tiedtiger

Gamers Are Not In A Culture War. They're In Stasis.

Tue, 23 Dec 2014 21:19:07 +0000

On KIA (The Gamergate Subreddit) I’ve been participating in a thread which asked what are the criticisms of Gamergate. I listed out seven, and have been discussing some of them with reasonable posters. However one in particular caught my eye, about this perception that gamers are in a culture war. I felt the urge to share my response more widely (and expanded on a little), as I think it’s an important issue.

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Games are a massive world-spanning industry at this point with hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of players. However the difference between games-as-now and games-back-then is that back-then the majority of players could probably have been described as younger outsiders who’d found refuge. That younger outsider component still exists, as does the older version - some of whom have changed over the years, some who remained the same.

The belief seems to have been that once games went big then everyone would be a gamer, and therefore all the outsiders would become the insiders. This hasn’t happened. Instead it’s more like folk music to rock music to pop music. The audience embraces and alters the medium to suit itself, not the other way around. Thus we have a modern age of game players who are not “gamers” in that cultural sense. They’re players, but that’s not the same thing.

However this isn’t a war scenario. The larger volume of players doesn’t give a toss about what gamers think or don’t think and don’t see themselves as being “in” anything against them. Instead gamer culture has essentially reached its own sub-culture limit and - not having changed the world to suit its own inner feelings - has fallen inward. Gamers mad, gamers angry, gamers hurt but increasingly sort of not that important in the wider landscape.

It’s not a war if only one side is kicking. The Anti-GG/SJW/Ghazi/Marxist/Feminist/whatever that Gamergate attacks is a conjured enemy born of its own inner drama rather than anything real. There are social justicey liberal game makers out there too, but what they’re doing has little or nothing to do with what GG claims to care about (for example; making games about trans experience is of no consequence to how other games are made) and generally operating at a much smaller level/volume than GG seems to assume. Just because Anita Sarkeesian has an opinion doesn’t mean she’s coming to take their games away.

There is no war. There is only unspecified hostility coming from reinforcement of feeling on the outside once again, and defense actions from those who’ve become the movement’s hapless targets. It is, to go the Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, the invented enemy necessary for the movement to exist. It doesn’t matter how real/valid/mild/strong that enemy is, its only function is to propel the movement (which goes back to point #1 on my list - citing every possibly misread piece of comment as proof while ignoring the much larger body of everyone else).

The larger issue is actually that gamers are in cultural stasis. It has become inward-looking, reactionary and driven by ideals of purity and feelings of disappointment. Where 30 years ago everything new was a new game to be discovered, now everything new is an exercise in an opportunity for disappointment. It’s comparing how the new feelings don’t match up to the old.

Everything is genre and comparison. Everything in whining. Everything is bitching. Everything is a sense of being betrayed by someone (though who can say). Everything is dudes like TotalBiscuit complaining on behalf of “the consumer”, satirical reviewers like Yahtzee eternally finding fault and well-meaning dudes like Boogie2988 proclaiming the second crash of video games is coming unless we go back to constraining developers in platform straightjackets.

These are all the signs of a culture that’s ground to a halt, one that finds itself out of step and out of time. And pretty mad at that as a result. But there’s no WAR as such. Just a lack of evolution and the sense that whatever “gamers” were is on the slide.

Comcast And The Ghost Of Internet Past

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 20:48:11 +0000

I read this morning about a friend who’s been caught up in Comcast’s latest experiments with capping data. The company’s idea is to draw a line in the sand demarcating “fair” vs “excessive” data usage and say that it’s reasonable to charge customers extra for going over that limit. Their line is 300GB a month.

This, of course, is a terrible idea. But it’s an idea that keeps returning from the grave because of a residual impression that data is a set of objects that travel over wires, and so like any object-based business it should have a sense of commodity. Comcast doesn’t think that television should be charged based on high or low television usage, perhaps because television services are broadcast at a uniform signal regardless of whether they’re being used or not.

Data, on other hand, is perceived to be like electricity or water. Advocates claim that it’s similar to the model that we see in cellphone usage plans, and ask why is not reasonable, but what’s missed is that that cellphone scheme is also a terrible idea. It’s just a terrible idea that we’ve had to put up with for a while.

Why is it terrible? Because cap schemes are only ever based on what the sense of present data usage is, and so they look to the past. Comcast is essentially saying that now it understands what this Internet business is, FINALLY, and can proceed to maximize value from it accordingly. But if there’s one thing that the history of the Internet repeatedly tells us it’s that its history is rarely an indicator of future directions. Any line in the sand gets blown away.

As an example of how out-of-date this kind of thinking is, consider this:

This is the current top level of service that Comcast offers in my area (which is also, for the moment, not capped). 105Mbps is pretty fast, but look at the recommendation for how many devices it’s supposed to cover. 5-8? Maybe 4/5 years ago that was true, but already it’s historical. Anyone who’s a heavy Internet user is a long way past only having 5-8 devices. Between computers, tablets, e-readers, phones, media streamers, gaming consoles and funky devices like digital radios, I’d warrant that the heavy user actually has as many as 30 devices online at various times. Even a moderate user likely has 5-10, and some families could have 40 or 50. Who knows.

In the last five years alone the way in which the Internet is used has continued to evolve at a frightening pace. Hi-definition video is everywhere for example. There’s services like Netflix and Hulu, and the prospect of 4K streaming. There’s live-streamed broadcasting. There’s game streaming, such as the newly minted PlayStation Now. There’s next generation consoles offering digital video game purchases that are 50GB in size. There’s better conference calling. There’s Photoshop in the cloud.

Moreover there’s so much more passive data consumption these days that the idea that responsible Internet citizens can manage their usage is ludicrous. How many devices do you own, for example, that automatically update? How can you know what size those updates are if they happen while you sleep? This is also something relatively new, something that backward-looking data caps couldn’t predict. Something that your provider (such as Comcast) might imply is your fault, but isn’t really. It’s progress.

Here’s another: With cloud technology maintaining and syncing our data, it’s unreasonable to expect customers to keep track, and sometimes those also result in high volume data usage. I recently had the experience of closing my account with one cloud provider, for example, which necessitated downloading all my data to my desktop and re-uploading it to a different cloud (as a side note: cloud services should provide inter-cloud transfer options, but that’s for another rant). This meant hundreds of GBs of data moving both down and up. It’s a perfectly reasonable, nay ordinary, activity when remote storage has become such an essential part of digital life. Yet Comcast would charge me hundreds of dollars to do it.

There are many instances where high-volume data activities are reasonable. Re-installing the operating system on your Mac/PC, for example, and then installing Dropbox. Your Dropbox might be up to 1TB in size these days. Data cappers would again that’s your fault, a consumer choice. You should be more responsible they might say, as though it were the same as watching too many movies or whatever. But it’s not really, it’s a necessity. Sure it’s unlikely you’ll reinstall every week, but it’s also not predictable that you’ll only ever do so three times in a year. You simply can’t know. Comcast would essentially be taxing you for the crime of setting up a computer.

Finally there is the simple matter of principle. This distinction between data and other forms of signal (like TV) shouldn’t be foisted on consumers. To us it’s all just signal and we pay to get access to it. Nickel-and-diming how we use it, or claiming that we should be more responsible in a world of services that actively take the headache out of digital life with automation, is fundamentally retrograde thinking. The future should always be more, not less.

As for me, if Comcast decides to try and bring this “experiment” to my locale then that’s the day I’ll end my subscription. There are other providers and imminent services that look forward rather than back. There’s fiber and unhooked channels and gigabit speeds and so on to look forward to. Rather than proclaiming that it has solved the Internet once and for all at 300GB a month, Comcast is taking one more step toward its own irrelevance.

#OpSkynet is the proof that #Gamergate is over

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 05:01:00 +0000

#OpSkynet is a #FollowFriday sort of campaign to try and hold the vestiges of Gamergate together, and in so doing it reflects the extent to which the GG Autumn has collapsed. The end began when it lost all legitimacy in the wake of Utah, and Colbert was the nail in the coffin. But many have desperately held on, trying to reinflate it with increasingly sad “smoking guns” and whatever.

Like I called a few weeks ago, GG’s just so over. It’s dead. It’s robo-dead. It has frothed itself into ridicule and irrelevance and nobody will ever listen to what it has to say again. The ultra-gaters are still out there, still fanning the remaining flames. But whatever initial wind they were using is past. All that remains are embers and ash.

If you are a gater, accept that the gaming world is bigger than the gamer core folks, that GG achieved very little and you ended up running with some truly terrible people and sounding a lot like them. You’ve succeeded only in becoming a laughing stock and watchword for gaming’s barmy fringe. And there you will stay.

Whatever it was that this whole episode was about doesn’t matter any more. Time to come back to the center.

Are Game Conferences Worth It?

Wed, 12 Nov 2014 03:22:00 +0000

There are many reasons why people go to games conferences, such as:

1. Connection: Developers and publishers go to conferences to batch meetings with one another.

2. Visibility: Conferences usually feature expos and booths. Why? Because developers have something to show off.

3. Education: For the press a conference is a chance to see everything all at once, a fat pipe of information. For developers, talks.

