Maybe it's because I had such a terrible commute this morning, but I can't get Bioshock: Infinite out of my head. More accurately, the response to it.
The end of last year was a rough time for gamers, because the inevitable "best of" lists came down the line like bullets from a gatling cannon. We discovered, to our horror, that the reviewers and critics we respected had listed some truly loathsome games as their favorites.
Bioshock: Infinite and Tomb Raider were the big ones for me. I hated both those games with a deep and abiding resentment that soured my opinion of anyone that liked them. Both were horrific.
Tomb Raider was openly horrific, like Hotline Miami. I could vaguely accept people liking those games, because ultraviolence, torture, and extremely boring depictions of human sadism are accepted parts of gamer culture. Getting upset with people liking Tomb Raider is like getting upset at people liking JRPGs or League of Legends. I can separate myself from that and say "well, it's just not a genre I like".
There are people who insist Tomb Raider is not an ultraviolent sadistic torturefest, but there are people who insist League of Legends is an inviting game and JRPGs are intense.
What I can't really get over, even now, is Bioshock: Infinite.
See, BI was created specifically to pander to straight white males ages 18-40, but it was created with a slightly new kind of pandering.
I grew up with games pandering to my demographic using violence and tits and manly-man growling. I was saturated in it, to the point where I didn't even really notice it any more.
BI tried to pander with obfuscated science-fiction storylines.
Sorry, Levine, I'm a connoisseur. I grew up on the very best science fiction. I remember my first viewings of Akira and Ghost in the Shell: both times I thought "oh, a good take on a standard story".
I was actively repulsed by the shallow plodding storyline in BI because it was so sub-par. When I read all the accolades about how amazing the story was, I was confused. The story was the weakest part of the game. Not just the big notes, but also the small ones. There were only a few story beats I liked, and even then they were usually screwed up in the last second by an overly heavy pandering hand.
Searching for other people who hated the story, I was struck that nearly all of them were not straight white males age 18-40.
They called out the story for a number of other problems. Racism, sexism, classism, and more. While the game attempted to make a racist, sexist, classist setting for the purpose of calling out those flaws, it ended up also BEING racist, sexist, and classist underneath that.
I thought this was all very interesting, and I learned a lot.
But that's because I had an "in". I already thought the game was crap, and I was hunting for people with the same opinion. When I found out that they had the same opinion for different reasons, I was able to sympathize and see their approach without feeling defensive, much like when you find someone likes the same band as you, but has a different favorite album.
Unfortunately, 99% of game reviewers and critics are straight while men age 18-40. And they were pandered to.
They loved this game because it touched them in all the spots they liked to be touched. It made them feel smart and mysterious and ruggedly awesome all at the same time. They loved it.
And when they heard these voices talking about how awful it was, they got defensive. They never actually listened to what the detractors were saying.
Many of them went into "full offensive defense" mode, like Jim Sterling. However, apparently Jim's first encounter with the detractors was with the people who hated the ultra-violent nature of the game, because he (and many others imitating him) defended themselves against that complaint with all the vigor they could muster. IE, they made fun of anyone who thought it was too violent.
Maybe it's because people who thought it was too violent were safe targets, as compared to women, people of color, and people struggling to earn enough to eat. Whether consciously or subconsciously, those targets were ignored like they didn't exist and had never said anything. Instead, it was "make fun of the namby-pambies that don't like violence" mode.
Any time I saw someone do this - and I saw it a lot - it really broke my heart. It showed just how exclusionary the gaming community was. Jim Sterling was probably the center of this, which is why I keep bringing him up.
See, Jim used to be a real toxic guy. However, when I started watching him last year I found he had really turned it around. He wasn't perfect, but he was a much better person and much more aware of misogyny and racism than before. I was sort of holding him up as an example of how "bro gamers" could become more culturally aware. He was a crack in the armor of exclusionary gaming culture, a path forward.
And then he held aloft a pandering example of exclusion as his best game of 2013. The crack in the armor was patched.
To me, the message was clear: gamer culture doesn't need to be inclusive. It can just get older.
I'm writing this so late not to dig up old wounds, but because I wasn't sure until now that I was really affected as deeply as I thought. But six months have passed, and I'm still upset.
Once I started pulling at these threads, my investment in "gamer culture" unraveled. For six months I've been completely unable to enjoy any major game, because all I can see is exclusionary bullshit. Even indie games often feel exclusionary.
