"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[itsamoose]

Milo wrote a review of Dragon Age: Inquisition. That's a quote from it, addressing how his suspension of disbelief was broken by the fact that lesbians are attractive and not bitter because obviously that's just total farce.

 

So dragons, demons, magic, elves, dwarves, all good.  But attractive lesbians?  Well, that's just too unrealistic.  I've seen this Milo guy referenced in the thread for being various shades of asshole, but who is he exactly?

 

Edit: Nevermind, figured it out.

[Zeusthecat]

I've seen this Milo guy referenced in the thread for being various shades of asshole, but who is he exactly?

 

[Twig]

Years of neglect...

[Griddlelol]

And I know cute lesbians, and apparently scissoring is overrated.

 

I had the embarrassment of hitting on a hot, gay, woman when I first started my job...for about a month. Everyone thought it was too amusing to tell me, including her. 

[Bjorn]

And I think I'm super done paying attention to anything Ken Levine has to say. I think that actually happened awhile ago, but recent stuff has really catalyzed that.

Like, it's good to know that adults are immune from the pain caused by words.

I was going to write some other stuff up about why I think he's ridiculously wrong, but fuck it, I got things to do.

[BusbyBerkeley]

Is that in regards to Hatred not getting put on Steam? I mean, by all accounts that was a good business move from them. Was there a petition against it?

Although it wouldn't really surprise me if he has garbage politcal views if the mess that was Bioshock Infinite's narrative was some unspoiled vision of his.

[Bjorn]

The Streisand one is about Hatred getting pulled. Which is just a dumb thing to say. Hatred is built around being controversial. The devs get exposure no matter what. It gets Greenlit, controversy. It gets pulled, controversy. This isn't the Streisand effect, it's just baiting.

A bunch of the rest of the tweets are about whether individuals or sites should have comments sections, and him criticizing people who opt not to have comments sections. He doesn't name her, but the single most prominent person in gaming who refuses to have public comments is Sarkeesian. So when you're talking about that subject, you're in part talking about her decisions.

The big problem I have there is that his opinion is rooted in ideology and not fact (which, hey, not surprising). We've got data that points towards reading hateful/negative things has bad consequences. That ranges from the (maybe) minor mood swings, to actually shaping how people view a site and its content.

And now I'm going off on the rant I was going to write earlier. Back to work instead.

[BusbyBerkeley]

Ahh, yeah that makes sense. I didn't really get the context of the comment section thing, I assumed it was something to do with Valve not putting Hatred on Steam.

I have no clue how or why people think that YouTube comments are a good thing in any way. Totally baffling.

[Gormongous]

The Reformation started by someone creating their own comments section on the door of the church.

 

...Which sparked the bloodiest war that Europe, maybe even the world, had ever seen at that point in history. A third of Germany's population died as a direct result of Luther having a problem, initially quite specific, with how the local inquisitor handled indulgences. Of course, neither he nor anyone in the church who opposed him paid a drop of blood for the chaos and devastation that came from their stubborn insistence on each of them having their own way, so it applies perfectly to Ken Levine, poster child for the out-of-touch privilege of a games-industry auteur. I'm sure it suits him fine for members of hate groups to make controversy-baiting games, since he'll never be the target of them.

 

If there are two things I cannot stand, they're people 1) throwing down historical references just to score talking points, and 2) insisting that people and business provide public venues for their critics to excoriate or ridicule them. By their powers combined, they form the duo of "clueless entitlement!"

[Bjorn]

Ahh, yeah that makes sense. I didn't really get the context of the comment section thing, I assumed it was something to do with Valve not putting Hatred on Steam.

I have no clue how or why people think that YouTube comments are a good thing in any way. Totally baffling.

 

I was going to write some commentary about each of the three batches of tweets to explain and critique them, but then just dumped them. So yeah, I can see how they would be confusing.

[BadHat]

Well, these more recent tweets take a bit of the edge off of his views, but they're still fuck-ignorant so w/e.

 

 

My biggest problem with his (and the thousands of other mouthbreathers who brought it up before him) view of "having a voice" is that the presence or absence of a comments section does not actually rob anyone of their "voice." I don't think Ken was directly referring to her (since he said "articles"), but Anita is actually the perfect example of this:

 

 

People are clearly not wanting for a platform to say and distribute whatever stupid shit they want about her, with or without her permission to do so below her own videos. Setting aside the ludicrous idea that a fucking youtube comments section is in any way conducive to worthwhile debate, I think recent events have clearly shown there's a darker side to comments sections (and twitter, and facebook, and etc), which is that the most overwhelming voices on a controversial topic are often those whose only voice is a comments section. Gamergate, if nothing else, has shown itself to be a petri dish of disempowered* people who turned comments, tweets, emails into tools of self-empowerment, and the few people with a loud enough voice to rile them into a righteous fervour. The insistence on "having a voice" in the form of comments, or something with a similarly low barrier to entry for anyone with 3 seconds to hurl their opinion like a molotov through a window, seems to me like someone read this article and took it as a mandate instead of a suggestion.

