I think the only thing I've ever pre-ordered was the PSP when it launched, back when I was 12 or 13 and wanted to get the shiny new console before everyone else (I didn't; they ran out and I got one on the next supply a week after launch). I really don't see the point of pre-ordering games except in exceptional circumstances. It used to be that big releases would sell out very quickly on launch and it would take a while for stock to reach sufficient levels that you could just buy a copy any time, so queueing at midnight for the store to open or pre-ordering were the only way you could get hold of a copy without waiting a few weeks when everyone else was playing it and talking about it (same with other media, like when the harry potter books launched). Nowadays they seem to be better at providing stock and stores seem to be better at supplying it to customers. When GTA V launched stores sold out at midnight launches but I remember seeing copies in the shops in the days following in plain view for people to buy. So pre-ordering that didn't serve much of a purpose.

And nowadays many people buy their games through digital distribution, meaning pre-ordering or pre-buying serves no purpose whatsoever. Pre-ordering a physical copy isn't so bad though provided you can cancel your pre-order and get your money back. You're pretty much paying a deposit to have the game set aside for you to buy, if you can wait a couple of days for reviews to come out and cancel the pre-order if you've changed your mind then no harm done; if you do still want it then you can buy it when it might still be unavailable to buy without a reservation.

A side note - I mentioned that I think publishers and stores have gotten better at predicting demand such that there's sufficient stock, making pre-ordering unnecessary. It occurs to me though that this might be a result of people pre-ordering the game. One thing that businesses really love is certainty, and the number of pre-orders they receive helps them gauge how many people are going to buy their game; they just need to use past data that compares number of pre-orders vs number of total sales and use current pre-orders to make a prediction. This in turn helps them get a better idea of how many copies to produce, so they don't waste money by producing too many or lose sales by producing too few. If that's the case then it's in their interests to keep encouraging us to pre-order, and in our own interests that some people keep doing it. They'd do a better job though if they didn't swindle us with shitty products and day one patches.

I think 70k is too high a figure - that's pretty much the entire amount raised and they had a few thousand already before gamergate kicked off. The Fine Young Capitalists themselves though should have some idea of how much money was donated them by pro-gamergate people since they can see where donors were referred to the page from (ie, if someone donated after clicking a link to the page in a gamergate thread then they could see that). That's why the "vivian james" character exists, because the perk of donating over $2000 was that you could design your own character that would be put in the game, and they said that 4chan users had collectively donated over $2000 (in a post from 5 months ago they said donations from 4chan totalled over $13000) to them and allowed them to create a character (they did the same for reddit users who collectively donated over $2k and had their own character Gilda Mars put in too).

It's difficult to tell how many of those who donated are pro-gamergate affiliated and how much they raised, but I think it's fair to say the onset of gamergate and the publicity the campaign got from gamergate threads promoting it were a big factor in its sudden surge in donations. The charity themselves are the only ones who can give a solid picture of how much was raised by whom, not sure if they've released any specific figures they attribute to gamergate.

It's certainly reasonable to criticise him if you think he went about it in the wrong way - we can all see what happened, publicly outing someone like that can be like a snowball rolling down the hill and who knows where it will end up. He very quickly lost control of what he'd done and perhaps there are better things he could have done. I didn't expect people to take his side and speak favourably of him, the only thing I expected was for the people reporting to acknowledge the claim that he was making - that he suffered in an abusive relationship. But instead they completely overlooked that and I think that was a serious misjudgement on their part.

I think I might be biased on this because someone close to me recently escaped from an abusive relationship (a particularly bad one, worse than how Eron describes his) and therefore I've recently come to realise just how utterly evil some people can be but still have everyone fooled into thinking they were a good person. And if they decided to publicly out their ex for being abusive in the same way Eron did, I'd think it a very foolish thing to do because that ex is dangerous. But I'd also fully support their reason for doing so, because that ex is dangerous. Telling the world about what happened wouldn't just be airing a private matter, it would be warning other people not to be fooled by their ex's deceptive personality and that a monstrously despicable person lurks underneath. Whether or not to speak up is a difficult dilemma for abuse victims (or at least for the one I know), because if they know the truth and don't speak up then they'll feel responsible if the abuser goes on to harm somebody else. On the other hand their own health comes first and not speaking up helps recovery.