I didn't make any conscious decision to not enjoy 99% of games any more. I just found that I could suddenly smell bullshit, and everything stank.
Although I can't speak for them, I can't help but think that this must be how basically everyone who isn't a straight white male age 18-40 feels about games. And I have to say: it's pretty bad. That there are gamers from outside that demographic amazes me. They have a level of tolerance and endurance I cannot even imagine, to enjoy something that stinks this badly.
I can't do it.
Games stink too much.
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Quality of Universe
I really like analyzing IP franchises for the kinds of stories they support, and the kinds of cultural baggage they are weighted with.
By "IP franchises" I mean things like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or Mass Effect: universes that can support many stories. Universes with a lot of fanon. I guess it includes things like My Little Pony and Adventure Time and such, but I do try to limit my analysis to universes I've actually witnessed. I don't try to guess at the sorts of stories and baggage MLP carries, since I've never seen it.
When I say that a universe can carry a kind of story, I don't mean that it's the only kind of story that can be told, just that it's the kind of story the universe is best at. For example, Star Wars is best at stories of redemption and combating darkness - internal, systemic, or universal. Star Trek is best at stories that explore the breadth and diversity of life and culture. Both have other kinds of stories in them, but their iconic stories are of those types.
I've always analyzed universes like that, and I've enjoyed how those stories reflect on fanon. Star Wars has a fanbase very dedicated to the original movies because the fanbase wants stories like those: stories of fighting against darkness. Later movies had a weaker focus on that. If you read the expanded universe stuff, you can see much of it sticks very close to the core stories that Star Wars seemed best at, and nearly all the fanfiction does. Fighting darkness is very compelling, no matter where the darkness is found or how it is embodied.
Star Trek, on the other hand, has many fans but they rarely highlight the same seasons. I think this is because the best story type is "exploring diversity from the point of view of white bread mainstream culture", and that's a story type that evolved with each season along with cultural norms. So you get attached to the seasons that were closest to your cultural norms, and therefore tickled your concept of "diversity" most.
It's really fun to think on this level, although a lot of the thoughts are guesswork. You can certainly disagree with this kind of analysis, especially if you were struck differently by the same universes I've described. But one thing I have started to notice is that these universes, these franchises, they are more than just the stories they can support. They are also the baggage they bring with them.
What made me really start to notice this was the rapid-fire discussion of Mass Effect, Star Wars, and Super Mario happening on Twitter recently. All of these franchises have baggage.
Baggage isn't inherently bad. For example, Star Wars has light sabers as baggage. If you tell a Star Wars story that includes Jedi, it's going to include light sabers, and you're going to have to keep in mind that the Jedi can, you know, cut anything apart in a flash. It'll weigh on your mind and constrain your story, but that's not necessarily bad and, like all creative work, the right constraints can actually fire you up.
Not all baggage is as intentional as light sabers, though.
The easiest example of unintentional baggage is deeply ingrained sexism and racism. Especially with older universes, there's a lot of passive assumptions about sex and race. For example, Japanese game studios are still struggling to stop being total creepers in how they treat characters like Peach and Samus. American companies aren't doing much better, with the new Star Wars featuring a grand total of one new woman into the cast.
Racism is also part of the culture of many universes. Not introduced on purpose, but just incidentally as part of the culture of the developers that they failed to properly account for. Fantasy settings tend to have this worst.
The older a setting is, the more sexist and racist it tends to implicitly be. For example, in Tolkien's works, the good guys are all European white men. Whether Tolkien was racist or sexist isn't the point: the setting has baggage. Unless you actively rebel against it, it'll creep into every related story. This limits what cultures it can appeal to: as time passes, what we are willing to put up with changes, and that kind of exclusion is less acceptable.
More modern universes tend to be more inclusive, but they use a technique that will, in the long run, be equally problematic. This is the "generic diversity" approach.
As an easy example, in Mass Effect the human species is represented in a fairly diverse manner, especially in the later games. Decent spectrum of color, decent gender ratio, even a steadily increasing diversity of sexual preference.
However, this isn't a situation where a woman's point of view is represented, or a Hispanic point of view, or a gay point of view. Instead, they are all given the default point of view of the developer. That is, they are all written as straight white men, and most of the intercharacter relationships among the human cast are relationships straight white guys have, with the focus on the kinds of strife straight white guys tend to have with each other - that one coworker who's racist, for example.
