For Game Developers, It's About the Labor of Love 164
Nerval's Lobster writes With "GamerGate" and all the debates over who counts as a "gamer," it's easy to forget that games are created by people with a genuine love of the craft. Journalist Jon Brodkin sat down with Armin Ibrisagic, game designer & PR manager for Coffee Stain Studios, the Swedish studio that made Goat Simulator, to talk about why they built that game and how it turned into such a success. Brodkin also talked to Leszek Lisowski, founder of Wastelands Interactive, about the same topic. While these developers might debate with themselves (and others) over whether to develop games for hardcore gamers, or jump on the mobile "casual gaming" bandwagon, they'll ultimately in it because they love games — a small but crucial detail that seems too easy to forget these days.
Nobody Counts (Score:2, Insightful)
"GamerGate" and all the debates over who counts as a "gamer,"
I heard vicious shouts that gamers were dead, and those didn't come from Gamergate . . .
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Look like we have a white knight or SJW modding this as troll.
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"Gamers" as in gamergate seem like "people who would like to make money off from games without making games".
the whole gamergate is stupid. it's about a stupid game, about stupid journalists writing for stupid online magazines and about stupid gamers.
goat simulator is stupid too - that and depression quest both underline how PUBLICITY matters more than the game being good in any way! and the problem is the "gamer" journalists who just latch on to everything they see other youtubers latch on to - so playing
Suckers (Score:3)
"Labor of love" - right. That's why game developers are so exploited that EA got into trouble with CA labor laws.
Re:Suckers (Score:5, Interesting)
You've got it all wrong. Programmers and artists get to keep all the love, while the owners of the company get to keep all the money. It's a win-win.
Re:Suckers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Suckers (Score:4, Interesting)
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Most games are created to make money. People see what is selling and they just cobble together some crap to try and make some easy money. There are people who do it out of love, but those are definitely few and far between.
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It's all a labor of love with programming, or we'd leave and take a job where we get respect and a life.
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They interviewed a "game designer" and "PR manager", which is not at all the same thing as the grunts who actually have to do the programming 14 hours a day and then get laid off when it's done.
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Bingo!
I love games and finished a computer science degree. Afterwards I could of went into game development, but after hearing how apalling working conditions are, avoided the industry.
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Thank you for your correction. Any help with learning this language is appreciated.
This is why tabeltop games are so fun (Score:1)
You get together with a bunch of friends with drinks and snacks and play a game.
Fun to design.
Fun to play.
If you're more worried about your metrics, you're doing it wrong.
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oh and I'm almost done with the WOD For The Horde quest chain - will finish this weekend after homework, since I have a test tomorrow.
Remember: fun. If you're not doing fun, ask yourself which of your players are using the content. If most don't use it, you forgot to add fun.
Gamer Gate Why ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Really why bring that into a story that's about people who are passionate about creating great games. Gamergate is about people playing the victim card, and pulling a shakedown on an industry. Sad for use we made it work for them. Who cared about Sarkesian before this ?
Re:Gamer Gate Why ? (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole "Gamergate" thing all just seemed like a lot of hand wringing and teeth gnashing over nothing. I'm vaguely aware of what it was, but don't see how it would ever relate to mine or really anyone's enjoyment of video games.
In other words: Who the fuck cares. I'll be over here playing some games until everyone's done talking about it.
Re:Gamer Gate Why ? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Who the fuck cares
I don't, but the author's of the offensive articles really screwed up.
They took a demographic they considered male, teenage basement dwellers and wrote a couple of astonishingly offensive articles, on a website aimed at that demographic. Then they found out that 'gamer' != that demographic. It cuts right across all levels of society and all genders. So they managed to write something offensive to everyone. When the story broke out of bubble of that one website, sympathy for the authors was heavily muted by the fact that everyone who plays computer games, myself included, think they brought it upon themselves, because they can see plainly how offensive the articles were and how they articles are talking squarely about them, regardless of where they sit in society.
