If anything Failbetter are probably some of the most egalitarian game designers I have ever seen. Baring small jokes that reference real-life historical events (such as women not having the right to vote in Victorian London) Fallen London (and Sunless Sea) are overwhelmingly equal for representation for both male and female characters and treats both with respect.
And if the forum is any representation of the wider audience then I will say that the Fallen London playerbase are some of the most respecting and accepting people in a gaming community I have ever seen online. In the roughly sixteen months I have been playing and on the forums I think that this may actually be the first time I have ever seen misogyny even being brought up like this.
Last time the Mayoral Influence card didn’t start appearing until the last week of July. An unknown factor is whether they plan on the card giving a favor, say Society or Church, that has yet to be implemented.
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edited by Anne Auclair on 7/19/2017
Gasp A veil? How ludicrously lascivious; men must surely have had no choice but to vote for her based on her overtly sexual appearance. It couldn’t have anything to do with her policies or her desire to help the poor or her background as a warrior nun. If anything, I feel as though you’re ignoring all of her other characteristics in favor of painting her as a sex object. Isn’t that a bit misogynistic - claiming a woman only won because of her body instead of her brain, as if she just sat there looking pretty and doing nothing?
BFW Edit to get rid of glowing tinder.
edited by babelfishwars on 7/19/2017
[quote=GaryStudebaker]Why was it obvious Feducci would win? Misogyny… it still is a major factor in real life politics, so it’s going to be magnified any times over in the gaming community. A couple old woman just don’t appeal to the typical white male gamer, just look at things like the ‘GamerGate’ controversy and you’ll see the reaction to feminist notions by the gaming community at large is VIOLENT rejection.[/quote]Please calm down. I identify as a liberal and a progressive, but I can’t support anything that’s just this illogical. You’re making broad, unfounded assumptions about the player base of Fallen London, and you’re just lashing out at ghosts. I can appreciate the passion; we need people like you, who can dedicate themselves to a cause and fight for what you believe to be right, but your emotions are overtaking your logic.
Think about it. Fallen London is a text-based RPG. It’s the type of game you play for a few minutes a couple times a day, with the satisfaction usually coming from well-written stories or the slow and arduous grind towards a long-term goal. Action consists effectively of pressing buttons and reading. This is a setting where words like "costermonger", "functionary", "Chiroptera", "coruscated", and "airag" are used on a regular basis. It’s an investment over months and years, not hours or days. The gameplay is more Depression Quest than Call of Duty. What conclusions can you draw about the player base from that information? I see no reason to assume we’re all typical white male gamers with a misogynistic streak.
Likewise, you say that "the reaction to feminist notions by the gaming community at large is VIOLENT rejection", as if you could quantify all gamers into some overarching stereotype. It’s as accurate as trying to stereotype everyone who regularly watches television, or everyone who reads books for fun, or everyone who has a Netflix or Hulu account. There are gamers who’ll send out rape and death threats, and there are gamers will harass and attack, but their actions do not reflect the population as a whole. If you want to lash out at someone, find those people and lash out at them (though engaging them in dialogue is a far more effective tool, in my opinion). Don’t lash out at the players here because a fictional male character won a fictional election, therefore misogyny. Take a step back and look at the history of Failbetter and the history of its forums, and consider if you’re actually seeing evidence of misogyny, or if you’re just projecting your worldview onto the situation and seeing ghosts where there are none.
BFW Edit: just removing some tinder nothing to see here
edited by babelfishwars on 7/19/2017
I must say, extremely well put Azothi. It’s as if you stole my thoughts and articulated them more eloquently than I ever could.
I’ll just add that accusing FBG of choosing the candidates specifically so that one of them will win (i.e. Feducci in this case) is ridiculous.
There’s no 3rd party independent vote counting here. FBG are the only ones who see the votes and announce the winner. Had they wanted Feducci to win, there’d be no need for them to carefully choose weak opponents for him.
Jenny was obviously going to win from day 1 considering the playerbase, though I’m not sure FBG consciously considered this. I feel the second election had more balanced candidates; a libertarian, temperance campaigner, and someone associated with the police are very much not in the image of modern progressives, so the playerbase wasn’t going to pick one based on their real life political beliefs.
edited by Kaijyuu on 7/19/2017
BFW edit - just removing tinder. nothing to see here
edited by babelfishwars on 7/19/2017
[color=#e53e00]All right folks, please chill.
