Reputation Assassination

[christian]

Jim Sterling: The Best Modern Games Journalism Has To Offer? Or A Vulgar, Patronising Embarrassment? - http://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/ ... y-mr-biffo

[christian]

The Enlightenment - http://www.pocketcollege.com/beta/index ... _RR161AS81

Rushdoony: Well, the academic community—you mentioned Bloom—is really the heir of the Enlightenment and the French Philosophs, because their attitude towards what they dislike is ridicule. They will not treat anything seriously that they want to abolish from intellectual discourse.

Scott: Well, there is a wonderful tactic, because it means that you don’t have to answer the other fellow’s arguments. You can ridicule them and therefore you can evade their point. Now Voltaire picked this up in London, took it back to France, introduced it and, of course, the Church was awfully easy to make fun of because it was a politicized church in France. It had been under the crown since the time of Francis I, a long time. The king appointed the cardinals and the bishops. So these were political jobs. Richelieu wasn’t even a priest.

And in Voltaire’s hands it became, first, a fad and then a fashion and then a custom. And custom, you know, is almost ineradicable. To this day the French will dismiss you with an aphorism. They very seldom put together a completely structured argument the way Germans do or, for that matter, the English speaking world. They dismiss you with a metaphor.

Or today, with a meme.

[christian]

https://twitter.com/pseudonymjones/stat ... 8138821632

a quick comic about how bad Pokemon Go is

Cn5Xel5WEAAsE6j.jpg (212.61 KiB) Viewed 220024 times

[christian]

Even Pokemon Go's Biggest Fans Are Turning Against It - http://kotaku.com/even-pokemon-gos-bigg ... 1784654305

In the course of a few weeks, Pokémon Go has gone from a mega hit, to a broken game even its most ardent fans cannot defend. This shift in the community is due to mostly one thing: a lack of communication from Niantic.

Maybe it’s just a vocal minority who is going too far. Pokémon Go has millions of players, and only a small number of them are on Reddit and Twitter, drafting campaigns to bring Niantic down—or at least get its attention somehow.

[christian]

Inside the Nasty Backlash Against No Man's Sky - http://www.vice.com/read/inside-the-nas ... y-backlash

[christian]

Digital Homicide removed from Steam - http://www.polygon.com/2016/9/17/129517 ... sers-valve

The spin in these articles has to be seen to be believed. As if Digital Homicide has anything against criticism. It's the lies and abuse that they're fighting against, not criticism. Just look at the posted court documents. Only two Steam reviews are mentioned. One of which begins with "GO F*** YOURSELF DIGITAL HOMICIDE". The other doesn't even mention the game at all. Both by the same reviewer. If you could even call him that. More like an abuser, who curiously only seems to review Digital Homicide games. I wonder why he hasn't thought to review games by anyone else. What a mystery!

It's completely dishonest to hide the so-called criticism that Digital Homicide is fighting against. It doesn't take any effort to find this stuff out. And it's disgusting to see so many cheering over Steam's decision to remove them from their store. As if DH games were any more deserving of removal than the piles of junk games that are daily dumped onto the store.

[christian]

http://www.digitalhomicide.ninja/

The lawsuit that was submitted in regards to a handful of Steam users has been labeled by the media and now by Doug Lombardi's(a Valve representative) statement as "being hostile to Steam users" in general which is incorrect. The lawsuit recently filed is solely in regards to individuals where no resolution was able to be obtained from Steam to provide a safe environment for us to conduct business. By removing us for defending ourselves against harassment Steam is openly stating you cannot defend yourself

When someone bothers you on say a platform like Facebook and you find the need to ban them, the Facebook response after you ban is "Sorry you had this experience" and then that person is removed from being able to post on your page. Steam's stance is what just happened to us. By removing us they have taken the stance that users have the right to harass me, tell me I should kill myself, and insult my family . If I try to defend myself against said actions then I lose my family's income. If it wasn't for 2 years of experience of dealing with Steam on a regular basis, this disgusting stance would seem shocking to me.

[christian]

Source: Battleborn is going free-to-play soon - http://kotaku.com/source-battleborn-is- ... 1787235168

Somebody told Kotaku that Battleborn was going "free-to-play", and Kotaku published a story about it. This understandably struck a nerve with Randy Pitchford.

https://twitter.com/DuvalMagic/status/7 ... 9299142656

I was just told about a reckless story about Battleborn going F2P that is false. There are no plans to convert Battleborn free to play.

Why would he be upset about this? Because the story is not being framed honestly. Randy explained on Twitter that there have been internal discussions about free trials to attract more players. Fair enough. The game hasn't been as successful as had been hoped. Doesn't help that the Internet has largely condemned it as a failure, spreading misinformation about how it's an Overwatch clone, etc. The same thing also happened to Paladins.

In this context of Internet harassment and hate campaigns, publishing a headline saying that Battleborn is "going free-to-play" isn't responsible journalism. It's another attack.

[christian]

Summary of the latest anti-Ubisoft campaign - http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016- ... itch-video

[christian]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2863 ... ment290151

So many interesting lessons from NMS. We've got:
- A relatively traditional hype campaign as has been practiced for decades. Some over promising. Some ambiguity. In the grand scheme of things minor (remember when Quake was described in press as an RPG with the main weapon being Thor's hammer? No one cared that it changed...because this is how new IPs have been treated in the press for ages.)
- Emergence of a long term mob protest. The communities are organized and ready to pounce on a game or more importantly, a game developer that they feel deserves their 'righteous rage'. This has happened before, but we are seeing hate campaigns that last longer and hit a larger number of player, including those not even involved in the actual game. Being a hater is now a hobbyist lifestyle.

I personally feel for the NMS team. Minor mistakes have been magnified. Perhaps a sign of our hyper polarized post truth era.

Takeaways:
- Expect more mob campaigns. These are not rational protests, but instead groups who are actively looking for someone to destroy. The hate is the hobby. An unplayed game, even one missing a bullet point, is not worth this much vitriol. These group may become more organized and more able to keep up sustained campaigns with the goal of ruining a developer and their career.
- Expect developers to be more guarded.
- Smaller teams without professional PR are most likely to run afoul.