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http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/08/the_legend_of_zelda_monopoly_dated_for_15th_september_in_us

 

:3

 

[Paliodor 1 739]

Całkiem fajny artykuł na Kotoku poświecony pierwszemu Deus Ex i temu jak pod pewnymi względami przewidział przyszłość:

 

How Deus Ex Predicted the Future

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Richard Wordsworth

Filed to: deus ex

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1

Warning: If you haven't played Deus Ex, but have maybe bought it in a Steam Sale as something you're absolutely going to play one day, this article will drive a twelve-car train of spoilers through that dream like you're Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception.

This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK.

A piece of driftwood internet wisdom that sometimes floats past on gaming messageboards goes something like this: every time you mention Deus Ex, someone will reinstall it. Somewhere, wheezing for breath under the clutter of my room/workspace/habitat, is my original Deus Ex CD-ROM, which I bought aged 12 on a whim with pocket money. My reasoning was solid: I'd never heard of the game, but the back of the box promised guns and conspiracies, and the dude on the front was rocking some dangerously cool shades. Little Me might not have known much about global banking conspiracies or the Trilateral Commission, but you could coax him onto the cyberpunk neo-anarchist bandwagon with a pair of polarised Wayfarers and a trench coat.

Fourteen years later, I've lost my fake RayBans and even the local Brixton drug dealers don't wear trench coats. Sunglasses at night went out with Corey Hart (or at least with Keanu Reeves). Deus Ex did indeed have guns, but even at the time they were inexcusably horrible to use. The game's not even a looker anymore – more a kind of papercraft tribute to how you think you remember it looked, with weirder walking animations.

So why do I go back to it? Because leaving aside its wackier conspiracy theories, it's the quality – the prescience – of Deus Ex's story that makes it such a great game to play in 2014 – in a horrible, unsettling sort of way. Revisit the game today and nano-augmented super-agent JC Denton's quest to unravel a global conspiracy doesn't seem twee or outdated. Somehow, it seems timely: moment after moment of sneering, political philosophising about money, health, corporations and the poor, punctuated by regular, 400-volt jolts of "wait, when was this written?"

Unlike the most recent instalment in the franchise – 2011's (great) Deus Ex: Human Revolution – the original Deus Ex doesn't drag you by the wrist right to the centre of its narrative. You aren't the bodyguard/confidant of a global leader in the human augmentation industry and your girlfriend isn't the brilliant, one-in-a-million scientist whose research holds the keys to the future of humanity's advancement. In DX1, you are, basically, a thug. A genetically engineered, laser-precise piece of next-gen thuggery, it's true – but a punchy cog in the wheel of big government nonetheless. Go here. Do that. Shoot them. Video game protagonist 101.

The set-up at the game's start deliberately plays on the unimpeachable FPS hero trope. Only if you slow down to read the game's scattered newspapers, public information terminals and hacked email accounts do you find out how rotten the world of Deus Ex really is, and that apple only decays further the deeper you burrow.

Your first mission ends with an interrogation with a captured terrorist leader. His group have stolen a shipment of vaccine (called Ambrosia) for a plague that's decimating all but the wealthiest in society (who can afford the cure). Your sole objective is to find out where the terrorists are taking it, so you can nab it back.

"Well done!" Your handler beams over your brain implant, once you do. "Report back to base. Mission complete."

But if you stay on after getting your answer, you can press the leader on his motives. What you get for your trouble could be an opinion column from a 2014 Sunday newspaper. This guy, who until 30 seconds ago was the target of an anti-terror raid (and who you can just waste in the head, if you feel like it, to the chagrin of your superiors), is suddenly flitting between Occupy movement rhetoric ("Ever wonder by the big car companies pay 2 per cent tax, while the guys on the assembly line pay 40 per cent?") and pro-Wikileaks soundbites ("Did you ever ask what it's for? The surveillance? The police? Is that freedom?"). Besides the boxy, 4:3 ratio TVs back at counter-terrorist HQ, there's not a thing in the thematic nature of DX1's opening mission that's aged a day.

"Regarding the 99 per cent [question], it's funny," says Deus Ex's lead writer, Sheldon Pacotti. "I guess I've always had a populist streak in me. I can't speak for the rest of the development team, but even before the economic shocks of the 2000s I was preoccupied with the smallness of individual people compared to modern companies and governments. It's hard to own your own career – and identity – when you often don't even see the faces of the people deciding whether or not your job exists. You're even more alienated when the 'decisions' are really just the result of impenetrably complex macro-economic processes. This vastness of scale is a direct outgrowth of technology".

The game's first big twist is that the National Secessionist Force (or NSF), which you've been bravely gun-plugging in the name of maintaining order, are actually the good guys: regular people pushed into fighting for their lives and livelihoods and then conveniently branded 'terrorists' by their government. The world that they live in is leaving them behind, as the rich pull away from the poor and employ people like you to police the divide.