4. Dissemination: Conferences are often seen as an ideal venue to spread ideas.

5. Social: Conferences are often the best (indeed, sometimes only) way for industry friends flung far and wide to meet.

The case for going seems simple enough, but recently I’ve found myself asking if game conferences are actually worth it. Some reasons why:

1. Focus: From a business perspective you can miss a lot simply because there’s too much going on.

2. Obscurity: Maybe your booth is cool, but it’s in a big hall surrounded by many similar booths. Maybe your talk is awesome, but in a sea of 400 other talks is it going to receive a fair hearing?

3. Quality: Most talks won’t be very good. Many are repetitive, recycling ideas found online. Many are basically sales presentations.

4. Impact: Talks, videos and other material often share much more widely through channels like YouTube than on conference stages. If a conference promises a TED-like production that’s one thing, but most can’t.

5. Same Faces: As for connecting, after a while you tend to meet a lot of the same people over and over.

There are also simply a lot of conferences on the calendar these days (go to gameconfs.com you’ll see what I mean) and they can get very expensive. So the question is simply one of ROI. Conferences are fun, a party scene and place to hang out. On the other hand do you actually find them that effective?

The 6 Problems With Gamergate "Ethics"

Sat, 01 Nov 2014 01:47:00 +0000

I’m watching one of the smaller YouTubers (Sargon) airing a full version of an interview that he gave to the BBC. Aside from being an potted listen in rephrasing answers, he continually makes three points

1. GG is not about Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian or Brianna Wu
2. Actions against said women are not GG.
3. That GG is about ethics in journalism.

These are the general talking points of Gamergate, as repeated for weeks. Okay? Here are their problems.

1. Most people simply don’t care. In all of this argument from GG this simple fact is missed. The most successful form of games journalism is preview journalism. All those features from the magazines of your youth that made you very excited about games were ethically gray, and all of them are today. It is in the nature of entertainment media to do this, and most people know it. This is why Colbert’s quote about imagining what would happen if there were no ethics in Hollywood journalism was so hilarious.

2. Nobody in GG can adequately explain what “ethics” means. Ethics is a word that most take to mean “good behavior” in a non-moralistic fashion. To be ethical is to keep your nose clean, and to avoid grift and bribe. The weird part is when that also drags in feminists, so-called social justice warriors, something about Milo and Cernovich and their playful chats about how all SJWs need is a good lay, and so on. I’ve been saying for weeks (on TechCrunch and here) that GG’s actually about a political assertion over what games should be rather than anything strictly to do with ethics. And that still bears true. GG’s version of ethics is non-normal.

3. GG presumes guilt. Does anyone claim that games journalists have been perfect? No. On the other hand does anyone have evidence that games journalists behave in an unethical conspiracy? Quite the opposite. The GameJournoPros mailing list is a group that discussed ethical behavior and the realities of their industry, not colluding on some hidden agenda. But Gamergate is convinced that something is going on in a “no smoke without fire” vein and - rather than asking and finding out - goes on the hunt for proof like a prosecutor. The difference is that Gamergate has yet to acknowledge that any of its alleged targets were innocent. DiGRA, for example, was a misunderstood target and read entirely out of context. No Gamergater has as yet even acknowledged those alternate readings that and instead ploughed on with further accusation. So it’s fine to say you want to have a conversation about ethics. But do you really?

4. The targets are problematic. If games journalism is corrupt, don’t you think it would make sense to search for corruption in places where profit might be had? For example how clean is YouTubers being paid for Lets-Plays? For example the big commercial games sites? For example one of Activision’s giant marketing budgets? No reasonable person can understand how the conspiracy is proved off the back of some deranged allegations about the private life of an indie developer who gives her game away for free. Nor off the back of one feminist who entirely self-funds (literally the very model of ethical behavior) in order to make academic essays. The supposed outlets and beneficiaries of corruption aren’t getting much from it. Which goes back to point 2 really.

5. "There’s no evidence" is an equivocating lie and everyone knows it. This is why the satirical meme “actually it’s about” arose. Even the most cursory glance at Brianna Wu’s case, for example, shows that it was triggered by a comedy Gamergate graphic. In the court of public opinion that’s evidence enough. Naturally the nerdcore wants to trot out ye olde “correlation is not causation” here but this isn’t the court of math and science. It’s of likely behaviors and associations, and anyone can put two and two together in this case. It says a lot that GG has had to create its own police force to stamp out harassment. Because that means said harassment exists, and at scale.

6. Tone. Finally there’s simply the matter of presentation. Have you watched any of Thunderf00t’s Sarkeesian diatribes? Have you watched sarky Sargon? Have you heard MundaneMatt rant and rave? Have you seen InternetAristocrat froth? Of all the various people involved in this call for ethics the number of voices that actually come across as reasonable comes down to two: Boogie2988, who only calls for reasonableness and an end to hatred, and TotalBiscuit, who while being stern doesn’t generally descend into the gutter. Most of the rest of the prominent GG’ers have no ethics however. To watch Thunderf00t claim he used to have a modicum of respect for Sarkeesian before whatever his latest nettle happened to be, for example, is to watch gutter smearing at its worst.

Practice what you preach and maybe the rest of the world will listen boys.

Standing up to Gamergate Bullies

Fri, 31 Oct 2014 15:35:42 +0000

Standing up to Gamergate Bullies:

spacekatgal:

As a software engineer, I don’t like broad, never-ending goals. I like to focus on smaller, attainable goals. In that vein, I’m ready to announce something. I am in the process of setting up a legal defense fund for women targeted by Gamergate.

One of the biggest ways Gamergate operates is…

Brianna wasn’t messing around when she said she’s Godzilla.

You Know That Mobile Is Now The Gaming Mainstream, Right?

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 01:20:44 +0000

Mobile is the biggest gaming platform in the world, but you knew that already, right? Well if you didn’t, it is. Mobile is huge because smartphones are everywhere and they’re not going anywhere. Indeed the predictions say that mobile will grow by as much as 40% more in the next couple of years. That makes it much much much MUCH bigger than console, PC, or anything else really. Possibly bigger than all other gaming markets combined. Think about that.

This unseating of traditional gaming platforms means that the sense of what the “mainstream” of games is has changed. We’ve all been arguing at length over Gamergate and the politics of games for months, but we forget that that argument is increasingly within a sub-stream (“gamers”) of what is now the larger river (“players”). And I know that offends some of you because you want to say that all players are gamers, but you do so at the cost of your identity.

I tweeted last night that I feel a second wave of mobile games is at hand. A second coming even, wherein they become deeper experiences. Having seen explosive growth for its first few years, mobile gaming was recently seen to have stagnated. This sometimes happens as platforms mature. But the platforms conditioned for success move on to find newer and better, more sophisticated games. Facebook was never conditioned for that kind of success, but mobile is.

Either way telephones and tablets with touch screens are here to stay. They are the new order of things. Their content is going to be keep on growing, diversifying and specializing as maturity takes hold. They are once again where the action is going to be. Are you ready for the second wave?

Five Things #Gamergate Should Consider

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 06:51:14 +0100

You’re not owed anything.
It’s impossible to recover from being ridiculed. This is what you’re not understanding about the current situation, or indeed why Gamergate is already dead.
Who would want to make games for you in the wake of all this?
Unless you don’t plan to ever have a serious job, consider what the social media trail you’re leaving actually says.
“No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.” I think you mostly believe this. But are you actually practicing it? Most would say no.

There Is No Anti-Gamergate

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 23:35:00 +0100

Something worth stating plainly in the Gamergate madness is that its enemies are not real. How do I know this? Well the movement sprang up around the idea that journalistic corruption was everywhere. It used the “social justice warrior” or SJW label and then claimed that “the SJWs” were operating against them. And so much of the impetus to begin organizing against the threat came from gaters feeling that they were under fire.

But of course none of that proved true. There were a few hot topic news articles around the death of the gamer that came out in similar timeframes. There was one ridiculous conspiracy theory from Milo at Breitbart that a professionals-only mailing list consisted of proof positive. And beyond that… nothing. “The SJWs” as gaters imagine them just aren’t real.

So the movement, displaying its usual capacity to pivot, went and found itself another enemy to name: Anti-GG. It’s a shadowy conspiracy of global media and so on working against GG, and a political center to fight over. But this narrative is (once again) false. There is Gamergate and then Everyone Else, and that’s it. And Everyone Else thinks Gamergate is a mix of the pompous, the ridiculous, the mysoginists, the proto-fascists and the deluded.

Oh and that it’s basically dead in terms of its viewpoint ever being taken seriously again, but that some of its members are acting in questionable, even dangerous fashions. Indeed that at least one of them might do something extreme. Gaters are fighting against a fiction entirely of their own construction for reasons that are hard to understand, and many people are being caught in their fire. That’s all that’s actually at work here.

We clear?

