1876 réponses à ce sujet

[deaf2heart_]

Having a great boss is like this, good for you guys for defending her for just talking about what she wants from video games. And I loved Dragon age 2, she does good work and she should get props for it.

[Jahannam]

OmegaXI wrote...

Wow I just found out about this, that poor lady has all my support. Anyway to find the people who did this acount and ban them from bioware games?

Banning IP addresses gets a bit complicated. I wont get into it all here. Account banning should be more frequent.

[Siduri]

It's shameful that Jennifer Hepler was targeted like this, and shameful that anyone would try to condone or defend the harassment she suffered. Good for Bioware for taking a strong stand backing her.

[Harle Cerulean]

Bioware, thank you very much for standing with Jennifer Hepler. Harassment like she has suffered is intolerable, and I'm pleased to see you taking that stance as well.

[StarHugger]

To the defense of Aaryn and Jennifer, I'd like to point out that Twitter is not an official platform in all cases. The @masseffect account is official, but Aaryn's account is his own personal account, so if he chooses to defend his peer with harsh language, that's his choice and does not reflect the opinion of BioWare as a whole. Really, people. It's like if I work for Coca Cola and on Twitter I tell someone "you are a sick piece of ****!" and they say "OMG, so unprofessional of Coca Cola!" No, you just got insulted by a guy who happens to work there, that's all.

[Safanarj]

Dear Jennifer Hepler I'm not too sure if this will reach you in any way but please don't let yourself be put down by such miserable people, there are many who love your work. I can understand your view and must say it's like when you like to build houses in Sims but then don't like the actual gameplay. Your doint a great job unfortunately people are better in seeing and accusing the bad side than the good one

Let them moan so they can be proud of themselves that they had something to moan about again and continue your awesome work, wich you are doing brilliantly

*thumbs up* for you

Sincerely

Safana

[BellaStrega]

Jelefant wrote...

Well I'm sorry, if that's not a fact I'll go have my eyes checked

Ah, the "I was only being honest" excuse.

[AstraDrakkar]

Kudos to Bioware for sticking up for Ms. Hepler. Why couldn't i have an employer like Bioware? Sadly, I have no computer programming or writing skills . ( If you guys at Bioware ever need an employee nurse, look me up. )

Modifié par AstraDrakkar, 22 février 2012 - 03:35 .

[Melca36]

Here's nice defintion of what "out of context" means.....

http://en.wikipedia..../Out_of_context

The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as "contextomy" or "quote mining", is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.[1]
Arguments based on this fallacy typically take two forms. As a straw man
argument, which is frequently found in politics, it involves quoting an
opponent out of context in order to misrepresent their position
(typically to make it seem more simplistic or extreme) in order to make
it easier to refute. As an appeal to authority,
it involves quoting an authority on the subject out of context, in
order to misrepresent that authority as supporting some position.[2]

That is what people did to that quote from a 6 year old interview

[jesuno]

StarHugger wrote...

To the defense of Aaryn and Jennifer, I'd like to point out that Twitter is not an official platform in all cases. The @masseffect account is official, but Aaryn's account is his own personal account, so if he chooses to defend his peer with harsh language, that's his choice and does not reflect the opinion of BioWare as a whole. Really, people. It's like if I work for Coca Cola and on Twitter I tell someone "you are a sick piece of ****!" and they say "OMG, so unprofessional of Coca Cola!" No, you just got insulted by a guy who happens to work there, that's all.

Completely wrong. Twitter and Facebook are seen as very offical platforms, even if it is your personal one. Most companies these days keep tabs on their workers' profiles, and most HR departments have instructions to search the applicant's online personas. Go to a resume writing course, and one of the things they list is to pull all questionable or indecent activity off.

I think people are losing sight of the the fact that Hepler and Flynn are just people as well, and people make mistakes. Those mistakes, however, where no where near as bad as what was being said about her before and after, and did not warrent attack on her person or residence.

[toli_man]

Aeowyn wrote...

Deus Ex HR has a story mode "Tell me a Story". People get riled up with the Story mode in ME3 because that's apparently Hepler's fault but they don't think about the fact that ME3's story mode is hardly new.

Edit: And from what I've gathered it's the combat she's having issues with.

DXHR was all about the conspiracy, from 2 seconds in till the end credits. it always has been.

Messing with that would be suicidal for the developer and the studio developing the game, they'd never get good press, and the company would feel that pressure every time

most gamers and developers know that without spore, kane and lynch 2, or kotor 2 ...  that they can be fallible, not just financially, but the community can snap back on a developer and cause problems. The reality is, people do remember, but they don't care enough to not buy the newest game, or hate the developer who put themselves out there.

