mrcharles

Guessing that someone arguing from an obvious position of privilege is a white guy is only a racist stereotype if you believe reverse racism exists.

It's a debunking of 'reverse racism'.

And yet in this case, it's not being bigoted to suggest that white guys complaining that people want inclusiveness is a bad thing is an invalid opinion. It would be like tall people complaining that a Brown's opened up. "Why are they catering to all those short men? The real clothes market is in average/tall people!"

You can call it bullshit if you want, I call it an argument made from a position of privilege.

But once again, I don't think you really understand privilege. Privilege does not mean that you never have to deal with discrimination. It simply means that there are kinds of discrimination you will never have to deal with.

White people have inherent privilege over black in north america. Men have inherent privilege over women in work settings. Tall people have privilege over short people when it comes to shopping for clothes. But one privilege absolutely does not imply all privilege.

Truly, games are doomed.

That's a racist stereotype

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw_mRaIHb-M

You are right, the only fun games have grimdark bald white guys with stubble.

Privilege does not mean you have had a problem free life. It means you haven't had to deal with certain things that other people have to deal with.

If you are a white dude, you've never had a bank officer refuse you a loan for bullshit reasons because of his own racism. You've never had your resume skipped from a stack because the person looking at it didn't like your foreign sounding name, or because they were worried you might get pregnant. You've never had coworkers contribute to a climate of harassment because "it's just a joke" about rape, sexism, race, etc.

I grew up really poor. Like, collecting bottles and exchanging for food poor with my single mother and sister. I had to work my ass off to get where I am today, but I did it by being able to get loans, being able to get apartments, by connections I made because of other white dudes.

It took me a long time to realize that privilege isn't "you have everything"; privilege is "you don't have drawbacks that other people have to deal with daily no matter their situation."

Platforms have denied games and game content for well over a decade now and games seem to be doing just fine thanks.

I'm unsure which popular and lucrative options are being removed though. Could you provide examples of what you think will magically disappear?

When they are arguing from a position of privilege that they should be prioritized against wishes of disenfranchised groups?

Frankly, yes. Yes it does.

Well, I'd like you to know that most professional game developers feel very strongly on these topics, and they feel that inclusiveness and diversity are good things.

In fact, what leads most of us to losing the passion is making yet another grimdark white dude game. So this push towards inclusiveness and diversity is actually revitalizing for most of us.

Well this statement: "Just make your game fun, challenging or whatever your goal is and have fun making it." Sounds very much like "don't worry about inclusiveness, games should be whatever you want them to be!"

Which is true but if you want your games to be exclusionary then don't be surprised when people call you on it.

Good news! No one is ever going to stop a game from being made.

I downvoted you because you misunderstood the point of that section of the article. It's not about 'offending' people, it's about consistently and invisibly leaving people out.

It's easy for us white dudes (as I assume you are, based on your post) to say "games should just be whatever!" because we implicitly have the privilege of identifying with the inevitable white dude main character. The few times the character isn't a white dude washes right off of us because we are absolutely used to a character that conforms to us.

Others don't have that. This isn't 'politics' it's about being inclusive and realizing that it's actually trivially easy to do so in most cases.

I've been making games professionally for over 15 years now. The progress we are making is fantastic because the main problem with games is that game designers are lazy. When we go with grimdark white dude, it is lazy. When game developers are forced to not be lazy, everybody wins. Because at the very least, you cannot argue with the fact that lazy design is always going to be inferior to non-lazy design.

Cause he's going to be CTO instead.

About to go make a Batsh batcher so I can call it batshit.

This will be a great feature for 2011!

Pretty neat! I plugged in my rocksmith cable and it just works. One thing though, it needs some kind of calibration. The tiniest bit of string noise and the lessons shoot off without me, even when I have my strings muted.

[CITATION NEEDED]

Yup. Unpaid crowdsourced unverified 'news' is all that ireport.cnn.com does, and apparently a majority of the internet can't distinguish that kind of garbage from actual reporting.

Maybe it says something about CNN, but it probably says more about the people willing to read an obviously flawed and false article and then act like it was "reported" by some kind of authority.

Unfortunately, that isn't an option at all, because the one time they are skeptical wrongly can result in bad shit. The same way that the fire department has to respond to every single fire alarm, even when they are false alarms. You can't choose where you go or what you do when it comes to people's safety.

Poutine is a meal.

Possibly true in the US; but in Canada where we get stuck paying bullshit exchange rate premiums all the time, I can still usually save a bit of money. Just recently I bought some audio equipment from amazon.com, which, with duties and taxes prepaid, still came to less than the pre-tax price of anything local. And I live in Toronto; it's not like stuff is hard to find around here.

Honestly, Amazon has a lot to offer even beyond "No Tax". And I say this as a Canadian who has had to pay taxes and duties on amazon orders since day 1.

People may gripe about it for a bit... but amazon is still the best way to shop, and also has the best selection and prices.

It blows my mind that it's 2014 and we can't do this. We are locked behind garbage cable boxes, poorly built custom software, and region locking, all of which is from a different era.

Capital-I Industry, perhaps. But I argue that it's because it's a lot harder to sell garbage albums with just one or two hit songs when you can go to Bandcamp and find a better artist, preview a whole album, and buy it for $5.

The biggest hiccup is almost a literal one; serializing large lua structures and then writing them to disk can take a lot of time. But this can largely be mitigated by just saving compiled lua instead of text lua.

There are ways around it but if people want to cheat their own SP experience who am I to stop them? We'll obfuscate a bit to dissuade casual users but I don't know that I've ever encountered a game that didn't have some level of save hacking available.

Hell, I've used it myself more than a few times.

It can only become corrupted by external factors; a lot of games I've worked on, in-game bugs could lead to corrupted saves being written out to disk. Since in this case we are just serializing lua data, unless the serializer itself has a bug, it will always write out correctly, and any issues become issues of game logic rather than anything else.

Aware of all the issues and already have a plan. But Lua generally only has access to the APIs you give it; from game code our Lua VM has no access to the OS at all, just game functions, and those game functions are never system related.

The biggest 'concern' would be save hacking, but at the end of the day that will happen no matter what so it doesn't bother me much.

On the game I'm currently working on, it's built very heavily around Lua. So for the save system, we simply fill a large Lua table, and then write that to disk, as Lua code. The 'save' file then simply becomes a Lua file that can be read directly into Lua.

This is absolutely amazing for debugging purposes. Also you never have to worry about corrupt save files or anything of it's ilk. Development is easier, diagnosing problems is easier, and using a programmatic data structure on the backend means that you can pretty much keep things clean and forward compatible with ease.

(Oh, also being able to debug by altering the save file in any way you want is a godsend).