Category: The Undefined Remainder

Geeky stuff. Internet, Games, Free Software, Sci-fi etc.

First impressions on Star Wars: The Old Republic – Not impressed.

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I’ve managed to play SWTOR for a few hours yesterday, and these are my impressions.

PGWTOR 2011

So yesterday night, I’ve had the opportunity to try the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic during its open/stress test beta weekend, so I might as well write my impressions of it.

First I want to say that from everything I know about it, I was not planning to play SWTOR. The reason for this is that the game, to me, frankly seems like a reskin of WoW, circa 2005. Few classes and races, holy trinity setup, not particularly innovating gameplay, cookie-cutter quests etc. The few videos I’d seen about it, made it seem like nothing particularly exciting, unless one was a hardcore Star Wars or Bioware fanboy.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the Star Wars universe quite a lot (albeit, I’d love if G.Lucas stopped messing with it, and let some people with a more realistic understanding of ethics and human motivation take over) and I’m still a Bioware fan, but WoW couldn’t keep my attention for more than 3 months (and that was pushing it) and thus I didn’t expect such a similar game to do any better. Also compared to other games like Guild Wars 2, which really seem to be doing a lot of innovative steps at a far lower cost (i.e. no subscription), I just didn’t see why I should bother.

That disclaimer out of the way, let me give you my impression of the various aspects of the beta.

Getting to the game.

I got my invitation, from the Bioware social site of all places. It came in a PM from the admin directly, and frankly, up until that point I never even bothered to try the beta out. But hey, I wouldn’t turn down a free demo of one of the largest games of the year. I’m guessing I got the PM because I had bothered to actually populate the Bioware social with my Dragon Age characters and the like and I was also currently replaying Dragon Age: Origins. I doubt I would have otherwise gotten a free invite. But perhaps I’m wrong and everyone registered there got one as well.

Downloading the game client was a bit of a headache as well, because for some strange reason, the installation program would crash if I had FRAPS running. It took a lot of search online and in the forums to figure this out. After I managed to get the client, came the very long download process, which went OK, barring an unexpected BSOD just as it had finished downloading, which I’m not sure was the cause of the downloading client, but anyway. Nevertheless, I still don’t get why they didn’t use EA’s Origin, which they rammed down our throat with Battlefield 3, but rather they used this standalone client, and thus yet another useless program to have on one’s PC.

As the open beta period was starting, I was hearing horror tales about hour-long queues, lag, crashes and so on, but to my surprise, everything went without a hitch. Europe had only half a dozen English servers and far too many German and French ones. No idea why this is the case, since everyone who doesn’t speak German or French is likely to go to the English ones. Nevertheless, even with so few English-speaking servers, the queuing times were very small. I managed to create characters in three different servers within an hour or so (I swapped servers due to miscommunication with Plutonick and some other friends I was supposed to play with). Still on the subreddit for SWTOR, I still see a lot of people complaining about the long queue times which I didn’t experience. The worst I had, was 25 minutes.

Character Creation

I won’t got into a lot of detail here, since you can find lengthy videos about this all over the internets. I’ll just mention the things that stood out to me.

Why are the larger body type men somewhere between overweight and ultra-beefy, while the larger body type women are simply displayed as (in structure) large and curvy, but still fairly slim/athletic type? What is it with game developers assuming that there are people who will play overweight men but not overweight women? Just give the option and let people choose for crying out loud.

I like the varied options for characters but I was disappointed when I found yet another game where I couldn’t play a long-haired guy. The best approximation I found for cyborgs was a fairly tame bob cut. So I went for the mohawk instead.

On the matter of hair, why don’t facial hair have their own slider for cyborgs but are rather tied in with either “hair” or “cybernetics”? Perhaps it is different for normal humans, but for cyborgs, I just couldn’t make what I wanted.

I still don’t get why in this day and age, a game thinks it’s a good idea to keep all starting character uniform rather than let them choose some preferred skills, abilities and clothes? Why is it so difficult as a smuggler to choose to be proficient with a blaster rifle, rather than a blaster pistol? Why do we all have to start with the same clothes? This is supposed to be a role-playing game goddamnit. As it was, the only differentiation between starting characters of each class, were body types primarily and faces secondary. And within the same body types, you might as well have had clones.

Playing

Disclaimer: I only played through the introduction area as I didn’t have enough time (since the beta was, as is common with these things, starting on US time. Yeah, America is the only place that counts obviously). As such, perhaps I’m missing how things improve considerably later but I’m not holding my breath.

The first area might just as well have been the clone vats. Dozens of identical-looking characters, doing the same quests, using the same skills, killing the same people. It was all fairly silly. I realize much of this was because of the beta and because everyone was new at the game, but the whole thing still was looking messy. Especially with everyone vying for the same enemies to kill and whatnot, even with the instancing that happens to separate all the people in the same area.

