OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I remember one of the first times it was recommended to me it was from a trans person excitedly telling me that you can be trans in the game, which as far as I can tell just means that you can put a visible penis on your female character. I'm not sure that's a win for diversity so much as being a win for perverts, but there you go.
I believe there was also some excitement in the progressive parts of the internet about a lesbian character in act two? Oh, and I remember something about getting a trans YouTuber (PhilosophyTube?) to voice a significant character, and that also seems like a bad sign.
You might feel free to dismiss me as just a cranky social conservative, but eventually all of this just gets tiring. Part of what's nice about going back to any video games prior to 2005 or so is that it's just not there. I'm sick of every video game, even games I otherwise quite like, having the mandatory part that I have to ignore. For the entire history of the industry up until the mid-to-late 2000s, we didn't do this. Can we just... not, for five minutes? Can we just have a video game with normal, sane sexual ethics again?
Just once?
(Well, actually, we can, the answer is Japanese games. But it's harder to find in the West.)
OliveTapenade
12d ago
The original context of the Hepler discussion was an interview she did in 2006. Note that this was back when BioWare was unquestionably good, so there isn't much chance that she ruined the games back then. Anyway, here is the relevant part:
What is your least favorite thing about working in the industry?
Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games. While I enjoy the interactive aspects of gaming, if a game doesn't have a good story, it's very hard for me to get interested in playing it. Similarly, I'm really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly -- I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don't like tactics, I don't like fighting, I don't like keeping track of inventory, and I can't read a game map to save my life. This makes it very difficult for me to play to the myriad games I really should be keeping up on as our competition.
And with a baby on the way in a few months, my minimal free time (which makes it impossible for me to finish a big RPG in less than six months already), will disappear entirely. If there was a fast-forward feature on games which would let me easily review the writing and stories and skip the features that I find more frustrating than fun, I'd find it much easier to keep abreast of what's happening in the field.
I have two conflicting feelings on this.
The first is - okay, fair enough, most RPGs are massive time-sinks, and if you have to play them because part of your job is knowing what the competition are doing, you'd want a way to go through that more quickly. That's completely reasonable. Heaven knows that I've skipped past combat in games to get to more of the writing before. (A hopefully uncontroversial example - does anybody play, say, the last third of Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines without using cheats to skip the combat?) Given that her job was game writing and she didn't have endless time, I understand the frustration.
The second feeling, though, is that she probably shouldn't be a video games writer at all. Writing and playing should not be treated as separate; rather, in a well-made video game, they need to support each other. In a good video game, the writing contextualises play, and the play contextualises the story, and they reinforce each other. Yes, I cheat through the last third of Bloodlines, but the fact that I do that is evidence that Bloodlines is a poorly-designed game. (To be fair it was rushed out and probably unfinished; the combat-heavy final act is garbage, but the low-combat first half of the game is excellent.) If I were hiring a writer for my game company, I would absolutely want the writer to understand and appreciate the gameplay. That's part of the writer's job. Gameplay can cause or intensify emotional reactions!
Hepler kind of has a point, especially for games that have terrible combat or a lot of grinding, and in 2006 I think it's fair to say that most RPGs had pretty lousy combat. But she can only have a point at all because of a larger design failure.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Jennifer Hepler was a writer, not a CM.
The thing is, the infamous 'Hepler button' is a perfectly reasonable idea and most older games had it. It's called, as Mantergeistmann points out, a cheat code. I freely admit that I played a bunch of Neverwinter Nights modules by Hepler-buttoning my way through them.
Really, it would not have been hard to put cheats in DA or ME, and in general I think that controversy was just one of communication.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Certainly what I've heard by osmosis is that it's pretty woke?
OliveTapenade
12d ago
My understanding is that BG3 transparently does not give the slightest crap about either BG1 or BG2, or the wider Forgotten Realms canon.
It's Divinity: Original Sin III. From what I hear it is competent at that and perhaps even a good game, but one thing it is definitely not is a sequel to Baldur's Gate II.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I am also firmly on board with RTwP as superior to strictly turn-based, at least for a video game adaptation of something like D&D. It's easy to miss this, because on the purely mechanical level D&D is turn-based, but if you've ever actually played D&D on the tabletop, you'll know that it is constantly speeding up, slowing down, some combats are glossed over, and so on. Playing through every single turn methodically is tedious - some rounds in D&D sound like "okay, so you all hit the guy, right? roll me an attack each - yep, that does it", and some rounds sound like "all right, let's get everyone in initiative order, Luke, you've won initiative, what's your action going to be?"
