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innuendostudios · 3 years

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I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

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lightns881 · 3 years

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It sounds like you read a lot of dnf stories, do you know what makes a story popular? How do you write a good story that will get lots of kudos?

Ah, the art of blowing up. Ngl this is a loaded question so I'm going to need a read more extension for this.

Look, anon, there's never one strict formula. Blowing up isn't an assured deal, but it is an art form imo.

I could go on and on about what goes into writing a good story, but I'm sure you could find some great advice from experts and writing books. I recommend reading the Jerry Jenkins website blog post called The 12 Best Books on Writing I've Ever Read. There's some amazing reccs on writing there that I've added to my Amazon book list. I've barely gotten through a few and it's completely blown me away! I'm a lot more self-aware of it as I write too, which has really helped me with the development of Aether's Legacy.

Anyway, what I want to focus on is your second question: how do you make your story popular?

I can't say I'm an expert in this subject, but from my Fandom and fanfiction knowledge as well as my hours of pondering how people and works and trends blow up, I've pinpointed one common factor.

Word of mouth.

Word of mouth is by far the biggest and strongest marketing scheme. Fandom is a collaborative effort, and what the hive mind decides is what blows up.

Take Heat Waves as an example. The story literally blew up due to word of mouth. Of course, it's a wonderful story, but there's plenty of other works on par with it in this Fandom, why is it that Heat Waves itself blew up? Twitter.

One popular fan account tweeted how much they loved it on a pretty November afternoon. A few other popular accounts took notice and decided to give it a try. Said accounts were fascinated by the quality of the work, whether because they hadn't read fanfiction, they'd only been familiar with Wattpad works, they weren't experience with Fandom writing, etc. Said accounts acted as driving forces in kickstarting its popularity.

Add in hundreds of users unfamiliar with dnf works who were suddenly curious about this very good story and you push it into trending. Friend tells a friend who tells a friend who tells another friend who tweets about it to someone who tells their friend who decides it could be funny to donate with a reference about it which is then watched by thousands of people who are curious about this seemingly random quote and decide to investigate which brings another wave of hundreds of people who repeat the process. Over and over until it gets to the CCs and they start making references to it which only adds to the visibility. Boom. You have the first story to explode into the number #2 most kudoued story in AO3 in barely a few months.

The power of word of mouth. It's the main factor of why a lot of things blow up.

If you don't believe me, then take it from Dream himself. And I quote: (in reference to compilation videos, tik toks of his content, etc.) "It is huge promotion... The only reason I have almost a million twitch followers, I hardly advertise it, but guess what all these compilations advertise it for me... I want [my content] to be used in every which way possible because guess what? I grow."

He's literally admitting a good chunk of his growth is due to people advertising for him. By creating fan content, retweeting, talking about it on forums, the collective hivemind is literally feeding his popularity through word of mouth.

All of this to say, anon, that if you want a story to blow up, you have to find creative ways to cultivate this power in your favor. A lot of times, it's, as they say, preparation meeting opportunity—luck.

I don't have all the answers for you anon. I probably wouldn't be running this blog if I did, but just consider word of mouth when thinking about popularity. Sure, you need a well-written story too. But if people aren't talking about it, will it really get that many kudos?

Twitter is probably a good place to start if you'd like to figure some stuff out. That's really all I have for you apart from this lengthy explanation on why word of mouth is literally the most powerful marketing scheme.

Just remember the grass isn't always as green as it looks. Just as popularity comes with good things, there's also a lot of bad, so you have to make sure you can handle it before you even consider wanting to rise in popularity. And also, at the end of the day, you should also step back and reexamine why you're writing in the first place. If you're doing it for kudos, that's totally valid. But also remember that it's important to write for yourself too, because you enjoy it. Passion is another huge key factor of good content.

Don't lose yourself, anon. Hope you have a great day and drink lots of water! Wish you lots of luck on your endeavors.

#dnf #dreamnotfound #writing things #fanfiction #AMA #published by accident but it's basically done

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monkey-network · 4 years

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My Issues with Butch Hartman

Call this the sequel to my post on Mr. Enter. But honestly compared to Enter, Butch Hartman has made himself look far worse in so little time. Not only with how he uses his influence, but he basically showed his true colors not long after he left Nickelodeon. With Enter, the worst you can say about him is his opinions on media and his politics. With Hartman, there is a surprisingly lot more under his belt that made the hate towards him .

To preface this, while I’m gonna shit on this dude, I’m not shaming anyone who still likes his past content. With that said, bibbity Boppity boopity. Let’s look at the fucking scoopity.

The Telltale Oaxis

This really takes the cake as the scummiest thing Butch has done. Words and opinions can be one thing, but using your platform to basically trick some people out of their money for a project you abandoned for the most part grinds me gears a lot more. As bad as his marketing strategy was, at least Enter provided effort in his indiegogo project beforehand for god’s sake. Oaxis is one of the most pitiable crowdfunded projects I’ve seen.

It’s nearly two years since Butch got Oaxis funded and what have gotten beyond pure dead silence. Nearly two years and little to no significant updates for Oaxis’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, his Youtube, or the site’s official account. No wait, that last part’s kind of a lie. They had monthly updates on the official site up until September 2019. Could’ve posted this on their social medias but you take what you can get.

The major takeaway from the updates, in all fairness, was that the kickstarter wasn’t enough and they still need to raise more funds for the service. The “capital-building” stage he calls it where he’s looking for more investors in addition to getting actual programs onto the service. That and Oaxis is a big vision for Butch and his wife in spite of not only giving up the monthly updates and basically secluding any mention of Oaxis from any place else. That’s basically it and I legit feel sorry for everyone that couldn’t get their refund back.

This isn’t HBO Max or Disney+ where you just expect them to have something together after their initial announcement because they’re already media conglomerates, this is an independent project. One that people, your fans included Butch, put over 200K thinking you would at least give people something. But beyond a “sizzle reel” that said nothing aside from Oaxis going to be a thing, you have presented jack after two years. I don’t expect the ins and outs of every business meeting with executives, but staying silent about everything except for monthly newsletters that offer very little encouraging progress and hasn’t updated since September of last year is not a good sign. And I’m especially hard on this topic, Butch, because this is the biggest point where it is seriously hard to trust you. It’s not criticizing your ego when after having too many cracks in your story, you really haven’t put your money where your mouth is.

I don’t wanna presume the guy’s given up on it, hoping everybody would forget it after a while, but he’s really put the effort in to make Oaxis feel like a afterthought. I’m not an expert in business, but even I can believe that after his non-apology for not being upfront with his initial intentions, that he’d try to provide updates on the project to not come off as the scam artist people have accused him as. Even with his Youtube channel that I’ll get to later, I don’t think it’s hard consistently posting about your so called vision if you have that much faith in its success. You’ve already gotten thousands of bucks initially with the crowdfund, people deserve more than your pitiful wishful platitudes and I unfortunately can’t believe you’ll have anything after a few years. It’s not that everyone forgot about it, but you mostly took the money and ran. If Butch pops up with something if he sees this somehow, I’ll eat that crow, but I sincerely doubt it after this long. Like at least post something on the Twitter, I get depressed just looking at it; that account is the textbook definition of famine.

The Childhood Reposter

I’ve brought up Butch’s youtube channel a couple times, and it’s when every time I look at it, it’s a little sad. When it comes to major creators, I typically think that after finishing their projects they’d move to newer things. People like Lauren Faust, Mike Judge, CH Greenblatt are all continuing to make new works under differing studios while new creators are getting the spotlight. Butch though? I mean, he has a new cartoon that I swear you’ve never heard about but other than that, the dude looks like he has little to say for himself nowadays beyond the 2 shows he’s famous for, Fairly Odd Parents and Danny Phantom. I would’ve added TUFF Puppy and Bunsen is a Beast but I can see that those two aren’t his major players seeing as how they’re rarely ever mentioned on the channel.

If it’s not some watchmojo level meme video, almost every other video is about either two of those shows in some varied fashion. I get that he “created your childhood” and made credulous bank from Nickelodeon, but it’s like Danny Phantom is all that stands between him and having an audience. That and drawing anime characters in his style which is... y’know, I’ll leave that to you. It’s like he retired and yet goes on about the good old days like a fluctuating ego. He’s still making a cartoon but to him that’s hardly a factor compared to his known successes.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to just be known as the guy who made two of your countless beloved cartoons. Not that that’s all he talks about, but it’s the insistence of his legacy that unfortunately gives me Bojack Horseman vibes. He no doubt has a good thing going but I believe that this isn’t gonna last. Just saying, dude has 850K subscribers and unless it’s a real hook like with the recent Danny Phantom/Jake Long death battle, he’s hardly getting a good fraction of views anymore. There’s only so many times you can milk Danny Phantom as your masterpiece before everyone moves on.

The Holy Boast

I wanna make this short because I’m not a huge talker of religion, but I stand to say that you should NOT, under any circumstance, believe BPD, PTSD, autism, fucking heart & kidney failure can be “cured” or “healed” through sermons of prayer. This here? This is genuinely something else.

https://www.healingjourneys.today/

For clarity, this was a gospel conference hosted by Butch and his wife and yes, they openly proclaim that BPD, austism, and heart disease can be cured through prayer of holy worship.

Now, I’m gonna give a full disclosure right here because this most certainly biases my point here, like I’m gonna own this. But my grandpa was a religious man that suffer from health problems. He notably prayed to carry on, yes, but at the same time he sought medical help. Even he told me that prayers wasn’t gonna keep the pacemaker going, he went to the doctors and actually did more than read the bible to improve himself. He unfortunately passed, but he was in his 70s and I honestly couldn’t believe, as hard as I try, that he was gonna live forever. My grandpa would’ve no doubt died far earlier if he followed this conference’s logic.

My point is that this is personally unsettling. I seriously cannot believe this is how autism and religion works and it blows my mind that him and his wife thought this conference was a suitable idea. I’m not bashing them as christians, but thinking mental disorders and bodily diseases can be done away with motivational seminars because that’s basically what they are is a legit slap to the face. And the seedling idea that they’ve done this before blows my mind.

The Financial Flaker

This is very recent and everything is generally explained in the 12 minute video but long story short: Butch hired an artist and never paid them for their work. The artist in question, Kuro, describes what happened between him and Butch in this video and provides receipts. Can’t really add anything to this myself beyond this just builds to the idea that Butch cannot be trusted as a professional business maker. I believe he still has people working for him but from this video, it tells me that Hartman will gladly use those lower than him in favorable pursuits and will gladly throw ignorance when he wants to because his cartoon veteran status presents that shield from thinking he can do no wrong, which can mean throttling his hires. Let’s end this.

youtube

The Conclusion

When I get down to it, Butch is almost a Machiavellian character in a way. It’s amazing how much the trust people have had with Hartman have evaporated in less than a couple years. It’s amazing how much his ego has truly shown after he stopped being a namestay in Nickelodeon. Haven’t even mentioned the times he arrogantly deflected criticism because he was a namestay at Nick and how a couple who’ve worked with are well aware of his ego. I can’t help but believe that even after everything, he claims ignorance to his fall from grace and keeps going. Even when more and more are knowing his true self, he’s mostly just doing what he’s been doing for the past few years.

It’s respectable in a way, but shows that the world will move on without him. Again, if you like Danny Phantom and Fairly OddParents, I won’t judge you for it nor say you should be ashamed. This isn’t about cancelling Butch, or get him to stop spreading whatever wacky things he believes in. It’s my personal take of how this man whom I once respected because of what he made before has lost every bit of that from me. It really feels like he grew up with that “I Created Your Childhood” mentality being a 4 time showrunner for almost a couple decades. And when he finally left Nickelodeon, I guess the chance to be that stand out self-made success got to his head and he finally showed his true colors. I now find it hard to believe Butch cares about the little guy that were his fans as much as he rides off his success and others who tolerate him. As such, like JK Rowling, more are seeing this side of him and leaving him behind. Meanwhile Butch is gonna chug on until he just loses steam. It’s kinda like Icarus where the guy will make every effort to fly to the sun. But sooner or later, he’s gonna fall, and in the end I doubt anyone’s gonna care to see it. I know he won’t.

#butch hartman #nickelodeon #animation #long post #sorry for the rant n bant

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publishinggoblin · 4 years

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How to Run a Kickstarter pt 4

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

Yesterday I covered your campaign basics. Now we look at pledge rewards and story.

Rewards: The rewards are the pledge tiers people back at. These determine everything to do with how your campaign functions financially.

What are you making? First, determine what you are making. This should have been decided pretty early on. Is it a book? Dice? Cards? Miniatures? A board game? Okay, take a look back at the manufacturing costs. How much were those? You can’t afford to only charge people for the at-cost cost, you need to make some money from this project to cover fees and to hopefully have some left over at the end to cover any invisible costs you didn’t prepare for.

Price it: So the most common pledge tier on Kickstarter is $25. It’s like a nice gold standard. Can you afford to price your item at $25? Keep in mind shipping comes AFTER the base pledge, so you don’t have to fold the shipping costs into it. If you can, great! If you can, but only if you make 100 or more of your item, factor that into your funding goal. For example, if your item manufacturing costs get less with more purchased (which is usually the case) then pick a bulk tier where you are able to sell your items at $25 a piece, be honest with yourself about the quantity (can you sell that many?) and then set the campaign funding goal at how many you need to sell. If you can’t do $25, be mindful of how high you do set it-- and if your item is way less than $25 to make, do not sell it at $25. You must price it according to how much sense it makes.

