Looking at an unfinished game is the equivalent of looking at an unfinished painting, your seeing the first brush strokes maybe some sketches but you have no realistic idea what the end result will be like.
Looking at leaks is a pontless waste of time, the fact they included personal information just makes the “hackers” scummy
Buying out competition and throwing out the workers confident that investors won’t back a small dog against a big one
In an investor run economy, competition means you might lose a bet. For an investor its better to reduce competition than lose bets. This is originally why anti trust legislation was created: The market needs to be forced to compete or it will amalgamate into a giant blob of noncompeting assets.
High taxes exist to reduce accumulation of assets and slow down the snowballing effect of huge investors. This is what the trump tax cuts look like.
This is originally why anti trust legislation was created
If you look at the history of anti-trust legislation, some of its first uses and biggest targets were labor organizers. Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, one of the first and most notable cases was the US lawsuit against the Workingmen’s Amalgamated Council (also known as the “Triple Alliance” of teamsters, scalesmen, and packers) over what was then the largest labor action in US history.
It wasn’t until the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act that unions were granted safe harbor from anti-trust provisions. And it took until 1941 for the courts to finally fully decriminalize labor actions - a process that was ultimately reversed starting in the 1960s under Nixon, and extended under Ford, Carter, and then Reagan.
High taxes exist to reduce accumulation of assets and slow down the snowballing effect of huge investors.
That’s the Keynesian approach, certainly. But the Chicago School that came to dominate US economics during the Volcker Era suggested instead that we can adjust the Federal Funds rate to keep malinvestment from derailing an economy. And that this strategy means asset accumulation is now safe and profitable for large corporate interests.
Large investment banks are actually good, because they give us a steady and constant flow of price information on a private market. And since price discovery is the real goal of regulation, the advent of these mega-banks means we can let the institutions regulate themselves without any conceivable downsi- sound of the 2008 market crash
Having other areas of your field with better pay/conditions/benefits can put more pressure on even non union places. Since there will be better contions elsewhere, there will be an expectation of a level of compensation/more people looking at those union places, requiring even the non union locations to at least increase something to compete for talent.
But on a serious note, something as obvious as “Managed Democracy” and quitting your job by signing up for “Early Biovat Reprocessing” and the characters literally saying things like “HELLDIVERS NEVER DIE!” Before being obliterated by a 380? It’s satire. Satire is funny. Like hahaha look at stupid Facist regime, I’ll role play along to get into the mood of the game because the idea is so fucking dumb it’s funny with amazing gameplay.
It’s willful ignorance at some point. I don’t think media literacy has much to do with it. It’s simply listening for what they want to hear, then ignoring the rest, just as real facists desire.
I mean, yeah. It’s an industry that has a near-unlimited supply of starry-eyed fresh college grads to throw into the meat grinder, and the executives of these companies absolutely love to take advantage of that. Maybe if enough devs leave the industry they might finally have to start respecting the people who work for them out of necessity.
People watch star trek and listen to fortunate son and miss the message in both of those pieces of art so I’m pretty sure someone would miss the political message in just about anything.
Does anyone really listen to RATM anymore? Tom Morello is a multimillionaire who hordes money instead of giving charity. Hes a hypocrite and a sell-out.
Music and film don’t demand that you engage with them in the same way as video games. There are some games where you literally cannot play them without engaging with their narrative and message. Spec Ops: The Line is a good example of this. It actively pushes back against the player’s natural inclination to play it like a modern military shooter and not absorb the message.
It’s actually very possible to miss the message of Bioshock. Andrew Ryan built the perfect city and Atlas ruined it. Andrew Ryan cast him out, but Atlas brought the player character as his final ultimate weapon. You eventually rebel, saving the capitalist Utopia.
I have seen people who abided by this interpretation. Any art with any level of subtlety can be misinterpreted. It’s inherently subjective and depends on the viewer’s personal biases.