As JC, you see both sides of the equation in the way that no other in-game characters do: the elite live in fancy apartments and mansions (which you break into and pillage for goodies), while New York is filled with the sick and the homeless - either living in crappy rented rooms in the dilapidated 'Ton Hotel, or in ragtag communities in abandoned subway stations. Deus Ex's augmentations (the biomechanical enhancements that give JC and other UNATCO agents their awesome, murderous powers (and the series' signature mechanics)) are huge technological advances. But the more you explore, the more you realise you're one of the chosen few who can enjoy them. These frightened, desperate people are being stacked against a Terminator. As the defenceless NSF leader puts it before he's carried off, never to be seen again: "Who's the scary one, huh? Me or you?"

 

One famous piece of trivia about Deus Ex is that, if you look at the city skyline during the missions set in New York City, the Twin Towers are conspicuously absent. The real reason for their exclusion isn't very interesting: something to do with memory constraints. So in the game's fiction, the Towers were destroyed by terrorists. Deus Ex was released in 2000, a year before 9/11.

But the game makes a more direct prediction about terrorism in the 21st Century in its first level, in which (before interrogating the NSF leader) JC is tasked with turfing the NSF out of the Statue of Liberty. The statue itself was destroyed previously in the game's fiction, losing its head and its torch. But the group responsible are domestic terrorists, and the attack therefore a symbolic one: in Deus Ex's world, the American people feel they're now subjects of a wealthy and corrupt elite working against the interests of the common man. Politicians and their families get plague vaccine while their own loved ones die in gutters. 'Liberty' is just a statue.

"I think the game's most accurate prediction comes in how terrorism operates in the story", says Pacotti. "From the mission ideas to the way characters strategise and explain themselves, the game dramatises the idea that 21st century war will be waged with symbolic acts. Before September 11th, though terrorism was prominent in the news, the notion that terrorists would destroy a major landmark like the Statue of Liberty seemed far-fetched, but now it's clear that modern wars are TV shows where both sides compete to write the script. PR has always been a part of war, but 24-hour news and the internet has made it almost the primary battlefield."

The responses of the powers-that-be to the threat of terrorism in the first Deus Ex are also eerily prescient, especially in their dehumanisation of the enemy. For the first chunk of the game, JC works as an agent for the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition (UNATCO). Although you can choose to play a stealthy, non-lethal character, if you go soft on UNATCO's enemies, the veteran field agents will chew you out and question whether you've really got the stones for the job.

"The terrorists have wired the platform with explosives and put in hostages", says your sometime-mentor, Anna Navarre, of an NSF group who have barricaded a subway station. "Get the hostages out if you can, but make sure the NSF learn that human shields will not work against UNATCO".

UNATCO HQ is a house divided. You're free to talk to the secondary characters whom work there between missions. General Sam Carter, a war veteran, runs the armoury. He's not happy with the way UNATCO's mission is being handled by the higher-ups, but affirms that the majority of people working in the building – the civilian staffers and the boots-on-the-ground – are "24-carat gold".

Expand

Wander down to UNATCO's bottom level, however, and you'll find the holding cells; several hold NSF prisoners. You're forbidden to talk to them (though you can), and later, one of the game's primary antagonists (a shady government higher-up) arrives to conduct the interrogations personally. Follow him surreptitiously to the cells and you can watch his 'interrogation' of the captives – who are, it's made clear, US citizens with families. The interrogation begins with carrots, moves on to sticks, and ends with murder. The government representative coldly rationalises his actions as "responding to a threat". The doctrine of the Bush and Cheney administration is carved deep into the foundations of UNATCO HQ.

"We may not have the premeditated lies of Deus Ex, but we do see extraordinary feats of storytelling when governments overstep or mis-step", says Pacotti. "To me, at least, some of the malaise of the Deux Ex dystopia has been present during the years after 9/11, during which torture, mass surveillance of civilians, and disregard for due process have all been touted as necessary for fighting terrorists. It's the story of totalitarianism nicely wordsmithed by the West and provided free of charge back to the rest of the world".

But if its treatise on terrorism was Deus Ex predicting the 2000s, maybe the best measure of how much times have changed since the game's original release is the fact that mass surveillance of a civilian population, while a fact of life in the game's universe, doesn't even earn the honour of being a major plot point. It's almost relegated to a lone (if chilling) Easter Egg, a hidden encounter that is easy to miss altogether if you aren't actively looking for it.