For someone who is looking for immersion, the whole area was really a blow to my suspension of disbelief. There was nothing permanent. Any quest you did, reset a few seconds later for the next person. I blew up a communications tower and it was pristine a few seconds later, enemies just popped into existence 20 seconds after you killed them and a horde of newbies, wearing the same clothes and wielding the same weapons, was running through an area that was supposed to be controlled by the enemy.

It also still left you with very little opportunity to choose your path. As a smuggler, my enemies were always the “Separatists”. Was there ever any option to start working towards joining them? To stay neutral? No, there’s a railroad quest-line with very little opportunity to avoid. The best you can do is select a light or dark answer at the end of some discussions, but effectively you still had always the same end result. Seriously, at some point I was offered a quest from, the main storyline, and I selected the option which very explicitly said “[Refuse Mission]”. I was expecting the classic Bioware nonsense which exited the dialogue and didn’t let you continue unless you talked to them again and accepted anyway, but surprisingly, I simply got the quest regardless of my choice. The main quests are very much a railroad and the side quests, (which you need to get in order to receive the necessary experience) are all very simple. Mostly go there and kill that, or go there and destroy 3 of these things, or go there, kill that guy and get this item. All very uninspired with their only benefit being the fully spoken dialogue.

That last part was really the only saving grace of the quests which were otherwise completely forgettable and superficial. You see, nothing that you do affects the world around you, and you do not really have much of a choice when doing them. It really felt too much like the way I felt when doing Borderlands quests. Just gather as many of them as you can, go to the area where they’re all concentrated and just do them one after another by the bucketful. I never really felt at all interested in most of what I was doing as I had almost no input as a role player. I had no option how to approach the scenario, no choice to avoid combat and very little choice on how to deal with the quests. Just bland Dark VS Light options (i.e. good vs Eeeeevil) which  sometimes manifested in you finishing the quest at a different quest giver than the original. The voice acting helped to draw you back to the quest, but it was only at the beginning or at the end of the quest line (with few exceptions) and thus, it was just not enough to make me care. It just helped me avoid skipping the dialogue altogether.

In this kind of game, I always try to play a character that is fairly outside the boring norms of good vs evil behaviour or lawful evil VS chaotic good. For example, two of my favourite archetypes I like to play is an Anarchist ((Direct action towards helping others, or let them help themselves, combined with actions which undermine established hierarchical authorities, such as armies, police, states and other kinds of oppression – i.e. closer to Chaotic Good in D&D terms but with a lot of fine details)) or an archetype I call “Benevolent Might Makes Right” ((A character who believes the weak should defer towards the strong (in power of arms) but that the strong have a moral responsibility to protect the weak who are under them. Usually I couple this with some underlying racism (not against human skin colour, but rather against other fantasy or sci-fi races) and xenophobia as well as a strong sense of honour, loyalty and respect for accepted authority. i.e. similar to Lawful Evil in D&D tems, but again, not exactly)). Both of these are imho closer to the nuanced ethics and ideology of many humans and it’s interesting to see how they interact in a very binary system of “Dark VS Light”. What happens is that there is rarely any acts or dialogue choices that are provided to me, fit within the character role I’ve selected. Very often I’m given three different options in a dialogue and end up saying to myself “Well, this character would never say any of these”, so I’m left to choose the out-of-character option that more approximates me. So that Anarchist archetype usually ends up coming off like a greedy opportunist with a good streak, while the Might makes Right Archetype sounds like a schizophrenic.

I digressed a bit above here, but this was to point why the quest lines of SWTOR and the dialogue left me unimpressed. The characters I like to roleplay cannot be done in this game of standard Bioware trinary morality (Good, Eeeevil or Greed), and the quests are generally uninspiring.

What I did like somewhat was the dialogue system when multiple player are involved, but I feel that this has so much untapped potential that they simply did not even consider. Why did they go for simply random rolls to see who speaks, which have no relation to who is a better talker or has more powerful personality? Why don’t we have skills pertaining to dialogue that can be utilized in these cases either in combination with the other players when trying to convince an NPC (and avoid combat for example) or against other players when trying to see which quest path you will take? Some mini game, based on skills and abilities between the speakers would be a great addition to a game so focused on dialogue. Unfortunately I can see why a fully voiced game would shy away from something like that, as it could theoretically increase exponentially the amount of spoken dialogue. But then again, that’s why I think that spoken dialogue can easily be a detriment in role-playing games as it severely limits available options.

On the graphical side, the game is good-looking but nothing particularly jaw dropping. Fortunately that meant my VGA could handle it, even though on the starting area, my FPS took a severe beating. Initially I thought it was because I had too high settings, but my FPS managed to creep up to the high 70s after I moved away for quests, so it seems to me that it had mostly to do with how many Player Characters were around my area.

A minor peeve was how the game prevented me from playing with my two Jedi friends which were apparently on a completely different planet. I understand that this can be amended after you reach level 10 and leave the intro portion, but it still annoyed that I couldn’t play with my friends, especially since the only guy I could play with, got bored with the game within a few hours and left me alone.

