#Video game criticism

[chronicles-of-oz]

A 6-hour Lies of P Analysis

Heya!

I’m Fairdy and for the past couple of months I’ve been working on a longform Lies of P analysis and critique video. If you’re interested in retrospectives or video essays like this and are interested in Lies of P, it’s mechanics and story, then I invite you to watch my first project!!

[hellyeahheroes]

I Want Shorter Games With Worse Graphics by Lextorias

[kaile-hultner]

I finally finished my 18-month-long critical deep-dive into Umurangi Generation, a game I fully believe is the best game of the decade already. 

[breakingarrows]

Replaying BioShock 2

When thinking of BioShock 2 I often lump it with the black sheeps of gaming, the sequels that had to follow up on a video game that was immediately regarded as one of the greatest of all time, and as the maligned entry that is secretly the best of the series. The Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, the Far Cry 2, the Grand Theft Auto IV, the Max Payne 3 games of video game canon. Games that often received reevaluation after the hype cycle had undergone its course and reached the point in time in which a game originally rejected and ridiculed by video game consumerists and forum posters becomes heralded[a] as “Good, Actually.” One game I don’t think has fully received its due recompense is BioShock 2. I first played through BioShock 2 in December of 2012 and it was then and there that I knew that BioShock 2 was Good, Actually.

The announcement of BioShock 2 in late March of 2008 was met with a lot of bewilderment. Commentators stated, “BioShock is the game I've enjoyed most in years. I can't see a sequel coming close to matching it but here's hoping anyway.” Sarcastically, “That's exactly what BioShock needed! A sequel!” “I just don't think the game lends itself to a sequel is all. A prequel could be good though.” “I loved BioShock but I can't think of anything I want in a sequel. They'd have to do something totally different.” “If it's not a prequel, don't bother.” “I don't really understand what they can do with a sequel. The story was nicely wrapped up, and the combat/research system will be hard to improve upon.” “If Ken's team isn't involved. No thanks!” “This is like Titanic getting a sequel. Either take the story in a completely different direction not involving Rapture, or a prequel.” Not every commentator was as dour and skeptical, though those that were had every right to be. BioShock was immediately hailed as a work of art after its release in August of 2007, and Take Two was now seemingly attempting to repeat the success with yet another BioShock game created separately from the original team.

Release day reception was mixed to positive. Surprisingly, a lot of posts were spent talking about the multiplayer component, something you can still hypothetically play today, but I will be ignoring. A general consensus was that BioShock 2 was an adequate-to-good followup to the seminal title that was BioShock. “If I had to give it a score, it'd probably land somewhere right around a 7. It's a fun game that gets a lot better the more you play it, but it's lost a bit of the magic of the original's unexpectedness and allure.” Some felt a little more aghast. “just finished it and can't remember any worthwhile level of this game... I'm on tears [sic], this is easily my biggest gaming disappointment ever, this is even worse than Devil May Cry 2.” Most people on forums did what people on forums do and overanalyze and complain about graphical fidelity. From framerate to texture quality to whether or not the PC resolution options constituted “widescreen.”

One common thread was that people found the game very hard, with low health packs, Eve hypos, and ammo pickups throughout, leaving them having some difficulty getting past the combat scenarios. Reviewing my footage of my hard mode, no-vita-chamber playthrough, while I did die exactly four times, I did find that I was very often handling a surplus of health, Eve hypos, and ammunition of each type for my arsenal of weapons. In the rush of release, the thrill of opening that shrink wrapped piece of plastic with an unmistakable “new game smell,” these terminally online forum posting freaks had blown their way through the game to their own detriment. This was not a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. This was not even a Killzone 2 or a Gears of War 2. This was BioShock 2. In this game in order to effortlessly glide from one combat scenario to the next you have to be slow, thoughtful, and most importantly thorough. You have to check every room and avenue, loot every dead-body-marking lockbox, hack every safe, peruse every locked off area, and then you will have accumulated so much health and ammo that you will force yourself to waste plasmid uses and bullets just so that you can keep looting. BioShock 2 was not hard because it didn’t give you enough health and ammo, BioShock 2 was hard because you didn’t seek out and find enough health and ammo.

Engaging with the combat in BioShock 2 is an overall improvement on the original due to now being able to simultaneously wield and fire a weapon and plasmid at the same time without swapping between the two offensive options. In BioShock you would have to choose between equipping a plasmid or equipping a weapon as your on-hand utility. In BioShock 2 you already have both active and simply have to choose which you want currently equipped in each hand, left is dedicated to plasmids, and right to guns. This makes combat much more active and engaging as your combinations of attacks work more efficiently when both plasmid and weapon can be triggered with the touch of a button. Electrifying an enemy and then bashing with the drill, lighting an enemy on fire and then letting loose a heat-seeking rocket, spearing an enemy before pulling it and shooting it back in with telekinesis, and insect swarming with any weapon’s special ammo as the swarm keeps them in place stunned. Overall the minute-to-minute gameplay of BioShock 2 is better than the original, and the weapons are adapted to fit into your status as a Big Daddy which I appreciated.

BioShock 2 culminates with two encounters that are the epitome of the two scenarios you have been engaging with over the course of the game. The first is a battle against two Big Sisters, the face of the game and one of its best contributions to the overall BioShock entity. They are as hard to kill as a Big Daddy but much more agile and capable of dealing damage. The second is a wave defense, a culmination of the optional but suggested scenario to guard a Little Sister who is harvesting Adam from predetermined corpses littered throughout the map of each level. These defensive scenarios allow you to utilize alternative trap ammo as well as trap plasmids at chokepoints and around the general area of a corpse before putting the Little Sister down to begin the harvesting. During my most recent playthrough I had built up such an arsenal that I could easily just sit back in a corner and allow the plasmid and ammo traps kill every single splicer that attempted to interrupt the harvest. These segments are completely optional but due to their surplus Adam rewards make it something that should be engaged with. Adam is the currency for purchasing new plasmids, upgrading plasmids, and gaining more health, eve, and active plasmid slots, making them the most useful resource in the game. These defense segments also allow you more opportunities to research the different enemy types after you’ve unlocked the camera. Research bonuses are how you get some of the best gene tonics such as the upgraded Armored Shell, Drill Vampire, and Fountain of Youth tonics.

