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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Gamergate 2

A week or 2 ago, someone made a Steam group called Sweet Baby Inc Detected. This group exists to let people know which games have involved the consultant company Sweet Baby Inc.

Sweet Baby inc is a company that seems to be dedicated to adding more diversity to video games, and many people believe their involvement makes games worse.

This heated up when an employee of Sweet Baby Inc tried to get people to report the group and it's founder in hopes that they get banned

This has been in my youtube and twitter feed quite a bit in the past couple weeks. Mostly it's accounts of employees behaving in similar ways as the above tweet.

I don't really play AAA games very much, so the actual effect of Sweet Baby on those games is not very salient to me, but when reading and hearing about it, I can't help but notice that they usually aren't giving many examples of of aspects of these games that people really think are bad because of Sweet Baby. In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.

What people are mostly talking about is how their employees conduct themselves on social media. And even though the way they often conduct themselves is unprofessional and dumb, It's also understandable when there's a hundred thousand people telling you how bad your work is and trying to stop people from doing business with you.

What are your thoughts?

For one, if Sweet Baby had no issue with what they're doing, the curator page would be free advertising, and they'd have no reason to try and censor it.

As their first response was to go on the attack, it implies that Sweet Baby wants to keep exposure of thier involvement to a minimum.

Upper Echelon did a well-researched video on the entire matter. It's fairly indepth, and goes over a few highlights, such as;

Despite claims to the contrary, the most recent example of a woke flop, the whole Suicide Squad mess, several writers(and lead script writer) work for Sweet Baby.

He also shows videos of Kim Balair, the CEO of Sweet Baby, subtly threatening triple AAA studios in a sense of 'Nice game you've got, would be a shame if a twitter lynch mob came for it'.

There's probably more, but you're free to watch the video.

There's a term called 'Mediocrity Principle', roughly paraphrased to mean 'if an item is drawn at random from one of several sets or categories, it's more likely to come from the most numerous category than from any one of the less numerous categories.' I find Sweet Baby to be the tip of the iceberg, the random sample that blew up in everyone's face, and I find it difficult to beleive the idea that they're the only organization with this prevalent attitude.

For added fun, you also have a government-backed NGO running defense and organization for Sweet Baby in the news media, calling to 'denounce gamergate'.

I know what I take away from all this. You can make your own decision.

In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.

I've seen a lot of people complaining about the uglification of women in videogames as early as ME: Andromeda.
But until now, if you weren't in one of a tiny number of underground forums, there was essentially no way to know this is the opinion of a very large number of people. Any complaints about the situation on major social media sites would be banned under the excuse of the usual "racism/sexism/bigotry".
The only reason you're hearing about this now is SBI Streisand-ing themselves into the spotlight.

Tangentially related.

I recently received a gift copy of Pacific Drive (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458140/Pacific_Drive/). Ostensibly a game about driving, scavenging, tinkering with the car, and uncovering the mysteries of its setting.

Well, at some point fairly early on, you unlock the ability to decorate your car...and the available decorations are a large assortment of "pride" flags, plus "black lives matter".

I searched and discovered a mod that removed all those, installed it, it worked, and so as to facilitate the same procedure for others I posted a guide on steam on how to remove those flags. Hardly a day later, the guide was banned. I asked Steam Support why this was, and they told me that it had violated the community guidelines. I asked which one exactly and how, and received a non-reply that simply gestured at the guidelines again, but also told me that I should not have included an obscured link the guide. I offered to remove the link and asked whether that would make the guide pass muster, and if not, what other rule remained broken. They finished up by telling me that the issue was resolved, and closed my ticket.

I wonder a little how people can stomach doing customer support in such a way.

Ah.

Cross that game off my list of things to look into, then.

I found it on the nose that Pacific Drive was set in 1998 before the black lives matter movement and development of some of the more obscure sexuality flags.

Imagine playing Battlefield Vietnam with the ability to unlock MAGA skins for your M16.

Let me illustrate by talking about a game that I was very interested in, bought, and turned out to be shit. This has nothing to do with SBI directly.

For those who don't know, the Payday series is co-op crime shooters, think first-person GTA without cars and with friends. You get heists, objectives to complete, you can do stealth or go loud etc.

Payday 2 was excellent, it still has a strong playerbase despite being released over a decade ago. I played quite a bit of it.

So they announced Payday 3 and I was ready. The initial guff I got from beta testers was that teh game was a bit janky (somewhat to be expected) and the female models had gotten ugly. There were a couple people whining about "diversity" and shit, but nobody really cared if the game was good.

