Emma Blackery's Google+ comments protest video, which of course generated a bunch of canonical examples of why comments are still broken.

Emma Blackery

A post at the YouTube Creators’ blog late Monday has acknowledged that YouTube commenters, never ones for productive discussion, have turned the site’s Google+ integration changeover to their advantage. There are now new and worse ways to propagate spam and immaterial content below videos, which has created an avalanche of complaints and outcries from both viewers and content creators. It seems as if Google can’t move fast enough to give its users tools to manage the triumphantly abusive and off-topic trolls of YouTube.

YouTube started to require that its users log in to Google+, allegedly to help fix the cesspool that was the YouTube comments section. The strategy was two-pronged: One, Google+ would require users to tie their comments to a real name and persona for accountability purposes. Two, the integration would use Google+ profiles to tailor comments to each user so that they would only see a few types of comments below videos: comments from Google+ friends, comments from “YouTube personalities,” and “engaged conversations.”

But along with those changes, Google also thought it would be safe to turn off certain comment restrictions. Previously, YouTube comments had a character limit and couldn’t contain hyperlinks in order to prevent some of the worst spam. Now those restrictions are off, leading to people posting links to porn or screamer videos, or just dropping ASCII porn art below videos.

A modder who spent 2,000 hours creating a Skyrim mod in order to snag a development job at Bethesda has been rewarded in an unexpected way. Bungie has hired him to work on Destiny.

Alexander Velicky spent a year building the impressive Skyrim mod Falskaar (pictured). At the time he said his work was directed at gaining Bethesda's attention. "The best way to show Bethesda that I want a job there and should be hired is to create content that meets the standards of their incredible development team," Velicky said.

Instead, the mod was noticed by Bungie, which has given him a job as associate designer. "Modding has been 90 percent of my life for over four years now, and all throughout you were there to support me," he wrote on a blog post, addressed to the Skyrim fan community. "Every single one of you made this possible. From driving me to work throughout development, to providing astounding amounts of feedback and support."

Velicky added that his experience offered a useful lesson. "I set my sights on a professional design job pretty early," he wrote. "I lowered my head, charged forward, and rarely looked back. Of course, I ensured what I was doing had a reasonable chance for success from time to time. But the most surprising of all, is who I've ended up with.

"I applied to many companies, and Bungie was in my 'huge company that will completely ignore me' category. Well, they didn't and look what it got me. Bungie is an awesome company with an amazing team, and I'm very lucky that they've decided to give me a chance. Never be afraid to try. I spent the time it took to apply and the rewards are proving to be greater than I could have possibly imagined."

Two nights ago, my mouth fell open, when I looked up to see Rihanna rocking a doobie at the American Music Awards.

What’s a doobie? In the South, we just call it a wrap. It is a particular way that black women with straightened hair style their hair by combing and brushing it around the base and crown of the head before bed in order to maintain the style for the next day.

During the 10 years that I wore a relaxer, wrapping my hair and securing the wrap (or doobie) with a scarf or bobby pins or a combination of the two was a nightly ritual. But what you never did — with any level of propriety anyway — was wear your wrap out in public.

I mean, sure, you could get away with it on a quick run to the corner store. But in general, once the hair is wrapped, you are in for the night and the style is not for public consumption.

So when Rihanna showed up at the AMAs rocking just such a style, but adorned with fancy bejeweled bobby pins, I registered it immediately as ratchetness.

Ratchet, because it wreaks of impropriety, and rejects the unstated rules of black women’s hair. There are certain things that black women don’t do out in public regarding hair: We don’t wear rollers outside (that is the ultimate act of ratchet-ghetto behavior), we don’t wear doobies outside, and we don’t wear ratty headscarves outside.  If you do don a headscarf, you better tie it up in an intricate way and make it look Afrocentric – “cultural,” you know.

Rihanna took no such pains with her appearance, defying all the rules at this year’s awards. I promptly wondered what it meant. She very well knows that black girls know that a doobie ain’t a style – it’s a pre-style, no matter how pretty the bobby pins are that you put in it.

If you don’t unwrap your hair, then basically you have made very little effort to get all donned up for the show. Exposing people to your doobie either means you know them very well, or know them so little that you couldn’t care less what they think.

The scholar in me is tempted to read this homage to ratchetry as a kind of subtle resistance to the pomp and circumstance of these awards. I feel emboldened in that reading by the blatant whitewashing of black culture that went on at the AMAs.

The AMAs haven’t been particularly good on this point in a long time, which is why it is not one of the major shows that I watch. But last night, Justin Timberlake won for best soul/R&B album in a category that featured him, Robin Thicke and Rihanna, and Macklemore won for best hip-hop album, just as he did at the VMAs.

