GamerGate - and it's continuing aftermath.

[Opus131]

Your understanding of evolution is that it indicates that some ants can fuck and produce a whale.

That's not what i said. The purpose of evolution is to explain how different spieces have come into being. As long as a dog remains a dog, no transformation has taken place. You can argue that if animal breeders had million of years at their disposal, maybe they'll be able to get something else other than a dog, but until that happens there is no evolution.

[Giest118]

As long as a dog remains a dog, no transformation has taken place. You can argue that if animal breeders had million of years at their disposal, maybe they'll be able to get something else other than a dog, but until that happens there is no evolution.

So suddenly empirical data matters?

[Opus131]

I'm talking from the point of you of what the theory of evolution says. Obviously i do not believe a dog will ever produce something other than a dog, now or ever.

[Durandal]

On an additional note,

http://archive.is/o6NRJ

When Alex St. John posted his opinions about game industry workers being "wage-slaves" who have "embraced a culture of victimology" he received plenty of negative feedback.
Now his daughter, Drupal engineer Amilia St. John, has responded, most particularly to her father's views on women in tech.
In a blog post today, Amilia St. John writes about her dad's "horrific toddler meltdown" which, she says, represents "the usual self aggrandizing agenda that older generations like to pedal on days when they need to feed their superiority complexes." She describes his opinions on women in gaming as "distasteful," "vile" and "revolting".

Noting the widespread reaction to her father's post, and his use of her photograph in a presentation he uses, she added, "As his toxic waste trash fire not only is associated with my last name but also my face, I felt compelled to respond to my father's sexist, ableist, and racist rants."
In his opinion piece on VentureBeat over the weekend, Alex St. John, the former head of WildTangent, wrote that developers should quit whining about fair wages and long hours and get down to doing what they love because, after all, "pushing a mouse around for a paycheck" isn't really hard work.

St. John was responding to a new initiative by the International Game Developers Association to tackle unpaid overtime and long hours. He claimed that "making games is not a job, it's an art" and that "there's no amount of money that anybody can pay people with a wage-slave attitude."
""I felt compelled to respond to my father's sexist, ableist, and racist rants.""
Amilia St. John currently works as a front end Drupal developer at Energy Circle, a technology tools and services company. Her blog post talks about her experiences as a young woman, gaining entry to the tech industry. She writes about how she grew up surrounded by relatives who worked in tech, but found it difficult to convince herself to follow this career path due to the low number of women taking appropriate classes.
"I could not find relatable peers to work with in my classes, and even if I did, purely academic relationships would often be misconstrued as ‘something more'," she writes.
She also notes that women who do enter the tech field are often "weeded out of engineering roles in favor of client-facing roles that 'perfectly suit' their 'stronger social skills'. "
""He shields himself from all of the realities that put white males in a position of power.""
She turns back to her father's argument that "any woman entering the tech industry has it made," and that women in tech are often "fatally compromised with victimology psychosis."

"My father's own conclusion being that everyone who is not a white male has a victim complex and is allowing themselves to be held back," she writes. "It is very convenient to pretend that the reason white males are so successful is because they are the self-starters, geared toward success etc. while everyone else is simply too lazy, apathetic and whiny to make something of themselves. By pretending this, he shields himself from all of the realities that put white males in a position of power in the first place."
Amilia St. John provides statistics to show how women are discouraged from working in tech, or feel forced to leave due to hostile working environments. A recent study found that 60 percent of women working in the Silicon Valley tech industry had experienced unwanted sexual advances and that 84 percent said that had been told they are "too aggressive."
"I beg my father, for the love of his daughters, to stop hindering our progress as women in the industry and start using his influence to promote positive experiences for minorities in tech," added St. John." Her blog post also includes resources for women working in tech as well as girls considering engineering as a career.
Polygon contacted Alex St. John for a response.

something tells me they don't talk much to eachother
I don't really think anyone wants a daughter like this
I don't either think that you shouldn't bitch about wages in video game development because its art, because many positions in video game development just have you implement the ideas from someone else who is actually doing the actual artistic work.

[Blinge]

From my understanding of this whole fiasco, alex st. john is a piece of shit. I've no idea why you'd place blame at the daughter's feet.
At no point has anyone 'bitched about wages' unless it's st.john bitching about having to pay people.

I guess now you've posted it here it's a gamergate story cause a woman's involved.

Can't wait for this to be fed through the mangled QuaPus propaganda machine .

[Mischief Maker]

Since working on art is a reward in and of itself and not to be sullied by giving the artist money for their efforts, can I pirate his games for free?

