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Decline Felipepepe is unpleasant and points fingers - I wrote yet another rant on Gamasutra

Zeriel

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Jun 17, 2012
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Are they IGN now or something? I mean I always understood they were popamole, but why do they even bother following nostalgia-led Kickstarters and classic RPGs if they don't give a shit about games history?
Let's be honest here, it's not like the Codex gives that much of a shit either.

I mean, look at the thread felipepepe did on PLATO RPGs last year. 2 pages of discussion and only 20/30 brofists for his very well researched and in-depths posts.

I've seen shitposts in GD with more brofists than that. Not to mention the Fallout 4 thread which has almost 40 pages since Tuesday night.

Sure, but indifference is a far cry from aggressive "IT DOESN'T MATTER WHATSOEVER, AND I'M GOING TO STAY AND ARGUE THIS POINT THAT WHO CARES".
 
Joined
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FO4 has a ton of pages because spewing lulsy one-liners and wild guesses is a lot easier than coming up with insightful comments for a decent thread. Brofists are renamed Likes from facebook and so not a measure of anything other than "made me lol, +1"
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Are they IGN now or something? I mean I always understood they were popamole, but why do they even bother following nostalgia-led Kickstarters and classic RPGs if they don't give a shit about games history?
Let's be honest here, it's not like the Codex gives that much of a shit either.

I mean, look at the thread felipepepe did on PLATO RPGs last year. 2 pages of discussion and only 20/30 brofists for his very well researched and in-depths posts.

I've seen shitposts in GD with more brofists than that. Not to mention the Fallout 4 thread which has almost 40 pages since Tuesday night.

Yes, but the Codex has such threads. And people get brofists for them. And there aren't any LOL WHO CARES ABOUT THIS OLD SHIT shitposts, and if there were, the poster would earn himself a dumbfuck tag and rightly so.

Also, there's not that many pages of discussion possible about such topics - you can talk about the old game design a bit, and that's that. They're too primitive for in-depth discussion, and too few, if any at all, have played those PLATO games to properly talk about experiences.
 

Nostaljaded

Savant
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Messages
359
Yeah, but that's in Chinese. I have a fan-translated english version.

The fan-translated english version which you have (and what you had previously passed to me privately and where I will be taking the ENG-translated files from) may not be fit for public release as it probably contains a few unreleased, non-public data.

So what I'm doing is slapping those ENG-translated files on top of the freeware to make it 'safe' for release and at the same time bundling some goodies to feed the hyper kuineas.

P.S. You do remembered we had some past correspondence in some other web right?

Point out if there's an existing Chinese Paladin thread for planting the eventual seed of no return.
 

Don Peste

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||☆||
Culture and history are chains and they put people and art into categories where they don't belong. Culture divides us all and takes away our individual identities. History stunts our imagination and our growth. For whatever reason, people can't go beyond what's happened before - and I think that's holding us back in a very big way.

Why can't we learn from our past without being imprisoned by it? Fretting over what's come and gone is such a waste of our all too short lives.
 

Gozma

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Aug 1, 2012
Messages
2,951
A lot of this history stuff has the problem where I don't care a huge amount (like I would never put in a bunch of effort to collate and structure information about MUDs, a near-dead form that used to be quite big and pioneered a lot of stuff) but when I read lies about it, like some dumbass giving historical credit to Ultima Online for things that were commonplace in MUDs (or Neverwinter Nights) five or more years beforehand, I mad

It's like, pure negative energy maaaannn
 

NotAGolfer

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Divinity: Original Sin 2
Culture and history are chains and they put people and art into categories where they don't belong. Culture divides us all and takes away our individual identities. History stunts our imagination and our growth. For whatever reason, people can't go beyond what's happened before - and I think that's holding us back in a very big way.

Why can't we learn from our past without being imprisoned by it? Fretting over what's come and gone is such a waste of our all too short lives.
not-sure-61217853693.jpeg
 

wwsd

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Messages
7,623
This is excellent. Of course it is formally correct that not everything can be preserved, but still loads of people undertake this effort, because they feel it's worth it. When I was secretary of a student organisation, I would get these incessant letters from the university library asking me to send them two copies, rather than one, of our magazine for their archives. I personally can't imagine why anyone would want to read what I and others wrote for that rag, but then again, I also found myself lookng 40-year-old editions of the very same magazine for my own use.

