Id Software co-founder and former Oculus VR CTO John Carmack is facing criticism for his recent announcement that he will be attending BasedCon, a sci-fi and fantasy convention for fans who are "tired of woke propaganda."
"I’m going to be at basedcon.com again this year," Carmack tweeted. "I had read books from and twitter-interacted with three of the authors (more since!), but I wasn’t sure what to expect last year. It turned out fun, in a grass-roots con way that reminded me of the old Space Access days.
I’m going to be at https://t.co/plYFgrjxYP again this year. I had read books from and twitter-interacted with three of the authors (more since!), but I wasn’t sure what to expect last year. It turned out fun, in a grass-roots con way that reminded me of the old Space Access days.May 17, 2023
"I was just going to show up as a normal attendee / fan of the authors last year, but Rob [presumably BasedCon fouder Robert Kroese] nudged me into doing a talk and some panels, and I enjoyed it."
Attending a convention is a pretty unremarkable thing most of the time, but BasedCon isn't like most. Its website (opens in new tab) claims the convention "isn't about pushing any particular ideology," while at the same time listing examples of "based beliefs" that the organizers subscribe to:
Men cannot give birth
Guns don’t kill people; people kill people
A fetus is a human being
Socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried
Discriminating against white people is racism
The website complains that while "sci-fi cons used to be a lot of fun," in recent years they've been dominated by "a small clique of authoritarian jerks who made them into venues for pushing social justice dogma." That in turn sparked controversies like Sad Puppies (opens in new tab), an effort to push right-wing authors to the top of Hugo Award voting, and the misogynistic harassment campaign Gamergate (opens in new tab), got Gina Carano fired from The Mandalorian, and drove the push "to get Critical Race Theory and other social justice garbage into schools."
It also warns that if you happen not to embrace those beliefs, you should probably stay away: "If you think people with a certain skin color can’t be racist or you expect people to use made-up pronouns when talking about you, you may want to do a reality check before coming to BasedCon."
Carmack is known for having something of a libertarian bent—he recently defended the idea of self-made billionaires (opens in new tab), for instance—and has never seemed particularly concerned about his public image. And he gets a lot of slack, because he's a little weird and he made Doom and Quake. But headlining an event like this is a step too far for a lot of his followers on social media.
"I've been a fan of yours over half my life and it's disappointing you're going to an event run by people with such reprehensible views," one follower wrote. "Please reconsider. There's so many better tech events that would gladly have you."
"Dude, you gave me a glimmer of hope interacting with my tweets about forms of address and VR, and now you're going to a party of chuds where /this/ is their raison d'etre," another replied. "This sucks."
One Twitter user pointed out that BasedCon does not disclose its location. The event will be held in an unnamed hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but "for security reasons" does not share specifics with anyone who isn't registered to attend. I think that's a very revealing detail about the real nature of BasedCon: If you're not willing to tell people where your event is being held, maybe it's worth examining why.
The whole thing is kind of gross and sad, and there's really no arguing that Carmack isn't aware of the ugly side of the event. The website spells it all out quite clearly, and as he said on Twitter, he knows the organizer and this won't be his first trip to the show. As many people responding to the situation have pointed out, it all comes down to the old adage: Never meet your heroes. I've reached out to Carmack for comment and will update if I receive a reply.
True. It can't be overstated how much people just did not know how to design control schemes at all back then, and past that Doom required the creation of a bunch of innovative math to make its graphics work.
No, that style of game is painfully awful and clunky, even with the later improvements that fixed absurd things like mouse-based movement.
Things being a genre isn't necessarily good. "There is a linear sequence of pictures and you press forward and that's it there's no mechanics or interactivity" is a genre. "Clone of a dogshit phone game that was a clone of a dogshit flash game from the early 2000s" is a genre. "RPGMaker game" is a genre.
I mean bad as they are boomer shooters aren't as bad as VNs, mobile games, or RPGMaker games, but still.
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You’re wrong. Doom specifically had what would become the default version of non clunky controls. It wasn’t the first, but it was the first time the majority of people experienced something other than using key look.
The game itself was also notably faster in play than anything else. It made build engine games look slow for Christ sake.
Doom would be the fastest, slickest experience until quake came out and actually felt buttery.
What are you comparing doom to that it comes out clunky?
I did say it was innovative specifically because of how there just was no actual established knowledge of how to design a control scheme yet, for all that it was still awful.
