Denial

I should be there on Saturday, sleep deprivation permitting...

(Also, I think they are paid - although I would think not very much, relative to a licensed and badged security guard.)

PAX has paid security - Enforcers aren't intended to be security guards. They are called "Enforcers" I suspect because it sounds cool, but the ones with front-of-house responsibilities are AFAIK basically like any other Con fan support team - primarily there to answer questions and direct people.

I feel like the demo revealed a lot of core play stuff, but not too much in the way of plot - and it looks like plot is going to be the key in this one, along with the relationship between the perspective character and Delilah... Basically, I'm now super excited to see/play this, but the IGN video does set up at least one element that may be pretty important to the game's narrative.

The Vive feels like an events thing more than a home thing at the moment - but I can see a situation where HTC turns out much cheaper, less sophisticated but good-enough VR headsets for the home, optimised for Steam/SteamOS gaming. HTC is a really smart partner in that sense, because most of what they are already making involves the same components, and they can leverage a lot of efficiencies that way. Also, they are really good at making good-looking devices, whereas, with the best will in the world, when Valve tries to make hardware it looks kinda goofy.

Yeah, I think the specific issue with a lot of Lords Managements, rather than FPS multiplayer, is that you can lose for a solid hour. And, for that matter, it can be very clear that you're going to lose for a sizeable chunk of that hour. I think that if you take winning or losing seriously, that is a real trial to endure, and people get very angry about it ...

Let's not go Team Jordan too quickly. He may not be a PUA, but that's a pretty low bar. He is nonetheless the creator of about 14 hours of unhinged ranting about Anita Sarkeesian, with a creepy fixity of purpose that made her pick him out as an example in her XOXO speech.

It does seem like, having been pretty consistently confused by how the media works and how the games industry works, Gamergate is now confused by how literally everything works. I mean, is this Nathan Vela's speech? That very clearly wasn't an unscripted "rant" - it was a speech, delivered at an industry event. See also the Mark Kern stuff about "hence the prepared sock" - perhaps the oddest phrase in the history of the English language. It seems very strange to me that it comes as a revelation that Tim Schafer wasn't just carrying a sock puppet around with him and then, on the spur of the moment, decided to make a bunch of jokes on stage at an awards ceremony, but rather that he might have planned out what he was going to say beforehand. Is he... colluding with himself?

Oh right, yes. Because women in Denmark don't want to have sex with a dude who, if memory serves, believes that wiping his ass "thoroughly" is a humiliating concession to women. Can't imagine why.

Wait, what? What did Denmark ever do?

Those seem like valid reasons not to like Twitter. OTOH, it also feels worth noting that the underrepresented groups who use it tend to be more concerned about its failure to police abuse and harassment than its character limit. I think the former is a bug, whereas the latter is presented as a feature. GG's presence on Twitter is partly because it's taken a hard "just a platform" line on the conversation, but also because it's a place - in most cases, the only place - where people can be mobbed and harassed directly. (Incidentally, Brianna Wu reportedly met Katherine Cross for coffee, Cross pointed out that if she was going to position herself as a leading feminist in games she really ought to be more careful about what she did with that brand, and Wu took that on board. So, yeah. People make mistakes, other people pick them up, people talk about stuff. The system, broadly, works.)

So, you know, at the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, non-stop transphobic harassment of Brianna Wu is not the same as "the rhetoric of some of these vocal Leftists". I mean, to my knowledge. Maybe we follow different leftists? Also, I don't think "I want you to stop trying to get people to send the police to my house" is exactly a... socialist position. To be honest, this thread has taken a turn for the odd.

More broadly, and more positively, I think that actually quite a lot of good has come from this. There is always going to be a set of people who are shocked, shocked I tell you, at unladylike behavior on Twitter - every time Shanley Kane says anything, she gets a bunch of helpful advice telling her to be more like Martin Luther King. However, vocal opposition is actually kind of useful, as long as one stays on the right side of simple abuse. The one big positive effect of Gamergate, as is becoming increasingly clear, is that it's going to make it a lot more difficult - not impossible, but difficult - for senior people in games media and games publishing to ignore gender-based harassment. Like, it took a while, but people like Jim Ryan are explicitly, by name, citing Gamergate in the discussion of the need to be oppose harassment in gaming. And, increasingly, people who currently have anything to lose (and the sense they were born with) seem to be tiptoeing away from the brand...

I don't think it comes across as concern trolling, but it is pretty unambiguously a tone argument, so... yeah. Not sure what one does with that.

I think Cross' take is pretty reasonable, though - it's possible to see someone you like, and whose work you approve of and respect, making what you think is a bad decision without ceasing to like or respect them.

