The Professional Gamer - October 17, 2014

I spent almost all of my free time this week with the new shiny game.  And then, I found one of my guilty pleasures on Netflix.  That was most of my week, but to those paying attention to cultural happenings in our world of geekiness, there has been rather a large to do regarding video games.  I've been reluctant to put out my thoughts on the subject, since many other better writers and thinkers have already done so much, but this has come to a head in such a way that most of the reading time was spent on blogs and news sites rather than pleasure reading.  Please click through to read the rest of the article.

Watching: This week, Crystal and I discovered that House Hunters is available on Netflix.  The show happens to be one of our guilty pleasures, largely because we enjoy seeing the houses.  On the other hand, we are almost always annoyed by the behavior of the buyers on the show.  I finally took the time this week to subscribe to the Daily Show Podcast, which has been a lot of fun.  Learning about how the production cycle works on a (mostly) daily broadcast show is interesting.  I don't think that I could handle the level of stress that the writers are regularly subjected to.  If you have some empty time in your podcast schedule, I recommend picking it up,

Playing: More Hyrule Warriors!  This game is a lot of fun, and now we finally seem to be getting to the difficult portion of the game where simply clearing a stage is not enough; the player must get an "A" ranking for the entire stage to get the best rewards.  In addition, the main villains were release this week as playable characters.  So far, I've played as Wizzro and Cia.  Cia is rather effective at taking on groups of enemies in a fairly wide arc, and killing them quickly.  I was able to take a keep on one map in about 1 minute.  Ganondorf is also a fun character to play.  I love the devastation that the player can unleash with his charge up attacks.

Reading: I didn't make much progress in my recording technique books during the past week.  For those who have been paying attention, #gamergate has ended up back in the news.  And I ended up spending most of my normal reading time, trying to keep myself up to speed on the goings-on.  I have been reluctant to speak about it, mainly hoping that more reasonable heads would prevail, and the whole made up scandal would blow over.  It seems that has not happened.  For a well written and unbiased discussion of the what #gamergate is I recommend this article by Kyle Wagner.  Suffice to say, I do think there is an issue with gaming press being too cozy with developers.  However, in reality, these issues are much more prominent at the large press outlets with regards to the AAA publishers, not in the world of small press and indie developers.  Even if #gamergate was pursuing a change for a real problem, their methods are generally criminal and reprehensible.  Death threats, doxxing, and the like are inexcusable.  I agree with Wagner's assessment that #gamergate is primarily about white men fighting to keep their privilege.  I am therefore hopeful that in the next few years, as the community continues to become more inclusive, the vitriol will be drown out by new voices.  In the immediate term, however, #gamergate has been extremely harmful both within the community and to the reputation of our subculture to the world at large.  Maybe if a few of the #gamergate activists who have performed illegal activities are charged accordingly, the rest will calm down.  I look forward to a future where people don't behave like such neanderthals.

That's all I have for this week, and I hope that we have better news to discuss when we meet again.