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Linkfest: November 15th – November 27th

Shaun CG — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 20:18:31 +0000

Del.icio.us links for November 15th - November 27th:

Game Logic vs Choice & Consequence | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – If the next five years of big-title gaming development can focus on closing that disparity of what we want to do in a world and what developers can afford to let us do, rather than pushing technology to add complexity to raw assets, we can end up with environments that are more interactive, manipulable, intelligent and alive, rather than just prettier. It’s important to empower us, as players, to do whatever we want in games and, essentially, to make the choices and options worthwhile by having the game react in the most interesting ways it can.
Tags: narrative gameplay storytelling emergentgameplay branchingnarratives criticism
Modern Warfare 3 Isn’t An Un-Game, John Walker. You Are An Un-Player (And That Is OK) | Kotaku Australia – So this is what I ask of you, and of all videogame critics and players alike: stop using “freedom” as a metric for a game’s quality or, even worse, for a game’s gameness. Every game is a dance between player and code, but that doesn’t mean the player always gets to lead. A game that leads the player can be just as meaningful, significant, intelligent, stimulating or exhilarating as a game that lets the player do whatever they wish (within the games confines). The player is not the centre of the equation, and neither is the game. It’s the interrelationship between the player and the game that matters most.
Tags: games criticism narrative gameplay storytelling reviewing
Modern Warfare 3 Is ‘An Un-Game With A Core Of Nastiness’ | Kotaku Australia – I’ve just this minute finished the singleplayer campaign for Modern Warfare 3. It leaves a very bitter taste at its climax. But perhaps not the same bitter taste that flavours it throughout. It is an enormously high-achieving action FPS, on a scale like nothing before it, turned to 11. And it’s a bloodthirsty, bombastic and clumsy un-game, with a core of nastiness.
Tags: gaming narratives war pomposity jingoism ideology gameplay
Sexy Videogameland: Metal Gear Solid And The Uncommon In The Common- Recall that MGS1 released into a time when cutscenes, particularly FMV, were very much in vogue. This was when people my age used to bring friends home from school just to show them opening cinematics. It was exciting — “it’s just like a movie,” was a common refrain, and at the time that wasn’t a negative. We felt awed.The idea at the time was that if only technology caught up a little bit, games could become great works of spectacle, capable of the same kind of emotional impact and thrill that our favorite films could provide. So a game that aimed more toward filmic narrative, with lots of dialogue and character, plentiful cinematics and scenes of dramatic, playable showdowns was very much in keeping with the appetites of the time.
Tags: cutscenes games history narrativedevices
Plot is Gameplay’s Bitch: Stories in Ulikely Places: SWAT 4 – SWAT 4 is a game that tells engaging stories without the schoolboy reliance on a grand overarching narrative. Who says games should be about a ten hour story and not ten one hour ones? It’s a game that intelligently combines scripted narrative (in the mission briefings and level layouts) with procedural content (in the random enemy positions and emergent scenarios), and presents it all through gameplay that reflects the both.
Tags: games narrative storytelling writing
LENIN’S TOMB: Occupy Tahrir Square – it is of more than passing interest that the current mobilisation has drawn support from salafists and detachments from the Muslim Brothers. We needn’t deceive ourselves about the role that such forces play. They enjoy mass support, and the Brothers in particular have the infrastructure for a viable political organisation. But, where they have supported progressive political struggles – for democratic and human rights, for Palestine, against the dictatorship – they have tailed, rather than led, secular formations. The responsibility of marxists, however, is to look for the dominant line of political division in any given situation. In this situation, the struggle is between the armed forces, who have murdered and injured several people over the weekend, and the revolutionaries, who include thousands of Islamist activists. The political logic of demonising Islamism in these circumstances would either be a purist abstentionism, or worse, support for SCAF as a bulwark of secular power against the Islamists.
Tags: egypt protest strike occupation resistance middleeast islam revolutionaryanalysis
Passive Incoherence and How to #Occupy The Moral Highground « Ruthless Culture – The truth is that the Occupy movement stands for all 100 of these answers and none of them. The movement’s political power flows from its capacity to serve as a semantic sponge for the inarticulate rage that most people feel about the current economic and political climate. By refusing to elect leaders and put forward a binding manifesto, the Occupy movement appears incoherent but this incoherent simply strengthens its moral authority. No matter how informed you are and no matter what your precise economic and political views might be, you can look at the Occupy movement and see something for you. They are a raised fist and a raised fist has all the meaning in the world.
Tags: ows occupation resistance protest
LENIN’S TOMB: Egyptian revolution – Some salient developments in Egypt today: The Muslim Brothers asked their supporters not to attend the protest in Tahrir Square today. This is causing a serious rift in the organisation, especially given the scale of the protests. Hundreds of thousands have demonstrated today, including about 100,000 in Tahrir Square (remarkable given the scale of army repression designed to keep people away), a further 100,000 in Alexandria. Despite the enormous amount of powerful and toxic tear gas being used, and the dozens killed and thousands wounded, “huge crowds” are reportedly still making their way into Tahrir.
Tags: occupation resistance revolution egypt middleeast imperialism
Tiger Beatdown › What’s Your Slavery Footprint? – The United States Department of Labor has a list of items produced with the use of slave and child labour, but even it admits this list is incomplete. For one thing, it doesn’t address the use of slave and child labour in the United States, and some nations are overrepresented in the list, while others aren’t present at all. What it does highlight, however, is that slavery touches almost every consumer good imaginable, and that slaves tend to be people most vulnerable to exploitation, like women, indigenous populations, and people living in poverty.
Tags: slavery labour globalisation globalcapital ethics consumerism
Kill Screen – Review: Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon – “As far as I can tell, aside from this insect’s uncanny ability to ruin a day spent lounging in the grass, there are two reasons we may find the above scenario appealing. The first, of course, is that ants are communists. Biologist E. O. Wilson was fond of vindicating Karl Marx’s belief that socialism works, by saying, “He just had the wrong species.” Sterilized worker ants are biologically hard-wired to live their lives in total interest of the colony because their existence cannot extend beyond the queen’s ability to reproduce. The lifestyle they promote is anathema to the kind we idealize and are genetically predisposed to.” Only Killscreen could write this in a review of an EDF game. :D
Tags: gaming criticism reviews edf

Linkfest: November 7th – November 14th

Shaun CG — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:51:12 +0000

Del.icio.us links for November 7th through November 14th:

A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design- As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work. I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I’m a little skeptical of, given that I’ve actually tried them and the animators presumably haven’t. But that’s not my problem with the video.My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It’s a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible.
Tags: futurism tacticility interaction technology
Tiger Beatdown › You Can’t Fight Child Abuse Without Fighting Ableism- Hillary Adams defies social narratives about disability, which is often perceived as a state of helplessness and inability to act with autonomy. She demonstrated ingenuity and enterprising behaviour, two things people with disabilities are not supposed to do, when she taped her father abusing her. She communicated on her own terms, another thing we are not supposed to do, when she posted the video and started talking about it. This makes it easier to ignore the disability aspect of the case, to treat Adams as exceptional and focus just on the abuse.But abuse doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and the fact that Hillary has CP matters. Which means that it should be part of the discussion. Because any conversation about ending child abuse must include disabled children. Not just because they are children too and thus are part of the picture, but because they are particularly vulnerable to abuse and because there are disability-specific issues that must be addressed at the same time we fight child abuse as a whole.
Tags: childabuse ableism disability
Tiger Beatdown › Roma women in Europe: the silenced, underreported gender oppression – European countries are always praised for the strides they make towards gender equality. European nations consistently rank on top of quality of life rankings and measurements. Moreover, the EU is held as a sort of modern gold standard for the promotion of human rights and the values of “reason and enlightenment”. Gender equality and anti discrimination laws are enshrined in the European Constitution and the upholding of human rights is considered one of the measurements for admission of new member states to the Union. However, while so many paternalistic European politicians claim to want to save Muslim women from their “oppression”, there is a group that hardly ever gets the same kind of “savior complex” discourse: Roma women. Their status as “Other” invisibilized and erased from mainstream discourse; their systematic persecution, more often than not, State endorsed, a small item in the back pages of European press.
Tags: roma racism europe prejudice britain
Protests highlight severity of benefit cuts for disabled people | Society | guardian.co.uk – Ministers have admitted that limiting the employment and support allowance will save only £4bn, rather than £5bn originally envisaged, over five years. Neil Coyle, director of policy at the Disability Alliance, said: “The Treasury has made it clear that they do not care where the axe falls – you simply have to deliver the savings. With the disabled already being targeted we will see more cash coming from the people least able to pay and in greatest need.”
Tags: disability britain recession benefits cuts coalition
Men Explain Things to Me | Gender | AlterNet – When River of Shadows came out, some pedant wrote a snarky letter to the New York Times explaining that, though Muybridge had made improvements in camera technology, he had not made any breakthroughs in photographic chemistry. The guy had no idea what he was talking about. Both Philip Prodger, in his wonderful book on Muybridge, and I had actually researched the subject and made it clear that Muybridge had done something obscure but powerful to the wet-plate technology of the time to speed it up amazingly, but letters to the editor don’t get fact-checked. And perhaps because the book was about the virile subjects of cinema and technology, the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.
Tags: sexism chauvinism gender
IGDA Writers Panel: Players Versus Characters, 2 « Electron Dance- Last year’s panel was held in a lecture theatre at South Bank University which was spacious and desk-enabled. At BAFTA, the audience were not as lucky. Dinky chairs jammed us into snuggling distances with our neighbours and I had to be careful not to poke out someone’s eye with the careless flick of a pen. The panellists got to wave their arms about and express themselves with gusto, but I didn’t have enough room to swing a gnat.But every crowd has a silver lining – at least I got a free drink.
Tags: writing videogames narrative character
Toward a post-Murdoch age – The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) – In the UK, a broad coalition, supported by the National Union of Journalists, has arisen to coordinate the ideas of academics, media workers and activists as to what a post-Murdoch media could look like. One of the major problems facing this coalition is how to explain the extraordinary gap between the press’s self-image and the reality. Part of the explanation must hinge on the limitations of the press’s ‘apartness’ from the dominant institutions of society which Alan Rusbridger referred to. The press may not share the aims of the government, but it does depend on governments (and police, and judges, and major-generals, etc.) for information and access, which is always more forthcoming to ‘cooperative’ journalists. More compellingly, the press doesn’t just share the “same aims” as commerce – it is commerce.
Tags: journalism newsinternational corruption corporatism
Tiger Beatdown › If you protest racism during Black Face season in The Netherlands, you will be beaten up and arrested – What happened afterwards will turn your stomach. Police demanded the activists to disband and stop protesting. They were told this was a children’s event and that children had the right to celebrate the holiday without disturbances. Two men and two women were arrested (link goes to news report in Dutch) when they stated that they also had the right to protest practices that actively harm them. They were told, in no uncertain terms, that they had no right to be there. One of the men resisted. He yelled that it was his right to protest. This video here, caught by a bystander, shows what happened to this protester. He was dragged outside the Parade, brutally beaten, thrown into the ground, dragged some more. In the video, you can see this young Black man, wearing a t-shirt that states “Zwarte Piet is racism”, subject to State violence in order to protect a Dutch tradition that is clearly not open for debate. The right of the White majority to wear Black face every year should be protected through whatever means necessary, even at the expense of those who are harmed by it.
Tags: holland racism europe stateviolence
Is Cameron about to re-engage his “toxic constituency”?- There is also another school of thinking, positioned by a quote which may or may not have come from Fredreich Nietzsche, questioning thus: “Do everybody deserve the vote”?One might easily contend, also, that in the event of true British democracy Katie Price or Jeremy Clarkson could be our prime minister – so in a way we should count our lucky stars that our democracy is only a shadow of its full meaning.
I, however, take a different view, being in favour of democracy on principle and not seeing it as a utility that ought to be used when it suits me. As tyrants fall in the Middle East I know full well about the possibility of there being a radical Muslim Brotherhood element to post-Arab Spring politics, but appreciate that this must be challenged with ideas and committed action.
Tags: democracy politics britain davidcameron
music.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object) – Guide to the history of and many scenes of TECHNO TECHNO TECHNO TECHNO. Well, all electronic music, really.
Tags: music reference history guide electronic

