The RPS Feedback Thread

Fumarole 2016-11-04 15:28:41 UTC #1281

[quote=“Procrastination_Giant, post:1270, topic:13”]
And yes, I think that this might be seen as showing a slight lack of integrity, since to anyone who hasn’t played the game or isn’t familiar with the subreddit this automatically sounds like “attractive lesbians are a major issue in this game and the community agrees” and that this warrented an investigation into the code.
[/quote]I haven’t played the game, and this was absolutely not my take on it.

Procrastination_Giant 2016-11-04 15:44:40 UTC #1282

Yes, the author clearly states that the code is represented as pseudocode for the sake of non-coders, but neither does that necessarily mean anything to anyone who doesn’t know anything about programming languages, nor does it make clear that all variable names and comments within said pseudocode are written by her, and that anything in those code-quotes are a complete reinterpretation by the author (Sadly my somewhat convoluted syntax didn’t get that point across clearly enough).

This is something the developer had to (or felt he had to) explicitely clarify in his notes on the whole issue, since it did apparently cause some confusion - I’m wary of putting too much stock in the developer’s follow-up notes, but in this case it does make sense to me. I’m not saying that this is malicious, I’m saying that it makes things more confusing since the general discussion surrounding the code can become muddled when (for example) someone uses a variable name that the original code doesn’t use in the same context. Oh and I’m not questioning the conclusions drawn by her or the person who previously decompiled the code - I believe that those were done in good faith and I don’t feel like i said anything to imply otherwise?

Either way: Merely tried to give GameCat a concise overview of why it simply isn’t “that simple” in this case (and anything “concise” is really difficult for me. My brain is unwieldy and fickle). I tried to infer a bit of a neutral tone by using the magical power of parentheses - “clear(er)”, etc. - but apparently that wasn’t entirely successful.

Yglorba 2016-11-04 18:23:52 UTC #1283

[quote=“Zephro, post:1278, topic:13”]
I’m almost entirely baffled whenever this happens honestly as it’s been the RPS style forever pretty much. shrug. I liked the article and found the attempt to look at the code to dig around in what’s going on quite a refreshing and interesting perspective. No problems with how it was written either.
[/quote]I suspect a lot of the people declaring that they’re “leaving forever” were either very casual readers who didn’t interact much with RPS in the first place, or haven’t really been reading it much at all.

The thing is that articles like this get linked in a bunch of places:

On the game’s Steam news page, which naturally attracts attention from people who don’t usually follow RPS that closely or who have previously only seen occasional things. Many of the people who read RPS before and didn’t get that it does cultural analysis articles like this are ones whose experience has been heavily through that.
On the game’s official Reddit and other places where its fans congregate, which naturally attracts a bunch of its hardcore fans - people for whom this particular piece is more likely to push their buttons.
On Reddit’s alt-right hangouts, since many of them have come to see videogames as a recruiting opportunity for their culture wars. (These people in particular, unlike the previous two groups, tend to be very big on thinking of themselves as tactical geniuses and are eager to say or do whatever they feel will win them their ridiculous culture wars. They are not stupid and know that “as a longtime reader, I’m outraged!” is going to be more impressive than “as some rando linked here by an angry thread in an alt-right subreddit, I’m outraged!”)

This is why articles like that (especially ones that touch on gender politics, which is a major obsession for the alt-right in videogames) tend to have a sudden flood of comments from mostly-unfamiliar names angry about it in indistinct meme-filled terms or declaring that they’re leaving forever. This is also why many of the people writing those sorts of comments don’t seem to have read the article at all - the angriest ones are there because they were linked in by posts that either gave them an inflammatory framing, or outright framed it as a chance to strike a blow on the forefront of their video game culture wars. To the most extreme ones, reading the article would be betraying the cause by allowing the enemy a foothold in your brain, after all; and the fact that it was written by someone in gender studies already tells them everything they feel they need to know.

Aside: I’m amused by the fact that the angry-ranty sorts of comments are simultaneously accusing the article of being driven by a sinister agenda and of being crude money-grabbing clickbait. One or the other, you know? If RPS is publishing these things because of John Walker’s sinister agenda, then by definition it’s not money-grabbing clickbait, right? Either they’re posting articles due to their deeply-held beliefs, or they’re posting them purely out of a cynical desire for clicks and cash - the two extremes aren’t compatible.

(Of course, the agenda thing, f you strip it of the hostile framing, isn’t really entirely untrue, in the sense that “analyze up sociological implications of games and the choices developers make, including ones related to gender” is legitimately on the site’s agenda.)

alms 2016-11-04 18:39:43 UTC #1284

Yglorba, sure, but you can easily check that the person who posted before me actually has a sizable commenting history.

A few things have been posted, since my last post, which I’d like to reply to, not sure if I’ll have the time though.

Grizzly 2016-11-04 19:35:01 UTC #1285

From a linguïstic standpoint, it’s usually better to use parentheses as little as possible (they have a tendency to make a text more muddy and confusing to read (in general, a reader should be able to skip all the text between parantheses (as such, if your text is full of parenthese (like in this example) you are doing it wrong))).

:-p

BillButNotBen 2016-11-05 04:45:03 UTC #1286

Oops. I use parentheses all the time. Too much (probably).

