I think this needs a part two.

So much more needs to be said about why this game is not a masterpiece!

Why is the game written in a pseudo-medieval register when the game mechanics are all about picking through garbage and hauling everything back to the local flea market? It's like a cross between Shakespeare and Bargain Hunt!

Given that the game is so horrifically materialistic, why even bother having quests when all the quests ever do is provide you with yet more clutter? Did we really need to sit through a speech in order to go and kill a load more goblins and acquire another magical set of armour?

Given that magical equipment is so easy to find and easy to produce, why isn't magic a more commonplace part of the world? Why is the setting so mundane?

I've sunk quite a few hours into it but it strikes me that Skyrim is less a narrative experience than it is an enormous time sponge. It's more like Minecraft than a conventional RPG.

Shouty... so shouty.

A tsundere review if ever I read one ;-)

My problem with this type of self-promotion is really two-fold.

On one level, I think it's problematic if someone seeks to benefit from a social process (including the Hugo Awards but really anything based on a popular plebiscite) without also seeking to enrich that process. For example, if McGuire provides a post linking exclusively to her own eligible materials, she benefits hugely from that post but she isn't really helping people to discover new works or think about the nomination process.

On a second level, I think there's an issue with social capital hoarding. McGuire has built a very strong relationship with her fans and using this relationship to secure Hugo nominations has helped McGuire to acquire a good deal of prestige and visibility within the field. Given how much social capital McGuire now has, I would like to see her use her engagement of the nomination process to direct people to people deserving nominations.

Scalzi is another author who has built a very intense relationship with his fans and all Scalzi has to do is link to a Locus poll and his readers ensure that the poll lists Old Man's War as the greatest SF novel of the 21st Century. However, Scalzi has also used his social capital to a) draw attention to rogue publishers who seek to exploit less experienced writers, b) help create the Hugo voters' packet and c) raise a lot of money for projects like Strange Horizons that are a great boon to the field and rely upon reader donations.

I'd be the first to admit that I don't have a great deal of moral force behind these convictions... If McGuire can't possibly spare the time to say "Hey, while you're voting for me, you might want to consider voting for these people who also do awesome work!" then I'm sure she has her reasons. We all have our reasons. I just think it would be nice if people with huge platforms and fan-bases used those things to benefit people other than themselves.

Edited to add:

I should also point out that while I read the first of McGuire's zombie novels, I don't follow her blog or really take an interest in what she gets up to so, for all I know, she's recommending Hugo nominees left, right and centre but I'm just not seeing them. I did cruise her blog when I put up the initial link but it's distinctly possible that McGuire is doing all of the things I ask but I'm just not seeing it :-)

Another point: I think talking about McGuire in these terms is tricky as people invariably use talk of 'voting blocks' to explain away the award successes of female authors while male authors are seen as being entirely deserving of their awards successes. For the record, I don't have any problem with McGuire winning awards... I don't personally read her work but I'm sure she's as deserving of a Hugo award as anyone else.

Oof... damning.

As someone who does tend to write long pieces and who does occasionally write about games, I was curious as to how he filled 50,000 words with only a single game. I had assumed that he either a) described everything in the game in great detail, b) described the theoretical framework through which he understood the game in great detail or, c) both.

I was kind of hoping for c...

e-sports just remind me of those times when you'd go to your mate's house as a kid and he'd 'show' you a game, which meant him playing it on his own for hours while you sat in silence thinking up ways to murder him.

Game designers have learned a lot from action movie directors but the lesson they really need to learn is that the sensation of pace and tone is largely relative. If you have everyone running around and exploding all the time, you don't have an exciting film... you have a hysterical film like Transformers.

In absolute terms, there's nothing higher than 11 but if you're at 3 for a couple of hours, 7 can feel like 105.

I'll look forward to your views on Killing is Harmless as I am curious to see what a 50,000 word piece on a single game actually looks like.

I'm happy to be corrected on the suggestion that the X-Com organisation might be setting humanity on a similar developmental path to the aliens as it has been a long time since I played the original games. I had Apocalypse on PC but I think my specs were not quite up to it and I moved over to Apple rather than upgrading so all I can remember was the hybrids and the fact that the X-Com agency does create a bunch of soldiers who look a lot like aliens come the end of the game. I always took the missions where you raid an alien base to be a sort of inversion of the early missions, recasting human soldiers as hostile Others in an alien landscape. I don't remember the games ever explicitly spelling out that humanity was becoming more like the aliens but I had assumed it was quite heavily implied if you paid attention :-)

Having listened to the podcast (great job on those BTW, really enjoying them) I think you engaged with the game's systems and found them to be a great improvement on those of the originals. I think that, by and large, they are a huge improvement as they take what was good in the original games and augment it with a decade's worth of familiarity with the tactical RPG sub-genre.

My complaint is really little more than an attempt to draw attention to the fact that the style of the game is actually a considerable step back from the style of the original. I think the style of the original accounted for a good deal of its charm and the remake's failure to either keep that style or improve upon it made the remake less impressive than it should really have been.

Mind you... I'm appalled that it took you until Xmas 2011 to read Cryptonomicon