Not being the sort of person to take offense at random things on the internet, I really don't care, but it's still pretty obvious the authors screwed up and got a predictable response. Society has people who live on a broad distribution of extremism. If you uniformly offend people across the distribution, you're going to offend the sort of people who send death threats over the internet for fun.
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> Who the fuck cares
I don't, but the author's of the offensive articles really screwed up.
They took a demographic they considered male, teenage basement dwellers and wrote a couple of astonishingly offensive articles, on a website aimed at that demographic. Then they found out that 'gamer' != that demographic. It cuts right across all levels of society and all genders. So they managed to write something offensive to everyone. When the story broke out of bubble of that one website, sympathy for the authors was heavily muted by the fact that everyone who plays computer games, myself included, think they brought it upon themselves, because they can see plainly how offensive the articles were and how they articles are talking squarely about them, regardless of where they sit in society.
Not being the sort of person to take offense at random things on the internet, I really don't care, but it's still pretty obvious the authors screwed up and got a predictable response. Society has people who live on a broad distribution of extremism. If you uniformly offend people across the distribution, you're going to offend the sort of people who send death threats over the internet for fun.
Pretty much exactly my impression. The one thing you miss in this, is it will definitely be an upward move for the key victims. I have no doubt that Sarkesian has had employment offers and speaking engagements at a level she never had before this.
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I just googled gamergate and apparently it is a reproductively viable female worker ant that is able to reproduce with mature males when the colony is lacking a queen. It pretty much describes what happened.
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It's funny how two people can see the same events and come to the exact opposite conclusion about what happened.
Some people wrote some articles about how "gamer" culture, which is/was mainly a badge used by mostly male hard core players, is somewhat outmoded now because most people playing games do so casually. Furthermore people calling themselves gamers and claiming to speak on behalf of their community created the whole GamerGate thing, an elaborate web of lies and false accusations with a few criminal t
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>Language and labels change meaning
Yes, it seems like that interpretation requires that you interpret the word 'Gamer' to mean lowlife male basement dwellers who yell into microphones.
Being competent in English I interpret 'Gamer' in this context to mean 'People who play computer games'.
So I'm a gamer. I like a good FPS. I've has my arse whipped in Starcraft. I've shot lots of zombies and Nazis in Sniper Elite .*, I've been top of the pile on master mode on Rocksmith, But I'm also a crypto hardware engin
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I'm vaguely aware of what it was, but don't see how it would ever relate to mine or really anyone's enjoyment of video games.
Well... Since you asked (sorta): a large part about it is related to the lack of any sort of integrity among games journalists. This impacts your enjoyment of games by influencing what games you hear about and play, and which games make money and thus which developers make further games. It also influences developers in a slightly more subtle way - aspects of really popular games will work their way into other games as developers play them and possibly enjoy those parts, or possibly just think that includin
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Yeah, just like feminists should just make their own games and not malign gamers not interested in playing their type of games as misogynists? Why the continued vitriol?
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Gamer Gate Why ? (Score:2, Informative)
So, next time you get death threats against you and your family, I hope everyone dismisses you as a low-life playing the "victim card". Grow the fuck up.
It Remains a Journalism Scandal. Deal With It. (Score:4, Insightful)
But no. Because the perpetrators were extreme leftists, they're afraid that the scandal might give folks like Fox News and Limbaugh political ammo*, so there was a complete media blackout, the likes of which I've never seen before (not a SINGLE article detailing the corruption, on ANY tech/gaming site, for a week). Another part of the blackout was blanket censorship in user forums/comments, up to and including reddit and--no bullshit--4chan. IMO this censorship of users merely discussing the scandal is still the most oppressive (and damning) anti-GG measure of all.
And then when the blackout didn't work, they colluded in a synchronized shotgun blast of articles to slander their core audience and intimidate any dissenters among them. The long-running smear campaign that began with the "Gamers are Dead" articles continues to this day, and the popularity of Gamergate is the long-running response to it. Every criticism and call for integrity is met with completely irrelevant accusations of misogyny and right-wing motivations. Gamers are (rightly) astonished and appalled to see corruption defended so vigorously (and uniformly).
