What grinds my gears

On July 2001 Comedy Central aired an episode of South Park named "Super Best Friends" that contained a depiction of Muhammad. The depiction was rather benign and not particularly satirical or insulting. Given that this was the pre-9/11 world, not very surprisingly it went pretty much unnoticed and didn't cause much controversy at all. On April 2010 Comedy central aired the first part of a two-part episode, named "200", that contained the same Muhammad characterization, except that it was (deliberately) censored so that the actual character isn't seen on screen (only a black censorship box). The double-episode is a social commentary on how the western world has been bullied into censoring all depictions of Muhammad. It makes no fun on Muhammad himself, but on the western fears. (The episode contains a lot of meta jokes about this censorship, as the characters themselves are not aware of the "censored" box, but it's referred to in the story...

Guitar Hero, and in general rhythm games with instrument-like controllers, were certainly not the first games of this particular genre, as rhythm games have existed for quite some time, but the popularity of such games really exploded with Guitar Hero (with the first game alone selling over 1.5 million copies, not to talk about the various sequels and spinoffs). This started in about 2006 with the first Guitar Hero game, and it was quite a craze. Then came another game, and then another, and spinoffs, and competing games using similar instrument controllers, and then... *poof*. Nothing. The market got oversaturated and the craze died out almost as fast as it started, somewhere around 2010 or 2011. It just... disappeared. Almost nobody plays any of the games anymore. What once was a staple of parties is basically nowhere to be seen anymore. (Ok, some people probably still play it, but you don't see much of it anymore. It has pretty much disappeared.) Talk about a temporary fad...

Do you know the old joke that the current "MTV generation" has the attention span of a goldfish? Well, it's not a joke. It's absolutely and completely true. (Of course there are always exceptions, but we are talking about averages and majorities.) When talking eg. about mobile phone games, and people browsing them (ie. installing a big bunch of free games and trying them to see if they like them) it has been estimated that a free game has about three seconds to interest the player, or else the player will move to something else and probably never come back. That's right. Three seconds. That's not a typo. Not three minutes. Not thirty seconds. Three seconds. The casual gaming industry, especially on mobile phone platforms, is basically a fast food restaurant of video games. No, even "fast food restaurant" is way too slow. There even isn't any appropriate metaphor for this. People basically "channel-surf" through hundreds of fre...

I wrote some criticism about Metacritic scores in a previous blog post . To add a bit to it, I would like to share something I stumbled across: The "Metascore" (which is the aggregate of scores given by critics) is on a scale from 0 to 100. The "User Score" (which is the ratings given by users of the website) is on a scale from 0 to 10, which effectively means that the game gets a "Metascore" of 4 from the users, while it got 42 from critics. An order of magnitude of difference. There is something seriously wrong and flawed in this entire system. Ok, maybe we could give them the benefit of the doubt? Perhaps the natural scale used by the average critic doesn't conform to the scale used by users? Perhaps critics are on average more lenient, so that eg. an abysmally bad game that gets a user score closer to zero still gets a metascore of something like 40? Perhaps the scores agree more on the higher end of the scales? With some games they do...

For some time now there has been a kind of "mini-controversy" of sorts in video games related to frame rates. Most "hard-core" PC gamers (and to an extent some console gamers as well) are not happy with anything less than 60 frames per second. It's kind of the absolute minimum. If the framerate drops below that, it's quite a big deal. Many people immediately notice the framerate drop, especially when using vsync. (Personally I don't notice it that much, nor does it bother me all that much, but I can certainly understand.) On consoles, especially on the 7th generation (ie. the Xbox 360 and the PS3), 30 frames per second was (well, still is, as of writing this, as the generation has not yet completely died out) pretty much the universal standard, with only few exceptions. The reason for this is that most game developers want to enhance the visual quality of their games, but naturally this will be slower to render, so it's done at the cost of framer...

I'm not here talking about people who publish videos about things like politics or religion and who disable comments. While that's annoying too, it's a somewhat different issue I won't go into in this post. I'm talking about popular youtubers who consistently disable comments on all of their videos as some kind of "protest" against the YouTube comment system, or even more egregiously, because they don't like their average viewer (which is quite a douchebag attitude to have, but more on that later.) And as said, this is not about people making videos about controversial subjects like politics, but eg. people who make video game reviews, "unpacking" videos, puzzle solving videos, "let's play" videos, and the like. In other words, not people who don't want to hear what the "enemy" has to say, but have other equally dumb (or even dumber) reasons. The craze of disabling YouTube comments started most prominently when...

