The Errant Signal Thread

[sexbad?]

There are some pretty nice points in that video, but he really covers them in this funny "I'm not comfortable around reasonable people" extrasensitivity and uses them to defend shit heads who themselves don't know what the hell they're talking about. I wonder if marriage turned him into this crybaby.

 

[Karellen]

What's funny to me about the Civilization segment in that video is that while I agree with the notion that you can perceive the "theme" of a game like Civilization by looking at the assumptions underlying its mechanics, I don't think there's anything particularly American, imperialistic or jingoistic about Civilization at all. Western, maybe? Setting aside the victory conditions, if you look at the mechanics as a whole, I think what you see is a very optimistic, humanist, utopian, ideal historical continuum centered around constant progress. Technological and cultural development is uniformly positive in nature and unilineal, without any major setbacks or periods of decline. You arrive in an empty land and proceed to take over, taking over resources that are endless and cannot be overexploited or destroyed. Pollution and environmental damage are insigificant problems. The cities founded in 4000 BC most likely exist six thousand years later. Progress is constant, nothing of value is ever lost.

Civilizations are indivisible entities emerging at the dawn of time into a practically empty, unclaimed land, without religious, ethnic, cultural or political divisions, perpetuating itself through time. Internal politics barely exist, and are hardly even abstracted. Your people are either collectively happy or not, so you cannot exploit your ignorant peasantry or your wretched borderlands to feed the insatiable maw of an opulent imperial upper class to keep them loyal to you. As a result, money and treasure are nearly pointless, making cultural and scientific advancement vastly more valuable than currency.

Cities and civilizations as a whole are persistently self-sufficient entities, what with their infinite resources and all. It follows that encounters with other civilizations lead either into friendly exchanges of technology and trade or total war (there is tribute, but it's almost completely irrelevant). Foreign trade never forms a major part of economy; you can't exploit your neighbors for resources or enslave them for industrial projects, which makes raiding and pillaging pointless, despite those being some of the most important reasons for warfare in history. The easiest way to gain military superiority is to be more advanced than your neighbors, at which point there's no real point in fighting them since they have nothing of value to you anyway.

Now, you could have an interesting discussion about how much of this is a result of deliberate design choices, and whether this kind of abstracted, practically sanitized history is necessary to make a fun, playable game. (I think most people prefer playing an optimistic, historical continuity over one that features frequent periods of dissolution, collapse and ruin, despite that the latter could lead to very interesting gameplay scenarios.) But I think it's pretty clear that the game does have a very particular perception of history and human society, which can definitely be examined from a political perspective. Although strangely, I think the most likely criticism that could be lodged against Civ from a progressive standpoint is how readily it glosses over how ugly, scrappy and full of shortsighted decisions and false starts history actually is.

 

[AngryEddy]

Chris is a cool guy, the very fact of him making mistakes and being rational enough to admit that, put him on a way better position than the typical youtube manchild who thinks he is a popstar. He defends liberal views more as someone who was educated on american schools than someone who is fanatical and has emotional issues.

I don't know how you can call a leftist who is angry that you can't win Civ5 via egalitarianism, reasonable and without emotional issues. Also, his apology didn't really ring of sincerity. He was rambling and deflecting about "video quality in Premier, and condemning gamer culture", when the main problems with his video was the fact that he was OBVIOUSLY partisan on his soapbox, he was actually wrong about Civ5 and the issue of Hunger, and just kind of whining about various left-wing social justice issues, rather than talking about politics in and of itself. He was dishonest, wrong, and made ZERO attempt to see the whole political issue from the other side and in fact kind of reinforced why most normal people who play videogames think the leftist gamers are complete kooks.

 

[DeepOcean]

Chris is a cool guy, the very fact of him making mistakes and being rational enough to admit that, put him on a way better position than the typical youtube manchild who thinks he is a popstar. He defends liberal views more as someone who was educated on american schools than someone who is fanatical and has emotional issues.

I don't know how you can call a leftist who is angry that you can't win Civ5 via egalitarianism, reasonable and without emotional issues. Also, his apology didn't really ring of sincerity. He was rambling and deflecting about "video quality in Premier, and condemning gamer culture", when the main problems with his video was the fact that he was OBVIOUSLY partisan on his soapbox, he was actually wrong about Civ5 and the issue of Hunger, and just kind of whining about various left-wing social justice issues, rather than talking about politics in and of itself. He was dishonest, wrong, and made ZERO attempt to see the whole political issue from the other side and in fact kind of reinforced why most normal people who play videogames think the leftist gamers are complete kooks.

