Messages

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WHAM: Regarding historical accuracy, that if it was truly about accurately representing the soldiers present in the war, wouldn't writing women and minorities out of a story be equally bad as adding them in? Just for example, Call of Duty: World at war took place both on the eastern front and in the pacific, yet we do not see one single woman in the game despite 800.000 women served in the Red army, and none of the Asian groups serving in the soviet army is seen either, and in the pacific campaign we only ever see white Americans and Japanese soldiers, despite the fact that there were tons of native south Asians living in the pacific during the occupation and native american code speakers played a huge role in the US army, and the same can be said for Red Orchestra and a whole bunch of other WW2 games that completely erase the women and ethnic minorities in the Red Army, yet that's somehow seen as an acceptable break from reality, but adding fictional black and female soldiers isn't?

And in Battlefield 1 they did limit female soldiers so that you could only play as a woman if you played as a member of the Russian women's battalion of Death, a real historical group of female soldiers, but it still got a ton of hate for being "historically inaccurate" and accused of being pandering.

I think the pose in general is good, neutral and still natural. The character is leaning a bit to the left, which makes the sprite look strange. It's not much- try flipping the image horizontally while you draw; it's amazing how many small balance issues you can find and fix that way.
Like your style, by the way, very much. There's something simple and charming about it :nod:

Thank you so much, and thanks for the advice!
I've tried flipping the image back and forth and make him lean less to the left, here is a new sprite with some adjustments:

WHAM: Did you read the link on Virginia Hall? She was a Brittish spy who fled across the Pyrenees on foot whilst hunted by the Gestapo and did it all with a prosthetic leg, and was so good at guerrilla warfare she got to train three battalions in how to do it. People with prosthetics did get sent behind enemy lines and into enemy territories in WW2, even if it wasn't common. The battlefield trailer takes a lot of liberties, but it's clearly not marketed as gritty and realistic. There is a tank decorated with a statue horse head, people doing crazy acrobatics and a guy with a sword on the battlefield, but somehow, it's the woman who got everyone up in arms over breaking immersion.

That moment when Jack is talking about other people's "goofy beliefs".

Jack: shut up

Everybody else: don't quote him. Don't engage with him or his "arguments". If you do, he "wins". Just don't.

Jack's proven himself as a hypocrite who thinks his right to make "suicide is gay" jokes in a thread specifically meant for safe discussion is more important than the right of those genuinely suffering to have a place to share their experiences without being mocked for it, thinks fining people for willfully misusing pronouns is a horrible violation of free speech but Hungary banning anyone from teaching and discussing gender studies isn't, and willfully misunderstands or ignores any arguments against him in order to accuse everyone who disagrees with him of wanting soviet dictatorships.

And I never claimed Eliot Roger, Alek Minassian and Breivik became criminals because of video games, I say it's because they were radicalized in the internet in their echo chambers where people "joked" that women and minorities weren't human for long enough that they started believing it for real, and they left behind manifestos explicitly explaining this. Even if the vast majority of people even in those forums just thought they were making edgy jokes or "just telling it how it is", some people did start believing it for real and use it as a justification for killing real people.

To anyone else reading this, here is a link to the suicide prevention thread Jack got locked down, and you can see for yourself whether Jack's description of the thread in his comment above is accurate.

As I see it, either you allow criticism or you don't. You don't get to choose whether criticism is allowed based on whether you agree with it.

When I see someone saying complaining about a black Stormtrooper, I say to myself, "well, that's not how I feel about it" and move on with my life.

Like Ali said, no one want's to ban criticism, but bullying and harassment isn't criticism, and there is a double standard where explicit threats and slurs hurled against people criticizing pop culture is brushed off as just harmless jokes and something that should be tolerated while anyone speaking up against the abuse gets painted as an evil boogieman trying to censor everything.

Sorry if I have a hard time just bowing my head down and accepting it when one group of people says that I am less than human and makes jokes about how people like me should be abused and mistreated, and everyday in the news I see new stories of people like me getting killed or abused so it's not just jokes to me, and a group of "enlightened centrists" then comes along and says that I'm just as bad as the people sending death threats because I want there to be forums where I can speak out freely without fear of facing threats and harassment just because of a trait I was born with.

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I honestly can't be arsed to read all of this, I'm not sure what has prompted Khris to say shut up so many times, but it's hilarious!!!