Are you unfamiliar with capitalism as a theory? Or Ayn Rand? Yes, capitalist utopia. That’s the entire libertarian ethos. Libertarianism is a political framework, pure capitalism is its economic policy.
Don’t get me wrong, the only Libertarianism I’ve ever known is intertwined with Capitalism. But they aren’t the same thing, and I always read BioShock as being a take on Libertarianism specifically.
I dunno how you could miss it in Spec Ops, that game is extremely blatant with messaging. I recently patient gamered it and was rather unimpressed. Bioshock still holds up though.
IMO it was a mistake to patient gamer Spec Ops. The whole point was that it was a pushback against the rhetoric of the US military and simultaneously a critique of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (and knockoffs thereof), which had just exploded in popularity. By not playing it when the things it was critiquing were in the zeitgeist, you don’t really get the same experience. Plus, the marketing for the game deliberately hid the fact that it was intended as a critique; it was marketed as yet another modern military shooter.
I think you can patient gamer it but it only works if you’re heavily familiar with that time.
I was really into COD4 and grew up during the Bush administration so I knew exactly what Spec Ops was critiquing. If you don’t have that experience though I agree it does not land.
What I didn’t like was the blunt messaging. I was expecting something a little deeper or more subtle than what I got. As a game, the clunky movement/cover system, simple enemy AI, and guns that just didn’t feel great hampered the experience. It’s very linear and there are forced choices (eg white phosphorus) that give you control but no choice but to be evil. The graphics are lackluster compared to its contemporaries, but I did enjoy the soundtrack at times. I really got into it with a few of those songs. Unfortunately that only happened a few times during the weekend I beat it in. It was okay, but I was expecting a lot more based on what people said about it.
Appropriately for the thread, the WP scene had a choice: walk away. It kept telling Walker to walk away. The player could have shut the game off.
That’s the pivot point: if you’re just playing a game about Walker, then having a choice doesn’t matter, you’re just being told a story about a lunatic. But, if Walker is a stand-in for you, and you’re playing the game “because you wanted to be something you’re not - a hero”, then not only is playing on a choice, choosing to play war porn in the first place is a choice.
I was expecting something a little deeper or more subtle than what I got.
That’s the problem when these things gain reputations. The reputation builds it up to be more than the piece of art can deliver.
Now imagine playing it when it was new and you weren’t “expecting” anything but a military shooter. It would still be just as blunt, but it landed back then far more effectively than when you go in knowing the reputation the game has built in the many years that followed.
IMO a lot of the subtlety comes from the imagery and symbols around you as you progress through the game. The vibrant tree that you pass that burns up when you look back, etc.
As far as gameplay goes it is very linear. The only “choice” is to stop playing. If I remember correctly the development behind Spec Ops was very rushed so they didn’t have time to so any of those branching paths.
I appreciate it like I would a visual novel more than I do an interactive game.
a lot of the subtlety comes from the imagery and symbols around you as you progress through the game
One of the things I did appreciate about the game was seeing how grimy and worn down everyone got as the game progressed. That was an excellent small detail.
I like watching it. But i like to see the faves I played throughout the year get recognition and hear a little bit from the Devs when they receive the awards. Announcements are a bonus for me. Plus I prefer to watch things fully even if they had already passed rather than just looking up the winners (in the case of the game awards). It would be like being into a sport but just looking up the results the next morning instead. I prefer to watch the full game unknowing of the outcome, and I take that mentality with me with both award shows (that i care about) and even Nintendo directs and it’s counterparts (which admittedly the game awards is half of)
The main problem with the Steam awards is that they don’t respect the actual release dates. For example, Red Dead Redemption 2, a 2018 game (or a 2019 game if you go by PC only) was named the Steam GOTY in 2020.
Steam also had little to offer in the years that were heavy on Epic exclusives and great games like Kena or Control, resulting in it being hard to think up a nominee.