Defending Little Sisters from splicers also prepares you for the battle against Big Sisters, as you’ll learn they only appear once every Little Sister has been dealt with in a level. This allows you to pick which vent by which to resolve the Little Sister decision and prepare the surrounding area accordingly. The subsequent fight was always thrilling as Big Sisters were most often the reason for my death. Mixing and matching defense and offensive options makes a playthrough feel more varied as you bounce from fighting splicers in a new area to looting, fighting a Big Daddy, placing a Little Sister for a wave defense, and repeating.

More critically than in gameplay, BioShock 2 succeeds in telling a compelling story with its characters. Whereas in BioShock the main story was highly regarded for its Big Twist, there wasn’t much more to it than that twist. The characters in BioShock were the highlight, each a twisted and morose individual whose personality made each level memorable up to the moment you killed them and moved on in the dark ride of Rapture. It all culminated in an ending sequence that everyone mostly ignores when talking about its successes, because after the twist it didn’t have anything worthwhile left. BioShock 2 has an idea and executes on it fully for a much more satisfactory whole.

In BioShock 2 you are an example for your adopted daughter Eleanor to learn from. By watching how you decide to deal with not only the Little Sisters but with specific characters who antagonize you throughout each of their levels she will ultimately make a decision that determines the type of ending you receive. This reflection of action is indicative of how our own children learn from us, whether we are aware or intend for it or not. Children are always watching and will pick up on mannerisms you might not even recognize until they perform it. Tantrum throwing objects is a reflection of our own frustration, and imitation-as-play reinforces everyday actions as routine. Eleanor learns from the player and through a more complex flowchart of points compared to the original game, will make the final decision of whether Sofia Lamb, Eleanor’s mother and your main antagonist throughout the game, lives or dies.

The original BioShock’s “moral choice dilemma” was a black and white decision between saving or killing Little Sisters. Killing Little Sisters would net you more Adam in the short term but saving them ended with an overall larger number of Adam to spend on gameplay abilities, making salvation the desired route to take. Sparing or killing a child is not a real moral conundrum, it is a simplistic decision given weight only by the empty words of marketing. BioShock 2 muddles the mechanical reward to its benefit. The maximum overall Adam you can gain is a mixture of saving every Little Sister until a certain point where you gain a tonic that gives you more Adam for harvesting, at which point you use them to gain Adam from corpses before killing them yourself. The decision to kill or spare a child is still cartoonishly simple for a moral decision, but is at the very least made more complex by the mathematical equations behind them. Retaining the save or kill decision reads much more like certain features from Fallout 3 carrying over into Fallout: New Vegas. That is, as a consequence of restricted development time and inheriting another studio’s data within which to chisel your own familiar but new (and superior) piece of art.

More thoughtful choices in the game come in the form of the named characters whose fate is determined by the player. The first character you meet is Grace Holloway, a woman who was entrusted by Sofia Lamb to watch over her daughter Eleanor while Lamb was imprisoned by Andrew Ryan. Holloway failed and Eleanor was inducted into the Little Sister program and bonded with your player character, Delta. Holloway hates you for this. Next is Stanley Poole, an agent for Ryan who was responsible for the flooding of Lamb’s retreat in Dionysus Park and Eleanor’s induction into the Little Sister program after she caught his work as a double agent. Lastly is the tragic character of Gilbert Alexander, a scientist who underwent a radical experiment on behalf of Lamb that left him transformed into an inhuman organism and left behind audio logs prior to his descent into madness that would teach a would-be savior how to deliver him from his current state.

The fates of these three characters, combined with the player's decisions for the Little Sisters they encounter will lead to one of six endings. Thanks to this flexibility it is entirely possible to get a “Good Ending” with Lamb dead, or a “Bad Ending” where Lamb lives, or a “Neutral Ending” where you killed each character and had a mixture of saving and harvesting Little Sisters. My preferred choice of ending is saving all the Little Sisters and only sparing Holloway, as Poole deserved death for his crimes and Alexander was a mercy killing at his own request. Holloway is a traditional misguided henchman duped into villainy, Poole is a classical self-serving villain, and Alexander is a tragic figure whose death is more of an assisted suicide than an outright murder based on vengeance or justice.

Lamb’s fate is not up to you directly. You do not push a button on the controller to decide whether she lives or dies. That is left up to your adopted daughter, Eleanor, to decide, based on the decisions you made up to that point in time. She learns from you as a child learns from their parents. It's a much more compelling undercurrent to the game than the original’s “would you kindly?” being a conceit of a player character lacking agency in most games. Even with the flowcharts explaining the criteria for each ending, the unseen complexity underneath the various avenues available to the player upon their first playthrough means that the ending they receive will be a much more honest reflection of themself put on display by the actions of Eleanor.

Andrew Ryan has become part of video game canon as one of the most compelling antagonists encountered in games. He is the industrialist founder of Rapture, the setting which so bewitched everyone in the first BioShock. The largest hole left by BioShock that its sequel would have to somehow fill would be that of its main antagonist. How could you top Andrew Ryan? BioShock 2 addresses this issue in two ways. The first is that it still includes many audio logs from Andrew Ryan so that you can once again be regaled by his charisma and ego stroking monologues. BioShock 2 also does some retroactive addition with the introduction of Sofia Lamb, a psychiatrist who seeks to create a utopia using her ideology of “collectivism” in direct opposition to Ryan. She is now known as one of the great figures of Rapture, going so far as to even have debated Ryan publicly over the future of the city and being included in a photo of “Rapture’s Best and Brightest: 1952”