It is not company policy for me to speak on any design, but the election is not and has not been rigged - either through choice of characters or anything else.
Please can we keep politics out of the forum. Failbetter feels its games speak for themselves as to our attitude in general, but we’d rather not let the forums degenerate into political infighting. There are better places for that.
As for our players, we strongly believe we have the best community in games. Please treat all our players, not just the ones regularly posting here, with respect.
I have noted a lot of passionate posts during the elections - because they were across the board I have not been warning or banning as vigorously as I would normally. Perhaps that was a mistake. Please return to your normal posting behaviours, as I will be holding you all to the usual forum standards.
Thank you. [/color]
edited by babelfishwars on 7/19/2017
Okay. I’m gonna take a deep, deep breath and do the idiotic thing of poking this wasp’s nest. I’ll try to do this as carefully as possible.
Entirely ignoring certain, ah, discussions as to why or how or for what purpose Feducci won, I will say there’s a discussion worth having in terms of candidate selection. It is true that in both years, many of us could pick out the winner on day one, and in both cases they won with more than half the vote or “nearly” half. In a three-way election, that’s a significant margin. It wasn’t as one-sided this year, and we did see some side-switching among active forumites halfway through, so I’d say FB is learning from their experiences with this event, but… it does seem like both times a character had a significant advantage.
I have my own views on why Jenny was a shoo-in, though it’s probably wise to let the dust settle more before touching on that one. The same is true of Feducci, though I think people voted less for him and more against the other two. Many people saw real-world parallels in the Detective and Campaigner (and plenty of us saw some in Feducci, too), and so personal views factored into things at least a little. I’d elaborate, but really, I feel like I’m already putting my neck out rather far.
My apologies. My comment about not wanting to see Feducci in my card deck was just meant to be a bit of humor to lighten things up. Not the brightest move I’ve ever made, but I really wasn’t trying to upset anybody or contribute to the flames. Won’t happen again.
[quote=Isaac Zienfried]
Entirely ignoring certain, ah, discussions as to why or how or for what purpose Feducci won, I will say there’s a discussion worth having in terms of candidate selection. It is true that in both years, many of us could pick out the winner on day one, and in both cases they won with more than half the vote or "nearly" half.[/quote]
You know, in any three way race, you have pretty good odds of randomly guessing the winner. And in any election there’s always the possibility of one candidate getting a much larger margin than the others. When these two intersect, a candidate’s victory can seem incredibly obvious in hindsight, when it really wasn’t.
Why did Feducci get nearly half the vote? Was it because he was a big name, tough as nails warrior who players spent a lot of time interacting with and who was deeply involved in lots of lore heavy storylines? Well, the same applied to the Bishop, and the Bishop only got 10%. The relatively unknown Contrarian got a better margin than him (I’m pretty confident the Campaigner beat the Bishop as well, but we won’t know for sure until FB releases the stats). Candidate selection is hard and I don’t really see what they could do differently (also, I really liked the choices we were offered and the interrelated election stories).
I think where the election could use some additional tweaks is the second week. The writers clearly wanted to encourage second week switching in order to increase volatility, uncertainty and engagement (in this they were immensely helped by Feducci being Feducci). The second week is where all the really juicy story information comes out. But you have a big penalty for switching mixed with a system that rewards players for election career (a reward that actually increased this year). The career reward isn’t all that much, but a penalty is still a penalty and even small penalties can actively discourage a lot of people (I encountered several players who essentially told me "It’s too late to switch" because they wouldn’t be able to rebuild their election career levels). We had a lot more switching this year than last and it still wasn’t enough to threaten the leading candidate. So right now, it’s pretty clear that if one candidate "gallops ahead" in the second week polls then the race is pretty much over because sheer inertia is on their side. There need to be more opportunities for potential upsets.
Maybe there should be alternative means of switching, so it’s not a stark choice of losing 50% or paying fate (perhaps if you get X election resources you can switch with a smaller penalty?). Perhaps there should be a day or event where you can switch without any penalty whatsoever, similar to the Day of Agitation. Possibly the election day reward could be made completely independent of election career level, making election career purely about the votes? Or mayhaps Fixers could be given a bribery mechanic, so they can actively buy off an opponents supporters and those mostly interested in profit-first? The last would have the added bonus of giving Fixers more to do.