More On "Mention Privacy" And Fixing Twitter

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 20:40:00 +0100

In my TechCrunch column this weekend I wrote about the death of Gamergate and what lessons it had to teach. One of my “lessons” was to do with Twitter and how to fix it. I’d like to elaborate further.

Twitter can be self-defeating. As a user invests time and effort into building a following, it grows. She is retweeted beyond the network that she has built for herself, and this amplifies her voice and the conversation that comes along with it. Readers reply, ask questions, make jokes, point out flaws and so on. But then comes the day when the emerging Twitter star runs into the anonymous person who thinks she is The Problem.

At that point her Twitter experience can quickly flip from the awesome to the terrible. It can become a world of sealions, trolls and threats. It becomes a kind of hell, wherein she’s afraid to speak for fear of angering the vipers. Over time that changes how she approaches the platform, makes it more a chore than a joy, and ruins the quality of the content that she might share.

The flip can start innocently, in some cases with a single tweet that nettles a disaffected group and is then passed around as an invitation to pile on. From there it can go all the way to detailed death threats in hours. This, you understand, is not a theoretical ”what might happen”. This happened to Brianna Wu. This happens all the time.

Most people agree that becoming a target of abuse is never a good outcome, but my contention is that Twitter is more vulnerable to that sort of targeting than most because the platform is ordered around the public rather than the private. Of course this has advantages. The ability to be heard is the biggest one, feeding into how information is disseminated, how news is exposed and so on. That tends to naturally self-sort according to the community, and I don’t propose to change that.

The break is in how mentions work. Mentions are the practice of typing @someone (say @tiedtiger - which is me), which means that what you say to them appears in their timeline. This function is intended to drive cross-pollination of conversation, but for some users it is the tool with which they are abused. If you don’t believe me go have a look at Anita Sarkeesian’s (@femfreq) mentions and you’ll see what I mean.

Until now Twitter has largely relied on the user to do her own policing when it comes to mentions. She can mute, block or report abusive users, but she has to do so manually. She can only do so post-offense, which means the damage is done. It’s all well and good telling Brianna Wu that she can block and report users, but “Death to Brianna” got to have its fun beforehand and scare her out of her home. The block system is just not good enough.

The other option is to go nuclear. The user can take her account to private, which means people can’t follow or retweet her, but this is self-defeating. If the point of Twitter is to reach out into the world and be heard, then cutting herself off from the world means she may as well go to Facebook. The trolls would have shut her up, which was their goal. Again that leads to a bad experience for the user, in essence destroying her reason to invest in the platform in the first place.

The solution (as I see it) has three parts:

1. Mention Privacy
2. Expand “Verified Users”
3. Social Blocking

Let’s go through those.

1. Mention Privacy

The core of reforming the Twitter experience has to be around preventing toxic mentions getting to the eyes of the user. If, for example, you are the sort of user who enjoys random pickup conversations then you should be able to have open mentions if you choose. On the other hand if you’re the sort of person who only wants to hear from your friends then that should be your prerogative too.

To do this I propose a new feature that I call “mention privacy” and it works like this:

The idea is that you can constrain the degree to which you are bothered by mentions by identifying different approved groups.

The most open version (besides turning the feature off) is to permit the mentions of followers, accounts you follow and verified users to appear in your timeline. In essence this means anyone you’re connected to and anyone that Twitter trusts. You’ll see a lot of mentions with this setting, but none from randoms with no connection to you.

The next level excludes your followers. Alas it doesn’t take much effort for a determined troll to find and follow you just so that he can @mention spam you. So followers may have to go. However you can still see mentions from people you follow and also verified users. Verified users are presumed to have some level of trust or civility attached (see the next idea for more) and so are permitted along with followers.

The harshest setting nixes the verified users as well. Say for example that there are some verified celebrities who are not trolling you yet are kind of annoying. You can get rid of them too. They will only appear in your mentions timeline if you also follow them.

Perhaps controversially theres’ one more setting that prevents users from mentioning you at all. For example if you didn’t want to see your username dragged around slanderous conversations on Twitter - even though you don’t see them - you could enable this setting. Then only the people whose mentions you could see would be able to mention you. Everyone else would be refused. And if they tried? Much as attempting to retweet a user who has turned on “Tweet privacy” is forbidden, mentioning a user who does not wish to be mentioned would trigger a “sorry” notification.

2. Expand “Verified Users”

Hand in hand with mention privacy is the idea that the “verified users” program should be put to a better use. At the moment the program is a mysterious outfit that runs in the bowels of Twitter and essentially exists to ensure that accounts can be trusted. You know that Seth Rogen is the real Seth Rogen because he has a little blue badge that says so. That kind of thing.

Twitter has always kept the details of how its verified user program works a secret. Some articles speculate that you can do it if you direct-message the @verified account to get on a list, but to do so you need that account to follow you first. So verified users are mostly famous people and some folks in tech that aren’t famous-famous but are known by Twitter employees. To date there are around 110,000 such users and they’re an odd mix (for example: at time of writing Anita Sarkeesian is not verified).

I propose that this program should be expanded to become a badge of civility across the platform. The model I would use is:

Anyone with an account older than one year can apply to be verified
This involves supplying more information to Twitter for verification purposes, including phone number, social security number (or equivalent in other countries) and a scan of an ID like a driver’s license
Once accepted users attain the “verified” badge
If a verified user is subsequently found to have engaged in poor behavior, their status can be revoked - either temporarily or permanently

Being verified means users get access to a couple of features, but the primary benefit would be being permitted a level of access through mention privacy which randoms would not get. By giving verified users something to gain (a better class of mention conversation) and thus something to lose, this would promote discourse on Twitter over the rage-filled bombing that popular users regularly attract.

3. Social Blocking

In response to harassment, trolling and other poor behaviors, many of the targets of gamergate turned to the BlockTogether service. In essence this service allows users to share a social list of bad eggs and block them all in a batch. The idea is that doing so helps them get ahead of the problem. BlockTogether is something of a blunt instrument, but it was better than nothing for many people. So my third idea is essentially a more powerful version of BlockTogether that I call “social blocking”.

It could work like this:

The system allows you to rely on the data of your friends to pre-block troublemakers. To you it would seem essentially to be a shared block list. You could define where you were deriving your block sources from and also whether you wanted their own block data to be made available.

I imagine that this feature would have to incorporate a threshold to prevent abuse though. Blocks could cascade all around the network very quickly, and some individuals would try to game it in order to censor or troll folks that they just didn’t like. Nobody wants that. So, say for example that the threshold were set at 50. This would mean that 50 of your followers would need to block an account before it was socially blocked for you.

Furthermore it could incorporate a degree of weighting. Say that you had a particular group of followers who were block zealots, for example, as some are. The system could examine how frequently they block and reduce their impact on the threshold by only counting them as half a user, or even less. That way your block-happy friend doesn’t inadvertently censor your Twitter experience, but you still get some protection.

Final Thoughts

My goal with this essay is to make Twitter better for everyone, regardless of where they sit on any ideological spectrum. I may be very anti-gamergate, for example, but it’s not as though I want to shove all the pro-gamergate people off Twitter. What I want is to feel that I’m able to use Twitter and that it is a pleasurable experience rather than a risk. That my increasing my reach and sharing ideas I’m not opening myself up to punishment.

What Lies Beyond Gamergate? The New Games.

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 01:23:00 +0100

At last.

At last the Twitter universe has been moved to action (through the #StopGamerGate2014 hashtag and associated) and shown just how in the minority Gamergate has always been. It’s terrible that it had to come to a threat of a mass shooting to get there, but the shameful, mealy-mouthed, “well they were asking for it” sanctimony of gaming’s Tea Party has finally overreached. The gaters now stand naked and accused, and no-one serious will ever come to their side again. Gamergate is over bar the shouting. Gamergate is dead.

So what comes next?

- The Age Of Merit

Gamergate started for several reasons but was largely propelled by the idea that games have merit. Consider, for example, the reaction of fans to Polygon’s review of Bayonetta 2. Most reviews declared it to be a great game, worthy of praise. Polygon, on the other hand, found fault with its sexualization and down-marked it as a result.

The fans foamed. WHY though? In any medium it’s normal to have dissenting or assenting voices. Indeed look at Metacritic and you’ll see plenty of cases of divergent responses to the average. Some reviewers thought Destiny was great for example, while others thought it decidedly meh. But nobody want to organize a boycott against them in the manner that they do with Polygon over Bayonetta 2. The difference is to do with why down marks are given.

In gaming fan culture it’s considered legitimate for a reviewer to down-mark a game because they just didn’t like the controls, or because the gameplay seemed thin. Similarly it’s considered legitimate if a reviewer is perceived as overly enthusiastic, to up-mark, as long as their review does not seem bought and paid-for. Both kinds of divergence are assessments of merit, as though the game were a car being reviewed on Top Gear. It handles well and does a great job on the curves, and the interiors smell nice. Both can be argued objectively.