And now that the smear campaign isn't working either, anonymous threats are used as an excuse to again slander the movement (this time as terrorists) and completely ignore the corruption. So of course as the smear campaign ramped up, the popularity of Gamergate ramped up accordingly--I think it's over 100K tweets per day now. And the gaming press, having addressed almost none of its ethics issues (to say nothing of its contempt for the gaming community), regularly feigns disbelief that Gamergate hasn't "burned out" yet in one-sided opinion pieces that, if anything, more than prove the need for the movement.
The crazy thing is that Gamergate itself is largely leftist. I am right-wing on many issues, but I've been impressed by (and learned something from) the integrity of the vast majority of left-leaning individuals in Gamergate. They just want journalism they can trust. They want the bad eggs removed, even if the bad eggs share many of their political stances. They understand that circling the wagons to protect "the cause" and "do good work" is likely to result in far more harm to the cause in the long run.
I see some of the mainstream media has now taken notice, and is just as happy as the tech press to pretend the journalistic lapses and cover up never happened, and to slander Gamergate as right-wing misogynist terrorists, all to support the invented narrative. It's an all too familiar story to those of us who've seen the mainstream media portray DVD ripping as grand theft auto, net neutrality as communism, or Jack Thompson as a defender of morality. But in this case, unbelievably, even here on Slashdot there hasn't been a Gamergate article yet that doesn't go out of its way to frame the whole issue in terms of misogyny and harrassment (much less an article that's pro- or even neutral). Is slashdot politically motivated to misrepresent this issue? The question is moot, because all those articles got 700-1200 replies each, so the clickbaiting is motivation enough. As far as we know, slashdot's editors are kicking themselves for not praising Jack Thompson years ago as a hero activist.
* not an invalid fear, but you have to cross that bridge when you come to it. If you try to pre-emptively murder the truth then you get no sympathy when it blows up in your face.
Re:It Remains a Journalism Scandal. Deal With It. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no journalism scandal.
You have:
1. GamerGate nuts focussing on a developer who an ex-boyfriend with "issues" claimed was sleeping with journalists to get better reviews. Turned out the journalist has never written about any of the developer's games. GG participants changed subject, claimed the issue was her sex life (who the hell cares? Jesus!). So: SCANDAL ONE: NOT ABOUT JOURNALISM.
2. GamerGaters then get upset that a "feminist" has written an editorial claiming that the games industry is catering for a non-existent market if they insist on aiming games at some kind of crude stereotype the industry refers to as a "gamer". GGers rant, rave, call feminist names, a minority make death threats with mixed reactions from the GG "community" - some condemnation, but plenty of victim blaming - and even persuade Intel to drop advertising with said publication. No hint anyone in industry paid for article, no hint article bettered anyone financially beyond advertising dollars and author's royalties. Article very clearly an earnestly and honestly expressed opinion. SCANDAL TWO: NOT ABOUT JOURNALISM.
3. With women developers in particular feeling that the viciousness of the campaign against the feminist in #2 crossed the line frequently into misogyny, and with many also concerned that anyone expressing a pro-diversity point of view was being labeled, as an insult, by the term "Social Justice Warrior", some start to speak out. One, who had even been told by a GameGater that if she didn't like games she should go off and write her own (she, uh, does) retweeted an amusing image meme making fun of some of the more bizarre quotes and positions she's been challenged by. Within days she's the victim of serious death threats, and has to flee her home with her family. GamerGaters generally answer that (1) it wasn't us, (2) we don't believe in that kind of thing, and (3) she was asking for it. In this case, no journalism is involved. SCANDAL THREE: NOT ABOUT JOURNALISM.
So, there are the THREE major events in GamerGate industry. Not one involves journalism, albeit the first kinda did for the 30 seconds it took to discover that while a journalist was involved, no journalism took place.
