So right-wing garbage site Breitbart has apparently decided to pander to the angry gamer demo even more explicitly with the launch of Breitbart Tech, “a brand new vertical dedicated to coverage of tech, gaming, and web culture.” Naturally, they’ve tapped the unlovely and ungracious Milo Yiannopoulos, Gamergate panderer par excellence, for editor.
Yesterday Milo went to the KotakuInAction subreddit, one of Gamergate’s main hubs, to announce the good news.
One Puckish Redditor gave Milo a little pop quiz to test his knowledge of technology and gaming. Milo, well, failed it.
![HBlight 314 points 19 hours ago Can you, offhand, name your specs for your pc? What model phone do you use? What do you think makes it good? Same question for a tablet if you have one? Complete the following phrase: "It's not a big truck, " Who is Linus Torvalds? Why is 60fps better for gaming even if 24 is perfectly fine for movies? If you can't answer these questions, do you plan to hire those who can? Plenty of "tech" writers out there who just use technology a lot. I'm just wondering if you are willing to get more into the culture of tech beyond this culture war in tech. :P permalinkembedsavereportgive goldreply [–]yiannopoulos_mActual Yiannopoulos, and a pretty big deal ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)[S] 181 points 18 hours ago I can see I still have much to learn.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/milofakegamer.png?resize=526%2C364&ssl=1)
One might presume that such an obvious fake gamer would quickly be hounded from the business by an angry Gamergate mob.
But, nah, someone explained all the answers to Milo and the regulars went on celebrating Milo’s new gig.
Because it’s all about ethics in knowing absolutely nothing about video games.
H/T — r/ShitRedditSays
The nominal reason for 60 FPS is due to “judder”. A fast moving object or scene will show a discrete jump rather than a smooth transition breaking down persistence of vision. This was notable in silent movies due to the low 16 FPS framerate involved. This is largely absent in 24 FPS movies because cinematographers actively avoid scene elements that would cause it. 60 FPS framerates are preferable even in cinema, according to SFX master Douglas Trumbull. With the advent of 60 FPS progressive scan monitors and GPUs 60 FPS was adopted as much because it was possible. That said, 60 FPS does have discernible psychophysical effects given that persistence of vision is far more complex than normally understood.
Sorry, decades of working on display technology…
It’s pretty amusing how any male-dominated space tends towards the same kind of dick-waving competitive behavior given the appropriate amount of time. Whenever one gamer asks another “What are your rig specs?'” my mind immediately translates to “Bro, how much do you bench?”
I don’t want to defend assholes so I wish people didn’t bring up this stupid FPS debate because usually whatever works for you is fine, but 60 FPS does in fact look more fluid and allows for more detail in high-speed animations. Youtube even has a 60 FPS video quality option now so it’s easy to go there and compare video games at 60 FPS vs 30 FPS (best done with fighting games in my opinion since they’re built around every frame mattering).
But everybody agrees constant framerate is more important than what the framerate is in general. But yeah, assholes go to ridiculous lengths to brag about the specs they’re able to run. That doesn’t mean 60 FPS isn’t more fluid than 30 FPS (and 60 FPS for high-precision games does actually make the game better, it’s why there’s rarely a fighting game that runs at 30).
katz, are video games acted out live for your amusement?
No – that’s not what real-time means in relation to rendering frames. And if you can comprehend that it’s not the case for films, why are you so confused in it being the case for video games? The hell is the point of dumb snark at somebody wasting their time trying to explain your questions when you could be the one googling them and wasting your own time?
Okay, but, how are you going to be a tech journalist and not know IT IS A SERIES OF TUBES. That is probably the one I find the most objectionable. He is not aware of all internet traditions.
As far as I know, nobody is able to reliably see the difference between 60 FPS and 45 FPS in actual experiments, once placebo factor have been sorted out. But, like Uncivilised Elk, I sure found 60 FPS better than 45.
My pet theory is that when you run 60 FPS on average, when the FPS drop (say, you just turned around yourself to force the computer to redraw everything), it drop to 30 or 40 and your eye see nothing different ; while if you had 24 FPS that would be instantly visible that the framerate dropped.
Heh, yeah, the thing that comes to mind for me: photo gearheads. Like, when you see a guy talking about his ultra-high-end camera equipped with a lens that costs more than a car, odds are that his actual photos will be super-boring images of flowers or something.
To be fair, 60FPS actually can help improve the kinæsthetic (or game feel if you will) in 3D games by making the controls feel smoother. And really, it is shitty when developers start locking the framerate on games when they are perfectly capable of running at higher FPS levels too.
No the problem is when caring about FPS becomes something that is put *above* the overall quality of the game itself, or when games are treated as a tool to see how far you can push a system instead of as interactive entertainment artpieces. It is possible to care about FPS still without falling into those camps or seeing games as just disposable product though.