That inherent presumption of merit has been a feature of gamer culture since its foundation. It is so strong that it’s seen as the default, as something utterly intrinsic. Reviewers are hailed as true by the culture if they speak to merit and talk about content as an aside. Equally they are pilloried if they are seen to go against the grain. An average meritocratic fan will happily accept that perhaps a game has content issues, but also to say that to fault its score on that basis is false. It would be like Top Gear marking down a car because of its paint job.

However the meritocratic way of thinking is at odds with where most experimental games have been going, and it has been for years. Your Dear Esther, Gone Home, Stanley Parable, The Passage, Depression Quest, dys4ia, Bientôt l’été, Proteus and many others don’t fit on a merit table. They either have little or no gameplay, no replayability or any purpose beyond exploring them. They are often poorly engineered, and yet attract considerable praise. In the meritocratic view they’re like Top Gear giving higher praise to a Reliant Robin than a Bugatti Veyron purely on aesthetics. Meritocrats fundamentally just don’t understand that kind of thing, and tend to interpret it as an attack.

In a sense, it is. Its roots lie in gaming’s history.

- The Era Of Founders

The founderwork era was the time when most gameplay innovations were discovered and incorporated into what we now consider classics. When video games were first invented this period of discovery was rich. As developers figured out what games were and how they worked it seemed as though the world was changing from week to week. As games expanded into new platforms and modes of interaction, this same sense of discovery happened over and over, providing many of what we designers call “verbs” with which to work. The language of games was in the process of being found.

This era didn’t come to an end one bright Tuesday in 1994. It started to gently tail off. Video games became less startlingly innovative and more incremental. The move to 3D, for example, brought many kinds of console game to a new kind of life, but their core loops remained as they were. In some cases the slowdown in innovation could be blamed on publishers walking away from certain kinds of games, but in others it was simply common sense. There are only so many ways to make an action-adventure character naturally control with a joypad, for example. Eventually you just repeat that paradigm from one game to the next.

The end of the founderwork didn’t happen in a straight line either. Since 2000 five major shifts (the arrival of broadband, the DS, the Wii, the iPhone and Facebook) have led to resurgences in founderworks at various points. However it’s noticeable that in all cases the relative discovery period has been much shorter than in previous times, and indeed many of the successful games in newer formats drew direct lessons from older games already established.

- The Era Of Masters

In the mid 90s something else started to happen. The relationship between players and games started to change. Gaming audiences started to settle into defined sub-audiences for long-lived franchises. They became fans of studios and propelled them to ever-greater successes along certain lines. The design of games started to become more of an independent discipline, one that combined and recombined existing verbs rather than striking out for new ones.

This I peg as “the masterwork era”. Starting with games like Mario 64, the industry began to change from a bunch of upstarts painters into Renaissance studios barreling away on huge paintings at their masters’ behest. The masterwork era was when the marketing of games settled around genres, and when there was significant budget made available to do that. However, much like the Renaissance masterworks, that money came with strings. The Pope wanted religious paintings and so Leonardo, Michelangelo and so on all had to work within a brief. Similarly the big game studios that made big-name games mostly had to work within defined genres like first person shooters or roleplaying games. They didn’t get much opportunity to color outside the lines.

Much of the industry engaged in a competition of exponential growth. Games tried to become genre kings by spending a lot of time and money and either succeeded or failed utterly. Thousands of studios went to the wall, but many of their staff got hoovered up into ever-larger teams working on ever-more-sophisticated games. They still do. The extremities of budget used to create a Destiny, for example, continue that tradition. After Destiny there will be another even bigger attempt at a shooter. After Grand Theft Auto V there will be a Grand Theft Auto VI, and that game might cost a billion dollars to develop.

Exponentially growing games align well with meritocratic thinking. The games being developed are high on convention and experimentally shallow (both mechanically and in terms of narrative) but it can’t be argued how well executed they are. GTA V, to take one example, is an enormous feat of engineering. The meritocrat sees this as good. It can be compared, like the Top Gear guys arguing over latest Lotus or Ducati. It can be objectively assessed or understood and rated. Progress can be reported and the customer can feel good about his purchase. It looks like approaching perfection.

But the masterwork era has started to draw to a close.

- The Era Of Artists

Depending on your viewpoint, a few years ago either the greatest or worst things to ever happen to the games industry happened.

The first was the rise of digital distribution, and with it app stores, Steam, social networks, metrics and direct communication between the developer and the customer. The second was the emergence of open cross-platform tools like Flash, Unity, GameMaker and Twine. For the first time in history game developers did not have to be elite programmers with an in-depth knowledge of the secrets of platforms, and therefore did not need to buy expensive development kits just to be able to get a seat at the table.

The result was a Pre-Cambrian Explosion of games. Many were terrible. Some were great. Many were retro-ish or casual. Some were different in ways never considered previously. First on iPhone, then in other places like PC, games became liberalized. Whole new companies sprang up from nowhere, and the indie in the modern sense was born.

For game makers these two events spawned a revolution. Designers new and old found a voice, put interactivity to previously unknown uses and found new audiences. Whether in a highly commercial or creative sense, the liberalized game developer was able to step away from the grind of exponential development and do something different. The “artwork era” had arrived.

Games started to have meanings. Games started to be about something. Games started to completely discard all pretense of being about what they were “supposed” to be about, from Anna Anthropy to Zynga. Rather than follow the path of the masterworks, these new games came at the problem from right angles. And some of them succeeded in part because the gaming media was very enthusiastic for them. Why? Because the games press is bored by the prospect of writing about masterworks. They’ve seen them all before, multiple times.

In the artwork era games are fashion. Games are sometimes important for the long term, but equally may be super interesting only in a moment. And that’s fine. Games can have a point beyond how they function, but also a point in the absence of function. Games can be built to not be played. Games can be built to not be winnable. Games can be built to play with those ideas. Most of these uses are pretty fringe, granted, but in the artwork economy of games that doesn’t mean they are bad. Much like the art world, games are starting to acquire a dimension of interestingness absent of their utility.

But meritocrats fundamentally do not understand any of this.

- The Age Of Catastrophe

Where your average game maker believes that the last few years have been a golden age of access and opportunity, your meritocratic gamer thinks they signal disaster. Theirs is not an age of embracing multiplicity and fringe game content. Theirs is an age of angrily asking why can’t game developers manage to release games bug-free any more, and why can’t they get technical details like framerate right.

Remember they’ve been used to seeing games like cars for a long time, with masterworks that seem to reach ever closer to perfection despite their astronomical cost. Meritocrats have glimpsed the infinite, in their view all these new kinds of game massively step back from that. They are exercises in un-merit. And to the meritocrat that can only sound like one thing: A repeat of the North American Video Game Crash.

Meritocratic folks don’t understand this new era built on culture, fashion, relativism and personal expression. Much like the people who complain that modern art isn’t art because it’s not paintings and statues, the meritocratic gamer has LONG had a problem with that whole way of thinking. Like the car fan who thinks Top Gear should stop with the road movies and celebrity interviews and get back to the cars, the meritocrat intensely feels that all talk away from function constitutes perversion. That to get too far into that ruins the main purpose of the game review. And in turn giving voice to that kind of thing threatens games. Hence Bayonetta 2 and talk of boycotts.

And that in large part is what underpinned the support for gamergate. In games you will find fans who passionately argue that the only way to save the industry from ruin is to place developers back under the yoke of platform holders. You’ll find many fans who think the secret to saving games is to constrain the number of available releases in order to ensure “quality” as Nintendo did in 1988. You’ll find plenty of Reddit readers who believe that connecting creators with players has been fundamentally a bad thing and that the intermediaries of publishers and platforms are needed to prevent dodgy developers from ruining games. In short, unlike any other medium, meritocrats have come to believe that they want less voices rather than more. That perfection can only be attained if developers are forced to aim for it. (And yes that is as nuts as it sounds).

They can’t see that the orthogonal game is simply different, and that it might not be intended for them. They don’t understand that games don’t have to exist in the “red ocean” of competition on specifications between masterworks, and that there are "blue oceans" out there for types of games and players that don’t relate to their values. They don’t understand that their values are not intrinsic, but rather conventional, and that conventions can change.

In large part the meritocrats are simply ignorant of a world outside their borders. They tend to know very little about what happens outside Steam and consoles. They tend to be baffled by the rise of Facebook or iPad games. They tend to be the ones arguing that Gone Home isn’t really a game. Theirs is a small island, and nobody’s managed to explain to them why the age of artwork games is actually a great thing, nor to get them away from their catastrophic thinking.

Their problem is not - and has never been - about how reviewers review or the ethics of games journalism. Those are surface details. Their problem is that they feel left behind. They don’t know what cultural criticism is, for example, and so interpret it as an attack on who they are. They don’t understand that just because a game doesn’t sit well on the old merit scale doesn’t mean it’s a fraud. The scale is simply wrong. And having largely witnessed this all develop around rather than through their culture, they started shooting the messengers. That in turn eventually led them to attempt to conduct an academic pogrom, and to threats, all while insisting that they were the reasonable ones.