Linkfest: October 17th – 23rd

Shaun CG — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 19:39:52 +0000

Del.icio.us links for October 17th - 23rd:

A blunt critique of games criticism – I read Ben Abraham’s weekly summary of game criticism over at Critical Distance. Unlike a decade ago, there is now an absolute deluge of essays being written about games. I see reactions, counter reactions, and copious commentary. What is difficult to find is good writing that dreams of improving the art and craft of games.
Tags: criticism writing gamedesign games gamecriticism
who killed videogames? (a ghost story)- “What we’re saying,” the smaller man says, “is that the other guys are making things that people will fathom playing for three months if they play it for a week, and that we’re going to make a thing that people will consider playing for six months, if they play it for three days. We’ll generate a mathematically proofable engagement wheel. The players will come for the cute characters, and–”I’m not listening anymore. For all I care, he is probably going to say “The players will come for the cute characters, and stay for the cruel mathematics.”
Tags: gamedesign videogames socialnetworks monetization socialgaming facebook zynga psychology manipulation evil
Telling Tales: The Art of Videogame Stories in 2011 – In fact story telling in games is taking on more intricacy all the time. It now assumes – under the banner of “narrative design” – that there’s more to spinning a good yarn than lobbing some dialogue on top of an existing premise for conflict. This undertaking, the work of the narrative designer, is a pursuit that meshes writing and game design together in a more tightly woven form that we might previously have been used to. This is not simply slotting exposition between the action, but something more integral.
Tags: videogames design gamedesign narrative storytelling
The Personal Is Political – For this paper I want to stick pretty close to an aspect of the Left debate commonly talked about—namely “therapy” vs. “therapy and politics.” Another name for it is “personal” vs. “political” and it has other names, I suspect, as it has developed across the country. I haven’t gotten over to visit the New Orleans group yet, but I have been participating in groups in New York and Gainesville for more than a year. Both of these groups have been called “therapy” and “personal” groups by women who consider themselves “more political.” So I must speak about so-called therapy groups from my own experience.
Tags: feminism politics essay gender personal quellism theory directaction
Not Safe For Work – Although Chaud hadn’t intended to go public so early, he ran with it and threw open the doors of the Polymorphous Perversity blog. He invited the people of internet to send him private sexual material: nude images and personal fantasies. The images would be cropped and de-personified for in-game avatars; the fantasies would be used to add reality and depth to the game’s sexual tapestry. In May, Chaud’s mood was ebullient: “I had a very weird insight today: I treat my game like a girlfriend… Yeah, I know, weird. But the good thing is: it loves me back.” But his posts were infrequent and in June he made a quick remark that this special relationship was fast becoming dysfunctional
Tags: sex gender perversity desire psychology sociology gaming gamedesign
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood – Well, hats off to the science fiction community, you have successfully goaded Margaret Atwood into producing a volume of SF criticism. This is a frankly bizarre state of affairs, something that just a couple of years ago I would have found impossible to believe, but Atwood’s introduction makes very clear that this is not an exaggeration.
Tags: writing literature review sciencefiction margaretatwood
Japanese noise-rock – The Japanese hardly invented the notion of blaring, atonal rock music, but for some reason, a number of its best-known practitioners hail from that friendly little island in the sea. There are a few speed bumps on the road to noise nirvana, however. Noise-rock, by its very nature, isn’t very popular; it consists of screeching, howling, searing blares of vocals, drums, guitars, and electronics, and few people can stand to listen to it. So its audience is pretty limited, no less so in Japan than in the English-speaking world. Many “Japanoise” albums are only available as imports, making them expensive and hard to find; the language barrier also ensures that it can be confusing to sort out one release from another. Music as alienating as this also has a built-in snob appeal, making it difficult to get good recommendations from fans who want to keep their club exclusive.
Tags: music noise japan
WE SPENT YESTERDAY CRYING IN THE ATHENS RIOTS – Tear gas. Fucking tear gas. I stink of it. My bomber jacket and hair are cracking from it; my nostrils are basically Dresden and Nagasaki. I hate tear gas. The Greek police though, they fucking love it. Today, in the centre of Athens, they responded to 100,000 plus protesters the way they usually do: nailing them with canisters of vile, noxious crap.
Tags: greece athens protest directaction uprising youth police eyewitness
Come one, come all! Feminist and Social Justice blogging as performance and bloodshed – And this performative aspect can take on a whole cruel turn as well. We are supposed to “stay in character” all the time, play the role that was assigned to us and perform it well, with soul, with passion. If you were lucky enough to get the role of “recognized feminist blogger” or “recognized name within Social Justice”, you should not deviate from the scripts that “feminist and/ or Social Justice blogging” are supposed to entail. Your opinions should be carefully weighted because if you say something wrong, the pelting of rotten vegetables begins. That is, if the blogger makes a mistake, the audience of prosumers will begin the collective dance commonly known in blogging as the “call outs”.
Tags: feminism blogging socialjustice echochamberdebate behaviour sociology internet
It’s All For A Cause, You Know: Breast Cancer, Pinkwashing, and Objectification – October, as many readers are no doubt aware, is ‘breast cancer awareness’ month in the United States. The tide of pink-branded products, courtesy of a campaign started in the early 1990s by the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, might have been a tipoff. Of course, pink branding is also spilling over into other months of the year—it really started to ramp up in September this year, but you’d be hard-pressed not to find some pink-branded products, or witty ‘breast cancer awareness’ slogans, at other months of the year as well.
Tags: feminism cancer charity advertising branding

Linkfest: October 3rd – October 9th

Shaun CG — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:09:43 +0000

Del.icio.us links for October 3rd - October 9th. I’m still having to add these manually since the new Chrome extension worked for two bookmarks, and now hangs when sending the links to delicious.com. Good work team!