Brittney Cooper is a contributing writer at Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @professorcrunk.

By Robert Florence on November 26th, 2013 at 9:00 pm.

Hello youse.

Yes, I KNOW it’s still November, but I want you to get your Christmas shopping done early this year. I’m tired of hearing you complaining about leaving it to the last minute. “Oh, I have everything to do! Oh, I haven’t even bought my mother those ten jars of goose fat she loves to eat!” I am here to get you started early, with some board game Christmas suggestions. I will only be suggesting stuff that you can actually buy. No out-of-print heartbreakers. And I’ll also only be suggesting stuff that you can PLAY WITH YOUR EXTENDED FAMILY. Read on to see what I mean.

YOUR CHRISTMAS SHOPPING – FAMILY EDITION

Yeah, I mean, there’s no point in me recommending Phil Eklund’s High Frontier, as great as it is, because it’ll just make your wee mammy’s head pop off her shoulders. And nobody wants to hear their wee mammy talking about how many thrusts she needs. I want to recommend a few games that you could give as gifts, or play with family visitors when they turn up UNWANTED at Christmas. Safe bets. Crowd-pleasers. Stuff idiots could play. YES, YOUR FAMILY ARE IDIOTS IS WHAT I AM SAYING.

So let’s go.

AUGUSTUS/RISE OF AUGUSTUS

Now, I know this game as “Augustus”, because I’m a cool dude. But I think it’s called “Rise of Augustus” now, because we live in the age of BLANK of SOMETHING or RISE of the BLANK of SOMETHING or THE SOMETHING of SOMETHING: BLANK of SOMETHING. Let me say this to you, though. This game is bingo. That’s all it really is. It’s bingo with a few extra decisions. And I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “FUCK BINGO”. But I put it to you that there are few games as accessible as bingo. I don’t know of anyone who can’t play a game of bingo. So with Augustus everyone has some cards (bingo cards) and then tokens are drawn from a bag, and you mark off those symbols on your cards. You have a limited amount of roman soldiers to place on the symbols, though. You can gain more as rewards for shouting BINGO! Or AVE CAESAR! Or HOLLLLLLAAAAA BABY! Oh, it’s some basic stuff. But it’s a lot of fun. It plays quick. It takes about three seconds to learn, and there IS actually some thought involved. You can choose how to structure your luck. Yeah. Check it out. AUGUSTUS: THE BLANK OF THE RISE OF BLANK.

LOVE LETTER

I’m tired of recommending Love Letter. It’s a slim deck of cards. You start with a card in hand. You draw a card and discard a card. That’s all you do. Every card has a power, and you’re pretty much trying to leave yourself with the highest value card at the end of the round. But the round can end early too. You can eliminate opponents and stuff. There’s a theme to the game too. You’re all trying to send love letters to a beautiful princess. Or a prince, if you get the Japanese edition of the game. Here are the rules of the game:

DRAW A CARD
DISCARD A CARD

If your family members can handle that, they can play and enjoy Love Letter. If they can’t handle that, I don’t know what to say to you. Just buy this. It’s less than a tenner.

DIXIT

Oh, Dixit. It never fails. It’s a beautiful thing. Get Dixit onto the table and your aunties and uncles will be saying “Oh, that’s a nice drawing isn’t it? That’s lovely!” They’ll smile, and you’ll see their yellowed teeth, and you’ll think about how we’re all crawling towards oblivion.

In Dixit you have a whole bunch of big cards with a different beautiful illustration on each. Your job is to choose one of your cards and say something about it. You can give it a title, say something descriptive, sing a song about it, WHATEVER. And then the other players play one of their cards that they feel fits the emotional emotions that you just evoked. Then you shuffle all those chosen cards together and lay them all out. And everyone votes for which one was the original. BUT HERE’S WHAT IS COOL.

WHAT IS COOL: The person who played the original card only scores points if only SOME of the other players pick out their card. Know what I mean? If everyone gets it (it was too obvious) or no-one gets it (your description was almost Lynchian in its fucking obtuse weirdness) then you score NUTHIN. Hey, if only one other player guesses your card then you get your reward and you have made a nice emotional connection with someone. Your brainwaves have melded with theirs and sex is inevitable. EVEN IF YOU ARE PLAYING WITH YOUR FAMILY.

This game is all about imagination and creativity and will let you learn some stuff you never knew about your dad. That’s nice, right?

ONE MORE.

