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Youtube and Controversies: Political attitudes, conservatism and the struggle with being non-political

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For those who don’t actually already know this, my Ph.D work is in political science, and since then I’ve taught political science for years before adding another graduate degree and focusing on communication. However, one thing that always seemed to grate at me was that no matter how hard I tried to be non-political, it was practically impossible. Not for me. But for anyone who happened to be in the audience. Let me explain.

To explain, it’s important to probably point out my political affiliation, because that helps to explain why it’s even stranger. Back when I was first going through undergraduate work at West Point, I was a staunch conservative. There was no problem that I felt couldn’t be solved with our military, states’ rights and did I mention our military? When I got to grad school and started learning massive amounts of information about politics, I started to realize that I hated politics. A lot.

So, I sort of became an anarchist. And that has all sorts of problems if you’re capable of actually understanding what an anarchist is. You see, people think an anarchist is some crazy liberal that throws Molotov cocktails at cops. Well, that was one type of anarchist, specifically the Russians at the turn of last century and maybe the French, well, anytime in history. As an anarchist of my type, what it meant was that I hated the fact that we need a government to do anything because what almost always happens is we become part of corruption and oligarchy, to the point where government is almost always used as a tool to oppress other people. There are good people in government, but over time, those people get drowned out by people who see government as that tool to push through their personal agendas, and there’s no end to the types of agendas they might want to push (social programs, religion, anti-Internet policies, anti-gaming policies, anti-Shania Twain fundamentalism, etc.). What it doesn’t mean is that I want to throw Molotov cocktails at anyone. That requires upper arm strength and exercise, both things I do like to protest against.

Anyway, getting back to my original point, when I was teaching political science, one thing that inevitably happened in class is that some young student would want to know what my political affiliation was. And it was rarely out of actual interest. It was almost always to figure out whether or not to listen to anything I had to say as useful. If I picked an affiliation that was different than his or hers, they discounted everything I had to say. If it was the same, they often felt they knew as much as me and then didn’t have to listen any further. If I chose my usual tact and said that I don’t have an affiliation, or that I don’t discuss it, they automatically decided that it had to be the opposite of the one they had, or they assumed it had to be liberal (no, not sure why that assumption was always made).

That brings me to an interesting phenomenon I’ve come across recently. Over the Christmas break, I found myself overly interested in following a number of channels on Youtube that I found interesting. Mostly, it was ASMR artists, but when that got kind of boring (or I didn’t need to sleep), I started to branch out and find other types of subjects. My first “go to” was gaming channels, but I’ll be honest, the majority of those are awful, often hosted by some teenage mentality that tends to scream into the microphone, or thinks it’s 1980 and has lots of flashy stuff trying to send watchers into seizures. But a few of them were actually pretty good, and one of them is actually a bit of the subject of this post.

I don’t remember how I found it, but I came across a cast called The Quartering, hosted by Jeremy Hambly, a Youtube game industry reviewer who leans to the conservative side of the house. Having watched his podcasts over the last year, I would recommend his site if you’re interested in interesting perspectives on the industry, but at the same time understanding that sometimes he seems to get a little high on himself and takes on fights that are generally left to different avenues of the Internet. An example is how he has a tendency to want to create a space that lacks politics when it comes to computer gaming (something I highly support) but then falls right into the same territory himself when he goes anti SJW (social justice warrior) and becomes political in trying to advocate for not wanting to become political. Yeah, it’s kind of the same thing I ran into when teaching political science, and even though I was completely aware of the problem, the problem always exists. What I did discover to be the ONLY solution is one he hasn’t reached yet, and that’s to stop caring about politics, rather than focusing on politics as an approach to not being political. Yeah, I know that sounds bizarre and strange, but it’s basically the only way to deal with it.

This last week saw some interesting developments for Hambly as he lost one of his main sponsorship deals with a coffee company when it was alerted to one of his recent videos (that pissed off people who tend to get riled by SJW politics), so he decided he was no longer going to accept sponsorship deals. Unfortunately, this type of drama continues, no matter what someone does about it.

What I would like to say is that when he’s not dealing with actual politics, his information is actually pretty interesting. However, one thing I have noticed is that because he has such large numbers of subscribers (I believe it is upwards of 100,000 subscribers, but could be off on that, although I know it’s pretty damn high), Hambly does often ignore the fact that his influence quite often becomes a McLuhan message is the medium factor (he’ll go on an anti-Electronic Arts rant and then laugh when EA suffers financially, arguing that it was EA that caused its downfall, not the fact that perhaps Hambly’s negativity might have attributed to the down turn).

