Denial
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Posts posted by Denial
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Instead, what if we think of video games as (here it comes) art? Or at the very least, we think of the makers of them not as "developers" (a moniker also used for software coders and urban planners), but as auteurs, as creators? If they have a proven track record as a creator, it makes sense to subscribe to them monthly and trust that they will continue to produce creative works that one, as a critic or journalist, can enjoy and even write about.
This is particularly relevant for the kind of people who are using Patreon for games. Like Cara Ellison is using it to create writing that is then distributed for free on the Interwebs. Zoe Quinn is making games and releasing them for free... Patreon is interesting partly because, instead of trying to get people to pay for a single object, you're often asking people to support a practice that makes content available for free, thus preventing it from having to be pitched to and tweaked to fit a publication.(Personally, I'm a big fan of editors, and editing, and house styles, but I can see a case for some work not having to deal with them.)
Of course, whether it's appropriate for journalists to fund developers specifically, or indeed the other way around, is a related but separate question. -
There is no need for hypotheticals, the entire Polygon Ethics Statement is available on their site. There is no insignificant clause applicable to Patreon.
There is no discussion of Patreon at all, or of donations. So, yeah, that's interesting. Let's say I give $5 to a women's shelter every month. Should I recuse myself from covering all women's shelters? Should I recuse myself from covering that specific women's shelter? These are interesting questions worth discussing. One interesting question there is where it is seen as meaningful - whether it is always meaningful, no matter the amount, or whether the amount is significant. If I stick my head around the editor's door and say "oh, by the way, I'm donating $5 a month to this indie dev, is that a conflict of interest?", and the editor says "No, that's the equivalent of paying for a cup of coffee while talking with her, don't worry about it" - or indeed "You're an opinion columnist; if it's your opinion that that's an OK thing to do, be ready to discuss and defend it" - what happens then?
I would imagine either that Patreon is a sufficiently new phenomenon that the ethics are still being worked out, or that this kind of microdonation is not considered by Polygon a meaningful ethics issue. That's definitely a discussion that has been had in various places.
However, it is nonetheless I think relevant that this discussion is borne out of a sustained assault on a female game developer, and on anyone who is supporting her, to try to create a chilling effect on covering female devs or supporting female devs who are being harassed. If you want to ignore that, then that's absolutely your privilege to do so - as it was privilege, I think, that meant that the Doritogate column didn't take into account that calling out a woman by name was going to lead to the rest of the article - the more specifically meaningful stuff - being drowned out by the noise of a campaign against that woman.
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(To be exact, entering people who might be journalists into a raffle with a PS3 as the prize - it wasn't a straight console-for-hashtag exchange...)
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Are you seriously trying to argue that information that is known strictly internally to an organization can be considered disclosed? Nathan Grayson's situation was that no conflict actually occurred because he recused himself of writing about Quinn, hence there was no reason to disclose any information whatsoever. If Nathan Grayson had written a piece on Quinn after they had been in a relationship, then it would be remiss not to disclose their previous relationship, but that's a hypothetical universe that does not exist. That is an entirely different situation than what we are discussing.
There's a short and a long answer to that. The short answer is "no". The long answer is "no, obviously not". I was saying that the Angry Internet's insistence that Grayson be fired was based a) on a misstated date provided in the middle of a Timecube-length ramble by a vengeful ex-boyfriend, which even he has now walked back and b ) on the apparent belief that he hadn't communicated the existence of a potential conflict of interest to his editor, or that he had and his editor had thrown back his cape, cackled dramatically and told him to go ahead. Neither is likely to be the case.
Angry Internet not really knowing how working in professional journalism functions is a problem here, as in many cases is Angry Internet not actually having a clear picture of how working works, since many have yet to enter the labor pool or are outside it, concentrating on building their YouTube channel.
