What grinds my gears

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...