Why Does It Matter That Game Designers Are Evil? – Surely, when engaging with a piece of art, the only thing that really matters is the effect that it has upon you as a thinking individual? Far from sounding the death knell for video games, Rogers’ piece is describing the beginnings of a gaming golden age. An age in which difficulty curves and XP progression are shaped by the contours of our brains, an age in which games achieve the capacity to reward and punish with absolute precision and absolute conviction, an age in which entertainment becomes a branch of neuroscience. If evil game designers means better games then I shall be the first to fall to my knees and praise the Dark Ones for they are truly the source of our deliverance from a world both boringly cruel and cruelly boring. Evil is not the death of games design… it is its logical end point.
Tags: games gamedesign writing ethics
a closed mind – the games press has been really excited about this game called a closed world, a game about the experience of being “LGBTQ” and dealing with oppression! of course, christine love, robert yang, stephen lavelle and i have been making games about being queer for YEARS. why does a closed world get the big press? because it’s not challenging. i’m not referring to the game’s difficulty, although you can’t ever lose the game. what i’m talking about is that in a closed world, homophobia is an rpg monster that you defeat using skills like ETHICS and PASSION. it’s not a complex system of interwoven and often subtle oppressions. it’s not the reason most of the trans women i know are on food stamps. it’s a bad guy, and you kill it, and you win.
Tags: queer gamedesign gaming writing characters laziness
Interview: How GAMBIT’s A Closed World Tackles Sexuality, Identity – One common criticism of video games — often levied by those most passionate about them — is that the range of experiences they represent is too narrow. These players are tired of games that all seem to tell the story of the archetypal, male “bald space marine, and are looking for more diversity on the frontiers of gender, race and sexual identity.
Tags: sexuality identity gamedesign queerness
The Life-Changing $20 Rightward-Facing Cow – The past year has been one of the strangest ever in the life of game designer, lecturer and author Ian Bogost. It started with the launch of the most successful game he’s ever developed, and ended with him bringing it to a strange, cathartic end. That game was Facebook title Cow Clicker, a now-infamous satire against social games. For its creator, though, it’s been more complicated than that. As his friend, I confess to being a little relieved it’s over with. This is the story of a person whose joke project became more successful than the one on which he lavished love and intellect, the climate that caused that to happen and how ultimately he decided to learn from it instead of becoming upset.
Tags: facebook games videogames socialmedia gamedesign satire
Tiger Beatdown › In the name of safety: the multi-national anti immigration industry and their billionaire profits – That’s what undocumented immigrants are: a bit of political change. Except that the security guards working for the company that Mr. Buckles represents had a big degree of responsibility for the gruesome death of eleven asylum seekers who were awaiting deportation in a detention center at Schiphol Airport in The Netherlands on Thursday, October 27thof 2005. Apparently, the kind of change Mr. Buckles aims for does not include preserving the wellbeing of people whose only crime was to seek an opportunity to better their lives. When detainees raised the alarm and cried for help, when flames were taking over the detention center, the guards working for Mr. Buckles’ corporation ignored them. They were left to die. Nine men and two women. Their bodies now an “opportunity for corporate growth”.
Tags: corporatism capitalism disastercapitalism pmc security immigration racism
Surprised the BBC is ignoring #occupywallstreet? You shouldn’t be – To get an idea of just how many people there are currently protesting in New York one could do better than to watch the BBC. Despite the fact that thousands have rallied in recent weeks against what has become known in the popular lexicon as the ‘feral rich’, the Corporation has dedicated little time to this mass protest.
Tags: bbc media news journalism objectivity selectionbias
New Statesman – Occupying Wall Street – The ’99 percent’ statistic has become emblematic of the American wing of what is phrasing itself as a global protest movement, taking its inspiration from square occupations in Egypt, Greece, Spain and Great Britain. Another statistic you can see daubed on placards around the Plaza is that the wealthiest 400 Americans have more combined wealth than the poorest 150 million. Later in the day, the United Steelworkers union becomes the latest in a growing list of labour organisations and non-profit groups to throw its support behind Occupy Wall Street, ahead of a united march next Wednesday.
Tags: usa protest resistance occupation bailouts classwar
Book Review: Political Discourse and National Identity in Scotland – After the “historic” victory in Scotland for the Scottish National Party (SNP), it was inevitable that the question of Scottish nationalism would re-emerge. Little attention has so far been given to analysing attitudes of nationalist sentiment, making Political Discourse and National Identity in Scotland both timely and necessary, addressing both “elite” and “non-elite” perceptions.
Tags: scotland nationalism politics surveys statistics research
Ludwig II… Stripp’d – If the goal of politics is to create happiness on Earth, then it follows that escapism, much like religion, is a bad thing because people who escape the realities of life are not only failing to improve the world, they are tacitly supporting the status quo. Clearly, all that time we spent levelling up in World of Warcraft should have been spent fighting The Man and films involving giant robots hitting each other are nothing more than a narcotic that Capitalism uses to keep us docile and ignorant. For many critics, the purpose of art is to draw the people’s attention to their plight [...]. Never mind that the intricacies of academic theory and cultural discourse are just as much of a distraction from changing the world as giant robots.
Tags: escapism realism fiction genre manga yaoi romance politics
Saturday Soapbox: Horrible Bosses – Article – So bosses aren’t on the way out. Sorry about all that: it was just a cheap starting point to build a discussion around. But, as with any game mechanic like traversal, levelling, or even health, it’s worth taking a look at bosses every now and then just to make sure that they’re still fit for purpose. Pinky Roader, after all, deserves nothing less.
Tags: gaming bosses gamedesign

Linkfest: September 12th – September 19th

Shaun CG — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:37:11 +0000

Del.icio.us links for September 12th through September 19th:

PC Gamers Save The World, A Bit | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – “Foldit players leverage human three-dimensional problem-solving skills to interact with protein structures using direct manipulation tools and algorithms from the Rosetta structure prediction methodology. Players collaborate with teammates while competing with other players to obtain the highest-scoring (lowest-energy) models. In proof-of-concept tests, Foldit players—most of whom have little or no background in biochemistry—were able to solve protein structure refinement problems in which backbone rearrangement was necessary to correctly bury hydrophobic residues. Here we report Foldit player successes in real-world modeling problems with more complex deviations from native structures, leading to the solution of a long-standing protein crystal structure problem.” Living in the fucking future.
Tags: gaming science research problemsolving crowdsourcing
Keith Stuart: Do game reviewers really understand innovation? | Technology | guardian.co.uk – The ‘better sequel’ mentality is damaging both to the games industry and to the quality of games journalism. It is a deferral of critical responsibility, a patronising pat on the head for the developer who dared to dream and fell short in some mythically vital way. I don’t want to be frustrated by dodgy controls either, but then I’m willing to blunder through if I’m going to get an experience I never had before. I felt the same about Killer 7 and Shenmue and the mobile game, Nom – flawed every one of them, but I don’t begrudge the creators a single second of the time I spent toiling with imperfections.
Tags: games criticism reviewing gamesjournalism
FightingFantasist: The British OSR Starts Here… – Right then, let’s out with it. Form ranks, King’s Colour to the fore. We don’t recognise much of the American-led OSR. The Brit experience looked something like this…
Tags: gaming rpgs britain history 1980s
COD XP: The Bug and the Windscreen Article – - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net – While nobody will say how much this all cost, one spokesman admits the two-day event has a budget comparable to a US television advertising campaign. A conservative estimate would put that at $15 million. So this is an event, a game, that is all about establishing hierarchy. Sometimes you’re the bug and sometimes you’re the windscreen. COD: XP is a 28-acre, $15 million windscreen.
Tags: gamesindustry activision callofduty hierarchy
BMJ – A Blot on the Profession – Interesting BMJ article about institutionalised prejudice in the assessing of applications at a medical school.
Tags: discrimination prejudice institutionalracism medicine study statistics system:filetype:pdf system:media:document
Optimizing WordPress – Tips for Speed | Three Wise Men – Handy.
Tags: wordpress web
Massive Unemployment: Proof That Global Capitalism Doesn’t Work | Economy | AlterNet – We have a choice: Americans can continue to accept large-scale unemployment as “natural” and permanent, even — a truly grotesque development — as a basic feature on a bipartisan road to “recovery” via austerity. Or we can follow the lead of the jobless young in the Arab Spring and of protestors beginning to demonstrate en masse in Europe. Even the newly minted proletarians of Ventura, California, sleeping in their cars, may decide that they have had enough of a political and economic order of things so bankrupt it can find no use for them at any price.
Tags: history usa unemployment reservearmyoflabor government publicworks protest uprising
The health reform Bill moves one step closer – Telegraph – It is worthwhile remembering that the Commonwealth Fund report last year placed the NHS top for equity, efficiency, safety, effectiveness and patient satisfaction. It was also cheaper than France, Germany and the US. That is not to say that there is not room for improvement. It seems utterly perverse, however, to open up our system to providers in other countries, such as American and German health-care companies, which, as shown by the Commonwealth Fund report, have a track record of providing a more expensive and inferior services in their own countries.

The Bill now passes to the House of Lords, where it will be debated. We can only hope that they have the sense and independence of mind to put the interests of the electorate first and put right this tragic wrong that has been done to our health-care system.
Tags: nhs britain healthcare privatisation coalition toryscum
How the Murdoch press uses misogyny to attack Julia Gillard – He’s right: News Limited is picking a tacky, misogynistic, and utterly transparent fight with the Prime Minister, and they’re doing it so that the very wealthiest people in the country can stay so. She may not be making the sort of moves that appeal to the left, or being the sort of person who appeals to the right, but her party won the election fair and square. There’s something else going on. I’ll put it bluntly: if Gillard were a man, the media landscape in Australia would be looking vastly different right now.
Tags: australia politics newsinternational media misogyny
Debate: GOP Crowd Cheers Dying Uninsured Man, Ben Bernanke Treason Claim | Mother Jones – A round-up of recent Tea Party / GOP scummery.
Tags: usa rightwingbullshit
A Legal Defense Fund for Climate Scientists | Mother Jones – A pair of scientists is trying to rally public support—and funding—to help other scientists fend off attacks from climate deniers. They’ve launched a legal defense fund to help individual scientists like Pennsylvania State University’s Michael Mann deal with the sizable legal fees that have resulted from attempts to gain access to their emails and other correspondence.
Tags: climatechange capitalism legalfunds science
Mad Men, and the new crop of retro sexist TV shows – In a show where everyone is a bigot, you end up liking some of the bigots. A smart show will use this against you; I’m of the opinion that Mad Men is a very smart show, luring you in with its beautiful surfaces and pretty people, then making you scream when you see the horror they take for granted. But very few shows have that sort of scalpel-like grace; in fact, this new breed looks to use mainly blunt implements, battering us relentlessly with awfulness toward women and other living things. And if people can watch a show as finely calibrated as Mad Men and come away with the message that it is somehow desirable to act like Roger Sterling, it’s foolish to think that these other shows aren’t attracting a viewership that is more turned on by the awfulness than the “critique.”
Tags: television criticism retro sexism racism
Scary Monsters (and Super-Creeps) – Charlie’s Diary – My take on horror is that it’s a tone; you can add a tint of horror to any other genre. Horror goes well with SF (“Alien”), with fantasy, with crime, with thriller, with romance, with literary realism, with just about every flavour. It’s the monosodium glutamate of fiction. We add it because it’s a contrast-enhancer.
Tags: horror genre fiction writing criticism
Ex-MI5 chief says Tony Blair got it wrong…a lot | Liberal Conspiracy – The Guardian reports today on a speech yesterday by the former MI5 Chief Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller. In earlier lectures she criticised the invasion of Iraq, said the term “war on terror” was unhelpful and said 9/11 was “a crime, not an act of war”. Yesterday she said it was important “to try and reduce terrorism by talking to its advocates” and that many anti-terrorist laws passed by the Labour government were “unnecessary” and “unproductive”.
Tags: intelligence mi5 waronterror iraq britain foreignpolicy newlabour
NHS ‘watchdog’ will be a “bloated monster” | Liberal Conspiracy – Monitor – the government’s revamped organisation to regulate competition in the NHS – is set to become ‘a bloated bureaucratic monster’, Unite, the largest union in the country, has warned.
Unite said that Monitor’s running costs were set to soar from £72 million-a-year to £82 million – with a 600-strong staff being paid twice the national average wage of £26,000.
Unite said that ministers were creating a bloated, old fashioned bureaucracy which would be responsible for handing over lucrative NHS contracts to the ‘government’s friends’ in the private healthcare sector.
Tags: nhs privatisation britain corruption
Book Review: Consuming the Congo – WSJ.com – Those seeking to distill this morass into a less murky essence risk oversimplification. It is true that minerals have played a crucial enabling role in the conflict, making it easier to finance the fighting and at times forming a strong motive for individual actors. But politics, even in the Congo, cannot be reduced to profit maximization. Nor would removing minerals from the equation quell all of the fighting—some groups are fighting for more than money and some have diversified into timber, cannabis and palm oil.
Tags: resourceconflict conflictminerals congo DRC africa analysis
Tiger Beatdown › With Dim Lights: On Feminism and Virtue – It was her insistence on my opinions being somehow “anti-feminist” that stuck with me; it was being presented with a choice between my core beliefs and my unrelated opinions about subcultures and Internet behavior. Being told that I could be myself and be cast out, or conform and find acceptance. Being told that there were some things I just wasn’t allowed to think, and that my identity could be stripped from me if I disobeyed. Starting with the desire to punish, and then working backward to find the sins; I clearly wasn’t “anti-feminist,” but it was the most effective thing she could think to say, to shame me. I couldn’t figure out why this was so familiar, why it pissed me off and hurt me in such an old way. And then I got there, figured out where I’d been there before, hearing “love” and “compassion” preached to me by someone who reserved the right to be hurtful and cold, hearing the language of my beliefs used against my being, all in the name of a greater good.
Tags: identity goodness morality ethics
Tiger Beatdown › With Dim Lights: On Feminism and Virtue – It was her insistence on my opinions being somehow “anti-feminist” that stuck with me; it was being presented with a choice between my core beliefs and my unrelated opinions about subcultures and Internet behavior. Being told that I could be myself and be cast out, or conform and find acceptance. Being told that there were some things I just wasn’t allowed to think, and that my identity could be stripped from me if I disobeyed. Starting with the desire to punish, and then working backward to find the sins; I clearly wasn’t “anti-feminist,” but it was the most effective thing she could think to say, to shame me. I couldn’t figure out why this was so familiar, why it pissed me off and hurt me in such an old way. And then I got there, figured out where I’d been there before, hearing “love” and “compassion” preached to me by someone who reserved the right to be hurtful and cold, hearing the language of my beliefs used against my being, all in the name of a greater good.
Tags: identity goodness morality ethics