Moreover, if I remember correctly, they also bar prior winners from their “most supported game” type category, which makes no sense because some games, like Euro Truck Simulator 2, get regular content and technical updates to this day. On the other hand, The Witcher 3 recently won in a category despite having been untouched for years.
Yeah the dates thing is an issue but it is because they take the Steam release of the game. That and they take from the last award to the next one not a calendar year. So RD2 was a 2020 game awards on Steam.
But yeah it feels weird I agree.
The most supported one I understand but the idea is to not have the same game every year even if it has been supported plenty otherwise Terraria would still be there…
The Witcher case I do not know… But the issue there is like any public voted stuff people don’t always vote based on category but they vote what they like. Or maybe they only played that game of the category so they vote that one etc… Some places might play with the numbers around behind the curtains and choose another one if it doesn’t make sense… but that also doesn’t feel right.
Hitman VR won the VR title despite being a bad port to the best of my knowledge. Because people without VR saw it as an option and said that sounds cool then picked it.
If you want it to be good, it will still take hard work. Your own training data, your own ideas, your own work. There’s no way to do anything worthwhile with an LLM that takes no work or thought.
This. AIs are basically garbage in, garbage out systems. More general an AI system harder it will be tailor to a specific game. That means companies will need their own training data to supplement it. AI is not “plug anywhere, do anything” type of a solution.
That’s not maximum profit, though! They could have created timed content, events, literally anything and would have probably made more money because of the cultural relevance…
Governments should only allow big mergers in exceptional circumstances
Big conglomerates should be broken up
They are bad for the workers, and bad for the consumers. Half of the time, also bad for the shareholders (according to an old McK study). Lives are being ruined for billionaires to gamble for more billions.
I love how this headline, too, doesn’t tell us what it’s about. But fair enough, it’s a good way to poke fun at the clickbait problem.
And frankly, the shitty part is that by now clickbait headlines/titles have become utterly ubiquitous. To the point where most users will no longer even notice, because they’ve become 100% of headlines.
Maybe because most people experience the art? and don’t feel the need to inflate their ego by thinking their interpretation or experience is the best way to interpret something?
this feels like a bunch of nerds sitting around complaining that gamers miss stuff, while not understanding that most gamers don’t miss it. they just experience it and don’t feel the need to externalize it.
Imo its the other way around. If you experience art, you think about it and try to get a meaning out of it (even if there is none, as in some modern art pieces). But if you just play a game you are not getting the art-aspect of it, you just enjoy it for the gameplay or maybe even the story but not for the deeper meaning.
Absolutely. If the value of art were just “experiencing” it without processing it, there’s an argument to be made that soulless blockbuster movies are as significant a piece of art as something with actual substance because so many people like the “experience.”
People who do more than just “consume” the art in front of them are not just self righteous nerds (though many are, sure)… it’s also a prerequisite to, you know, actually creating something of artistic value.
how do you know I’m not appreciative of the art as I’m playing?
I’ve seen quite a lot of symbolism, meaning, and expressions through video games. but not every video game is made for artistic expression. they can be, to great effect IMHO.
either way, how the art is experienced is entirely up to the individual player. and there’s no definitive way to experience art. that… kind of defeats the purpose of art, ya know?
Art might not be about thinking while you are experiencing it, but it most definitely is about thinking about the experience afterwards, as much as experiencing it in the first place.
I try to avoid reviews for games that haven’t been released or aren’t in an open beta. I am especially suspicious in regards to embargoes that lift less than 24 hours before the game goes on sale.
Publishing peoples’ private info is bad and nobody should be encouraging others to find that info.
On the other hand, info about the games should be published. If a games journalist is willing to tow to company PR lines and withhold valuable info (to players) about games, then they should be willing to cover this. If they aren’t, then they’re just a fan with special access.