I did not directly experience any abuse, yet it had an impact on me because I saw first hand the damage an abuser can do and how they can cause that damage in ways I hadn't considered. And that is why, when reading the blog, I formed the impression I did - because everything he described sounded like what had happened to the person I know. And perhaps this is where I'm biased, because I might be wrongly identifying certain behaviour as abuse instead of being rather common in relationships. On the other hand, someone whose life hasn't been affected by an abusive relationship might be dismissing genuinely abusive behaviour as the dramatic proceedings of a bad relationship, something not worth getting in a fuss over. So I don't know where I stand on this - I strongly sympathise with him, believe that he has a justifiable reason to tell others what happened to prevent it from happening to him, and I don't take issue with the way he did it. But I also know that I'm not taking an objective stance, and don't know how much that is affecting my interpretation.

When you say "You can't blame other people for your own emotional health" - I strongly disagree. You can't blame others who aren't close to you if your mental health is in a fragile state and their normal, reasonable behaviour happens to upset you. It's not their job to step on eggshells around you because they can't possibly know. If however someone has caused your decline in mental health, knows they are doing it and deliberately continues, then it certainly is their fault. Especially if you're in a relationship with them; people in relationships are supposed to look after each other. You're not forced to be in a relationship with someone, and if the relationship is causing them harm, then you call it off. To use an analogy of physical health, you can't blame others for being sick if you just have a low immune system and they accidentally passed you an illness going about their normal business, but you can blame them if you're in poor health because they beat the crap out of you. If someone knows your weaknesses and exploits you, that's not your fault.

He might indeed have been a 'wuss' for staying with her for so long and not breaking up after she first cheated, that's what most people would have done and he instead seemed to be under the delusion it wouldn't happen again and his girlfriend would improve. But a capable abuser can build up delusions with careful lies or admissions of guilt, controlling behaviour and gaslighting (when you do things to make people doubt their own judgements and sanity, it comes from a movie where a man made his wife question her own judgement by doing things such as making the gas lights flicker and pretending to have not seen anything happen when she pointed it out). To use an example of the person I know, even for weeks after leaving their ex for good they were still convinced their their ex was a good person at heart who was a victim of the dark side of their own mind, believed them capable of changing and wanted to get back together once that at happened. Eventually something just clicked and they saw reality for what it was. They started making sense of their ex's past behaviour that all fit into a long term pattern of manipulation, control and abuse, and finally accepted that their ex was a rotten to the core person.

One last note: "Even if every single claim about their relationship that he made was 100% accurate and objective (which is unlikely since he clearly wrote this fresh on the heels of a breakup that by his own account wrecked him emotionally)" - From what he's said, I get the impression he took several months of careful thinking before deciding to post it, it wasn't a spur of the moment decision. This post from his friend who helped him post it gives some more background.

I disagree with the idea that the blog post that started this all is slut shaming. The purpose of it wasn't to shame her for sleeping with other people (her ex-bf even said in an interview with vice that he's open to polyamory and wouldn't have minded her sleeping with people if she'd been upfront about it). Read his blog and it's clear that his main gripe is her allegedly abusive, dishonest and manipulative behaviour that took a heavy toll on his mental health. That's what he said, we have only his word and some facebook screenshots to back it up. Therefore it wouldn't be prudent to take sides on what is largely a personal feud, and instead to keep an open mind about both sides of the story.

But supposing he is being entirely truthful (and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out he was partly driven by a desire for revenge and spiced his story up accordingly), why should other people care about what she did? First of all, if she is capable of abusing and harming those close to her, then they have a right to know so that they do not suffer similarly. Secondly, the many people giving her financial support through donations have the right to know if she is engaging in actions they may find contemptible. If one of my favourite games developers turned out to be an abuser, I would certainly be put in the difficult situation of deciding whether or not to continue paying them money.

