#GamerGate (the consumer revolt that won't go away)

a reply to: Krazysh0t

My issues is cost vs value.

If your game is 60 dollars, I better get at least 60 hours of game play out of it.

It makes no sense to pay more than 1$ an hour for digital entertainment. This is why ALL games should let you play the first hour for free, without any kind of limits, and then opt you for purchase.

Much less pirating would happen if this was the general norm. I myself, purchase EVERY game I finish, but I DO NOT, purchase every game I play.

Now these cost problems are generally cuased exclusively by Publishers, not individual studies making games. Stuff like Green Light and Kickstarter are cutting out the middle man, providing better content and better cost for content ratio.

So it is getting better.

~Tenth

a reply to: tothetenthpower

There is no other way to look at this. HIS side is for gamergate (even though the article I just linked says he could care less about it) and HER side is against it. It is a completely polarized issue with no middle ground. You can try to evolve the issues away from how it started all you want, but at the end of the day it was started with misogyny and it will always have that taint with it. At this point, anyone with real grievances about this issue should just wait until this blows over and start a new social justice movement.

originally posted by: tothetenthpower
a reply to: Krazysh0t

My issues is cost vs value.

If your game is 60 dollars, I better get at least 60 hours of game play out of it.

It makes no sense to pay more than 1$ an hour for digital entertainment. This is why ALL games should let you play the first hour for free, without any kind of limits, and then opt you for purchase.

Much less pirating would happen if this was the general norm. I myself, purchase EVERY game I finish, but I DO NOT, purchase every game I play.

Now these cost problems are generally cuased exclusively by Publishers, not individual studies making games. Stuff like Green Light and Kickstarter are cutting out the middle man, providing better content and better cost for content ratio.

So it is getting better.

~Tenth

I disagree. I think the problem with the games industry at present is in post purchase support. Games are being released before they are completed. Because it's easy to assign developer time onto the DLC teams as opposed to finishing before release.

The DLC it'self get's rushed out and the games don't get patched properly and the DLC causes instability etc...

It is not an issue I see going away... I think it's going to get worse....

Korg.

You say...

originally posted by: tothetenthpower
a reply to: Krazysh0t

Which I don't of course, nobody deserves that kind of treatment.

And then you say...

originally posted by: tothetenthpowerBut I still maintain that her online infamy, was sought out and encouraged by her when this all started.

Which is just a dressed up way of saying that she wanted to be harassed therefore she deserves to be harassed.

Talking out both sides of your mouth here.

originally posted by: tothetenthpower
a reply to: Krazysh0t

My issues is cost vs value.

If your game is 60 dollars, I better get at least 60 hours of game play out of it.

It makes no sense to pay more than 1$ an hour for digital entertainment. This is why ALL games should let you play the first hour for free, without any kind of limits, and then opt you for purchase.

Much less pirating would happen if this was the general norm. I myself, purchase EVERY game I finish, but I DO NOT, purchase every game I play.

Now these cost problems are generally cuased exclusively by Publishers, not individual studies making games. Stuff like Green Light and Kickstarter are cutting out the middle man, providing better content and better cost for content ratio.

So it is getting better.

~Tenth

Yes, a $60 price tag is pretty high. I would, personally, value my entertainment a bit more than $1 a day. Probably around $1.50 a day (40 hour game). But I have ADD, and if a game runs real long I have a tendency not to finish it (which is a problem when I play JRPGS, but I have other strategies I employ to keep me invested in those).

I also buy used quite a bit and even when I do buy them new, it's usually after the game has been out for a while and has gone down considerably.

Pirating will happen regardless of the norms. Look at the Dreamcast. Piracy literally RUINED that system and made it unprofitable since you could burn any game on it to a cd and it would run it. There was a game once that the developer just ASKED people to donate as little as 1 penny for the game and people STILL pirated it. It's going to happen.

a reply to: redhorse

Which is just a dressed up way of saying that she wanted to be harassed therefore she deserves to be harassed.

No.

I said she wanted to be popular, she wanted to be famous online, and she wanted her 'product' to be at the top of every indie game chart there was.

She used sex and her gender to get it and then cried wolf when people called her out on it.

I nowhere said she deserved or wanted to be sexually harassed or verbally assaulted.

I said she wanted attention. She didn't get the kind she wanted, but she wanted ATTENTION none the less.

Her PR strategy backfired.

~Tenth

a reply to: monkofmimir

I kept up with the #GamerGate stuff for a bit at the beginning. To clear a few things right off the bat, I don't condone threatening and harassing people. Gaming journalism has been pushing agendas and talking about the hard time women have in gaming while having game companies send them free copies of things for reviews. And they better not be extremely awful reviews! I quit reading gaming sites for these reasons. Specifically the free copies of things for early reviews. Now I only look around for release dates, often just going to a game's site. Luckily I learn about new ones via the grapevine and youtube. It is, however, unfortunate that the beginning arguments revolve around someone's love life.

I also get that each person's online experience is different, but if I listen to Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian and any number of feminists/SJWs from the tumblr-sphere, all women have horrible experiences in gaming all the time. I'm a female who has been playing MMOs for over a decade. I've never had a man harass me. I have had females harass me and treat me horribly. Guess what? Being a jerk isn't gender-specific.

