salarta

zennistrad:

In light of the controversy that has been extending back for more than half a year at this point, something extremely depressing has come to light.

Not too long ago, Totalbiscuit, a popular games critic who is supported by GamerGate (though he claims to be neutral), wrote a lengthy Twitlonger questioning the theory of media influence, particularly in video games, asking “where are the scientists?”

In response, an actual social scientist posted a lengthy explanation of media influence. It’s a very good read, and I suggest anyone who’s interested read it. However, what was most important was what was added at the end.

[added on reflection] Let me also say on other thing. There are a number of us in academia who love games, care about games, and believe games are important.  We have been working for years to make games a legitimate tool for education and for study, and we were making progress.  People were starting to take games seriously.  And then came GamerGate. I have seen the careful progress of a decade come crashing down, and now, when I go to talk about games to industry groups or fellow academics, GamerGate always comes up as an example of how terrible and immature people who play games are.  It will take years
and years to repair the damage, and it is absolutely devastating to the
serious study and application of the power of games to real problems.  
We are going to have trouble getting grants, getting foundations to fund
games, and getting people to take us seriously.  It is devastating and
makes me very sad.

For many years, people have been fighting for games to be recognized seriously as an art form. GamerGate, as it seems, has caused serious damage to that. Social scientists have been studying the influence of games, not just because of their negative effects, but because of the potential positive effects as well. Games could potentially be a powerful tool to help teach empathy, and increase satisfaction and happiness.

But now that GamerGate has shattered public perception of gaming in academia, we may never be able to fully understand how to allow games to reach their full potential in this regard. But it’s not just media studies in video games that have suffered.

Rebecca HG, also known as 8BitBecca, is a video game archivist. Her work is vitally important to the future of video games, as the passage of time guarantees that physical storage media degrades and becomes unusable. Within decades, many out-of-print games may be lost forever, outside of illegal ROMs.

But now, thanks to GamerGate, video game archiving as a professional practice is all but dead.

To any reasonable person, this would be devastating. Nobody benefits from this. Academics refusing to take games seriously means that games can never be realized as an art form. Even worse, without academia the task of preserving, understanding, and maintaining the cultural history of games becomes a daunting task. Half of all American films made before 1950 are lost forever, and were it not for the work of archivists and academics, it’s likely we would never have been able to preserve even that much.

So what happens to video games when academics don’t take them seriously at all? What happens when people refuse to archive games or study their cultural significance?

To put it bluntly, video games will have no future. If we do not take care to study the cultural history of games, it may forever disappear to us when cartridges and CDs inevitably die, emulators become obsolete, servers shut down, manuals are lost, and the publisher history fades into obscurity.

This should make any gamer uncomfortable, but unfortunately, this is not the case. GamerGate has not been shy about their disdain for academia in video games, as evidenced by the popularity of anti-academic figures such as the Youtuber known as “Sargon of Akkad”, who is one of the most widely-praised supporters of GamerGate. Just reading the title of one of his videos tells you all that you need to know:

In this context, GamerGate’s reaction to the news that academia is no longer taking games seriously is depressingly predictable.

GamerGate is killing video games. And that’s exactly what they want.

montalbinowitch:

Cecil and Rosa share the best FF relationship and yet they’re one of the most unpopular pairings ): I wonder why

The reason for the pairing’s unpopularity is twofold.

First, there are a lot of Rydia fanboys (and fangirls) that really, really wanted Cecil to be paired with Rydia. That’s a lot of why some people don’t like it; they see Rosa as an obstacle because the canon guarantees Rydia can’t be with Cecil. It’s led some people to insist Rosa’s just an unnecessary support while Rydia’s the main female protagonist. One guy even tried to claim a “Japanese sourcebook” said Rosa dated Kain, but dumped him for Cecil because Cecil has more power. Nevermind that the canon actually says Cecil’s considered fairly lowly for his status as a Dark Knight while Kain is considered highly regarded for being captain of the dragoons.

Second, and more common for the average person, Rosa appears to be “boring” because her personality became the basic template for Aeris, Rinoa, Garnet, Yuna, and pretty much the entire white mage class. A lot of people don’t recognize her value because they started playing Final Fantasy later in the franchise, unaware she even existed. When they later play FF4, they do it without any knowledge of how she shaped the franchise, so they assume the worst out of her.

The positive here is that over the past 7 years or so, people have been more respectful about Rosa both as her own character and for her place in the franchise. Not Squeenix, of course; they keep excluding Rosa from things because they figure they can get more money out of Rydia and not enough out of Rosa. But in terms of the fan community, things are much better than it used to be.