It's not about journalism. It never was. Stop pretending otherwise. And if you're going to pretend it is, choose a new hashtag, and start tweeting stuff about, you know, actual journalism scandals. Clue: the first time you tweet some whine under that hashtag about "SJWs", you've probably stopped talking about journalism.
Re:It Remains a Journalism Scandal. Deal With It. (Score:4, Informative)
From everything I've read about the subject:
The journalist did mention her game. It wasn't a review but was definite positive exposure for a game that would not have gotten if they were not close friends. The reason her sex life became an issue was that it seemed to involve a lot of journalists and marketing people. Conflicts of interests and what not. The sex aspect was central but not because of the sex; more the close personal relationships (which sex is). Of course there were a lot of jokes about it. Additionally there was a bunch of stuff about journalists funding games and judges from some indie game competition having monetary reasons to want certain games to win.
Is your second point about the 10 or so articles put out by separate publications that totally aren't colluding to write their own narrative declaring that "gamers are dead" and everyone that disagrees with them is part of that group? I can see why you think that's not about journalism... Or is it about the mailing list they were all a part of discussing stories and what to print?
The interesting thing is those female developers all seemed to have friendships with the people implicated in the whole ordeal. Other female developers and gamers that weren't part of that same friend-group don't seem to share your one-size-fits-all-women mentality. Lady makes fun of people but it's harassment when they responded and made fun of her? How do you expect people to respond when you accuse them of something they didn't do. Should they not say "we didn't do that"? None of the threats have been shown to come from this junk at all. In fact, from what I've read any identified threats have come from third-party assholes just trying to stir shit up. It is always advised not to advertise death threats because that just gives the threatener what they want and encourages more but a few of these women seem more interested in broadcasting their threats than reporting them to the police. Is this what you mean by "they're asking for it"?
The SJW thing in ancillary to the journalism. The journalists happen to be part of the "SJW" clique and used trigger words like "misogyny" to get people's brains to shut down so they could deflect blame. The whole thing has a striking similarity to the "donglegate" fiasco from a few years back.
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Brianna Wu: *retweets meme*
GamerGaters: *dox her, send multiple violent rape & death threats*
Man, what a double standard those SJW's have, calling the latter "harrassment" and not the former! It's clear that they're of the same scope and intensity, right?
Re: It Remains a Journalism Scandal. Deal With It. (Score:2, Informative)
Literally identical death threats - word for word ignoring names and addresses - were sent to GamerGate supporters.
Weirdly you've never heard about those and no one "had to flee their house" over them, probably because they were directed at men who are used to the crap you get on the Internet.
The death threats are coming from trolls who want to smear gamers and promote drama. Drama that Brianna Wu was promoting as well, up until the same trolls targeting GG got her too.
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I don't want to understate that doxing is wrong but there is a difference between a dox of a person that wants to stay anonymous and one that uses their real name and has all of their personal info out in the open.
The double standard is that "gamergate" is supposed to constantly denounce all these things that aren't coming from any of the main voices (or that can be pinned to any of the voices at all) yet you have prominent people in the implicated media companies recommending contacting people's employers
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Literally every time anyone says "I don't A, but B", they mean B but are just too cowardly to come right out and say it.
So why don't you go and take your concern elsewhere and fuck off, you misogyny apologist.
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And of course that would have to be " ... they mean A".
Fuck it. I'm out of this discussion, the stupidity is catching.
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You seem like a rational and easy to deal with person. Not inflammatory in the slightest.
But I'm glad you made this post so some people here at Slashdot can see exactly how "misogyny" is used to shut down people's brains and how it has been tacked on to "gamergate". Repeat a lie enough times and people seem to think there must be at least some truth to it.
I am a "misogyny apologist" (lol) for not siding 100% with journalists and hence lumped in with the "rampant" misogyny. The journalists did behave in une
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BTW, anybody who's not an SWJ should be ashamed of that fact (and won't get into Christian paradise as the Christ was crucified for being a SWJ)... but I'm not sure that living-room SWJ* are not worst than those who do not even pretend to care.
