Denial

Seems incredibly apposite.

I know, right? And what happened to Daman McFerran? He was on the last list of SJW jorunalists. Has he become less social justicey, or have other SJW journalists out-SJWed him? Really, without transparency into the judging process, this whole thing reeks of payola.

I think the harassment spreading to the much more well-known Anita Sarkeesian, and people like Joss Whedon and Tim Schafer getting involved on the opposing side, may have caught TFYC off-guard. There's an rather self-pitying statement on their web site which, reading between the lines, suggests that they were so excited to be getting funding for this pet project that they hadn't really considered the long-term consequences of having their professional brands associated with the part of the Internet that harasses and threatens to mutilate women. They are now, it seems, continuing to try to get the money but also want to try to separate themselves (or himself, as appears increasingly the case) from the Zoe Quinn situation. Which is of course the only reason they have any funding at all. Fulsomely complimentary YT videos is a pretty weird response, but then TFYC has zigged a number of times when one might have advised zagging, so...

Pretty much every time a white person uses Martin Luther King as an example of the importance of polite, principled, gently-gently protest, I find this passage, from "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" springs ineluctably to mind: Here I find it, again, highly appropriate.

Yeah, that, and the whole "hey, I'm wearing my baseball cap backwards, I've done some kick flips on my BMX, I've turned my chair around to sit with my bare arms resting on what would normally be the back. Time for real talk, bros" junior pastor feel. In his need to be liked and accepted by the young men he appears to feel he's addressing, he uncritically repeats anything that he thinks might dispose them favorably towards him. Like, was Totalbiscuit just "asking everyone to calm down"? Oh, actually, no, he was taking the opportunity to talk about how corrupt and nepotistic games journalism was (in contrast with YouTubers) and how terrible DMCA claims were, in a way that was likely to, and indeed did, help a whole bunch of anime avatars to feel validated in their attacks on Zoe Quinn. Not malicious, but hardly uncomplicated. And was he "shouted down"? How do you shout down a guy with millions of followers, again? And why would you describe Phil Fish as "perennially highly-strung" when talking about him getting doxxed and his financial records shared over the Internet? What would be a "low-strung" response to that? You do it because you want to show the audience that, underneath this short-sleeved clerical shirt and collar, you're one of them. Likewise, why mention how much you didn't like Depression Quest? And Dungeon Keeper and Sim City - hey, kids! EA are just the worst, right? Then the dropping of knowledge of some cool indie games by some cool game dev chicks - hey, they ain't no Zoe Quinns! Why ain't Kotaku covering them?* So, yeah. All of the above, basically. Its need to be liked, as a text, means it parrots what it thinks its audience wants to hear - Phil Fish is a loon! Zoe Quinn makes bad games! Games journalism is corrupt! And its ultimate advice, "ignore Quinn" is just kinda shitty. "Don't harass Quinn", yes. But she isn't some sort of Nathaniel Hawthorne adultress, who the villagers should turn their backs on. Maybe "pay attention to the fact that Zoe Quinn is, no matter what she did, now getting death threats and round-the-clock harassment, and is going to PAX with genuine fear for her safety. So, you know, don't harass Quinn, don't talk about what a bad person she is and how she is destroying gaming, but also don't ignore Quinn"? The guy's heart is in the right place, I'm sure. But, yeah. * Also, Emily Short? Really? The most famous and successful interactive fiction writer of the last 15 years is your women in gaming deep cut? Oy.

Huh. "Gamer". That is pretty deeply embedded.

Oh, man. That Slate article. I know what it was going for, but I haven't encountered a female gamer who has read it without feeling flames down the side of their face.

This could also apply to the erotic fiction.

I was impressed at the advice to boycott EA _and_ BioWare. DOUBLE BOYCOTT! I guess FunCom also gets the DOUBLE BOYCOTT, since Ragnar Tornquist is still technically working there and The Secret World is published by EA... Or maybe it only gets HALF BOYCOTT because Tornquist is only part-time and you can buy their games directly as digital downloads. So complicated, my feelings.

I don't know if this is exactly Thumbs merch business, but I just thought to note that the Olly Moss "Social Justice Warrior" design would make a great shirt, and it would be fine if any margin on that went to the creator/the podcast/a donation to RAINN or similar rather than Teespring or Cafepress...

Well hey now friend wait a minute.

Well, speaking of quick to judge - Anita Sarkeesian has had to move out of her house after receiving a very detailed death threat including her home address. And Hollywood branch of the Tea Party Adam Baldwin has tweeted the initial creepy YouTube videos about Zoe Quinn to his million-plus gun-loving followers. I find myself weirdly unconflicted about these actions.

That's pretty great. Jeffrey Yohalem (UbiSoft) and Neil Druckmann (Naughty Dog) have also said that anyone interested in games should watch Tropes vs Women. And Anthony Burch at Gearbox is a total SJW. And I literally can't believe that nobody at Telltale has said anything, so let's just throw them in. So, that's no Far Cry, No Uncharted, no Last of Us, no Borderlands, no Walking Dead, no Game of Thrones, so far...

That T-shirt is great. I think the best thing about it is the response of "TheAlexLynch97". Followed in the same minute by. Secret of comedy, gentles. Timing!