Linkfest: September 4th – September 11th

Shaun CG — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 15:04:31 +0000

Del.icio.us links for September 4th through September 11th:

David Cameron’s immigration promises were desperate and self-defeating | Richard Seymour | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – Torn between his business allies’ enthusiasm for immigration and the Tory bedrock, Cameron has been left looking foolish
Tags: immigration uk politics davidcameron
Riots as revenge « Though Cowards Flinch – Back in the 19650s and 1960s, both Conservative and Labour governments, in collaboration with willing councils, pursued overtly racist housing, employment and education policies towards the people then immigrating from South Asia and the West Indies.
At the time, a sociologist who did have the “cognitive resources” needed to ”anticipate revenge effects” (which Chris says policy makers lack), said…
Tags: racism society poverty inequality britain sociology
Oi! | Music | Gateways To Geekery | The A.V. Club – Yes, Oi! is a subgenre of punk rock played predominantly by skinheads. And depending on what kind of experience you may or may not have with such folks (or what kinds of movies you’ve watched about them), your view of Oi! may be duly influenced. Of course, not all skinheads are racist; the working-class youth movement began in England in the late ’60s and originally had reggae as its primary soundtrack. Oi!, however, didn’t rise until the following decade, when a chunk of the punk subculture chafed at the pop and/or art trends that had begun to proliferate in the movement. For better or worse (but mostly better), Oi! was punk’s first roots revival.
Tags: punk history punkrock oi skinheads uk music
How to read a press release: Case studies from the Daily Mail and the Guardian « Though Cowards Flinch – Research has recently been produced from the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology, which has found that a third of Europeans are suffering from a mental disorder in any one year. Further still, women suffer disproportionately from depression, which has seen an increase over the last four decades.
Tags: media journalism journalisticstandards rightwingbullshit
Dead Sea Apes – Cool drone band from Manchester, worth checking out.
Tags: band music
New Statesman – News from Nowhere – I’ve left London, and I am sailing to a new island that has appeared out of the ice in the Arctic circle. No, this is not a prank. I’ve been invited along with an eclectic collection of academics, artists, lawyers, activists, sixth-formers and scientists to sail to this small pitch of land, which has been named NowhereIsland, as part of the Cultural Olympiad.
Tags: fuckingawesome socialexperiment fun theory politics society culture lifestyle
Private schools aren’t doing as well right-wingers like to think | Liberal Conspiracy – I do love to see more stats supporting the argument that exams aren’t getting easier, and that private schools ain’t all that.
Tags: education uk schools privatisation
I live sweat… – “If you didn’t want to scoop ice cream for a living, you got in the van.” – Kate Tyler Wall examines the role punk has played over decades of economic shifts. – I’m waiting for the punk scene to come to the fore again and get in the world’s face about it. Pat Graham of Spraynard (whom I’m going to see open for Kid Dynamite this weekend) said in recent interview that he’s worried punk audiences are too focused on just having a good time at shows, but that “punk is more than just singing your favorite songs with your friends.” Punk songs don’t have to be overtly political to capture the essence of a time and place. TV Party summed up the ’80s just as well as any Dead Kennedys diatribe. Too much earnestness reminds me of what passed for ’70s and ’80s political resistance in the university town where I lived (what Frank Turner aptly describes as “idiot fucking hippies” in “60s battle reenactments”).
Tags: punk history subculture economiccrisis
Sirs – Neato.
Tags: band music
Brainy Gamer: Unplayable – I’m pretty sure I’ll continue to teach Ultima IV. The series is simply too foundational to overlook, and I can develop new teaching strategies. But I believe we’ve finally reached the point where the gap separating today’s generation of gamers from those of us who once drew maps on grid paper is nearly unbridgeable. These wonderful old games are still valuable, of course, and I don’t mean to suggest we should toss them in the dustbin.
Tags: teaching gaming history
Dire Straits’ homophobic faux-pas | Sady Doyle | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – Still, one wonders if we gain anything by erasing history. When certain publishers removed the “n— word” from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there was a widespread outcry – and it was based on some very solid grounds. Yes, the word appears many times; yes, the word is unambiguously racist. But erasing evidence of racism from Mark Twain’s work, while valorising Twain himself, is hypocritical: sanitising history makes it impossible for us to learn from our mistakes, or even to know that we’ve made them.
Tags: language censorship homophobia bigotry radio
Don’t be afraid of the snark | Sady Doyle | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – Mockery and derisive laughter are the natural responses of people who feel powerless and pushed around; if there’s nothing else we can do but register our discontent, we should register it. And if we can make the whole ordeal less painful with a few jokes, we should do that, too. But we shouldn’t mistake the relief it gives us for actual power.
Tags: snark internet writing dialogue
Cheerleader’s protest after assault was not ‘frivolous’ | SE Smith | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? Sex offenders, apparently. The US supreme court decided this week that if someone assaults you and you refuse to cheer for him at a basketball game, the school district is justified in suspending you from the squad.
Tags: rape rapeculture sports texas supremecourt misogyny sexism twofoursixeightfuckyouguys
What Christine O’Donnell wouldn’t tell Piers Morgan | Sady Doyle | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – This is far more serious than believing in witches. O’Donnell represents a lethally extreme strain of homophobia, which has many supporters, and O’Donnell has been open about this fact when in safe company. The fact that she backs off in less sympathetic environments only shows that hers is a policy of seduction – winning over as many people as possible before telling them that certain Americans deserve second-class status. It’s both worthwhile and necessary to call that out, and Morgan has done us all a service.
Tags: teaparty fruitcakes farright homophobia television interview
Tiger Beatdown › “Elitism:” Now, It Basically Just Means “Not Having Sex With Everybody” – What you CANNOT do, however, is participate in a subculture, build a lifestyle around the subculture, become WORLD CHAMPION of the subculture, and then scream bloody murder because someone finds your participation in the subculture unattractive. That’s not you being “bullied;” that’s just you exercising a massive and unrealistic sense of entitlement. And when you shriek that some woman is a “bitch” and a “cunt” and a “narcissist” and a “predator” and whatever else, just because she didn’t want to fuck some dude, just because she detailed her reasons why and didn’t bother to pretend she found the guy’s interests attractive, and just because that makes you worry that there might be people in the world who don’t want to fuck you or who don’t find you attractive (SURPRISE, there are, this is also true for everyone else in existence), well: guess who’s actually the bully in this situation?
Tags: feminism internet dating funny
How Doctor Who became Nurse Rory – And then we got there. The moment I stopped caring. Amy is surrounded by killer robots, in possession of a life-saving tool that can do anything she can think up, and Rory actually has to instruct her to “think” something. But even this isn’t condescending enough, apparently. Because Amy then turns to Rory, and asks him: “What do I think?”
Tags: doctorwho television sciencefiction feminist critique ugh
Feminist Media Criticism, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, And That Sady Doyle Piece | ThinkProgress – A world where women are perfectly safe, perfectly competent, and society is perfectly engineered to produce those conditions strikes me as one where we can’t tell any very interesting stories about women’s struggles and women’s liberation. If we tell ourselves stories in order to live, it doesn’t strike me that we do ourselves any favors as active feminists by leaching depictions of sexual violence, women making bad decisions, and institutionalized sexism from our fiction, or by dismissing entire swaths of consumers or modes of consuming fiction.
Tags: feminist critique fiction fantasy epicfantasy writing
Tiger Beatdown › Enter Ye Myne Mystic World of Gayng-Raype: What the “R” Stands for in “George R.R. Martin” – So, get it out of your system now, because, guess what, George R.R. Martin fans? I don’t like your toys. Deal with that. Meditate for a while. Envision a blazing bonfire in a temple, and breathe in its warmth and serenity. Then, imagine me dumping all your comic books and action figures and first-edition hardback Song of Ice and Fire novels INTO the bonfire, and cackling wildly. Because the fact of the matter is, in my ever-masochistic quest to be hip with what is happening in pop culture these days, I read the first four novels in the series. And my conclusions were: Dear God, George R.R. Martin is creepy. Quite possibly the creepiest author I’ve read in QUITE SOME TIME.
Tags: fantasy criticism funny sexism racism writing epicfantasy
Kill Screen – Laughing Stock: Doug TenNapel – For the designer behind the most outrageous platformer of the fourth generation, Doug TenNapel is surprisingly puritanical about the role of comedy in videogames. Earthworm Jim, co-created by TenNapel and released in ’94, shook up the medium with its surreal style, darkly comic tone, self-knowing satire and preoccupation with cow-launching, and led to outstanding reviews, two sequels, and a television show. But for all his game’s visual dynamism, TenNapel, a graphic novelist by trade, says it is the gameplay that supersedes all other elements, including laughs. TenNapel’s stepped away from games for the moment to work on the online comic Ratfist, but still has strong opinions on games: a space, he believes, of visual limitations but artistic possibilities.
Tags: interview gamedesign artists 90s
BBC News – Scottish soldier convicted of transgender prejudice – A soldier from Kinross has become the first person in Scotland to be convicted of transgender prejudice.
Tags: progress prejudice justice crime
I, Singularity… – Charlie’s Diary – The coming revolution in the English-language genre is here. And it’s this: we’re diverse. I’ve taken to calling it the Rainbow Age of science fiction, because the one thing I notice about the writers in my cohort is that we are multicolored, multicultural, multinational, multiethnic. We come from a wide range of class and religious backgrounds and life experiences. We do not conform neatly to gender binaries or established sexual identities. You cannot assume that we are male, or heterosexual, or white, or American or English or Canadian, or of protestant or Jewish background, or that we are probably professional or middle class.
Tags: sciencefiction fantasy genre multiculturalism
Eve’s CSM Fight Back, And Some Thoughts | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Unfortunately for CCP, players like Gianturco are much better at this stuff than they are. The company has been prone to devs saying the wrong things, as well as making some catastrophic design errors along the way. Of course that’s almost always forgiveable because things can change, and the game is a work-in-progress. It’ll evolve. It always does. But CCP are increasingly unable to come away from misjudgements or battles with player-opinion while also looking like a winner. This will be their most difficult challenge yet. And I believe that’s because this is the most fundamental battle they are ever going to face: a battle over how to run both their game, and their company.
Tags: gaming eveonline development gamesindustry
New Statesman – An afternoon with the English Defence League – On both sides of the political spectrum, politicians and policymakers have urged us to try to understand the disenfranchisement of white, far-right groups like the EDL, rather than dismissing their protests as “mindless violence”.
Rioters from the inner cities, by contrast, are sent to jail for six months for stealing bottles of water; their rage at a system which does not want to educate, house or employ them written off as “pure criminality”.
Tags: edl racists fascists scum
All they are saying is give war a chance – The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) – From being a movement that boldly declared its independence, it became wholly dependent on external powers. Most tragically, elements within it became obsessed with ‘Africans’, who were frequently arrested, harassed, or killed. In the days following the capture of Tripoli, several news organisations have found evidence of rebels rounding up black men and killing them. “This is a bad time to be a black man in Libya,” reported Channel 4′s Alex Thomson. This jars with the language of human rights with which the opposition validates its claim to rule. It is also a disgrace to the February 17 revolt.
Tags: libya revolution conservatism entrenchedpower civilwar

