Showing posts with label let's never speak of this again. Show all posts
Showing posts with label let's never speak of this again. Show all posts

Sunday, November 10, 2013

On "On cliques."

Mike Bithell wrote a post, "On cliques," about his perspective on exclusivity in the indie game scene. I think the example he gives, of going to a party while not really knowing anyone and then getting upset when no one is dying to talk to him and then feeling foolish for getting upset, is understandable and human. I'm sure everyone's felt that way at some point. It sucks to feel like you don't belong.

At the end, he says everyone should talk more, and try to be more understanding of each other, and I think that's good. Let's all do more.

However, I've seen some other peoples' responses and takeaways that strike me as, uh, callous, or even poisonous.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Greenlight, briefly.

$100 is not a huge amount of money to me. It's okay if it's not a lot of money to you either. Being rich and having privilege is not a crime -- however, being oblivious and insensitive is a crime, or at least unethical. You should own your privilege: understand what that means and understand that others have much less or much more.

As game designers, you should already know that it doesn't matter what a rule was intended to do. It matters what a rule actually does.

And when a lot of indies are brave enough to admit they're poor, and say that this rule discourages them from submitting to Steam for their best / only chance at some semblance of financial security based on their very good and deserving work (look at any indie's released sales numbers and the pie chart looks like Pac-Man with a nearly closed mouth; that is Steam's market share) -- when they say they are in pain, I am not going to tell them their pain is their own fault, or that their pain is imaginary, or that they're better off with their pain anyway.

Poor people deserve to make and profit from games too.

So please don't shut people out, because that's just one more door we'll have to kick down.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

The Company of Others.

Very few people read the dictionary for fun -- and generally, the people who refer to it as some sort of authority on language, well -- very few people read those people for fun either. They are the people who ruin conversations by googling whether Kevin Bacon's first role really was in Animal House when establishing certainty is never the point. In fact, certainty makes things worthless.

That's why the act of naming is a powerful act. It implies mastery and ownership over something, it imposes limits: North America. Adam. Drosophila. So it must be pretty to think you're some sort of intrepid explorer charting undiscovered countries, setting your flag down in alien soil. Civilization. Wilderness. Barbarians.

Many games have a notion of sportsmanship. When you're, say, 6 years old, you learn that arguing in a game of tag is foolish. Competition is not an excuse for selfishness and ruining the game for others. It's even more foolish when the game has no end in sight; when victory is impossible or irrelevant; when, clearly, the point is just to enjoy running around in the company of others.

I think formalism has its uses. Arguing about whether something's a game or not, however, when the designer and at least one player clearly find it a compelling and/or playful experience of some sort and use the word "game", is probably the most wasteful application of formalism possible. You're not "furthering the advancement of game design" or whatever by negging someone's work, you're more likely just making the developer feel like shit.

Games are for people who care about what games are, about the purity of genres and mechanics, the thrill of a kill -- and that's okay. However, games are also for us, we who simply enjoy running around in the company of others.

So join us if you want, it's your call. 

But if you don't, then please, just get out of our way. We have a game to play and you're interrupting us.

Friday, August 3, 2012

On "Gaymercon"

The main perpetrators behind pushing "video game players as a political identity," or the existence of "gamers," are the industries and companies who seek to profit from it. I have no objection to corporations interacting with politics as long as those interactions are visible and transparent -- but the "gamer" was invented, and is still largely owned, as a marketing ploy ("Buying Call of Duty is a form of personal expression!") and if you believe otherwise then you're fooling yourself at the behest of whoever makes these incredibly patronizing ads.

However, I'm content to let that discourse exist, far from the indie / academic / game design scenes where I frequent, where no one uses the word "gamer" unironically and if you do then it marks you as an outsider and you feel awkward as the room visibly chills around you and you resolve to never use the word again. (Okay some academics like the word and use it for explanatory power, my bad, I guess it's just personal revulsion on my part, then.) People who readily identify as "gamers" don't directly hurt others, so I don't really care, so do and believe what you want.