Another possible tweak, perhaps the "meet and talk with the candidates" portion of the election should begin a week before the campaign gets formerly underway and get a little more content (as in, before the player can choose who to support). That way there would be more to think about before "committing" to a candidate in the first week of the election. So, they’d first see themselves as a voter, rather than as a supporter - when you consider yourself a supporter the barriers to new information are greater.
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edited by Anne Auclair on 7/19/2017
If they want to encourage switching then they should not release any information on who’s in the lead. There’s a well known effect in political science where people will vote for whoever they think will win, probably due to a desire to be on the “winning side”. Some countries ban publication of exit polls and the like during voting periods for this reason.
The problem is that the player’s character would realistically know who was leading, based upon their investigation of the various campaigns, Huffam’s journalistic reports, and the activity on London’s streets. Also, people use the halfway reports to determine who to switch to if they mostly want to stop one particular candidate.
Increase candidate information in the pre-campaign week, make it mechanically and psychologically easier to switch in the second, and let Fixers bribe the avaricious. That will certainly increase uncertainty.
On the whole, I think the election is working as intended and greatly improved since last year. But, being the newest festival, it is still going through some experimentation and growing pains.
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edited by Anne Auclair on 7/19/2017
I think an interesting question is this: does the winning side effect play out in the FL context? Unlike RL elections, the FL mayoral race doesn’t really matter … and many people play the game for RP purposes, and thus vote as their character would vote. Does this dampen or eliminate the winning side effect? Are FL players less prone to the winning side effect vis-à-vis the general population (because of our awesomeness)?
With my admittedly faulty memory, I recall that in the 1894 election, which was well polled over nearly it’s entirety
http://community.failbettergames.com/topic22651-election-im-contributing-n-votes-for-c.aspx
Jenny’s level of support stayed pretty constant throughout.
BTW, this poll predicted:
Jenny: 49.3% (55% actual)
Contrarian: 33.1% (35%)
Bishop: 17.4% (10%)
In any event, FBG is perfectly positioned to address my question. They know how votes were distributed before and after the mid-feastival polls came out.[li]
edited by Lady Sapho Byron on 7/19/2017
Looks like the card is out. Haven’t had it myself, but I saw somebody else with it in the “Who else is here?” sidebar.
I won the luck-based choice (duelling for Feducci’s enjoyment, odds are strongly against you) and
after complimenting me on my win, he implied he could use someone like me when the time comes. I gained a bunch of Connected: Revolutionaries and two tales of terror. Oh dear.
I forgot to echo this because i forget to echo everything.
edited by a Nice Friend on 7/21/2017
"for Feducci’s enjoyment" i swear to god, Feducci’s demeanor rather reminds me of a nice beer from beyond the great ocean I had a chance to sample once. It was, if memory serves, labelled "Arrogant Bastard Ale™".
[spoiler]"They do say he is increasingly furious that the games he arranges mean nothing; that he wants to have already upended the board" this man has no chill whatsoever. it’s been what. five days? additionally, he takes meals at the gambling tables, so I suppose he no longer cares to maintain the Tomb-Colonist thing.[/spoiler.]
edited by gronostaj on 7/21/2017
I picked the second option and got Society and 2 Scraps of Incendiary Gossip.
I don’t know if the Wiki is maintained by the devs or the players, but here’s the echo for the action:
"Up in arms"
The protesters stand outside the Mayoral Manor. A platoon of Feducci’s supporters, armed with swords and rifles, face them: the Constables simply watch from the sidelines, there only to intervene in case of homicidal disagreement.
You join with the protesters. Angry rumours are spreading amongst them: that Feducci plots to remove the laws which prevent him bringing in his desired legislation; that in his obsession about games, he plans some evil against the Royal family. But the Dauntless Temperance Campaigner, at their front line, keeps them focused and steers them away from mere gossip.
edited by Sallow on 7/21/2017
The in-app screenshot of losing the human-baiting duel on mayoral card for those interested. What? I’m not bitter, you’re bitter. No, I don’t "care" that "the mayor" is giving "undue amounts of attention" to my "victorious opponent", I just think it’s funny, how…-