(*) How do you translate "guerillero de salon"?
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Oh for the love of... isn't it awfully convenient how when something negative is done, it's somehow not done by the group? So tell me, how does one become part of Gamergate? Is there an initiation ceremony, certifications, physical qualification, etc? Of course not, only think you need to do is to post something in the name of the 9 letter hashtag. So, yea Gamergate is a crazy easy thing to be part of, and as a result, it's partially made up of legit crazies and trolls. Just accept that and move on. Even gr
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It's. Not. About. Journalism.
Just because you keep saying that doesn't make it true.
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That's why y'all are harassing the women, and not the corrupt journalists, right? The entire movement has been spearheaded by misogynists from the very beginning.
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Re:Gamer Gate Why ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Except for those basement-dwelling gamergate scumbags, who decided to act out what they were being accused of.
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Yeah because political corruption on a grand scale should be ignored, right?
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Except for one thing, they don't experience discrimination, certainly not at the 'epidemic' levels stated by Anita and friends. These are the same kinds of lies spouted by that inane 'itsonus.org' campaign. In fact, most gamers don't give a shit at all what you are, as long as you play well. Online gaming is a great equalizer in a lot of ways. The only people who get shit on along race/sex boundaries are people who make a point of telling everyone and then behaving in ways that draw ire. All that does i
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I have one question for them: If they have so much proof of gender discrimi
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Exactly. I was modded troll for questioning the narrative. Whose worse known for this? The gamer community or the 'social justice warriors'? Who is censoring who? The anti-gamergate sites: polygon, RPS, kotaku, arstechnica, and even 4chan are censoring any talk about this, and have done so from the beginning. The 'journalists' from these sites colluded with each other on a 'gamejournopros' mailing list for years. Search it out if you want. Several of the people working for these sites have had outright
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I don't see any links to stories regarding lawsuits over employment discrimination.
Watergate vs. all other -gates (Score:2)
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List of scandals with "-gate" suffix [wikipedia.org]
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I agree it's a label that's been thoroughly abused. That doesn't mean that it's a good idea to always discount what's inside.
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Which group are you talking about, the "journalists" or the "gamers"?
But you're right. Basically the entire thing is fake. The whole thing about "gamers sending devs death threats" is actually just a bunch of trolls from Something Awful who aren't even involved trying to play each group against each other for lulz. (I'd link to the thread, but once they got caught them sending identical death threats to both "GGers" and "anti-GGers", they deleted it.)
Unfortunately people fell for it, so we got a bunch of st
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Nope, it is not. Not by any stretch. Gamergate is based around made up 'issues' as an excuse to attack people who point out the rampant sexism.
Ganmergate is a bunch of people who realize the industry is changing and they don't like change.
They use propaganda, lies, and threats to push an ideological agenda.
They are a hate group.
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Let's keep this simple: Don't be a dick to people and obey th
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The problem is what one person considers friendly trashtalk another considers 'being a dick', so enforcing subjective rules like that just gives people opportunities to abuse the enforcement system and become dicks themselves. I still think the "grow a thicker skin and stop crying" is the better cultural attribute to cultivate. Secure, mentally healthy people don't let names bother them to the point where they need 'trigger warnings,' nor do they take hyperbolic troll comments as life threatening.
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Yeah those people who 'point out rampant sexism' are claiming victimhood to shield themselves from criticism. This is no different than democrats who race bait anyone who criticizes their positions (republicans used to do this with 'christian shaming' back in the day). Sarkeesian's videos have been thoroughly debunked at a logical and factual level (it's not hard to do). The whole thing blew up because of the evidence of journalist, site, and network collusion to push this narrative. The sites that allo
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I think it gained the traction it did because it mirrors the same politics at a societal level. Also, there are those who've been saying "no one cares" to shame others away from it.
Not an April Fools joke? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wait, so you're telling me that Goat Simulator was NOT an April Fools joke? Wow... there sure are a lot of fools out there.