Narrator voice: The game was not good. They made it permanently online, meaning you had to be connected to their servers, even to play alone. You needed a new launcher and a special Starbreeze account. And their servers didn't work. And the whole structure of the game was just......bad. It wasn't fun or engaging. Just a joyless grind-fest with no rewards. If you could even get in to play it, which you couldn't for the first three weeks of release. The relative fatness of the female characters was the least of anyone's worries. Frankly, the models weren't that bad.

The playerbase cratered after an initially decent start. Within a few weeks, the number of people playing had dropped 99%.

According to SteamDB, Payday 3 has a 24-hour peak of just 378 players compared to Payday 2's 31,866

The CEO of Starbreeze just lost his job for his role in this abortion.

And yet, lots of people who didn't play the game defend it against people who did by claiming that they just hate diversity.

It's not about the uglier female models. That's just a symptom of a deeper problem. When you see that in a game, it indicates that the game wasn't meant to be good, it was meant to tick the DEI boxes. IDGAF about the female models in isolation, but I have a very strong association between obvious political choices in games and shit games. I gave the game a shot, ignoring the trolls whining about unimportant things like how fat the females are now.

Now I'm out forty bucks and I have a game that is worse in every single playable way than its predecessor. Because the studio decided that chubbing up the female models was more important than making sure the servers were functional for a permanently online game.

DEI, not even once.

https://www.ign.com/articles/starbreeze-ceo-out-after-payday-3-disaster

In my mind, the order of operations is:

  1. Creatives come up with a cool idea/world/gameplay mechanic that, despite having quite a bit of jank, catches on and is a moderate success
  2. Creatives scale up a bit and second try is better than the first. Huge success and brand loyalty follows.
  3. investors get involved (either finance types or an outright purchase of the thing by an EA or Microsoft) because the creatives suck at/don’t care about business aspects. Decision process starts changing to prioritize engagement metrics.
  4. Studio expands or becomes part of a larger corporate environment. HR starts making more decisions.
  5. Old guard leaves/is forced out. New hires are mostly fans and not the ones with creative vision. Innovation becomes irrelevant as decisions are now being made based on engagement.

That is the pattern I see across the NA AAA games industry. The games that are being made are so laden with vampiric “engagement drivers” (read: unfun tedious time wasters not central to the gameplay loop) and cash shop features that they were never going to be fun. They tack on DEI feelgoodery to provide the thinnest veneer of moral virtue over what is basically a $60-70 predatory phone app disguised as a game.

The focus on DEI is symptomatic of the ultra-safe corporate decision making, but not the cause of why games (and movies and comics) suck now. For example, a hypothetical Suicide Squad game with fighting fucktoy Harley Quinn and a soy-free Luthor and no other changes would have still been shit. Gamers would be complaining that it was a tragedy that Kevin Conroy’s name was associated with such a dreadful game, and Rocksteady would still be dead.

Instead, we’re going to have a media cycle talking about -ist/-phobic gamers, and the corporate types who killed Rocksteady will end up at another company and start poisoning that one too.

So basically Bungie Monogatari ;)

I have a very strong association between obvious political choices in games and shit games

Well, yes. It's a very clear indicator of priorities, isn't it? It's the difference between a group of passionate people making something they'd want to play, and a group of cynical and jaded 9-to-5ers ticking off the checkboxes their corporate overlords have foisted on them. As the industry has generated more and more money, more corporate vultures in suits who have never played a "vidjeo jame" in their lives have moved in to extract that money. They don't know what makes a good game, and frankly, they don't care; end of quarter reports are what matter, so do all the things our market research department says people want and that are popular now, and jam this monetisation system into it because our reports say that it improves revenue by 8%. And shove all the god damn anti-piracy measures you can in to stop people STEALING money from us! Oh, and remove that, and this, and can we make this character black and/or female to appease the DEI screechers? No it doesn't matter if those things fit the game or actively make it worse, just do your job and do as I say!

The best example of this to me comes all the way back in the 90s, actually, courtesy of Naughty Dog developing Crash Bandicoot. To hear Andy Gavin tell it;

But the Universal Marking department (of one) thought differently. They had hired one of those useless old-school toy marketing people, a frumpy fortyish woman about as divorced from our target audience – and the playing of video games – as possible. This seems to be a frequent problem with bigger companies, the mistaken idea that you can market an entertainment product if you aren’t also an enthusiastic customer of said product. (...) In any case, this obstacle (the marketing woman) wanted to call the game “Wuzzle the Wombat,” or “Ozzie the Otzel.”

