For the record, I have no problem with them saying “we don’t support alt-right political views and we want to make that clear; we don’t ascribe to those values, and don’t come looking for them here; some of the things you identify with are things we identify with monsters, and I hope you’re well aware of that; also, don’t use our products to endorse views that differ from our own because that’s a bad thing to do”. That’s perfectly fine.
What I’m not fine with is “if you have beliefs different from our own, you are forbidden to buy or enjoy our products on their own terms; actually, you’re monsters beyond redemption and we wish you were dead - not vampires-like dead; really dead, because even a world of vampires is better without you”.
And I’m not fine with that because I’ve seen people change for the better. But they never did so by being rebuked and “hated”. While most will not change and, yes, keeping them away will often be the best idea, assuming such a posture with the people that are not beyond redemption will only succeed in radicalizing them and robbing them of the possibility of change. I think that’s the “last straw” that got Trump in power: the “deplorables” part of the equation, not the “nazi” part.
Yeah not a fan of that design style for a busy site like that one. We use a similar thing on Unwinnable but we only publish one piece a day on the site, so it works.
OK, can I ask what specifically you guys don’t like about the RPS redesign? We still need to improve the QT3 frontpage. And where as I don’t think I’d propose anything like what RPS has to Tom, it would still be good to understand where you think those sites (RPS or even Eurogamer) fail so we don’t repeat their mistakes.
I am not saying I think the Qt3 front page needs changing. But you might consider that fundamnentally it has a well known look.
RPS used to as well. Now it looks super generic, like it’s about to become a member of the Jezebel et al family of super generic content sites. I mean I could be glancing at any number of websites I don’t actually care about. The color combination is bad, and it also isn’t meaningfully repeated in any way that makes me identify the content as “RPS” and not “some rando’s game website”.
My biggest gripe with Eurogamer is that they have 2 columns, one for all stories and one for most read stories that end up being basically the same most of the time. Don’t use an algorithm, curate dammit. I’d ask them to do without the puns but apparently that’s UK law.
I don’t dislike the white spaces on either Eurogamer or the rebooted RPS, but I am usually disappointed when a redesign ends up dramatically lowering the information density on the page. Engadget is now useless and un-fun to browse. They used to have basically the same format as Joystiq, which is still my favorite. Image, headline, a bit of text, an invitation to click through and read more.
So make the colors more modern and light, clean up the lines, and leave the info as it is, that’s not broken.
So GoG tweets something that shows them to agree with the GG crowd and VG247 tells GoG to sick it up their bums.
I think positions on this will be determined by how people view GG. The initial intent of GG was to take politics out of game reviews but it was quickly co-opted by bigots and trolls who seized on this to vocally spew their bile. Then people on the other side like Anita Sarkeesian tried to use this to garner sympathy to further their own careers. The whole thing became a mess but in this case I think was a very poor decision by GoG to tweet that crap. Any association with GG is not a particularly good thing.