So basically, I want gaming news to be about games not social issues. I don't hate Zoe Quinn, but her twitter alone before and after everything is enough to have me never buy a game from her. Yet I've seen where people said they bought a game from her because she is 1. Female or 2. Being harassed. I've never liked Anita Sarkeesian because I feel that she cherry-picks to create her Tropes vs Women videos.

The only good things that has come out of this is The Escapist changing some of their policies. I've also discovered some great women with a level-head on their shoulders amid the ones who were making their own death threats to anyone who opposed Quinn and Sarkeesian. It's like any situation though. The worst people have the loudest voices.

a reply to: monkofmimir

It was tarnished to begin with. They shouldn't have made a movement out of the scraps of something so ugly.

It would be like getting Westboro Baptist church to lead the charge for religious freedoms.

Time to move on... if anything in Gamergate has/had any value, like the charges of corruption and sex for positive reviews, that needs to be spearheaded in a different movement/hashtag or whatever. Gamergate IS dead.

Gamergate has turned into an attack on Women. It's never okay to attack women and threaten them and belittle them and intimidate them. Gamergate is a facade of worthless cowards that think they are better than women.

I've got news for you. We're all equal. We're all humans. Gamergate and those behind it is/are sickening and disgusting.

P.S. I get that there is an undercurrent of anti feminism and fear of the PC games that might create, but money talks in all industries and I don't see games like Call of Duty, Halo, Dead or Alive or any of that going anywhere. It ain't happening. But, because you disagree with a viewpoint does not give you the right to Bully, intimidate or threaten a woman. Ever. Gamergate is a haven for that kind of behavior, it's been compromised degraded and hijacked to actually become an anti feminist front.

Feminism is a whole other thread or several, but to bring it back together, Gamergate has been compromised and hijacked by misogynists and cave men. It's dead. Someone brings up gamergate to me now and I know they think they are superior to women and don't mind threatening women to prove that point. it's that simple. Blah.


Also remember that gamergate was spawned by Eron Gjoni, who wrote a series of blog posts about the end of his relationship with indie game developer Zoe Quinn. Gjoni accused Quinn of sleeping with a video game journalist named Nathan Grayson

Grayson never even reviewed that game, I believe?

Now take it a step further to Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian being threatened with death and worse at the hands of gamergate. Pathetic.

a reply to: Domo1

You forgot how these people are all self-promoting each other and developers financially making the whole thing incestuous.

a reply to: tavi45

BioWare made a game with weak characterization because all the characters had to be made with open sexuality, meaning they couldn't express sexual preference until the PC signaled which way they ought to swing.

Now, I'm not against BioWare having gay romances and straight romances and bi romances. Different strokes for different folks, but that particular strategy weakened the characterization of the companions. Part of what makes a character who they are is ... well, who they are. It's a bit hard to write someone when you don't know what they're thinking because part of that has to be supplied by the player who may or may not want the character you're attempting to write for to swing a certain way.

As a result, we played through a time span of 10 years that didn't feel like it because the only companions who could really be fleshed out were the ones who couldn't potentially romance the PC.

Thankfully, they reversed course on this and just added a ton of NPC romances into forthcoming game all of whom have pre-defined orientations, but that brush with PC was ... unsettling and unsatisfying.

a reply to: monkofmimir

I have friends that work for major gaming mags/sites (editors and etc) to friends that work for or have worked for Ubisoft, Blizzard, Riot, Cryptic and more. While #Gamergate and my own friendships leaves me a little stuck in the middle, as a gamer, it does provide for an opportunity to see who knows who, at least via Steam as my friends list is a kind of "6 degrees of separation" game. So what do I see?

Well, the first thing I checked was the game review editor friend. He's not friends with the guys that I know from the game houses. However, I do see a Valve employee on his friends list, which is kind of interesting. Checking the two others that I know that are involved in reviews, they aren't friends with any of the people that I know from the game houses despite all playing the same game. Guess the world isn't that small after all.

Where I do see a whole lot of connections are the game designers and the connections start getting downright retarded. My bud from Cryptic is buds with friends from other game developers and well, a whole lot of game designers. In fact, all my game design friends pretty much know each other. It's kind of stupid but not unexpected nor is it really the big question--game reviewers and game developer relationships. Looking at my 4 friends that are directly and meaningfully tied to game review sites and mags, I only see one potential conflict of interest.

I'm not going to name this friend or the employee, as that would be a betrayal, but it is an interesting one on the surface. Knowing the guy, i know he's a huge fan of Valve's games and well, he loves games in general. In fact, that's the one thing that is consistent with all of the gaming journalism related people that I know--they love games. Does my review writing friend have a love of that particular Valve guy? Probably. Would it affect how that mag may review any game from that company? Probably not as they did have an employee that worked on a game that ended up being sold on Steam and the mag in question recused themselves of reviewing it because of that conflict of interest.

