Crystal Dynamics Explains Spider-Man PS4 Exclusivity By Saying A Bunch Of... Words, I Guess?
Furnished content.
We had just been talking about the upcoming Marvel's Avengers multi-platform game and its very strange plan to make Spider-Man a PlayStation exclusive character. In that post, I mentioned that I don't think these sorts of exclusive deals, be they for games or characters, make any real sense. Others quoted in the post have actually argued that exclusive characters specifically hurt everyone, including owners of the exclusive platform, since this can only serve to limit the subject of exclusion within the game. But when it came to why this specific deal had been struck, we were left with mere speculation. Was it to build on some kind of PlayStation loyalty? Was it to try to drive more PlayStation purchases? Was it some kind of Sony licensing thing?Well, we have now gotten from the head of the publishing studio an...I don't know... answer? That seems to be what was attempted, at least, but I'll let you all see for yourselves, if you can make out what the actual fuck is going on here. The co-leader of Crystal Dynamics gave an interview to ComicBook and touched on the subject.So the beauty of Spider-Man, and what Spider-Man represents as a character, and as a world is...again, it comes back to the relationship with PlayStation and Marvel. We happened to be...once you can execute and deliver, when it comes down to choices of where and what Spider-Man can be, that’s a relationship question that PlayStation absolutely has the rights to, that as you guys know, with Sony’s ownership there, and Marvel with Sony saying, ‘Hey, this is something we can do. This is something we can do on this platform.’ If anything was deserving of a Jonathan Swan meme, this must surely be it. I have read the above paragraph no less than ten times and I have no idea what the hell it is saying. There seems to be some nod to Sony's publishing rights for video games and Spider-Man, but, as we've said previously, those rights don't seem to actually exist. Then there's some talk about how special Spider-Man is, alongside "Hey, this is something we can do."...okay. It doesn't get any better as it goes on.And so, what we do as creators is say, ‘This is an opportunity that we can make something unique, and fun, and awesome that we all...you just talked about Black Widow, and to be able to have that experience. So we love the idea of being able to bring this character to the PlayStation players. Blink, blink. But why exclusively? Why wouldn't you love to bring that character to Xbox owners? PC gamers? Nothing in this dump truck of words strung together seems to have anything to do with the exclusivity deal this man's studio struck with Sony. What the hell?But I really do think people will look at this and say, ‘Yeah, okay, we get that, we can understand the business behind that’, but in general, we’re making this game for everybody. They sure as shit don't. The response to this deal has been nearly universally negative. Which makes all the sense in the world. Owners of other platforms don't get to play the character. PlayStation owners might be glad they do, but does anyone really think they're also cheering on owners of other systems not getting to play Spider-Man? Why in the world would they even care?Whatever else, the studio should try harder to explain its decisions rather than simply trot out an ill-prepared studio head to weave a tangled web of words.
Read more here
posted at: 12:00am on 07-Aug-2020
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)
Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: Twitter Locks Accounts For Fact Checking The President
Furnished content.
Another day in which we get to explain how content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. On Wednesday, Twitter (and Facebook) chose to lock the Trump campaign's account after it aired a dangerous and misleading clip from Fox News' "Fox & Friends" in which the President falsely claimed that children are "almost immune" from COVID-19.People can debate whether it was appropriate or not for Twitter (and Facebook) to make those content moderation decisions, but it seems perfectly defensible. Claiming that kids are "almost immune" is insane and dangerous. However, where things get sketchy on the content moderation front is that Twitter also then ended up freezing the accounts of journalists and activists who fact checked that "Fox & Friends" nonsense:Or in the case of Bobby Lewis from Media Matters, Twitter suspended his account for simply mocking part of the Fox & Friends clip, noting that when a host asked the President to "say something to heal the racial divisions in America" Trump couldn't do it and could only brag about himself:Now, tons of people are reasonably pointing out that this is ridiculous, and arguing that Twitter is "bad" at content moderation. But, again, this all comes just a few weeks (has it been a few weeks? time has no meaning) since Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all received tremendous criticism from people for not being fast enough in pulling down another nonsense video -- one that Breitbart livestreamed of "doctors" spewing under nonsense about COVID-19 in front of the Supreme Court. Indeed, at least week's Congressional anti-trust hearing, Rep. David Cicilline lit into Facebook for leaving that video up for five hours, allowing it to get 20 million views (meanwhile, multiple Republican representatives yelled at Zuckerberg for taking down the video).So, if you have some politicians screaming about how any clip of disinformation about COVID-19 must be taken down, it's no surprise that social media platforms are going to rush to take that content down -- and the easiest way to do that is to take down any of the clips, even the clips that are people debunking, criticizing, or mocking the speech. Would it be nice if content moderation systems could figure out which one is which? Yes, absolutely it would. But doing so would mean taking extra time to understand context (which isn't always so easy to understand), and in the process also allowing the videos that some say are dangerous by themselves to remain online.In fact, if Twitter said to keep up the videos that are people fact checking or criticizing the videos, you create a new dilemma -- in that those who want the dangerous nonsense to spread can, themselves, retweet the videos criticizing the content, and add their own commentary in support of the video. And then what should Twitter do?Part of the issue here is that there are always these difficult trade-offs in making these decisions, and even if you think it's an easy call, the reality is that it's going to be more complex than you think.
Read more here
posted at: 12:00am on 07-Aug-2020
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)
|
|