Linkfest: August 21st – August 28th

Shaun CG — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 18:55:28 +0000

Del.icio.us links for August 21st through August 28th:

LENIN’S TOMB: Racist vengeance in Libya – There is frightening evidence of racist killings taking place across Libya as elements in the opposition-cum-regime now act on the unfounded rumours that “African” mercenaries acted as Qadhafi’s fifth column.
Tags: libya racism revolution rebellion imperialism
LENIN’S TOMB: A couple of recent police killings – A lot of people showed some very nasty streaks during the UK riots. Social media was groaning with almost Streicherite hate-mongering and calls for violent repression that a Ustashe would think twice about. Bring in the army! Water cannons! Plastic bullets! Live bullets! Shoot them all! Massacre them! Massacre them! And now that’s all over and the state has regained control, and the explicit bloodthirst has receded back into its usual subterranean psychic flow, there’s no need to do anything rash. The police will simply take whatever new repressive technologies are handed to them, add them to the repertoire and continue to maim and consume bodies, perhaps at a slightly higher rate. The intensified social antagonisms will be resolved with the carefully scripted, bureaucratic application of violence. A few hundred deaths, a few thousands injuries, a few bad headlines, a little more fear and resentment, more CCTV, and the retooling of the state for the age of austerity is complete.
Tags: britain police power violence authority
New Statesman – The anti-choice minority are being allowed to dictate policy – The battle for abortion rights in Britain has begun in earnest. This week, the small, vocal, venal group of Christian conservative lobbyists working in Westminster to roll back women’s right to reproductive choice has won a victory. The Department of Health has confirmed that abortion clinics will no longer be allowed to offer counselling to women presenting with crisis pregnancies, who may instead have to go to biased religious counsellors if they wish to receive advice and information on abortion. This has been done without any debate, circumventing the parliamentary process ahead of next week’s discussions on this and other anti-choice amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill.
Tags: abortion britain religiouszealots
SchNEWS 785 – 26th August 2011 – Atos Shrugged – This is the third website run by disabled activists to have been forced offline after heavy legal threats from Atos, without the company ever having to have their supposed evidence tested in court (or held up to ridicule more like). Some of the things the sensitive company has found unbearble in the past include subverted logos, the website name ‘AtosRegisterofShame’ and the phrase ‘Atos Kills’.
The only thing to do with a bully is overwhelm them with sheer numbers. The company has gone through an extensive – and no doubt expensive – corporate rebranding; online activists have been responding by suggesting a more honest corporate identity
Tags: atos corporatescum disability benefits privatisation
Nothing To Lose « Electron Dance – I characterise each computer gaming decade in the following way:

1970s, Genesis – The first computer game businesses appear with Atari dominating

1980s, Democratisation – Home computers enable ordinary computer users to make their own games

1990s, Corporatisation – Profitable games require the polish and resources that only big business can afford

2000s, Revolution – Game development becomes cheaper and games break out of narrow genres in a big way
Tags: gaming history gamesindustry
Hark! A Vagrant’s Kate Beaton on History, Comics, and Crowded Elevators | The Hairpin – Kate Beaton is the artist and mastermind behind the web comic, Hark! A Vagrant. In it, she affectionately satirizes iconic figures from Queen Elizabeth to those wacky Fitzgeralds, winning her a spot in the hearts of history and lit nerds (and everyone) everywhere. Her second book, which will feature classic strips as well as new material, will be released by Drawn and Quarterly this fall. We caught up with Kate to ask her the tough questions.
Tags: katebeaton webcomics art interview
Favorite Books of the Secretly Jerky | The Hairpin – Favorite Books of the Secretly Jerky
Tags: books funny
Why I’m not on Google Plus – Charlie’s Diary – (Actually, there are several reasons I’m not on Google Plus, nor on LinkedIn or Twitter or a bunch of other social networks, starting with “attractive nuisance” and moving on through “waste of time” and “I dislike the amount of spam you’re sending me” and ending in “thank you but I don’t want you to monetize my personal information”: but this is the stuff specific to Google Plus …)
Tags: socialnetworks design realworlduse web2.0 google
LENIN’S TOMB: No tears for Qadhafi; no cheers for NATO – I would strongly caution against getting carried away with the prospect of permanent revolution here. I think the US and its allies will very quickly stabilise this situation. There will be no analogue to ‘de-Baathification’. The old state structures will be preserved and adapted, and the new government will enjoy considerable legitimacy provided it delivers on a basic menu of elections and political rights. Moreover, the parties that win those elections will likely be the more pro-capitalist elements allied to the ruling class factions in the leadership of the transitional council. The government that now follows will be less oppressive and more democratic than the one it ousted, and it will probably be less sectional than the Qadhafi regime.
Tags: libya proxywars middleeast africa
Gamasutra – Features – Persuasive Games: From Aberrance to Aesthetics – Video games aren’t science. They are not a mystery of the universe that can be explained away via testable predictions and experimentation. We need to stop looking for answers, whether those answers would come from a technical innovation whose arrival only renews obsession with the next breakthrough, or from the final exploitation of the true nature of our medium by means of a historical discovery so obvious that it will become indisputable. The answers lie not in the past or the future, but in the present, which is all we will ever get in any case.
Tags: gamedesign historicalaberrance
Palestinian children routinely jailed for throwing stones, report finds | Liberal Conspiracy – Each year, approximately 700 Palestinian children are arrested and prosecuted in military courts, the majority on charges of throwing stones. These courts can and do imprison children as young as 12, even though Israeli civilian law prohibits the imprisoning of a child under 14 years of age.
According to B’Tselem’s latest report, 60 per cent of the children jailed for stone throwing between 2005 and 2010 were aged 14 or under. Prison terms range from a few days to over a year. One 14-year-old boy was sentenced to 20 months, while nearly a third of minors aged 14-15 are locked up for four months or more.
Tags: israel humanrights children youth
Analyst Breaks Satire Barrier, Become Parody | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Pachter also attacked the idea of unions within game development, saying that people who earn a lot of money don’t need any protection, apparently because money provides them with a cloak of impenetrable entitlement: “I think unions are in business to protect workers from, I think, dangerous working conditions and unfair labor practices. Sweatshops should have unions but games studios, which tend to pay people a lot of money, shouldn’t. I just don’t think people who make over $100,000 a year need a whole lot of protection cause they might have to work overtime.”
Tags: employment unions gamesindustry bullshit
What are people like Melanie Phillips calling for then? | Liberal Conspiracy – I ask because the message they’ve been sending out loud and clear is that Europe is under threat of imminent enslavement, and quite possibly genocide, at the hands of a sinister cabal of Marxist fifth-columnists in cahoots with one of our largest ethnic minority groups, the latter of which they portray as irrevocably violent and totalitarian.
Unsurprisingly, they’re stridently in favour of “resisting” this theoretical dictatorship.
That being the case, what kind of “resistance” do they expect the urgent threat of Nazi-Commie-Jihadist European domination to inspire in their readership? A sudden upsurge in the creation of idiot blogs?
Tags: rightwingbullshit farright islamophobia racism terrorism britain
Anders Breivik wasn’t a “lone wolf”, he was part of a movement | Liberal Conspiracy – Islamic ideology had questions to answer after 7/7 and the hard-right ideology pushed by certain pundits in the press has questions to answer now.
The Anders Breivik of this world do not emerge from nowhere, just as the English Defence Leagues of this world do not emerge from nowhere. They are fostered by an ideology legitimised by screaming tabloid headlines and the fear-mongering of politicians who really should know better.
And unfortunately whilst Breivik’s actions were the actions of a nutter, he is not the only nutter out there.
Tags: farright rightwingbullshit britain norway terrorism
Deborah Cohen: Amy Winehouse’s battle with addiction « BMJ – Her celebrity status meant every painful twist in her chaotic lifestyle was played out in lurid detail in the press— blood soaked ballet pumps, arms razed with scratches, slumped in a corner at parties. Hardly glorification.
I’d been to several festivals where she’d played—or tried to. Incoherent and stumbling, close-ups on large screens beamed out a small pale girl whose wrinkled skin belied her age.
People turned, tutted, walked away. Some jeered and booed. Others stood and watched wide-eyed in horror. (Some wide-eyed from ingesting a similar cocktail of class As and booze—their drug consumption not having turned bad.) You have to question the wisdom of thrusting such a vulnerable person onto a stage—trial by rather hypocritical festival going crowd. Sympathy, one the whole, was notable by its absence.
Tags: addiction drugs death britain popculture popstars
Punknews.org | Hot Water Music: “Up To Nothing” – New HWM song. Mighty fine.
Tags: band music
Journalism; when is it justified for a writer to work for free? | Funambulism – The Controversial Bit: yesterday morning, I posted on Twitter the following: Hypothesis; people who write for free are using their secure financial situation as an unfair advantage. Any antitheses?
Tags: journalism writing freelancing gamesjournalism
искра/iskra: The Big Issue – So it seems David Cameron is to edit the next edition of the Big Issue.

