Noted, I didn’t even know she existed. What are some good articles she wrote for IGN that you’d recommend?

I don’t expect IGN to keep anyone on the writing team but it’s good to know good authors.

My bet is: you can’t reliably fire unionised workers, so you make them want to quit instead.

The IGN newsroom is a joke, name one reputable journalist you are SURE works there without checking first, and I’ll be genuinely surprised, the only value is in the brandname, their coverage can probably be replaced by some LLM horseshit with nobody really noticing.

The higher ups know it, the journos know it (hence why they unionised) and thus they’re at an impasse.

Once they inevitably lose this standoff they’ll be replaced by third-worlder english speakers with chatgpt, mark my words.

A bunch of Skadis custom hooks and holders. Most involved ones were a paper towel roll holder and a magnetic file rack for some Stanley metal files.

People aren’t exactly ranting about how Winston (a Gorilla) isn’t sexually attractive

Well that’s for 2 reasons:

1. He’s a single character, the vast majority of characters in any successful piece of media are at least somewhat appealing, and this stands true for OW.
2. Winston is a stud

demonizing queer repsentation as ugly.

They’re not, they’re specifically saying Concord’s character design is ugly for a lot of very practical and valid reasons, and also it’s only representing a very specific minority of people who are a spit in the bucket of the total audience numbers necessary to support a paid live service title.

So it’s both doing a disservice to itself by just being incompetently made AND playing into the stereotype that minority rep always ends up ugly (an already very common sentiment due to how often cases of it sucking are spotlit) because it has basically nothing but that.

Ironically had Concord had a more actually diverse cast, and not overwhelmingly represented a handful of pet groups the designers seemed to overwhelmingly favour, it would have not been possible to attack it as “they’re all lame fat and/or gay.”

It still would have tanked, so on balance not much of an issue, but still.

You absolutely can. Something bad and uninteresting is not an improvement on something mediocre and uninteresting.

You don’t get points for the jump if you shatter both your knees on the landing and the kneecaps fly out into the stands killing one of the hotdog vendors.

There’s something deeply funny to me that the same political side that demands representation for everyone in everything is then stunned to know that if EVERY character doesn’t represent something the typical audience likes/wants to see that audience will go elsewhere.

This is not rocket science, and it’s such a deeply american problem it’s honestly hilarious and frustrating at the same time with your culture’s obsession with moralizing media consumption and production only somehow ever registering one way.

If your game’s characters look lame, uninteresting, and nothing like most people would want to be, nobody’s gonna buy it. It’s that simple.

Progressives keep banging on about how people need to be represented to want to partake in a piece of media,* then when a piece of media that represents exclusively stereotypical members of a portland polycule shows up people are surprised if it’s played exclusively by some polyamorous portlanders (not even all of them if you look at the stats).

* which is yet more horseshit america-centrism, the rest of the world is used to not being represented in most media we see since americans make most of it, and i’d rather laminate my own testicles than subject myself at an earnest attempt from an american at representing my demo.

Furthermore:

Overwatch is super diverse, but all their characters (yes, even the fucking gorilla, Winston is handsome as fuck and he passes the harkness test) look appealing.

Their bodies look well proportioned, even Roadhog who is a morbidly obese alcoholic with visible cirrhosis looks more visually appealing than any concord character, because even he looks like an idealised and larger than life (pun very intended) version of a morbidly obese alcoholic.

Meanwhile concord characters look like frumpy cosplayers that wouldn’t qualify for 3rd place at a backwater anime con somewhere in whatever US state has the worst inbreeding rates.

Your example with DRG is very fitting as well because I don’t think most people would call those characters sexually attractive (but trust me, some absolutely do), but they are extremely visually appealing. Bold recognizable shapes that fit their roles, good color combinations, fun presentations.

Concord looks like it’s about to scold you for microaggressing someone, DRG looks like it’s about to attempt to burp another country’s national anthem it hasn’t even heard before.

DRG oozes goliardic fun, while Concord looks and feels like the used dishrag at the bar where that team’s art director will end up working if there is any justice in the world.

ETA: two words, punctuation

Baldur’s Gate got them all, sorry.

