Cancel Culture, Reputational Harm and Deplatforming

It's really difficult to talk about cancel culture without the conversation turning into a swamp.

I'm going to paraphrase Hank Green here, but there was an insight he shared that I think is really relevant. He said something to the effect of "You'll navigate the conversation much more successfully when you replace the word 'cancelled' with 'had some harm done to their reputation'."

It's a bit of an oversimplification but that's also the truth. Left of center we don't talk much about being cancelled, we tend to distinguish between reputational harm and deplatforming. The definitions of those words being kinda self-evident but for the sake of being thorough, when I say reputational harm, I am talking about what everyone thinks of a person, and when I say deplatforming, I mean an entity taking away a person's platform. An account banned on Twitter, being locked out of posting videos on YouTube, being blacklisted from speaking on college campuses. A body that determines a person's speech is harmful enough to not provide them with a platform.

And make no mistake of it, I think that there are people who we think should be deplatformed, who should lose their ability to continue doing harm. The big example being Woody Allen, a convicted sexual abuser who fled imprisonment and is living mostly consequence free. Or Alex Jones, who spread his Sandy Hook hoax conspiracy theory so far and wide it ended up harming the parents of the children victimized in a school shooting. And I don't take deplatforming lightly, to me it is the hammer of last resort reserved for when the evidence against a person is very strong and no other recourse for justice is available.

Reputational harm is different. This is your garden variety cancelled. Someone sees you said some shit online and distance themselves from you. You're still allowed to post or whatever but folks decide you are not worth their time. Losing good-will with the people.

And if your job is contingent on not losing people's good will, that's a harder problem to solve, but it is yours.

Posting on the internet can suck if your job is dependent on your reputation and you have enemies or you're just a bad public speaker or you have nothing in terms of public relations. There's a reason people spend six figure amounts on a good PR Team or a good PR Campaign. It's hard to gain people's trust and very easy to lose it.

We live in a low trust media environment, both in that we can't trust a lot of our news outlets and in that there is so much misinformation and disinformation online that you can't be sure of the truth of anything you read. And people launch misinformation campaigns, someone out there can decide that you are their enemy and you must at all costs be stopped.

Should we forgive online figures for messing up? Honestly, yes. I believe that people should be able to make mistakes, make mistakes repeatedly, and as long as they are making a good faith effort to fix the issue, we shouldn't dole out infinite punishment. That's not to say I don't think some mistakes are beyond coming back for. No one wants to bat for a sex pest, no one wants to bat for an abuser. But people make mistakes and people are human.

There isn't a clean note to end this on. I might change my mind on this a bunch more in the future. But what I know about this in the here and now is that we can't keep going on like this. This isn't going away and we're destroying the mental health of creators who are constantly walking on eggshells.

We need better solutions to these problems.

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Game Immersion, or Why You Need To Stop Staring At Traffic In Games And Drive

I love The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

It's one of my favourite games of all time. Specifically on PC. What makes Skyrim so special is how unabashedly moddable it is. You can practically change anything in the game, it's so robust that it's almost become a game engine of its own.

But one thing that Skyrim players often go to absurd lengths to protect is their immersion. And if you look on Nexus you'll see some truly unnecessary mods. There was one that actually crashed my game from the strain it put my PC under just to simulate flocks of birds.

All in the name of immersion.

Immersion in a game is kind of a strange thing. When people talk about something breaking their immersion, they usually mean that they've seen or heard something that took them out of the experience. Sort of like a wrestler breaking kayfabe. The game isn't supposed to acknowledge that it is a game. The NPCs shouldn't do things that are inhuman and uncanny.

Keep the mask on.

When I was in school we did film study. I remember there was a kid in the back who would yell and interrupt the film every few minutes, until the teacher eventually go fed up, paused the film, went to the whiteboard and wrote in big black letters

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

Where that line is for everyone is going to be different. For some it's not seeing hanging signs in Skyrim sway realistically in the breeze. Other people can interpret the 16x16 sprites of an NES game as full living breathing world.

There's something that stuck with me. I remember MovieBob saying it but I don't think he's the first, that's where I heard it first though.

"Are you guys sure you don't mean engagement?"

It's a lot harder to suspend your disbelief when you're staring at signs instead of doing something engaging. You know why you don't ask worldbuilding questions about the mushroom kingdom? There's a goomba coming to kill you, you do not have the time. Get running. The clock is ticking down.

I have a feeling that modern games are all trying so hard to make complex simulations of real life that we've confused the quality of the simulation with the quality of the game. What pedestrians do in Grand Theft Auto, what the other drivers on the road do in Watch Dogs, whatever the moon logic was behind the swordplay in Kingdom Come Deliverance, seriously, what is with the game's combat, why did we bring back Daggerfall's worst feature?

