Deadpan

It's certainly a better use of their time than some of the other stuff they get up to, but those sites contribute to abuse of writers either by openly using people under the pretense of getting paid later or by just copying what they've seen on big sites as if they could compete on news writing. In a sense, this is getting angry at people for not realizing immediately what I had to spend some time learning too, but then that wisdom is already out there and here's a movement that's really doubling down on sticking their fingers in their ears and ignoring anything people who are part of the "system" have to say.

Persons is also an acceptable plural. It arguably sounds a little more formal and can be used to draw attention to the fact that you are talking about a small and distinct group of individuals rather than a nebulous crowd. So Very Important People sounds more like you're talking about VIPs in general and Very Important Persons sounds more like you're talking about a specific group of more than one VIP.

Not even rewriting them, really. At the height of this, there was this site promising straight access to the unassailable truth of press releases, launched by people who were seemingly surprised to learn that such things exist and they had wasted their time reading critical news sources instead of listening directly to marketing departments. I wish I could remember what it was called, but I lost track of all the terrible "gonna fix games journalism" sites that sprung up in the last six months.

I'm continually amazed that they seem to think that to avoid personal relationships influencing your writing, you apparently have to pretend the person in question and their work don't even exist. I mean, it's hardly uncouth to mention that Quinn made Depression Quest, even the worst of GG tends to agree that it is her game. It's not like we can cover X giving a talk or Y showing off a new game and then claim that the stage was empty just because we talked to this person before. I keep imagining pictures of crowded halls at E3 or something with captions about Microsoft giving a press conference in front of NOBODY, NOBODY AT ALL, THERE WAS NOBODY THERE, NO NO.

Pretty much. As a GG platform, KiA is technically against censorship of all forms, it just doesn't perceive being shouted down (or worse) by its braying masses as a form of silencing so much as a part of the discussion process, nay an expression of free speech. So even though they claim to value differing opinions, they'd show their appreciation by mercilessly attacking and downvoting it. I can't really recommend that course of action either way. I know it's tempting to want to sway them, but if words had the power to (easily) do so, it'd had happened a long time ago already. Many people have written many a clever analysis or witty deconstruction in the wake of this, they just happen to be read, or not read, by ignorant people unwilling to consider what you, I, or anyone else not already close to them has to say about all this. For their sake as much as ours, we'd like them to change their ways, and words will be required to achieve that, but at the moment walking into their little conspiracy cesspit will probably only add to their fantasies of persecution and their spaces being invaded.

"The founder of Occupy is with us now." Fucking hell, just because "let's go back to slavery" Tunney clings on to their Twitter account doesn't mean she single-handedly started a notably decentralized movement.

Kicking around a similar idea, although based around I Am Suspicious of Myself, which would suggest I need to find a way to make the player subtly doubt themselves along the way by changing little things when they are not looking. Or make them the murderer. Anyway, if you want to go down the route of having fail states, you can add extra complexity by making several people plausible suspects (or accomplices) and rolling a variable at the beginning of the game. Here's the code I used in one of my prototypes for this: Where x should be the amount of different results you want to have, i.e. set x to 3 if you want it to have three possible outcomes. This works by generating a random number between 0 and 1, multiplying it and then rounding down. The +1 is option, I just added it to make sure the count starts from 1 rather than 0. Alternatively, if you want to avoid fail states, one way that detective stories often resolve this is by having a helper character that's working with the real mastermind, so that say Sherlock turns to Watson and asks "Did you figure it out yet Doctor?" and then the player picks one of several candidates and Sherlock either goes "Well done" or "Obviously not!" If that's not what you have in mind for your protagonist, you can also have them turn to somebody else and ask them if they worked it out yet. If you do want to make sure that players don't just flat out lose the game, you could offer some subtle guidance by maybe just letting them influence the detective's final murder reveal a little bit. Like, you have a section where they begin the parlor room scene that ends with a choice of whodunnit, except if you pick the wrong person the next page says something along the lines of "Such an obvious suspect, aren't they? Of course, I have long since ruled out X since" and then you get another choice of why they can't have done it. Kind of as a way for the player to redeem themselves, or to make sure, at least, that they have to choose the wrong option several times in a row in order to fail the game, rather than just once.

