Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Boring PAX East panel is boring - What panels didn't hold up?
Posts
from the news post yesterday -
"it is entirely true that during PAX East, when a DVD of The Dungeon Masters went missing for a panel, my cohort did create a new panel on the spot and then operate said panel for its duration."
I was disappointed with the 'geek is no longer a 4 letter word' panel. The geekdad blogger looked bored to be there, and a good portion of what his wife had to say would have been better suited for a "Geek/Gamer Girls" sort of panel, and seemed kind of rantish. There was some interesting stuff to be said, but overall I didn't come away with much, except that people in the Q&A line need to know when to stop talking. When they said they only had about 10 minutes left for questions, the very next person in the line went on seemingly FOREVER about god knows what. A good amount of people (my group included) got up and left during this guys rambling.
Granted, there would have only been a few minutes left anyways, but as a moderator of a panel, you have to know when to step in and interrupt someone when they go on for too long, and aren't asking any questions...especially when there is still a long line of people waiting to ask something.
And my god, that NVidia 'future of gaming' panel was AWFUL. I'm not some adolescent kid who gets all excited by four letter words, so the whole crank that shit up thing got old after the third time he said it. The technology itself looks cool, but the presentation sucked in my opinion.
Best panel I attended: Future of Online Gaming!
Honestly, at this point, it feels like it might be worth it to just put in a submission for my own Feminism and Fandom panel for the next PAX East and find people who I know will actually tackle the questions they're asked.
After time adrift among open stars
Among tides of light and to shoals of dust
I will return to where I began
Hated:
Enforcement on Xbox LIVE: Tales from the Din Part 2
Good opening the rest might as well have been Stephen Tolouse reciting the TOU for Xbox Live, very defensive and felt like he was assuming he was talking to a bunch of modders/cheaters/etc. instead of gamers.
Disliked:
The Death of Print
I thought I could listen to John Davison and Jeff Green talk about anything and be entertained but there were sound issues and nothing informative, entertaining or useful came out of the panel
Neutral:
NVIDIA Unveils the Next Generation of PC Gaming
Join a live taping of Xbox LIVE's Major Nelson's audio podcast
Liked:
Sequelitis Snake Oil: Quack Medicine for the Video Game Industry
Kotaku and Croal: In Search Of The Best Games Ever
Loved:
Get Ready For Love: The Joystiq Podcast LIVE!
An Evening with Scott Kurtz
Blamimations ALIVE! with Kris and Scott
Penny Arcade Panel #2
http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/laserorgy/archive/2010/03/26/pax-east-day-one-penny-arcade-q-amp-a-the-quot-girls-amp-games-quot-panel.aspx
If you want to do this panel again I'd definitely suggest taking these complaints seriously because I'm not sure anyone has said they liked the panel yet.
I had this panel circled on my schedule the moment it was published as an option, and I walked out because I was so offended that the things I know need to be addressed were dismissed with superifical comments about how "sex sells" or "we're all just gamers."
I appreciate your post Molotov Cupcake and hope that there will be future opportunites for real discussion.
The girls in games panel was one I missed that I planned on seeing. Hopefully they'll do a better format for it next time.
I wish the panelists had had the opportunity to just speak with each other, instead of having to go through the line of questions, and not really being able to answer any of them. I think it's the fault of the format more than anything else. Molotov Cupcake, I would have liked to hear more of what you and Alexis Hebert had to say, honestly.
Going to PAX East? Challenge the PAX Pokemon League! (Check our website for more details)
I wasn't just bored by this panel, I was disgusted by it.
My girlfriend was proud of me for having asked what we considered an important and hard question, and were surprised at the throwaway answers I (and the other questioners) got.
With the exception of the woman who said she was a MIT grad, the panelists were just perpetuating the stereotypes I thought the panel was supposed to address.
What the hell does "Hello Kitty hardcore" have to do with anything? Okay, so you like a brand that is tailored to females and also like to play games, what does that have to do with women not being encouraged to feel strong about their science and math skills?
Not only that, the woman from Turbine almost seemed to take my question as an insult... her answer was basically "I'll have you know, there are two female programmers at my work and they are great and just as smart as the boys."
