Blarghagh

Listening to your examples, a few things come to mind: Most of the action and racing tracks from the soundtrack to Beyond Good & Evil. The soundtracks from StarCraft 2, especially the Terran and Zerg themes. Shpongle. This is not a random word, it's a psychadelic electronic music type thing band. I also really like the soundtrack to Pacific Rim, especially the tracks (such as the main theme) where Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine guest stars with his driving riffs. Say what you will about the man wanking his guitar off in strange ways, but he knows his way around a steady riff. If you can get your hands on it, try getting an Audiomachine collection. This is a company that does a lot of trailer music and they tend to have multiple versions of the same tracks (such as a completely orchestral version contrasted with one with a lot of synths and electronic beats, versions for every game essentially). Looks like someone mentioned this before and I missed it, so hats off to them but I'll keep this here as an extra recommendation. Maaaaybe David Newman's score to Serenity, specifically the tracks "Going For A Ride" and "Space Battle", but that may be a bit too regular movie soundtrack. And here's a recommendation for everyone. Try playing a fast paced game with this track playing:

Indie devs active in GG isn't really blacklisting - I'd say reviewing the games of a person actively trying to take you down is a pretty ****ing huge conflict of interest so in this case they're doing the right thing. Shame it's at the cost of those devs.

Regarding Nike: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_sweatshops Regarding the much bigger and omnipresent western brand, Apple: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Controversies One-minute Wiki search, I could find much more serious examples if I put actual effort into it. If you think western society won't buy from the worst of the worst if it's "hip", then you're very, very wrong.

TYT, or The Young Turks, is a liberal YouTube news show, they host (among other things) The David Pakman show. As far as I know, I could be wrong.

Considering the lack of curation on even Steam titles with ILLEGAL content (i.e. stealing code, art assets and music from other people and putting them into your game) and the aforementioned worse murder simulators there is simply no logical reason to claim banning this game from Steam was not a political decision in the first place, so yes, I agree, they should never have provided a mechanism for that.

I'm not really sure what the issue with Hatred is anyway. It's violence glorification? The violence is horrible, if anything it's more realistic approach is less glorifying of violence than Call of Duty is. The Grand Theft Auto games are far is more guilty of this by not taking violence seriously, but that's okay because it's "satire". How about Postal 1 and Manhunt? They are both worse than this, and unlike GTA you cannot defend those specific games as being "satire", they are murder games. As TotalBiscuit pointed out, one of these allows you to piss in your grandmother's face before killing her. Explain to me why Steam has no problem with that, but draws the line at a game that is so aware of how terrible the main character is that he is identified solely as "the Antagonist" to point out that hey, you're the absolute evil bad guy in here. Is it because it's purposeless violence? How do you know? All we have is trailers. Maybe this game is a biting social commentary on a society so broken that many of its inhabitants snap and decide the world needs to be "cured"? If anything, if it's not a commentary its definitely a reflection of that and as such it still has artistic worth (moreso than GTA anyway). I'd also like to point out that some of the things I've heard said by vocal #GamerGate detractors fall directly in line with what the lead in this game would do. Like that Tait guy, who said all #GamerGaters should be put into death camps. As for the accusations that the developers are neo-Nazis, all accusations thus far look to have been entirely fabricated. If credible evidence shows up, then I'll condemn them for being neo-Nazis - which is not the same as condemning everything they do, mind you. If I condemned everything the Nazis did I would only be using dirt roads.

Very much so, no way this game passed Greenlight based on its merit. That's what you get when you start to tell consumers what is and isn't good for them.

I'm curious, what do you think of the books by Marquis de Sade, such as The 120 Days of Sodom?

