T w e n t y S i d e d
Kaiden is so fired for this.
The Last Big Thing from Apple!
Here’s a comic I wrote a month ago.
Here is a joke that appeared on Begeek.fr, this week.
Look, I don’t claim to own a joke. The internet is one big remix tape of ideas, feeding and looping back on itself. That’s what’s beautiful about it. It’s completely possible that begeek.fr saw the joke I wrote and thought it could be done better. Arguably, that’s what happened. The Begeek.fr version of the joke was picked up on the Consumerist and Gizmodo, as well as showing up on Digg in a big way.
But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to at least expect a link back. A hat tip. A “here is where the joke came from”. (And if begeek.fr wanted to maintain Plausible deniability – which they totally could have pulled off with a joke this simple – they shouldn’t have done a straight copy & paste of the third panel, which I photoshopped myself.)
But cut & pasting my work and then basically re-telling the joke I wrote with small modifications and then passing it off as an original idea is a jerk move. I would have loved to have a little sip of that massive Digg, Gizmodo, and Consumerist traffic. I work hard to draw attention to my stuff and build an audience, and breaks like that never come as often as I’d like. I think a small link is just a matter of basic courtesy, honesty, and manners. Particularly when the traffic starts pouring in. It wouldn’t have hurt begeek.fr at all to say where the joke came from or what it was based on. It’s not like I’m asking for money. Just a few bytes of HTML and some basic decency.
(And don’t bother, now. It’s too late.)
Update: begeek.fr left a comment below indicating that the image was sent to them via email. Can’t really prove them wrong, so the matter is settled. I think they could have dodged this by just saying it came in email.
Sigh. That’s the way it goes sometimes.
Well, I’m off to make my next bit of entertainment. Maybe this one will hit the big time…
Shamus Plays LOTRO: Part 7
The theft of a handkerchief: Will it, or will it not, end in mass murder?
You’ll have to read to find out.
Escapist Webcomic Contest
A month ago The Escapist launched the webcomic contest, which was an opportunity for someone to score a deal not unlike the one I have with Stolen Pixels. I made a comic that outlined the rules.
The contest is now closed and the contestants are waiting on the judging. The judges have been announced:
- Senior Editor Susan Arendt, Brand Manager Spinwhiz, Community Manager Kuliani, Affiliate Relations Manager Encaen.
- Ryan North of Dinosaur comics.
- Brian Clevinger of 8-Bit Theater
- Shamus Young of Stolen Pixels
This is the “secret project” I alluded to on Monday. And it really is a project. In total, people submitted three hundred and forty six comics, most of which were four strips each. Applying the power of mathematics to these numbers, we discover that there are 1,384 pages of stuff to review. Over half of the submissions came in the final weekend of the contest.
A few years ago most new webcomics revolved around the Two Gamers on a Couch trope. (The gamers were both dudes in 99% of the cases.) This year it looks like the new trend is “Two Dudes who are Game Designers”. Reading through the list, it’s interesting (and saddening) to see the same comedic mistakes made again and again. So many people, all freely and creatively choosing to tread the same ruinous path as a hundred other entries.
I’m not quite done going through the list. I think I’ve at least glanced at each entry once, but I’d like to give them all a second look. I try to read them in a different order each time, just to give them a fair shake. It’s easy to dismiss one as “crap art” if you were just looking at gorgeous artwork. I don’t want to miss some undiscovered XKCD because of this sort of thing. I’m reminded of the Penny Arcade story where their comic was rejected by an editor. From the perspective of Gabe & Tycho it was simply another trial to endure, another slope on the way to the summit. But for someone trying to pick a winner it can serve as a cautionary tale. Odds are very good that one of the three hundred and forty five non-winning entries will go on to find some sort of success. They’ll probably do it just to spite me. Their merchandising alone will exceed my household income, and their biggest selling item will be their logo with a “Rejected by Shamus Young” stamp over it, a satirical jab at my failure to detect their greatness. I’ll be known as the hack who didn’t realize that “Two Game Designers on a Couch with a Cat” was destined for world-class greatness.
That’s the nightmare I keep having, anyway.
I will say that good writers seem to be rarer than good artists. I’ve witnessed a lot of great art married to unworthy writing, but I can’t think of any instances of brilliant writing with terrible art.
I don’t know when the winners will be announced. I’m trying to get my side of things finished up this week.
Spoiler Warning Episode 8
This is where I would make jokes about there being too many elevators if I still had the capacity to do so.
At least Randy put some points into intimidate.
Stolen Pixels #173: Riddled
Arkham Asylum is a fantastic game, if a bit short. I beat the whole thing in a weekend, and it took another evening to run around and finish up 100% of Riddler’s sidequests.
Still, it was uniformly entertaining.
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Once the game was over I tried the “challenge” modes.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Stolen Pixels #173: Riddled”
The Culture of Piracy
DaveMc asks:
What are some ways that the gaming community might make game piracy seem uncool? As you've often said, Shamus, it's a social problem more than a technological one (or at least, all attempts at technological *solutions* are worse than useless). […]
I'm inclined to think that things like Tycho's off-hand dismissal of pirates' self-justifications here are potentially quite powerful:
“For my part, I'm aware that people copy games â€" I was twelve once, after all â€" but the extent to which piracy is accepted as a valid ethos is absurd. It's considered the appropriate response to so many scenarios that the notion of it as an outgrowth of any coherent ethical framework is hilarious. It's so, so rad when people tart up their nihilism.”
That seems like a shot in a culture war where one side asserts that there's something uncool about pretending to be not paying for games out of some sort of principled stand. But what else can be done? […]
The short version, this:
Link (YouTube) |
That’s the end credits to System Shock 2, showing the team as a series of corpses. (Which is an ongoing theme in the game. By the end, the game mechanics will have cultivated an irresistible compulsion to investigate the bodies you encounter.) I watch this and walk away with the impression that these people busted their butts to bring me this game, and that they took great pride in their work.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Culture of Piracy”
From The Archives:
Overused Words in Game Titles
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
The Gameplay is the Story
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
Spider-Man
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Denuvo and the "Death" of Piracy
Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Philosophy of Moderation
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Was it a Hack?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?