I thought it was an interesting article presented in a relatively neutral way. It seemed to me to be a “talking point” kind of article that introduced an issue that people might not have considered and then invited them to consider it.
Of course, this is the internet so considering means outrage.

I agreed with this comment on the article:

I have never felt more naive than when I reached the bottom of the article thinking, “Wow, what a fascinating topic. I’ve never considered the major social implications that could be taken away from discrete coding decisions before. I wonder what RPS thought of these interesting revelations.”

charlesg 2016-11-11 11:01:32 UTC #1287

Uhh is this for technical feedback as well? I found a small thing.

I am subscribed to mail updates for discussion threads on the main site, and if someone replies to the main article, it says the main article is written by Kirrus.

EDIT: Nope nope nope, this appears to be a mail from a test environment. I’ve removed it lest the URL to the test environment become public.

EDIT 2: I have had contact with sysadmin staff about this and forwarded them the mails in question.

Ffrog 2016-11-13 11:30:53 UTC #1288

Any chance the RPS team could tweet about every story that appears on the site, rather than just selected ones?

charlesg 2016-11-13 16:58:00 UTC #1289

If you’re looking for a notification every time a new post is added, you should check out RSS readers. It’s what I use.

Having said that, there are twitter bots that use those RSS feeds as inputs, you could possibly set one up yourself.

Ffrog 2016-11-14 09:30:39 UTC #1290

I do all my RPS reading on my phone when I check twitter, don’t really want a separate app for it. Twitter bot like twibble looks promising, but not free so out of my price range. Maybe something RPS could spend some of their advertising money on? A quick article on gender bias in hexcells would probably pay for it

Krathor 2016-11-14 20:33:42 UTC #1291

From my time as a writer for the site, I think you could add a Twitter post automatically to any post, so it’s just a case of the author adding that. Unless they have started being selective for what goes on Twitter from the editorial perspective.

alms 2016-11-14 21:04:57 UTC #1292

With the amount of posts RPS has gone to publish, a notification for each one of them would be perceived by most as Twitter spam = unfollow.

While several twitter feeds could be set up, in doing so you would incur a risk of confusing the reader and provide a chance for them to pick the unwanted one.

Looks to me you want to use Twitter as a replacement for RSS, but its nature is that of social media, and RPS has to work within that context.

There may be other reasons, too, just my two cents from the sidelines.

BillButNotBen 2016-11-17 09:39:18 UTC #1293

I’ve said it before, but I wish there was an RSS of only top articles.
I don’t know how you’d define what was a top article… but hey.
I used an RSS reader for RPS for so long… but recently I never check it because there are too many unread posts each time… it becomes like work. I tried mixing my own feed using “reviews” and “features” RSS feeds, but that still misses some important news and adds in a bunch of filler stuff like “have you played”.

I assume it’s in their business interests to write as many articles as possible and get as many people to look at all of them as possible… but I have limited time each week and I’d rather get the 10/12 best articles/reviews/top-news each week.

Maybe I should try their twitter and see if it has less stuff.

Ffrog 2016-11-17 10:27:23 UTC #1294

Take yesterday, November 16th as an example. There were 14 posts on RPS, 11 of which were tweeted by RPS. There was no tweet about the stories on Birthdays The Beginning, Overwatch’s Sombra, and the Have You Played: Planetary Annihilation.

I don’t think tweeting about 3 extra stories a day would be perceived as spam by many followers. But it might encourage more of the 166,000 followers to read these stories they might have been interested in. Like me: I would have read the HYP:PA, if I’d known about it.

alms 2016-11-17 22:12:12 UTC #1295

Heh you see, for me HYP is not filler - more like a game and why I should play it in a nutshell.

As for “too many unread posts” I know the feeling: it’s the effect RSS always had on me. I tend to think it’s my fault for adopting a completionist mindset: Ubi-clear-the-map paradox?

Heliocentric 2016-11-17 22:17:18 UTC #1296

Hah, to me an RSS is a list of suggestions that I wilfully cherry pick. I have over 10k unread emails. shrugs

somini 2016-11-18 00:03:16 UTC #1297

The true face of evil. I too suffer from completionism, and I have at most 10 unread emails, of stuff I have yet to process.

Graham 2016-11-18 10:23:15 UTC #1298

We use a Wordpress auto-poster to spit out tweets and Facebook updates direct from our CMS. It is currently broken for scheduled posts, which includes most of our features. We have to therefore tweet those manually and therefore have to remember and be around in the evenings to do so, and that’s not always the case. We’ll get it fixed in the near future or die trying.

Ffrog 2016-11-19 08:39:29 UTC #1299

Thanks Graham, good to hear you’re on the case! Good luck fixing it, hopefully non-lethally

alms 2016-12-19 22:47:04 UTC #1300

Anyone has an idea what’s going on here?

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/12/14/astroneer-survival-crafting-without-the-cruft/

Chrome with extensions and stuff.

http://i.imgur.com/sssfpLZ.png

The other tab isn’t responsible for this - closing RPS makes the problem disappear. Actual system load is higher as part of it takes place in other Chrome processes.

Microsoft Edge, clean:

http://i.imgur.com/uBa6ysb.png

The post has animated gifs but they seem to be completely loaded, so I have no clue what the hell it’s trying to load. Both network and CPU usage oscillate, those seen in the Chrome shot are near peaks.