Where I think that a conflict of interest could very well arise is in the advertising revenues of gaming review sites and reviews of games themselves. If you've got some big game developer plunking down big bucks to advertise their latest and greatest, it's going to look funky if you have a review in the same mag that is bashing the game. That part reminds me of the tale of Jeff Gertsmann, which should be a huge red flag.

kotaku.com...

Ironically enough, I don't trust game reviews. As far as the misogyny goes within the industry, I do think there might be a problem. I'm a female and well, I've actually had a game designer from a larger house threaten physical assault against my person so definitely some bad eggs in the industry.

originally posted by: Krazysh0t
a reply to: tothetenthpower

Who cares who she slept with? That's the whole point! I don't care if she is an idiot or not. I don't care if what she created can be considered a game (for the record it most assuredly IS a game, just because you don't consider it a game doesn't make it so). This whole issue is a giant double standard on women and is insulting.

Go read that Cracked article I just posted. Do you think that those actions are acceptable? This poor girl's PARENTS have been harassed. I don't care what issues may or may not be real with this debacle, it ALL started from misogyny and ALL traces back to it.

People are idiots, but attacking video games to make them into something no one wants to play is also unacceptable.

Heck, I'm a woman and I don't want to play the PC feminist-topia games these people want produced.

a reply to: tothetenthpower

Exactly, maybe it's because I was exposed to higher levels of testerone in utero than the average woman, but I do have aggressive tendencies. When I was growing up, I used sports to get those out, but now that I have migraines, I can't do that like I used to. Now, I use video games.

No one online knows I'm a woman unless I tell them. It's the one place where everyone competes pretty levelly. There's no color/gender/whatever, and these people want to take it there.

HELL NO!

a reply to: redhorse

Well, unless part of her argument is that gamers are all drooling, mouth-breathing misogynist thugs who likely want to do to real-life women the same kinds of violent things they do in video games, so she pokes the hornet's nest to get the worst possible responses as "proof."

a reply to: ketsuko

So don't buy them. Just because games like that are made, doesn't necessarily mean that they will stop producing games that aren't like that. Nothing wrong with having options. If that genre isn't your cup of tea, then don't buy games from it. I don't buy FPS games anymore.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

I don't, but when the totalitarian mindset gets in charge, they try to take away the options of the free market. The mindset is that if that kind of game is the only game that is right, then that's the only game that should be made. That's what the collusion is about - crafting the narrative so that the culture starts to think that everyone else believes that whether they do or they don't. Control the press, control the narrative, control the culture. Pretty soon, even though no one likes them, those are the only games you find.

a reply to: ketsuko

So name ONE industry where that has actually happened. Last I checked, I can still buy hate music or snuff films if I know where to look. Sure it can be exceedingly hard, but the stuff will be made as long as people like it.

originally posted by: tothetenthpower
a reply to: redhorse

Which is just a dressed up way of saying that she wanted to be harassed therefore she deserves to be harassed.

No.

I said she wanted to be popular, she wanted to be famous online, and she wanted her 'product' to be at the top of every indie game chart there was.

She used sex and her gender to get it and then cried wolf when people called her out on it.

I nowhere said she deserved or wanted to be sexually harassed or verbally assaulted.

I said she wanted attention. She didn't get the kind she wanted, but she wanted ATTENTION none the less.

Her PR strategy backfired.

~Tenth

Here's the deal and this is something that I can directly comment on. Not everything that goes on for a female gamer or female working within the industry is necessarily "attention seeking". As a former fps gaming champion who happens to be female, I've had my gender touted before me by both industry and individuals. Because I was female and I happened to become a champ of something that had not had a female champ before, a ticker was run on the G4 channel. Did I get asked if that was okay? NO.

Did I have people say that I play to gain attention? Every day of my darn gaming life. Nah, I just like to play games and if a guy can't handle me calling out an enemy position in my kicked in the nuts squirrel voice, that's his problem and not mine. My SPEAKING in a game does not make me someone who is seeking out attention. My defending myself from negative and frequently toxic commentary about my gender does not equate to seeking attention. And yet, the declarations that everything I do as a female gamer is generally equated to "attention seeking". Maybe I just like video games and prefer being one of the guys...

Now I was interviewed a while back for a gaming mag. I didn't get interviewed because I was a female gamer. However, I did get asked for a picture and I gave them a nice sedate shot of me in all my mom glory. What happened next was the editor went digging til he found a much more enticing photo to use instead--without my permission. And wouldn't you know it--I got accused of being "attention seeking" for that, too. I was mad a bit. Not going to lie but you know, I chose to look at it a whole lot more holistically. You don't see ugly models in jean ads. Even in ads for business services, you're going to see that attractive female wearing a headset and a smile. Sex sells and well, I got sold.

But it sure as hell was not my choice and was not with my permission. Yet still, that accusation of being "attention seeking" came around.

As far as Quinn goes, it seems to me that the biggest attention seeker of all is her ex. After all, he's the one who started it and honestly, that's the same thing I tell any guy that is harassing me in a game for being an "attention *****". That the only person that I see seeking attention is the one that can't keep his mouth shut and play the game. Usually wins. As for Quinn, who wouldn't want to defend themselves from nasty allegations regardless of gender?

a reply to: WhiteAlice


Amen Alice. Well said!