This may be old news to gamers, but a reader just brought it to my attention:
Capcom and IGN recently put on a little online gaming “reality” show called Capcom’s Cross Assault, based on the game Street Fighter x Tekken. The show, like the game, pits a team of Street Fighter players against a Tekken team.
During a live stream of the ongoing battle on day five of the tournament, Twitch.tv community manager Jared Rea made a few remarks criticizing the assholish, and often misogynistic, comments of some of the fighters.
Here’s how the Penny Arcade Report summarized what followed. (I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting several particularly egregious comments in bold.)
“This is Aris,” a voice said on the feed. “If you don’t like onions, you get your sandwich without onions on it, man. This is the fighting game community.” He then stated that sexual harassment and the fighting game community are “one and the same thing.”
The voice belonged to Aris Bakhtanians, the coach of the Tekken team.
“The sexual harassment is part of the culture. If you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community… it doesn’t make sense to have that attitude. These things have been established for years,” Aris stated. He then noted that making sexual jokes at StarCraft players would be inappropriate, so it’s unfair for anyone to tell fighting game fans they can’t viciously mock women. …
“That’s what you’re trying to do to the fighting game community and it’s not right,” Aris continued. “It’s ethically wrong.” This may be the first time in the history of video games that someone had said that removing sexual harassment is ethically unjust.
Later in the, er, discussion, after someone brought up the harassment of a guy playing a female character (“someone yelling the world “bitch” over and over … and then scream[ing] for her rape when she lost”) Aris responded with this:
“What is unacceptable about that?” Aris asked. “There is nothing unacceptable about that. We’re in America! This isn’t North Korea! We can say what we want.”
You can listen to the whole discussion on this video; it starts, with Rea’s comments, at about one hour forty-five minutes in. (Aris starts commenting about two minutes later.)
Many more appalling details in the PA report post.
Oh, gaming community! Get it the fuck together.
I know many folks who RP here, but mostly it’s Mutants and Masterminds, LOTS of LARPers, and my roomie does Warhammer 40K.
Would love to do M&M, but I would have to borrow roomie’s supplies. Also, everyone is either not taking players or doing big heavy-duty campaigns that would be an ASS to jump into or get out of.
Seriously, you two come up my way any time, we’ll have a weekend short campaign. Our characters will be trapped in a giant doomsday device with a long fuse and have to figure out how to escape and/or defuse it before it’s too late and the world is destroyed. It’ll be awesome.
There is an increasing trend of play by post and chat/skype RPG’s. Largely because groups can have difficulty staying together locally over the years (once one is formed), and the challenge of forging a new group is fraught with all sorts of difficulties.
For me, I went to a summer camp when I was young that ran a roleplaying game that doubled as a tutoring and educational tool. I eventually worked there, but I am kind of happy that environment was my introduction to RPG’s.
LBT – You’re in the Boston area, right? I actually live pretty close by.
RE: Dracula
Ah, zat so? Yeah, I’m in the area. Alas, Falconer is southward, but maybe if we neg him enough, he’ll be unable to resist coming to our neck of the woods.
Hey Falconer! Your pants are too blue!
You guys ever done D&D over webcam? I have a couple of times and it works OK when the people you want to play with are far away
RE: katz
No way I can do it. My Internet is always public access.
I’ve really wanted to try D&D. I wish I could play with you guys, but I am a million zillion miles away, where the sun never shines and souls turn black.
…Okay it’s not that bad but I think it’s going to snow.
LBT: I have friends who LARP in Boston, and some in Boston who come down to NYC once a month to game.
There’s Play by Post games, LBT, but DnD is absolutely horrid at that format (Most systems are). And public access *might* block the sites, but I wouldn’t be sure about that (Unis don’t)
I was in the beta for the D&D virtual table, though I haven’t checked up on it in ages. The issue I believe is that only D&D Insiders (subscription service from WotC) can access it. I would certainly be up to DMing a game for people interested to try it out, but I can’t really in good conscience ask people to subscribe given that it’s not cheap.
RE: Pecunium
Seeing the number of LARPers I know, I am willing to bet that you and I have acquaintances in common.