All of the cultural pieces actually relating to being female, or black, or gay, or religious, or homeless, or poor - these are all given to aliens.
This doesn't mean the aliens represent the point of view of these cultures, or the people who have these issues. Nope, they still don't have much of a word in these games. Instead, the issues can still be treated in the same way as they have been for decades, just now people have a harder time calling you out on it because you've changed out the faces.
Not only is this lazy, it's also not very good at keeping up with the changing culture in the real world. The Asari and the Quarians both carry a lot of aging sexist and/or racist baggage with them. In time, those species will need to be completely reinvented to stay acceptable, let alone relevant. In fact, you can already see that happening with the Asari, whose representation grasps at dozens of different straws, some more unfortunate than others.
Although I say this is lazy, it's still 100x better than the exclusionary settings of last century.
Anyway, that's my own opinion on the matter.
By "IP franchises" I mean things like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or Mass Effect: universes that can support many stories. Universes with a lot of fanon. I guess it includes things like My Little Pony and Adventure Time and such, but I do try to limit my analysis to universes I've actually witnessed. I don't try to guess at the sorts of stories and baggage MLP carries, since I've never seen it.
When I say that a universe can carry a kind of story, I don't mean that it's the only kind of story that can be told, just that it's the kind of story the universe is best at. For example, Star Wars is best at stories of redemption and combating darkness - internal, systemic, or universal. Star Trek is best at stories that explore the breadth and diversity of life and culture. Both have other kinds of stories in them, but their iconic stories are of those types.
I've always analyzed universes like that, and I've enjoyed how those stories reflect on fanon. Star Wars has a fanbase very dedicated to the original movies because the fanbase wants stories like those: stories of fighting against darkness. Later movies had a weaker focus on that. If you read the expanded universe stuff, you can see much of it sticks very close to the core stories that Star Wars seemed best at, and nearly all the fanfiction does. Fighting darkness is very compelling, no matter where the darkness is found or how it is embodied.
Star Trek, on the other hand, has many fans but they rarely highlight the same seasons. I think this is because the best story type is "exploring diversity from the point of view of white bread mainstream culture", and that's a story type that evolved with each season along with cultural norms. So you get attached to the seasons that were closest to your cultural norms, and therefore tickled your concept of "diversity" most.
It's really fun to think on this level, although a lot of the thoughts are guesswork. You can certainly disagree with this kind of analysis, especially if you were struck differently by the same universes I've described. But one thing I have started to notice is that these universes, these franchises, they are more than just the stories they can support. They are also the baggage they bring with them.
What made me really start to notice this was the rapid-fire discussion of Mass Effect, Star Wars, and Super Mario happening on Twitter recently. All of these franchises have baggage.
Baggage isn't inherently bad. For example, Star Wars has light sabers as baggage. If you tell a Star Wars story that includes Jedi, it's going to include light sabers, and you're going to have to keep in mind that the Jedi can, you know, cut anything apart in a flash. It'll weigh on your mind and constrain your story, but that's not necessarily bad and, like all creative work, the right constraints can actually fire you up.
Not all baggage is as intentional as light sabers, though.
The easiest example of unintentional baggage is deeply ingrained sexism and racism. Especially with older universes, there's a lot of passive assumptions about sex and race. For example, Japanese game studios are still struggling to stop being total creepers in how they treat characters like Peach and Samus. American companies aren't doing much better, with the new Star Wars featuring a grand total of one new woman into the cast.
Racism is also part of the culture of many universes. Not introduced on purpose, but just incidentally as part of the culture of the developers that they failed to properly account for. Fantasy settings tend to have this worst.
The older a setting is, the more sexist and racist it tends to implicitly be. For example, in Tolkien's works, the good guys are all European white men. Whether Tolkien was racist or sexist isn't the point: the setting has baggage. Unless you actively rebel against it, it'll creep into every related story. This limits what cultures it can appeal to: as time passes, what we are willing to put up with changes, and that kind of exclusion is less acceptable.
More modern universes tend to be more inclusive, but they use a technique that will, in the long run, be equally problematic. This is the "generic diversity" approach.
As an easy example, in Mass Effect the human species is represented in a fairly diverse manner, especially in the later games. Decent spectrum of color, decent gender ratio, even a steadily increasing diversity of sexual preference.