Let’s do one more. Because I’m a heavy hardcore geek. I’m more interested in NEXT WEEK’s column, where I’ll be suggesting the best board game Christmas gifts for TOTAL HARDCORE SHUT-IN WEIRDO LOSER LEVEL GOD-TIER GEEKAZOIDS. But we’ll do one more can’t-miss easy-to-find and inexpensive family game sugg-

JAMES PUREFOY WRITES:

“Hi, James Purefoy here. I just want to talk about Robert Florence for a moment or two. I have ZERO interest in board games, because my evenings are spent fiddling with the kind of components you’re more likely to find in a lady’s underwear. Do you follow my meaning? I’m calling you a virgin. But I just wanted to discuss something that even I have noticed. My friend Robert is recommending some family games, and yet he hasn’t mentioned anything like Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride. He is being what I would call “annoying”. You can’t go wrong with a game of Settlers of Catan, or even the Star Trek edition of the game, which I’ve heard is a lot of fun. I haven’t played it myself because I’m a Hollywood actor. Robert’s a good lad, but he’s what I would call a “hipster”.

I just want to say that it’s your family that matters on Christmas Day. After you’ve had your dinner, and before you settle down to watch Solomon Kane on Bluray, any kind of board game on the table will hit the spot. I bet you could even make Trivial Pursuit fun. Well, let’s not go that far. Just make sure to play a game. Play an old classic, even. Play Monopoly. It’s actually good, you idiots. Play Thunder Road. Or play Loopin’ Louie. But just play something. Except Carcassonne. It’s SHIT.

Now, if you’ll excuse me – I have an actual grown-up proper career to enjoy.”

NEXT WEEK

The proper Christmas stuff. Do you have a hardcore geek in your life? Or are you just buying gifts for yourself? Let’s burrow down into some of the most incomprehensible and brilliant epic board games of our time!

Stay dicey!

Board games, as a medium, are no stranger to the digitization of physical products that just about every form of media is undergoing.

Mobile app stores have seen countless digital board game adaptations sail to the top of the charts, and cling to those spots with unswerving determination. It's not just the major publishers that are finding that success, either; companies much smaller than Hasbro and Mattel are selling huge numbers of their digital games. And It's not really that hard to figure out why: tablets and mobile devices seem tailored for emulating board game experiences. They're sharable. They're interconnected. They sit flat on a table.

That's just the first step in the digitization process, though. The second is the complete cannibalization and annihilation of the adapted physical product.

Again, it's not hard to figure out why that second step is so obligatory. The proliferation of powerful, relatively inexpensive, internet-powered devices has filled consumers with an avarice for the fastest, most inexpensive, internet-powered means of consuming content. It's why print media has declined. It's why entertainment media producers are expanding their digital distribution platforms.

Only, board games don't seem to be having any trouble at all.

Take Days of Wonder, whose two biggest cardboard properties — Ticket to Ride and Small World — have found success both in physical and digital formats. Those physical versions run at a standard price of $49.99 a pop, while their digital adaptations are much, much cheaper; Ticket to Ride is $6 99 on iPad and $1.99 on iPhone, while Small World 2 (an updated version of the original board game) costs $9.99. You would think that gulf would cause the expensive, physical game sales to come to a complete halt.

Only, board games don't seem to be having any trouble at all

But when Small World hit iPad in 2010, sales of the physical game tripled for three months. By the time that spike leveled out, sales were steadily double the game's previous numbers.

"What's interesting is because we control both the digital and cardboard versions, we can see and track sales trends, and we have seen repeatedly that when we launch a new version of the game, either Small World or Ticket to Ride, or we do a special promotion with Ticket to Ride Pocket ... I can then track very accurately what happens in the next three to seven weeks in terms of sales, and I see big bumps in cardboard sales," Mark Kaufmann, vice president of sales and marketing for Days of Wonder told Polygon in a recent interview.

"Anecdotally, we get lots of emails from people who say, 'I had never heard of this as a board game, and my friend turned me onto it on my iPad, or iPhone or Android device, and then I was shocked to find out there was a board game.' They've lost that resistance to playing the board game, because they know the rules, and they know they had fun playing it."

Days of Wonder's founders all came from various tech start-ups, which either got bought out or "fell on their asses and failed, because that's what start-ups do." The team always wanted to do digital versions of their games, before they even started making them — not because of how potentially lucrative those digital games would be, but because of their potential for brand expansion.

"The purpose originally was never to commercialize them from a sense of, selling them and making money," Kaufmann explained. "It was to help teach the game. We really felt, and we still feel, that one of the key ways to sell more cardboard games is to have more people know the rules to those games.

