Why is casual racism/sexism more accepted in video games than other forms of media (these days)?

since I'm a self-loathing idiot, I read through the game review racket part

the logic is as follows:
- Game studios/publishers/backers put a lot of weight on the aggregate score Metacritic assigns a game
- Individual reviews shouldn't have scores that vary much according to a reviewer's opinions if it's an opinion on a topic they deem inessential to the gameplay (?!)
- These outlier reviews skew the scores and developers will be laid off and starving because one reviewer had an opinion different than other reviewers

It obviously falls apart in the middle. They're basically demanding all reviewers to fall in line, and placing the blame on reviewers instead of Metacritic or studios.

seriously this is some weirdo HUAC shit, esp the way they try to get people fired for their connections to "SJW"s

this kind of "silent majority" victimhood is reprehensible

i love how the conclusion is three paragraphs of vague non-committal high-school-book-report shit after 15,000 words of insanely detailed examination of women's twitter conversations (and a picture of geoff keighley)

It reads to an extent as a document of a power struggle in GamerGate, the dudes who are actually interested at least talking about journalism are clearly getting the upper hand a little but still need to pander to the base with some red meat about Quinn.

i saw #WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant was trending:

Woody ‏@XLRWoody 11h11 hours ago
#WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant have a discussion about journalistic ethics without being accused of being rapists #GamerGate

Abdullah Qutbeddeen ‏@AzapYourSaviour 22h22 hours ago
#WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant get Wil Wheaton to stop being such a censor happy bully and manchild. #GamerGate #NotYourShield

WIL WHEATON IS BEING SUCH A MANCHILD YOU GUYS

they don't realize ST:TNG is in re-runs

so metacritic basically just survives on its game section huh

remember when they tried book reviews

pretty sure the beat-metacritic-keep-your-job concept is over because a) fallout new vegas left a real bad taste in people's mouth and b) mc scores just aren't a good representation of commercial success as much as they were ~5y ago. so that's a stupid argument anyway.

this is basically about defending the purity of metacritic scores right?

― linda cardellini (zachlyon), Monday, October 13, 2014 6:30 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i didn't really know how realistic this was when i posted it

i guess it makes some sense, game review scores are about as uniform across publications as they can be

mostly because reviewers never consider content as being pliable like every other part of gaem

xp

i still see ppl putting tons of weight into mc scores. apparently there is a huge difference between a 75 and a 78 and an 81. like every single tick represents an entirely different tier.

so i work at a large software company and, when i venture out for lunch, hear dudes having serious discussions about video games as if this is not the most embarrassing thing in the world to do. even when i'm talking with someone irl about a game that i enjoy, i hate how impenetrable and ridiculous it sounds.

anyway, i can't help but wonder if any of these co-workers are #gg dudes (i hope not, and would prefer not to know if that were the case).

my understanding is that metacritic scores affect the bonuses of the programmers and can determine funding for future sequels
or is that an outdated notion?

that is as terrible as customer service reps begging you to rate them as 5s across the board, otherwise they fail their evaluations

Ehh, tbh talking abt games is not more impenetrable or silly than talking abt music or sports or stamp collecting or fiction, if someone else is into the same hobby it's a nice thing. Obv there are socially thoughtful and smooth ways of doing all these things, and there are rude and ill-motivated ones (one-upmanship, name-dropping, cliquishness, ego masquerading as conversation etc), but GG aside, i wd not shun game-talkers just for game-talking. I have, however, strenuously avoided eager-to-be-lik managers banging on abt the sweet assinations they got to do in Call of Duty or w/e, esp when foisted upon coworkers who obviously couldnt give a shit and were giving every signal that they wd prefer small talk to be about fishing, food, sports or the weather even.

xp it does, but pinning the blame on individual reviewers to maintain a game's Metacritic score is so massively wrongheaded

watch yourself jordan #ggamerhaterz

this is a two year old story so maybe outdated but i don't remember hearing anything further about it... probably those dastardly game journalists up to now good
http://kotaku.com/5893595/why-are-game-developer-bonuses-based-on-review-scores
m@tt? u know more?

if bob dylan gets less than a 93 on a new boxset or whatever he has to spend an hour in the bad boy corner and no treats

not that i'm giving that argument any credence because as mh points out it falls apart in the middle

tbh no #gamergate people give an actual shit about dev bonuses

owners and managers of dev shops give a 3rd party website and its aggregation method absurd amount of power over the compensation of their employees, and the problem is... critics.

i do wonder why they would eschew the traditional bonus method based on sales

i'm sure that's part of the equation!
my guess is that shareholders want the simplest and easiest take on "critical success" and view metacritic as an inarguable method of judging that metric

It's funny how Fallout: New Vegas came up, since that dev seems to be the first one to publicly reveal the practice... of course, that game had plenty of notorious launch bugs which is clearly why the review scores were slightly down for an otherwise well-received game

yeah the one example we have had great narrative content but got knocked for crunchy gameplay problems

bringing up that mess (as well doritogate, gerstmann-gate, etc.) into #gamergate is pretty disingenuous in any case
Fear of Skirts was what blew this up

my understanding is that metacritic scores affect the bonuses of the programmers and can determine funding for future sequels
or is that an outdated notion?