That was gamergate.

- Long Live “The New Games”

StopGamerGate2014 shows just how out of touch meritocratic thinking has become. As games have expanded and gone both niche and mainstream, their reach has long surpassed the old dichotomies. There are players alive today who’ve never played numerous classics and don’t care, for whom the movements in games are more like the movements in music. For whom innovation is irrelevant and culture is more important. For whom games are a brave new world for all new reasons.

Games are not as they were. Games will never be as they were again. Between tools and access the nature of what can be done in the industry (and beyond) has fundamentally shifted. What “games” even meant back in the day is simply no longer true. The era of merit, of the “The Old Games”, is over. This is the time of “The New Games”.

Gamergate was an opportunity for a great wave of rage to let forth under a dozen different pretexts, but ultimately it was only ever about standing against the tide. Much like Dylan fans who screamed blue murder when he went electric, gamergaters were the players who bought so deeply into an ordered universe of console vs console and high-grade title vs high-grade title, like car fans, that they never paused to consider whether their entire frame of reference was small time.

The New Games are scary. They go in a dozen directions all at once. They are deeply connected to the idea that games are culture and that movements in culture matter. They are largely unconcerned with the idea that games require scores or merit, or objective assessments. Meritocrats thought they understood the universe, but the universe changed - and broadened the sense of what games are.

The old games are over. Long live The New Games.

"No True Gater..."

Tue, 14 Oct 2014 20:21:20 +0100

Another week, another woman forced out of her home by dox-shaped death threats stemming from her opinions on video games. Another round of denials from gamergate that it had any involvement, and for further giggles another round of apology-demands from selfsame woman for daring to speak out. Another round of witless “what I would have done had I been threatened” posts, another set of cries to not paint the whole barrel with the action of the bad apple. Another round of quisling damnations that essentially say things like “I totally reject this line of attack against this woman, even if she is a lying liar.”

I haven’t forgot #notyourshield. That explains everything, right? It explains nothing. Gamergate is essentially attempting to distance itself from the Brianna Wu incident by claiming that it is not serious, that the same thing happens from “the other side” (the other side that doesn’t really exist you understand). Gamergate is denying all involvement with lone wolves. Of course. And in so doing, gamergate is invoking the ”No True Scotsman” defense. “No True Gater”, if you will.

It gets weirder. First there’s the hyperbole:

On Sunday I found myself reading one prominent gater engaged in No True Gater deflection. I tweeted asking how many incidents does it take before maybe the problem with this kind of behavior is seriously acknowledged. I wasn’t saying that all (or even most) gaters condone this sort of behavior, but it happens. It’s not nothing, and I was implying that maybe gamergate taking more of a stance or action against it would be a good thing.

His response? Remember how gamergate reacted very angrily to twice being compared to ISIS? This is one of the times I found myself agreeing. Not only are such comparisons tasteless in the extreme, they are hyperbolic. They throw unnecessary fuel on the fire. The movement itself continues to claim that it wants a rational discussion and sensible action in the field of journalistic ethics etc. So of course this key representative of the community rationally responded by asking…

Would I say the same thing about high schoolers and shootings? Or terrorists from an entire religion? And similarly from some of his fans: was I saying that a few shootings meant we should paint all black people as dangerous? So hyperbole against the movement is bad, but the movement feels it has free reign to deploy such rhetoric (and accuse you of being the harasser 5 seconds later…)

Secondly come the religious positions:

When I asked this prominent gater to calm down, he said that even if there were 100 cases it wouldn’t matter because there are 1 billion gamers, all of whom he claims to speak for. 100 incidents wouldn’t constitute a measurable minority.

There aren’t 1 billion gamers. The kind of people this individual claims to speak for are a smaller group than that. I don’t, for example, see him posting about the world of casino players or sports very often. There may be 1 billion players of games when you factor in everyone on mobile phones and social networks etc but it’s semantics to claim all of them are “gamers”. In reality there are 150-200m people who regularly buy gaming-dedicated devices worldwide judging by install bases and assuming a reasonable degree of crossover and multiple-device purchase. Of those I’d ballpark maybe 20m who are very active.

He went berserk when I tweeted a short version of this, claiming that because I was misrepresenting “gamers” there could be no discussion. Never mind that the overall numbers of gamers wasn’t my focus, indeed I offered to run with his definition because what I wanted to talk about was this idea that 100 incidents was too small to be considered worthy of attention. But we never got there. He flat out demanded I apologize for daring to question his language or its assumptions. And a variety of his fans piled on as well. I had apparently offended the Dauphin.

Add these kinds of responses together and we get here:

Like many religions, gamergate operates through cognitive dissonance. It doesn’t matter that many of its positions contradict each other, you are required to believe all of them at the same time or else you are the enemy. You are required to demand evidence from the enemy at every opportunity (Is Zoe really still out of her home? How do we KNOW?) while at the same time required to take the word of that zoepost jerk at face value. You are required to deny that one form of harassment is real while at the same time citing every even-slightly questioning tweet as examples of how the enemy harasses you. You are required to believe in the existence of the SJW conspiracy even though seven weeks of searching for it have yielded nothing substantial. You are required to maintain the fiction that gamergate is a leaderless consumer revolt while paying active attention to the talking-point boards and email campaigns that underpin its actions.

And you are required to subscribe to Not All Gaters even though it is clearly at odds with itself. You can’t claim to speak for only the true Scotsmen and yet all Scotsmen at the same time. You can’t say “it’s not us” while then saying you also speak for “the 1 billion”. It does not compute, and looks disingenuous.

If you do speak for “all gamers” then you have to accept the actions and activities of all and hold a serious position on how some of them behave. My opponent in the above conversation later post a Tumblr about how he abhorred the actions of the few, but again with the quisling damnations. It’s terrible about Brianna even if she did… etc. Yes it’s terrible what happened even if she was asking for it. But gamergate isn’t about that. Not the true gaters anyway. Right?

Go ahead gamergate, you keep on thinking you’re winning. The only thing you’re winning is contempt.

Apple TV Please Fix On-Demand's Black Hole

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 04:37:00 +0100

I decided to catch up on a show that I haven’t seen in a while: Hell on Wheels. I like the show enough to want to keep seeing it but, having no interest in following TV schedules, I’m behind the curve. So I go searching on a variety of streaming services for it on my iPad and Apple TV. I think you know how this story is about to go.

On Netflix I can watch up to season 3. On Hulu, Xfinity and AMC I can watch season 4 episode 4 and later, but not 1-3. On Amazon and iTunes I can pay $30+ for season passes, but this seems poor value as I’m sure it’ll be on Netflix 6 months from now.

Had I been on point sooner I’d be getting the show on demand with no problems, but I left it late but not too late, so I’ve hit a weird black hole. This isn’t the only show that I’ve encountered with this problem. It’s not consistently the case, but the policies of some shows disappearing from one service yet not appearing on others is a pain. So is the 20 minutes spent trawling through numerous services just to find out this information. In the end all it does is make me think “oh screw it” and watch something else. That seems wrong.

TV is basically a balkanized mess. Some shows are here, some are there, some are half-here, some are in black holes. No one system gathers all of what you want to see in a clean interface that makes sense and works on your time. Everything works around how TV companies want it to work, what they think is best to capture value, and of course that means a dozen different half solutions from a dozen different providers.

This feels like a very Apple problem. Apple TV plays host to many apps, for example, but it doesn’t do deep searching or tracking. It provides no master index, no global favorites or following functions. It pushes iTunes content too hard and at the expense of other supported services. And its service complement isn’t complete (Amazon etc). It could, and more. With new phones, watches and tablets all in the bag, TV is the problem I’d like to see Apple attack next.

Thoughts on how:

1. Release a new Apple TV 4 with:

a cable connector similar to what Microsoft tried to do with Xbox One, to take over their terrible cable interfaces for live viewing.
the ability to mirror that signal across AirPlay etc to other devices in the home.
DVR style pause and rewind.

2. Release an updated OS for Apple TV that features:

a global “Follow” function that works across all services
a global “Favorite” function that does likewise
a notification service to let me know when new episodes of followed shows are available
deep searching across all services to find shows and viewing options
Genius to work across all services
better integration with provider logins (like Comcast’s) to avoid having to activate every app channel by hand
more support for other kinds of apps (like games)

3. Create an “iTunes TV”in demand service that

operates on a subscription rather than season pass model
works with Apple TV etc
has all the content (like Game of Thrones etc)

If done right, I would happily drop several other streaming services as long as the content was there. I’d pay $30 a month for this. Maybe even $40. In the mean time I guess I’ll watch something else.

A Quick Word About Copyright And Authorship To #Gamergate

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 15:38:00 +0100

Outside the argument over gamergate itself, we need to talk a little bit about copyright. One of the tactics that gaters use a lot is to mirror content from “blacklisted” sites in order to deny advertising revenue to providers. For example since Kotaku is on a blacklist but some articles are considered important to the gater cause, they mirror it on archive.org or similar.

