Shadowe

I joined OCR's forums over 20 years ago at this point, after having been a listener for some time as well. It's hard to believe it's been two whole decades already. The ups, the downs, the good, the bad, losing family members, nearly dying, getting married and discovering what it truly means to live... for over half of my entire existence on this planet OCR has been my life's soundtrack. Maybe there's a reason I wound up marrying a musician. How do you even begin to put that into words? What can I possibly say that could begin to hold a candle to that, to encompass the joy and solace music provided for half a human life? I guess all I can say is: Thank you, DJP. For everything.

The number one thing: Please for the love of all that is good in the world stick to real actual HTML links and pages designed for PC users. A 3 inch wide column of web 6.0 javascript with billboard sized text that never gives you any idea whether you actually clicked a link or not, whether something's loading or not, or whether the problem's on the far end or what is a nightmare.

So what do you want to call the attitude that a particular idea of what a UsEr ExPeRiEnCe should be is so important and valuable that the actual forum users and what they want simply don't figure into it? What is that if not elitism? It's true that OCR's forums aren't doing well but that's not because forums in general are dying. I'm part of some very active forums elsewhere that are even actively growing, and as Meteo Xavier said there are plenty more out there. The "paradigm" is fine, what's changed is that today people have almost limitless connectivity and the other forum I'm on thrives precisely because of that connectivity. Leadership there have made it a point to treat the forum first and foremost as a community. Give people a stake in something, make them feel like they have a say, and a sense of belonging and investment in that places' success will follow. Do the opposite, and the opposite happens. OCR's been dying a slow death going all the way back to unmod getting deleted, and your response pretty much proves why. When you tell people that the only thing you'll consider "good faith" is telling you what you want to hear after you do something your forum's users don't like you can't be surprised at the inevitable decline of your community. Tell people "my way or the highway" and they're going to wind up choosing the highway. Don't blame the "erosion of the paradigm", own your leadership's results.

If anyone had any doubts about the intentions of this or whether this thread was in good faith keep in mind this thread's being silently censored. I made a post that apparently cut way too close to home when I brought up elitist postmodernist designers treating users as a monetizable resource to be farmed and managed rather than respected and listened to. Let's be honest, this was never going to be a conversation. Feedback was never actually wanted, this was just an attempt at trying to placate users by pretending they had any voice at all. OCR's staff haven't been willing to listen to their users since they deleted unmod.

But User #63421, ninjawizardguruexperts who went to importantpomoartschool have informed us that this is Good Design(TM). They know what's best, not the users who actually use this forum. They assure us this decision will be a resounding success. After all when has a postmodernist hip attempt to strip features and control away from users ever gone over badly?

I've been around OCR since the logo was blue and I've got to be honest, I think you're being misled by the same UsErExPeRiEnCe clique that's behind most horrible UI decisions that actual users utterly despise. With social media and tech being the way it is today we're seeing more than ever an extreme gulf between what "experts" and self proclaimed thought leaders say customers and users want and the reality. You see this everywhere from phones to computers to pop culture, just compare the "critic" score to the user score on almost any major mainstream release on rotten tomatoes for the past decade.

Maybe I'm just a freak or something but I mean when I was 4 I had an NES with SMB1, SMB3, Adventure Island and a Sega Genesis with Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and a couple other games. Older games are hard as balls by todays standards but they were still games and still played by us back then. Children will rise, or not, to your expectations of them. They want challenges and genuine achievement rather than games that give you wins for free and make it all super easy for you. The first time I ever actually beat Sonic 3 entirely on my own was an incredible feeling. Remember we're the generation that grew up with childhood games like The Lion King and those insane moon logic LucasArts and Sierra adventure games. Nobody told us that was "too hard" so we just kept trying until we beat them. Kids have a superpower, limitless potential growth as long as nobody tells them what they're doing is impossible.

After the stunt they pulled stealing someone's decks with MTGO i'm never touching a digital wizards product.

Kinda reminds me of the "Movers" track from the Homeworld 2 OST

That's because Sarkeesian/McIntosh would deliberately curate comments to delete anything reasonable and leave only trolls. My answer to any claim of "objectification" is the same: Disprove the claim. If it's a legitimate concept and not a cry of "witch! communist!" then no one should have trouble naming a simple way to disprove the accusation something is objectifying. If there is no way to disprove an accusation then it isn't legitimate, it's witch-hunting and can be dismissed summarily.

