BioWare Supports Beleaguered Writer

[Bloodtrozorx]

Good work gamers, way to make us all look like a bunch of immature pricks.

If you participated in this unjustified hate against that woman YOU are the disease infecting our pastime.

Um, This.

Yes her insult(comeback) was incendiary and hilarious to boot but she really didn't deserve the treatment she received. I understand that people can be passionate however that was misogyny for the sake of it. These are the same kids playing COD and screaming at every female player to "get back to the kitchen" as far as I?m concerned.

 

[sifffffff]

Great. BioWare has truly fallen. Jennifer Hepler is supporting the death of truly excellent games. LOL Why not put in a fast forward button? Who cares about good and deep challenges?

Where are you getting this shit?

There's more than one side to the story you know. Yes the mob of angry people are twitter is vicious and unruly, but that's what happens when you make a career out of being crap, then taunt other people about it.

I love how they donated $1,000 to a charity too. Not only is it chump change to them, it basically says "Waah, a grown woman got bullied on the internets. Won't someone think of the children?"

I've read some truly stupid shit in my tenure on this forum but this takes the cake.

I know this is going to be a shock but a lot of people don't think she's made her career out of "crap"

Not liking something doesn't give you the right to defame the person who created it.

And she's fucking totally justified in taunting the people attacking her. The best part, her analysis of them was spot on for probably 90% of the cases.

And that second part about them giving money to charity? They gave money to charity. Who the fuck cares what their motives were.

One more point to address a comment I've seen several make. That since she isn't interested in gameplay she should just write in a different industry or be less involved in the development.

Why?

First of all I don't think she's currently involved in gameplay design, just story. Second of all I don't think somebody needs to like playing games to write for them. For a lot of people having a passion for something and writing for them doesn't always turn out to be all that great.

See fanfiction

 

[UnderGlass]

snip

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1) Normally you'd be right. However, this aren't twitter and facebook accounts that are solely used for one or the other. Both Flynn and Helper created their Twitter accounts as a way to interact with the fans, like several other people, they're accounts are monitored by fans for news about upcoming games. They're 'personal' twitter accounts are also 'commercial' accounts and while they are not the 'offical' accounts for the company and they should be held accountable for their actions.

2) The problem with your example is that you still show professionalism in that scenario. You're still being polite, you're still acting like an adult. Flynn and Helper didn't do that and they don't deserve sympathy because of it. Tell me, do you call those trouble making customers 'fucking morons'? When they continue to push your buttons, do you simply tell them to 'fuck off'? No, I don't believe you do.

First rule of the Internet, don't feed the trolls.

Yes and no. This is what I meant, Hepler's and Flynn's Twitter accounts by no means constitute an official channel of Bioware news and updates even if fans do follow them. Very few Twitter accounts do - regardless of who's operating them. Again, people think just because someone is known then they can behave like baboons.

Someone could very easily find out my address from my name, it's public information. But if they start sending me violent abuse or come up to me on the train then I'm afraid the gauntlet has been thrown and the gloves are off. In my example there is a difference between my official workplace (ie. Bioware forums ; Edmonton offices etc.) and say a confrontational and personal attack in a public arena (twitter). Apologies if the analogy was unclear. The attacks have nothing to do with people's grievances over professional issues and everything to do with telling this poor woman what a **** she is and how she should go die.

In response to your question if I were copping the kind of abuse Hepler has endured, to my face, over a period of time and other means of removing the aggression were unavailable: I would have absolutely no qualms telling them what a fucking moron they were. Workplace or no. I deserve better than that.

 

[Darmort]

Just a little note to all of you people, who were gleefuly a part of this little campaign (and I know you guys will come visit this to see this, heck you probably won't be able to resist responding to this post I bet considering what an utter lack of self-control you have)

Jennifer Hepler is not the cancer killing Bioware. Nor is that retarted Bioware 'story chart' you people keep posting around on message boards to pump your own egoes. Nor is it your slavering obedience to certain alternative gaming companies, whose stories are, by the way, by now just as predictable as those of Bioware's only that you choose to be willfully blind to this reality because you happen to love their 'alternative' and 'edgy' tropes moreso.

You want to know who the real cancer of Bioware right now is? It's 'fans' like you. Self-entitled 'fans' with nothing better to do but cry about 'back-in-the-day'.

Now reply to this post to 'prove me wrong' again and, in doing so, totally validate my own point. Go on...everyone loves to see you 'fight the good fight' for the 'back-in-the-day' Bioware (which, by the way, never existed because you missed the real strong point of their stories to begin with). Everyone loves to see you argue on forums after all...because you are a joke of the biggest kind. Especially when you resort to desperate primitivism, such as this, and completely prove the opposite point right - that Bioware's spirits, for whatever faults it does indeed have and has had since Baldur's Gate, still lives.

And if you still think that isn't the case (as I know you don't), then think on how Muzyka's response to yours makes you look like anything but 'intelligent' and anything but as rational as the fictional state of Bioware's old stories that existed nowhere else but in your own deluded heads.

Damn I love you. I don't care who you are. I love you. Just needed to say that.


Okay, so a writer admits that she doesn't like playing video games because she can't play them? Would people just think about this for a second? Play a game you suck at. Doesn't matter which one provided you suck at it. Now try finding that enjoyable.

Fine. She can dislike video games for that. It would be an ENTIRELY different point if she had said she hated video games for the reasons Jack Thompson does, in which case you'd have to question as to why on earth they'd work in the games industry...

 

[mgs16925]

So basically she said that she enjoys games as a form of interactive storytelling, but does not like the actual gameplay parts. I may be showing my age a bit here, but this used to be an entire genre in gaming when CD-Roms were new (it was drowned out because most of them were shit). It's also the entire crux of the games-as-art thing.

It's like saying you like tabletop role-playing for the communal storytelling, but don't like the number crunching needed for every combat; what she said isn't even a criticism of gaming really, just saying that she likes the part of it SHE WORKS ON AS A JOB better than the parts some other people enjoy. This has always been a part of the gaming crowd; it's why easy mode exists. The easy mode in the newest Deus Ex was even called "Tell Me a Story", and no-one seemed to mind that.

What I find most odd is that people are blaming her for the homosexual romances in Mass Effect 3 (which have been present in all other Bioware games since Juhanni in KOTOR) instead of the fact that ME3 will actually implement her idea as an optional game mode.

 

[mgs16925]

So basically she said that she enjoys games as a form of interactive storytelling, but does not like the actual gameplay parts. I may be showing my age a bit here, but this used to be an entire genre in gaming when CD-Roms were new (it was drowned out because most of them were shit). It's also the entire crux of the games-as-art thing.

It's like saying you like tabletop role-playing for the communal storytelling, but don't like the number crunching needed for every combat; what she said isn't even a criticism of gaming really, just saying that she likes the part of it SHE WORKS ON AS A JOB better than the parts some other people enjoy. This has always been a part of the gaming crowd; it's why easy mode exists. The easy mode in the newest Deus Ex was even called "Tell Me a Story", and no-one seemed to mind that.

What I find most odd is that people are blaming her for the homosexual romances in Mass Effect 3 (which have been present in all other Bioware games since Juhanni in KOTOR) instead of the fact that ME3 will actually implement her idea as an optional game mode.

 

[Andy Chalk]

Look, I know you're a contributor and your heart is probably in the right place, but if you can't respond to my actual posts without resorting to utterly misrepresenting what I'm saying then let's save ourselves trouble and not bother having this conversation.

Your second and third paragraphs speak for themselves - if she didn't want trouble with the internet, she should have kept her mouth shut. In an interview about her preferences in gameplay, no less. I really don't see where I'm misconstruing anything.

 

[Tanakh]

Except that's not what she said, what she said was she wished there was an option to skip difficult gameplay sections, something some games actually do.

She never should have been insulted in the first place and when people start spamming your Twitter feed with hate that means it's no longer a professional issue. People started insulting her as a person in the online equivalent of approaching her in the street and hurling abuse and she responded in kind.

Humm, tree things:

- The "I prefer" part alluded to it being optional. Certainly in her post there is nothing as authoritarian as "Videogames should have no gameplay".

- She never said difficult, managing an inventory or reading a map is never difficult so actually that proves difficulty is not part of the issue. She simply doesn't like the interactive parts of the game which are not totally related to the game story, which is fine, it's her opinion however dumb i think it might be.

- I would say it's more akin to Elton John going to a love parade and then saying "Gay sexual orientation is fine, but I rather have it with zero physical contact. I don't like all that kissing and penetration stuff, cuddling is the most I like". Why? Because she works in the videogame industry giving an interview to a videogame specialized media directed specifically at videogamers saying that the "game" part of the videogames is what she likes less about videogames. She actually knew it was a horrible answer, don't know why she said that anyway.

Anyway, I have no issue with her work or her position at Bioware. I remember the plots she was involved in DA:O and they were good, if a little generic; and after DA2 and ToR (I couldn't even finish DA2 due the boredom), ME:3 is the last game i will be playing from that company until I see a great improvement in the "ambient", "content" and "game" part of their videogames.