This behavior is only quasi-legal at best in so far as it happens with the presumed consent of the copyright owner. Technically it’s infringement, in some cases widespread and systematic infringement. For instance Gamasutra might be fine with you mirroring, but that doesn’t mean it’s 100% legit or a case of fair use. If Gama decided one day it wasn’t fine with it, you’d have to take it down.

Personally I have no problem if folks feel the need to mirror the content I write. I don’t care about traffic stats nor do I run any ads so if you feel like sticking it to Tadhg by denying him clicks because of all the harsh things he has to say, knock yourself out. However there is a line and that line is stuff like this.

This is a copy of the article I wrote about who’s really afraid of gamergate, copied and pasted into pastebin with zero attribution. That means that the copier stripped out all mention of who wrote it or where it came from and then proceeded to distribute it. That’s not cool behavior, not cool at all. Here’s what is cool:

If you want to copy my stuff you are welcome to. Everything I publish on my sites is under a Creative Commons license, specifically an “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International" license. That means:

You may share or mirror my content. Note that that doesn’t necessarily apply to anything I write for sites like TechCrunch. AOL and other companies own that content, and if they chose to act more restrcitively there would be nothing I could do about it.
You must give appropriate credit. If you pastebin something I write then add “written by @tiedtiger” or “written by that asshole @tiedtiger” and include a link back to the source.
No commercial uses. If my articles later turn up in a “Gamergate Cookbook” for sale on Amazon, I will sue/DMCA you. No making money off my work, period.
No derivatives. You may not take my work, remix it and call it your own. My work is my work.

—-

In the case of the above pastebin link I’m choosing not to do anything further so you can see an example of what uncool infringement looks like. In future please do not do likewise. The work is mine, I wrote it. The very least you can do while copying it is tell people that, even if you disagree with every single word of it.

Games/Violence Does Not Equal Games/Sexism

Wed, 17 Sep 2014 17:46:05 +0100

In the endless quest to find the chink in Anita Sarkeesian’s armor that completely undoes her whole argument, gaters have recently seized on something she said in one video about how sexist content affects the viewer. Indeed how believing yourself immune to such influence actually makes it more likely that you will be so affected. “But wait”, they say, “isn’t that the same as the widely-discredited view that violent games make us more violent?” Therefore therefore therefore…

This is specious reasoning. Why?

Media does not affect whether we act violently, this has been shown over and over. But that doesn’t mean media doesn’t affect our perspective. If, for example, you see a movie about a subject like the black experience in the 1850s it likely update your frame of reference as to what that situation was like. Similarly if you play dys4ia it will probably update your reference as to what living as a trans person is like. Your paradigm is altered.

Games can be highly educational. One of the key selling points of a game like Shogun 2: Total War is how it educates the player on what the political life of Japan was actually like, in many ways more so than a dry book might. One of the key traits of the Gran Turismo games is the window that they open into the world of sexy cars. They are capable of updating and altering our paradigm.

The question is whether that influence goes both ways. If dys4ia can change your view and perhaps make you more understanding of one situation, then can games that present more negative situations have a similar effect? If, for instance, you’re commonly playing games where women are set dressing, objects, playthings, tokens, rewards or the sole pink version of an otherwise male character ensemble, is that likely to affect your view of women.

Do games make us act more sexist? Probably not. But do their universes update player paradigms to become more sexist in outlook? That one is harder to dismiss. Anita has a valid point, one deserving of further study.

Who's Afraid Of #Gamergate?

Wed, 17 Sep 2014 07:57:26 +0100

Here’s a YouTuber who goes by the name of Mundane Matt:

Mundane Matt has been making the case that the secret to “winning” at gamergate is starvation tactics. In essence he says that what the gaters need to do is not click on sites perceived to be in league with the enemies of ‘gate or its demands. No clicks means no ads means no revenue. Thus, goes the rallying cry, they will be afraid. This line of thinking is pretty commonly through gamergate posts, this idea that everybody is afraid of it.

But the gaming media isn’t afraid. There’s just no reason to be. Gaming media sites get traffic the same way that everyone does, mostly through effusive coverage of what games are coming and what consoles are selling and so on. Furthermore, as plainly explained by the founder of the Escapist, emotional headlines get clicks. Yes it’s tabloid and yes in a better world it shouldn’t be so, but it is so.

Game developers aren’t afraid of gamergate either. Why should we be? Gaters can claim to have consumer power on their side, but as yet there are no demonstrations of that power which could be considered credible. The kinds of people who like to buy indie games like Gone Home don’t really jive with gamergate in the first place (plus there’s the Streisand Effect) while the kinds of games they do buy? They’re going to buy anyway. That may sound depressing but it is what it is.

One group afraid of gamergate is the women who got trolled, threatened, targeted and so on. It doesn’t matter that the gaters claim that this behavior didn’t represent them. It happened, colored the whole thing and the outside reaction has been irrevocably tied to that. As I mentioned in my previous post, this is why gamergate is going to go down as a particularly ignoble episode in gaming’s history. Not the cause. Not the slightly-clueless demand for journalistic integrity. Not the veiled politics of demanding “real” games be judged in the media on “merit”. In the eyes of outsiders it’s only going to be remembered as a hate thing.

You know what else? Not many people find gamergate hilarious. In a callow way perhaps, in a rolling-eyes way maybe. Y’know, gamers, etc. For many of us gamergate is actually deeply disappointing. It reflects a part of the gamer mindset that we’d hoped had evolved by now, but apparently hasn’t. For the want of a better word I’m going to call it gaterism.

Gaterism has a corporatist, complaining, and inflexible character. By corporatist I mean that it seems to buy into the narrative of companies and the hero mythologies of platforms over people. By complaining I mean it acts as though it has been mistreated by the industry - at a time when we are falling down in games of all kinds to play. And by inflexible I mean gaterism represents a vision of gaming that’s small, functional, mechanical and unthreatening. One that maintains that functional merit should be all (by which is meant fun, playable, etc) and that anyone who’s successful for other reasons probably doesn’t deserve it.

As such, gaterism may consist of people from all across the spectrum, but it’s divisive. That whole idea that game publishing should be more controlled for “standards”. That notion that somehow the liberalizing of gateways was a bad thing. That attitude that regards game developers as needing to be brought to heel. All of that. All of it is related.

It should be the other way around. With the rise of digital and the lowering of barriers and costs of tools, we live in a goddamned golden age of video games. We see stories all the time of game developers making it on their own and being able to make the games they want to make without being in hock to higher powers. Some of those games are traditionalistic, some are fringe. Many are marketing story driven because that’s what you often need to overcome discovery issues. Many are developed in an open way. Many are bad, but you know what? Better that than being unable to get to market at all.

Gaterism isn’t there. Some game makers are, so are some journalists. Some of us see a future in the medium that goes beyond its past. Yet gaterism seems to just want its corp-game-products, which is fine, but also for nobody else to have games that don’t satisfy its standards else they corrupt the entire medium. And so gaterism becomes oppositional.

Because gaters are the ones who are truly afraid.

Facebook Comment Post-TechCrunch Piece Re: #Gamergate Answer

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 23:25:09 +0100

I’m posting this here too largely to make it more visible than FB comments are likely to.

(relates to this)

Rather than get stuck into all the comments like last time, here’s a phat addendum:

You’re (commenters, gamergaters, etc) getting so heated by your issue that it’s impossible to have any kind of conversation with you. You’re almost all in instant-reaction mode and not listening to any of the criticisms and observations being directed at you at all, preferring instead to target them as “enemy”. I’m not specifically talking about my column. Agree, disagree, that’s fine by me. I mean everything. I see 99% unfocused personal raging at something and only 1% engagement.

Here’s how it’s been so far:

* Someone looks at what’s going on in the movement and observes the sex angle? Attacked. Clearly a person on the make, on the low road, part of the problem etc.
* Someone looks at what you’re producing and asks question? Attacked. Clearly a person on the make, on the low road, part of the problem etc.
* Someone even goes half way and addresses the issue you want to address (see above). Attacked. Clearly a person on the make, on the low road, part of the problem etc.

It’s a pattern, and not a good one.

As to the point of the piece: I worked from a source graphic linked to above (here again: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BxdTyGdIIAAvAWX.png) that explains what the movement is really about. This graphic has been shared widely. And what does it say? Here’s how I read it.

- Not about race, gender etc. OK. I want to believe that but there are some associations that you haven’t gotten past. Nonetheless I took the step to ask what else.
- Against collusion. Check. What that means has rarely been clearly stated other than a sense that some folks must (not shown to be, inferred) be in cahoots.
- Creative endeavor. Check. Nobody disagrees with that.

But then this:

- “More importantly, however, games should be judged fairly, and on their merits, structural and mechanical, rather than unfairly shut out or badmouthed because they do not match a reviewer’s political stances or do not appease their sense of justice, social or otherwise”

You can rail at me all you like but this is a POLITICAL statement. That thing I said about gamergate’s answer being about the product itself? That is what this says. Here’s why:

- “games should be judged fairly”
Ok. What does “fairly” mean?