 

(While on the topic of WWIC, here's a great piece in the same vein - http://www.nickcapozzoli.com/blog/2014/11/21/wwwgc#.VJC1GiuUewV)

 

* Just to clarify - I don't mean disempowered to mean unprivileged (though it certainly doesn't preclude that). I mean people who feel disempowered in their own lives and lack an outlet for their frustrations. I know this feeling pretty well and GG reeks of it, as others have already observed.

[SuperBiasedMan]

To extend the criticism of "people need a voice", anyone with access to an internet device has a massive voice these days. Social media is built around that premise. If all social media colluded to prevent the discussion of a specific topic/ from a group or individual, then their voice would actually be hampered in a way that matters, relative to others. EXCEPT you can still just make your own website and have it instantly more accessible than any random person some decades ago could dream of.

[Dewar]

Less people need voices. 

[Zeusthecat]

None of us have voices on the internet because the internet doesn't have vocal chords. Duh.

[BusbyBerkeley]

Hatred was re-added into greenlight or something? Anyway, this thread was the top one when someone linked it to me. Keep it up gamers!

[Twig]

Huh why was it added back in. Seemed pretty cut and dry response from valve...

[Reyturner]

Does valve need to approve a listing? Can devs just resubmit if rejected?

[Jordan A]

I'm not really sure how to process this. Like, on one hand, I really strongly object to the game, and the response from those Steam threads is disgusting.

 

On the other hand, I guess if you ban this one game, where then do you draw the line, who gets to decide where that line is drawn, etc.

 

But on the other hand (back to the first hand, I guess), woof.

 

[Merus]

On the other hand, I guess if you ban this one game, where then do you draw the line, who gets to decide where that line is drawn, etc.

 

Yeah, no-one's been pouring detergent down that slope. In practice, we're pretty good at saying 'hey this seems like it's trying to monetise hate, ban that, but this is merely expressing it but it has other things going on, let's leave that to society'.

[Jordan A]

I guess I was really just Devil's advocating myself, you know? Probably needlessly. I've thought about it and I don't think I'd lose a second of sleep if Hatred were not to be sold on Steam.

[Gormongous]

On the other hand, I guess if you ban this one game, where then do you draw the line, who gets to decide where that line is drawn, etc.

 

The thing is, no one's banning the game. Valve's just not choosing to distribute it through their service, which I think is a reasonable business decision on their part. The makers of Hatred are welcome to find a different digital distributor or a physical publisher to tap into the gold mine that's evinced by those wonderful Steam threads.

[Jordan A]

The thing is, no one's banning the game. Valve's just not choosing to distribute it through their service, which I think is a reasonable business decision on their part. The makers of Hatred are welcome to find a different digital distributor or a physical publisher to tap into the gold mine that's evinced by those wonderful Steam threads.

 

I realize that. I shouldn't have used the word "ban," I suppose that wasn't terribly clear.

[Gormongous]

I realize that. I shouldn't have used the word "ban," I suppose that wasn't terribly clear.

 

No worries! I wasn't particularly correcting you, I just wanted to get those words out there again, because a lot of well-meaning people are using "ban" for this situation and it's somehow magically turning this into a free speech issue, which is immune to human fucking decency, of course.

[tberton]

The thing about the Hatred situation, which has been mentioned elsewhere (Zoe Quinn discussed it on Twitter the other day), is that it's fine to be worried about the slippery slope, but the answer is not pressuring Valve to distribute Hatred, it's weakening Steam's stranglehold on PC gaming.

[Merus]

I'd abandon the Steam storefront and its weirdly coercive subsystems in a heartbeat, but there's a lot to like about Steam as a game launcher - it has a friends list, easy multiplayer group forming, automatically updates games, has built-in mod support, and theoretically shares your library across multiple platforms, although in practice my Mac can't connect to Steam unless I restart it.

 

I can't imagine any storefront convincing the other storefronts that they should give up the opportunity to be the central game launcher. Microsoft is in a stronger position, but the abject failure of the Windows Store as a marketplace doesn't bode well for them managing to convince others they have the superior solution.