Nobody asked, but: here are, in my opinion, the best game reviews of all time.
3) “Chess”, by Greg Kasavin.
2) “World War II Online” by Lum the Mad.
1) “Anne McCaffrey’s Freedom First” by Old Man Murray.
Anyone have any better candidates?
Author: Damion Schubert (Page 38 of 136)
If you liked yesterday’s post (“Why Did a Designer Put This Terrible Feature in This Game?”), then you might like these two old chestnuts:
How old are these? Hint: I made some submissions to these myself while working on this old fossil. You kids don’t know how easy you have it with your Unity and your Twine.
Since I finally have time to do so between gigs, I’ll be going through my old blog archives and trying to import stuff that is still relevant and/or interesting to my new blog over the course of the next few days. Interested parties will discover that, for example, I’m certainly not going to be confused with a Social Justice Warrior. (In fact, the biggest thing keeping me from making my dream game is the fact that Apple Cert doesn’t allow NC-17 stuff =)
Also, I’ve started up an Ask.fm site, which you can access here. You can ask me any question you like here, and I’ll respond to them. The best ones will likely become zen posts in the long run.
Some of you guys have been bugging me for an update on Gamergate. This is kind of depressing – none of y’all actually want to jump in the muck, but you’d love to know how it looks down here. I see how it is. I remember once upon a time, this blog was about game design issues. Now, it peels away my soul one layer at a time. The things I do for you people.
Still, I picked a great week to leave my job, because this is the week that GamerGate was the Night of Long Knives writ large. If you believe that life is a spectator sport, then this week was a NASCAR race, complete with spectacular car crashes throwing wreckage that decapitated random fans in the stands. If you don’t believe me, ask Milo, #Gamergate’s most notable and respected journalist.
Today was my last day at BioWare: Austin. It was a distinct pleasure to work at one of the finest game studios in the world for 8 years of my life. In particular, shipping Star Wars: the Old Republic has been the highlight of my career. It’s hard to leave, and I’m leaving some incredible talent behind, but for me, it’s the right thing to do.
Oh, and I’m pretty happy about all this. Continue reading
When #GamerGate kicked in, I strongly advocated for the people who actually cared about ethics in games journalism to use the energy to create a consumer organization (Initial proposal here, answers to criticisms here). The central, and perhaps most important part of the idea, was the website, something I called “GamesOmbudsman.com”, which would focus on basically reporting on games industry press – basically watching the watchmen. What I envisioned was something similar to Politifact, but centered on the games industry.
So it’s not a surprise that I am intrigued and cautiously optimistic about the website GamerGateFacts. GGF’s mission statement is in their sidebar.
GGF does not have an agenda against journalists, feminism, leftist politics or even the gaming press as a whole.
The only agenda GGF espouses is one that stands against lies, corruption, censorship and cronyism and any who choose to defend or further them.
And, well, these guys are trying, and are not that far off the mark. I do have some criticisms for them (see below), but what I see here is a very promising skeleton of an idea that could serve the game community well for years in the future. Here’s what I like (i.e. this is good, don’t change it).
I like Oliver Campbell. As far as #GamerGaters go, he’s a moderate, reasonable guy, and he comes at the topic of ethics in games journalism with relative experience and logic for a consumer movement that frequently has no idea what ethical journalism looks like. That being said, every now and then, he says something extremely silly.
Once this situation rolls into the holidays, and OTHER businesses start getting affected? Heads will metaphorically roll.
— Oliver Campbell (@oliverbcampbell) October 28, 2014
Killing Christmas is kind of a favorite fever dream for the far end of GamerGate, with some treating it as some sort of End Boss like event (GamerGaters like game analogies, unsurprisingly). A similar sentiment was echoed by the short-lived Operation Krampus, a cause they abandoned around the time that they realized they’d declared so many media outlets boycotted that Krampus would effectively mean that Game Publishers could only give review copies to Return of Kings.
Anyway, this is just me talking here, but I find Oliver’s future pretty far-fetched. Why?
Sometime last week, someone asked me in a comment here why I’ve been devoting so much time and energy to #Gamergate here on a blog that should be talking about game design. Shortly before that, Felicia Day provided me with an answer, in a clear, eloquent story describing how the scandal is affecting her. I’m clearly biased personally, because I have had a huge crush on Felicia forever to the degree that I would probably spontaneously turn into a 13-year-old fangirl if I ever met her, but its a beautiful, nuanced piece that describes her attempts to get past the paranoia that recent events have brought into her life.
Actually, none of it really was, because it never really actually is. But it does highlight that ActuallyEthics is my new favorite Tumblr.
This developer tells GamerGate that “You are Not My Shield.” Continue reading
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