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I like it! Hope it works out well!

When you translate Lovecraft to Greek, do you translate it into a modern, clean greek or do you try to preserve the somewhat archaic language Lovecraft wrote in?
I've seen Finnish translations of both kinds, and the printed-in-the-50's translation that used really old-timey and archaic finnish wording to suit the source material was really interesting (and also challenging) read.

If someone buys a game about harsh survival in an unforgiving world of limited resources, with no limits on what is allowed, do they still have the right to complain when someone smashes their head with a rock and blows up their home to steal their pile of shiny rocks? I'd say "no". In a game like Rust or DayZ, a lot of things that would count as harassment in other games can and should be considered just another part of the experience, which I think is why there is fairly limited popularity for such games in the long run.

Rust was intended to showcase a post-apocalyptic hellscape of a world where people are more like animals, doing anything to survive and thrive, so I think it does its job well enough. It's fair in exactly the same way life is fair (the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must), and cruel only in the way the people playing it are cruel. If a server were populated by kind-hearted people willing to sacrifice their own progress to help others and to build a community, there is nothing in the game stopping that from happening. That just isn't the way we human beings are by nature. Thus it's not really the game's fault.

It's just not a game for the faint of heart, or those easily frustrated.

[Baron]

Best Character: Baron, for his format provided the most defined character here.
Best Atmosphere: Sinitrena, for the sincerest form of courtly love on display
Best Writing: Baron wins here for me. Sorry, Sinitrena, while I appreciate the effort, I'm more easily swayed by more traditional letter writing than poetry or song.
Best Heart Throb/Break/Ache: This was a tough pick for me. Sinitrena has to win over in the end, with sheer sincerity, while Baron comes in a very close second indeed.


A Moment Of Pause
> I feel confused and ill at ease after reading this.

Shall I... for my Lady
> The structure took a moment to get used to, but I did end up reciting the whole thing aloud to myself. Colour me impressed!

The Love-Fool Diaries
> Oh, bloody hell that was fun! An the poor fools story has, indeed, been told!

-----

And so, the final scores are:


Shall I... for my Lady by Sinitrena > 10 points

The Love-Fool Diaries by Baron > 8 points

A Moment Of Pause by Mandle > 2 point


And the crown of the most romantic of fools goes to Sinitrena!
Congratulations, and I look forward to our next theme!

As to why people buy cards: Cards mean badges, badges mean levels, levels (every ten) mean extra friend slots, etc.

Wait, what? Friend slots? Is that an ACTUAL thing?

[that]

Good point. I don't really tend to think of the blank slate characters are proper "characters", so my previous comment didn't take those cases into account.

For the record: The Myst games did the best job at making a blank slate protagonist. No name, no face, no physical attributes of any kind. You are you, a stranger in a strange place, and your actions define you.

Another interesting take on the blank slate character was what Rust (an otherwise horrible game I wouldn't recommend to anyone) did: Your character is generated upon game start. Build, skin colour etc are all random and you cannot affect them or change them, ever. The character you get is bound to your account and the only way to try to get a different one is to create a new account and buy the game again. An interesting take on the whole "you can't choose who you are in the real world, either" -thing I'd like to see experimented with more in better games. In a game like Rust it apparently devolved to "let's kill all the black characters lul" in an instant, because Rust is that kind of game.

I actually quite like the thinking of that article.

A ton of men play female characters because they enjoy their games more that way (the most common claim I've seen is "I prefer watching a female character, so I play one", so make of that what you will), so it makes perfect sense for women to enjoy playing around with male characters in a similar way. Whether it be for the looks and titillation (ooh, mancandy!), to experience a different kind of persona and toy around with investing yourself in a character that is different in background, personality and physique to yourself (see also, fat people playing as athletic people or simpletons like myself enjoying Sherlock Holmes games to feel smart) or to just have the change to experience the reverse side of some narrative tropes, it still makes a ton of sense. Games, like movies and books, tend to be a lot about experiencing something you can't experience otherwise.

