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Three Great Magic the Gathering Stories

June 13, 2015 / Damion Schubert

My favorite game of all time, bar none, is Magic the Gathering, the collectible card game. For those who care about the details, I tend to be a card collector, but prefer to stick to the Standard format, which is a more constrained format that roughly limits the player to using cards from the last two years (the format creates a rolling obsolescence that players eagerly look forward to and crave – a neat trick on the part of the game designers because it simply creates a gold-plated monetization model while still keeping the game balanceable.

Anyway, there have been three stories that have been fascinating from the MTG world in the last 6 months.

1) The tale of the guy who won a $5000 magic tournament while shrooming. Go ahead, see if you can guess which guy in the top 8 photo is currently hallucinating.

I Won a $5,000 Magic: The Gathering Tournament on Shrooms

I stared at the trippy art in my beautiful deck and felt destiny course through me with the might of a million memories. I knew I would win the tournament. I also knew I’d gotten this feeling dozens of times before and I’d invariably lost, at some point, with all the dull brutality of probability….Ah, how sweet it is to win when you’re anyone. But how much sweeter when you’re a massive and incorrigible troll!

2) The guy who coded a neural network to create new magic cards. Can a computer replace a designer? These results imply ‘not yet’, but there’s clearly a world to explore here.

Slidshocking Krow
U
Creature – Dragon
Tromple, Mointainspalk
4/2

For anyone familiar with Magic—and I’ve already outed myself here—it will be immediately clear that this is a ridiculous card, in every sense. It’s tremendously overpowered, and its abilities aren’t quite right (the AI meant to emulate Trample and Mountainwalk, two abilities that creatures in the game actually do commonly have). But other than the misspelling, all the other details are technically sound; it could be a card in the game. It doesn’t break any rules.

3) If you’re going to cheat, don’t do it on camera. I meant to cover this when it happened, but to be honest, there was another, more fully engaging but less interesting scandal in the games industry at the time. In THIS scandal, experienced player Trevor Humphries was caught manipulating the top of his opponent deck. It is fairly standard in MTG to have cards that require your opponent to shuffle your deck – for example, if you play a card that requires you to search your deck for a certain card, your opponent gets a free shuffle of your deck to prevent YOU cheating. However, Humphries figured out how to take that shuffle and in almost every instance, drop a land on top of his opponent’s deck (effectively ensuring that his opponent’s next draw was not hugely impactful to the game state). I should note that the videos showing this in action are pretty deeply fascinating, once you know what’s going on.

What’s really amusing here was the temper tantrum on the way out, once he recieved a 4 year ban from competitive play. He seems to have no level of internalization how deeply he’s run afoul of the integrity of the sport.

“ENTIRE COLLECTION FOR SALE, on a FOUR year sabbatical. I guess I’m just as bad as all the nasty criminals of the world. Yeah, the rapists, murderers, felons, etc, I’m so bad I forgot I was the only one who knew how to sin. All you underground dojo KEYBOARD cage fighters won. Yea I messed up, I gave in to temptation. I AM HUMAN. I didn’t threaten your personal life, your woman’s or let’s play the game of (do) we publicly punish Trevor. A FOUR YEAR SENTECE ITS A FREAKING CARD GAME, yea all the media fire you guys really got your justice, F@&#*$ clowns.”

A Bad Week To Be an Utter Asshole Online

June 11, 2015 / Damion Schubert

This has been a rough week in the real world for me, but today something happened that put a big ol’ smile on my face. First off, Twitter made it very clear where they stand on blockbots by effectively implementing a feature that does the same thing by allowing users to share blocked user lists. This, of course, greatly upset our resident miscreants residing on Reddit’s preferred GamerGate hangout because our founding fathers bled and died so that righteous defenders of good gaming could bombard feminists with insults, anime porn and pictures of dismembered corpses. But hey, turns out that was just the appetizer!

Later, Reddit announced that they were going to close 5 subreddits, all of whom have populations that are sub-5000, with the exception of Fat People Hate, a message board dedicating to finding pictures of fatties and mocking them, with an occasional side order of actually sending a brigade of shit posters to harass said fat people and occasionally try to push them towards suicide. The announcement made it clear that the subs that were shut down were frequently those who engaged in abusive or harassing behavior. The choices raised some eyebrows. For example, CoonTown (it’s an awful link – just don’t click it) is still up – admins would later explain that that’s because CoonTown tends to keep its vile shit localized to its own subreddit, instead of brigading others.