As for combat and general such gameplay – One word: Boring. Perhaps this was because I was still at the first levels, but I never felt any challenge, nor any need to actually strategize. It was simply a process of using my abilities one after the other as their cooldowns expired and my energy allowed. As a smuggler, the cover mechanic worked only half the time, as it was very often I would stand next to cover rocks or whatever, and the character would simply kneel rather than use them. I could however run behind them and kneel and then I would actually get the benefit of cover. I also don’t understand why I couldn’t take cover behind covers, or behind trees. If you actually hide behind a tree and use cover, rather than peek out and shoot, the game would tell you that you have no line of sight. As a result of this loss of opportunity, the level designers ended up spreading random barrels and chests on the rooms, simply to act as cover for people, where the corners would have sufficed much more believably.

I still don’t understand what is with their obsession with 3-man groups. Granted you still find the occasional solo beefy enemy, but usually it’s groups of 3 people standing around for you to kill, before they pop back into existence a few seconds later. It was fairly silly, and at some point Plutonick got killed by such a group of three when he went afk for 3 minutes and it ended up spawning on top of him, at an area we had just cleared. I don’t understand why we can have larger groups, as was the case with other Bioware games, thus forcing one to actually strategize with Area of Effect abilities, tactics in movement and cover (such as when being attacked from multiple sides) and so on. But no, usually just the usual boring 3 enemies waiting for passers-by, or a beefy single dude.

In closing

I’ll probably try to play it a bit more today and tomorrow and see if things improve at all outside the intro zones, but I’m not holding my breath. I’m also interested to see PvP, but I don’t think it will be anything to talk about.

After playing this beta, I’m sure I’ll be sticking with my original plan to completely bypass it and try Guild Wars 2 instead. The price for this game, is imho just not worth the lack of innovation and lackluster role-playing and story. The funny thing is that I would be perfectly willing to purchase this game if there wasn’t any subscription required, so that I could play it at my leisure with a few friends a few times per month or simply as single player. But this is definitely not something worth however much a monthly subscription will be.

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What are the ethics of Piracy?

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Is it ethically wrong to pirate games? I refute 4 common arguments for this.

So, the moderators of /r/gaming in reddit have decided to make a grandstand against Piracy and as these things go, a big discussion spawned up around this announcement. I jumped in as well, and that turned out into a long thread about the ethics of pirating games. So I decided to expand and clarify my opinion on that point.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’re most likely already familiar with my general opinion on piracy (Long story short: I’m strongly supportive of it.). It is for this reason that I cannot stand silent when the usual moralizing against pirates crops up (with alarming frequency) on reddit.

There are a few common arguments for the moral condemnation of digital piracy which I’ll attempt to refute in this post.

Nobody deserves to experience a game or other intellectual property against its creator’s wishes.

The argument here relies on the concept that whoever creates a game gets to choose who is allowed to experience it arbitrarily. At the most basic level, it tries to shoehorn an intangible or infinite good, such as an idea or a specific expression of an idea, into the natural limitations of a tangible or finite good, such as, say, furniture.

This principle – that the creator decides who gets to use it – comes as almost a law of nature for tangible goods because it is built-in the concept of trade required before any use by another person can happen. In other words, before I can experience sitting in a chair, I have to acquire it from the chair’s creator which implies an agreement. The same is true for services rendered, which might be intangible as well, but are still tied to a finite good which is time spent by the one performing the service. So if I want to experience someone playing music to me, I need to have an agreement from them doing so.

The only reason why an exchange is happening in most of these situations, is because this is the norm for distribution we use in our current economic system and because the experiencing of these goods or services is a zero-sum. This means that if two people want to use the same goods or services, an exchange needs to happen to keep things fair and civil, or another socioeconomic system needs to be in effect, where sharing and communal ownership is an accepted scenario. For bad or for worse, the latter option is dismissed and outright, and thus by necessity market exchange become the only good scenario. To put it simply: If you want to acquire a good or service, the only moral option is to compensate its current owner (usually the creator) for it.

Given that for most people, this is the only moral way to acquire goods, it is not difficult to see why it’s immediately juxtaposed on something which does not need it: intangible and infinite goods.

In other words, the above moral condemnation relies in internalized moral values coming from an upbringing within a market system such as Capitalism where all other options for distribution are marginalized, dismissed and demonized. When market agreement for the acquisition of goods and services is all you know as morally acceptable, it is not hard to see why the acquisition of “digital goods” will be considered as immoral is such a market agreement did not occur beforehand.

It is because of this that for many people, even those who pirate themselves, it feels wrong to see people acquiring games without paying for them in some way. It is this feeling of moral condemnation, from which I believe most people start  and proceed to claim that it’s wrong for someone to experience (“acquire” ) digital goods without the agreement of its owner. But this moral sentiment has no basis because the same laws of distribution do no apply. There is no zero-sum game between current owner and anyone else. If anything, the concept of ownership itself loses its meaning when talking about intangible goods and we start talking about replication of goods, rather than exchange.