Through one of these articles, I saw a link to this Kotaku piece about how a re-release of No One Lives Forever is being held back by copyright owners. I never played that game myself, but it came out during my early teenage years, and I still sometimes go back to the games I played back then. This was easier around 2-3 years ago, when I still had a functioning XP machine. In any case, it seems to me that sometimes piracy is the most reliable option for preserving and archiving games, even if it's only on one person's HD and shared through torrents. Because apparently the industry itself is either unable or unwilling to curate its own products, gaming journalism is unable or unwilling to call them out on it, except for a few "screams in the wilderness" like this article, and the audience as a whole is simply too amorphous to do it reliably.

in gaming, the philistine attitude as exemplified by the RPG Watch comments seems more pervasive than in other media. It exists everywhere, but I think you would be hard-pressed to find large groups of people who actively support George Lucas's efforts to suppress the original, unaltered versions of his own films. In the film world, people generally recognise films that didn't sell well initially, but are seen as classics anyway, or as "cult" films. Of course, critics and experts take a more proactive role here. In any list of good films, there is some room for blockbusters or films that won loads of Oscars, but when you compare Filmsite's 100 Greatest Films to the first 100 films in the IMDB Top 250, the difference is striking.

The English-speaking internet-using movie-viewing audience may collectively have the opinion that 2008's The Dark Knight is the fourth best movie in human history, and that Citizen Kane only comes in at #67 because it's boring and outdated, but even those who think so are consciously or unconsciously reacting to critical material citing Kane as the best film ever. It only takes a quick Google search to find an abundance of sources stating that a film from 1941 is still the best ever made and why this is the case, and then they can easily acquire it and judge for themselves. They may come to the conclusion that it's overrated and that Adam Sandler films are far more entertaining, but it is out there with lots of signs pointing them in the right direction. And then other signs pointing them towards less clichéd titles than Kane, many of them dating back to the pre-WWII period (so outdated!).

In gaming, the main criteria are often still: was it recent, and what's the average score? And the answer to that is always the hype-driven AAA 10/10 GOTY pre-order stuff. In 2006 Oblivion was the bestest game evar, in 2011 Skyrim was MAJESTIC, and all the limitations of Oblivion suddenly became glaringly obvious (they would have been obvious to anyone who'd played RPGs made before 2006, or even only Morrowind). And then they pad out their top-100 list by mentioning a few classic staples. I think felipe mentioned in another article how gamers' idea of gaming history is basically Pong, Space Invaders, Pacman, Mario, Chrono Trigger. Maybe that's the reason why gaming critics are still frantically searching for "The Citizen Kane of games", because their historical frame of reference is a mile wide and an inch deep. Something has to arbitrarily raised to "the best ever", because the alternative, actually engaging with a wide variety of media in comparison to both contemporary and past works, including previously overlooked ones, is too much work.
 

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
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Wow, that's surprising.

Still, funny how so many people read that article, but very few replied to it and no one went on to address issues like the NWN Vault...
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
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Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Ah, it reminded me that I forgot to mention this last week: http://www.critical-distance.com/2015/06/07/june-7th-2/

The Things We Don’t Talk About Enough

Over on Gamasutra’s Member Blogs, Felipe Pepe raises a good point: for every lost game like P.T., there are countless other game histories that are being lost without apparent outcry. In particular, Pepe calls out the dead archives on game sites of days gone by (something that matters quite a bit to us and our own anthologies project!) as well as a lack of interest in interviewing some of development history’s smaller names.

As if in answer, David Wolinsky’s audience- and developer-focused Don’t Die has just released an interview withPurple Moon founder Brenda Laurel which is enlightening as it is bracing:

I remember when we showed our website to [Microsoft co-founder] Paul Allen he said, “Oh, this is cool. Can you make this for boys?” Now this is after $4 million and four years’ worth of research on girls he says this. I don’t think they ever got it, honestly. And that was true of Atari, as well. Investors in those days, they rarely understood what they were doing. And those of us who were doing the work were trying to do stuff that mattered.

Turning from developer histories to the current state of the industry, Brendan Sinclair has been doing some important legwork following up on game hardware manufacturers’ use of conflict minerals — another aspect of the business which could benefit from more active discussion.
 

Irxy

Arcane
Joined
Nov 13, 2007
Messages
1,882
Location
Schism
Project: Eternity
Sarinee is updating HotU again, BTW. No downloads on the site (at best there'll be links to the proper download sites) and now it feels more like a reference site than a museum.
I also miss the CYOA section, still have all of those on a dvd somewhere.
 

Zeriel

Arcane
Joined
Jun 17, 2012
Messages
13,383
Wow, that's surprising.

Still, funny how so many people read that article, but very few replied to it and no one went on to address issues like the NWN Vault...

A bit late, but I think this is common on subjects like this. No one wants to acknowledge the shittiness, they just want to avoid thinking about it.

This happens in politics all the time, inconvenient truths that people will not deny when it is pushed in their face, but which everyone then agrees to ignore and never talk about again.
 

Neanderthal

Arcane
Joined
Jul 7, 2015
Messages
3,626
Location
Granbretan
I think Newton said it best, "standing on the shoulders of giants." The whole of human advancement is a case of building on what has come before, not ignoring and trying to blind yourself to it. Felipepepe is damn right about gaming heading in a regressive direction by ignoring this fact.
 

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