RTwP, to me, simulates the actual flow of play of D&D much better than strict TBS.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I think the reason people like ME2 is because they like the recruitment missions and the loyalty missions, and those together are a solid 80% of the game.
Then of the rest, the main story missions make no sense from a plot perspective, but are mechanically fine, and then the suicide mission at the end, though nonsensical story-wise (and roundly mocked for the giant Terminator at the end) is still a very well-put-together action setpiece.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
For better or for worse, people like looking at hot people, and in any business trying to attract and keep a mass audience, that means you need hot people. Or drawings of fictional hot people, as the case may be.
OliveTapenade
20d ago
To be fair, would you notice if you passed a man in the street who converted to Islam? A man can convert while changing absolutely nothing about his appearance or dress.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
My candidates for the most significant findings in all of history are things like the wheel or writing or the lever or agriculture or domestication, and I don't think LLMs are in that league. I can understand, however, that if you're a singularitan, you might believe that LLMs are that important, so fair enough.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
Consider the possibility that this comment and both those linked websites are gibberish to me.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
This is a cheap shot, but I feel like if 'AIAYN' were one of the most significant findings in history, I would not have had to google it to understand what you're talking about.
The most significant finding since 2017, maybe? I guess? But there's a pretty significant gap between 'all of history' and 'the last nine years'.
OliveTapenade
23d ago
As someone whose workplace is heavily Chinese and hears Mandarin-language conversations every day, the nei ge dispute made me laugh.
If you can't handle hearing nei ge, I hope you are never in earshot of two Chinese people talking, because you will hear it a lot.
OliveTapenade
23d ago
I snigger at people whose rigour about words that rhyme with digger is pursued with such vigour that even a euphemism is a trigger.
OliveTapenade
24d ago
...does that sound too close to a bad word for Americans?
Are you nervous about saying any word that has an -igger sound in it?
Over here, 'digger' is a common, complimentary way to refer to an Australian soldier. It's normal to hear people talking about 'supporting the diggers', for instance. It's funny to think that going on about 'the diggers' would make any Americans present uncomfortable.
OliveTapenade
24d ago
Yes, I think that's largely the correct position. Well put.
OliveTapenade
25d ago
Okay, fair enough - I was taking 'leftist' to mean basically the 35-40% of the population that would identify as being, in some way, 'on the left'. My mental model of politics is that roughly 30-40% or so of people consider themselves on the left side, 30-40% or so consider themselves on the right, and then the last third contains those who are checked out of politics entirely, those who consider themselves 'moderate' or 'centre', and a handful of special snowflakes with esoteric views who don't see themselves falling into the system at all.
If you just mean the 5-10% or so who would identify as strongly capital-L Leftist (or Progressive, Socialist, etc.), then sure, I'll concede the point. This group is mostly what Hidden Tribes calls Progressive Activists.
I do still think that their own race is important - the Leftist/Progressive Activist demographic is a disproportionately white one, so I do think there's something hypocritical and symbolic about performative hatred of whiteness on their part. The scorn for and hatred of 'whites' is real, albeit often with an implicit 'but I'm one of the good ones' exception attached, but I don't think they actually expect to do themselves harm. A great deal of what we're talking about is kayfabe.
OliveTapenade
25d ago
It does when you consider how much they hate white people. Your pitch here is the steelman in autarky. They also think "less white people" is a good thing, and "less say in politics for white people", and other less savory things besides.
Most of them are white people, which I think complicates this picture somewhat. There's absolutely a kind of class resentment as well as a sneering toward 'white' understood in a tribal sense, cf. the way Scott has talked about Americans-criticising-Americans as a kind of tribal equivocation, but I do not think most leftists hate themselves, and truly pathological cases are fortunately rare.
OliveTapenade
25d ago
Just descriptively, I think that the statement "Trump is a populist liar who is only in it to enrich himself" is widely believed on the left, and widely disbelieved on the right.
It's not universal - for what it's worth, I think that statement is true, and I probably qualify as being somewhere on the right - but if you had to generalise, yes, I think people on the left would mostly agree that it's true, and on the right, while there are some like myself who agree with it, many would disagree. It would be a matter of real controversy.