I’ve written about GamerGate (mostly on Twitter). I’ve written about Marvel treating the X-Men and Fantastic Four fanbases like shit, including harsh criticism about Tom Brevoort and Rick Remender. I’ve written about how companies like Squeenix and Capcom have screwed over franchises purely to hop on the latest trends, out of greed, including harsh criticism of Motomu Toriyama.

Right now, I want to write about the intersection of all these ideas, and this is all personal.

I’m all for people voicing their grievances, and demanding they get heard, but I draw the line with doxxing, death threats and harassment. Anyone that does that is a colossal asshole. No matter how much a guy like Tom Brevoort pisses me off, I am never going to send him threats, or create a big campaign to have people harass his family, or pay someone to dig up personal information. I will never do that, because it’s wrong. It’s sick and inhumane.

Likewise, I may look down and speak negatively about CBR’s forums now, as I have with other sites, but I’m not going to try to get anyone to smear an admin, or write to their advertisers to try to kill funding they need to run the site. That behavior is asinine and unacceptable. I don’t like what they do, but that doesn’t give me the right to ruin lives and try to destroy communities for my own reasons.

If I have a legitimate gripe, and I believe I do in most cases, then spreading that gripe alone is more than enough. Spreading it is all I will ever need, because I trust human beings to be smart enough to see the same problems for themselves. Real problems don’t require me to manipulate people with lies and propaganda. Real problems are their own undoing, and all I have to do is say they exist.

That’s why, after all the things I’ve said before, I will never support GamerGate. I know what it is and how it works, and it is not what people supporting it want others to believe it is. I look forward to the day when the industry can talk about real ethical concerns in games journalism again. Until then, I may not even say a lot of them that actually do exist, because if I can help it, I’m not going to be the reason some assholes go out and ruin an entire family’s life over video games.

spasticatt:

marvelusedtomatter:

salarta:

fanservicethor:

salarta:

From what I can tell, Disney and Marvel are doing it to be dicks about the pissing match between Disney and Fox over the X-Men film rights. Disney doesn’t own the film rights to the X-Men films, they don’t like the terms with Fox or don’t like that Fox owns the film rights, and they think diminishing and ruining the X-Men franchise in the comics is the way to go.

It’s why they’re trying to turn the Inhumans into a replacement for the X-Men. It’s why Wolverine’s been killed off and Magneto will likely be too. It’s why the X-Men didn’t have a panel at SDCC last year while Spider-Verse did, and why there’s been a massive drop in the number of X-Men titles since last year. It’s why when Days of Future Past came out, Marvel Entertainment put out no advertising for the X-Men comics or put Pietro on any covers of All-New X-Factor. In fact, I strongly suspect the real reason All-New X-Factor got no real promotion and ultimately got canceled was the pissing contest between Disney and Fox over the films.

There are smart ways to handle a spat with another company over rights, and there are stupid ways. Disney and Marvel are choosing to be really, really stupid. It’s going to bite them in the ass, if it hasn’t already.

Its only going to bite them in the ass in the short run. Disney/Marvel is playing a much larger game they’re confident they can win. In light of the facts that superheroes are not leaving anytime soon, Marvel’s incredibly long history of publishing, the nostalgic nature of the viewers/readers, and that Disney has a ton of resources at their disposal, they’re probably going to get the X-Men back and then go back to how things were. Even if they lose a majority of readers now, 5 years down the road human nature will kick in and readers will return, new readers will develop, and Disney will make a profit again. This is how business is run and how risk works.

Actually, it’ll bite them in the ass in the long run too. They’re playing a larger game, but not large enough, and they’re going to lose.

Disney and Marvel are operating under the assumption that hurting the X-Men franchise on their end trickles down into hurting Fox. And to a very small and limited extent, that’s true. It does mean less exposure if there’s no cartoons or toys, and people who started reading the comics for non-X-Men franchises might not shift over into being diehard X-Men fans if the X-Men aren’t used much or well.

But those are small numbers compared to the film consumer base. If the film is good enough, people will go see it anyway. Look at the Resident Evil live-action films. They screw over the source material. The second film especially is a huge insult to Jill Valentine in particular. People complain about those films constantly online. And yet… they’re some of the most successful films based on video games out there. Capcom isn’t even making any toys or video games or anything to help promote those films, and they’re still successful. Perhaps a case could be made that Capcom continuing to push the franchise with recent games contributes to that, but the second film came out at a low point for the franchise.