But when that word poisons something that I actually value, like a conversation about being non-straight in society -- that's when I'm not so sure about this.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Newsflash: Attention-starved Man Invents Mod Team, "Makes" Fake School Shooting Mod

In my apartment, we have a dog. Every now and then she yelps and jumps a lot, until you pet her or take her out for a walk. Sometimes we're too busy eating or working though, so then we just tell her, "Go lie down!"

* * *

He promised "great gameplay" so I was eager to download and try it. Turns out he (or "they") hasn't released anything yet and probably never will. He also complained about Super Columbine RPG, saying it's poorly designed -- and I agree -- but I don't see any indication that this mod will be any better. If anything, it's worse.

All I see are boring, blocky rooms with the same supermarket lighting; sterile, lifeless things. Actually, it's not even really a school shooting mod, because the only thing that transforms this first week's exercise in level design into a "school" is his unconvincing insistence that this profound lack of imagination and craftsmanship is something that it's not.

It's fake; or if it's not fake, it'll suck and no self-respecting man-shoot enthusiast would bother with it anyway.

Don't get trolled so easily, people.

And to this attention-starved pseudo-modder: Go lie down.

(Not that being attention-starved is a crime, you should just hide it better... And of course, I'm not saying he doesn't have the right to troll you. Read ModDB's rationale for pulling the mod from the database; I kind of agree but also kind of don't -- but then again, I'm not the one receiving a flood of misdirected hate mail.)

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

"I think the 'artgame' thing has pretty much run its course at this point."
-- Jason Rohrer, 27 December 2010

(bonus links: this epic 242+ page thread on TIGSource, or just read this comic by Cactus which sums it all up nicely... but now that it's dead, let's look upon its exquisite corpse -- what exactly was an 'artgame' anyway?)

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Pity the First Horseman

http://gamification.org/wiki/Game_Design
"Competition is the basis for most of humanity's progress and evolution."
Unfortunately, the documentation's rife with errors: "Engagement Curve" should be re-labeled as "How to Interfere With The Player's Daily Life and Make Them Worry About Monetizing Their Friends Frequently Enough to Collect Enough Virtual Points to Buy a Re-Colored 128x128 PNG of a Kitten."

Or maybe it's one of traditional gaming's double agents operating in the field, deliberately planting false information like this gem -- "Playtesting in traditional gaming happens very early in the design process" (Wrong. Playtesting in a digital context happens at an intermediate stage, when you finally have a working prototype to actually playtest).

... Okay, I have a penchant for exaggeration when clearly just one foolish individual wrote all this, and most of it is "blah blah blah" but some of it is downright absurd. We're probably falling into that "first we'll make fun of them, then we'll fight them, then they'll win" trap, but hey, we might as well enjoy ourselves before we're competing for NikePoints(TM) by kicking each other in the groin repeatedly.

(hat tip to Andrew Weldon's Facebook profile.)

Sunday, November 21, 2010

On All That Gay Stuff: A Statement

I, of all people, have the least interest in getting typecast as "that guy who always complains about gay stuff in video games." However, the combined weight of Rock Paper Shotgun and Jim Sterling's vast and powerful Twitterverse have motivated this statement... (plus, I'm getting bored of arguing about this)

0) To everyone who can't fathom how I could so horribly misconstrue Jim Sterling's words: have you forgotten the 3rd image he posted in his article? You don't remember? Well, here, let me link you to the image of a man getting fingered, with an effeminate anime-style gay male character photoshopped on top.

That is the face of your beautiful, tolerant, post-sexuality paradise: it's riding on a steady undercurrent of homophobia and revulsion of what gay sex represents. Wait, no, you're right: Jim Sterling included that image because he wants you to like it and be tolerant! Of course.

... or is his point that gay sex is funny / gross, so video games should avoid it -- because only normal people should have normal sex, right? However, let's assume that image is completely innocuous and Jim Sterling means completely well, as so many people have assumed for some reason. Okay: