A Platform for Trolls (continued)

I’ve been thinking a little more on the problem of [giving a platform to trolls][1].

On the same day that Donald “I don’t settle” Trump settled his Trump university lawsuit, he also tweeted his disapproval at the way Mike Pence was addressed by the cast of Hamilton. One of these was an enormous story with long-ranging implications, the other was someone being pissy about hurt feelings. Which of these was the main news story on lots of newspapers (including hte New York Times)? The tweet, obviously.

During the summer, Twitter took the extraordinary step of issuing a lifetime ban on “@nero" – Milo Yiannopolis – for directing hate speech. This almost instantly decimated the “gamer gate” movement on Twitter¹. It was like someone opened the windows and let in some air. Twitter briefly became a slightly nicer place.

Now, imagine twitter banned Donald Trump. I don’t know why, but you could easily argue “hate speech” too. Imagine the effect that would have on the news cycle. Non-issues would be avoided. “Rich white man has hurt feelings” wouldn’t generate pages and pages of think-pieces. [We could focus on issues instead of imaginary ‘scandals’][2]. Imagine how much less toxic the world would be.

Sure, Twitter’s investors would have a goddamn heart attack and never let it happen, but still, it’s nice to imagine, isn’t it?

Choice and achievements

I’ll make a bet with you: you give me a game that presents the player with a quote-unquote “moral choice” – who you fuck/marry/kill – and I’ll bet you cash money that there’s a trophy or an achievement for at least one of your choices.

Games like Mass Effect (the classic whipping boy for “choice” in games) have a black and white sense of morality. You’re either a saint to everyone you meet or you’re a complete asshole. These games have achievements for playing exclusively in one way or the other, which just encourages the player to min-max their moral compass and not necessarily make the decisions they actually want to.

This is what I loved about the recent Rise of the Tomb Raider. The bad guy is a total dick to your character throughout the game, so when you finally beat him (spoiler alert: you beat the baddie at the end of the game), you’re given the choice to either walk away and leave him to die or walk up to him and straight-up merc that prick.

By the time I reached this part of the game and I had to decide what to do, I followed my typical first instinct in these situations. I paused the game, then went online to find out if there was a hidden trophy for either decision, because if so, that’s the choice I’d make. Games had conditioned me to expect my choice to be rewarded, one way or the other. “Ding! You took the moral high ground, here’s a trophy!”

With the final bad guy in Rise of the Tomb Raider, there’s no trophy. No extrinsic reward telling you that you did a good job. So, unusually for a game in 2016, you’re free to do whatever feels right for you.

And that’s so refreshing.

A Platform for Trolls

Last Friday, Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTÉ, invited professional troll Katy Hopkins to be a guest on its flagship light entertainment show, The Late Late Show.

Although it’s subsidised by license fees, RTÉ gets almost half its funding from advertising. Meaning its revenue is directly affected by the number of viewers it gets.

And this is how we end up with people like Katy Hopkins on the Late Late Show. Someone that no-one wanted to see, no-one wanted to listen to, someone whose appearance drew an enormous 1,300 complaints. She ends up on their prime time chat show because it got people talking.

Reasonable opinions don’t go viral. People don’t tweet en masse when a guest on a TV show says something sensible.

Sensible people — people who care about things like acceptance and inclusion — were complaining about Katy Hopkins being on the show. They talked about how they weren’t going to watch the show, and everyone inside the same echo chamber of opinions repeated the same thing, over and over again.

Meanwhile, the people who were insulated from the uproar, the people who don’t know who Katy is (or worse, the people that agree with her) just watched the show anyway. Along with, I’ll bet, a lot of the people who said they wouldn’t. And then come the complaints to RTÉ and the cycle continues.

On a similar note, Mark Zuckerberg released a statement last week denying that fake news stories on Facebook had any impact on the US election. A site that relies on advertising revenue saying that content on that site can’t influence people? Bullshit, right?

Well, if the group in Facebook working to fight back against these fake news stories, it’s totally bullshit. Quoting one anonymous Facebooker “to highlight fake news articles in the news feed, to promote them so they get millions of shares by people who think they are real, that’s not something we should allow to happen. Facebook is getting played by people using us to spread their bullshit.”

In chasing controversy — for views, clicks or whatever — media outlets like RTÉ, Facebook and Twitter are directly responsible for a lowering of the standard of general discourse. They’re normalising hatred and intolerance. They give a platform to trolls because it’s profitable for them, and they ignore the wider social impact. And I don’t think that’s good enough any more.

