Something I noticed.

It’s both? And I think men should err on the side of not talking about hitting women with anything, particularly when they are in an unironic lather of rage against said woman. Normalizing violence against women, including making into a joke, is a real problem.

I agree here. I don’t like CYOA either, but gave them a shot and I think scored them fairly. In fact I actually found a few gems from that style over the last few months. Still not my thing but I won’t dismiss them out of hand.

I also agree with zarf, the experience of game-play for me starts before I even launch and if I have issues with launch, then it’s going to affect the score and a 1 might come if I can’t even play because of issues (assuming they are issues with the game and not with my PC), but that would be very rare. I don’t believe I gave a single 1 in this comp, usually the effort of actually creating something and submitting it gets a bonus point or two in my opinion.

People not distinguishing between jokes and hate-speech is a problem, too.

Brilliant point. I won’t go into detail, because I’ve done that to death on Victor’s blog, but I think it’s impossible to dissociate reviews from the playing experience, and from our own personal tastes - just take a look at how many different interpretations Boogle got.

The trick, of course, is to be civilized when you’re doing it. And if you have to rant, like Morayati, then you add a warning in the beginning (which she did) and make sure that the reasons for all your griping come across (which she did).

To be fair, I think “If you have nothing positive to say, don’t say it” is crap. I prefer to think “If you have nothing constructive to say, don’t say it”. Cuddling in reviews doesn’t lead us anywhere. Some reviewers will be more incensed by some game aspects than others. As long as it’s all within certain bounds, that’s actually a good thing.

I don’t believe Morayati crossed those bounds, given the context.

And matt w: youtube.com/watch?v=i9SSOWORzw4 [emote];)[/emote] I think this was the context in which it was brought up.

So what does everybody think about all those hateful comments Reels received for only being runnable in MSIE? I’m sure lots of its 1s are primarily related to that, coming from people who couldn’t even play it properly. Many people probably believe it’s fair. Though what’s the difference between that and dishing out bad ratings, because they cannot play certain games for other reasons?

I guess what I’m saying is: While the general sentiment expressed here is a good one, there are limits – or, it could also be that we all have to re-think our own standards to consider where we, ourselves, might be just as unfair. These things go both ways.

Well, Reels had a whole different problem. It was not a good game to start with, I don’t think. Also, any game/program/website that limits itself to IE is asking for trouble. I seemed to be able to play the game in Firefox, but maybe I was mistaken.

Though in THAT case I’d have preferred the game not to have votes at all, rather than 1. I think the sheer fact that most other games would have, say, 60-90 votes cast and Reels would have 10-20 (random figures) would be very revealing for the author, and a lesson for him. Whereas if everyone just lumps the 1s together, it’s not constructive at all.

People not distinguishing between jokes and hate-speech is a problem, too.[/quote

What on earth makes you think the two are incompatible? If I were a member of a group that regularly had to deal with physical assault, and someone made a joke about physically assaulting me, I don’t think I’d feel too awesome about it. Even if I knew it was a joke rather than a threat.

I’m just saying that David wasn’t ACTUALLY threatening her! GOSH!

The most shocking thing about this thread isn’t the reviews, it’s people failing to see a Monty Python reference when it’s there. In their face. Like a great big fish.

I know this is technically derailing, but we need a laugh and Hitler’s been brought up.

youtube.com/watch?v=Jr_91leJpXo

(shouting like that I’m amazed that Cleese never lost his voice. It’s not volume, Brian Blessed style; it’s the throat-searing yelling)

Also, I think Reels didn’t advertise itself as an MSIE-only game. If a game is described as a Web-based game and it doesn’t run in most standard browsers without advertising that fact, I think it’s fair to dock it.

David: Well, the Python sketch was not about hitting women, and unlike what you said it was funny, and I don’t think anyone who is disturbed by talk of hitting a woman would be at all reassured by “It’s a Python allusion,” but other than that… there really isn’t any other than that, is there?

That’s a double standard, in my opinion. The Twine games did not advertised themselves as Javascript games (which they actually are), but as ‘web’ games. Blorb games did not advertise themselves as such, but as Glulx or Z-Code games. Differences which could mean the world to some players. I don’t see anyone here arguing it would therefore be fair to give them bad ratings because of that.