Also we can’t directly compare how visuals works in movies to how they work in games as they are two completely different mediums, and even the visuals are different if we refer to live action movies as video games are an animated medium. Visuals work differently and have different purposes between mediums.
Ohlmann, I don’t know about 45 vs 60, but for 30 vs 60 – at least a decent amount of people have to be able to tell the difference.
A while back I happened to spend more time than I should’ve watching a stream of this one game before it was out in my region, and all the streams I watched were 30 FPS (I didn’t know this at the time and didn’t even think about the FPS). One day I happened to tune into a stream that was 60 FPS and immediately I was wondering why the game suddenly looked so much better and more smooth. That’s when I realized to check the framerate of the stream and indeed it was 60 FPS this time, whereas the prior channel I streamed it on was 30 FPS.
And I’m not super crazy about playing video games all the time. I have a select few I really love but overall it’s for sure a secondary hobby for me.
But still I was easily able to tell there was a clear difference in what I was watching without framerate even being on my mind.
As for 24 vs 30, I actually think that would be way harder to differentiate than 30 vs 60. The thing that often happens though is that a game will jump from 30 down to 24 and then back up to 30. And the fluctuating framerate is what’s easy to pick up on because it almost feels like the game stutters at times. A steady 24 vs steady 30 – I doubt I could tell the difference between that.
I’ve been a gamer for 25+ years and I have no fucking idea how to answer any of those questions, except I managed to guess the Linux thing (pure luck).
In my day, examples of gamer credentials could be a good Time Trial run in Super Mario Kart or F-Zero, top scores in Pilotwings, beating co-op Snake Rattle ‘N’ Roll, defeating Death in Castlevania without taking damage, knowing which bush to burn in Legend of Zelda, etc.
@dhag85: No kidding. I’ll never understand the arbitrary “gamer tests” that some people run. Everyone games differently, and some people care more about games than about the hardware (myself included).
I know I have a shitty, store-bought PC instead of a fancy gamer rig, but that’s all I need to play my games. I don’t have a *need* for them to run flawlessly, I just need them to run with little to no crashing, bugs, glitches, etc.
The use of arcane knowledge and understanding as a marker of group-belonging is pretty standard across class, gender and cultures. A brief look at the fashion industry, for example, will reveal quite a lot of women who probably don’t bench or have penis measurements, but who nonetheless know an awful lot of domain specific knowledge that other people might consider shallow or pointless.
The gamergaters make it easy to conflate cliquishness and nerdiness with being raging assholes, but those three things are hardly the same.
I have a laptop with a decent video card and an XBox (bought back in the wonderful days of dual income) that does everything. I don’t know how any of it works, and honestly trying to understand lessens my enjoyment. The idea that I have to both care about specs and also WIN at specs in order to be allowed into the manly clubhouse of the People Who Play Video Games For Fun Club is pretty ridiculous.
That’s not intended as a dig against people who really are into specs, just the irritating gatekeepers.
I’m hardly a gamer, but I know the answer to all of those except the first one. Does that mean I should take over from Yiannopoulos?
@katz: you are taking things out of context. You do not do real-time effects/physics processing on a movie. In games you do (except for pre-rendered cutscenes).
It’s funny because they’re praising the hiring of a right wing hack with no idea what he’s talking about for a tech column out of one side of their mouths while disparaging the technical qualifications of actual developers and competent tech writers with the other. It’s almost as if they don’t actually care about the things they purport to care about and are only concerned with politics…
http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/13/135089/4691690-0594089077-beetl.jpg
Found a better photo of him.
In terms of 60fps vs 30fps it’s not really about bragging rights (though I’m sure it plays a part). The other suggestions are a little closer to the mark. But the basic answer is that 60fps is better than 30fps because (or if) your monitor has a 60hz refresh rate.
Effectively your frame rate should match the refresh rate as closely as possible. Most monitors refresh at 60hz these days. IE they poll the pc/graphics card for a fresh frame 60 times in a second. If your machine is producing fewer than 60 frames in that time frame your system has to do something to make up the difference. The monitor has to show something. In the past it would insert blank, either black or white, frames (which makes the issue more visible). These days it’ll just repeat whatever the last frame rendered was.
Now this does a couple of things. At very low frame rates it creates a shuttering, flickering image. It can (as you guys noted) cause motion of any sort to look and feel shuddery and sluggish. It also has an effect on inputs. You move the controls to the right, but the monitor can show the effect yet because it gets the movement frame after the fact. Meaningless for a single frame but do that 100s of times over 10 seconds and inputs become sluggish and jerky.
Now the lower the frame rate goes the more apparent this all becomes. In my experience once you hit the low 20s the illusion of motion starts to break down entirely and you end up looking at a weird jerky slide show. But 30’s entirely playable (and entirely appropriate for a 30hz display, like many tv’s). I play a lot of my games down around 30 on a 60hz monitor. The worst I tend to run into is some a mild sluggishness in controls and motion, and excessive motion blur. It tend give things a disjointed, disconnected feeling. And it can make motion sickness and eye strain more likely (on a pc anyway). But 99% of the time it’s fine, often it’s just about indistinguishable from 60fps.