Interesting to consider whether Tim Schafer or Joss Whedon would also be described as "purposefully ma[king] incendiary gamergate tweets trying hard to draw their attention". Or, you know, just talking about what was going on

While I was trying to find out what the Wardell/Wu thing was about, I came across this Twitter post, in which Wardell take Wu to task for suggesting that people not buy Stardock games. Interestingly, he is very happy to join in with the usual suspects - histrionic, attention-seeking, undeserving of attention - but when things start getting hardcore transphobic he pulls up. I think there's some survival instinct there. Likewise, on the 26th he's talking about wearing his GamerGate T-shirt, and a few days later he's having coffee with Brianna Wu. What's changed? Well, I imagine one element is simply that he is becoming aware that he isn't going to get what he wants from GamerGate. The two things he particularly lined up alongside GG with were 1) that games journalism needed to be taught to watch its step with devs and studios (informed in part by his own experience with Kotaku and others) and 2) that there should be a correction where devs and studios who were getting, in his opinion, coverage disproportionate to their achievements (due to their gender/race/politics) received less coverage and more deserving devs and studios got more. 2) has pretty much crashed, on fire, into a lake of petroleum at this point. The public profile of devs like Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu has been boosted hugely, as has the profile of writers like Leigh Alexander and Katherine Cross and cultural critics like Anita Sarkeesian. Meanwhile, a press has sprung up that does indeed cover these more "deserving" devs and studios, but a) nobody reads them and b ) few devs of any note or quality want to be associated with them. There's only so many times NicheGamer or TechRaptor can interview the same half-dozen people. That leaves... well, The Escapist, really. That's Gamergate's big win. 1) I think might have looked more like a winnable war - until GDC, and Mark Kern's hashtag hijack hijinx. If you arrived at GDC and found that devs were expressing vocal frustration with GG for screwing up their hashtag in order to attack journalists, you don't, I imagine, need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. And, related, Mark Kern seems to be prepared to go a lot further to get positive attention from GamerGate. And, I guess, in practical terms, Stardock has product out. Product that the core audience of Gamergate - young men - probably aren't very into. I imagine Idle Thumbs' forum is more progressive than many, but I doubt that it's a ludicrous outlier, and people here have been expressing uncertainty and doubt about buying Offworld Trading Company because of its publisher here. In terms of bottom line, there's probably a limit to how useful GamerGate is here. So, it doesn't seem ridiculous to me that Brad Wardell might want to put in some time on this, and do it about now. Wu's motivations I think _are_ trickier, but I can see the argument for giving leading GamerGaters a chance to bend their swords into ploughshares and quietly extract themselves from the mess they've helped to create. It's the truth and reconciliation approach, in a way. Whether that's the right approach... well, that's trickier. But. Nobody is behaving wholly irrationally here, it seems to me. [Edit to remove ironically but unintentionally ableist language.]

"Oh my God, Cossette, you can't just ask someone why they're not your shield!"

That's true, and I'm forsaking accuracy in the rush to giggle. But "two right-wing MRAs fall out" is hardly earth-shattering news. The far right and the MRA movement spend all their time having public fights, forming factions, squabbling over Patreon/adsense dollars, dramatically falling out and making up. It's basically like Sweet Valley High with far, far fewer women.

Also, "I know this is going to be a 'let's break the Internet' moment." 301+ views. I feel the Aurini/Davis partnership may be less of an internet-breaking duo when exposed than Kim Kardashian's buttocks. Is all I'm saying.

"I would like to handle post-production here in Atlanta..." Post-production of what?

Yeah - I wasn't sure what the intention was, there. Mark Kern encouraged GGers to post tweets beginning "I support a free and fair press because..." to the GDC hashtag, with the promise of an e-celeb retweet, because... game developers need to see that when they're trying to organise drinks with other game devs in a time-limited situation? If it was aiming for anything other than getting a whole bunch of devs to be irritated by and then filter out the word "gamergate", I'm not sure what it was. OTOH, I'm finding Mark Kern's contribution a bit bewildering overall - in that sort of "is this performance art?" way that the Internet does sometimes. Like, when he tweeted Like, what? It's not even the comparisons of Gamergate to the great civil rights movements of the 19th and 20th centuries (because at this point, sure, who hasn't suggested that the dream Dr King really had was Gamergate, but he had to edit the speech because of the powerful SJW lobby who ran the South in the 1950s and 60s). It's just... I mean what on Earth does that mean? What is he suggesting people should do? What advice is he rejecting? I genuinely have no idea.

Almost too perfect.

I think that article overstates the case hugely, to be honest. Feminist Frequency only matters to the games industry when it damages their larger reputation, and it only does that when there are sustained, visible campaigns of harassment against Anita Sarkeesian, because that starts to raise questions about regulations, retail stocking and fund allocation. It would probably take a lot for funds to start treating video game publishers as a bad-news sector, and there are other good reasons not to invest in games publishers. Cultural critique of games in general is going to be as impactful on games as it is on movies, i.e. not really very much at all. The people who do care are often game developers, because they often want to make better games. There's a reason Bungie and DICE got Sarkeesian in to talk to them, and not Activision or EA corporate, although - rather wonderfully - GamerGate may well change that, as Intel has demonstrated.

Absolutely! There's a really interesting conversation to be had about whether The Sims is a game, or a system, or a toy, or indeed at what point something becomes a game or not a game. The problem is that if you can reliably expect people to follow "It's not a game" with "it's a visual novel for girls", or similar. A similar problem, of course, affects actually discussing the content of Tropes vs Women videos critically. If you say "I think this example is a little forced", and a herd of megatrogs immediately jump in to say "Yes, and she is a fraud, and a misandrist, and she bleached her skin and look at this four hour YouTube video"... well, it's not an incentive.