[Bananamatic]

does anyone unironically want to be a professional game dev these days
i heard nothing but how shit it is, 80 hours a week of anything would make me sick of it, even playing dodonpachi saidaioujou

tbh the article only feels like shit because polygon just quoted all the parts that sound like social justice as usual while leaving out the rest, her actual blog post is quite reasonable

[Squire Grooktook]

does anyone unironically want to be a professional game dev these days
i heard nothing but how shit it is, 80 hours a week of anything would make me sick of it, even playing dodonpachi saidaioujou\

I do.

They're not all that bad, from what I can tell. Some basically amount to decent programming jobs.

Which is what I want because I'm ok at programming and it would make me feel more enthusiastic if what I contributed went to what I like. While also making me money.

I'm going for a computer science major though, so if the game dev stuff doesn't pan out, I'd just go for a more mundane programming job. I'm fine with that too. Just as long as it puts food on the table. I already know enough to do amateur 2d/3d game development on my freetime anyway, so that's always on the table as a hobby.

[Mischief Maker]

What I meant by the question is how do you determine the closeness of something to God? What quality makes Mozart closer to the infinite than Salieri?

Well, if you have to ask, i'd have to question your intelligence. Mozart is quite clearly greater than Salieri, and to me the paltry talent of Salieri is a degradation or a falsification of the genius of Mozart, which in its turn is a falsification of an even higher divine reality. The idea of the other way around being true, that from the ability to play Pac-Man a low intelligence could slowly produce genius out of thin air is nonsensical.

What are you, my codependent girlfriend, sulking because I don't just "know" the thoughts in your head that you don't properly verbalize?

Fair enough that i shouldn't have brought science into this, since my objection to evolution is not based on any particular scientific question, least of all stuff like the law of thermodynamics, which appear to be an hot topic in this debate between scientists and creationists (and i repeat that i'm not a creationist):

Well if you're not a creationist, consider different sources. That dude you linked doesn't understand the theory of evolution, doesn't understand thermodynamics, but cherry picks a little bit of scientific vocabulary to fool the layman into thinking his arguments carry more weight. This is the dictionary definition of pseudoscience.

If you're wondering what source would be better to gain an understanding of the theory of evolution, read The Origin of Species!

The "greater" in terms of the biosphere is the sun (and in some places the Earth's radioactive core) whose rays are harnessed by life forms of lesser energy such as photosynthetic oak trees.

I'm not seeing how this shows that the "greater" can come from the lesser. Would you mind explain how this works? So the sun (which is "greater" under some unspecified metric) produces rays which are harnessed by life forms of "lesser energy" (whatever that means), and this proves the logical principle in question is invalid how?

Again, you don't define what quality of greater and lesser you're using, so I just picked energy. None of the chemical processes that drive any lifeform on Earth has a greater amount of energy than the residual energy beamed onto the surface by the sun. This is arguing that evolution is not a greater coming from a lesser.

The theory of evolution posits species change from the gradual accumulation of novel traits in different environments over a process of millions of generations, not a single generation.

Chesterton provided a very humorous refutation of this explanation:

But this notion of something smooth and slow like the ascent of a slope, is a great part of the illusion. It is an illogically as well as an illusion; for slowness has really nothing to do with the question. An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny. The medieval wizard may have flown through the air from the top of a tower; but to see an old gentleman walking through the air in a leisurely and lounging manner, would still seem to call for some explanation. Yet there runs through all the rationalistic treatment of history this curious and confused idea that difficulty is avoided or even mystery eliminated, by dwelling on mere delay or on something dilatory in the processes of things. There will be something to be said upon particular examples elsewhere; the question here is the false atmosphere of facility and ease given by the mere suggestion of going slow; the sort of comfort that might be given to a nervous old woman traveling for the first time in a motor-car.

I don't see how the "slowness" of the process makes the impossibility of the process possible. It seems that on some level you have to explain that the process isn't in fact impossible (to wit: by denying there even is such a thing as a species, just a sort of biological continuum where every line of demarcation is purely arbitrary).

You and this creationist are missing the point. The time is secondary. Evolution happens in very small mutational steps that accumulate over many, many generations and ultimately add up to major morphological changes. A great amount of time is required for all these generations to accumulate, that's all.

Once again, these creationist sources that you're turning to do not seem to understand the theory of evolution at all and are knocking down arguments that only exist in their own heads.

Okay, the entire method of science is about removing relativism from observation. The simplest example would be measuring the length of something using a ruler instead of eyeballing it and making a guess on your own. Same thing with double-blind studies and a variety of other methodologies used by scientists throughout history.

