Deadpan

An obvious idea that did not cross my mind was to check the start date of this thread I suppose. It also means narrowing down the focus something fierce and tying it very strongly to how relatable you find the work of that particular developer. The idea of going through such a large part of thecatamites oeuvre is laudable in its commitment to depth and detail, but as an activity I'd take up for personal enjoyment I guess I find the idea a little discouraging, if unreasonably so. I've got this mental block about learning in week one (or 25) that I'm just not into his work, and then what? Obviously nobody could force me to stick around against my will, so there'd be no harm in trying, but I suppose I feel like I shouldn't commit to this if I'm unsure about whether I'll actually stick with it. That said, this game collection was too good an opportunity to pass up. These will take more organizational effort for sure, and I'm not sure putting it up to a vote is such a good idea if only because of the largely hypothetical concern of reaching an impasse that needs sorting out. I wouldn't want to wish the task of coming up with a predetermined (slowly evolving?) list of games on anybody, but such a varied and impractical effort of altgames curation is probably what I would most enjoy. Which is a preposturous demand to make when I haven't even brought myself to join the existing discussion. Ugh, sorry. I'm so in love with the concept of this thread, but such a lazy slob about actually taking part. That said, what are we playing next?

Maybe it's a little bit of both, and they're the self-affirming effect of a toxic culture. Like in this case, it's possible that TB had or picked up certain personality traits before his career, which then drew him to streaming, while at the same time his only persona maybe exacerbated those parts of his personality. And now he's generating more of his type, leading by example. Very early on, I talked to one of the gaters, a dude with maybe 50 followers or so who went on about how he's trying to get into reviews and streaming because that seems fun. Saw that name pop up again when somebody passed around another of GG's unimaginably vile comments, and he's up to 1,900 followers now. That guy is probably feeling so high about his rapid rise to perceived stardom right now (which I'd trace back to GG's "Let's all follow each other because then we reach a lot more people" idiocy), thinking that this is the road to success and he just got to walk it a little further. And he can't be alone. There's got to be a whole bunch of people thinking that this is how they'll carve a name out for themselves. In general, the question of how to deal with such viewpoints was what led me to feminist theory in the first place (thanks a lot early Anita-haters!), which has a long-standing and very interesting discussion on how to further its goals and how to win over other people, or at least get them to drop their open anti-feminist views. Obviously it's not a solved problem, else feminism would probably be a little more popular by now, but it's fascinating stuff to get into regardless. Very different viewpoints on how to approach people, whether it's worth appeasing them and how far you should go to make them feel included, whether you should just antagonize some outright, etc.

Very true, but I'm still working out how I feel about it in the case of Klepek. He's shown awareness of these issues and a lot of commitment to reaching down and helping other people up, promoting other people's work. To compile those "Worth Reading" articles on Giant Bomb, he probably had to wade through several times the material he ended up including, and I doubt those we're ever particularly popular. Just something he probably felt was important to do regardless, and I have a lot of respect for that. Maybe that doesn't make it better. Maybe it's actually worse that the result of a guy promoting the work of women and other marginalized folk is that that guy gets promoted instead of any of the people he points to. I really hope at least GB does something differently this time, but it seems much more likely we're looking at another case of people getting preemptively mad at Samantha Allen even though she didn't even apply for the job. Kotaku has been doing a lot of smart stuff in recent times, especially that transition to post-launch coverage, and I still can't work out how I feel about them on the whole. They're throwing a lot of stuff at the wall hoping that some will stick. If you look only at the wall, I guess they're a very decent site. If you look only at the pile of garbage on the floor, they seem like quite the mess. Probably the truth is somewhere in between? Perhaps it's not the best approach to look at it as a(n in)coherent whole though, because of the freedom that its writers generally enjoy.

This feels like an appropriate place to point out that the site I run is compiling a massive list of GOTY picks that is open for anybody to join in. Doesn't have to be the best game of the year, just something you liked enough to want to share with the world. The entire point of the list is to make nonsense of the traditiona DEFINITIVE TOP 5 GAMES lists through a tidal wave of wonderful stuff. Last year we ended up having 53 games. More to the point, I'd probably pick Crawl, mostly because I want more people to be aware of the local multiplayer dungeon crawling. It's a bit hard to get into, matches take something like 40 minutes and you'll be very confused for the first few of them, so it probably requires a committed group of friends meeting up for the explicit purpose of playing Crawl to make the most of it (unlike stuff like Nidhogg, which you can bust out at unrelated gatherings and have fun instantly). I've not actually gotten to play as much of it as I hoped since scheduling matches can be complicated, but I definitely like the concept a lot and the entire production has charm coming out of every hole, so there.

Did you plan your game club in accordance with the calendar year, which would suggest that the discussion of 50 Short Games should be complete now or some time soon? Because if you are doing another version of this, I'll complete one of my resolutions and join the fun.

It's right in line with all the people now saying "This could have easily been prevented if they hadn't bad-mouthed GG," forever unaware that what they are really saying is "If you criticize GG, you deserve every bad thing that's coming your way." Super ethical, super charitable. I don't know, maybe in his case in particular many things would be different if he didn't operate so much on the lessons learned from talking into a microphone so many hours of the day: that is opinion is always interesting and worth listening to, in vapid games criticism as in social commentary. But in general, this desire to be credited for short-sighted good intentions despite making things worse is relatively common, as is this idea of apologizing as a sign of weakness that often makes people dig their heels in like that. Whether the audience they are performing their "strength" for is real or perceived doesn't make a huge difference, I think. On the flipside, one could have even expected him to be more understanding of concerns of unwelcome attention, since he has to live with it himself. Quite a bit of it, sadly.