Naturally, KotakuInAction (the #gamergate subreddit) is supernervous, to the degree that they’ve been making contingency plans in case they get banned as well. Not because GamerGate ACTUALLY harasses people. That’s completely a misunderstanding fed by media hype. As an example of said media hype, here’s a story of how a college student was utterly bombarded by harassment at the hands of #gamergaters for daring to talk about them at a game conference. And here they are brigading the /planetside subreddit because a mod banned a player who made a transphobic slam, and would only let him back in if he wrote a 500 word essay.

Anyway, this was after two more utterly embarrassing episodes for Gaming Assholishness. First off, they managed to look like utter hypocrites by cheering for Ubisoft excluding Kotaku from coverage because Kotaku has had some hard-hitting coverage of Ubisoft in the last year – including Kotaku calling attention to and refusing to take part in embargoed reviews after Ubisoft’s attempts to snow their customers on the half-baked status of AC:Unity.

At any rate, KiA and Twitter tonight are schadenfreude delights today

Anne Rice and Brigading

June 4, 2015 / Damion Schubert

A new article from STGRB (Stop The Goodreads Bullies). This one involves a “bully” review that was removed by… http://t.co/ao6TGaQW91

— Anne Rice (@AnneRiceAuthor) June 1, 2015

Just in case the recent imbroglio wasn’t weird enough, Anne Rice (perhaps accidentally) aligned herself with #GamerGate by slamming Randi Harper in Twitter, pointing to an article on ‘Stop the Good Reads Bullies’, a site dedicated to shaming people who abuse . This has resulted in a flurry of responses to Anne, including a veiled rebuke from Neil Gaiman.

From 2004: what I think about authors replying to people on Amazon etc who write bad reviews. Seems apt now: http://t.co/GCVVSVvzxA

— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) June 2, 2015

It also earned a ringing endorsement from the crazy uncle of neoreactionary cultural conservatism. In many ways, these are old battles that just oddly crossed paths. Anne Rice has long had a history of activism against people who abuse author rankings on sites like Good Reads and Amazon by brigading, for example. Whereas Randi’s objectionable posts were from a pre-GamerGate crusade that her and other feminists had against Vivek Wadhwa, a (male) advocate for female empowerment who apparently had a habit of occasionally stepping in it.

In 2015, Wadhwa was criticized publicly by several women in technology for the way in which he was speaking on behalf of women in technology. One example mentioned was that at an event, he had used the slang word “floozies”^[87]^[88] when referring to technology companies needing to take hiring women more seriously, in the context of his advocacy for tech companies to include higher-ranking women on interview panels for female candidates. Wadhwa responded to the criticism, writing that he had not known what the word “floozy” meant due to his poor grasp of American slang, as an immigrant, that he had apologized at the event as soon as his misstep was pointed out to him, and that he had lost sleep over this.

To be honest, I’m so unfamiliar with the Wadhwa case that I don’t know if I have much of an opinion on the matter, and to be honest, I’ve tried to care a couple of times, but I just can’t be bothered to give a fuck. Work’s been a bear, you know? For all I know, Randi was right here, or she was a bully. Here’s my point, though.

Harper is the target of Anne Rice’s wrath, which means that Anne Rice’s opinions are now being uncritically and enthusiastically supported and touted by the #gamergate hardcore on Twitter. The hypocrisy of GamerGate followers in this regard is an impressive new low for them, because Brigading shit is one of their favorite things to do. Check out, for example, the reviews of Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest. Or the grossly disparate ranking for the Nightline story about GamerGate. Or the fact that KiA actually manipulated IMDB’s ranking system just so they could write negative (and frequently dishonest) reviews about noted #gamerGate villain Anita Sarkeesian’s work. And that’s before you get into them using their numbers to bully and harass individuals with dogpiling, harass organizations and events with coordinated hashtag campaigns, and attempting to bully the press into their point of view with dishonest boycott campaigns. These, by the way, are frequently NOT the acts of third party trolls, but are indeed happily orchestrated and bragged about on sites like KotakuInAction.

I’m pretty happy whenever I see prominent voices speak out on online bullying. If Anne Rice really wants to repudiate horrible, petty online bullies, though, then I welcome her to take on the big game and call out the voices currently attempting to hoist her on their shoulders. Because if an honest anti-bullying advocate is offended by Harper’s advocacy, GamerGate’s coordinated campaigns of brigading and bullying over the last 8 months must be utterly stomach churning.

Time to Lego Penis

June 1, 2015 / Damion Schubert

The Phrase ‘Time to Penis’ was the MMO answer to ‘Time to Crate‘. It was coined by designer par excellence Jeff Freeman who sadly is no longer with us, and was used to describe the length of time, in a game with user created content, it would take for players to fell the game with phalluses.