Subterrania was this amazing objective based gravity-is-a-thing spaceship shooter, never played anything else like it. It was like a 2d Jungle Strike set in space that didn't suck. Then there was Crusader of Centy, which played something like a cross between a single character Final Fantasy, Metroid, and Streets of Rage. Gaiaraes was a kickass R-Type styled game where you could steal weapons from enemy ships. This game was long for a shmup too, and had the usual trippy level design complete with black holes and giant animals/people. Gain Ground was... Interesting. You got different characters with different weapons and the goal was to either eliminate all enemies on each screen or somehow get all your characters to the exit on each level. Infuriatingly difficult at times. General Chaos was also a tactical sorta-isometric game but you controlled a whole squad at once in a sort of turn based combat. Mega Turrican was a really long and artistically amazing sidescrolling platformer that was kinda like Ecco in hitting on some surreal/disturbing story tones told through level design. Ranger-X was another sidescrolling shooter but with the interesting twist that you controlled two different mechs simultaneously, which could interact with each other. The levels were generally somewhat non-linear and objective based. Robocop vs The Terminator was on the surface a plain old sidescrolling platformer/shooter, but there were a ridiculous number of weapons and once you uncensored the game with a cheat code things got a little crazy with blood and stripperrific outfits. Shinobi 3 is probably one of my favorite Genesis games, right up there with Sonic 3 & Knuckles. The art and music are great, the storyline conveyed surprisingly well through level design alone, and the gameplay is top notch. Imho it's one of those games that shows just how much a competent team can get out of the Genesis.

There's a case to be made for some clothing, particularly things like suits, where to a point quality and price go together. A bespoke canvassed suit will fit you perfectly and last far longer than an off the rack glued-together polyblend suit, but it'll also cost a hell of a lot more. I saved up for many years to buy a set of navy, charcoal, and black partially canvassed suits on sale at Brooks Brothers and comparing it my old Men's Wearhouse suit is like comparing a guitar bought at target to a custom american made fender.

I'm not going to buy the idea that it's oppressive but it's certainly cringy as fuck. I think someone was on something way stronger than acid to think this was a good idea.

Ziggy's not dead, he just went home.

Congratulations, you've just literally said Jack Thompson was right about everything and videogames make people violent and sexist despite literally all evidence we have showing otherwise. You're right about one thing though, there's nothing really to discuss with someone that holds a religious belief in the evil influence of media even when contradicted by the scientific evidence that it doesn't work like that.

It's ironic that you'll misappropriate the straw man fallacy while yourself moving the goalposts from "critique" to "freedom of speech". Especially given that the people you're defending here are so openly hostile to the very concept of free speech that they're both more than happy to publicly flat out say it should be dumped and have created an entire meme around mocking the idea of its existence. That said a straw man is a fabrication or misrepresentation (like what McIntosh writes into all of Anita's videos). Something that actually happened as described is by definition not a straw man. Sarkeesian/McIntosh themselves explicitly blame videogames for violence, sexism, "rape culture", and even mass shootings. They and their cult explicitly call for the censorship and outright banning of games they judge "problematic". They explicitly hold themselves up as impossible-to-disagree-with arbiters of morality, truth, and goodness. These are not "Straw men", they are real things that have actually been said and have actually happened. That's as un-straw as you can get. If you want a straw man look at this thread's title, or just watch any of FemFreqs videos. None of this is "critique". It's bigotry and cult worship wrapped in gender politics flavored sophistry. Unless you want to claim that "critique" doesn't need to have any basis in or even remote connection to truth or factualness in which case we've officially gone off the deep end of saying people can just make shit up and lie all they want. Again, things that have tangibly and provably happened by definition are not straw men. Maybe you missed the last year, or maybe you're just refusing to accept things that you find politically inconvenient, but the collusion of pretty much the entirety of the major players in gaming journalism is a matter of objective empirical record. The blacklisting, the intimidation, the collusion, everything but an explicit admission of criminal racketeering in indie game contests has been verified through leaks from GameJournoPros. It's not hyperbole when literally every major game news outlet puts out almost identical narrative-enforcing articles within hours of each other. It's not hyperbole or a straw man when we've literally got them admitting to repeated acts of collusion and narrative setting in private mailing lists. And it's patently a single cohesive narrative centered around the worship of their sainted professional victims.

The issue here is that's not what's happening. Critique is critique. It is not critique when someone holds themselves up as having a divine mandate to declare things objectively sexist, racist, and the cause of everything from rape to mass shootings. It is not critique when almost the entirety of someone's claims are provably misrepresentations if not outright fabrications, it is not critique when someone is simply saying "This is evil and must be banned", and it is most assuredly not critique when all of this is held as an objective truth that only racists and misogynists would dare disagree with. Claiming that depression quest is an inaccurate or even patronizing misrepresentation of depression and practically a non-game is simply incomparable to an entire industry of people zealously enforcing a single narrative from a single person that "X makes you a misogynist, and if you disagree you're part of the reason women are raped and abused and mass shootings happen". That's not critique, that's cult worship. Anita and the person that writes all her material and runs the twitter account (Jonathan McIntosh) are both more than happy to explicitly admit they want to see all games they don't like completely banned, and are more than happy to celebrate when games get pulled from shelves because of their half-truths and whole lies. They're not just knocking on that door, they're blowing it in with a breaching charge and storming the building.