I mean, with extremely rare exceptions, basically the entire field of ‘games journalism’ is just doing advertisement for the industry they are supposed to be critical of, even the opinions and culture commentary just serve to drive what is functionally a gossip generator that makes either hype or hate for whatever particular thing is worth talking about right now, and then its forgotten entirely within 72 hours. Net effect though, is more awareness thus more game purchases.
Fucking coffeezilla played a pivotal role in convicting SBF.
When has any games journalism outlet ever done a 60 minutes style actual investigative journalism about the industry? And actually exposed an issue the public was generally not aware of? When have they done anything like that instead of just reacting to someone already doing that for them on some social media site or youtube and then they just summarize it?
Fuck, I am probably being a bit hyperbolic but Christ it feels like almost all gaming journalism is basically classified ads and opinion pieces.
Yep. When the industry can cut off the only way for games journalists to reliably make money (pre-release review copies) then they are totally controlled by the industry. A real journalism industry would see one company not given a copy or blacklisted and the refuse to cover their release entirely in solidarity. Otherwise none of them can be trusted.
Instead we get an article here, pontificating on the concept of whether or not its good to report on something that could harm people if its reported on.
It manages to do all the words and stuff to let you know that basically, they can see arguments both ways, but uh in the end its published so kinda just obviously went one way on all that.
The function is, I guess, just to indicate that the writer is conflicted and well informed? But its so obvious theyre just writing a bunch of words to hit a word count because uh its published anyway so the author obviously donesnt care that much for half of what they said.
Then it just ends with like a magical fantasy useless ‘I believe things will get better and we can all be better people’ ending with absolutely no set up or explanation why this might be likely.
Its honestly a baffling piece of writing.
All I can actually take away from it is a hack happened, hacking is bad, the author needed to hit a word count, and I probably should have just read the headline.
I mean here I am commenting on it so thats something, it worked! It got a click rofl!
There is no obligation for publishers to send early copies, although when you don't do it selectively you're sending a bad message that you have something to hide or an axe to grind, so it's pretty bad PR to handle things that way.
Plus nothing stops an outlet from still getting a copy and reviewing the game day one. With so much of today's content being live video the kind of thing you're describing is... pretty inefectual? I get that it's the stuff people remember from the old days when there were more gatekeepers and print media could be reliably delayed by months by doing that, but... yeah, that's pretty anecdotal these days. It's mostly messing with critics' free time, which isn't the best way to get them to be nice to your game, if that's what you're trying to do.
You risk losing the audience when the other outlets’ reviews are up days before the game release while yours will be published a week after the game release unless really cutting corners or reviewing a short game.
See, I hear this a lot, and it's a bit disappointing. Because hell yeah, there is great journalism being done. If you want "investigative journalism"... I mean, why? It's videogames, not politics, but yeah, there are people out there doing that stuff (Jason Schreier comes to mind, even if I don't particularly like the guy, but he's not alone). If you want genuine, in-depth documentaries and explorations of the process of game development then I like you more. Noclip and People Make Games come to mind, in terms of sheer production value and coming from the journalism side, but Youtube is full of in-depth looks at games from that perspective based more on documentation and less on talking to the actual devs.
So maybe the question I have is why aren't those better known? Why is the hype machine still what the audience cares about? Because all of those are publicly available, and some even very popular. Why isn't it the default and why do people not actually engage with it even when they claim they do want to engage with it? Particularly when Noclip started doing what they do, it was such a common trope to say that people wanted that exact thing and nobody was doing it, and then the very, very good 2Player Productions documentary on Double Fine's Broken Age happened and it seemed like it was possible to do, so Noclip started doing it... and they're fine, they're good, they're still going, but they certainly haven't exploded in popularity or anything.
Whatever, this is an old argument. At this point most gaming coverage is let's play videos and Twitch streamers. And you know what? That's fine. that's still better than the relentless hype machine. I just hope the good ones doing good work get to keep doing it as well.
So you say theres great investigative journalism being done and mention Jason Schrier. Agreed, he is the only person that I as well can even think of as an actual journalist in this field, hell, also James/Stephanie Sterling.
