Blarghagh

Have you actually read the Koran? Because I didn't find it more or less violent than the bible. About the same, really. The Koran had some more sections espousing peace than the Bible did, but it also had more espousing violence - yet the violence in the Bible is more brutal. In my opinion.

That's a highly simplified view, Meshugger. Obviously the majority of gamers already knew they couldn't trust games journalists when it comes to AAA titles. It's been that way since most modern gamers were little kids, since the early print magazines. Gamergate became such an explosion because people thought they could trust journalists when it comes to indie titles, so that revelation hit most a little harder. The view was always that publishers have a bit of a stranglehold on journalists, but when it comes to indies it's entirely voluntary. It also happens that when publisher related stuff happens, such as the Jeff Gerstmann situation where he got fired from Gamespot over giving Kane & Lynch a low score when Gamespot was heavily pushing advertising of the game and the publisher pulled that advertising, other games journalism websites ate them alive. Not even just publisher stuff, look at this screenshot of a Kotaku article from '10: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B7CMYw_CYAAwFm_.png:large Yeah, KOTAKU cared about ethics. If you did something unethical as a games journalism website, the other websites you were in competiton with would goddamn murder you and never look back. Now Kotaku has an editor that when asked by TotalBiscuit why they don't have a proper ethics policy, it's because it would take away the journalists' freedom and no other website even cared. That, to me, is the surest sign that these websites are working together. If there was no collusion, these guys would still be at each other's throats and rightfully so, because competition breeds excellence. It's grown into an incestuous mess of freelancers that survives on clickbait and it needs to change. Of course, like I said, that stranglehold that publishers have on journalists is a major problem so I do want GG to move on and set the fire to their toes as well. Sometimes I wonder if journalists get in bed with indies (figuratively) and undeservedly promote them to compensate, and honestly I kind of understand that outlook even if it isn't ethical. And obviously, this is the reason the publishers have been silent on GG on a whole - because gamers are fed up with unethical behaviour, so they have to stay on their toes. They know full well they are in danger and it takes only one wrong move to set both sides off against them. This is also why YouTube personalities are much more trusted than games journalists - it's harder for them to grab hold of YouTubers since they rely on YouTube's advertisements, not specifically from those publishers. Even when they try, a YouTuber like Total Biscuit comes along and blows the whistle which leads to his significant subscriber base tearing them an unholy new one such as with the Shadows of Mordor brand deals situation. What is the line? "The cynical fleet has arrived"?

Anonymous seems to be systematically taking down online jihadist networks. Thoughts?

Yeah, for months I've been hoping GG is going to move on to the publishers. It's actually been happening a little bit - GG, following TotalBiscuit's lead, has been ripping UbiSoft a tiny new one. It's just not enough. Still, enough of GG is solidifying into a media watchdog that I feel this will happen eventually. Baby steps.

I believe it's Larian that claimed a high metacritic score for an RPG means many more players, and I figure they know what they're talking about. Honestly, I think gaming requires their own version of Rotten Tomatoes to go about. Metacritic is too limited and looks solely at numbers and should not hold this power. This is one of the reasons I feel games reviews need to be divided in consumer advocacy (numbers) and culture criticism (sociological examination) - or do away with scoring altogether. Because places like metacritic picking up scores given by culture criticism pieces and pass them on as consumer advocacy and like in the Obsidian situation with New Vegas Metacritic scores can seriously affect developers.

Who knows? I'm not really interested in the bastard, I'm interested in how it's being handled and responded to. Jenn didn't seem upset about it, she just laughed at him and told him she enjoyed dramatic fiction.

So far there seems to be very little reflecting on PoE going on. I like the idea but if there's not some more of that I may be forced to move this to C&C.

In the meanwhile, #GamerGate continues to denounce harassment but none of the opposition denounces Jenn of Hardwire getting horrific kidnapping, rape and death threats because #GamerGaters deserve it or something. Twitter removes someone calling FemFreq a fraud in two minutes, but this has been up for four hours despite constant reporting. Warning - Extreme Language: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B7EVmSTCAAANsYQ.jpg:large