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Goat Simulator's actually quite a lot of fun. Maybe not $10 worth of fun, but if you want something that's fun to screw around with for an hour or so, it's actually quite fun.
Especially when you find out you can combine powers like "summon minions," the jetpack, and the black hole.
Re:Not an April Fools joke? (Score:4, Funny)
I played with it for a while, was initially amused and then got bored.
But my 5 year old grandson loves it and keeps coming back. It's the game on which he finally cracked the WASD/Mouse thing, which is a pretty important life skill in my book.
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I use the mouse lefty, and the keyboard with the right. Arrow keys for motion, and a Rosewill RK-9000 mech keyboard, wired for PS2.
USB limits you to 6 key presses per transfer.
PS2 is 'all key presses get sent' 200 times a second in hardware with a decent mobo.
I have every key programmed for something, and I've been using some of the main ones for >30 years now.
I had to learn a new whole set of "fast functions" when Crysis came out; adding cloaking, armor, and all really was hard to do for a bit.
A side ef
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Nah, the entire point is just to play and laugh your ass off. Skating games are actually (nominally) about doing cool tricks and racking up points, and less about "oh my god I blew up this gas station and launched through a house!"
I hate this strategy of justifying exploitation! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's too easy to justify grueling jobs with bad work conditions and inadequate compensation by saying "Oh but the people who take them do the work out of loooove!" We do the same thing with teachers: Their jobs suck, their hours suck, their pay sucks, they deal with absurd bullshit, but all that is ok because allegedly, "they loooove kids and receive intrinsic rewards from their work."
We don't think this way about accountants or dentists. We don't expect them to loooove replacing fillings or mastering actuarial tables. We pay them so that their jobs are worthwhile even without the love. And I wish we would apply this standard to all jobs. A coding job where you produce games should be compensated like a coding jobs where you produce financial software, or anything else.
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On the contrary, when a job is paid too much, people are doing it for the sake of money and not because they love to do it. Think of the politicians. They don't care that much about ideas, they are into opinions, and more favorably the ones that will get them the cash. That's why we get all these crappy laws.
Think of a fireworker paid a million dollars. At that rate, you'll get a bunch of real assholes that will do anything to get the job because of the money, but when the day comes they have to risk their
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A job is done correctly iff the guy in charge is happy with his job done correctly.
This is a reliable way to fuck up a software project
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Please explain.
From my experience in the software industry, good managers are worth their weight in gold.
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Teachers are not easily replaceable, and yet for the work they do their compensation is abysmal.
Their problem is a different one. There's many factors involved as to why people become teachers, and why they stay in the profession. Simply though, they stay because of job security, and the knowledge/fear that changing careers into a different profession would be very hard (and in the short-term at least involve a pay cut).
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Purely supply and demand. The amount of people who go in computer science or what have you to start making games is crazy. Stupid mini-games aside, the effort/knowledge/skill it takes to make even an average game is absurd compared to most other type of applications, yet programmers flock to that industry in droves. That lets companies be more picky.
This is in contrast to average, more business-oriented fields (law, banking, data, etc), that can be interesting if you're into that stuff, but doesn't have the
Passion vs. paying yoru dues (Score:2)
From the article: "In both cases, the developers suggest the best strategy is to make games they're passionate about." But in order to make games you're passionate about, sometimes you have to "pay your dues" to the incumbents by developing games you're not passionate about in order to gain access to platforms suitable for games you're passionate about.
Startup studios not staffed by long-time veterans of the mainstream video game industry have been limited in what platforms they can code for: either PC (
Gamergate is NOT about defining "gamer" (Score:4, Informative)
It's about unethical journalists. And those same journalists have been trying for weeks now to deflect this focus away from them and pretend it's about sexism, changing gamer culture, etc. so they themselves don't have to answer for a decades-long games journalism tradition of "journalists" being in bed with the very companies they're supposed to be covering (through advertising, bribes, press releases disguised as "previews," etc.)