It is for these reasons that I cannot simply accept the above ethical proposition, which relies on nothing else than societal conditioning. However, most of the time, if you ask the person proposing the above “why”,  then a different justification may be presented.

Game developers expend tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars to create games. They deserve to be rewarded for their efforts and costs.

While I agree that someone who creates something very popular should be rewarded accordingly by society, the argument that someone doing something costly (in time or money) deserves to be compensated does not convince. I could bake very expensive mud pies but it would still not entitle me to money for them. If you’re going to support a market system, the whole point is to give people a reason to buy your product or hire your services. One cannot support a market system in one hand, and on the other claim that someone is entitled to reward for effort and cost extended

The main problem here is not that people are pirating games, but rather that the companies making them are still confused about what they are really selling. Copyright law allows someone to pretend that an infinite good is finite, by artificially limiting its supply. It is for this reason that game companies still create games with the misguided assumption that they are creating commodities, rather than services. This is a flawed business model which is built on top of a very flawed institution: Copyrights.

But copyright is realistically ((Theoretically it’s a law created to promote progress and the arts, but multiple studies and the actual number of modern creative works prove that it is not only unnecessary for this purpose, but actively harmful)) a law created and enforced specifically to support a specific business model: That of selling books in a technological level where printing books is not affordable for the everyday consumer.

So now we have multibillion dollar industries, built around a business model, relying on a law for a different technological era, applied on things it’s not meant to apply to (digital goods). There is no valid reason why any informed consumer should respect such a business model – and this is why the latest generations simply don’t.

A developer of an expensive game, absolutely deserves to be rewarded if their game is popular, but they do not deserve to rely on an obsolete business model, just so that they can achieve hyper-profits; because that’s what it boils down to. Business models relying on artificial state-granted monopolies such as copyrights are by design far more profitable than business models made with the digital age in mind. And there’s no doubt about it that the latter can be profitable as well. Any look at the MMORPG industry as well as the indie game industry will show that the latest trends are for free-to-play games which monetize their audience through other methods.

These may still be relying on copyrights to a larger or smaller extent, but those proto-business models are still evolving and it’s very likely that forms will be found through which one will be able to monetize even free software games.

If a developer wants to give their game away for free, more power to them, but if they want to sell it at 59.99$ a pop, we have to respect that.

This is a variation of the very first argument and relies on the same assumption: That the owner (usually the creator) gets to decide arbitrarily if and how we are to experience their product. I’ve already explained why this is an emotional argument and why it does not apply to infinite and intangible goods so I will not repeat myself.

I will however point the borderline schizophrenic way that this is applied to games (and attempted to be applied to other digital goods as well) where they want games to both be considered individual products, for the purpose of selling them to you as a package and at the same time want them to be considered services as well, for which you need to acquire a revocable license which you are not allowed to transfer to others.

In other words, the developers want to have their cake and eat it too. They pretend that the best part of tangible and finite goods (for their bottom line) apply, while requesting laws and moralizing against that the best parts of the same types of goods, so that the consumer cannot use them.

It is disappointing that opponents of piracy will gladly grant the creators of content the freedom to pretend whatever they wish, simply because they accept the above maxim. That the creator/owner gets to decide how you experience their goods.

But I see no reason why the creator/owner gets to decide which laws of nature apply.

If everyone got those games that costed millions to create for free, then the companies making them would stop.

I’ve dealt with this argument extensively in my analysis of the Economics of Piracy so I won’t go into detail. Suffice to say that this is a very flawed understanding of how content creation works within a supply & demand market economy. In short: if there is a demand, someone will find a way to make money fulfilling it.  If the previous business models fail to achieve this, then new business models will evolve to perform this task.

Consider this: 8 years ago, it was unthinkable that an MMO could function without monthly subscriptions. And yet, slowly and as the audience increased, MMOs have discovered that monthly subscriptions are less important than a large user base, and have slowly progressed towards a free-2-play model in order to attract more initial customers. The business plan has changed and now the demand is satisfied for high quality MMOs, while still allowing the companies behind them to make money.

Or take Team Fortress 2: In a day where most AAA games come out at full price with frequent and expensive DLC; TF2 has increased its profits tenfold by going completely free and providing all its (frequent) updates for free as well.

And these are only the beginning. It is completely false to say that if people could get the games for free, such games would not be made. What is true to say, is that the companies which refuse to change their business model to fit with the times and the advances in technology, will go down with them.

But it is not moral to respect the wishes of a company who wants to sustain itself on obsolete plans.

Quote of the Day: The Steve Jobs market relationship

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No Messiahs here.

Steve Jobs

Quoth Girlcore

“steve jobs turned apple around by turning liberal humanism into a huge marketing gimmick and selling it to hipster college students. he disguised market relations as social relations and made dumb 20-somethings think that the role of seller/consumer is some kind of intimate social bond as long as the company has commercials that appeal to their generic liberalism. this is why a bunch of people are acting like when some CEO billionaire who sold them a product died it was like they lost a personal friend”

Truly, I was always amazed at the kind of rabid following that Apple has achieved and the borderline cult of personality that has formed around Steve Jobs. I can understand people blindly following leaders, but a billionaire CEO with a sad streak of (attempted) authoritarianism?