Moving away from Hambly here (as I said, I actually like him and think his information is informative, so I don’t want to get into a criticism mode here), one thing I’ve started to notice is that there are a lot of Youtubers who attempt to adopt the Hambly model, but completely fail to do so, and only make things worse because they turn into shrills for anti-establishment thought without doing anything other than harping on how much enjoyment they get out of the drama. Having watched a lot of this behavior over the last year or so, I am starting to feel that a lot of these commentators are somewhat responsible for the down turn the industry is starting to feel. I mean, think about it: If the majority of the people covering the industry keep talking about how bad the industry is, it’s going to feed the perspective that the industry is nothing but bad.

I used to work for the industry (both Maxis and EA), so I had a unique perspective myself, but at the same time I also realized that there are a lot of diverse minds in that atmosphere and whenever I tried to get a “this is how they feel at this company”, I find myself often realizing that I was putting too much of a spin on the thought based off of anecdotal information I received from a very limited observation of what I was able to see myself.

From the too little, too late file: Sim City is going to allow offline play

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london

Last year or so, EA/Maxis released the latest version of Sim City, the continued offspring of one of the originally wonderful games to come out on PC. Unfortunately, it had some things wrong with it. Okay, I’m being nice. It had a LOT wrong with it. So much that after a week of trying to play it, I deleted it from my hard drive. But that wasn’t enough. I then burned my hard drive, pulled it out of my computer, threw the hard drive out the window, installed a brand new hard drive and even replaced my operating system so that there would be no hint of that game ANYWHERE near my computer. Okay, not exactly the events that happened, although all of the events DID happen. But the rest of that had nothing to do with Sim City. My hard drive crashed for another reason, but I hated Sim City so much that I’m now blaming all of that on Sim City. It’s kind of like how I blame all of my bad relationships that I’ve had with women on Anne. Not because Anne did anything wrong, but she gets blamed and happened to be at the right place at the wrong time when it came time to forever blame every bad relationship on someone.

But I digress….

The problem with Sim City was that it was designed with great mechanics but horrible mathematics. Let me explain. Imagine a town where its population is made up of tens of thousands of people. And then you throw a big party so that lots of other people come to your town. Well, and then after the party was over, instead of leaving town and going back to their own towns, all the people stay and then move into any available house that happens to be located anywhere nearby. If someone already lives there, that’s okay. They’ll just stay there and the person who lived there before can drive around the town all day, making it impossible for fire trucks to get to fires because everyone’s on the road without an actual place where they actually live. Then add more people (cause they called everyone on their cell phones and told them about the grate party), and then you have a cluster**** of people driving around and walking down the streets all day long, and anyone can work in any job because education no longer is important. Just people.

And you get an idea of why the game kind of goes nuts once you start to actually get any decent population.

But the biggest complaint was that the game forced you to play online (on EA’s servers). And quite often, they’d crash. Or just stop working. Or whatever.

People demanded an offline mode (because that’s what every previous version of Sim City was), but EA said that was impossible. And then people abandoned the game. So EA has announced that is NOW going to allow offline play, which by the way I did mention they said was completely impossible, right? All along, I got the idea that EA was trying to sell us stuff in real money, and the only way to do that was to make sure everyone had to play online, kind of like Blizzard is doing with its current crap load of games, like Diablo III, another game I abandoned shortly after a few weeks of realizing it was a shadow of its original versions.

So, will this cause me to go back to Sim City? No. Not a bit. I own the game and haven’t reinstalled it on my computer mainly because they screwed it up enough that I saw no reason to ever do so again.

What I do know is that I will NEVER buy another Sim City game again. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: I used to work at Maxis and used to love everything about Sim City and the Sims. Not any longer.

Oh well.

Sim City: A Game You’ll Learn to Love and Hate

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londonI recently bought the new release of Sim City (from Electronic Arts, using its subsidiary Maxis Software, which is bought some years back). Maxis used to be one of the greatest companies on the planet, creating Sim City, the Sims and then Spore (which was a little after they were bought by EA). However, Sim City has always been the bread and butter of Maxis, and most likely the reason EA bought the company in the first place (The Sims was released under EA’s ownership, even though it was the last project begun under the Maxis only name).

So what are my thoughts on Sim City? It’s a lot of fun, at least until you get really involved with the game. Let me explain. When you first start playing the game, you get overwhelmed by how much there is to do. You build a road from the highway through your patch of land, you then zone residential, then industrial and commercial. Soon after, someone complains they have no power or water, so you build some kind of power plant and a water pump. This goes on for awhile, until someone else complains that there aren’t enough people to work the zones (so you zone more residential), and then you start to realize your city is lacking in fire support (you build a fire house), police (you build a police station), health care (you enact Obamacare…oh wait, I mean you build a clinic), and you continue until your little patch of land starts to become a thriving city. There’s always something to do, so you’re never going to get bored with it.