Just as Eleanor’s ending decision is a reflection of the player, Sofia Lamb is a mirrored reflection of Andrew Ryan[b]. Both spouted ideological babble in order to bring themselves into power, but neither were willing to separate that power from themself. Ryan founded Rapture so that people could be free from regulation by government or religion, so that anyone could do what they wanted. This propaganda didn’t include the asterisk that stated all this was fine, so long as Ryan stayed on top. The original BioShock is the story of how Ryan’s ideology of freedom fell once his position as top dog was threatened. Sofia Lamb is very much an altered reflection of that same grasping at power. Her “collectivism” is riddled with “common good” sentiments but all with her at the top with no equal or superior authority. Lamb is happy to sacrifice the individuals in her quest for the greater good, exemplified through Holloway, Poole, and Gil. Holloway was manipulated into serving Lamb out of guilt rather than adoration after the abduction of Eleanor, Poole’s allegiance was known to Lamb prior to the drowning of Persophone making her implicitly guilty in his actions, and Gil was coerced into serving as a test tube. Lamb strips everyone of their humanity and turns them into pawns to be manipulated and moved around according to her will. She may be the complete opposite in terms of beliefs but she is as hypocritical as Ryan, ruthlessly more so as she rules not by force but by love. Throughout the game you will come across adoring murals painted in her honor, she refers to her followers as the “family,” and pressures people to carry out her will as examples of their devotion. Ryan is a tyrant, a familiar and often used person to fight against in all forms of fiction. Lamb is much more sinister, having a morally uprighteous front belying a rot of egomania.

This utilization of coercing through adoration most similarly correlates in my own life to the use of religion and “God’s” will to push an individual's agenda onto others. Some of the latest media to tap into this insidious form of religion would be Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass in the character of Bev Keane played by Samantha Sloyan and on a more systemic level in Under the Banner of Heaven miniseries based on the book by Jon Krakauer covering the 1984 murder of Brenda and Erica Lafferty. Navigating a murder case involving deeply Mormon families included multiple conversations about faith and “Heavenly Father” as coverage for decisions and in-action that very much harkened back to my own years in service to the church my family attended. Lamb’s many audio logs recording conversations with followers and frequent propagandizing on speakers as you walk through Rapture gave me similar feelings of repulsion. She’s the type of person to stab you while smiling and explaining why this outcome was the best thing that could happen to you and fighting it will only hurt those you love.

Lamb’s indifference to all of those around her extended to her own daughter Eleanor, who wasn’t a person as much as another tool by which to achieve utopia. Lamb never loved Eleanor, she loved the promise Eleanor held as the ultimate mechanism towards whatever Lamb's version of utopia was, most likely something like Human Instrumentality with herself as god. Eleanor, lacking a mother, was nonetheless a person with feelings and opinions. She rebelled against her mother constantly. The more Lamb tried to control Eleanor’s growth the more Eleanor chose the opposite. When Ryan imprisoned Lamb, Eleanor was left with Holloway who cared for her with more love than Lamb did. That love, however, was more a substitute for Lamb than genuine care for the girl. Holloway loved to serve Lamb, and watching over Eleanor was a duty to be performed in that devotion. The loss of Eleanor was less the horror of losing a child and more the horror of having failed Lamb.

With you, Subject Delta, she had more of a parent than before. It may have been a parasitic relationship created to harvest Adam above all else, yet despite this, the mute Delta was a better parent than anyone Eleanor had before. Compared to the motherhood of Lamb, a life bonded to the protector Delta gathering Adam was more freeing and fulfilling than as a subject to the utopia project.

Parenthood is a recurring subject throughout BioShock 2. Andrew Ryan’s audio logs begin with his pondering of fathering of a child, not knowing his son would one day kill him. Holloway talks about how Lamb offering up Eleanor fulfilled her desire for motherhood that was denied by her infertility and the forced disappearance of her lover. A series of audio logs tell the story of a father named Mark Meltzer whose daughter was kidnapped by a Big Sister and his descent into Rapture in an attempt to recover her that ended with him as a Big Daddy you can fight and slay. Lamb and Eleanor’s relationship makes up the core of the game’s drama, with you serving as the imprint Eleanor acts upon. Our forward momentum is a reaction to Eleanor’s love for us in the form of a father/daughter relationship. However, there is also a more utilitarian reason for your desire to reunite with Eleanor and it is due to the Little Sister/Big Daddy bond you share. Brigid Tenenbaum briefly returns in the beginning stages to inform you that death awaits if you do not once again get into contact with Eleanor. This muddies the bond between you into less of fatherly love and into a resolution to live. The dual motivation continues for a majority of the game, as each roadblock puts the player more at risk of death from separation (with flashing red seizures reminding you of this despite it being a fraudulent threat as the player character will never actually die) and blossoms a concern and care for the one who calls you father and leaves gifts behind for you, pushing you ever towards a reunion.

Eleanor reports that Lamb is continuing the utopia project despite the disruption caused by the Little Sister programming, and Alexander serves as a grim warning for what fate might befall her if Lamb gets her way. After your climactic fight with two Big Sisters you are stopped one last time by Lamb smothering her own child in an effort to sever the bond and kill you. She is partially successful, the link is broken but you still live, though bound. Eleanor continues her rebellion by turning herself into a Big Sister after a unique section in which you control a Little Sister and gather the required materials for this transformation. While playing the Little Sister you view Rapture through their eyes. Everything is pristine and heavenly. You’ll occasionally get flashes of reality reinforcing the vast gap between what a Little Sister sees and what everyone else does. Corpses are literal angels, the walls are furnished with expensive decorations, curtains adorn every wall, and splicers look like they might have when attending the 1958 New Year’s Eve party. The finale has you fighting alongside Eleanor as she becomes a summon via the final plasmid slot. The first time I played the game in 2013 I very rarely brought her into the action out of a naive fatherly concern for her safety. This recent time I summoned her often as I recognized the mechanical and narrative fulfillment of her rebellion against Lamb reaching a climax as she now had the means with which to fight back physically whereas before it was all posturing and subterfuge.

