joshwent

Yup.

These concepts always baffle me a bit when they're discussed on a site that exists specifically to tell us about the quality of new games. I (like most others) thought Colonial Marines looked awesome from the demo and trailers. Then I read reviews, watched the QL, and clearly saw that the game in my eager imagination was not the game they released... so I never bought it.

It's pretty damn simple. No "trust" necessary. Just don't buy a thing if you know nothing about it.

The dude who owns Uber seems like kind of a dick... but as far as their drivers go, they're just regular people. Not to mention the crazy awesome old school video game van than Dan talked about randomly getting through Lyft.

And you can be pretty sure about the quality of your driever by checking their reviews. Just go for it.

I'm not very hopeful about real world applications of Hololens, but it's a bit premature to criticise something that doesn't exist as a consumer product yet.

Here's her official little bloggie thing about it.

Call me Jaded (heh... heh) , but it's a bit sad to see her talking about "innovation" and "incubating new IP", when in the same breath she's talking about how rad the new Battlefield was and how psyched she is to make a fucking Star Wars game.

I'm sure she could help to make great, interesting stuff, but EA just seems like the completely wrong place to fight that fight.

@believer258: Yeah. I'm not gonna go so far as to flag the OP, but this kind of thing is on shaky copyright grounds at best.

Taking someone else's work, not adding anything personally to it (like the commentary and unique gameplay of a let's play), and distributing it for free might not be amoral necessarily, but it's something I don't personally support in this fashion, and it feels a bit weird promoting it on GB.

@dudeglove: It's 5am here, my girlfriend sick from a bad ear infection is asleep next to me, and I just burst out laughing out loud. Thanks. ;)

Really though, that board is a fucking gem. If I had more time to just learn how to play the fucking thing, I think CK2 might be one of my favorite games.

@pcorb: Be careful what you wish for. Provoke someone to focus on the detrimental effects of the CK series rather than MK, and accusations of, "reinforcing colonialist attitudes and misogynistic culture", won't be too far behind.

Just when I wanted to give this dude a little credit as a probably intelligent person who's released some games and maybe has something insightful to say about the process... he shows a bewildering display of willful ignorance and intolerance.

But what's really fucked up is how pathetically egomaniacal this baseless screed is.

The game industry actively breeds a group of belligerent hooligans for profit. And the longer this process continues, the tighter the vicious circle becomes: only violent games sell well, so only those get made, so only violent people buy games, and so on.

Translation: Our games didn't sell well because the industry forced gamers not to like them! Also, "only violent people buy them"? WTF?! Just unfathomably ignorant.

I could pick apart literally every sentence of this nonsense, but one part in particular is deeply (to begrudgingly borrow a terrible term) problematic.

Whether violent people are attracted to games or games arouse violent emotions is irrelevant. Anyone who has ever been attacked by a gamer lynch party knows that a certain number of people who play antagonistic and violent games are aggressive, intolerant, reactionary, misogynist, and so on.

In other words, it doesn't even matter if games contribute to some player's violent urges or not. The fact that some people who are violent also play violent games proves that those games probably affected them and games need to change to prevent that.

For any rational person, and certainly anyone involved in games enough to be on this site, that concept is fundamentally ridiculous. But it's that exact same flawed rationale that castrated the comic book industry in 1955.

Frederick Wertham, an adolescent psychologist went on a personal crusade against comic books and their role in contributing to the "juvenile delinquency problem" in the US in the 50's. He was originally spurred to action when he discovered that almost all of the violent children he interviewed read comics. What he failed to acknowledge is that at that time, almost all children read comics (yes, even girls).

It doesn't take an "intellectual" to understand that correlation isn't causation, but Wertham was able to seduce the parents of post-war America into believing that these trashy publications were destroying the country, and worse, hand the government a flawless way to appear to protect children by doing nothing more then censor art. Everybody wins!

