By Alec Meer on December 17th, 2008 at 6:50 pm.
Tis the season to write round-ups, tralalala la la la laaaah. I know we’ve covered much of the same ground in our award-winning* Now That’s Why I Love A Best 2008 Ever series, but I figured there’s room for a separate look back at the biggest storms in teacups of the year that’s nearly gone. Has it really been a year with more flashpoints than usual, or is this just an unfortunate side-effect of the rise and rise of internet discussion, and the Angry Internet Men that inevitably come with it? At any rate- here’s the PC gaming scandals, scandalletes and total non-events that most angered the Angries this year, compiled at random by an idiot (i.e. me). Some uprisings were justified, others less so – but the debate around them always fell prey to MAXIMUM RAGE.
(Oh, and for the record, as it does get a bit overused these days, by ‘Angry Internet Man’ we mean someone who takes a really extreme negative reaction, usually expressed as any or all of swearing, shouting, taking instant offence at offhand comments and a refusal to consider the other side of the coin. That’s as opposed to just someone who’s righteously annoyed and expresses it thoughtfully. Though being a whiny bumhead also counts.)
10. Diablo 3 has colours shocker
(Er – in case you you’re not familiar with it already, that screenshot is one of the crazy mean people’s commentary on Diablo 3, and not our doing)
About the most ridiculous protest of the year, and one that makes me fear for developers’ perceptions of PC gamers. Oh no – long-awaited RPG is slightly more colourful than its predecessors. STOP WHINING. Fair play to Blizzard for actually responding to the irate fans with their reasoning for the change, though were I in their shoes I would, I suspect, refuse to stoop to that level.
9. Sporewar
That’s Spore: the game, not Spore: the copy protection. What was expected to be a cute, inventive follow-up to the Sims and the posterboy for procedural generation turned out to be something else entirely. It suffered the violent wrath of Angry Internet Men because its mini-games failed to meet their sky-high expectations – so their disappointment was entirely understandable, but it’s sad that it seemed to shoot straight to outright dismissal/loathing rather than re-evaluating the game based on its own merits.
It also found itself in the middle of a very different storm, and one that briefly escaped the confines of web-rage to reach the mainstream. I.e. people made penises and buggering couples in it. To some, it was damning proof of the fall of society. Others reacted to news that EA would be banning naughtier creations as though Margaret Thatcher had personally visited them and stomped on their face. Remarkably, Spore as we know it in light of all the fury around it and Spore as really it is are two very different things. It’s sold well, and on the back of being a creation tool more than as the oddball strategy game it becomes.
8. Orc vs Orc
We’ve already talked today about the absurd, insane fanboy fallout from our own comparisons between Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft, but in truth it was a torrent of poison that briefly gripped MMO sites the world over. Notably, MUDfather Richard Bartle endured character assassination by a raft of WAR fansites after an interview in which he apparently stated the two games were very similar. Forums, meanwhile, were full of WAR vs Lich King debate, underpinned by this persistent, spiteful sentiment that WAR was somehow a real man’s game where WoW was some cartoon noobfeed. I know I’ve said it before, but people who play an MMO actively do define themselves by it – and as a result, they’re making PC gaming more tribal than ever. All Orcs are equal, but some orcs are more equal than others.
7. Bethesda Are Worse Than Hitler
There’s been a slow trickle of poison throughout the year about Bethesda handling the second sequel to the old turn-based Fallout RPGs. Surprisingly, the fury was at its worst before release rather than after, with die-hard Fallout fans harshly and bitterly pre-judging the game based on what they saw as Oblivion’s critical failings and resentment that a 2008 game wasn’t 2D, turn-based and PC-only. Extreme exaggeration was everywhere, Bethesda suffered any amount of name-calling and every screenshot was pored over for inconsistencies with the first two Fallouts. Celebration that a third Fallout was happening at all was in incredibly short supply. The white noise of hatred actually seemed to dim upon the game’s release. While it’s got more than its fair share of problems – especially the crashtastic PC port – a goodly number of the angries seemed pleasantly surprised by it. Well, at least until they got to the abysmal ending.
6. Assassin’s Greed
Conversely, AssCreed’s PC port wasn’t greeted with much good cheer. Already carrying something of a bad rep from its console versions – unskippable drear-o-thon cutscenes, a craptastic sci-fi sideplot and too many inane mini-games – its PC version being late, buggy and resource-hungry seemed to erode the last remaining goodwill for it. Matters were made worse by its infamously long-winded and asinine exit-the-game procedure and Ubisoft’s blaming the PC port’s poor sales on – here we go – it being leaked to Bittorrent some weeks before release. Hilariously, they even claimed a fatal bug in that version was included as deliberate security measure. Oh, and there was also some old bollocks about a patch that reduced performance on Radeons. Add to that all the kerfuffle about not allowing their games to be sold over Steam in Europe and the use of Securom in Far Cry 2 – Ubi’s not made friends of many PC gamers this year.
5. Pirates of Goo
This argy-bargy about World of Goo turned out to be the biggest of many big piracy discussions we had here, but it spread far beyond RPS’ thin walls and onto the internet at large. Astoundingly, it was a comment left by 2D Boy on one of our posts, rather than a news story itself, that sparked The Great Rage. “Roughly 90% of WoG copies were pirated”, reckoned 2D Boy. “You’re making that up”, said the piracy-is-a-victimless-crime brigade. No-one knows the full, real extent of the problem, but that a fair few people would seize any excuse to deny that piracy might have been problem for WoG, without any of the facts, made for a sad state of affairs. Once the initially shouting had died down, we were given some more carefully researched stats that seemed to sate the calmer doubters – but it’s a still a distressingly big number, no? Let’s just hope all the controversy helped shift a load of copies of this splendid game.
4. Bioshock Ate My Children
By rights, this should have been 2007′s problem. Unfortunately, it remained (remains?) an open wound for a certain breed of gamer. Many had treated it as the last, best hope of intelligent shooters, and when it turned out to be a stylised corridor-pounder that stopped making sense two thirds of the way through and climaxed with one of the more embarrassing boss fights of recent times, a lot of folk felt betrayed. It’s hard to deny – unless you’re Mad Kieron – that Levine & chums’ shooter pulled far too many punches, but the irrational (pun entirely intended) rage of so many people at the mere mention of its name, even months later, totally overshadowed what it did do very well, in terms of atmosphere, setting, horror and early narrative cleverness. Calm down, dears. Believe it or not, Levine didn’t specifically design the game to offend your sensibilities. Oh – and that it was one of the first games to employ limited-installation DRM horror was a slap in the face that hasn’t yet stopped stinging. The game dodged 0-day piracy because of it, and it’s more than likely it’s thus one of the main precedents for all the Securom punishments of this year’s games.
3. Epic dump the PC
The worst aspect of the Unreal creators clearly giving the finger to the platform that made them in favour of shiny Xbox dollars wasn’t that we wouldn’t get Gears of War 2 or whatever on PC, but rather that Cliffy B, Mark Rein and co just kept on saying stupid stuff throughout the yeaer. They were like a guy who dumped their smart, pretty girlfriend for someone with bigger boobs, but inexpicably kept on slagging off the ex in company. Clearly, they’re still in love with the first girl, but they won’t admit it to themselves or anyone else. Alright, chaps- go away if you must, but do stop it with the uninformed insults. I wonder what irked PC gamers more – that sense of betrayal by one of their early champions, or embarrassment that the preening, bling-draped, nonsense-spouting Cliffy ‘Don’t call me Cliffy B’ B was once one of us.
2. GTAgate
This wound’s so fresh that I barely need summarise it. GTA IV PC’s triple whammy of DRM, unnecessary and irritating ancillary applications and more fatal bugs than Walker’s underwear drawer made this 2008′s final insult to a bunch of gamers that had suffered enough. Frankly, that blood hasn’t been spilt over this camel back-breaker is astounding. Oh – worth noting the first patch came out recently, which purports to fix some of the bugs and performance problems. Good that Rockstar have reacted quickly, but I don’t think anything they could do, short of free hats for every purchaser, is going to make up for the laughable state they released the game in.
1. Spore’s DRM Signals The End Times
I’d say the burning pitchfork treatment that resulted from the revelation of Spore’s internet-only activation and limited installations is an entirely different scandal to dissastisfaction with the game itself for one simple reason – it had nothing to do with the game itself. This was a war of principles, the bloodiest battle to date between freedom-crazed Internet Men and out-of-touch, piracyphobic publishers. The mainstream news reported on it, it introduced the concept of DRM to people who’d never heard of it before, and it convinced more than a few people to utterly loathe a game they hadn’t played. At the heart of it all was the oddly unassuming Spore itself – which, if it hadn’t ended up selling so well, might have been a bizarre Joan of Arc figure for the internet age.
Whatever lessons have been learned from the fiasco and the fury won’t really be clear for a while. Despite all the enraged emails we received demanding we report on Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3′s use of Securom, it’s very likely the case that most of the post-Spore DRMy games would likely have been planned as such months previously. So it’s what happens with next year’s games that will be fascinating. Do publishers truly fear the Angry Internet Man now? And is he the guy in Tiananmen Square he seems to think he is, or just a wild-eyed loon carrying a The End Is Nigh banner?
* If no-one else gives it one, I’m going to award it the title of RPS’ Best Best of 2008 Feature.
17/12/2008 at 19:12 A-Scale says:
You’re committing the fallacy of shifting the burden of proof. It is not an a priori truth that even a single copy of WoG was pirated. That has to be proven with evidence. The evidence we were given seemed sketchy, according to some, and many rejected it. If the piracy defenders were wrong, it certainly wasn’t because they refused to accept the claim that WoG was pirated, without evidence.
17/12/2008 at 19:13 cyrenic says:
So, for the record; PC gaming is the smart, pretty girl with a flat chest?
17/12/2008 at 19:14 Dominic White says:
One thing I’m finding increasingly amusing is the divide forming between what the Angry Internet Men think, and what reality tells us.
Fallout 3 springs to mind. Possibly the most preemptively hated game ever. It was the sign of Bethesdas downfall, it was the beginning of the end times, it was raping and pillaging in the streets, and…
It comes out, and somehow went on to get glowing reviews across the board and shift an absolutely ludicrous number of units. One of the biggest sellers on all platforms this year, even. To top it off, the mod tools have been released just recently, and there’s a trio of remarkably good-looking mini-expansions (the first set in pre-war Alaska, even!) due early next year.
Oh, and that ‘terrible ending’? It’s not the ending. The third expansion apparently picks up where the main plot leaves off.
17/12/2008 at 19:17 dan says:
I literally lol’ed when the headline popped up in my feed reader. Good work RPS!
Surely 2009 can’t get any angrier… can it?
17/12/2008 at 19:20 A-Scale says:
Also, where’s the starcraft roiling over it being split into 3 parts?
17/12/2008 at 19:20 lumpi says:
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAWR!
17/12/2008 at 19:21 Angry Nerd says:
Also, for the record, the last Epic game that worths any attention was UT2004. None of their sh*t brown games should be on PC anyhow.
17/12/2008 at 19:21 Gap Gen says:
Well, there is no doubt ample evidence for piracy of World of Goo – I’m sure people cited seeing it on torrent sites (the 2D Boy blog definitely quoted at least one link to a Chapter One pre-order code). Like the coverage at the time said, the throw-away comment was replaced by better analysis that put the figure at about 82% (I think?).
Either way, even if World of Goo had a piracy rate of under 1%, pirating it would still be wrong.
17/12/2008 at 19:24 Youatemycheeto says:
Guys, take note. A-Scale has recognized the universal truth that using terms from intro philosophy classes like “a priori” and “the fallacy of this and that” makes whatever you say seem much more intelligent and sophisticated, regardless of its actual content.
I don’t think anyone said that every single copy of WoG was pirated. Correct me if I’m wrong. What they did was claim that around 90% were pirated without giving as much evidence to back it up as they might have.
It’s important to point out that the initial reactions which Alec was writing about were not, “Hey guys, I’ll believe that stat when I see the evidence” but more along the lines of, “Those guys are idiots, their methodology was clearly wrong, there is no way that many copies were pirated.” There’s a difference.
