SAVE / LOAD / RESTORE

So, I’m a couple of weeks late to this truly repulsive piece of “news,” but feel compelled, as a female gamer, to weigh in on it.

Anita Sarkeesian did a Kickstarter campaign to do research on female video game tropes. She asked for $6,000 and ended with close to $160,000. As Helen Lewis emphasizes in the linked article, Kickstarter is a totally voluntary thing. You VOLUNTEER to back projects that you believe in. There are all kinds of different projects on it. I have a friend who’s launching an erotic comics anthology, and friends who have launched fantastically successful campaigns for magazines, game proposals and toys.

In response to Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter, a small slice of the internet - and I stress this is definitely a minority here - went bananas. Anonymous memes/pics/cartoons appeared, featuring Sarkeesian being brutally raped. One sad little cocktail sausage from Canada, a guy named Ben Spurr, created a game that allows the player to punch Anita Sarkeesian’s face until it’s bruised and bloody and totally unrecognizable. He claims that it was merely to GET HER ATTENTION and prove a point. Spurr wrote:

Anita Sarkeesian has not only scammed thousands of people out of over $160,000, but also uses the excuse that she is a woman to get away with whatever she damn well pleases. Any form of constructive criticism, even from fellow women, is either ignored or labelled to be sexist against her.

She claims to want gender equality in video games, but in reality, she just wants to use the fact that she was born with a vagina to get free money and sympathy from everyone who crosses her path.

Apparently this is what it takes to get a full-fledged feature on gaming in the New York Times, which touched on Sarkeesian’s cyberbullying (which, to me, somehow doesn’t even seem adequate enough to describe what’s going on).

I’ve loved and played video games for the past 20 years of my life. I’ve never seen the kind of vitriol and rage launched against this poor woman. Yes, there is sexism in the gaming industry, and the gaming community. As an online gamer, I know what to expect from trade chat regulars and trolls. The people behind the screen may not fecklessly spout sexist, racist bullshit to their real life peers, but their gaming personas do. I know some wonderful people who can say some truly fucked-up things in games that they’d never normally say.

It’s a weird, inexcusable behavioral dichotomy that I’ve always found fascinating. I’m not sure which theory this is (spiral of silence or whatnot) but obviously has something to do with avatars and relative anonymity and the sense of fantasy you get playing a game.

What I’m trying to say is - trolling is something one should expect from the gaming community. People say shitty things and laugh about them, but they’re mostly harmless if you’re smart enough to ignore them.

Now, in the case of Ben Spurr (see tweet above), all of that goes out the window. This guy is a bottom-feeding dick. He claims he made the game to get her attention. He never explicates what exactly pisses him off so much about her project - and mind you, the research/project is obviously still in the works. What he’s gone and done is given Sarkeesian the best kind of ammo she could have hoped for. I hope she’s got steel balls and will take advantage of this moron and incorporate this into her research. Look at the support on her Kickstarter and tell me I’m wrong.

Really dipshit? I bet you say that to all the girls. I wonder what the females in his life think of him. In all seriousness, I hope they punch him in the face. With tasers.

Posted a quick link to this last week but I’m stuck in O’Hare waiting on an increasingly delayed plane, without access to a smoking room, so INTERNET HO!

Curiosity is going to be a MMO featuring a huge opaque black cube that players can chip away at with a virtual chisel. The default chisel provided is valued at something like 59 pence (what is that, 5 chickens? no seriously, like a buck?) and does a terribly slow and arduous job at cracking the cube. Or…you could splurge and buy a fancier chisel - there’s a whole range, with the fanciest extra-shiniest being a diamond chisel that costs 500,000 pounds. It’s 100,000 times more powerful than the standard default chisel, but it’ll cost you. Cold. Hard. Cash.

Molyneux wants to find out who’s willing to pay 500,000 quid to reveal the secret surprise inside the cube. In a friend’s words, this is a game of “who’s the idiot?” and it’s going to be hilarious. There’s no better surprise than disappointment. I imagine it’ll feel a little worse than my dad on Christmas; he used to tell me that Santa liked beer more than milk, but I didn’t believe him. Santa never got beer.

What I’m more interested in is the fact that Molyneux plans to unveil 21 other little game-experiments after this one. I don’t know how many iterations of “who’s the idiot” one can make without losing the novelty. I’m already prepped to roll my eyes at the result. All of this is supposed to be R&D leading up to a new game he’s developing, but I’m pretty sure that by the time he gets done with the 22nd mini-game, there’s going to be an epic backlash against what would otherwise be a somewhat interesting experiment.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the face of the ultimate troll. Respect.

“After a certain number of taps, the cube will open, revealing something “truly amazing, absolutely unique” to the player who performed the final hit. And that’s the key – the more expensive your chisel, the more likely you are to see the money shot.

