Deadpan

It seems moot to argue about the original original meaning of meta, as a Greek preposition and prefix, but the meaning that evolved from that had less to do initially with being self-referential and more with being on a higher plane of abstraction, meaning that it concerns something else of the same type, i.e. a metagame isn't a game that addresses its own gameness but a game that exists on top of another game, a level of strategizing beyond individual matches in LOMAs for instance. In that sense, a goal beyond goals fits the bill decently enough, I think, particularly if it's not initially clear what you're working towards on a grand scheme.

The real story is pretty much that Twitter conversation Ninety-Three posted: Tale of Tales make obviously sarcastic tweets about how weird it is that hiring indie cabal high chancellor Leigh Alexander as a consultant didn't turn their game into a smash hit and dillweeds are being either geniunely or intentionally obtuse about it and try to claim that this was a real confession of real crimes, that ToT apparently felt compelled to make because they consider themselves above the law or something.

Because they don't have to run to chase us down, their batteries outlast our frail bodies.

What's the story on how a blocking tool is supposed to help ISIS here? My mind is boggled.

I think it's fair to say anti-GG is a thing, but also to say that it's pretty different from what GG means when they say that. Their concept manages to somehow be simultaneously be too broad and too narrow I think, since they think that just about anyone who speaks favorably of one of their targets is then part of some organized resistance force or secret cabal, but are also convinced that they speak for the silent majority of the games community or maybe all of society with their regressive politics (which may be uncomfortably close to the truth I guess). I don't think keeping tabs is bad necessarily, not just for how it may affect "the conversation" around this, but also just as a coping mechanism. I get the impression that srhbutts for instance is mostly doing it at this point to shout to the world that "Look, this shit is STILL going on" and if that helps deal with the stuff she would have gotten anyway, then why not. Definitely something where us allies should be thinking carefully about whether what we're doing is helping or just showing off though.

Far as I'm aware Tauriq has requested people not talk about GG as the reason for him leaving Twitter since it has just exacerbated the harassment issues that were already there. In other bad news, Gita Jackson of Paste fame has also recently deleted her Twitter account. So with them gone for the time being, it falls to us to promote their work on there. More productive than arguing with gaters over it certainly.

Yeah, wasn't aimed at your comment there, and the "let people choose what they like best" thing applies equally to the arguments over why pan- is supposedly unnecessary and bi- supposedly discriminatory. I always figured it just reads as "both sides of the spectrum" not "both of the two and only two genders that exist" myself.

This is also the kind of hugely personal issue where I don't feel it's very productive to press language economy and talk about how there's already a word for this and that. Maybe the advantage of a seemingly new-fangled term is simply that it feels more comfortable to the person self-describing that way, and that's good enough then.

Alternatively, two spots are now open to be claimed. It's a race! (a very, very slow race, but still)

You probably made the right call. I had a lot of fun with it so far, but I probably shouldn't have decided to push so far towards the overarching goals of killing bosses and fully levelling up one of each class because now my roster is pretty much full and when new stuff comes along I'll probably have to get rid of some people to hire a new low-level crew for the new low-level missions that the beefed up folk consider beneath them.

I went into Persona 4 way late (Vita, yusss) and it really was a bit weird seeing how those characters were really written opposite all the "such progressive arcs" hype I'd caught before. Kanji works out pretty okay I think since using an interest in activities that aren't considered traditionally masculine to mark him as gay would have also been weird, and then his plotline actually ends up being about how those assumptions are garbage instead. There's some bad stuff in there for sure, but it barely registered for me opposite Yosuke's constant gross comments towards him I guess. I'm struggling to find a favorable read of Naoto's story though personally, especially given how you need to push her towards less ambiguous and more clearly feminine presentation if you want to romance her, which feels like such a gross, controlling relationship.

It's pretty terrible pay but my impression was that that's still the rule rather than the exception. I think The Toast also revealed that that's what they pay recently? Oh well. Hard to get paid, and then you hardly get paid. In my experience, the likely result is that they will get fed up with organizational work after one issue and then you'll take over and run it for the next three years or so.

Kill Screen have that prestige going for them, but don't let that pickiness fool you into thinking it's a particularly lucrative gig. Far as I'm aware, they still only pay a flat rate of $20 per feature, which is pretty standard. If that's the direction you want to go with your writing, I'd probably recommend trying Unwinnable first, both because they pay better and because I get the impression they could use a couple more writers right now. Also they're pretty good about actually responding.

Never been fond of it. Reddit's shtick about being this completely democratic platform where the best stuff will naturally float to the top is the usual lie of meritocracy that people who simply happen to be ignorant of the challenges others face in this environment tell themselves. Even outside of its openly hateful subreddits, there's a certain assholeness embedded in the culture of the site, like it would be in any big site that prizes "free speech" over stringent moderation. Like with 4chan, anybody can post there in theory, but in practice only a very small group of people will actually end up sticking around for long in a place like this. This limits the material that ends up on the site something fierce (given how its anti-spam rules dictate you must be active there to be allowed to occasionally point something new out to the group), not to mention how it skews what views end up being prevalent. All of which I'd find slightly less terrible if not for the airs of superiority.

Does anybody know to what extent exactly Twitter has been working with Harper and other folk over this? I saw some anger going around that they built something of their own instead of just hiring either her or whoever is behind BlockTogether, but I don't know how accurate that is.

