#nathan grayson

(article by Nathan Grayson)

“the channel had a habit of running fake controller giveaways that redirected viewers to a [army] recruitment page.”

“America’s armed forces are also an official sponsor of Twitch’s esports brand and channel, Twitch Rivals. This means, among other things, that the Army’s logo appears on the side of esports broadcasts centered around big-name games like League of Legends, Valorant, and even chess, which feature multiple popular personalities.”

...and they reduced his suspension to 6 months as well as the announcers who for some reason also got suspended. It’s not perfect but a step in the right direction.

https://kotaku.com/blizzard-reduces-suspension-of-hearthstone-player-who-m-1838984893

Nathan Grayson has a good recap for Kotaku of a nasty argument in the Guild Wars 2 community that ended with two ArenaNet employees fired. You can read the article for details about that incident, but one of the fired developers said something that applies to nerd culture at large:

[Jessica Price] said that the Guild Wars 2 community was mostly supportive. The problem, in her eyes, is that studios tend to structure themselves around the small percentage that isn’t.

“I want to preface this by saying that 9 out of 10 fans are fine, and that I’ve had a lot of genuinely beautiful interactions with individual fans in which the affection I expressed is genuine,” Price said. “But 10% of your fandom being toxic is still a really high percentage.”

Corporations are money-making entities and often do not want to tell some subset of racist or sexist gamers they are not welcome. There are many reasons for that, but those reasons don't solve the underlying problem. You get the community you tolerate, and this is the cost of tolerating toxic players. Shame on ArenaNet.

Nathan Grayson, reporting for Kotaku:

Video game protagonists don’t wear clothes the way you and I do. When you boot up Uncharted 4 and see Nathan Drake clad in his traditional half-tucked henley, you’re not looking at a nude character model with a separate “shirt” object draped over it. His clothes are grafted on, more like parts of his body. To truly show them coming on or off, without faking it, the developers would have to be simulating both the clothes and the Drake separately, which is not yet a solved problem. […]

The problem, [developer Tom] Francis told Kotaku in an email, is multifaceted. “Physics-wise, it’s hard to simulate floppy things that wrap smoothly around complex shapes, hand-animating is not time-efficient, and ultimately it just doesn’t matter enough,” he said. “Undressing is never a big enough part of a AAA game to be worth the dev time it’d take to solve well.”

Clothes and natural-looking drinking seem to be two mountains game animators will never cross.

Nathan Grayson, reporting for Kotaku:

One week ago, two Guild Wars 2 narrative designers, Jessica Price and Peter Fries, were fired after Price called out a player of the game on Twitter, prompting widespread backlash. Since then, mobs have tried to employ similar tactics against more women. […]

Another developer, who chose to remain anonymous, faced an especially coordinated attack, albeit an incompetently-handled one: The company this developer freelances for, she told Kotaku in a DM, received a “a three-digit number’s” worth of letters complaining that it was morally wrong to hire “a transgender,” that the quality of the studio’s games had gone down since she and another woman were hired, and that her Twitter account set “a bad example for the letter-writer’s children, who supposedly play this game.”

For a brief period of time, the developer said, her CEO was ready to tell her boss to fire her. Then, another employee realized something was amiss with the letters. “Fifty or so of them glitched out with a lot of variables exposed, including %FEMALENAME,” said the developer. This made it clear that the letters were simply form letters with blank spaces for the name of any woman that the mob wanted to attack.

In case it was not abundantly clear the ArenaNet firing, was a disaster, this story should unnerve any right-thinking person.

Part of me wants to condem this anonymous CEO, but fooling third parties who should know better is the whole GamerGate playbook.

The targeting of specific employees—typically women, people of color, and other marginalized groups—by specifically coding their language in ways that might rope in someone who doesn’t understand what’s happening. This is GamerGate 101.

Oh boy its time to pretend gamergaters understand or care about journalism rather than just being the most pathetic reactionaries than HP Lovecraft but lacking any talent.  I sure do love bad faith arguments. 

And you know it is bullshit because what these people scream out as incoherently as they can is “ZOE QUINN SLEPT WITH A JOURNALIST FOR A GOOD REVIEW CORRUPTION IS REAL AND I’M NOT BITTER ABOUT HIGH SCHOOL”

while what was written was....not a review..

In the article covering a failed Indie Game Jam that never happened, he mentions depression quest twice

“ According to a report on Indie Statik (and corroborating testimonials from Depression Quest creator Zoe Quinn, SoundSelf maestro Robin Arnott, and traveling indie of all the hats Adriel Wallick), GAME_JAM was originally conceived as an attempt to give wider audiences an inside look at what a game jam - that is, a rapid-fire game creation process, usually done over the course of a few days as a creative exercise - is actually like.”

“ Tempers flared as it became apparent that the show wasn't quite what people were expecting, and Pepsi's on-site consultant decided to get involved - but not as a calming influence or a mediator. YouTube personality JonTron and Depression Quest creator Zoe Quinn butted heads during the Let's Play challenge, and they decided to resolve their differences with a discussion off-set. Cameras, however, quickly followed.”

oh wow, he acknowledged the Zoe Quinn made Depression quest, such corruption, much marketing. 

Like this is your smoking gun?     He mentioned that she created the game?  I mean honestly he is nicer to Robin Arnott much more calling him a “maestro” that is far more positive coverage than Quinn gets.  

Yeah see, if this was an actual review, where Nathan Greyson is like 

“OMG you guys should check out this great game depression quest, it is so fantastic, best written game ever made, super impressive, totally revolutionary and if you don’t go and get it now, then you are missing out my man.  10/10″

You know...like the way JonTron has done  for other games regularly?  The guy who was outed as an White Nationalist (oh of course, you lot don’t care about that bit).  

So if Nathan Grayson had acted like JonTron, then maybe you might have had a point but erm...that didn’t happen.  

For those who care,  Nathan Greyson says he wasn’t close to Quinn when he wrote the article, but of course we only trust men’s word if they are associated with the Alt Right apparently Link here

Speaking of JonTron, it is not coincidence that Gamergate doesn’t seem to care about youtubers literally being paid by major game publishers to give positive lets plays of their game, but they have been obsessed for a fucking half decade about a guy who acknowledge Depression Quest existed in an article one time, of all the horrible people in gaming (agian JonTron) of all the major problems in Games Journalism, of all the extremely open issues of blatant corruption, this is the one you fixate on, a guy mentioning that she made a game in a game which she released for Free?  Its not like anybody is going to lose money on Depression Quest. 

Its almost like...There had been a creepy sexist hate mob going after Zoie Quinn for almost two years before Gamergate even happened and her ex boyfriend deliberately created a story in order to feed her more to those trolls as part of a larger hate group against women and minorities in gaming.