Higher End Pledge Tiers: Having just one pledge tier is fine, but it makes you unable to earn more. Consider other incentives. For the tarot decks, we offered readings at a higher pledge tier-- or for most, you can offer signature pledge tiers. Since that takes just a moment for you to sign, it’s essentially earning more money for free. Making soft cover books? Offer a fancy signed hard cover, feel free to inflate the price for its uniqueness. No one is forced to buy it, the lower, base pledge tier still exists, but people who like fancy things will.

Keep it Simple: When I ran the Normal Tarot, we had so many pledge tiers because it was part of a campaign called “Break Kickstarter” where we ran the Kickstarter strangely. At the end, when I did a backer info export, it was a mess from all the different tiers. Try not to do too many unless you really have that many options.

Add ons: Add ons aren’t something really supported by Kickstarter, but you can do them anyways. IF you have a separate item that people can buy, like an older book, or a mat, dice, etc-- you can put it in the campaign story with a cost clearly associated with it. People can bump up their pledge by that much money and get the add on. Because it’s not officially part of Kickstarter, this DOES make it harder to track, and requires you to stay on top of it as people up their pledges. Ask them to message you, or consider using Backerkit or other after-the-campaign services which will do a better job keeping track. I’ve never used them because they take a cut and I can do the work, but they would be a huge help to people with lots of backers or who haven’t done it before.

Story: The story is the section of your campaign with all the text and images, and beyond your pledge tiers and cover image/video, is where you put all the campaign info.

Keep it Simple: Your backers only need to know a few things beyond the campaign’s product and backer tiers: Who are you? What is this project for? Why do you need the money? What makes your product unique/worth backing? These don’t need 100 paragraph answers, and they especially don’t need your life story unless it’s part of your product/marketing strategy. (i.e. these are my grandma’s recipes, let me tell you about her, etc)

Explain What Your Project Is: You have to be clear what the thing you are making is. Explain what it does, how to use it, and include pictures wherever you can.

Backer Tiers and Add Ons: If your project has multiple backer tiers that might be confusing to people who don’t read closely, it can be good to include backer tier explanations in your campaign with clear pictures of what is included. Also as noted above, add ons will be mentioned here, since they have nowhere else to go. Include a clear picture and price, and tell them clearly in text to upgrade their pledge with the cash listed there and to message you what they backed-- or follow up at the very end with a backer survey.

Check for the next post on the Final steps before you can launch tomorrow!

#how to run a kickstarter #kickstarter #how to #advice

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loquaciousquark · 5 years

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Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E58 (Apr. 16, 2019)

Gooooood evening, everyone! @eponymous-rose may have social obligations she was actually looking forward to tonight, but I had a birthday party I was desperately trying to get out of, and so I am here, and Henry is also here, looking immensely put-upon at this human flopped on his pillow.

Tonight’s guests: Liam O’Brien & Taliesin Jaffe. Liam’s shirt is remarkably Tal-ish tonight. Rep it, boys.

Tonight’s announcements: New campaign journals available at therooktheraven.com/criticalrole. They’ll be at Denver Pop Culture Con next week MONTH! sorry!--Ashley will be there too! It’ll be the first time everyone’s been at a con together...possibly ever! Liam: “Four years in the making.” Everyone’s sick & Brian took Nyquil thirty minutes ago. This should be an interesting evening. Three days left in the Kickstarter campaign! Earlier today, they cracked $10 million, which means Travis’ll be filming himself traipsing through a haunted house. Good heavens. This Thursday, about half an hour after CR ends, Joel Hodgson from MST3K will be coming on the show to hang out with the guys & celebrate.

And now...Episode 58: Wood & Steel

CR Stats: briefly derailed by accusations that Brian’s hair looks like a shark fin. Caleb’s spent 1475 gold on paper and ink so far. Liam: “God, grad school, man.” Caduceus has used Eyes of the Grave 13 times. “It’s a little panic spell, really. Every now and then it helps. It’s nice to be able to walk into a room and go, ‘hey, is there anyone undead in here?’“ This episode was Yasha’s first natural one stealth check. “Not Ashley’s, though.” “No.”

Tal’s shoulder is still peeling from Ashley’s roast of Sam pre-show last episode. Neither Liam nor Tal think Sam was really prepared for it, and now Sam’s working overtime to make up for it. The president we deserve, honestly.

Re: Cad’s check on Fjord: “Clay loves these people. On the other hand, he also has a sense about what an addict is. I love you, I trust you, and I’m gonna go through your wallet real quick.” He was trying to validate his own trust in Fjord just in case he needed to stop him doing anything dumb later.

Taliesin is REALLY excited (one might say gleeful) about making Travis’s haunted house experience as terrible as possible. Brian suggests tasers in case Travis starts barreling through walls in panic.

Caleb is feeling as if he’s blown a bit of his cover lately; the filthy disguise that he’s maintained for so long is pointless now. He’s expecting someone to come “knocking at the door soonish.”

The whole idea of consecution really, really messed Caduceus up. “Clay doesn’t know what to think. This is definitely a...bedouin monk having someone try to explain the flying spaghetti monster to him. It feel offensive and yet harmless...something’s rubbing him the wrong way and he doesn’t know what it is yet. He’s not really about the souls--that’s not what his order is about. His order is about flesh & what happens to the remains; the souls are the souls’ business--that’s what the Raven Queen is for. He’s not sure if it’s his own prejudices.”

Caleb has to think of Nott as a totally different person now. He doesn’t know what she wants, if she wants to run off with her husband now. His feelings for her haven’t changed. He thinks they were codependent for a long time, but now he’s faced with the reality that she doesn’t need him nearly as much as he needs her anymore. He hasn’t even had a chance to talk to her lately “because he’s not even sure if the script is the same.”

Marisha bombs the set with a laser pointer nerf gun. I am so happy I’m not kidding.

They discuss who did the laser pointer addition (Christina) and attempt to shoot off Brian’s hand. It misses & hits a plush. Brian: “You almost hurt Molly. Oh, wait.”

Clay hasn’t quite figured out the interpersonal relationships of the group yet. He’s kinda noticed the Caleb/Nott relationship (although it doesn’t make much sense to him), but he has figured out he and Yasha have the most in common. He first thought he’d get along most with Jester because they were both clerics, but now knows they’re completely different people who heal for completely different reasons (one out of enjoyment of healing, one forced). He really wants to keep Fjord & Caleb on the straight & narrow, and he sees his relationship with Yasha as more straightforward “I’ll help you, you help me.” Brian’s interested in hearing what Cad thinks Caleb’s right path should be. Me too!

Tal talks about how when they’re traveling at cons, he sits & thinks about other people’s characters and how he/Clay relates to them.

GIF of the Week! Big Shaft. What more needs be said, really. The winner gets a Cobalt Soul journal which Brian says is available on shop.critrole.com as well as the UK store which is A STRAIGHT UP LIE, BRIAN, THEY ARE 100% SOLD OUT, I LOOKED EARLIER TODAY, WHY DO YOU TAUNT ME WITH THESE LIES. >:((((((

Caleb didn’t ask Waccoh about dunamancy because it wasn’t the right time. Cad is very interested in the staff. Liam likes the Ring of Evasion.

What did Tal think of Fjord’s very Percy-esque intimidation in the last episode? “Take it! Run! Murder them all!” Percy loves the dodeca & would have loved to play with it. Both Liam and Tal marvel at how easily threat came to Travis.

In terms of the broken sword, Cad’s hoping for a lemonade-out-of-lemons situation. Brian & Liam switch seats so Liam can pet Henry. Understandable, really. He feels like it’s the world communicating to him that it is meaningful. “He always moves forward to something that feels meaningful. His job was to speak to people about their lost loved ones. He ran a funeral home. So while he doesn’t entirely understand how people relate to one another, he understands how people function, and he’s fascinated by that.” Tal constantly has to weight if his decisions are based on gameplay or something about Cad’s observations. He’s very acutely aware of the difference between his intelligence and wisdom scores.

Liam dabs & regrets it. Then he talks about how that’s why Cad makes Caleb nervous. It’s like talking to a human lie detector. Tal keeps talking a bit about how Cad sometimes spooks Caleb, but I’m 100% distracted by Henry jumping up & sitting between Brian & Tal. Poor Liam.

Everyone worries a bit about Ashley’s low AC, except Liam, who worries sarcastically. Ya jerk.

Liam answers an interesting question about Caleb’s selfishness--is his generosity this last episode a show to prove to the group that he’s a team player or is he just genuinely caring more about the entire group? Porque no los dos--he’s trying to keep them alive and working well together, and now he has different reasons to do what he’s doing. “Everything’s changed for him” over the last few episodes.

Everyone discusses how motivations change slowly over time and how it’s not a smooth journey--sometimes they’re selfish one day and selfless the next, and sometimes the “shitty purpose on the macro scale” still has “good happening on the micro scale.” It’s not a straight road and people can backslide. Taliesin: “I love something that’s complicated.” Liam talks about how Percy freed Whitestone and did some very dark things on the way there. Dani: “It’s all part of being one person with lots of facets.”

Fanart of the Week! I really hope it’s that GoT video! Ahh, it’s @morphenominal12′s portrait of Yasha. Okay okay okay, this is pretty good. Respect. At least Liam doesn’t taunt me with a journal I can’t buy. Why do I keep thinking it’ll stop saying “Sold Out” if I keep refreshing the page?

A question points out that all three of Taliesin’s characters come from large families (even if those families are dead or adopted). Tal says he doesn’t know much about being an only child & is from a large family himself. It’s part of starting from what you know, and he likes having a few pre-built relationships that he or the DM can build on later. He says maybe being an only child will be his next challenge.

Very, very belatedly, the crew adds a graphic of dollar signs falling from the top of the screen. They do it three times before everyone realizes it’s because Tal said he’d do only-child plots for money. “And on this show, we spend five minutes deconstructing a bad joke from the tricaster.”

Cad doesn’t know how he feels about consecution. They’re not undead...but what are they? It’s making him a little queasy but he can’t put his finger on it. He’s spent a lot of time thinking about how a nature cleric relates to larger heroic destiny, and about his need to see the kiln.

They tuck in a sleepy Henry. I would die for this dog.

Liam signs us off with all of Brian’s catchphrases. What a nerd.

And we’re out! Is it Thursday yet?

#critical role #critical role spoilers #talks machina #talks machina spoilers #i want that darn journal #how rude #long post for ts

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scumgristle · 4 years

Link

You’ve been vocal about your hate for My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way, what is it about the guy that gets under your skin, because Boneyard Press published his first book “On Raven’s Wings”?

HDF:Short answer? Gerard Way is a liar and a fake who devalued Boneyard Press products and implied I was a liar by his deceits and instead of owning up to his deceptions he kept on lying and set his fans loose on me for an online hate campaign that hurt my wife’s recovery from Chemo and Radiation therapy to combat her ovarian and cervical cancer.

In order to inflate orders on his upcoming comic book, “The Umbrella Academy”, Dark Horse, editor Scott Allie & Gerard Way made a major press push stating the falsehood that “The Umbrella Academy” was Gerard’s first published work in comics, which they knew was a lie.

Gerard’s first published work was done over a decade earlier when Boneyard Press published his series, “On Raven’s Wings”. Issue #1 was published in April 1994, written by Gary Way, drawn by Jose Santos with inks by Dana Greene and a fully painted cover by Rob Nemeth. Issue #2 was published in September 1994 with Gary writing, Jose & Dana on the art, another great painted cover by Rob Nemeth. When Gary couldn’t hold his art team together, we canceled the series, but that didn’t stop me from schleppin’ this kids books to convention after convention telling everyone what a great new writer this kid was and that yeah, he’s got the goods. I did this for YEARS.

Dark Horse and its editorial staff knew all about this but decided to pump the numbers up with the lie about ‘first published work’. They were even lying about it when directly asked by some members of Gerard’s fan club. They claimed that Garry Way was not Gerard Way. According to Dark Horse, they were two different people.

Why did they do that? Because any comic geek worth his salt can tell you, an artist’s first published work is generally the most valuable, knowing this, fans will invest in a new book so they can have that “First published work” tag. Dark Horse & Gerard lied about it all to inflate their sales on the book.

They kept right on lying even to Rolling Stone. Dark Horse’s Scott Allie said, “Hart published Gerard’s first comics when Gerard was fifteen. I don’t think we’ve ever said Umbrella Academy is the first comic Gerard did.” Funny thing was, the very day this was quoted in Rolling Stone the Diamond Preview catalogue came out with a full page add proclaiming that The Umbrella Academy is Gerard Way’s first published work. Full page ad. Big ass bulletin points. Dark Horse and Scott were full of shit and they knew it but they threw me under the bus in the press anyway.

