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According to the results of a search right now, there has been no discussion here of the Pragmata controversy so far.
Wikipedia talk page
(There is no Wikipedia article on it, at least not yet.)
Summary on Know Your Meme
Shoeonhead's video
Forbes review
Slant Magazine review
I’d put forth the following arguments:
It seems the Blue Tribe generally views Gamergate as a propaganda defeat because they see it as a long-term contributor to the MAGA/alt-right phenomenon but at the same time I don’t think they concluded that they themselves are even partially to blame. Therefore they are looking for opportunities to fight back, and are now including the pedophilia accusation in their attacks on evil gamers. As far as I can say, this was generally not yet the case back in 2014.
I’m also noticing something that eluded me so far, namely that the probable reason why both the original Gamergate (the Zoe Quinn controversy) and the current controversy proved to be effective ragebait to the Blue Tribe is that they are fueling two of their grievances at once.
One: they generally believe that toxic loser men are aiming to police women's sex lives out of resentment and hatred. I don’t think they have anything specific in mind. (I once asked here what this stuff is even supposed to be. I only received one answer: ‘compelling or aggressively encouraging women to not be floozies.’) It’s just a general vibe that makes them feel the ick. It’s why they think Quinn was unjustly attacked.
Regarding Pragmata I think their train of thought is the following: this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.
Their other usual grievance, of course, is that toxic males want to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for women, turning them into their own toxic ghettoized playgrounds.
All of this is a nothingburger, other than the fact that it's successful despite doing a bunch of things that nobody in the western games industry wants to do. So they have no excuse for not doing it.
If it had sold 30,000 copies nobody would have cared. But it is successful.
Out of fear of backlash, you mean? Or out of simple profit considerations? Or something else?
Pragmata is:
The game industry doesn't like any of these things. They like predictable fiscal outcomes, safe products, and the industry itself is staffed by people who despise their (mostly male) audience and have seen games as an opportunity for social engineering for years.
It's no surprise the current wave of independent developer success has come from generally outside the games industry, or people who had to leave the entrenched game industry to start up their own companies.
I played the Pragmata demo and found it fine. Fun gimmick with the combat hacking thing but I feel like it'd get tiresome over 20 hours so I didn't buy it, but the demo was perfectly entertaining.
Sheer expense of a new game is definitely a part of this. The economics of doing anything AA or above seem to be straight up 'you hit okay sales or you're looking at a serious possibility of bankruptcy' whereas in previous eras there seemed to be a lot more scope for shovelware without absolutely annihilating yourself if something missed. This may also tie into the death of tie-in games and whatnot, which seem to have steeply declined in recent years where studios would put out solid 6.5/10 mediocrities loosely based on popular movies or TV series. From an outsider POV it does seem somewhat insane that the pursuit of graphical fidelity seems to be forcing such insane expenditure on new releases.
I'm between 5 and 10 hours in the full game, I think, and so far it's still holding up for me. They still regularly add additional game mechanics to both sides of the combat to keep it fresh. Either side of the combat on their own would make for a ridiculously easy game but but that you're forced the juggle them still works for me, and when I think I've got it all down they add something else to juggle (danger squares in the hacking, enemies you have to clear another layer of defense before attacking, etc...)
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