Worth Reading: 11/03/2014

"Impact Winter is a post-apocalyptic survival RPG that deals with the themes of leadership, teamwork, isolation and survival. You play the role of Jacob Solomon: leader of a group of survivors holed-up in a remote church."

I know most people would take a historical view to analyzing the main character's name and say how it just screams Old Testament! But I want to take a more blunt perspective and point out how a name so close to solo man seems to contradict the alleged themes of leadership and teamwork.

I don't see anyway to download the Ask Leah podcast without using iTunes, but the "stream m3u" file contains a direct link to the mp3. What a weird setup -- there isn't even text on the download link.

Hell yeah Morrowind!

@patrickklepek: Thanks for sharing that Adrian Chen article, sir. Having grown up in the Philippines and knowing a lot of people who graduated from college and ended up working in the call center/outsourcing industry, its actually a very common trend for recently graduated people to end up working in that industry even though they end up being underemployed because it pays way more than the field they spent years working towards to earn a degree. Sometimes its not even because people actually aspire to work in that field but rather the money is that much better.

I loved Morrowind at the time but all attempts to enjoy it since have not panned out well at all.

There are design choices in that game that had to die and I do not mourn them.

Archiving is one of the coolest things in the world. If there was some way for me to enter the field or even find a way to help I totally would. I guess for now I'll just keep maintaining my own personal collection until I find a way.

Ashly Burch is slowly starting to resemble the secret third sister of Tegan and Sara Quin.

I believe in Bioware.

@fracture: @nycnewyork:

Actually, I find this is also another analysis of what the various stakeholders for, against and inside gg believe.

Jesus Christ duder, I don't like Bioware much after DA2 and ME3, but this is absolutely ridiculous.

I want to watch Evolution of Horror in Video Games, but I just can't stand that guy. I know it's silly, but certain types of voices really turn me off. I guess I will try again.

There! It took all day but I read the Film Crit Hulk article. So help me I respect the man immensely but I can't enjoy reading his incredibly long articles. They're always paved on a seemingly endless road of ennui.

I'd never even heard of the extinction mode in Ghosts before. I don't play CoD at all for the very reasons he cited (I was bored just watching 10 minutes of the quick look; I have never been bored by a quick look before), but that does seem like fun.

Meh, games as art to me has nothing to do with "proving" something to anyone...it has to do with that games are amazing and fun and incredible and they deserve to be cared about and not though of as meaningless, and that art should always be something to engage with and have a form of meaning to someone.

And yeah Morrowind is rad and all and really well designed but playing it now is just not really enjoyable, it's too bad because that game with at least the fidelity and action of Skyrim (which isn't ideal but still passable) would be fantastic.

Sorry Anita Sarkeesian but I will still call myself a gamer despite the fact that you think that gamers are over.

The term gamer doesnt define me as being only that but it is an essential part of my identity and I dont let other people dictate to me who or what I am.

It is quite fine for one to not call themselves a gamer but you dont have the moral authority to define other peoples identities.

'Everybody hits the wall, generally between three and five months,' says a former YouTube content moderator I’ll call Rob. 'You just think, ‘Holy shit, what am I spending my day doing? This is awful.'"

Fucking amateurs.

Nice to see that Total Biscuit & Stephen Totillo video posted on here. I would like more of that and less of the finger pointing.

I call myself a gamer too. It's absurd to think that such a large swath of the gaming media thinks it is okay to deem an identity dead. Especially one so tied to the very hobby that they promote and make their living from. It's irresponsible and completely insulting and not anyone's right but the individuals, like you said. It's a character smearing campaign.

For the record I'd also call myself a man, a musician, a writer, a feminist, a dancer, a nerd, a film lover, a dog person, and many more. Crazy I know. Gamers only define themselves by one thing if I'm to understand the narrative so I must be some anomaly.

Gamers aren't the uncultured hateful bigots that so many game critics keep accusing them of being. The gamers I know have been some of the most accepting and nice people I've met in my life.

For a group so intent on removing harassment from the internet the games media really can be bullies.

It's not bullying to say that the target group for games doesn't have to be people who call themselves gamers.

@almostswedish: Just so. I was always under the impression that the "gamers are dead" shorthand was pushing against "gamer" as a binary identity (you're either "hardcore" or a phony) and instead was promoting a more inclusive spectrum of identity in which people can exist as gamers to varying degrees but with equal validity.

@weilide: @almostswedish: It's absolutely bullying. If you want to be inclusive you don't proclaim an identity dead and also call them misogynistic harassers.

I want the community to be inclusive too. I don't think character smearing/identity smearing is how you do it.

