courage_wolf

If this catches on across the entire industry I fear it has the potential to ruin or even kill games. The game I am really worried about right now is the new Unreal Tournament since Epic seems to be taking the game in a similar direction. Skins are one thing but if Epic allows it and the community decides to sell custom maps, game modes or mutators it could kill the game. Arena shooters live and die by their mod scenes and if everyone in the community has to shell out $3 a map just to play whatever is currently popular people are going to leave quickly.

And what about Valve's own cash cows? If Dota had been a $20 mod for Warcraft 3 would it have spawned such a massive community that Valve makes massive profits off of? This move seems to be yet another step in Valve's plan to outsource all their development and make money exclusively off the work of other people. There are to many cash shops in Steam and Valve's games now and all Valve seems to care about is squeezing as much money out of people as they can. I remember Gabe Newell raising hell about how Windows 8 was going to ruin PC gaming because Microsoft put an app store in it, now Valve makes most of their money selling cosmetic items generated by users for games based on user created mods. People need to think long and hard about what Valve is doing and its potential to harm the games we play.

Sony should get with the times and give us a new Colony Wars game. Space sims/shooters are coming back in a big way and Colony Wars was fun and accessible. A modern game in the series with online co-op and multiplayer would be a lot of fun and provide a genre that doesn't currently exist on consoles.

This just give me a creepy voyeurism vibe. I assume Steam alerts you when someone starts watching, but the service as described does not sit well with me. All I can think of is clicking a check box and forgetting it then 4 months later get a notice that the guy I raided with a few times is now watching me play Far Cry. It doesn't sit well with me at all and I have no intention of enabling this feature.

I absolutely disagree with your final statement. As I see it a big part of the problem with the modern civil rights movements or equality movements or whatever you want to call them is that those involved in them have built silos where their issues are the only issues that are important. Feminists may give lip service to racial issues and civil rights activists may occasionally comment on women's issues, but when it comes down to it they are all fighting against each other for limited public mind share. People can only care about so many things and there are so many causes competing for attention that they inevitably resort to sensationalism and develop an "Us vs Them" attitude to retain supporters and influence the public. In exclusively promoting their own message and cause various groups today are working against each other and accomplishing little while the general public ignores them all.

I believe it would be far healthier and more productive for most of the social activist groups to join together and form a movement based on fair treatment and equality for all instead of being divided along lines of women's issues or racial issues or gay rights and all the others. If everyone who cared joined together with a unified message of equality for all it would be far more powerful than jumbled mess of causes we have today. It would also help with actually getting stuff done. Instead of "This is a women's issue" or "This is an African American issue" various groups could join together and say "This is a human issue and we want to improve it for everyone." A great mass of people working together on a few issues is going to accomplish a lot more than hundreds of small groups working on hundreds of issues. And it would help with dialogue between different demographics. Another problem I see in today's equality movements is that members of one demographic will often use their cause as an excuse to vilify and alienate members of another demographic. By expanding their focuses beyond a single demographic equality groups could make their movement more approachable to those currently on the outside who may agree with the cause but are driven away by the narrow scope and potentially hostile tones of the current message.

Talking about Carolyn Petit's article on Bayonetta, I think Yahtzee summed it up very well in his Zero Punctuation Bayonetta 2 review: "We need more gender diversity in games that isn't that." What surprises me is that the reactions and outcry against Bayonetta has been very timid this year. As I see it Bayonetta as a character is as much a challenge to sex negative feminism as it is to male oriented objectification of women, but the usual suspects in decrying sexualization in video games have been unusually quiet on the topic of Bayonetta. Other than Polygon's ridiculous review of Bayonetta 2 Carolyn Petit's article is the only other recent negative interpretation of the character I am aware of.

Bayonetta is certainly a divisive character, but the general attitude towards the character seems to be overwhelmingly positive, especially among women in the games industry and who play games frequently. I suspect this is partly because Bayonetta debuted and was established as a popular character years before today's major feminist critics of games established themselves and the narrative on the character was able to develop without their input. I wonder, if Bayonetta 1 was released in 2014 instead of 2009 would Bayonetta as a character have received the same overwhelmingly positive reception from both men and women or would we currently be engaged in a heated internet debate about whether or not Bayonetta was bad for women? I think that many of the people who would typically be speaking out against Bayonetta right now are holding their tongues because they know that public opinion would be overwhelmingly against them.

I feel like there is way too much sensationalism going on in regards to AC Unity. Obviously I am going off of my own experience and cannot speak for anyone else, but from what I have experienced this is far from the unplayable mess the internet narrative is portraying. My bug experience has been limited to falling through the ground once, getting stuck floating through the air once and some texture pop in along with frame rate dips in parts of the city. I just have not encountered the things that others say make the game an unacceptable release.

I think people are using the buggy release of AC Unity as an excuse to go after Ubisoft for a whole host of issues beyond the present state of the game and that this criticism is not entirely fair or well intentioned. I could very well be wrong but I don't remember Bethesda getting this kind of hate when Skyrim launched and was undeniably broken. As I remember it PS3 players were justifiably mad that the game was basically permanently broken on their platform but the general player population didn't care and had fun with dragons flying backwards. People just seem to accept that Elder Scrolls games launch broken and I don't remember people calling for Bethesda's blood like the are with Ubisoft. There seems to be no consistency to what people on the internet actually want and expect from games. The only thing I can really count on anymore is that if there is a video game company that is currently popular to hate people will pile onto the bandwagon.