About midway through the game, JC finds himself quasi-abducted and wakes up in the secret mansion of Illuminatus Morgan Everett. It's one of Deus Ex's many non-combat moments. JC's objectives are to meet Everett, learn about the Illuminati's plans for the world, then meet his pilot Jock at the helipad so that he can fly off to his next mission. But if you decide post-meeting that you'd rather take five to do some snooping, you might discover the code to an otherwise impregnable blast door. Behind it sits a computer running an artificial intelligence named Morpheus.

Morpheus, as it explains itself to JC, is a retired prototype for part of the ECHELON network: a gigantic, automated spying system built to intercept and analyse phone conversations, emails, faxes and other forms of communication from around the world. In the game, Morpheus has since been replaced by more advanced AIs (Daedalus, Icarus and possibly Oracle). Now it is kept by Everett as a techno-curiosity to amuse house guests. Its party trick is telling people their life stories, harvested from the digital footprints they leave online.

"Human beings feel pleasure while they are watched," it says, without emotion. "I have recorded their smiles as I tell them who they are".

"Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance", JC replies.

This unhappy piece of future-gazing was written at the end of the '90s, before Facebook, before Twitter, before smartphone apps that recorded your movements via GPS with your one-tap consent. More unsettlingly, Morpheus dismisses JC's cynical response ("no-one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera") as naive, positing that "the need to be observed was once satisfied by God" and that "the human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame: the observation and judgement of others".

That's Morpheus, a fictional artificial intelligence, predicting the web-born mentality that drives Facebook-stalking and pushed the Mail Online to become the most viewed online newspaper in the world, off the back of stories about D-List celebrity affairs and cellulite.

 

"In the Morpheus conversation, though I personally had no inkling that something like Facebook was on the horizon, I started seeing a very clear personal connection between human beings and the 'data mining' of the [Morpheus] AI", says Pacotti. "I think there is this fundamental human need to be known, understood, and therefore assigned a proper place. Even among a group of teenagers on Facebook, this involves a certain ceding of power, whether to a group of peers or to our software overlords".

If this article had been written ten years ago, it would have been about war and the lengths that a hypothetical future government might go to in the nominal defence of the Homeland. Deus Ex would still have been ahead of its time, but rooted in the physical and segregated from the life of the average citizen; we'd be talking about the military augmentation of soldiers through the Future Soldier programme or the abuse of captured enemy combatants and illegal rendition, not mass surveillance and the individual right to privacy.

But even after Guantanomo failed to close, even after the term 'Black Site' entered the vernacular and can now be bandied around in TV shows like Homeland and The Blacklist without making us sick, Deus Ex's other themes remain salient. The hero facing off against the corrupt heads of the serpent with Plasma Rifles and GEP Guns is still good video game gloss, but the backing music – the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor, the distrust of the government – resonates more than ever. So what has changed in the 14 year interim? What would Deus Ex have looked like if it had been made today?

"Nothing is quite right about the world of Deus Ex", says Pacotti. "Like all fiction, the gameworld is prone to exaggeration – from the luridness of cybernetic implants to the fierceness of laboratory mutants – but when I try to put my finger on something that is dead wrong, I have a hard time.

"One issue that occupies more of my attention these days is the falling economic worth of human beings. Globalisation simply continues industry's search for cheap resources and cheap labour, as disruptive as it may seem in the West – and might well work its mischief long before the timeframe of Deus Ex. The more apocalyptic change is automation. The middle class is disappearing because mediocre human intellects, which previously could be effective at organising, say, a filing cabinet, simply don't 'add value' where they used to. The conspirators of a re-imagined Deus Ex would need to be more cognisant of this shift, I think.

"The tone of [the game's] idea – a [domestic] armed uprising in the US – doesn't feel quite right today, yet all of the same tensions are present. Accusations of a conspiracy between big business and government, anger at the US allowing itself to be led by other countries, severe wealth disparity, armed standoffs between ranchers and the government, secession movements (like the recent one on Colorado)... A slight shift of focus, and the future could still turn out like Deus Ex after all".

 

[Gość _Be_]

Polygon wrzucił fajny artykuł o tym, żeby przestać preorderować gry bo to rak branży.

 

http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/10/5887425/aliens-isolation-ripley-preorder-exclusive-no

 

 

re-ordering a game doesn’t help the consumer. It helps everyone else.

 

That’s the reality of the situation. Good pre-order numbers sound good on earnings calls, and they’re evidence of an upcoming successful launch. They can be a PR weapon if a company wants to crow about strong early support for a title. They’re treated like money in the bank, and rightfully so: A customer is more or less committing to buying a game before they’ve read a review or heard from others who have played the game to completion.

 

Pre-orders help publishers, we know this.

 

Pre-orders also help stores like GameStop manage inventory. Selling new games is a low-margin business compared to selling accessories, used games, and the other trinkets you find in the store. This is why you’re always upsold when you go into a specialty video game retailer: They don’t make that much money on new games, so they want to push you towards products that earn them more money. Knowing the demand for a game allows them to order the minimum amount of product to meet that demand, so they don’t waste money on inventory that sits and takes up space.

