Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Episode 70 Announcement!
I'm still working out some scheduling details, but I can now confirm that Episode 70 - which will cover the Oliver North/Call of Duty issue at length - should make it's debut later this week. Until then, do yourselves a favor and read this solid editorial on Kotaku that gets into some of the other more troubling aspects of the campaign and the general Fox News-style fear-selling vibe that has set in across the COD franchise in general.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
25 comments:
Ironically a game about a robot uprising like this would probably have a very anti-military subtext. Even when the word "robot" was first invented it was used as part of a commentary on the oppression of the proletariat, and it would be easier to count the instances where robots aren't used allegorically than not.
The real weapons of war aren't guns or bombs or missiles - they're human minds, programmed to kill. The indocrination of the modern warrior cult is the result of thousands of years of painstaking development, and it is the most crucial technology the army employs. Wars can't be fought without people who will take orders, regardless of their immorality.
If there's any kind of technology we have to worry about working against us, it's not artificial intelligence, but intelligence artificialized: human software.
James, go away. We've been over this.
Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are currently allies, and solving their human rights issues is something that the world will get to. But now, the United States has its own issues that need solving. For all you, selling weapons to them could be part of a diplomatic strategy to gain enough of their trust for a human rights request.
Oliver North, meanwhile, is selling weapons to fuel terrorist groups and make himself rich.
See the difference?
Good times. The advertising campaigns and general angle of the CoD series as of late has been making me really uncomfortable. It is going right for the most jingoistic, trigger-happy, propagandist image it can muster and it's REALLY creepy at times.
@James Feel free to keep commenting, I know I and a lot of other people have a lot of fun laughing at you. You should be a comedian.
@GavinMcQuee, Hammbone: were you this harsh when Bob said he supports eugenics?
@James
i accept that you have the right to speak your mind... just dont go off on one of your "cold-war flashbacks" and start shouting commie when your posts get deleted. this is bobs website, and if he deems that you are harming the experiance of the other guests he can and will delete your stupidity from HIS website. funny thing that freedom...
but i have come to my conclusion.
you are not a troll as i though you were, you're just another coldwar obsessed internet crazy. and yes, you should still shut the fuck up and go fellate a cactus. WOO FREEDOM OF SPEECH!
@bob supports eugenics? ive never heard that. and dont have the requisite knowledge of the issue to make a stance. but i am 10000% sure that whatever you are talking about is just "red-scare", "COMMIES-EVERYWHERE!", ignoring the majority of information just to sling to the stuff that further removes you from reality
@James
Right, let me put on my serious hat...
I'm sure you have more specific quotes than me (you are a much bigger fan of Bob after all) but Bob has never said "I'm a fan of Eugenics cause I'm a horrible monster." I know it would be brilliant to your cause if he did, but he didn't (feel free to prove me wrong with specific, real quotes, the ones you made up in your head don't count)
What he has said is that the planet is overpopulated and will inevitably bring about our own destruction. This is a fact. The planet is overpopulating and causes shortages and bla bla bla I don't need to spell that out for you. He than said that population control would deal with this but specifically said HE DIDN'T want that to happen.
So essentially, this image you have in your head of what Bob SHOULD BE is probably a bad person, the person Bob actually is, is a well thought out if harsh person. Cruel to be kind I suppose is the word.
Right, serious hat off now...
Anyone else kinda dreading this episode? I mean, Bobs already been over the problems he has with the COD community in great length as well as his opinion vis-a-vis gamers getting more involved with politics. Beyond pointing out and explaining what exactly the problem is here (which is self-evident to anyone with a working brain), I'm not really sure what he can add to the discussion that he hasn't said before.
Oh and James: Everyone has heard and is bored of your repeated political attacks and opinions, you have not convinced anyone and have generally failed to present your case in a clear and logical fashion. You've ceased being the 'fight the power' guy and are now the annoying uncle who complains about politics at the dinner-table, do you really want to be that guy?
@James breakin my one rule here of not commenting on others to say that you're kinda missing the point of what Bob means by eugenics, it's not ethnic cleansing it's more placing limits on amounts of kids and such because we don't have the resources and space for them
@James Thinking Hat is back on...
I like your term "implying", essentially admitting he hasn't said that so your gonna assume the crap out of it for your own political gain. Kind of what you accuse Bob of doing?
Anyway on point, it's all very assumptive, he's essentially saying eugenics would work (which it would) and that it has been used poorly in the past. No real endorsement of it just cold hard examination of the situation. Far to subjective to be real evidence.
Until Bob actually gives a full blown clear answer I can't really make educated comments, just mock you a lot more for my own amusement. But thanks for randomly scrolling through Twitter archives for my own vague queries. Now find a Bob tweet where he talks about Dr Who, you clearly have nothing better to do with your time.
"Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are currently allies"
Oh I see! Human rights violations are totally okay when they're committed by a group with the nominalization of "ally".
"For all you, selling weapons to them could be part of a diplomatic strategy to gain enough of their trust for a human rights request."
Maybe it was that way with Iran. Maybe it was all one giant charity bake-sale where the proceeds were sent back in time to Victorian England and given to orphans with leprosy.
"Oliver North, meanwhile, is selling weapons to fuel terrorist groups and make himself rich."
What seperates us and our allies from the terrorists? Is dealing in death and destruction okay only if it makes other people rich?
Anyone else kinda dreading this episode? I mean, Bobs already been over the problems he has with the COD community in great length as well as his opinion vis-a-vis gamers getting more involved with politics. Beyond pointing out and explaining what exactly the problem is here (which is self-evident to anyone with a working brain), I'm not really sure what he can add to the discussion that he hasn't said before.
Agreed. I'm also concerned by the fact that we've already heard Bob go on at length about the connection between CoD and right-wing politics in the Anders Breivik episode.
There's also the fact that he's covering this particular subject during his Necrothinker story arc. It just doesn't seem like a good idea to have the Overthinker do an episode where he complains about CoD again when he's currently in a plot line where the central theme essentially says "modern games like CoD aren't a be-all end-all evil". (At least not if we want to take the Overthinker seriously as a character, and not just a "Bob self insert avatar".)
Unless he manages to write something really convincing, I think this episode might just give further proof that he's just haphazardly splicing together 2 completely different shows into 1.
You people are so sycophantic it's fucking pathetic. Bob isn't a baby, he doesn't need, and I suspect doesn't want, a bunch of internet dwellers shielding him from any criticism. So stop acting like Bob is your mommy and you MUST DEFEND HIS HONOR because it's asinine.
People make perfectly valid points which you mental pigmies have utterly dismissed in the most egregious combination of logical fallacies I've ever seen. The fact anyone even bothers to respond to your inane brown-nosing is hilarious. It's frankly pathetic that Aiddon is the one being the most adult here and he's a troll. How does that even work? No seriously, how? Was that by accident? Was that planned? Is this a plan you have?
I've not said a peep about this because I'm kind of tired of trying to defend something as nebulous as "games that existed after 1996" from people who clearly have no idea what the hell they're even talking about but this needs to be said:
What Oliver North did is neither an actual crime nor is it unique, Obama has been conducting drone bombing raids in Pakistan for three fucking years now...wheres the outrage? If any of you actually gave a shit, you'd be demanding more accountability from our actual present, one that I voted for by the way, instead of a man who was at best a middleman and at worst a henchman.
But you don't care, you really don't, nor have any of you even bothered to do anything more than browse Wikipedia on the subject. Because this isn't even ABOUT Oliver North it's about Call of Duty and it's about a small segment of gamers feeling impotent and weak because they can't adapt to changing times.
This is the last fucking time I'm saying anything about it, both because I'm wasting my energy and because I'm expecting little more as a response than snippy bullshit from Aiddon and people making vaguely discriminatory quips at me, but if you people really hate COD and modern gaming in general so damn much (this goes for Bob too) then I'd suggest finding another hobby.
I'm sorry that the medium has left you behind. I'm not being sarcastic or mean spirited, I'm genuinely sorry--I can understand that it must feel terrible to be left out of something you used to be a solid part of. And I realize it must be heartbreaking to know that it's now something you possibly may never be a part of again. But at the same time you people have no right to demand gaming remain in some kind of stasis to make you feel more at home. Things have changed, gaming has changed: Japan isn't as important as it was, crowdfunding is a thing now, shooters are more popular than platformers and JRPGs are a dying breed.
The 80s and 90s are over, they've been over more than a decade. I'm really sorry but fucking deal with it. If it really does upset you that gaming is now aimed at a different audience then simply stop playing them. I stopped watching Comedy Central when it became the Jon Stewart and South Part Channel so you can live without gaming.
And whatever you do stop, please stop, latching on to idiotic sensationalist bullshit like this every time something happens and trying to pry some meaning out of it. No one cares, in the larger scheme of things no one ever will, a year from now this will be completely forgotten and gaming will move on again. Oliver North won't even remember this in that short a time, since he's not a gamer, doesn't even probably know what COD is, and doesn't play games so he's just on autopilot making money.
Filling the internet with bile and vitriol against FPS games in general and COD in particular won't stop ONE SINGLE COPY from selling, if anything you'll just make the public MORE aware of the biggest media franchise ever.
I'm genuinely sympathetic that you feel alienated or even upset at what you see as an unwarranted sea-change in gaming but you can't turn the clock back.
And even if you could, what would that achieve? Like what is the endgame here? I'm serious what would this even accomplish?
