Thrik

You... can crotch grab people? D:

I really need to remember to say this next time my girlfriend asks me to open a jar of pickled onions.

I think that last sentence sums up a lot of game and often film writing in general. More often than not, you can bet that the following tropes will be used: Loved one is in danger and must be saved World is in danger and must be saved Main character has been wronged and must wreak revenge upon those responsible As a lot of stories feature male protagonists it's an easy jump to imagine that when trope #1 is used, it'll invariably be a woman. While I would like to see more female protagonists in games and often choose to play as one when an option is offered like in Mass Effect, I'm not sure that the damsel in distress trope is noteworthy except in the most extreme cases and even then it's more down to it being a tried-and-tested plot formula than any kind of sexism or whatever, the same way that someone saving their family/friends (Because everyone is helpless except the main character, right?) is used all the time. I mean, if we get to the point where we have to think long and hard about putting a woman in any kind of danger in a story then we're heading into some pretty daft territory IMO. Also I think picking and choosing these damsel in distress examples is questionable when during the same games you save numerous dudes too. BTW to touch on the above, Metal Gear Solid is a really funny beast. On the one hand it's often ridiculed for featuring classic perverted moments like Snake checking out a girl's cleavage or a character slapping a girl's ass right in front of his girlfriend. Yet the next minute it features extremely well-rounded and strong female characters, and MGS4 in particular surprised me with this enemy type that pops up numerous times throughout the game: ... who after some fearsome firefights and such turn out to be women. I guess it does say something about my expectations, but when they groaned with a female voice as I silently shot them in the head it caught me off guard. Other than that there's no indication or behaviour that'd give their gender away, which is the kind of equal treatment I guess Anita is striving for. So in that respect MGS is a perfect example of how to do it completely right and completely wrong at the same time.

GJHHFFRFGJUGRFkibrHKRH RKHJR BH<RJ BRK GJREKGJRDGR FJGR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well I was mostly describing how it gives stupid gamey stuff like invisible walls an equally stupid but at least canonical explanation.

I was kidding.

SPOILERS

The way you guys are describing the way sims seemingly live anywhere is weird, but I guess there are limits. Clearly the simulation could be as sophisticated as Maxis likes (and I bet hidden toggles make it so), but there's a big performance trade-off for serious number crunching and simulation. I guess in a way the somewhat random driving around to find a suitable home kind of emulates the kind of traffic you find in real life when people are taking kids to school, hitting the shops, joyriding, meeting friends, etc. Not sure how much of that the game simulates but I'm sure it's missing some real-world driving that goes on. Adds to the feeling of randomness I guess.

Hype.

But what does this video add to that cause? It's so uninteresting that anyone not already firmly of the anti-sexism orientation is unlikely to watch it, or if they do find it so tedious to watch the issues raised barely get absorbed. As for those already of the anti-sexism stance, it brings practically nothing to the table. No new ideas, no action plan for actually changing stuff, etc. It's just like a spoken Wikipedia article about what sexism and tropes are. It's not going to move things even an inch towards a better non-sexist world. I dunno, if it were more substantial it might have swayed me into enjoying and sharing it. As it is I couldn't possibly recommend that video to anyone I know.

I guess a thing to remember here is that this video isn't the kind of thing I'm particularly interested in watching. I don't really go for serious, lengthy videos like this which describe things like sexism, racism, nationalism, ageism, religion, etc. Not that I'm ignorant about these issues, but watching YouTube videos where someone goes on about them without making much in the way of real arguments — something there's no shortage of on YouTube and you don't need even $6000 to do it — isn't how I like to spend my time. So I guess if this kind thing appeals to you (likely if you backed it) it's probably interesting enough. This video has attached an unusual amount of hype though, so a lot of people who wouldn't ordinarily bother are viewing it because it's being posted everywhere as if it's some must-see thing. To my less invested eyes it's a relatively dull video blog about an issue I respect but don't really need to spend hours listening to someone else's opinion on.

Watched it. That was really... boring. It's like she's just reeling off Wikipedia research and applying virtually no real analysis or points worthy of consideration. If she had even an ounce of enthusiasm it'd probably help, it's almost like she's just reading an essay out loud. An essay that ticks the boxes and would get a pass, but is wholly unnoteworthy.