When I said he is decent for a youtube celebrity, I meant that ignoring his political opinions (This video is pretty shitty and he is cleary not qualified to do a decent political discussion and the choice of Civ V to discuss politics was retarded. The game is a world power political simulation and only that, to try to attach meaning to design decisions on it is pointless.). The guy hated Bio Infinite with passion, for that reason alone I give him a little of credit, he still thinks gameplay is something important as he wasn't all that enthusiastic with Gone Home and Dear Esther and while he wasted alot of time rambling about feminism on his Tomb Raider video he didn't seemed like the fanatical type that want to cut heads because of "misogeny" and actually said it was a mediocre game. His political views are barely something more than propaganda and his desperate attempts of tying his political views to gaming to make it be accepted as art, shows insecurity issues from him.

He is decent for a youtube personality more because I don't feel the visceral necessity of immolating him alive like I feel with Anita "scam for dumb people" Sarkeesian, his ramblings about leftist propaganda are still terrible. There are intelligent people on the left that try to defend it's theories on a rational basis, Chris is not one of them as he uses all the tricks in the book like strawman, labeling, taking things for granted without looking to the basic logic principles to see if it makes sense, appeal to emotion, thinking that rambling is the same thing that being deep, avoidance of reducing his arguments to simple logic statements, thinking that political discussion is the same thing as preaching a political message, he is just like most people that become butthurt when their bullshit is exposed instead of just saying that they were mistaken. He is a leftist with no balls but he isn't a bullshit careerist like alot of people that entered on the misogeny bandwagon and actually still talks about gameplay on his videos, I don't hate him but I really don't care about his ramblings. Want someone that I want attached to a pole and slowly roasted on fire with an apple on the mouth? Jim Sterling. If you think Chris is pretentious , you saw nothing.

 

[Metro]

I'd say Campster/Chris/Errant Signal is definitely a careerist as far as psuedo-intellectual game journalism goes.

 

[Weierstraß]

You're choosing abstractions to make the game playable and fun. Civilization V's gameplay is no more politically charged than the fact that most games center around killing things. It's a completely hollow criticism. I can at least understand the argument that military shooters glorify war, because they tend to have terribly written single player campaigns that show a child's understanding of how war works. Even then, the level of writing is so low that the idea of taking offense doesn't even enter in it for me.

In most games killing is right. Maybe not political but it's certainly an opinion of some kind. Choice of mechanics is an opinion, whether it was made for "fun" or something else.

And yes, I sort of know he already touched on the "gamers" thing but then why is he even talking that way if he objects to "gamers" as a group? It's literally central to his entire argument.

It's actually literally irrelevant to his argument.

 

[sea]

It's actually literally irrelevant to his argument.

He criticizes "gamers" as a monolithic group for having wishy-washy opinions on politics in games, yet also admits that he shouldn't do that. So why does he go ahead and do it anyway when his argument doesn't work as soon as you introduce the nuance of the real world to it?

 

[Weierstraß]

Oh, the poor gamers are getting their feelings hurt! What does it matter? It's still irrelevant to the points he makes in the video.

 

[Dexter]

And yes, I sort of know he already touched on the "gamers" thing but then why is he even talking that way if he objects to "gamers" as a group? It's literally central to his entire argument. So how can he stand by this video and what he said in it if his "true" beliefs are completely at odds with it?

A lot of these kinds of commentators always pull that shit in regards to “gamers” and “gaming culture” and always construct what either of that is supposed to mean based on what they are trying to say or achieve on a momentary basis.