 

Pre-orders help publishers, we know this.

 

When you’re pre-ordering a game, you’re giving a retailer money so they don’t have to order enough copies to fulfill a demand that may not exist. Any scarcity on the part of the retailer is artificial; they’re trying to save money by ordering the minimal amount possible, and you’re giving them a data point to help in that quest.

 

You’re also locking yourself in to that retailer: You’re given them a financial commitment that you’ll come back to that particular store to pick up the game, and won’t go to a competitor. It’s also saying you’re likely to come back and buy the game no matter the reviews, or even before the reviews hit.

 

"You’re fighting a problem of potential scarcity, a problem created by the retailer"

 

If you decide not to get the game, you have to go back to that location, ask for your money back, and they’re going to try to get you to either buy the game anyway or move the preorder to another title. There is nothing a retail gaming store hates more than returning the deposit on a game.

 

So you’re fighting a problem of potential scarcity, a problem created by the retailer, by making it harder to back out of a purchasing decision later.

 

Pre-orders help publishers and retailers. They’re bad news for consumers. This is a general rule, but for today I'm going to talk about Alien: Isolation, a game you should in no way pre-order. This is an example of a larger trend; the counter-attack against the idea of not pre-ordering using increasingly attractive exclusive content.

Why pick on Alien: Isolation?

 

Well, I also warned you against preordering Battlefield: Hardline due to that franchise’s abysmal reputation for game launches. But Alien: Isolation, despite the somewhat crazy pre-order bonus, is a bad bet. Pre-ordering games in general doesn't make much sense, and the move towards more substantial pre-order bonuses in terms of exclusive content is a reaction to the fact the industry is aware of how messed up the pre-order culture is on its face.

 

Pre-ordering is bad news, and the Alien: Isolation content is the reaction.

 

Let me be clear: I hope the game is good. As a fan of Aliens, I hope the game is great, and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played at events and in virtual reality. I hope the game does everything it sets out to do, and does it well. I’ll buy it in a heartbeat if that’s the case.

 

But I also saw many demos for, and played, Colonial Marines prior to launch. It looked great. It played well. I was excited about the game, and I came close to pre-ordering the super-special editions and buying the season pass and all the fun stuff based on that enthusiasm and love for the property. Then I played the game, and the reviews hit, and it became one of the biggest turkeys of the year.

 

Previews and interviews are important, and I enjoy reading them and writing them, but I also know that you can take a rotten piece of steak out of the garbage and cut out a bite that still looks and smells pretty good. Publishers are adept at showing every game in the best possible light pre-release, and we should treat these things as hints at greatness, not greatness itself.

 

But Sega doesn’t want you to wait for reviews, it wants your money now. It doesn’t want to risk you thinking critically or hearing from friends that the game isn’t great, it wants your money and commitment right away. So it’s going to set up a nice piece of bonus content, and say that you can only have it if you promise to purchase the game before we know more about it.

 

That’s not marketing, that’s consumer hostility. That’s a steak place saying you can only have potatoes if you show up and order before you see a picture of the food or hear from anyone else who has eaten it. We wouldn’t tolerate it in any other business, and we need to tell publishers who attempt this bullshit to get lost. This move should make you more skeptical of the game, not more excited.

 

"That’s not marketing, that’s consumer hostility"

 

I can’t even show you the trailer for the content, since it’s an exclusive with another publication, and I feel goofy with limitations put on how we can share marketing materials for a pre-order bonus. Let that sink in: Sega won’t let a commercial for a pre-order bonus go into wide distribution. That doesn't inspire confidence.

 

The more Sega waves its hands and repeats that we have to buy now, right now, before we read a review to get this great content … the more I feel like the company is trying to slide something past me. Imagine buying a house where the realtor said if you wanted to wait for a walkthrough you couldn’t have windows. Would that make you feel confident in your purchase?

 

High pressure, exclusive content that’s locked to pre-orders with marketing materials that’s limited in distribution is all the evidence I need that confidence in the game is low. These moves make me take a step back, not forward, especially when Sega has more or less pulled a fast one on us with Aliens games in the past.

 

You can pre-order to get the content if you want, but be aware you’re voting for this practice to continue. I hope the game is good. I want it to be good. I'm not telling you not to buy it, I'm telling you to wait until we know it's good. That shouldn't be a controversial or risky idea.

 

But we know that the pressure for pre-orders will only continue; this is why GameStop is willing to fund exclusive content. If GameStop pays for the content it gets to control that content, and that means more pre-order exclusives to get your money before you have all the information about a game.