...seriously? Obviously no one is questioning females' ability to fulfill programming roles, I wanted to know why women aren't being encouraged to pursue those roles and what the fundamental problems with the career stereotypes are. Telling me that a single digit percentage of your programming staff is female isn't exactly addressing the core issue or explaining the statistic, just reinforcing it.
Altogether, this panel (and some of the others) just reminded me that the games industry is like an elitist club, and was really depressing for someone like me who is an aspiring game developer.
I was really suprised at how defensive the panel got after your question. You're right, the woman from Turbine did get annoyed and really tried to paint you as the bad guy. You were actually the second to last question I witnessed (Fem Shep being the last one). I agree with you, disgust would be the feeling I felt after this panel. I hope they give it another try next PAX.
I'm glad someone else picked up on that. My girlfriend and I left after the Fem Shep question as well... at that point we could tell the panel just wasn't for us.
Hey, I totally fixed that...
...about 30 minutes into the panel
(Actually, I am really sorry about that. We had a really bizarre, and hopefully unique, adapter situation going on there)
I do want to confirm that the feedback here matters. PAX has a very limited amount of time for programming and the organizers do aspire to make all the material good. And since it's for you, obviously they want to know what you think.
Also: I'm happy to see that everyone seems to be on board with the room clearing after panels. Personally, I hate seeing people camp out in theaters at other cons waiting for the next panel while denying a seat to someone who wants to see the current one. There were those who thought that maybe kicking everyone out would be a controversial move, but I've always felt it was a solid idea; certainly for the satellite theaters, anyway.
"People can be mean, but MMOs are overall a positive thing anecdoteanecdote" x5.
Yawn.
Yeah when she said "We got 70 programmers and 2 of them are woman" I wanted to stand up and tell her she was making your point for you.
On a side note, I'm in a different industry than you are trying to get into and I have to say they're all the same... so don't get discouraged by the perception of elitism, every business is that way. Not to sound cliche, but all you really need to do is bust your ass and work hard... it also doesn't hurt to know someone.
Woo, at least you were reppin' WPI well. I was actually surprised I didn't see more kids from our school at PAX.
We are quickly destroying that mold though. Digital distribution and independent platforms for development are opening up the process to more and more people.
Keep with it, most of the time if you want to affect change, you have to start doing it away from the mainstream.
The Iwadon panel was extremely weak.
The musical guests panel had its moments, but overall I found it a little disappointing, simply because a lot of people's honest and serious questions were brushed aside with pithy jokes, often just one short sentence or even one word. Since the panel was entirely Q&A, that left surprisingly little content. It got a little more serious toward the end, which was nice, but I really wish they'd either prepared an actual panel or taken people's questions seriously. One or the other, really. You can't have a great panel by having no talk or discussion but also disdaining the Q&A.
While I thought that the "Beyond Candyland" panel was very good, I think it could have been identified better in the program as being a board gaming 101-style panel. I can't have been the only person in the audience who already owned every game they recommended (except for Dune). This probably applied to a lot of the other panels as well. The Chip Tunes panels were great for me, because I knew very little about Chip Tunes, but they had to be kind of useless to people who were already really on top of the scene. So on the one hand, it would be neat to identify which panels were for n00bs (in that specific topic) and also to seed the programming with panels more aimed at people who already knew what was going on.
I agree about the filmmaker. I felt that he was really self-aggrandizing and kept trying to steal the spotlight. Andrew Plotkin (I assume that that's who you mean by the guy making new fiction) barely spoke, though, which I was actually kind of disappointed with.
The film itself really had a nostalgic bent and sort of wrote off modern developments as attempts to recapture a slight glint of the glory days. I think if I'd have been Andrew up there I would have been pretty frustrated about that, because modern IF has put out some truly amazing work. I love Infocom as much as anyone and am gradually hitting up eBay to build a complete collection, but even I have to admit that the best games of the new era are much better and more compelling than most of the games of the old era. I wish the film had focused on that a bit more, but as he kept reminding us that it was a short cut and not the full film, maybe that was just the editing.