I did only say 'mostly' on the left, because I think there are people on the left who would disagreement with that statement because they think that Trump is sincerely a fascist of some kind, who is in it for genuine if evil ideals.
OliveTapenade
25d ago
Looking at immigration, the left's goal is "infinity migrants" not "replacement of the whites". This is a crucial difference, and many right wing great replacement consoiracy theorists completely fail to understand their opponent.
The mistake of the Great Replacement theory is the second word, yes.
(Well, that, and attributing it all to a secret cabal of suspiciously Semitic people, but never mind.)
The left-wing position as I understand it is basically that everybody deserves a chance at a better life and that nobody should be privileged or disfavoured because of where they were born. That ends up rounding to open borders. There is no valid argument against this (in their minds) because it is inherently illegitimate to discriminate on the basis of race, culture, or language. Everybody therefore has a right to move anywhere they like. A planet-wide Schengen Area, if you will.
If pressed they can support that with something about wealthy countries having responsibilities to poorer ones, but that's not necessary for the argument.
Nowhere here does the idea of replacement comes in. If you have large-scale immigration like this and the native population is declining due to low fertility, then you will inevitably see immigrants make up a larger and larger proportion of the population, but remember, it is always wrong to discriminate between people on the basis of race, culture, or ethnic origin. It is thus impossible to argue that changing the ethnic distribution of the population could be bad.
Now having said all that -
I freely grant that the wider left is often hypocritical, or at least, combines the above position with other positions that it clearly contradicts. This is most obvious in cases involving subaltern or indigenous peoples. First Nations or Native Americans or Aboriginals or Whatever do get to play the blood-and-soil game. But nobody else does. Nonetheless the existence of immigration-maximalists who don't hold that position (e.g. Bryan Caplan) makes me think that this is not an inherent part of the maximalist position, but rather a contradiction of coalitional politics.
OliveTapenade
27d ago
In that case, thank you for the compliment!
Random addition, I'm sorry, I'm thinking about Harry Potter now and I'm in full-on literary criticism mode.
Gryffindor and Slytherin are generally presented as each other's opposites, and Harry and Malfoy are the archetypal Gryffindor and Slytherin, respectively. We are also told that courage is the Gryffindor virtue, and ambition is the Slytherin virtue. This is never pointed out to us explicitly, but it occurs to me that, in the world of the books, Harry and Malfoy are both characters who are totally lacking in the other side's characteristic virtue.
It's easy to notice that Harry's signature virtue seems to be passivity, obedience, or lack of ambition. Since Rowling is on Harry's side, she tends to also present acceptance and passivity as one of the primary virtues. Consider how in Philosopher's Stone, Harry is able to see the location of the Stone in the Mirror of Erised, whereas no one else can, because Harry alone does not want the Stone for anything. Other people see themselves doing things with the Stone, but Harry, who only wants to find it and not use it, sees himself finding it. Throughout the series as a whole, Harry follows Dumbledore's instructions obediently, and he is generally pretty bad at taking initiative himself. When in situations that would require him to take the initiative, he tends to either sit around waiting for things to happen (cf. Goblet of Fire and even worse in Deathly Hallows), or to do what he thinks Dumbledore would want him to do (cf. Dumbledore's Army). When characters ask him what he would like to do after graduating, he tends to stammer a bit and be unsure, as he does not seem to have given it any thought. In the parable of the Deathly Hallows, with the three brothers granted wishes by Death, the two brothers who want to use their wishes to accomplish things fail and die horrible deaths, whereas the third brother, who wants to do nothing except hide, is the 'good' one; and Harry inherits the third brother's cloak, and his power of invisibility. The climax of the whole series is Harry's death in the Forbidden Forest, a scene which involves Harry obediently following prophecy, accepting death, and letting it happen to him. Harry is a person largely without ambition.
Meanwhile the most noticeable character trait Malfoy has, aside from his snobbishness or his bullying nature, is his cowardice. This almost becomes a virtue in the final few books - Voldemort and the Death Eaters try to recruit Malfoy into their army, or have him carry out important duties for them, and he always hesitates. Malfoy is afraid to actually hurt other people. It's not that he's selfish, or that he's primarily afraid to be in danger. In Deathly Hallows, for instance, Malfoy would definitely be safer, in Malfoy Manor, if he just positively identified the heroes. But he doesn't. In Half-Blood Prince, he is entrusted with a crucial task for the villains, but dilly-dallies, makes excuses, and ultimately is too squeamish to go through with it. The dramatic climax of the book is Malfoy hesitating, afraid to commit a murder. But he never becomes a hero either. He is too afraid to join them as well. The heroes save his life in Deathly Hallows but he's still unable to bring himself to join them. Just as Harry suffers a basic lack of ambition, Malfoy suffers a basic lack of courage.