What dissapoints me is that a company that was famous for the narrative in their games is this passionless about good writing in videogames; it sure is very nice to see them supporting their staff, but it's sad to see them employing writers that doesn't love videogames, because without the writers loving the game part of videogames you can certainly do good narratives, but not great ones, narratives that really exploit the advantages in storytelling of a videogame to create a truly brilliant videogame story (maybe even video game history), flashes of this can be seen from time to time, like the crash at the beggining of Bioshock, the opera house event on FF VI, the companion cube in portal, some fights on SotC off the top of my head.

Yup, shows perfectly how people are capable of taking two quotes and saw them together to put words in the mouth of the woman which she never said.

If you don't understand me: SHE NEVER SAID THAT!

As you can see, this is a reply to Andy's post, which also has stuff SHE NEVER SAID (at least not in her infamous interview), so I assumed we were posting our interpretation to her written words, not a direct quote. Was that unreasonable? If so, why mine is the only unreasonable of the two?

 

[Andy Chalk]

I mean, what the fuck is she doing being a game writer if she hates playing games anyway?

At what point did she say she hates playing videogames?

Go ahead and look it up, get back to me when you find it. I'll wait.

 

[Jadak]

I heard about her new book, how piss poor it is, plus she wrote some really bad parts of DA:O and I just have to say this, the fact that they are adding male homosexuality in the last installment of Shepard's story seems very off if you ask me.

Honestly, I don't particularly care what sort of sexual preference based content they feel the need to include in the game, I just wish they'd base it on selecting a sexual orientation of your character up front. If I choose my Shepard to be a heterosexual, then simply don't show any of the dialog options leading to those outcomes,

And as for the quote about her thinking a fast forward button to skip combat would be great... Isn't that what books are for? If you skip dialog, you still have a game. If you skip combat, you have rather weirdly cut movie with a choose your own adventure element.

But to be fair, I'd love that with The Old Republic. I don't hate the game, but my primary interest in it is the storyline, not the rest of it. So sure, if I could just skip through the fights and read the story, that'd be great. And I'm sure her employers would just love the impact that option has on the subscription base when people like me flip through the story and end payments.

 

[Madman123456]

Some Criticism is in Order. Many People are looking for new Ways to get Narrative acrosswith the Gameplay as opposed to the "old" way, gameplay->Cutscene with exposition dump -> gameplay.
One can deliver narrative through the Atmossphere in the Game, the Artstyle, Ambient sounds and so on. You'll need to see if and what of your Narrative is lost when the Player is distracted by Gameplay.

You will not be able to discover new Ways in which to tell a Story when you don't play the Games. Bioware may want someone who loves Games to write for their Games.

The "skip Combat" Feature might be an Idea as soon as you can convey narrative in a dialogue scene as easily as you can in Combat. For now its not a very good idea. I can think of many ways in which many Dialogues may have gone in another Direction. I can think of many Scenes in which i immediately thought "why didn't they think of telling the other Character this or that which would have solved the Problem in a Minute?".
When we can actually converse with NPCs, then we may want to skip the Combat. Possibly.



This is my Critique and wether you agree with it or not, you may have noticed that i didn't call her any Names. I attacked the Basis of her Ideas and explained why they aren't very good.

 

[Tanakh]

Why, then?

Yahtzee's column, some featured articles, Yahtzee's vids, lately Jim's vids, some friends i met through here, the comics and to post of forums in my freetime, in that order. I do dislike most of the editorial columnist here, but at least they are fun to talk to

Great. BioWare has truly fallen. Jennifer Hepler is supporting the death of truly excellent games. LOL Why not put in a fast forward button? Who cares about good and deep challenges?

Well... to be fair BioWare gameplay has always been at most good, never excellent (MDK2 was closeish). If they have fallen is IMO because their write department has become complacent and their Art department seems to decide whether to work or just Copy paste and go to the pub based on a dice.

Videogames are the only narrative form in the world where you have to be "good enough" to watch the narrative unfold. Some games have already implemented a system like that, L.A. Noire lets you skip action sequences you keep failing at.

While I think it's a step in the wrong direction... mhee, if more people would play them, then I am for it.

But... roflolz, you CAN'T be serious about videogames being the only narrative form where you have to be "good enough" to watch it unfold. Take an average person that only see summer bluckbusters, put him in his living room to see The Seven Seal or Un chien andalou or Ikiru or Luz Silenciosa (not to mention the really long and really slow ones), it is highly unlikely they watch it whole without a gun to their head, more less with pleasure, and even more that they get it; do that with À la recherche du temps perdu, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, Cicero's Oratioria for books, with atonal music or pre-classic music, with almost any ballet or postmodern "serious" theater. I don't know one narrative form where you don't have to be "good enough" to get it.