Ripping off your fans like that, gaming store owners, that’s some pretty low shit to pull, but it was going to get a lot lower when he sicked his fans on me & I was unable to keep my wife from reading the hate mail, which just wrecked her. I mean, she was already emaciated from the Chemo & the Radiation… Watching her crying, reading that shit he sent my way because he wasn’t man enough to own up to his own actions…

Yeah….

This shit is personal.

You ready for the background on why this is such a burn? Because here’s the long story…

So it’s the early 90’s and I get a submission packet from a high school kid named Gary Way. He was a big fan of mine so he sent this comic book that he & his buddies were doing together to me. I thought it was pretty good. So I decided to invest my money & publish it. That’s when I got to know him, when I took him under my wing.

I did this with a lot of the lost souls & angry young kids who found their way to me. I wasn’t just their publisher, I was their friend, I cared about my guys. They were important to me and I wanted them to get stronger, to be stronger, to do the best work they could do. My philosophy at Boneyard Press was give me your stragglers, give me your battered & cast offs… I would rebuild them… I would forge them into wolves and together, we would own the shadows.

Gary was one of these kids.

I used to have talks with his mother about how to keep him from getting beat up & bullied at school where he lived in Jersey. I talked with Gary quite a bit too. This was before email & texting, so people actually talked to each other then… So… after Boneyard published the first issue of his on going series, I took a liking to the kid so much I got him on the Sally Jesse Raphael show as an “Official Boneyard Press Writer” and he got to stand up & ask a question on the air.

Pretty cool for the school punching bag, right?

Gary gets out of high school & stays in touch with me through his days in college. A lot of my interns & guys did that as they were growing up. When he called me from the offices of DC & told me about his new job at Vertigo, I thought, Fuck yeah, now one of my guys is rising up! Kick Ass!

911 happens, I don’t hear from the kid again. Me, my life moves at light speed, so I don’t think twice about it… a few years go by, I’m working full time in Adult films, then I get the youtube/mail from a fan who tells me all of her friends are calling her a liar over my book, On Raven’s Wings, and it’s author Gary Way.

You see… Apparently there was a Gerard Way with a new comic book coming out from Dark Horse comics & they were marketing it as the first published work of Gerard Way, the frontman for My Chemical Romance, which will have more value in the collectible comics market & would help them get a sales bump. My fan said to her friends, “Hey, that’s not his first published work, he did a series for Boneyard Press as Gary Way, that’s his first published work.” She contacts me to get the truth. I go fucking ballastic.

No motherfucker is going to make a liar out of one of my fans. Fucking no one.

I write a blog on my Live Journal account wondering if Dark Horse is a knowing partner of Garry Way’s charade to game the fans & the retailers or are they unwitting pawns. I was very, very, very angry. Then I got my hands on the My Chemical Romance video interview with all grown up Gerard Way telling people that he wished someone had taken a chance on him & published his comics when he was a teenager, that only someone believed in him enough to publish his work back then.

I’m fucking LIVID watching this & listening to this. I watched it over & over.

Then when Rolling Stone get’s involved, the press goes nuts, my lawyer tells me to shut the fuck up for once and since my wife was recovering from ovarian & cervical cancer, which nearly killed her… and the chemo turned her into a walking skeleton… I mean… I’d go to rub her feet, and there was no meat on the bottom of her foot. It was all bones.

Since the doctors in Japan had told me her cancer was stress related and that too much stress would kill her… I had to shut the fuck up & do my best to keep Waka from reading all the hate mail & hate memes on the web. That didn’t need to happen. Gary could have just owned up to the truth.

Only he didn’t.

Instead of manning up and owning his lies and deceptions, he chose to hide behind a bunch of clueless emo twits and chose to sick his fan base on me… On my wife. Who cried & cried reading this shit. She doesn’t want me to talk about this, she doesn’t want to acknowledge how this puke & the scum bags online got to her, but she was vulnerable back then. I was her only caregiver. The only one. Her family was back in Japan. And I couldn’t stop her with from reading this… I could only shut up, try to let it blow over while I consulted with my lawyers about what to do.

For what Garry Way did to my reputation, to my company and most of all, what he did to my wife… in the midst of her suffering… When I was only speaking the truth. If he wasn’t lying why did he call my office from the middle of his south American tour, when this whole thing blew up, he sure was able to find my number and communicate with me AFTER the truth came out. It didn’t have to go down the way it did. My wife should have been able to focus on recovering from cancer, from never being able to have a baby. But no, this asshole put us through the ringer to save his own pride when caught in a lie.

For that… For what he did to my wife… I hate that motherfucker.

I hate that motherfucker like you cannot even put into words.

#my chemical romance

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theonyxpath · 4 years

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With a bit more than a week to go, Legendlore keeps rolling, even through the traditional 3rd week KS doldrums!

For our part, we continue to try and spread the word about this integrally inclusive setting with panels and actual plays like these:

Now, the very cool thing about Legendlore, and why I call it “integrally inclusive” as well as “Not your Father’s D&D” is that Steffie and team have taken an existing aspect of the original comic book world setting – the transference of a real-world person into this fantasy world – and designed the character generation system so that you have complete freedom to create the sort of character you want to play.

What I mean is that you can or can not be a direct port of who you are into The Realm, or you can change the characteristics and even change your species, but the choice of just what that means in terms of both the setting and the game rules is up to you. Being in a wheelchair, for example, is only a limiter if you want that to be the case with the character – maybe for story reasons, maybe for personal reasons; either way you decide.

And in a different spin on that basic setting concept, the game also explores the idea of taking your character from a different 5e setting and importing them into The Realm. In fact, The Metal Scourge Actual Play linked to above, does just that with characters from the Realms of Pugmire and the Scarred Lands!

Finally, besides all the porting in from other worlds, you can also play a character that was born in The Realm or the other regions in the world of Legendlore. It’s an amazingly flexible set of options!

If a game that is specifically designed to give players the chance to see themselves in the setting sounds like what you’re looking for in fantasy gaming, here’s the direct link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/339646881/legendlore-rpg-setting-for-5th-edition-fantasy-roleplaying-0

TC: Aberrant art by Lee O’Connor

#OnyxPathCon Follow-up

Not only did our Monday Meeting crew have an Onyx Path Virtual Gaming Convention “postmortem” late last week after we got our heads back together after the con weekend, but a bunch of us sat down earlier today with Gehenna Gaming for a con follow-up.

So here are some numbers and what they mean to us:

#OnyxPathCon as a hashtag was headed to trending all weekend, although it didn’t make it over the target to actually do it, although we had more than 1,000 mentions, which is pretty cool.

We raised over $1550 for the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, and over $1600 for the Bodhana Group! Both extremely worthy charities that we are so glad to be able to donate to. Thank you all who contributed to this effort!

There were 34 games drawn from our many game lines, and the players expressed a 90% satisfaction rate in the after-session poll. This is so fantastic to hear, as so much of our impetus for the con was to provide our community a chance to play during a time their regular gaming might be curtailed.

Let the Streets Run Red art by Oliver Specht

We were also told anecdotally that while most of the attendees were familiar with Onyx Path and played their favorite game lines, they also took the chance to try out our other games during the con. Plus, we heard from players that were trying out our games for the first time! So, from a PR perspective, the idea that we were getting fresh eyes on our games was another piece of great news.

Our convention web-site had over 7,600 unique visitors, which, you know, is more folks than some presidential election rallies, so we’re pretty thrilled about that!

Now, lest you think it was all us patting ourselves on our backs, we also looked into the operational screw-ups and miscommunications that occurred as well. IF, big if, we did this sort of thing again, we’d want to use the experience of having done this one to inform our efforts.

We would definitely give ourselves a lot more lead time, which would actually help us out across several levels. We’d be able to set up more, and more varied, games to play, and have more options for GMs, panelists, etc.

Not saying we will do another, BUT I’m not saying we won’t…

TC: Aberrant art by Lee O’Connor

Today We Talked About:

Lots of talk today about our Jumpstarts, and if we are making them as we should be. Are they providing players with enough to get them started playing the game lines? Overall, that’s what we are aiming for: a quick and easy way to start playing ASAP.

We want to be sure that we’re following through on those aims when push comes to shove with the many creative hands that add their efforts throughout the creation of any given Jumpstart.

These sorts of reviews are vital when we consider the sheer number of projects we’re doing, and sheer number of creators involved. We try not build our releases with projects that aren’t just there to fill out a part of the setting or system, but which also fill an “ecological niche” in our release schedule.

Finally, we also talked about DriveThru‘s massive fiction sale, whose link is below in the Sales Partners area of the Blurbs!. A great chance to get ahold of some fantastic stories that reveal and expand parts of their game worlds that can only be touched on in the rulebooks.

One of the reason’s we try and include fiction in our Kickstarters ties into the idea behind the Jumpstarts, too. In this case, fiction is another method of exploring the game world that doesn’t require other players to insure that you can immerse yourself in our:

Many Worlds, One Path!

Blurbs!

Kickstarter!

The Legendlore Kickstarter funded and now we’re building towards Stretch Goals: the GM’s Screen, and starting the Legendlore Companion book PDF!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/339646881/legendlore-rpg-setting-for-5th-edition-fantasy-roleplaying-0

Grab your friends and escape to another world!

You’ve found an enchanted portal — a transition point — between worlds. The portal, called a Crossing, takes you to a world you thought only existed in novels and films: a magical land where dragons roam the skies, orcs and hobgoblins terrorize weary travelers, and unicorns prance through the forest. It is a world where humans join other peoples such as elves, trolls, dwarves, changelings, and the dreaded creatures who steal the night. It is a world of fantasy — of imagination.

It is the Realm.

It is Legendlore.

Onyx Path Media!

This week: a Game Designers Roundtable with Eddy, Danielle Lauzon, Travis Legge, and Monica Speca! They completely nerd out about game design for an hour!

As always, this Friday’s Onyx Pathcast will be on Podbean or your favorite podcast venue! https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

All our panels and games from Onyx Path Virtual Gaming Convention are all available on twitch.tv/theonyxpath!

All you need to do is head on over to the website and subscribe. If you have an Amazon Prime account, you can do so for free and access our entire catalogue of videos!

Don’t miss Jen Vaughn’s Legendlore actual play taking place on our Twitch channel every week on Friday night! Lost in the Crossing is an amazing story played through by a fantastic GM and excellent roleplayers, and handles the Legendlore world from the perspective of visitors and native inhabitants of the Realm! Make sure you’re tuning in every Friday or catching up afterwards by subscribing.

That’s not all for Legendlore, as we have actual plays by Steffie de Vaan and Corinne McCrory over on our YouTube channel, which you can find here https://youtu.be/UaQXSlEatDw and here https://youtu.be/ECRrErPLm64! Please give our GMs some support and tune in!

This week on Twitch, expect to see:

Behind the Screen – Scion

Realms of Pugmire – Paws & Claws

Legendlore – The Metal Scourge

They Came from Beneath the Sea! – They Came from Devil’s Reef!

Changeling: The Dreaming – The Last Faerie Tale

Legendlore – w / Steffie de Vaan

Mage: The Awakening – Occultists Anonymous

Legendlore – Lost in the Crossing

Scarred Lands – Purge of the Serpentholds

Get watching for some fantastic insight into how to run these wonderful games.

Come take a look at our YouTube channel, youtube.com/user/theonyxpath, where you can find a whole load of videos of actual plays, dissections of our games, and more, including:

Changeling: The Dreaming – The Last Faerie Tale: https://youtu.be/7-hEqJ5D2KY

Scarred Lands: Purge of the Serpentholds: https://youtu.be/HZN4IlP1PP0

Onyx Path News: https://youtu.be/kpCNbIYzB4I

What’s up with Onyx Path #1? (from #OnyxPathCon): https://youtu.be/wGvD5LnWHaQ

Changeling: The Lost – Littlebrook Reunion: https://youtu.be/EXyXKxJ5usM

Legendlore – The Metal Scourge: https://youtu.be/ECRrErPLm64

Chronicles of Darkness – Seattle by Streetlight: https://youtu.be/JyOeb7X7Y5w

Subscribe to our channel and click the bell icon if you want to be notified whenever new news videos and uploads come online!

A Bunch of Gamers continue their actual play of They Came from Beneath the Sea! and conclude it with a mini review: https://youtu.be/qIMwcOZmR8k

The Botch Pit have released a wonderful new guide for Changeling: The Lost right here. Do give them a like and a subscribe: https://youtu.be/Bd0UZQZt2OM

Please check these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games! We’d love to feature you!

Electronic Gaming!

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is awesome! (Seriously, you need to roll 100 dice for Exalted? This app has you covered.)

On Amazon and Barnes & Noble!

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue from which you bought it. Reviews really, really help us get folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these latest fiction books:

Our Sales Partners!

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost Second Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scion 2e books and other products are available now at Studio2: https://studio2publishing.com/blogs/new-releases/scion-second-edition-book-one-origin-now-available-at-your-local-retailer-or-online

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e at the same link! And now Scion Origin and Scion Hero and Trinity Continuum Core and Trinity Continuum: Aeon are available to order!

As always, you can find Onyx Path’s titles at DriveThruRPG.com!

Check out the Massive Fiction Sale at DriveThruFiction.com! Fantastic bargains on huge amounts of our fiction books!https://www.drivethrufiction.com/sale.php?manufacturers_id=4261

On Sale This Week!