I don’t really a solution for any of this. I’ve just been feeling really demoralized for the last week and wanted to get this off my chest. So, in lieu of a conclusion, here’s a photo of Christoph Waltz eating a hamburger to cheer us all up.

Update 20161130: Gizmodo recently ran an article about Reddit tearing itself apart. tl;dr the /r/The_Donald subreddit is driving lots of pro-Trump engagement (in all its hate-spreading glory) while driving other traffic away and alienating moderators.

What's Making me Happy - Week of August 22nd

These Mysterious Symbols Have Been in 19 Video Games and No One Knows Why

A strange sigil has been cropping up in (mostly indie) games and, thanks to some amazing detective work on the part of some redditors, it appears to be pointing to some kind of ARG. Is this Frog Fractions 2? Is lowbrowculture.com Frog Fractions 2? If you want to get deeper down the rabbit hole of this, I can recommend the /r/gamedetectives subreddit which consumed a lot of my productivity last week, especially their work on Overwatch’s apparent “Sombra ARG”, where it’s perfectly reasonable to take a random line of source code from a web page, run it through a Vigenére cipher (using the passphrase gained from a previous bit of detective work) and then diff’ing the resulting “datamoshed” image with an original image to get even more clues. I love this stuff. (Incidentally, this is the second week in a row an article from Patrick Klepek has been making me happy. He’s doing amazing work at Vice.)

Fake human sacrifice filmed at Cern, with pranking scientists suspected

Let’s just take a look at the lede to this story:

Spokeswoman at high temple of particle physics suggests ‘scientific users’ of the Geneva facility ‘let their humour go too far’ with staging of occult rite

Holy shit. Something about the phrase “pranking scientists suspected” doesn’t fill me with confidence.

Disney’s Practical Guide to Path Tracing

Walt Disney Animation studios have put up a primer on a super-technical high-tech subject presented as if it was a 1950s documentary. It’s really informative and really charming. See also Disney’s Practical Guide to Snow Simulation.

How much faster would it be to render Toy Story in 2011 compared to how long it took in 1995?

Speaking of Pixar, Quora has some real gems hidden away deep in its belly. Like this fascinating 2011 answer from Craig Good, Pixar boffin, about the render times for the original cinema release of Toy Story vs the 2010 remaster.

All Mapped Out

Popbitch goes deep into the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Maps, digging into the music theory behind what makes it so unique and why it turns up under so many pop songs. Why did the Black Eyed Peas sample the intro? Let’s take a look at the drum tab to find out, shall we?

What's Making me Happy - Week of August 15th

Spaceplan (game)

I’ve got a real soft spot for ‘clicker’ games. Things like Cookie Clicker and Candy Box just hoover up my productivity (honestly, I went to look up the URLs for these and I just lost 20 minutes to Cookie Clicker again). Spaceplan does nothing new with the formula, but it’s very slickly done and, unlike most other games of the genre, this one actually has a well-written story.

No Man’s Sky (game)

No Man’s Sky is a peaceful, colourful slice of sci-fi. When people ask me what it’s like, I say it’s very Minecrafty. You travel to galaxies to collect resources that allow you to travel to more galaxies and collect more resources. And you do this again and again until you’ve explored the universe. The act of doing this is so serene and calming, it’s a lovely refresher from the usual hyperkinetic games that come out this time of year. Also, there’s a lovely story doing the rounds of people naming the planets they find after dead relatives as a way to remember them. Pull-quote: “It’s one of 18 quintillion planets now and no one else may ever find it but I know it’s there and it has her name on it. That’s good enough for me.”

Hikea (video)

Web series where people take drugs assemble Ikea furniture. In the first episode, Giancarlo and Nicole take acid and build a chest of drawers and it’s actually super sweet.

A Burglar’s Guide to the City (book)

Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG) is one of my favourite writers. In his book A Burglar’s Guide to the City, he talks about how burglars have used architecture to plan their robberies. If, like me, your favourite parts of heist films like Ocean’s Eleven are the bits where they construct elaborate recreations of the places they’re about to rob, then this book is right up your street.

Phone Sex Operators (article)

A series of portraits of the people on the other end of phone sex lines. Their stories are fascinating

“My first night was on a Saturday at midnight. It was a gentleman who I believe called himself Bob. He told me about his first experience with a glory hole. He explained that he had no one he felt comfortable telling this to, and I felt a strange intimacy between us, though it was rooted in a fantasy. I think it’s easier to release repressed desires to a non-judgmental, fictional person, because there are no consequences in the outside world.”