17/12/2008 at 19:27 skillian says:
I know the RPS writers love it, but “Angry Internet Man” has to be the worst meme I’ve heard this year. It seems to just be a way of belittling some very justified concerns PC gamers had this year.
To be honest, even after reading this article I can’t really tell if RPS really thinks any of these concerns have any validity.
The last line, “And is he the guy in Tiananmen Square he seems to think he is, or just a wild-eyed loon carrying a The End Is Nigh banner?”, seem to suggest you guys are still making up your minds on whether to continue swimming against the tide or finally admit that there were a lot of fucked up decisions made in PC gaming this year.
Fun article anyway, brought back some memories that made me smile :)
17/12/2008 at 19:27 Pags says:
Unfortunately Alec, you have retrospectively opened up 10 different cans of worms. Are you prepared?!
17/12/2008 at 19:28 The_B says:
I’m waiting for the inevitable “RPS Angriest Internet Men of 2008″ feature. Meat Circus and Cliffski* would be high up there. I’d probably be somewhere down so low I’d get into the “Almost idiotically optimistic RPS readers of 2008″ one.
That or “RPS Commenters that Try Too Hard to be Funny and Fail frequently of 2008″
*(Covering my arse with a ‘Love you guys! Mwah. ;) ‘)
17/12/2008 at 19:31 Naurgul says:
Bah, I don’t like the term “Angry Internet Man”, it’s ridiculously insulting. Sure, there are people who get worked up too much about things but that doesn’t mean that we should just make fun of them and call them names. Remember the part about “refusing to stoop to that level“?
Maybe, you know, just maybe, the so-called “angry internet men” are right in some respects, despite the wrong way they protest. Maybe it’s just the fear we have about the possibility that they are correct that makes is so easy to brush off their ideas, when, all we are entitled to brush off is their behaviour.
Sometimes, I feel like RPS is comprised of some kind of British aristocrats, discussing about the savages that live in their colonies over a cup of tea. And I don’t know whether I should just find it funny or what.
17/12/2008 at 19:34 Dinger says:
… and she has a drawer full of the most variegated toys and an active imagination concerning how to use them. This explains why, when slagging off on the ex, from time to time the new Console Elite’s pupils will dilate, his gait will devolve to something between a stagger and a waddle, and he will start muttering something about “configuration problems landing me in A&R a few times.”
17/12/2008 at 19:35 Man Raised By Puffins says:
That cat looks like its been caught yawning rather than in the midst of a fierce rage, although I guess that’s apt too.
17/12/2008 at 19:36 ZenArcade says:
I agree with Naurgul – the term seems to suggest that to show how you feel about a topic you deem important is stupid. It’s like the “stiff upper lip” thing I guess, some people cannot be fucked with all that bollocks and want to get straight to the point (i.e. me ¬_¬)
17/12/2008 at 19:40 D says:
Is this an invitation to every Angry Internet Man ever to reiterate his angryness? If so…
7. I’m still fairly miffed about Fallout 3, mostly because it means we’ll never see a proper one.
17/12/2008 at 19:41 Flint says:
DRM has to be the most boring issue ever to constantly cause massive uproar wherever it goes.
I mean yeah it’s a silly bad thing but good god the uproar.
17/12/2008 at 19:43 Hypocee says:
4. That’s an oversimplification of what ‘we’ said, thanks very much Alec, and an immediate halving of The Number followed the less-doolally analysis ‘we’ asked for.
17/12/2008 at 19:46 Hieremias says:
Let’s be honest though: you guys in the games media love to fuel the nerd rage by talking about it so much. I think I’ve almost seen more posts from the RPS quartet about “Angry Internet Man” than genuine, real, honest-to-goodness angry internet people.
A long thread with many people expressing the same “Ya that Spore DRM is stupid” does not make for a horde of Angry Internet Men.
17/12/2008 at 19:46 Heliocentric says:
Free hats! The mans a fucking genius. When i publish my app (i won’t call it a game its more of an ai/genetic algorithms toy) my technical support will be entirely sending out hats with an eula saying “by opening this hat i agree i’m not angry.”
17/12/2008 at 19:49 Tei says:
Talking about DRM is boring, so I avoid it as posible. But seems publishers don’t really want to help. Only one game with DRM is too much. Releasing more games with DRM is calling for a “user rebellion”.
For reference, see pic 1:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/dec08/mob.jpg
17/12/2008 at 19:49 Heliocentric says:
With Aim’s it matters not whether they are right or wrong in this article. Simply that they are angry and they arn’t afraid to say it. Angry is angry. Right or wrong.
17/12/2008 at 19:50 Switch625 says:
I bought GTA4 and it didn’t work (even after trying all the various tinkery methods) so I asked for a refund and was told by Steam (in so many words): “We care not for your statutory rights or your Sales of Goods Act 1984, you can’t have a refund.”
I felt pretty Angry Internet Mannish at the time, but must admit a free hat would’ve gone a long way towards cheering me up.
I like the term Angry Internet Man. It fits nicely with the image I get in my head when I see the 1000th piracy/DRM thread comment stating the same damn thing in hysterically over-wrought language.
In fact, I’d really, really like an AIM hat. Merchandising idea, RPS?
17/12/2008 at 19:52 garren says:
I hate this whole labeling of “angry internet men” too. It’s so insulting (and retarded) to call peoples opinions and criticisms by such way, even if they just might have a point.
Don’t be a tool. Use your goddamn brain.
17/12/2008 at 19:55 Tei says:
@Dominic White: [I've suddenly taken leave of my senses and decided to ruin a game loads of people are currently playing! It's hard to say why I'd do such a thing - perhaps I am evil]
note: this comment may or not may [have formerly] contain[ed] traces of spoilers
17/12/2008 at 19:56 Dan Lawrence says:
@ZenArcade & Nargul
Surely the point is that if you have a serious point you should be able to express your displeasure coherently and without recourse to rudeness. The Angry Men the post refers to are the careening trolls that sling insults left, right and centre at any who dare suggest that perhaps there are might be another side to a story. If you are going to insult people you should at least be funny not just brimming over with thundering rage.
17/12/2008 at 19:57 Switch625 says:
I think if you read Alec’s disclaimer at the beginning of this article, it’s pretty much implied that if you’re saying something new, or making a good point, you ain’t an Angry Internet Man no matter how angry you actually are, since you’re able to write something coherent that provokes thought.
The AIM label is reserved for people who just scream and shout about injustices without adding anything to the discussion.
Edit: beaten to it by Dan.
17/12/2008 at 20:01 Dominic White says:
Tei: Not sure on the specifics. All I know is that the third addon will be called ‘Broken Steel’, and will raise the level cap, add new perks, and feature a story arc going beyond the original ending.
17/12/2008 at 20:01 The_B says:
Angry Internet Men being angry at becoming Angry Internet Men by being labelled as Angry Internet Men.
Oh the irony?
17/12/2008 at 20:02 Wisq says:
Yes, PC gaming is Alyx Vance.
How fitting that Valve should not only buck the trend of “how much boobage can we stick on a video game character?”, but that they should define and represent their own “home” platform in the process. ;)
17/12/2008 at 20:04 Larington says:
To re-make an important point, the problem with Angry Internet Men isn’t that they have a justified dislike of something, but rather the method by which they point out this dislike of something. Usually involving lots of swearing, and an inability to actually state the grievance in a calm manner. Oh, also a propensity towards being overly defensive when someone puts forward a counter-proposal that conflicts with what they want in any way.
Oh, and my vote for biggest Angry Internet Man for 2008 would clearly go to that person who is convinced piracy helps sales and couldn’t possibly be detrimental to the PC ever, at all. Who constantly goes on about his evidence but refuses to actually link to said evidence in a free-to-access form. Hmm, I’m wondering if I should omit this last paragraph lest someone try leaping upon me over this comment.
Oh, and who here wouldn’t at least want to get to know Alyx better…
17/12/2008 at 20:05 ZenArcade says:
so if I flower my posts with jokes, i’ll be taken seriously?
As far as I know, most “angry internet men” from here do exactly what you just said, bar a few overwhelming posts, but one or two among a sea of genuine complaints isn’t bad going…
Larington: So like most discussions then?
17/12/2008 at 20:05 Mo says:
Oh snap, the Angry Internet Men are getting angry about being called Angry Internet Men! ;)
17/12/2008 at 20:06 Switch625 says:
ZenArcade: I don’t think anyone has specifically said that you are an AIM, have they? By the definitions most are putting forward, you aren’t one.
17/12/2008 at 20:07 Mo says:
I knew I should have refreshed before commenting … The_B beats me to the joke.
17/12/2008 at 20:11 Jockie says:
Number 8 is still going and if not across the internet then in WAR itself.
I decided to start a new character after not playing for a while today and some guy, obviously new asked in a chat channel if the ability to view armours before buying, that exists in WoW was in the game. About 5 people jumped in instantly telling him to f*** off back to his childrens game.
17/12/2008 at 20:11 ZenArcade says:
lol… switch, i don’t define my entire life by being an AIM ;) I do feel as though that term is applied to anyone who isn’t a quiet, reserved little boy who talks politely and doesn’t swear… (not all of us went to grammar school guys, duuuuh)
Although I spose it’s only human to create distinctions in certain circles, as in the article above, PC gaming is becoming more and more “tribal” which is a massive shame.
17/12/2008 at 20:13 Larington says:
As I understand it, RPS does moderate stuff, some of the piracy discussions were heavily moderated so that most of us don’t have to witness this sort of behaviour, nor let it distract people from conducting some mature discussion of the issue being covered.
Meanwhile, DRM foibles aside, I’m now of the opinion that EA is maturing as a games publisher, and that this is a good thing. Acti/Blizz/Vendi meanwhile, are currently going backwards imho.
17/12/2008 at 20:13 Caramon says:
@Tei: joder, macho, no tienes remedio. Vas jodiendo los finales de todo por todos sitios. Primero Harry Potter y ahora Fallout 3?
To the rest: sorry, old feud.
17/12/2008 at 20:14 Optimaximal says:
I was always under the impression Angry Internet Man defined the opinion-less sheeple who had no prior experience of what he/she was shouting about and had heard it second/third-hand on the internet.
Case in point – Spore/SecuROM. It’s not that people weren’t justifiable in complaining – EA set a dangerous precedent this year as they likely have no intentions of capitulating like 2K and removing any limitations after a while because it’s helping their crusade against the second-hand market.
It’s the fact they deliberately spamming Amazon reviews (amongst others) with comments like ‘I haven’t played Spore so can’t comment on its content, but the guy posting above me gave it 1 star citing DRM/SecuROM Malware/Rootkits/Paying full price for a game rental/insert reason here so I’m going to copy him, rate the game 1 star and pirate it anyway!’.
17/12/2008 at 20:15 Switch625 says:
WoW hate is nothing new. I used to play Guild Wars and it existed there. It’s basically gaming’s equivalent of the music lover who regards chart music as “retarded” (disclaimer: this is me) or the art-house film guy who moans about Hollywood dumbing-down movies.
There’s this sense of once you get too popular, you’re not cool anymore. It’s no bad thing, in my book, as it often enables obscure stuff to get noticed solely on its “cool” factor, which then turns out to be actually quite excellent on its own merits.
17/12/2008 at 20:17 Simon Jones says:
I was inconveniently (so I thought) on holiday when GTA IV was unlocked on Steam. Consequently, on my return, it installed and run without any DRM/authentication issues whatsoever, and I have also encountered no bugs so far and it runs at a solid, friendly framerate.
Upon checking back over the week’s worth of RPS that I’d missed while away, I was rather perplexed to read all the armageddon-laden posts about GTAgate. It’s almost like I somehow ended up with a completely different, stable version of the game to everyone else.
17/12/2008 at 20:20 Pags says:
Ironic as it may seem, it does at least go some way to showing you’re not deadly serious about the subject. Having the propensity to not take something like DRM as being a matter of vital importance is a good way of singling yourself out from the people who take that sort of thing as some sort of personal insult.
17/12/2008 at 20:22 Larington says:
Sarcasm, meanwhile, buries an Angry Internet Mans commentary behind an obfuscating layer of uncertainty that makes his point even more difficult to grasp. Or so I find.
I certainly don’t like having to translate sarcasm out of someones comment when I’d genuinely like to understand what that persons grievance is.