I don't think anybody's upset with you though, so that seems fine. More on point, while that's valuable advice it's definitely more rooted in pragmatism than idealism. Ideally, folk should be able to examine their own failings without walling off to critique or lashing out at perceived attackers, but since these things are rather common, trying to frame what they did as a momentary lapse of judgement rather than a character flaw makes it more likely for them to stay open to critique. That doesn't make it a moral obligation though. It's not necessarily the right thing to do, just a helpful thing to try.

Oh yeah, more responding to the general vibe of the thread since I last looked at it.

The crux of the matter is that it's not relevant to the discussion whether or not TB is a decent guy way down inside. This is a very commonly discussed angle of racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. and it never fails to derail the conversation. The supposed personal attack of being accused of discriminatory language or action takes precedent over the discrimination itself, as if "hey, that's not cool" was anywhere near as hurtful as the stuff that comes out of these people's mouths. It's not an unfair accusation. Despite the literal meaning of the word, transphobia doesn't take the form of being personally scared witless of trans folk so much as buying into and reinforcing cultural fear and prejudice (like that "trans as deception" thing, which banks on the idea that they really still belong to the gender they've been assigned at birth, whatever they themselves might think on the matter) similar to how sexism isn't a word we reserve for only violent misogyny or racism only for KKK level shit. Contributing to these systems is something we can all be a little guilty of. There's various degrees to it all, but that surface level expression of how you choose to carry yourself is certainly one of them, no matter what you're like deep inside. Actually, what bubbles up would seem a decent indicator of what's going on below, nay?

Storify certainly speaks to a weird hole in Twitter functionality that had to be filled this way*, but I remain unconvinced that people who like it or are just prone to longer rants and such are using the platform wrong. At least, from where I'm standing, the idea that they just should write a blog post instead reads like "I don't get why people record speeches or stand-up performances, the should just put the same content in a movie instead." There's certainly something quite different about the immediacy of getting your thoughts out there one after another instead of the perceived pressure of having to premeditate them on a larger scale. Jay Allen and Sarah Butts chronicling all this terrible stuff has been quite effective at showing non-games people how bad it is, for me at least, similar to how David Futrelle keeps track of all that MRA nonsense. Me saying it's bad and linking to articles saying it's bad is one thing, but this huge corpus of examples of their thoughts and actions is something else. Not worth getting them riled up, for sure, but I also don't think they necessarily have that much choice in the matter. Like, Sarah isn't going to be left alone even if she stops addressing them directly and just says what they did (and probably wouldn't be left alone even if she stopped talking on Twitter entirely at this point). I know the example we are talking about is Allen going at Baldwin, but it also points back to an earlier exchange when it was the other way around, and while that may just be Allen gloating about previous burns I wouldn't put it past Baldwin to keep attacking until Allen eventually gives in and engages him again. Like, that prodding bears thing only applies to sleeping bears, right? Different approaches for when they are already awake and sniffing at you? *although I once saw somebody use a Twitter collection to similar effect? Guess that didn't take of

And that's why skeletons (of games) fart like that.

I'll be there, but I'll probably be busy chatting to folk and pretending to be a journalist for a bit. It's a really cool festival to go to.

Not in the sense of being hard to read necessarily, but more on the level of burying its supposed critiques under a whole lot of other faux-profound garbage. And, well, there's that.

I don't keep cats myself since I'm out of the house or out of town too often for even a relatively independent pet, but thankfully a lot of the people in our building do, so there's a couple I run into on the way to the elevator. Anyway, contributing with this picture of the two furballs I shared a room in Berlin with during A MAZE last year. The were both really friendly. The orange one was a bit playfully bitey, but the white one was just the nicest thing, very interested in climbing on my shoulders when I got down to tie my showlaces. Definitely got the full cat experience from that brief stay, everything from sitting on my luggage, to sitting on my clothes to sitting anywhere on my body I wouldn't push them off, really.

