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.
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.