However, this isn't a situation where a woman's point of view is represented, or a Hispanic point of view, or a gay point of view. Instead, they are all given the default point of view of the developer. That is, they are all written as straight white men, and most of the intercharacter relationships among the human cast are relationships straight white guys have, with the focus on the kinds of strife straight white guys tend to have with each other - that one coworker who's racist, for example.
All of the cultural pieces actually relating to being female, or black, or gay, or religious, or homeless, or poor - these are all given to aliens.
This doesn't mean the aliens represent the point of view of these cultures, or the people who have these issues. Nope, they still don't have much of a word in these games. Instead, the issues can still be treated in the same way as they have been for decades, just now people have a harder time calling you out on it because you've changed out the faces.
Not only is this lazy, it's also not very good at keeping up with the changing culture in the real world. The Asari and the Quarians both carry a lot of aging sexist and/or racist baggage with them. In time, those species will need to be completely reinvented to stay acceptable, let alone relevant. In fact, you can already see that happening with the Asari, whose representation grasps at dozens of different straws, some more unfortunate than others.
Although I say this is lazy, it's still 100x better than the exclusionary settings of last century.
Anyway, that's my own opinion on the matter.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Problematic Culture
So, I just saw some early peeks into "Lightning Returns", which is a spin-off of Final Fantasy that is by the Valkyrie Profile team and is basically Valkyrie Profile 3: Final Fantasy Crossover.
The problem is that Valkyrie Profile was fairly progressive for its era, while Final Fantasy is astoundingly regressive for its era. Valkyrie Profile has tremendous respect for itself and its characters, while Final Fantasy is so disrespectful in its pursuit of the almighty dollar that the characters can only be described in terms of their appearance plus one adjective, if that much.
To me it feels like the creeping stink of Square Enix is poisoning another good franchise.
Let me explain.
In Valkyrie Profile, when you leveled up your characters would become better people. You would increase their bravery, their kindness... decrease their bloodlust or greed. Their personalities were embedded so deep into the gameplay that where other games would talk about +2 magic power, Valkyrie Profile would talk about +2 kindness. In a game with dozens of characters, they all shone brilliantly and clearly every second you played with them. In fact, the main plot was about growing your personality and independence!
In Final Fantasy, the characters are treated as containers for stats. Their personalities are suborned to ever-changing combat roles and, if they are women, to the clothes you make them wear. This is especially true in Lightning Returns.
The worst part is that they actively destroyed one of the least objectified women in the franchise. They chose one of the few women that existed as more than a fanservice romance target, and made absolutely sure to destroy her specifically. Obviously her personality should depend on the costume she wears! Obviously!
Ugh. Dressup isn't even inherently that awful. They've made it awful by aiming at the worst target and killing her with it.
As an example, there are many western RPGs where you can dress your character up however you want. Many people dress their character up very sexy. It's unsuitable, sure. It's sexist, yeah. But the character has no predetermined personality. The only personality these characters have is the one you assign to them. So when you create a character that dresses sexy all the time, you've created a person that likes to dress sexy. Sure, it's a shitty, sexist character. But you didn't objectify someone to get your jollies. You created someone that likes to help you get your jollies.
Hopefully the difference is clear.
...
I hate Square Enix. Their culture is awful. They poison everything.
It's nice that the Valkyrie Profile team are trying to pull them out of the quagmire they sank into... but the result is that the Valkryie Profile team is sinking into the same shit.
The problem is that Valkyrie Profile was fairly progressive for its era, while Final Fantasy is astoundingly regressive for its era. Valkyrie Profile has tremendous respect for itself and its characters, while Final Fantasy is so disrespectful in its pursuit of the almighty dollar that the characters can only be described in terms of their appearance plus one adjective, if that much.
To me it feels like the creeping stink of Square Enix is poisoning another good franchise.
Let me explain.
In Valkyrie Profile, when you leveled up your characters would become better people. You would increase their bravery, their kindness... decrease their bloodlust or greed. Their personalities were embedded so deep into the gameplay that where other games would talk about +2 magic power, Valkyrie Profile would talk about +2 kindness. In a game with dozens of characters, they all shone brilliantly and clearly every second you played with them. In fact, the main plot was about growing your personality and independence!