Here’s a series of Tweets from a senior developer who worked on Lego Universe – the ultimate child-friendly user-created-content IP.

Funny story – we were asked to make dong detection software for LEGO Universe too. We found it to be utterly impossible at any scale.

— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015

And just how expensive was it to do regular penis sweeps?

It was all automated, but the human moderators were IIRC the single biggest cost center for LEGO Universe’s operational costs. Or close to.

— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015

The whole thing’s a fast, good read.

Tilting at the DiGRA Windmill

May 22, 2015 / Damion Schubert

This past weekend, DiGRA held their annual games conference in Germany, which can mean only one thing: clearly it was time for #GamerGate to send in the welcoming committee, flooding the hashtag with a load of unwelcome hate for the attendees to enjoy – a playbook that #GamerGate has seemed to decided to copy from their attempts to do the same to GDC and the Calgary Expo. Because it turns out, if you are trying to reach a whole bunch of people who are skeptical about your cause, the best thing you can do is to hijack their hashtag and fill it with anime, porn, and mockery of their life’s work. In this case, it didn’t work out so well – the usual cranks didn’t discover the conference was happening until it was almost over, and since they were on European time, most of the worst flooding happened while the academics were all out partying. At any rate, it proved to be another excellent excuse for those of us in the know to educate people about the AutoBlocker tool.

DiGRA has about as much to do with ‘ethics in games journalism’ as a plate of oatmeal cookies. The haters are merely riding ridiculous conspiracy theories founded by a YouTube eCeleb named Sargon of Akkad who attempted to forge a link between the organization and journalists last autumn, particularly the ‘Gamers are Over’ articles which the gamergate teeming throngs continually willfully misinterpret as an attack on all gamers, as opposed to an open condemnation of the minority of gamers who were attacking Anita and Zoe, followed by a call to the rest of gamers to not ‘give press to the harassers. Don’t blame an entire industry for a few bad apples.’ But I digress.

The point is that DiGRA has been a tertiary satellite of this whole #GamerGate thing since late last year, when the hardedged footsoldiers of the Gate embarked upon military jingoistically titled “#Operation Digging DiGRA”, an op where they would fact check and peer review DiGRA’s papers in order to search for bias, error and, of course, the influence of the evil feminists in the world of academia. As near as I can tell, they never found much – possibly because there was nothing to find, but in fact it probably largely due to them realizing that reading many academic papers is about as interesting to most lay people as watching paint dry. Still, DiGRA had the all-time best response to this – they offered and encouraged gamergaters to read their papers and send in or publish their comments, if those participants were willing to participate with academic rigor! Probably because academics, too, know that laymen find reading academic papers about as interesting as watching flies fuck.

At any rate, I don’t want to cast any real aspersions of how dumb you’d have to be to have a lot of knowledge about the inner workings of the industry and academia’s relationship to it, and still think that DiGRA posed any kind of existential threat to the ‘Gamer’ populace as a whole. So of course Mark Kern was involved, offering such chestnuts such as decrying some presentations as libelous, and implying that anyone who hasn’t shipped a game before isn’t worth listening to. I think I also saw somewhere that he demanded to know how DiGRA is funded, but ironically, Mark has blocked me on Twitter, so confirming is a pain in the ass.

The truth of the matter is that we went from a world that had no game studies or game creation college programs, to fully fledged programs aimed at helping students build, examine and understand the mechanics, in a shockingly short period of time. Hell, I helped create one of these college programs myself at a community college here in Austin, although the program I worked on had a lot more hands-on vocational skills we need in local studios in Austin, rather than the navelgazing that DiGRA excels in. Still, this eruption of new college programs across the world actually demonstrates how games have fully risen from being a backroom oddity played by antisocial nerds to being massively important cultural forces that the whole world enjoys. Which is to say, DiGRA is a result of the fact that games are, in modern society, a hugely important cultural product that merits that level of examination and study. Which is to say, people who truly love games should celebrate DiGRA’s existence, not fear it.

At any rate, you would think that some Gators would be excited that one of the prepared talks was about a study showing that game use doesn’t correlate to increased sexism. This study conflicts with the findings of some others, and clearly the methodology of the various studies will need to be compared and contrasted in order to explain the discrepencies between the findings, or identify the next study that needs to happen to resolve these differences. Still, this is how knowledge is SUPPOSED to grow, not by choosing a stance and then ignoring all information that conflicts with your belief system.

Loving Things You Criticize

May 20, 2015 / Damion Schubert

You know that guy I was talking about over the weekend, whose hobby is to be as ridiculously thin-skinned and hyperbolic as the imaginary social justice strawmen poisoning the gaming press and industry that he’s invented in his head? Well, he’s back, and he wants to help out all you imaginary haters who want to write clickbait reviews !