BioShock 2 is a game I keep thinking about every now and then years and years after that first playthrough both for the mark it left on me and how underappreciated it still seems to be. Unlike Wind Waker or Sons of Liberty which were lampooned but eventually underwent a reevaluation in the culture writ large to become Game Canon, BioShock 2 remains in the shadow of both its predecessor and successor, and even its own DLC add-on expansion, Minerva’s Den, which had its own success completely separate from BioShock 2. Developer 2K Marin would eventually be handed what would become The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, itself a failed internal project within Irrational Games first handed off to 2K Australia before becoming a 2K Marin project and whose commercial failure would lead to 2K Marin’s closure in October 2013, two months after the game’s release.

Something entirely forgotten between my initial playthrough in 2013 and finishing my recent replay was that my wife and I had decided to name our baby daughter Eleanor in December of 2020. I had already known the connection to The Last of Us’ Ellie when my wife presented the two name options she liked the most but it wasn’t until I booted up BioShock 2 again in order to complete a replay and begin working on this essay that I was met with the audio log of Sofia Lamb discussing her daughter “Eleanor,” and I was hit with a realization that this game forgotten by a majority of the gaming public was now made much more personal to my own life. The lessons taught by the game, of children learning from those they love, bears true and reminds me that my own daughter is watching and learning whether I’m aware of it at the moment or not.

[a] As with all audiences, there are segments that will have always loved a game, segments that still hate it, and segments that don’t really care one way or the other about it. Grand Theft Auto IV was highly rated and sold millions but has mostly been lost in terms of cultural relevance.

[b] I appreciate another subtle reflection in that the first BioShock your transportation between various sections of the city was by Bathysphere, a small private vessel and underwater equivalent to the car. In BioShock 2 they are discussed as a reason for the death of the Atlantic Express railway system, your mode of transportation in the sequel. This reflects the rise of private motorized vehicles, and the machinations of the automobile industry, destroying public transport systems above, as well as serving as icons of each antagonist's ideology.

[golmac]

ICYMI: Monday's A Mind Forever Voyaging post about temporal modularity and existential authenticity. Part 7 of 9.

"Those exceptions have been rightly celebrated—buying The Wizard of Oz at the bookstore is frequently mentioned—but ultimately player agency as it operates in A Mind Forever Voyaging departs radically from what we’ve come to expect from Infocom’s buttons, scrolls, teacups, and whatnots."

[noescape-vg]

Media layoffs are nothing new anymore. Surprise and anger has been replaced with this kind of exhausted resignation (no pun intended), this beleaguered acceptance that “this is just the way things are.” The games media industry is certainly no stranger to cuts and closings. Fanbyte gutted, Launcher gone… every other site shedding handfuls of talented people seemingly by the day. It paints a bleak picture. Even before today, the accepted wisdom has already changed to “don’t try to get a job as a critic or a journalist in this industry, at least not right now,” because there are just very few safe, stable options. 

Vice shuttering Waypoint, though, is a total unmooring gut-punch.

What does Waypoint mean to games media? I mean, just ask around. Folks all over what’s left of social media have been talking about the often profound effect Waypoint‘s mere existence has had on them, either as freelancers trying to make a name for themselves in a cutthroat industry or simply because of the content the site published. Some of the keywords people have used to describe the criticism and journalism put out by Waypoint: humane. Holistic. Comprehensive. Thoughtful. Life-changing. 

I think a lot about this speech from Brassed Off, where Pete Postlethwaite’s character Danny Ormondroyd refuses to accept the award for a national brass band competition after his band, the Grimley Brass Band, wins for their rendition of the William Tell Overture. “This band behind me’ll tell you that that trophy means more to me than aught else in the whole world. But they’d be wrong,” he says. “The truth is, I thought it mattered. I thought that music mattered. But it doesn’t bollocks. Not compared to how people matter.” Waypoint understood this. It was a site that specialized in games criticism that focused on the people who made and played them. Losing it feels like losing a piece of one’s soul. It isn’t like death, per se, but a comprehensive diminishing, a removal of life’s color in a meaningful sense.

Former Waypoint Editor-in-Chief Austin Walker reposted the site’s mission statement in response to the news today. I’ve spent the afternoon slowly reading through it and digesting it. In the post, Walker talks about how terrifying nights in Dragon’s Dogmaare (can confirm, holy shit) and how, in order to complete some of the game’s more involved quests, he would have to plan extensively in advance; and prior to departure, he would set a titular waypoint to guide him. 

Waypoints in the context of games, Walker continues, are “the first (and brightest) illustration of a player’s intention.” They are ways of orienting ourselves to our goal in inherently unfamiliar environments combined with statements of purpose: we are going to the place to do a thing, and in so doing we will have Played The Game. “Before we assault the fortress, before we start the race, before we leap from one star system to another, we set a waypoint,” he wrote. “They are the marks we leave on the map, the beacons we place in the dark that declare, yes, we will walk into the night.”

I didn’t get too terribly far through Death Stranding, but waypoints were one of the basic mechanics I loved—and grew to rely on—in my short play sessions. There are different kinds of waypoint markers in Death Stranding, including purely social ones, just little digital pips that let you know someone else had been there before, or liked a bridge you made, or warned of BTs in the area before your baby in a jar could wake up to tell you. These signs of life – also seen in games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring – made the empty world feel less barren. It helped make me as the player feel less alone. 

Losing Waypoint feels scary. As others have commented, it feels like the end of a specific era of game criticism, one where thoughtful, considered writing about games and the culture around them had an institutional home, is officially over. But like the little thumbs-up or emoji strewn across the alien America of Death Stranding, I don’t think Waypoint – what it as an institution stood for, what its people represented, what its body of work entails – needs to go away entirely. We can carry its mission forward. We can set new waypoints. We can continue to walk into the night.