You are not answering the actual point here. How do you, a creature of flux, get to determine, in an absolute faction, that you are a mere stage in an ongoing development, or determine anything whatsoever for that matter?

Let me give an example of the wisdom of the ancient philosophers being brought down by scientific inquiry. Aristotle was a great philosopher of the ancient world, yes? Well Aristotle as a mere creature of flux declared that the speed at which an object falls is faster the heavier the object. For many centuries this was accepted as fact until your countryman Galileo Galilee put this model to the test. He dropped two weights of different mass from the leaning tower of pisa and found that the objects hit the ground at the same time. Now one of the requirements of science is that an experiment can be repeatable. You yourself right now can take two similarly shaped objects of different weight, drop them from an equal height, and no matter your own belief system or prejudice, both objects will hit the ground at the same time. Your relative prejudice toward this question is eliminated by using actual physical objects and reliably seeing the same results.

So in the future, if you're going to step on an elevator and someone says, "By the way, that elevator was designed by an engineer who said, 'Psh! Muh Science!' and designed it using an Aristotelian model of gravity," do not use that elevator.

[BIL]

Meanwhile, in "muh GG:" Like any great-hearted Twitter activist, John Walker Flynt of Giant Spacekat (creators of indie sensation and upcoming Steam smash Revolution 60) never runs from a real fight. So I was not surprised to see him take aim at that most deservingly venal of capitalist figureheads, Scrooge McDuck.

Spoiler

His usual courage when tweet-slamming fictional entities aside, this is also a great way for John to recant his thoughtcrimes on capitalism some months back - demonstrating to the Twittersphere that not every cartoonishly deranged icon of first-world excess is a moneygrubbing shitlord. John thanks all Patreons for the monthly two grand needed to stave off the nightmare spectre of Jace Connors and the Battle Prius.

Unfortunately some things are just too dangerous for even our working class feminist heroine - so for the second year running, Giant Spacekat will not be attending "PAX East" due to a lack of event security. Given the ongoing trend of straight white dudes assassinating women game developers, often mowing down conference-goers with the Race War Van, John had expected a personal SEAL detail at minimum. Fuck if I know or care about this PAX shit, frankly, but as your local Giant Spacekat shill I've got to pass the news along.

To minimise this setback, please donate generously to John's Patreon as we count down the months to the release of Revolution 60 on Steam! Megaman Battle Network meets Dragon's Lair in a female-friendly screen-licker with the avant-garde "CGI burn ward" stylings of ReBoot, and a faint whiff of bulimia. Coming October 2015

[Skykid]

^ Made my morning.

His Patreon is amazing. It's literally saying 'I need your money because I'm harassed on the internet and after blocking people on twitter I don't have enough time to make games'.

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=439829

I'm sure a fair portion of that sum must be coming from an asylum.

[BIL]

Regarding asylums, I do wonder just how damaged/disabled the guy is. I'm here waiting for the bus to show up, watching his infamous "THIS IS A HIT PIECE" interview... he brings up Smash TV and its pleasure dome as an example of sexist 90s videogames. Smash TV, a Verhoevenesque satire of consumer carnality so lurid, you'd have to be either a) in primary school or b) brutally concussed to miss its point. Of all possible examples, with over two decades to reflect since, that's his verdict on its lurid victory scenes. It's not a dystopian horror where the citizenry can now murder for mod-cons with their own hands. No, it's an affirmation of masculinity. Jesus Christ! No wonder Little John had to get the chop.

It's not normal. As with his epiphany on the depredations of Scrooge McDuck (and by extension, getting really esoteric here, Ebenezer Scrooge zomg), he's either having a laugh or legit fucked in the head. Would you seriously need to sit him down and explain why such characters' flaws are morally instructive? Does he think Animal Farm is about animals on a farm? This is some Chris Chan shit. There is of course a third explanation for all this - c) utter grasping dishonesty - that it's more fun to ignore. ;3

I love him, honestly. In such a cruel world, the worst you can really say is that he ruins cringe masterpieces Alan Partridge and David Brent, being them IRL. (though he can't replace Basil Fawlty - Basil has at least some principles)

[evil_ash_xero]

Ragging on Scrooge McDuck?! Wu has gone too far.

That's like one of the best Disney characters, of all time. Granted, I'm not a huge fan of Disney characters, but he's awesome. He SWIMS in money!

[BIL]

What is best in life, Unca Scrooge?



In that order.

Spoiler

Any thoughts John?



Ha! Excellent satire, John!