@almostswedish: You're right. It's not bullying, it's plain wrong.

The people playing "games" is pretty equal across the board, however once you break things down by clearer studies, you'll see that they are counting people who have played any game, at any point in their life. The study considers facebook and cellphone games on the same level as AAA games as well.

You and I came away with different things from that discussion. To me it showed at least one more gaming press outlet actually coming to the table to respectfully discuss issues of interest to GG. This is good to see even if I don't consider myself a GGer, but I sympathize with the way many of them have been treated by the press and those who've bought into what most of the press have said. I'm not a big fan of Kotaku, but I have a lot of respect for Totilo for not being one of the many who say they can't discuss the issues of ethics in the gaming press (whether you agree or not that there are issues) until people abandon their GG tag or women stop being harassed.

The problem arises when people try to convince other people on using reductive, generic, subjective, and overall meaningless labels. Who gets to decide what art is? A masterpiece to someone may be a completely dismissible product to others, such as "art" like this. Journey may be the greatest experience ever to someone, while other people may find spiritual connection with Street Fighter, just to name something. And both are entirely valid.

The same applies to labels like "gamer". It means entirely different things to different people, yet people are arguing over it without realizing that it is just a label.

Okay, well first off, it was Leigh Alexander who wrote the article you're talking about, not Anita Sarkeesian. Also, I'm not sure what this post is even in response to because there's nothing about this in Worth Reading this week.

All the same, the article is a rejection of the stereotypical "gamer" stereotype. One that I'm sure you don't see yourself as. The angry, pubescent man child that a lot of people see when they think of "gamers." The point of the article is that games are so far reaching and so prevalent in current society that everyone is a gamer. You're just as much as a gamer as my mom, who loves Candy Crush, is. I don't think there's anything offensive about that sentiment, even if the language was probably more inflammatory than it probably needed to be.

The problem is that the issues of interest to GamerGate are impossible to pin down. Search the tag right now and you'll find just as many posts whining about Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkeesian as you will about "ethics." You're never going to convince me, or many other people, that GamerGate's primary goal isn't to silence voices in the games industry that they don't agree with, which 9 times out of 10 means feminist voices. My sympathy for anyone still associating themselves with GG has just about run out. The name has too much baggage around it to ever spark an actual conversation.

I popped it in on my old compy and it hurt to look at. Still picked up the dead drop at that tree stump though.

@milkman said:

Okay, well first off, it was Leigh Alexander who wrote the article you're talking about, not Anita Sarkeesian.

You mean it was Leigh Alexander, Arthur Chu, Devin Wilson, Dan Golding, Luke Plunkett, Casey Johnston, Patrick O'Rourke, Joseph Bernstein, Chris Plante, Callie Beusman, Victoria Mcnally, Anna Minard, Jack Smith IV, among others all released "gamers are dead" articles on that same day.

Anita Sarkeesian missed the deadline, and released a near identical article covering NOTHING BUT the harassment angle, Calling it "The Death of Gamers" Just last week the day after her Colbert Report appearance.

So yes, she did.

This is true.

@spraynardtatum: @notlikelytocare: My bad, I missed that link in the article and assumed he was talking about the old article. That's my fault. Apologies to @nardak. However, everything I said still stands and now that I see the article, it only reinforces exactly what I was talking about.

I have never seen this many people come to the defense of a meaningless marketing buzz word. Everyone is a "gamer" now. If that bothers you, sorry.

Anyone who plays and enjoys video games have always been gamers (if they want to be) and we certainly didn't need a media dog pile to point that out. As I said before, I identify as a gamer and have since I was a child. It isn't, and has never been, a meaningless marketing buzz word to me and has never been a boys club. It was part of my core identity growing up and I hold it very dear.

You don't get to choose what people are offended by. This is the same sentiment many use when addressing feminist critique and I think it applies here. Those articles were supremely irresponsible and laser focused on killing an identity. The shear volume of the same political statement is alarming. I want to know how and why all of these writers decided to say the exact same thing all within such a short time period. I find it weird.

I'd even consider Jeffs answer during this years PAX panel to hit the same chord with me. His response was equally shaming and broad. Saying that "most people that identify as their hobby are assholes" is a terrible thing to say, based in unprovable assumption, and completely demeaning. It was perpetuating a stereotype. And that came from the mouth of the person I have the most respect for in the industry.

These articles aren't saying everyone is a gamer now. They're validating stereotypes that we've been trying to shake off for years and saying it's been true all along. It was a smear campaign and it worked pretty well.