17/12/2008 at 20:24 AndrewC says:
Actually Angry Internet Men *should* be ridiculed and *should* be ignored. As soon as they start shouting discussion stops and turns into an argument solely about winning and losing instead of moving forwards towards argreement and solution. Nothing useful can happen when AIMs are around.
The rhetoric of hyperbole, where any problem is always The Worst Thing In The World, is merely a variation on Godwin’s Law, and only shows that the AIM is cynically misrepresenting the problem or has an understanding incapable of nuance.
The Manichean need to cast the debate in terms of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ is evidence either of a simplistic and childish worldview or a dangerously dogmatic worldview that can not allow even the slightest compromise or change in viewpoint
The demonisation of the ‘other’ is always linked to the beatification of the ‘self’ and as such only speaks to the arrogance of the AIM and nothing about the topic in hand.
Whether dangerous or pathetic, they are poison, and always undermine the case of whatever cause they are arguing.
17/12/2008 at 20:24 Nimic says:
To be fair some of these are very much valid concerns. I do think the “Angry Internet Man” thing is a bit silly.
17/12/2008 at 20:24 A-Scale says:
Indeed, how dare I try to class things up by using words larger than “methodology”? My point is not that 2d boy did not prove that every copy was pirated (straw man fallacy lolol), but rather that they didn’t prove that ANY were pirated. The numbers they put out were criticized by many as erroneous. If scientists put out a study stating that global warming would flood London by 2020, and it was then criticized by others who said it was erroneous, we wouldn’t just scale back the prediction and say “Ok, 2030 then!”, the study would be discarded. I’m tossing out their evidence until I see something more substantial that doesn’t rely on heavy exaggeration.
17/12/2008 at 20:25 Trezoristo says:
Oh, the good times :).
I don’t think there is any need to feel attacked. Whenever something becomes an issue on the internet there are always people who’ll take the extreme uncompromising negative stance on the matter. I believe that’s the crowd the term ‘Angy internet men’ is referring too.
17/12/2008 at 20:31 Deadpan says:
So what you’re saying is, no matter what you do, there will be a mob of fanboys that will get pissed off and scream at the top of their lungs. DRM, more colors, not being a byte-for-byte copy of the original franchise, it’s not coming to my console, my console is better than your console, etc, etc.
And publications/blogs and commentards like me enjoy nothing more than waiving the bait above the cage. :D
On that note, I resolve to wait a week after release of any new PC game I want to get. Hands still sore from all the bugbites, and my face is still sore from all the palming because the honest reviews don’t come out until after it hits.
17/12/2008 at 20:32 dan says:
Did Tei just spoil the end of Fallout 3 (and thus, my Christmas present) for me? :O
If so, I may have to transform Hulk-style into an Angry Internet Man.
17/12/2008 at 20:34 Larington says:
Don’t make dan angry… You won’t like him when hes angry.
Sorry, sometimes I see a joke and can’t stop myself.
17/12/2008 at 20:40 Duke Nasty VI says:
I’m getting World of Goo for myself this Christmas. Loved the demo, but just couldn’t afford it before now, with me being broke most of the time
17/12/2008 at 20:42 Tom says:
Up until now, I didn’t know about Fallout3′s ending. Damn them spoilers!!!
But I also had no Idea of it’s securom protection, so now it’s been added to the ‘avoid’ bin, just like all the other ‘must have’ titles of this really crappy year for pc gaming.
Back to playing Doom…good old,plain doom.
17/12/2008 at 20:43 Meat Circus says:
Bethesda are better than Hitler. FACT.
17/12/2008 at 20:47 Dinger says:
First Rule: If you address the Angry Internet Men as such, they will answer. And they will be angry.
A-Scale: Your claim that 2D-Boy has not proven a single instance of piracy is ridiculously positivistic and beside-the-point. Nobody, except perhaps you, has the sophistic audacity to claim that the number of pirates of World of Goo is zero. In fact, given behavior patterns with other titles, it’s reasonable to presume the existence of some number of pirates preying on 2-D Boy. So you can’t go from claiming that they haven’t listed name, government ID number, address and moment the pirated copy entered possession, as well as independent verification of these facts, to asserting that they haven’t shown anything about piracy.
The question is one of magnitude, and there are means for approximating these things. They listed them in detail. If you want to have a go at those, go ahead, but don’t sit here like with yer perty sophistry pretending you know your way around logical argumentation. Heck, you probably think that’s an ad hominem abusive.
17/12/2008 at 20:47 Citizen Parker says:
As with The_B and Mo, I can’t understate my supreme satisfaction with Angry Internet Men being chuffed at being labeled Angry Internet Men. It’s like perpetual motion, endlessly feeding upon itself.
“I can TOO state opinions without being spiteful and cursing, you nincompoop Brits!”
17/12/2008 at 20:52 Wisq says:
Wait, wait …
By “unlocked on Steam”, do you mean “open for playing on Steam”, or do you mean “the Steam version was made DRM-free (aside from Steam itself)”?
I heard that the Steam version of GTA4 had the exact same DRM, Social Club stuff, GFWL stuff, etc., as the retail copy. Has this changed?
17/12/2008 at 20:52 Colthor says:
@Tom:
It’s just a CD check on the launcher/config thing, not any online activation/install limit rubbish. And you can run fallout3.exe without the disk in the drive.
SecuROM 7 has been used for disk-checks at least as far back as Dark Messiah. I think Oblivion used SecuROM 4.
17/12/2008 at 21:03 Mark Stephenson says:
I tried to write a comparison between MeatCircus as an Angry Internet Man and Jesse Baker (comic fan online at large) as an Angry Internet Man here but I guess only KG will know who Jesse is so it doesn’t really work.
But basically MeatCircus_MeatCircus just seems like an internet hate machine that just hates games cause games fucked his dog when he was a kid and stole his lollipop and Jesse Baker “LOVES” comic books a little bit too much for his own good.
I guess it all comes down to people getting angry about things to different degress and at the end of the day it’s better to be a sour faced miserablist than someone who loves something so much it warps love beyond all healthy recognition.
17/12/2008 at 21:04 Turin Turambar says:
1. Diablo 3. Oh yes, it was something ridicule. But being honest, there were some moments here and there where the low-poly stuff and cartoon-like textures remembered WoW. But it just for technical reasons, like in WoW.
2. Spore, the game? Mediocre game.
3. MMOs. Not a MMO player.
4. Fallout 3 was one of the best games of the year. But still it felt dumbed down in a few things, and in other stuff the original Fallouts were much better, so everybody wins!. :)
5. AssCreed. I didn’t have any problem running it, and boy it was pretty!. Pity that the game sucked, both the badly designed stealth and the repetitive overall design, the plot, etc etc.
6. World of Goo. Great game and i don’t like puzzle games a lot. I will buy it.
7. Bioshock. Very good game, but still it’s not System Shock 2, or Thief, or Deus Ex. It was overhyped by reviewers who can’t see the difference between a good game, a very good game, and an masterwork; they just call it masterwork like crazy men. Backslash justified, a bit.
8. Epic. Whatever, they never were that great, even in the old times. Heck, Unreal I was overhyped, for me. I don’t care if they stay away from the pc.
9. GTAgate. Ah what delicious fall to watch. DRM + bugs and problems + extra programs like rockstar club + ABYSMAL perfomance. And after that, the game itself has his share of problems. Angry man wins here.
10. Spore DRM. Who cares? See point 9.
17/12/2008 at 21:05 Turin Turambar says:
EDIT: Shit, i wanted to write “see point 2.”
17/12/2008 at 21:05 Senethro says:
So much denial!
17/12/2008 at 21:09 Meat Circus says:
For the love of Xenu!
MetalCircus and I are *different people*.
I love games. I hate twats. And there are so many twats. So very many. My anger over DRM is jin-u-wine, you can be sure of it. Mmmm.
Fallout 3 was… quite good, but with many bloody stupid bits and a shocker of a main quest.
See, not anger. Just UNARGUABLE TRUTH.
17/12/2008 at 21:15 Kieron Gillen says:
Mark: Man, Baker_Baker posting here would be splendid. And by splendid, I mean deleted by Alec every single time.
KG
17/12/2008 at 21:17 AndrewC says:
To prove my point that Meat Circus is a TWAT, I wrote the word in capital letters.
17/12/2008 at 21:17 A-Scale says:
Alec’s point was that it was ludicrous for anyone to suggest that piracy has not hurt WoG sales. I have seen no evidence of that. You’re arguing that there just MUST be at least one episode of the game pirated. I don’t know for sure, as I haven’t pirated it. How do you know exactly? If 2d boy was to come out with some statistics that weren’t susceptible to being called grossly exaggerated I would give their claim some more attention. Until then I’m not going to rest on the assumption that it was pirated bunches and bunches, or even once. I just don’t know, and neither do you.
I’m not qualified to argue such numbers one way or the other, but quite a number of people pointed out significant holes in 2d boy’s strategy of attaining that number. Until we’ve got a set of agreeable numbers to base our conclusions on I don’t see how you can make a conjecture about how much, or if at all WoG was pirated. You might also want to try not acting like a prick.
17/12/2008 at 21:20 AndrewC says:
I pirated it.
17/12/2008 at 21:21 cullnean says:
i ilke angry internet men, you can set them off raging with a single 3 word comment
“you are wrong”
17/12/2008 at 21:21 Meat Circus says:
@AndrewC:
I’m the angry internet man, and yet, you’re the one resorting to insults.
I try to empathise with how hard it must be for you to constantly have to deal with the crushing realisation of how much more correct I am than you.
:(
17/12/2008 at 21:22 Kieron Gillen says:
A-Scale: Did you miss their 2DBoy’s second, more rigorous set of statistics*, by the way? The holes which people brought up were taken care of they ended up with 82%.
KG
*Which lean conservative. The remaining primary unaccounted for elements are ones which would raise the Piracy rate.
17/12/2008 at 21:23 A-Scale says:
Well that’s one.
17/12/2008 at 21:23 A-Scale says:
Yes Kieron I did miss that. I’ll check it out after my exam. Thanks.
17/12/2008 at 21:26 pepper says:
So much anger, i suggest we rent the LA con center, invite the internet and all the developers and enjoy a good cup off tea with some nice cake… delicious sweet cake..mmmm..
17/12/2008 at 21:28 mrrobsa says:
What a shame.
17/12/2008 at 21:28 Meat Circus says:
I hate cake.
Cake makes me angry. Why are you trying to anger me with CAKE?
(This is a lie. Cake wins. Except Black Forest Gateau which is a cake for twats.)
17/12/2008 at 21:29 Senethro says:
Damn, and there was me hoping that Kieron had just fallen for the troll. Oh well.
17/12/2008 at 21:30 pepper says:
No, no anger will be allowed meat circus! You will also need to change your name to unicorn circus!!
17/12/2008 at 21:32 Meat Circus says:
Did anybody *really* get angry about the WOW GHEYNESS in Diablo 3? Or was it all some elaborate jape?
17/12/2008 at 21:34 AndrewC says:
Your experience of Black Forest Gateau only extends as far as Iceland, I assume. Bless.
17/12/2008 at 21:34 Kieron Gillen says:
A-Scale: It’s worth reading. The interesting thing about the story, for me, was how hyperbolic the defence of the statistics was – with many people arguing that Piracy rate could be as low as 5% due to movable IPs. My take is that while the initial methodology wasn’t perfect, people arguing as hard as they did that it was totally meaningless numbers says a lot about the debate. In actual fact, the initial guess was a pretty good rough one – they figured some elements would push it up and some would push it down, but it’d pretty much balance out.
My personal suspicion is that the initial guess was actually right, and the positive non-included factors in the second estimate would have knocked it back up to 90% from the 82%. But that’s a suspicion, and doesn’t really matter.
As I said at the time, the distasteful thing about the argument was how hard people were debating over what was effectively whether there were five pints of blood by the corpse, or only four and a half. Hell – maybe there is only half a pint. Blood spreads around a lot, you know…
KG
17/12/2008 at 21:38 Meat Circus says:
@ AndrewC:
Are you some Indiecake elitist?