 

I’m not interested in helping retailers or publishers just to get content that’s being held back to provide the illusion that pre-ordering isn’t consumer hostile. There is no reason in the modern market to pay for a game before it comes out, and everyone involved in the business knows it. That's why pre-order exclusives are becoming more and more attractive; they have to give you a reason to pass on making a rational decision in order to get this special content.

 

That’s a game I’m not willing to play anymore.

[raven_raven 12 012]

Yep, każdy bardziej ogarnięty powtarza: DO NOT PRE ORDER.

 

BTW, najpopularniejsze gry na torrentach wg stanu:

 

polaczki-cebulaczki ;/

 

 

[aux 3 768]

Fajne zdjęcie znalazłem. Williams z córką Zeldą.

 

[Zdunek 1 121]

Robin był wielkim fanem Zeldy. 

[tk___tk 4 795]

 

fajny nowy game sack o grach które wyciskały maksimum z systemów na których wyszły. jest to gamesack więc oczywiście mowa tu o systemach cztery generacje temu i wcześniej. ten street fighter na saturna \m/.

Edytowane 17 Sierpnia 2014 przez tk___tk

[Paliodor 1 739]

Daje plusa bo właśnie takiego kanału o j-gierkach szukałem.

[tk___tk 4 795]

te filmiki z serii left in japan zaje.biste są.

[Paliodor 1 739]

Na nie i te poświęcone poszczególnym konsolom szczególnie zwróciłem uwagę  ale poza nimi jest tam też masa innych ciekawych filmików więc będzie co oglądać.

[Paliodor 1 739]

Fanmade Shenmue HD:

http://bbs2.ruliweb.daum.net/gaia/do/ruliweb/default/hobby/310/read?articleId=22359880&bbsId=G005&itemId=431

[tk___tk 4 795]

Fanmade Shenmue HD:

http://bbs2.ruliweb.daum.net/gaia/do/ruliweb/default/hobby/310/read?articleId=22359880&bbsId=G005&itemId=431

 

ping coś niedawno pisał, że się robi w szanghaju duologia hd, ale nie wiem czy żartował... jeśli to prawda to jest szansa na premierę na zachodzie?

[Paliodor 1 739]

Tego nie wiem ale myślę,że byłyby na to szanse. Tym bardziej,że to fanowski projekt więc to raczej kwestia zebrania chętnych ludzi do tłumaczenia na angielski.

[raven_raven 12 012]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5-51PfwI3M

 

gejming żurnalizm [*]

nie wiem czy mówiąc o tej sprawie nie pogłębiam problemu, no ale whatever

[tk___tk 4 795]

jesse ventura \m/

 

 

I ain't got time to bleed.

 

edyta:

 

fajny filmik, chyba jednak nie kupię feza.

Edytowane 20 Sierpnia 2014 przez tk___tk

[django 549]

Cisniemy po gejmig żurnaliźmie? Super. Oto (pipi)a bomby prawdy napisane w 2008 roku i nadal aktualne.

 

 

The Videogame News Racket

By Alex Kierkegaard / March 29, 2008

The first thing that needs to be understood in any discussion regarding the business of videogame news reporting is that the sources of these news are always the game companies themselves. This is the main difference between general news reporting and videogame news reporting: in the first case the sources of news are innumerable, whereas in the second case one could conceivably compile a list of all currently-active game companies, and, in theory at least, as long as one kept an eye on their press releases, one's coverage of the game news world would be complete and comprehensive. -- In theory.

Because in practice things are quite a bit different, as we all very well know. In practice, a great deal of game news does not in fact originate from the game companies themselves -- a great deal of it originates from specialist magazines and websites, and from the major professional blogs across the world.

But why is that?

The answer to this question, were it to become understood by every single gamer out there, would, within a short time, put out of business every single professional game news outlet on the internet (at least in their current forms). And since the sooner this happens the better for the health of our little hobby, I think it's time someone presented the world with the answer to this question.

The honest search for information morphs into manipulation
Let's take a trip back to the early '80s. There's no internet as we know it, so in order for the necessary communication between game companies and their customers to be established, a number of specialist gaming publications are founded across the world. Without them, gamers would have no way of finding out about new games until they came across them in the stores, and no additional information on them beyond what is written on the back of each box. This is, therefore, where the magazines come in. They are, above all, a vital source of news coverage -- the only one that exists -- compared to which their criticism aspect is merely an afterthought.

But with the arrival and rise of the internet, the need for the news sections of game publications vanished overnight -- though hardly anyone seemed capable of grasping this fact. Each game company immediately established an online presence with its own dedicated website, and began designing dedicated sites for each and every one of their upcoming games. Because of slow connection speeds and high webspace and bandwidth costs, these sites were at first rudimentary, containing little more than a handful of screenshots and a few paragraphs of text, but it wasn't long before those technical difficulties were overcome, and official websites became extremely sophisticated, capable of delivering more information on each title, and of a much higher quality, than any all-purpose gaming site or magazine.