I think $13k is more than enough for each video, based on the apparent production values of the first. Making allusions to all these researchers and producers doesn't count for much if the end result doesn't seem beyond what a few passionate dudes could have come up with in their free time. I'm not saying the quality of the videos is bad, but it's hardly outstanding.

A Kickstarter should be specifically for the funding of exactly what's described. It's not meant to be a donation system or a way of giving a company extra funds they can use for whatever. How annoyed would you be if Apple did a Kickstarter for some project they're unsure would sell well, and then after getting way more than necessary they just said "thanks guys" and put the extra into the company's general money chest rather than using it to improve the product or develop something implicitly related to it that'd definitely be of interest to its contributors? The point I'm raising is that if a Kickstarter project gets more funds than it asked for and more than was specified in the stretch goals, what then? You can't keep inventing stretch goals indefinitely, there's going to be a point where excess money truly is excess. So what should happen to it? Should it be returned to contributors? Should the project owners get to keep it for themselves? Should a system exist so people can revoke their money without penalty until the funds fall to the stretch goal ceiling? Should some facility exist in Kickstarter so a specific plan of how to use that extra money can be outlined, whether it's marketing or whatever? I'm basically getting at the fact that whereas most parts of Kickstarter are very transparent and this is partially responsible for its popularity IMO, the matter of what happens to extra funds is fairly ambiguous and in many cases I suspect project owners just do whatever and nobody has any idea what happened to it. I get that some people might simply not care about it, especially if they've only contributed $5 or whatever. But what if you've donated $500 and you discover that the project owner ended up with an extra $50,000 that he essentially just blew on things completely unrelated to the project? I'd kind of want my fuckin' $500 back. I suppose I'd just like to see Kickstarter itself accomodate for this kind of thing more, this isn't anything to do with Feminist Frequency at all. I can't really blame her if she has decided to just take the money for other things (I think it's almost guaranteed she's only used about a quarter of the overall funds at most), but I do think better processes need to exist on Kickstarter for managing this. It's important to maintain the line between contributing towards a product and contributing towards a team/cause/company, the latter of which Kickstarter isn't designed for, nor does it allow it AFAIK.

Where's the proof that she didn't? I'm only playing devil's advocate here because I don't actually care very much what she does with the money, but I do think that as a general rule those who enjoy funds well beyond their expectations should have at least an ethical obligation to be open about how all that money is spent. Kickstarter is becoming a pretty big part of the developmentosphere so it's interesting to think about. When the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter exceeded its requirements I was happy because they almost immediately showed how that extra money would be used, and it was easy to see where it'd be going — on making a better game that's more likely to succeed, thus making everyone's contributions even more worth it. I'd have been pretty disappointed if they got all that extra money and nothing was said about where the excess would be going, swallowed into Double Fine's general funds (although that's still not a particularly bad thing, but that's only because it's Double Fine ). With something like this video project, clearly you don't need that much money. She's got at least 10 times more than what's necessary for even the most lavish of productions, which leaves a big question mark in the air regarding what she's doing with the rest of it. Is it going to be invested into future projects? Or is she just going to take the other $130,000 or so and have a great time with it? Does this bother anyone? Well, yes. But should it? It seems obvious that at least some supporters are disappointed with the end result considering the spending power she had to ensure it was absolutely great. As a non-contributing viewer I was pretty bored within minutes and couldn't really be bothered to continue, and I've heard similar opinions quite widely already. So in terms of interesting outsiders in this subject and attracting support — rather than just preaching to the contributing choir — it's not doing so well.