My argument is that it hasn't aged well and the entire boomer shooter genre is shitty nostalgia bait, not that the standard when it came out wasn't even worse.
Things that aren't shitty antiquated sprite shooters with like 3 fps animations and mouse-based movement?
Like Half Life slaps the piss out of Doom style games, and Half Life is unplayably clunky now. Half Life 2 was another massive step up, and is unplayably clunky now. Hell, even Halo was seen as groundbreaking for its time, and Halo is an awful game with shit core gameplay.
Wait hold on a second. How are you saying that halo is a bad game with shit core gameplay?
On account of it being a bad game with shit core gameplay. Like yeah it did this or that new and introduced such and such mechanical concepts, but it's just not good. It's got that thing old games did where bullets leave the barrel at a 45 degree angle at random so the standard bloom is physically larger than the enemy models, it's janky af, and the levels are repetitive and bland. And before you go "well clearly you just don't remember it very well" I played it again last year, it took two hours to run through the whole thing, and it was a miserable experience. It's just a bad game both design-wise and mechanically.
Like it's everything I hated about FPSes back in its era, and playing it again reminded me how much the general body of game design knowledge has improved in the past twenty years.
Okay so what would you say is a good shooter with good core gameplay?
I don't know. Crysis of all things held up reasonably well when I played it five or six years ago, though its sequels were kind of shit (and its plot is pure Bush-era chauvinist lunacy). Any "bullets go where you point them and bloom happens after sustained rapid shots" game necessarily does gunplay better than Halo did. Ironically Destiny 2 has very good core gameplay, despite ultimately coming from Halo and for all its other problems.
Really I just think most games from the Bush era were just plain bad. They were overwhelmingly fascist wank with mid mechanics: the bizarre and experimental mechanical complexity of some of the late 90s games (not FPSes; 90s FPSes were all awful) was being abandoned in favor of a more standardized and basic form with shitty early 3d graphics eating up progressively more of their labor budgets and needing to be accommodated. And the shitty, shitty FPSes of that era were almost all following directly in Halo's footsteps creating bland linear corridors with bad gunplay and Fascist plots.
Can you give me an example of bizarre and experimental gameplay that wasn’t present in 90s fpses?
Sorry for all the questions. This went from being a chance interaction with a person of bad takes to a meeting with a human whose experiences are so psychedelically different from my own that it just prompts further investigation.
I meant weird complexity and people just throwing shit at the wall in other genres, in RPGs and strategy games, where they were just kind of randomly throwing a kitchen sink of ideas into mechanics that were mostly under the hood or represented through numbers more than visuals. MUD/MUSH games did a lot of that, and were free to do it since they were just text. Daggerfall did a ton of amazingly ambitious and weird things that didn't really work in practice but were at least bold ideas (and it was also a completely broken, garbage game mechanically, which hurt it more than anything else did). The Fallout games did a ton that just wasn't being done for over a decade after them (although both FO1 and FO2 have the absolute worst interfaces I've ever seen, wrapping back around to the point that there just really was no accumulated knowledge about how to make games playable or create usable controls and interfaces yet). A lot of that went away over the Bush era as games were pared down and most of the weird and complex shit wound up in indie passion projects like Dwarf Fortress (and I mean Dwarf Fortress suffers for its obsessive simulationism and complete lack of concern for gameplay mechanics or playability, but goddamn if it isn't weird and complex). It took so long for that to start coming back, at which point it started being done right as well.
Like, the state of things back then was so bad that Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines stands head and shoulders above its contemporary RPGs, despite being a half-finished and janky mess with absolutely dogshit gunplay (pretty similar to Halo's, really), simply because it focused on complexity and storytelling in a genre that had completely abandoned both of those things. Does it hold up now? Not at all, it's a problematic mess, but it was amazing for its time. FO:NV would be the next real standout RPG, that's how big of a drought there was then (and it also, despite its infamously bad gunplay due to being a Bethesda-engine game, had better gunplay than Halo).
My sister in Christ, faceball is a port of a maze shooter you would play over networks before the internet using midi controllers.
How much more throwing weird complex shit at the wall do you need?
Fr There’s a lot of innovation and experimentation in mechanics that’s going unrepresented here. Plus a fundamental aspect of 3d games and the 90s was the development of the media and medium alongside each other. The technology that allowed the representation fpses rely on was growing by leaps and bounds every year and I’d argue that it wasn’t until the very tail end of the 90s and the 0s that the capital juggernaut that is the graphics card industry had enough feet under it to really push fidelity for fidelity’s sake. Games up until maybe 99 we’re genuinely boasting not cryteks nice pretty jungle but to what end, but instead real tangible improvements to legibility and through that, gameplay.