Games are about play. Or at least, they are to me. It is about being playful, it is about playing. Some argue that games don't need to be fun, and I think there are some games that can make an interesting point or be a worthwhile experience by being deliberately unenjoyable, at least for certain stretches.

But it'd really suck if that was every game, or even a majority of games.

I'm not worried about my immersion. Suspension of Disbelief comes easy to me. And it's not stuff like janky AI or broken physics that do it, one of my favourite games is Skyrim. It's usually stuff like bad character writing, people making decisions that don't make a lick of sense. Why can't I send the radiation proof super mutant to go and flip the switch in the big radiation tank, Bethesda? Why must I, a regular wastelander who is very much not immune to radiation, go into that room and die? He's my friend, he'd do it if I ask, it's no inconvenience to him.

I think a lot of people would actually agree. Just make s fun game. We'll figure out our immersion later. And if it's that much of a problem, well...

There's always Nexus.

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NFTs and Crypto (Wow, in 2024? That's old news, who gives a shit?)

I've on my socials pretty thoroughly expounded on my position on NFTs and the Cryptocurrencies.

These are technological solutions in search of problems.

 Do I really need to explain either concept? Maybe there's one person who needs the cliff-notes; The blockchain is both a system of validating transactions and also kind of a cloud storage, but it's way better at the former than the latter. Just think about a bunch of computers keeping full copies of a database, and whenever something needs to change, all of those computers need to agree that the the change is legit. Non-fungible Tokens and Cryptocurrencies are built on top of blockchains. It is the data that goes into the database. It's resistant to man-in-the-middle attacks but those are relatively rare. And now I've given you a one paragraph version of Folding Ideas' Line Goes Up. It's a good video. You should watch it.

Blockchain technology is interesting but has as of yet only really been great for the grifter; Do you want to run a ponzi scheme without running a ponzi scheme? Invent your own crypto coin. Do you want to part some easy marks from their money? Mint some NFTs. You can even set the system up so the minting cost is bore entirely by the buyer.

And just to be clear, I say 'easy marks' but often there are sincere investors looking to expand their personal portfolios and they just don't know any better. These folks can sometimes be very annoying and very over-zealous but truly, they do not deserve to be scammed like this.

Now, I'm hesistant to put Web3 as a concept in with NFTs and Crypto, mostly because while NFT and Crypto follow the philosophy of decentralization, rather than one company owning the servers your data goes on, it's separate entities cooperating and potentially hosting entirely bespoke data... A lot of Web3 is smoke and snake oil. See the excellent Web3 Is Going Great blog for just how much of a trashfire it's been.

The most solid and promising ventures I've seen are in the landscape of decentralized web applications; Mastodon, Peertube and the like. This is actually very cool. But it's also a trend backwards, showing a version of the internet where private individuals create and share things they themselves host, much like it was before 7 corporations bought everything.

Blockchain is an inefficient solution to a problem that's not that big a problem and the pure electricity cost is staggering. NFTs have yet to show anything worthwhile, there's very little you can even buy with your Bitcoin.

But I suppose none of it matters anyway since the grift has moved on towards generative AI. The crypto grift is dead, long live the AI grift.

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One Way Sonic 06 is Better Than Sonic Frontiers

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

I'm not one to easily give Sonic The Hedgehog (2006) praise but one way Sonic Frontiers is worse than Sonic '06 of all games is in the... Let's call it the "Sonic dies but the power of friendship brings him back" bit.

For context, in Sonic Frontiers around the 75% mark, Sonic succumbs to Cyber Corruption and his friends have to find a way to bring him back. They trap themselves in Cyber Space again to stave off the corruption. The issue is more with the pacing of the game than any flaw with the scenario, since Sonic remains out of commission for all of two minutes before his friends bring him back again.

Something similar actually happens in Sonic '06 where Sonic is mortally wounded by Mephiles and his friends need to go find the 7 chaos emeralds in order to bring him back. Rather than it just being a cutscene, there's a mission where all the characters go search for chaos emeralds and it's the culmination of the games various mechanics. Rather than Sonic dying and immediately being brought back, the player has to earn that moment and Sonic's friends have to all band together and find the chaos emeralds inside the broken remains of the world.

The actual nuts and bolts of the gameplay in Sonic '06 is still poorly constructed, but the narrative pacing is better in this one moment. There's a ludic element to the events happening on screen and there's a tension that lingers and is hard fought to be resolved.

I just think that's better. I would have liked a couple levels where Tails, Amy and Knuckles had to go into Cyberspace and fight the Cyber Corruption rather than just a cutscene that immediately brings Sonic back.

That said, Frontiers is in its construction still a far more solid game, and while it has issues, it manages to rise above its flaws where as Sonic '06 drowns in them.

