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

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or is that an outdated notion?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.

ding-dong gate

just like saying that

there are a lot of legitimate axes to grind about the relationship between game scores and advertising/review copies/previews from publishers, and abt how publishers treat devs (e.g. crunch time and between-project lay-offs, although that recent story about one company making its between-project staff basically sit in a room and do nothing wasn't any more inspiring than lay-offs)

but GG have obv largely missed all these points and the ones they have picked up on are actually kind of annoying since a lot of them were written about by The Enemy (Kotaku, SJWs, L. Alexander) years ago and brought up as "you wanna talk about ethics? why aren't you talking about ..." bullet points by "anti-GG", largely to a bunch of "shut up and let's dig up dirt on women and the people who might have had brunch with them once"

I know all my posts itt are just me longwindedly pointing out the obvious and whining about being a woman who used to play Populous back in pre-historic times or w/e but y'know I'm an angry woman who used to play Populous a lotttt

PS I love shop talk, bring it on! there is a game company just round the corner from my work and sometimes I eavesdrop on them talking shop in the pub on a Friday evening and I love it. sadly they also can get very loud and talk about car engines all night which I do not like so much

pffffffft populous isn't a """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""Real""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" game

more like molypoo

e.g. crunch time and between-project lay-offs

haha. interestingly i am seeing a lot of studios take on the same approach as other industries -- a LOT of people hired on a contract basis... that way, no layoffs, you only employ people when you have work for them. i've never worked for contracts in my life so i dunno if this is a good or bad thing. i do know people who do it and they love it though. get paid more per hour, able to take on multiple contracts at once, able to take no contracts for a while if you want.

and re: crunch time... this comes down to planning i find. the two causes of crunch are poor planning and non-creative interference (e.g. being made to redo stuff arbitrarily). it almost always happens at this level, but it is getting a LOT better i think. i hope. i've heard of places that have managed to avoid it almost entirely (!). maybe they're unicorns tho.

of course gg doesn't give a fuck about any of these though, because workers' rights are not a fascist issue, which is also why all of the blame is on individuals and "activists" and not on the multibillion dollar orgs who are making the games or whatever. as if a blogger has more direct control on the content going into a game than the stakeholders of the publicly traded org making the game ffs.

minor weird GGer tic to look out for: equating hipsterism with "SJW"ism with SF/the bay area.

o_O

that one isn't that far off lol

That's just super old-school liberal-baiting right? These ~~~feminists~~~ at ~~~Berkeley~~~ etc. Funny in this context because ordinarily you'd think these techie characters would worship at the feet of Google etc.

Google is in Silicon Valley, doesn't count.

"they're just saying that to be popular" --> "they are popular" --> "they know how to be popular" --> "i wish i was popular" --> "i am so alone"

Nah, go for it on PC if you can, just for the ability to integrate mods & bug fixes

Offers a much better upgrade experience

Upgraded, rather

http://i.imgur.com/LmPND8x.jpg

I'm mystified by the intent and origin of this document

and why they thought they needed to put the word "actual" in the title

8chan presumably considers 4chan to be a nest of sjws at this point

pick list of new targets?

yeah I really can't tell what the point of that is or who it's aimed at

lmao @ "Actual Women"

Thank you, 4chan, for saving us from ersatz women in the videogame industry with this handy cheat sheet

video games can't be sexist look here are some women who make games

they make real games, not bullshit like depression quest or w/e