Assume that you don't feel well and go to a doctor. After much study and experimentation, the doctor presents a diagnosis of cancer. He shows you the scans and the results of the tests, he explains in detail what kind of cancer it is and what stage it is in, and suggest a treatment that has a good prognosis. You then go to a second doctor who knows nothing of this, and he performs a lot of experimentation and comes up with a very similar, if not identical, diagnosis, and a very similar treatment suggestion. Then you go to a third doctor, and the same thing. You keep repeating this with 99 doctors in total. Some minor details may have slight differences (such as the estimation of the advancement of the cancer, or minor details in the suggested treatment), but overall they all give pretty much the same diagnosis and the same solution. They all show you the scans and the results of all the other tests for you to see, and you can corroborate that they are all pretty much the same. ...

Metacritic is a website that aggregates scores given by critics of different media, such as movies, TV shows and video games. Its purpose is for people to easily and quickly see what the consensus of critics at large is of a given piece of art. They do this by taking the score given by a critic or publication and scaling it to a 0-100% scale, and then calculating a weighted average of all such scores. The problem with this is, however, that the numbers are often rather meaningless, and don't necessarily really reflect the actual quality of the work (either in general, or personally for you in particular). Giving a score to a piece of art is in itself often a rather meaningless thing to do. Not least because the scale itself is highly subjective and dependent on the publication or even individual critic. For example, in a scale from 0 to 10, some people might consider 5 to be "average" (ie. not excellent, not horrible, but ok; still very watchable/playable), while ot...

When the United States of America attacked Iraq in 2003, the rest of the world, especially Europe, just loved to hate the USA. There was tons of bad press, protest marches and so on. I couldn't stand the hypocrisy of those protest marches in particular. For example here where I live there was a (needless to say completely futile) protest march against the invasion of Iraq, which disrupted normal traffic. I found this especially hypocritical because there were no such protest marches eg. during the Rwandan genocide or when Russia attacked Chechnya in 1999. But when it's the USA who's invading a country, then people love to hate it, and organize protest marches because it's trendy and it gives them a feeling of having the moral high ground. I detested this hypocrisy so much that I actually flung to the other side, ie. I started liking the USA. After all, I knew (and still know) lots of Americans online, and they are on average really smart and good people. The USA ha...

Since basically the dawn of time there have been two major annoyances I have had with almost every first-person shooter game: Firstly, reloading. I hate reloading as a game mechanic. I understand that having to reload adds a certain level of realism and challenge to the game. The problem is that when a game mechanic is more frustrating than challenging, it becomes questionable whether it's a good game mechanic at all. You wouldn't believe how many times I have died because the playable character runs out of bullets and starts reloading right during a crucial moment. You wouldn't believe how many times this has happened right when just one or two more shots would have killed the enemy. And of course reloading takes forever in the heat of battle. And yes, I do reload manually whenever I can. In fact, I reload as much as the situation allows me. But that doesn't help in a very difficult fight where there simply aren't any pauses that would allow reloading. Bas...

Steam is Valve's content distribution system. Or in simpler terms, a centralized way to buy games online. Steam filled an almost empty market niche at the right place at the right time, and it has got immensely popular over the years, and has become almost a monopoly on that front. While competing systems have emerged later, they have hard time reaching even a tiny fraction of the popularity of Steam. In the very beginning Steam was used by Valve exclusively to distribute their own games. (Steam also worked as an anti-piracy system.) However, after some time they opened it to other vendors as well, although at first they gave high priority to third-party games using Valve's own Source game engine. However, they soon started allowing any games to be distributed through Steam without such biases. Initially Valve had really high standards of quality for what they would and wouldn't accept to be distributed through Steam. On the plus side this ensured that most if not all ...

While the PlayStation 3 was in no way a failure, it nevertheless had a rough start. The Xbox 360 had a full year head start and was quite a success, so the PS3 had very tough competition on that field. On top of that, Sony made too fancy of an attempt at making the console efficient by using an exotic and obscure processor design which was not supported by any game engine at the time. It actually took several years for game engines to fully take advantage of the peculiar architecture of the PS3 (and even then many game engines never reached its full potential). In other words, while the PS3 can, in the end, be considered a successful console, it had a very rough start and it took it several years for it to catch up with its biggest competitor. One could estimate that the console was almost doomed because of this, but in the end everything turned out well. It seems that now the roles are pretty much reversed with the next-gen consoles, ie. the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. While ...