“There’s only one black cube in the whole world, and everybody who’s tapping and chipping and sculpting away at this cube is trying to find out what is in the middle. I’m not going to tell anyone,” Peter promised Edge.

Peter is most looking forward to discovering how/when/if that player divulges the secret. “We will rely entirely on social media,” he explains. “How will this person prove it? That in itself becomes a fascinating aspect of this experiment.”

Finding rich people stuck on social media, willing to spend money on useless intangible bullshit? EEEEASY.

A couple of cube-surprise predictions:

1. Austin Powers

2. $10 iTunes gift card

3. An overly elaborate rickroll

4. Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed head

5. Nothing (…that would be too easy)

“Radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment.” - I can get behind that. Molleindustria is an Italian “guerrilla game” developer that offers players the chance to address social indifference based on real-life situations. It’s actually a lot more interesting than it sounds. Their name game “Unmanned” is basically a day in the life of an unmanned drone pilot, which includes mundane activities like shaving without cutting yourself, dealing with your wife, etc. There’s a game on religious hate, oil politics, “Run Jesus Run,” Catholic church issues, “Tampatico” (which I’m assuming is a jab at the old Tamagotchi craze), and best of all, MCDONALDS: THE VIDEO GAME which totally reminds me of the Monolith Burger mechanics (which I will continue to bring up at every available opportunity) in Space Quest.

It’s been a while since I posted some original content on here, this being Tumblr and all (original content? what is that?), but once in a while something really big happens that compels me to log in and pretend I’m still a quasi-active blogger. (note: scroll down for the TL;DR version)

1. SPACE QUEST IS COMING BACK! This is the game series that got me into gaming (well, closely tied with King’s Quest). It probably won’t be named SQ, but The Two Guys from Andromeda are working on a new game. In terms of what got me started down the path to chronic carpal tunnel syndrome, this game had everything - humor, dialogue, iconic characters, endlessly repeatable gameplay. I made the shit out of those Monolith Burgers. Roger Wilco was a fantastic role model for 11-year-old me. These guys had the Midas touch for memorable world-building and exactly how comic timing, hapless satire and sarcasm should be used in a game. If I wasn’t working on a stupid Mac half the time I would be glued to my laptop wearing a Super Depends and drinking out of a Camelbak. Please, please please, CHECK OUT THEIR KICKSTARTER here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spaceventure/two-guys-spaceventure-by-the-creators-of-space-que

If you haven’t heard of Space Quest, then YOU SHOULD FIND OUT MORE ABOUT IT.

2. DIABLO 3 is coming out next week.

Pretty sure I will be doing the adult diapers/Camelbak deal next week. Some of the more “adult” “civilized” people (you guys are lame anyway) who are unaware of my gaming proclivity can’t understand why I want to squat in a dark room for hours on end clicking and raging, but it’s in my blood. On the outside, I am a semi-normal functioning adult. On the inside I’m still twelve. I played the original legit shit when I was 11, and I’ll be damned if I don’t regress into an Altered States blob when this giant timesuck hits the fan (William Hurt looks better than I would).

The only difference here is that Blizzard is a giant money machine, so I have no need to compel you to buy D3.

Space Quest (or whatever it’ll end up being called), on the other hand, is a wholly independently-financed venture.

TL;DR version:

BUY SPACE QUEST, CAN’T WAIT FOR DIABLO 3.

Space Quest yes, D3 no.

Summary is in the title: “fuck forever and never die.” I don’t see why this needs more thought. This is the pinnacle of editorial writing simply because of the creation and use of the word “fuckfully.” That is all.

Man, from a writer’s perspective, I want to get my paws on this (hint: boyfriend, if you’re reading this…:3)

You have my attention. Seriously though, am I the only person who misses playing that trivia dungeon thing in the old Encarta 98?

Ruh roh, $_$

Citing “uncovered information” from unnamed sources, the tech blog says that Valve is developing a platform for low-cost, micro-sized PCs that would offer access to Steam’s vast library of games, but in a streamlined console-style experience. It’s possible that Valve be producing a Steam Box of its own, but other manufacturers will also be able to develop hardware for the platform.

The report claims that baseline models will have an Intel Core i7 CPU, NVIDIA GPU and 8GBs of RAM, such as the Alienware X51, which may have been designed to be a Steam Box-capable device.

“Hatoful Kareshi [J] (hato=dove, kareshi=boyfriend so it is a word play of “full of pigeons boyfriend” and “heartful boyfriend”) is a Japanese style text-and-image virtual school dating game for girls, except all of your school love-life targets are pigeons.”

OH MY GOD WHAT MORE COULD I POSSIBLY ADD TO THIS *brain explodes*