Last thing. The higher you frame rate over all (even in excess of refresh rate) the more “safe” you are from occasional slowdowns or performance drops pushing you to an unplayable frame rate. Dropping from 60 to 50 is unnoticeable. Dropping from 30 to 20 is. That said producing way more frames than your display is capable of showing is just wasting resources. Bragging about making 120fps on a 30hz tv is where the dick measuring comes in.
It’s a surprisingly good question from these reprobates (though I’m guessing accidentally). It hits on a bunch of stuff about how video, tv’s, film and computers work at base level. The fact that Milo couldn’t even provide a bit of color based on any of those topics makes me think he’s even less knowledgeable than I suspected. Or just doesn’t care.
@Pie
I think you’re underestimating the impact of toxic masculinity on the kind of one-upmanship that Terrabeau was describing. Pure cliqueishness doesn’t explain why, in gaming, women often face extra scrutiny to make sure they’re not “imposters,” for example .
And I don’t really know from the fashion industry, but I like clothes, and I’ve never found myself excluded on account of not knowing all there is to know. What I have experienced is men setting themselves up as experts on what I should wear, either because they’re gay, and they believe that affords them some knowledge I don’t have; or because they’re attracted to women and consider themselves, wrongly, to be the intended audience of my outfits.
Do you even 60 fps, bro?
Yeah, my own sense of this is that in a lot of dude-driven scenes, it’s not about breadth of knowledge so much as easily-quantifiable metrics of some kind or another. Like, to go back to my photo example – it’s not ‘who knows the most about photography’ so much as ‘who has the biggest/fastest/most-expensivest lens’.
“Rope” says Yiannopoulos, “I need more rope! I don’t have enough to tie the knot! Give me more rope!”
I’m all in favour of this. Valizadeh tried to create a website to pander to gators and ended up wasting time and money. Now we’ll see Yiannopoulos do the same.
Unless I’m missing something, this is a bad decision for Breitbart to make. There simply aren’t that many gators out there; several people have run the numbers and concluded that they add up to less than ten thousand globally. Ten thousand pairs of eyeballs is what’s known in web publishing terms as “chickenshit.” There’s no way that’s a viable audience for any website larger than a single person’s blog.
There’s also another issue that Breitbart might have missed: this is not an audience like their normal one. Gamers, by and large, know a lot about tech and are not going to be content with cheap meaningless word-count: they’re going to expect reviews by experts, they’re going to expect exclusives, they’re going to expect interviews, and so on. This does not come cheap. Simply trying to run that sort of operation without one hand tied behind one’s ideological back is difficult enough: the internet is littered with the bones of websites that never made it. Trying to do it on the cheap with the assumption that your audience won’t notice is not really an option, and yet that’s Breitbart’s stock in trade.
In other words, faced with the normal web question of “how do we make cheap content aimed at a large audience which is acceptable to lots of advertisers”, they’ve decided to do exactly the opposite: expensive content for a tiny audience who have a track record, if the *chans are anything to go by, of alienating their advertisers. Good luck on that one, fellas.
Napoleon said that one should never interrupt one’s enemy while they’re making a mistake. I feel that in this case this is germane advice.
Oh Mr Yiannopoulos, here is your rope.
eschen… it’s the ethicks not the polytics they care about. Get your ethics right and everything else falls into place. the frame rate means nothing if you sent bring ethical about the fps
fucking android 5.1 stock keypad is fucking diabolical at autocorrect. “means nothing if YOU AREN’T BEING ethical about the fps” (caps is intended for emphasis not shouting)
Oh boy, I’d love to set these asses in front of my favorite game — VtM:B, running on a nearly decade old mac, with a hilariously installed vista OS, just to run the damn game. But I don’t play it in FPS mode except a few spots where melee is suicide, so I’m not a gamer… forget that I obtained a copy of the vista install in digital form (DVD drive be busted), installed it until the first reboot via bootcamp, crossed my damned fingers cuz fuck MBR bullshit, and rebooted into a half finished install to properly install fucking VISTA just because it’s the only Windows OS you can install digitally that the game will run on!
Nawh, being in love with a handful of games doesn’t count, you gotta drop $50+ monthly (or more often) for the latest FPS! Unless it turns out to be shit, in which case no true gamer would like that game!
Sorry for the geek out up there, that whole process took like nine tries and a shit ton of coffee!
monitors refresh at 60Hz, so syncing the game with the refresh rate is smoother (not hugely to the human eye, but it’s real). film projectors, the “traditional” kind, run at 24 fps and so shooting at 60 fps would result in “slow motion”.
it’s that simple, and not anything to do with technical marvels. film could easily be shot at much higher frame rates, so long as we replace every old projector on the planet….