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Winning game designer banned from future Spiel des Jahres events for anti-Israel symbol.
Board gaming is a much bigger hobby than it used to be. The Spiel des Jahres award was created in 1978 to highlight family-friendly games, and I played some of the early winners (Rummikub (1980) and Scotland Yard (1983))--but it was 1995's winner, The Settlers of Catan, that really changed the face of board gaming in the United States. As an established presence in the European market, the Spiel des Jahres evolved from a simple trade award to the gold standard for "must have" games. Like most at-home hobbies, board gaming also got a bump from the COVID pandemic--but more broadly, the nerdification of American culture has fed board gaming in much the way it has fed video gaming, comic books, and other IP-adjacent hobbies.
These days there are three "Spiel des Jahres" awards--the children's award, the regular award, and the "complex game" award. This year's "complex" winner was Daybreak, "a cooperative game about stopping climate change." The creator, Matteo Menapace, presumably wrote his own bio, though I don't know that for certain:
Anyway, Matteo reportedly wore a pin or sticker or something looking approximately like this onto the award ceremony stage. The announcement describes this as
Predictably, a reddit post in the most popular board game sub refers to it as a "pro-Palestine" sticker rather than an "anti-Israel" sticker. These days the line between those things can seem pretty thin, or so it seems to me. The commentary is predictable enough... I suppose in this case I would say that it seems like the political symbol in question "deliberately skirts the border of comprehensibility." Matteo is clearly an activist, who was doing activist things. The Spiel des Jahres people are clearly on board with the DEI rhetoric, and employ it in this announcement, so this may be one of those "leopards at my face" moments, too. But I don't know what Matteo's nationality is (Google suggests maybe he's an Italian living in the UK?), and Germany has some fairly strict anti-semitism laws for, you know, historical reasons, so there may be a culture gap issue here as well.
Ugh. /r/boardgames (and boardgamegeek, the largest dedicated hobby site for boardgaming), and the boardgaming hobby in general, are emblematic of my growing disgust with leftist politics. boardgamegeek hasn't quite gone as far as RPGnet (which famously explicitly banned any support for Trump on its discussion forums), but they have moderators who openly declare that their "political" forum is a leftist space. Anything right of AOC has to be expressed in the most tepid terms, and expect to get dogpiled with impunity, while any degree of heat in response will get you banned. Boardgamers are the fucking worst. (I can say this, I'm a boardgamer. Although I'm a dirty hex-and-counter wargamer, and only old white supremacist men play those.)
Anyway, a watermelon has been a Palestinian symbol for a while now, and I'm actually a little surprised that Matteo got this much heat for a relatively innocuous pin, especially given that Israel/Palestine remains a kind of third rail in boardgaming, as in most other liberal spaces, because of the intersection of leftist Palestine supporters and Jewish gamers. It suppose it is because the award is German and Germans are extra-sensitive to anti-semitism complaints.
I am willing to extend someone enough charity to accept that "Pro-Palestine" does not necessarily mean "Anti-Israel" (in the sense of "wants Israel destroyed'), let alone "anti-Semitic." Pro-Palestine right now is basically the BLM movement of 23-24. A lot of leftists' support really doesn't go any deeper than "Israelis are bombing children, this is very sad." That said, you often don't have to peel back a pro-Palestine activist's views very deeply to find a seething hatred of Israel, and possibly of Jews.
I agree, in principle. In practice, in my experience, anyone with strong views on the matter tends to seek ideological purity. I have a number of problems with Israel, which are often difficult to express without either being accused of antisemitism, or being praised by outright antisemites. I have many more problems with "Palestine" (in any of its many incarnations), which are all but impossible to express without being accused of Islamophobia, being pro-genocide, being racist, and so forth.