Waypoint‘s raison d’être is as follows: 

be a guide to games culture

investigate how and why people play games

make readers think, laugh, and ask new questions about games and the world around them

Games will not save us. But we cannot escape them. They are reflections of the way we interact with work, with household chores, with our friends, family and neighbors, with the world itself. For as long as video games exist, for as long as there is a digital culture to speak of, we can continue to light beacons in the night for ourselves and whoever else might come this way.

[astronnova]

good luck

[anneapocalypse]

For the record I feel like saying "Dreadwolf is going to suck because they laid off Mary Kirby" is like... really dramatically missing the point of what's going on here.

The next game has been in alpha for nearly a year now. Kirby's work on the game as a writer was probably mostly finished. Which does not make this better. If anything, it makes it worse.

The layoffs aren't terrible news because a game we're looking forward to might be worse because of them. They're terrible news because people who have devoted years of blood, sweat, and tears to making the game good (including the person who wrote one of the two characters on which they've been hanging the entire marketing campaign for said game thus far) have been axed now that the company has decided it can probably get by without them.

The quality of the game when it finally comes out is irrelevant here. If it's amazing, it won't make this any better, and if it's awful, it won't make it any worse. What matters is the people whose labor made it exist at all are profoundly undervalued, the industry as a whole is broken and frankly abusive, and I wish everyone in it some good labor organizing.

[ravenpureforever]

On one hand, Young Justice is kind of neglected by the actual superheroes that should be looking out for them in a lot of crucial ways and very much failed by the adults around them

But on the other hand Red Tornado straight up hosts a parent-teacher conference where their respective legal guardians all show up, barring Batman who’s in traffic so Nightwing fills in instead because Robin’s dad does not know he’s a vigilante which is objectively hilarious

[literalgrill]

Do NOT Support Hard Drive On Patreon

You might see friends today suggesting you support Hard Drive on Patreon today. You know, the funny video games version of The Onion? As a journalist, I will firmly tell you DO NOT GIVE THEM A DIME.

The CEO has pushed out all former staff that have built the site up to its current greatness and has been pushing the use of AI. The staff begged to have a Patreon before basically all being pushed out, but the idea was refused until now, when it will only line the pockets of a single person instead of hard working writers.

I know they might have provided laughs before, but Hard Drive is a shell of what it was once. Let it die and support the people who actually made those moments of joy possible. Don't believe me? Check out what former employees are saying below:

Kevin Podas: Okay you know what, I would feel bad saying nothing about this, so here goes:🚨SAVE YOUR MONEY🚨

We passionately advocated for a Patreon at Hard Drive & were aggressively shot down. The talent & people who built the site were pushed out. To see this now is beyond upsetting. For the past few years or so I put a lot of myself into this website. I pitched a ton of jokes, got over 120 articles published, & met a lot of great people. I'm sure if you've been following me for some time you could easily see this.

However, there is a lot of misinformation. I was eventually promoted to Managing Editor of the site & was ecstatic. Grateful for the opportunity. Felt like all of my hard work in the comedy mines was finally paying off. But things took a turn for the worst, & each day there were new surprises that affected our livelihoods. These were all very avoidable surprises, mind you.

A patreon was going to be our hail mary, but alas, for some reason, the power that be did not want it. Causing us to leave a dream job behind. "At least we did all we could," we consoled ourselves afterwards. I put a lot of myself into this project. I pitched all sorts of ideas that could have helped-- we all did. Merch collaborations, Patreon-integrated YouTube content, so much more. And most of them were shot down out of sheer stubbornness and nothing more. To see lie after lie spread, and multiple big publications and YouTubers that I am a fan of promote this Patreon under these pretenses is incredibly upsetting. There are so many receipts.

Please share this and consider pulling out if you've already put money into this. On Hard Drive using AI, also from Kevin Podas: I can't personally confirm that part aside from some of the recent header images for articles on both Hard Drive and Hard Times are being made with AI. As far as writing, it's been mentioned in the past, but I personally do not know. Maybe others do, maybe not. MORE From Kevin Podas suggesting the owner denying a Patreon being set up earlier cost an artist a job that was replaced by AI: We had a social media person who was awesome! He made the images until this AI implementation. He had to leave because ad revenue was low and a Patreon was aggressively refused.

Luca Fisher: at the risk of burning some bridges, i have to back up kevin here. i've only been part-time, in-and-out of hard drive since i got in last year, but i can corroborate that management doubled and tripled down about not hosting a patreon/crowdfunding and that many other suggestions and ideas, including mine (and ones much smarter than mine!), were shot down in really long, apocalyptic threads of everyone left on deck desperately trying to come up with ways to keep the lights on. managerially it has been messy and sad

i've written for multiple publications that have long since died, ones that were in the process of dying, and ones that, in this case, are soon to be put in the ground. it is sad and sucks every time. i don't know what could have been done differently, but i do know that a lot of great writers and content creators were left shorthanded and unhappy by the way things have gone. and it is sort of puzzling to see the sudden championing of patreon after we were all told plenty of times that it couldn't work and we should move on also, just to add my own personal two cents here, i was really disappointed by the shuttering of many different article sections on the site over the past 6-8 months. i understand cutting corners in a deficit, and i know it had to be done. that said…

all in all, i'm really sad to see this all happen. i don't fault anyone, if only because i don't really know enough about how this all can happen to make sense of it. games journalism is in a sad, sorry state, and will likely no longer be a thing in the next decade

VideoSealMan: I'm gonna say this because I think I deserve to. For months, MONTHS on end I was bugging Hard Drive management about a Patreon. Often I got ignored for a week+, but when I actually got a response I was encouraged to - of all things, write up a Google Doc pitching the concept I did it regardless. I wasn't the only one trying to sway management on a Patreon, but so fiercely was I fighting for it that last night, I was accused of making this comment directly by the CEO! With no evidence whatsoever! After I'd been gone for over a month.

I vouched so hard for Patreon because I wanted all the writers and creatives working with Hard Drive including myself to get paid better. When I actually got a response, the idea was often shut down. Eventually due to the state of my company, my pay was cut for a second time I confronted management alongside a couple other important figureheads at the org and told them that if we couldn't do a Patreon - I could no longer financially justify staying there. The answer was still no, so I left. Baffled at the decision, but whatever.