That’s what Fox is looking at. In the X-Men franchise, Fox has a franchise that served as Marvel’s biggest moneymaker for a decade. They can still promote the hell out of it without Marvel’s help through commercials, collabs with places like 7-Eleven, that sort of thing. That may even include some games or a live-action show. Fox isn’t going to throw away something with enough history of success that they know it can be successful again. They’re not going to give it up unless Disney and Marvel make them a very generous and tempting offer.

By contrast, Disney and Marvel are pushing away a LOT of current diehard fans of the X-Men franchise with their current behavior. At the bare minimum, they’re pushing fans toward seeing the films to get their fix of the X-Men franchise they love so much, because Disney and Marvel refuse to give it to them.

At worst? They play into Fox’s hand. Since Disney and Marvel own the franchise, they could set a narrative of giving more exposure to the X-Men franchise, in the form of “We could treat the franchise so much better if things could be worked out with Fox.” Play up collaboration between Avengers and X-Men, but in a way that the X-Men actually look good and are treated with respect. When a film comes out, stress the source material, and emphasize the idea that Fox is straying too far from it.

But that’s not what Disney and Marvel are doing. Instead, they’re trying to diminish and ruin the franchise on their own end. Doing this results in Disney and Marvel looking like they’re BAD for the franchise. On the one hand, we have Fox. Fox strays from the source material, may do odd things or even bomb occasionally… but it’s granting the franchise more respect than Disney and Marvel have demonstrated with their ownership of everything outside the film rights.

Disney and Marvel are essentially turning the X-Men fanbase against themselves.

And you might say “Yeah, but the Marvel films mean those fans will be replaced,” but that’s a misconception. It implies you can only have one or the other. In reality, there is no choice between one or the other here. You can have both. No matter how you look at it, Disney and Marvel refusing to treat the franchise respectfully on their end translates into a loss of sales, and there’s no Avengers-side counter-gain to make up for it.

“Equaling out” back to what they were before these tactics, if it happens, will not be a sign of success. It will still be less than the gain they would’ve had if they didn’t pull these stunts in the first place. That effect is permanent.

Sorry for the long screed, I think I’ve said all I needed to now.

The X-Men were Marvel’s biggest property for nearly 30 years, actually, from the late 70’s until the Decimation. And it doesn’t even need to be said that reducing the mutants on Earth from several million to 198* around the same time they started thinking of creating their own movieverse (after the success of the X-Men and Spidey films) and giving more attention to the Avengers – which, coincidentally or not, no longer counted with any of its classic mutant members on its roster (quite the opposite, when you consider that one of those mutants became the one responsible for disassembling them), but took advantage of the massive popularity Wolverine has always had, which only increased after Hugh Jackman, to boost the sales. And when the Avengers profits surpass all their best hopes and expectations, what happens? Oh, that’s right, they kill Wolverine.

{*yes, I know there are more than 198 mutants now, and that AvX made it so new mutants can appear, but where are all those new mutants again? I don’t think we saw more than 20 appear since 2012. Their presence is barely felt on the fictional societies in the Marvel Universe, like even the common people have forgotten about mutants most of the time. Compare it to the Claremont or the Morrison years, or to how many new inhumans seem to appear every month.}

In one of these videos, I don’t remember which, they said that, back when Marvel was going bankrupt, they sold one of their properties to Fox (I don’t remember if it was X-Men or Fantastic Four) for 10 million dollars. 10 million! Alright, that was worth a lot more in the late 90’s than it is today, but it’s still too little for properties as well known as these. Marvel was desperate, and Fox took advantage of it to get the rights for a bunch of movies with a huge profit from the start. Not the nicest move, but capitalism rarely is. So, much like Alan Moore’s righteous indignation at how he was treated by the Big Two, the Marvel/Fox relationship has been sour from the start, but it still helped save the company, not to mention how, if the first X-Men movie had failed, we certainly wouldn’t have all these superhero movies today.

Okay, and where do I want to get with this? That salarta is absolutely right – since Marvel and Fox have never had a good relationship, the X-Men are now, more than ever, suffering the consequences of that. And, on one hand, it makes sense for them to do what they’re doing – whatever the terms of their negotiation with Fox were, they don’t get as much money from X-Men and Fantastic Four toys, cartoons, videogames, etc, as they do from properties that are entirely theirs, like GotG, or those they are sharing with a company they have a good relationship with, as is evident by the Spider-Man situation. Capitalism. The comics suffer from it because they don’t make half as much money as the movies, and probably the cartoons, do nowadays, and yet they are still a promotion of sorts to those properties. So they cut down the X-comics to a minimum, cancel Fantastic Four, rarely include them in their celebrations and advertising, and bet on flooding the market with Guardians of the Galaxy and Inhumans comics beyond what seems reasonable – come on, there are too many books of those, and not enough people buying them yet, but they still see it as a more worthwhile risk to take than putting out X-Men comics that, if successful, will give them (and especially their mother-company) less money than a successful GotG or Inhuman line, though X-Men is much more likely to succeed than the other two. 