Finally wrote down some thoughts on why I dislike the second game so vehemently, mostly because its nature as a follow-up leaves little doubt in my mind that it was deliberately designed to be cryptic in order to score points with the artsy crowd while also enjoying unironic success. It's a violent video game about violent video games that half-assedly tells us we're bad for playing it, but never considers its own role in providing us with more of the same. One game is about shocking your audience, maybe. Two games are about pandering to it, one way or another. Locking on is only really good for tagging an enemy before you burst into the room to make sure you don't have to worry about keeping track of them too much. Way too slow to actually use in bigger firefights.

I don't think I've ever heard anybody talk about performative language outside of linguistics classes, and inside linguistics there's more recent terminology for such uses of language in Searle's Speech Act theory (which would label marrying people or sentencing someone as declarative speech acts). So yeah, I mostly use performative (and see it used) to describe things that are about expressing something for either your own benefit or somebody elses. Gender is one such thing, but games can be performative too, when you play a particular part in a team and let other parts of your personality shine through in accordance with the role.

Since a local games personality unwittingly retweeted some innocuous BasedGamer garbage about loving games, being passionate about games and (a vaguely threatening piece of advice) to make sure nobody ever makes you feel any different about games, I noticed they have a survey up to learn what their audience values in reviews. This might be a good time to broaden their perspective with a little input, although I doubt they'll listen to it. This is, after all, a site with the official policy of "outliers with drastically different opinions from the gamer norm will be eliminated" If you simply want to have a good laugh, I can recommend browsing their openly accessible, shoddily written and entirely ridiculous outline for the site. My personal favorite.

Absolutely, the more the merrier. Thanks!

Certain enough to have started compiling a list of things I'd like to read with folk and asking them to signal interest. I put this up as a way of letting people know. Still unsure what format it will take, depending on how many people are interested a group email conversation might be enough, or we'll crash on a forum like this one, or I'll make a simple blog with a comment section somewhere. I'd encourage you to join anyway if you're unsure. The critics and such I've gotten interested are all quite stressed, so it'll be low-upkeep, and there's always the option of just watching the discussion unfold.

While trying to level up some of my less used character classes, I found Bounty Hunter, Plague Doctor, Grave Robber and Occultist to be an interesting combination. The Occultist can mark targets for the Bounty Hunter against strong, individual foes or hit the back lines with Abyssal Artillery, and having a Plague Doctor around makes the potential bleeds from his Wyrd Reconstruction less of an issue. The Grave Robber deals some nice damage with thrown daggers from the back line, but since neither the Plague doctor nor the Bounty Hunter rely strongly on being in a particular spot, I generally used her to lunge forwards and then slide back with Shadow Fade to stun and buff up on the way back. She has really high crit modifiers on her abilities, as it turns out. That team has been doing well enough that I sent them out on a Level 5 mission when just the Occultist had hit that level since I wanted to keep the chemistry going, but then they ended up eating shit through a string of ineffectual heals from the Occultist and enemy crits. My Bounty Hunter kept getting knocked-back by this big skeleton, so for a while there the Grave Robber was stuck trying to slide back with Shadow Fade and then being pushed to the front again. Only the Bounty Hunter and the Occultist made it out of that in the end, and I'm probably going to wait until more new things or balance updates come along to capture my interest again. Hellions still conquer everything, I guess.

They decided to use his website precisely because he allowed that kind of discussion, and that's a conscious decision, as is continuing to allow it. You continually bring up the creation of that one new board as if only actively inserting yourself shapes the culture of a site, but staying away shapes it just as much. What kind of creative work are you talking about here, exactly, that's not possible inside places with basic codes of conduct? Also, why does your credo that everything would happen regardless not apply here? Why the need for a big unified platform, suddenly? What about the creative work we are missing out on because marginalized folk (or just plain sensitive people) have been driven away by a culture of needing to tough it out?

Doesn't strike me as a leap. As Leigh Alexander wrote: "When you decline to create or to curate a culture in your spaces, you're responsible for what spawns in the vacuum." The idea that inaction and inattention do not put you above reproach is written into our societies on a very basic level, see also the concept of criminal negligence.

It'd be more about the craft, the how rather than the what of the writing, which does limit it people who are interested in meta games criticism conversations.

I think Slade is that R*gueSt*r fellow. Hard to tell garbage golems apart though.