Oh you must be relieved, you have found a justification to also jump on the " lets ignore BruceVC on this thread bandwagon " And the reason, well its very serious. He used the word censorship in the wrong context !!!! I meant to say you are avoiding/boycotting/ignoring certain websites and that means you aren't getting a balanced view of certain topics. Exactly how I cannot explain to you properly about removing the hookers in GTA, you don't understand my reason and you refuse to read the link which explains the point But I get thats not really important to most people on this thread, whats more important is a medium so you guys can vent and express outrage. But you aren't really interested in dissenting opinions, which is why you will notice that very few people outside of the normal contributors are active in this discussion But at least you found a way to ignore my posts, that pesky word " censorship ", well done Listen closely, because I am only saying this once. I do not appreciate that implication in there that I am somehow hypocritical because I am now censoring you, so here's some education: If I decide to not respond to you, but leave your posts intact, that is a boycott. If I were to remove your posting ability, which is actually well within my powers, then I would be censoring you. I would never, ever censor your opinions or those of anybody else here - I am only here to enforce forum guidelines, and in fact I am going to be letting other mods handle the occassional beef with you from now on since my extreme frustration with you constitutes a serious conflict of interest - but that doesn't mean I have to take them all seriously. As for jumping on a bandwagon, I believe I started the bandwagon since we had this discussion before. I can find the posts where I resolved not to speak to you on this subject three months back, if you want. I just changed my mind because I felt bad about ignoring you since I believed you were discussing this in good faith. Clearly, that was a mistake. It has nothing to do with your opinions, I can respect some of your opinions. In fact, I'd be the first to admit that most prostitutes are, in fact, victims of society. You don't even know how much you are understating some of that when you claim that legalizing prostitution would solve the problems. It's legalized here, but at most it mitigated some of the problems. A large share of "legal" prostitutes in Amsterdam here are foreign women who were lured here with the promise of a dance career and forced into prostitution by circumstance or threat. Not to say that it isn't a huge improvement, most of them get healthcare and fewer have drug addictions and in fact the lion's share of prostitutes are in there by choice (though whether they like it or not is up to them). You assume I, being a part of "you guys" as if we were a single unit, disagree with you on everything and that simply isn't true. Also, I read that article two threads back when it was first posted as an archived link and in fact the two of us discussed it then. At length. Again, you can literally look back and find the posts. I wasn't even participating in this discussion about prostitutes in GTA this time around since we already had it, literally you and me. In fact, we drove around in circles about it several times. We discussed the idea that adding male prostitutes might be a solution, though that probably would just add gay-bashing to the list of complaints since male prostitutes mostly service men. We argued about how GTA is an exaggerated representation of US street crime and for it to be so prostitution is a neccesity. We bandied back and forth if being a "victim of society" was a worthwhile reason to censor them in art as street gang youths are just as much victims of society and you could say that soldiers are victims of society and their PTSD means that any war game would be insensitive on the same grounds (thinking about it, war games have been shown to help soldiers deal with PTSD and there is a correlation between video game sales rising and crime rates dropping so until we have more information, the logical conclusion would be that censoring any of these could be harmful to society rather than beneficial). You didn't agree with some of the points I made, though you conceded on others yet you are making those same points again now. I am not interested in dissenting opinions? You've literally said "I haven't thought about it that way" on some of the things you said then and yet you're back now with the same points still not having thought about it, instead derailing the thread to make the same points again and again and again. It's not your use of the word censorship. It's the fact that we've explained how you're wrong about what is or isn't censorship a million times in long, drawn out discussions and you simply do not care. It's not any of your opinions that are the problem, it's your debating style, memory span, manipulation and all around acting on bad faith. There is simply nothing to gain from discussing with you. I might as well try arguing with Oby. Do you not see how frustrating you are being that in almost every thread you participate in a lot people eventually decide you are a troll that should be ignored? This thread isn't even the worst one, as it's not about RPG romance. I consider Longknife to be one of the most interesting of the newly active members, even when I disagree with him (which happens plenty of times) his posts are always interesting and he puts the sincerest effort into it - he just had the same breakdown I had with you three months ago - a breakdown of frustration because you ignore everyone that puts effort into their posts in favor of engaging with Volourn. Just three days ago, you told me "you made good points, I'll respond later since I have to respond to these other people first" and you have yet to do so. I haven't been counting, but thinking back there were at least six other instances of you doing this to me alone, and you have done it to other people too. You never end up responding to what you consider to be "good points". There's also the use of "you guys", implying this is some sort of echo chamber, when not three pages back you liked one of my posts for disagreeing with someone else here. We're constantly arguing amongst ourselves, about whether femfreq should be ignored, about how much of feminism is toxic and how much of gaming is toxic, whether male privelege is or isn't a viable reason to discount male opinions, about whether the latest GG scandal is worth attention or not, even about why we are in this (I am in it for free speech, others for taking down specific targets that offend them, and still others just hate hipsters from San Francisco and want to rant on the internet). The reason very few other people participate in this thread is because they a) don't care that much and b) they always stop by making some wild accusation, of course the pro-GG people will defend themselves. When Tale did it, I gave his arguments the time of day and responded in great detail, did I not? I responded rudely when he started in a rude manner, but once he decided to actually argue his points I respected his opinions and gave my counter argument and I'll very much agree to disagree and I've been proven wrong on certain issues in this thread and conceded several times. I am not discussing the prostitutes in GTA now and your link isn't relevant to me also because I don't see the point of discussing it with you again. What is relevant is pointing out that GG is a consumer boycott on moral grounds at it's very core and your response is "psh it's easy to make an exception, your boycott hasn't done anything anyway". I'd hate to see you actually champion a cause you believe in if that is your attitude, you'd give up in a day. Which seems about your track record, anyway, considering how highly you seem to value the victimhood of prostitutes when your male urges come a-knocking. If it's so important to you that we read that link, we told you exactly what you had to do: Provide an archived link. In the amount of time you spent writing posts about it since, you could have done that a hundred times over. It's obvious you do not want anyone to actually read the article, you just want to derail the thread (since this is the umpteenth time you posted the same article) and you find your hook to do so by judging us for not doing it on your terms. But here's a newsflash, your terms are not more important than a legitimate consumer boycott. Judging from your posts, you seem to have less respect for people using peaceful consumer means of protest than you do the people who harass, as at least you recognize their dedication. Why would I waste my time on you if you can't even respect any of my (or Nonek's, or kirottu's) peaceful means and aren't willing to use a minute of your time making an archived link? There is no reason to engage with you. There is no point to it. There is nothing to gain, nothing to learn and no way to convince you since you conveniently just forget when you changed your mind. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - I'm done. I should have stayed done three months ago. When Zorapter or Hiro or Longknife say you're a troll, a couple of months ago I would have disagreed. I enjoy some RPG romances and agree with the vast majority of SJ causes (if not the toxicity of a lot of the groups that espouse it) and because of that I'd never been on the receiving end of your bad faith, manipulative style of debate. Now? None of those guys would be able to convince me that someone else is a troll. You did. Especially when you started throwing around "whore" as a derogatory term to try and troll Volo where you perceived his weakness to be - female loved ones. You aren't here in good faith, you're here to get a rise out of people and I commend you because you're very effective at it.