In some ways that makes Malfoy one of the more interesting characters in the books, to me. Rowling could have written him as a two-dimensional villain, and she didn't. In the first book Malfoy is, like Snape, a red herring - he's nasty so he seems like the villain, but he isn't. But as the books go on, we can tell that he has actual virtues. Rowling herself writes "There is, after all... some unextinguished good at the heart of Draco."
I think the crucial chapter for him is chapter 31 of Deathly Hallows - Malfoy intervenes to stop Crabbe and Goyle from killing Harry, Crabbe betrays him and sets the room on fire, and Harry goes to save Malfoy and Goyle:
And then Harry heard a thin, piteous human scream from amidst the terrible commotion, the thunder of devouring flame.
“It’s – too – dangerous –!” Ron yelled, but Harry wheeled in the air. His glasses giving his eyes some small protection from the smoke, he raked the firestorm below, seeking a sign of life, a limb or a face that was not yet charred like wood….
And he saw them: Malfoy with his arms around the unconscious Goyle, the pair of them perched on a fragile tower of charred desks, and Harry dived. Malfoy saw him coming and raised one arm, but even as Harry grasped it he knew at once that it was no good. Goyle was too heavy and Malfoy’s hand, covered in sweat, slid instantly out of Harry’s –
“IF WE DIE FOR THEM, I’LL KILL YOU, HARRY!” roared Ron’s voice, and, as a great flaming chimaera bore down upon them, he and Hermione dragged Goyle onto their broom and rose, rolling and pitching, into the air once more as Malfoy clambered up behind Harry.
[...]
Malfoy fell off the broom and lay facedown, gasping, coughing, and retching. Harry rolled over and sat up: The door to the Room of Requirement had vanished, and Ron and Hermione sat panting on the floor beside Goyle, who was still unconscious.
“C-Crabbe,” choked Malfoy as soon as he could speak. “C-Crabbe…”
“He’s dead,” said Ron harshly.
I notice that, facing certain death by flame, Malfoy's first instinct is to grab the unconscious Goyle and try to drag him to safety. Malfoy could then drop Goyle and just hang on to Harry, but he holds on to his friend, unwilling to leave him to die. Once they all get out, Malfoy's immediate thought is for Crabbe, and he seems to be in tears. He seems to feel this way even though Crabbe had just turned on him. That tells me that Malfoy is not entirely a horrible person. He cares about his friends and responds empathetically, even when he could let go and save himself.
Malfoy's problem isn't that he doesn't have a conscience. He does. It's that he's a coward. He's a fence-sitter - in theory he believes in pure-blood supremacy, but he doesn't have the stomach for what Voldemort and his minions would do to secure it. He seems to realise that Voldemort would destroy everything he cares about (as does Lucius, by the end), but does not have the courage to stand against him.
Anyway, when I make this analysis, it seems pretty clear that what Harry and Malfoy need to do is learn from each other - or at least, learn from the house opposed to theirs. Harry's ability to accept what is necessary is to an extent a virtue (a better writer than Rowling could make something kenotic out of it), but if it were tempered with ambition, if Harry had more sense of purpose and initiative, he would be a better hero and a better man. Likewise I cannot help feeling that Draco Malfoy, if he were given more of a spine, could also perhaps be a good man.
Whether you wrote a genfic about a Harry/Malfoy friendship, or M/M slash, or M/F romance with a Malfoid, I think there's potential there. A dramatically compelling friendship or romance should have something that each partner offers the other. A partnership in which Harry can encourage Malfoy to be braver and more principled, and Malfoy can encourage Harry to show more initiative and ambition, seems like it might bring the best out of both of them.
OliveTapenade
28d ago
Okay, good catch. I didn't remember that line.
OliveTapenade
28d ago
That being said, another poster pointed out that in many ways, Harry Potter really is about world building, it's a beautiful world, you just have to squint a bit.
I'm a huge fan of BG1 and BG2, which I consider some of the best RPGs ever made, so it would be fair to say that BG3 crapping on BG2 is a deal-breaker for me.
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