[evil_ash_xero]

I don't know how to feel about this one.
Candace Owens, from the Social Autopsy Kickstarter, has apologized to GG. Here is an archive: https://archive.is/Yd3wm

Here are the important bits, quoted:



I fell victim to it too. I didn't even know who or what Gamergate was and I was just screaming at them because fear was planted in my mind.

That's cyber-terrorism. Everyone tried to kill each other and the people that orchestrated it sat back and laughed.

Didn't give one another chance. We all sucked. And I'm incredibly sorry btw. That was me sucking. Yelling at an entire community. I'm sorry

It's not who I am and I just want to say to everyone I offended that day, that I'm sorry.



Now, on one hand...this is great. As someone from that side, has seen the light. However, Social Autopsy was one of the WORST ideas, I have ever heard of. It was taking SJW shaming tactics, to a whole new disgusting level.
And I'm sure some of this has to do with the feud between her and Zoe Quinn.

I guess it's a wash.

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

^You missed the most interesting part of the story - where ZQ passed the "my intern" email with Candace's personal info around her private harassment squad. The smoking gun of organised, racist abuse is right there yet SJWs and the mainstream media will ignore this.

This serial abuser was allowed to speak at the UN

[BIL]

imo the most amusing interpretation of this latest shitshow is: Blowy and Randwhale saw an uppity newcomer moving in on their cyberbowling alley protection racket, and put some muscle on the case. So that's what I'm going with.

And yes whatsherface is clearly a fucking retard. Our two social justice pioneers weren't wrong on that! Broken clock twice daily etc etc

btw, Rebel Game Jam is gonna be great! We think it'll coincide with Revolution 60's Steam release. Maybe some kind of three-way promotion with the FemFreq box set might be possible? Regardless, everyone has been working so hard and making the most of your generous donations! Sadly John has been a little distracted with his tireless humanitarian work on twitter. Please consider a donation to cover this.

Spoiler

I think "bus" needs to go, too! What would Rosa Parks think? And yes, for you shitlords lurking the thread, "male/female" connectors are problematic. :[

Spoiler

Can someone PM an admin about installing appropriate word filters for your hardware subforum? I've already gone to backchannel about banning Raiden Fighters threads from the high score subforum. I think this place is getting better already <333

[EmperorIng]

Yuck. Opening this thread makes me angry. If there ever was a case of bringing back the gulags, I know who'd be first in line.

[BIL]

Ahuviya tbh

Spoiler

[evil_ash_xero]

Yuck. Opening this thread makes me angry. If there ever was a case of bringing back the gulags, I know who'd be first in line.

You'll be alright.

[Durandal]

http://archive.is/hQ3Ct

Steam's turned toxic, and Valve doesn't care
PC gaming's most important storefront is all too often an unmoderated playground for harassers and trolls, damaging developers and gamers alike

Steam saved PC gaming. As retailers aggressively reduced the shelf space afforded to PC titles - blaming piracy, but equally motivated, no doubt, by the proliferation of MMO and other online titles which had little or no resale value - Valve took matters into its own hands and delivered on the long-empty promises of digital distribution. It was a bumpy ride at first, but the service Valve created ushered in a new and exciting era for games on the PC. Freed from the shackles of traditional publishing and retail, it's become a thriving platform that teems with creativity and experimentation. Steam still isn't all things to all people, but it saved PC gaming.

Sometimes, though, you look at Steam and wonder if PC gaming was worth saving. All too often, browsing through Steam to look for interesting things to try out leaves you feeling not so much that you want to close the application in disgust, but that you'd like to set the whole damned thing on fire. The reason isn't usability, or bugginess, or anything like that - Steam has its issues, but by and large it's a solid piece of technology - but rather the "community" that Valve has allowed to thrive on its platform. On a platform that aims to expose and promote great games from newcomers and relatively unknown indies, community feedback, reviews and recommendations are vital components, but a legacy of poor and deeply misguided decision making from Valve has meant that engaging with those aspects of Steam can all too often feel like swimming through hot sewerage.

The problem is this; Steam is almost entirely unmoderated, and Valve makes pretty much zero effort to reign in any behaviour on its platform that isn't outright illegal. As a consequence, it's open season for the worst behaviours and tactics of the Internet's reactionary malcontents - the weapon of choice being brigading, whereby huge numbers of users from one of the Internet's cesspits are sent to downvote, post terrible reviews or simply fill content pages with bile. Targets are chosen for daring to include content that doesn't please the reactionary hordes, or for being made by a developer who once said a vaguely liberal thing on Twitter, or - of course - for being made by a woman, or for whatever other thing simply doesn't please the trolls on any given day. The reviews on almost any game on Steam will often contain some pretty choice language and viewpoints, but hitting upon a game that's been targeted for brigading is like running headlong into a wall of pure, frothing hatred.