Let us say you succeed in getting Activision shut down and tried for war crimes by proxy or whatever, and COD vanishes from the Earth. Then what? That's going to stop Blacklight Retribution? Battlefield? That's going to stop Gears of War? That's going to stop Bathesda from putting out new Elder Scrolls games? Or stop new Fallout games from coming?
Gaming wouldn't immediately revert to some pre-2000 state if you succeeded in making a big enough stink as to actually have any impact. Even if you managed to actually succeed, and garner allies somehow, you still can't erase the last fifteen years of change.
And even if you could this engineered, laser-guided outrage isn't the way to do it.
James, just take your toys and go home. It was bad enough when you were spamming the comments, but now you're just being a vitriolic bully who disregards the beliefs and opinions of others. If anyone's a hypocrite it's YOU.
@Jannie:
So far, the only one here who has openly championed the death of entire genres of gaming is you, with your smug dismissal of everyone else's faves as "evolutionary dead ends." You claim that others want to somehow refuse you the ability to play FPSs, and yet your entire rant about "you're free to give up gaming" is an open call for the rest of us to be required to change our own tastes to match yours.
So, as long as we're complaining about others: You continually display a desperate, insecure need to assert that your own tastes in entertainment are so universally held as to relegate everyone else to an irrelevant minority (whom you nevertheless complain is maintaining a stranglehold on the industry despite your faith in the free market to separate the weak from the strong), and then claim that this alleged universality of your tastes makes them objectively superior.
I don't say this as a die-hard "retro gamer." I play modern games. I like a lot of them. I miss all the Xbox 360 games that I haven't been able to play since it RRoD'd for the third and final time. But of course, there are only two types of gamers to you, aren't there? Gamers who like what you like, and manchildren who stopped aging in 1996.
As for "endgame?" Well, we can stop letting the public face of our hobby be represented by Oliver North. You can whine about politicians being just as bad, and you're doubtlessly right about some of them, but I don't see any of them being called upon to make commercials for the most popular gaming franchise in existence, and the single franchise that represents gaming to those people who don't follow the industry.
Face it, Jannie, the only one here who wants to ban everyone else from the table is you.
@Jannie:
"Or stop new Fallout games from coming?"
>Implying Bethesda's games are true sequels or even remotely similar to the originals.
Note: I do not actually care about CoD.
@Jannie
You know, I kinda want to agree with you but, I think there's more to it than holding on to the past. Yes, gaming has changed and will continue to change. This is unavoidable. However, a lot of these changes aren't exactly positive. Our image has gone from "socially awkward geek" to "anti-social douchebag". Publishers are charging us an arm and a leg for shit like extra characters (back in the day, you'd actually EARN that shit) and, in the case of FF13-2, the god damn ending itself. The countless CoD wannabes aren't helping either.
You do know that all because FPS games are the popular genre doesn't necessarily mean it's good, right?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB7eqwKYdy4
^In depth look on why CoD is shit.
I remember Perfect Dark, 007, TimeSpilters....you know the GOOD FPS games. I'm sure plenty of people just hate the genre but, I dislike current-gen shooters because most are BAD.
It's easy to tell people to let go of the past but, in all seriousness, the kind of thing we had going for us in the 80s and 90s is not something we should give up so easily. Games back then (even the some of those knock-offs) had some real imagination put into them. Some of those games still exist today but, as long as space marines and army men are the face of modern gaming, I'm not all that convinced that things are entirely better now. It's not as bad as people say but, I miss the days when innovation actually meant something. Just look at modern Hollywood.
Oh, not to sound like a total dick but, someone calling Master Hand "Mister Hand" and didn't have a clue as to what Super Mario Sunshine was about telling people to let go of their ancient relics is not a convincing arguement in the slightest. Not calling you stupid or anything but, it bugs me how critical you can be of the Golden Age while not knowing some of the franchise history. It's like when people call Eggman "Robotnik" when his original name was really Eggman. It helps to know what you're talking about.
Jannie is absolutly right. None of you really care about modern politics or even want to acknowledge the US itself has being fucking people over and making shady deals since the birth of the country.
But oh no Call of Duty has one of those people in there comercials! Rise to arms my flabby armed brethren!
Call of Duty is a mega franchise that rakes in boatloads of sales every year. The same people posting here and Moviebob will cry and complain about it because more people want to BUY these games than there favorite japanese/anime company because its their choice to do so.
It didn't change when Call of Duty allowed you to play as a terriost and massacre a whole airport full of people, its not going to change because oliver north who most people wont even know is advertising the game.
Let, it, go. Your not the intended market for this game and Activison will continue to rake in the profits while you all will just waste your time and energy complaining about it and achieve nothing as usual.
Post a Comment