What do you envision the "gamer identity" to be? I ask this question honestly because you defend it so whole heartedly that you must perceive it really differently than me. I associate that term more with products like Mountain Dew Gamer Fuel, Gamer Grub, Pwnmeal, and COD that I do with people who play lots of games. I see the term gamer associated more with "pro-quality" headsets and mice than I do with people who really like a diversity of games. I also hear the term gamer used as a largely negative term by media outlets to demean people who play games . I have really never seen that term as anything other than a form of marketing spin and as a derisive label.

Your experience must have been very different than mine, but I have definitely felt like I had to emphasize every other thing I do in my life just to avoid being pigeonholed by the term gamer. I don't see it as an identity a much as a weaponized label that holds a bunch of negative connotations. I have felt that I have had to overcome the term gamer more than I have identified it.

Ugh jesus, gamergate. Is that still going on?

Re: Sarkeesian's NYT article... I never associated much with the straight white teen male demographic that was pandered to in video game marketing, even despite being exactly one myself in the 1990s & early 2000s. That emphasis always struck me as juvenile, and limiting of what games could be. I don't decry all these articles that signify the passing of "gamer" as a shorthand for that demographic. I've also personally let go of my elitism over casual/alternative/indie games in terms of what constitutes a "real video game". Games are mainstreaming. Eventually the label will be as meaningless as "movie-goer". ("But I only watch triple-A movies for the hardcore!")

Re: Morrowind... The video's major point which is apparently lost on the people complaining about the walking speed is how Morrowind begs to be subverted by YOU, the player. The inconvenience of walking is merely another thing to be subverted.

I haven't played the game since its day, but I recall jumping (lol) being a faster mode of travel AND a faster skill to level up than running, so in the early game, I was jump-skipping my way to adventure. For player-controlled fast travel, I eventually created a ring of super jump which allowed me to leap a mile at a time, literally. By that point, travel was a solved problem.

Being allowed to break the game in such glorious ways is part of what makes it more exciting than its successors, which severely constrain their systems and funnel players into preconceived paradigms. In other words, they accommodate casual players uninterested in understanding & subverting the rules (as a necessary part of the series' rise from a cult PC audience to a mainstream console one). Morrowind, like the cult classic Dark Souls, both respects your intelligence and expects great things from you.

(The most fun I had in Skyrim was figuring out how to glitch-"mountain climb" on my own, and thus do some very light sequence-breaking. That tiny bit of subversion made me nostalgic for Morrowind.)

A gamer is anyone who loves and enjoys video games. Like an audiophile or a movie lover. Your perception of the term is the demeaning one perpetuating exaggerated stereotypes that bullies tended to use on me and my friends and it was hurtful and will always be hurtful.

@spraynardtatum: I don't think we're ever going to agree if we have a fundamental difference of opinion on what the articles' purpose was. If you want to talk about a smear campaign against the "gamer identity", I would look at GamerGate, not the "Gamers are dead" articles. That did much more damage than any article could have ever done. GG has pretty much solidified to me that I never want to associate myself with any kind of "gamer" identity. In recent months, the actions of people who call themselves gamers or say they speak for gamers are much more offensive and disgusting to me than any Leigh Alexander article.

But the term gamer clearly doesn't have one concrete definition since we are able to disagree about its meaning and its connotation. Why not just say I like games, rather than use a term that clearly has a widely perceived negative connotation associated with it? Why label yourself with the same term that was used against you as a derogatory term?

Because I don't agree with the widely perceived negative connotations. Because I have good friends that identify as gamers too and I want to defend them. Because I don't think it's right when other people decide what someone calls themselves or identifies as.

But if all you mean when you say you are a gamer is that you love games, then why use an overloaded term? I understand that your friends use it and that the way you use it is not harmful, but it has so many associations that you are going to get unfairly tagged with. The term gamer will lose its negative meaning when enough game players demonstrate that the old stereotypes are invalid and when those people gain cultural influence, not by people defending the term.

I love you.

I don't want the association of ill-informed stereotypes to dictate what I call myself. I don't think that's fair and it validates bullying of people that I care about.

I really didn't like those articles at all, but in this respect, sadly, you're not wrong.

No disagreement there from me either. It's heinous and unbelievable what Zoe Quinn and Anita and Brianna Wu have been put through. Unquestionably horrific.

Can we stop talking about "ethics on video games" now? Just have fun holy shit.

I'm all about this Morrowind love. Borrowing a phrase from Dan Ryckert, it's probably my favorite game of all time. That video was a well-articulated version of what I've been struggling to say for a long time.

man that FemFreq article... where do I even start?