In my eyes, the whole "protagonists in games need to accurately represent group X so player group X can identify with them" doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The whole point of that argument is that players lack imaginations and cannot enjoy an entertainment product unless the protagonist is similar to themselves, and yet we've not had this issue with, say, movies. Or have you ever heard anyone complain that they couldn't enjoy the Silence of the Lambs because Clarice Starling was female? Or are women unable to read the Lord of the Rings because there were no women in the Fellowship of the Ring?

From what I've seen, card trading has lost most of its meaning and all of my friends have a notification sitting on the top right corner of their steam window, letting them know they have "X new items". A lot of people don't even bother to look at the cards nowadays, since they have so many and the effort of selling them is not worth the trouble to do it, considering the return of 1-2 cents per card.

However, if the effort is minimal, I do still recommend adding them to a game, and am looking to do so for my own game as well, despite my disinterest in them. Despite their lack of worth and tedious nature, they are still seen as one of those marks of a complete game being sold on steam, so if "Achiement Spammer 2000" or "Titty-Bouncer Extreme" have them, your game may be viewer negatively by comparison for not having them. And hey, there are the few people who do like collecting badges, and those people will thank you for the opportunity.

"The year is 1820 AD. All of Africa is occupied by the Swedes. All? Not quite! One small village of indomitable Nigerians still holds out against the invaders..."

I wonder if they have a magic potion or something... And a really fat man lobbing rocks at people.

[quite]

Ahh, Sweden. It's like Finland but not quite as good, and a bit to the west. 
(The meatballs are nice, though.)

[Mandle]

Aaaugh! It seems I have granted an extension by accident, since I've been so swept up with work that I missed the darn deadline!

Without further ado, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you our contestants for the past fortnight:

A Moment Of Pause by Mandle

Shall I... for my Lady by Sinitrena

The Love-Fool Diaries by Baron

Please cast your votes in the following categories:

Best Character: Main Character or supporting, it doesn't matter. Which character stood out as interesting, funny, unusual, ect...
Best Atmosphere: Which story made you feel - anything really. Which story dragged you into a world of its own?
Best Writing: The technical aspect of writing. Turns of phrases, style.
Best Heart Throb/Break/Ache: Which story made you truly feel for one or more parties included?

With only three stories to go on, I think we can manage with a fairly short voting deadline of: 24th of March 2019 / 23:59 UTC

(Psst: Spread the word outside of the Competitions & Activities board if you dare. Would be nice to have more voters than just the participants themselves.)

Time to remind people that this project is still very much alive.
After some major difficulties during 2017 and 2018, with my personal health and 3rd parties working on the project, I am finally able to push and, and am seeing progress!
A new artist has begun working with me on the project to deliver an original soundtrack, and work is progressing smoothly once more.

I've been optimistic before and failed to deliver, but right now I am once more hopeful that GNRBLEX - Redux might see a summer 2019 release date!

Just a few precious days to go, people! Give it all you've got and give Mandle and Sinitrena a run for their proverbial money!

Ubisoft really dropped the ball with that one, though "dropping the ball" describes most of what they do. Didn't they recently have a whole issue with first making a character that could be straight or gay or whatever in the main game, then drop a DLC that forced that character into a straight relationship after all.

It's like they try to do a bunch of things, but aren't really aware of what it is they are actually trying to do.

From the topic of sad failures to something more positive: Have people here played A Hat in Time? One of the most fun games I played last year, despite its minor technical issues, and a fun example of a game with a female protagonist I cannot imagine anyone would have a problem with playing.

Feel free to suggest other fine examples of games that have key female characters and were done well. Off the top of my head I can think of a few I've enjoyed.

- Dishonored 2 - Death of the Outsider
- All of the Shantae games
- Portal 1 & 2
- Night in the Woods

And some of the well known AGS ones:

- Heroine's Quest
- The Blackwell games
- Nelly Cootalot

Like I said, the more you try to use random made up "biological facts" to justify societal laws, the more you sound like what Ali accused you of being.

