Denial

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Posts posted by Denial

  1. Posted

    He lit a cigarette. His glass of whiskey lit a cigarette too. “I can only truly love my best friend,” he said, “but not in a gay way. Women wouldn’t understand it. They’re too gay.” Both of the cigarettes agreed.

     

    Seems incredibly apposite.

  2. Posted

    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.

  3. Posted

    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...

  4. Posted

    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:

     

    I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

     
    I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
     
    In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills.
     
    Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

     

    Here I find it, again, highly appropriate.

  5. Posted

    For me it's that it takes as a priori true some of the claims that have been made against Quinn. As an example, supporting the FYC indegogo is only a "great idea" if the allegations about Quinn being a compulsive liar are true and her criticisms of it are false.

     

    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.

  7. Posted

    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.

  9. Posted

    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.

  10. Posted

    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...

  12. Posted

    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.

  13. Posted

    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...

  14. Posted

    That T-shirt is great. I think the best thing about it is the response of "TheAlexLynch97".

     

    .@ollymoss fucking blocked

     

    Followed in the same minute by.

     

    who the fuck is olly moss anyway

     

    Secret of comedy, gentles. Timing!

  15. Posted

    And, tangentially, I do think that LPers/video reviewers have a role in the games industry, in just the same way as make-up tips youtubers have a role in the cosmetics industry. They can certainly help to drive people to or away from a given product. I don't think there's any magical difference between games media as represented by a guy with a mic and screen capture software and games media as represented by an established gaming site.

     

    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.

  16. Posted

    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.

  17. Posted

    I've seen a few bits of seemingly nasty anti-youtuber sentiment popping up in my timeline though.

     

    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...

     

  18. Posted

    JonCole:

     

    Yeah, Clara's death felt a little like... well, like we hadn't had a woman riddled with bullets in slow motion up to that point. It would have been unnecessary writing and animation overhead, I know, but I think it would have been super interesting to have the option, when you found the email from Quinn saying "yes, kill her", to choose to be all HOOOOOOLLLLLLLYYYYYYYY SHHIIIIIIIIITTTT (as my mother would say), drop everything and burn rubber to get to her and save her, then find out that Quinn had died of a heart attack on the news afterwards.

     

    In some ways, Clara is kind of a sexy lady hacker archetype, but there are elements of her role that become interesting only after that point. Like, you can now see her actions up to this point as being convulsed with guilt about the death of Lena - trying to help Pearce, but also worried about what this terrifying mass-murderer will do if he finds out that she was involved in Lena's death. How two people, both of whom feel guilty about the death of a child neither of them actually killed, could relate to each other after that would be an interesting little narrative. Whereas instead she finds expiation in a piece of go-big symbolism, dying on Lena's grave.

     

    On a mechanical level, of course, she's also part of a board-clearing: all Pearce's contacts and enemies have to be cleared off the board so their absence in the open-roaming section after the game story ends is not conspicuous. But she could have taken up her promise and disappeared, with a promise to check in on Pearce in a few years. i.e. Watch_Dogs 2.

  19. Posted

    Yeah, I appreciate this initiative of Ubisoft to release these "indie-like" games. In fact, I think that Ubisoft is the best publisher of the big three ones. However, they need to use the creativity of these smaller games in their big franchises add well.

    When you talk like this, actually it sounds like a way better game. I just wished that the story incorporated this dissonance, by portraying Aiden as a character whose feelings and beliefs led to those dissonance, with an ending that had this aspect in focus (it doesn't, does it? You can spoil the game for me).

     

    Well...

     

    The ending of the game feels like it's closing off all the narrative elements introduced into the game, almost in reverse order. So, Aiden rescues and sends away his family to start a new life where not even he can find them. He kills Iraq. He kills Lucky Quinn. He finds out that Clara was in fact the fixer who located him, and thus was responsible for his niece's death, and had been trying to redeem herself by helping him. Except that by helping him, she has in fact enabled him in alienating himself first emotionally and then physically from his remaining family. Oh, and Lucky Quinn's last act is to call a hit on her, which Pearce is too late to stop, so that's another death.

     

    Then he has to stop Damien, in the process of which he is also attacked by a heel-turned Jordi Chin, and finally revisits the scene at the start with Maurice, except this time around you get the agency that was denied in the first scene fake-out, and can either kill him or leave him. That choice I think is taken in the game's narrative to be a statement on whether Pearce has fallen into moral nihilism as a result of the death or exile of basically everyone he has ever cared about.

     

    He does a fair bit of voice-overed soul-searching after his sister and nephew leave, where he basically acknowledges that everything he has done up to this point has made things worse for them and for him, and that he should probably have just moved on, but at this point he is in too deep, and feels morally and practically obligated to tidy up the various bad guys controlling Chicago, since they all want to kill him. That characteristic of Pearce as a man who cannot stand aside and watch - even when it is in his own and everyone else's best interest for him to do so - is consistent, I guess.

     

    There's also a subplot based around who a mysterious woman in an encrypted video (which turns out to be what Lucky Quinn thought Pearce and Damian were trying to get hold of, and why he called the hit), who feels a bit Kai Leng if you haven't picked up all the audio logs, IYSWIM...

     

    So, I think it does attempt to address the futility of Pearce's plot for revenge in some ways, and the way it has functioned as a maladaptive coping mechanism for his grief, but it has the problem that if you are not making Far Cry 2 or Spec Ops: The Line or similar you have to be careful of telling the player that their labor has been misdirected. So, even if Pearce's grief response is identified as problematic, he has still cleaned up the town. And the scene is being set somewhat for a sequel, also...

     

    I think it's complicated, but IMHO the plot could probably have done with at least one less key player, and maybe one less group of antagonists, and some more on Pearce's inner life and how he has been dealing with the death of his niece up to that point. That said, that would make it more like Gone Home, which may be a good thing for me but is probably not what Ubisoft were aiming for.

  20. Posted

    Younger viewers may also not get that "Fuck you, pay me" is a quote from Goodfellas:

     

     Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? Fuck you, pay me.

     

    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.

  21. Posted

    It doesn't make me comfortable to say that game devs make content and they don't.

     

    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.

  22. Posted

    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

    Aiden is kind of a wad. I mean, he ends up doing some good, in the sense that he probably straight up murders most of the criminal element of Chicago, and he does disrupt the human lady sale, but on the other hand he is pretty much wholly responsible for the chain of events that leads to the death of his niece and thus the beginning of his quest for vengeance. And then his sister, whose daughter his niece actually was, keeps asking him to let it go, move on, help her to raise her son, and he totally ignores her, while also not warning her that she might be at risk as a result of his quest for vengeance, since he has already screwed up fatally vis a vis his family once. Leading to her being kidnapped and terrorized, and his nephew probably being permanently traumatized, or retraumatized. And then this poor kid has to be uprooted from his home - the only stability he has had - because Aiden Pearce can neither conceal nor protect him in Chicago.

     

    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.

  24. Posted

    I stopped playing Watch Dogs because of the story, I just didn't see the point of going through all of it just to see how Aiden's drama would end. But I have mixed feelings about the game itself, don't think it was bad.

     

     

    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...