Available this Wednesday, we offer the third in the Scarred Lands Vigil Watch PDFs on DTRPG!

Also available this Wednesday on DTRPG: Scion electronic wallpaper and the PDF Scion Screen!

Conventions!

Though dates for physical conventions are subject to change due to the current COVID-19 outbreak, here’s what’s left of our current list of upcoming conventions (and really, we’re just waiting for this last one to be cancelled even though it’s Nov/Dec). Instead, keep an eye out here for more virtual conventions we’re going to be involved with:

PAX Unplugged: https://unplugged.paxsite.com/

And now, the new project status updates!

Development Status from Eddy Webb! (Projects in bold have changed status since last week.):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep.)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

Adversaries of the Righteous (Exalted 3rd Edition)

The Devoted Companion (Deviant: The Renegades)

Saints and Monsters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Anima

M20 Technocracy Operative’s Dossier (Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary)

Squeaks In The Deep (Realms of Pugmire)

Redlines

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Hundred Devil’s Night Parade (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Novas Worldwide (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Exalted Essence Edition (Exalted 3rd Edition)

M20 Rich Bastard’s Guide To Magick (Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary)

V5 Children of the Blood (was The Faithful Undead) (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Wild Hunt (Scion 2nd Edition)

CtL 2e Novella Collection: Hollow Courts (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Second Draft

Many-Faced Strangers – Lunars Companion (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Mission Statements (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Contagion Chronicle Ready-Made Characters (Chronicles of Darkness)

Under Alien Suns (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Trinity Continuum: Adventure! core (Trinity Continuum: Adventure!)

Dead Man’s Rust (Scarred Lands)

The Clades Companion (Deviant: The Renegades)

V5 Forbidden Religions (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Development

TC: Aberrant Reference Screen (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Contagion Chronicle: Global Outbreaks (Chronicles of Darkness)

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

N!ternational Wrestling Entertainment (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Assassins (Trinity Continuum Core)

V5 Trails of Ash and Bone (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Manuscript Approval

Crucible of Legends (Exalted 3rd Edition)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Post-Approval Development

Editing

Lunars Novella (Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Player’s Guide to the Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Contagion Chronicle Jumpstart (Chronicles of Darkness)

TC: Aberrant Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

LARP Rules (Scion 2nd Edition)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

The Book of Lasting Death (Mummy: The Curse 2e)

They Came From Beyond the Grave! (They Came From!)

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Dearly Bleak – Novella (Deviant: The Renegades)

Post-Editing Development

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

W20 Shattered Dreams Gift Cards (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Hunter: The Vigil 2e core (Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

Pirates of Pugmire KS-Added Adventure (Realms of Pugmire)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Terra Firma (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Indexing

Art Direction from Mike Chaney!

In Art Direction

Tales of Aquatic Terror – Handing off to Meredith to AD.

WoD Ghost Hunters (KS) – Prepping KS assets.

Aberrant – AD’d. Second new comic in.

Hunter: The Vigil 2e

Mummy 2

Deviant

Legendlore – KS running.

Technocracy Reloaded (KS)

Cults of the Blood God – Rolling along.

Scion: Dragon (KS) – Waiting on art notes.

Masks of the Mythos (KS) – Notes back to Chris for tweaks, hiring artists.

Scion: Demigod (KS) – Art rolling.

They Came From Beyond the Grave! (KS) – Finals coming in.

TC: Adventure! (KS) – Shen Fei cover art finishing.

Geist: One Foot In the Grave – Contracted.

In Layout

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad

Vigil Watch

TC Aeon Terra Firma

V5 Let the Streets Run Red

Pugmire Adventure

Scion Titanomachy

Proofing

Trinity Aeon Jumpstart – Errata gathering.

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate – Inputting errata.

Contagion Chronicle – At WW for approval.

Cavaliers of Mars: City of the Towered Tombs

Magic Item Decks (Scarred Lands)

Yugman’s Guide Support Decks (Scarred Lands)

Dark Eras 2 Screen and booklet

At Press

Scion Companion – Awaiting errata from devs.

TCFBTS Heroic Land Dwellers – Prepping PoD files.

TCFBTS Screen and Booklet – Files at press.

They Came from Beneath the Sea! – Awaiting color correction from printer.

Creature Collection 5e – PoD proof ordered. Traditional files sent to printer.

Pirates of Pugmire – Files at press. Prepping files for PoD.

Pirates of Pugmire Screen – Files at press.

Pugmire Buried Bones – Inputting errata.

Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition Dark Eras Compilation – Inputting errata.

Today’s Reason to Celebrate!

Three years ago, my good friend and one of the genuinely good people in TTRPGS, Stewart Wieck, passed away. He was the White Wolf, and without Stewart it’s doubtful that all the amazing game worlds that came out of WW and now from Onyx Path would have existed. Thank you, Stew, in your ivory tower in the sky, for giving so many of us the start for so much creativity and imagination!

#Onyx Path Publishing

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marauders-fanfilm · 5 years

Text

Long Overdue Update

Hey everyone! First and foremost, I want to issue an apology. I posted an update at the end of 2018 for the backers on Kickstarter & Indiegogo, but neglected to post it to our social media pages, and that’s on me. We are still here, we are still hard at work, and I apologize for neglecting our Social Media lately. I am making a point to rectify this for the future.

Yes, the project has taken far longer than any of us anticipated, and while it is not any one person’s fault, I will take responsibility here on behalf of the production. And for that I apologize to all of our backers, our fans, and to our cast and crew. We all want to see this project completed, and our Post Production team have been pouring their hearts into doing so. Unfortunately as we all are working as unpaid volunteers, and we all have other commitments we must prioritize- Day jobs, school, families, etc, and as such our availabilities fluctuate week to week. But our team has been generously donating their nights and weekends to the film, and the results so far have been amazing. That said, if anyone has experience in Visual Effects and really wants to contribute, we’d always be happy to have more hands!

Outside of Visual Effects, which is the main thing that has been taking time on this project, the score is almost complete, and is sounding absolutely beautiful. It’s taken a while, as composer Paul Bourque has been quite busy with his own professional music career, but it is going to be worth the wait. There’s also going to be a fair bit more on the Official Score than just what is heard in the film. I truly think you’re all going to love it! It has come to our attention lately that there have been some questions circulating about the film’s budget and how it was spent. This is absolutely fair, and I’m happy to expand more upon that and what’s been going on lately, though I am going to add a cut here before this post gets any longer! TLDR, we’re still here, still hard at work, and while it has taken longer than any of us anticipated, we truly feel that it will be worth the wait -Aaron Director, The Gathering Storm

2017 was largely a year of delays and roadblocks, and that slowed things down a lot. Our original VFX Supervisor (a team of one) finally left the project after almost a year of delays, admitting he just didn’t have the free time to commit to the project. We brought on a new team of VFX artists, but after several months, they too left the project, admitting that they just didn’t have the time with their academic workload. This just left our current VFX Supervisor, Martin Bayang, alone, and essentially still stuck at the starting line.

But with our last update in April of 2018 we began to search for additional artists to help tackle the 350 or so VFX shots of varying complexity in the film. I am proud to say that we now have a team of six incredibly talented artists working on the film, led by Martin, and we are about halfway through the visual effects! I have been personally going through every new shot alongside Martin, and I am THRILLED with how everything looks so far. These amazing artists, who range from a talented High School student to a Visual Effects artist from Game of Thrones, have been working tirelessly to bring the magic to life, and you won’t be disappointed. That said, in the last few months several of our artists have had to leave the project due to a lack of available free time to continue working on it. We still have several active members on our team, and are currently pursuing more. We are working as hard, and as fast, as we possibly can to bring you guys this story, and we really do appreciate your patience. There have been claims lately that the production was not as transparent as we should have been. While there is nothing nefarious being concealed, these claims aren’t necessarily wrong either. While we’ve tried to keep you all updated of the progress on the project, I have kept some of the individual personal issues behind closed doors, and that may have been a mistake. I would like to rectify this by offering an explanation to at least some of this: When we began production back in 2014, I believed the producer we had knew what they were doing. When it became clear that this was not the case (losing one of our key locations just days before filming began), they were replaced by their Associate Producer, who managed to successfully get us through all three rounds of filming. When filming wrapped however, that producer stepped off the project as well, leaving the responsibilities of Producer on me, in addition to my responsibilities as Director. A couple members of the cast stepped up to help, and we couldn’t have gotten this far without them, but they too have careers and personal lives, for the last two years I’ve been doing my best to steer this ship on my own.

Since then, I have done everything in my power to keep things moving through Post Production. Through multiple editors stepping off the project midway, starting us back at the beginning, before finally reaching picture lock. Through numerous VFX artists delaying for months before admitting they hadn’t completed anything and moving on. Through several days of insert & pickup shoots. Through weekly score and VFX meetings and hundreds of hours of video and audio post-production work, and occasionally when I get a chance, updating our Social Media.. I have given up numerous career opportunities, and more personal social plans than I can count. And none of that is meant to be me looking for sympathy. But when I tell you that we are here, busting our butts working to get this done, and that we’re just as eager to see it completed as any of you, I want you to understand how much I truly mean that. In Regards to Questions About our Budget:

It has been brought to my attention that there were some serious questions and rumors circulating regarding the film’s budget, and how funds were allocated. I went back through all of our records, and totaled things up to come up with a total of what the numbers actually ended up being. Filmmaking, especially something like TGS, is expensive. But for anyone with questions, I would like to take a minute to go through the exact numbers: • Equipment Rental: 31.3% Obviously the biggest chunk of the budget, this covered the camera and lens rentals, the steadicam rig rental, the lighting and grip equipment rentals (Dolly tracks, stands, lights, disposables, etc), as well as sound recording equipment through three separate rounds of filming. This ran us more than our Kickstarter estimate, though less than our Indiegogo estimate.

• Transportation: 26.9% This covered everything from truck rentals to haul all of the equipment and set dressings, to shuttle vans for the cast and crew, to gas, to flights to bring back members of the cast who had moved after Principal Photography. While Transpo is usually a significant portion of the budget on major productions, it isn’t on smaller student projects, and this ate a large portion of our budget. But we had locations all over New England, and a significant number of our team were students without their own means of transportation. This was an area where our producers definitely really undershot the budget, unfortunately. • Locations 19.3% Another one of the major factors separating us from other student and fan film projects. To capture the look and feel of Hogwarts, we shot at a number of incredible locations across New England, from a castle, to several churches, and a museum. But venues like that, often used for Weddings, aren’t cheap. We were prepared for that. What we weren’t prepared for was having to schedule additional days in these venues (I will come back to this).

Production Design, Props, Wardrobe, and Makeup 11.6% Self explanatory, but yes. All of the School Uniforms for our cast and extras. Other costumes for the cast, from their casual clothes to the Professors’ costumes, and more. Props and set dressing. Furniture. All the little stuff you likely won’t notice when it’s there, but are what make the scenes come to life. We managed to stay under budget on this one.

Crafty/Meals 6.3% This is one of the categories I’ve seen a lot of rumors and accusations circling around, so I feel I need to explain this: Feeding your team on set is standard protocol. When they’re working 12-14 hours a day, there isn’t time for people to grocery shop and meal prep before work, or for people to venture out to grab lunch (nor was there much around many of these locations). Let alone, all of these people were taking time off of work, unpaid, to be there. A warm meal is the bare minimum we could do. That said, I think there might have been some misconceptions because previous budgets described it simply as crafty, leading some people to believe this part of the budget just accounted for a table of snacks, instead of the reality of this section of the budget covering all food/beverage costs. We actually ended up staying well under budget in this category.

Production 2.4% This one isn’t particularly interesting. Basically miscellaneous. Various little expenses that don’t fall into other categories. Fees, office supplies, legal advice, printing scripts and sides, etc. About what we budgeted on the IGG budget.

Post Production 2.2% While none of our post team are paid, this covers costs like Dropbox, Stock Footage, and the software we purchased for our composer.

When we started this project, almost all of us were students. Students with a dream of continuing the world of our favorite franchise, of telling the story we’d always wanted to see told. But we were students nonetheless, still growing, still learning our craft, still making plenty of mistakes along the way. After this project and several years of experience in the field, I can say there were places where we could have trimmed some of the fat. But beyond the basic costs of producing a film like this, the big thing that drove up the budget was just bad luck/human error. I’ve spoken about it before, but during principal photography, there was a power glitch during a footage transfer that corrupted data and lost us several days of filming that we had to go back and reshoot. And unfortunately during the first round of pickups in 2015, an error by our producer cost us the use of one of our main locations, resulting in us needing to bring everyone back and do a second round of pickups: Re-Renting gear and transportation, booking more days at the location (who decided to jack up their price), etc. Because of this, the crowdfunding budget was spent before we finished that third round of filming. I know that statement is going to upset people, but we’re making a point of transparency here, and it’s a significant piece of what I’ve been avoiding making public. Since 2015, I’ve been covering everything since then out of my own pocket. Because while it wasn’t my errors that cost us, the other producers have all left the project, and at the end of the day, this is my project, my baby, that I am determined to see through to completion. Because you, our fans, and our dedicated team all deserve to see it done. I know the next question following that will be regarding Backer Perks - Don’t worry, they won’t be affected. Most of them are already here in boxes, ready and waiting. However, there are still a couple things remaining, first and foremost the DVDs of the film, which obviously can’t be printed until the project is completed. Because of this, and the fact that the vast majority of backers are receiving DVDs, they’re unfortunately going to have to wait until then to go out. I have been putting money away for the last few years to cover the cost of DVD Printing and Shipping, and it’s all ready and waiting for post to be completed. And I know a lot of you have asked about this - Once we’re at that point, we’ll get in contact with everyone receiving packages to confirm their current address before mailing! So yes, it’s been a long and difficult journey. It’s taken far longer than any of us planned. We’ve had dozens of team members come and go, but no matter what, we’ve kept working. Because we love this world, we love this project, and we love you guys. None of this would have been possible without you. All of the pieces are starting to come together, and I could not possibly be more excited to share it with all of you. Until then, Mischief Managed Aaron

#Marauders Fanfilm #Behind the scenes #BTS

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comicsinkcorporated-blog · 6 years

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Interview with Screaming Villains, developer of Night Trap 25th anniversary.

