Thanks for sharing that, I have never played personally DOTA, only watched videos of it, so that little observation provides quite some insight.
Mr.GRIM
1999
IGN’s video review of Dead Cells is a a complete ripoff of an earlier review by Boomstick Gaming. It’s almost word for word.
MrTibbs
2000
Review’s been pulled from the site! Filip Miucin’s got some explaining to do.
BY IGN STAFF Editor’s Note: As a group of writers and creators who value our own work and that of others in our field, the editorial staff of IGN takes plagiarism very seriously. In light of concerns that have been raised about our Dead Cells review, we’ve removed it for the time being and are investigating.
Nesrie
2001
That’s pretty weird. I mean after awhile reviews do tend to focus on the same things but not that… closely.
That’s some great endorsement of Boomstick from IGN, I guess.
??? Assuming you mean AI/machine learning in general, the article doesn’t go into any of that. It’s very focused on the DotA bots, which I don’t think many people are nervous about.
Anyway, I watched three of the matches and it was very impressive. They display so much mroe tactical sense than the bots you can mess around with officially and semi-officially, and their team-fight execution was off the charts. The areas where they struggled were for instance when the opposition pulled creeps out of lane. It was clear the AI was befuddled, but at the same time it didn’t make a lot of difference to the matches I watched. I’ve yet to see the one the AI lost - it will be interesting to see if humans can learn to exploit OpenAI’s weaknesses faster than it can learn to overcome them.
The AI gets the benefit of some restrictions like the hero pool, but it is also handicapped in its own ways. In particular, it has a reaction time floor of 200ms (still faster than humans in practice, but on the same order of magnitude) and it can only assess the map every few frames (of course it is much better at taking in the totality of the information than humans, but that’s kind of the point.
!!! That was a general remark motivated by several of my news feeds coming pretty much every day back with one story going on the topic of automation and its (perceived) impacts on human society. I thought that short introduction worked well as a somewhat ironic comment on how the headline plays up to the cacophony.
Interesting to read what did impress you on the performance of the bots.
Almost as if ethics in game journalism were an issue.
Mellified runs and hides.
It ACTUALLY is about ethics in game journalism…
LMN8R
2007
The fact that IGN immediately pulled down the review once they discovered this shows that no, ethics in games journalism isn’t really that big of a problem, and the right processes are in place to deal with ethical breeches when they do happen.
That doesn’t sound right. No one sent death threats to Anita Sarkeesian about this, so it can’t be an “ethics in videogame journalism” thing.
Of course it isn’t that big of a problem, hell, it isn’t a problem at all for the most part, “oh a review likes / dislikes something I don’t, what a problem, someone wants something different from what I want, the humanity!”
This is so much better than any snark I could have deployed. Well done!
LMN8R
2011
Now here’s an incredibly good piece of games journalism. And nauseating.
One day, Lacy conducted an experiment: After an idea she really believed in fell flat during a meeting, she asked a male colleague to present the same idea to the same group of people days later. He was skeptical, but she insisted that he give it a shot. “Lo and behold, the week after that, [he] went in, presented exactly as I did and the whole room was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is amazing.’ [His] face turned beet red and he had tears in his eyes,” said Lacy. “They just didn’t respect women.”
Among the people we spoke to, three women described being groomed for promotions, and doing jobs above their title and pay grade, until men were suddenly brought in to replace them. Both male and female sources have described seeing unsolicited and unwelcome pictures of male genitalia from bosses or colleagues. One woman saw an e-mail thread about what it would be like to “penetrate her,” in which a colleague added that she’d be a good target to sleep with and not call again. Another said a colleague once informed her, apparently as a compliment, that she was on a list getting passed around by senior leaders detailing who they’d sleep with. Two former employees said they felt pressure to leave after making their concerns about gender discrimination known. One former male employee said that Riot’s “bro culture” is more pronounced behind closed doors, and hurts men too: One of Riot’s male senior leaders regularly grabbed his genitals, the source said, adding, “If he walked into a meeting with no women he’d just fart on someone’s face.”
What the hell can be done to fix this? Or must women make their own separate studios to be taken seriously?
Nesrie
2013
I think that’s kind of an… interesting question when you can look up attempts to even talk about these problems, not just at the gaming companies but those who use their products and see how well that goes… right here, in this topic, less than two weeks ago.
I mean just talking about this stuff is an uphill challenge… and that’s before doing anything.
That sounds less than great.
Seriously though, what an awful company culture.
Not that it makes it any less horrific, but this is far from the only industry to still have these awful problems. It’s going to take some serious effort and time to get a change. At least we’ve mostly moved on from the blatant ass grabbing of the 70-80’s, but still a long, long way to go.
Not all game studios are like this. Just fyi. I mean you probably already knew that but I just wanted to say there are many games studios which have great inclusive and pleasant cultures. I hope I have run a few of them.
But the most effective ways to combat it I have seen is 1.) To simply take this stuff seriously day to day , by seriously I mean the senior leadership team leads by example in behaviour. 2.) In my experience, simply hiring more women colleagues. I know that sounds obvious but there really is no substitute.
What doesnt work is throwing the state mandated harassment video out at everyone and thinking “job done”.
As an aside I think I know “Lacy” and if its who I think it is, she does not make shit up.
Nesrie
2017
And on to the genitalia grabbing… uhhh.