I shudder to think what would have happened were we to replace Microsoft with Apple. The top down absolute control they demand for their products, on software AND hardware and the way they abuse the patent and trademark system in order to stiffle competition would have choked the free software movement by locking down hardware control as much as possible, and going after people who sought to bypass it.

I have really no sympathy for the man. As much of an icon of our age as he was, his company’s business practices did and continue to do immense harm in our culture. The rabid following he and apple have for having shiny products and a strong marketing section, is really sad in my eyes.

Why are gamers obsessed with review scores?

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Battlefield 3 fans are raging against reviews that gave the game just 9 out of 10. I explore possible reasons why.

BATTLEFIELD 3

Battlefield 3 is going live tomorrow and already the “Day 0 reviews” are hitting the net, and as is usual with these kind of things, the battlefield 3 fanbois are furious. Furious I tell you, that the game received only a…9 out of 10 on one review site which game Modern Warfare 2 a far better score back in the day.

Following that incident, there’s not only been quite a lot of flak thrown IGN’s way ((Disclaimer: I don’t have much love for IGN myself, for being a sold-out advertisement mouthpiece. This is an attitude I’ve had regardless of whether they are praising my favourite games or not. As a matter of fact, I would think that a 9/10 is very good, if I thought such numerical scales are a good way to rate games.)) but also a flood of review scores are hitting the front pages, celebrating the high score or denouncing the dirty rotten reviewer who dares to rate it lower than expected. Valid low points of the game, such as the campaign being far too trite, small and linear are trivialized (“BF3 was never about single player, why are you surprised”) and every high review score is upvoted to prominence.

The whole phenomenon is interesting to me because of how similar it is to behaviour of fans of sports teams who agonize for their placement in the league, for how many games they’ve won or lost and take it as an  almost personal insult when someone badmouths their team. And yet, video gamers tend to snub their nose at sports fans for their obsession with their teams, as if their own behaviour is better.

On the average however it isn’t. Time and again, reviewers not only get lambasted by the fans of a particular game when they rate it low, but there have been more than a few cases of threats and wishes of physical violence against such reviewers for doing such an unthinkable thing.

But reviews are generally directed at people who are undecided about a particular game, so why are those who are already convinced of its superiority upset about a low score or obsessed with achieving as many high scores as possible?

At a base level, I think this is because of the Illusion of Asymmetric Insight combined with Choice Supportive Bias. That is, the people already convinced of the quality or superiority of a particular game, either because they are long time fans, or because they have already put a significant portion of their disposable income towards it, tend to start thinking themselves in that group. When someone puts down their choice ((compared to their expectations that is, because giving a game a 9/10 instead of a 9.5/10 is not a big difference)) then the first explanation put forth for this event, is that the people doing it are in the out-group or stupid: They are biased, they are sold out, they are unprofessional and so on.

Thus if IGN rates the Battlefield 3 worse than Modern Warfare 2, then the most logical explanation is that they are playing for the another team, at which point the Illusion of Asymmetric Insight comes into play.

But further than this, we see a much greater obsession with scoring in reviews than almost everything else. In no other product will you see such praise or anger towards review scores from large publications, than you will see in video game circles. Sure, Android and iPhones, MS Windows and GNU/Linux, Vim and Emacs, they all get their own share of fanboi wars, but from what I’ve seen there’s just not this amount of bitterness created by such conflicts and when it happens, it’s usually because of the choice supportive bias such expensive gadgets create.

Now to be accurate, not all games create such a rabid protectionism in their followers. Games like Red Orchestra 2 for example, which are similar enough, never had such an extreme reaction to bad reviews. So there’s obviously some factors that drive up the fanboysim.

One of the most important ones I believe is that focus on multiplayer that a game has. The more multiplayer focused a game is, the more people you want to have playing it, so that you have a robust community with a lot of choices for the players. A bad review can cause people who are on the fence pass the game and thus reduce the community size, which will can indirectly impact the multiplayer experience of those who really like the game (i.e. nobody wants to find only empty servers). A good review on the other hand can make more people join the fun, and thus the incentive to promote and praise such reviews.

Incidentally, I’ve also seen the exact opposite result against games the majority didn’t like. A recent example is Brink, which for various reasons disappointed a lot of those expecting it. Personally I found the game great but in those initial days of its release, I found it practically impossible to find a positive review of it upvoted in reddit. Such articles were almost immediately downvoted and thus buried from eyesight, by those who felt they got burnt from the game. Why did so many people felt the need to prevent others from discovering a game they didn’t like? I’m guessing they thought they were preventing others from getting burnt as well, but could it also be that allowing the promotion of such a multiplayer game would in a sense “steal audience” from all the other multiplayer games?