When they want to point out how “diverse” gaming is or “how far it’s come” they apply the broadest possible definition which can point out that up to 1.2 billion people around the world are playing games in some way: http://www.newzoo.com/infographics/global-games-market-report-infographics/

Or they point out numbers from US game industry lobbying organizations without any insights into the methodology used to get said numbers like the ESA that are meant to make the industry look good (diverse and harmless), for instance: http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2013.pdf

The usually cited “facts” are:

"58% of Americans play video games"
”The average game player is 30 years old, and 36 percent of game players – the largest age segment – are 36 or older”
“68% of gamers are age 18 or older”
”45% of gamers are female”

The same “study” also says:

“89% of the time parents are present when games are purchased or rented”
“80% of the time children receive their parents’ permission before purchasing or renting a game”
“93% of parents pay attention to the content of the games their children play”

When they try to build some sort of “progressive case” and need to state that “gaming is…”, “the gaming industry is…” or “gamers are…” and they act as if they have found and defined some big overbearing “problem” that needs to be “addressed” they usually disregard all of that though and happily build their straw men that are supposed to prove said injustice, statistics or actual proof be damned.

And suddenly you’ve got the famous “toxic gaming culture”, the “sexist gaming industry” articles and similar.

Spoiler

It’s even funnier when he acts as if everyone he wants to categorize as “gamers” actually cared about what Ebert had to say and it wasn’t the self-professed often butthurt “gaming critics” about the topic of "games being art" that took issue and some outspoken figureheads:

Instead of realizing that all of this is a wonder of modern times where games like League of Legends or World of Tanks can be played and enjoyed by almost everyone around the world together from what they say is 145 different countries with wildly varying views and political as well as religious and personal opinions instead of hitting each other with clubs and trying for some tolerance in regards to differing gaming tastes and opinions as well as kind of games and messages:
http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2012/10/lol_infographic-610x3217.png
http://images.vg247.com/current//2012/12/20121221_world_of_tanks_infographic.jpg

A thing which was previously only largely possible in highly officious events like the Olympic games till the mid- to late 90s and everyone also has the ability to consume media created by almost anyone around the world freely and the whole “region restriction” thing where a few broadcasters and publishers largely controlled what everyone got to see, play, read and listen to is largely done for. (Indie games largely weren't even a "thing" before around 2008 with titles like World of Goo or Braid, nowadays they are the largest part of the PC market where everyone can publish their works and are even gaining ground on consoles, KickStarter even further democratized this process).

They choose to concentrate on how offended they were over someone somewhere saying something that they didn’t particularly like to hear in a match of <game> or the sheer existence of a product that offends their personal delicate sensibilities that will supposedly fling all of “gaming back to the middle-ages”.

 

[Metro]

I'd say Dexter is definitely a careerist as far as psuedo-intellectual game journalism goes.

 

[Athelas]

Wow, that tweet from Cliffy B epitomizes everything that's wrong with gaming culture. 'Oh hey, this guy who thought games weren't art just died from cancer, but he missed the true art of Bioshock Infinite and bullshit-sci-fi Elizabeth-waifu LOLOLOL'. The guy is dead and he's still desperate for his validation. Pathetic.

 

[Metro]

Cliff B has always been a fucking retard.

 

[DeepOcean]

Gears of war rot the brain of this guy if he ever had one. What little faggot, Bioshock Infinite storyline is so awful that even Michael Bay would only make a movie about it if someone bought him with alot of money. With developers like those, it's no wonder why video game writing is so awful. "Hey guise, I had a great idea, why don't we masturbate ourselves non stop?So, one day we are recognized as art, eventually someone on the movie and books industry is going to ignore the awful storylines and terrible gameplay, we are going to get what we always wanted: to be recognized as shitty movies."

 

[Ninjerk]

Gears of war rot the brain of this guy if he ever had one. What little faggot, Bioshock Infinite storyline is so awful that even Michael Bay would only make a movie about it if someone bought him with alot of money. With developers like those, it's no wonder why video game writing is so awful. "Hey guise, I had a great idea, why don't we masturbate ourselves non stop?So, one day we are recognized as art, eventually someone on the movie and books industry is going to ignore the awful storylines and terrible gameplay, we are going to get what we always wanted: to be recognized as shitty movies."

His peak was being allowed to work on UT99.

EDIT:

On Gamer Culture and Strawmen

http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=585

Sounds like he reads a lot of Kotaku.

 

[chestburster]

By Campster's logic, a toothpaste is "political." --It clearly endorses the value of brushing the teeth, which used to be part of the culture imperialism that Western colonizers impose upon the barbarians. Hell, human existence itself is "political." By simply existing (i.e. not die), you endorse the view that living is more valuable than death, which is very in contradiction to some nihilists' point of view.

