aperson

I'm not sure I understand the question. A achievement is an achievement - how can it be valid or invalid? Amy Hennig's resume is more impressive than Neil Druckmann's in a direct apples-to-apples comparison, so however notable he is or what he achieved she's at least as notable and has achieved at least as much. My posts were less about what sort of work was valid and more about how female video game developers have over time, perhaps despite good intentions, been moved into a women's issues ghetto, where female game developers are recognized for acting sufficiently feminine and also expected to act sufficiently feminine.

I'm not talking about games for a female audience, I'm talking about games that are about appropriately female stuff and for the audience that wants games with a "woman's voice." The idea of a "woman's voice" in games is nonsense and once again ghettoizes female game devs. If you are a woman you have a woman's voice, full stop. If you make a kick ass action game as a woman you have a woman's voice. If you create a silly kids platformer you have a "woman's voice." If you make an anti-feminist screed you have a "woman's voice." The idea that you only have a "woman's voice" if you talk about lady things is ridiculous and destructive. It's not feminine for women to be creative unless what they create aligns with what you believe women should be expressing? What? If a woman creates a COD-killer is she "acting like a man."? I get the intent here but this type of thinking is extremely regressive. It's the idea that women speak, or should speak, only in a certain range, and everything outside that range is inauthentic to their gender.

IMO these types of lists do more harm than good. I get the intent but the reality is that these sorts of lists basically ghettoize women in games and imply that the way for women to be notable in games, especially these days, is not to make good games but to specifically address "women's issues" or throw red meat to liberals. You see this sort of thing all the time in video game media as well - a website has 10 male writers and 1 female one and the woman is basically on the women's issues beat. This sends the message that female game "journalists" can't succeed just by doing a good job, and similarly that female developers can't be notable just by doing good work or working on big franchises - instead they have to do women's work. This "women's work" is often gender / feminism / "social justice" related so maybe on some level that seems like a good thing, but I think in the end it's ultimately destructive and still implies that women are only valuable when doing womanly things. It's a little more subtle than "a woman's place is in the kitchen" but not by all that much - the woman's place is in creating visual novels about lesbian dating that draw zero revenue, while men get to create Call of Duty.

Hennig. The only reason I mention this is that I was just googling for lists of notable women in game development and a list I found spelled it wrong as well.

Being notable in the video game industry is largely about self-promotion. Most of the "notable" women in video games these days aren't creators but are twitterers, bloggers, etc. It's actually really interesting, sad and regressive. Lists of notable female game developers are often highly skewed towards women working in the Atari / 286 era. They've actually become more invisible over time and now the vast majority of female gaming personalities have very little to do with the creation of games - the "notable" women in video games these days are mostly women dealing specifically with "women's issues." It's interesting to compare someone like Kim Swift to someone like Jonathan Blow. Blow appears in all sorts of media - his talking head videos appear on Gamespot, he gives lectures at various events, he's the subject of numerous sycophantic bio pieces in major magazines. Kim Swift has a pretty low profile. But Portal is a much better game than Braid - so what gives? Hell, Erik Wolpaw gets more press than Kim Swift. Hell, Jonathan Coulton gets more press than Kim Swift. I don't know if Kim Swift is shy about press and doesn't self-promote or if people are just incurious or what, but it is odd.

It's become an extremely common phrase. It's just one of those accepted terms that people use without examination. Here are my objections to "core gameplay loop" as a concept: 1. When people talk about the "core gameplay loop" they are most often talking about the structural organiztion of the game rather than the gameplay. 2. As I said before, the more designers talk about the "core loop" of their game the worse the game is. The most complex writeups of core loops tend to be about bog-standard match-3 games with commoditized gameplay. 3. Almost everything in life can be described as a loop, but that description is rarely the best one or particularly helpful. A movie is just a loop of scenes - however the "core" of movie being "there's a scene then there's another scene" is completely useless both as analysis and as creative direction. 4. Similar to 2, when designers think about games as loops they tend to make very repetitive games. (For obvious reasons) How designers mentally model games is a complex issue, but as a related example if you think about "combat" and "traversal" and two separate things you're always going to make an Uncharted rather than a Mario, because you mental model precludes the design of Mario. Using a loop as a mental model for a game is IMO very bad compared to using verbs or experiences. Almost any game is going to have some repetition even if you do your best to avoid it, and embracing that repetition at the outset only makes things worse. 5. It's very hard to explain what the "core gameplay loop" is for a variety of classic games. Again with Mario - "the core gameplay loop of Mario is jumping" is a real sentence I didn't make up, but that doesn't describe Mario gameplay at all. Mario has obvious structural loops (8 worlds, 4 levels per worlds) but the gameplay is not loop based - there's no loop you can describe that when repeated makes up a Mario game, beyond meaninglessly vague stuff like "jump over or on some dudes and pits." The way Mario games are designed is verbs-first - the reason everyone plays around outside the castle in Mario 64 is that the game was designed not based on the "core loop" but on the core movement mechanics. --- It seems to me that the idea of the "core gameplay loop" became popular after the Bungie "30 seconds of fun" thing as a sort of bastardization of it. Now it's often used as a way to pretend that shallow F2P games have complex gameplay as they have a lot of different reward cycles, even though none of those reward cycles could honestly be described as gameplay.