CI: So how did development for Night Trap 25th anniversary first come about?

SV: It honestly started out as sort of a joke. Sometime after the failed Kickstarter, hardcore fans started attempting to recreate their own remake of Night Trap and some gaming sites were writing articles about it which I found kind of odd especially since they either didn't work or barely worked. I was already messing around with FMV stuff as a hobby and a friend of mine came up with the idea of myself making a working version running on a phone.

I threw it together in about 3-4 days, posted a video of myself playing it on Youtube and sort of remained anonymous about it. I got a local arcade owner that I know to post the video on his Facebook account since he was friends with an absurd amount of retro gamers and it started to spread and got about 5000 views within the first 24 hours.

The website fmvworld.com found it too and decided to contact Rob Fulop (one of the creators of Night Trap) to get his opinion on it. Another website called segabits.com also contacted Tom Zito (producer of Night Trap) to find out if he had any involvement so that sort of put me on their radar. After that I figured "what the hell?" and sent an email to Tom at about 3am and got a response in about 15 minutes. He just asked a couple of questions about it and asked for my phone number. The next day, he called me and 20 minutes into the conversation he asked if I would like to do an official version and I said yes.

CI: Limited Run Games PS4 version of Night Trap remains their fastest selling game, while the Nintendo Switch version may end up being their best selling game. Were you surprised by the popularity of this remaster?

SV: I don't think anyone was expecting that. It just came out of nowhere which I think helped a lot so thank god my friends were able to keep their mouth shut while I was working on it. Originally, there was only going to be 5000 copies of the game available. Once the announcement was made Josh Fairhurst from Limited Run Games and myself were pretty much stuck on Twitter the entire day so we definitely wasn't expecting the reaction it got.

After that, Josh said something like "We might need to increase the quantity" which at the time I don't think they ever exceeded 5000 on a game so it got bumped up to 6000. After that, he came back again and said "Maybe we should add a collectors edition" so now we're at 8000 for PS4. Then it was "Let's release a big box version for PC" so now there's another 2000. It just kept growing and growing and still didn't meet demand. What's funny is the guy that made the announcement trailer and myself was constantly googling Night Trap that day just to see what was being said but then we went to the trending section on Youtube and we're like "Oh my god! The trailer is trending higher than Gucci Mane!" For a brief moment a game that a lot of people considered terrible was all of a sudden popular and I think that's rad.

CI: What do you think it is about Night Trap that has made it so beloved amongst fans?

SV: It has a b-movie feel to it and doesn't take itself seriously. A lot of hate that it gets is sort of undeserving. The popular ones are usually "this is barely a game" or "this has bad acting". NT was made 5 years before it was finally released and intended for a console that used VHS tapes and the acting is very similar to 80's horror/thriller films. Unfortunately, it was the wrong time period when it was finally released in 1992 and at that point nobody was really reminiscing about the 80's like they do today. The fans that are super hardcore about Night Trap are usually gamers that have a great interest in movies in general. What surprised me was the number of people that I've talked to that said Digital Pictures influenced them to pursue a career in the film or tv industry.

CI: Were there any notable, unforeseen difficulties during development?

SV: Engine restrictions was the biggest issue. I figured out pretty quickly that a lot of the gaming engines available weren't really designed with FMV in mind so because of this I think the video quality suffered more than I would've liked. Luckily, this is no longer an issue with future releases.

CI: How did the Limited Run Games physical release come about?

SV: The dudes from My Life In Gaming actually brought it up. One of those guys lives down the street from me and very early in the development process I told him I was working on Night Trap and wanted a documentary to go along with it since it has a crazy history and I thought it'd be a cool promotional tool. He immediately suggested that I work with Limited Run Games. Over the next several months I kept telling him that I'd think about it whenever he brought it up.

About a month before the game was announced, Coury came to my house to film my interview for the documentary. After we were finished he brought up Limited Run again so I told him to go ahead and tell them what I was working on. Ten minutes later, I got an email from Josh Fairhurst. Limited Run is super rad and I honestly can't imagine doing any game without their involvement so I'll most likely harrass them with each release that I do. They actually ported Night Trap to Nintendo Switch. I can't say anything bad about those dudes. They've helped me tremendously.

CI: So the Nintendo Switch version of the game comes with Japanese & French audio, was this something Screaming Villains commissioned themselves? Did Night Trap have an original Japanese and French release? And what was the reasoning behind including the new audio?

SV: The Japanese and French audio actually came from previous releases. I got ahold of copies of the game that were originally released in Europe and Japan and just ripped the audio from the disks. Before it was released I started getting messages and emails asking for additional language options so that's where that idea came from.

CI: So Night Trap as a copious history with Nintendo, when the company called out the game out in court, vowing it would never appear on a Nintendo system, which lead to some bad blood between the original Devs and Nintendo. How did it feel to finally put Night Trap on a Nintendo System?

SV: I think it's cool. Digital Pictures always released their games on Sega consoles and 3DO so it's super rad that one of them finally ended up on a Nintendo console. Definitely long overdue. With Night Trap getting released on there with a Teen rating without cutting any content might hopefully stop people from claiming that the game uses violence against women to move the story further which is absolultely ridiculous along with everything else that people claim is in there that doesn't even exist.

CI: What was the decision to go with Double Switch as the next FMV game to remaster?

SV: Double Switch just seemed like the obvious choice since it's the same type of game as Night Trap but everything is improved on. You could I guess call it the spiritual successor to Night Trap. It's also my favorite game from Digital Pictures. I think it was expected too. Back in February, I met a lot of the people that worked on Friday The 13th The Game. When I was introduced to the Executive Director Randy Greenback the first thing he said to me was "Are you doing Double Switch next?!" Josh from Limited Run was campaigning for it pretty hard too since his aunt is a childhood friend of Debbie Harry who appears in the game. A very short teaser for it was showng during the Limited Run E3 conference. While watching the conference there were people leaving comments like "Just announce Double Switch already!"

CI: Night Trap special editions in the past have come with cassette tapes, patches, and even a VHS tape. Can you tell us if Double Switch special edition will come with anything like that?

SV: It most likely will but I have no idea what since I haven't really talked to Limited Run about those options yet. Usually what happens is they throw an idea at me and I pretty much agree to all of them. They're huge Sega nerds like I am so I trust them with their ideas. The idea of pogs came up for Night Trap but we ran out of time so it wouldn't surprise me if that happened with Double Switch.

I'm sure it'll come in a Sega CD jewel case too since Limited Run ordered about 15,000 of those. I will say that it's getting a completely new cover since the original ones are kind of lame and don't really fit with the type of game that it is.

It looks super rad! DS also has a super rad soundtrack that was done by Thomas Dolby, who wrote and performed the hit song "She Blinded Me With Science" so I was hoping that a stereo version of the soundtrack existed so we could release that but sadly it's all mono.

CI: There was some rumors that Screaming Villains have been working on bringing, Marky Mark: Make My Video to the PS4. Can you confirm this?

SV: Oh dear....that was a joke that went too far. What happened was Josh Fairhurst and I kept getting our tweets captured and used as news articles for very minor stuff. I hated it because I wasn't used to this sort of thing since Night Trap was my first console release and Josh was beyond frustrated with it because of a random person making a negative comment about Nintendo, which led to a gaming site writing an article claiming that Josh spoke negatively about Nintendo when it wasn't even him or even anyone affiliated with LR.

They were forced to update the article and admit that they were wrong. After that, we started tweeting each other about a re-release of Marky Mark but making it sound official like it was an actual thing that was happening just to see if anyone would start turning that into articles.

One night, I took it a step further and made a working version of the game running on a PS4 in about an hour and then the next day we both posted a link to a video showing it. That got yanked from Youtube within the first 20 minutes. We used to talk about it all the time trying to figure out how to make it happen since the idea is too ridiculous to ignore but no. No remake of Marky Mark Make My Video.CI: What other FMV games do you want to bring to modern consoles?

CI: What other FMV games do you want to bring to modern consoles?

SV: My original goal was to get as many games from Digital Pictures as I can which is pretty much happening now. Night Trap and Double Switch aren't the only ones coming. Outside of DP releases the goal is D which was originally released back in 1995. I feel like there's a ton of different things you can do with that one.

CI: Lastly is there anything you would like to say to the readers?

The obvious thing would be thank you to everyone that played NT25. It was a stressful process so it made me happy to see that people that were fans of the original enjoyed it. Also, if you're a fan of Digital Pictures releases then stick around because some super rad stuff is coming!

#Night Trap #nintendo #Sega #horror #playstation #interview

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chasholidays · 6 years

Note

Hey love your fics im a first time prompt sender, if you can could you carry on Where Everybody Knows Your Name, except with Monty and Miller, I want to see if Monty gets his customer crush too, looking forward to the holiday fics i cant wait thanks x

Original fic here!

“It was Nate, right?”

Monty considers, but he can’t help the smartass retort. It’s his lot in life. “No, Monty. We work together?”

Clarke rolls her eyes, but she’s clearly amused. Possibly in spite of herself, but he’ll take what he can get. “Your customer crush. Nate with the rainbow flag on his bag?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s him. Why?”

“I know him.”

He frowns. “Okay, that’s just unfair. You can’t hog all the hot queer boys. We’re in a recession.”

“Which is why I’m talking to you. He and Bellamy are friends. They hang out. If you came to hang out too, you could actually spend time with him.”

“You have such a weird thing about talking to people you’re romantically interested in. Who does that?”

“People who want to get laid.” She leans back against the counter, watching him shrewdly. He likes Clarke, but she can be kind of intense. “You don’t have to do anything about it. But I figured I should let you know. Hanging out with Miller is a possibility.”

“Miller?”

“Bellamy calls him Miller. That’s why I didn’t make the connection earlier. But we all hung out last night, so—“

“So you slept with a customer and want to enable everyone else to do the same.”

“We’re dating,” she points out. Monty still thinks she might be a witch, honestly. It would explain some things. “All I’m enabling you to do is spend some time with him socially. He’s hosting game night at his place on Saturday night. Bellamy said I could bring friends.”

The entire premise of Monty’s crush is that Nate is attractive and seems to be queer. He’s quiet and polite when he comes in, and usually puts a dollar in the tip jar after he pays. There are no particularly deep feelings involved. He’s eye candy.

But, well.

“Game night?”

“Apparently he’s really into indie board games.”

“Oh my god.”

She smirks, and he’ll give her this one. She deserves to be smug. “So, you’re in, right?” she asks.

“Send me the details, yeah. I think I can make it.”

Monty has a fairly effective strategy for dealing with random crushes: he doesn’t do anything about them and eventually they go away. He likes having a person to idly fantasize about, but actually making a move always seems kind of terrifying. In college, his first and only girlfriend had asked him out, and they’d had a year-long relationship that ended with graduation.

And since then, nothing. Just scattered crushes, the kind with no pressure at all. People who aren’t really real, customers and attractive strangers on the bus. When Clarke was hired, he thought about getting a crush on her, but she was too intimidating, and not really his type.

Plus, after less than a month, she was dating Bellamy, which sort of proved his point. Anyone who went from crush to flirting to relationship with the efficiency she did was not someone he could ever date.

But a quiet guy who’s friends with his coworker and her boyfriend, who has board game nights? That guy’s right up his alley. And it’s a more than a little terrifying.

Clarke agrees to walk over to Nate’s with him, so he won’t be showing up alone. Bellamy isn’t even there, so they don’t have to pretend he’s not nervous about interacting with his semi-crush.

“It’s not a big deal,” Clarke says, which isn’t actually that helpful. He knows it’s not a big deal. She doesn’t need to remind him he’s being irrational.

His expression must give him away, because her face dissolves into a sheepish smile. “Sorry. So it’s going to be us, Bellamy, Miller, their friend Monroe, Raven, and her boyfriend. Apparently they try to do this like once a month.”

“Cool.” He pauses. “Bellamy didn’t think it was weird? That you were bringing me.”

“Nope. That’s part of why I asked Raven,” she adds. “I just said I was bringing my two favorite coworkers.”

“Aww,” he says, grinning. “Thanks.”

“Not a lie.”

