Denial

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Posts posted by Denial

  2. Posted

    In a sense, the only reason not to sell at that point is because you don't need to. Like, there were rumors of Microsoft buying Valve at various points, but there was never any reason why Gabe Newell - already sufficiently wealthy, first from Microsoft stock and then Valve stock, to be able to do pretty much what he wants for the rest of his life - would want to be an employee at Microsoft again...

     

    (Oh, man. What if Notch turns out to be this generation's Peter Molyneux? Maybe not the Molyneux we need, but the Molyneux we deserve...)

  4. Posted

    On the other hand, I can imagine how awful Twitter might be for a Polygon writer if nobody was blocked. I noticed a couple of names in the list of people who have been kicking around the dread hashtag. However, using somebody else's blocklist, using Blocktogether, does sound like a hostage to fortune.

     

    (There's blockbot, which has a list of known trolls, spammers, griefers etc, which works a bit differently.)

     

    OTOH, I can't fault someone for blocking people in general. And if you're the editor in chief of Polygon and relying on Twitter as a primary mode of contact with industry figures, you're probably in trouble anyway, so I don't know how big a deal that is.

  6. Posted

    I'd like to have a clear rundown of this thing just to send to people, and have started to write one up a couple of times myself, but it's so ridiculously convoluted at this point once you try to include all the different parts of it. 

     

    This by Tadgh Kelly (disclosure- whom I know) is actually not a bad summary as well as something of a call to action. It doesn't cover everything - the Silverstring-as-ACORN part, for example, is not there, and I think TFYC as a whole doesn't feature noticeably, but then that feels like a sideshow anyway...

  7. Posted

    This is quite the article-...except the fact that it was mostly based on strawmen, and even ignoring that fact, it's ad-hominem, and beside the point of #GamerGate. It doesn't prove any point other than "herpderp, gaemerz r nerdz wich r angree an ef-entitilelld olo0loolthus dey hav no rite to orr baise to maek argumints ol0lo0l fuck gaemrs". In short, this is slandering that's beside the point and has absolutely no backing other than trust in the writer.

     

    Is a legitimately terrific comment.

  10. Posted

    You say marinara sauce, I saw tomato sauce. How is shoddy journalism not a form of corruption exactly?

     

    If I make you a chair with three functioning legs, that chair is not corrupt unless I was paid by your sworn enemy to endanger your coccyx. It is however indubitably a shoddy piece of work.

     

    Shoddy journalism may also be corrupt journalism. However, it need not be. Plenty of people are able to turn out substandard work without being illicitly encouraged to do so.

    So, you know, words mean things? That's basically what's happening here. Words are meaning things.

  11. Posted

    I mean you say there's no corruption but then say there's misdirection where that corruption might lie, right? But obviously, we can agree there's some level of corruption. The way journalists basically pass on press releases as articles, the way the games industry is covered almost like an extension of AAA marketing departments?

     

    That isn't corruption; it's just shoddy journalism. The issue there being that the enthusiast press (which most, if not all, games-specific sites pretty much inevitably are) is usually run at razor-thin margins, usually with expenses needing to be near zero and ad revenues being very limited. Sites like Polygon (Vox Media), Kotaku (Gawker Media) and at a lower tier The Escapist (Defy Media) have the ability to cross-market and cut better per-view/click revenue deals, but if you look at the sites that the Gaters were holding up as shining examples of the kind of journalism they want to see - places like Cinemablend's gaming section - you're probably looking at people who are paid little or nothing for their labor. They may get freebies from PR, and that may be the bargain: they produce content that pulls in some ad views - mainly copying and pasting press releases, either with minor alteration or straight out - and in return can try to get free merch.

     

    One weird thing is that people without journalistic training are being lovebombed - despite one of the 'gate's multifarious demands being the frankly hilarious stipulation that you need a journalism degree before being able to be a journalist - and, in part due to that lack of journalistic training, they are responding to a level of attention and praise they have never previously received by moving further into the tank.

