It’s clear that wokeness isn’t the cause of bad game writing. The very suggestion is ridiculous.
Firstly, game writing has always been terrible barring a number of exceptions that can literally be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Secondly, countries with less ‘wokeness’, like Japan, have even worse, more hackneyed and more cringe game writing than their western counterparts.
Thirdly, some of the rarest examples of good game writing, like Disco Elysium, are explicitly leftist, woke fiction (bordering on actual political propaganda) far to the left of the average ‘Sweet Baby Inc’ employee.
The vast majority of bad game writing since the invention of video games, and probably still today, can be lain squarely at the feet of straight white (and Japanese) men. This is not in any way to suggest that wamen or minorities are any better (just look at modern YA fiction to see they are not), but it’s clear that the dire state of game writing is not their fault.
Certainly, in this case it’s action taken in revenge before a friendly judge. The point is the same, the anti-abortionists would rather actively make society worse, more stupid and more violent for everyone than admit that free and easy abortion serves the public interest.
But let's put aside speculation about technical issues and focus on what is SBI's department: writing. Well, thing are not looking so good there either
There are maybe 10 AAA games that have ever been released with passable writing, and probably two thirds of them are from two studios (Rockstar and CDPR). That’s passable, by the way, not good (which would lower the number to maybe one or two, though I’d rather not debate which exactly they are).
Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.
Kotaku has written an article about it, the article's author claims that you can't be racist against white people.
Gawker was famous for paying writers for clicks, she seems to be doing a very good job. Amusingly, the same practice on the same website (then under different ownership of course) led in substantial part to the original Gamergate moment.
Like for example many western AAA titles in recent years struggle with modeling female faces for some reason, and the in-game models look uncanny valley-ish and quite unlike the people they're modeled after, and the conspiracy-inclined are saying that the characters are deliberately made ugly to challenge the patriarchal standards, or something.
Japanese games always anime-ify all their characters’ faces, even in the rare cases in which they use facial capture. It’s extremely jarring when playing yet another Japanese game with ‘realistic’ (by which I mean not-cartoon or exaggerated in art style) environments and anime plastic skin triangle face NPCs, where everyone looks like the picture Koreans bring to the plastic surgeon. But that’s a personal preference, probably.
Western games tend to go for direct scans rather than yassification. I think there’s a general emphasis on ‘more real’ characters, but it’s pretty common across the board. British TV tends to avoid casting extremely beautiful actors in many roles (especially in comedy and ‘gritty’ drama) and it seems to have been that way for a while, and probably isn’t the result of feminism. And, for example, the women in ‘Suicide Squad’ by Rocksteady, which you note these consultants worked on, don’t seem to have been made particularly unattractive physically in the clip you link, judging by Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman at least.
Mass Effect Andromeda
This really brought me back. But really, the face model for Sara Ryder does seem to look a lot like the final character model, people just cherrypicked pictures in which the model was mewing/posing instead of smiling or moving her facial muscles and therefore showed her prominent jowls and squareish jaw.
2rafa
3mo ago
Trump represents a pent up peasant and heartland burgher rage in a way that no other GOP politician can.
Yes, they want to “own the libs”, but that’s misses out the most important part. They want Donald Trump to own the libs. Owning the libs is important but not essential. Donald Trump is essential. Better Trump is in power and fails than DeSantis is in power and actually succeeds. This is, in effect, the decision that is being made.
But in a wider sense, American conservatives aren’t serious people. They consider forcing impoverished black single mothers to give birth to more children higher priority than ending mass immigration. That considered ending the tiny amount of GDP sent to Ukraine (tying up a longstanding geopolitical foe for years at the cost of zero American lives) more important than ending affirmative action - which only happened because of a 30-year effort by some autistic Jewish guy who couldn’t let it go. These are people who genuinely abhor the pittance spent on America’s empire when it has been the mission of every great Western civilization to conquer, to expand and to rule other lands and peoples.
They live in an imaginary mid century fantasy that is itself a product of Hollywood. They do not aspire to greatness, personally or collectively. Kevin Williamson was right about Trump, and about his supporters. The libs - if he wins again - will be “owned” well and truly for 4 years, and then simply pick up where they left off. Trump doesn’t understand institutions, but his supporters don’t care. The ‘deep state’ will let him spend 4 years in the AG’s office fighting spurious legal cases against his onetime political foes, and all the while the rest of Washington will tick along as usual.
2rafa
9mo ago
They also survived at 400% the rate of second class men, if we’re cherry picking statistics to demonstrate supposed chivalry.
We accept that election-rigging happens, now we're just debating the specifics.
We accept that dirty behavior (which may be described as ‘rigging’ if you prefer, although I would limit the use of that term to Anschluss-referendum-type ballot stuffing / just making up numbers) is a perennial feature of US elections and that there was nothing special or unique about 2020, then?