The second reason I feel promotes fanboyism is when there’s active competition. Both Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 come out within weeks of each other. They are the most widely anticipated releases of the year and they compete for practically the same audience. Realistic looking modern warfare multiplayer FPS experience. There has always been a simmering comparison between these two, much like back in the time, there was comparison between Starcraft and Total Annihilation, even though they had significantly different playstyle. But the fact that both were Sci-Fi RTS that came out around the same time, gave rise to the inenvitable comparison between the two.

Today, in the eyes of many, the underdog that has been the Battlefield series, attempts to finally dethrone the leading champion that is the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series. Many still enjoy both just as much, but the marketing force of EA certainly pushes the comparison in the eyes of the audience ((See for example how they close some of their trailers with a quote of “Beyond the Call”, which is a direct jab at the Call of Duty series)). So even if many players are prepared to enjoy both franchises, not only do the companies behind those games prefer a direct competition, but many of their fanboys see it this way as well, and will lose no opportunity to put down the opposition.

Which, unsurprisingly, is what a bad review becomes. The opposition. Treason.

Finally a lot has to do with the intended audience as well. The sheer popularity of those games and their target audience of teenage boys and young adult males means that those more impressed by the marketing and word of mouth, will also tend to be fairly impulsive and immature (Just take a look here and see how many references to male masturbation you can find). This is likely to exaggerate asymmetric insight and choice selection bias, thus further stoking flames against those badmouthing their newest favourite game.

I will admit, I’ve also noticed that I’ve fallen victim to a lot of the above biases. I too catch myself upvoting positive aspects of the game and downvoting mentions of negative. I check myself to avoid it, but it’s notoriously difficult to control one’s subconscious impulses. It is precisely because I see how much this drive to belong and support “my team” is affecting my behaviour, that I decided to write this post and explore the reasons behind it.

Personally I think review scores are irrelevant and that most major publications are sold out anyway, so there’s little reason to trust their reviews, whether those are negative or positive towards the game. I have a different idea on what constitutes a useful review in a findamentally subjective experience such as a video game, but that’s a subject for another day.

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Quote of the Day: Immortality

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The internet makes our thoughts live forever.

Quoth happybadger

The time is 16:33 on 18 October, 2011 AD. In a fraction of a second after I click “save”, this comment will be readable by you- someone whom I have never met and who may be on the other side of a planet living in a country which I’ve only heard of from a Wikipedia article or brief mention on the BBC.

This comment will have travelled thousands of kilometres within a second of clicking save. Within minutes, it will be picked up by electronic spiders which comb the internet for new content and index it. Within an hour you should be able to google the first sentence of this paragraph and see my comment, within a day it should be on every search engine online.

If this comment goes viral, millions of people will be viewing it simultaneously and it will be rehosted many hundreds or thousands of times. You don’t know my name or anything about me, but you’ll have countless platforms to read the words I’ve written.

In a year, those same websites will still exist. The indexed passage will still exist. You can google the first sentence of this paragraph and find my comment. Within a decade every cell in my body will have recycled itself and I will effectively cease to exist as the same creature I am now, but these words will stay exactly as I wrote them. In under a century my cells will stop recycling and I’ll stop existing altogether, but these words will stay exactly as I wrote them.

As long as the data exists on some server in some data centre within some country on whatever planet we have colonised, my great-great-great grandchildren will read this comment as I wrote it more than a century before. Their great-great-great grandchildren, though they will have no idea who I was, will be able to read this comment as I wrote it in an age so barbaric that they can’t fathom living in it.

This comment will last as long as computers last, whether it gets one upvote or a thousand upvotes. If we don’t blow ourselves up before we leave Earth, we can assume that it will exist for thousands, if not millions, of years. Beings which are augmented through technology and natural evolution, so advanced that they’re an entirely different species than me, will either translate older languages or learn to speak my monkeytongue and read this comment in an environment I cannot possibly imagine.

It’s now 16:53, 18 October, 2011 AD, in Chicago, Illinois. I stopped halfway though this to get a drink. Water is still relatively clean and plentiful, and looking up the sky was a pale blue and free of smog. I’ll probably never leave this planet, let alone the solar system in which I’m writing this comment, and whoever and wherever and whatever and whenever you are you will have seen a perfect snapshot of this moment in time, one that was heard around the globe within a second and preserved for all eternity within a day. If the rest of this thread survives as well, you’ll have 477 other snapshots to read through as well- each of them perfectly preserved for as long as we remain civilised.

But seriously, true immortality is your own wikipedia page 😉

I seem to have caught a bad case of the MRM.

Db08 Comments

In which I’m being invaded by MRAs

MRM ofA sketch of a male face, sporting a neckbeard course stands for “Men’s Rights Movement”, something composed entirely of self-titled MRAs, who don’t actually do any activism, except troll and harass feminists online. Case in point, this article of mine, which unfortunately caught the attention of an MRAs who promptly called forth a troll brigade. And for the last few days, I’ve been receiving increasingly inane comments, such as:

I never cease bemusement at the fact that you paranoids keep lying about your fantasy world of so-called rape culture, replete with the overwhelming abundance of so-called rape jokes (none of which I’ve ever heard). You’re always gonna protect women from being raped, despite the fact that no man in his right mind would ever have sex with you, especially forcible sex. Get the help you so sorely need, will ya?