While that hatred is obviously misplaced, Angry gamers do hate, but relative to say, michael bay, or george lucas hate, or tebow hate, it's marginal and disaffective and reductive to displacement about perhaps their own life, or the anger created from playing or not being able to play the game they wanted. and gamers, are relatively sane compared to most fans.  but the darker side of that is very dark.

i.e. in Spore's case, the DRM was bad, but, collectively, the game was far worse, and the backlash intensified by blaming the DRM measures, which in turn, displaced all the emotion and  that anger at the game, and the expense of paying the money, the lost hope and expectations, the build up,etc,

and turned that emotion into vengeance at a perceived issue, the threat of it's new form of DRM. While practically, the DRM affected perhaps 20% of the vocal side of the community, the rage was immediate and palpable at the time. and it substituted for a lot of people, any kind of logical problems with the game, they latched on to that one issue and filled it with venom and hatred, and death threats, etc. 

anyway, 

ME 1/2/3, the mechanics and genre of the series was about integral action adventure, the ARPG route. Taking the action out, or the adventure, is critical tampering with the mechanics for a chance to reinvent gaming.

the content of those /r/gaming threads, since deleted, but available on archives, other gaming forums, and on people's twitter accounts, etc.  is pretty detestable, but lead from  speculation that ME3 was being changed due to percieved problems with the gameplay from ME2. out of context, it was unconsciable, in context, it was dubious and fearmongering, and fraudulent, which was why it was deleted from reddit soon after, but then posted elsewhere and on social networking sites, etc.

it was touchy for a few reasons, it's one of the more salient points of modern multi-platform development, the constant scaling back that occurs in depth, content and narrative, to address perceived faults in developeing a sequel, perhaps directly as a consequence of the efforts of DA2 to address perceived faults in the first DA game, then mishandled, mismanaged, or just incomplete, or unplayed. there were very unhappy gamers that created some very ugly, accurate comics, blog entries and memes in 2011 about those changes in DA2, and that's part of the community. 

i noticed a lot in the demo, that i hope is only in the demo, that seems to be indicative of tampering with that mechanic, not "story difficulty", but the harbinger that is the console mindset, hitting enemies with melee attacks, frequent health/shield regen, etc. factors that ME2 altered in their migration from ME1 to ME2, in terms of mechanics and interaction with the player, that are critical experiences for the player, that may break immersion for ME2 to ME3 players. i'll find out later i suppose once i play ME3. 

Still, gaming has had sacred cows before, sacred genres, sacred mechanics, and they've been ignored quite often in the search for a new audience and a shorter development pipeline, more especially multiple development platform game develoment, with FPS gaming being one of those pipelines that makes gaming easy to deliver and test and get an audience up to speed,

FP-RPG's being a dynamic that makes people feel it's open-world, without having to code for that open-world, etc. and the consequence is often felt in that backlash to the game and the developers if they stick their heads out. bioware has been insulated from the full extent of that residual and misplaced angst for a long, long time and it's facing that community right now i expect since the release of SWTOR and DA2. 

the concept that Hapler stumbled over in that interview, and to be fair, it was years ago now, is a sacred cow, the scale of difficulty in games, and the flow of the achievement model in regulating action and combat. 

where you battle an end boss to get the cinematic, is pretty sacred ground on most games. it is essentially, the treadmill of every game, to defeat something, and accept a reward. i believe her context was that narrative, doesn't need the typical destructive achievement /objective completion that ARPG's value as the "meat" of the game, and it probably doesn't need the gamer to kill 900 krogans in the basement, and walk out the door to face robots and spiders, etc.  but then it would not be that genre of game, if you could turn off the difficulty, if you could pass by the krogans to get to the spiders because you got sick of it. it would be akin to skipping ahead in the book, avoiding the middle to see if the butler killed mr darcy in the dining room with the candlestick without the interleaving drama and red herrings, etc.

while it would be incredibly hard to sell an ARPG without the A or the G, developing without the A or the G happens all the time. sometimes, they forget the G. or the P, or the A in the rush to get the product out the door.  

what actually happened to create this mess, is *much* easier to find out. 