I'd change that to : "It is hard to keep people engaged in eyeball visual things that are not action packed" Media tech and easy access has made a lot of people (dare I say the "masses") bored of the visually mundane. It's not like the old days where ppl could only see films in a theater or on tiny, crap TV's. Scrumptious color-saturated vistas or fast CGI action, either way, our visual ent. world is getting to the point where what's on screen is visually more enthralling than what's in real-life, if you're talking about visuals and visual attention span alone. It's like what digital tech and manipulation has done to photography, imo. I mean, there's more to it than that, of course, but it's a big part of things. I'm sure studio heads have all kinds of psych and sales texts to prove visuals must be ever better and more exciting and plots be ever more simplified with fast cut editing to keep attention, and point to them when approving AAA scripts. They don't even approve AAA based on scripts anymore. They just look at how many sequences a script has that has possibility for set-pieces and send it straight to a streamlined pre-production process so they can hammer out some preliminary storyboards. That way they can actually tell whether it's eyeball pleasing visual action. If they're not satisfied with the storyboards that come out? They don't buy the script.

That didn't seem very funny to me.

So you boys are telling me that if there was a hidden camera in your house that was filming surreptitiously everything you did, including intimacy with a partner, you would consider this the same type of invasion of your privacy as someone reading your emails ? Hold on, what? You just added a bunch of qualifiers that weren't in your original post. You just took your relatively simple example and made it a lot more complicated. That's not how it works.

Whelp, today was a wonderful blend of vomiting and sleeping.

Right! Huckleberry Finn, not Tom Sawyer. My bad. Thanks Longknife.

Bruce, While I support Steam's right to make this decision, I do not support the decision. At all. First of all, Steam has Postal 1 and 2, Manhunt, a bunch of GTA games with a new one being re-released on Steam. As far as I can tell, Hatred is not really any worse or more "controversial" than those. So it cannot be anything other than a move to pacify the press. It's not a decision made based on the merit or content of this game as you imply - it is simply a response to other peoples responses. Then there's the slippery slope argument, if you start removing games because they are "controversial" (especially when you have an essentially monopolic grip on digital distribution) then where do you stop? "Sexual content, such as the Apple store dropping the amazing and forward thinking Papers, Please* for non-existent sexual content (the nudes are entirely nonsexual). Sexist content? Racist content? Defined by who? If I have a villain who I demonstrate to be a terrible person by making him racist, do I suddenly run the risk of losing the best platform by having "racist content"? What if my game is the A Clockwork Orange of video games but is banned because it's violent? Like the personal account of a developer that was posted a few threads back - it wanted to make a serious Holocaust game to educate people from first person perspective how horrible it was, but it never got made because using the Holocaust for "entertainment" was deemed bad, despite a trillion movies on the subject. I don't understand why this game is "controversial" in the first place. Is Falling Down controversial? God Bless America? They have similar subject matter. Stephen King's Rage? Lolita? If they are, I haven't heard anything about it. It's just because people still believe the absolute tripe that video games cause people to be violent. Who defines what is "controversial"? Keep in mind that in Tom Sawyer, there is a lot of racism... it's controversial now, but it was much more controversial at the time of release because it had made the black characters too human! If this line of thinking was prevalent then, it would have been banned for not being racist enough, let alone anything else that showed black people in a positive light. When you start censoring art, whether the art is tasteless or not, you are going down a terrible road and it's going to lead you straight to 1984. Of course, what chafes me most is the all out hypocrisy of it all. I can dump unfinished games made entirely from illegally obtained assets and code on the Steam store (and this has happened) and it won't get curated because "that's not what we do, it's up to the consumer to choose what he wants" but a game is violent? Even though the Greenlight response is overwhelmingly "yes, the consumer wants it", that violent game's gotta go off. Either curate the bloody store or don't, this just makes Steam look like spineless jokes who will cave to the slightest amount of peer pressure. *Note that Papers, Please was praised by the press hating on Hatred and they condemned the action then. What's the difference? Sorry if this post is more rambly than usual, I am very sick right now.

Good god, massive cold shivers all night. I thought I was going to freeze to death. I think I have the flu. Goddammit.

The problem with saying this should be the golden age is that distribution ease doesn't contribute to that most of the time in practice. It's only going to take longer to sift through crap to find a gem which makes reading a more frustrating commitment. There's going to be more great books but it's a lot harder to find them.