Feminism has been historically an extremely important social movement that has achieved a great deal of social progress in terms of equality and justice. Of course every social movement has its fringe radicals, but those usually get largely ignored. The internet era, however, gives these fringe sub-movements a loudspeaker to spread their messages, which in some cases may cause what would have been a forgotten ideology to become almost mainstream. A form of feminism I'll call "new feminism" (for the lack of a better term) is a modern variant of feminism that basically borders on conspiracy theories, seeing "sexism" and "patriarchy" everywhere, and making mountains out of molehills, treating minor issues as if they were great injustices that will destroy our society as we know it. (I suppose that since feminism has in large part achieved its goals, ie. equalizing the law to be gender-neutral, the modern feminist is left little of actual importance to c...

I have lately noticed, from diverse sources, several things that I consider major problems that are eroding the game industry from the inside. These include: "Early access" and "prepurchase" business model. (Also: Using your customers as your beta-testers.) "Free to play" games with microtransactions. I have ranted about these two things in earlier blog posts, so there's no need to repeat the same points here. Publishing what basically constitutes an incomplete, or severely nerfed game, expecting to publish the rest as DLC's. (Sometimes this is done because of lack of time and resources, but in other cases it's done deliberately, to try to monetize.) Trying to pander to the lowest common denominator. There are two different (and independent) forms of this: Lower the feature set of the "current-gen" versions of a game to match the "previous-gen" versions. In other words, if for example the Xbox 360 version of a game...

Serial killers and mass murderers tend to be overwhelmingly male (with existing but very few exceptions). Things like school shootings are almost exclusively done by males. Prison population is overwhelmingly male. Things like gang violence is likewise overwhelmingly male. But why is this? Scientific answer: Because men have on average significantly more testosterone production than women. Testosterone is a hormone that affects behavior and causes things like aggression and being more prone to taking risks. (Testosterone also causes men to be on average stronger than women, which only aggravates the imbalance in physical violence in an altercation between a man and a woman.) Feminist answer: Because our deeply-ingrained sexist patriarcal culture and values. If we just taught our male children to behave better, and got rid of those sexist cultural values, men would stop being so aggressive. I'm sorry, but you won't change the difference in testosterone production via edu...

I already wrote a rant related to this in an earlier blog entry , but I have to write more about it. Here's a fact: There is no such thing as a "free" mobile game. (The same is probably true for most consoles, and to some extent even digital distribution platforms like Steam, but it's most prominently true for mobiles.) You might think that you are downloading a "free" game, but you are not. Granted, in some cases you might not end up spending actual money, but at the very least you will be spending your privacy (more about this later). In many cases you will actually end up spending money. In fact, a lot more money than with normal, honest "pay upfront, get whole game". Ask any person which one they would prefer: Pay something like $5 for a full, unrestricted game with all content, playable forever, or use a "free-to-play" game that needs you to spend $50 and even more to be able to play unhindered and without restrictions. Any rat...

Anita Sarkeesian has made a video series where she posits, and comments about, the claim that video games are on average inherently sexist against women, that there basically are no strong female characters, and such characters are often relegated to be essentially "objects" to be saved, used or abused by the player, and how video games pander to and entice male players to engage in such abuse. I'm not going into the subject of how much she misrepresents, distorts and fabricates evidence of this, as that would be a whole rant on itself. Instead, I'm going to examine that accusation more seriously, from my own experience with video games. Is there any truth to it? The thing is, I have played hundreds and hundreds of games during the past 30 years, and I am honestly having a very hard time pointing out any game that would support the idea, especially if we are talking about games made in the last 15 years or so. Let's start by examining some games I have playe...

There's a very commonly used argumentative fallacy used by many people, the so-called argument from ignorance ( argumentum ad ignorantiam). The name of this argument is a bit unfortunately named because it's really confusing. People very often misunderstand what it actually means, and is misleads people easily. Many people think that it means something like "making claims about a subject that one understands poorly". In other words, pretty much "you don't know what you are talking about" . For example, many people could call something like this an "argument from ignorance": "The Occupy Wall Street movement just wants anarchy, thus they shouldn't be taken seriously." While that's certainly a completely stupid argument, it's not an argument from ignorance, because that's not what the term means. What it means is to argue for a position using an unknown, something unexplained. In other words, the very fact th...

Many people will play several video games intermittently, and may well leave some of them unfinished (or in a perpetual state of "I'll finish it some day." ) I don't do that. When I start a game, I generally play it through before going to another game (at least on the same system.) I don't like leaving games unfinished. (Also, while I don't outright rush through games, I don't really willingly prolong them for as long as possible either.) Even if a game is bad or boring, I really hate leaving it unfinished, so I generally play it through before uninstalling it and going to the next game. Thus it's quite rare that I leave a game unfinished. There usually has to be a reason for it. Many times it's simply because the game outright bores me out of my skull, but that's not always the reason. Sometimes it isn't even that the game is bad. Just for the fun of it, I'll list here games I have left unfinished (and will probably never finish)...