I do think that they did create a sense of cliquishness by calling on some of the audience members by name, and it did feel like when they were doing the Q&A they would give friends of theirs in the audience first dibs on getting their questions in. There's nothing like saying, "We'll let {Joe Whoever} speak, and then we'll go to the gentleman in the back." to make people feel second-class.
Looking back you're right - I think it was much less Plotkin and more the filmmaker. The author (is that the best way to describe a creator of IF?) really was just answering the questions put before him and maybe that was my issue with him. The filmmaker chose to focus the block of the film we saw and the panel a bit on commercial viability rather than the creative process of new IF and maybe that's what made it come across as douchy. I think self-aggrandizing summed it up very well.
Plotkin's obviously a hobbiest and the questions made it sound like he was digging for ways to make profit rather than discussing his creations and that focus probably is what rubbed me the wrong way.
After time adrift among open stars
Among tides of light and to shoals of dust
I will return to where I began
Were the dungeon master folks actually supposed to be there? The schedule on the PAX website makes no mention of any appearances. Tycho mentioned in Monday's newspost that the DVD went missing, I think that's about as much of an explanation as you can get.
After time adrift among open stars
Among tides of light and to shoals of dust
I will return to where I began
Instead of placing all random volunteers in it, the organizers should reach out to one or two prominent feminists and get them on the panel. People who are known for being feminists, and not for happening to be females in the gaming industry, which seemingly was the only qualification*
As a male feminist, I was disgusted by what I heard on that panel. The female feminist next to me - who, unlike me, has to experience sexism every day - was livid. What a wasted opportunity to inject some reality into a pax that was marred throughout by casual sexism (Wheaton's "aimed at teenage girls" remark during the keynote was especially thoughtless, as was the borderline harassment of female audience members during the IGN live podcast).
*and it's shameful that they were able to hide 95% of the female industry volunteers on this panel while every other panel I went to was 100% male, including ones on journalism, Molotov.
Yeeeeeaaaaah.
How about no?
The only thing worse than getting someone who pretends there isn't a problem is someone who sees problems even where they aren't.
How about people who at least willing to talk frankly about the situation as it is, without injecting any ideology into it?
The good panels were the ones that were meant to be entertaining, the PA panels, Kurtz's panels, but the ones that were meant to be informative had almost no structure at all.
I've been to more than a few professional conferences over the years and these kinds of off-the-cuff Q&A sessions almost never work out well. Also, they could get more people involved by having sessions where multiple people give talks. Rather than make some group figure out how to fill up 90 minutes of time, you could have 3 groups with 30 minutes, maybe 10 minutes of an actual discussion topic and 20 minutes of Q&A. Those kinds of things have worked well from my experience and it gives the session a little more structure.
Lastly, man, that nVidia thing was a waste. Just show the damn game already. You've already got a whole hall full of people who are already buying your stuff, you don't need to play the salesman. That guy's whole schtick was just amazingly condescending. Seriously, "Crank that S#!T Up" was the best you could come up with?
I think there is a good way to do "Girls in Gaming," but I think it does need to be more of an objective, clinical examination of the topic that focuses more on numbers and business strategies than the cultural dynamic issue. I don't think you'll ever have people going home happy if you talk about a hot-button topic that everyone has his or her own opinion on. And I didn't really *learn* anything from the '06 panel, either: sure, some women gave some opinions based on their own experience, but eh, it didn't really get me thinking about how things should change, except that smarmy all-girl clans should gtfo.
Anyways, I admittedly was not at this panel, but my tl;dr point is that Girls in Gaming panels are probably too controversial for their own good, since everyone has an opinion, and are too likely to be insipid/annoying/demeaning. Put them away until you get some more objective panelists/topics of discussion
Different topic: how was the panel on gaming start-ups ("I HAVE A GREAT IDEA FOR A GAME!!") I was happy to see that - I'm more interested in GDC-ish/business-y panels, so I was curious if it went over well/whether there's a chance of being something like it at Prime.
Q: "You are in the garden. You see a rose bush. You have a fishing rod. Exits are North, South and IN."
A: "What do you want from me?!?!?"
I'm so saving this comic.
