Nuclear Monster

  • Jon Ronson’s How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life:

    In the early days of Twitter, I was a keen shamer. When newspaper columnists made racist or homophobic statements, I joined the pile-on. Sometimes I led it.

    The journalist A. A. Gill once wrote a column about shooting a baboon on safari in Tanzania: “I’m told they can be tricky to shoot. They run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out.” Gill did the deed because he “wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.”

    I was among the first people to alert social media. (This was because Gill always gave my television documentaries bad reviews, so I tended to keep a vigilant eye on things he could be got for.) Within minutes, it was everywhere. Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received, one stuck out: “Were you a bully at school?”

    Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized. As time passed, though, I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive. I also began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment. It almost felt as if shamings were now happening for their own sake, as if they were following a script.

    Every mistake is a learning opportunity. When somebody doesn’t get the opportunity to recover because their career and life get destroyed by public shaming, they don’t get a chance to learn.

    Even Sam Biddle, the person who initially brought the public shaming to the subject of Ronson’s article realized his mistake and publicly apologized.

  • Malik Dellidj made this awesome pseudo-midi keyboard on codepen that plays clips from Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. Dvorak not supported. Qwerty and Azerty are good to go. Here’s the video for inspiration while you music. 

    Our work is never over. When it is I need to go watch Interstella 5555.

  • Wesley Yin-Poole followed up on the Godus fiasco by interviewing the winner of Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity, the game where you tap on things and then win what we now know to be utter disappointment:

    During the early afternoon of 26th May 2013, 18-year-old Scot Bryan Henderson tapped on Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity cube for the last time. He had won the game.

    A tiny message appeared on the screen of his smartphone. It contained an email address for someone at 22Cans, the Guildford studio Molyneux had founded after leaving Microsoft and traditional game development behind.

    Bryan, confused but intrigued, followed the instructions. Have I really won, he asked?

    At the time Bryan was promised fame, fortune, and some level of control of the Godus world, and you won’t believe how big an ass Molyneux has been. Incredible.

  • Evan Narcisse of Kotaku interviewed Michael Lambert about his explorations into hidden and incomplete portions of Team ICO’s games. Makes me miss Shadow of the Colossus. What an amazing game.

  • Oli Welsh:

    Starting today with our review of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D, Eurogamer is making the biggest change we’ve ever made to the way we review games. From now on, we will no longer be scoring games out of ten.

    In place of scores, we’ll have one-line summaries for every review, and a new recommendation system whereby some, but not all games will be considered Recommended, Essential or Avoid. As a result of these changes, we will no longer be listed on the review-aggregation site Metacritic.

    Review scores are important to four groups of people: People making purchasing decisions; people who want their purchasing decisions justified; those who write about games; and developers who want their games reviewed well and scored highly.

    Unfortunately for journalists writing about games, review scores have been overvalued by people who play games, and they’ve had too much influence on the careers of the people who develop them.

    I spoke with an anonymous game developer about this and he confirmed that there are still some situations where studios receive bonuses based on the review scores the games they work on receive. However, he also elaborated it would be unusual for a specific individual’s contract to include mention of review scores with the exception of an executive like a studio president.

    Terrible games have scored poorly in critic reviews and still sell well based on marketing and other pre-release hype. Great games have scored well and not done well enough to warrant sequels, HD remakes, and marketing hype.

    It’s good news that Eurogamer, like the dearly-departed joystiq, are trying new things but I still believe that review scores offer something valuable to people who are looking for recommendations. Joystiq attempted to solve that with a short summary at the bottom of the review and awards on an ongoing basis. Eurogamer is doing something similar with awards and other signage to indicate games to look into or avoid.

    I think they’re onto something good, but just like everyone else I look at the score first and then go back and read the review. It’s a bad habit, but it’s one that isn’t going away with my generation. Younger people seem to be watching pre-recorded (youtube) and live streaming (twitch) videos instead of reading anything. I definitely watch and listen more these days than I read.

    This is a shame for everyone who has lost the opportunity to express themselves with more nuance than you can get on a podcast or in a video. Some games, and some opinions, just don’t get represented well enough on either.