Diversity for the Amoral

The new year started off with a fresh set of outrages to scourge Real Gamers™: Kick McKeand wrote a good article about diversity in games, Emily Grace Buck (who's started a new program for story games) reminded us that old gaming quip about story and pornos isn't all that clever, and it turns out Soldier …

Studio Closure

News of Telltale Games’ closure highlighted the fact that quite a few game studios have closed this year. There has been a lot of reflection on everything from the precarious nature of work in games, to the viability of certain types of games, as well as an outpouring of support for at least some of the …

Your EA Takes Suck

EA is an awesome company that makes good games and you sound like a moron when you bash it. EA bashing is the gaming version of clapter. If you've ever watched Real Time With Bill Maher, you'll immediately know what I'm talking about. Clapter sounds a little something like this: "Hey, how about [politician] right? …

L’Affaire le Laissez-Faire

A little over a month ago Valve issued warnings to the makers of adult visual novels and others which became publicized resulting in controversy and uncertainty regarding the status of games with sexual content on Steam. A few weeks later Valve reversed this implied decision and announced that they would open the store to anything …

Hot Sex Robot Takes

Ten people in Toronto lost their lives when a man drove a rental truck down a street with the intent of hitting as many people as he could. A screenshot of his Facebook post identifying himself as an incel was verified, Redditors cringed at the quality of mainstream coverage of that community, and commentators took …

On “Where do you get your ideas from?”

If you would ever like to divest yourself of hero worship for creative types, look at their responses to the question "Where do you get your ideas from?" This cure is a little stale now as somewhere along the way somebody must have realized how insufferable they sounded and there are now thoughtful answers to …

Copyright Revisited

I wrote a blog about copyright. I am happy with its content (perhaps not the style) but given the latest streaming controversy I thought it would be good to revisit the topic and make some ideas more explicit. Because so much of this topic deals with the recognition of an author's work, I would like …

Advice

Given that this blog is still connected to my Twitch channel which seems to anchor all my other online encounters, I wanted to talk a little bit about advice. Specifically, I wanted to talk about the kind of advice you get on the internet, and how generally careless we seem to be about who we ask …

The Secret Reason Your Favourite Streamer Hates You: Backseating

Introduction This article is the first in an intended series on 'viewers behaving badly.' I say intended because I am familiar with the frustration that comes from an author proposing a series only to leave it unfinished and so take David Kreps' approach in his Microeconomics Foundations I: Choice and Competitive Markets: advertise the proposed series (a …

What’s in a Name: The Case of ‘Metrics

While it is hard to think of an econometrics book being popular in any traditional sense of the term, the best candidate for a popular econometrics textbook is Josh Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke's Mostly Harmless Econometrics (MHE). The title is a deliberate reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and communicates the irreverent tone taken in …