And then, eventually, you start to build a major city. And unfortunately, that’s where you start to hate it. The reason you hate it isn’t because there’s not a lot of fun things to do, but because the game was designed badly, almost as if they realized they didn’t have the ability to handle AI as they needed to, so they dumbed down the simulation to be less of a simulation and be a compromise instead. Here’s an explanation of that:

Your Sims (the citizens) are disembodied people who don’t really have a specific place in your city. The people who work at the health care clinic are not doctors. They’re just arbitrary Sims, meaning that when people get up in the morning, they might be a doctor, a fireman, a ditch digger, or a protesting hippie who hates government. The way they find their jobs is through a process I like to call “first come, first serve”. A Sim wakes up in the morning, at the same time as every other Sim, and walks out the door of his apartment to find that there’s a business next door selling donuts (so he decides to work there). The next day, he’s not so quick to the donut shop, so he ends up being a neuro surgeon instead, because the clinic or hospital is located next door to the donut shop. He’ll work his entire day in whatever place he’s in, and then he’ll come home–to any home, because he doesn’t live anywhere; he just occupies the first building that’s built for housing. When visitors come to the city because of your tourism stuff you’ve added (like a building that holds mega super concerts), the Sims will fill up the buildings on their way out, or may or may not leave the city. There’s really no rhyme or reason for what different people end up doing when they’re in your city because they’re all interchangeable. Which brings up the problems that destroy your city.

If your traffic was bad before, it becomes a nightmare when everyone is out on the street trying to get to whatever place they need to go. Your firemen, stuck in traffic stops aren’t putting out fires, and your city starts to burn down, even if the buildings are across the street from the firehouse. Your police can’t stop crime, so you have Sims moving out of town because there’s too much crime (caused by cops not being able to maneuver through traffic (or by cops choosing to be donut makers that morning)).. You probably get the picture.

The city’s infrastructure works the same way. If you have water running through your city, it gets bogged down by the fact that the designers of the game didn’t design water (or electricity) any better. Your power gets clogged and randomly just kind of moves around the town so that you can end up with an important set of buildings just not getting power or water because the AI is too stupid to deliver it now that your city has become a lot more complicated. Even if your water pump is across the street from the building that needs water, it waits until the water fills in some cycle that makes no sense to common sense and has as much simulation value as whack a mole does to international diplomacy.

I had a great city that turned into ruins because these problems just blew up at one point where I became too big to fail, but failed miserably. All attempts to fix it were useless because nothing could move through the city. This wasn’t because I was using weak roads; it was because there was so much going on at one time that the Sims pretty much just sat in traffic, water wouldn’t flow, and the city kept complaining that I needed to provide more power, even though I had about 2x the capacity of power that just kept clogging itself up. Even putting a power plant next to the one building lacking power didn’t work because of the previously mentioned random traveling that everything in Sim City does.

This problem is now being noticed by a lot of players, needs to be fixed, or the game is going to be the most successful failure of all time (although it will compete with Diablo 3). EA has the ability to fix this, but I suspect that they’ll do the corporate thing and basically take the money and run, chalking it up to a good experience for the bottom line, even though it may provide the final nail in a coffin that doesn’t need to really happen.

The next move is for EA to do something. The question is: Will they do it or just screw over its player base?

EA’s Sim City Reboot Isn’t Going As Planned…unless you’re one of the disasters that destroys the cities

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On the third day of the release of the new Sim City by EA’s Maxis studio, things have gone from reviews of “best game ever” to “what a crappy piece of s4#&!”

The problem isn’t the game itself, although some complaints have started to come in on that level as well (like how small the cities are in comparison to any previous incarnation of Sim City). The problem is the servers because this was EA’s attempt at forcing every single player to have to play on EA’s servers, requiring an always on internet connection. Another company with a more stellar reputation, Blizzard, tried doing the same thing with Diablo 3, and let’s just say that the result was a lot of people claiming Diablo 3 to be the worst game put by Blizzard in a very long, esteemed career of putting out great games.

So everyone is complaining about EA right now because not only do they have to be online all the time, but EA doesn’t seem to know how to run their servers so that the servers are on all the time. 3 days in, players who paid for the game can’t even play the game. So people on numerous game boards are attempting to cash their games back into EA, complaining about how badly the game was implemented.

I should point out that I was working for Maxis when EA took over it. As we were moved from Walnut Creek to Redwood City, you could see the company of Maxis being gutted out by the new owners. The last project I worked on was The Sims, and you could see how things were slowly going downhill for those at Maxis. Working on Sim City 3000 was a pleasure. Seeing what was happening after The Sims was awful and I felt bad for anyone that was sticking around.

If anything, hopefully other companies will learn that just because a bigger company has money to buy you out doesn’t mean that they’re going to continue to make your quality product with actual…well, quality.