RE: Rutee/Blackbloc
I’ve heard of those, and been interested in them (more informal RP stuff than campaign style–you know, Deadpool, the Emoticon, and Superman hang out in a bar kinda thing) but I admit I tend to prefer gaming with folks in person, given any choice in the matter.
We played using Maptool, which is free, and we just talked using Google Hangouts, which is also free. It worked pretty well.
If you’re going to play-by-post, I tend to think you should probably just dispense with a system and make it pure cooperative storytelling.
I like systems personally, and D&D 4E in particular, because I’m the sort of gamer who goes “Alright, I want to make a ninja. Let us see what is the most awesome ninja I can build within this system.” I like roleplaying. I like games. Therefore I like roleplaying *games*, and not just freeform roleplay.
I think the term is Power Gamer or Munchkin, except both of those terms in gamer parlance generally happen to mean “Whatever X I actually am PLUS being an obnoxious asshole”.
Gaming systems just tend to work poorly in play-by-post because it’s all like:
DM: Make a reflex save.
(hours later) Player: I got a 12.
(hours later) DM: You fail. Do you have evasion?
(hours later) Player: No.
(hours later) DM: You take 8 points of damage.
(hours later) Player: Is that acid damage?
(hours later) DM: Yes.
(hours later) Player: I have acid resistance 5.
(hours later) DM: OK, you take 3 points of damage.
With hands off DMs, that’s a big problem, but it’s a drag elsewhere too. The main problem is that there’s a finite supply of checks that can be called for in any round of posts without slowing things down. Some games handle this better than others. Another potential pitfall is book diving, even with piracy. DnD doesn’t lend itself to posts in its incarnations, but there’s plenty of games that do.
“Your pants are too blue” ?
Pfft. Please. I am fallen among Vols right now, but I grew up in Wildcat country. Try harder.
Plus, I’m seeing a group already. We’re doing Star Drive using d20 Future.
I wouldn’t mind a Mutants & Masterminds game at some point. I’ve got a multi-part adventure that involves world-hopping. One of the worlds has Nazi gorillas.
NAZI.
GORILLAS.
Your pastimes are invalid.
Point is play-by-post lends itself more to systems with fewer (or no) rules where each post can actually advance the action; systems where several exchanges are required for each turn are best played in real time.
Ugh. I used to play Call of Cuthulu back in high school. I’m goint to have to get a game going again when I move for graduate school (I already know some of the seminarians play D&D).
… Falconer, can I steal the Nazi Gorillas idea?
The Nazi Gorillas aren’t my idea, it’s in a published adventure.
… But sure. Gorillas and comic books go hand-in-hand, as do Nazis and Nazi punching, and punching and comic books go hand-in-hand.
So a Nazi gorilla is just asking for it.
katz: Holy crap, Maptools looks amazing!
Falconer: What’s the name of this adventure? Because punching (kicking, nerve-striking, hurling boulders at, etc) Nazi gorillas sounds like way too much fun.
Time of Crisis by Green Ronin Press.
Crud, the description includes “super apes” and “uber Nazis” but not “Nazi gorillas.”
Why must my misunderstanding of reality be more awesome than reality itself?
Omigawd MapTool looks awesome. It would be great for face-to-face or for online chat play!
Now I gotta convince the guy who hosts the game to load it onto his computer so we can use his humongous TV.
Better yet, construct a tabletop surface out of glass and mount a big flatscreen horizontally below it … and a die-rolling mechanism … and gouts of flame … yes … where’s my sketchbook ….
Okay, just pulled my copy of Time of Crisis off the shelf. Sadly, no Nazi gorillas. Nazi supers, yes. Super apes, yes.
And the super apes more than make up for the lack of Nazi gorillas. Check it:
Chimpanzoom
Elastigibbon
Brainiape
Dr. Simian
Iron Monkey
Metamorph, the Mandrill of 1,000 Faces!
Together they form … THE PRIMATE PATROL!
@M Dubz, it does look like the Nazi Gorillas were my idea.
But you can use them anyway. You’ll just have to append this lengthy legal statement to the end of your work product.