That is the key claim. No democracy is free of corruption or dirty electoral behavior of the type we’re discussing. So ‘2020 was rigged’ proponents face a simple choice - either they accept and argue that every US election ever has been ‘rigged’ by their standards and America is not and has never been a democracy OR they admit that what happens to Trump in 2020 was nothing out of the ordinary and he should accept that he got played and stop whining about what happened to everyone else happening to him.
Which is it? Trump’s thin skin is relevant because it stops him doing what almost every other victim of dirty behavior in US electoral history ultimately did, which is take the L.
I don’t agree with forcing expansive gun rights on liberal states whose electorates have clearly rejected them.
Complain legitimately about the way in which red states had progressive politics forced upon them (in some cases at gunpoint). And by all means advocate the federal government enforcing policy on the states when it comes to borders, immigration, foreign policy and (actual) interstate commerce, as conservatives rightly do in the first two cases.
But I see no reason why conservative gun owners must force the population of Hawaii to accept a law which both doesn’t affect the gun policy of conservative states and is transparently deeply unpopular there. Similarly, I’d find it wrong if and when a progressive Supreme Court limited gun ownership rights in a conservative state.
It doesn’t seem bad if Texas is the Wild West and Hawaii is East Asia when it comes to gun policy. Conservatives still have plenty of places to live. Regional differences in view on permissiveness around vices, weapon ownership, abortion and so on are part of the normal tapestry of life in countries with hundreds of millions of people.
Well it’s relevant becuase in the Canadian bureaucracy (as in most bureaucracies) most things are recorded in writing, including offers of this kind of assistance apparently. Almost nothing in a Western bureaucracy when it comes to interaction between some government body and the citizen would ever happen ‘verbally’, even minor stuff requires 7 forms and a bushel of letters sent to the citizen about everything that relates to anything to do with an issue.
So while the government may have conveniently lost its copy, it’s much more suspicious that the veteran did, especially when she went directly to the press to complain about it.
Haringey is approximately 32% White British. My estimate is that among school-aged children, it’s more like 20%. Most of the white British will be wealthy Londoners who live in the affluent neighborhoods of Highgate and Muswell Hill, who will almost certainly send their children to private schools. (Quite a few of the rest will be Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who have their own schools too). The rest of the borough is “among the most deprived local authorities in England” according to Wikipedia.
My guess is that there are very, very few white english children at the schools sending students to these programs. So while white working class English boys are indeed one of the lowest performing demographics in UK schools (as many conservative opinion columnists have noted in response to this program) there are very, very few of those left in Haringey. (And many if not most of the working class white children in the borough will be the children of slavic immigrants, who seem to perform fine).
For what it’s worth, I think this stuff is pretty smart and pretty good. Whatever becomes of the immigration debate, encouraging a culture of achievement, responsibility, respect for education and conscientiousness in young black men (which this program seems to want to do) is surely a good thing. It would be a bad thing if the government shut it down.
2rafa
1mo ago
I can’t take seriously someone who thinks that Kojima’s writing is good. Cult classic in a weird, schizo, Japanese man has fever dream based on American popular media and current affairs type way, maybe, but good? Deus Ex’s writing is OK, the reboots are better and less hackneyed (and I think Mary DeMarle is one of the best game writers), but it still doesn’t reach network TV level, let alone beyond. Spec Ops does something interesting with narrative, the moment to moment dialogue is rarely impressive but I do really like it as a narrative experience and I’d say it’s on the list.
Writing doesn’t have to be good to strike a chord with people. Harry Potter struck a chord with many people even though Rowling isn’t a great writer (she’s not a bad one either). Sitcoms like Friends strike a chord with many people even though the writers frequently phone it in. Characters, their vibe, parasocial relationships with them, these are all big reasons why people find themselves drawn to very long stories (which a sitcom in syndication is, to some extent) like Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate, Persona, I’ve met people deeply invested in World of Warcraft’s ongoing story lol. But that doesn’t make it good.
2rafa
1mo ago
Tolkien isn’t fantasy garbage, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that the average quality of fantasy writing that fantasy writers consume is even remotely close to Tolkien’s level. To be clear, I’m not making the point that all literary fiction is on the level of Joyce or Austen either, but the average quality in the fantasy space - particularly in games - is much lower.
2rafa
9mo ago
If he’s not attracted to adult women then why would it be a perk? The only answer I can think of is so he doesn’t get beaten or killed by the other male inmates in a revenge attack, but in any case progressives (and many non-progressives besides, myself included) believe that extrajudicial prison violence is an embarrassment on the US prison system anyway, so that’s not a specific enough argument.