The immediate assumption that I’m female nonwithstanding, it is completely nonsensical in every way. Even if I was a female, what does not having sex have to do with protecting women from being raped? Only an MRA knows.

No one has said that rape is not serious, but I’ll go ahead and do that. A famous feminist once said that men can learn from being falsely accused of rape. Well, I throw that right back, that women can learn from being raped

This comment just takes the cake. That person then continued posting shit, but presumed to also start posting links to various MRA crap, which I promptly deleted.

The way you write tells us you’re a woman, clamato, and a bad liar to boot!. It’s especially evident the way you imply you’re not a woman … without specifically denying it in print.

There was a weird certainty from the invading MRAs that I’m female. Which is perplexing since I have a gallery full of my ugly bearded face.

one thing you apologists for false rape accusers are forgetting………….is that when the law becomes unwilling to protect men from false rape allegations, there WILL become a time when the law is going to be unable to protect false accusers from their victims

Ah yes, no MRA trollvasion would be complete without this classic canard. “Just you wait” whispers the sexually frustrated neckbeard between clenched teeth “Soon there will come a reckoning when us nice guys refuse to stay virgin and take matters into our own hands.” Or something like it, I’m sure.

And lets not forget the actual forum post. I tried to parse what the original poster was saying, but the replies were in some kind of MRA code language and I couldn’t understand what the hell “ES&D you lameass!!” and “LSOS! Go to hell!” are supposed to convey. I guess “Eat Shit & Die” is the first, but I have no idea how that is a valid argument.

Anyway, the trollvasion is currently going strong, as every reply in the forum pushes the topic up, allowing new MRAs to see the link and come here to vomit their opinion all over the place. I’m not worried though, these things tend not to linger. Kinda like an early cold.

EDIT: Egads, here come more of them

Incidentally, with a name like Divide By Zer0 this guy is probably a socially awkward programmer or computer science student who thinks he will help his chances with women by betraying his own gender. I’ve met a few dipshits just like him in real life, one of whom is pushing 40 and still hasn’t learned anything.

Oh the gnashing of teeth.

The end of a chapter.

Db0

I’ve stepped down as a moderator of /r/anarchism.

Ever since 2010 I’ve been one of the moderators in reddit’s /r/anarchism. Due to the nature of reddit, I was also one of the most “untouchable” ones, meaning that I couldn’t be demodded by almost nobody else, except one other person above me. I got so high up this technological hierarchy of sorts, because I was one of the most known and suggested people around  the Great Shitstorm of 2010 and was simply the second one who was added.

I’ve been planning to demod myself since the start of 2011, both for my own emotional calm (since we seem to be having persistent drama around /r/@) and to allow others to step up without me being seen as a “leader”. Unfortunately I felt compelled to stay for various reasons, primarily the common unilateral actions from other mods and the heavy-handed and ban-happy rhetoric that I saw many people asking for.

Today however it was suggested to me by another mod that we both stand down and I guess it just clicked. It’s been long enough, I have implemented two succesful initiatives in /r/anarchism: the tendency icons and the Confederation of Anarchist Reddits so I think my tenure has been succesful. There’s also no drama or shitstorm currently unfolding, so my stepping down won’t be spinned into something it’s not.

I won’t be leaving the decision-making process or the community of course, but I’ll be doing it on the same equal footing as the rest of the “plebs”. And we’ll see how it goes.

One part of my mind is very wary that the banhappy crowd will take over and democratic decision making will go the way of the Dodo, as already a lot of decisions are being taken in a knee-jerk reaction rather than through consensus or democratic agreement. Another part, fully expects that I will be banned on some flimsy excuse by the few mods that openly hate me (because I reverse unilateral actions too much and thus I am a “reactionary liberal”).

It was good while it lasted folks. 🙂

Once again comparing false rape accusations to actual rape.

Db052 Comments

Redditors insist that being accused of rape is just as bas or worse as being raped

I had a discussion on this issue again on reddit. I thought I’d repost my comments here. Unfortunately the person I was talking to deleted their comments, but I’ve quoted a part of it. Basically that person claimed that they had both been raped and been falsely accused of rape and both scarred them deeply. They were using their personal experiences to argue that false rape accusations can be just as bad as being raped. So I wrote…

Were you convicted? Same thing can happen for being convicted of murder, or any other serious crime.

Not to mention that this is not necessarily what happens to all who are accused of rape. Much of the time, the rape victim is not believed at all, their tale trivialized, or they are victim-blamed.

Yes, it sucks to be considered guilty for something you didn’t do. If there’s enough evidence to convict you, it can totally ruin a life and nobody deserves that. But accusing someone of rape is nothing compared to being raped.

Simply being falsely accused does not always lead to anything bad happening. Being raped always leaves permanent scars.