Except that we all lost. Comics for adult audiences were censored into oblivion (this especially included anything racially diverse or sexually mature), and the industry as a whole was basically retarded to the point where the best stuff the largest companies can reliably publish even to this day are the same toothless superhero stories that made it past the censors 60 years ago.

I could go on, but I'm sure I don't have to. People here are smart enough to instantly see through this bullshit.

It's just deeply depressing that apparently the even more knowledgeable folks at Gamasutra... aren't.

Exactly. But that's the whole problem.

It's an endless downward spiral. Alternative party candidates have no chance of a winning president in 2016, without a doubt. But when that justification is used to exclude them from these kind of discussions, especially in the media, it serves nothing but to ensure the 2 party reality forever. It's the same flawed reasoning that lead the Presidential Debate Commission to have Green Party candidate Ralph Nader literally dragged out of one debate in 2000 (which was possibly the US's closest presidential election in history, fwiw.).

Not to mention how governmental policies nationwide are blatantly stacked against inclusion of alternative candidates being able to run at all. In Philadelphia (where I live), for example, any non Dem or Rep candidate for any level of office was required to show proof of up to 4 times the number of signatures in favor of a candidate than any from the "big 2" were. And even then, those signatures can be legally questioned which leads to a lawsuit where the party must prove that all of their signatures are legit, or they can be all dismissed, forcing the party to start from scratch. Then take into consideration the meager campaign budgets that third parties have to fund this stuff, before they can even start running for office, compared to the literal billions of dollars that the Dems and Reps get easily every year.

(just to be totally transparent, at the beginning of this year, PA has made some strides to level that particular playing field, and after numerous lawsuits costing hundreds of millions of dollars, the Libertarian Party is now actually recognized as a party of the state meaning that their requirements will be the same as the Dems and Reps. The Green Party, and every other party that can't get enough cash to waste on lawsuits forcing the state to recognize their existence, still face the same absurd barriers.)

Anyway, that's just one example of the many about how the "they don't have a chance" excuse serves to cover up systematic injustices that Dems and Reps rely on to maintain power.

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For a more focused point, the benefit of these kind of issues-first quizzes is that the person doing it might be surprised by the results, and therefore possibly question their party allegiance, or at least their stance on some issues related to their favored candidates that they took for granted. When these quizzes artificially limit those revelations, they limit that personal growth and exploration.

My top two matches from that specific quiz were:

Rand Paul 77%

Bernie Sanders 71 %

That tells me nothing at all, and neither of those two candidates represent my political views as a whole. I might be into some weird genetic combination of those two folks, but I can't tolerate Paul's resistance to gay rights and vagueness about abortion access, and to me all of Sander's well-intentioned policies to help the poor, improve education, and strengthen business will have the exact opposite effects. In short, though both of those candidates may mirror my thoughts on around 70% of major issues, I'd be loathe to vote for either of them with the crucial other 30%.

Were I less educated, or even just had less free time to do the work of searching for any alternatives, I may just settle for Paul and hope that he focuses on shit he says that I agree with, rather than shit he says that I'm disgusted by, or see that those two diametrically opposed people were both high in my results, and just shrug with a disillusioned smirk... and not vote at all. (which is clearly the only resort of hundreds of millions of people in the US. Since even during a presidential election just a little more than half of all eligible voters actually wield that power.)

I also want to make it clear, I'm really not trying to attack you personally, and my previous post was unnecessarily snarky. But hopefully this way too long reply at least shows that I'm very passionate about access to the democratic process, and the demolishing the walls that we all subconsciously erect in our minds keeping out any non-binary perspectives.

This country (if not the world) likes a boxing match. We like coke vs. pepsi, MS vs. Sony, etc. And that's ever more prominently lead us into a destructive quabble about the good/evil party saving/destroying the world, without giving any thought maybe they're both just expensive sugar water, and there might be a better choice somewhere else.

@darthorange: That "quiz" disregards any non Dem or Rep candidates. When you're promoting something that blatantly excludes certain people, you're actively inhibiting the democratic process.