17/12/2008 at 21:39 Dan Lawrence says:
@ Kieron
Probably also worth noting that 2D Boy’s Ron Carmel said this:
“we don’t think that we’re losing sales due to piracy, and we have no intention of trying to fight it”
17/12/2008 at 21:39 Senethro says:
Kieron, it sounds like you feel… strongly about this issue to write such a long comment.
17/12/2008 at 21:40 pepper says:
He has a point, it was mostly arguing about what people were arguing about. And that for 500 posts long with a few people throwing meaningfull comments about.
17/12/2008 at 21:44 AndrewC says:
@Meat Circus
Whatever proves you wrong, pumpkin.
@ Everyone
I didn’t really pirate it.
17/12/2008 at 21:44 Mark Stephenson says:
Slightly more relevent to this post I actually stopped posting on RPS because I found myself becoming an Angry Internet Man here on RPS over stuff that has actually been posted about today which was the WoW vs War debate.
As a long term WoW player I found it “annoying” that anytime a game that I like and enjoy got mentioned on the site some “body” who clearly didn’t like it felt the need to post and have their anonymous internet vote counted whereas I would have prefered to have a discussion about stuff.
I couldn’t give a flying fuck about Warhammer Online. So quite naturally I have nothing to say about it. Do I therefore have to go into all War threads and call people out in some kind of Tribal willy waving competition.
Ug Ug!
The whole WoW vs War thing was the worst thing of the year for me. I like Futurama alot more than the Simpsons too. Why can’t they exist together?
Because the way the War Evangelists acted made me want to mention at every possibility that they were probably social rejects with long hair, a large and expansive Iron Maiden collection, with BO and a history of hiding in dark corners shaking a d20 whilst painting there little men.
I believe in live and let live … man but the War Evangelists made me want to call them all a bunch of smug passive aggressive fucknuts and as such I completley discounted everything they said.
They were off on one as if they were “fighting the man” in some counter culture revolution and I was just looking around wandering where the man who was putting us down was whilst being constantly insulted for some reason I still don’t understand. Same thing counts with people who say that WoW is nothing but a grind. YAWN! a) you havn’t seen how Blizzard bought their A-Game to the expansion and b) all games are a grind you bleating sheep who likes to hear the sound of their own keyboard tapping.
Anyways bygones be bygones …. Tabula Rasa was steaming pile of shit and the fact the servers will be shut off will help save the world’s carbon footprint and everyone who likes it is rubbish.
That last paragraph was intended as humour for those of you who don’t like us AIM’s adding sarcasm into our posts. But then again when I reviewed this comment before posting it was “tl so I “dr”
17/12/2008 at 21:48 The_B says:
No offence to RPS meant, but doesn’t this statement define this very post?
17/12/2008 at 21:49 Meat Circus says:
@AndrewC:
Goodness me. You’re the angriest person on this thread Right Now, and I haven’t even said anything particularly controversial.
You must really like black cherries.
17/12/2008 at 21:54 Meat Circus says:
@Mark Stephenson:
With regard to the WAR/WOW think, you have to consider that most WAR players will be successfully rehabilitated former addicts.
And there’s never anyone able to express righteous indignation from the moral highground more vociferously than a recovering addict.
If (as I believe) WAR is like a better WOW, what would be so wrong about evangelising that anyway?
17/12/2008 at 22:02 John Walker says:
I think there’s a helpful distinction to be made: Everyone is capable of being an Angry Internet Man/Woman, but not everyone who has a strong opinion and states it is an AIM.
The term isn’t used to dismiss the passionate, informed opinions that people voice. It’s used to describe the people who are aggressive and unpleasant when delivering their opinions. People leaping to be offended by the term should consider whether anyone’s really referring to them. Unless of course their response is to get aggressive and unpleasant – if that’s the case, yes, we’re talking about you.
17/12/2008 at 22:02 AndrewC says:
I love the fucking shit out black cherries. What would someone be like if they did not like black cherries and the way their juice soaks into a thick moist dark chocolate sponge, offsetting the chocolate’s thick bitterness with its own sharp sweetness? Why, that person would have to be some kind of twat.
17/12/2008 at 22:02 cullnean says:
@meat circus
you are wrong!
17/12/2008 at 22:08 cyrenic says:
Even though I’ve never eaten it, I’m super pissed Black Forest Gateau is getting made fun of on this thread.
17/12/2008 at 22:10 James T says:
I like people who use the term ‘Angry Internet Men’; they have so little self-awareness!
17/12/2008 at 22:12 Mark Stephenson says:
@Meaty
“And there’s never anyone able to express righteous indignation from the moral highground more vociferously than a recovering addict.”
True enough :)
However I like playing WoW so STFU and let me play what I want without slagging off something that I enjoy and trying to make me feel like a lesser person simply because I am not as enlightened as you.
Non-Aim’s : There was a large amount of tongue in cheek in my reply to Meaty there, whilst still retaining my position of dislike for the War Evanglism I appreciated the candor with which he replied to me and tried to reply with a candor that I hope he understands.
But seriously I’m Pro Choice and Anti Death penalty and nothing the other side says about these issues is ever going to change that. I don’t need the other side preaching at me everytime the thing I like/believe is mentioned.
Hell … Paul Barnet gets the prize from me for most interesting marketeer in games this year. We need more people like him and I wish him well. I hope War sorts itself out nicely. But the condescending pricks who sneer at me because apparantly I like “grind” and I play WoW can go fuck themselves, preferably in a thread I won’t read because I’m secure enough in my sexual ability not to have to go picking fights in places where I have no positive contribution to add.
So Nur Nur Nee Nur Nur … Khorne is Rubbish! Tzeentch RuLeZ!
17/12/2008 at 22:17 Pace says:
I just felt like saying that Meat may be a bit confrontational from time to time, and I may rarely agree with him, but he at least has interesting and intelligent things to say.
17/12/2008 at 22:20 Panther says:
Is this post merely an attempt to troll for Angry Internet Men?
If so… where do I sign up?
I’m sure I could rant about plenty on that list, not least Spore and Fallout 3…
17/12/2008 at 22:22 Kieron Gillen says:
Dan: Yes. I actually personally think Ron’s wrong (I’m also aware that if I were a creator of indie games, I’d totally say that I wasn’t going to fight piracy because you get good PR from it. And you haven’t the resources to do any real DRM anyway).
The other interesting thing about the numbers-in-piracy debate is that while any piracy figures are hyper analysed, unsupported things like that Stopping 1000 pirates = 1 sale thing are never examined. The piece it’s from doesn’t show any of its working – it just pulls it from the ether. In fact, from the same piece, the only numbers show say that sales were constantly up in any month they included a new DRM measure.
Senethro: I feel strongly about many things. It’s how this blog gets written. Or at least my bits.
Mark: When are we going to go drinking? Jamie and I miss you, man!
KG
17/12/2008 at 22:22 Meat Circus says:
@AndrewC:
Is it wrong to find that post curiously erotic?
@Cullnean:
You can’t handle the truth!
17/12/2008 at 22:26 Mark Stephenson says:
Screw Black Forest Gateau!
Bannoffee Pie is the way forward! Toffee and Bannana on a nice crumbly base.
Cream was always a waste of space with it’s airy fluffed up ways.
Bannoffee is the way forward in the after dinner stakes arena (ADSOGGPerger)
… Wait … What do you mean they both have crea….
17/12/2008 at 22:27 Pags says:
To be honest, I’m not really sure what this retrospective was in aid of, especially as Alec is the most vocal about his annoyance with angry internet people. He baited the bear!
Also, Meat Circus is my seventh favourite person on RPS. Even if he doesn’t like Black Forest Gateau.
17/12/2008 at 22:29 qrter says:
@Kieron:
Here I disagree. As I see it, you need to define how large a problem actually is before you can truly find a way to solve it.
To keep up with your analogy, the body isn’t dead but heavily wounded – is the body missing all appendages or is there still an arm attached? Will we start to sew on appendages willy-nilly, maybe ending up with 2 legs and 3 arms, or actually look at what needs to be done?
If the numbers don’t matter, why mention them in the first place.
All that said, the more important question is what such a rate of piracy actually means, economically (and I’m not so sure that Tweakersguide article from last Sunday Papers provides the answer..). To 2D Boy it doesn’t seem to mean much at all, which is probably why they are one of the first companies to actually publish their findings.
17/12/2008 at 22:29 Meat Circus says:
Cake = death.
Okay, so nobody was actually killed in the great Sachertorte wars, but they *could* have been, and that’s what matters.
17/12/2008 at 22:34 Meat Circus says:
@Pags:
Kiss kiss.
Me, I’m not trying to deny anything. I am sometimes angry, I’m on the Internet, and I am a man. QED. I love my righteous fury. It keeps me warm at night.
Still, I also wonder exactly what Alec was hoping to achieve with this post. Still [I'm stepping in here to prevent this becoming a bitch fight - Alec's been candid about that Meat, you scoundrel - JW].
17/12/2008 at 22:35 John Walker says:
I’ll interject that I agree with Ron and think he’s right. And while I see Kieron’s point that it would be savvy for an indie dev to woo the fans with such a comment, I don’t think that was at play here. Especially since they’ve got publishers, who I’m sure aren’t big fans of such remarks.
However, I’m glad to see banoffee pie fans coming out in the fight against Black Forest tyranny. Although I’m going to throw a cheesecake spanner into the works. It’s clearly the best. (But can’t we all unite against the Black Forest liking scum with a banoffee cheesecake?)
17/12/2008 at 22:39 bhlaab says:
Between Fallout and Indiana Jones, I’m planning on never looking forward to anything ever again.
17/12/2008 at 22:40 Mark Stephenson says:
@KG last time we met there was Laserquest with the Halo soundtrack playing overhead.
How can we possibly top that? Real Life Planetside?
17/12/2008 at 22:41 soviet_ says:
These comments are hilarious, good show
17/12/2008 at 22:43 AndrewC says:
Cheesecake: the choice of those who can’t decide which course follows the main.
17/12/2008 at 22:43 IdleHands says:
RPS have joked about plans to rule this world, but now I’m starting to take it a little more seriously.
Step 1; Post controversial news to rile up and divide the gamers
Step 2; Continually reopen the old wounds
Step 3; Watch as the internet explodes in an all out angry men / women war, all the while watching the battle unfold from their ivory tower whilst sipping brandy and laughing maniacally
I’m on to you RPS
17/12/2008 at 22:48 John Walker says:
Soldiers, it’s time to have IdleHands… disappear.
17/12/2008 at 22:50 Pags says:
We’ll just bury him in cake.
17/12/2008 at 22:54 RichP says:
I find the epic Diablo III and Fallout 3 threads humorous, probably because I haven’t played a game from either series (I’ll turn in my PC gamer card) and have no idea what everyone’s complaining about.
There is, however, a group of PC gamers who live in darkened rooms and dismiss any and all “colorful” games as being “teh ghey.” Remember the AIMs who, in between rounds of Quake 3, called TF2 “cartoony” nonsense?
@Dominic White: There’s a reason why AIMs and fanboys aren’t businessmen: they mistake their opinions and beliefs as being widely-held. Remember back when the console fanboys were certain that the Wii wouldn’t sell because of the ridiculous name? Or that Blu-Ray would “lose” the format “war” because HD-DVD sounds more familiar to consumers?
17/12/2008 at 22:59 Kieron Gillen says:
Worth noting that while I disgaree with Walker and Ron, I don’t necessarily think it’s a cynical decision. It’s just that I know that it’s the only sensible thing to claim.
KG
17/12/2008 at 23:18 Kong says:
@Tei:
I used to have a dream: I carry a shotgun with me every time I go to the cinema and shoot every head that makes loud blabla during the feature film.
So Tei … what would you suggest is the proper punishment for people blablaing out the end of a game? Huh? Pray that my black magic wishes for you do not transport over IP, you [insult].
[I've removed the offending comment, thus ruining the game for me too - thanks a bunch Tei! Sorry it wasn't caught earlier, Kong - JW]
17/12/2008 at 23:26 Ben Abraham says:
So… does this mean you plan on talking about Far Cry 2 then? I don’t care about the DRM, haven’t even really noticed it, but I *do* want to hear you blokes take on the game… just sayin’.