It is unendingly frustrating to know that myself and many other people who put their soul into Hard Drive LEFT because of management's absolute refusal to compromise on a Patreon, to then see them launch one anyway a month later and get over 1000 people pledging money. I'm seeing a lot of things float around about greed and people being fired. No one was fired. Everyone who left, left because they were sick of management's decision-making. And honestly, management is a lot of things but I would not call them greedy. (From my experience.) They did genuinely make an effort to pay people as much as possible. I found the pay very fair for a while. I am not disputing that I was paid what I was owed - yet management frequently feels the need to remind critics of that. Lmao, yes. I was paid what I was owed. No one is disputing payment. You did the bare minimum a business owner should do and paid everyone their due, very well done. I make no allegations of greed, cheating or foul play. I make allegations of poor management and incompetence that has fucked over other people.

Basically the only people left at Hard Drive have been there for about 2 months. They will reap the rewards of this successful Patreon I and so many others passionately fought for for so long. We will not see a dime.

I do not know the new people at Hard Drive, But I feel bad for them. They were haphazardly thrust into Hard Drive's workplace with little to no explanation on how anything works, or given any context on the state of the place. Even now managements feeds them half-truths and misinformation about other people's grievances. I am broke and have been for a while. I had to move out of my flat in Reading and back with my family because of how little money I was making. This has basically doomed my flatmate to moving back in with abusive parents, which is something I feel guilty about every day. If we had gone with the Patreon I worked myself hoarse over back then, this could have been avoided. Some of my other good pals could also not have been fucked over.

It was a bad judgment call, but it's not a crime. It's just management getting it wrong.

So should you give to the Hard Drive Patreon? I don't know! I don't think any of the new people working there to patch up the holes left by the recent mass exodus have any bad intentions. Maybe they deserve it! But it is not the same site you knew a year ago, or even a month ago. Myself and many people who were there far longer than me and did far more for it than I did are all gone now because we could not deal with management's terrible decision-making and dogass communication any longer. That's what you should know, imo

I had an agreement in place with management that I would receive the next 8 months of revenue from the Hard Drive YT channel from my leaving in November. This was a deal I appreciated, and thought was very fair on management's behalf. So far, the deal has been honoured for 2 months. However as of last night I was removed from the Hard Drive Slack without warning, and as an editor for the YouTube channel. This means I no longer have any way of verifying how much I am owed, I just have to take their word for it. I'm sure management will make their own statements full of half-truths and weird language on the many cases being brought against them - I'd take everything they say with a pinch of salt if some of the screenshots I've seen of them talking about me are any indication lol

To management; I do not want to talk to you. I want you to DM me a screenshot of how much I'm owed every month and then send me the money per our agreement until June, then we can go our separate ways. Do that and admit to your mistakes, and maybe you can recover your reputation! That's it from me, lol. If they pull out of the deal and fuck me over I'll have more to say, but most of what I know is other people's stories of incompetence and poor decision-making, lol. I genuinely get no pleasure out of doing this; I do not think management is evil - I just think they're really bad at what they do and it's cost other, more talented people, lol. You should believe the writers imo

One last thing I wanna say btw, management did often stress that no one should try to make Hard Drive a full time thing. They were transparent about that, and that is fair. I was working on it because at a few points, I was lead to believe we actually were doing a Patreon. Many other ppl have similar stories of being strung along by management changing their minds and stop-starting shit every 2 weeks. We all made the fatal mistake of overestimating our manager - who would tell you one thing one day and something totally opposite the next week lol

Hunter R. Thompson:

I'm not your dad, but speaking as a Hard Drive writer, I don't know that funding Hard Drive on Patreon is worth it

The driving talent on the back end—behind the kickass site I joined in 2019—have peaced out over the years as the site's been (in our view) increasingly mismanaged. Mismanagement like, not setting up crowdfunding before the ship sank and all its best crew failed; or publishing a screenshot of Andy Ngo pedojacketing a trans writer, complete with her deadname; or a disgruntled ex-writer getting falsely accused of shit-talk, by actual staff. I'm grateful for the writing I've gotten to produce for HD (and will forever be kicking myself for not writing even more, in the four years I've had to do it!! i'm a dumbass!!!) but it is very much no longer the site I signed up for.

I don't want to resign as a contributor altogether, because I'm open to the idea of the site recovering and bad practices being retired as finances level out-- it would just be dishonest for potential backers to not be Aware Of The Circumstances, I think.

Jeremy Kaplowitz: i truly don't want to start shit, but feel compelled to say: i want to see Hard Drive succeed w/o resorting to throwing former writers & editors, myself included, under the bus. surely there's a way to save the site without building it over the corpses of those who left. my $0.02 i don't blame anyone who wants to sign up for the HD patreon and i support the website, but that includes those who worked on it for years, have complaints, and don't deserve to be treated like bitter assholes like this kind of stuff is just objectively true, meanwhile there's these new writers who joined the site after i left (meaning, in the last ~3 months) claiming people are liars. decide for yourself if you care, but this is what happened! [Quotes this Tweet]

Seth Finkelstein: Writing for Hard Drive has been a privilege the past few years, and it makes me so angry to see people I looked up to get jerked around behind the scenes. The amount of grenades the editors jumped on our behalf is immense, and I don't think the way they're being treated is right.

