Denial

Weirdly, when PressFarttoContinue was banned from Polaris Media for hassling/harassing Dodger, TB was pretty quick to shut him down, saying: I guess maybe that's consistent if he believes that there was nothing gendered about that situation, but it feels like you'd have to work quite hard to believe that. Or, I guess, if it's only attacks on friends and coworkers that is problematic.

That's a super weird answer though, right? Because being rude about "your demographic" (which, yeah, I don't think demographic means what GamerGate thinks it means - 18-25 year old core gamers are not the core demographic of Gamasutra, nor does Leigh Alexander belong to the 18-25 male core gamer demographic) is not an ethical issue. It is possibly an issue of editorial wisdom, or political expediency, but it isn't an issue of journalistic ethics. I mean, I guess if you feel anyone writing about games has an ethical obligation to be unswervingly positive about games and everyone who plays them, lest they provide ammunition for the mainstream media then that makes sense, but that feels almost like a self-reductio ad absurdum. However, this is just a restatement of "nobody in this argument has a common understanding of what 'ethics' means", really, which is already very clear.

That reminds me of something I think Elizabeth Simins (of Gaming's Feminist Illuminati) said - that as far as she was concerned Gamergate had settled into the background radiation of Internet harassment, because she was now back to getting only as much harassment and abuse as she normally got for being a woman with opinions on the Internet - it's just that a chunk of it was now Gamergate branded.

Good!

I guess there's the Cryptarch as a mid-point, where you buy mystery items in a particular class, and the higher your Cryptarch rank is, the better the items are likely to be... but I've never seen a legendary come out of a Cryptarch purchase...

(YT, NSFW)

I'm on PS4, by the way, if anyone wants to update the first post...

Yeah - there doesn't seem to be an "anti-Gamergate side", exactly - just people who are more or less regularly impacted upon by its followers. That's partly a condition of the well being poisoned, I think - people who tried to engage initially in good faith found that they got responded to with spamming of the hashtag, to encourage a mass to descend on them. As a result, people have largely stopped taking the risk. (This also helps to explain why it isn't trending, which is the source of another conspiracy theory: Topsy shows a lot of use of the hashtag, but it's concentrated usage by relatively few people - like, literally dozens of tweets a day.) That isolation has its own problems, of course - primarily that it makes the gamergaters pretty easy targets for people who do reach out - who appear now to be progressively further-right ideologies, trying to recruit them like the Foot clan in the OG TMNT movie. I got kind of a shiver when I saw people talking about the evils of "Cultural Marxism"...

I get what the Indie Stone is saying to an extent, but I think it's sort of odd to compare Indie Stone with the Spacebase team at Double Fine. Double Fine isn't a studio making an early access game - it's a studio making several games, some of them being released as early access. It's based in San Francisco for historical reasons, and also because it's one of relatively few American cities with the job market to sustain job mobility among game studios. This feels to me like two different problems...

Yeah - my plan is to hit Vanguard level 2, then switch to FWC, although having found a legendary scout rifle might change that, since that was mainly what I wanted from the FWC... although their logoed cloak is super snappy.

I'm level 21... might grind up to 23 soon, but probably not soon enough.

I've been doing that with uncommon class items - buy the engram, immediately dismantle it, harvest the wire to upgrade armor (although I've taken a Destiny break lately).

If memory serves, the total impact of JournoList was that Dave Wiegel left the Washington Post, carried on working as a journalist, and is now at Slate. Ezra Klein, the creator of the list, is now editor-in-chief at Vox. So... yeah. Not sure what the expected impact of this is meant to be, but I guess we'll find out. Meanwhile, Scott Nichols, who is in the Google group, is doing an ask.fm thing for anyone with questions, and I have to say is doing very well at maintaining his composure, although not well enough to avoid being accused of condescending to gamers, I imagine.

I feel your pain. It'll be a long time, if ever, before I level a Warlock to 20: am currently Bladedancer developing my level 21 Hunter... So, you know, thanks for the unusable hat, Destiny gods.

I imagine that this was prompted by links being posted to this article, in which he misgenders Chelsea Manning throughout and goes off on a transphobic ramble in the very first paragraph (so you know, warning and stuff). (Although if he can't bring himself to refer to trans people by their chosen gender, God alone knows what happens when he finds out about bronies.)

Last week, I literally asked if there were any red wine glasses. For wine I had decanted. I no longer know what I am.

That's where it's from - a megillah being a scroll, literally, more specifically one of the Megillot, the five books of the Ketuvim, and most commonly the Book of Esther, because it gets read out at Purim. So, ganze Megillah in Yiddish - the whole Megillah - is used to mean a lengthy, complete account. (This has little to do with feminism. Although I guess Esther is a strong female protagonist...)