17/12/2008 at 23:28 Gap Gen says:
There is a take on the game to be heard on one of the podcasts, I’m sure.
17/12/2008 at 23:33 Gorgeras says:
On every issue I’ve had an angry rant over, I’ve always approached it from the moral angle first. Publishers used to fight the piracy battle with amoral pragmatism and mostly indifference those who owned pirated software. Their focus was mainly on those that sold pirated software. Money was made from good offers selling lots of unrelated games in one pack. The Orange Box is a recent anomaly; publishers don’t seem to do this anymore.
More recently, publishers have been claiming moral high-ground and making moral arguments and moral claims in the fight against piracy. Piracy isn’t merely illegal; a technicality. Piracy is THEFT; it is wrong. Publishers like EA are merely trying to protect the hard work of their staff, including the ones they lay off or force to work in unreasonable conditions.
How dare they? Yes, how friggin dare they! Ask them to explain why it’s wrong and suddenly their real selves come to the surface because they do not genuinely believe there is anything wrong with stealing or robbery except for the technicality that it is illegal, otherwise they would spare no expense to make sure a game they sell *always* runs as advertised and will provide extensive after-sales support to make sure.
What’s so wrong with pirates stealing when the brand of theft done by publishers and developer is ok? How dare they claim any kind of moral authority when they have moved heaven and earth to avoid the recieving end of it since forever.
17/12/2008 at 23:34 Ben Abraham says:
@Gap Gen
Yeas I vaguely recall them mentioning it, but I’m pretty sure it was actually before the game came out – maybe in that episode where Walker laughed too loud at one point?
Anyway, KG & Walker were talking about what they thought it had the potential of being, so I’d love to hear whether they think it lived up to it. (Unless they did in a later podcast which I have subsequently forgotten).
17/12/2008 at 23:37 Gap Gen says:
I do remember them recounting the propensity of the game to create Benny-Hill like chases every time you drive past a checkpoint.
17/12/2008 at 23:37 manintheshack says:
Fuck me, I’m gone for a few hours and RPS explodes again.
By the way, you missed out two ‘la’s.
17/12/2008 at 23:46 Kong says:
>Tei says:
@Dominic White: How can Fallout 3 continue? You xxxxxxxxxxx (xxxxxxx). Is Fallout 3.1 about xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx?
note: this comment may or not may contain traces of spoilersdan says:
Did Tei just spoil the end of Fallout 3 (and thus, my Christmas present) for me? :O
If so, I may have to transform Hulk-style into an Angry Internet Man.<
Yes he did and intentionally.
I am building up anger, the kind that lets your neck swell. It keeps swelling the more I think about this evil soulfucking fascist who intentionally spoils what otherwise would have a been a pleasant surprise in a media that is filled with boring happy endings and has over the last decade descended below the threshhold of mediocrity. You want to see an angry man? I make #1 AIM right now. afk for pumping 40lbs of iron singlehanded. Up yours spoilerboy!
17/12/2008 at 23:48 Larington says:
My main concern is that all this debate about how valid the numbers gathered on the issue of piracy are, is distracting from the real issue – That there are people who CAN afford to buy games but refuse to because they can get away with just taking it for free. I know because I used to work with one of these people who basically goes from game to game pirating anything he can get his hands on for free and not paying a penny the whole time (Cept for Internet obviously) and frankly I’m amazed I never got the urge to punch him for it. Bloody free loaders.
17/12/2008 at 23:49 Riotpoll says:
I’ll jump on the banoffee pie wagon, it’s so tasty. Ruining good chocolate cake with cherries is almost blasphemous!
The Diablo 3 anger was the funniest, “It’s not fair we can now actually see what the hell is going on on the screen, bring back the horrible murkiness and terrible graphics!”. I tried playing D2 a few weeks ago and it’s horrible to look at, and the monsters all blend into the background; eugh. (except that bit in the desert, obviously). /endanger grrrr
(I was so angry that I spelt “anger” wrong, but noticed before I posted)
17/12/2008 at 23:50 IdleHands says:
Mmm cake . . wait! Your one of their agents, I shall add your name to the list once I get within my secure bunker. I shall be safe from any nerdrage attacks in there, it doesn’t have internet access
17/12/2008 at 23:50 Dracko says:
haha you morons thought bioshock was atmospheric
17/12/2008 at 23:58 Larington says:
Alternatively, it seems rather like people discussing if the nukes heading for their country even exist and how many of them there are, all the while said nukes are getting ready to deploy their payload, MIRV like, right across the whole country.
18/12/2008 at 00:01 Quirk says:
Kieron:
With regard to World of Goo, you’re still failing to grasp the underlying point, so I’ll try and make it clear with an analogy.
Imagine a guy setting up an unlabelled big red button in the street, supposedly to study how many people passing by would push a big red button without knowing what it did.
However, the only data he releases from his results is that the button has been pushed a hundred times over a period which has seen two hundred people walked down the street. He then goes on to claim that approximately one-half of people passing by push the button.
This is not a sound way of calculating the percentage of people who push the button. Even if it emerges later that in another study more detailed statistics were kept, and that they show that 45% of people pushed the button with only a few pushing it more than once, it does not magically convert the original claim into good science. When you have an unbalancing factor which has the potential to turn your results into nonsense, you absolutely have to account for it.
It’s an issue with bad methodology. It’s nothing to do with the wider debate. I didn’t and don’t have any strong position on piracy one way or the other, and I don’t have any strong positions on big red buttons, but I have a real problem with people passing off scientifically flawed research as a huge result with scare quotes, and I posted a lot on that thread. It was as utterly irresponsible of 2DBoy to neglect to account for dynamic IPs initially as it would be for the researcher mentioned above to ignore the possibility of people pushing the button multiple times. Dynamic IPs are common, it just so happened that their individial users were generally not submitting large numbers of high scores. Their updated results fortunately showed that they were not embarrassingly wrong by orders of magnitude in their claim, but they did not and could not vindicate their original decision to ignore an element capable of turning one legitimate copy into a hundred pirates.
Again, I repeat: this has nothing to do with piracy. This has to do with slipshod science amplified by journalism. I am concerned that you passed on their comments unquestioned in the first place, but I’m a hell of a lot more concerned that you now appear to feel that there was no big issue, just a bunch of people in favour of piracy taking up their usual sides. This suggests to me that the next time someone is saying something big and sensational, even thought it may be relatively obvious that they haven’t fully done their homework on it, it’s going to be reported as fact again, and there will still probably be people who believe you on it because they trust you not to mislead them. It’s the common tragedy of the press with science and statistics, but I’d like to hope that you were better than that. That’s all.
18/12/2008 at 00:04 Noc says:
Quirk: The original methodology failed to account for a variety of factors. So they took another look at it, after receiving this criticism, and accounted for those factors.
I’m not sure what the problem is, at this point.
18/12/2008 at 00:05 Tom says:
My underpants are more atmospheric. Seriously Bioshock, I can tell you…
18/12/2008 at 00:06 Gap Gen says:
The original 90% figure was a throw-away comment in the comments section, not a paper in a peer-reviewed journal of statistics. Nothing to get in a big fuss about, especially, as you admit, it was a reasonable figure to begin with.
18/12/2008 at 00:16 Down Rodeo says:
Good stuff. RPS is almost becoming… a community! This does feel a bit dangerous, though; mentioning the things that got people angry last time in one post? Ah well. In regards to the cake wars I’m not sure I have an opinion other than it being calorific and tasty.
Oh also I do have a problem with the term AIM – I have a mental image of them all being rather young and near pre-pubescent. I feel this is perhaps wrong and might have to readjust my view of the AIM. I’d have said something about DRM and piracy but since I haven’t got anything new to say and this also being an issue that could get me rather uptight I will refrain. Until I go green and start hammering my keyboard anyway (to steal the Hulk gag made somewhere up there).
18/12/2008 at 00:18 Saflo says:
I’m convinced Dracko is someone’s gimmick.
18/12/2008 at 00:24 Kieron Gillen says:
Quirk: But my later point elaborates – the piracy-is-big stats (no matter how rough they admit to being, even if the people who’ve published the stats don’t think it matters) get tore apart even when it matches the piracy figures other people have got with more rigorous methods and in all likeliness the methodological problems aren’t going to make much difference*.
Conversely, the piracy-can-be-forgotten stats – with no evidence whatsoever – get accepted on face value and quoted forever.
Why wasn’t every single thread which reported the 1-in-1000 stat full of people trying to say it was wrong?
You know why. And that’s what sickens me.
KG
*And, as I said before, the arguments concentrated on the problems that would reduce the piracy rate rather than the ones which would raise it.
18/12/2008 at 00:26 Davik says:
I think he just did – for me too. Fuck.
18/12/2008 at 00:33 Funky Badger says:
Quirk: isn’t that the analogy Big Tobacco use?
18/12/2008 at 01:03 Saul says:
It’s good to see the AIM getting riled up over being called AIM. And someone should definitely do hats.
18/12/2008 at 01:04 The_B says:
I have a proposition:
1. Take a room
2. Fill it with lots of alcohol
3. Insert into the room the RPS Hivemind.
4. After two hours of copious drinking, introduce several laptops.
5. Instruct the hivemind to write a feature, which also has to include mentions of Piracy, WAR and GTA, all the while continuing to supply more alcohol.
6. ????
7. Profit!
8. (Send someone to clean the room up 24 hours later. Probably send some paramedics as well.)
18/12/2008 at 01:06 Noc says:
Also worth noting: The figure didn’t crop up at the first time in a story RPS wrote. It cropped up in a comment 2D Boy placed in a comments thread, and was widely quoted from there when it happened. I hope you’re not accusing RPS of journalistic irresponsibility for not thoroughly fact-checking their comments threads.
Once a hubbub arose over this, they wrote a follow-up article on it, reprinting the comment and talking about the responses that had been made to it across the internet. This isn’t an issue of “Oh, someone made an outrageous claim, lets print it without fact-checking it!” It’s a matter of “Hey, these guys said some things, and this whole matter’s been flying about the tubes. Here’s some more background.” Which is, you know, worth doing, even if its not accompanied by as much analysis as it could be.
At this point, 2D Boy’s research received some criticism, and – in something unique to the internet, I believe – 2D Boy went back and took a look at their numbers and published a more accurate follow-up. Which RPS promptly posted. The original comment that garnered attention and was blagged upon by everyone else was in a comments thread; the revised figured constituted a major part of RPS’s coverage of the matter.
There’s not very much here that points to RPS being journalistically irresponsible in reporting inaccurate figures. Actually, these events highlight how useful the internet (and specifically RPS’s not-shitty-at-all comments threads) is in making the journalistic process a two-way street, wherein articles can be expanded upon and amended by further information and feedback brought up through channels of commentary. This, while not excusing internet journalists from standards of accuracy and responsibility, is a far cry from that of other media, where once published a story will be seen in its present form, and where a belated retraction or correction published in a subsequent issue will do little to reverse the damage done.
It’s also a good example of how the introduction of dialog into the journalistic process works really well, and is a great alternative to having the news-men shout down the happenings from the rooftops.
18/12/2008 at 01:11 Dolphan says:
The term (AIM) could be insulting, I guess, but it’s a useful one because there is a divide, one that’s become particularly noticeable this year. On any one of the issues in this list (and others, the Starcraft 2 split springing to mind – interestingly, I think it’s noticeable on some things where people don’t really get angry, like reactions to the Old Republic story-stuff) people divide in attitudes and opinions in a noticeable way. It’s almost like the left-right split in politics, in that people can vary on which side they take for a given issue, and there’s middle ground in each case so that the divide isn’t clear-cut, but is still noticeably there.
A lot of it has to do with attitudes towards publishers/developers, but any attempt to characterise it beyond saying that some people are, well, a lot angrier (and more suspicious/cynical, usually) than others would probably be controversial. It’s not about judgement, though – plenty of the people who tend to be on the ‘angry’ side aren’t aggressive or offensive.
18/12/2008 at 01:35 Psychopomp says:
“It’s basically gaming’s equivalent of the music lover who regards chart music as “retarded” (disclaimer: this is me) or the art-house film guy who moans about Hollywood dumbing-down movies.”
It’s at this moment I realize how much of a pretentious cunt I am.
And yes, I have been in the Videlectrix thread.
