1978

I’m curious about Adam’s take on this. I’ve been too involved over the years to have an impartial view of the people involved.

1979

Can we discuss gaming-related Wikipedia issues in this thread? I mean, they have done a lot of research into which publications are reliable and not.

1980

Speaking of this, Polygon has a preview of the next version of Vampire: The Masquerade.

It goes about as well as you’d expect it to.

I invited White Wolf’s Jason Carl, producer on Vampire’s 5th edition, or V5 as it’s called, to run me through character creation and a short gameplay session. What I encountered during our one-on-one game was an intimate exploration of evil, a role-playing experience that was extremely intense. This is not a game for the faint of heart. Even experienced game masters should think long and hard about before bringing it to the table.

To be completely honest, I’m not sure that it’s a game that I’m interested in playing again any time soon. But that has as much to do with me as the content of the game itself.

1981

That doesn’t sound any different from Vampire 1st edition.

…in reality, from my personal experience there was a gap between how the game was supposed to play (if you take notice of the themes that permeate it, all the storyteller guidelines, etc) and how most people played it in the end (a more watered down version of what the books describe, when not directly going into ‘dark superhero powertrip’ stuff).

1982

Anita Blake or bust!

1983

So my previous post was mostly snark because I don’t have a lot of patience for “20,000 words of navel-gazing.” From another point of view, that’s 20,000 words of quality New Games Journalism or in-depth reporting or whatever. And good on you if that’s where you’re at; aside from getting cheap digs in on a nerd forum full of salty old dogs I don’t mean to piss in anyone’s Cheerios.

I should also say that I don’t have any special insight into this; I don’t know the guy, never worked or interacted with him, anything like that. I have some tenuous old professional connections (people I knew or was acquainted with, that kind of thing) with Polygon but those are worth the paper they’re printed on for sure. So don’t take this as anything more than one guy’s opinion - and a guy who’s pretty salty toward his old profession to start with.

Anyway, basically, Pitts was brought on as part of the leadership of Polygon back when Gies gutted the staff of the floundering Joystiq to set sail for the brave new Polygon and its sexy “We’re relaunching Games Journalism!” trailer (brought to you by Microsoft) and no-holds-barred attitude of being a gaming site that NeoGAF liked, or something. Like I said, I’m salty.

(Seriously, watch it if you dare. It’s a thing, if you don’t remember.)

Moving on, Pitts was features editor there and put out mad copy. But it turns out that Vox Media’s corporate benevolence only goes so far, and Pitts got the boot when the clicks were not coming in commensurate to the cost of producing the editorial.

(Taken from that GB forum link, which was originally sourced but it appears Pitts’ tumblr has been nuked.)

Throwing rocks from the gallery at those who are trying to do something ambitious is no great accomplishment. I’d rather be the one who rolls up his sleeves and tries to accomplish something inspiring, even if it may fail. Even if it won’t last.

(Yep, I’m throwing rocks from the gallery here.)

Most of the links I’m finding are dead, but Polygon EIC Chris Grant per NeoGAF:

We’re very proud of the feature writing and video work we’ve done, but producing that content is expensive and requires that all (or at least nearly all) of those pieces are smash hits. When you’re publishing two to three pieces like that a week, bringing in the audiences day in and day out is tougher than we’d imagined it would be way back in 2012. Lesson learned.

Mostly I’m just amused at the least repentant navel-gazer in the industry (barring maybe idk, David Cage? Different industry tho) getting another shot, and I decided to take a cheap shot because Polygon continues to annoy me and I wanted you all to share my pain.

I write software for a living now. It’s much better suited to my temperament. Haven’t inspected a navel in a good long time.

1984

I appreciated the 20,000 word “long reads” going into the details, the people and drama of the gaming industry. I found very compelling especially the pieces on Mad Minute Games and Battlefront.com - probably because I have some emotional attachment to the subject matter. Those pieces didn’t strike me as navel gazing.

Obviously, not all the pieces were so interesting (to me) or good (from my totally back-seat writing position at every games journalism site)… but that’s kind of normal, right?

1985

Eurogamer has a story about a THQ rep, Dean Sharpe (now the CEO of 4A Games), sent over to Kiev to help ship S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, which was in danger of becoming vaporware.

Stalker lost a zone, lost monsters - lost zombies, according to Yavorsky - lost vehicles, and the artificial intelligence was redesigned. But the biggest thing Dean Sharpe faced backlash over was cutting sleep. “The plan was still to have resting in Stalker,” he says. “For me, from my standpoint, it wasn’t that tough of a call. I was looking at the test reports and the amount of bugs associated with this feature. I didn’t see the value based on the number of bugs it was creating. We could get rid of half-a-bug-report by cutting one feature. It was a no-brainer.” But the community felt otherwise.

“The community view was, ‘What the fuck is some American guy doing coming in and destroying our game?’ I was even getting death threats on a daily basis from the community,” Sharpe says. “We had one THQ actually turned over to the authorities because it was pretty violent what it said was going to be done to me.” For a long time there was caricature of him going around the internet with the slogan “The Castration of Stalker”. I see why Sharpe prefers life off the radar.

1986

Thanks for posting this!. I love it. Like a (short) hero novel, but the characters exist in real life. Hero Weapon of Choice: the hacksaw, cuts the bad, leaving the very good to shine.

1987

As well you should! Like I said, I’m just yelling at clouds over here. Thus my first lighter post.

1988

I appreciated your comments, you were badly burnt (?) by it and I am happy to hear you now got a profession that is both fulfilling economically and spiritually :)

Shame that Polygon changed again… I can’t recall reading a full article there in a while. Time to go over my feedly and cut down the noise.

1989

TBF this was years ago they fired Pitts ;)

1990

Yeah, I had never heard this story before. It even has a twist ending that I totally didn’t see coming.

1991
1992

Yep. I was coming here to post that. It’s a good look at the scummy techniques that freelancer uses to get his stories. And tabloids will happily publish them.

1993

I have heard from one of Pitts-era Escapist video creators that Pitts tried to demand creative credits in the videos. Sounded an awful lot like the songwriter credits from 50s era musicians to me.

This person also didn’t get paid by The Escapist for almost an entire season of videos apparently.

1994

This sounds super D DUPER accurate! The Escapist is famous for leading people on and withholding payment. Too many of my friends don’t work in this industry anymore because of The Escapist, and it makes me very angry sometimes.

1995

I wrote a couple pieces for the Escapist back in the early days.

I never got paid for one…but that’s because I forgot to invoice them for it.

1996

This actually was - if you get pass the headline - a quite fair and balanced piece on stuff that makes folks nervous at many levels

I particularly liked this bit:

I dug into the details with Mike Cook a couple of weeks ago, an AI researcher known for his game-making AI Angelina. As he predicted, the bots fell apart the moment they were pushed into a situation they hadn’t practised for.

It is rare to find the fine print so clearly exposed for laypeople.

1997

I have not gotten to read the article yet (will do when I can!), but I am going to blather on anyway. Dota to me has a good bit to of visual reaction to it, and an AI can easily react much faster with a better situational awareness as it is not distracted by the display and information presentation. I would not be surprised to see an AI victory here.