It’s so easy and tempting to dismiss the rule for a game like Reels which, as Peter rightly pointed out, is actually quite bad even once you get it to play. Yet, from a fairness point of view, it does deserve to be treated by the same standards as all the others, doesn’t it? Or, the other way around, if you allow an exception for Reels, you have to have the same lenience towards anyone else making occasional exceptions to the ‘play the game before rating it’ rule for whatever other reason.

Here’s the thing about joking with physical violence / racism /sexism: Jokes are about the unexpected, a twist on what you expect for reality. For people who deal with violence, racism, sexism every day, there’s nothing unexpected. It’s part of their daily life, and it’s exhausting. Then someone comes along and tries to do the exact same kind of thing and thinks you should enjoy it. It’s not funny, it’s not enjoyable, it’s exhausting and scary and those people are justified in disliking it.

Think of the scene from Zombieland (spoilers…) where Bill Murray pretends to be a zombie to scare someone as a joke, then gets shot. Justifiably. If you don’t want to get shot, don’t pretend to be a zombie in the middle of a zombie invasion. (Analogy lifted from Crommunist).

Hitting someone (with a fish) obviously meant something, or else they wouldn’t have brought it up. And just bringing it up can be a scary thing to do: showing vulnerability, expose yourself that you’ve potentially dealt with serious violence, look like you’re being demanding in front of everyone.

There are two ways you can go from here:

  1. Dismiss/ignore/mock the request. You get to feel that you didn’t do anything wrong, but the people who felt hurt or nervous are reinforced that their feelings, comfort and sense of belonging don’t matter. And that disrespect gets piled onto additional abuse, dismissals, etc. Those people will quietly, slowly leave.

  2. Apologize, track it back, and don’t do it again. Even if you don’t see what was wrong, it means words in reassuring others that their feelings, comfort and sense of belonging matter, and encourages that if people are brave enough to take a step forward and make an in-good-faith request from the community, then that request will be honored.

I’d like to be a part of the community that honors in-good-faith requests and supports marginalized people.

Okay, so no more Monty Python references just in case someone takes offense. Got it.

Regarding Reels, here’s my two cents.

It SHOULD be treated like every other game. I WAS terrible. But I did use IE to access it and play it. On the other hand, the game said that it was compatible with most browsers, when in fact it wasn’t. I feel this should have been pointed out, although it isn’t grounds for an auto-1.

Regarding Reels vs. Twine, I believe that requiring twine to say “Javascript” would be weird, since Javascipt, along with CSS and HTML is one f the three standards for the web. Reels was Javascript itself for that matter.

I thought jokes were supposed to be funny.

The most notable thing, in this thread, is that you never know which tiny bit of what you say may hurt someone. This will ultimately tend to complete silence, I think.

You are intelligent enough to understand why this is not what anyone has been saying.

EEAtheist was much more patient about this than I’ve felt like being, so everyone read her.

Well, no, for two reasons. One of them is that there’s some subjects that you can know in advance are very likely to hurt someone. If you link that Monty Python clip and someone says “My brother died when someone hit him in the face with a fish!” Well, that’s not something you could expect. If you talk about hitting a woman in the face with a fish and someone said “My sister is in the hospital because her boyfriend hit her in the face,” well, that’s not actually that surprising. Or “I’m a woman and I deal with a constant barrage of reference to violence against women, and it’s not cool.”

The other thing is what happens if you find out you’ve hurt someone. That guy who said “My brother died from being struck with a fish!” It’s really unfortunate that you pushed his particular button, and you couldn’t really have anticipated it. But it seems like the decent human thing to do is say “Gee, I’m sorry,” not “But it was a Monty Python reference! Are you trying to silence me?”

I understand your point, but that’s the kind of attitude that I don’t think is constructive for the comp, or any sort of review process. If you played the game and hated it, give me all you got. If you did not even get past the login screen and point that fact out, then that means you are scoring a game based on zero knowledge of it just to be a jerk.

And there’s never any reason to be a complete jerk about it. I know we’re all very clever people with greater than average vocabularies and we all enjoy laying down the snark when warranted. A drive-by review is bad enough. but it’s lame to also insult the author in the process by flipping them off as you drive by when they likely spent a good chunk of time and effort to create a game.

Correcting this is a minor difference. Something like “I don’t want to create an account or give my twitter login to get into the website, so I won’t review this game” suffices and creates no hard feelings.