Considering the people disputing her points literally can't even grab a beer without being forcibly evacuated by the police due to credible bomb threats I really don't think she's the one whose right to express themselves you should worry about. She's being bankrolled by intel, raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars, and is invited even to speak at the United Freaking Nations. Zoe Quinn is apparently getting into showbiz, is pulling in tons of money herself, and has thus far managed to avoid jail time for the multiple counts of perjury she's provably committed. Brianna Wu... well just check out the sweet motorcycle she bought with victimbux. They're all doing fine, I'd be more worried about the people who started at the level of losing their jobs, having their bank accounts or paychecks hacked, getting knives and syringes in the mail, and having dox up to and including the schematics of their homes posted online and have endured escalating violence now culminating in multiple forcible mass evacuations by law enforcement. Personally I find an abusive relationships or cults to be a much better metaphor. Religion as a metaphor works only in the sense of blind devotion in the face of facts. An abusive spouse on the other hand... they strip someone of all their self-worth, beat someone down to the point their entire identity is based around seeking their abuser's approval, control them through fear and violence, and brutalize them whenever they try to stand up for themselves or leave. Sounds exactly like tumblr and the toxicity it's brought to modern feminism.

There is an advantage in steering, it's easier to make very precise movements when you're pressing up against the edge of the control stick's range of motion than it is to do so by twitching left and right.

1. Knuckles the Echidna 2. Ristar 3. BJ Blazkowicz

You keep using that word, I don't... wait, no, nevermind it does.

So basically you admit that you're deliberately writing incomprehensible convoluted sentences for... why again? You're trying to make impossible to understand posts because you think the situation is confusing and therefore everyone deserves to be confused? And I'm not even going to touch that stuff about the distinction between two objectively definable and distinct groups being "arbitrary". You wouldn't happen to be a postmodernist would you? Because all of this is starting to sound a LOT like their "nothing truly means anything" rejections of an objective knowable truth. Lets try this a third time: My original comment was pointing out the double standard in this thread and elsewhere. That double standard is that gamergate is utterly excoriated for literally everything on the internet even when there's proof it wasn't gamergate (like with the GNAA and SomethingAwful trolls), while on the other hand the other side (GameJournoPros members and supporters) has been proven to publicly condone and even outright engage in not only more but more severe attacks. But unlike gamergate the GJP members and their supporters' proven behavior is barely even mentioned, let alone criticized, let alone to the absurdist levels of hyperbole thrown at gamergate. Your response to this has been to repeat what you now admit to be deliberately incomprehensible convoluted questions that as near as I can tell boil down to something I've never even said. As for what Sarkeesian/McIntosh, Quinn, and "etc" have experienced there are multiple statistical analyses proving objectively that 85-90% of all tweets directed at them are neutral at minimum ranging up to positive. If I were you I would be far more concerned about the real world violence and harm suffered by an extremely disproportionate number of gamergate supporters, which starts with people losing their jobs or having their income and utilities interfered with and escalates to multiple people nearly losing their lives in SWATting attacks or getting mailed knives, syringes, and dead animals. I realise it sounds absurd but it is literally the case that there is a group of people who have been proven to be colluding through a private mailing list (GameJournoPros) to engage in everything from blacklisting to bribery/payola and potentially criminally racketeering the IGF/Indiecade. This is an actual thing that has been verified even by the people on the list. These people, and the people that they're either extremely close friends and roommates with or have financial ties to (most often through patreon) have literally been writing provably complete and utter bullshit to smear the people protesting them for that very corruption. One of the most recent examples is one I just linked you to, a bunch of people wrote articles claiming Alanah Pearce had been harassed by gamergate. She publicly stated on twitter that there was no indication of that, and she was actually set up and then quote-mined. Similar things happened with the developers of "That Dragon Cancer", who repeatedly insisted they were not being harassed at all by anyone despite GJP supporters insisting gamergate was attacking them. You raise exactly the point that I made though. It's far more likely that a small group of tight-knit people that are already colluding with each other privately would write a bunch of hit pieces on the people protesting them than it is that tens of thousands of people from all over the world would suddenly declare war on only a handful of women and "weaponize charity" to the tune of over a hundred grand and a quarter. I know he didn't say reference, I did. My point was that he posted something which is literally so utterly unconnected to gamergate in any way, shape, or form that it doesn't even reference it in passing and then implied it was representative. It's become commonplace for gamergate to be blamed for literally everything bad on the internet, anywhere, ever, even when there's proof otherwise. As for understanding what's going on... if you're not speaking in absolutes then I guess you could get some understanding by reading things like the Press Dossier or articles written by Georgina Young and others. But this is very much a complex issue and no matter how much it's condensed or synthesized by people like Ms. Young there's still going to be mental legwork involved. A number of people, primarily gaming journalists, communicated through a private mailing list called GameJournoPros. Leaks from this list include evidence of bribery/payola, collusion, blacklisting, and a host of more routine ethical violations. Several incidences have been uncovered where soem of these people have direct personal ties to those they've given favorable coverage to such as roommates, old friends, and romantic partners. Many of the people involved in the anti-gamergate side of this also have such personal ties, and many have direct financial ties such as payments through Patreon or even potential criminal racketeering such as with Polytronic and the IGF/Indiecade. A number of the most negative pieces written about gamergate even outside of gaming journalism itself were also by people with ties to the GJP list or its members, such as patreon payments and the like. The final bit that confuses a lot of people is why "social justice" keeps coming up if this is about ethics in journalism. In the simplest terms all of the above and then some was committed while using the banner of "feminism" as a shield against criticism, as well as an excuse to engage in vicious bullying, toxic mudslinging (classic "yellow journalism"), and blackmail. Basically a group that is 80-90% wealthy white males is using the image of feminism as an excuse to make themselves bulletproof against any criticism, and using tumblr style hate-activism against those they don't like. The reason these people are a defined group should be clear at this point. They have a clearly defined and shared tight-knit ideology, a clearly defined and objectively listed group of individuals which form their de facto leaders, and there is a wealth of information documenting their practically incestuous financial, professional, and personal ties to each other. Where this gets muddy is when you consider the people they've recruited to fight for them using the social justice narrative. I think it's Meatt, with two T's.