This will have to be an area on which we disagree with, then. I talk about evolutionary traits affecting the decisions we make as a broader society, such as choosing not to draft women into the military, while you try to equate that to the actions of individuals in a moment of duress or other extremely heated moment. I do not think those two are comparable, and thus I don't think your relating the two has any connection to the point I was making. Laws about matters such as the military draft are drawn up with more sensibility than decisions about immediate survival in a life or death situation.

No one is forcing them to spend money on the girls and to suggest otherwise and imply that all men always want sex and they just can't control their impulses is the exact same rhetoric that's used to dismiss male survivors of rape and sexual assault.

Sure, I will consent that nobody is forcing people to do anything here. However, among these young male viewers are numerous boys suffering of self esteem issues, bullying offline and online, and a lack of meaningful social interaction. All prime causes of why we have such high suicide rates among men. Such individuals are exceptionally vulnerable to being monetized and taken advantage of, as for them something as simple as getting their name called out by a pretty girl on screen is easily worth tens of dollars of investment. If you do not see anything wrong with that, then once again I must say that is an area where we will simply have to disagree on.

Just like in Assassin's Creed Unity, where after getting criticism for removing playable female characters from the game, Ubisoft explained that it was because women were too hard for them to animate.

Ah, Ubisoft. Their claim that women would be difficult to animate in their current game was valid in the way that doing so would have required them to use the same skeleton structure for the female and male models, meaning those characters would have needed to be the same height and general build for the animations to make sense. So their excuse basically boiled down to "We don't want to make a female character who is as tall as a male character". Optionally they could have made a whole new set of animations and skeletons, but I can see why that might have been prohibitively work-intensive at the point of development they were at when the statement was made.

Then why did you feel the need to make such a huge deal out of how wrong you thought Battlefield 5 was?

I feel like a broken record here, but once more: Because it was initially marketed as something it was not and its lead developer was making claims about historical accuracy that had nothing to do with actual history, while abusing the fans of the series by calling them uneducated idiots for not going along with his fantasies, which led me to personally decide against buying the game.

Did you miss the woman murder statistics I mentioned and the link with the scientific study showing that the overwhelming majority of men did not in fact put random women over themselves?

Are you really comparing violent crime statistics, the edge cases of our society, to the general evolutionary nature of our species? Apples to oranges, my friend.
That's the equivalent of saying that "human beings are not biologically designed to survive because some of them kill themselves on purpose!"

Men get more abuse due to the fact that there are more men in gaming circles, but the women who are in those spaces get far more abuse than their male peers and get horrific threats of sexual violence and sexist slurs on top of the same death threats and nazi-accusations men get, Snarky already pointed that out and he's actually working as a moderator.

One group receiving abuse does not diminish the abuse suffered by another group. And yet there seems to only ever be discussion of why women feel excluded from the online space, while men continue to tolerate the abuse they get and remain. That seems sexist and unfortunate to me, in how the issues faced by men are belittled. However, that is not the point of this thread, and I think we can all agree on the general point that "online abuse, against anyone, is bad". (Well, some people can't, but they're a different breed of animal, and usually dealing out the harassment themselves.)

Then why are you blaming the streamers and not Twitch as a platform for allowing children to pay for their services or the children's parents for not teaching them better? Also, just casually comparing any woman relying on her looks in her job but not actually selling sex is hugely demeaning to them and basically encouraging harassment and lewd propositions to women just because they dress skimpy.

There is definitely blame to be placed on Twitch, too, but they are not technically violating any laws and they're making a ton of money off of the practice, so it is unlikely anything will change through their action.
That does not remove the fact that there are predatory individuals who are selling their sexuality and appearance, even if it is not selling direct physical sex, to audiences that are vulnerable to being scammed or led along.
I personally also believe that people who are not familiar with gaming communities may well end up being introduced to them through streamers and compliations of streams on Youtube, and the female gamers represented in those tend to be mostly the titty-streamer variety, which I feel may well feed into the negative stereotypes and make people more inclined to think less of female gamers. (And before anyone shouts at me about it again: just because I am pointing out that I think this is happening does not mean I think it is a good thing. Is that now adequately clear?)