"There's this hesitance with new games ... the vast majority of the population has really good memories of playing games, but they're kind of afraid to learn new ones, because they might be too complex, to try to figure out the rules. One of the reasons we think Monopoly sells so well is people think they know the rules, so it's an instant, 'Oh, well I know how to play Monopoly. It may not be that exciting, but hey, we know the rules so we can play it.' There's that barrier to overcome with new games."

"One of the reasons we think Monopoly sells so well is people think they know the rules..."

The reason their physical sales aren't cannibalized, Kaufmann explained, is because the experiences offered by the two versions are completely different. The digital game is quick, accessible, cheap and portable, perfect for pick-up-and-play sessions or asynchronous matches with distant opponents. The board game is something you plan your night around; it's more personal and communal than its digital counterpart.

"You play board games around a table with people for the social camaraderie, giving people grief about the stupid move they made or that you beat them, or that they beat you. It's an excuse to socialize. When you play on a tablet or phone, it's actually often quite different; you like the game, you like the experience of playing it, but you're on the subway, you've got 20 minutes and you want to play the game.

"We wanted to make sure when we created those versions for tablets and phones, that we took into consideration how people would be playing it. Yes, some people play on the tablet face-to-face ... but a significant number, and a much larger percentage actually, play either solo against the bots on the computer, or they play online with one of the hundreds of thousands of players who might be playing on the network."

But there's something to be said about the convenience offered by that digital experience. A question I, a fairly late Dungeons & Dragons bloomer, have always asked is: Why is there no properly licensed digital version of the game's 4th Edition — a version characterized by its fairly codified (and therefore easily digitized) game mechanics? There is certainly no shortage of digital games based on the D&D license, some of which come closer to emulating the tabletop game's core mechanics than others; but why isn't there a D&D 4th Edition iPad game?

According to Wizards of the Coast's Nathan Stewart, brand director for Dungeons & Dragons, it's because of that same separation of digital and physical experiences.

"On the digital front, we look at what the fans are wanting ... through what they're playing and buying and whatnot, and also what the mediums will help deliver," Stewart said. "What you've just described, this digital version of the paper game — it kind of exists through virtual tabletops, it's just not very popular. That's actually probably missing some of the point of why people like getting together at the table and playing. The shared storytelling, the go anywhere, do anything element, the social aspect of it, it's really the core reason and it's something only D&D delivers."

The company's approach to digital interpretations of its franchises seems to differ from brand to brand. For Magic: The Gathering, the digitization has been fairly straightforward; in 2009, the company launched Magic: The Gathering — Duels of the Planeswalkers, a console game that mirrored the mechanics of the physical trading card game, which would come to mobile platforms in later iterations. It served as a (comparatively) inexpensive entry point into the game, and has managed to boost sales of physical cards threefold since it first launched, a Wizards of the Coast representative told Polygon.

"...if you're a D&D fan, when you sit down to talk D&D with people, you should all be able to have the same stories."

Dungeons & Dragons has a different digital strategy altogether; one that focuses less on digital monetization and more about cross-platform narrative experiences. Before deciding how a project will manifest — whether through a mobile game, MMORPG, tabletop game, novel, or so on — Wizards of the Coast examines how that project will help broaden the storytelling going on in the franchise's other iterations.

It's a somewhat convoluted goal, but it can be boiled down to a single, ideal end user experience, Stewart explained.

"In the future my ideal world is you and me, more of our friends are sitting around a table talking about the D&D experience we had, talking about Bhaal coming back, and 'I can't believe the god of murder is resurrected, and how much havoc this is going to wreak on Baldur's Gate,' and, 'This is insane, I don't know if I can even survive this,' and as we start talking, we all realize that none of us are playing the same game.

"But we all experienced the same thing, we knew what everyone else is talking about. The storyline was pervasive across all our experiences, even if you were playing a standalone board game, and I was playing the Neverwinter MMO, and someone else was playing the tabletop RPG, someone else was playing Baldur's Gate 3 on Xbox. That cohesive storytelling, if you're a D&D fan, when you sit down to talk D&D with people, you should all be able to have the same stories. That's what drives our strategy."

That strategy is also how Wizards avoids cannibalizing its own sales across D&D games; because you can get more of the story by indulging in more titles, invested fans are less likely to stick to just one.

"By delivering these great storytelling experiences then optimizing them for the right delivery vehicle, you can have them coexist and be complimentary to each other," Stewart said. "If you just experience one of them, awesome, that's great ... if you delivered all of them, they're all unique and different so you feel like you got a really big piece of the puzzle."

Of course, Wizards of the Coast hasn't completely ignored the convenience of direct digital ports of their physical items. Just last week, Lords of Waterdeep, a Dungeons & Dragons strategy board game that launched last year, was released on the iOS App Store in a digital adaptation from Playdek.