“We like you too.” He exhales. “I shouldn’t be nervous, right? This is board games. If I’ve got a thing, this is it.”

“Definitely. Also you like Bellamy and Raven, and Miller is pretty laid back. You have good taste in crushes.”

“Thanks. Did we know Raven had a boyfriend?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, cool, just checking. Should I call Nate Miller? Does everyone call him Miller?”

“I don’t think he’ll mind Nate? He and Bellamy met in high school and there were a couple Nates, so he went by his last name. Either is probably fine.”

“It’s probably good,” he says. “Nate is an idea, Miller is a person. I can get to know the person.”

“That’s the spirit.”

They run into Raven a few blocks out, falling into step with her and her boyfriend, a tall guy with long hair who’s about as intimidating as Raven is, honestly. They’re one of those couples Monty is sure could kick his ass without even noticing they were doing it.

“Hey,” says Raven. “Finally putting your money where your mouth is, Monty?”

“I’ve never understood that saying,” he muses. “Do you have any idea how dirty money is? The last place I want it is where my mouth is.”

Raven smirks. “Don’t be nervous. Me and Clarke are going to talk you up.”

“That actually makes me feel worse, thanks. Is this your boyfriend? Do we get introduced or is he just going to lurk?”

“Yeah, this is Roan. Roan, Monty and Clarke. Clarke’s boyfriend invited us. I slept with him after it turned out Clarke and I were dating the same guy.”

Roan takes this in stride. “I will probably need a diagram. But it’s nice to meet you both. Raven has been educating me on the evolution of board gaming beyond Scrabble and Monopoly, so I’m looking forward to an educational afternoon.”

“Oh wow,” says Monty. “Yeah, you’ve got a lot to look forward to. Did Bellamy tell you what we were playing? If Miller’s understanding of modern board games begins and ends with Settlers of Catan, I don’t think I can be into him anymore.”

“What if board game night is actually just Sorry for three hours?” Clarke asks. “What then?”

“As long as it’s not Monopoly. Then none of us would come out with relationships.”

They talk favorite games until they get there, which lulls Monty into a false sense of security. He can do this. He’s a normal person who has normal conversations.

And then Nate opens the door to the apartment building, and it all kind of falls apart. He usually comes in on his way to work, dressed in slacks and collared shirts, but on his own time he apparently favors tight t-shirts and worn jeans. The t-shirt has the triforce on it, too, just to rub it in. It’s like he stepped right out of one of Monty’s pathetic dork fantasies.

“Hey, coffee shop crew. I’m an asshole who doesn’t actually know any of your names except Clarke. I assume you’re Raven and you’re Monty,” he adds, guessing correctly. “And you must be Raven’s boyfriend, name to be determined.”

“Roan,” he says. “A pleasure.”

“Cool. We haven’t ordered pizza yet, so you guys can get in on arguing about toppings. Come on up.”

Bellamy and Monroe are already upstairs, looking at Nate’s–Miller’s–impressive collection of board games. To Monty’s commingled relief and horror, he’s got great taste in games, some titles he loves, others he’s been hoping to try out, and even some that weren’t on his radar at all but look cool.

“I have a problem,” says Miller, when he catches Monty examining a deluxe edition of Underlings of Underwing. “A kickstarter problem.”

“This is honestly amazing,” he says. “Like–wow. You have the game collection I dream of having.”

“Yeah? What are some of your favorites?”

There’s this zone Monty gets into where he’s nervous, where he can interact normally, have full, coherent conversations, but it feels as if he’s watching himself do it, as if he’s in a video game running through a pre-written script until he hits a decision. He and Miller have a perfectly cordial discussion of games, and Monty’s sure he comes across well.

On the inside, though, he’s basically dying.

It gets better once they settle in for actual gaming. The games are engaging and require him to put thought into them, and even though he always ends up playing the same game as Miller when they break into groups, he can interact through mockery and trash talk, which works for him. Especially since Miller gives as good as he gets.

He’s congratulating himself on interacting like a normal human and never having to do it again when Miller grabs his arm. “Hey, have you played Pandemic Legacy?”

“No, just regular Pandemic.”

“I’m trying to get a game going on Thursdays. Bellamy and Clarke are in, so we need a fourth. You want to join?”

“Thursdays?” he asks, to fill the space as his brain catches up.

“Yeah. I figure we won’t make it work every week, but I want to try it. I hear it’s cool.”

“Yeah, me too. I can probably do that, yeah. Thursday nights?”

“Yup. Give me your number, I’ll text you when we’ve got a plan.”

“Awesome, sounds good. Looking forward to it.”

They shake hands, and Bellamy and Miller do a bro hug, and everyone else says their goodbyes downstairs. Clarke’s going over to Bellamy’s, which means she’s not going the same direction he is anymore, and he gets to walk home alone, letting his music dominate his brain.

Jasper’s playing Splatoon when he gets to the apartment, and Monty just collapses next to him with a groan.

“Did it suck?”

“No. It was amazing. We have a ton in common, he has a huge game collection, he wants me to join a weekly Pandemic Legacy game. I don’t know how it could have gone better.”

Jasper pats his shoulder, consoling. “Sorry, bro. That sucks.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Miller’s never been one of the regulars who comes in every day, so Monty doesn’t actually see him again for another couple days. He comes in on Tuesday morning, though, looking just as attractive as always, except now he has a personality.

Clarke Griffin is the worst thing that’s ever happened to Monty, probably. This is her fault.

He’s grabbing a big order of pastries when Miller comes in, so he just offers a smile, but he ends up in line right next to him, because that’s the kind of luck Monty has.

“Morning,” says Miller.

“Morning. How’s it going?”

“Okay. I was hoping you were going to be here. When do you finish work on Thursday?”

He blinks. “Oh, uh–three? Morning shift.”

“Cool. I was thinking like six for the game. Order dinner, figure out the rules, fight over how to prevent disease while the world dies around. The usual.”

“Yeah, that should work for me. Are you getting any pastries?” he adds.

“Yeah, blueberry muffin.”

Monty grabs one quickly, puts it in a bag and hands it over. It’s nothing he hasn’t done for other regulars, nothing he hasn’t done for Miller before, even. But this is the problem with a fake crush becoming a real crush: now everything feels important. It’s not fun anymore.

Which is, of course, ridiculous. He still doesn’t have a chance. He just has real things to pine over.

“Thanks,” Miller says, easy. “I’ll text you later tonight.”

“Cool. Have a good day.”

“You too.”

“Very natural,” Maya says, patting his shoulder once Miller is gone. “Totally smooth.”

“It may seem that way, but on the inside I am dying.”

“No, I can tell.”

“Thanks,” he says. “Really.”

“At least you get to hang out with him every week,” Clarke says, and he glares at her.

“I’m not even talking to you. You’re banned.”

She just smiles. “You’re welcome.”

He makes sure there are no customers around before he gives her the finger. So he’s not that doomed.

Yet.

Interacting with Miller isn’t that bad, except that the whole crush thing doesn’t get better. He’s just waiting for something to ruin it, and nothing does. Miller is not only hot and queer, but sarcastic and geeky and passionate. He works for a theater company that does outreach in public schools and seems to love it, and while Monty doesn’t really think he saves kittens from trees in his spare time or anything, that’s not really his type anyway.

Miller is his type. Basically just as he is. And he has no idea what to do about it.

“You could ask him out,” Clarke says. They’ve got their fifth week of Pandemic Legacy tomorrow, and Monty might be complaining. Just a little.

In his defense, it is her fault. She deserves it.

“How dare you,” he says.

“Monty doesn’t woo,” Jasper adds. “Monty is wooed.”

“Hey, that’s not fair. Most of the time, I’m neither.”

“Oh right. In general, Monty is just sad and alone.”

“That’s me,” he agrees. “I’ve got a brand, Clarke. Respect the brand.”

“And your brand can never date Miller?”

“No, my brand’s just bad at it. And I think it’s incompatible with his,” he adds.

“Really?” Clarke asks, sounding dubious. “You’re nerds who love games. How are you not on Miller’s brand?”

“His low self esteem makes it hard for him,” says Jasper, like he’s some kind of expert.

“Your mom’s low self esteem makes it hard for her,” Monty mutters.

“You’re great, Monty,” says Clarke. “Really.”

“I know. But that doesn’t mean I’m asking Miller out.”

“Okay. But you could.”

“I could,” he agrees. “I’m just not.”

He assumes it’s the end of the conversation, which is true in a limited sense, but Clarke clearly doesn’t forget, because Monty’s been at Miller’s for about three minutes when their phones buzz with a message from Bellamy: Sorry, something came up, me and Clarke are out.

It’s not even a real excuse. They really could have done better.

Miller must agree, because he snorts and tosses his phone aside. “Wow, subtle.”

“You think they’re having sex?”

“Oh, probably. I meant–” He glances at Monty, like he’s thinking it over. “Bellamy’s been telling me to just make a move for weeks. He thinks just because he’s dating his barista crush, everyone else should too. So he probably decided to skip out just so I’d–do this.”

Monty’s mouth goes dry. “Wait, what?”

“No pressure,” he says, with a shrug. “But if they’re not here anyway, we could switch this to a date. Or we can pretend I didn’t say anything and play video games.”

It takes his brain a second to catch up. “Really?” is what he comes out with, and then, “I mean, um. Can we do both?”

“Both what?”

“Video game date? Like–we’re on a date, but we’re still playing video games. Is that something you’re into?”

Miller smiles. “Yeah, Monty. That’s exactly what I’m into.”

“Oh. Wow. What are the odds?”

“Pretty shitty,” Miller says. “We must be lucky.”

Monty can’t stop grinning. “Yeah, we must be.”

He makes Clarke a coffee when she shows up for her shift the next morning. “I’m not saying I forgive you,” he says. “But I no longer want to murder you.”

“Cool.” She raises the cup. “To customer crushes?”

“To customer boyfriends,” he corrects, and she grins.

“Even better.”

#screwitanddoitanyway

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happylittlemarmite · 3 years

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Creative Journal

26/10/20- Week 5

Session Themes: We began this weeks session recapping Edward De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats idea from last week and there were some important points i thought i should note down as a reminder for myself:

“Thinking as a skill”

A “tools approach”

“Software for thinking”

Parallel thinking- Everyone thinking the same thing at the same time

we covered whether originality is important in terms of creativity. Looking back at our discussion in previous lessons regarding the definition of creativity, we saw how overall originality is a key aspect of a lot of peoples interpretation of creativity. We looked at Disney’s Steamboat Willie as a case study. The iconic 1928 short film known by many as the opening animation for numerous Disney films, is actually an idea taken from Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr., a silent picture from the same year. Using characters like Mickey mouse, changing the story and the addition of music makes Disney’s take entirely different from the “original”. It’s not that the idea was stolen and copied, but instead used as a point of influence for the animation. Many people today know the name “Steamboat Willie” but would not recognise “Steamboat Bill Jr.”.

We also learned about “Permission Culture” or “Read-Only Culture”, “ a culture in a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past. ” (Lessig, Free Culture, 2004). I found this idea super interesting as someone that utilises “outsourced” mixed media in my own graphics work, the idea that so many people can produce things with the intent of it being theirs only, so that nobody else can work on it, add to it, or use it in their work. This has lead to the rise in popularity of concepts such as “Creative Commons”, a creative copywrite license that allows free public distribution and usage of materials that may have otherwise been copywrited in the past. Concepts such as these are so important to the industry especially in times like these when going out and capturing images for yourself is less feasible.

We discussed whether utilising somebody else’s work was necessarily considered “stealing”; the difference between outright theft and copying. The examples we looked at were parody and pastiche.

Pastiche

Imitative work with the purpose of replicating artistic methods/stylisation

To celebrate/admire

To pay homage (publicly displayed special honour or respect)

Parody

Imitative work with satiric/ironic intent

To mock

Parody and Pastiche link to the ideas we’ve been learning about in terms of “reverse brainstorming”. In order to replicate something for pastiche/parody you need to truly understand your source materials and similarly “reverse engineer” it.

DSD Activity: This week I’ve started trying to listen to “sleep meditation” podcasts. I’m on sleep medication but still struggle to fall asleep before 3am on a regular evening, usually i listen to fan noises or rain noises but haven’t been able to recently since i broke my phone. So far I’ve been struggling to get into it, it’s a pretty foreign feeling to me trying to tune out of a conversation in order to sleep. They keep talking about how “some people find it difficult to tune out but keep at it” but I’m too interested in whatever they’re speaking about. Sometimes they tell stories, other times they’re more of a guided meditation to help you become more relaxed and think about physical sensations and distractions that may be preventing you from getting to sleep. I find the latter much better for sleeping, but i do enjoy listening to the stories although they keep me awake.

Inspiration: Some interesting media I’ve been looking into this week are old “big tobacco” advertisements. A friend and I were discussing the depopularisation of smoking in recent years, how we always thought it looked “cool” when we were younger but now my 13 year old sister pretends to gag when i come in from a cigarette at my mums place. We were talking about how old “big tobacco propaganda” has been replaced by vape/ecigarette/shisa advertisements. It’s not quite the same in terms of product, obviously cigarettes are much worse than their substitutes, however in terms of corporate propaganda its exactly the same. In years time when we have more research into the long term effects that come with these substitutes we may even laugh in disbelief that these were once being marketed as a safer and healthier alternative. Looking at some of these advertisements, i also really enjoyed the retro art style and shocking nature of some of the messaging, so i’ve also held onto this as inspiration for my own graphics work.