― So beautiful cow (forksclovetofu), Thursday, November 13, 2014 12:07 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the example they use there is FNV... which is the most extreme example i've ever heard of. i know that some companies were doing this back then (game came out in 2010) when people were actually far more reliant on metacritic scores to affirm their purchases. it's a lot less the case these days -- i may be completely misremembering this but i think i saw a study showing sales vs MC scores from ~6 years ago vs ~1 year ago and people just aren't doing it anymore.

using critical success to measure success from a shareholder standpoint is only useful so far as you think a good critical score is going to sell more copies, because in the end it's about numbers -- granted i haven't talked to people at other companies about this in a long time so maybe it's different elsewhere but at least from where i am (4yo studio) mc scores didn't factor into bonuses -- and if they did they didn't factor into fucking 100% of your bonus, that's bananas. but look at fallout 3. that game sold insanely because of the MC SCORE... so it made sense to them? i guess? especially while essentially outsourcing their sequel and looking for ways to hold the devs' feet to the fire to maintain their "quality" benchmark? but let's say they got some other company to make SKYRIM 1.5: THE WINTER GLEN CHRONICLE or whatever... the "85+ on mc" rule would be cuckoo in 2014. more important shit like quality dlc, live support, metrics, anything that gives the game a long tail... that's the shit pubs care about now.

that sounds right
the importance of fallout 3's metascore was mostly that fans of the original games were scared it was not gonna be as good or properly reverent to the game's history and I think the critical consensus drove a lot of sales

of course FNV was way more reminiscent of 1+2 contentwise

i keep writing things and deleting them out of irrational fear can we googproof this thread thx

F3 mc score was also important because a huge segment of the gaming pop had never played (or maybe even heard of) fallouts 1-2 and they needed to prove that yes, you, non-fallout-player, should play this fallout game

...can you imagine if they called that game fallout 3 now? there's no way it'd happen again... not because of fan outcry, but because it's a stupid idea to sequel a game instead of just subtitling it (now it'd be Fallout: DC or Fallout: New Earth or Fallout: Broken White House or Fallout: Where is Benjamin Franklin or something)

to clarify it's not stupid to put a number on a sequel, just stupid to do it when the game you're releasing has little to do gameplay-wise with its prequels and the prequels are unknown... once you have the formula, you throw numbers on the sequels (e.g. metal gear -> mg2 -> mg solid -> mg solid 2 -> ...etc)

the point is women are cool

well stick fallout in the title and you're gonna sell to 99% of a core cult audience which isn't a bad thing

and the ink spots ad was also genius

shld probably take the shop talk out of the making fun of nerds thred

Shop talk is interesting and less sad-making than GG!

no7 much 7o say reallyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

^7rue 7hat

(is 7here a 7hread)

there should be, somebody get on that

will do

*groan*

no pun intended :/

I didn't even see that pun, was referring to 77 but *double groan, backflip into eye roll*

I just found it interesting that the subject they're purporting this is about still has a narrative hole you could drive a truck through, and the only review they single out as a statistical outlier had reservations about possibly sexist content.

If it's not about people bringing critical social analysis to the table and it's actually about corrupt practices, then don't be so fucking transparent as to have your one example of a "bad review" be one that questions sexism

you're asking for displays of both good faith and intelligence there

I keep hoping one of these ding-dongs will prove me wrong

This gets back to the basic inability to define the "ethics" at stake though - like there is a huge wing of GG that will straightfacedly say that the ethical problem is including social content in reviews, because this is unfair to developers (the MC discussion above) or to the fans who just want the faaaaacts the objective faaaaaaaacts, how many pixelllllls how's the combaaaaaaaat etc. Ethics = checking your values, politics and education at the door when you start to write about a game. I mean, that's what they have talked themselves into so it is very hard to argue about the contradictions of citing the review that brings up sexism because in this worldview that is the point. I think this is also why they can see the blatant harassers as "extremists" and not just people on some completely different, parallel track that belongs properly to another hashtag: they are fighting the same fight, against the same people, but those guys are doing it too much or in the wrong way. This matters because it reveals - not news for this thread - that to be a GG "moderate" is a fiction or a delusion, or a very elaborate mental process of constantly erasing the previous steps in the evolving argument that led you to the current rhetorical tropes.

Even if you do divorce game reviewing from social critique: If you make a value judgment about a game's gameplay or art style, none of those judgments are based on facts. They're opinions just as much as any social criticism is. But for some reason the former are fine but the latter aren't?

we want some games with storylines and plots, but you can only say the plot is good or bad.