That said, a broken clock is still correct twice a day. Good for you, Sonic '06. There's a lot to learn about your failures, but there is at least on triumph to your name.

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The Thing That Bothers Me The Most About Batman

Source: Black Metal Gun by Somchai Kongkamsri

Something that bugs me about Batman is less of like, a character thing and merely that they keep making him bulletproof.

I think a lot of tension gets taken out of Batman stories when he shrugs off 9mm slugs like nerf darts, instead of the incredible gut punches they would be. 

Every Batsuit in the modern era has basically been made into a high-tech suit of armor so advanced that gunfire isn't an issue. It's a writing conceit meant to deal with the fact that Batman routinely goes up against armies of armed thugs and without it he'd be turned into Swiss Cheese.

And while I'm sympathetic towards the idea of not having to deal with it... I also kind of think that it goes against the principal of the matter? The heart of Batman stories is that Bruce Wayne is a very human superhero. One guy using his money and privilege to change his city for the better. He isn't faster than a speeding bullet, he can't shoot laser beams from his eyes, he hasn't inherited the thunderbolts of Zeus, aliens didn't give him a super advanced light construct ring...

Batman is just a guy.

A guy that writers keep trying to turn into Tony freaking Stark.

The Tony Starkification of Batman has always been a sore point for me, Batman's superpower isn't money or super advanced tech. It's his deductive reasoning, it's his ability to get into the mind of criminals, it's and it's his humanity. 

Batman is Halloween Sherlock Holmes. We don't need a second Iron Man.

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Review: Crystalis

Of late I've found myself kind of obsesed with the idea of top down 8-bit RPGs, and nothing really scratched that urge for me in quite the same way as Crystalis for the NES.

The experience of the game was at times straining but I found myself captivated. The music is a notch above what you usually hear from even the best 8-bit soundtracks, the writing is strong and the gameplay has its weak points but it also flourishes when it works.

The things that age Crystalis the most is the lack of checkpointing and its sometimes indecipherable logic. More than once was I sent to a guide to find the path to progression, only to find that I needed to equip the glasses item to look at an inconspicuous wall to find a secret entrance, or I needed to use a lamp on a broken statue and place that statue in a shrine in order to remove the whirlpools blocking me in the sea. I also found myself grinding more than I would have liked to. While grinding isn't strictly necessary, you risk putting yourself at such a severe disadvantage in some sections that it'd almost be silly not to.

Still, the ending of the game is what made it all worth it.

There are few NES games I would classify as having particularly strong stories, it's something inherent to the era, coming from the arcades and without much space to store text in a still developing medium, NES games just weren't as narratively capable for the most part.

Crystalis shattered that conception for me in its entirety.

The story is that good.

I have some experience with the Gameboy Color port but I'd say that despite its improvements, the noticeable screen crunch will make mazelike dungeons even harder to navigate and triple the difficulty of the combat.

Crystalis can be a hard sell, it can be a weird game and it can be obtuse but it can be an intensely rewarding game. It earns my recommendation.

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There's Something About Undertale's Morality That Bugs Me

 I want to float an idea past you.

A videogame is a conversation between a player and a developer.

I think about that sometimes. I think you can classify most forms of art as a conversation between the artist and consumer. Art is trying to say something and hoping you'll listen. You might not get to respond personally to the artist but you can form a rebuttal, or a rejection, or an agreement.

And I think videogames can allow for the most input into that conversation just in the fact that for the conversation to move forward, there must be input.

And I think I hate what Undertale has to say.

Okay, well, that's hyperbolic. I really only have one small criticism of its approach to morality as an all-or-nothing zero sum game in which the onus is entirely on the player to be moral and it instills this idea where you can only truly be moral if you adopt a martyr complex and let tens or hundreds of monsters of various sizes punch you directly in the face and if you strike back at even one, no matter how much violence or aggression they show towards you, then you are put into the track of a middling ending.

I think the misanthropy also really gets to me, humans are usually the instigators, they wronged the monster population, they killed Asriel and children are the only ones with innocence. It feels very born of Christian values, the idea that people are born with sin and only through acting as Christ would are we able to find salvation and like, I just think morality is more complicated than that.

For one thing, I don't think Undertale is a bad game and I think some of the ways it approaches non-violence is fun and unique. And more games should allow for non-lethal playthroughs but I think rather than it being a developer's litmus test, let players choose for themselves.

If anything, I think it only bothered me so much because of the potential I saw within the game to create an experience that would have been, at least to me, an unforgettable playthrough.

Instead... The best I can do is voice my concerns over a blog post and hope it doesn't make me come off as a condescending asshole who was unhappy with the ending he got in a videogame.

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