Games

[icycalm]

I swear half the general-gaming thread titles read like a videogame version of The Onion:

What if all the next-gen consoles bomb?
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=535746

They are utterly mesmerized by the term "bomb". Every other thread it's "bomb this" and "bomb that" for pages and pages, without any of those fuckwits trying to define what it means for something "to bomb", or why anyone should care in the first place. I mean by any reasonable definition Ferraris have been "bombing" for almost a century, and yet it's still the best carmaker ever, SO WHAT THE FUCK DOES IT EVEN MATTER, MORANS?

[Amor fati]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017- ... misconduct

Influential internet forum NeoGAF has gone offline after an allegation of sexual misconduct surfaced against its owner.

The site imploded over the weekend as the claim went viral, the majority of NeoGAF's moderation team elected to resign in response, and forum users created dozens of threads asking to be banned.

Hours later, the site could no longer be reached.

NeoGAF admin and owner Tyler "Evilore" Malka was last week named by film director Ima Leupp in an account of sexual harassment posted to her Facebook.

Leupp shared details of the incident as part of the ongoing #MeToo movement, where sexual harassment and assault survivors speak about their experiences publicly to highlight how widespread the issue is.

[icycalm]

I just came here to post about that.

First off, it is insane that all those mods quit because of some private sexual issue of the admin that happened years ago.

But then I think of how every thread on there that mentions social issues is filled with SJWing, and it makes sense, and then the mods' quitting does not sound like catastrophe but a huge relief, because it was they who had fostered that atmosphere, by permabanning countless users who ridiculed SWJing and expressed opposing views.

So, for a moment I was hopeful that the owner could just get a bunch of new non-SWJing mods, and rid the site of that aspect of it that I always found annoying. However, what if the owner himself is a SWJ? After all he must be, otherwise he wouldn't have condoned the mods' behavior all those years.

Bottom line is that that forum is filled with priceless information on videogames that should not be lost, but there's nothing I can do about it (and that's why I try to copy-paste as much of it as I can in here, btw: though it's next to impossible to copy-paste the huge threads with technical info on say emulators, so what I should have been doing is simply saving them on my hard drive, which I now regret not doing).

[icycalm]

I tried tweeting to the Evilore and NeoGAF accounts that I would be willing to mod the forum single-handedly (and to ask Brandon Sheffield for my credentials lol), but the tweets disappeared seconds after I made them.

[icycalm]

Hmmm, it seems to be here now:

https://twitter.com/culturevg/status/922438438154096640

@EviLore @NeoGAF icycalm/Alex Kierkegaard offers to single-handedly mod NeoGAF. Ask @necrosofty for my credentials.

It doesn't show in my main timeline for some reason.

I would turn that place into a heaven for gamers if they handed the keys over to me.

[icycalm]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread. ... t252791071

It always seemed weird to me that people willing to argue over technical minutiae like 1-2 frame drops or 1-2% differences in pixel resolution are completely unwilling to see the/any utility in discussing real-world influences or implications of the media they consume.

That's why I love NeoGAF, God bless them. And I do indeed bless them.

[icycalm]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread. ... t252791295

I'm not sure why I bother to try and explain this but maybe one last time.

It's super easy to be happy with 'apolitical' entertainment when you're positively represented in movies, games, books, etc etc etc all the time. Maybe you're not a straight, white male but in case you are, that's where you're at. When you're a minority, you live a life 24/7 where people use political power to make your life harder, screech hate messages at you, or just try to beat you up. It's not something you can take a vacation out of. Also, you don't see yourself represented in game characters like the aformentioned group does. In short, it's easy to love the status quo and not want to shake the boat when you're the one who's on top. I mean I love playing something mindless too, but I don't have the luxury of turning things 'off' even if I want to.

Then move to Africa or Asia. And start posting in African or Asian forums. I sure as fuck would not expect a Japanese site or forum to give the same weight to Western concerns as to Japanese or Asian ones, and the fact that minorities in the West not merely expect but downright fucking DEMAND it proves what arrogant fucking dickheads many of them are.

Then again, so are many white people, and we call these people SJWs. And the reason NeoGAF is being split apart is because it was BOUND to eventually, if not over this "sexual harassment" bullshit, then over some other bullshit. It was inevitable, and it happened, and that is indeed a sign that the industry is maturing -- with all the good and bad consequences that this entails.

If you can't find me a film or literature site where SJWs and alt-right types can happily co-exist, I don't see how they can be expected to do so in the gaming space.

[icycalm]

And for the record, Insomnia is neither SJW nor alt-right, and my viewpoint is that both these groups are composed of complete and utter dickheads.

[icycalm]

Nor are the people in the middle of the spectrum much better. Well, they are at least a little better, because they are nowhere near as annoying. But the reason they are in the middle is not because they are enlightened, but because they are ignorant and passive, and that is a contemptible and pathetic thing to be in its own right.