- “on their merits”.
What does merit mean? Does it mean that the game is significant for some people (arguably having merit for them)? Or does it mean that the game has a timeless quality? Turns out the latter.

- “structural and mechanical”.
This baldly states that gamergate considers games that lack strong structure and mechanics are bad, and those that have them are good. And by twinning those qualities with fairness the whole statement consciously says “good-product games should be considered more worthy”. Depression Quest etc should not be getting the reviews it did if it were “being judged fairly”. And why is this so?

- “unfairly shut out or badmouthed because they do not match a reviewer’s political stances or do not appease their sense of justice, social or otherwise” This is saying that all these “unworthy” games that do match up structurally or mechanically can only be being successful because of politics. It denies that there is any other reason that they might be successful. Such as, say, because they have merit on a scale that is different to yours. Occam’s Razor would suggest that’s all it is, but no. Gamergate can only see a conspiracy.

So, as I said both this week and last, and the week before that, this is an inherently conservative position and many of your tactics and responses are likewise. (I don’t mean you are conservatives in the wider political sense, but on this you absolutely are). You are literally denying that other interpretations of games, other views and other lenses can exist. You are literally claiming that there is an inherent merit in games over and above their context, and you are literally saying that that’s the only thing that matters. You are also, as a side note, maintaining a deliberate ignorance.

So your quest for journalistic legitimacy is not. It’s, as I said, an advocacy for a style and a rejection of other styles. You’re twinning broader views, or even the possibilities of them, with politics in order to justify your own inner idea of what the “merit” of games should or should not be. And that’s fundamentally a losing position to be in.

Why?

Because of course games are going to be reviewed in context. They can’t exist in a vacuum. Of course there is a narrative of the medium and that narrative is much bigger than “games should be fun”. I’m not denying you that aspect of games to acknowledge that, but your “what gamergate is really about” statement IS denying all the other aspects of games to everyone else. You are very directly calling all non-merit based judgments as unfair, agenda’d or political. This is intrinsically a small-universe view.

The irony in all this is that if you look at much of my other writing I’m actually a hard-nosed pragmatist most of the time when it comes to discussing games, what they are and what they need to work. Have a look at my prior series of articles about the Seven Constants of Game Design, or about the Four Lenses of Game Making, or much of the material on my site. I have a reputation as being a formalist, a designer who demands that games make sense. Many times I’ve been seen to argue that some kinds of games (such as adventure games) have inherent structural issues. And yet at the same time I maintain that games are magical and unique and need to be regarded on their own terms. You’d see that in many ways we’re all talking from a similar place.

But this movement and its knee-jerk character is largely in the wrong. It is self-marginalizing and destined to lose. One day it will feature on a “Top 10 Ignominious Things That Happened In Gaming” list, remembered largely as the most knee jerk reactionary thing the Internet had mustered in quite some time. You’re simply out of your minds if you think it can conclude in any way.

And, for now at least, that’s all I have to say on the matter.

You Are Not Censored

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 19:36:20 +0100

You are not censored.

Censorship is the proactive blocking of news, opinion or expression by an agency. Censorship prevents voices from getting out at all and is an affront to values of free speech and human rights. Censorship has had consequences ranging from fines to jail time to torture and execution depending on the regime. Censorship is not the same thing as having comments blocked from a site for being rude. Comments often detract from the quality of a well-thought out post. Comments are usually nothing but graffitti. Just because you have the right to free expression doesn’t mean you have the right to vandalize.

You are not censored.

You have the ability to build your own press organ for free. It’s easy to create an online presence, to place whatever kind of content you like on it. For example I set up this site on Tumblr. Through it I can broadcast my opinion to the entire world. It isn’t banned, isn’t blocked. I can say whatever I want with no threat to my personal freedom. So can you and nobody’s going to stop you.

You are not censored.

You have an opinion, we all do, but it’s not necessarily interesting. Developing insightful opinions is a talent, as is learning how to express them. It’s not as easy as it looks to think about something and understand where you actually sit with it, or why. It’s not easy to figure out how to put your opinion into words, to tease out its logic and see its contradictions. Usually it’s easier to just reiterate someone else’s talking points, to lash out. But just because you did that doesn’t mean it’s worthy of notice or response.

You are not censored.

The vast majority of time people in the West who complain about being censored are actually complaining about being ignored. The whole world seems to carry on a conversation around but not with them. They yell “I have something to say too!” but nobody cares. Meanwhile that blogger they hate with all those wrong opinions gets retweeted everywhere, which is so unfair. Clearly, the complainers eventually conclude, they’re being actively shut out. But that’s not it. They’re just boring. They write badly. Their opinions are unoriginal, their arguments insensitive and their tactics repellent. Their threads and comments are deleted because they can’t remain civil and always go for the poster rather than the post.

You are not censored.

It’s easy, comforting even, to explain away a lack of impact as being censored, but usually it’s about credibility. The Internet creates space for the long argument and the deep view. The Internet facilitates a body of work, but that means you need to take the time to build one. You need to build your legitimacy and authority, and it happens slowly. I have a body of work out there that establishes the authenticity of my voice. It is far from perfect, but I did it (and still do) and this is why some people follow and listen to me. Do you?

You are not censored.

You are ignored because you are dull. However if you do learn how to become interesting, gain credibility and authority then we will eventually notice you.

PS: Don’t be surprised if - in so doing - your original opinions evolve. They should.

On #Gamergate's Ignorance

Thu, 11 Sep 2014 15:03:00 +0100

In the latest rounds of gater “discoveries” and railings about “truth” the targets shifted from indie developers like Zoe Quinn over to talking about DiGRA and a few key folks like Kris Ligman and Zoya Street. In particular one Pastebin tried to lay out an inferred web of corruption (to which I responded) between various people, centering on this:

At the DiGRA panel, many different words were used in approaching what the panel was actually about. It’s difficult to put into layman’s terms, so here is a single except from the transcript spoken by Adrienne Shaw which explains the main topic of the panel rather clearly:

Line 64 of the file:
Adrienne: Why do we see such tension between academics and game designers? less of an issue with indies, but there are always some people in industry that have similar questions until industrial logic takes over later and how can we better intervene in industrial logics to disturb that process. How can academics bridge the gap to the industry audience to help them do different work? How can we disrupt the capitalist norms that facilitate this?

And to explain the difficulties this ideology is having in academia, Line 80 from the same file:
Aaron: Peer review and publishing models. The corruption of the peer review system is problematic. The reliance of peer review to get tenure and a job impacts us and slows us down.

At this point it seems as though the individuals speaking on this panel are having difficulties with the “corrupted peer review” (as stated by “Aaron”) system used within academia and wish to move into the industry itself.

We’re concerned due to the content of the transcript and the evidence pointing to possible collusion within the peer review system that grants given to papers published under this process, though not this paper specifically as it is merely being used as an example to show that their papers are recieving grants for funding, might be improperly used, and perhaps should be looked into.

Subsequent to this the authors then go on to ask what peer review is, and say this:

So let’s look at how academia’s peer review system functions:

First Person Scholar is a peer-review site which offers timely constructive feedback on the articles they publish. On their site is a page where a Board of Discussants is listed [13a,b]. The notable names on that list are Mia Consalvo, Adrienne Shaw, and Gerald Voorhees.

Gerald Voorhees wrote an article titled Identification or Desire: Taking the Player-Avatar Relationship to the Next Level [14a]. The contents of this article are not important, however at the bottom of this article, Adrienne Shaw is listed as a Discussant [14b]. Below the Discussant comments, a series of articles cited are listed. Amongst these articles are writings by Mia Consalvo, Adrienne Shaw, and the author of the article, Gerald Voorhees [14c].

With this we see that the author and the discussant of the articles noted are citing each other to establish a justification for the publication of the article. With this we can infer that the authors of these papers are probably colluding together to legitimize the content of their published papers within academia as discussed at the DiGRA panel.

See this rather neatly expresses the real problem. It’s clear from the commentary associated with the research that the Pastebin’s authors have no firm grasp of what peer review is - especially with reference to the arts - nor indeed what “industrial logic” is or what the corruption of the peer review system that Adrienne Shaw references actually means. Because they assume that something’s going on, all of this material seems to indicate collusion. Indeed as they say at the top of the piece itself:

It is very likely that some individuals connected to this are not necessarily guilty, but are simply trying to pay the bills and doing as they are told by their employers. We are not looking for people to lose jobs over this. We are simply looking for an explanation. All information contained below is easily viewable by any person who cared to look.

Their perspective is pre-judged, and therefore their material prosecutorial rather than investigative. They’re not (indeed nobody in gamergate seems to be) taking a step back and looking at the context. They just assume it means something bad.

They just don’t know that, for example, peer review means that you get your peers to review your critical work as a way to improve it. To the gamergaters that’s people in cahoots working to back each other up and present a front. They just don’t know that Shaw’s reference to the problem in the review process is about how hard it can be to break into it. To the gamergaters that’s people colluding together.