But you are… disappointed that I wish there was real journalism around gaming and the gaming industry?
You also say ‘Why would you even want investigative journalism relating to gaming?’
Well uh because to me that is real journalism, and real journalism is historically hugely important to keeping society balanced in a democracy. It acts as a counter to corporate and government propoganda, lies and malfeasance.
Then you ramble about basically how you can find some actual deep dives about how games were made on youtube, (noting that such content is not super popular) and gamers streaming themselves gaming on twitch, and conclude that ‘this is an old argument’ and basically ‘i can watch gaming content somewhere so its fine I guess’.
MudMan.
You are arguing with yourself, in your own comment.
The topic is journalism. We were talking about investigative journalism in this subthread. Journalism as it pertains to the field or industry of video games, how a lot of it is just garbage.
And you spent the vast majority of your reply here /not talking about investigative journalism, not talking about how gaming journalism is largely just advertisements for game companies/.
‘Content’ relating to video games is not the same thing as Journalism.
You opened with being disappointed that I would wish there was real investigative journalism about video gaming, which is a stance you never explained or justified with anything other than ‘other content about games exists.’
Is your stance that its fine actually that there barely is any actual real gaming journalism… because other content about games exists?
Huh. Normally, you'd think when somebody takes longer to rephrase a post than it'd take to read the original they're trying to straw man the hell out of it...
...but no, you mostly got it.
Define "investigative journalism" when it comes to television. Radio? Maybe movies.
At best it's generalist journalism looking into a major issue, like the Ronan Farrow work that resulted in the whole MeToo movement. Other times it's straight-up business journalism, like the mainstream coverage of mergers or tech regulations. There is no reason why gaming can't be treated the same way, and in fact it is, as we saw through the whole Activision/Microsoft merger.
The idea that gaming needs a specific brand of "investigative journalism" as a matter for the daily gaming trades, such as they are, is based on this weird, antagonistic perspective that gaming fandom has about game development and it is, very much, part of the same problem as the hype cycle.
Sometimes, "investigative" journalism comes down to gossip, too, which is less relevant and I do not love. Schreier's brand of "I have insider buddies and they tell me this stuff" coverage can stray into that. He walks the line, for sure. Some of it is genuinely interesting intrahistory, some of it doesn't clear that bar for me.
What I do care about, though, is good journalism, and there are definitely people doing that, including those in-depth, after-the-fact analysis and historical documentaries. If those don't qualify for what you want to see in games journalism, then we just disagree about what is needed.
Sometimes, “investigative” journalism comes down to gossip, too, which is less relevant and I do not love. Schreier’s brand of “I have insider buddies and they tell me this stuff” coverage can stray into that. He walks the line, for sure. Some of it is genuinely interesting intrahistory, some of it doesn’t clear that bar for me.
This is how the sausage is made, unfortunately. Schreier has to work with the same kind of currency any investigative journalist does, and sometimes that means publishing a piece as part of an agreement. I’ve seen this happen for decades in sports journalism, and in turn, that facilitates a lot of what labor has needed to survive in that industry. Considering professional sports is one of the very last bastions of collective bargaining in my country, I find it easy to overlook there.
Schreier’s work has similarly been important for labor in making games, so yeah, while there’s garbage sometimes, I have zero problem with it.
Schreier has not published any of his gossipy pieces because he had a deal with anyone, at least that I know of. If what you mean is that he publishes the gossip because that's the red meat what keeps him employed at Bloomberg so he can write more thorough coverage of the really interesting stuff.... well, you have a worse opinion of Schreier than I do.
Honestly, you guys are doing little to get me on board with that sort of thing. From the way you talk about it I'm getting the distinct impression that this sort of "investigative journalism", which often boils down to "game development went poorly for reasons", is only feeding into the antagonistic relationship and not, as I'd hoped, creating more awareness of how the process goes so people can have more informed opinions.
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