With the arrival of the internet, in other words, a direct link between game companies and gamers was established, rendering news publications obsolete. Why, then, over a decade later, are they still in business?

The reason they are still in business is because they have in the meantime struck a deal with game companies, under the terms of which the companies are to feed them information at regular intervals, while WITHHOLDING IT FROM THEIR VERY OWN OFFICIAL WEBSITES until such a time as this information has become practically worthless. If you think I am just cooking up conspiracy theories, ask yourselves: How on earth is it possible for sites such as LameSpot, Euroidiot or Fanitsu, to get hold of a screenshot or video clip of a game before the very people that are making it? Even if these websites employ superspies that break into the offices of these companies and steal screenshots and videos every week -- surely, these screenshots and videos were made at least a few hours before being stolen, and surely the people that made them could very easily upload them to each game's official site within a few seconds -- either sometime before they were stolen or shortly afterwards.

And yet they never do. They never upload these screens and videos (and in-depth mechanics explanations) to their very own websites because if they did they would have no "exclusives" to bargain with in their negotiations with magazines and websites -- no bargaining chips with which to secure magazine covers or extended frontpage time. (Of course these "exclusives" are not the only bargaining chips the companies have at their disposal. Or, to put it another way, ALL companies have these chips, but the bigger, more powerful ones have another, additional kind of chip: that of advertising.)

This is therefore the process by which the honorable, legitimate business of game news reporting evolved into a despicable racket, a disgusting scam that has been shaping the direction of our favorite hobby for well over a decade. Because you must understand that there was very little dishonorable about news reporting back in the '80s: game journalists back then busted their asses on a daily basis to bring to us the latest news on as wide a range of games as it was financially feasible for them, and to present it to us in an aesthetically pleasing manner. They had to cultivate and maintain contacts with key people in as many companies as possible, they had to travel to trade shows across the world and report back on the latest developments, they had to go without sleep for days on end to meet deadlines. Without them, we'd have been left completely in the dark.

Compare all that effort to what would be required in 2008, if each company SUDDENLY BEGAN FEEDING THE LATEST INFO AND MEDIA ON EACH OF THEIR UPCOMING TITLES DIRECTLY TO THEIR OFFICIAL WEBSITES, in a timely manner. All you'd need then would be to subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds, and the information would arrive straight to your mailbox, live to the second. At the most, one could start a website that would gather all these feeds, compiling all the information in real-time into appropriate sections (by genre/hardware platfom/etc.), presenting it to each reader in an easier to digest format, and all this with absolutely no need of human intervention (and therefore no need for staff, a budget, and advertising). The necessary technology for all this has been available for years: It may be decades before it's finally put to use.

This then, is how the legitimate business of game news reporting morphed into a scam. Specialist news publications originally appeared because there arose a need for them; once that need had disappeared, they could only stay in business by insidious manipulation. And we are all paying daily for allowing ourselves to be manipulated.

The death of opinion
What you must understand is that what separates popular publications from less popular ones these days is not the quality of the coverage they provide, as was once the case, but the quantity and the timeliness. Specialist gaming publications no longer live or die by the breadth of their coverage (everyone covers the same games made by the same five publishers), or by the sharpness of their aesthetic design (all websites look just as dreadfully ugly), or by the quality of their editorial (lol) -- they live or die by their ability to play this game of manipulation. Why is Fanitsu the no.1 gaming magazine and website in Japan? Surely not because of the insight of its reviews and articles (all Japanese publications suck equally) but because it manages to secure the most "exclusives" -- in other words, because it has learned to play the manipulation game better than its competitors. Why is LameSpot the no.1 gaming website in the English-speaking world? For the same reason.

I will now open a parenthesis and try to explain to you the job of the videogame news writer. Whether we are talking about corporate game journalists or random aficionados who post their ramblings on their personal blogs, the job of all these people is the same. You can think of them as black boxes: The latest information comes in on one side, gets processed inside them (inside their brains, that is) and comes out the other end slightly (or considerably) altered -- with a spin, so to speak. Their job is to take the pure, undiluted information that comes out of the game companies, and put their personal spin on it. There is nothing more they can do -- there is nothing less they should do.

This process, however, the process of providing worthwhile commentary on the latest news, is costly -- because it requires time and brain power. In the case of game writing, it means that the writer must be well acquainted with the genre each game belongs to, and remain up to date with new developments not only by looking at screenshots and watching trailers online -- but above all by spending lots and lots of time playing all the key games that come out in each genre, AS they come out.