     

    (I guess, Goodgames.us could become a media giant and give them all paying gigs. But it feels like it will be another site with limited editorial oversight, a largely amateur staff and a stock in trade of reproducing press releases and pestering publishers for review copies.)

    Which way The Escapist jumps probably remains the most interesting element of this farrago from a business perspective. 

  12. Posted

    That QA example is really good. On the other hand, that's two hours out of the life of someone with things to do, and the m.o. of trolls is to try to waste your time for as long as possible, so it could have gone a lot worse... 

  13. Posted · Edited by Denial

    The title makes me think of bad, overly angsty DC comics crossover events myself. Which is not unfitting

    Also, wasn't Identity Crisis roundly criticized for depending on the illogical targeting of a widely beloved woman by an irrational stalker for its narrative impetus?

    Seems legit.

     

    (Edit of "universally", because somebody out there probably hates Sue Dibney.)

  14. Posted

    also, I could be wrong, but that escapist statement looks like sarcasm to me. 

     

    You're wrong, FWIW - which doesn't mean it's _sincere_, but doesn't mean it's sarcastic. I think Alexander Macris may be positioning the Escapist to try to scoop up the people who are insisting that they are done with sites like Kotaku, Destructoid, IGN, Giant Bomb etc. It'll be interesting to see how big that audience actually is...  I have my suspicions.

     

    The Escapist is pretty well-positioned for that, since its flagship products are largely already video podcasts, so is a more native fit with the YouTuber culture. It's been a long time, in online publishing years, since Julianne Greer was running it as a weekly online magazine of longform pieces on video games...

  15. Posted

     I don't really know what the end-game is when you're dealing with a group of people that is largely so closed to any form of reasoned argument, and who are being orchestrated by the coagulated mass of bodies that is 4chan. It's so frustrating and depressing to have a bunch of people shouting 'Down with journalistic corruption!' while people are being harassed out of the industry under the same banner, and for the one hand to be seemingly oblivious to what the other hand is doing.

     

    It's interesting. I don't think you have to do much to get lovebombed; the Escapist guy has arguably overegged the pudding, there. All you really need to do is downplay the harassment angle (cf Totalbiscuit's retroactively hilarious assertion that all right-thinking people know that hating women is wrong, and there's no need to go on about it), and do a fist-to-forehead bit about what this is really about. You want to do enough to get the praise from Twitter (which is _tremendously_ validating, btw), but not be cut out from the mainstream of acceptable journalistic community or repulse the larger community of readers who are responding with what at this point must be well-worn horror at the harassment.

  16. Posted

    I think he's trying to make it clear that the change of policy at Kotaku doesn't justify or excuse the harassment of Jenn Frank or Felix Maya Kramer.

     

     It is wildly unfair to hound any reporter for as contentious an issue as whether funding a developer through Patreon is an ethical breach. It is, at worst, a gray area, one that some reporters will choose to avoid and that others won't. What next? Trying to ruin the career of writers whose Instagram reveals that they once accepted swag from a game publisher?

  17. Posted

    There's actually a precursor of this kind of brouhaha when a guy called Burch out on the grounds that Tiny Tina's dialog was racially offensive* To which he responded, "I don't think that's the case", but then asked Twitter, got some responses and said that he'd think more about it and might tweak her presentation in future.

     

    That still turned into kind of a shitstorm, but.

     

     

    *Didn't see it myself, but I could follow the argument.

  18. Posted

    Well, the tiny crack through which the harassers squeezed their body, Tooms-like, was that initially she mentioned her friendship with ZQ in the first draft, but it was cut, and the Guardian's lawyers told her not to worry, and that for an opinion piece not focussed on ZQ that wasn't a material disclosure.