So, TB's transformation to douchelord is complete I guess. Turns out that a zealous devotion to customers always being right leads to the idea that your own personal needs must be catered to at all times: not the best basis for reflecting on your own failings and shortcomings. Instead now we got the pied piper of bawling babymen who expect to be constantly coddled everywhere they go. Poor TB, so confused why people aren't more grateful for his input on how white privilege isn't real, why this charity stream isn't thanking him for bringing nasty people to them. Confused and angry.

It's all less inaccurate than you might think.

I've actually been aware of this game club before I joined the forums (Hi Alex!). It's a neat idea, though I'm always a little too distracted and disorganized to stick with something like this. The reason I'm finally writing something in here, except to tell you how cool I think this is, is because a fellow critic wrote something about 50 Short Games on a blog I'm also on. Unfortunately, it's German. But sitll, discussion is happening. You are not alone!

It seems that somewhere in between forgetting about my membership to this forum for a while and writing on the subject again, I've fallen back into the habit of arguing with gaters again. While I swat at my own head with a rolled up newspaper going "Bad! Bad!", allow me to point out that somewhere in the process I created this blog for answering anonymous questions about ethics in games journalism. I understand that most of you on here are probably not as head-scratchingly confused by these issues as these lost souls, but if you do have any questions loosely related to such matters, I would appreciate raising it to a higher level of discourse. It would be nice to get back into talking about games writing on a level beyond "Why is feminism even allowed to exist?" for a change. You are lovely people and this thread is good for my soul. Thank you, that is all.

I guess I had a slightly different experience with that. When I was 19ish, I worked in a hospital as a porter for nine months, cause taking that kind of public service job for a while is Austria's alternative to six months of military service. One other guy started at the same time as me: I'd just dropped out of my first line of studies and was using this as a break to work out what to do with my life, he was simply taking a break from his job as apprentice mechanic and was eager to get back to that. During that time, he hit it off with one of the regular patients, a girl who had to come in every so often to have her medication adjusted, and by the time the nine months were over, they lived together and were planning to get pregnant, which apparently happened shortly after I left to go back to university. Both of them were barely over 20. I still, for the life of me, can't figure out if he's the dumb kid in this story or if I am. If you want something else socially acceptable that allows for frequent pauses in the conversation, try taking your dates to art galleries or something along those lines. You're not really expected to maintain constant conversation there, so when you run into a dead end, you can just wander off and pretend like you're very interested in the picture on the other side of the room all of a sudden. Plus some of these places might have wine.

If irony were a real, physical force, it would have pulled this movement apart a long time ago.

Well, much like the tagging system and user reviews, this already seems to have seen both terrible and deeply ironic uses. I'm not sure what to make of it yet. On the one hand, giving prominent Youtubers and such a way to put their mark directly on the place people shop for games is likely to turn the front page of Steam into a hotbed of payola, on the other hand, it potentially allows for the promotion of otherwise unnoticed games, and the more Steam opens up, the more necessary this is going to become. It all depends on how people will end up using it I guess. I mean, my site already runs a big yearly retrospective in which we recommend dozens and dozens of games from the last year. Might as well tie it into a list on Steam this year.

I've definitely noticed that too. I've made some attempts at good faith communication early on for a thing I was writing, but since then I've also seen the people I talked to pop up many times when other people posted links to or screenshots of conversations they had or saw. I'd honestly be curious to know what the people who are still keeping this going see as their endgame here, except maybe to burn down all games criticism in existence. It seems that at some point this whole thing became about keeping momentum going, and prolonging the existence of their horrible crusade, until maybe some genuine case of corruption comes along and retroactively legitimizes it. Except it won't, the same way that a real plot by the government to spy on people via the NSA doesn't "prove right" the tinfoil-hatted brigade that raved about black helicopters and mind-altering chemicals in their cereal long before that.

Seeing the gamer outrage threads on a forum I used to frequent was what drove me to finally join this one after the many, many recommendations. Let me just say that reading through this all has been really soothing.

I've been watching quite a bit of the pre-Worlds stuff this summer. I'm not terribly interested in the event and don't really pay attention to what teams are doing well (or what they are called for that matter), but I enjoy watching League played at a high level. My interest in the game itself died quickly when I learned that I can't do the kind of map-awareness, vision management and team coordination that the game demands besides actual combat, but I've played enough of it to know what's going on in these games, and that makes them kind of fascinating to watch. Besides, I'm generally very interested in learning about how Riot is managing this behemoth, in terms of communicating with players, addressing toxicity, but also making the game watchable as a spectator sport. Quite likely I'm biased towards them because I have some basic knowledge about what's going on in League, as opposed to Dota 2, but it seems to me that theirs is actually the superior spectator environment right now. From what I've seen of the International, streams of Dota games still use the game's standard UI, only with a bit more information layered on top, while League's is geared towards comparing team performance and individual matchup performance at a glance. It's fascinating to think about the planning that must be going into these aspects of it.

I guess I'll settle for a hyphen, but there's a 1,500 word essay on this bubbling in me at all times.

Hello, new best friends. I'm Joe, student of language and literature from Vienna, and I write about video games (which should be one word, but I guess the site automatically changes that). Mostly at the small site I run, but I've also managed the occasional guest appearance at more reputable places. Self-promotion ends here. I've been listening to the cast for a while now, I think I started around the XCOM Obama episode, or at least that's one of the earliest I remember now. Never got around to joining, but decided to fix that today when I went back to the Escapist forums I used to frequent, saw that the gamer outrage threads had more pages than most stuff I write has views, and wanted to do something more productive than get angry at those. So here I am, finally giving this a shot after all the recommendations on the cast. So, hi! <3