While that makes sense in the short run, as it allows them to focus on promoting their not-as-well-known teams, it’s a stupid long-term strategy. Here are the 5 possible scenarios to come from it:

1. they are successful in diminishing people’s interest in the X-Men, but Fox still manages to make a lot of money from the movies, and those rights don’t return to Marvel;
2. they are successful in diminishing people’s interest in the X-Men, Fox doesn’t give up and continues trying new ways to make one of their most lucrative franchises continue to be so, and Marvel doesn’t get the rights back;
3. they are successful in diminishing people’s interest in the X-Men, all the Fox movies are a failure, and ten years after the last movie Marvel gets the rights back, but by that time people have finally gotten tired of superhero movies and moved on to the next big thing (I’m hoping it’s dinosaurs), they are no longer a good investment, and the Marvel executives realize they actually lost money they could have made with the comics all in the hopes of hypothetical movies some day;
4. they fail, people continue to love the X-Men and the Fox movies, the potential new readers are all disappointed by the lack of new X-Men comics to choose from in the store or Comixology and end up not buying anything;
5. and, the only one that ends well for Marvel: they fail, people continue to love the X-Men and the Fox movies, they realize they are never getting those rights back and are actually losing money when they fail to publish all the X-books the readers clearly want to buy, so they fix that situation and the world goes back to the way it’s meant to be.

But the worst thing, for me, is that, by demoting the X-Men, we lose everything they mean. This is not about nostalgia, and, sure, it’s better to have actual than virtual representation, but not every minority is properly represented yet or at all (barely any of them are, actually), and metaphors and fictional minorities like the X-Men are still useful to discuss subjects that would be too sensitive to approach using real ones. Think of the Genoshan genocide, or all those comics about how humans reacted to the Decimation, or Days of Future Past – none of those stories could have been told using a real-world minority, and even if they could they would not be as effective, because the point of the X-Men is that they represent each and every oppressed person, with a reach that goes beyond gender, race, sexuality, religious or political beliefs, economic situation, illness… everything. Everyone who has ever felt alone and hated for being different can relate to the X-Men, and is there anything more important than that kind of support and hope, especially on today’s world? And that’s something you don’t get elsewhere. They might be trying to use the Inhumans to fill that gap, but it’s failing spectacularly, because the Inhumans are, for better or worse, a nationality, and as such their reach will always be more limited (plus, the people who might buy it are the X-Men fans, or those with potential of becoming so, who are all too unhappy at Marvel to give them a chance). You might enjoy Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy or Inhumans (I do), and even relate to a character or two on the roster, but 95% of you won’t feel the kind of emotional connection to them as a group that minorities everywhere have always felt for the X-Men – since, you know, you’re not part of a paramilitary organization, space pirates, or an isolationist nation once located on the moon. They just don’t have that potential.

To conclude, that is why most of the X-comics we’ve had in the past couple years were either part of a company-wide strategy of making their line more diverse (X-Men, Storm, Uncanny X-Force Vol. 2); traditional books that were still popular enough that people would get upset if cancelled too soon, so they waited until they reached the necessary minimum to justify their cancellation, which was inevitable since they didn’t get any significant promotion (X-Force, X-Factor); and the fruits of Brian Michael Bendis’ lobbying and story pitches (All-New X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Cyclops, Magneto, Battle of the Atom, possibly Black Vortex). I’m not much of a fan of Bendis’ writing or how his X-Men stories don’t seem to be getting anywhere, but I’ll be forever grateful for what he’s done to ensure the X-books survived a little longer. Yet, he’s moving on to other books now, and while it’s hard to make predictions before Secret Wars, I think it’s safe to believe that Marvel will continue to cut down on X-books, until maybe only Uncanny X-Men remains (possibly Storm and Magneto too, if we’re lucky, for the whole diversity thing), since the Schism seems to be over now, and to appease us and pretend they’re not doing what they’re clearly doing, so they can avoid losing more readers when they’re not gaining that many new ones. But we’re paranoid and like to play the victims, right, there’s clearly no empiric data to back us up, we don’t know what we’re talking about, right?

The fact that Marvel continues to put the fans down by saying that we’re ‘overreacting’ and ‘delusional’, shutter they are CLEARLY citing the X-men franchise to a minimum in order to promote the Avengers, GotG and Inhumans, is a far greater insult to me than anything they’ve done thus far. Although taking away the mutant factor of the X-men is a pretty close second.