This should come as a surprise to none. The Big Issue is perhaps one of the most foul and conservative institutions working in homelessness in the UK. Its liberarian fuckwittery is summed up exactly in its tagline, “Working Not Begging”.
Tags: homelessness britain libertarianism bigissue

Linkfest: August 8th – August 21st

Shaun CG — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 16:56:50 +0000

Del.icio.us links for August 8th through August 21st:

Infamous 2: Mindless Fun and the Basis of Aesthetic Judgement | Blasphemous Geometries | Futurismic – As my opening reviews suggested, whether a work constitutes mindless or mindful fun is largely a matter of individual perception and predisposition. One can play Infamous 2 and be uplifted by the political allegory just as easily as one can play the game and hate the fact that it manipulates us at every turn. Similarly, there are times (as with the work of Haneke and Eisenstein) when the manipulative character of a work is a source of prestige rather than animosity.
Tags: psychology consumption subjectivity entertainment brain
LENIN’S TOMB: The sadistic state – The criminal justice system is engaged in a demonstration of the state’s ability to control the territory, because that very ability is just what has recently been in doubt. The moral and ideological pedagogy behind this disciplining and consumption of bodies teaches us that the party of order is in control, because its claim to rule hinges considerably on its ability to rule. This is, of course, the hallmark of a very brittle social order.
Tags: britain justice police power authority violence force
LENIN’S TOMB: The competing common senses of the riots – In light of this, the repressive responses have to be seen as ranging from the delusional to the obscene. Among the delusional, bring back national service. A simple point: Greece has national service. You work it out. Equally delusional are the hopes invested in using bigger and better weapons. The policing breakdown here was not military – the gun that apparently killed Mark Duggan was not a toy. Look at it. That gun is a beast. It’s designed to decimate flesh. Police use these weapons on citizens. The idea that they haven’t got enough weapons or powers is fuelled by a juvenile revenge fantasy, not reality. What happened was a breakdown of leadership and legitimacy. Resorting to more repression as a way of ironing out these problems will both intensify them in the long run and hurt and damage a lot of people along the way
Tags: riots britain police rightwingbullshit
New Statesman – Demonising the young won’t heal our cities – As panicked politicians with little understanding of social disorder fight to reclaim the narrative, it is vital that we resist the easy story of “us”