“Make Something Rubbish” Project: For this mini-project, I decided to pitch a film about paint drying. I thought about doing grass/plant growth but in order to actually see any growth on film i think I’d need to do some kind of time lapse which may end up being actually interesting, the only interesting thing that occurs as paint dry's is perhaps a slight change in depth of colour, which is MUCH LESS interesting than plant growth. I started by thinking about traditionally enjoyed aspects of film and how i could counter-cater to the masses. Popular film usually has a range of exciting characteristics whilst this does not. No exciting cast, no music, no interesting camerawork or lighting. This film couldn’t even be enjoyed by people that are into “interpretive art“.

I really thought i had done something clever with this idea, until i did more research and found out that such a film already exists! However, i think my idea is unique to this in terms of intent. Charlie Lyne’s Paint Drying was made with the purpose of making a statement against the BBFC for making film production in this country less accessible to aspiring creators. He made it with the intent of making the BBFC sit and watch an entire 10 hour film of only paint drying, which, whilst making a statement on censorship and economic privilege, was a conversation heavily publicised due to it’s message and comedic nature. This research inspired me in some ways, instead of making a time-lapse, I too had decided to pitch a 10 hour paint drying film. However, the key difference as I’ve stated is intent. Whilst the exact same concept, my film is not trying to make any kind of statement, cause any kind of conversation. It’s simply a film about paint drying. It doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t have any kind of purpose. Just boring paint drying. I can’t find the full film anywhere online but judging from the video on the kickstarter page and the trailer made available on youtube, i believe the actual piece may even contain some music and/or somebody painting the actual wall initially. This would be much too exciting in my film.

youtube

#Journal

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sazorak · 6 years

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What I Thought Of Every Single Game I Played In 2017

2017 was a weird year for me. In terms of my personal life, it's been something of a holding pattern; I'm a year older, but I've not accomplished nearly as much as I'd liked to. I've had a lot of good times, and I've done my best, but I probably haven't made an entirely meaningful use of my lingering youth.

But on the other hand: I got to play a whole bunch of video games! 2017 was a good year for video games. It had to be a good year for something, I suppose, and if the rest of the world was going to be getting it nasty this year, video games might as well be the thing that gets its due.

This write-up is an overview of what I thought about every single game I played this year. Only games that released this year qualified for a numbered “place”, as interpreted through my own rules. Here we go!

[2015] | [2016]

19. Fire Emblem Heroes – Android – ★★ – 2017

As a latecomer to the Fire Emblem games, this did nothing for me. I don't have a great amount of affection for the characters in the abstract, three lines of dialog and a couple cut-ins of them stabbing a guy don't even qualify as “fanservice”, and the narrative that is there is just plain bad. It's admirable that they managed to reduce their permadeath-driven tactical RPG to an experience that works on phones, but I have zero interest in throwing myself into gachapon hell in the hopes of a “dream team.” Besides, the second orb I cracked open had a five-star Camilla in it, so my experience was guaranteed to be a down-hill one.

18. Pictopix – Steam – ★★ – 2017

Pictopix is a fascinating lesson that not all Picross games are alike. It's not just a matter of creating puzzles that are secretly pixelized art: there is a flow to good nonogram design that is apparently quite hard to achieve. Where I get a lot of enjoyment from the Picross E- and Picross S- titles, I didn't care for this one, despite being on a platform well suited for a picross-a-like experience. I'm not sure I can even articulate just what rubbed me wrong about it (though the shoddy controls didn't help); the puzzles just felt clunky in a way that other takes on this style of puzzle did not.

Shantae: Half-Genie Hero – Steam – ★★ – 2016

I accidentally backed this game on Kickstarter a few years ago. I thought an artist I was a fan of was attached to this project, when they just did some contracted promotional material for the Kickstarter. It's on me for reading into that, I suppose. In any case, I backed this game, it came out last year, and I couldn't honestly be bothered to actually play it until this year.

After having finally done so: I'm not sure why people like these games? They feel like baby's first platformer; it's well-produced, but threadbare in terms of mechanical complexity. There's a vague Metroidvania-aspect to re-exploring levels you've already completed, but it lacks the simple mechanical joy that the best of those have. The characters don't really do anything for me either; I presume if you've been following these since the mid-90s you get something from their interactions, because personally I just find it kind of lame? The art is fantastic, and the game looks good in motion, but overall, it's just not for me.

17. For Honor – Steam – ★★★ – 2017

Until I started making this list, I had completely forgot that For Honor even existed. Remember this game? It's the one where you play as an assortment of medieval warriors assembled from across the globe to stab each other in 4-vs-4 3 rd person capture-the-point combat. It was OK, but the experience overall fell flat— largely because of an abundance of flaws peripheral to the core gameplay.

The basic combat and mechanics felt and worked well; the simple axis-based block-or-attack combat system enabled some truly awesome duels that really felt like you were in a melee. But while the combat worked quite well, there wasn't a whole lot going on around it to justify the overall experience. The campaign was functional, but it was clearly an afterthought, bereft of even characters. The multiplayer was fun, but severely hampered by a poor progression / unlock system, as well as bad matchmaking and server issues.

In another year, perhaps For Honor would have stood out more. If the game had received post-release support in the way Ubisoft's more Clancyesque titles, perhaps it'd have had longer legs. As is, I spent enough time with it to know that it was maybe worth coming back to once they had hammered out their online issues— something that never really happened. And then the rest of 2017 happened and put it in its proper place. Oops!

16. Picross S – Switch – ★★★ – 2017

Where Pictopix disappointed, Picross S is functional, acceptable Picross. It's far from the best Picross offering in this line (I think I had the most fun with Picross E3, and not just because of its dumb name), but it is Picross on the Nintendo Switch, which is basically all I was really wanting out of it. The loss of touch screen interactions from the 3DS release is bizarre (the Switch has a touch-screen my dudes!), but I can live with it.

15. Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment – Switch – ★★★ – 2017

It's been interesting to watch Yacht Club take the baseline premise of Shovel Knight— a retro-styled platformer shouting its Mega Man inspirations via megaphone to anyone who'll listen— and alter their execution with these different DLCs. Where the original Shovel Knight was a relatively straight-forward platformer (with Ducktales-inspired down-stab action), and Plague of Shadows was something of an odd build-your-own-shooter, Specter of Torment focuses instead on aerial combo-attacks. These changes really alter the gameplay; where the others could be a bit mindless at times (particularly Plague of Shadows, which was fairly easy given the number of projectiles you could throw across the whole screen), Specter of Torment is considerably more demanding of one's attention; you have to be more deliberate with your actions relying than relying on flow to get you through.

The design of the levels doesn't feel entirely there; while they certainly have been more redesigned than Plague of Shadows' were to fit the different style of movement, it just wasn't that fun to play through. Rooms were either too easy or too frustrating, with little in the way of a middle ground. The boss fights were trivially easy (which is dire in a game aping a series that largely relied on the quality of its emblematic show-downs). The plot was… fine? It certainly was a Shovel Knight prequel alright, that's for sure. At this point, I must imagine Yacht Club and I are both on the page on wanting see them work on something else at this point. They've proven themselves to be extremely competent developers, but it's time to put Shovel Knight to rest; they've gotten about as much blood as they can out of that particular stone.

14. Mario Kart 8 DX – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017-ish

OK, seriously Nintendo— when are you going to make a new F-Zero? Don't you give me this bullshit about “Why would you want a new F-Zero when we've already done it before!” when you keep making new Mario Karts with little different beyond the platform you put it on. All Mario Kart 8 DX did was pack-in all the DLC and add a true battle mode— which is great and all, don't get me wrong. It's just a sign that your excuses suck and you need to fund a new Captain Falcon vehicle-vehicle ASAP.

13. Player Unknown's Battlegrounds – Steam – ★★★★ –– 2017

I want to like Plunkbat more than I do, but I don't. What's there that's good is great; the open-world mix of random-luck and skill-based shooting (especially with friends!) is a real hoot, particularly when one is either taking it entirely too seriously or entirely not seriously at all.

But something about the game just feels… incomplete? Despite leaving early access, it really has a lot of work that it should be still getting. The physics is jank (the vehicles annoy me to no end), there's still absolutely 0 tutorializing for new players, and the problem with persistent hacking and aimbotting has been dire as of late. There's also something to the notion that a lot of the skill in the game comes down less to polished learning of the mechanics and their interactions and more a sort of base memorization of Plunkbat Best Practices. That's not innately a bad thing, but I personally find these sorts of experiences better when they're focused more towards tactical mastery than strategic mastery. Both are important in Plunkbat, but I prefer mastering the former over the latter. The game seems to disagree. I feel like the quality of my gear should be less important than how good I am at using what I find. That is not the case. Oh well.

I'm looking forward to putting more time into this with buds in the future, but I've fallen off the wagon as far as general enthusiasm goes. Eh!

Prison Architect – Steam – ★★★★ – 2015

Prison Architect is sort of a highly-specialized, more accessible Dwarf Fortress. Much of the appeal of Dwarf Fortress is the immersive unpredictability of managing emergent personalities trying to go about their tasks, and ultimately, it's so complex that an ASCII-based rendering is the only way to handle it all. Prison Architect constrains the variability by its very nature (the things people do in a prison are typically well-regulated, and there's not a lot of agency within those bounds), resulting in an experience that is nowhere as impenetrable as Dwarf Fortress— but also nowhere as appealing.

There's just not as much going on when you get down to it; while there's certainly variability in prisoner personality and actions, there are just so fewer variables in terms of what someone can do and interact with. Plus, given your funding regimen and in-take are totally under your control, the actual form your prison takes doesn't need to vary; you're not incentivized to innovate beyond a desire to keep things interesting. You can just your layouts entirely towards efficiency and nothing else, and even then, there's no real end-game to it beyond making numbers get bigger.

Mini Metro – Android – ★★★★– 2015

Mini Metro is a slight mobile puzzle experience, but it is quite engrossing while it lasts. The pairing of simple mechanics and style works very well on the phone. You make subway lines connecting points. It looks like a subway map. It's pretty good.

Total War: Warhammer – Steam – ★★★★ – 2016

I've always been vaguely interested in the Total War games— just never enough to go out of my way to actually, y'know, play them. Warhammer Fantasy has never been my thing, but I like fantasy things in general, and the idea of applying battle tactics to lines of zombies was appealing enough for me to give this a look. Overall, it turns out I enjoy the tactical depth of Total War!

I'm not sure how I feel about the strategic-layer in the few factions I played—it's a bit micromanage-y, and any faction managing to sneak its way to the back-end of your empire becomes a real chore-- but the tactical level is very good. The interplay of artillery, cavalry, and troops-of-the-line is realistic enough to where you can apply real-world know-how and be rewarded for it. The types of troops are massively varied, both inside and outside of the factions. I was mostly drawn to this game by the monster-y factions, so those were the ones I played most.

I'm looking forward to checking out Total War: Warhammer II... eventually?

12. Sonic Mania – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017

Sonic is bad. If you add up the total of what Sonic has been over the last two decades and average it out over the amount of games he has had the misfortune to appear in, the average Sonic is hardly deserving of the fawning devotion he receives. Those first few mainline Sonics were good, no question—but that was over two decades ago. SEGA has never succeeded in recreating the feel of those games—even when they have ostensibly tried.

Thankfully for them (and us), there are those that can succeed. Sonic Mania, created by long-time Sonic fans and hackers, perfectly captures the feel of those first three games almost too well. It's basically Sonic 1-3+K+CD, warts and all. The Sonic CD-based stages in particular carry on Sonic CD's design of being too long and really fucking annoying, which is rather indicative of the ethos of Whitehead towards recreating the feel of the older titles. I'm very curious to see if they'll be given permission to do a Sonic Mania II, where they'll perhaps have a chance to innovate more and burn off those warts. I'm not sure if they would, but I certainly hope they do. Sonic deserves better than, well, Sonic.

Stellaris: Utopia & Stellaris: Synthetic Dawn – Steam – ★★★★– 2017

This is technically a 2017 release, but it's so miniscule an addition to the existing Stellaris that it's not worthy of a numbered ranking. Stellaris in 2017 is a lot like Stellaris in 2016, but better. The addition of end-game specializations, new government-types, and the ability to play as both hive minds and robots are extremely good, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. That's the Paradox model, I suppose; they'll continue iterating and adding onto Stellaris over the next half decade until it finally achieves some near-ideal state—or the engine buckles under all they're trying to do with it. One of the two.

My favorite Stellaris moment this year must be the creation of "The Borth Problem". The Borth are a race of space Hyper-Platypuses, whose traits were specially selected by their creator (me) to be absolutely trash. They're short-lived, xenophobic pacifists who hate being around each other almost as much as they hate being around everyone else. I force them to spawn as one of the empires in every game I play-- not because they're particularly threatening, but because watching them repeatedly balkanize every two months under the strain of their own ineptitude and malfeasance is extremely good. Occasionally some fool attempts to annex Borth planets, which is a tragedy in and of itself.