Jason Rubin elaborates;

If Andy and I deserve credit for anything name related, it is for viciously defending our character from the ravages of the Universal Marketing Death Squad. I remember the name mooted by Universal to be Wez or Wezzy Wombat, but as I said things were very confused, and frankly it doesn’t matter what the alternate name was.

When Universal stated that as producer and they were going to pick the name, Andy and I walked the entire team (all 7 of us!) into the head of Universal Interactive’s office and said, “either we go with ‘Crash Bandicoot’, or you can name the game whatever you want and finish the development yourself.”

I cannot think of very many dev teams that would have the sheer balls to do such a thing today.

Did they make the female models fat, or did they just stop doing sex doll caricatures?

I shouldn't care about this, this is not the kind of game I'd play, and I do know that such games aimed exclusively at guys are not worried about women, they're putting in sex dolls. But the whining irritates me when it boils down to "I can't wank to this image".

What games I play, I'm not thinking about "whoo, look at the crotch bulge on that beefcake, I'm gonna beat off". But male and female sexuality is different, and guys who play games about shooting stealing it go boom etc. want their sexy sex doll wallpaper as well. That's fine, but don't complain as if "women are supposed to look like anorexic stick insects with zeppelins for breasts" is the normal depiction of women.

Great, and now I'm whining. I should go back and finish my replay of Baldur's Gate 3 for the evil ending, then continue on with the second replay I started and see if I can get Wyll to get into Astarion's pants this time round 😈

Well, this is the previous "sex dolls" from PD2

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamespot.com%2Fa%2Fuploads%2Fscreen_kubrick%2F1179%2F11799911%2F2761522-clover.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=7f642c546f82c7b13b8e444b4f95b8d02cd6f7c6327e822a247849ea4d7b7355&ipo=images

Sounds to me like projection

To be mildly fair, Sydney did get a lot of porn made of her, but then again, that was mostly just literally one artist who just really liked Sydney.

Did they make the female models fat, or did they just stop doing sex doll caricatures?

The former. It's kinda hilarious actually because these days, games use real life actors as a base for human models, and people have started to notice that the actresses that do the capture are more curvy and have better looking faces than the end result. Which means someone, at some point, had to make the thing more ugly than it really is, and have a reason to do so.

people have started to notice that the actresses that do the capture are more curvy and have better looking faces than the end result.

Another possible explanation for this is that most women (especially in shots that end up highly ranked on Google images, eg. photoshoots, awards ceremonies and so on) wear flattering clothes that accentuate their curves. Meanwhile, when scanned into the game (if the model is based on a scan) they're wearing a skintight wetsuit. With faces, a lot of it (honestly this is true at least for Horizon and ME: Andromeda) is scanning the actual face and then players comparing it to pictures of the model in makeup striking a specific pose (ie. mewing).

Your theory is that the pretty women in the google images for characters like M.J. in the recent Spiderman II or Alloy in the Horizon Forbidden West games are just fat with good fashion sense? How does that square with Stellar Blade?

Is Aloy fat? I don't play capeshit but as I recall MJ in the Spider-Man games was again an average looking redheaded woman, and certainly not fat.

from the first one to the second one, yeah, she got fat

EDIT.- Alternate link because the other one got mangled. Sorry that its to iFunny.

Your link is mangled and goes to a random /r/funny thread, seemingly due to some combination of trying to link an image hosted on Reddit and old.reddit.com.

More comments

Speaking of, what do you think of BG3 female party members' looks? Am I the one who's crazy when I think the "they making em look like men for trans appeasement" crowd need to touch grass?

That crowd needs to touch grass. I would say that I don't personally find any of the female party members attractive (Shadowheart comes close but her haircut is so damn ugly), but that's just personal preference. I certainly don't think they look like men.

I find Lae'zel to be the most attractive woman in the history of videogames, but that may be down to personality.

Lae'zel has that wonderful teef-ling bit that is probably the most endearing character interaction in the whole game.

I used to find Lae'zel the most grating woman in the history of videogames, but then I recruited Minthara. Can anybody tell me what is the drow attitude towards nudity? Does she feel humiliated when I don't return the clothes I looted from her in act one and she is forced to strut around the camp pussy out? I hope she does.

