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You know what we didn't have in a good while? A proper gamer drama.
All the actors from the past decade are basically defunct: Sarkeesian largely ceased publishing after the parted ways with McIntosh (my long-standing belief is that he was the brains behind the operation, and she alone just couldn't make enough quality material to stay relevant), Zoe van Valkenburg's last claim to relevance was an accusation against another of her exes in 2019, resulting in his suicide soon after. Youtube continues to steal lunch money from written articles about games, so Polygon and Kotaku are shells of their former selves. Vice's Waypoint has come and gone, and the only thing of note they did was having to apologize after posting a 9S forcefem fanfiction on main.
There has been some occasional flareups here and there, but nothing that could possibly rise to the 2014's heights of in(s)anity. Dare I say... until now?
You probably haven't heard of Sweet Baby Inc.. It's a "narrative consulting" company that specializes in retooling the game's scripts to better represent historically underrepresented groups. Notable releases with which they worked in the past few years include God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2 and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. For those of you who don't play often, the former two were generally favorably received, while the latter was a critical and commercial bomb that was dead in the water for years before its launch and probably killed the development studio.
The broader public (by which I mean the narrow, extremely online subset of the fandom) learned about its existence some time last year. People have been coming up with some wild conjectures about what exactly SBI's involvement was with those games. 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. I am of two minds - most of the examples usually provided seem to be deliberately taken in-between frames, but still it's a bit weird how Japanese devs like Capcom, Platinum or Kojima Studios don't have those issues.
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:
Oh, and as you probably expect at this point, SBI's members have been occasionally seen on twitter gloating about how the hold white male gamers in contempt. I've given up twitter and tumblr for Lent, so I won't be providing specific examples here, sorry.
A few days ago, a steam curator was created listing all the games that have SBI's involvement as "not recommended". The situation is played out predictably: some employees claimed harassment, the steam group got Streisand Effect'd and grew to 200k over the last two days, it has been mass reported, people are trolling in the fora claiming to have insider info, the forum got wiped... Kotaku has written an article about it, the article's author claims that you can't be racist against white people. It's all 2012-2015 discourse frozen in amber, time is a flat circle. The only difference now is that because it's Musk's twitter, the statement gets stamped with a community note. Contrary to what I wrote at the beginning, it'll probably blow over in a few days, but I decided to do a writeup just in case.
Myself, I haven't bought a western AAA game since 2017, and I wish all of you the same.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've no idea where you get your ideas about 'science fiction' and 'fantasy' ? Bottom of the barrel WH40k or Star Wars novels ? But generally popular and acclaimed writers of either can write. I'd argue that SF writing in the last 30 years completely pwns "Golden Age of SF" writing. Standards have risen.
Problem isn't what they read, problem is they don't practice writing much. Which is why they suck.
I think it’s kinda both. I think in order to be able to write passable fiction in science fiction and fantasy it’s absolutely essential to get out of that genre in your reading. Not because science fiction and fantasy are all bad, but because without a rounded literary toolkit you end up lacking tools that can make your story more interesting. Use mystery and clue dropping to get more tension in a story rather than simply info-dump. Use stuff from romance so your characters feel like they’re actually hot for each other. Use horror elements to make enemies that are actually scary.
I’ll also suggest that I suspect that a lot of game writers are failed screenwriters and novelists.
You don't read recent sf much, right? You could learn all that without ever leaving the genre-
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Of course there are science fiction and fantasy writers who ‘can write’, often better than the majority of literary fiction writers. But those who can are only very rarely writing film, let alone video games. Look at BG3, you can tell it’s trash written by fanfiction writers.
Bad fanfiction writers too. There's a fuckton of them on DA, and most are trash. But some are actually decent-ish.
E.g. the guy who's written the best (erotica genre redacted) Witcher fanfics I've read would probably do a better job than the BG3 writing team.
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Peter Watts and Richard Morgan co-wrote the script for Crysis 2, and their absence shows in 3. Crysis Legion is a rare example of a "tie-in videogame novel" that stands alone as great military scifi. Hmm, maybe I should re-read it.
That makes me think of one of the big points at the end of Shamus Young's excellent writeup on what went wrong with Mass Effect. Writers have a particular style that shows through in their work, and you can't just switch writers in the middle of the series without alienating people who were enjoying the first writer's style. Sounds like Crytek ran face first into the same trap as Bioware did.
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Watts is doing almost nothing but games / TV writing now, saying publishers aren't interested.
Seems to be almost all uncredited. Talked about NDAs often too. Imdb has nothing so. He's not googleable - Peter Watts is an incredibly common name. I should ask him, I swapped a few emails with him over the years.
Not sure how this is connected to his online spat with the murderously sociopathic SJW Thai Chinese lesbian heiress. Assuming that's something that probably makes him more than toxic.
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I'd still like you to defend the idea that the problem is SF writers not reading enough classics. I recently had a "Ima reconnect with my roots" moment, and decided to read one of the books that was on the mandatory reading list when I was in school. I even picked one that I spontaneously recalled the other day, thinking about the state of the world, so it should be interesting, seeing how it popped up when I was thinking about stuff, but it was just... mid. My memory of it's themes and message was better than the actual thing itself. The only way you can appreciate it, is if you have deep passion for history, and want to figure out how and about what people used to think in the past, and/or the history of literature, and you enjoy watching how the medium evolved over the years. But the thing in itself? Absolutely, horribly, disgustingly, mid.
I swear, if all that survives of our current era of media is Marvel movies, people like you will be absolutely adamant they're classics, and modern plebeian writers are shit, because they don't have an appreciation for them.
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I was tempted to make reference to Half-Life, which was a revolution in storytelling in games (or FPS games, at least), and that game's main writer was indeed a sci-fi writer who had published some works in the 90's before coming to Valve.
Marathon had some of the best writing in a video game I've ever encountered. Incredibly immersive.
I agree, but at the same time, Marathon is kind of a unique case thanks to it being part of Bungie's insane rabbithole of deep lore (not even the bouncing ball from Gnop! is safe!).
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