Of course, Steam's not the worst of it in most regards; the places that spawn these brigades in the first place, places like Reddit and 4chan, are far, far worse, and concoct many other malicious ways to hurt and harass their targets. That Steam permits this behaviour on an ongoing basis is, however, a huge problem - not least because Steam is a commercial platform, and provides harassers and trolls with an opportunity to directly damage the income of the developers they target.

It's not that Valve doesn't care about the quality of its platform. Just this week, it implemented a new feature allowing customers to see scores from recent reviews, rather than overall scores, so you can get a sense of how a game has changed since its original launch. It's a good, pretty well considered feature. Yet its arrival really just highlights how little Valve seems to care that its storefront is being used as a tool by harassers, and filled up on a regular basis with vicious, abusive reviews and comments that no customer wants to be confronted with when browsing. Sure, traditional retail may have been hanging PC gaming out to dry all those years ago, but at least I'm reasonably sure that most traditional retail stores would have kicked out anyone who ran into their store and started screaming obscenities in the face of the first girl they saw.

And look - I get that community moderation is hard. It's really hard. Much harder than throwing in a quick algorithm to compute review scores from recent reviews only, which is why that got tackled first; but harassment and brigading isn't a new problem on Steam, or on the Internet in general, and there are only so many times that you can claim to simply be picking low-hanging fruit before someone points out that you haven't even brought a ladder to the orchard. You're not even trying. You don't even want to try. I stated earlier on that Steam ended up this way because of bad decision making down the years, and this is what I meant; there has never been a sense that Valve wants to tackle this problem. Rather, they've given the impression that they hope they can fix it with some clever engineering tweak, some genius little bit of code that'll somehow balance the need for community feedback to expose good games against the need to stop harassers and trolls from treating the platform as a 24 hour public toilet.

That's not how community moderation works. It's a fundamental, obtuse misunderstanding of how any sort of system designed to manage, build and support a community works - from statecraft right on down to housemate meetings to discuss unwashed dishes. You need people; you need actual people doing actual moderation jobs, granted the training and the authority to step in and put the community back on the rails when it falls off. It's hard, and it's actually pretty expensive, and it takes a lot of care and attention - but it's not impossible. Look at the progress Riot Games has made in turning around the community of League of Legends, which was formerly one of the most grossly toxic communities in gaming. It's still by no means perfect, but Riot has shown that it cares, and that it's willing to fight to improve things, and LoL is by far a better, more welcoming and more fun game for it. Some of that was achieved with tweaks to systems and protocols; but in the end, it takes a real, breathing, thinking human to counteract attempts by other humans to be unpleasant to one another, because if there's one thing our species has demonstrated extraordinary affinity for over the centuries, it's finding creative ways to skirt around rules in pursuit of being unpleasant to other people.

Riot's done a good job of this because, I believe, Riot genuinely believes that it's the right thing to do. Therein lies the rub; I don't think Valve cares. It should care. It has a damn-near monopoly on PC game distribution through its storefront, and that gives it responsibilities - if it doesn't like or want those responsibilities, that's sad in and of itself, but I'm sure a quick dip in the swimming pools they're filling with money from Steam might take the edge off the pain. It should also care, though, because there's a hard limit on how much a business can grow if it permits abusive behaviour towards whole classes of customers or clients. Anyone making a game that tackles a tough subject, or aims at a non-traditional audience, or who is themselves a member of a minority group; well, they'd probably love to be on Steam, but they're thinking twice about whether it's a good move. That's not conjecture - it's something I hear almost every week from developers in that position, developers whose starry-eyed view of Steam from only a few years ago has been replaced with absolute trepidation or even outright rejection of the idea of exposing themselves to the storefront's warped excuse for a "community".

Today, that might just mean Steam is losing out on a few bucks here and there from creators and customers who have had enough of the toxic environment it permits; but markets diversify as they grow. Steam took over when retailers failed to serve customers with an appetite for PC games. What, then, will happen to Steam if new waves of customers - younger and more diverse - find that games and creators they like are treated abysmally by the service? Valve shouldn't need a commercial incentive to fix this problem; they should fix it because it's the right thing to do, because tacitly enabling and permitting abuse is really little better than engaging in harassment yourself. If that's not enough, though, there absolutely is a commercial incentive too; Steam may be dominant, but it's not the only option for either consumers or creators. There are far more sales to be lost from permitting abuse than from telling harassers they're no longer welcome. Valve should give the latter a try.

