Working at Bioware/EA, huh? So the problems in that company isn't just at the very top. As we knew.


His death has actually hit me harder than expected. I've not listened to much of his the last few years, but he was a staunch defender of consumer rights and called out companies and games that went in a despicable direction, and among game reviewers too. To lose a voice like that, and such a strong and popular one, is going to be detrimental. It's not just a person that is gone, but the values he stood for and promoted.

Can't imagine what his wife must be going through, though. You can never really prepare for something like this. And at such a young age, with both their lives ahead of them -- it must feel so horribly unfair and gruesome. Hopefully she is made of strong stuff, with good friends and family around her.

This is what I have seen. I am not usre if there was anything else but I think this alone is "sufficient".

I just now heard about his death. I am sad to tears, I really enjoyed his reviews. Rest in peace.

I never liked his material. He came across as an annoying arrogant twit. BUT after the suffering he's had to endure, it's nice to know he's at peace. No one deserves to go through what he did.

This guy has managed to grab a lot of the clips that were sent out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aXU4LN5Gcw&t=75s

It is absolitely shameful and I find it hard to imagine how anyone could even put finger to keyboard to even type such a thing out to the public.

Okay, so a couple of cunts (like, ex-devs) tweeted negatively about TotalBiscuit after his death. Some reactions made it sound like the Bioware studios were throwing a champagne party, which made me feel sick about even owning a couple of Bioware games. I wonder how many people shivered the same way.

All in all, it's just as anecdotical and isolated as the occasional trash posting on these forums (with dipshits cheering for forumers' cancers, or beaten up mayors, or the destruction of the life of several minorities, etc). In fact, it's the usual stuff that ordinary outraged people do at the same scale, or don't see as an issue (not even pointing it out) when it's inline where their own hostilities. I expected something much worse than that, something more "consensual" within some companies.

So, just : shrug. Like I shrug when twats use TotalBiscuit's death for videos about anita saarkaaawhatevs "not even being a real gamer anyway". People throwing bits of corpses at each others, and seeking to justify it. A couple of devs or ex-devs have a tauto mentality ? Good for them. Tautos have a right to code, I suppose. But quite a few forumgoers on these very boards would deserve the same outrage for various equivalent reasons, and would probably get it if they were relatable to some high profile company. Beh.

I'd say the elephant in the room is that some people don't forgive TotalBiscuit for having been the excuse (and the caution) of gamergate as the movement was hijacked by ultraconservative sickos. But he has been this precisely because he was a genuine representant of the authentic "journalism watch" roots of the movements, and wouldn't admit the scale of this hijacking. Him becoming such a target of the anti-gg reactions is as abject as what gg had become. It's sad. But not an uncommon story.

Anyway, I end up reassured about the general consensus on TotalBiscuit. I can go back to disbelieving that a whole company's "corporate culture" would, internally, present his loss as something positive. In which case, yeah, a non-negociable blacklist would be mandatory.

If The Simpsons shaped my humour, TotalBiscuit shaped my critical thinking. For around 6 years he's encouraged me to open up the clock and see how it works, to consider game mechanics and their intended (or unintended) effects with an analytical eye. He never spent half a review/impressions video talking about how breasts make him uncomfortable, nor did he invite someone for an interview with the intention of ambushing them for ratings. He was the one critic who I felt best represented my interests as a consumer, and I shall miss him.

I really don`t understand your logic. You can`t shrug everything away because it`ll still come after you.

I don't shrug away significant things such as collective movements, whole subcultures, consensus shifts, etc. And in a way this is what I first thought it was.

I do shrug away a couple of isolated morons.

For instance, when I arrived on gog, there was a couple of transphobic users who were typing disgustingly hostile stuff that were bothering some trans forumgoer, or a couple of islamophobic twats who were trying to convince a muslim user that he probably was a bloodthirsty terrorist deep down. I was mostly (perhaps naively) advocating to ignore them, as some statistically unavoidable imbeciles.

But when these discourses found momentum throughout the forums, snowballing through mutual validation (and the "extended" gamergate movement actually helped a lot), yeah, it became a worrisome problem, setting the tone and texture of these boards, defining its subculture. So much that the gog staff themselves ended up putting in place a short-lived moderation system.

The dickheads who are twitting trash about Totalbiscuit's death belong to the first situation, and can be ignored. But I first thought it was the second situation, which would have been way more disturbing.

What you mean to say is the pathetic attempts to troll and hide behind political correctness in order to censor these forums and videogames at large, failed. Although I wonder if TBs stance on Gamergate would have been different if he didn't have cancer.

What did he do?

Encouraged developers to take game options like FOV and colorblind options seriously, as well as framerate

Didn't back out from questioning bad practices, or quacks like Sarkeesian despite blowback from people on the ''right side of history''

Didn't back down from the position of ''games don't kill people'' while many so called game journalists did so

Held himself to the standard to which he held everyone else (or even to a higher one)

To name a few. He also contributed a lot towards the SC2 community, called out people for inadequate disclosure standards, was partly involved in the discovery of G2A as thieves, was the loudest and most logical and first in decrying pre-orders, and plenty of other stuff. A lot of the stuff that we see as common knowledge now was first propounded by him.

If you ask me to show you any other person in games coverage who's done even half of that, I wouldn't be able. Hell, most people in games coverage don't even care for even one of these things.

What Shadowstalker16 said

Oh I see where we are. When someone starts throwing around idiotic terms like `transphobia` and `islamophobia` that`s when I know I`m not talking to logic or reason. Do you even understand how Islam would destroy anyone that was a trans?

I`m not Islamic, I`m Christian bought up. And I`m proud to be what Nature biologically set me up to be. How about you quit your Hetero and Christianphobia, jerk.

Now you can shrug me off.

Yep!