So has the OP figured out yet that the vast majority of writing on game design is absolutely horrible and not worth the time it takes to read? I feel like I should elaborate but I'll make it brief: 1. The most-cited books on game design are almost universally terrible. 2. Many game design theories are trivially easy to falsify, yet remain popular for years despite being easily falsifiable. ("A Theory of Fun" is a perfect example of both 1 and 2 - the theory is clearly incorrect) Similarly, many theories sound plausible but no more plausible than a million other competing theories, such as theories that try to separate players out into different groupings like the Bartle types. 3. Many of the academic texts spend a lot of time on academic-sounding but meaningless topics like what the exact definition of game is, and contain inane statements like "before making a fun game we need to know exactly what a game is and what fun is!" (Eric Zimmerman's book is a good example of this, 100 pages in and it's still wanking about the 8 different possible definitions of video game) If you read a book on movie-making that was all about "but what is enjoyment???" and "but what is a movie???" I assume you'd put it down in disgust, but for some reason game design books are full of this stuff. 4. Reliance on terms like "core gameplay loop" that make less and less sense the more you think about them. Fun fact: the more someone talks about the "core gameplay loop" of their game the worse their game is. "The core gameplay loop of Mario is jumping" is an actual sentence you can read in a game design book. Note that I am talking specifically about "academic" writing about game design here, and not general criticism. (Which has it's own share of different problems) For some reason academic writing about games is essentially completely immune to logic and review. My impression of it is that it's mostly written by people attempting to mimic how they imagine academic discussions should sound. Edit: To be nice, the Schell book of lenses is pretty good. One of the few "academic" pieces on game design I can think of that might actually make someone better at or understand more about game design. (or at least how to approach it) One thing that amazes me about game design writing is how little of it is based on case studies and real-world examples. It seems like, and maybe this is just me, that instead of trying to divine out of thin air unifying theories of game design that are trivially proven false it makes more sense to look at games that work and try to derive rules of thumb based on them. Instead of coming up with inane theories about what "fun" is why not look at some fun games, figure out what makes them fun, and see what they have in common? For some reason almost nobody does this.

Steed seems like the one with the most immediately obvious appeal, but watching the wrapup video for it they didn't seem to have much idea of how to turn it into a bigger game. They immediately began thinking, for lack of a better term, completely inside the box. Maybe you get more melee moves, maybe you take on different missions - basically an open-world brawler but with a horse - which sounds terrible. Seems like they made a game initially based on Shadow of the Colossus, but when SotC no longer worked as the template they got stuck. Edit: I also think it illustrates something Chris brings up a lot on the cast: how easy it is to make default decisions or fall into established patterns without really thinking about them.

There are actually two different levels of that thing not working. The first is that if you have a reference and re-assign it you aren't changing the original object, you're simply re-assigning the reference. So "pos" was pointing at position but then it as made to point at something else. The second is that Vector3 is not a reference type anyway, so in reality "pos" wasn't pointing at anything.

A really good strategy for all sorts of logical reasoning is to consider extreme cases. I mean the reasoning and the type of problem is the same. (Yes, the answer is to stay where you are) These types of problems are tricky because the "common sense" explanation is based on the state where you have no relevant information, but in the course of the problem you obtain relevant information that changes the probabilities. (Or....elucidates them)

I won't comment on the answer, as I am familiar with the problem, but it's interesting how counter-intuitive statistics and probability can be. "Common sense" basically doesn't mean anything in those domains. (Or many domains, but that's a wider discussion) Similar question: say you want to stay at the best hotel out of 3, with the caveat that once you leave a hotel you can't go back to it. You go to the first hotel on your list. Then you go the second hotel and it's better than the first. (We'll assume no hotels are exactly equal) Given that should you now continue on to the third hotel, or stay at this second one? In some ways I think this is even more devious that Monty Hall (although the solution is basically the same) in that it's not interactive at all. Nobody actively does anything, there's not even the potential for any sort of trickery.