Usually people don't start brigades to shit on your game unless your game is shit, and even then it shouldn't affect your incomes if you have a (dedicated) fanbase, or in which case you have no fans and only haters, you probably made a bad game. Even Undertale has its fair share of haters but manages to have a 96% approval rating on Steam. The recent update where Steam added a different approval percentage for recent reviews should be an indicator for possible bad/good updates and/or brigading is another step to making Steam a consumer-friendlier place after allowing refunds, so I wouldn't say Steam doesn't care, it's just that there is a fine line between trampling your costumers and enforcing community standards.
I hear that the Tribunal in LoL isn't all that good as this article makes it out to be, though.

[Zen]

http://archive.is/hQ3Ct

Steam's turned toxic, and Valve doesn't care
PC gaming's most important storefront is all too often an unmoderated playground for harassers and trolls, damaging developers and gamers alike

Steam saved PC gaming. As retailers aggressively reduced the shelf space afforded to PC titles - blaming piracy, but equally motivated, no doubt, by the proliferation of MMO and other online titles which had little or no resale value - Valve took matters into its own hands and delivered on the long-empty promises of digital distribution. It was a bumpy ride at first, but the service Valve created ushered in a new and exciting era for games on the PC. Freed from the shackles of traditional publishing and retail, it's become a thriving platform that teems with creativity and experimentation. Steam still isn't all things to all people, but it saved PC gaming.

Sometimes, though, you look at Steam and wonder if PC gaming was worth saving. All too often, browsing through Steam to look for interesting things to try out leaves you feeling not so much that you want to close the application in disgust, but that you'd like to set the whole damned thing on fire. The reason isn't usability, or bugginess, or anything like that - Steam has its issues, but by and large it's a solid piece of technology - but rather the "community" that Valve has allowed to thrive on its platform. On a platform that aims to expose and promote great games from newcomers and relatively unknown indies, community feedback, reviews and recommendations are vital components, but a legacy of poor and deeply misguided decision making from Valve has meant that engaging with those aspects of Steam can all too often feel like swimming through hot sewerage.

The problem is this; Steam is almost entirely unmoderated, and Valve makes pretty much zero effort to reign in any behaviour on its platform that isn't outright illegal. As a consequence, it's open season for the worst behaviours and tactics of the Internet's reactionary malcontents - the weapon of choice being brigading, whereby huge numbers of users from one of the Internet's cesspits are sent to downvote, post terrible reviews or simply fill content pages with bile. Targets are chosen for daring to include content that doesn't please the reactionary hordes, or for being made by a developer who once said a vaguely liberal thing on Twitter, or - of course - for being made by a woman, or for whatever other thing simply doesn't please the trolls on any given day. The reviews on almost any game on Steam will often contain some pretty choice language and viewpoints, but hitting upon a game that's been targeted for brigading is like running headlong into a wall of pure, frothing hatred.

Of course, Steam's not the worst of it in most regards; the places that spawn these brigades in the first place, places like Reddit and 4chan, are far, far worse, and concoct many other malicious ways to hurt and harass their targets. That Steam permits this behaviour on an ongoing basis is, however, a huge problem - not least because Steam is a commercial platform, and provides harassers and trolls with an opportunity to directly damage the income of the developers they target.

It's not that Valve doesn't care about the quality of its platform. Just this week, it implemented a new feature allowing customers to see scores from recent reviews, rather than overall scores, so you can get a sense of how a game has changed since its original launch. It's a good, pretty well considered feature. Yet its arrival really just highlights how little Valve seems to care that its storefront is being used as a tool by harassers, and filled up on a regular basis with vicious, abusive reviews and comments that no customer wants to be confronted with when browsing. Sure, traditional retail may have been hanging PC gaming out to dry all those years ago, but at least I'm reasonably sure that most traditional retail stores would have kicked out anyone who ran into their store and started screaming obscenities in the face of the first girl they saw.

And look - I get that community moderation is hard. It's really hard. Much harder than throwing in a quick algorithm to compute review scores from recent reviews only, which is why that got tackled first; but harassment and brigading isn't a new problem on Steam, or on the Internet in general, and there are only so many times that you can claim to simply be picking low-hanging fruit before someone points out that you haven't even brought a ladder to the orchard. You're not even trying. You don't even want to try. I stated earlier on that Steam ended up this way because of bad decision making down the years, and this is what I meant; there has never been a sense that Valve wants to tackle this problem. Rather, they've given the impression that they hope they can fix it with some clever engineering tweak, some genius little bit of code that'll somehow balance the need for community feedback to expose good games against the need to stop harassers and trolls from treating the platform as a 24 hour public toilet.

