Category: Gaming

Circling The Drain

The mainstream financial media is subtly acknowledging that a lot of the price action in Bitcoin was fueled by leverage. We seem to be in the process of finding out how leveraged bets on a rising asset price work in reverse. Hint: they don’t work very well.

Bitcoin, which was soaring around $125,000 in October, dropped below $86,000. That’s down roughly 7% from a day earlier.

Strategy, the company that used to be known as MicroStrategy and now raises money just to buy bitcoin, lost 10.3%. It said that it raised a fund of $1.44 billion in U.S. dollars, not in bitcoin, by selling stock to help pay for its dividends on preferred shares and interest on its debt.

Rishi Sunak’s Britain

Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and the Right Side Of History pulls on its marching boots;

Ubisoft, the company behind the Assassin’s Creed and Rainbow Six franchises, has not only partnered with the Anti-Defamation League to fight “hate” in gaming but is also now working with British police to jail gamers for their speech.

British state media is reporting on the news as a great new innovation.

The Spite Is Inexhaustible

When bedlamites want you fired:

Kara Lynne, the now-ex community manager of [games distributor] Limited Run, was reportedly fired following complaints from a trans activist on Twitter who had dissected Lynne’s social media history. Jonathan “Jessica” Blank, a trans-identified male better known in the My Little Pony fan community as Purple Tinker, published a Twitter thread on January 6 accusing Lynne of “transphobia” and tagging Limited Run Games in an apparent effort to have her penalised.

The so-called infractions Blank levelled against Lynne included that she had been following popular conservative social media account Libs of TikTok, and had posted a tweet expressing opposition to self-identification laws in 2016. Other alleged examples of transphobia included that Lynne had expressed support for the upcoming Hogwarts Legacy video game.

One of these.

Revenge Of The Nerds

Today in Woke history a look back at a battle in the culture wars a lot of people are completely unaware of, GamerGate

Grab a coffee, it’s a long one.

The dynamic is both obvious and predictable (just like it played out in the New Atheism Movement). Article after article appeared, weaving a bogus narrative of an “overwhelmingly male” gamer identity that felt “threatened” by the inclusion of women into their sphere. Male gamers just didn’t want to change themselves or the gaming-community “status quo,” as though they’re afraid of being decolonized, if you will. Alongside these, others argued in contradictory fashion that most gamers are women anyway.

The gaming and gaming-community “status quo” is the most relevant of their targets, however. Part of this has to do with the way (male) gamers behave with each other and with (or around) female gamers. Another part of it has to do with the content of the games themselves.

Obviously, gamers are the problem.

The Pokemon World Championship. Really?

Detectives discovered that the two men had driven from Iowa with several guns in their vehicle that they did not have licenses for.
After obtaining a search warrant for the vehicle, police found a 12-gauge shotgun, an AR-15, several hundred rounds of ammunition and a hunting knife.
On Friday, arrest warrants were issued for 18-year-old Kevin Norton and 27-year-old James Stumbo and the men were taken in to custody at their hotel in Saugus.

Gaming isn’t Dead

Sask E-Sports league.

“E-sports is a global phenomenon that has really started to grow in the last six to seven years in North America,” he said. “In other places like Korea and Japan, it has been a pretty big sport for 15 to 20 years. It is actually South Korea’s national sport.”

Can confirm that Koreans are cut-throat good at Planetside2. Course, I’m hardly good, so take that for what it’s worth.

Based Mom’s perfect phrase.

The Social Justice Warriors (SJW’s) are so concerned about #Gamergate being able to argue their point of view in front of real journalists (as opposed to the gaming press) that they’ve called in multiple bomb threats.
The perfect phrase? From Milo’s report on what Christina Hoff Sommers was going to say:

Too many in the media are addicted to a simplistic damsel in distress storyline

Perfect. A knife straight to the SJW’s soul.

Level Up, #Gamergate!

Via Hot Air:

When Gawker whacked the beehive last fall, it ended up costing them some seven figures in ad revenue, and while some gamers were contacting the advertisers directly, other gamers were letting the Federal Trade Commission know about business practices they’d seen that they considered shady.
It appears that effort has finally paid off, as the FTC has updated its endorsement guidelines in ways that directly address the concerns raised by gamers.

So, to recap, conservative minded folks fail to influence culture or to buttress their beliefs against the tide of SJW’s, but gamers and SF readers are winning.
So we’ll probably dismiss them as teenagers and nerds some more.

#Gamergate

Virginia Kruta writing on Dana Loesch’s site on #Gamergate.

#GamerGate is essentially the backlash, fueled by gamers themselves, against a collusion between game developers and certain gaming journalists to promote specific games based on their political value rather than merit.

I’ll add a simple example that doesn’t quit fit the ‘political’ narrative:
The newest Simcity came out in early 2013. It sold for around $80. The city simulation genre has millions of fans, most not normally known as ‘gamers’. It’s a concept that crosses from the traditional gaming enthusiast to the people just wanting to idle away some time. The game was unplayable on release and for at least two months after. It still hasn’t lived up to the hype that Electronic Arts payed for. Magazines were filled with glowing reviews, multi-page infomercials. The hype was unbelievable. “Finally a successor to the 11 year old Simcity 4!”, etc.
This is the Metacritic page. Look at the difference in reviews from the Critics vs the Users. One group reaped benefits from EA’s largess and the other group payed EA for the privilege of having a crap game.
The eulogy? EA shut down the Maxis studio responsible for Simcity 2013 in March. Cities: Skylines from developer Colossal Order and published by Paradox has taken the throne of city simulations, and they are doing it for around $30.

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