     

    So, to be clear, the lawyers of one of the most respected newspapers in the world, which already has its own code of ethics, were considered not to be sufficiently expert on disclosure or journalistic ethics, and a woman was hounded out of writing

     

    Genius.

  19. Posted

    "Worst tabloid methods used by campaigners calling for better press ethics".

     

    From the SPJ Code of Ethics:

     

    — Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible.

    — Diligently seek out subjects of news stories to give them the opportunity to respond to allegations of wrongdoing.
    — Identify sources whenever feasible. The public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources' reliability.
    — Always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Clarify conditions attached to any promise made in exchange for information. Keep promises.
    — Make certain that headlines, news teases and promotional material, photos, video, audio, graphics, sound bites and quotations do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.

     

    Like, literally the first things it says.

  21. Posted

    Well, if you want the full story, the by now inevitable imgur is here. The takeout is:

     

    The moral is that this sites are under the influence of people who doesn't have a journalistic integrity, this people is not honest, this people gives positive or negative reviews according to their personal agenda, don't let them take control of the hobby we all love and care for.


    I know that spelling/grammar mockery is the lowest form of critique, but really. Dude manages to spell "Riendeau" a different way every time, despite it being right there in the Twitter screencaps. Some people just don't respect their art...

  22. Posted · Edited by Denial

    Zoya Street, whose geek credentials are hopefully established by having written a book about the Dreamcast, wrote a piece at the Border House that helped to capture an ill-defined discomfort that I had with Totalbiscuit's response, which has grown in clarity as he's doubled down.

     

    TotalBiscuit thinks that he has nothing to learn about his own misogyny. “Any right-thinking individual knows that hating women is bad, we don’t need libraries worth of articles to tell us that.” This week’s events seem to demonstrate that there is a huge subculture within games composed of men who desperately need to seek help, and instead just reinforce each other’s disordered views on women and relationships.

     

    I think that if one thing has definitely come out of this, it's that this "Haven't you heard? Sexism is over" stance (a line from Kate Beaton's amazing Strong Female Characters, mentioned above) is clearly inadequate to the realities of being a visible woman in games (or indeed anywhere else, qv the nude photo theft).

     

    (Edit to fix HTML)

  23. Posted

    I'm really curious about the fixation on sex. Is it because fictional media has taught them that corruption manifests itself primarily through sex, because they are inexperienced with sex and therefore mistrust it, because it's one of the easiest things to allege but one of the harder things to prove, or because of some other cause I haven't imagined? 

     

    Well, finance is difficult. Like, Gamsutra is owned by UBM Techweb . UBM also runs GDC. Look! The same organisation is paying journalists to write about developers, _and_ putting on an event which depends for its success on the attendance of developers!

     

    If you wanted to build a conspiracy theory based on that, it would be childishly simple. But the people who are trying to build their brands on this stuff - the anonymous YouTubers and the basement-level bloggers - a) don't have the tools to put that together (which in this case basically means the focus to click on a few links) and b ) don't have any interest in doing so, and know that their audience has no interest in trying to follow that stuff.

  24. Posted

    "It's partially organic."

     

    Wait, like the nanosuit in Crysis?

     

    If I'd known those "Gaming's Feminist Illuminati" T-shirts gave you cloak and bullet resistance, I would probably have bought one. Even though pink isn't my color.

  25. Posted

    It's a lazy "she's not a real gamer!" argument based on the single fact that she at some point in time said she didn't identify as a fan of gaming, or something to that effect.

     

    Specifically, it's usually supported by a video of a talk she gave at Santa Monica College in 2010, but it's selectively excerpted. She says she'd love to play [sc. more] video games, but she doesn't like ripping people's heads off. So, she doesn't play a particular type of video game for pleasure, in essence.

     

    The funny thing about that, it seems to me, is that the dudebros were trying to undermine her by saying she wasn't a real gamer, and a couple of years on a whole bunch of people are saying "actually, if this is what being a real gamer entails, we don't want to be real gamers".