18/12/2008 at 01:44 Nick says:
I hate black forest gateaux and DRM and WoW. Grrr.
18/12/2008 at 01:49 Psychopomp says:
I can no longer tell whether or not Dracko’s a troll, but his spelling and grammar do seem to be detiorating.
That makes me smile.
18/12/2008 at 02:08 Riotpoll says:
@Nick; That’s the spirit! Grrrr
18/12/2008 at 02:11 MD says:
Psychopomp says:
“[...] his spelling and grammar do seem to be detiorating.”
I love it when that happens.
18/12/2008 at 02:12 Angry Internet Pastry Chef says:
I take offense to that, Nick.
18/12/2008 at 03:49 Alex says:
Kieron: As I said at the time, the distasteful thing about the argument was how hard people were debating over what was effectively whether there were five pints of blood by the corpse, or only four and a half. Hell – maybe there is only half a pint. Blood spreads around a lot, you know…
I disagree. That’s making assumptions on people’s motives. Heck, I’d love to have joined that active discussion based on how right or wrong the statistical methodoloy was – regardless – of how I felt about the piracy issue in a whole. It’s just that more interesting. You shouldn’t simply discredit that statistical discussion because of the overlaying piracy blood theme. The first post with the 90% showed blatant errors, of course people would react.
Doesn’t matter if it was about how many pirates downloaded it or how many windows their house has.
18/12/2008 at 04:36 Quirk says:
The issue, Kieron, was that the methodological problems had the potential to make a hell of a lot of difference. My analogy was not an idle one. If you’re trying to get us worked up about the tendency of random passersby to push buttons when they’re clueless about what they do, you need to show that the testers accounted for the possibility of one small boy standing there pushing the button repeatedly.
The errors in the other direction were unquantifiable. Without more data, they were hard to discuss. However, the errors reducing piracy could quite possibly have been the result of only legitimate users using the software. Certainly if you counted separate IPs as separate users on many commonly used remote applications, you’d swell the userbase by an increasingly large multiple over time. You’d quite probably get my usage of Team Fortress spread over more than a hundred separate IPs, if you were logging every time I started it up and found a server, for instance. IPs are just a hopelessly poor way of keeping track.
And yes, they fixed it, and this was all to the good, and I had no complaints after they’d done so. Mischaracterising the people who’d taken umbrage at their original poor metholodology as pro-piracy is, however, distinctly unfair. I’m not pro-pirate, I use legally bought software, I rarely torrent anything save abandonware, and I’ve said very little in most of those piracy discussions. To be harping on at this point at how the response showed what callous nasty pirates we all were is just rude, very nearly Angry Internet Man rude.
Noc: while I’m not going to go back and check just now, I seem to recall that, when 2DBoy first posted in the comments thread, people immediately took them to task over their methodology. Having this turn into an RPS front page article which didn’t mention these issues wasn’t fantastic, but it got updated as the comments thread went on, and 2DBoy did eventually come out with better figures. It was a satisfactory resolution all round. Poking at it now and claiming that the original complaints made over 2DBoy’s figures were unjustified just highlights that Kieron, at least, didn’t understand what the fuss was in the first place. It wasn’t a question over how many pints of blood were spilled round the corpse; they’d given us so little useful information we couldn’t even be sure someone had died.
I am of course glad that things were updated; I’d just like to pre-empt being served the same kind of suboptimal statistics again.
18/12/2008 at 04:53 pkt-zer0 says:
Bethesda aren’t worse than Hitler, they’re just horribly lacking in talent and creativity. “Hey, here’s a completely different IP for you, what are you gonna do with it? The same shit we’ve been doing the entire last decade, that’s what!”
The “celebrating that a next game was getting made at all” type comments I always find funny – I don’t see why Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel would need to have been celebrated, because hey, it’s Fallout at least! The same way I don’t see why a (hopefully theoretical) dumbed-down console shooter calling itself a true X-COM sequel would need to be celebrated.
Anyhow, I imagine the top 10 is going to be incomplete, seeing how Steam just decided to go with the 1 USD -> 1 EUR conversion rate for all its European customers. That’s bound to make a couple of people mildly annoyed, if nothing else.
18/12/2008 at 05:35 Noc says:
Alex: It’s not a matter of the discussion of methodology being a problem, or even of the conclusion that the study was inaccurate being a problem. It’s the use of methodological quibbles as an excuse to disregard the work entirely.
It’s very telling that the response was not “These are interesting figures, but I’d like to see more data about the issue of multiple IP addresses to try and pin these numbers down more.”
Instead, the response was “They used an improper methodology to arrive at these figures so the result is completely invalid.”
Lets quote Commenter Quirk, here:
Thus, the numbers meant nothing! And that there were, obviously, as anyone with any knowledge of internet architecture can see, far, far fewer pirated copies than previously assumed!
Except, when 2D Boy looked at the numbers, they came up with this:
So, clearly you can draw a correlation between unique IP addresses and users. It fits a nice neat curve, too. Does it shift things a little? Yeah. Does it completely invalidate the figures? Not really.
Now, there are two ways to approach something you’ve been told. You can say “Well, they may be right, and they might not, and I’d like to take a closer look at the factors involved before I make a judgment.” This is what people do when they’re given a figure about something they have no preconceptions about. There’s no reason to assume that it’s completely wrong, so they don’t. They figure that there’s probably some truth to the figure, and some inaccuracy, and seek more information.
The other thing to do is to say “Wait, that CAN’T be right.” You sort of need to have preconceptions in order to do this. Otherwise, you don’t know what the figure “should” be, so why should you assume that it’s wrong? At this point, if you look at the methodology and find flaws into it, you’ll point to them and go “Ahah! This is why these numbers are all wrong! Everything makes sense now.” We all do this, all the time; we find something that doesn’t fit, and look closer, and figure out what makes it different from all the others. It’s a useful skill! Except when your preconceptions about what the “right” number should be is wrong.
Hence the knee-jerk reaction of “These numbers are completely inaccurate because of IP address propagation” is pretty indicative of preconceived – and, as the revised numbers show, incorrect – notions about piracy. (Or apparently in Quirk’s case, preconceived and ultimately incorrect notions about IP address propagation.)
Which, as far as assumptions about motivation go, are pretty reasonable ones. The obvious confounding factors are people being overly contentious and confrontational either because it’s the Internet or because they’re simply like that, and people who would otherwise reserve judgment hopping on the “This is all wrong!” bandwagon because it seemed to be the predominant position.
But neither of those factors have anything to do with the people in question being predominantly concerned with seeking higher standards of scientific accuracy.
18/12/2008 at 05:38 Hypocee says:
KG, that’s because the biggest problem with 2DBoy’s initial methodology was potentially orders of magnitude greater than any of the other imponderables; it could have produced the same 90% result in a hypothetical universe with one, paying player. If they had, say, only totaled up torrent traffic and divided by filesize I pwomise I’d have been as quick to pile on in the opposite direction – as I did in some recent Spore piracy fluff, actually. I want good science or as close as we can get on the anonymous Internet, and based on limited data as to how dynamic the average dynamic IP is and how many people play WoGoo during travel, that initial methodology looked like abysmal science.
What’s not understood about the 1000:1 number’s derivation? I thought he gave quite good detail on what he compared with what.
18/12/2008 at 06:09 Noc says:
Addendum, for people writing things at the same time I was:
The accusation that the figures were (or, now, could have been) inaccurate by orders of magnitude was (and is) hyperbole. In a similarly hypothetical world, every one person buying the program could have installed it on eight machines to give a similar result. This is incredibly unlikely, of course; most people will probably have it installed on one machine, and increasingly smaller numbers of people will be using multiple machines. Which would likely give you a curve similar to the IP address one, actually.
The issue at hand was that we didn’t know how quickly IP addresses propagate . . . which means, you know, that a reasonable person without preconceptions about what the result should be seeks more information to fill out his knowledge of the matter. Instead of arguing about how the information he’s given is obviously wrong.
So either you were using hyperbole to justify your issues with a claim that seems wrong to you . . . or you were simply being overly contentious about something that you didn’t actually know very much about. The latter, while not making you the subject of Kieron’s accusation, isn’t really a good thing either.
18/12/2008 at 06:44 Psychopomp says:
@MD
Motherfuckin’ DOH!
Also, this whole thread has gotten WAY, WAY outta hand.
18/12/2008 at 07:11 pepper says:
I still think there is way to little cake and too much else in this discussion!
18/12/2008 at 07:14 thefanciestofpants says:
And now for a change of subject;
The PC port of Assassin’s Creed: I liked it. Suck on that one.
18/12/2008 at 07:47 Tei says:
All that is required for good men to prevail is for evil to do nothing.
18/12/2008 at 08:47 Acosta says:
This is the best list I have read this year by far. Angry internet men need to be less angry.
I just hope 2009 brings less excuses to speak about DRM and pirates, it has been an issue since the beginning but I don’t remember a year with so many discussions about it. Probably I’m naive here.
18/12/2008 at 09:25 subedii says:
It’s weird to see an RPS article on “Angry Internet Men”, because to be honest, I really thought some of the coverage on things like Epic was pretty laden with hyperbole.
Epic didn’t really “keep” making comments about how the PC was dying or anything. The biggest source of angst was one or two off-the-cuff remarks by CliffyB (yes I’m afraid that moniker really is going to stick with him, no matter how much he doesn’t want it now) that got blown into a huge deal, even moreso by the whining about how they “made their fortunes on the PC”. Seriously, nobody cares where they started off, the question is where they can make the most money making the type of games that they do.
I really think that part of the reason for all the hyperbole is quite simply because CliffyB hit a nerve with his statements, and now it has to somehow be twisted into Epic “Giving PC gaming the finger”. Irrespective of CliffyB acting… the way he does, I can at least understand his position as a developer. Describing leaving the PC games market as “dumping the smart girlfriend” just sounds like sour grapes. A more apt comparison might be trading out your old business running a corner shop to being an executive at a multi-national. You don’t have as much flexibility or variety, but you make a metric tonne more money and reach a whole load more people
Oh, and one item I’d like to see added to the list: The continued uselessness of the PCGA. I’d be more than happy if they’d just go away.
18/12/2008 at 09:37 Ian says:
I’d just like to say I unflinchingly loathe everything the internet tells me to from this moment forward.
18/12/2008 at 09:41 roryok says:
It’s DEFINITELY the second one.
18/12/2008 at 09:44 Meat Circus says:
@Roryok:
Epic’s highly trained pet monkey Clifford is an almost perfect hate figure as well. Shallow, self-absorbed, platitude-spewing, wittering, frat boy-bothering, trivia obsessed consoletard.
And us PC gamers created him.
We’re sorry.
18/12/2008 at 09:57 Gap Gen says:
I played Morpheus on UT. I HAD NO IDEA. I’M SORRY.
18/12/2008 at 10:11 jalf says:
I don’t recall much angry-internetman-ness about the World of Goo thing. Most of the comments I can recall were just “you’re interpreting your data wrong. That 90% figure is useless because it doesn’t take into account X”. That’s hardly a “really extreme negative reaction, usually expressed as swearing, shouting and a refusal to even consider the other side of the coin”, is it?
18/12/2008 at 10:14 Dante says:
“I wonder what irked PC gamers more – that sense of betrayal by one of their early champions, or embarrassment that the preening, bling-draped, nonsense-spouting Cliffy ‘Don’t call me Cliffy B’ B was once one of us.”
Perfectly put Mr Meer, the latter sums up my feelings exactly. In fact I’d say I’m embarrassed in general that so much of the gaming press seems to hang on the word of someone who appears to me to be nothing more than a mouthy fratboy with an inflated sense of his own importance.
18/12/2008 at 11:05 Dreamhacker says:
Assassins Creed still crashes on my computer. Post patch. Makes you wonder what the hell you pay for…FROTHFROTHFROTHFROTH
18/12/2008 at 11:13 Chaz says:
As an owner of a PC and a console, his decision not to publish on the PC anymore didn’t really mean a great deal to me. However it still doesn’t stop me from thinking Cliffy B’s a bit of a twat. The fact that he’s been hugely successful doesn’t help, because really, no one likes a winner, especially losers like us.
