[TRENCHES] Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - Vulgarity

Neuroskeptic · April 2012

Henroid wrote: »

Framling wrote: »

Okay, so it was a programmer nailing an artist's wife? How did no one notice a programmer checking in a whole bunch of image assets?

This right here is why I'm skeptical of the story.

Um, maybe it was a small company without much oversight?

I can't see why anyone would automatically assume this story is untrue. Stranger things have happened. I am a bit skeptical just because it seems convenient that this would both happen and be detected by a game tester in such a way as to make a Trenches story (with the tester getting fired at the end in classic Trenches fashion to cap it all off) but it's bizarre to say that the story per se is implausible.

Daedalus · April 2012

Neuroskeptic wrote: »

Henroid wrote: »

Framling wrote: »

Okay, so it was a programmer nailing an artist's wife? How did no one notice a programmer checking in a whole bunch of image assets?

This right here is why I'm skeptical of the story.

Um, maybe it was a small company without much oversight?

I can't see why anyone would automatically assume this story is untrue. Stranger things have happened. I am a bit skeptical just because it seems convenient that this would both happen and be detected by a game tester in such a way as to make a Trenches story (with the tester getting fired at the end in classic Trenches fashion to cap it all off) but it's bizarre to say that the story per se is implausible.

Small company? Hell, I work for one of the largest and there have been projects where nobody is really keeping an eye on what gets checked into source control unless something goes wrong.

Opty · April 2012

Hell, even if it's a huge company, there's very rarely someone watching over every checkin. Generally people only take a look when the build is broken, so if the programmer made sure that it didn't break the build when he checked in that stuff then there's a high chance he could get away with it. Doubly so if he checked in the art around a time a bunch of art assets were checked in and did the programming seperate.

Denada · April 2012

I'm choosing to imagine that Programmer was having an affair with Artist's wife, but the wife decided to end the affair and go back to her husband. Programmer then got pissed and put this into the game and intended it to be found as some sort of stupid revenge thing, and didn't think about the consequences because he was blinded by anger and rejection and has already displayed poor judgement by having an affair in the first place.

In that context the story is believable, and also very sad.

Aurich · April 2012

Also, I feel more bad for the artist. I know fisticuffs isn't ever a truly acceptable response, but in this case I cannot think of any satisfactory alternative. Having the programmer fired isn't really enough. I don't suppose he could sue or get him arrested. Pistols and Paces may have needed a comeback.

Dedwrekka · April 2012

Aurich wrote: »

Also, I feel more bad for the artist. I know fisticuffs isn't ever a truly acceptable response, but in this case I cannot think of any satisfactory alternative. Having the programmer fired isn't really enough. I don't suppose he could sue or get him arrested. Pistols and Paces may have needed a comeback.

The Arcanum avatar really makes the last sentence so much sweeter.

format · April 2012

Denada wrote: »

I'm choosing to imagine that Programmer was having an affair with Artist's wife, but the wife decided to end the affair and go back to her husband. Programmer then got pissed and put this into the game and intended it to be found as some sort of stupid revenge thing, and didn't think about the consequences because he was blinded by anger and rejection and has already displayed poor judgement by having an affair in the first place.

In that context the story is believable, and also very sad.

This is the context with which I read the story. People do weird stuff under the influence of rejection. People do weird stuff without rejection also, see SimCopter.

Caulk Bite 6 · April 2012

what's this about SimCopter?

Opty · April 2012

One of the programmers set it up where speedo wearing men replaced the random civilians and kissed and stuff if you played it on his birthday. There might have been more that happened besides that but that's what I remember.

lobbyguy · April 2012

I do not know if the tale is true but my career as an IT monkey has made it clear to me that people not only do stupid things, they very carefully document them for future review by authorities.
A CFO at my first real job was a dick. He "found" a topless photo of one of the office clerks on a website and emailed it other management with the title "Our employee of the month!"
The CEO descended on IT to demand where he got that picture. We told her that he went to the website and crawled through the photo gallery until he found it. The clerk was nearly fired for a violation of a morals clause in the employee handbook, I think mostly to cow her and keep her from filing a sexual harrassment suit.
This same CFO had exactly 1 picture file in his My Documents folder titled something like "tittays!.jpg" It was three nude women on a wooden deck posing arm-in-arm. One of the women in the pic looked just like one of the managers in the company. Creepy.
There were always rumors that they were having an affair at the time but no one cared and it would have ended their marriages anyway. Years later I found out that they had both got divorced and were dating openly.

PikaPuff · April 2012

Just add "And then I was fired." to the end and you can submit that story.

forty · April 2012

Taramoor wrote: »

forty wrote: »

Tale setting off massive bullshit alarms in my head.

Remind me to someday regale you with tales of Daggerfall and SimCopter.

Regale me with tales of Daggerfall and SimCopter.

marsilies · April 2012

forty wrote: »

Regale me with tales of Daggerfall and SimCopter.

The Simcopter story wasn't hard to find:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter#Controversy

The game gained controversy when a designer inserted sprites of shirtless "himbos" (male bimbos) in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other, who appear in great numbers on certain dates. Their fluorescent nipples were drawn with a special rendering mode usually reserved for fog-piercing runway landing lights, so they could easily be seen from long distances in bad weather. An unintended emergent behavior of the code caused hundreds of himbos to swarm and crowd around the helicopter, where they would be slashed up by the blades, and then need to be air-lifted to the hospital -- which earned the player easy money. The easter egg was caught shortly after release and removed from future copies of the game.