 

[Warachia]

Great. BioWare has truly fallen. Jennifer Hepler is supporting the death of truly excellent games. LOL Why not put in a fast forward button? Who cares about good and deep challenges?

This is the same as Guillermo del Toro who doesn't watch cutscenes, so what if a person doesn't like a part of what they are making? That is why they are not making that part, there are plenty of people who work with films, but don't watch movies, should we start claiming that the movie industry has collapsed and because of these people and they somehow orchestrated the death of these things?

How does a persons' opinion mean that gameplay is going down the toilet? It's not like she's a lead designer, and even if she was, she understands why gameplay is there, she personally doesn't like it. The best part with this second paragraph is I can swap out gameplay with anything else, like movies (for crew that don't watch them) books (for publishers who don't read them) and games (for people who don't play them) and prove your argument is incredibly flimsy.
There are also plenty of people throughout history who hated what they were doing but made great things, or hated each other and made great works.

 

[Tanakh]

-snip-

Nooooo! I agree almost completely with the hamtaro furry fan! How the mighty have fallen

JK of course, good post.

 

[tzimize]

As much as those people are fucking morons, he shouldn't have come out and said it. But yeah, it is cute that we want our community to be taken seriously when stuff like this is still happening.

I dont really see why she shouldnt have said it. Shes a writer. I know not all people like games, and I dont need them to. If she was in charge of gameplay on games and didnt like playing games, then we'd have a problem. But shes not. Tbh, I often feel like she does. If a game has a shit story, I often cba to play it. That said I can enjoy pure gameplay experiences too like binding of isaac or super meat boy.

People are just as the always are. Dumb. (for clarity, not referring to you, referring to the internet hate campaign).

That poster is referring to another bioware employee posting from his twitter account that the people attacking hepler were "fucking morons" it was not hepler herself.

Just clarifying, he wasn't talking about her story statement.

Ah.

Well, dont I look like a twat now.

Phew, at least its the internet, I'll be right at home. Thanks for clearing that up, and if the original poster sees this, feel free to ignore my comment completely.

 

[Grimh]

Huh? Wait a minute. I thought the cancer that was killing BioWare was EA. I was misinformed!

 

[Erttheking]

I heard about her new book, how piss poor it is, plus she wrote some really bad parts of DA:O and I just have to say this, the fact that they are adding male homosexuality in the last installment of Shepard's story seems very off if you ask me.

All the same, saw the title of this article, had to grab this.

Wow, there were so many things wrong with that sentence. A series that started off by advertising lesbian sex and it's a bad move that they appeal to women who like guy on guy action...the Hell?

OT: The guy is getting flamed like Hell...I don't really feel sorry for him.

do you people even read? I said MALE.

Did you read my post? I flat out stated that ME started by advertising lesbian sex, and now they're appealing to women by adding guy on guy action. (Yes girls like that, it's what girl on girl is to us)

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YaoiFangirl

Check the real life folder.

So what are you trying to say? Girl on girl is fine in ME but guy on guy is going too far? Word that in a way that actually makes sense please.

What im saying is that has been in there sense game one, and im fine with that, but Male Shepard has had no homosexual options for the first two games, it feels shoehorned in.

Really? Funny, I seem to recall that romancing Tali with a Femshep was impossible in the second game but now is possible in the first game. So is that shoehorned in? And can you remind me why adding things to a game is bad? Do you just want something to stay the same forever? Also it was aliens only, which was cheating.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DiscountLesbians

By the way, you do know that it was originally going to be possible to romance Kaiden and Ashley in the first game right?

I think the point he was making was that from a storytelling perspective it feels rather awkward and forced for a male Shepard to be able to declare himself gay only after there have already been two games without a homosexual male option. Nothing against homosexual males, but it does seem forced and is quite obviously a meek attempt to appeal to fans who were upset at the lack of gay male options. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but the first two games in the series were devoid of anything that could hint at Shepard being gay (and the developers were actually somewhat insistent on that point).

So it seems like more: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuddenlySexuality As opposed to real, good storytelling or a more natural flow to such characterization. Especially since there was absolutely no reference to a male Shepard being gay at all. At all.

And if Shepard actually had a set personality instead of being whatever the Hell the player wanted him to be, ranging anywhere from an asexual paladin of light to a nymphomaniac slash physcopath. As for there being no hints to Shepard being even possibly gay....hahahahahahahahaha...no

 

[ben-]

Well if she didnt like video games, or video gamers before she sure as hell wont now. Good work guys.