I’m sure the fact that Ghibli movies and BotW are best-in-class examples of their respective mediums has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

Looking forward to the metric shittons of open world ghibli knock-off garbage being currently greenlit by frothing execs hoping they have at last found the blueprints to the dopamine machine.

Stop Killing Games can focus on other industry problems later when it has established more of a presence.

Or just not? SKG is a consumer rights and art preservation movement, not a labor rights movement.

None of the people who signed up for SKG should expect it to pivot to something else once the stated goal is achieved, and especially not to legitimise itself as an organisation beyond its stated mission off the back of the support for it.

I guarantee you without a shadow of a doubt that a “Stop firing devs” would not have gone anywhere close to this level of support.

Moreover, it’s basically impossible to unionize any kind of digital asset production work, because with modern internet connections locations are a non-issue, and you can’t unionize across vastly different countries and economies.

Too many people are willing to work in games while being paid breadcrumbs to even make a union possible, even without the outsourcing issue, and frankly if you are that willing to get fucked why should anyone stand in your way?

Lol no.

If you want workers’ rights get your own movement started, you don’t get to come shit up the initiative others have set up for an entirely different purpose.

I got it, it was just a funny slip in a conversation about mixing up player and character roles/feelings.

Yeah no that sounds like a messy person being messy, at least in my circles “bleed” is more like when your character grieves and you feel a pang along with them, or when they’re moved by an event or angry at a character and you get the same physiologic responses, not throwing a tantrum at the players for their in game actions.

Then again you did say they physically stopped the player so maybe they’re not the only person whose lines are a bit blurred.

Dragon age 2, Mass effect 3

ME3 is particularly bad cause most of the game is exactly as it should have been, and then the ending is pure unadulterated trash.

MC and Visa are not technically payment processors, that would be stuff like stripe or ayden.

The problem is that cc companies have rules that put the onus of ensuring nothing illegal is purchased with their issued cards on the ones actually meditating the transaction, so it becomes a chilling effect because the intermediaries don’t want to risk burning a bridge with the largest cc networks in the world, and overcorrect as a result.

I don’t know if he genuinely didn’t understand or if he was too embarrassed to admit to a mistake

Worse, he actively lied. In his edited video about the petition he actively misrepresents the initiative, then goes on to edit out the the part of Ross’ video that would have contradicted his misrepresentation.

This is not an innocent or negligent mistake on Thor’s part, it’s an active attempt at burial.

As a liberal, and an Italian: yes, cause every coffee prep method that isn’t espresso fucking sucks.

And I guess replicators can make espresso too.

And mokas burn more than they cook.

However much is intentionally inflammatory controlled opposition, it will never catch up to the work of people like Dworkin, Solanas, or more recently Julie Bindel.

There are plenty of established, respected feminists, who you could never in a million years claim are a psyop, whose work is taught in academia on a regular basis and whose contents would immediately get me banned off of most social media platforms if I were to swap the genders they’re talking about and post an excerpt.

And this is just the theory aspect.

Let’s not forget the revolutionary additions to the legislative side of things like the primary caregiver standard, or the Duluth model for domestic violence.

There is a reason “feminism” is not called “egalitarianism”.

Yes more modern waves have put some token effort into at least presenting a path for men to improve their lot in society, but let’s be real, conservatives do that for women too, it’s hardly in good faith and it’s fundamentally useless because the focus of the ideology isn’t to improve the lot of everyone.

It can’t be, because it starts from the presupposition that men’s lot is the best lot, and women’s needs to catch up to men’s.

Even when it nominally factors in facts like men being expected to put themselves in harm’s way and die for society it also handily blames men for making the choices that, for instance, lead to war, and it implies that therefore it’s not as important because the fact that the person sitting at a desk sending men to get shot on the front lines also happens to have a penis somehow makes it less problematic.

So yeah, there’s plenty to criticise.

Feminism has some very valid complaints, hell, a lot even, but there’s also a shitton of reasons why your average man can look at your typical feminist and ask himself “why the fuck would I ever side with you?”

Person who does not care about a topic

No reaction

Person who cares

Strong reaction

No way!

Oh for sure, but the reason i invoked those two specifically is that they’re very similar outside of their approach to aesthetics, and that they came out at a time when looking for fidelity over having a real art style was becoming a possibility.