Now, normally, this would not be a problem with the major publications. The big sites and magazines employ at least a dozen people each, and could therefore easily see to it that they have a couple of experts in each genre among their staff, so that their commentary would always be interesting to read and insightful.

Yet in an industry where being "interesting to read" and "insightful" means to commit professional suicide, such people would be a liability, and therefore cretins and simpletons are preferred instead. Besides, the nature of this industry is such that even if you had Friedrich Nietzsche in your staff, anything he had to say about an upcoming game would be forgotten the moment your competitor pulled out of its sleeve a brand-new "exclusive" screenshot or video clip.

Insight, therefore, takes a lot more time, effort and talent to be produced than random screenshots and videos, and results in less traffic. And since on the internet traffic = money, is it any wonder then, that insight has been abandoned?

In the case of blogs, things are even worse. Most blogs are run by one or two people at most -- even big ones such as Siliconera -- yet in order to generate the necessary traffic to start making money, these blogs STILL purport to cover thousands and thousands of games across dozens of genres. How do these people find time to play anything? How do these people manage to keep up to date with each of these genres they cover so that their commentary will still have some value?

The answer of course is that they don't, which is why you will never read anything genuinely interesting in any of these blogs. These people -- these cheap, malfunctioning, worthless "black boxes" -- are failing to do their job properly. In their mad efforts to cover as many games as possible in the least time possible, these people, these leeches, instead of processing the latest information and putting their own spin on it, simply copy it verbatim, or at best throw in a couple of dimwitted observations or stale jokes, and move on to the next game. And the reason they are still in business is because the companies refuse to give us all the information directly. This is why I call corporate game journalists and professional bloggers leeches, because they stand between the players and the companies, making money without providing any useful service to their readers -- only to the game companies who know best how to manipulate them.

This process, finally, ends up having a tremendously negative impact on the quality of commentary and criticism available. Have you ever wondered why blogs like Kotaku and Joystiq, though they employ nearly as many people as the big sites, and though their traffic is oftentimes comparable, hardly ever review anything? I'll tell you why. Because reviewing -- because actually having an opinion which you might be called on to defend -- is bad for business. Much easier to fill the internet with hundreds of thousands of pages, each containing one or two paragraphs with random comments on a game, months before it is released -- comments which you can then retract at any moment because you made them before the game came out, and comments which no one is going to call on you to defend anyway, because by the time the game is released, months and years into the future, everyone will have forgotten them. -- Thus, the death of opinion.

How the internet works
By God, if I were to fully explain this to you right now -- and if you were to fully understand me -- your head would surely explode, you would surely go insane -- I have no doubt of that. The fact that I will try but fail is for your own good!

As I mentioned before, on the internet traffic = money, and therefore if someone wants to make more money out of his website (as all the owners of professional gaming sites naturally do), he would do well to copy the practices of the top ranked sites in terms of traffic.

Now the owner of each site can only ever know the traffic of his own site -- never that of his competitors (to do that he would have to have access to his competitor's statistics reports, something which is impossible without illegal hacking or industrial espionage of some sort). Therefore, the only way to compare websites in terms of traffic is to use some third-party company that compiles statistics. Far and away the most reliable such company is Alexa, and a quick look at its Global Top 500 will tell you that out of the top four sites, three are search engines (the fourth, YouTube, is an aberration whose presence in the top four I could explain, but I won't because this explanation would have no bearing on the present discussion).

Now why do search engines receive more traffic than any other kind of site on the internet?

The answer is simple: Because they contain the internet.

This is the mind-blowing part. To fully grasp it you must know quite a bit about how the internet works, but it is not my purpose here to teach you this. Suffice it to say that if I had never built Insomnia, and if I hadn't looked very hard into ways of increasing its traffic, I never would have realized this, nor all the other things I am about to reveal to you. The point here anyway is that the more pages your site has the greater its traffic will be -- even if those pages are filled with nothing more than random screens, videos, and tiny bits of worthless text. There's no doubt that for very small sites quality counts more than quantity, but as a site grows in size quantity becomes increasingly more and more important. Once you finally begin approaching the level of traffic of search engines (as sites like LameSpot do -- currently ranked #131 on Alexa), quality of content is not only unimportant -- it is harmful to your quest for ever more traffic, because the vast majority of human beings are mired in such unfathomable stupidity, that they instinctively draw back from everything that so much as displays the slightest hint of quality in it. The masses despise quality because they can never hope to comprehend it. Search engines -- the ultimate websites in terms of traffic -- are agreeable to everyone because they do not make judgments. They give everyone everything they could possibly ask for -- no matter how worthless, banal or even deprived. This is the key to their success -- a success built on prin(nene)les antithetical to the demands of culture and of criticism, which thrive on exclusion.