11. Tekken 7 – Steam – ★★★★ – 2017

God am I terrible at fighting games. I've just never put in the time to get any good, and I'm way too prone to mashing out moves I think are cool than learning combos or hit-strings. God do I love fighting games though— and Tekken 7 is a good one. It is a Tekken game through-and-through, but the additions they've made to the cast have been good, and the limb-specific combat system continues to hold up after all these years.

To be completely honest? I've been playing mostly as Eliza—whose special strings are just Street Fighter entry strings. She's basically Ryu if he was in a bustier (and a sleepy Dracula). It's allowed me to get past the hump of learning how to pull-off her specials, though it's done little to actually get me good at stringing combos together. It's still a lot of fun though.

10. Puyo-Puyo Tetris – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017

IT'S PUYO PUYO AND TETRIS, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions – PSP – ★★★★ – 2007

Coming to Final Fantasy Tactics two decades on from its initial release on the PlayStation, one can still understand the appeal. The tactical RPG system has phenomenal mechanical depth, supporting wide-ranging customization and gameplay specialization. There's lots of weird systems to learn and exploit. The setting is austere and grounded in a way that few RPGs are; the story it tells is ultimately yet another Japanese tale of man-killing-god, but the way that it's presented is more about fighting back again the abuse of systems by society, and the futility of one man trying to change the world.

At the same time, two decades have passed since Final Fantastic Tactics came out, and it honestly has not aged superbly well. The controls are bizarre, its job system is rather annoying in practice, it suffers from the usual problem games with permadeath carry where the second a character joins the party and becomes non-essential, their relevance to the story ends. The story which was apparently once so astounding seems almost quaint now; “Organized religion… may be bad!” is far from a hot take in these days, and there have since been hundreds of other games (JRPGs, even) playing in the same sandbox.

As someone introduced to the Ivalice setting of Final Fantasy through Final Fantasy XII, it's also somewhat strange looking back at this series and trying to conceive of them as some connected timeline. A lot of what I liked about Final Fantasy XII was its diverse races and their cosmopolitan associations and interactions. Tactics has even less than none of that. It goes out of its way say with a ringing finality “AND EVERYTHING NOT HUMAN OR DEMON WENT EXTINCT, THE END.” Pour one out for my Ban'gaa homies, I guess??

I had fun with Final Fantasy Tactics, but I suspect I may have had a miserable time if I didn't have a friend warning me of points-of-no-return and making sure I didn't build myself into an unwinnable state. Also: exposing me to the utterly broken arithmetic / mathematics magic system, good lord.

9. Splatoon 2 – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017

Splatoon was a good game; Splatoon 2 is that same game, on a different platform.

The additions made to Splatoon 2 are really quite minor; there's some slightly different weapons, and the campaign is denser, but all in all it's just the same good game. The only meaningful addition to Splatoon 2 is Salmon Run, Nintendo's take on the cooperative Horde mode. And you know what? Salmon Run fucking rules. My best multiplayer experiences this year were playing Salmon Run with my boys on Discord. If it were more reliably available, I'd probably have played it more!

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8. What Remains of Edith Finch – Steam – ★★★★ – 2017

The latest in the Walking Simulator genre, What Remains of Edith Finch is low on the interactivity, but high on the graphical fidelity, atmosphere, and emotional heft. Sometimes that emotional heft veers into the realm to over-sentimental schmaltz (the ending engendered some real roll-eye), but it doesn't diminish the overall experience. What interactivity that is there is quite good, and it all-in-all made for a great evening experience. I like these sorts of evening-games where you can plop down for 4 hours and just have a nice, self-contained emotional experience.

7. Metroid: Samus Returns – 3DS – ★★★★ – 2017

Maaan, it's good to see Samus in a properly ass good video game again. Other M was bullshit that I wasn't down with at all; this is some proper Metroid-ass Metroid. While there's perhaps still a bit too much Metroid 2 in there (the game is remarkably linear for a “Metroidvania” and the area design is a bit one-note – befitting its Gameboy origins), Metroid: Samus Returns is a very excellent proof of concept that yes, you can make a good Metroid in 2017.

It's also proof that even if we can no longer trust the franchise to Sakamoto's hands without him ruining everything and throwing a tantrum about Prime, others are capable of doing what's necessary to ensure that Samus remains a galactic badass and not Sakamoto's weaponized nadeshiko. Uugh.

As an aside: The references back to the Prime Trilogy, as well as the REALLY WELL-HIDDEN sequel-hook, are extremely good and appreciated. I am pumped to see what Mercury Stream (or someone else!) does with Metroid moving forward. Is that sequel hook actually a Metroid Prime 4 hook? That'd be cool as hell.

6. SteamWorld Dig 2 – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017

SteamWorld Dig was a relaxing, though ultimately rather forgettable take of what would happen if you crossed Metroidvania with Mr. Driller. SteamWorld Dig 2 would be the same, if it wasn't for the fact that it's just so god damned well-polished. Everything about it from the core gameplay feel, the movement, the digging speed, the music— they're just so damn well executed. The game world is just a delight to be in.

The story and ending are disappointing (as legally required of every SteamWorld game) but that's not really the point; this is absolutely a game where it's absolutely about the journey rather than the destination. When your journey revolves around such a fundamentally satisfying gameplay loop, the greatest sin it has is ending in the first place.

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HITMAN – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2016

HITMAN is good! IO Interactive has created the ultimate encapsulation of the Hitman formula. The game is built to encourage replay and iteration on the game's limited number of maps. This is great, because replaying missions to achieve the perfect murder is a real joy. HITMAN is a game about perfecting the art of playing it: learning the systems, the maps, and the routines of people to the point where you see the clockwork that everyone else is beholden to— so that you can slide between the cogs like a bald, sardonic time-ghost. The game is grimly hilarious and cool in equal measures. I can't wait to see what they do with Season 2.

Stardew Valley – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2016

Stardew Valley is a celebration of the routine. While so many games are about providing novel experiences and spectacles to keep our interest, Stardew Valley enables you to a build a routine, iterating and adapting as the world twists and turns around it. It's about riding a slowly swelling wave while maintaining flow; your farm and experience gets more and more complicated as the seasons go on, but it's always at your own pace; there's no real stakes beyond a desire to prosper and discover. It's charming and addicting in equal measures.

I'm glad they stopped development on it to focus on porting it to new platforms, because I'm pretty sure they'd have honest to god killed people with it. It turns out the cup-and-ball game from that Next Generation episode is actually a game about pleasing your peepaws' ghost by growing corn and hooking up with the goth chick down the lane. You're welcome, peepaw.

Valkyria Chronicles – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2016

Man, SEGA used to make brilliant RPGs back in the day, huh? I really liked Skies of Arcadia, and this is another RPG in that vein from that era. You wouldn't think “fantasy World War II European Front through the lens of Japanese RPG developers” would work, but… it does! They manage to evoke some genuine ethos, and their depiction of the brutality and horror of war, the in-grained senselessness of inherited discriminatory beliefs, are actually pretty OK. You'd think “We're going to depict ANIME FANTASY HOLOCAUST” would be the Worst Thing Ever, but they manage to thread that line enough to make it work… mostly.

Perhaps the craziest thing about Valkyria Chronicles though is that they somehow managed to make a tactical JRPG about trench / tank warfare not only work, but work well. While it's kind of breakable in areas and has balance issues, it managed to hold my interest through the dozens of hours without getting bored. I wasn't invested enough to do much in the way of the extra / repeatable missions, but I thoroughly enjoyed the combat for what I played.

That all said, Valkyria Chronicles could have done with less anime all around. If you turned that anime dial down a good 20%, this would have been a vastly superior work— perhaps even an all-time great. Unfortunately, its tendency towards Anime-ass composition and design, and some frankly juvenile characterization means it will forever carry that stigma of “it is very anime” that prevents it from penetrating into less anime-immune audiences. Still, for those willing to give it a shot and endure some really ham-fisted anime-as-all-hell ruminations on peace, Valkyria Chronicles is a real gem.

5. Super Mario Odyssey – Switch – ★★★★★ – 2017

The single thing that has defined Mario since the halcyon ape-threatening days to his hat-tossing present has been his movement. Over the years, the movements available to “Jump Man” have become more varied and complex, but they still harken back to what set him apart in the beginning: it's all about the jump. Mario Odyssey, while ostensibly about his more obvious hat-trick, is in reality just another stage of the gradual, ever-evolving repertoire of Mario's jump. He just… jumps so damn good y'all. It feels real damn good to run around and jump on shit as Mario. The hat even makes it so he can basically jump in the air, it's ridiculous.

Mario's new ups are made even better Mario Odyssey's excellent collections of worlds for him to mark with his kicks. The sheer variety and volume of unique platforming experiences is great, and it's ultimately up to you how deep you're willing to take it. Mario is something of a casual completionist's nightmare, given just how many stars there are to find. But for those willing to take a step back, the game allows you to engage it just as much you'd want. You could work on polishing your platforming skills to where you easily master the Darker Side of the Moon, you could just play enough of the game after “beating” it to get your fill, or you could just play what's needed to get to the credits. If you're a complete mad-person, you could try even collecting all those stars. All are valid end-points, and no matter what the experience is a complete and quality one.

Some one-off thoughts:

The new enemy designs in the game are so good. A particular shout-out to the Oni Thwomp!

THERE IS A BOSS WHOSE NAME IS “Brigadier Mollosque-Lanceur III, Dauphin of Bubblaine”, FUCK

Steam Garden's God Hand surf rock theme music is so good

The entire end-game sequence leading into the post-game zone was one of the most surreal things ever

NEW DONK CITY

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4. Cuphead – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2017

Cuphead is a magic trick. At first glance, it seems impossible, like an actual sorcerer has walked in and done something impossible. “There's no way anyone could recreate the style of Fleischer-era cartoons and make a genuinely good video game!” Like any magic trick, once you look at it long enough the magic goes away, and you see it for what it is. You see the sleight of hand, the smoke and mirrors required to resurrect a nearly century-old style and make it work in what should be a wholly incompatible medium. But the skills required to pull that trick off, and that such a small studio accomplished it, is itself a feat worthy of a wizard with a sizeable beard. It's not perfect, but it's as damn close as any person could ever expect to see, really. The game looks, sounds, and plays damn good.

It's been funny following the discourse around Cuphead's gameplay, particularly the reaction to its difficulty. It's nowhere near as hard as people make it out to be; it's got a lot in common with bullet-hell shooters like the Touhou games, to be sure, but the difficulty about those games, like Cuphead, are more about learning how to play them right than anything particular crazy about most of the challenges they put in front of you. Once you learn how to precisely move the character, you can basically relinquish yourself to the flow state and soldier through pretty much everything (within reason). Cuphead's real trick in this regard is that the types of things going on screen look so fucking cool that it can pull you out of the flow through sheer wow-factor. It's a game that is harder because it looks so good. Unreal.

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3. Pyre – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2017

The cruel hands of mother nature have evolved Supergiant Games into the perfect predator of my species. Their approach to writing characters, stories, and music is such that whenever they release one of their games, they burrow a tendril into my brain and maneuver my zombified body into a hole so they can lay eggs in my chest cavity. I'd feel more broken up about how they play me like an acoustic guitar if they weren't so, y'know, good at playing acoustic guitars.

Ostensibly, Pyre is NBA Jam meets Oregon Trail meets a Visual Novel, but it's so much more than that. It's the archeology of uncovering the history of a world through half-heard conversations and vaguely-written reminiscences. It's the trepidation of holding the fate of friends in your hands and knowing that you can't save them all in the end, and still having to choose. It's the struggle for glorious revolution, even though the odds of a bloodless one is low. It's all these things. You plot the end of an empire with a pipe-smoking treeman in between games of mystic slamball with a mustachioed dog. Everything about how it carries itself and presents its world resonated deeply with me and held me enraptured to the very end.

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2. NieR: Automata – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2017

I've spent a lot of the last year thinking about Nier: Automata. At this point, I'm not even sure what to say about it. Do I talk about the questions it raises about humanity and what we may leave behind? Do I talk about its astounding visual and audio design? Do I go on a long aside on Yoko Taro's writing and directorial style? They're all valid things to talk about, but they're also all meaningless. They're only important in how they made me feel over the course of my journey with Nier. Intrigued, lost, depressed, uplifted. Nier: Automata invoked all these emotions in me in turn.

In the end, I'm left somewhat in awe of the experience. Not because Nier is a perfect game; it's a very flawed one. But it's a game that's really made me feel and think. Yoko Taro weaves the threads of narrative, emotion, and atmosphere with the deftest of hands. So what if the loom he was forced to work with wasn't a particularly good one? Nier: Automata is one of the most complete explorations of the nature of humanity and how impossible it is to grasp. I imagine I will carry thoughts of it with me forever.

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1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Switch – ★★★★★★ – 2017

Breath of the Wild is my favorite video game of all time. Thanks, Nintendo.

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#game of the year #2017 #nonfiction #think piece #breath of the wild #nier #pyre #cuphead #mario odyssey #valkyria chronicles #final fantasy tactics #hitman #steamworld dig 2 #stardew valley #Stellaris

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