The creative process is not unconscious, though. How many people worked on creative aspects of GTA V - i.e. including artists, designers, writers, coders, not including QA, testers, localization etc? A few hundred? They didn't sit down, go into a fugue state for ten hours and then recover and go home. A AAA game is a huge collection of decisions, from very high-level decisions about setting (the core team that worked out the high concept of Destiny was about five full-time people) down to individual choices about dialog lines and particular approaches to animating a particular action. The auteur theory that holds that GTA V is created by Dan Houser, or the Metal Gear games by Hideo Kojima - with the rest of the development team acting merely as a kind of idea loom - is itself a function of marketing. There are certainly more or less hands-on creative leads, and you can see authorial intent, but it's a romantic notion to suggest that GTA V is a pure transmission of an unconscious creative intent to the player, unmediated by the thousand-odd people involved in making and marketing the game. Houser may be more hands-on than many, and Rockstar may have more autonomy than many corporately-owned studios, but. If you want auteur, Jason Rohrer is over there. The end product may well reflect or exemplify unconscious attitudes, but it isn't the product of an unconscious process. (A good example might be Duke Nukem Forever, which for a whole range of reasons was unusually gross and offensive for a notionally AAA release - to the point where its content and its approach to that content possibly even hurt its sales. It's notable in that context that a whole bunch of decisions - and non-decisions, in the sense of decisions not to make a change to a created piece of work - led to that product shipping in the shape it was in.) Either way, at the end of the process, you have an object designed to fit into the culture, and to be understood and purchased as such. And as cultural objects, I don't see how (or why) they should be exempt from cultural criticism. If some of that criticism makes you feel bad, then I think that's probably something for you to deal with. One way to do that is by examining the object in the lens of that criticism. Another is dismissing the criticism (which is a valid response in many cases! It's OK to discard the Fox News critique of Mass Effect as a graphic gay sex manual in game form, because it's unrelated to the object). Yet another is deciding that your hurt feelings justify a lengthy campaign of terror against women. If you don't think you're being given any advice on how to respond to cultural criticism, though, I honestly don't think you're listening. Like, think about what these cultural objects are doing, and how they fit into the culture. Maybe raise your expectations of the products you're consuming, or indeed creating. A number of creatives - notably Steve Jaros, formerly of Volition and now of Valve - have noted that cultural criticism of their work has helped them towards making better work. That seems to be a good response. (neonrev: Totally cool with getting drunk later, also, but I was thinking of "the whole Megillah" in its idiomatic use to mean a long, drawn-out story...)

The fact that the far right is making a concerted pitch for gamers is one of the most interesting/horrible things about this whole megillah. And I guess Wikileaks is looking to harness the same... energy? It does highlight something interesting, which is that the roiling discontent of the gamergaters is often categorized as "conservative", but it doesn't necessarily line up with the groups currently courting it. If this whole thing has an upside, it may be that at some point Breitbart.com is going to have to try to work out what its editorial position is on erotic My Little Pony fanart.

Mojang's revenues in 2013 were about $330 million, and it's got a terrific margin - its profit was $129 million. Lucasfilm's merchandising revenue, as a point of comparison, in 2012 was a little over $200 million - although that was in a year where nothing much happened in the franchise creatively (insert "just like every since Return of the Jedi" joke here). At the time of the acquisition, Disney's CFO estimated that the adjusted Box Office revenues for the prequels would be $1.5bn in the present day (i.e. if they had entered a world with 3D glasses and 2012 cinemagoing levels in the BRIC nations). However, the cost of making those films is pretty huge as well. Mojang, relatively speaking, is cheap money, if not big money, and relatively low-risk. It's hard to blow $500 million on a 50-person studio. In the longer term, I suspect Microsoft is gambling that Minecraft/Minecraft-shared-on-the-Azure-cloud will end up as the equivalent of Angry Birds/Farmville on the mobiles of the future... so, huge scaling across every device, maybe with extra goodies for Windows 8/WinPhone versions...

One interesting question there is whether Microsoft will hire people to join Mojang to do the inevitable Windows Phone version, or outsource it as Mojang has previously.

I'm AreaDenyal - will indulge in an orgy of friending later!

I think this nails it. I'm interested by the way Bungie pushed the lore down mainly to item descriptions and Grimoire cards. I'm still absolutely tickled by the fact that when you meet your class vanguard commander for the first time you get one line of canned speech. No dialog, no big "welcome to the fight" thing. Just "Bill Nighy filled you in, right? Have a bark and some equipment, and go kill things."

Jennifer Hale, who incidentally has the best voice in the world, has spoken to Overcast's Marketplace Tech Report about the harassment of women in games culture (starts at about 3:15, or maybe AUSTIN 3:16). Saddeningly, although not surprisingly, friends of hers apparently warned her against speaking out in public. Zoe Quinn has responded by booping a Reaper.

(Obviously, this would never happen, nor should it. But it would be perhaps the most epic troll ever.)