Other Bits On AI: We do know for sure however that AI art has been used by the site. Its fucking owner confirms it here:https://twitter.com/MattSaincome/status/1743040541603123622. Seems the owner pushed AI written articles as well! TayFabe: My vaguetweet is making the rounds & these made me apoplectic. - owner regularly lobbied using ai. Once he tested it & said ai was writing better satire than 25% of the HT/HD writers. - ai images were used on the site & socials w/o consulting the team or disclosing it publicly I found the ai bit relevant to include bc 1) it illuminates a stark change in HD's current direction & leadership, 2) ai images have previously been used on the site and (since deleted) ig posts, 3) ai content fucking sucks, and repeatedly pushing to use it is a telling quality The "handful of writers who chose to leave" includes 2 editors-in-chief (both cofounders who wrote a combined total of >1,000 articles & defined the voice of HD), & at least 3 other editors. These guys put in WORK since 2017, so cool to be corrected by ppl who joined in Nov 2023 [Link to mentioned vague tweet from post.] More from TayFabe: owner continuously lobbied for using ai in every possible way. No one else wanted to do it, but he kept on, saying ai was writing better satire than 25% of the HT/HD writers. Also, ai images were used on the site & socials without public disclosure or consulting the team.

The owner has responded now multiple times in a private discord... Thank you for people sharing screenshots! First Screenshot:

Kevin's Response: He banned me from the server for speaking out, so no, I didn't see it. And he gave no indication of a timeline, it was just "we'll do one when *I* say so" and gave every inclination he was totally against it. It bred an environment that pushed our hands to have to leave. Screenshot Round Two:

Kevin's Response: "Starting one in 3 months" is an absolute lie. He denied it, I have screenshots and others who can confirm. No timeline was given. Just "this is what it is now" and like, I couldn't live off of that. I wanted to do more but he was allergic to good ideas from others around him.

Matt, owner of Hard Drive, responds publicly on Twitter.

Matt: Kevin, the patreon launch was delayed because I didn't think it would work. Everyone is happy that it did work. Everyone who left the site because we didn't have money to pay for creative content which didn't revenue is welcome to return home. But unclear why the hostility.

Hard Drive paid out literally every dollar it had, then a bunch more, to creative people who worked on the site. When we ran out of money, we couldn't pay anymore. We did our best.

Kevin: Right, and my point of this thread was that it was completely and totally avoidable. This is reasonable to be upset about. How could I have been any more clear?

Matt: If we knew with 100% certainly that the community would have supported us via patreon, we would have done that. We didn't know. We had tried 4 years ago and got no support. We were wrong this time. We did our best to figure it out. We paid all the money we could.

Kevin: So you knew with 100% certainty this time? Or you took a leap of faith?

Matt: It was a last gasp panic effort after ad rates got cut in half on january 1st due to seasonal spending changes. We didn't know it would work. We were embarrassed to ask for support. We wanted to figure it out.

Kevin: Every site has a Patreon. Every YouTuber, comedy group, etc. But you insisted that nobody cared about Hard Drive. Which is wildly untrue. I know you see that now, but again, I think you can see why I and many others are pretty upset. A last ditch panic effort was long overdue. A couple more things from Matt:

It was about the size of the hole we needed plugged budget wise, the time I had left of personal resources, and the past data I had about us trying a patreon (which turned out to be a bad indicator). I didn't think the Patreon would help us fast enough. I made a bad estimation

aka "if we make $1000 more dollars a month via patreon, which would be 10x what we got last time, we will not solve any of our problems. If instead we try to plow down path B, we might make it out in time." That was the thinking. I chose the wrong path, but didn't mean to Kevin also retweeted this comment from the user Matt was responding to: So you're saying that you're bad at running the business, didn't listen to any of your employees until after they were forced to leave their jobs, and now you're going to get more of the money from the Patreon that was their idea in the first place? Matt's Response: Respectfully, I made a mistake delaying the patreon decision. But keeping a comedy site alive for 9 years is not easy, there are lots of potential ideas, and think overall we've done a good and honorable job. Will leave this thread in peace now to allow people their space.

Sorry for linking to Elon's hellsite (derogatory), but sources need links so...

[spankymerve]

There's a genre of negative video game criticism that ascribes intention to the bad parts of a game and accident to the good parts. It's very irritating!

[kaile-hultner]

Three Minutes, by Kaile Hultner

We fly at top speed through a different, shallower canyon than the one Riley is posted up in, hitting imaginary checkpoints to keep ourselves on track. The canyon opens up into the valley, and our target, a flashing red diamond hovering above Ghorbrani’s head, begins to beep at us. We are told to engage our thrusters, to piledrive into the general at the highest possible speed, the ground eaten up under us, the sound of our propulsion crackling behind us.

[breakingarrows]

Portfolio

Writings I'm proud of:

Homefront: Invasion Media, Justified Violence, Images with no Substance

Demoscene and “Art” Games on PlayStation 3: .detuned and Linger in Shadows

Endrant Studios: A History

Morbid Curiosity: Wolfenstein

Replaying BioShock 2

Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and the Damned Critique

Replaying Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2

Fallout: New Vegas Critique

Replaying Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Replaying Grand Theft Auto IV

Morbid Curiosity: Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway

Video Games as Theater and Language

Morbid Curiosity: Assassin’s Creed (2007)

Rewatching Batman Returns

The Outer Worlds Doesn’t Want a Revolution

Memory and Self in Prey (2017)

Prey (2017) as a Teacher and Tester of Player Empathy

Violence in Fallout: New Vegas

Replaying Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies

Replaying: Bioshock (2007)

AAA Games Desperately Need an Editor

Violence in Fallout 3

Spider-Cop, Spider-Cop, Irresponsible Spider-Cop

Shin Godzilla

You Don’t Have to Buy at Launch

Halo's Space Opera Storytelling Was Most Effective When It Was Small

Remedy's Real Storytelling Success in Control Lies on the Margins

Disco Elysium Review — Superstar Cop Confronts Reality

Facebook's Fan Subscriptions, Patreon, and the Problem of Games as Products

Assassin's Creed Origins' Bayek is a True Model for Other Video Game Protagonists

[triaelf9]

Aeor date-sploration memories XD

[mashounen1945]

Maybe people should stop talking about videogames

Okay, that's too extreme. Let me re-phrase it...

