The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Category: Social Media (Page 2 of 3)

Who, Exactly, is Silencing Feminists?

My post about whether or not the #gamergate crusade is anti-feminism has gotten some attention.  It should be noted that my point was not that #gamergate is misogynist or anti-women – that’s a much longer and more complex discussion though here’s a few strong hints about how I feel – but the idea that it’s anti-feminist is pretty clean-cut.  Which is to say, there is a strain throughout GamerGate that is virulently opposed to “SJW” discussion of games making its way into the press, or “SJW” theory making its way into the games (“Games should have ideology!”)  In almost every example, “SJW” seems to refer to some sort of feminist critique or theory, including those that are presented fairly, academically and without judgmentalism.

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The Problem With GamerGate is Twitter

Damion notes: Dave Rickey is one of the smartest designers I know. He also violently disagrees with me on many aspects of my opinions about #gamergate, what its origins are, and what impact social justice issues have – as you can see if you read my comments threads here on Zen. He tends to be more pro-GG and I tend to be anti-GG, but in general, both of us have been trending towards a shared ‘pox on both their houses’ stance. He made the following comment on Facebook, and I asked if I could reprint this in its entirety, and he agreed.


Proposed: The problem in “‪#‎gamergate‬” is not misogyny, or corruption in games journalism. The problem is Twitter. Twitter is a breeding ground for social dysfunction, where you are lulled into a sense of community and comradery because everyone you follow and everyone that follows you are basically in agreement. The only things that can penetrate the bubble are “Outrage Porn” being retweeted into it, and attacks responding to outrage porn that is being passed around other bubbles. Continue reading

Policing Your Own Pool: Netflix, Google and Reddit

Three articles that are not strictly game design related, but interesting nonetheless.  First off, here’s an article that discusses how Netflix has reverse-engineered Hollywood in order to categorize all of their films – an article that will surely interest anyone who works with massive amounts of data.

“What emerged from the work is this conclusion: Netflix has meticulously analyzed and tagged every movie and TV show imaginable. They possess a stockpile of data about Hollywood entertainment that is absolutely unprecedented. The genres that I scraped and that we caricature above are just the surface manifestation of this deeper database.”

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Google+ Games Dies a Quiet, Dignified Death

A lot of talk has been given to the radically quick collapse of the Facebook gaming universe, including Zynga’s recent troubles and jump to the online gambling space.  Left unsaid is that, if you’re a social network other than Facebook, things are probably a lot worse.

Which in a platform that’s supposed to encourage some level of virality, pretty telling.  Whether its telling about Google+’s viability as a game platform, or its viability overall, is hard to tell.

Scamville

An excellent read:

Last weekend I wrote about how the big social gaming companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on Facebook and MySpace through games like Farmville and Mobsters. Major media can’t stop applauding the companies long enough to understand what’s really going on with these games. The real story isn’t the business success of these startups. It’s the completely unethical way that they are going about achieving that success.

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The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

Over the weekend, there’s been what tentatively appears to be a stolen election in Iran, followed by protests with estimates of six or seven figures. Sadly, the news networks pretty much ignored the story (at least, up until the New York Times criticized them for doing so).

Top coverage of the event in America, it turns out, has come from the bloggers: Andrew Sullivan on the left, and Hugh Hewitt on the right being good examples (and normally these two are at each other’s throats). Without the bloggers, the issue would be almost invisible to us here in the west. Continue reading

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