The necessity of hope
Two years has it been that long? Still, on with it.
Two things occupy me this day, the first is this:
Which is both a virtuoso bit or marketing, and a video that has amassed 1.9 Million views in 1 day.
To talk about why that is important I need to recount the following:
I was walking from the main meal counter to the sweets counter when I was struck with both the absurdity and the life saving nature of hope. At the time I was in despair over my first marriage, there seemed no way out, then in the internal back and forth known as "self talk" I was in engaged in some gallows humour, when part of me said "there is hope in that, at least" and within the space of a step, both the absurdity and the possibility of hope struck me. Literally it was like I was caught in a beam of light. By the time I reached the checkout counter I had decided to get a divorce, because a choice between hope and despair is no choice at all.
The Bethesda Game Studios Community is odd. Both because it is a true community, and because recent events have not been kind to it. I said in a recent tweet that the community is "saturated in disappointment" at present. Which is a truism, and a great cause of sadness for all involved, including your humble scribe. The proximate cause of this is simple to understand. It's called Fallout 76. If you type that into Google, you will get a protean wail of anguish and invective back.
Fallout is not really my franchise, I own Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, simply because of the latter's reputation as the "best" Fallout game. I have them as I too plan to integrate them into the allegedly epic Tale of Two Wastelands in itself a multi year fan made mod, and testament, like the Beyond Skyrim project, (a plan to integrate the rest of Tamriel into Skyrim) to the tenacity and dedication of the community itself. To reintegrate my economics geek for a moment, it is a true Gift Economy.
So with the less than stellar reputation of the the last true Fallout game, Fallout 4. as well as the current Fallout game, Fallout 76. It gives us an insight into the state of the studio. The Elephant in the room however, is The Elder Scrolls VI, if you skip to the middle of this next video you will see the fan reaction to a few seconds of video and what was a pretty lackluster presentation until that point:
Their next new adventure, Starfield can be thought of as a land grab, for the other badly burned community this year, that of Mass Effect. So for Fallout 76 to show the studio in such disarray is cause of much angst.
Of which, this is a fine example. Keep in mind that is a friendly review from an active player, and it has 1.4+ Million views:
You only have to watch 30 seconds or so to get a feel for it. So it is that into this febrile environment, that Obsidian, (recently bought, and infused with cash by Microsoft) Creative independence intact by all accounts, because Microsoft need good games and are clueless as to what that means, in the face of the overwhelming success of Sony this generation. But I digress...
Obsidian have form, they are truly old school RPG makers. They made Fallout New Vegas, and many other well regarded games. So to a community desperately in need of hope, the Obsidian video is like that beam of light, the word hope is actually written on the back of the Player Character's outfit.
Finally, for this part of the ramble, there is this video from a man called Micheal, a stalwart of the community, and the defacto source for in-depth tutorials on how to mod the games themselves:
The closing music is significant IMO, because in many ways, what the games feel like is home.
The rest of this will be about tumblr, the first thing I look at when I wake up in the morning, Mostly supplanting twitter for me. Largely because it manages to combine Skyrim, the infosec crowd and sundry other weirdness into one cohesive whole. It's not without it's issues like rampant porn spambots in addition to the many other bugs of the platform that have never been addressed.
Essentially tumblr will begin blocking porn on December 17th, why? a kneejerk reaction to being blackballed from the Apple App store because a porn bot surfaced Child Porn on tumblr, and tumblr we're not able to filter it out. Child Porn is bad, no question. But gutting a platform, and removing and silencing marginalised communities, in a safe place most of them though as home, is as regressive as it is disruptive. The Irony in this Verge article which argues this is a bad idea for the platform because of what happened to LiveJournal, is not lost on me.
So yeah, some good, some bad, hopefully the community experience that is tumblr doesn't change too much. Otherwise I'll have to read Reddit in the morning.
Two things occupy me this day, the first is this:
Which is both a virtuoso bit or marketing, and a video that has amassed 1.9 Million views in 1 day.
To talk about why that is important I need to recount the following:
I was walking from the main meal counter to the sweets counter when I was struck with both the absurdity and the life saving nature of hope. At the time I was in despair over my first marriage, there seemed no way out, then in the internal back and forth known as "self talk" I was in engaged in some gallows humour, when part of me said "there is hope in that, at least" and within the space of a step, both the absurdity and the possibility of hope struck me. Literally it was like I was caught in a beam of light. By the time I reached the checkout counter I had decided to get a divorce, because a choice between hope and despair is no choice at all.
The Bethesda Game Studios Community is odd. Both because it is a true community, and because recent events have not been kind to it. I said in a recent tweet that the community is "saturated in disappointment" at present. Which is a truism, and a great cause of sadness for all involved, including your humble scribe. The proximate cause of this is simple to understand. It's called Fallout 76. If you type that into Google, you will get a protean wail of anguish and invective back.
Fallout is not really my franchise, I own Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, simply because of the latter's reputation as the "best" Fallout game. I have them as I too plan to integrate them into the allegedly epic Tale of Two Wastelands in itself a multi year fan made mod, and testament, like the Beyond Skyrim project, (a plan to integrate the rest of Tamriel into Skyrim) to the tenacity and dedication of the community itself. To reintegrate my economics geek for a moment, it is a true Gift Economy.
So with the less than stellar reputation of the the last true Fallout game, Fallout 4. as well as the current Fallout game, Fallout 76. It gives us an insight into the state of the studio. The Elephant in the room however, is The Elder Scrolls VI, if you skip to the middle of this next video you will see the fan reaction to a few seconds of video and what was a pretty lackluster presentation until that point:
Their next new adventure, Starfield can be thought of as a land grab, for the other badly burned community this year, that of Mass Effect. So for Fallout 76 to show the studio in such disarray is cause of much angst.
Of which, this is a fine example. Keep in mind that is a friendly review from an active player, and it has 1.4+ Million views:
You only have to watch 30 seconds or so to get a feel for it. So it is that into this febrile environment, that Obsidian, (recently bought, and infused with cash by Microsoft) Creative independence intact by all accounts, because Microsoft need good games and are clueless as to what that means, in the face of the overwhelming success of Sony this generation. But I digress...
Obsidian have form, they are truly old school RPG makers. They made Fallout New Vegas, and many other well regarded games. So to a community desperately in need of hope, the Obsidian video is like that beam of light, the word hope is actually written on the back of the Player Character's outfit.
Finally, for this part of the ramble, there is this video from a man called Micheal, a stalwart of the community, and the defacto source for in-depth tutorials on how to mod the games themselves:
The closing music is significant IMO, because in many ways, what the games feel like is home.
The rest of this will be about tumblr, the first thing I look at when I wake up in the morning, Mostly supplanting twitter for me. Largely because it manages to combine Skyrim, the infosec crowd and sundry other weirdness into one cohesive whole. It's not without it's issues like rampant porn spambots in addition to the many other bugs of the platform that have never been addressed.
Essentially tumblr will begin blocking porn on December 17th, why? a kneejerk reaction to being blackballed from the Apple App store because a porn bot surfaced Child Porn on tumblr, and tumblr we're not able to filter it out. Child Porn is bad, no question. But gutting a platform, and removing and silencing marginalised communities, in a safe place most of them though as home, is as regressive as it is disruptive. The Irony in this Verge article which argues this is a bad idea for the platform because of what happened to LiveJournal, is not lost on me.
So yeah, some good, some bad, hopefully the community experience that is tumblr doesn't change too much. Otherwise I'll have to read Reddit in the morning.