For a second there, I thought you were my girlfriend. She has extensive plans for a cat shelter in case she ever wins the lottery. Like, drawn out floor plans. Yes, I'm well aware she's insane. I'm never bored.

Agent Carter had a good start, it was entertaining. Galavant also made me laugh quite a bit.

... it's also no coincidence that control is at the center of being able to move your body and think at all and that video games mirror those options, you dumb bastard.

Yeah, coming from somebody making the point that nobody is really censoring GTA he sure is censoring it by not buying the product. I think I'm going to go back to my earlier stance of not engaging with Bruce about this subject.

Isn't he dating Patrick Schwarzenegger?

How much use is a boycott if people just easily make exceptions? "Strange justifications" my behind. The consumer boycott is the very core of what we're doing here.

Dude, we're in the middle of a consumer boycott. Of course we're not going to give it more traffic. There is no way that after months of #GamerGate and several discussion regarding archived links that you participated in that you do not know that. Which is, I think, why you choose a link to do your arguing for you - so you could judge us for not reading someone else's opinions rather than actually have to defend opinions as your own. You could have given your own actual opinions (considering we're speaking with you, not with Polygon) or even archived the link, it's easy. No reason not to have done so, other than perhaps staggering ignorance that's even out of your league. This is exactly why people think you're arguing in bad faith. Either you are extremely manipulative, or you just come off that way constantly because of... coincidence?

I wonder if the PETA Kill Shelters are a phenomenon anywhere except the US. I've only heard about it in US context. PETA, ironically, kills more animals in their shelters than pretty much all other shelters in the world combined. That was hyperbole, naturally, but not as hyperbole as you'd think.

I don't know what's going on here but I'm enjoying it.

Completely wrong?

Telling of what? That people are angry at feminist for infiltrating and subverting online media, they shouldn't be allowed to be angry and criticize. "Inflitrating?" "Subverting?" What those quotes were telling of is that GamerGate is little more than another crackpot conspiracy theory. Such language does little to disabuse me that this is gaming's equivalent of the Red Scare. "We GamerGaters do not avoid women...but we do deny them our essence..." Well, I don't know about those people but I'm sure if I judged huge swathes of people based on internet comment sections of tabloid websites it would make everything seem like a conspiracy theory.

Yeah, I don't think anyone here really takes The Ralph Retort seriously.

It's The Ralph Retort. What did you expect?

What's that video? I've stopped watching all the GG videos that come up because there's just too much vitriol and stupidity in most of them. I want to see Bruce talk to this guy.

Happy birthday.