Conspicuous consumption is the point.

A* pathfinding is very similar to what you've already done. You have a list of open nodes, directions you've tried, etc. It's basically the algorithm I outlined above, just with a non-trivial heuristic. Good luck

The fact that people didn't expect layoffs is a little surprising. They had a studio full of people without anything to work on. Beyond that it sounds pretty normal. SSM recently laid off a bunch of people. Disney just laid off a huge number. I still don't see what's particularly different about this. As far as layoff stories goes it sounds nicer than most. It seems to me that the people on the "Levine is an awful / incompetent person" train just needed some good drama and a villain.

I strongly suggest you adopt a coding style that fights against logical problems. I find it extremely useful to put comments in code that say what the code is supposed to do. In fact, typically I write these comments before I write the code. Hopefully this is tied in with invariants - things you expect to be true at different stages and can check against. Here are some things I see eyeballing your code: 1. The use of '=' to test equality. (Apparently this is a thing in Gamemaker, but deprecated?) 2. num appears to be e+1 always 3. You can choose an xdir and ydir of zero, which means select the tile you are already at (this would be bad no?) 4. Except you can't actually hit the zero case, since you are adding one to the result of irandom 5. The case where e equals zero seems very strange to me. This is choosing the first seed tile? If you have a loop and your loop contains a test for just the first iteration of that loop that's usually a good indication that your loop is wonky. 6. If your layout_width is 6 and open[e,1] is 5 your if statement will pass, meaning your range is actually from 0 to 6 inclusive, when 5 (if I understand correctly) should be the last possible index 7. This check is also weird in that the if statement will fail if open[e,1] is zero, which should be ok if xdir is zero or one. (basically your bounds checking looks messed up) The starting tile being on the far left is only a problem if you are trying to add a tile to the left. Here is how I would comment your code, the way it is written now: //1 For the desired number of rooms, find a direction we can add a tile in and add that tile //2a. Pick a random direction and test to see if that space is already filled (wait...do we already have one seed tile??) //2b. Keep going until we hit a direction that works. //TODO the way this code is written we can test the same direction an indeterminate number of times, and there's no way of knowing if we've unsuccessfully tried all 4 directions //TODO it's possible that no direction works, in which case we should pick a different tile to try to attach to and cross this tile off a list of viable tiles to expand from //2c At this point we know that the xdir and ydir address a free space adjacent to our current tile, //except that this free tile could be off the map, which we probably should have checked for in 2b and rejected at that point, now what? ----- Now here is how I would write the "correct" version: //1. Pick a starting tile bound to the map //2. For the desired number of rooms: //pick a direction to test from the last "open" tile //test to see that direction is open and in bounds (I should write a function for this!) //if not cross the direction off the list of available directions //if we find a working direction put that tile down and repeat //if we've tried each direction unsuccessfully pick a different tile from our "open" list to work against, and remove this tile from the "open" list //NOTE: we didn't actually put a room down in this case, so we shouldn't increment our counter vs desired room total --- Basically, come up with an idealized notion of how the code should work, then write the code to match. This also makes it easy to debug - if things are going wrong you have a good understanding of what the code should be doing so you can just print stuff out to make sure that it is doing that - in this case print out the list of directions you've tried and rejected, print out when a tile gets marked as closed, etc. Writing code that is correct, or at least easily made correct, is an important skill to develop. In large projects the difficult bugs are bugs that deal with multithreading, memory use, or code interfacing with other code such that what the code is doing becomes less and less clear, and these are the sorts of problems that are best dealt with via prevention rather than debugging.

I don't see the problem. The judge abstained from voting. I think they deserve a lot of credit for abstaining when they haven't seen all the entries. Seems like something you'd expect, but then again that's not how most video game awards work by comparison. (Which is one reason why video game awards are idiotic and just come down to whatever titles had the most buzz)

I think it's fair to be a bit concerned by or perplexed over how popular YA books are with adults. Maybe that's a function of content - literary fictions tends not to be about boy wizards and vampire romance. I have a somewhat low opinion of YA fiction, but I also have a low opinion of literary fiction. (For different reasons) And it seems odd to me how there is a stigma (at least in some circles) with adults liking YA fiction but there's no stigma with adults liking Pixar movies - which are movies made for six-year-olds. Maybe someone can explain how liking fiction written for teens is bad but liking fiction aimed at toddlers is ok. See, that's how you do elitism. Go all the way!