Ok you're not even making sense anymore. You've got so many convoluted twists and double negatives in here that it's incomprehensible even before you take into account the fact you've somehow turned a straightforwards point about a double standard into some kind of torturous grammar exercise. I made a comment about the fact there is a double standard at work here where one side is utterly excoriated for every single bad thing that happens on the internet even when there's proof it WASN'T them. At the same time the other side is given a complete free pass even when actively participating in or publicly condoning an order of magnitude more and more severe attacks. And all of this is despite the first group going to such extreme lengths to combat inappropriate behavior that they're literally filing police reports and taking down troll accounts faster than they can be retweeted for publicity This at least makes sense, even though it's something I literally just addressed. The "that's not journalism" death-by-a-thousand-technicalities argument is patently disingenuous; Your entire argument here boils down to declaring "that's off-topic" by fiat and then claiming gamergate is wrong for violating your personal decree of what is or is not relevant. The fact of the matter is there's no tangent at all. The high level topic is "ethics in game journalism". The problem is the lack of it, or alternatively worded the corruption of gaming journalists. A perverse ideology which co-opts the language and rhetoric of social justice and feminism to justify attacking others, and serve as a shield against criticism, is part of the means by which that corruption is expressed. And what foundation is that? Provide a falsifiable explanation which can not be just as readily applied to nearly anything else out there, and which does not turn things into a race for one side to declare themselves "feminists" and the other side "misogynists" before the other does. If anything has doomed gamergate from the start it's the fact they're going up against journalists who have absolutely no problems with simply printing whatever false narrative they want. Just look at the recent IGDF blacklist and Alanah Pearce debacles. What's more likely: That tens of thousands of people from all over the world will come together for months for the sole nefarious purpose of attacking women which they then express by raising over $120,000 for feminist organizations and charities, contacting the FTC requesting regulatory reform, and constantly go out of their way to support and give voice to women and minorities? Or that a clique of wealthy well-connected individuals already proven to be engaging in collusion and blacklisting by the evidence in the GameJournoPros leaks are smearing the people protesting their corruption with something they know everybody will rush to defend without question? I don't know about you but I'm not inclined to believe there has been a global conspiracy of staggering size and scope going on for the last three or so months. Especially when the evidence just keeps mounting against that and in favor of the "misogyny" narrative being nothing more than a McCarthyist diversion. I'm not really sure what you mean by "elaborate" on this. There's a group of people who have extremely close financial, personal, and professional ties including a leaked mailing list which documents their behavior ranging from collusion to blacklisting. This group, and the individuals they have direct financial or personal ties to, have basically been the driving force behind the entire controversy. Is a random outlandish post on gamefaqs which doesn't reference gamergate in any way shape or form representative of the thing it makes absolutely no reference to whatsoever? I don't know, can we ask the same question but swap out gamergate for taco bell?