Perhaps the most notable digitization Wizards experimented with was D&D Insider, a suite of digital tools that encapsulated all the data D&D 4th Edition had to offer. By paying a subscription fee, users could create characters — traditionally a fairly complex equation — using a simple application, then print out the parameters of their different powers and abilities on discrete cards. Almost all the math and rule-checking was done for the player; a kindness that stretched across other applications, including a Monster Creator.

"It's completely successful, and it still remains successful..."

"It's completely successful, and it still remains successful, it's a very widely used tool for the tabletop audience," Stewart said. "I think a majority of the 4th Edition players that are actually playing are using that on a regular basis. I love the tools, I think they're awesome — the only thing that I would say is, the only thing the tools don't do that I wish they would have, is they don't work great at the tabletop. Not from a design standpoint or a portability standpoint. They're great for prep, but you really wouldn't use them at play very much. I think people try, but sometimes it takes away from the experience."

Wizards of the Coast is looking at how they'll improve those tools for D&D Next, the upcoming relaunch of the game's ruleset. Moving the Insider apps over to mobile devices and tablets seems likely, as it would fold those tools into a play session more ergonomically. Other third-party apps are already spreading across tabletops, performing similar functions, and Wizards of the Coast isn't ignoring them.

"They have some ineloquent solutions, but people are still really eager to use that at the table," Stewart said. "We see a lot of it, so we know that's what the consumer wants. We're absolutely looking at how to deliver that, because it's just blatantly clear that that's what the gamers want. You see it, we see it and we're definitely looking at how to best do that."

It's more difficult to track the impact that digital D&D games have on the physical franchise, given the lack of direct adaptations, but the core brand clearly isn't suffering. That's because Wizards of the Coast has a legacy in D&D — the kind of gold mine upon which the physical board games industry is built, according to Days of Wonder's Mark Kaufmann.

"One of the interesting things about board games, the analogy that our CEO likes to use is: In what other business category is the product that was number one 70 years ago still the number one product, which is Monopoly — and arguably, Scrabble's getting really close now," Kaufmann explained. "There's nothing like that in the business market today, where the same product is still successful. The length and scale of the lifetime for board games is very long, which makes it an interesting business in that once you get an evergreen title, or a product that will continue to sell, and continue to be successful over time, you then get economies of scale.

"Ticket to Ride sells not because I'm a great marketer, it sells because people like the game, and play with their friends, who then like the game, who play with their friends and so forth," he added. "All we really do is try to build the network of players. That makes the cardboard side, at least in our case, because we have two games that are quite successful ... it makes it more profitable as we move along."

"Nobody throws board games away, even if they haven't played it in five years."

It's incredibly difficult to secure such an empire, but developers who can thread that needle can set themselves up for long-term success. Solid franchises can serves as a sturdy bedrock for cardboard game makers; it's a stark contrast to the far more volatile mobile game market, Kaufmann said.

"The long tail [of mobile games] — yeah, it's really long, but it's really skinny for most of it," Kaufmann said. "We know where we are in the rankings, and we're profitable with our digital side, but we don't think of it as being an awesome business to be in. If I were a company that only sold digital games on iOS or Android devices, I'd be concerned. If you get outside the top 10, nobody's making a significant amount of money."

Of course, there's something to be said about the physical presence of board games. Exposure on the App Store is problematic, and the low price point of most software doesn't engender much commitment from users. A $50 board game taking up a square foot of shelf space is much, much harder to ignore.

"You throw apps off of your devices probably all the time," Kaufmann said. "Nobody throws board games away, even if they haven't played it in five years."

YouTube's new Google+ comment system has its fair share of detractors — including one of the company's own co-founders. But YouTube seems to think the change is working out for the better. "New features like threaded conversations and formatted comments are coming to life," reads a new post from the YouTube comments team. And while the team doesn't address the controversy of requiring Google+ head on, it does admit that the new comment setup has brought on an influx of spam. "While the new system dealt with many spam issues that had plagued YouTube comments in the past, it also introduced new opportunities for abuse and shortly after the launch, we saw some users taking advantage of them."

To help fix this, YouTube says it has already rolled out some updates that should prevent some spam comments. But it's also promising that other improvements are on the way, including one oft-requested feature: bulk moderation. YouTube plans to release tools for moderating numerous comments "soon," and says it is also "working on improving comment ranking and moderation of old-style comments." So while it doesn't appear that the company will be retreating from the new comment system anytime soon, YouTube clearly seems determined to make the change worthwhile for video creators and commenters alike.