I agree, as a boardgamer, that boardgamers are terrible, and online boardgame forums are excellent demonstrations of Conquest's Laws. What amazes me is how the same can today be said of pretty much every hobby that was ever demographically "geeky white male." RPGs, video games, anime, comic books--but also science, engineering, philosophy, and information technology. These spaces have been absolutely overrun with people insisting "it's not just for you!" and for maybe the first decade of the new millennium, the response I usually saw was... this, basically. But post-Awokening (and with the help of "Woke Capital") a lot of old school nerds and geeks have been hounded to the edges of the space. It's weird to watch properties that weathered and survived the "moral majority" censorship of the late 20th century cave with zero resistance to the new millennium's
church ladiessensitivity readers. You could kill children in the original Fallout. Warhammer 40k was not PG-13. It used to be okay for something to not be for you.It pains me that this is such a lost thing nowadays. There's nothing wrong with things that don't appeal to everybody! In fact, I would go so far as to say that's what makes life interesting - we can each be into different things that others would find unbearable, and we are better off for it because each of us is happier than with something that tried to appeal to everyone at once. But for some reason, that's now treated like it's morally abhorrent.
Also, maybe it's just my skewed perspective but it seems like the actual rule is even worse than "we must water everything down for everyone". It seems to be only the things that nerdy men enjoy which get this treatment. Board games have to be PC, video games must remove any trace of sex appeal because that scares off women, programming must be packed full of diversity statements and codes of conduct, etc. But nobody expects the local crochet club to change to appeal to men, etc. Basically, it feels like society kicked nerds out in the 80s, we went "ok whatever we're going to do our own thing", and now 40 years later the bullies are back to kick us out of the communities we built as a refuge from them in the first place. It really grates.
The problem with this argument is if everybody was actually on your side in nerdy spaces in the first place. There were plenty of people who wanted to kick you out from the jump.
Again, I've made this analogy before, but in 1997, if among your friend group, one of the guys in your local area that is into anime, Warhammer, Doctor Who, or whatever thing you're deeply into is kind of off, occcasionally says cring things or whatever, you may put up with it, because that's the only option you have. But, this did make a current brand of nerd think they had more support than they actually did.
But, in 2024, you don't have to deal with that guy anymore, and thanks to the increased popularity of nerdy things in general, there are plenty of people with more normal views on stuff.
If the option is somebody who might know less about cool thing y you're into, but also doesn't complain there are now non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing, a lot of people are going to side with the person who knows less because they're less annoying to be around, even if you don't care one way or another.
I'd also argue video games are part of the capitalist system, while crochet groups really aren't, even though there have been rows about crochets involving race. But yes, it turns out people who own businesses want to make more money, and they'll drop their appeal to males 18-34, if it'll help them also win over older males and women.
I think a big thing your side doesn't get is the actual reason for the desexualization of games is actually less evil SJW's, but the fact that programmers, engineers, and actual gamers are getting older, having kids, and it's far more defensible to a wife to be playing a game on the lbig living room TV with characters that look like the modern Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, or whatever the game people have determined is full of 'ugly' people, as opposed to the polygons with boobs of the late 90's.
Ironically, I would compare this to a refugee situation, where refugees sometimes put up with extremist or less than fantastic parts of their refugee community because they all have to stand together. Well, some of the refugees found a new country and they have to follow certain rules and stop saying certain things and don't find that a problem, while there's a smaller group that wants to hold on to outdated traditions because that's the way it was.
This doesn't really track, because if you don't care one way or another, then it'd make more sense to find the annoyance in the people complaining more, more loudly, more violently, more disruptively, etc, and the amount of extraneous noise and controversy created by people complaining the exact opposite - that there aren't enough non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing - is about an order of magnitude greater. If one is less bothered by calls for this ideology than against it, then that would mean that they certainly do care one way or another.
I'd also note that the description of these types of people "complain[ing] there are now non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing" is highly uncharitable at best and just downright strawmanning at worst.
