I'm not so sure. Several of the most popular game platforms (Xbox, PlayStation, iOS) are effectively closed, with gatekeepers who decide which games are allowed. And those gatekeepers don't allow certain types of games on those platforms. Of course it's still possible to create whatever games you want on the remaining free platforms, but removing some of the most popular and lucrative options could make it economically challenging.
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.
> It's easy for us white dudes (as I assume you are, based on your post)
That's a racist stereotype.
> the privilege of identifying with the inevitable white dude main character
You're telling me that people relate to some ex-military dude that goes around shooting people who shoot at them? (COD) You're also telling me that we relate to some girl jumping on top of buildings and running around? (Mirrors edge) The same with a ripped Spartan with chains embedded in his arms? (God of War) [To make things worse... his skin has been dyed many times over]
You've got to be loony if you believe that the race of the character prevents someone from relating. From my perspective its a fantasy world you're entering. Just because I'm playing Sonic the Hedgehog doesn't mean that I can't relate just due to it's Hedgehoggian race.
Being inclusive: Yeah, it's extremely inclusive, The most famous videogame in the world is about a Italian plumber, the most sold videogame in history is about a redneck, a black man and a Russian man. The most famous puzzle game is about a women in a experiment. They want the prime time on more AAA games? So you think giving them the main role in GTA would make them happy? I don't think so, they would scream "Women are not violent, this is sexism!"
I'm "brown" by all US definitions of it and I couldn't care less for "more brown people in videogames".
> The progress we are making is fantastic
There have been no progress, getting closed to your biased ideal of games is not progress until you can proof otherwise.
> It's not about 'offending' people, it's about consistently and invisibly leaving people out.
The trouble is, this isn't something you can solve on an individual level as someone developing a single game - you have to leave some people out, there's simply not space - and yet, as the article alludes to, there's this pressure to meet everyone's expectations around inclusion.
(Even when the people being included don't actually exist. There was this big, screwed up gaming media hoo-hah a while ago about how a game and its developers were racist because they hadn't include any black people. It was set in a time and a region when they didn't exist - and from what I recall, the developers actually did the research on this, they didn't just assume everyone was white in their setting.)
Okay, I understood this part of the article 'you can't do everyone justice'.
As for the 'white dude' part: lucky guess ;-) But I personally can't identify with the flat stereotypes in games, it just doesn't work for me. I also will never say "games should be just whatever", they are just so much more to me.
I love the stories, seeing worlds that never have been and never will be. That's what games are for me about.
To the politics: My part was about workplace politics, but you are right about the game politics, it is good to take the extra mile and reach out.
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.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I do think it's interesting that we don't hold many other forms of media and art to this standard. Movies are about the only ones I can see where people do bring it up, but even that is a "fringe" concern, for the most part you'll never see a review of a movie bring up diversity and inclusion, and yet it's quickly become a fixture in modern games reviewing (see: Polygon).
I wonder if it's because gaming is a world you can escape to, immerse yourself in more than movies? But then, I find books to be far more engrossing, and you'll never see this brought up for them. It's interesting, that's for sure.
It is really hard to say what you mean when you only have words to describe what you feel.
I hope you can take this as an apology, I don't wan't to hurt any feelings with what I do or say, it is just too easy to loose the passion for what you do when all you do is trying to meet expectations. I learned that the hard way.
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.
>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.
I am neither white nor dude and it is easy for me to say it too. Stop trying to hide behind me to justify your politics.
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.
Yes it does work with the Rocksmith cable and we've seen a bunch of users discovering that. As you point out, pitch detection can be a little sensitive with that cable (depending on the guitar), and you're right that we could / should do some calibrating to improve it.
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.
Actually there are many cases where the police completely ignore calls for help and courts have found that police have absolutely no responsibility to protect individuals.
The police do however love opportunities to justify large expenditures and fancy equipment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
The Court explained that "[t]he duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists."
No one would ever be a police officer if police officers were liable for damages every time they were unsuccessful in protecting someone. This is perfectly reasonable.
No, they do have an obligation to protect the public in general. That's the point of police.
What they don't have is financial liability for the death of every specific person they aren't smart/fast/legally empowered/well-funded enough to save, because that would be unreasonable.
> No, they do have an obligation to protect the public in general.
I see your point but I think it's a pretty arbitrary one. Have a police force every been held legally accountable for failing to protect the public? The case law that the police have no particular obligation to protect individuals is well established.
What does it mean to have an obligation to protect the public when the public is made up of individuals and the police have no particular obligations to protect individuals?
> The same way that the fire department has to respond to every single fire alarm,
I discovered this isn't true, at least not in Lowell, MA (a bit north of Boston, MA). A few years ago I bought a 3-family rental property. There was a big blizzard that froze the badly insulated water pipes in the house, which resulted in the pipes bursting on the 3rd floor. That caused what amounted to a waterfall inside the 2nd and 1st floors.
When I arrived, the fire alarms were on. I was going to head down to the basement to turn off the water main but then I realized I had no idea where the water main was (I had just bought the house) and I figured that venturing into a dark basement full of water with live wires running everywhere probably wasn't the brightest idea.
So I called 911, explained the situation, and waited. They told me they'd "send someone". 20 minutes went by. The waterfall was still going. I called again. They told me they'd send someone. 10 minutes went back. I called a 3rd time and was told "they're busy clearing snow from fire hydrants around the city". I happen to be standing next to a light switch in the house and I happened to smell something that smelled like smoke. "But I smell smoke", I said to the dispatcher.
"Smoke?!", she replied. "We'll send someone immediately."
And within 3 minutes I had a dozen firefighters in the house.
I think police regularly (have to?) pick and choose where to go, more so than firefighters. I know from friends and anecdotally that e.g. reporting a domestic violence situation in a poor neighborhood is certainly not gaurenteed to get the cops out.