That's not how community moderation works. It's a fundamental, obtuse misunderstanding of how any sort of system designed to manage, build and support a community works - from statecraft right on down to housemate meetings to discuss unwashed dishes. You need people; you need actual people doing actual moderation jobs, granted the training and the authority to step in and put the community back on the rails when it falls off. It's hard, and it's actually pretty expensive, and it takes a lot of care and attention - but it's not impossible. Look at the progress Riot Games has made in turning around the community of League of Legends, which was formerly one of the most grossly toxic communities in gaming. It's still by no means perfect, but Riot has shown that it cares, and that it's willing to fight to improve things, and LoL is by far a better, more welcoming and more fun game for it. Some of that was achieved with tweaks to systems and protocols; but in the end, it takes a real, breathing, thinking human to counteract attempts by other humans to be unpleasant to one another, because if there's one thing our species has demonstrated extraordinary affinity for over the centuries, it's finding creative ways to skirt around rules in pursuit of being unpleasant to other people.

Riot's done a good job of this because, I believe, Riot genuinely believes that it's the right thing to do. Therein lies the rub; I don't think Valve cares. It should care. It has a damn-near monopoly on PC game distribution through its storefront, and that gives it responsibilities - if it doesn't like or want those responsibilities, that's sad in and of itself, but I'm sure a quick dip in the swimming pools they're filling with money from Steam might take the edge off the pain. It should also care, though, because there's a hard limit on how much a business can grow if it permits abusive behaviour towards whole classes of customers or clients. Anyone making a game that tackles a tough subject, or aims at a non-traditional audience, or who is themselves a member of a minority group; well, they'd probably love to be on Steam, but they're thinking twice about whether it's a good move. That's not conjecture - it's something I hear almost every week from developers in that position, developers whose starry-eyed view of Steam from only a few years ago has been replaced with absolute trepidation or even outright rejection of the idea of exposing themselves to the storefront's warped excuse for a "community".

Today, that might just mean Steam is losing out on a few bucks here and there from creators and customers who have had enough of the toxic environment it permits; but markets diversify as they grow. Steam took over when retailers failed to serve customers with an appetite for PC games. What, then, will happen to Steam if new waves of customers - younger and more diverse - find that games and creators they like are treated abysmally by the service? Valve shouldn't need a commercial incentive to fix this problem; they should fix it because it's the right thing to do, because tacitly enabling and permitting abuse is really little better than engaging in harassment yourself. If that's not enough, though, there absolutely is a commercial incentive too; Steam may be dominant, but it's not the only option for either consumers or creators. There are far more sales to be lost from permitting abuse than from telling harassers they're no longer welcome. Valve should give the latter a try.

Usually people don't start brigades to shit on your game unless your game is shit, and even then it shouldn't affect your incomes if you have a (dedicated) fanbase, or in which case you have no fans and only haters, you probably made a bad game. Even Undertale has its fair share of haters but manages to have a 96% approval rating on Steam. The recent update where Steam added a different approval percentage for recent reviews should be an indicator for possible bad/good updates and/or brigading is another step to making Steam a consumer-friendlier place after allowing refunds, so I wouldn't say Steam doesn't care, it's just that there is a fine line between trampling your costumers and enforcing community standards.
I hear that the Tribunal in LoL isn't all that good as this article makes it out to be, though.

Your comment on this article is on point, Durandal. Well done.
Are people still falling for this divisive narrative? What was the point of this article? Even the meanest intelligence should be able to see right through it.
For those who did not/do not want to read it TLDR; toxic gamers harassing girls and minorities and the games they make by leaving bad reviews on STEAM. Solution - STEAM censorship.

The most telling line? "because if there's one thing our species has demonstrated extraordinary affinity for over the centuries, it's finding creative ways to skirt around rules in pursuit of being unpleasant to other people" and so, goes his reasoning, STEAM must shut these "unpleasant" people down.

Really? This is not my experience of the species. Is it yours? It is certainly not my general experience when it comes to gamers.
Gamers, as a whole, are one of the most inclusive groups imaginable. They only care about one thing "Is it good?", and if it is not they say so, in no uncertain terms.
This guy wants the narrative to say otherwise. "Its not a shit game", says he, you only think that because your a misogynist. Its akin to saying, "you disagree with President Obama because your a racist".

Let me finish by saying this; When one "side" says whatever the fuck it wants and has no problem with you doing the same and the other "side" wants to shut you up, you should be able to figure out whats up, all on your own.