In Final Fantasy, the characters are treated as containers for stats. Their personalities are suborned to ever-changing combat roles and, if they are women, to the clothes you make them wear. This is especially true in Lightning Returns.
The worst part is that they actively destroyed one of the least objectified women in the franchise. They chose one of the few women that existed as more than a fanservice romance target, and made absolutely sure to destroy her specifically. Obviously her personality should depend on the costume she wears! Obviously!
Ugh. Dressup isn't even inherently that awful. They've made it awful by aiming at the worst target and killing her with it.
As an example, there are many western RPGs where you can dress your character up however you want. Many people dress their character up very sexy. It's unsuitable, sure. It's sexist, yeah. But the character has no predetermined personality. The only personality these characters have is the one you assign to them. So when you create a character that dresses sexy all the time, you've created a person that likes to dress sexy. Sure, it's a shitty, sexist character. But you didn't objectify someone to get your jollies. You created someone that likes to help you get your jollies.
Hopefully the difference is clear.
...
I hate Square Enix. Their culture is awful. They poison everything.
It's nice that the Valkyrie Profile team are trying to pull them out of the quagmire they sank into... but the result is that the Valkryie Profile team is sinking into the same shit.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Participating in the Emergent Internet
So you like the idea of the internet getting better and better. You want to do your part. You share cool things with your friends - and with strangers, you're not particular.
But maybe you could do a little more? You know, make the internet better without actually putting any effort into it?
Can do!
The internet of the future is not simply sites, but links. Who links to what? What links to who?
To help build this, simply remember that there are two kinds of posts - two kinds of content. One kind introduces new stuff, while the other kind reshares that stuff. Both are important. Creators are often not very good at the whole "resharing" thing, while people who reshare continuously get very, very good at knowing what will make a splash with who. They're different jobs.
Right now, you're a resharer. You find something interesting and want to share it. So you do.
Well, if you want to help the internet grow and flourish, you need to give credit.
Nothing about giving credit diminishes your reshare. Giving credit makes you look like not a dick. So let's give credit!
First and most importantly, give credit to the original poster - the person who originally created the content. If you're sharing directly, this is easy: just link to the page you got it from. But even if you are sharing a reshare of a reshare of a reshare, give a link or a name-drop to the original source. If you can't find the original source, say so.
Then make sure you give credit to the other resharers who, like you, are striving to make the internet more interesting. If you read someone's resharing of a Shatner video and want to spread the love around, link to the original video and to the resharer's post. Links are free. If it's a long chain of links, or of the sharer's link is not something you want to directly link to for some reason, no problem. Do a "via" and tag everyone. "via +doggydoggydoggy and @mobileskunkarmor" or whatever.
Pretty easy, right? Just link. LINK LINK LINK LINK. Links are free. Just get in the habit of linking. The more threads you connect, the better a netizen you are.
...
What, you want a more advanced course? Okay.
If you want to be a good citizen of the internet, one part of that is being a filter to purify all the bad citizens.
Bad citizen number one shares images and animated gifs by reuploading them to imgur or G+ or whatever. The cool image just pops up in his stream. Even if he doesn't claim he created it, he certainly doesn't give any link love to the author!
Well, simply post the link yourself. A simple reverse image lookup at http://images.google.com/ can give you the source. Don't make any accusations, just a simple comment that says "original source -> LINK". Chances are, the author isn't intending to be a dick, and if he gets upset at you, well... problem solved, he's going to lose a lot of followers and his reshares won't matter.
Bad citizen number two shares direct links to the original author, but never gives any "via" credit. Sure, maybe they stumbled across every single article on their own. More likely, they're leeching off other resharers, aggregating other, interesting people's work and pretending they did it. Make no mistake: finding and distributing interesting content is work, and these leeches are not doing anyone any favors.
A big giveaway is if more than 2/3 of the posts they make are links with no real added commentary. If someone links to a news article and says "I think this is probably a sign that France might be about to raise interest rates 0.1%", that's probably okay. If someone just posts a link to the news article, sans comment, they may be resharing without giving credit to the resharer they originally got the link from.
I don't know what to do in these situations, aside from keeping in mind that the guy probably doesn't consider a resharer's work to be of any value. Funny, considering they are a resharer themselves.
EDIT: There are some people who reshare privately. Maybe Maggie doesn't want her parents to know she's gay, or whatever. If someone has reshared privately, use your best judgement as to whether to include them in your credits or not. If you're thinking this deeply, you're probably not a type 2 bad citizen, no worries.
