James Margaris

Before these layoffs Riot said they were going to take 2XKO in a new direction, but the leadership is the same. So...? They were responsible for the old direction but...they learned their lessons? Or they are "data driven" so they don't employ judgement at all really?

I think A Realm Reborn was probably a bad thing for the industry in that people still point to it and say "maybe we can pull a Real Reborn." But A Realm Reborn happened because they replaced the lead on the game, and the new lead brutally identified the existing problems and pledged to fix them.

The problems with 2XKO have been obvious for years. Riot obliquely acknowledged some problems but didn't address them in any real way. That's 100% on the people at the highest levels of leadership. And the PS5 launch was a disaster - that's not on a mid-level employee!

I think a big issue with modern game development is the disconnect between responsibility and accountability. The people in charge are theoretically responsible for the overall state of the game, but when a game does poorly a texture artist who did a great job is laid off.

Most of the problems with the game stem from high-level decision-making. The people who should be laid off are the people writing the layoff emails. No offense to those people (I've met some personally, they're nice guys!) but they made some fundamentally misguided decisions.

Psyduck is the best because it looks like his head is about to do a Scanner's style explosion, or maybe he's about to inflict that on someone else who knows.

It seems like all of this is the result of one guy at Valve waking up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and deciding that this game needed to be singled out while dozens of more offensive games floated by.

Interesting - sort of like how in the contemporary US we have Darren Aronofsky, who is (presumably) both blind and deaf.

This looks suspiciously like Cham Cham

(Also I assume this is a hentai visual novel like 98% of PC-98 games...)

Obama on Twitter proudly supporting our athletes

To all the other countries: please continue to boo our athletes.

To our athletes: feels bad but we gotta take the L here - try not to take it too personally.

Something odd about this new Horizon game's art style is that it makes the creatures not look particularly mechanical.

Broadly speaking the people who want to quit their white collar consulting jobs to be farmers or who want to become trad farmer influencer types are the people with the least exposure to actual farming - their entire knowledge of farming is Stardew Valley screenshots.

I would say "I could fix her" but she doesn't need fixing.

I don't even remember what a synched anim even is in this context!

Code comment "todo figure out what the fuck this does"

This is why you should document variables when you create them

People got mad at that "why don't games work more like Hollywood?" series of tweets but it's weird that, when describing a video game producer, you have to say "it's different at each studio." It really doesn't need to be different!

Season 2 episode 1

I've heard that game design candidates typically don't like "play our game and write up feedback" take home tests. What are the specific objections to that?

Too broad? Spec work? Puts you in the awkward position of being critical while trying to be hired?

Retweets appreciated (research!)

This is why they love AI so much.

They've spent their lives struggling with the most basic tasks and it's genuinely life-changing that a computer can write out a complete sentence for them. And they assume it's life-changing for everyone since they're surrounded by these complete dunces.

This guy does a "spicy" interview every two weeks. It's honestly a little sad. Find a hobby or something instead of living out the rest of your life as "guy who worked at Bethesda and has no respect for former co-workers."

This looks like the world's worst bourbon ad.

I like how many pointless close ups and slow zooms there are - mimicking the language of cinema without any understanding of how that language is used.

It is genuinely crazy to pitch "real accountability for murder" as a common-sense "reform" like it's some dull procedural matter.

It's going to be the same people in ICE and the same people running ICE so what you're asking for is a pinky swear from the murderers to stop murdering.

"I could beat the top-ranked female chess player."

"Oh you mean after thousands of hours of practice?"

"No right now, having never played Chess before. What does the horsey do?"

It's the same "if you try hard enough you can do anything" mentality that makes people think they could beat a grizzly bear in a boxing match.

But it's also a fundamentally lazy world view in that it discounts planning, preparation, training, strategy and basic competence as not part of trying hard

Time to revisit a huge pet peeve of mine.

When you start Highguard you have to read the EULA and then the accept button is a press-to-hold button. All you want to do on that screen is accept - why is it press to hold? If they accidentally accept (after reading!) who cares!

As an author (who has written pieces like that in the past!) I have no idea what you're supposed to do with that information, other than build up a body of work to make it clear you're on the level.

Is it, IMO, statistically valid to assume that if someone writes a very well-reasoned essay about how Dragon Age is poorly written - an essay you agree with! - that the author is an anti-woke grifter mimicking a normal human. As Casey Stengel said that's just playing the percentages.

I 100% agree with this but I would add this wrinkle:

I think Marvel's Midnight Suns is not well-written, and I wrote a blog to that effect.

But if I read a blog claiming that Midnight Suns is not well-written I'd suspect the author is secretly anti-woke, and I'd be right the majority of the time.

An excellent philosophy.