This also doesn't track for a few reasons. One big one is the fact that the very idea that it's more defensible to a wife to have the modern visuals versus polygons with boobs of the late 90s on the big living room TV is an ideological one. To some extent, what visceral reaction someone has is outside of ideology, but deciding whether or not to submit to that visceral reaction certainly is within ideology. This was one of the core arguments in the fight for gay marriage in the 00s - some attempt was made to convince people just not to find the idea of gay men viscerally disgusting, but the larger point was made that even if you do find them gross, this should play no part in the way you treat them. If there was some movement to get rid of gay men in media because it's just far more defensible to display non-gay men on the big TV due to people tending to just find gay men gross (whether or not this is actually true isn't relevant), most people would recognize that this would be ideologues pushing forward their ideology.
And speaking of movements, another big issue here is that we do have explicitly ideological movements that explicitly call for the kinds of changes we're talking about, with self-proclaimed examples of changes made explicitly for hewing to the ideology. This doesn't mean literally every last case of these types of changes is ideologically motivated, but it certainly points in that direction generally.
And the types of changes we see are consistent with the explicit goals of the movement and not so much with just wanting to put more defensible stuff on the big screen (which, again, would still be due to ideologues pushing their ideology). If the motivation were just that, we'd expect to see changes generally limited to taking costumes from stripper-level to, I don't know, something like dinner party-level. Maybe make some armor more properly covering. But we're not limited to just that, including androgyni-fying women and adding racial/sexual-orientation diversity. "Defensible on the TV" can somewhat track for jiggle physics on women wearing stripper outfits (again, still ideological), but really, not at all for having characters that aren't sufficiently diverse in a racial/sexual-orientation dimension. That's the kind of thing that's barely even noticeable to a typical viewer, and the ones who do notice it almost always tend to do so for ideological reasons (the very idea that there's something to notice there is, in itself, ideological, of course).
Furthermore, all this taking place in the context of the general increased accessibility of media that, in the past, used to be considered inappropriate makes it rather doubtful that this particular case of media transformation is driven by some secular desire to avoid what's inappropriate to show on the big TV. Often, the very same individuals who call for putting less-sexy women in games are also the ones who call for exposing kids, wives, and other general laypeople to media that's even more sexually provocative than a sexy woman jiggling around in a stripper outfit. So the push for these changes is primarily a push for changing what people do and don't consider appropriate to see on the big living room TV - which is almost explicitly a goal openly espoused by a massive ideological movement right now (and has been for, well, I'd guess longer than I've been alive). Given all that, the idea that these changes aren't being driven by ideologues (who have openly said that they want to cause the types of changes that we're talking about now) but rather by individuals making decisions about the type of media they themselves would feel comfortable showing to others just doesn't hold water.
The causal connection between "type of game devs would feel comfortable showing on their living room TV" and "type of game devs would want to make" is also something that seems to have greatly weakened since the 90s as well. Because of the more niche, less lucrative nature of the industry in the 90s, dev teams tended to be small enough that you could believe that the main decisionmakers in major titles were ones who actually enjoyed those games and were working towards one that they would want to play. Today, due to how much those things have changed, the executives making these decisions have other priorities they have to meet. One would normally think that the overriding priority would be profit, but other entertainment media, namely movies and TV, have shown that ideology is an even more pleasurable drug than money to plenty of executives.
Exactly so. See the press eg. lambasting Stellar Blade while being ecstatic about very detailed gay sex and fucking bears in Baldur's Gate 3. The common denominator in the whole thing is that the activists are deeply against anything pleasing to heterosexual men.
It's the same sort of thing where if you track the various forms of cultural leftism for the last few decades, the common thread in all is that normal, European men and their culture are Bad and should be done away with. You won't find a single iteration with normal white men not at the bottom of the totem pole and at blame for all of society's ills.
This is the first I’ve heard of stellar blade. I guess since I don’t own a PlayStation?
I was paying attention before BG3 came out. They’d already built up a lot of more normal hype. Sequel to a long-neglected franchise, popular AA developer, good teasers…then they had that livestream.
Which of those apply to stellar blade?
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