1661

Classy, coming from a guy who literally stole a story from my nothing blog last year.

1662

Here in spain we(me and some friends) call that “noeslomismo” (translated: isnotthesame). It describe the weird opinion of some people that wen take other people stuff see it as normal,but wen other people take his stuff, turns crazy.

isnotthesame people normally take stuff from other isnotthesame people with hilarious results.

and the printing press seems to think anything on internet have something like a “Free Take License” or something. Like these TV programs that take videos from Youtube, but never say is from youtube, or who is the author of the video, and at the same time remove youtube videos that show his stuff.

1663

I propose “Free Take License” be the new Creative Commons standard.

1664

This is just a blurb in one of Yahoo’s front page articles. It’s a list of ten reasons why this idiot wouldn’t want an iPad.

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/111688/why-I-dont-want-an-ipad-for-christmas

  1. The Games

Yes, they’re great. But that’s the problem. Computer games are as addictive as cigarettes. And this is a habit everyone is taking up, not quitting. This is why I dumped my iPod Touch. Am I alone? Maybe. But I don’t think so. I know lots of people with horror stories about addiction to immersive games. Someone I know—now, as it happens, a British member of parliament—once sat down to play Civilization, a role-playing game, on a PC one Saturday evening and didn’t finish until three o’clock … Thursday morning. (He stopped when he ran out of cigarettes.) And that was on an old PC. Games on the iPad are more intense than ever. A friend recently showed me some of the serious news apps on his iPad. I noticed that to get to them he first had to “wave” us past several screens of games. Is he really using his iPad to read that article about the Indonesian economy, or is he playing Angry Birds? Hmmm. You make the call.

1665

Ah yes, the famous role-playing game Civilization. Too bad it’s not nearly as intense as Angry Birds.

1666

Don’t underestimate the danger of games. We might need Wesley to come and save us.

1667

Wow. That guy got paid to write that?

1668

It’s funny to see the train of thought, clearly not from a gamer. New games are better than older games (aren’t they? That’s why they are old and the others are new!), more advanced and with better graphics, more intense and surely that means more addictive.
If the old 1996 Civ 2 was addictive, surely 2010 Angry Birds is like crack!

1669

Besides the callback to Civilization being used as an example of addictiveness, I find it quaint that he considers that widespread availability of games to be a negative for a particular platform.

1670

In the continuing saga of Jonathan Blow and my misadventures with game journalists, have some links, in roughly chronological order:

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=281445

http://the-witness.net/news/?p=701


[INDENT]This one is kind of interesting, because Jim basically says they’re going to write sensationalist headlines, and that’s that. I wrote the following reply to a comment of Jim’s:
Jim Sterling: “No I didn’t [take the quote out of context]. The context of what he said was quite preserved.”

Wait, of course you took it out of context, you even said you did at the top of this post. The context was the whole interview in Edge, which you said you haven’t read yet. CVG took the quotes out of that context, and you did too by repeating their quotes. Just because CVG did it first and you link to them didn’t make it any better for you to do it too.

Developers and the press need to work together on this issue if the press wants developers to continue to say anything interesting in interviews. The excuse of “that’s the only way to get hits, which are the only way to pay the bills” is a fine rationale, but it implies you are basically putting developers on notice that anything said will be treated in this manner, which has a chilling effect on what is said in the first place. This is a real shame for fans in the long run, as even indies will begin to talk like the more mainstream corporate publicists over time, which is to say they will “stay on message” (read: not say anything thoughtful or interesting).
[/INDENT]

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=281577
[INDENT]This article originally had me as Chris Heckler, which I find awesome, given it was a response to questions about context and accuracy.
[/INDENT]

Finally, EDGE decides to post the whole interview, and hopefully that’s the end of that:

http://www.next-gen.biz/features/interview-jonathan-blow-chris-hecker

Whee! Sigh.

Chris

1671

You managed to both make the error that Destructoid is games journalism and not just a different colored Joystiq feed and that the endless parade of slapfights you get into by making the grave mistake of posting in a site’s comment section is interesting. You were wronged in the past but you are letting that define you.