/v/ had railed on hapler a year earlier for the jarring displacement of the narrative options with anders, and how absurd the homosexuality was presented, even quoting people who were homosexual having problems with the dialogue and content at the time, to confer that it wasn't just their prejudice.  then they started to see if it was isolated to just "tweaking for a wider audience/controversy", or if the author of that change, was purely responsible for a series of horrible choices and tweaks for a console platform, or if it was due to mismanagement, micromanagement, or a series of understandable errors, rather than deliberate corruption or a failure of development. 

the lack of information about the game development team, the lack of critical feedback post-DA2, and the notion of critical contempt being censored on the bioware forums, lead to a mistrust and a misconstruction on the majority of gaming foums and on community sites elsewhere. the problem was, there were signs, MITH, being one of the examples people used to support haplers percieved skills as a writer,  the video interview, her very tiny footprint of writing , and generally her internet persona, or the lack of one, painted a very destructive image to people who wanted a scapegoat. 

the "cancer" accusation, etc. was a mutation of a 4chan meme,  to identify that notion of angst, that players felt in being involved with a game, they felt was horribly mutilated from the expectations.

hapler, not knowing any of this, should have been aware of this, wasn't. simple google searching her name, would have revealed a vocal community that was against her, it does now, but it did before as well. still, a good community is rare, an exceptional community handles malcontent with humour and refrain, it's rare and notable.

the majority of the community, only hates. that's what it does. anything else a community does, is the exception.

the halper non-gamer meme is amusing though for it's inconsistency. it's purely designed to antagonise people, as was the misinformation, anti-hype and rhetoric that Hapler recieved upon entering into twitter as a free agent. 

out of context, it is vile, in context, it's a meta-game that you have to realise is full of normal people, idiots, anonymous, badly informed, low IQ idiots.

nobody expects the internet to be mean, but it is, and it's voracious at times. and tragically, the internet is full of self-informed hipsters.

/v/ is all about the disconnect of peer identity and gaming as a hipster fashion, the concept of /v/irgins being cool is the signature of a driven, communal sense of anti-conformity. the more they hate the game openly and without mercy, the more they enjoy and love it secretly. and the more they love it without question, is typically when the game has passed through into nostalgia. it's not exactly a community people identify with, due to the slavish anti-conformism, but they hold their values as sacred as any dogma, knowing it's wrong, makes them better people.

so, there's that.

anything passing through the lens of /v/ is going to be a kind of conciliatory gesture of beautiful ugliness, much like the /v/ga awards parodying the spike video games awards, awarding equal time to good and bad games, that the typical awards show could never look at. 

still, back to the point, being able to skip ahead, has unintended consequences for the flow of the game itself, and in a modern $60 12 hour singleplayer game, being able to skip ahead is going to present horrific conequences for the future of games in the current 15-20-30 month development  and publishing mindset to create cinematic FPS games.

there are few games that value a long-term investment in gameplay, that aren't RPG's or MMO's. console development makes that premise hard in the current expectations for DLC, for animated 3D avatars, fast action, world building and short intermission gameplay, etc. and quarterly DLC addons,etc. 

and sure. people skip narrative all the time, but, in WRPG's, the whole notion of scaled difficulty or 'consistent difficulty' is something that WRPG's can sacrifice for narrative. JRPG's hone skill and gear collection because their notion of enjoyment is skewed along the notion of skill advancement in the player, not the narrative or the finality of the game experience.

RPG's are sort of the last bastion for games that require time sinks, skill & gathering mechanics and artifices, barriers to gameplay that can only be won through development of player skills and acquisition of gear and social/faction treadmills. FPS doesn't have those, and it's successful on a scale that RPG's aren't in a western market. 


the problem with skippable action is, narrative feels stupid. the problem with skippable narrative is, action feels stupid and disconnected. but its only a problem in games that have a strong narrative elelemt, where players have to invest in the outcome, have to know more, have to care about the character.  

without the fluff to show the gamer how epic their achievement is, they don't feel engaged, only numb from the lack of accomplisment or finality. if you instill a sense of impending cinematics every time someone enters the room, it lacks definition, people refuse to walk near rooms before reloading and saving the game so they can skip ahead, etc. 

i.e. the notion of  "press X to not die" versus "press X to win" is one issue that people are frustrated with in the schism between FPS and RPG's and the era of kismet/cutschema's, i.e. Press X to ...  can be immensely jarring. but in context, arguably, being in the same recycled dungeon, in an otherwise consistent game, can be harrowing. DA2, broke a lot of that flow mechanic in the way it asked players to collect companions, then disown them, etc. 

Modifié par toli_man, 22 février 2012 - 04:52 .