I don't think you would find it as hilarious if you actually read the context. If you can't be bothered to read any of the previous posts, why are you taking time to write a long reply?
Snarky has basically already debunked your argument in his post.

I also can't give gamergate any benefit of a doubt or consider both sides equally bad when one side just calls the other fascist or bigoted and the other send explicit threats of torture, rape and murder and threats to the kids of their opponents.

Much has been made about this, it seems to be your entire basis for why people should be censored when not speaking highly of the protected classes. But how many of these threats have been confirmed as real? You accused people on the other side of the spectrum of complaining that "progressive" games are bigoted and racist, in a fantastically devious attempt to make others think such things are wrong, but do you really think just "the other side" is capable of this kind of duplicity? Ali made the bold statements that 100% of the hate was real, even though gamergate itself was not. Is it impossible that some pantyfa type sent themselves a bunch of death threats with swastikas on them, just so they can say "look how attacked we are"? Is everyone on your side good? Is it impossible that there were some Jussie Smolletts on the "good" side of gamergate? 100% real?

You haven't actually read any of the stuff me or Matti or Snarky has written on why this stuff is dangerous if that's your takeaway, and you still haven't answered my question about the Hungarian ban on gender studies.

Real criminals like Eliot Roger, Alek Minassian and Breivik have been radicalized online and have killed real people because of their beliefs, and when death threats and hatred is normalized it's only a matter of time until someone else is emboldened to kill or hurt people, and what you see as harmless jokes they see as approval of their abuse, and the hatred is real, unlike the "censorship" you imagine.

But seriously, wasn't it enough that you got the World Suicide Prevention Day thread locked thanks to your "jokes" and prevented everyone else from sharing their thoughts there, are you going to derail this thread until the Moderators lock it down too?

Snarky:

[did not have a robot arm]

Don't do it.
Engaging with Jack and his "arguments" means he has "won". Just don't do it.

I wish it was that easy, but many people just take a lack of answer as silent approval instead. 

Well, I think the Adventure game genre has been largely spared from the brunt of it, but I've seen lots of hateful comments surrounding many other games, and to name just one example the latest Battlefield got tons of hate for being "disrespectful to history" by letting people pick the gender and skin color of their avatar in a game set in WW2, whereas the 2004 game Silent Storm, also set in WW2 and you can pick the skin color and gender of your avatar, doesn't have a single review scolding the game for it.

I decided not to buy BF5 because of this. Allow me to explain the difference between the two games you described as examples and why your comparison of the two of them is nonsense:

Battlefield 5 did have the soldier's race and gender be historically accurate in the campaign, it was just in the multiplayer you could freely choose it for your avatar, and multiplayer fps by their nature aren't meant to be realistic simulations of war when people can effortlessly bunnyhop across the map and anyone can use any weapon without training. But even if you think it ruins your immersion or was a bad creative choice, do you think the developers deserve the death threats they got over the game?

And the female soldier in the trailer did not have a robot arm. It was an arm prosthetic, and it was accurate to what was available at the time, just look at this photo of a real prosthesis next to the woman in the trailer:

And real people like Virginia Hall and Douglas Bader did get sent on dangerous missions into enemy territory despite having prosthetics. They're not exactly like the character in the trailer, but said character is not completely made up from nothing either.

Also, Wolfenstein: The New Colossus also got a ton of hate for being "an SJW game" and featuring women and people of color despite being an alternate history sci-fi game with nazis on the moon, so you can't use "historical accuracy" as an argument there.

The reason why I feel as though people are annoyed with things like International Women's Day, and the Battlefield fiasco, and so on, and so on. Isn't because of women. But because of the political correctness that's constantly being shoehorned in.

The problem is that to a lot of people in anti-SJW circles, merely being a woman is seen as a political statement, and merely saying that you want women and minorities to receive the same respect as the men in the majority is "political correctness gone mad".

I also can't give gamergate any benefit of a doubt or consider both sides equally bad when one side just calls the other fascist or bigoted and the other send explicit threats of torture, rape and murder and threats to the kids of their opponents.

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In all this what women says? Female developers and female gamers are really concerned about all this?

Short answer: Yes. There are plenty of women in the industry who've faced death threats and explicit threats of rape and sexual torture for the most petty reasons, just look at Jennifer Helper for one example.