This was one of the main reasons I started keeping an eye on the quinnspiracy/gamergate fiascos in the first place, because it seemed to me like a number of news websites, including some whose writers claimed to be strong supporters of social justice, were being horrible to a potential abuse victim speaking out, dismissing him as a bitter jealous ex and not even acknowledging the substance of his complaints. Of course they were angry about what other people had done as a result of his post, but their inability to separate the two risked reinforcing the idea that abuse victims shouldn't speak out for fear of ridicule.

That's an ambitious project your undertaking, and I wish you the best of luck. Generally I think it's good to see people getting involved and discussing their views (provided it does fit into some wider discussion and not an "I'm right you're wrong" argument!).

One of the biggest oversights that I find Anita and other critics have made is failure to argue that it's a particular problem for gaming. Sexism and sexist people exist, and they cover all walks of life and interests, so inevitably some of them play games and anyone who thinks there's no sexism in gaming is not paying attention. However, a lot of discussion has focused around gaming specifically, and I've yet to see a strong case made for the idea that gaming in particular has a problem, rather than sexism in gaming being a product of sexism in wider society and the environments it operates in.

What are your thoughts on this, are you doing it because you think gaming in particular has a problem, or because gaming is something you're familiar with and can talk in length about?

Does the game actually force you to kill innocents? My understanding of what the gameplay involves is limited, all I saw is the trailer where the guy loads up his guns and goes out shooting people but it didn't give any idea of what objectives there are in the game.

It looked to me more like some sandbox game where you're given the means to kill loads of innocent people but whether you do so is ultimately your own decision.

Lads and lassies, we allowed this topic on the condition that it would stick to the code of conduct. We know that this is a controversial subject and many people hold strong views on it, but that's no excuse for insulting each other or trying to derail the thread. If you can't post without attacking someone or insulting people with differing views then don't post at all.

To those of you who are using this as an opportunity to debate and want to continue doing so: as you were.

To be honest I didn't think destructible environments were that common. I know red faction had it years ago but I never found any other games that used the idea. Glad to see there are other games that have it though.

The thing with just cause though is that there's no point in it, really. Why blow a hole in a wall when you can just grapple over it? I suppose if you had a vehicle that you wanted to get in through that way

It doesn't go that far in terms of destruction, no. You can only blow up certain objects and there are plenty of them, but they're mainly scenery pieces rather than things like compound walls. There are no tanks but a number of heavy APCs with cannons on which are more or less the same thing.

I live to serve, my lord. I'll be more detailed. Never played mercenaries so I don't know how it compares but here are my thoughts on JC2:

- action that's over the top, but still grounded in reality enough for it not to be cartoony,

Plenty of shooting, and police chases when you screw up, armed vehicles that you can steal or purchase and have delivered in missions, one of the objectives of the game is to blow up anything with the government logo in it. You have a grapple hook that you can shoot on walls to climb up them that makes it more fun.

- lots and lots of fun and satisfying destruction, using a large selection of weapons and armed vehicles,

I think there's enough destruction, not loads but a decent amount. Weapon selection is ultimately what you make of it, there is some variety but usually you have to buy the weapons. Same with vehicles, it's not hard to get hold of an armed helicopter or APC if you steal one from the army when they're pursuing you but sometimes your only option is to buy one.

- lots of stuff to do in the game world (side missions, assassinations, challenges etc.)

The usual: races, assassinating army generals, finding stuff, non compulsory missions, blowing things up.

- humorous dialogue and not taking itself seriously,

Don't really remember but I think JC2 fits this. It certainly didn't take itself seriously.

- a badass protagonist

Personally I thought he was a bit of a dick but I suppose he's badass

If you're still not sure, take a look at some gameplay videos on youtube and see what you think.