In the Kuchera/Quinn case, it's possible that Kuchera didn't think to report it. It's also possible that Polygon has a de mininimis clause that means that a small donation, say, whether to an indie dev or a charity, is not considered a conflict of interest. Or that Ars had the same, and he didn't think of it when he moved. It's probably a good idea to have rules about this, and to enforce them, but Patreon is a tip jar; the average donation to Zoe Quinn's Patreon page is about $5. It would be a good thing to have a solid policy on, but it's not a lot to build a whole j'accuse on.
Speaking personally, the idea that the best place to focus attention in the search for ethical violations is the microfunding site entry of a female developer is kind of unfortunate but probably inevitable. As we saw the last time there was a big games journalism corruption story, when the focus on PepsiCo's influence over the programming of GTTV and the offering of a PlayStation3 at the VGAs to journalists in exchange for tweeting a hashtag about Defiance were both largely forgotten in the rush to scrutinize and threaten a woman who had been involved in neither situation, but who was foolish enough to tweet an opinion that disagreed with a columnist's.
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This seems legitimate for a reporter off in a third world country somewhere (the guardian, for example) who has no other option but to eat food provided to them, but it isn't like the reviewers are being sent to places like that, and bringing or paying for your own lunch is not out of the question.
Dude, Britain is really not that bad.
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Well, one can compare, say, the Guardian's code of ethics. That puts the cap on gifts at £50, which is defined as "insignificant value". That's not an unusual statement at all - if a publication wants to mandate that its writers decline all gifts, it can, but the idea that "nominal value" usually means somewhere between $25 and $100 is generally accepted, and allows for things like USB sticks (which are a handy way of giving people print-quality images, and more hassle to try to get back than it's worth for a company like Activision).
Samples are different from gifts, as described in the ethics policy - they are things one might write about. So, a review copy of a game is a sample, whereas a T-shirt is a gift, by the looks of it.
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The Tim Schafer thing hammers home again what I think is one of the strangest things about this - the guys who viscerally loathe Anita Sarkeesian, and who have been led to believe that she is the enemy of video games, just don't seem to get how far away they are in belief and method from people who actually make video games.
Like, what made them think that Tim Schafer - fortysomething Berkeley graduate, Northern Californian, father of a young daughter for whom he made a casual Kinect game, head of the studio that made Costume Quest - would hate Sarkeesian the way they hate Sarkeesian? It's weird.
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Slightly random thought, but... I just paid for Robert Yang's new game on itch.io, even though I didn't have to. Does that make me more corrupt (because I have given the creator money, rather than having to part with the money in exchange for the game) or less corrupt (I have paid for the game, rather than getting it for free)? Is it only acceptable ethically to pay the minimum market price? How about collector's editions? I'd be very suspicious of e.g a games journalist getting a high-value collector's edition as a review copy, but if someone buys a collector's edition and reviews it, they have paid more than they need to have. Does that make a difference?
Then I guess a similar problem occurs if you are reviewing a Patreon exclusive piece of content. Say an indie dev makes a game that only Patreon contributors get access to. Is it more corrupt to write about that (while being a Patreon contributor) or more corrupt to write about the free content the Patreon funds?
In the case of Kuchera/Quinn, I think it's probably relevant to consider what "undisclosed" means. There's no attempt to conceal his donations to Patreon - it's a matter of public record. (Compare, for example, with the Patreon for "The Sarkeesian Effect", which I doubt has a lot of Polygon columnists donating but does have a number of pseudonymous backers). So, while it isn't being disclosed in the article, it's also not being concealed. It's in the public domain. Given that, I'd say it's probably oversight rather than malice that led to the failure to disclose on that article - or the donation falls beneath a set de minimis level. There's no attempt to conceal the donation more generally...