They just don’t know that the reason they keep seeing the same names across sites is that the pool of people critically writing about games is tiny. They just don’t know that the available funding for said people is microscopic and that - far from conspiring to control the industry - several of the talks at Critical Proximity were about how hard it is to make ends meet. They just don’t know that Kris Ligman has long struggled to pay her rent and even took to Twitter once threatening self harm because of it.

I’m not calling gamergaters stupid, but I am calling them ignorant. Specifically a widespread ignorance around the arts, how the world of the arts, criticism and so on work, and what all these links they think they’re finding mean in context. Gamergate is the equivalent of watching fantasy fiction fans try to haul obscure literary writers over the coals by claiming that since lit people know each other and the people who write for review columns, they must be colluding to destroy the world of publishing. It’s missing the wider context that literature is a small scene of people committed to the art itself, and who often struggle and help each other out. That it’s a club, not a cabal.

Gamergate doesn’t seem to understand that DiGRA, Indiecade, IndieFund, SilverString media, Critical Distance, Critical Proximity, Gamasutra articles (and other as-yet unpicked targets) represent a nascent arts scene. Gamergate doesn’t know what that is. Gamergate doesn’t understand the language that it uses, and in many cases (especially on video) gamergate doesn’t want to understand. Gamergate wants to judge. Gamergate already thinks it knows enough. Gamergate wants answers, but when the answers come in terms that gamergate doesn’t comprehend, gamergate yells “conspiracy!” and “you’ll get yours!”.

In the two major articles that I wrote about gamergate I painted it as a far-right kind of political reaction. That assessment still holds. The Tea Party was full of motivated people who wanted to see government revert to an order that seemed to make sense (constitutionalism in this case) and managed to seize the coverage agenda for a while. But Tea Partiers eventually showed themselves to be largely ignorant of how government worked, why it worked the way it did and why they often were beneficiaries of that system. They just didn’t understand it and so rejected their idea of what it was. Gamergate is basically the same, but in our space.

Such problems are very hard to unpick because there is little common ground between those who have a wider view versus those who don’t. However I think there is an emerging difference between the moderate gamers who have been swept up in the emotional tide of gamergate and the hardcore gaters leading the charge. I happened to have a discussion on Twitter with one such moderate yesterday, but such discussions are few and far between. Most are loaded, goading and full of leading or push questions that try to frame the debate in ludicrous terms, full of urges to “get educated” and “see the truth”. There’s not much talking with that.

I do think gamergate will eventually burn out, but it’s going to take time. It hasn’t uncovered anything of any note, has attempted to mudsling in order to get at its perceived truth and caused a couple of great people to give up in the face of the madness. But the energy of that reaction can’t sustain indefinitely. The moderates will realize that it’s run its course and even that it went to some pretty awful places, and recant. The gaters will continue to bang their drum but do so in an echo chamber.

The wider question for journalists, academics, game makers and more is how to get better at conveying their world. For all the fake ”truths” that have emerged from this whole sordid affair, the one genuine truth is the disconnect between our literary scene (maybe “interary” scene in our case?) and large sections of the base. The allegations that started gamergate and continue to prop it up are an elaborate fiction, but the energy that they’ve tapped into is real. We all need to get better at talking to each other without declaring each other to be over, or going straight to the language of who’s oppressing who.

I Don't Know Why I Care About #Gamergate

Tue, 09 Sep 2014 01:52:36 +0100

(#gamergate is this.)

Sometimes I’m overcome by the need to grasp an online nettle. I have always had this side, ever since I first discovered Usenet forums. Actually maybe even earlier, like when reading the Letters pages of Dragon Magazine aged 12 and growing hot-headed at some of the things they had to say. I sometimes end up embroiled in massive thread fights for days, occasionally weeks, at a time, long past the point of all intellectual utility.

I know, I know, I shouldn’t. Don’t feed the trolls. Don’t wade too far into the murk. Don’t go too far up the river else you go mad (to steal Sal Romer’s analogy). But I sometimes can’t help myself. On Twitter, in Facebook comments and elsewhere some discussions just seize me and I end up goading people who show the apparent emotional maturity of an eight year old and the sense of humor of a stone.

And I deserve what I get in response. Much as all Internet discussions eventually go to Godwin, all discussees eventually become the bore who thinks he’s hilarious and insightful and tells me so while drubbing me with the three talking points he learned on YouTube. Meanwhile my friends start to look at me funny and privately ask “Why are you doing this?” and I have no good answer. Because someone on the Internet is wrong, it seems.

Often it’s because the discussion broaches on something or someone close to me. In this instance I care because I’m friends or friendly with several people who’ve been attacked for the crime of knowing one another. These are not rich, powerful or influential people you understand, they’re rent-scrabbling indies and journos who feel motivated to go make some games, write gaming-related content, whatever. They’re contributors and I feel protective of them.

It bothers me to watch hard-working contributors suffer the onslaught of the frustrated. It rankles me to watch the couch-borne deign to sit in judgment of people who work 16-hour days for years. It makes me seethe to see those who know nothing of the industry sanctimoniously accuse insiders of not living up to their morality. It enrages me to see consumers form blacklists and issue their promises to ruin careers and worse. It turns my stomach to watch so much energy being poured into a cause whose inevitable conclusion is obscurity, alienation and a souring of the will to make games. And it galls me to watch cowardly death threats issued from anonymity denied as further proof of conspiracy.

It’s also just the ugliness, like the guy who sees fit to answer Big Tough Questions about Anna after he spends a couple of minutes wondering who she is and laughing at her appearance. It’s the begrudged developer trying to invent a rationale for why his game never got into the IGF by accusing everyone he thinks was involved of being whores. And of conjuring conspiracies around Brandon’s alleged love life while seemingly unaware that Brandon is very ill.

It’s the heartlessness, the meanness and the callousness. It’s the lashing out at convenient targets. It’s the sneering self righteousness over something so trivial as whether an indie game got greenlit. It’s the need to complain for two solid weeks that no, posting relationship dirty laundry online is not an act of heroism, no, accusing people of fake-hacking themselves is not ok, and no, hurtful attacks online aren’t either. And then to watch in turn as they hypocritically claim they never bought into that logic to begin with and it’s just another example of you deflecting from “the truth”.

It’s also a sense of deep embarrassment at the state of gaming, that for all that game makers have fought to achieve, an epic adolescent tantrum is their reward. That despite their hopes for a broader tomorrow when the world might regard what they do in the same cultural breath as any other art form, the conservative fan prefers to snipe about who the contributor is and why their work “oppresses” the “true gamer”.

But who would want to engage with that? Who in their right mind would want to make games for that? Who needs that kind of grief? There’s nothing as dull in all the world as arguing with a teenager who believes (s)he’s right, nothing to be had from discussing, debating or engaging with people so completely unaware of their contradictions. Theirs is the domain of madness and hormones and ignorance and the co-opting of language like “harassment”, “censorship” and “oppression” because they don’t really understand what those words mean.

These are things that I’m supposed to be relatively philosophical about. In my work I rarely deal with games that even glance off this crowd. Most gamergaters have never heard of anything that I’ve worked on. Most of them are not broad, sophisticated aesthetes of the form with cultivated tastes. They’re deep otaku types who get very very mad if the hair color of a character changes from one release to the next. Yes that’s my generalization, and I’m happy to make it. I should know better than to bother with them.

I also know that most of them will eventually get over this. The irony of “movements” like this is that they fire up enough to burn some people alive, but their participants then move on. Five years later they look back on themselves and laugh at how dumb they were back in the day. But the burned stay burned, and maybe that’s why I care. Maybe that’s why I grasp the nettle.

Yet at some point I just have to stop. Some things I can change, some have to change all on their own, and this feels like the latter. Some fights are not actually mine to fight, and I feel a little of that too. It doesn’t really matter that I don’t respect gamergate or that I think it’s showing off some of the worst tendencies of all things geek. It’s irrelevant that it’s a self-enclosed ideology, a magic circle unto itself busily generating its own mythology. It doesn’t help to know that it’s just another snake that will eventually eat its own tail and body. I just have to stop.

So I’m turning off those additional columns that I’ve had open in Tweetbot for nearly two weeks scouring all the important hashtags. I’m disconnecting from knowing who’s #notmyshield. I’m ignoring further comments on my TechCrunch piece. I’ve said my piece on what I think the movement really is and what it’s about, and I’m in danger of turning into a bore repeating my own mantras and giving the movement more oxygen than it deserves.

I’d wish you luck gamergaters, but that would be insincere. Instead I wish your reality check comes swiftly and that you do something more valuable with all that energy than bitch. Something less ignominious, something less acidic. I hope you learn to contribute, to add rather than subtract. I hope you eventually realize that your reasons for feeling as you do have little to do with games or the gaming media, and more about where you’re at in life. I hope you grow and learn to appreciate this world where people give you almost everything you could ever want for free and work harder than you know just to make you smile.

I hope, soon, you learn the art of giving thanks.