It reminds me of a quote by Margaret Atwood; Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them.

To compare that to people speaking back against you and some people getting banned from some forums for violating the rules (but still perfectly free to voice their opinions in other forums) is not comparable to a real communist dictatorship.

It's not there yet, but certainly on the spectrum. We already have the protected classes, who no one may speak about unless it's praise. It would be too late to point it out after it becomes illegal.

Not using transgender pronouns could get you fined

You probably think this is great, helping all these strong characters who have no one to defend them, but in reality it's a legal penalty for saying the wrong thing. This was 3 years ago. When they figure out this law didn't help their cause at all, what comes next?

(Go hide in your tent, Khris)

When it comes to protecting trans people, it's because they are disproportionally targeted for violence, assault and murder more than any other demographic and in some places it's still legal to kill a transgendered person if you were dating them when you discovered they were trans, the so-called trans-panic defense. As late as the 1970's in Sweden, one of the most progressive countries on the matter, the songwriter Cornelis Vreeswijk was involved in a scandal where he had attacked two transwomen with a kitchen knife and the newspapers played it for laughs, and Cornelis even got to publish a humorous song joking about the whole ordeal and remained popular. Just to get this straight, everybody laughed at him trying to kill two persons with a knife and even cut one of them, and there was a law in place that all trans people in Sweden had to be sterilized that wasn't removed until 2013.

If there is a slippery slope, it leans towards society regressing back a hundred years and not whatever imaginary dystopia you think of.
To me, the entire debate on weather society has gone too far and minorities have too many rights is frighteningly similar to the rhetoric that was seen in the Weimar republic before the nazis took hold. In the 1920's, Berlin was seen as a safe haven for queer and transgender people and there was even an institute for gender studies which housed some of the first known scientific text on transsexualism, but once the nazis took power (and they were able to take power exactly because the moderates and conservatives thought the nazis would respect the democracy once they were in power) all the writings and teachings of the institute were deemed degenerate and all texts burnt at nazi book burnings and the people teaching at the institute forced into exile, and the persecution of the queer, handicapped and political adversaries on the left became a way for the nazis to test the water and warm up the populous to the idea of exterminating large groups of people.

And I see similar worrying trends in right-wing nationalist movements today, in Hungary, Victor Orban has banned gender studies and an entire academic field of study became prohibited by law overnight. If you are so eager to defend the right of American people to misgender transpeople, all in the name of free speech, would you be equally ready to defend the right of the Hungarian students and teachers to exercise their free speech in order to teach and study subjects that the prime minister's party is uncomfortable with?

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You want to deny cultural marxism. These days you are not allowed to say anything that might hurt the feelings of any one, because that person's entire psyche might collapse and they kill themselves, and in the next moment you are expected to believe that this same person is not just capable, but strong. Forget cultural marxism, that was in the 60s. This kind of completely contradictive thinking is logical marxism. Beliefs decreed by the institution.

That's some ridiculous strawmanning if ever I've heard some. Whenever I hear "you're not allowed to say anything these days" I ask, why hasn't anyone thrown you in prison then? You can't advocate for free speech unless you're also prepared to accept that a great number of people will criticize what you say, and that also means accepting that many people today will criticize opinions they deem bigoted and harassing.

And speaking as someone whom had relatives living in Czechia back when it was ruled by an actual communist dictatorship, I find the casual allusion to one insulting. Back then, speaking up against the state meant you could legitimately end up in prison just because something you said, prisoners were isolated and abused until they were broken and even after they were released, they found themselves pariahs with no future and unable to get any job apart from the most demeaning ones. To compare that to people speaking back against you and some people getting banned from some forums for violating the rules (but still perfectly free to voice their opinions in other forums) is not comparable to a real communist dictatorship.

I can remember 3 women out of my head now, because I was naïve enough to try to defend the project against them. I found out later they were actually sent to bug me deliberately. They did leave a negative impact and some damage. I'm not accusing anyone with anything. It just sucks to be under fire for every word said.

Yeah, one of the more frustrating strategies of these types is to, instead of openly criticizing a project they think is too progressive for being too progressive, they make up a false or exaggerated strawman claim that it's secretly bigoted and racist or sexist in the hope that naive people who genuinely think such things are wrong but haven't seen the project in question up close will swallow their bait and do their job for them.

