Trump says the exact same thing.

It's a tough nut to crack. On one hand the Penny Arcade Dickwolves-gate Crisis brought the idea of rape-culture and the idea that you should be sensitive to other people's traumas (ie: trigger warnings) into common knowledge. On the other hand, it also turned rape-culture and trigger warnings into a punchline for a lot of people. But, at the risk of repeating myself, being right isn't enough when you want to change the status quo; you either need the buy-in of the privileged class or you need to totally destroy them. But hell, my attitude is informed by my privilege and situation like anyone else (and I have a natural bias against my total destruction). I'd like to think I'm an ally.

He means stuff like this the LAPD posting articles about "Protecting Yourself from Becoming a Victim of Date Rape" implying that it is "natural" to get raped if you fail to conform to those practices. When problematic behavior is normalized, the people perpetuating it aren't necessarily doing it out of malice; they don't think anything of it precisely because it is normal. That's why otherwise reasonable people can say thing like "Affirmative Action is just reverse racism against white people" or "feminism is no longer relevant because women can vote"; from their perspective there isn't a problem and being told (or even asked) to change their behavior feels unwarranted. That's why it is common practice around social justice / gender politics to call out and publicly shame people for espousing and perpetuatng harmful or problematic ideas, operating on the theory that there is no such thing as a harmless sexism / racism / whatever-ism (see /r/ShitRedditSays). Of course, like all other things left leaning, everyone has their own idea of what is right and so there is no unified front; some flavors of feminism leads to pretty extreme trans-phobia for example. Personally, I think you catch more flies with honey; rubbing someone's face in their privilege just makes them defensive, especially when they don't even understand why they're getting confronted. To them, it just feels like an attack out of the blue and you don't end up reaching them (or end up pushing them further away).

Just because a problematic trend has been normalized in a culture doesn't mean you shouldn't confront it.

Her original Tropes vs. Women series sort of did.

In as far as she presents herself as an expert on video games, yeah. It'd have been nice if she'd been able to hand the mic off to someone like Kathleen Saunders or Kat Baily for those bits.

The amount of bile that was thrown at her for even wanting to make this video was totally out of control and, as a result, criticizing any aspect of the video marks you out as some kind of Male Rights idiot. As for the criticism for her "regressive crap" comment, it's just that it is rather out of place in a video that is presented as being fact based. Making a value judgement marks her position as being a matter of opinion and undermines her message. That being said, if she'd gone with something a bit looser and more conversational, it wouldn't be as out of place. My opinion.

She is if she wants anyone who isn't on her side to care. This is was I was talking about: it isn't enough to be right. I totally agree with everything she says. I'm actually a big fan of her previous work and I've learned a lot from it... but the worthiness of the message doesn't make up for its lack of execution.

and she'd reach hundreds of thousands of times more with a GOOD video.

I think this series absolutely can be executed as a YouTube show, but you need to make it entertaining. Call up Thought Bubble (the guys who do the animated sections of Crash Course), interview some people in the industry, do some skits (see The Death and Rebirth of Superman). And for the record, I am in no way defending Double Dragon Neon against anything ever.

My $0.02 on the video: this is a terrible execution of a completely worthy idea. A single talking head scolding "games" for 20 minutes over something that a lot of people think is harmless (this normalized attitude towards sexism is itself is a problem I know) isn't going to win anyone over. I really hope she makes these a bit more engaging in the future as the message really is important; see Vihart, Day9 Daily, Crash Course or Half in the Bag for ways to make me want to watch you talk about anything for 20+ minutes. Honestly, I think a lot of social justice advocates lose sight of something very important; it isn't enough to be right, you have to be convincing. While it might feel like you're cheapening an important issue by making it engaging, either with humor or by treating opposing views with something other than acid scorn garnished with sarcasm, you have to make people laugh before you can get them excited to be on your side. She isn't going to reach anyone by calling Double Dragon Neon (a game that NOBODY likes) "regressive trash" even if it is warranted.

I was drawn into the Idle Thumbs show by trying to figure out meaning of the the mysterious term LoMa. By the time I found out I was hooked.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a wonderful ride. It does, however, have a monkey trap you have to overcome. There is a jar with an opening just big enough to slip your hand into, and inside that jar there is a big ball of "taking all the stuff this game says and does terribly seriously". It is tempting to reach in there and grab that ball as everyone loves taking games terribly seriously. But then you're stuck! Your hand clutching this enticing ball won't come out of the jar. Struggle as you might you cannot escape and you will lament the terrible fate engineered by the perverse minds at Kojima Productions and Platinum Games. But you just have to let go. Let go of "taking all the stuff this game says and does terribly seriously". Then you'll be free to romp around in the big stupid playground they've built for you. If you can't have fun slicing Gatorade-powered cyborgs into a thousand pieces or flipping a 50ft robot into the air while off-brand nu-metal rises to a screaming crescendo then I pity you; next you'll be saying that there's something wrong with Asura's Wrath (scummy DLC true ending notwithstanding). While it's neither the best Platinum Games character action / orgy of absurdity or the best Metal Gear Kojima-babble fest, Revengeance is still pretty damn great with mechanics deep enough to reward at least a couple playthroughs.