site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28140 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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:

  • Jon Stewart gets called "one of the good ones" with some bizarre anti-cop writing. I think it's written in-character from Harley's perspective, but still.
  • Most of the (mind-controlled, hance they're the bad guys in the game) Justice League die pathetic deaths, in one case almost getting literally pissed on. But somehow Wonder Woman is immune to Brainiac's brainwashing and gets to have a dignified, dramatic moment, at least comparably.
  • Also WW: her society is brought up as superior to ours, having solved issues such as toxic masculinity.
  • And then there's the case of Miles Morales having wrong country's flag in his home. Representation!

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.

I wonder how the media reaction to this will be, compared to what happened in 2014. I was a much more avid user of Twitter back then, as well as a much bigger gamer compared to now, and I was able to watch in real-time as various gaming media outlets formed their narrative about misogynist gamers harassing women which was about as close to the exact opposite of the situation as one could get if one actually intentionally tried (which I suspect was the case). Even back then, media outlets had been losing readers in favor of social media, but they still seemed to have enough credibility that plenty of more casual gamers just naively took them at their word. 10 years later, and social media has continued to rise and media outlets have continued to lose credibility, and I believe the viewership/readership numbers have reflected this.

That means that if people sympathetic to SBI want to set the narrative again, then doing the same thing as before, where some sympathetic writers at a handful of media outlets rewrite the narrative (most likely in uncoordinated fashion, I'd guess) to flatter the people they like and denigrate the people they don't, might not be enough to achieve the same level of success in convincing people. I primarily learned about this situation from a YouTuber/Twitch streamer who regularly gets 6-7 figures in views on each video, where he was just straight-up shitting on SBI for being ideologues trying to sell something that customers don't want to buy and calling out one of the media outlet authors as racist for stating the very standard - downright cliche at this point - modern "progressive" line "you can't be racist against white people." And there are plenty of smaller "content creators" similar to him saying similar things who still get 5-6 figures per video. That kind of ecosystem wasn't really around back in 2014.

Now, this ecosystem also definitely produces people who are sympathetic to SBI. And, who knows, maybe there are YouTubers who get 7-8 figures per video who basically parrot the lines Kotaku and Polygon spit out? But even if that's the case, I think the presence of the ecosystem of more diverse viewpoints would make it harder for the SBI-preferred narrative of "oppressed minorities being harassed by bigoted gamers who want to exclude them from their spaces" to take hold. It's not a true marketplace of ideas, but it seems at least half a step closer to one than what it was in 2014, and that half a step could be enough for contrasting ideas from diverse viewpoints to win out.

To take a more bird's eye view of this, I think the past decade since the affair of reproductively viable female worker ants has shown that the Anita Sarkeesians of the world had a complete victory in that time period. SBI has been around and modifying games for a while, and it's only now, after plenty of damage has been done to multiple formerly well-regarded franchises, that fans have even begun to notice them to any significant extent, much less push back. And more to the point, the very fact that devs and/or publishers see enough value in SBI that SBI can survive as a company shows that the ideology has taken a pretty firm root in the industry. The future is not yet set, of course, and this particular episode seems to be at least a blip in the other direction, but what I'd expect right now is that the people sympathetic to SBI will come up with some new technique that I don't even have the capability to imagine right now to continue to subvert the industry in ways that paying customers are even less able to notice or control.

And more to the point, the very fact that devs and/or publishers see enough value in SBI that SBI can survive as a company shows that the ideology has taken a pretty firm root in the industry.

Grapevine says it is due to ESG investment monies, by involving SBI they get access to more funding from institutions that demand woke capitulation.

I've seen people claim this a lot, but as best as I can tell, this is a naked claim without any actual evidence. Are there any documents anywhere showing what scores different companies have, how putting in uglier women or more pathetic men into their products changes the scores, or how much investments into these companies get affected by that score? And is investment from institutions that demand woke capitulation that big of a factor in financial success in the gaming industry when compared to simply putting out a good product?

In any case, assuming every single claim about ESG scores being the driver of this phenomenon is true, that would explain how the ideology has taken a pretty firm root in the industry.

If you are interested, here is the following from James Lindsey @conceptualjames on X:

Gamergate 2 is underway.

Former game executive and develop at Blizzard Mark Kern @Grummz: "The way games are funded you don't use your own money. Even EA, it's games are hugely expensive to make they're they're upwards of you know 250 sometimes 600 million dollars it's for certain live games it's incredibly how expensive they are and to do that uh your CFO is your best friend.

"You're counting on your CFO to get you tax breaks to get you in to put studios in regions which are financially favorable and you will borrow the cheap money you will get a cheap money to do it. Even EA does this. I worked with EA; we were putting together a deal where they were taking bailout money from the banks in the last financial crisis that we had, and they were applying that cheap money towards games same thing with Covid money. They're applying that cheap money towards games, and what has been the cheapest money while interest rates were still low, you know a couple of years ago it was ESG financing, and so they're going to take this money."

"Because the returns on investment have been so poor on Wall Street for ESG funds, that source of Revenue is drying it up. This Woke machine cannot continue in the way that it is now for AAA gaming, and I think unfortunately, it's so entrenched that you're not going to see—you're not going to see much of an ability to course correct because the studios are—they're just gonna shut down."

Part 2:

Mark Kern explains how ESG money comes with strings attached inside corporations and is used to make companies partner with DEI consulting companies like Sweet Baby Inc:

"Everyone needs to realize is that it's not that these Studios are funding the games out of their own pocket; that would be very expensive for them. Cash is king. They will preferably go out and get money from other sources if it's cheap enough to help spread the risk of these massive titles, and so you have a lot of quid pro quo happening, and I can tell you that developers have been approaching me and giving me some inside baseball on what's been happening, and there are deals funding deals out there for studios—and I can't get too specific; I don't want to out sources—that have certain strings attached like a company will suddenly sign with a developer and now that developer needs to hire a DEI director and needs to go out and hire consultancy firms to gender balance."

"Their staff quite specifically go out and hire companies like SBI to consult on their writing and do sensitivity reading and changes for that, and what does, all this does, it boosts their ESG score. It allows them access that funding so ESG is not going away entirely."

"It's [ESG] become an evil brand. People are waking up to this... You have you have a rebranding going on right now. They're not calling it ESG, but it's still out there."

https://x.com/conceptualjames/status/1767208090150060079

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats