Been meaning to talk about this Jason Schreier report in Bloomberg about the failure of Dragon Age: Veilguard.

It's a bunch of crap... The gist of the article is that developers from BioWare blame EA and poor business decisions behind the failure of Veilguard.

They blame "marketing misfires, poor word of mouth," along with switching from a multiplayer focus to single-player.

They're only concerned with right-wing anti-government extremism. None of that left-wing stuff is important here. These are leading questions. It introduces to the respondent an idea that they may not have had prior to reading the question: "is misogyny embedded in gaming culture?"

Absolutely not a fan of Kowert's work. The best way to remove administrator bias in a survey is for reasonable people to take the survey and have their voices heard. So please take this survey if/when you have some time.

https://twitter.com/CJFerguson1111/status/1617191459719110656

Ok I now have some time and I'm going to go through this survey and rip it apart. 🧵

WTF is "twin-spirt"?

And now we have the New York Times writing about the #GamerGate connection in the Pelosi attack. Took four reporters to write it and not one of them appears capable of critical journalism. @tarangoNYT, @livia_ar, @skarlamangla @tarangoNYT @livia_ar @skarlamangla We know DePape himself said explicitly, "How did I get into all this? Gamer Gate it was gamer gate."

So ok then, link established? I mean, the guy believes a fairy is following and talking to him, but let's take him at his word that that's how he got into all this...

Yeah this is money well spent. $700,000 to study "the little understood phenomenon" for which there is no actual f'n evidence. Part of that money goes to @TakeThisOrg, which you might remember is responsible for this little gem.

Social Justice has addled the brains of its devotees. A 🧵.

Here you see a curator for the renowned Guggenheim museum go off on a writer for The Atlantic. She claims the writer "literally demand[ed]" that she speak to her. That demand?

"Might we talk?" So offended she was by this literal demand that she sent an email back to her and The Atlantic's editor, telling her to go F herself.

In the email, the curator calls the writer a "rapacious White woman." She believes they defer to "Whiteness."

Of course she mentions "harm".

Boo (my cat) was laying in the middle of the dark hallway when I walked through and I kicked her. Now she's afraid of me. ☹️ Update: she came out and rubbed against my leg and meowed. She wants either food or to go out. But when I came out she ran away from me again and went back into hiding, lol.

Interesting.

"In 2020, a collective of 14 victims and six allies lodged a formal complaint against Jennifer Scheurle with the IGDA"

gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-… I think it's important to add some context here. These harassment and abuse allegations might not be what normal people would consider harassment and abuse.

This is the world of the too-online, far social justice left. In this world, victimhood is social currency.

Ken Levine is perhaps the kindest developer I have ever interacted with. He is generous with his time and genuine in his replies.

I'm not surprised Jason Schreier felt the need to write a hit piece about him. archive.fo/wqYBV "Levine is a flawed manager who struggles to communicate his vision" -- Can anyone come up with an entire idea for a video game and communicate that idea effectively? Do you really think the people working on Death Stranding knew wtf was going on?

There's a new disturbance in gaming, as if Anita Sarkeesian herself were resurrected and turned into a formerly successful actor.

Her name: Geena Davis. Geena Davis created the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media: (If she can see it, she can be it™).

And they kinda just sat out there doing Anita Sarkeesian type research, counting the number of women that are in media.

Remember last year when the Anti-Defamation League published that survey about gamer harassment? If you don't remember, they lied about it being nationally representative, and their survey claimed that 29% of gamers have been doxed.

They've published a 2020 survey. If 29% of gamers have actually been doxed, then that would mean *millions* of gamers have had their private information posted. I asked them about that and didn't get much of an answer.

This year that 29% has somehow dropped down to 13%,.

Jason Schreier, who has like 90% of Twitter blocked, has a new article up talking about the culture of sexism at Ubisoft.

Much of the conversation about that reporting now is focused on this part, which talks about Ubisoft's reluctance to feature a solely-female protagonist. This is an intentional conflation: Ubisoft is sexist, therefore they are reluctant to feature only female protagonists.

This makes it impossible to have an intelligent discussion about whether or not it's a smart business move to have a male protagonist.

Megan Condis, who is still protected, participated in a softball interview on Vox, where she spouted more nonsense. One of your primary duties as a journalist is to convey WHY what you are telling your audience is important. Here the writer says white nationalism in gaming is important because a game made a lot of money.

The MAGA kids thing shows how important optics are, especially in the era of intersectionalism. To many, a MAGA hat is a symbol of evil. A smug white kid wearing a MAGA hat staring down an elderly Native American is an intersectionalist's simplistic dream of Good vs. Evil. The kids did act in an unruly way. The tomahawk chop in particular was disrespectful. But we now have several videos of the incident, none of them corroborating the allegation that they were chanting Trumpisms.

There is no debate. Game journalists should be good at games. If you're not, go find something you're good at and write about that. You also shouldn't do game journalism if you're not good at writing.