I think this is a panel they hold regularly; I was at the one at PAX Prime last year, too. (Different panel; same moderator.) One of my friends commented afterward she thought this one was pretty much the same as the one at Prime; I didn't completely agree because I thought the one at Prime had done a better job of addressing the issues, although both did a lot of ducking. (Are people scared to talk frankly about the sexual objectification of women in games and game marketing? Or do they honestly think it's irrelevant?)
I also think the panel would be more interesting if the panel included an actual feminist--not as in the man-hating type, but someone who has actually studied and thought about gender issues and can speak intelligently about them. Bringing experience and theory together would help, and, since the same questions are asked every time, they might as well discuss them as a panel beforehand instead of waiting for the audience to bring them up. But, let's be fair--it's hard to do a in-depth discussion of gender issues and gaming in one panel. It could easily be broken up into four or five, since it covers so many different issues. (For example, women working in the industry, the portrayal of women in games, marketing to women, etc, etc.)
(And why is it Girls and Gaming, anyway? I'm not offended by the title, but I'm busy making my peace with turning 30 this summer. Am I really still a girl, as opposed to a woman? Should I feel I have to be? Does using the term 'girls' as an umbrella term to refer to all females in gaming trivalize them? Discuss--no, wait, I don't think anyone ever asked that question at the panel.)
As one of the girls(er, women) in N7 hoodies, I was a bit irritated the FemShep question largely got ducked, but I'll spare you the analysis of FemShep and gender issues I gave my friends on the way out.
I do think it's good the panel is offered at all, and I like that so many guys showed up and asked questions.
BTW, the community management panel first thing Sunday morning was the emptiest one I went to, but notable in that four-fifths of the speakers were women. Apparently it's actually a fairly equitable field, gender-wise.
Here is the question:
Why do we see exposure of a strong, but highly sexualized character like Bayonetta, but no exposure Fem Shep who is a strong woman as well? You can play Mass Effect as a male or female Shepherd and the game doesn't change, but in all the marketing material you only see John Shepherd. Is the reason you don't see Fem Shep because she's not sexy enough?
That is how I remember the question, if others remember it differently please share your memories of the question.
Regarding the FemShep issue, I don't recall that I said anything on the matter, but did I want to. I never have used a female avatar simply because I'm too lazy to mess with the character editor, but I have found myself asking that same thing. Shepard is an ideal, not a concrete character set in stone. Just as Clarity pointed out, we only see a white Shepard. Both excellent points, and one that I also felt was completely dodged. As someone who favors controversy and discussion over smoothing things over and generalizing them, I found it a bit difficult to speak amongst women who are "proud gurl gamurz" and find nothing wrong with the industry, simply keen on "kicking men's butts" and whatnot. That's not me, and has never been what I'm about. Simply put, I like to bitch and complain. It was hard for me to speak up with my truest opinions in a full room when I was ready to speak to my companions rather than answer essay questions that I could have approached much easier had they been on paper.
I'll openly admit my expertise is not fully in feminism or the gender issues brought up in here and by the questions asked, as I study and analyze the realm of game journalism much more fully, though I most certainly do not downplay the struggles and the sexism we face on a daily basis. I don't feel as though I was the best candidate to choose for this discussion, and to those who were offended I do hope that I didn't nauseate you as much as I believe I did. I would have much rather been placed on a panel regarding journalism or grassroots community as I had applied for in the first place. But to those of you who stopped at the table to ask me a question personally or to ask for my card or details about my website, thank you so much. I hope that next year I see you all in a different discussion and that this one is not filled with boilerplate "everyone get along" answers. I'm used to being disliked -- perhaps these women wanted to play nice and keep everyone happy. And that annoys me the most, despite the fact that I enjoyed meeting all of the women and have since made friends despite the points that I do not agree with them on.
What's more, if any of you are keen on gathering together for a podcast hosted and moderated at my website, you're all welcome to PM me or contact me somehow to join on, as it'd be a wonderful opportunity for a rebuttal to questions you felt were unfairly answered. If anyone is interested in this do let me know. I have spoken to Valkyrie of the Frag Dolls and she may be willing to come on as well if that's not a turnoff to you girls wanting a fair shot at real talk.