The basic point is that the results of fale accusation and rapes always vary. Some victims might take it better than others. But rape, on average, has far far worse results and occurs with far higher frequency.

Finally, within the current system there is a kind of zero sum effect between false rape accusations and actual rapes. We’re still at a point in time where many kind of rapes are not considered “rape-rape” (as some clueless media personas have called it) and there’s still a huge amount of rapes that don’t see justice because the victim was afraid to come out for fear of being accused and victim blamed. By making the culture more focused on false-rape accusations (i.e. more skeptic towards accusations of rape), is just going to make victim blaming even worse and thus more women are unlikely to even come out.

There is no perfect solution within the sociopolitical system we live in (which is why, and others, are rather radical about the change we need to have). But until then, I find it absurd to compare something that happens to something like 0.5% (or was it 0.05%? fairly small anyway as it only affects around 2%-8% of rape accusations) of males and has on average very little consequences, to something that happens to 15%-25% (statistic vary, but it’s a fucking lot) of females, causes horrible psychological damage, and is so permeating that it affects the lives of all females, without it ever happening to them, simply due to the fear that it might.

They replied to that comment with parts I quoted when I responded.

sad but true that an accusation is basically the same as a conviction in the eyes of everyone around you when it comes to rape

That’s just not true. I guess it depends on who you hang out with but this attitude is definitelly not generic.

I’d say that the SOCIAL consequences of a false accusation are at least as bad if not worse as those of being raped, and the potential exists for someone’s life to be destroyed just as fully if not moreso (thanks to the lack of support/resources) as someone who was raped.

Again, that’s just not true and I haven’t seen any study showing that this is anywhere near common.

OTOH, there’s never a loss for cases of rape accusations (true of false) where the accused didn’t have any problems from it.

Yes, the potential is there, but having a potential for a false rape (or murder, or theft) accusation to turn out horrid is not a guarantee. But every rape turns out on a scale of horrid.

Everything I know about feminism I learned on reddit

Db031 Comments

MRAs are hilarious. We just write down things that they say.

a user in /r/ShitRedditSays (/r/SRS for short) has created a sort of Hall of Fame of quotes from men’s rights “activists” on reddit who presume to define feminism and feminists. In their own words:

How do magnets work? What makes the sky blue? What are the Olay seven signs of ageing? These are just a few of the questions science has yet to answer. But by far the biggest mystery of all is feminism. What is it? Who subscribes to it? And what does it portend? Until comparatively recently science had no answers to these difficult questions. But now, thanks to the combined collective wisdom of reddit, its Byzantine intricacies have been unravelled. In this thread, I will present the sum of reddit’s expansive knowledge on feminism. And as you might expect, most of the quotes below are indeed from the people who talk about feminism more than any other group on earth: mens rights advocates!

The results are hilarious, and not at all surprising for anyone who has spent a minuscule amount of time arguing from a feminist perspective on reddit. And don’t think that the quotes themselves are hard to find or anything. According to the OP, it took a couple of hours to create this huge-ass compilation of redditry, just by doing a fairly simple search for the “feminism” keyword. This is because it’s MRA that like to talk about the term itself, while actual feminists discuss the actual sociopolitical issues.

Some choice quotes to give you an idea:

  • Misandrist feminists want gender based apartheid, and the male population culled to lest than 10%
  • They sure do love their homosexuals, those feminists…
  • Feminism will not fight for men because its very purpose is to fight AGAINST men. How much more evidence do the men here need that feminism hates you?
  • Feminism IS the system
  • Feminism has ALWAYS been about promoting the needs of women above those of men.
  • feminism taken to it’s logical conclusion: Oppression everywhere you look. Paranoia and suspicion about every word you hear. The patriarchy is out to get you. Women are oppressed by evil men with impunity. Big Father is watching you. Big Father will rape you. Your only function as a woman in this “patriarchy” is to be raped and killed. Women have been so brainwashed by the patriarchy that they can never be free. The only solution – the final solution – is to remove the male from the planet and cut out the cancer before it kills you. Do you want to be free? You’re not free. You’ll never be free. The only path to freedom is to destroy the male that keeps you down. 77 cents on the dollar. 1 in 4. Rape, rape and more rape. Everything, everywhere is rape. Rape is around every corner. Sexism spews from the mouths of everyone around you. Look what men have done to you. Look how they hold you back. There’s not enough female electrical engineers because the patriarchy holds them back. You could rule the world. You DESERVE to rule the world. If women ruled the world there would be no war, there would be no sickness, there would be no pollution, there would be no discrimination, the would be no hate. If women ruled the world all the problems would be solved – forever! Doesn’t the world deserve better than what MEN can give it? Don’t you see how men everywhere are nothing more than a disgusting cancer rotting our world from the inside out? Don’t you see it makes sense that men and masculinity should be destroyed? Don’t you??!!

And that’s just the tip of the penis iceberg. Take a gander yourself and laugh your heart out.

/inb4 MRAs tell me how they find nothing funny or questionable about these quotes.