18/12/2008 at 11:17 James G says:
The WoG piracy issue has made UGO’s ’2008 and heartbreaks’ list. They seem to be still using the 90% figure though, which just seems lazy now.
http://www.ugo.com/games/heartbreaks-of-2008/?cur=world-of-goo&morepics=1
18/12/2008 at 11:38 Brother None says:
Ah, Fallout 3…
I think the build-up to it ear-raping the franchise was so big there was no way it couldn’t be better than people expected. Call it a positive consequence of a negative build-up, or blame it on the fact that Fallout 3 is a pretty good game.
Just not Fallout.
PS: anger.
18/12/2008 at 11:39 cHeal says:
I always worshipped at the altar of Tim Sweeney myself.
18/12/2008 at 11:44 Brother None says:
Oh, and on the topic of “AIM is an unjust label”, I don’t care if you label me an Ostrich and stick feathers on me, as long as you give my arguments due time. The fact that the hyperbole and incendiary language of AIMs is always – ALWAYS – met with counter-incendiary language and straw men (I’m pretty sure no one has every said Bethesda is worse than Hitler, for instance) is what really ends up killing the debate, and putting it on a spiral where things go from worse to worse fast.
I think most people here who know me know me as a reasonable chap of sorts. Yet if I ever want to debate Fallout 3 anywhere I first have to swim my way through numerous pre-conceptions of traditionalist Fallout fans, straw men and odd opinions attributed to all of us. If anything, that is even less fair than how Fallout fans approached criticizing Bethesda.
18/12/2008 at 12:09 Quirk says:
Noc:
Dynamic IP addresses, as I’ve mentioned before, are common. Everything depended on the usage pattern of people submitting high scores. With this piece of data not filled in, there was no particular reason to suppose that those with seven or more IPs were not significantly more common than they were. My initial quote is quite accurate.
You write: “Clearly you can draw a correlation between unique IP addresses and users”. You still can’t in the general case, beyond stating the former will always exceed the latter by some margin. Your citation of a single specific data point where the margin is relatively low does nothing to change this. To return to my perhaps over-used button analogy, if you know people can push the button as often as they like, you need to check they haven’t done so.
What these figures actually say is that the majority of users submitted just one high score, or all the high scores attributed to them within a relatively short period of time, and that the percentage of users engrossed enough with the game to keep coming back and attempting to improve on their high scores was really rather low. This is a reasonable enough usage pattern, and fits with some other observations on the percentage of gamers that complete games, etc, but it is not at the level of something that can be taken as a given. It’s little to do with IP address propagation, which we do know something about, contrary to your claims. We have a more serious study than 2DBoy’s claiming that Americans go through an average of 5.7 IP addresses per month, 8.3 per month on their home machines – and that this is a low IP count by world standards. It can be found here.
You also write: “The accusation that the figures were (or, now, could have been) inaccurate by orders of magnitude was (and is) hyperbole.” Nonsense. Given a usage pattern which assumed regular log-ins from most users over a period of weeks or months, the number of IPs compared to the number of users would be very likely to be an order of magnitude more. Even assuming that a significant minority were reguarly competing in the high-score stakes, you could easily reach a factor of two or three. This is not at all like assuming that people are installing things on eight separate machines. It does not require terribly unusual behaviour, unless you count playing the game after you’ve played it through to completion as terribly unusual behaviour, or possibly even taking a break and playing the game again a few days later.
18/12/2008 at 12:20 Kong says:
>Do publishers truly fear the Angry Internet Man now? And is he the guy in Tiananmen Square he seems to think he is, or just a wild-eyed loon carrying a The End Is Nigh banner?<
Why would they? The anger is as virtual as the medium. As soon as the AIM steps on the street, some of his self is left behind. The street is a dangerous place, where the AIM risks to get punched on the nose if he speaks his mind out aloud.
Out on the street the AIM quitely makes a beeline to the next mall where he buys the object he loathed and of which he spoke so bad in virtual space.
The loon at least has the courage to show his banner out on the streets. The loon will propably not show sins of consumer neurosis.
The loon knows the next dead line: 2012. If the loon is right, we will never hear of Tei and his kind again after the great stellar constellation. Which would be fine with me.
18/12/2008 at 12:27 marilena says:
Even with the disclaimer that intelligent contributions are not regarded as AIMs, the article still belittles these contributions. Because they are not mentioned, they get brushed off and basically everyone who’s ever voiced an opinion in any of the directions mentioned above, he becomes and Angry Internet Man and there’s nothing he can do about it.
It’s very close to racist rhetoric* that brushes of exceptional individuals of a race as unrepresentative of the whole.
I guess it’s easy for games journalists and game developers to call everyone who dislikes a game with a high grade as an Angry Internet Man, but the truth is that reviewers have really gone mad, tagging every piece of crap in sight with a straight 10 and calling it a masterpiece.
*I’m not saying it’s as harming – I’m not angry ok? :P – just that it’s close in how it works
(Oh, and, while I didn’t take part in the preemptive trashing of Fallout 3, I would like to pint out it was pretty much on the money. “Oblivion with guns” could be the game’s tagline, it describes it perfectly.)
18/12/2008 at 12:54 Tei says:
@some guys: I am sorry. Some jokes are best not made, and my commentary was idioticy on my part. Again: sorry. Hope you guys can forget this, I care about making people angry, I don’t want to.
18/12/2008 at 13:07 Kong says:
marilena said >the truth is that reviewers have really gone mad, tagging every piece of crap in sight with a straight 10 and calling it a masterpiece.<
Right. The truth is, that 10 means average, mediocre, familiar. Which is the way most people – consumers – like it. “All men play on ten” (Manowar, couldnt resist sry).
Nobody wants anything to change, Diablo is a very good example. Diablo players want to click a million times on animated pixels. The thought of somebody changing one bit of something they are used to fills them with fear, fear leading to anger which leads to virtual rage.
For those of us who are being gamers for more than two decades now that is not enough anymore. Pearls like Vampire:Bloodlines for example keep me playing PC games. I will always own a computer, I can abide my time until a game comes out that puts a smile on my ancient face.
Games where developers put much thought, love and passion into deserve a rating of…well 10 is the top rating for beauty. For most games reviewers beauty seems to be found in looks only, not in content.
Maybe there should be different rating systems.
“This game gets top rating for repeating and copying the stuff players are used to.”
The same crap in shiny new drappings. Anybody know the story “The Kaiser’s new clothes?”
18/12/2008 at 13:27 Kong says:
>Tei says:
@some guys: I am sorry. Some jokes are best not made, and my commentary was idioticy on my part. Again: sorry. Hope you guys can forget this, I care about making people angry, I don’t want to.<
I accept your apology. Forgetting you spoiled the finale of Fallout 3 for us is a different matter. I can forget this when the game is ancient history.
Please try to think about what you are writing before you write it. What I do not understand is, that you were aware of the fact that you are going to post a big fat spoiler when you did it. Maybe you had a beer or two at the time?
18/12/2008 at 14:26 Doug F says:
@ Brother None
(emphasis mine)
No, I think opening the discussion with “hyperbole and incendiary language” pretty much guarantees that any debate is stillborn. Saying that that the person responding should respond calmly and seriously to the AIM’s vitriol, and that they share the blame for the aborted conversation if they don’t is just silly.
18/12/2008 at 14:43 Chaz says:
My main problem with the Angry Internet Men phenomenon is not so much their anger and vitriolic bile, but the fact that they usually seem unable to express it in less than 10,000 words. What is the web expression now, tl;dr or (too long didn’t read). So in fact most of their hate ridden posts usually just pass me by completely, as my eyes scan right past the huge wodge of text they’ve just spent the last half hour angrily committing to page.
18/12/2008 at 15:08 clovus says:
I hope 2009 is better. I can’t remember how many times I’ve become an AIM. Borrowing a /b/ meme:
Panel 1: Guy grabs game box off shelf
Panel 2: (Shows top of box with title “Mass Effect”)
Panel 3: (Shows bottom of box with statement “*Internet connection required to play”)
Panel 4: FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!
That just happened to me yesterday. I still bought it, and have really enjoyed the first hour.
18/12/2008 at 15:17 James T says:
If you don’t read them, how do you know they’re ‘hate-ridden’? (keeping in mind that if the posts are that long, they’re probably aren’t…)
18/12/2008 at 15:29 Chaz says:
@ James T
Well to write these super long posts you’ve got to have some anger driving you along; that or the writer is an insufferable bore. Either way life’s just too short to spend reading some over long War and Peace length response to some trivial minutiae of gaming matter.
18/12/2008 at 15:40 James T says:
Why anger?
18/12/2008 at 16:32 Chaz says:
I don’t know, you’ll have to ask an Angry Internet Man.
18/12/2008 at 16:47 Meat Circus says:
Hey, don’t look at me. My anger never increases *my* tolerance for tl;dr.
18/12/2008 at 17:09 Brother None says:
‘s not what I meant to say; once something/some opinion/some group gets labelled “AIM”, the standard response to anything coming from that group is unfair. And that pushes more people on both sides into extreme attitudes.
It’s all the fault of the internet and its habit of extremising people. The issue is never important enough for either the anger AIMs aim at it or the vitriol people spit at AIMs. I mean, one GameSpy editor went as far as saying all Fallout fans should get a disease and die. Does that sound like a reasonable response to a bunch of guys who – at the end of the day – are doing nothing more than criticizing a game.
The whole umbrella approach, from both sides, doesn’t help, and the habit to just write off people as either angry PC elites or stupid console kiddies or whatever labels you want to use.
It’s all very infuriating, the fault of which does not lie with AIMs alone.
18/12/2008 at 17:33 sinister agent says:
11. RPS
18/12/2008 at 18:27 Tei says:
I have learn from my errors.
I use to post long flame email on mail list. 100 KB long emails. I guest these people that think tl;dr with tinyest fences of text, will be absolutelly anhiliated with one of my smallest flame emails.
My point is… If you get scared because some people is angry, and other people write long text: you need L2P more. People is like that, and there are really angry people out here, and people that write 300 pages long texts (are called novels) . If you L2P more, you will learn there exist something called “a library” where theres something called ” a wall of books”. If a book is a “zillion” of “walls of text”. A library is a zillion of zillions of walls of text. I think these people that write “tl;dr” on the internet will explode if one day enter a public library.
Because 100 KB of text is NOTHING. 30 pages of text is NOTHING. These people are scared by really the tyniest fence of text, not wall, fence. 3 hours long “The Return Of The King ” LOTR is long. 15 pages of text is a 14 seconds long teaser video.
I would love to break the image of the world for these people. But I will not, because it create problems. I know creates problems to post 100 KB long post. Most people is like that, and is sad. Why this fear to long texts? do long text killed your dog?
18/12/2008 at 18:53 sinister agent says:
What the hell is an “L2P more” and why should I let it live?
18/12/2008 at 18:54 Doug F says:
@ Brother None
Now I know why your handle seemed familiar!
I will say that I’ve found your posts on NMA to be fairly reasonable, but it seems that the site suffers from a similar problem to major religions, if you’ll excuse the metaphorical leap, in that the loudest voices tend to be the extremists/fundamentalists/Angry Internet Men, and they drown out the rational voices. The folks running NMA don’t seem too bad, but the comments/forums make me want to distance myself from such people, lest all Fallout fans be tarred with their crazy brush.
18/12/2008 at 19:01 Doug F says:
@ Tei
What.
I read that against my better judgement, and while it was hard to follow in places, it seems like you’re trying to put crazy/angry internet diatribes on a pedestal with actual writing?
The problem with most 100kb long posts isn’t that they’re too long to read, it’s that they’re not worth the time spent reading it, time that could be better spent doing, well, anything else. For me to even consider reading a post that’s more than 2 or 3 paragraphs, it needs to be either entertaining or informative, interesting, and contain some semblance of proper sentence structure, punctuation, and grammar. It needs to be readable. A 3 page long single paragraph stream of consciousness rant about why your favorite franchise has strayed from it’s roots and how it could be saved is definately too long, and I’m not going to read it in most cases.
tl;dr version:
You want people to read what you right, make it interesting, entertaining, and easy for them to follow.
18/12/2008 at 19:03 Doug F says:
“Does that sound like a reasonable response to a bunch of guys who – at the end of the day – are doing nothing more than criticizing a game.”