and “them”.Because the truth is that it’s all “us”. The disorder will continue until we acknowledge that the young people who rampaged through Manchester, Liverpool, Brixton, Tottenham and 50 boroughs of London are as much a part of the “real Britain” as those who nobly came out the next morning to clear the debris from their trashed high streets. The language of “true Brits” defending themselves against a feral underclass is precisely the language of social division that predicated these riots.
Tags: britain classwar socialdivision riots
SchNEWS 784 – 19th August 2011 – The U.N. Holy Land – The machine-gunning of an Israeli bus and the subsequent air-raids on Gaza represent another dangerous turn of the screw for Palestine. Anxious to rescue themselves from their own domestic discontents (see SchNEWS 781) another border war might be just what the Israeli authorities want.
Tags: israel palestine occupation statemurder resistance protest
Why riot? – The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) – No-one wants to hear social and economic justifications for rioting, least of all anyone in the UK political class. But justification is not what is at stake. The issue is explanation, as that will determine the response.
Tags: britain riots police coalition
Civil disorder and looting hits Britain: We have been here before | The Economist – These are bold claims, amounting to a thesis that Britain has been wrecked and transformed from a familiar, law-abiding spot to an alien hell hole in just three or four decades. But here is an odd thing, surely: go back precisely three decades and you get to the summer of 1981, scene of some of the nastiest riots in modern British history, when racially charged violence saw tracts of Brixton in south London and Toxteth in Liverpool burn for days.
Tags: riots britain moralpanics media lazyjournalism kneejerkreactionaries blametheparents
Your Critic is in Another Castle: The Chatty RPG – But then there is the world of gaming. Or rather, there are the worlds of gaming. When you reach a new location in an RPG, what’s the very first thing you do? (After saving, of course.) You talk to every. single. person. in town. At great length. You ask them their life stories. You perform their tasks and errands, up to and including murder. You ask anyone and everyone you meet if they need help, and if they do, you immediately proffer it. Your sword (or gun — Fallout and Mass Effect are not innocent of this) is at anyone and everyone’s disposal, with small exceptions for not helping members of a problematic alignment, or persons perceived as evil or shady.
Tags: writing gamedesign playeragency npcs worldbuilding
Your Critic is in Another Castle: Beyond the Girl Gamer 2.2: We all live in a… – A game can include female characters galore, and yet still find itself an example of incoherent world-building that doesn’t take gender or sex into account in any way. [...] The first game mainly portrays female NPCs as servants, nobles, locals, or witches — and though not ideal, this is at least theoretically consistent. By the second, nearly all groups, factions, and character types are a fairly hefty gender mix. Men and women both guard town walls, or oppose you with malice (i.e. swords), or are dungeon bosses. And yet women who get lines or quest segments are still mostly there to be plot devices, rather than to be characters with agency. Your player character can be female, and yet nearly the entire game is designed around the responses of a male player character.
Tags: gamedesign writing gender fantasy
Epilogue: Nations as Characters – Too often, historical criticism of games is based on accuracy and realism, something that is difficult to talk about meaningfully in an art that relies on abstraction. (You can ask why some things are abstracted and some are not, of course.) But what historical game analysis really needs sometimes is kicking at the premises. This series is pretty much 25000 words kicking at the idea that we give nations personalities and they are often consistent from game to game, developer to developer, and this says something about how we turn history into a pastime.
Tags: gamedesign history nationstates nationalcharacter abstraction
The Zulu National Character – It’s honestly hard to justify the Zulu as the greatest of the African civilizations. Their migration and warfare did not lead to any great empire; a tiny corner of South Africa along the Indian Ocean. Give Shaka credit for survivability and military insight, but he wasn’t the Napoleon of the Cape. There is no Code of Shaka, after all.
The Zulu were, however, the most obvious of the African. Like the Babylonians, Meier probably used them in the game because, first, he needed an Africa civ that wasn’t Mediterranean Egypt, and second, people knew who the Zulu were. Recognition was the important thing here. The default name for the first Zulu city in Civ 1 and 2 was Zimbabwe – which is not even a Zulu city.
Tags: africa history empire gaming gamedesign eurocentrism
Daily Routines – How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days.
Tags: interesting writers biography
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | Magicland – Beck was still polishing his act in his early days at Fox; does anyone remember when he simulcast a close-up of his own eyes in real time as he sermonized? Immediately, Stephen Colbert was on the story, pretend-praising Beck, saying, “Glenn has climbed into his genius cannon and lit the fuse.” He pegged Beck as a personage whose eyes offered “a wormhole to another world,” and it wasn’t long before Jon Stewart and the South Park boys were feeding on Beck’s performances; it was fertile ground. This kind of attention of course brought out Beck’s petulance, which is never far from the surface. Unlike Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh, or, as far as anyone can tell, Michele Bachmann, Beck fancies himself a comedian.
Tags: glennbeck usa rightwingbullshit funny media foxnews
Socialism and/or barbarism: An open letter to those who condemn looting (Part one) – Lastly, we disagree that “what we’re witnessing now has absolutely nothing to do with” that shooting. And that is the real difference, the tiny crack between us that widens into a yawning gulf, a division that cannot be squared.
For we want to understand the world in its historical particularity, how and why it has gotten to be the way that it is, and why that is insupportable. You, however, simply want to make sure that it goes on as long as possible. Regardless of the quality, regardless of the consequences, regardless of anything other than your collected capacity to declare that it’s a nasty world out there, but at least we have our decency. At least we sit high enough to look out over the killing fields. At least we got here by legal measures. And how dare they. How dare they.
Tags: riots britain rightwingbullshit analysis
New drug could cure nearly any viral infection – MIT News Office – Most bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics such as penicillin, discovered decades ago. However, such drugs are useless against viral infections, including influenza, the common cold, and deadly hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola.
Now, in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.
Tags: medicine research science future health
S.F. gay married couple loses immigration battle – “Citing the Defense of Marriage Act, the Obama administration denied immigration benefits to a married gay couple from San Francisco and ordered the expulsion of a man who is the primary caregiver to his AIDS-afflicted spouse.”
Tags: homophobia usa immigration law
An Open Letter to David Cameron’s Parents « Nathaniel Tapley – Dear Mr & Mrs Cameron, Why did you never take the time to teach your child basic morality?
Tags: politicians riots hypocrisy tories davidcameron
Marechera’s Poetry – Dambudzo Marechera was a performer. Throughout his life, he continuously reinvented himself by putting on roles, donning costumes, and creating myths about his person. This was what he saw as both the inescapable effect of colonization, and a reaction against it. To Marechera, being colonized meant being a ‘mimic man’ destined to imitate the colonizer. Yet he believed that liberation from colonization could happen through making self-reinvention a way of life, adopting a fluid identity that resisted being defined, categorized, and spoken for.
Tags: poetry
New Left Project | NLP Blog | Democracy BBC Style – John Reith, the founding father of the BBC, made much of the democratic potential of broadcasting. His concept of democracy however was rather unconventional. In May 1933 he told an audience at Manchester University that in his view: ‘A man may be as good a democrat as any other and yet reject, in the light of philosophy, history or experience, democratic process to accomplish democratic ends’ [1] Two years later he made a similar remark praising Mussolini for his pursuit of ‘high democratic purpose by means which though not democratic, were the only possible ones.’ [2] Reith’s fascist sympathies did not end there. Like many other British elites of that period he was quite open about his admiration for Hitler, and according to his daughter Marista Leishman, having been effectively ousted from the BBC, he came to believe that his personal calling was for dictatorship.
Tags: democracy fascism bbc britain history
The Smart Set: Paperback Politics – August 5, 2011 – If the zeitgeist has a face, it supposedly belongs to Ayn Rand and her capitalist philosophy of Objectivism. Talk radio hosts adore the author’s demands for limited government; Congressman Paul Ryan insists that his staffers read her overstuffed opus Atlas Shrugged; picket signs at Tea Party rallies suggest that we all “READ AYN RAND.”
[...]
There is another writer whose political and philosophical influence is finally being felt in the public sphere. You may have read one of his books as a child. His name is Robert A. Heinlein, and he wrote science fiction.He was a libertarian enamored of military might, a conservative who championed free love. His heroes are certainly competent. They’re also folks who hack the systems in which they live, not elitists who abandon a corrupt world full of moochers and looters to worship the dollar as an end unto itself. And unlike Rand, most of Heinlein’s work is actually readable.
Tags: robertheinlein libertarianism usa politics aynrand objectivism capitalism individualism books sciencefiction
LENIN’S TOMB: A crisis of ideology and political leadership. – The truth is that riots almost always hurt poor, working class people. There’s no riot that embodies a pure struggle for justice, that is not also partly a self-inflicted wound. There is no riot without looting, without anti-social behaviour, without a mixture of bad motives and bad politics. That still doesn’t mean that the riot doesn’t have a certain political focus; that it doesn’t have consequences for the ability of the ruling class to keep control; that the contest with the police is somehow taking place outside of its usual context of suspicion borne of institutional racism and brutality. The rioters here, whenever they’ve been asked, have made it more than abundantly clear what their motives are – most basically, repaying years of police mistreatment.
Tags: riots london violence rebellion vandalism looting capitalism
LENIN’S TOMB: Reactionary birdsong – While we await a pronunciamento from Cameron (ie not from his butler), there is a seam of political reaction already in the post in response to the riots. The right-wing is going stir crazy over these events. You need only follow the Tweets relating to each new hotspot and the Twitterers who express, far more concisely than the ‘vox pops’ on the news, the instapundits, the right-wing blogs, and those politicians who have so far been dragged out their hangovers by the media, where this is all going. Here’s a brief songsheet.
Tags: riots britain language media journalism punditry
Penny Red: Panic on the streets of London. – Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.
Tags: london riot inequality capitalism recession cuts
Top Gear’s electric car shows pour petrol over the BBC’s standards – So how does it get away with it? It’s simple. It makes the BBC a fortune. Both the 15th and 16th series of Top Gear were among the top five TV programmes sold internationally by BBC Worldwide over the last financial year. Another section of the editorial guidelines tells us that “our audiences should be confident that our decisions are not influenced by outside interests, political or commercial pressures”. But in this case we can’t be. I suggest that it is purely because of commercial pressures that Top Gear is allowed to rig the evidence, fake its trials, pour petrol over the BBC’s standards and put a match to them. The money drives all before it.
Tags: television bbc hypocrisy drivers cars
Liz’s blog » In which I join the 21st century – List of neato places for acquiring ebooks and other Kindle-friendly gubbins.
Tags: books ebooks reading
Kill Screen – Review: Duke Nukem Forever – There is a tendency to think of modern games as acontextual—to ignore their past. We trick ourselves into ignoring those previous iterations, such as the gap between Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid, because frankly they do not matter so much. This is the future. We are beyond those childish days, and their constraints no longer shackle us.
Tags: games criticism reviews
nihilistic_kid: Who’s Pulling Your Strings – Of course, in the creative sphere, it’s actually fine to use someone else’s thoughts. They’re only interesting though, when the creator is aware of the other people in his or her head, and the many things they have left there. Attempting some endeavor—whether writing or overthrowing a country’s government—without first being aware of the puppetmasters and their plans for you, and for history, is doomed to the clichés of repetition and ultimate defeat.
Tags: writing thought cliche imagination creativity preconceptions psychology
Chris Christie slams fearmongering over Sharia law – New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie defended his decision to nominate a Muslim judge to the state Superior Court against conservative critics who warned that the new judge will implement Sharia law. The notoriously blunt-spoken Christie calling their fears “crap” and “crazy.”
Tags: usa islamophobia crazy
Polygamist leader convicted of child sex abuse – Yahoo! News – SAN ANGELO, Texas (AP) — A jury convicted polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs of child sexual assault, in a case stemming from two young followers he took as brides in what his church calls “spiritual marriages.”
Tags: religion mormonism sects polygamy weirdmotherfuckers

Linkfest: July 4th – July 10th

Shaun CG — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 17:22:32 +0000

Del.icio.us links for July 4th through July 10th:

LENIN’S TOMB: Let it bleed – The Star’s offices have been raided, so both the Murdoch and Desmond group – the most vile, degraded end of the capitalist media – are implicated thus far. I doubt it can stop there. And the relationships between police, politicians and press executives – comprising a potent combination of state, capitalist and ideological power – are under scrutiny now. David Cameron looks in a very precarious position over this. In this light, I think any socialist who sees this purely or mainly as a jobs issue has seriously lost perspective. The situation is rich with materials for socialists to operate on, presenting a set of wide open opportunities.
Tags: media journalism tabloids capitalism britain
New Statesman – The momentum of the Murdoch backlash must not slow – For years, the Murdoch press has manipulated a particular type of moral outrage in order to peddle its propaganda of war and hate. Now, with the scandal of Milly Dowler, the murdered schoolgirl whose phone was reportedly hacked by a detective employed by News of the World, that very same moral outrage has been turned back against News International. It’s like an attack-dog finally turning around to savage its abusive master.
Tags: media government oligarchiccapitalism corruption
Artificial Stupids | Orbit Books | Science Fiction, Fantasy, Urban Fantasy – One of the hoariest of science fictional archetypes is the idea of the artificial intelligence — be it the tin man robot servant, or the murderous artificial brain in a box that is HAL 9000. And it’s not hard to see the attraction of AI to the jobbing SF writer. It’s a wonderful tool for exploring ideas about the nature of identity. It’s a great adversary or threat (‘War Games’, ‘The Forbin Project’), it’s a cheap stand-in for alien intelligences — it is the Other of the mind.
The only trouble is, it doesn’t make sense.
Tags: ai artificialintelligence sf sciencefiction research computing
New Left Project | Patriotism – A Dead-End Solution to a Non-Problem – Don’t open the door, and definitely don’t answer the phone: it’s probably someone trying to sell you some ‘new patriotism’. Its salespeople are Labour politicians. Its purpose is to enable Labour to ‘re-connect’ with lost voters.
Tags: labourparty britain politics nationalism
L.A. Noire: The Team Bondi Emails Article | Eurogamer.net – At the story heart’s were eleven testimonials – delivered by former Team Bondi employees interviewed under the condition of anonymity – which detailed the oppressive work conditions that hundreds of staff endured throughout those seven years. Among their complaints were an “ominous crunch” period of development which continually shifted year to year; a studio-wide expectation that staff would work overtime and weekends; a praise-free working environment; and a boss named Brendan McNamara, who one of the sources called “the angriest person I’ve ever met”.
Tags: gamesindustry crunchtime management
Cheryl’s Mewsings » Anthologies: Some Data – On Saturday I mentioned that I had been sent some data about gender splits in anthologies. I have since been taking a close look at it and want to present some of the data.
Tags: sf fiction books anthologies gender
Turning The Page « Electron Dance – We’re actually skirting around a more fundamental issue, the real elephant in the room. The loss of the printed manual is a signal from the future. It is an omen not of the death of print, but the death of product. We all see the writing on the Facebook wall.
Tags: gamesindustry production digitaldistribution
Smart Casual? Article – Eurogamer – His games have been played by in excess of 200 million people, but he is neither famous nor revered. Such are the new economies of scale in the casual gaming boom that a Dutch designer in his early twenties can entertain an audience twice the size of that enjoyed by the best-selling video game of all time, and remain almost entirely anonymous.
Tags: casualgaming gamesindustry socialnetworks
LENIN’S TOMB: Predator – I consider this story sinister down to the last detail. Not just the hacking of Milly Dowler’s voicemails; not just listening in to every word spoken by a distressed relative; not just deleting messages when the inbox was full, to make space for more messages; but actually profiting from the brief moment of false hope when people thought that Milly Dowler must have deleted the messages herself and thus be alive, by sending hacks round to conduct an exclusive interview with the unaware family about their hopes. In a depraved way, they circled around the vulnerable, knowingly, cynically awaiting a moment of weakness, brazenly bleeding them dry when the opportunity presented itself, creating some of the torment that they then exploited.
Tags: tabloids media capitalism
Chasing the Orgy: Good Reviews or Good Friends? « Ruthless Culture – One of the reasons why reviews are always in crisis is because they are born of an attempt to free intellectual culture from the need for geographical proximity. The book review was born not of the retreat of patronage as a means of funding artistic lifestyles but of the tragic fact that many people wanted to sit in the same coffee shop as Dr. Johnson than was entirely practical.
Tags: reviews criticism writing academia
I live sweat… – “Critical self-awareness should cause people to realise their actions restrict others…” – Amy Greer casts a sociological eye over the pit – I don’t wish to use something as reductivist as the female/male dichotomy card to explain what I think is happening when people, mostly males, mosh. Rather than a basic gendered distinction, I would rather argue that a complex interplay of social norms, performance, ritual and also cultural specificities intersect in an interesting way that is both generalisable to many experiences of popular music and culture and specific to my specific experiences of specific types of hardcore. I feel anxious writing this; too often the words of individuals are taken as representative opinions of entire groups. It is not my intent to represent any broad group, any ‘gender’ or experience, I am merely articulating my own opinions, as based on personal experience.
Tags: moshing hardcore punk sociology
There’s more to the Facebook generation than the odd poke – If the male leader of an Islamic charity were to advise the government on how girls should dress and consume popular culture, there would be uproar. Instead, the Prime Minister congratulates Bailey in an obsequious letter for voicing “an issue that concerns so many parents”. It is reassuring to know that, in this decadent modern world, there are still powerful, middle-aged men on hand to manage and censor the sexuality of young women.
Tags: sexism sexuality youth teenagers britain