It's also unlikely that this information was not available to his editor, or his publisher. Not to suggest that people on the Internet can be a little solipsistic sometimes, but the fact that something was not disclosed to you does not mean it wasn't disclosed. I don't know if that was the case with Kuchera and Polygon, but I _very_ much doubt that Nathan Grayson's editor was not aware of his relationship. It wasn't disclosed to the readers, because journalists don't have an obligation to disclose details of their private lives if there is no conflict of interest, and Nathan Grayson recused himself from writing about Quinn after the relationship started.
The reason Kotaku ended up commenting on this, I would imagine, is because Angry Blogpost Dude claimed initially that the relationship started in early March, i.e. before the Game Jam article came out. He has subsequently claimed that that was a typo. Take that as you will.
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It is the way it works, and it isn't always bad, but it is a system that tends to maintain what the dominant status quo is inside of an industry (mostly white males in your industry, then mostly white males benefit). It makes it harder for outsiders to break in even when the are equally or more qualified.
This feels like the exact opposite of the concern being felt by the people currently complaining about nepotism in video game journalism, though.
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Well, there are diary entries tied to specific interactions and an implicit challenge to find them all, and the game was built expecting speedruns. So that already exists.
Yeah, I left out the important (FSVO important) bit in the hypothetical, which is that the cassettes would need to have no or very little narrative function - they would simply be collectible objects, and would have no function other than to give you a numerical assessment at the end of the game of how good you had been at finding and collecting collectable objects.
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I'm hoping that some like-minded individuals will create an official list of games that are not games. I would enjoy reading it, especially if it includes the reasons that they are not games.
This is a super interesting question! I was at Nine Worlds Geekfest last weekend, and Jack de Quidt of The Tall Trees was on a panel discussion what was and wasn't a game. The usual suspects were mooted - Gone Home, Proteus and so on, and de Quidt asked what would need to be added to Gone Home to make it a game in the eyes of those who maintain that it isn't. How about adding a collection mechanic - where you could, say, pick up VHS cassette tapes hidden around the house and get a score at the end of the game? That mechanic existed in The Path - does that mean that The Path was more of a game than Gone Home, even though the mechanic was put there to satirize pointless collection mechanics? And if so would it be enough actually to make it a game - that is, would just adding that mechanic to a "not a game" make it a game?
Or is it not about what needs to be added, but about what needs to be taken away? If you take away the female protagonist, does that make it more like a game? How about the LGBT themes? Would a game with the same basic (shudder) gameplay, but which was a
ghost story or a serial killer story
be accepted as a game? Or, pushing it out yet further, would it be thought of as a game by the people who insist it is not a game if the studio had had a different gender mix, or if it had been shown at the PAX Indie Megabooth in 2013?
I've actually gone beyond his hypotheticals there, but I think it's an interesting train of thought to follow. The question of what is or is not a game seems to go a long way beyond game design.
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So, wait... Youtubers are going to break the necks of games journalists while that dude from Torchwood looks on in horror?
OK. That makes things a lot clearer.
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My point is that the Quinn thing might be an example of a real problem the industry that should be dealt with, and that the way to avoid all this drama shit is to deal with this stuff out in the open, in a mature fashion, that doesn't just give more ammo to the trolls.
Sadly, however, to my knowledge none of us has the power to go back in time and suggest to Eron Gjoni that the best way to go about this might not be to write a blog post about his relationship with Zoe Quinn that appears to be longer than his relationship with Zoe Quinn, and then share it with 4chan. As it is, we are where we are.
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Hah, one of the creators is the dude who started arguing with forum member Lacabra on Twitter, mostly by ignoring that the attacks on ZQ has anything to do with misogyny.
Best part of that exchange must be "What MRAs? I am no MRA, I am an Egaltarian".
I AM AN EGALTARIAN!
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When are they going to get round to building a single unique death star ship and having an auction for it?
"This costs a million dollars. It's a lot of money, I know. But you can not only blow up any other ship in the game... but every ship in the game. At the same time. Everywhere."