In short, the only ones who are cool with me are those who understand my theory, and ultimately my philosophy. Everyone else is subhuman and deserves a varying amount of ridicule and contempt, depending on the degree of their subhumanity. But you already knew I felt this way, so I hope I am not saying anything new to you.

[icycalm]

I don't know anything about this dude, but having read this, he sounds pretty cool to me: https://imgur.com/a/eBPYm

[icycalm]

They are making a new forum called ResetEra.

'Nough said.

[icycalm]

I just realized why NeoGAF's tagline, "Believe", is so immediately attractive.

All you have to do is consider my definitions of art as the craft of illusion, and of videogames as the supreme artform.

[icycalm]

https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/24/1653 ... #449588235

Hey, kids. We know you want only the best parts of NeoGAF, so we’ve built a new forum around everybody’s favorite part of NeoGAF: The moderation. Now you can enjoy the megalomaniacal, unaccountable moderation of your favorite forum, without all the pesky activity. Sign up today to get pre-banned.

[icycalm]

The new forum the fags and trannies made: https://www.resetera.com/

I won't bother making a new thread for it, since it'll be dead in a few months like Reaxxion.

[icycalm]

Quality content lol:

https://www.resetera.com/threads/gaygli ... ition.783/

[ExiledOne]

http://nichegamer.com/2018/01/25/neogaf ... community/

NeoGAF Owner Admits Identity Politics, Authoritarian Left Hostility, and Unfair Moderation Ruined its Community

Anyone that browsed the online gaming forum NeoGAF during its more recent years and eventual collapse generally found the community had done a number of things to turn away large numbers of users. Now, we’ve learned that the issues faced by the community and its moderation team were more noticed than we thought.

NeoGAF owner Tyler Malka actually confirmed (via KotakuinAction) the once popular internet gaming forum had a big problem with identity politics, noting that “every identity of person seemed to trend toward hostile tribalism over time,” forming a “huge rift” between the community and its moderation team.

Malka also said that individual mods “had their own agendas they were furthering,” noting that he “failed to course correct it all.” Surprisingly, Malka went on to say that eventually nothing was “progressive enough” and he became the enemy to a subset of the trans community on the site, as well as a subset of every minority community on the site.

Furthermore, Malka said that he “took that all in and tried to navigate it, tried to understand people’s positions,” but unfortunately “nothing was good enough and a ton of people lashed out” at him “any time” he said anything. Coming from this, it makes sense when he confessed that he was “completely miserable every moment I was on GAF” last year.

He went on to say that he “tried to turn things around” but he was dealing with “rough personal issues all year and was only just starting to pull myself out of that when I got #metooed (falsely) out of nowhere. It was overwhelming and scary. It got mainstream media attention.”

Things only got worse from there, according to Malka.

“The community had become a powderkeg of polarized, authoritarian left hostility that seemed to revel in setting this place on fire from within and throw me onto a pyre the moment they found out about that BS allegation,” he said. “Almost all the mods immediately bailed, we got DDoSed for like two straight days, and by the time we were back up we barely had any mod coverage and I was deeply hurt by what the community was saying about me and could barely engage with it.”

After the fallout of NeoGAF and the subsequent launch of ResetEra by its refugees, Malka took a step back to address personal concerns and figure out where to go from there. He pointed out that the trans community within the site isn’t to blame. He now has a good outlook on the entire thing, saying “everything that happened” eventually “became an opportunity to actually course correct this place like I couldn’t when it was at its peak.”

Malka said now the hope is to “actually talk about things again, and use this place for escapism from the shitty real world,” rather than “some insane asylum where you’re driven out for ‘normalizing!!11’ if you don’t hate everything and want to die.”

The GAF owner did reveal that his overall goal with running an internet forum should “trend toward not giving a damn what anyone claims to be in terms of identity, just the content of what they have to say and the evidence supporting it.” He said when you become a “protected class” and wield power by “announcing that you’re a person of color or a woman or trans or whatever it may be,” that sort of power is “going to be taken advantage of on a platform like this. And it was.”

Finally, Malka said that he “never wanted that outcome.” He wanted everyone “to be able to come on here and not deal with what I felt was a massive dissonance between how we typically engage with each other on the internet vs how we do IRL.” Malka also said they’re going to go through the bans handed out by former moderators and unban users who were unjustly banned.

My take: Sadly, ResetEra is more or less the same type of echo chamber you found at NeoGAF during its peak, as most of the users who fled to the former over the latter were the ones taking advantage of those sorts of identity politics. I was a frequent GAF user over five years ago and was generally sad to see what became of its community and staff.

How do you feel about the fallout surrounding NeoGAF? The current state of things? If ResetEra is anything other than a renamed GAF community? Sound off in the comments below.