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I don't know what GamerGate was when it started. It may have been a positive movement, it may have been a staged attack by a small minority, it might have been about boiling discontent against games journalism which has been corrupt since 1970.
What it is now is the worst dregs of the internet and their corrupt counterparts having a shit slinging match to see who can hit the bottom of the barrel fastest. There are no good actors here. They have moved on to other things, and left the garbage to rot.
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But is this still a thing? (Score:2)
I'm not asking rhetorically, I honestly don't know, I don't follow the gaming press much. I don't see how they can have enough influence to be worth paying off.
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Remember all the hype for Destiny before it's release? It was all bought and paid for with Bungie's HUGE ad-buy budget (we're talking north of $100 million spent just for the hype alone).
Then, a week or two after release, all those same magazines (IGN, Gamespot, etc.) who were two weeks earlier hyping Destiny as the GREATEST THING EVER in their "Previews" and "Games We're SUPER Psyched About!" sections sheepishly release mediocre reviews (too late for all their readers who already bought it based on all the
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This is just you growing up and realizing video games pre-order has no value and is just a way of getting money from suckers. This has always been true. A couple of times a year this happens and each time a whole new batch of gamers is rudely awoken to this fact.
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But only when a game designer's jilted ex-boyfriend posts hearsay about it. AAA publishers were doing worse shit all the times but there was no uproar of this intensity. Now Gamergate is about fueling a false persecution complex and attacking anyone who points out how horrible they're being.
No, "gamergaters" instantly made it
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But only when a game designer's jilted ex-boyfriend posts hearsay about it. AAA publishers were doing worse shit all the times but there was no uproar of this intensity.
You must be too young to remember the uproar over the Kane & Lynch/Gamespot [arstechnica.com] incident from a few years back. There have been plenty of other similar explosions over the years, and none of them involved sexism that I recall. But you keep believing all the embarrassed game journalists who keep saying "The ethics of game journalism are just fine, no need to...HEY LOOK OVER THERE, IT'S SEXISM!!!!"
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I don't, probably because it wasn't as rage-filled and rooted in misogyny as this roundabout is.
They weren't nearly as hateful or accompanied by vitriolic attack campaigns against small handfuls of individuals who had the temerity to point out the piss poor behavior of those on the "gam
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But y'all didn't hold GameSpot's feet to the fire over Kane&Lynch. You whinged a little bit, and threatened to boycott GameSpot, but really nothing happened.
Apparently a journalist mentioning a game written by somebody he knows is much worse than, you know, a triple-A studio buying positive reviews. And the appropriate response is to attack the developer, and not the journalist.
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If your concern in life is ethics in video game journalism, you got serious problems.
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I'm not saying it's *my* concern. Frankly, I just assume that every single game "journalist" is nothing more than a paid shill for whatever company happens to be buying ads that week. But it *is* the major concern of most of the gamergate crowd. And they're being unfairly slandered as just a bunch of misogynists and fascists by the very "journalists" who have every reason to distract their readers away from the real issue.
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If your concern in life is ethics in video game journalism, you got serious problems.
if your concern in life is dismissing other people's concerns in life, you need to get a life
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It was never about journalist. The original claim, that a female indie developer slept with a journalist in exchange for a favourable review, has been proven to be false. The review doesn't exist. The journalist in question never reviewed any of her games. He mentioned one in a list and wrote an article that mentioned her in coverage of an event, but both those things happened before they were involved. It's all complete bullshit.
There are issues in games journalism, but GameGate has never been about any of
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Say what? (Score:1)
Labor of love? Goatse simulator? You are freaking me out.
It is downright shameful... (Score:2)
The developers, artists, and even the QA staff love their jobs and work very hard. It is the evil publishing companies with bad management and evil treatment of the staff that needs to change. Publish a new game and lay-off 75% of the staff. The creatives quit and move on. Happens all the time. How anyone would want to work in the game industry is a wonder, if they do work in the industry many quit after the first ship-date.
The indie market is different. I am talking about the mainstream classic game