I'm okay with people playing videogames they like while they talk about various things and sharing that with everyone else (either on live streams, like most people dedicated to this, or on pre-recorded videos, like "The D-Pad" in most of their playthroughs), or talking about technical stuff like how something in a game works or what you can see when going out-of-bounds on a 3D game (yeah, I'm talking about "Shesez" and his Boundary Break series here), or telling fun facts such as unused content (like "TetraBitGaming" does sometimes). I'm even okay with showing and explaining glitches, which the watchers/readers might very easily interpret as you mocking a game for its flaws; I've seen "Son of a Glitch" talk about glitches in games he seemingly likes genuinely, such as both Sonic Adventure titles and NiGHTS Into Dreams..., and also with games usually seen by the general public as "objectively good" like the first Mega Man X, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and it's very clear he does it out of legit appreciation of all those games (especially when a glitch is really obscure or difficult to pull off or -like screen-wraps in classic Sonic games- a side effect of something clever the developers did to solve some other bigger problem -such as finding a way to save memory while the game is being played in the case of those classic Sonic games-).

But what I can't tolerate anymore is videogame critiques, reviews and journalism. Yeah, the entire field of videogame journalism is already like a rotten apple tree, but even if it wasn't... If those guys saying "videogames are The 10th Art" are right, then videogames are one of the most subjective forms of art ever, much more like painting and less like movies and television. Moreover, while, it's true that every form of art is subjective, the highest priority for a videogame is to entertain its receiver, more so than for any other form of art. More precisely, a videogame seeks to entertain in such a way that each individual player feels like the game is tailor-made for them.

But really, videogames aren't art. Okay, yes, the task of developing a videogame certainly requires knowledge and skill and they could be considered arts in their own right (and by that, I mean the technical work to create what was asked by the person/team who had the idea of making a game in a certain way, regardless of what kind of game it turns out to be once all the bugs and glitches were repaired and it can officially be said there's a completed product ready to be released), and the story within a videogame might be a masterpiece. However, a videogame's story is still dependent on the game itself (perhaps it'd be more accurate to say it's dependent on its gameplay), through which that story is told, and the story is always something secondary during a game's development. And more importantly: gaming itself, the specific act of playing videogames and getting good at them, isn't art.

Rather, videogames are a hobby. Yeah, big surprise... But seriously videogames are, have always been and will always be a hobby. And that's not something bad, a hobby isn't necessarily inferior to art, but it seems some people feel like they'll not be respected as adults (or even as human beings) and the stories told through videogames won't be respected as actual literature and the people working on videogames won't gonna be appreciated and better compensated if they don't prove there's something serious, some sophistication, some finesse, some je ne sais quoi, some quality metric with a sharp line separating the good from the bad, in both videogame development and gaming.

There are very, very few "videogame reviewers" I still respect, and one of them is "That Trav Guy". His reviews are much more... How to call them? "Down-to-Earth"? "Humble"? Also, all videogame YouTubers say their reviews are "just their personal opinions" but it feels like Trav's videos convey that message much clearer and much more unambiguously than the work done by many others (it certainly helps that he didn't create a whole-ass character as part of his reviews, unlike some obnoxious, self-aggrandizing YouTubers like AVGN). During one of the Metroid anniversary streams done by "SomecallmeJohnny" (when he was playing Metroid Prime 2, IIRC), Trav had explained his reviews aren't about whether a game is good or bad and how good/bad it is, but about what worked and what didn't work in that game. And really, that's the exact thing reviewing videogames should entirely be about.

To top it off, there are so many cases of the gaming community's perception of something changing a lot through the years and depending on which game they're talking about. There are the famous "First Game Syndrome" and the "First Installment Weirdness" trope and things being either well received or at least neutral only to "age like milk" later on, all cases of something in a comparatively old game getting either better or worse when it reappears in sequels of that old game or when the old game itself gets ported to newer platforms. Lastly, we have "gamers" just being hypocritical in general. And even if they're not, perhaps they have their emotions too high or each of them is too desperate for making their favourite games look good and they can't think straight despite having good intentions and being convinced they're not biased.

If there's a genuine need for some kind of quality standard, then let's shut up about videogames, keep playing whatever we want while letting everyone else do the same but staying all silent about it for 10 years, and then come back to meet up and compare notes. Maybe that way, we can effectively get rid of all biases and stop judging a series/genre for past failures and stop holding each series and genre to different standards and just... calm the f*** down about all this and start again.

Now, what would be the moral of this rant? I guess it's "Nobody can really assign a score to a videogame". As long as it's playable from a purely technical standpoint and we're leaving its story aside, there are no such things as good or bad videogames. Just let everyone play and share whatever they like, let players of each game share advice on how to play it. In a nutshell: let videogames be enjoyed as the hobby they are.

And for those out there who see themselves as "true gamers"...

Stop being annoying Beta Male Cucks ™.

[the-kipsabian]

saw a take so fucking rancid on twitter i almost deleted the entire app from my phone jesus fucking christ

first of all ao3 is an archive site. this is like going to the library and saying "oh i dont like this" on every piece of media you find that you dislike and thinking they should be stamped with some sort of a marker just cause you didnt like it

you can always click back and leave. fic writers owe you nothing to explain themselves and their creations. if they have mistagged or miscategorized fics, then i understand, however there are report tools for that instead of yelling at the artist tbh

im not saying free works arent necessarily above criticism. but this is just. fucking wild. its common courtesy to just enjoy stuff (or fucking leave if you dont, the back button is free) and if the artist specifically asks for critiques, then give one - constructive that is, shitting all over someones work is not proper criticism, mind you

i just find it fucking wild people are treating art and archive sites as social media these days like this and everything needs to be policed and ~catered to the algorithm~ like. no. ao3 doesnt have an algorithm. you should be able to fucking tell what you like and what you dont like and steer away from that kind of content and let people fucking be with their art. they dont owe you anything (except trigger warnings i'd argue, but i know some people disagree with that as well for some reason), and imagine how much more energy you'd have if you only engaged with things you liked and spent time looking at instead of going to places where you dont enjoy yourself. let alone spending time telling other people you dont enjoy what they enjoy. what a fucking life