What to put in a prefab, what to put in scene, what to put in a script through the editor and what to do in code is IMO the hardest thing to figure out in Unity. I'm not sure there's any shortcut to getting comfortable with that other than using it for a while. If you are going to have a pretty small number of planets I would probably make prefabs for each. If you want it do be more dynamic or support a larger number I would do it in code.

Edit: Deleting my previous post, as convo has moved on. This is business as usual. I'm not cheering for Levine's new project - the only Irrational game I've played is Freedom Force. But I don't get why this is terrible and awful and we need to find one individual to blame here and not for the other 100 rounds of layoffs at various places in the last year. It's terrible when people lose their jobs, but if you are going to be laid off from a place Irrational is a pretty good place to be laid off from. I get that the letter was very odd and invites criticism. But beyond that, what's special here? Why does this call for the wailing and gnashing of teeth and "oh, these poor ex-Irrational folks!"? What about those poor Ghost Games folks? Trion folks? Folks nobody in this thread has even heard about? Is it because some people who worked at Irrational were well-known before or after? (Shawn Elliot, Steve Gaynor, etc) Is it because they had amusing Twitter feeds or podcasts? Because Irrational is a prestigious developer? This is not me saying "you can't be upset here unless you're upset every time someone is laid off", but it does strike me as at odds with how common this sort of thing is. There are plenty of "grunts" who don't have podcasts and who don't work at prestigious studios. They work for 2 years at Pandemic. Then Pandemic lays people off and they work at Bottle Rocket. Then Bottle Rocket closes and they work at Harmonix. Then Harmonix lays people off and they work at Trion. Then Trion lays them off. I don't see anyone trying to figure out who at Trion is to blame or claiming that Scott Hartsman is a terrible person. About how the process that lead to End of Nations is irresponsible. I get that Irrational closing is a juicier story - Irrational is high profile, makes AAA critically successful games. But that doesn't make layoffs at Irrational more morally wrong. It doesn't put those people in worse shape than anyone else laid off. (If anything, if you're going to be laid off, a high-profile AAA dev is who you want to be laid off from) Many of the people I know who were laid off with me have been laid off at least once again already. So yes, it's hard not to see this as "business as usual." --- On Twitter I saw Mattie Brice talking about how this was a good case for unionization. At first I was like "what? That's dumb! Unionization wouldn't have prevented these layoffs!" But at least that's looking at the bigger picture. Calling Ken Levine an idiot is not "coping" or "learning" or "educating" or "raising awareness" or fighting against corporatism or whatever - it's ego gratification. Maybe a union or guild or something similar would address issues like how you can work on a game for 6 years then get credited as "special thanks" or not even credited at all. Maybe it would give employees more leverage in negotiations, some sort of dispute resolution process, etc. If people want to affect positive change why not try to start some twitter hashtag movement #gamedevguild or some shit? (Don't call it a "union", that will never work!) Or call for reforms to the IGDA since the IGDA is useless shit that actively fights against game dev employees?

Yeah, I wrote something similar then deleted it. I don't think the concept of genre is very useful, it's more often than not just a qualitative judgement. There are some rigid fiction forms. Every Clive Cussler novel is basically the same book. A lot of murder mystery pot-boilers are very similar. In those cases I think it's useful to talk about working within an established form. However "science fiction" is not a form. It's not even a theme. It's a setting - or really just a time period. A Star Wars novel and "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" have almost nothing in common. They appeal to different types of people and are thematically completely different. They have different structures. Putting them in the same genre communicates almost nothing. Meanwhile "The Road" somehow isn't science fiction, even though there are 20 syfy movies of the week that are just lesser versions of the same story.