And Campster makes a big deal of such trivial arguments.

 

[Infinitron]

On Gamer Culture and Strawmen

http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=585

I left a comment there.

 

[AngryEddy]

On Gamer Culture and Strawmen

http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=585

I left a comment there.

How the tides have turned. What caused you to take such a less than favorable position with the asshat?

 

[Infinitron]

On Gamer Culture and Strawmen

http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=585

I left a comment there.

How the tides have turned. What caused you to take such a less than favorable position with the asshat?

I don't think the tides ever turned. I've always found his liberalism obnoxious, but his videos had redeeming intellectual value.

 

[Shadenuat]

http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=585

Seemed like just another ramble about what the guy

can definitely feel

He thinks there exists some general gaming subculture to fight, which doesn't seem any true. There are probably some groups which can be considered subcultures, like WoW'ers, or, old example from 90's we had, Quaker's, but "general" subculture of people who are are hateful? Highly doubtful. And if there exists one, who is he going to fight with his "intellectual" videos? Teenagers shouting on each other in Call of Duty? Who, he thinks, is even watching his videos?
I think it's time to drop the white knighting and do some nice gaming analytic videos like ones where he discussed how other systems historically lag behind combat, or he's going to morph into just another evolution of angry snowman journalist.

Also, what Infinitron said there. It's easy to throw stones at popular games and find flaws in them, say they have no imagination, but it can be difficult to do a good review of a good, hard game. Nothing is wrong with pure holy hate, but let's see him do an interesting run on more obscure games which actually do things right. Too bad those never will give you as much hits>dollars as "bioshock" in tags, huh?

 

[AngryEddy]

1. And so we begin to see the shape of the gaming subculture take form. News article by news article as they post the latest scandals, blog post by blog post as critics write about their experiences, a picture of games culture comes into shape. It’s young. It’s a subculture predominantly controlled by men.

2. It’s either anti-intellectual or simply lives so much in the moment it lacks the capacity for meaningful thought and discussion.

3. It’s a self-identifying group of tech-literate people who have the means to buy a $400 game system and a $60 game disc. It’s rash and emotional. It’s often hateful. It doesn’t care who it hurts.

4. This is the gamer subculture I rail against. This is the supposed strawman I built up just to tear down. But I struggle to see it that way.

5. The notion that gamer culture only wants criticism when it adulates and only wants politics when it’s comfortable is not a new or radical idea if you’re paying any attention to it at all.

6. It’s trivial to find examples of every gamer argument I referenced. “They’re just games.” GameSpot commenters insisting critics should shrug off misogyny. People openly questioning whether Polygon should give Danielle Riendeau games that treat women shittily, because as someone who has worked for the ACLU and “pro-feminist publications” she is less likely to be permissive of games that treat women shittily (and referring to reviews as “an odd format to use as your soapbox” is more or less “keep your politics out of my video game reviews”).

1. This is just incoherent babble with a leftist barb at the end.

2. Just more rambling, he doesn't even cite a source this time. We need to fear this nebulous collection of stupid male gamers, but we don't know who they are!

3. Tech-literate? I thought we male gamers were retarded cave men? The way he contradicts himself, makes it seem like he doesn't really think his viewpoints over, and just kind of runs his mouth whenever an idea pops up. Also, who cares if you hurt someones feelings? We live in an international world now: you will offend everyone at some point or another, especially when you go against the status quo, or tell the truth. Should we all be a collective blob of liars and cowards for the sake of not offending anyone? Go die nameless, in a ditch, Campster faggot.

4. Of course he struggles to see other people's perspective, he's an axe grinding radical, with egomania. I'd be more surprised if he was as thoughtful and understanding as he pretends to be.

5. Sounds just like Campster, doesn't it? He had a problem with video games, "attacking the minority base, when they should've been attacking existing power structures" and how "Civ 5 needs to deal with fixing hunger", even though it already does. He's projecting like the neurotic cocksucker that he is.