Linkfest: May 30th – June 5th

Shaun CG — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 16:03:13 +0000

Del.icio.us links for May 30th through June 5th:

Bissell, Braid, and the Use of Words | Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling – This is a key passage in a much lengthier discussion that left me with increased respect for Braid and for the other things its creator was trying to say. Blow’s ideas, elicited and then elaborated by Bissell, made more sense to me than Blow in his own words.
And all at once there crystallized for me what I find problematic about Braid.
Tags: games writing indiegames art
Alice Launch Trailer Is Messed Up, Amazing | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – They are not wrong.
Tags: games trailer video
New Statesman – Human cost of welfare reform – There used to be a liberal consensus that it was the government’s responsibility to provide employment and ensure that those unable to work were entitled to a minimum standard of living. As the Welfare Reform Bill oozes unchallenged through the Commons, the real scandal is not that the government is lying through its teeth in order to justify its evisceration of the welfare state. The scandal is that no one in Westminster is prepared to make a moral case for welfare provision as the honest heart of social democracy.
Tags: employment work britain cuts coalition
LENIN’S TOMB: Class and common sense – The ‘Chavs’ phenomenon condenses many of the themes of this savage creed. It charges poor people with getting ideas above their station, with being feckless and irresponsible with money, tasteless, stupid, drunk, thuggish, and barbaric. In the guise of lewd satire, celeb-bashing and tart social commentary, it gives us a hit of class hatred. It references, and caricatures, the outward signs of social problems such as poverty, alcoholism, bad education and so on, but does so in the manner of a taxonomising anthropologist or zoologist, naturalising these very signs as qualities of a particular social sub-species: here a ‘pramface’, there a ‘Croydon facelift’, and mark the Burberry and inauthentic branded wear. The ‘chav’ is a folk devil, the quasi-satirical subject of the last decade’s repeated moral panics about the ‘underclass’: nightmare neighbours, feral youths, ASBO kids, and so on.
Tags: chavs classconsciousness workingclass underclass bigotry neoliberalism britain
Punknews.org | David Combs (Spoonboy, Max Levine Ensemble) talks sexism in the punk scene – “In a punk context, I can say with certainty that the scenes I’ve visited that were the most gender inclusive have always been the most exciting and thriving music communities. There’s nothing to be gained for men in maintaining the boy’s club.” Excellent essay on sexism in punk. The comments even show some signs of brane which is pretty unusual for PunkNews.
Tags: sexism punk music scenes
The Keepers Of All Games Article – - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net – The National Archives, Kew: home to records, documents and other ephemera of cultural importance. It may be a short distance from the grime and bustle of Westminster, where Britain’s future is cut and shaped daily, but to enter its leafy grounds is to press pause on that work. Instead, it offers a chance to reflect upon and study the notable detritus of our past, a national Wikipedia made of bricks and mortar, where history is held and filed in neat, curated rows.
It’s here that Iain Simons and James Newman, co-founders of the National Videogame Archive project, have called a meeting to discuss their efforts to preserve the digital heritage of the interactive entertainment industry. It’s a poignant choice of venue. For all the great many things preserved at The National Archives, not one is a video game.
Tags: gaming history documentingthepast
Egypt: Gene Sharp Taught Us How To Revolt! · Global Voices – “Last February, Sheryl Stolberg of The New York Times wrote an article about the political science professor, Gene Sharp, whose ideas were credited by her as being an inspiration for the Egyptian revolution, as well as many other uprisings in the region.” Western media claiming credit for the Egyptian revolution? Never!
Tags: media revolution revolutionarytheory funny mockery
Twitter won’t bring down Ahmadinejad – Mike Madden – Salon.com – The crackdown by Iranian authorities on traditional journalism means Twitter and Facebook updates — at least the ones by people who are actually there — are providing a real service; the more widely the message is spread, the more the world can be outraged by the government’s oppressive reaction to the protests. Still, the Internet isn’t causing a revolution — it’s documenting it. That’s plenty to be proud of, without needing to exaggerate things in the name of solidarity. So keep the Tweets coming. Just don’t forget that the real action — and the real risk — isn’t happening anywhere near a computer.
Tags: socialmedia socialnetworks revolution activism iran democracy protest
5 Reasons Twitter Isn’t Actually Overthrowing Governments | Cracked.com – “During the recent spate of revolutions in the Middle East you couldn’t turn on the news without hearing a comment about how important Twitter or Facebook was to the protesters. By the time a former national security advisor suggested nominating Twitter for the Nobel Peace Prize, you probably got the impression that social networking was saving the world. Sadly, the reality is that Twitter was about as important to the revolution as Bill Paxton was to the marines in Aliens. Why?” This whole ‘social media as a revolutionary tool’ thing has always rung false to me, so good to see more writers taking the myth apart…
Tags: socialnetworks revolution protest activism socialmedia twitter facebook
LENIN’S TOMB: Not saving the Liberals – Dan Hind makes some astute observations here, on the need to break the coalition before the next election. He argues for a strategy designed to split the Liberals, and in so doing save them from historical oblivion. A few observations, then.
Tags: liberaldemocrats neoliberalism economics britain politics strategy radicalism
Poll: everything more popular than Daily Mail | Liberal Conspiracy – When asked whether they regarded various things as “positive or negative aspects of Britain today”, the Daily Mail came out bottom, viewed less positively than “membership of the European Union”, “the TUC”, “ethnic and religious diversity”, “civil partnerships for gay couples” and “the BBC”. The NHS was viewed most positively, then the BBC, then the Royal Family.
Tags: polls statistics britain
I live sweat… – “…I needed an alternative to mainstream society – the space to be who i want to be.” Lou Hanman of Caves on strict gender norms and their impact on punk and hardcore. – It was really great to be asked by Andy to contribute to his series on sexism in punk. When he said he’d been trying to think of someone from a band in the UK punk scene, to write something from a UK point of view, it sounded like he couldn’t think of many people.
This makes me feel sad and reminded me of a question I recently answered for a zine – “What it’s like for a woman in punk – do I feel outnumbered?”
Tags: caves bristol punk sexism feminism
‘Call of Duty’ Targets a Monthly Fee – WSJ.com – “Consumers are used to paying $60 each for videogames that run on consoles like the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Now the publisher behind the industry’s biggest videogame franchise— “Call of Duty”—is about to find out whether it can get them to pay a monthly bill, too.” So, Activision are actually going for this. I am kind of hoping for egg on their faces.
Tags: videogames callofduty activision exploitation puregreed
ATLAS HOODS: BOTSWANA’S COWBOY METALHEADS – Viceland Today – Love it or hate it, when most people think of metal, they think of white dudes. Even if metal was born from the blues and there are growing scenes in places like Indonesia and Peru, metal’s founding fathers–Priest, Sabbath, Maiden–and most of those who’ve come after have been unmistakably Caucasian. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find out about a small but passionate collection of guys who dressed like doomsday cowboys and listened to Motorhead in the predominantly black, central African country of Botswana.
Tags: metal africa scenes botswana
Kill Screen – 5-10-15-20: Bryan Lee O’Malley – As you may know, we’ve partnered up with Pitchfork to do a variety of things, big and small. One of those is borrow! The 5-10-15-20 format is something they dreamed up more than two years ago to ask musicians about music that moved them at five-year intervals. We’re doing the same for videogame people. First up—Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley, who’s been blessed with the trifecta of comic, film, and game for his cast of pugilistic outcasts.
Tags: bryanleeomalley scottpilgrim videogames biography