[BIL]

Oh god, I wasted too much time mansplaining about videogames today and neglected my PR duties... ahem. Zen I hope you're not trying to rationalise the gynocidal hate speech being directed at Revolution 60, the True and Honest videogame that's as good as it is progressive :O

Spoiler

It would be a shame if I had to add you to my already substantial "system11.org" ignore list for hate speech!!!

Also John's Patreon has gone below 2k again, could some of you noble gentlemen please donate to the fight against sexy - I mean sexualised videogames? FGM and honour killings will always be with you, but Revolution 60 is here on Steam today. Or tomorrow. Coming soon!

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

Spoiler

Is that new? It looks like Ken Penders' art.

Spoiler

In related news, The Sad Puppies are at it again and the recent Hugo nominations are causing all sorts of delicious drama. Nominations include the Marxism episode of My Little Pony (yes, it's real) and short story Space Raptor Butt Invasion by Chuck Tingle, who wants Zoe Quinn to accept the award if he wins.

[BIL]

Hooo... always a pleasure to meet another Penders scholar! He is indeed a mighty rival to Giant Spacekat's brand of CG that makes infants scream for their mothers!

Is that new?

Is actually from 2013, before John hopped aboard the GGravy train I, I mean found virtue

Don't worry though, there's plenty of miniskirts, cleavage and lycra to go around in the all-new Steam release!

[Zen]

Oh god, I wasted too much time mansplaining about videogames today and neglected my PR duties... ahem. Zen I hope you're not trying to rationalise the gynocidal hate speech being directed at Revolution 60, the True and Honest videogame that's as good as it is progressive :O

Spoiler

It would be a shame if I had to add you to my already substantial "system11.org" ignore list for hate speech!!!

Also John's Patreon has gone below 2k again, could some of you noble gentlemen please donate to the fight against sexy - I mean sexualised videogames? FGM and honour killings will always be with you, but Revolution 60 is here on Steam today. Or tomorrow. Coming soon!

Hey BIL,
Are you like, you know, calling me a Shitlord?

I dont think that I have heard of Revolution 60 until now (quick web search) Ah! It is that transparent attempt at pseudo cultural carpetbagging by John Flynt?
I do recall there being mention of a "game" a while back, that would show just how toxic gamers are and would anoint John Flynt as a true martyr etc. This is it, is it? And its getting hate, is it? Do tell.

Fuck that shit. Nuke it from orbit. Just to be sure.

And yes, I am an Arch Shitlord. Got horns, tail the lot.

[BIL]

It's not my job to educate you shitlord! Or at least, it isn't in my free time. ;3 Fortunately for you, as your local Giant Spacekat shill it is my job!

For starters, please ignore the internalised misogyny of this traitorous Woman Of Colour regarding Revolution 60's award-winning blending of an anemic and crippled - I mean, female friendly Megaman Battle Network clone with the cutting-edge interactive cinematic experience of Dragon's Lair.

And definitely ignore this full LP of the mobile version! The game's been yanked off the store anyway! Under no circumstances should you peruse it with popcorn and soda for an MST3K-esque cavalcade of badness! ONLY by paying the low, low price for the upcoming Steam release will you truly understand this moving work from True and Honest gamer, progressive crusader and Deagle Nation arch-nemesis John Walker Flynt.

[Zen]

Well . . . !
The insanity has been progressing unabated then. I have been afk, as it were, from these issues for a while now.
Thank you for the links, BIL.
Looking back a few pages in this thread now and I see that you chaps are well up to speed. Should have read back a bit before posting, apologies.
Just wandered in expecting fuckery (not the good kind) only to find open discourse. What does it say about the state of things, when I say that I was surprised to find an open an forthright thread?

[No_not_like_Quake]

There's a Met Art model named Toxic A, so it can't be all bad.

[Zen]

Sorry to bump some topics here but im reading back a few pages and I see that I have missed out on so much good stuff. Not least of which was the objectivist/realativist/pure science/evolution brouhaha.
The cherry on that particular cake, for me, was the self declared presence of an emanationist. I feel like you chaps were not prepared. In fact I know you were not prepared. Let me put it this way;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYk7m6Nu1Do

At one point, I believe I saw Squire Grooktook stick his fingers in his ears
FYI and for what its worth, do not make the mistake of judging or, "understanding" Opus131 too quickly, chaps. You might be unwittingly committing cosmic Seppuku with his lightsaber.

On topic, not sure if this was missed or not http://nichegamer.com/2016/04/28/star-g ... ing-women/