6. Now he's really coming off like a raving, lunatic. I sure hope that his viewership and the people that post on his blog, introduce to him the concept of "Conflicts of interest". I read the entirety of the Polygon article and watched the video about Dragons Crown, and the cunt spent more time talking about her political disagreements with the game, than she did with the mechanical disagreements with the game [repeating visits to the same levels was the only issue she had with the game mechanically]. She is in no way qualified to talk about or review video games on a professional level, and her entire life's career seems to point her more in the direction of politics, than of videogames. She's serving as a fifth columnist, using Polygon and its reader base, as a vehicle to push her radical agenda.

 

[Tehdagah]

"People openly questioning whether Polygon should give Danielle Riendeau games that treat women shittily"

So how many women were abused during the development of Dragon's Crown?

Btw, feminist Danielle Riendeau:

Spoiler

Edit: What the Gamespot's reviewer said about GTAV? I don't wanna click on that site.

 

[Ninjerk]

"People openly questioning whether Polygon should give Danielle Riendeau games that treat women shittily"

So how many women were abused during the development of Dragon's Crown?

Btw, feminist Danielle Riendeau:

Spoiler

Edit: What the Gamespot's reviewer said about GTAV? I don't wanna click on that site.

What does she mean by "even I'm impressed?" Is she some fitness guru, too?

 

[felipepepe]

It means that she sees herself as a smart, strong and independent woman, above sexists hormone-inducted statements about other people's body... unless they are like, reeeeaaaaaally hot!!!!111

BUT DON'T YOU DARE DREAM ABOUT MAKING A SIMILAR COMMENT ON A FEMALE BODY, YOU PATRIARCHAL SCUM!

 

[Xor]

I usually like campster's videos because he has insightful things to say about game design in general, but this was a pretty disappointing video and the blog post just makes the whole thing worse. He might have a point with the "all games are political" topic; of course the creators' prejudices are going to come across strongly in the work they produce. Who cares? The argument seemed to be more about how much gamer culture sucks than any kind of point about politics in games. I don't have time to write up a lengthy response right now, but my main problem with his recent blog post is that it seems to be built on this us-vs-them mentality. Campster's arguments for the shape of gamer culture are all observations of things he doesn't agree with, and the implication is anyone who disagrees with these positions is wrong. That's what really annoys me about the gaming feminist movement.

I don't generally care what people's political leanings are, and I don't mind people inserting their politics into other works. Where I usually draw the line is when people use their beliefs to proclaim themselves more enlightened or intelligent than others. I hate being preached to.

 

[AngryEddy]

I found an interesting article that was linked on the gamer culture ES blog: http://reportsfromthefield.com/2013/10/17/pvp-and-gamer-culture/



Here's some snippets:

So, how do we go about engendering a culture that discourages bad behavior? Well, first it might be helpful to think a bit about where that bad behavior comes from. Where are these bad actors in gaming culture? Who are they? What do they do? Where do they play? What kind of behaviors do they exhibit that make the culture so toxic? This last one is, sadly, quite easy to catalog. We know that bad gamers engaging in these behaviors tend to be:

• A minority of all gamers, but a vocal one that is loud enough to generally obscure their numbers and get a disproportionate piece of attention focused on them, despite their small size.
• They’re elitist.
• They’re misogynist.
• They’re coddled by a game industry that would rather go for the short term cash grab and appeal to these bad actors, than spend the time and effort growing a more inclusive, long term, and healthy culture.

A story was related to me recently about a ganker. This ganker killed his victim (Did I mention they’re always male?) in a Halo match, shooting him from behind, and then tea-bagged his corpse (you can look that one up yourselves).

You could try to remove the anonymity from gankers. Perhaps developers could provide some kind of meter to let players know that a person is a ganker, or even attach their account name, or real name to their avatar. But none of these solutions gets to the real problem. The real problem is that as long as bad behavior is allowed by both gamers and developers themselves, then bad behavior will continue. And then it just feeds on itself until it spills out into the real world, as we see it doing so now.


The only way to end the problem, is to end ganking. And the only way to end ganking, is to end open world PvP.

Don’t sit here and tell me it’s okay because I signed up to be on a PvP server. That doesn’t make it okay. It’s just an attempt to blame me for your shitty actions against me. “A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, with ‘stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer.’”

This is the company that ES keeps. Always remember this. Every time he pretends to be this really enlightened individual, here to save us from mediocrity, just remember that he hotlinks to blogs like this one, that advocate ending player vs player combat in all video games and removing internet anonymity.