Graphics and gameplay aren’t two different things for fpses in the 90s, they’re one in the same! If you had a big, higher resolution monitor and the card to drive it you had a real advantage in deathmatch.
If you could refresh more tiles on the screen at once suddenly you’re not limited to bumping into shit ys style.
The rpg genre had also already existed for 25 years in tabletop form and at least ten in a form we’d call a computer rpg or video game rpg or whatever now. Fpses wouldn’t reach that point till 93.
In that way It’s like comparing the simple rock and roll of the 50s and early 60s to contemporary jazz.
I’m also pretty surprised you brought up halo and destiny but not pathways or marathon. Or jumping flash. Actually I’m not surprised about that one, no one remembers it.
I’m also still struggling with your criticism of games that use hitscan or random distribution for shot placement. As a person who shoots enough to recognize “pulling one” or a “flyer” , and enjoys weird simulations, that kind of shortcut has never bugged me. What are you talking about there?
I was talking specifically about strategy games and RPGs getting watered down and made overwhelmingly empty and shit during the early through mid 2000s, even as interfaces improved. It was part of a general commentary on the environment that Halo came into and in many ways defined.
My entire premise is that things like Doom were technically important and steps forward towards games being less bad, but still bad in their own right. They were in a struggle to do the bare minimum with hardware that just wasn't there yet, and that led to a lot of clever improvements to stuff like rasterization math to enable them. They are historically important for that reason, but they're still just not good as games.
Comparing Doom and other 90s shooter to stuff like Chainmail and really early D&D editions is very much on point and I agree: they're important for historical reasons, but do not at all hold up due to lacking all the accumulated design knowledge that would develop after them. And just like with boomer shooters, TTRPGs also have a "what if we just, like, forgot every improvement of the past 40 years and made clunky random chargen dungeon crawlers for tabletop again?" scene too.
Specifically the old standard of "you have a cone of fire, when you shoot it goes somewhere in that, also it's like a 45 degree cone in front of you lmao enjoy waiting for RNG to let your shots hit the thing the reticule is over" which is basically just a less honest version of the shit Arena/Daggerfall/Morrowind did where you first had to hit an enemy and then the game would roll a dice to see if you actually hit it or not. That's largely been supplanted by much tighter base bloom cones and various recoil solutions ranging from just making the bloom cone bigger until it's the size that used to be the standard, to more specific patterns whether that's jerking it in a specific direction or having a specific and consistent back and forth wiggle.
Your point about strategy and rpg games might have validity. I have to just believe you. I stopped at morrowind out of lack of time and can’t lodge a response without spending time on the source material.
I think doom wasn’t an example of hardware that wasn’t there yet. I played it on a 486. You could play doom on everything but the 286 I think. And the software they were developing (and maps they were making) are examples of still making something that works as a game despite that constraint. Which it very much does. You say that doom is bad as a game but that’s tough to swallow. Theres a release history, nostalgia buffs like to compare ultimate doom to stuff without realizing that we weren’t trading floppies with v1.666 on em, but even taking into account the buggy release and the years of fixes and bugs which are now just part of compatibility it’s still something that I would easily say works as a game at release and now.
I guess let’s separate the Janus layout from the chessboard itself: do you think that the rules of doom, the collection of player interactions, enemies, objects, weapons etc. work as a game? Do the chapters themselves, the level packs with interstitial screens, work as games? Would you make a meaningful distinction between doom and doom 2 for that? Would something like Culture Shock work as a game?
Once again, I’m sorry for grilling you, it’s just like meeting someone who’s willing to defend the idea that oranges are a mineral instead of a fruit. I gotta learn more.
I wouldn’t compare doom and chainmail, maybe faceball or one of those vector graphics tank sims and chainmail. Doom is way more like ultima. It’s an establishment of the format that the genre is gonna operate in. Maybe it’s one of the formats the genre will operate within. I think pathways was coming out at the same time.
This is wild. By bloom you mean how when you’re running or shooting fast in halo there’s less accuracy? I always liked that part of the game. One of the things that bugged me about ut was that your character could blast someone across the map using a pistol at a full sprint.
My old college roommate hated that part though. He wanted ut with a controller on live.
That was one of those bush era developments to slow the gameplay down and take the shooter out of the ghetto of deathmatch twitch play and expose it to a new audience.