Not to quibble, but if these are the same guys who claimed that each and every positive review of Fallout 3 was due to the reviewer being a “whore” paid off by Bethesda (and what a marketing budget they must have had), that goes a little beyond “criticising a game” and well into attacks on the journalistic integrity said reviewers.
18/12/2008 at 19:39 Red says:
I HATE BEING CALLED AN ANGRY INTERNET MAN @!$$##!!
18/12/2008 at 19:41 Ted says:
The NMA/RPG Codex crowd have been such jack offs for so long and so consistently that they long ago abandoned the right to expect anyone to take anything they say seriously. You just can’t act like that consistently for years and then suddenly think you can expect people to listen to anything you say, even if you do suddenly try to change your approach and engage in reasonable debate.
18/12/2008 at 19:47 Nick says:
@Brother None: Funny, thats what I’ve been hoping would happen to the entire of Gamespy for about 10 years.
18/12/2008 at 20:03 Meat Circus says:
Also, I want to be somewhat fair to BrotherNone.
Whilst NMA does have its RPG extremists (and, you know, I know where they’re coming from), it’s somewhat unfair to lump it with the RPG Codex, a site which seems to have devolved into nothing more than hilarious faux-ironic homophobic and racist abuse.
Mr None seems to keep a tight rein on that sort of thing at NMA.
Also: Vince D. Weller. Perhaps indisputed king of the Angry Internet Men in RPGland, but infinitely worth reading to my mind.
There has not been a better interview anywhere on the Internets in 2008 than when Kieron and Vince locked their digital word-cocks in battle.
18/12/2008 at 20:07 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
I would be more Angry that no Americans in the thread have yet mentioned the mighty Lemon Chiffon cake, but I’m too hungry and tired to add an extra adjective to my “Internet Man” descriptor.
18/12/2008 at 20:09 Meat Circus says:
@DCJ:
Are you trying to turn this into a “who has the best cakes, the USA or Europe”?
Nuclear wars have broken out over less.
18/12/2008 at 21:04 Gorgeras says:
I think I sometimes feel I don’t understand reviewers. I haven’t done a full play-through of Fallout 3 yet, so I can’t judge that. But was Crysis ever a 90%+ game?
PC Gamer was a voice alone when Crysis Warhead was given a so-so score, but every other review source seemed to think it was almost as good as the original. I think the score for Crysis Warhead more closely reflects the value of Crysis and it’s ridiculous undeserved acclaim was a result of the novelty factor from such an advanced(and at first badly unoptomised) engine.
Severence: Blade of Darkness? What a turkey. PCG game of distinction though and PC Zone award of excellence. Almost unanimous praise on the interwebb. Codemasters never could be arsed fixing all the game-breaking bugs and sluggish controls. Now the same thing has been done with GTA IV, even though by all I’ve heard it’s an even worse port than Bully. I’m fairly sure it was the novelty factor and hive thinking that allowed that farce to sell at all.
So why is such a mockery made of people that don’t appreciate this kind of treatment when they give up so many statutory consumer rights in signing an EULA they can only read post-purchase? Where is the finger pointing at overly-generous reviewers who have bred an atmosphere where any game under 70% you just KNOW has to be atrocious whilst all the average, above-average and good game are boxed in to the highest bracket where no review score or ancedote from a reviewer can help people tell if it is worth a purchase?
What about the publishers and developers that willingly misrepresent and missell these games and then wonder why piracy is so high? You just know they have a significant amount of influence on reviewers because websites like IGN are hopelessly positive whilst published magazines which are less dependent on advertising revenue tend to be more critical.
How does a game like Kane & Lynch get nominated for a Bafta?
I’m an angry internet man and I have a lot to be angry about. Maybe more attention should be focused there than at me.
18/12/2008 at 23:56 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
Meat Circus: Heavens, no. That would mean getting France involved.
19/12/2008 at 00:04 Gap Gen says:
“How does a game like Kane & Lynch get nominated for a Bafta?”
Many of the people on the BAFTA video games committee are industry figures like CEOs and PR men, so they’re possibly not up with the quality of games but rather the quality of the marketing. That’s my hypothesis, anyway. For my money, the Golden Joysticks looked worse, although to be fair they seem more like “Top of the Pops” than a critic’s Best Games Of the Year list, complete with corporate whoring.
19/12/2008 at 00:55 john t says:
Bioshock would have saved itself with me if the ending was you killing what-his-name, and then the camera pulls away as a Little Sister leads you down a hallway, revealing that you’re now stuck as a Big Daddy forever in a dead, empty world.
19/12/2008 at 01:12 Ted says:
Story-wise Bioshock should have culminated with the Andrew Ryan confrontation, but I still greatly enjoyed playing it through to end beyond that. The level where you have to turn yourself into a Big Daddy was one of the best in the game I thought.
19/12/2008 at 10:23 Psychopomp says:
@John T
I concur. Bioshock is, IMO, a defining moment in gaming as an art form. Until you get to the end.
Jesus Christ, that was an embarrasing last 5 minutes.
Also, I feel that I should remind everyone that YES I HAVE PLAYED SYSTEM SHOCK.
ONE AND TWO.
I WASN’T IMPRESSED.
19/12/2008 at 11:16 Dante says:
A belated comment on the subject, we at man vs horse had our own battle with the AIMs this year with our MMO Showdown:
http://manvshorse.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/mmo-showdown-city-of-heroes/
We hadn’t played MMOs before, so we gave some trials a shot, after it got picked up by RPS (and later kotaku) we got tons of comments, mostly disagreeing with us.
Anyway, if you look at the various sections you can see a clear split between reasonable person and AIM. The comments on our Eve section all plug the game, but do so in long well thought out articles that try and provide a balanced argument, while the WoW comments are far more numerous and consist almost entirely of badly spelled ‘you suck’ attacks. Interestingly, both also contain a fair share of the ‘snooty internet man’ who looks down his e-nose at you because you’re too stupid or ignorant to possibly understand the depth of the game.
Personally I like the City of Heroes crowd best, they seem to just be raw fun lovers, well except for that one guy who was just slandering one of the developers, but that’s another story.
20/12/2008 at 15:32 Hypocee says:
Gorgeras, Severance was much-loved and -played for nearly a year throughout my family and friends, despite hard-locking everyone’s machine 3-5 times per session or whenever you even thought the word LAN. A game has to be pretty awesome to get through that!
20/12/2008 at 20:45 Crode says:
I think the WoW vs WAR debate should have a much higher ranking in this list :) I believe most of the problems were due to various ‘News’ sites being run by WoW fanbois and posting biased articles. Not anything Bartle said.
20/12/2008 at 21:16 Gorgeras says:
Severence was Blood Omen 2 with worse execution and more violence.
21/12/2008 at 10:39 malkav11 says:
I don’t know. I’m just automatically suspicious of piracy-related numbers. So often they’re essentially pulled out of people’s rear ends, and there’s very little concrete data to be had so far, most of it totally inconclusive. I think we can safely say that things are being pirated – and public tracker torrent numbers may give some vague ideas as to comparable popularity and such, but beyond that…
Eh.
All I’m prepared to say based on those sorts of numbers are a) people shouldn’t pirate. The impact may or may not be large. It may or may not be negative. But it’s still a rude thing to do.
And b) the more intrusive the DRM, the more it harms the legitimate customer, most likely disproportionately to the pirate. Modern DRM now deliberately sabotages the longevity of the product, which should be unacceptable to anyone.
22/12/2008 at 09:27 jalf says:
I’d say Steam’s pricing screwup is at least up around #5 on this list so far, and still rising… Nice though, it’s been a while since we’ve had a case of the AIM. It’s about time we all had something to be properly angry about. :D
Thank you Valve, and your belief that VAT means Valve Added Tax. ;)
23/12/2008 at 11:33 dammskog says:
Valve should be on nr 1.
7,554 Members in antisvalvetaxscam group since dec 18th
please redo this article
the hate keeps growing as valve keeps silent
23/12/2008 at 11:40 Psychopomp says:
What are you going on about?
23/12/2008 at 14:05 Wil the Skill says:
Zoey’s the PC. Lara’s the 360.
I’ll take Zoey.
24/12/2008 at 15:17 C says:
Now this is awkward.
25/12/2008 at 00:54 jalf says:
At the risk of being branded an AIM, what I found worth debating there was not whether it was 4.5 or 5 pints, but simply “do we *know* how many pints it is? Can we find out?”
The question wasn’t +-0.5 pints, it was pretty much +- infinity. The numbers *could* be wrong by any margin, because they failed to take into account some pretty obvious factors. There could have been a total of 0.001 pint, or there could even have been 20 pints. No one knew, because they hadn’t measured it (yet). All we had was a guess based on incomplete data. And I fail to see why it is then wrong to point out this missing data and say that it invalidates your conclusions. It does. You can’t conclude anything if you don’t have data to back it up.
The argument was simply “Is it ok to claim that there were five pints of blood by the corpse when we haven’t actually looked at the blood by the corpse?”.
And I think it’s a bit sad to see that anyone who questioned the initial 90% figure are now being branded as “a member of the piracy-is-a-victimless-crime brigade”.
It was never a question of 90% vs 82%. It was a question of “a basically random guess” vs 82%. I think the former is useless, while the latter is very interesting, and actually sheds some light on just how bad piracy is on PC.
I don’t like piracy any more than you do, which is why I thought it was worthwhile to try to uncover the *real* number.
Don’t you think a 82% piracy rate based on real data is a lot scarier than a 90% rate based on made up guesswork? I do. In the same way that knowing that it’s a bit more helpful to perform the forensic analysis and find out that the guy actually died from blood loss, rather than merely seeing that “there’s something red nearby”, and then concluding that “he must have been stabbed through the heart with a kitchen knife at least 6 inches long by a tall dark person with sunglasses who smoked a cheap brand of cigarettes and lisped.
And it’s a sad day when this can get someone branded as “a member of the piracy-is-a-victimless-crime brigade”. Does that make me an AIM?
25/12/2008 at 01:30 Larington says:
@Jalf: Being an AIM is all in the wording. For instance, responses that said something along the lines of “we’d like more reliable data please” were fine whilst responses like “I’m ignoring that because its wrong, end of conversation.” weren’t worth the time wasted reading them (imho).
Sadly, quite a few responses fell into the latter group, demonstrating just how afraid PC gamers are to admit that maybe, just maybe, we might have a genuine problem on our hands. Maybe its denial, maybe it isn’t, regardless we should do everything in our power to ask for increasingly reliable data, whilst steering clear of the oft travelled path of – If it doesn’t fit my world view, its not true.
28/12/2008 at 23:05 Amake says:
I downloaded World of Goo from a torrent in about 10 minutes a couple of days after it was released, so I’ll say there’s some piracy going on. You know, for the record.
And here’s a question: I tried it out, and found it didn’t do anything for me, so I deleted it. Do you think that makes me a good guy? Or should I repent by purchasing this thing I don’t want?
29/12/2008 at 04:07 Crazy Internet Hobo says:
Maybe because it wasn’t, and maybe because now it never will?
Instead of that we got a mediocre game with flashes of both retardation and gaming quite goodness. After years of incredibly disheartening information given to the press the angry people were expecting simply a horrible game, so their expectations were ultimately exceded upon release, thus reducing the hate.
It’s still postapoc Oblivion TC with guns, hamfisted fallout references (seriously, they’re so forced and out of place that the game would’ve been better without them), some skillchecks and enough mutilated bodies to call it goreporn though, so extreme lowering of expectations was pretty much the only way for it to not dissapoint.
29/12/2008 at 16:26 Bob says:
Ah, atmosphere is important in BS but not in D3… Yawn.
06/01/2009 at 02:19 Shnyker says:
Heinous commenting jerks, took me a minute and an arf scrolling through all that, who knows what would happen had I wanted to read it! H’anyways I got a kick out of the Epic ordeal, being a console owning caveman as well as an intelligent pc gamer (I’m the missing link, yeah) Epic has not only left the smart girl they have grown fat and taken up poker and smoking, and gaining money from neither.
08/01/2009 at 17:29 Sarajlija says:
Again, GTA4 works fine.
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