Honestly, there is a huge difference between "made for teenage boys" vs "MARKETED to teenage boys". I'm sick of gamers getting solely blamed for just regurgitating shit put into their mouths by marketing teams, especially since I'd wager most of the guys spewing that vitrol are quite young. Our generation grew up in a world that hated video games, where people like Sarkeesian and her parents felt "excluded" for arbitrary reasons that boil down to judging a book by its cover. There's this huge group of kids and teens who are totally jaded because their environment doesn't support their entertainment decisions. I think Feminist Frequency has good intentions, but she is coming into this from a platform of spite, not a genuine desire to improve M/F relations. I think the feminist conversation could have happened much more naturally without her trying to cut and quarter everything into tropes.

The thing that really sticks out to me is that she thought the PS2/XB/GC generation had NO GAMES for her. She seems to contradict herself, saying that there are no games for women and yet claiming certain games are made only for men instead of trying it herself and seeing if she enjoys it. I work in big box stores for my retail job (in the gaming sections), and I see the behavior of kids, they pick the toys they like regardless of whether it's for boys or girls. Usually it's the parents (or school) that enforces the gender stereotype (like in Sarkeesian's experience), and yet we must continue to chide media creators and the most "undesirable" demographic of "gamers" to expect a change. How about raise your kids outside of that binary and let them decide what they like?

Growing up, my sister and I both loved playing video games, and this whole idea of games being only for specific genders was not a thing at all. We always bonded over Nintendo (still do), but as we got older, our tastes diverged a bit but we were always interested whatever each of us was currently playing. She is way into RPGs, where I'm more of an action gamer, and maybe that's due to the gender conditioning, but our tastes still overlapped and we end up playing a lot of the same games. When she saw Gears of War, she didn't think "this is for boys", she thought "wow this has great music!". She doesn't play shooters because she is not good at them, not because of some dumb gendered reason, which is ironically exactly why Sarkeesian avoided these games. When Mass Effect became more of a shooter, my sister didn't give up on the series and say "welp this doesn't appeal to me anymore because i'm a girl lol!", she gutted up and beat it.

You know what she thinks about the gender debate?

She doesn't. She's just going to college for game design.

A lot of the negative attitude harbored toward women is because of the SELF-IMPOSED belief that the gaming community is not suitable for them. If you are as knowledgeable and passionate about games as any other gamer, you will be accepted. If you are acting like you are the hottest thing in the community and you're saying shit to insinuate the male gamers, that you're so cool and unique because you aren't an icky boy, don't be surprised when they find your address, mail you 600 copies of the Qur'an, and then all parties get promptly banned by the moderators for being fucking idiotic.

This whole GamerGate thing is a petty forum squabble that has been blown way out of proportion by irresponsible journalists who in their attempt to address a problem have inadvertently given trolls a platform to speak on and a banner to rally under. If you are a gamer, you are obviously going to feel insulted by an article titled "Gamers are over" and the idea that gamers are exclusively young males. It just screams of ignorance, the words of someone who has only seen the industry side of things and thinks they're too good for the culture.

Look at someone like Felicia Day. She loves the culture, plays all the games, is feminist but not condescendingly so. People like her are the people who should be speaking up, and while it's unfortunate that she was doxxed after publishing her thoughts about GamerGate, I thought what she said was quite sound and gives an honest perspective of a woman who is actually IN the culture, rather than REPORTING ON it. These are the kinds of perspectives I enjoy reading, the actual GAMERS talking, not those who are so snarky as to claim they are above it.

Apologies for this page-stretching comment, just got really set off.

While I couldn't agree more with you on this, you have to consider that people also learn through the media and society. There are many different kinds of role models, not just parents, and those said parents are also conditioned by other factors.

Somebody has to break the self-feeding cycle somewhere, and telling someone to "be a better parent" is much more abstract than actually identifying one of the biggest sources where people get their social conditioning from, the media.

It is not self-imposed, society and other forms of media have a lot to do with it. Imagine if most of the movies out there were something like The Expendables, that would certainly have an effect on who and who doesn't feel welcome in that culture.

Also, "if you are as knowledgeable and passionate"? Who gets to decide who "knows enough" or is "passionate" enough to be accepted? Why does it even have to be a requirement to be "accepted"? That is the kind of elitism that critics like Sarkeesian are complaining about.

An outsider's perspective has as much value as a "gamer" one. Just because someone is on the "inside" or not, doesn't mean that they can't express themselves and be considered as equals. Games is a form of mass media, therefore it concerns everybody, whether they are an "expert" or not.

Here is a good article that touches on video games marketing history and why things developed as they did.