Amentep

Yeah, my biggest problem with Kingdoms of Amalaur was that I didn't ever care about what I was doing. I just felt disconnected. I think I played about 20 hours before I just kinda...stopped playing it. I was doing a bunch of quests, and I was leveling up but I really couldn't say I was having fun. EDIT: That's not to say it wasn't well made. it was. But for whatever reason I just never connected with what was going on with the game.

I just finished XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Pretty fun I thought (but having never played the previous X-COM games including the one this is a remake of, you can take my opinion with a grain of salt).

Uncle Sargy's here! ...and that percentage continues to go downward...

Her hardline stance singlehandedly extended the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland for over 10 years (a generation of IRA members joined up because of her, according to a number of BBC commentators, reporters, and former IRA members themselves,) she destroyed the British coal industry, she was a passionate backer of big business special interests, her Hayekian economic policies put the British economy into a recession that would have seen her ousted after her first term were it not for the Falklands War, etc. I guess it may be too late now, but if you'd listened to the BBC's coverage and retrospective on her life, you'd have gotten a longer laundry list of reasons why "x" populace or faction despised her. I understand why people dislike her. I'm not sure I understand celebrating her death as - to me at least - there are very few people we should celebrate the death of (if any, I waffle on the point).

I think "plausibility" in this sense is consistent with your take on internal consistency; in essence do the events logically follow from the set-up be it fantasy, realism, science fiction, horror, etc.

We should strive for a 100% awesome composition. Aren't we at 95% right now anyway? I'm still posting, so it's got to be lower than that!

As I understand it, verisimilitude as a theoretical construct is about truth (or, perhaps better put, how to express degrees of falseness away from truth). Verisimilitude in writing is about approaching reality (or, more correctly put, in my opinion, plausibility), which could be considered the "truth" that all falsehoods are then removed by degrees from.

We should strive for a 100% awesome composition.

I believe this is the thread you want - http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/135-location-no-age-or-sex-required-yet/ - albeit a decade out of date, apparently. Time for a new one?

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/grimoire-heralds-of-the-winged-exemplar?website_name=grimoireforever Funny, that link is for a game called "Grimoire", not "Wizardry" (and yeah, I know the history, but Grimoire isn't Wizardry 9, its Grimoire). Really ? I know, right? In other news, the sky is blue.

Unlike InExile who had to get Torment up before Wasteland ships because of how they're doing things, I gather that it might be some time before we see another Kickstarter for Obsidian (as they have already have other projects in their pipeline)

Awesome!

Named for a city in Puerto Rico, apparently.

Yeah...you'd think they'd have realized that conceptually, it was a bust.

Someone complaining on the internet doesn't make it representative nor guarantee that their taking offence is justified. And of course there's the issue that I could tell you anything within reason and you wouldn't doubt me. Now this is a bit of a dangerous line of thought, but in reality unless I give you information that you could independently verify, you really have no way of know who I am beside me. I could tell you I'm a 30 year old man, or a 20 year old woman, or a 50 year old Scandinavian and you really only have my word that any of that is true. So I think that the inherent "you are the image you create" nature of the internet makes many people take them less seriously in regards to anything "serious". As a side note, this is why I've thought boards that insisted on you using your "real" name to be a bit silly. Just because I posted that my name is Roy McCarry or Marianne Hill or Sven Larsson and that sounds like a real name that matches who I say I am, it doesn't make it my real name. The argument usually goes that while everything is playing out on the level of fantasy as you say, the fantasy is defined by the male gaze. While there are women who want to be sexy, their definition of *why* Lara Croft is sexy might vary wildly from men, and thus when Lara is presented in ways that might support the male fantasy but not the female fantasy there is a disconnect created within the viewer. i know a few fans of the character who felt the swimwear / skimpy sexy clothing poster images of Lara really deflated the things that they liked about the character being strong and independent and - yes sexy - but clearly in control of those things. But then she's parading about like an SI model and she's not owning those aspects anymore, they're serving non-character related interests. If its true that we identify with characters either because we want to be them or because we want to be with them, it'd be very easy to take a character whose initial appearance creates a wide appeal and then through poorly thought out choices weed out male, female or all players from remaining interested in the character.

Right there are other ways to do it, but my question is whether doing it via "level scaling" breaks the verisimilitude or not since contextually the level scaling is an attempt to address the "reality" of the game situation

There is that, but I was more just looking at the numbers. I would never estimate a 30:1 ratio of Supporter:Opposer based on looking at comments or forum discussions about it. Of course, at a place like this there's no where near the numbers of people involved in this discussion to even allow a ratio like that. Are opposers particularly vigilant (there's little need for them to send John several emails, but they may feel compelled to make several replies) in responding, so a few people end up being overrepresented when examining post count? Is there something about the way John did this that would facilitate responses from people that otherwise would not (it did go viral)? From a stastical point of view, internet commentary is self-selecting so invalidates itself as being extrapolation to the population (at least without significant margin of error). I'd also say that because its near impossible to eliminate sock puppeting you'll never know on the internet whether 500 people think alike or if one person posted under 500 aliases. However to be fair to the opposers, Walker makes it fairly clear that his opinion is set, ergo it doesn't invite debate from those who disagree with his stance. Why email him you disagree with his position when you know you can't change his mind. I can't help but feel that there may be an "unmeasurable" group that feels there's just no point in registering a disagreement (that's on top of the fact that you typically have to feel passionate to write a letter of comment anyhow; ambivilance doesn't drive writing campaigns).

