#GamerGate News

Will they study the sole GG related case of somebody being driven to a suicide or nah?

Journalists demonstrate that they are unbiased by suspending the editor who has said that they are biased

Journalists have investigated themselves and said that journalists have done nothing wrong

Vote with your wallet

Amazon is going to face a trial over removing from people's libraries movies they did buy

In the counter-spirit of Sweet Baby, I've decided to start Sick Bro. I'll be consulting video game companies on how they could make their games even cooler. Games that make you go 'That's Sick, bro'.

Goals include:

Stay tuned for kickstarter information.

Make it 35% and add skateboards in somehow and I'm in.

Skateboards! Jesus Christ, how could I forget skateboards.

This is just recreating the 90s video game scene

Correct.

Where do I invest?

There are few times in life you will feel real schadenfreude. This is one of them. It seems the "message" people got a good dose of their own medicine.

They're a PR disaster and it's been entertaining to watch the self-destruction.

What's been going on with them?

A fun summary when you have the time:

I expect a very curious amount of very high places to start running damage control to Sweet Baby Inc, some passive aggressive agritprop twitters, tumblrs and other social media to throw shade at, "all the right-wing not-real-gamers that aren't actually welcome in gamer spaces," and a bunch of astro turfed retellings of these events like a bunch of nasty Nazis ran around hunting for Jewish influence on a big crazy posterboard.

that's about what happened last time, and they made damned sure if anyone mentioned gamergate and didn't describe it as "a right-wing reactionary take that came about for NO REASON other than hatred of progressives and girls and black people", they'd be disregarded as right-wing monsters.

You called it

They made sure to include gamergate in there I imagine.

Kindergartens, please stop affecting policies.

SJWs are just some loony university kids, they said.

Personally, I find it funny that modern creators are bigger puritans than the 90s Fox.

My hottest take re: gaming is that soulsborne-inspired “games should be hard” shit is the worst brain poison to affect gamers since gamergate.

"diehard" "hardcore" gamer fans have surprisingly horrible media literacy and game design understanding. its fucking wild. Just a weird wank off for games being hard?? I can't even begin to understand their angle

yeah i'm a casual player (and even then i mostly put my time into sandbox games) and i tend to struggle and get angry with really hard bosses, this hit especially hard when i first played ultrakill, my first shooter game ever

ultrakill isn't too bad at it, to be fair, but it seems like gamers want every single "hard" game to be a glorified boss rush with regular levels and enemies acting like filler content

also while we're at it can we get rid of "gamer rage" where it's normal to get extremely destructive and scream slurs if you lose a round of cod or something, it's one of the two main reasons why i avoid most multiplayer games

The point of the soulsborne format is to give the player a sense of accomplishment by presenting them with an obstacle which they are initially incapable of surmounting, then allowing them to learn how to overcome it, without ever reducing the obstacle. It triggers the reward response the human brain reserves for developing a new skill, in the space of minutes or hours rather than the weeks or months that it would take in real life.

Pulling that off requires an incredibly delicate balancing job on the part of the developers. It needs to be easy enough that the majority of players will figure it out before they give up, but if you make it easy enough that a significant fraction of players are winning on their first attempt, the entire reward loop falls apart and you end up with something that's just tedious.

Obviously this doesn't apply to all, or even the majority of games. The 'reward' in most video games is to progress the story, or to develop a parasocial relationship with the characters, or to go through a power fantasy, or to have an outlet for creativity that would take impractical amounts of resources in the real world, or a thousand other things, and stopping to re-do a fight detracts from the experience by delaying your payoff without adding to it.... but soulsborne games don't have those. The characters are two dimensional. The story barely exists. You build nothing. If you take away the challenge, there's basically nothing left.

If you don't enjoy learning from failures and improving your own abilities over repeated attempts, this particular genre of games is simply not for you. If you want to win the first time, play one of the 90+% of games in which you're expected to win the first time. But when you fail the first time, or even the first ten times, that doesn't mean the game is too hard for you: it means the game is working as intended. Every time some douchebag tells you solution to a particular fight is to just 'git gud', that's because they spent at least three hours hammering away at the boss you're asking about.

I love it when someone comes out of the woodwork to reinforce my point like this.

#that so much writing wasted on something that fundamentally is not important

Guess what? You're allowed to completely ignore the existence of this genre!

But you're not allowed to tell the millions of people who like it, nor the thousands of artists who have dedicated their lives to creating it, that it should not exist.

And if you have no idea what the purpose is behind a design decision, you have no basis for claiming that it's the wrong decision.

I mean the fact they even brought up Gamergate at all, let alone as a comparison to people telling them for acting entitled over a genre that they're free to ignore should tell you that you're not dealing with someone with an IQ higher than that of a vegetable.

They are removing his character arc where he gets girlbossed into stopping being a chauvinist because we have reached the point where a main character just needing such a lesson makes him too toxic.

Finally some good news.

I don't pirate stuff, but this sort of practice undermines ethical arguments against it.