People have the desire to take everything, to pillage everything, to manipulate everything. Seeing, de(nene)hering, learning does not touch them.
--Jean Baudrillard

Have you ever entered the title of an upcoming game into Google in search of information, only to be confronted by a results page full of links to pages that have practically none? This is what these websites do. This is how -- in their insane efforts to get closer and closer to the traffic of the search engines -- they become increasingly more like them. The moment a new game is announced they make a brand-new page for it -- a practically empty page! And yet this page will bring them more traffic than any insightful review ever would, because by the time the game is released (at which point it becomes possible to review it) hardly anyone will care about it anymore -- they will be too busy Googling like mad the next upcoming game, and giving millions and millions of hits to other blank pages, or, later on in the development process, to hastily slapped together "previews" (nothing more than reworded versions of info contained in press kits) full of "exclusive" media obtained from game publishers through their dirty little scam of manipulation.

These blank pages are the key to one's understanding of the problem. Their existence proves that the people who run these sites know very well how to manipulate -- not only the publisher-gamer relationship in order to profit from it, but also the search engines themselves, which send them a great deal of their traffic -- the amount of which determines the value of their chips in the game of manipulation with the publishers. The greater their traffic the more inclined will be the game publishers to grant them "exclusives", which in turn will only serve to drive their traffic ever upwards.

Both corporate websites and game publishers are locked into this game, like partners in a dance that never ends. They live or die -- they fail or prosper -- based exclusively on the capacity of their marketing departments to manipulate those of their partner's. Were one of them to suddenly stop dancing, its partner would immediately shun it, causing it to lose a great deal of business and eventually driving it into bankruptcy. If a game publisher suddenly stopped feeding "exclusives" to random websites, and instead always updated first its own official sites, then LameSpot et al. would immediately retaliate by giving more frontpage time to the games of its competitors. Similarly, if LameSpot's bosses suddenly developed a conscience and self-esteem, and hired intelligent experts to act as commentators on the news released by the game companies, then the companies would simply stop granting them "exclusives" in favor of other, more compliant websites. And if one partner does at some point decide to put an end to this wretched dance, there are always numerous others willing to take his place and dance dance dance as if the world was on fire.

In the words of fellow videogame aficionado Raúl Sánchez, this whole situation consists of, much like any other in the world of electronic gaming these days, "comedy and drama in equal part". But can there possibly be some way out of this madness?

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/the_videogame_news_racket/

 

Jest jeszcze kontynuacja w ktorej koles jeszcze mocniej analizuje temat i jedzie z dziennikarzynami. Polecam.

[tk___tk 4 795]

niezły tekst. dlatego cieszy mnie fakt, że nadchodzący secret service ma być kwartalnikiem.

[Blue 245]

No to dalej:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKmy5OKg6lo&list=UUWB0dvorHvkQlgfGGJR2yxQ

[tk___tk 4 795]

 

dobra telenowela.

[Blue 245]

W ogóle polecam kanał artystokraty z internetów. Cały dzień ogarniam chaos mieszkania i z twarzy nie znika mi uśmiech słuchając tego intelektualisty. 

[tk___tk 4 795]

zasubskrybowane .

[raven_raven 12 012]

no właśnie ciekawy typek się wydaje, na /v/ i /pol/ ktośtam go hejtował, ale trzeba sobie swoje zdanie wyrobić c'nie

[Suavek 4 135]

Racji w filmach tego gościa jest tyle samo, co sztucznej sensacji.

[tk___tk 4 795]

obejrzałem jeden o idiotach na tumblerze i nawet się uśmiałem. w filmiku o steam summer sales zalecił na koniec wrzucić żyda do studni. no, ale przypomniał mi o babymetal więc <ok>

 

 

\m/

[django 549]

Koleś to fedora mocno, ale jego filmiki o tumblerze to swietny popkorniak.

 

Najbardziej karygodna rzecza w tej calej aferze jest poczatkowe tuszowanie calej sprawy, kasowanie tematow po /v/ oraz redditach, kompletna cisza w eterze na stronach gejmingowych (nic dziwnego skoro Zoe ma koneksje w kazdej redakcji w ktorej sa SJW). A, no i ta nagroda na IndieCade ktora przyznal jej jeden z kochasiow, troche smiechlem.

 

Calosci absurdu dopelnia zekomy hack balerinki Phila Ryby. Hakerzy podpisuja sie jako /V/, uzywaja starego sloganu a w dodatku wrzucaja poltora giga plikow w ciagu paru sekund od wlamu (w tym pliki ktore niewiadomo co robily na tym serwerze, chyba ze Filip jest idiota).

 

Ogolnie, (pipi)ac gejming żurnalizm. Dodajcie sobie do zakladek thegamerpost albo n4g czy jakis inny agregat newsow i nie nabijajcie tym sukom klików. (Patrz: artykul na poprzedniej stronie)