When did I say you did? I was pointing out the more or less total media blackout on the attacks they've endured and the absolutely hypocritical responses they've gotten even from prominent journalists in mainstream outlets like Re/Code. No, my posts can be boiled down to pointing out that the facts simply do not support the conspiracy theories levied against gamergate, and that there is a profoundly hypocritical double standard in the way these issues are discussed. You characterize it as those two straw men, but in reality I'm saying "By your own standards you should be condemning this other defined clique of individuals orders of magnitude more strongly than the people you are criticizing, rather than not at all". I'm saying that in the real world you have to look at two sides of imperfect people and decide "Ok they're not perfect, but these other people are committing orders of magnitude more and more severe harm". And when you've got one side which at its core claims to be the ultimate moral authority that becomes especially relevant. And somehow I've yet to see the people behind that, the people publicly condoning and encouraging that, meaningfully criticized or condemned in any way. Instead I see the very narrative they're using to justify themselves reinforced and the victims of those attacks given a lipservice at best. That might not be as explicit cheering, but it's absolutely enabling behavior. I've already addressed that point and I'll repeat it: The "that's not journalism" death-by-a-thousand-technicalities argument is patently disingenuous. Nearly everyone involved has at some point played the two step shuffle of claiming to be a non-journalist when it suits them, and a journalist when that suits them. Furthermore ethical reform in journalism is no more inherently restricted to engaging solely with self-identifying journalists (when they're identifying as journalists and not something else) than ethical reform in any other field in the energy industry is restricted to engaging solely with power plant technicians. When you've got a group of people with such incestuous financial, political, and personal ties (including their own private listserv for collusion and blacklisting) everyone involved is part of the problem... not just the people who choose to wear a particular nametag. You also don't seem to get that the toxic and bigoted ideology this clique of people were all involved in is itself part of the problem. It was the driving motivation behind their corrupt behavior, the means by which they abused others, and how they shielded themselves from criticism. Firstly "Anti-GG" is very much a defined clique of individuals with extremely close financial, professional, and often personal ties. Virtually all of them were participants in the GJP list itself or have direct ties to one another. It's patently unreasonable to claim they aren't a defined and narrow group. Secondly... "some small fraction" is not an honest way of describing some of the most prominent voices of gaming journalism and the indie scene acting with the full support and backing of their friends and followers. These are not anonymous trolls shut down faster than their tweets can be retweeted for publicity, they're major public figures acting in their professional capacity. Finally that's a very inventive stretch to justify a double standard. One which is eminently abusable simply by any group declaring itself by fiat to be "not a group".

That's a good question which you're simply asking of the wrong side. Milo writes like that because he's an inflammatory asshole, the rest of gamergate has been objectively demonstrated to be ~85-90% neutral at minimum. If the narrative isn't about demonizing or attacking people why did this start with things like "pissbaby" and "obtuse shitslinger" and devolve to racial slurs and similar from there? Ironically enough you've unintentionally brought up a double standard yourself: Why is it that people who either choose to stay in their home, or are not wealthy and well-connected enough to be able to drop everything and leave, aren't considered real victims? Wu, Quinn, and Sarkeesian have all been doxxed... and so have around thirty other people. The difference here is that Milo is contrasting being threatened on the internet with things like losing your job, having your bank account hacked, your internet shut down, income payments being stopped, nearly getting killed in a SWATting, and getting mailed knives, syringes, or dead animals. And yes Timaeus I can basically turn this entire paragraph into a series of links. Nobody deserves to get threatened and it's unconsciousable whenever it happens; but the real world harm suffered by people, especially women and minorities, for supporting gamergate is simply incomparable in severity or volume to a doxing... something which itself has happened to around one full order of magnitude more people for supporting gamergate. Those aren't contradictory points, they're addressing two entirely different things. One is in response to the narrative of exclusively or near-exclusively female victimhood, the other is in response to the theatrically overdramatic reactions to and stirring of a moral panic over internet trolling. You're also not considering that it's possible to care about harassment without accepting that certain things, or in this case everything someone doesn't like, is "harassment". Consider for example the recent case of Claire Schuman versus Totalbiscuit needing to explain that people how replying to a public statement on twitter isn't harassment. One involves the definition of harassment most people would go by, the other is addressing the "anyone saying anything I don't agree with is harassment" definition used by Sarkeesian/McIntosh et al.