Questionable citizen 3 makes derivatives and post them without links to the original. For example, creating an animated gif but not linking to the video you ripped it from.
In these situations, I recommend simply linking to the video, if you can find it. Done simply, it should be okay. For example, "ha ha, I loved that bit. Here's the full video->"
Remember that the questionable citizen in question actually did a fair amount of work. They're not really leeches, just clumsy.
...
Following these guidelines will hopefully result in a culture of clear link love. Sort of a dawning of the age of Aquarius sort of thing, except geeky. Do your part for the internet: LINK!
But maybe you could do a little more? You know, make the internet better without actually putting any effort into it?
Can do!
The internet of the future is not simply sites, but links. Who links to what? What links to who?
To help build this, simply remember that there are two kinds of posts - two kinds of content. One kind introduces new stuff, while the other kind reshares that stuff. Both are important. Creators are often not very good at the whole "resharing" thing, while people who reshare continuously get very, very good at knowing what will make a splash with who. They're different jobs.
Right now, you're a resharer. You find something interesting and want to share it. So you do.
Well, if you want to help the internet grow and flourish, you need to give credit.
Nothing about giving credit diminishes your reshare. Giving credit makes you look like not a dick. So let's give credit!
First and most importantly, give credit to the original poster - the person who originally created the content. If you're sharing directly, this is easy: just link to the page you got it from. But even if you are sharing a reshare of a reshare of a reshare, give a link or a name-drop to the original source. If you can't find the original source, say so.
Then make sure you give credit to the other resharers who, like you, are striving to make the internet more interesting. If you read someone's resharing of a Shatner video and want to spread the love around, link to the original video and to the resharer's post. Links are free. If it's a long chain of links, or of the sharer's link is not something you want to directly link to for some reason, no problem. Do a "via" and tag everyone. "via +doggydoggydoggy and @mobileskunkarmor" or whatever.
Pretty easy, right? Just link. LINK LINK LINK LINK. Links are free. Just get in the habit of linking. The more threads you connect, the better a netizen you are.
...
What, you want a more advanced course? Okay.
If you want to be a good citizen of the internet, one part of that is being a filter to purify all the bad citizens.
Bad citizen number one shares images and animated gifs by reuploading them to imgur or G+ or whatever. The cool image just pops up in his stream. Even if he doesn't claim he created it, he certainly doesn't give any link love to the author!
Well, simply post the link yourself. A simple reverse image lookup at http://images.google.com/ can give you the source. Don't make any accusations, just a simple comment that says "original source -> LINK". Chances are, the author isn't intending to be a dick, and if he gets upset at you, well... problem solved, he's going to lose a lot of followers and his reshares won't matter.
Bad citizen number two shares direct links to the original author, but never gives any "via" credit. Sure, maybe they stumbled across every single article on their own. More likely, they're leeching off other resharers, aggregating other, interesting people's work and pretending they did it. Make no mistake: finding and distributing interesting content is work, and these leeches are not doing anyone any favors.
A big giveaway is if more than 2/3 of the posts they make are links with no real added commentary. If someone links to a news article and says "I think this is probably a sign that France might be about to raise interest rates 0.1%", that's probably okay. If someone just posts a link to the news article, sans comment, they may be resharing without giving credit to the resharer they originally got the link from.
I don't know what to do in these situations, aside from keeping in mind that the guy probably doesn't consider a resharer's work to be of any value. Funny, considering they are a resharer themselves.
EDIT: There are some people who reshare privately. Maybe Maggie doesn't want her parents to know she's gay, or whatever. If someone has reshared privately, use your best judgement as to whether to include them in your credits or not. If you're thinking this deeply, you're probably not a type 2 bad citizen, no worries.
Questionable citizen 3 makes derivatives and post them without links to the original. For example, creating an animated gif but not linking to the video you ripped it from.
In these situations, I recommend simply linking to the video, if you can find it. Done simply, it should be okay. For example, "ha ha, I loved that bit. Here's the full video->"
Remember that the questionable citizen in question actually did a fair amount of work. They're not really leeches, just clumsy.
...
Following these guidelines will hopefully result in a culture of clear link love. Sort of a dawning of the age of Aquarius sort of thing, except geeky. Do your part for the internet: LINK!
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