The serious business of making games

WTF is wrong with people

Well see how “swatting” remains a problem among gamers. People are broken.

Or maybe our society is broken? Decade after decade of rampant individualism, narcissistic self-indulgence, unregulated capitalism, and hyper-commodification of all aspects of identity and personality, coupled with profiteering off of shaming people for everything from body image to relationship status, it’s a wonder any of us can even breathe.

Turtle Beach is in trouble.

Sounds like some kind of shell game.

Logitech will subsume them and they’ll die off quietly. Just like Ultimate Ears, Jaybird and countless other brands that stopped innovating.

The Turtle Beach Maui daughter card for General MIDI made me so happy back in 1994.

Pretty soon as they’ll join the likes of Creative Labs, Gravis, ATI, Matrox, Saitek, 3Dfx, Rendition, S3, Guillemot and Media Vision in the land of defunct PC gaming hardware brands.

Creative is still kicking.

New report from current/former workers at Nintendo of America confirm that, yes, Nintendo is a Video Games company, and unfortunately has the same problem as everyone else.

Women’s discomfort didn’t stop at distasteful jokes, and they didn’t always feel that they had a safe way to report incidents. One former contractor claimed a more senior tester stalked her between July 2011 and February 2012. He made calls and sent text messages to her phone that one witness felt were “disturbing.” Kotaku corroborated reports of his persistent behavior with three other sources. The stalking victim told Kotaku that she cried at her desk and had panic attacks every day. But because the man was “friends with the right people,” she didn’t feel she could flag the stalking to her contracting company. Three other sources corroborated about how the stalker had free rein to torment his victim.

In fact, it was common for full-time Nintendo employees to date precariously employed contractors. “A lot of the NOA red badges had reputations for using the tester pool of associates as a dating pool,” Allison told Kotaku . If you were approached by a red badge, and they appeared to be making moves on you, [other women said that] you didn’t want to dissuade them too hard.” The upsides of being romantically involved with NOA employees were opportunities and access. The most iconic one was the company Christmas party, which is off-limits to contractors unless they’re accompanied by a “red badge.” To associates who tried to improve their standing, it was worth dealing with the power imbalance if it meant being a part of the prestigious Nintendo brand.

This “Red Badge” shit is right out of a dystopian society.

You must befriend a red badge if you want to get ahead!

“[Product testing] really felt like a frat house sometimes,” said one former tester who worked in the department in 2017. She tried to avoid interacting with a man who held so much power within the department, but she still had to deal with male coworkers. They would make jokes about gender stereotypes and female characters who got their skirts flipped. When she complained, men would tell her that she had to be tough enough to work in product testing.

C’mon, it is just a joke, you can’t take a joke?

It sounds like she didn’t report the behavior to anyone, so I’m not sure how even her own company that was the contractor, much less Nintendo, could really be expected to address it.

It sounds like the “red badge” folks were just actual Nintendo employees, as opposed to contractors, and Nintendo had a policy of only inviting their actual employees to their Christmas party? That doesn’t sound like some kind of dystopian policy.

Read the article

They have a dirty manga pending library too. Source: my best friend was a QA tester contractor during Switch development

Pretty much every large game company I’ve worked at or visited pulled this badge color shit.

The “contractors” work in the same buildings as everybody else, work on the same teams, have company email addresses – they functionally are “actual employees” except they get a fraction of the benefits and can be let go way easier.

When I did game testing, they would ritually fire everybody every nine months and then rehire the same people a few weeks later to skirt some labor law about full time employees.

Yeah, I was gonna say, we do it too. The regular folks have certain badges and the contractors have another to differentiate them as indirect employees. There isn’t exactly a hierarchy based on the badges (some of the contractors have more responsibility or bigger teams under them then many of the regular employees) but there are some company functions and areas off-limits to the contractors.

That said, if the regular Nintendo workers were knowingly using their direct status to entice or coerce the contractors into dates based on the possibility of regular employment, then that’s pretty gross.

This is what was intimated in the article, and quoted above. Very gross and very dystopian.

Yup. I read the article. If it happened, it’s gross.

Whole lot of Embracing:

One more

And a new subgroup

Let’s hope they… embrace Tolkien’s ingenuity.

I just finished The Desolation of Smaug for the nth time. Here is a pretty good review: I think it’s the strongest of the trilogy although I also liked An Unexpected Journey.

I’d be down for Gandalf games but not really a Gandalf spinoff limited series in the vein of Obi Wan Kenobi at this point. A musical stage production, on the other hand…or a concept album…