Off the top of my head Night Trap and Deadly Premonition are both examples of similar games, where events unfold in real-time and you can miss them by not being around. And Lightning Returns. And some Zelda games. I agree that "replayability" often doesn't really mean that, but if you aim to make a game replayable and instead you make a game people play once then talk about and remember fondly that sounds good to me. --- As far as the stats on percentage completion - when these numbers were popularized it became fashionable to draw dubious conclusions from them. I was going to write something very long about this but I'll make it short: the fact that many people don't finish many games doesn't necessarily indicate that games are too long, nor does it indicate consumer dissatisfaction. People can consume half a game, move on to something else and be perfectly satisfied, then go out and buy the sequel to the game they didn't finish. There are also issues like that most games require some amount of mastery, and the fact that developers train players not to finish games by mailing in the latter portion because they know many players won't see it anyway. According to the linked piece only 46% of players finished Portal, and 56% finished Mass Effect 2. So is game length the problem? I suspect that many people don't finish a lot of the books they start. I suspect, especially with the advent of Netflix, that a lot of people don't even finish a lot of movies they start. But I'm not sure that's a problem and not just a function of how people consume content. --- There are already narrative games designed to be replayed. 999 for example. This is not a system-driven game, but it's a game you play through 2, 3 maybe 5 or 6 times. Systems-driven narrative is really hard. (Talk to Chris Crawford) The idea that you can have pieces and the AI can assemble them into quality fiction - it's tough. Very hard to imagine that not just turning into awkward noise. But, I don't see the harm in trying. And maybe, even if that approach doesn't work out, they'll hit on a hybrid or something else cool. This Eurogamer piece reminds me of "that guy" in a brainstorming meeting who immediately shoots down everything that isn't standard cover-based-shooter mechanics. A guy who writes about games admonishing a creator for trying something risky and experimental - what? Why are you guys working on this weird 3D Mario game? It's fundamentally flawed - when you project a 3D space onto a 2D plane the viewer has no depth perception. I can't even tell if I'm standing underneath this block! Let's master 2D Mario first!

It was not my intention to talk down to you. Let me be succinct so as to clarify what I clearly didn't do a good job of communicating: 1. "Developing through failure" is generally understood to be a good process. If there's a better process (beyond a factory sequel model) people don't seem to know what it is. So I don't think it's irresponsible to adopt that model - it may very well be the most responsible choice. The best heart surgery process can still result in patient death - that doesn't mean following the process was a bad decision. 2. I don't know what process Irrational actually used or how they implemented it. I only know how Levine described their process 3. The interview with Wells seems to indicate that the process wasn't actually all that iterative. If anything the failure may be that they didn't follow the process Levine described. If this "developing through failure" process does not scale and is an irresponsible way to run a studio what would you suggest instead? The video game business is volatile. Success is not random but good people and processes can fail, middling people and processes can succeed. Very few publishers or developers have a long-term repeatable strategy for success. What William Goldman said about film, "nobody knows anything", applies to games as well. Nobody in the video game industry knows how to make money. (This is an exaggeration, but not a large one) Who would have thought that Minecraft or Flappy Bird would blow up? That Dark Souls would become a cult sensation? Wii Fit was a huge success, Wii Fit U looks like a flop. After making Minecraft Mojang made Scrolls (say that five times fast) - which did about one millionth as well. Same company, presumably similar methodologies, totally different results. I wouldn't be shocked if Mojang never makes another successful game. Remember Castle Crashers? Huge XBLA hit, a poster child for the most successful period of XBLA. The followup game made no splash and was quickly forgotten. I'm sure the dissolution of Irrational is at least partly Levine's fault. What I don't see is how that makes him an idiot, ignorant, incompetent, guilty of adopting an irresponsible process, etc.

With the difference that I never consumed all that much fantasy fiction what Gormongous wrote almost exactly describes my attitude. I like David Cronenberg movies. I like Phillip K Dick novels and Cordwainer Smith short stories - here's a story about cats piloting little spaceships! I like things that are imaginative, weird, prickly, gross and obtuse. The first time someone said this it was probably super clever but now it's very trite: fantasy fiction is some of the least fantastic stuff around. It's often fantastic in an extremely narrow, well-defined range. Basically a wizard shooting a fireball at an orc. (Maybe I would like "urban fantasy" or something other than sword and sorcery stuff.) As far as escapist fiction: to me calling something "escapist" is the same as calling it "just escapist" - the written equivalent of empty calories. I'd like to think that there's something more than escapism to the things I read. It doesn't have to "have something to say" or be a staggering work of literary genius, but hopefully it has good writing, or interesting ideas, superior execution, or something other than just being comfort food. I like some pulp fiction. I mean actual pulp fiction, not some sort of retro attempt. (If that's a thing that exists). Pulp fiction is pretty clearly escapist, but just the writing style alone can be interesting from a modern perspective. It's a window into a different time period. So while at the time it may have been "just escapist" it's something more now. (Or maybe that's just what I tell myself)