1672

Hopefully not! I commented there because I didn’t want to bother writing a real post, but still wanted to make the point. I agree the comment sections on articles are almost always a waste of time, but I do think there’s value in posting opinions if they differ from the normal “gj <insert site name here> rulez” comments. I don’t thing Jim even replied (of course, 100 comments happened over night). Anyway, hopefully this isn’t defining me, that sounds scary!

I’m just glad EDGE finally posted the whole thing, so fans can decide if Jonathan and I are tools without the game journalists helping them make the decision. :)

Chris

1673

To be honest, feeds provide a service.

I read Kotaku from time to time, when I get bored and the world seems moving much slower than my need to read something new. There are some blogging in kotaku,… this crescendo dude, and his post about his children are cute… I know blogging is not journalism, but is a something else that often is worth read too. The part of Kotaku that is more boring, is a lot of useless news about useless subjects, and how ignorant are the posters (people of the type ‘Sex produce babies?’ or ‘but whats the point to play minecraft?’ ).

1674

Well it was boring pap to me and the same stuff I see every single year about how indie gaming is going to revitalize X. It’s much like the old quake mod scene where you have a few gems and a lot of coal. And personal feelings aside, Braid is an actual game that was finished and seemed alright except for all the words in it so good on Blow and good on you if you can see that we come to this thread to point and laugh at Sterling not attempt to reform him.

1675

Well… then indie games follow Sturgeon’s Law :D

Sturgeon was commisiones (maybe by himself, he is the type of “work hero” that take roles to help fix the world) to make a article about something (probably the quality of science-fiction). So he closed himself in his hotel room with a lot of science-fiction books. He worked on all that stuff night and day, and … his final conclusion was that a 90% of these stuff whas shit. So he revelead that in the convention, probably everyone found that ‘revelation’ fun ( I suppose thats is made more hilarious for how is Sturgeon, the type of naif, direct, cool dude ).

(note: this is the version of the story that I know from one science-fiction book preface, so probably is the true one. Disregard the version from Wikipedia, is probably a fake one).

1676

Can’t we do both?

Chris

1677

Games journalism doesn’t seem bad at pre-hyping your game checker… Shouldn’t Edge spend more time interviewing indie making great stuff on XNA instead of always going to the usual suspects like you or Blow ?

1678

I’d be happy with more in-depth and interesting interviews with anybody, doesn’t have to be the usual suspects, for sure!

Chris

1679

Hey Chris,

There’s a weird disconnect here that all devs that are interacting with the media need to get their head around.

The reality is that I’m not interested in everything you say. I’m interested in the interesting things you say.

Much of that interview wasn’t newsworthy. The opinion of the developer of (what I think is) the highest rated download game of all time on the artistic/A&R policies of the console manufacturer’s download stores is newsworthy. If you’re afraid that what was said is likely to hurt relationships, perhaps the lesson is: don’t say it.

CVG did me a service in telling me what was interesting in that interview. They didn’t take it out of context, and they provided a link and source if people wanted to get more or delve deeper. That’s not “hack journalism”, it’s just decent news writing. I’m amazed at the reaction.

1680

Sure, people shouldn’t complain when the most interesting things they say are singled out for attention. But leaving aside your unconvincing argument in favor of CVG’s post, is that even the case here? I count two awesome things about this particular example that put Blow and “Heckler” firmly in the clear.

First, it appears that their interview was with Edge, with an expectation of grown-up coverage – but the ‘most interesting thing’ was crudely cherrypicked by one of its sister publications before the original item even ran. The context wasn’t available to anyone except the people doing the cherrypicking. Say you were a rock star talking to Rolling Stone about the deeply meaningfuls. If everything you said was being piped to TMZ first, you might not want to talk to Rolling Stone.

Second, the episode inspired another games writer to boast about creating these shit-storms just for fun, and explain how his site sensationalizes everything because its readers are stupid. If I remember it right, he even put the word journalism in scare quotes, yet complained about the journalism of his more successful rivals at Kotaku! So if nothing else, we can thank Blow for inspiring one of those ‘brutally honest’ responses that is really just an entertainingly sociopathic spaz out.