Players are under no obligation whatsoever to accept or adhere to the intent of a game's creator in how the game is viewed and experienced. Whether or not the black bars are there for artistic vision or (much more likely) to cover up game performance issues there is no reason why anyone who wants to change the game and has the power to do so should not remove them. For a single player game artistic intent and technical stop gaps stop mattering once the game has been shipped and is in the hands of players. If someone wants to reskin the game with 8 bit graphics that is their prerogative regardless of what the developers think because it is up to the players to find their own enjoyment out of the game that they paid for. Removing the black bars is no different than making a house rule for a board game, changing the UI in Skyrim, installing a high res texture mod for Deus Ex, adding missing story content into KOTOR 2, or creating your own levels for Super Mario Brothers. They all enhance the games by increasing the player's enjoyment. Players enjoying a game is much more important than a developers artistic intent.

I have an issue that I have been trying to mentally resolve for a long time now, it relates to women in gaming and recent events but is also much broader. First off let me say that I fully believe in men and women being treated equally well inside and outside the video game industry and that the internet harassment is horrible. Giant Bomb and the gaming media speaking out about it is absolutely the right thing to do and should have happened long ago. I hope that my post is relevant to the spirit of the thread, if not I apologize for going off topic.

The problem I am having and have been having for a long time now is that I find it extremely hard to support many of the voices in the women's movement who are calling for change. I generally agree with the messages they are presenting, but the tone and attitude that many convey is very hard for me to accept. Basically I am a straight white man and many of the voices I see calling out for fair treatment in the video games industry and feminist voices in general come off as extremely antagonistic and vengeful. The message that I am receiving from people like Zoe Quinn, Leigh Alexander, Anita Sarkeesian and feminist articles on sites like Jezebel and where ever else my Facebook friends post from is that straight white men are the cause of all these problems women are having and that straight white men are responsible for everything bad that happens to women.

I have a problem with that because these messages all appear to be attacking me personally, saying "You are causing these bad things by existing and you should feel bad for causing them." I try to be a decent person online and offline, I don't harass people over twitter or message boards, I don't say terrible slurs about women I meet in real life and I try to speak out about things like internet harassment and vote for equality every change I get. Beyond that I don't know what to do but there are all these feminist voices telling me I am a bad person and need to change my ways and stop oppressing women. I am unable to directly support these people because their underlying message is horribly insulting and I am not about to begin self flagellation to gain their approval.

So my question in all this is how do I approach women's issues when most of the voices I hear championing these issues seem to be intensely angry at me simply for being alive? If the messaging was more inclusive I would probably be actively supporting these people, but as things are I often tune them out because the message is so consistently negative. Are there voices for change that do not hold men at fault for the problems women face? If not, how am I supposed to support good treatment of women when those I see calling for it are treating men badly?

That Zach Gage article reads like something Jack Thompson would have wrote during the height of the Video Games are Destroying America craze of the 90s. It reeks of someone with an agenda to push desperately searching for something that can be turned into a controversy. He is literally making the same arguments that Jack Thompson did, video games are training us to be violent people. Now he isn't invoking "Think of the children" when he tells us how terrible Talion kissing his wife is, but he is making the same argument that game players will be incapable of seeing the difference between fiction and reality and that their in game acts of violence will bleed over into the real world. I thought the video game community had moved on from that line of thinking decades ago, but apparently it is still alive and well. Is Zach Gage also offended that World of Warcraft uses the same buttons for starting attacks as it does for communicating with other players or that Grand Theft Auto 5 uses the same button for accelerating a car as it does for firing a gun? Is he worried that players will begin to associate talking or driving with murder? Shadow of Mordor is targeted at adults, no one is going to confuse kissing with murder and to even suggest such a think is highly insulting to both the game players and the game developers. Zach Gage's opinion is idiotic and I suspect it was run as clickbate to drive traffic, a trap which I have unfortunately fallen into in order to critique it.

My current issue with the coverage Gamergate is getting is that there appears to be a massive double standard in the way the gaming media is reporting it. They are quick to denounce internet harassment and attacks, rightly so, but as far as I have seen this has only been directed at the Gamergate crowd. There has been a lot of harassment and worse going both ways and to address only a single side of it is intellectually dishonest and actively harmful to the stated goal of stopping internet harassment.

Lots of game developers and media members have been massive assholes to their fans and readers over the last month. Gamers have been called terrible names and terrible stereotypes like the fat gamer who lives in his parents basement have frequently been invoked, gamers have been publicly compared to groups like ISIS, people who criticized Zoe Quinn over twitter have had their real names and addresses and social security numbers tweeted by Quinn's supporters with no denouncement from her or the media, false DMCA claims have been filed in an effort to suppress criticism, women who have come out in support of Gamergate have been labeled gender traitors for not falling into line, female indie developers have anonymously written that they are afraid to publicly support Gamergate for fear of being socially ostracized by the indie scene and loosing their careers, anyone and everyone who criticizes the gaming media for its ethical standards is being labeled a misogynist, and the list goes on and on.

The point I am trying to make is that there are horrible people on both sides of the debate but I only see the gaming media calling out one side for their bullshit. I may very well be wrong and would happily welcome proof that shows I am wrong, but if it is out there I have not seen it and it is certainly not as wide spread as it should be. The message that internet harassment is terrible and needs to stop absolutely needs to be spread, but only going after one faction and ignoring another is never going to stop this. By ignoring the terrible actions of a very vocal group with access to a large audience the gaming media is enabling them to continue being terrible people in the future. All the guilty deserve to be punished and it is past time that the gaming media start holding their friends, colleagues and business associates to the same standards that they are trying to hold their readers and community members. Letting them get away with their terrible actions only perpetuates the problem of internet harassment.