I feel like this definitely got worse over time too with the introduction of the expansions. Hearthstone was always kind of balanced in such a way as to favor having one or two big kickers (read: legendaries) in your deck, if it's not an all-out rush strategy, through the automatic progression to more expensive cards the longer a match lasts, opposite something like Magic where how many land cards you should put in and how many you end up drawing is a more active concern. However, regular cards still felt pretty competitive opposite those and since getting one was entirely a matter of finding one in packs, you might have griped about your enemy turning around the game with a bs legendary or epic, but you also could hold out hope that you might find that same one in the very next pack you grind for. Now there's so many cards tied up in this single player content - one legendary per wing of these dungeons, plus a whole lot of basic cards that are big in the meta atm - that if you tried to make due with just the cards you start out with, you'd feel helplessly outgunned. Intentionally, I guess?

Woof. That's a complicated issue situated somewhere between the inevitable structural imbalances in access to information and the question of what the purpose of games writing should even be. The short of it is that I don't think anybody in games should be making these qualitative judgements about the validity of platforms, nor does anybody really need to make that kind decision at the moment. Keep in mind that I already believe this kind of information should be made openly available to move away from the bane of preselection by way of granting exclusive coverage.

Kotaku has been publishing good criticism (being one of the first major sites to stop scoring games, in the traditional sense) and excellent commentary for a long time, it just so happens that these are buried under the many, many other posts the site also has to throw at the wall to have enough things sticking to it for it to continue to exist. I find it strange that people reserves such unique scorn for this model given how rarely they lambast other games sites for the anemic news posts, trailer summaries, and otherwise regurgitated PR material that constitutes the majority of their stock. Regardless, whether a site is good enough to attend shouldn't be a decision a publisher gets to make, and based on reach alone they certainly desever a first-row seat at that kind of thing, if they want it.

Crap on a butt, sorry to hear that.

<3 Oh my, ethics! Usually I like to say that the fewer sites report from E3 the better, but a specific ban is obviously shit.

I indeed didn't mean to imply that caring about this or the issues themselves are unique to US so much as to point out that the reframing of these stories in the terms of dominant cultures can write over other kinds of (for instance) racism that that culture might not be aware of (or at least the people making media might think they aren't aware of and couldn't possibly empathize with). Which I didn't communicate very clearly, apparently, so sorry for being unclear. I tried getting at this with the line before the one Bjorn latched onto, how if you deviate from the local folklore anyway (which people are bound to even just to translate from one time to another, if not one space to another) you should at least do it in progressive ways. Edit: I actually meant to say that people reduce the amount of diversity (which is hardly a quantifiable thing but forgive that for a second), stating mass appeal as a reason but more like using it as an excuse. So they end up not representing the actual local culture they quote from, but also not representing the diversity of the one into which they transport the work, which is like the worst of both worlds.

As far as I'm following the discussion (not just on here), it seems like there are two valid positions being pitted against each other for no good reason. On the one hand, given that the Witcher series is already much closer to Hollywood fantasy than local folklore and it's fair to demand that if you're gonna deviate from the source material anyway you might as well make the cast a little more diverse in the process. On the other hand, I think it's also true that specific local history is deserving of more representation than always being transformed into the US version of the the representative social issue for the sake of mass appeal. Like, this reminds me of when TB posted that silly thing about how there's no racism in Britain because there's no black people around (that he's aware of). Disregarding that the processes leading to such perceived homogeneity are hella problematic in and of themselves, as Gormongous points out, this also just goes to show that people have gotten so used to thinking of racism exclusively as the discrimination of black folk that they remain ignorant of the analogous baggage in their own history. Like, Austria didn't ever really get involved in colonialism (although not for want of trying), but that doesn't mean we don't have some incredibly racist history through (among many other things) our past as a multinational state and the discrimination Hungaria, Croatia, Bosnia etc. faced as the "insignificant" extensions of the German-speaking "core" of the empire, which is still very much present in contemporary views. People might respond negatively to certain features or last names because they imply roots in one of these countries, even though the family of the person they're speaking to might, at this point, literally have lived in this country for hundreds of years. Despite this, these attitudes tend to be discussed publicly as being for or against immigration (!), not as being racist or not.

I agree wtih this entirely. That kind of criticism exists, but it's reviews that tend to influence game developers, not design deep dives and critical interrogations of a game's politics. So the kind of criticism itsamoose wants has very little actual power to affect change, and the kind of criticism that does has very little interest in doing so. Also, this all ultimately ties back to the tastes and actions of audiences at large. The only power us critics really have in this weirdly lopsided dialogue with developers comes from our relationship to the subsection of people who play games, either through our alleged ability to influence them, or our alleged role of speaking for a significant portion of them. And given that people, at least those who are vocal on the issue, tend to disregard our concerns entirely (when they aren't arguing that voicing them is detrimental to games on the whole), we have ultimately very little influence. It's not the person speaking at a rally that drives change, it's the people who came to listen.

Also there's like a couple dozen instances burned into my brain of accidentally sending a soldier just to the left or right of a piece of cover.

I'd argue that although discouraging, that's pretty much representative of the amount of feedback you're ever going to get. The only time I ever really get comments on anything is when I touch on hot-button stuff and that rarely goes beyond "Yes I agree" or "No I disagree (plus a string of expletives)". Outside of that, endorsements from other critics at most, which are like more mild-mannered variations on the same theme.