If I were to draw conclusions from my experience as a moderator, the group most targeted for abuse is moderators.

That is probably the one group above all other online groups, regardless of sex, orientation or political view, that gets the most abuse. I don't think I could do it.

someone who has repeatedly excused and diminished abuse directed towards women.

I hate to keep asking and not getting answers, but: When have I done that?

But I think there needs to be room for both realistic depictions of history and fun swashbuckling versions of history

Said it before, and I'll say it again. I agree. There is room for both and I have no issue with both existing.

And now you've lost me, because firstly, the idea that men naturally want to protect women is 100% a cultural expectation and not some biological inevitability.

I'm pretty sure some evolutionary scientists will disagree with you here, considering how the human society has evolved. Sure, modern society has changed a lot from our hunter-gatherer days, but to claim that human evolution has entirely surpassed such basic instincs as "protecting the breeding-aged females to ensure the survival of the species" that is inherent in most mammals is a bit much.

The biggest reason there aren't more women is that for the last decades both the community and developers have been trying to drive them away, both through in-game content like I described in my previous comment regarding the Metro 2033 sequel, but also because so many gaming communities contain trolls and creeps that take active pride in harassing women, and the majority of the other members just spend all their time and effort on insisting that they're not one of them and accuse people speaking up against is of being SJWs who want to look for a conflict instead of actively denouncing the harassers and call them out on it.

There is truth in what you are saying, but keep in mind that in sheer quantity the vast majority of online abuse is still directed at men. And still men choose to participate in these communities, despite being repeatedly called "gay" or "faggot" or "motherfucker" or "nazi" or "fascist" or whatever other colourful language you'd like to insert here, along with the same death threats, swatting attacks and more that are unfortunate side effects of online anonymity that allows people like Ali to throw around some pretty foul things without a worry in the world.

Also, the whole implication that men can't control themselves isn't just dangerous for women, but it's also greatly harmful to men who fall victim to sexual abuse, because it reinforces the notion that men can't be sexually abused because they always want it and that anyone sexually abusing a man is basically doing him a favor. A woman on Twitch offering a service and people choosing to pay for that service doesn't mean that she's stealing or abusing the people paying her anymore than hamburger chains are abusing hungry people.

Like I said, I agree for the most part, and believe that women should be free to sell their bodies if they want (hey, the 'oldest profession' and all that) just as men should be free to avail them of such services if they want. But when the primary target demographic are children, such as on Twitch, it gets shady as heck.

You've done it again. My bad opinions are a consequence of being acted upon by outside forces. These women's bad behaviour has tainted my view of the group. No. I am responsible for the views I hold. If I blame one person for what another did, that's my error.

BTW, which part of the picture of a woman with bare arms the most abusive? Is it the elbows?

What are you on about? Where did I say my view of the group was tainted? That I personally viewed female gamers negatively because of the streamers? Or that the image was abusive?
Could you kindly get your head out of your backside and discuss the topic at hand rather than trying to desperately wrangle any and all discussion into fuel for your personal vendetta, please? It is getting rather tiresome.

I have never played a Twitch game, so I'm not entirely clear on the social dynamics first hand. Is it common for adult women to look to play games with young boys in return for money? Do people build businesses around this model?

Twitch is a video streaming service mostly focused around games. People can play games, other people can watch and chat with the people playing.
I saw a stream where a Russian lady was doing gymnastics before a camera there, and she'd raised over a 100 000 dollars from viewer donations. Her goal was 200 000 dollars so she could buy a house. An extreme example, sure, but gives you an idea of how lucrative it can be.

And to give you an idea on what a very popular female streamer's feed can look like:
https://i.imgur.com/CMCEHHw.png