[sagevallant]

Just a quick visit to show a little support. Those idiots don't speak for all of us, Jennifer!

Honestly, while not outright wanting to skip the gameplay, I am one of the gamers that slogs on for the sake of the story. This is why Bioware is my favorite developer.

[Justin85]

Dragon Age 2 helped get my wife through her debilitating pregnancy. She was pretty immobile, so I would sit and play DA2 while she watched, and we both really enjoyed the story. (And don't even get me started on Dragon Age: Origins... another masterpiece.) Your writing makes a positive difference in people's lives -- proven by the fact millions of people continue to buy Bioware products.

As a professional writer myself, I know I would feel devastated after the lambasting you received. In general, writers tend to be pretty sheepish and self conscious! But don't feel bad. Your writing is engaging to say the least. I promise. Keep up the great work!

[Enduance XXVII]

Jahannam wrote...

Enduance XXVII wrote...

mjh417 wrote...

Somehow I didn't even know any of this was going on til this morning, but I'm glad to hear that Bioware is gonna support her. She did nothing wrong and a bunch of nuts are attacking her now over nothing.

Hah, that's a joke. Both side were wrong. But I guess on these forums only Bioware is right.

So give me your facebook page and after I insult you and degrade you for half a year and you finally respond, You will say we are both right.

I respond by saying I have a penis and you're a woman, so your point is invalid. What would you say then? Sexism right? That's what Helper said.

Like I said ealier, Kotick, Gabe, all have taken critism more than a year. I won't go into details of what people say about them but they move on and keep making/publishing games, not repond to some trolls.

[Dynamok]

When you start marketing towards the CoD audience, this is what you get.

[ScottishMartialArts]

Kaduos wrote...

First off, these people are actually crying about a writer who doesn't play games - or, more accurately, plays games, but would rather see the story than the gameplay? So, let me get this straight; to be a writer, you have to like playing games? Is that what the argument is here? Or is this an argument about gameplay vs story? Or something else? I'm confused, because none of that would make sense anyway, because they're two entirely different things that can exist without eachother completely, so what's the problem again?

Just imagine a screenwriter who doesn't much like movies. Writing for the screen you need to be able to think visually, to imagine your writing as it will appear in a movie. If a screenwriter doesn't like or doesn't understand cinema as a medium, then they aren't going to make a very effective writer. Likewise, a videogame writer needs to be able to imagine how they're going to integrate their storytelling with gameplay, and how the two are going to complement each other. One of my main complaints with Bioware's writing is they aren't very good at pacing their exposition, often having extended 10 minute expository conversations in the midst of a high tension action sequence -- think the first conversation with Jacob in the opening level of ME2. Delaying verbal exposition until the player has come down from an action sequence makes for better video game writing, but if someone doesn't get the medium, they're not going to understand how to pace their writing to complement gameplay.

[ScottishMartialArts]

Melca36 wrote...

Here's nice defintion of what "out of context" means.....

http://en.wikipedia..../Out_of_context

The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as "contextomy" or "quote mining", is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.[1]
Arguments based on this fallacy typically take two forms. As a straw man
argument, which is frequently found in politics, it involves quoting an
opponent out of context in order to misrepresent their position
(typically to make it seem more simplistic or extreme) in order to make
it easier to refute. As an appeal to authority,
it involves quoting an authority on the subject out of context, in
order to misrepresent that authority as supporting some position.[2]

That is what people did to that quote from a 6 year old interview

Right, but even with the full context it's pretty hard to come away from the interview with the impression that Hepler actually likes PLAYING videogames. That's what I take issue with: a game developer who isn't actually passionate about gameplay. Granted she's a game writer, but even writers need to understand gameplay and how best to complement it with their writing. If you don't "get it", the end result will be a badly paced mess. Now I'm not suggesting games should be all action sequences and story only gets in the way, but merely that a game needs to have story well integrated with its gameplay or the experience will become disjointed.

[Rinji the Bearded]

ScottishMartialArts wrote...

Right, but even with the full context it's pretty hard to come away from the interview with the impression that Hepler actually likes PLAYING videogames. That's what I take issue with: a game developer who isn't actually passionate about gameplay. Granted she's a game writer, but even writers need to understand gameplay and how best to complement it with their writing. If you don't "get it", the end result will be a badly paced mess. Now I'm not suggesting games should be all action sequences and story only gets in the way, but merely that a game needs to have story well integrated with its gameplay or the experience will become disjointed.

That's why skipping combat would be completely optional, just like skipping dialogue already is.  Don't want to skip the combat? Okay, then don't?