In your case it's especially egregious considering that several female characters are already prominently visible in many of your clips and screenshots, and claiming a story is sexist just because the lead is a man is ridiculous. I consider myself a feminist yet I've too have made games where the central characters are men, simply because that's how I envisioned the characters and because their gender and background did play a role in the stories I wanted to tell, and I'm sure most would agree that just having a male main character or focus on the relation between two men isn't sexist in itself.

The comedian Richard Herring spends the whole of International Women's Day trolling everyone on Twitter asking "When's International Men's Day?" (which is a lot of people), and in the process manages to raise thousands of pounds for Refuge.

Here's his Twitter account:
https://twitter.com/Herring1967

I'm glad at least one person could turn that mess into something positive!

Happy get over it day, everyone!

I'll admit it's a catchy song, it's just too bad too many people ask others to just get over things whilst lingering and complaining about everything themselves.

Personally, I sometimes feel like it's going backwards looking at all the controversies and hate against new games that dare present strong female characters who aren't objects all while classic heroines like April Ryan and Kate Walker could be strong and nuanced protagonists wearing practical clothes without being questioned or accused of being pandering.

Really? I didn't notice so much hate, almost in my country.   

_

Well, I think the Adventure game genre has been largely spared from the brunt of it, but I've seen lots of hateful comments surrounding many other games, and to name just one example the latest Battlefield got tons of hate for being "disrespectful to history" by letting people pick the gender and skin color of their avatar in a game set in WW2, whereas the 2004 game Silent Storm, also set in WW2 and you can pick the skin color and gender of your avatar, doesn't have a single review scolding the game for it.

Using sims sure is a novel choice, it'll be interesting to see the finished game!

Personally, I sometimes feel like it's going backwards looking at all the controversies and hate against new games that dare present strong female characters who aren't objects all while classic heroines like April Ryan and Kate Walker could be strong and nuanced protagonists wearing practical clothes without being questioned or accused of being pandering.

All the same I feel that this community has been great at making everyone feel welcome and that it has greatly encouraged me to keep making games and sharing my thoughts, and I've also been working on a new project with a female protagonist that I plan to add to the games in production thread soon.

It grinds my gears that on every international women's day, you invariably find men whining that "Why isn't there a men's day?", not only because it's a pretty shameless attempt to detract from the real issues women face that's meant to be brought to light on this day, but also because there already is an official international men's day on November the 19th.

That last screenshot is just lovely, I could definitively see someone printing it out and hanging it up on their wall! 

You should totally consider releasing some wallpapers of the game environments as a cool bonus dlc!

Anyway, best of luck with the case and I really hope you'll be able to complete the game without hindrance.

It's always great to see new people coming here, good luck with the test project and I look forward to see you try your hand at any of the competitions!

Great to see some new tracks!

1st: Flugeldufel
2nd: Cassiebsg 2
3rd: Cassiebsg 4

Thor's hammer has been stolen by the evil giant Thrym, and so Thor must team up with Loki to retrieve it.

This game was made for MAGS in February 2019 with the theme Dressing up.



Link: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2332/

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If someone uploaded a game to mediafire or gamejolt or whatever that was full of racist hate-speech then that platform would receive complaints about the content and take it down.

Apparently this does not apply to Steam though. 

Really?

Well, there was some controversies regarding some horrible shooting games like Hatred and Active Shooter, where the player got to plat as a terrorist gunning down defenseless civilians for the sake of it, being let up on the Steam storefront and only taken down after massive criticism, but the last few years Steam has basically let any game up on their storefront, not just including games that are basically hate speech and glorifying terrorism and neo-nazism, but also asset flips, games filled with stolen code and artwork, broken games missing their executable and straight up malware and viruses, all are allowed on the Steam storefront as long as the "developers" pay the fee for putting it up there. The journalist Jim Sterling has made several videos about the subject on YouTube, but there has also been a few articles about it in games magazines, here's a polygon article of a game that straight up hijacked the player's computers for bitcoin mining.

I'd try and come up with a joke about how low Steam's standards are, but no matter what outrageous vile hate propaganda, theft of copyrighted materials or malware scam I can think of, I've already seen examples of it on Steam.
Even the edgy freeware games I played as a teen on sites like Newgrounds and Gamepuma way back in the early 2000's had higher standards than that.