Gormongous, I think you have some wrong impressions of game development, perhaps because you're mentally drawing inappropriate comparisons to other mediums. Most game studios are heavily iterative, and "fail often and fast" is considered good practice. There was a time when people would write up 100+ page design docs then the team would implement them, but that has largely fallen out of favor. The conventional wisdom now is that you may have some intuition that something will work, but you have to try it out, and will often find that it just doesn't work. Then it's off to plan B. Sometimes you hit upon something good completely by accident, sometimes it takes a bunch of takes at something to find the right path. The process that he describes is a common process, and generally understood to be a good process. Some people have brought up an interview with Nate Wells, to contrast Naughty Dog and Irrational and imply that Ken is egotistical etc. But if you read that whole interview Wells espouses a very similar philosophy. ( http://eat-games.tumblr.com/post/55627570901/interview-nate-wells): He's saying that Naughty Dog is more iterative than Irrational! In fact, he seems to be implying that at Irrational the process wasn't iterative enough. That before trying things out they had to have time-wasting meetings. That Irrational didn't have a good continuous integration setup, didn't have a good source control scheme, or just didn't have the right attitude. That people were too reticent to just throw something out there with the knowledge that they could always roll it back. And if Ken is a control freak it would make sense that rapid experimentation at the individual or small group level would be hard. So I don't think it's fair to say that developing through failing or iteration is irresponsible or dangerous. In fact, let me stress again, this is often considered the correct way to do things. Now, that said....the ideal scenario is that you have a small team doing this rapid iteration to "find the fun", using temporary assets that are cheap to produce. Once you "find the fun" you build out the entire game using temp assets, grey boxes, etc, then you "art up" the game. Similar to how a movie can have years of pre-production and then a shooting schedule of a couple months. That's the ideal scenario. It's very hard to achieve. While this small team works on the rapid iteration what does the rest of your team do? Sit around? Do you let them all go, then hire them back? They can work on DLC, but there's a limit to how much DLC they can work on, and what kinds of people work on DLC. They can work on a second project, but then you need a second project, and to juggle two projects. (This is something Chris has talked about on the cast, how DoubleFine has many projects running at once to alleviate these sorts of issues) In some games where the visual design is very important or where production value matters more than mechanics it may not be possible to "find the fun" without production-quality assets. It's also possible that your boss wants you to produce a vertical slice with production quality assets to get the game greenlit or to demonstrate progress. They may regularly measure your progress in such fashion - and for an upper-level executive a grey-box level probably isn't going to cut it. You may also be required to produce a demo or an E3 build. So you do a lot of work to make something appear production quality, then tear all that work down afterwards because it had a shoddy foundation. You can be perfectly aware of the fact that you should be prototyping with a small team using temp assets and not be able to do that for a variety of reason. It's also possible to get very far along and realize your game just isn't working. Ideally you "found the fun" so this doesn't happen, but sometimes it does. Maybe your game was fun in small doses but the game as a whole just doesn't work. Maybe you give it to an outside metacritic-prediction place and they come back with "65" and "needs multiplayer."

I find it fascinating that the response to "watch your tone" being used to dismiss things out of hand was the invention of "watch your smarm" - also being used to dismiss things out of hand. Before someone might shut down discussion with "I don't know, I have some issues with your tone" and now they can say "I don't know, you seem to have some issues with my tone." It's the same fucking thing just reversed. It would be kind of brilliant if it wasn't so obviously ridiculous. Just pretend your opponent is making a tonal argument and you win for free. Clever. In the written word tone and content are both solely defined by the words you choose. There's no line where one starts and the other ends. The idea that content and tone are cleanly separable is nonsense. The problem with this is not the tone. It's that it's fucking dumb. It's a little rude, but it's also complete nonsense. It betrays a complete lack of understanding of what it takes to develop a game or found and run a studio. Aaronofthe made a point about jumping to conclusions based on little information, that people were assuming the worst without cause, that other humans should be treated with some respect, and that the process of creating a game was being grossly oversimplified, portrayed as a simple task that only a clueless idiot could botch. The response to that was dismissal out of hand as "smarm." This is a mechanism that enriches conversation? "Don't smarm me bro" is a valuable contribution? It looks to me no better than "watch your tone" - employed in the same way for the same reason: as a dodge to avoid engagement. I look forward to the day when a series of feminist concerns is dismissed as being too smarmy while an MRA guy defends his sexism as a noble blow struck against the forces of smarm. I assume this will happen if it hasn't already.