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The narrative text seems intent on shuffling you off to Paris as the first leg of your journey but you can manually pick Cambridge instead, which is interesting, at least, if not necessarily a more advantageous or quicker route.
Pretty sure Cambridge unlocks after the first play, which is why it isn't flagged heavily in the text - it's an Easter egg.
(The real Easter egg,
I think, is the steam-powered car that takes you from Tangier to Lisbon. It's called a Gardner-Serpollet car, which is I think anachronistic - they were closer to the end of the 19th century. Serpollet was the driver of the first steam-powered car to break the land-speed record in 1902, which was called l'Oeuf de Pacques - the Easter Egg.
I love the care that went into this game. How many people are going to get that joke?)
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"Finished" isn't quite the right word, but I went back to Watch_Dogs, completed the narrative missions and then tooled around solving puzzles and collecting audio tapes. It's a really interesting game: in some ways it is comically stuffed with content, and in other ways things seem to be missing that you'd expect in that kind of game (multi-button melee combat, most obviously, although I don't think that was a bad call - who actually used melee combat in GTA when they weren't being forced to by the mission structure)?
I think I'm actually enjoying the world more now the narrative mission is over, but I'm also aware that to get the full story of the narrative you'd need to complete a phenomenal number of individual puzzles - which are sometimes pleasantly brain-teasing and at other times pretty rote...
It's certainly a game I got the hours out of, though. Although it feels like if the cars handled better, especially the early available dial-a-cars, it would have taken less time, because the fixer contracts would have ended faster. Likewise if the cars were less titanium-reinforced and the world less breakable...
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Sure, but DICE also basically own the Battlefield brand. A bad brand extension ultimately I think hurts them more than it hurts Visceral...
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In reality, the police are just as heavily armed as they are in the game, but they're deployed against unarmed protesters and news reporters. That's some virulent propaganda, whatever the original intent.
I think that's the thing that is really striking about this for me. The kinds of weaponry and equipment we're seeing levelled at unarmed black people in Ferguson maps uncomfortably to the vision of policing-as-actioner in BF:H.
(And indeed to the LAPD - since the shooting of Michael Brown, LAPD officers in the Newton division shot and killed Ezell Ford, another unarmed young black man.)
I don't know if DICE should be thinking about this stuff, or whether video games in general should be addressing it (actually, I do know that, but I try to be realistic in my aspirations), but it creates an ice cream headache of cognitive dissonance...
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The other thing about this is that there's a very real chance that it would have launched against Uncharted 4, which Sony would have been pushing aggressively as a platform-seller, on PS4. At which point it gets mulched - or more specifically, lots of people who like that kind of game buy Uncharted 4 at full price, play it, and then buy Rise of the Tomb Raider six months later at a discount.
If Microsoft will give you money not to throw yourself in front of that train, and will push your game like crazy to shift Xboxen, I can see the logic... especially if you get to release six months later on PS4 at full price...
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"Glitchhikers"
By: Silverstring Media
Available: http://glitchhikers.com/
Synopsis: On a night drive, you pick up and talk to a range of unusual characters. Relatively little action, beyond accelerating, decelerating and changing lanes, but tons of atmosphere.
Trailer:
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All MMO expansion packs should have the subtitle "Rise of the Babies".
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Madden-as-a-service!
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Ah, that's a good point. There is weapon damage types and enemy damage weaknesses in Destiny, but I haven't noticed them to be particularly worth acknowledging that early in the game. Would not be surprised if there are enemies immune/highly resistant to Fusion and Ballistic damage, for instance.
There are a couple of high-level Hive enemies underneath one of the buildings who have proven immune to everything I hit them with so far - although I think that was level disparity rather than ballistic immunity. I hit them with the Golden Gun as well, and nada.
Feminism
in Idle Banter
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I'm sure the feminist cause is very touched by your concern, and appreciates the advice. As, I imagine, it did when it got the same advice about Anita Sarkeesian, Jennifer Hepler, Adria Richards...