Absolutely. Gaming sites are also in the ad-supported online media business. The games industry makes, markets and sells games. There's no shame in not being in the games industry, but it's unhealthy to think you are part of an industry because you say things about it, or because it sends you things or buys ad space (or indeed pays you to feature its games in your LP videos). One difference, though, is that professional gaming sites generally refer to the SPJ or NUJ code of ethics (in English-speaking sites), and as such did not see the invasion into Zoe Quinn's privacy as a suitable topic. Many YouTubers explicitly reject a status as media, and thus the relevance of media ethics to their operations, and as such some YouTubers felt entitled to seek page views by discussing or capitalizing upon that invasion of privacy. #notallyoutubers, but that doesn't seem to me to be the first point of concern here; there's a structural question about media ethics, and what constitutes media. I don't think it's allowable - although I absolutely understand why it might be desirable - for YTers to count as media when credibility is being considered, but as just some guys playing video games when ethics is under the spotlight.

Well, LPers aren't in the video games industry - they are in the ad-supported online media industry. They just happen to be playing video games rather than providing make-up tips. Still, sure, #notallyoutubers and all that, but it feels like a fairly low-intensity problem relative to the violent harassment of women and the passive or active encouragement of same by successful Internet personalities.

Well, several high-profile YouTubers have more or less not covered themselves in glory on this one - and I think it's also made people aware of the existence of a sort of drossy underlayer of people making misogynistic YouTube videos, whom I wouldn't describe as professional YouTubers but who would clearly like to be and are desperately trying to hoover up viewers (and Patreon funding, in some cases). Some known quantities are behaving badly, some formerly unknown quantities have emerged blinking into the half-light...

JonCole:

Well...

Younger viewers may also not get that "Fuck you, pay me" is a quote from Goodfellas: The point being that people will often have very good reasons, from their perspective, not to pay you, and if you accept those reasons as valid then they won't. So, if I'm offered 8% of the net profit on a project that will only turn out net profit after everyone else involved in the project has been paid, I think it's OK for me to examine how I feel about that. If I'm an independent developer, and I have an interest in how people are paid for their work, that's going to be of interest to me. In the same way, professional journalists often advise aspirants not to work for free. That's partly self-interest, in the sense that it devalues the coin of their own labor. But it's also trying to warn them of a very common business practice, which is to try to persuade people who don't have a lot of experience in business that they don't need to be paid, or that they will be paid at some point in the future. If someone goes into this with their eyes open, then cool. But "with their eyes open" here means understanding what everyone else involved is being paid, what the bonus structure is, what the net profit is likely to be at various different sales points, how much of the money being raised is going to salary and how much to marketing. This is all stuff I'd want to know about a project where I was getting points and everyone else was getting salary. I haven't seen any indication that that information is being made available to potential candidates.

Content yes, games no. Tim Schafer said was that anyone who wanted to make games should watch TvWiVG:WABD2 (as I believe the cool kids are calling it). I think it would be nice if people who upload video of themselves talking about or playing games to YouTube also had a broader critical understanding of how games work, but they aren't the core audience Schafer is thinking about. Although on the plus side the #IStandwithJonTron hashtag is inspiring some amazing comedy.

Thinking about it, one of the interesting things about Watch_Dogs - and I think this is somewhat deliberate - is that the mission structure gives you a choice about how big a douche you want to be, but only by locking yourself out of some missions. Like, it's almost impossible to do the fixer race missions without killing or at least injuring civilians, because you have to drive irresponsibly to get to the waypoints in time. On the other hand, the gang hideouts, CtOS towers, suitcases, serial killer investigations, QR codes etc are all doable without impacting the civilian population meaningfully, and often reward you with extra narrative, which may make them quasi- or pseudo-canonical. In the limited terms of the game's morality system, this doesn't matter too much - you can always heal your reputation by stopping a few crimes - but in terms of how you construct your own narrative within the open world it's quite interesting. In the same way that you can choose not to hack the bank accounts of people the profiler identifies as being on the run from abusive spouses or saving for life-saving surgery - it has no mechanical impact, but it gives you that Walking Dead option of how you feel about your character. Of course, that's complicated by the core narrative, where Basically, Aiden Pearce moves through the moral world of Watch_Dogs like a Looney Tunes character moves through a room full of rakes. Which I realise is somewhat deliberate, in a Far Cry "ah, but what if the real monster.... IS YOU?" way, but also makes me feel like every time I hit a cutscene he's going to do something ethically and logistically deeply unwise. He's like a celebrity software developer talking about feminism on Twitter - totally out of his depth, but apparently convinced that being good at hacking phones also qualifies him to make judgment calls about other people's lives. Whereas once the campaign is finished I can settle down and explore this really attractive city simulation and the various things it lets me do, without feeling the traditional dissonance of hanging up on a phone call where the urgency of the core narrative is asserted, then deciding to take on a fixer mission and a CtOS breach and maybe take a digital trip because, hey, they're nearby. I think my favorite part of the Creeds is always finding very tall historic buildings and climbing up them, which feels like the same instinct, except with handholds instead of CCTV cameras.

Holy cats that is four hours long.

I am a sucker for narrative, so I played it to the end, but I found that actually I had a lot of fun afterwards - I wasn't feeling pressured to complete the story missions, just wandering around, unlocking CtOS towers and picking up collectables. There were so many side tasks in there - in fact, a slightly ridiculous number. Like, putting chess and poker in there? And connecting solving ten chess puzzles to a skill that allows for longer slo-mo aiming? That's quite an incentive. Not to mention the drinking contests, and the "digital trips", which were effectively several indie games dropped onto the map of Chicago...

Toast of London was... not a great use of Matt Berry's talents, I think. But I did bail on it after the first two episodes, so it may have picked up.