The designer, Jacques Servin, was fired afterwards for adding unauthorized content (which delayed the release of the game, and caused Maxis to miss Christmas season). He cited his actions as a response to the intolerable working conditions he allegedly suffered at Maxis. This caused a member of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a gay AIDS organization, to call for a boycott of all of Maxis' products, a measure which Servin rejected. Some months later, a group named RTMark announced its existence and claimed responsibility for the himbos being inserted into the game along with 16 other acts of "creative subversion." Servin stated that he had received a money order of $5,000 from RTMark for the prank.

The Daggerfall story I couldn't find, but I think it's because Taramoor was thinking of the wrong Elder Scrolls game. Here's a story about Oblivion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion#Rating_change

On May 3, 2006, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) in North America changed Oblivion's rating from T (Teen 13+) to M (Mature 17+), citing game content not considered in the ESRB review, i.e., "the presence in the PC version of the game of a locked-out art file that, if accessed by using an apparently unauthorized third party tool, allows the user to play the game with topless versions of female characters". In response to the new content, the ESRB conducted a review of Oblivion, showing to its reviewers the content originally submitted by Bethesda along with the newly disclosed content.

The ESRB reported that Bethesda Softworks would promptly notify all retailers of the change, issue stickers for retailers and distributors to affix on the product, display the new rating in all following product shipments and marketing, and create a downloadable patch rendering the topless skin inaccessible. Bethesda complied with the request but disagreed with the ESRB's rationale.[108] Although as a result certain retailers began to check for ID before selling Oblivion, and one California Assemblyman used the event to criticize the ESRB's ability, the events passed by with little notice from the public and gaming journalists.

The thing with Oblivion and the GTA3:SA "hot coffee" debacle was that these were likely not the work of a rouge programmer, but features that were at one point planned to be included in the game, and made inaccessible late in the developing stage, instead of being removed (potentially causing bugs). The idea of nudity in Oblivion isn't particularly shocking, considering that both Arena and Daggerfall have some topless nudity.

Aurich · April 2012

It would be difficult to confuse Oblivion and Daggerfall. Come, Taramoor, tell us a tale.

Caulk Bite 6 · April 2012

I read that the thing with daggerfall was that it had non-explicit nudity

Caulk Bite 6 · April 2012

Oh, looks like I neglected to do more than skim, before posting duplicate info.

The thing I like about the oblivion thing is that, in plain language, they're saying "If you hack the game, you can see titties."

marsilies · April 2012

Caulk Bite 6 wrote: »

The thing I like about the oblivion thing is that, in plain language, they're saying "If you hack the game, you can see titties."

This goes a little more in depth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESRB_re-rating_of_The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion

About the nudity mod:

The fact that the content of Oblivion under investigation was inaccessible during normal play made no difference in the decision. ESRB policy had been "absolutely clear" since the Hot Coffee controversy, Patricia Vance told a reporter. Publishers were told that they could not leave unfinished or other pertinent content on a disc. If locked-out content was "pertinent to a rating", ESRB policy stated that it needed to be disclosed, and Bethesda had not done so.

There was also more violence and gore in the game than what Bethesda originally presented the ESRB (which depends on a video provided by the publisher depicting gameplay and the most extreme elements in the game for their ratings). This increased violence may have been enough on its own to warrant the increased rating, although it appears it was the nudity mod that prompted the re-review process.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/op-ed/797-Boobies-Did-Not-Break-the-Game-The-ESRB-Clears-the-Air-On-Oblivion

forty · April 2012

Yeah, I looked up the SimCopter thing after making that post. Didn't figure out what the deal was with Daggerfall. I have to say the SimCopter situation is a pretty different ballgame than what's presented in this tale, so my bullshit alarms are still ringing.

Apolloin · April 2012

I think that this is more an artefact of the industry that was than a modern phenomena. It's far too easy, these days, to find out exactly who checked in those art assets and to diff the files to see what changes were made.

About 15 goddamn years ago I was working for a tiny Publisher working on very niche 2D product. One of the games we were publishing was submitted where the phrase "Codername is a talentless w__ker who can't write code for s__t" was written in very darkblue pixels on a darkblue background. Needless to say the external producer immediately caught it and called over us Assistant External Producers to come see. And then phone 'Codername' who was also the co-owner of the company.

Even back in the dark old days pre-2000 it was pretty easy to prove whodunnit. The guy was fired that afternoon.

Smrtnik · May 2012

This kind of stuff happens all the time, even "smart" people can be total geese. I'm a programer (not in games industry) and some years ago on a project I was working on there was this prima donna programmer that refused to work in the lab with the rest of us, or use the version control. He was a master BSer, though, and his PowerPoints were great, so the management loved him. As such, the team was told to just deal with it. He would work only with one of us directly at a time to integrate his stuff with the rest of the code. Since he didn't want to use any of or structures or existing network interfaces the idiotic solution finally directed by management was to have an area of shared memory through which data would be exchanged.

Anyone that worked with him as the point of contact would after a bit just leave in disgust for another project. I was the fourth such contact. When I was finally allowed to look at his code, most of the comments were insults about how much this person or that person there sucks (and more creative ones too). Since I can be stubborn I worked through and got the two codes talking, but it took forever. We then discovered that all the things his stuff was supposed to do are not working or not working right. So the management told me I need to find another project to work on, no longer needed on that one. Good riddance.

Penny Arcade

[TRENCHES] Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - Vulgarity

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