There, I prepared a review template for the alarmists. You’re welcome. #TheWitcher3 pic.twitter.com/08f3RtPbZS

— Adrian Chmielarz (@adrianchm) May 19, 2015

A few things there, Adrian.

Saying that a game missed an opportunity to be more diverse or inclusive is not the same thing as saying the game is racist, and claiming otherwise is being needlessly hyberbolic and alarmist.
Saying that the world is misogynist does not necessarily mean that the game is misogynist. As one example, the recently released Mad Max is a world that has interesting and strong female characters who solve things in interesting and inspiring ways, despite the fact that the world is deeply, DEEPLY misogynist. You know who loved that film? Your old buddy, Arthur Geis. That being said, even if you believe that sexual violence is important for a story or game, how that sexual violence is handled is deeply relevant to some audiences
If you are the sort of person who thinks that women dressing like harem girls for battle is inappropriate, then the fact that the women who rule the world are dressed in dental floss is not going to impress you. I’m going to stress, I’m not one of those people – what can I say, I came of age to my dad’s hidden stash of Vallejo books. However, it is a sizable, SIZABLE number of the people – mostly but not entirely women – and considering that the audience for RPGs is now believed to be majority women, actually giving a shit about their opinion may be worth something a designer interested in expanding the audience of their AAA game might want to, you know, at least not mock. It certainly merits a mention in a review, as it is the sort of thing that these women may choose not to buy a game over.

Oh, one more thing: I do tend to frequent more than a couple of SJW hives of scum and villainy and you know what? They’re all super-excited about the Witcher 3. Even as they discuss, criticize and explore these issues deeper, the excitement for this title has been building for weeks. Because progressive gamers are still gamers, too, they just place valuation on different things. Many of them loved the previous two Witchers as well.

It turns out that it is possible to enjoy and even love a work of art that you criticize. But Adrian knows this. His twitter feed is currently filled with criticisms of the game collected from the first day of play – opening area may be too long, and bad quest design results in lost time. Standard RPG issue of failed sense of impending objectives clashing with side objectives. A lengthy discussion of the failure of art direction driven mostly by the foliage of the game. A general sense that it’s not as polished as it should be. These are all valid topics of criticism and discussion amongst adults.

So is that social justice stuff.

On Tokenism

May 18, 2015 / Damion Schubert

Hidden among Adrian’s tirade against Polygon for the mindcrime of daring to care about SJW issues, is this chestnut. This is not a particularly new argument, but Adrian captures it more eloquently than most.

Note that I am not sure that adding “strangers from the strange lands” to the game would solve anything for the chronically offended. Based on everything I learned about them in the last year, and I learned a lot, if you put a person or a few from any non-white race, they would be called “token characters”. It is the Token Minority trope after all — and, as we know thanks to the megaphoned dilettantes, tropes are bad, mmkay?

The only way to please the outrage factory would be to have every race, every gender, every minority imaginable represented equally. As long as the hero, Geralt, is not a straight white male. And whoever replaced him, they would certainly not be allowed to be nicknamed The White Wolf.

If you think I am exaggerating, then you haven’t been paying attention lately, have you? I so envy you — and I’m not even kidding.

TLDR: We shouldn’t care about adding diversity to games because it’s hard. And it’s hard because you can’t make those blasted Social Justice Warriors happy anyway. I’ve seen many variants of this discussion point over the last few months – often in much more profane terms, I proffer, and as such have had much time to reflect on this point. Here are several thoughts that spring in counter to thoughts similar to these.

Mad Max: Fury Road

May 18, 2015 / Damion Schubert

There are those who think that you should not see Mad Max: Fury Road because it will turn you into a raving feminist. Yes, these people are idiots. Still, while MM:FR is clearly about tough women surviving, adapting, and excelling in a deeply, deeply misogynistic post-apocalyptic world, that’s not why you should go see it.

You should go see it because it is a wonderful, beautiful cacophony of destruction and violence. Never before has a post-apocalyptic hellhole looked so beautiful. and the movie kept finding ways to surprise me in providing problems for our heroes to solve, and ingenius solutions they managed to juryrig along the way.

Even more importantly, the effects are clearly largely practical effects, as most of the carnage feels elaborately weighted and real. If you love action films and practical effects, I predict you will want to buy this on DVD, in case it has a ‘making of’ featurette on it.

Also, you should read up on the making of the flamethrowing guitar player nicknamed the ‘Doof Warrior’.

If you love action movies and have no problem with a strong ‘R’ level of violence, you should see this movie.

Zen Of Design