Valve did this now? What on earth do they hope to gain? Valve has made questionable decisions before but I've never known them to be downright idiotic.

No, but welcome to the club.

Note "in order to remove things". To censor means that you expurgate it but deliver the final approved product to the end user. This is not what Target did nor is it the goal of the petition. Bans keep things from the end user. **** Wanted to comment on this from the other thread: There's an inherent problem with this, which is that from studies I've heard of the vast proportion of male prostitutes work in the male-male sex trade with much fewer actually doing male-female; given the current climate, I'd imagine giving players the ability to kill them will be seen as some sort of comment against homosexuality Hm, that makes sense but would only make it a problem if you acknowledge that factor in the game. If you make it obvious they service women it would be fair... but then it would be censoring homosexuality, I guess. Uh. Carry on.

While that's terrible, it's not really much to do with journalism and sexism in the games industry. This may be too small, so here's a larger version: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B4nXIxpIAAMcXhT.jpg:large Supposedly written by a 3D artist who worked on Bayonetta. Could not find a source to confirm that and nobody could provide it, so I'm doubting it right now. Either way, it shows at the very least that I'm not the only one who thinks the media outrage machine is detrimental and destructive to its own goals and needs to work more productively.

Tattoos? Guys, you aren't noticing the most important thing. That's some sweet ass Darth Vadar figurine on her nightstand... and the light is a lightsaber? Guys, she could be the one. And a Boba Fett tattoo. That's not even the nerdiest thing there. That's SKELETOR from He-Man above it. XD

Oh, I totally agree with that. I absolutely hated it and I would never play it. I cannot understand the motivations in making this game nor the motivations for wanting to play it. As for another topic, I'm not sure how many of those experiences I can share - I seriously skirted the edge already considering I want to keep myself and my previous employers anonymous for both legal (NDA) and personal reason. While I'm also sure I will be hilariously judged because most of my shipped titles are awful IP based shovelware for mobiles (hired hand, not design) so I really would rather not on that basis alone, the more important factor is my involvement in #GamerGate could have serious consequences for my future despite the fact I have never harassed nor advocated the harassment of anyone in its context.* If you have specific questions I'm sure I could try to answer them as well as I can (and keep in mind, my experience is very much ground level as a hired hand for small developers on corporate contracts) but I'd like to stay cautious here. I think I've already posted more than enough information on this board to get identified as it is. EDIT: *Actually, this sounds really bad. I've never harassed nor advocated the harassment of anyone outisde of the context of #GamerGate either. EDIT EDIT: I feel this sounds cowardly, so I'd like to point out that I've met and talked with the IGDA founder who recently supported #GamerGate blacklisting several times and know he is involved with several prospective employers. Not a good situation for me.

There was no (intended) emphasis, the media side of the equation was the topic specifically. This is, after all, about ethics in games journalism I actually very much like that comment and I would have probably not noticed it was meant with snark and have taken it seriously. I would love to see the moral outrage crusaders to work constructively instead. For example, in the case of Hatred, large names in games media reported lies about the developers being neo-Nazis either out of ignorance by not fact checking or simply to discredit and attack the developers. Several also told the developers that they were horrible human beings and they should cancel the game and apologize. What is the point? It's very easy to condemn someone without trying to take them down. I have no interest in Hatred, but the audience will decide whether or not they think the game is worth it. The most ironic thing is that the Streisand effect is very real and without the media furore about it signal boosting it, most people would not have heard of the game, being another case of where the media watchdog bit its own arse.

Again, what attitudes you infer from my posts is not my problem. I've never once stated the artists' careers are in danger, I said the bigwigs fear for their own careers and change what the artists are allowed to put in. I recognize that the sentence structure in the first post may have given the wrong idea, which is why I have already clarified it several posts ago. Although even if that were the case, the "SJ Agenda" (if we insist on using that term) would still be the direct cause for these actions being taken, even if these actions themselves did not come from them. So the statement of "the SJ Agenda has resulted in less minority characters" would still be correct.