2rafa
10mo ago
You can’t tell me that anti-affirmative action advocates aren’t firmly aware that they’re in practice advocating for a huge reduction in black representation in top colleges, businesses, civil service employment, state contracts and so on.
2rafa
1mo ago
I’ve been to many wonderful small towns in the US, but they were all in New England or in the outer suburbs of wealthy cities and the residents all had some source of external wealth, either from commuting into highly-paid PMC jobs in the nearest major city or from tourism. And again, if it’s a low variance rural lifestyle in a pretty, walkable, homogenous locale, much of Western Europe easily vastly outdoes the US and the US’ advantages (like much higher salaries) are less necessary.
Idk, what actually rural small Midwestern towns very far from the nearest major city are you thinking of? Happy to take a look on Streetview.
Surely there are many appeals and other delays a wealthy defendant can file for before assets are seized and sold forcibly in this way.
That’s to say nothing of what Trump could do to hurt New York if he wins again, which would presumably result in some behind-the-scenes negotiation.
2rafa
2mo ago
The point I'm trying to make here and the point that yourself the OP, @2rafa, @SwordOfOccam don't seem to be grasping is that onus of proof is not on the losers to provide evidence of illegitimacy, the onus is on election officials to convince the losing party that they lost fair and square.
And my point is that Donald Trump is a sore loser who was never going to accept that he lost “fair and square”. What do you think it would take to convince Trump he lost fair and square? This is the pivotal question in this debate, since most of Trump’s supporters will take his opinion on the matter.
2rafa
2mo ago
I think this is dismissive. What rape culture typically seems to refer to is men strategically getting young women very drunk so they’re less likely to decline sex.
You can disagree that that counts as rape, and indeed often it isn’t, it’s just young people getting drunk and hooking up. But it’s also not the same as young men merely being ‘interested’ in having sex with women. “Girls are easier when they’re drunk” is kind of a universally accepted male wisdom, so it’s useful to have a term for men pressuring women into drinking for that purpose. One could imagine a society in which, for example, getting people blackout drunk so they didn’t object to sex with you was considered generally objectionable behavior.
2rafa
4mo ago
Do you likewise think his unpopularity was arrived at by legitimate means?
No, I think it likely a result of his longstanding poor character and reputation coupled with a failure to accomplish most of what he promised his voters once in office.
That is, do you think that people on the other side should accept outcomes secured through such methods?
I am yet to be convinced the other side don’t do the same thing themselves.
2rafa
7mo ago
I could tell you, but I’d rather just copy @raggedy_anthem’s excellent comment:
I'm saying that women are more depressed and suicidal than they have ever been. They are more depressed and suicidal than they were in the Bad Old Days of supposed patriarchy. Like men, they are struggling to find fulfilling relationships or lasting contentment, because the current regime isn't good for them either.
Women are suffering the direct consequences of letting men like Brand loose to enjoy themselves. They are getting raped, taken advantage of, or just used in that sad, grubby way that doesn't amount to a crime. They are getting the resulting STIs and raising the resulting babies by themselves. In return, they don't get the sexual pleasure or status that a rake enjoys. All they get is the fleeting satisfaction of being desired. This is a terrible deal for women, and to be honest it's not one that most women ever even wanted. It's a race to the bottom, where you have to do things you aren't comfortable with in order to get male attention at all. If you want to know what it's like to grow up female post-Sexual Revolution and post-Internet porn, this is a great place to start. Little girls didn't choose this.
I see a lot of assertions that this state of affairs was all young women's idea, and that they need to be punished in order for it to change. That perspective... really lacks empathy or insight into who's actually driving the bus. It's blaming some of the least powerful people involved.
2rafa
7mo ago
Becoming a FAANG dev or majoring in computer science at Stanford is hard. Going to a bootcamp and doing basic data science python stuff for a plain old corporation that pays $105k a year in the burbs of some Sun Belt City isnt. But I think you’re getting distracted, because my focus wasn’t just on tech but on ‘email jobs’.
Do you think millennial girlbosses in HR or ‘Product Marketing Managers’ are doing an ultra-challenging job intellectually? Because they all make decent money too.
2rafa
1mo ago
Is Aloy fat? I don't play capeshit but as I recall MJ in the Spider-Man games was again an average looking redheaded woman, and certainly not fat.
2rafa
2mo ago
My point, then, is that the specific conservative hysteria over 2020 was because Donald Trump specifically couldn’t accept that he lost (whatever the ‘rules of the game’), not because historically unprecedented corruption occurred. This is the country of Tammany Hall, of Chicago machine politics, of comical gerrymandering, in that context 2020 just doesn’t feel special.
Wow, 13,000 copies? A veritable Harry Potter indeed.
More options
Context Copy link