I suppose for some (not necessarily me) it raises some ethical issues. If you run a Kickstarter campaign and are given a huge amount of money through the sheer goodwill of people wanting to support your project, is it right to essentially just take that extra money for yourself? I've only watched a few minutes of this new video but there's no way that's remotely $160,000 worth of budget, nor does such a concept need it. In fact anyone who spends that much on a YouTube video project deserves a slap. So the question is: what should a project owner do with that extra money? Be transparent and show exactly how it'll be used for this and/or future projects? Based on the amount she earnt she could create over 25 video series. Return it to the people, or donate it to charity? What's the right thing to do? This isn't meant to be 'take it and enjoy it, you deserve it' money. It's meant to be a direct contribution towards the production of something. This isn't specific to this Feminist Frequency project, of course. I'm just thinking about how Kickstarter funds are used in general. With something like Double Fine Adventure it's clear where and how extra funds are being used to genuinely enhance the end product, but I see little evidence of that here and can easily imagine how that'd irritate people, especially if they contributed.

I don't believe anything's been given away in that respect. I suspect it's largely marketing smoke and mirrors; how else can you justify this absolute disaster if all people stand to gain from such a recklessly heavy-handed approach to online connectivity is leaderboards and the relatively minor multiplayer aspects? I just can't imagine what the game could possibly be doing that'd require remote computing. Sure the game has sophisticated simulation and that's probably helped their marketing department to sell the idea, but I really can't see it being beyond modern hardware, even at the lower end. And if it really is to help out those with truly shit computers, why not just offload it for that end of the market? It'd both alleviate much if not all of the stress on the cloud hardware, as well as let people benefit from using the hardware they've bought to enjoy a more responsive experience. The whole thing has just been terribly planned and executed, with a rabid desire to stop pirates (and seemingly any other fucker) from playing the game at any cost. I work with cloud computers and big software launches so I understand the difficulties involved, but it's a problem that countless web-based companies deal with and overcome on a daily basis. I'm not sure why games industry companies keep getting it so wrong but they're clearly not hiring the right talent for the job. Ironically, maybe it was the unbelievably high piracy levels of Spore — spurred on by the (at the time) aggressive DRM EA and Maxis implemented — that prompted them to try so hard to make this game impossible to pirate.

This has probably been the single most disastrous launch I've ever seen. After Maxis's last game (Spore) went through the same shit and became the year's most pirated game in addition to sparking off massive DRM controversies, how the fuck were decisions made within Maxis/EA that led to this? I feel sorry for many of the developers because from what I can see there's actually a really good game beneath all this, that can scratch that simulation itch many of us have been feeling for some years since the genre disintegrated over a decade ago. But the game's had so many bad reviews as a direct result of these issues that it doesn't stand a chance of living up to its potential. How many people are going to hit the 'buy' button after seeing the 1000+ 1-star Amazon reviews? I suspect what'll happen is EA will solve these issues, make dedicated fans happy with less intrusive DRM and bigger cities, then re-release the game either as a special edition or an iterative sequel in less than a year so they have another chance with the mainstream/casual buyers (who would ordinarily constitute a large part of a Maxis game's audience). Saving the review scores of this release is pretty much a lost cause.

Sounds worryingly like this video is more about preaching to the choir than providing any compelling analysis. That'd be disappointing considering how much we ended up funding her with to make this actually good. I'll watch it at the weekend, though.

AC is basically a mix of really well-researched and beautiful historical fiction combined with truly bad sci-fi. I was originally OK with it because it provided an excuse for some useful/cool gameplay and UI stuff. Unfortunately someone at UbiSoft clearly thinks it warrants being more than that.

Better be some Monkey Island references in this shit.

You'd think that after the massive controversy that erupted when Maxis released their last game, Spore, going remotely near intrusive DRM and/or mandatory online connectivity would be either avoided completely or planned and executed to absolute perfection. In a word: nope.

Also, I recall that The Sims 3 had a similar thing to this. You could buy any number of plots of land in a huge neighbourhood, one of which came with the game. As time went on other (much different) neighbourhoods were added, and I'm sure you were eventually able to craft them yourself. So perhaps at some point in the future SimCity will follow the same (microtransaction-studded) road of opening up a region editor for more advanced users.

Oh so there city plots that sit on land more interesting than a football pitch, then. That's at least something.

Maybe if it were SimCity 4... One thing I'm wondering: I've seen a lot of stuff said about the new SimCity not featuring terraforming like its predecessors, yet in some shots I've seen rivers and roads that go uphill. Is this some kind of marketing evil or is there at least some ability to do more than build roads, foliage, and buildings on a flat expanse of land?