Hepler has no bearing on the gameplay -- she writes parts of the story and that is absolutely it.  It's pretty obvious with the great amount of story-gameplay segregation in DA2 that gameplay developers and the writers do not collaborate as much as a lot of people would like them to.  However, how is this exclusively Hepler's fault?  She's not the lead writer, nor did any of her contributions in DA2 have much to do with said story-gameplay segregation.

Modifié par RinjiRenee, 22 février 2012 - 05:21 .

[ScottishMartialArts]

simfamSP wrote...

Well your arguement is put aside by the fact that Jennifer has written pretty amazing stuff.

See, I would disagree on that point. I don't know off hand precisely which parts of Dragon Age were written by Hepler, but if we look at the product as a whole, it wasn't exactly exhibit A in the case for video game writing as great literature. Instead it was pretty boilerplate genre fantasy, with all the annoying hallmarks of Bioware's style: poorly paced, psychological issues standing in for character depth, excessive use of dialogue solely for exposition, etc.

[ScottishMartialArts]

RinjiRenee wrote...


That's why skipping combat would be completely optional, just like skipping dialogue already is.  Don't want to skip the combat? Okay, then don't?

Hepler has no bearing on the gameplay -- she writes parts of the story and that is absolutely it.  It's pretty obvious with the great amount of story-gameplay segregation in DA2 that gameplay developers and the writers do not collaborate as much as a lot of people would like them to.  However, how is this exclusively Hepler's fault?  She's not the lead writer, nor did any of her contributions in DA2 have much to do with said story-gameplay segregation.

Gameplay is a tightly integrated whole. Change one component, you change the whole experience. For example, designing a game around the limitations of a console controller has a strong effect on the gameplay, even if there's a pretty good PC port -- it's why console first person shooters are so much slower than the PC-designed shooters of yore, or why Birds of Prey doesn't have the tactical depth of IL-2 Sturmovik. Likewise, if you build a game around the gameplay being optional that's going to affect how that gameplay plays -- I can only imagine that the disjointed segregation you see between gameplay and story in Bioware games would only get worse.

As for Hepler, I'm not trying to lay all of Bioware's ills at her feet, but instead saying that she's symptomatic of a larger problem. Were Bioware's writers more tightly involved with the design process and were they able to speak the language of game design, you might have a more integrated game-story experience than what currently exists in Bioware's offerings.

[Stanley Woo]

Guldhun2 wrote...

Jahannam wrote...

No, you can criticise all you want. Can you do it without being a jackass is the question.

No you can't. Not on the Bioware forums.

Even if people give well thought out arguments, they quickly get an avalanche of drones replying with the "No it's not, so it's not".

And those who want to post messages of support and positivity are quickly shouted down by those who need to have their say "just so BioWare won't think there are no problems with the game." So it evens out. All you want is fairness, right?

So how about both sides of the discussion allow the other some leeway to discuss their opinions, and both sides be more accepting of dissenting opinions? And you might start by not calling those who support BioWare "drones."

There, now we can all stop being jackasses, all right?

[chestersmurf]

OmegaXI wrote...

Wow I just found out about this, that poor lady has all my support. Anyway to find the people who did this acount and ban them from bioware games?

I just found out about this too and it is terrible. I agree with you that the people should be banned if possible. Block there origin ID or SOMETHING because people have to understand/learn that this kind of behavior is unacceptable. Not only is it an absurd response to ANY opinion. But the idea of a fast forward button is even a good one. I know after playing ME1 6 times I would have skipped certain battles if I could.

[Rinji the Bearded]

ScottishMartialArts wrote...

As for Hepler, I'm not trying to lay all of Bioware's ills at her feet, but instead saying that she's symptomatic of a larger problem. Were Bioware's writers more tightly involved with the design process and were they able to speak the language of game design, you might have a more integrated game-story experience than what currently exists in Bioware's offerings.

Or maybe the gameplay designers could give the writers a little more leeway (ie, not demanding that there be  blood mage enemies running rampant and giving the false illusion that Kirkwall is full of blood mages because they want the player to have mages to fight).  I don't agree that the writers have to know all the nuances of gameplay in order to their job -- perhaps the gameplay designers need to be bit more sensitive to the writers as well?  Plus, it was not Hepler's fault exclusively that the story-gameplay segregation happened, yet she's being treated as the sole perpretator hecause of something she said six years ago.

Modifié par RinjiRenee, 22 février 2012 - 05:43 .