I'd assume - perhaps wrongly - that would be up to the individual. Don't get me wrong I think your standpoint is understandable and your point well made; but I can also understand those who don't agree with you feeling this is important to bring up. Perhaps it is crusading for the sake of having a windmill to tilt at. I don't know the answer to that. But I don't think its wrong to ask the question, even if in answering it you find that the question didn't need asking. Mayhap there are invisible barriers being put into place by individuals who don't intend to do so that - if those barriers were removed more women would care? Without pondering the question, without examining the system, without thinking about ones actions these unintended consequences can't necessarily be measured.

What I find interesting about this is this type of breakdown is not at all what I see on comments (and certainly not the case on this forum). On some level there's a level of this going viral, and it's easy to be an outside observer that has an email address or a twitter account and can take a few minutes to write something up. I'm also curious if "the stage" is what motivates the more adversarial people. And I mean adversarial as in the types that are itching for a good internet argument (i.e. people like me, although I don't think I'm as intense as I once was... clearly I still have it in me somewhat). Despite a moderator telling me to do so on numerous occasions (on numerous message boards), I have very limited recollection about ever taking a discussion from the public space to the private PM space. It just wasn't as much "fun" then. Sort of like that bit in Thank You For Smoking where Aaron Eckhart's character tells his son that he's not trying to convince his son with the argument, he's trying to convince the hypothetical observers. In this sense, many internet pissing matches end up becoming a competition to see who can win, as opposed to any sort of attempt to educate or promote genuine discussion. There are certain people who flock to being contrarian. And there are some people who feel being an ass is a valid debating topic. True story - back in my days on Usenet groups, there was a guy whose common debating tactic was to take anyone who disagreed with him repeatedly and create a thread accusing them of being a child molester as a way to try and cow people from disagreeing with him. Its not a valid question. Really? Which arbiter of validity said so? What people do is always interesting from a social standpoint. How they do it is important from a social standpoint. Once you've satisfied the basic needs of your society (food, water, shelter) then things are going to turn to the luxuries of life and how those are used (or how they're available). Neither is what's posted on message boards on the internet. So we're already pissing in the wind, contextually, as it were. But I'm not sure that just because this message board isn't the real world doesn't mean it isn't worth it to think about broader topics. "Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say that the greatest good of a man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living — that you are still less likely to believe."

Who is getting riled up? And if a valid question is asked, doesn't the source become irrelevant?

I knew she was disliked, but I'm surprised by the vehemence seen from people on her passing.

I'd say that - in my experience at least - fandom in general is insular to a fault and it doesn't matter what you're a fan of. One of the more depressing things I've seen in fans is people making fun of other people's fandom. What a lot of hardcore people don't seem to understand - in my opinion at least - is that being hardcore doesn't somehow make them better; their being a fan of something doesn't make the object of their fandom superior to that which they are not a fan. But that's the thing, fandom for many is a refuge. And anything that is seen to "change" that refuge is going to be seen as an attack by a certain segment of the population who can't get past their own exclusionary tendencies and/or their own self-doubt about themselves or their fandom.

The big question - in this sense and in my opinion - is whether the barrier to their readership is internal or external. This isn't something that Walker addresses; he seems to assume its external (I'm not entirely sure; I avoided the site for years simply because I have trouble taking them seriously with the name "Rock, Paper, Shotgun as a serious game journalism site). This doesn't mean that self-examination or trying to raise points about larger issues is irrelevant, however. Anything that is advertising driven should either be casting as wide a net as it can or do very, very well with an advertiser popular demographic).

I find a lot of media related studies to be horribly skewed or weak in methodology in terms of generating results worth caring about. I'm not sure I'm against people trying so much as that often it comes down - in my experience at least - to the individuals using their own experiences and what "facts" fit what they think it the case. Most of them don't seem to start life as "How does media "A" do this" but "Media "A" does this and I'm out to prove it". I confess, I've never understood why anyone would care whether someone was a "casual" fan of something or not. Hell, I post here regularly and I couldn't care less if any one of you fine people liked anything I like. I do enjoy our discussion, but at the end of the day I could care less how "hardcore" you are.

To be fair, gender studies is going look at everything produced by a society to try to understand how it influences and is influenced by gender. I don't think there is any way to escape scrutiny in this sense as you suggest.