I question your taste in women, lol (I know, taste is totally subjective). Lae'zel's entire personality is grumpy. Maybe if she got the sand out of her cloaca she would be more pleasant to have in the party. :/

I think this is why people are really using DEI. It’s a great way to deflect attention and criticism from your story or game because any time someone says they don’t like the product, you can always default back to “the fans are just mad about inclusion.” Which means you don’t have to spend time producing something fun or good — which takes time and costs a lot of money — and still get people to buy it and even defend it.

They learned from the film industry. If you think the Ghostbusters reboot sucks, obviously that means you're a misogynist alt-right manbaby troll.

DEI is just the newest way to polish the turd.

I didn't watch the female Ghostbusters. I liked the general idea of a reboot and having them all gender-swapped wasn't a dealbreaker for me, but the clips I saw and the fawning coverage about Kate whosis turned me off. I didn't think they were funny (apart from Chris Hemsworth being game to parody his "all brawn no brains" image) or as good as the original. So I didn't bother watching it, because "ooh she licked the guns, so strong female sexy daring!" does nothing for me.

So "all-women Ghostbusters" didn't put me off, "these women as Ghostbusters" did.

I think often DEI is used as a shield, maybe the original movie/game/show didn't have a DEI agenda explicitly, but it just sucked, people complained, and rather than admit "okay we made a shit product", the creators then scrabble around for "uh, uh, they hate it because - woman character! black character! gay character! it's prejudice, not because we made a shit product!"

That explanation doesn't work because in many cases "this game / book / movie / comic wasn't made for you, chud" comes way before it's anywhere close to finished.

It also makes no sense to blame it on unwillingness to spend money - never played Payday, but cheaper indie games do better numbers than this for a much lower budget, and if they wanted easy money for little investment, they'd resell the previous one with updated assets, and call it a sequel. The success of these artistic and semi-artistic projects generally isn't about the money in itself, it's about catching lighting in a bottle. You need a good team, that wants to put something out, and works well together. This is hard in the best of times, as several well-funded corporations found out upon being beaten up and having their lunch money stolen from them by a well functioning startup. But wokeness adds another layer of issues, it's hostility to meritocracy will result in losing key talent via "who needs this asshole, we'll just hire someone more agreeable", people being terrified of providing necessary negative feedback, and will attract the worst kind of social climber.

This is why JTarrou's example is so good. The wokeness that one needs to look out for isn't necessarily the wokeness in the game, I'm pretty sure a good woke game could be made, it's wokeness on the team that's the issue. The two will obviously be correlated, but conflating them let's people dismiss the issue via 2rafaesque arguments.

and if they wanted easy money for little investment, they'd resell the previous one with updated assets, and call it a sequel.

The fuck of it is, they kinda were doing this before Payday 3 to begin with. I might have to dig up this one video talking about the history of Payday 2, but in short, from my memory: Overkill/Starbreeze put out the game, made a shitload of DLC for it, tried to put it behind them as they focused on a new Walking Dead licensed game and their own snazzy VR headset project, those two things failed hard, so they went back to Payday 2 and cranking out DLC for it just to raise money to keep the lights on (complete with new "complete editions" to save you the hassle of purchasing the million DLC packs separately). I don't know why they even bothered with Payday 3 if they were going to go back to supporting 2, which did kind of make them a lot of money anyways.

I think this is why people are really using DEI. It’s a great way to deflect attention and criticism from your story or game because any time someone says they don’t like the product, you can always default back to “the fans are just mad about inclusion.”

I honestly think you're impugning too much intent behind this sort of thing. I suspect a few people might be self-aware and cynical enough to do this on purpose, but given how such a defense is only good for the ego and not for profit, I think the people making these decisions are mostly doing so out of a genuine desire to intentionally manipulate the audience into being more friendly to their ideology. And when it backfires as it so often does, in part because time and resources on that inevitably trades off against time and resources for crafting a good game with good mechanics and good narrative, they have a convenient way to deflect attention. And at this point, in 2024, this way of deflecting attention has become not just common, but downright cliche, and so they have a neat playbook to follow that they see fellow ideologues in the field turning to to protect their egos. I doubt it goes any deeper than.

I suspect a few people might be self-aware and cynical enough to do this on purpose, but given how such a defense is only good for the ego and not for profit,

Such a defense is good for media publicity. Media publicity can't make a bad work into a hit, but it can certainly increase the profit by some amount since it takes longer for people to figure out how bad it is.

Except that there’s no reason not to make the game good (or movie, or TV show) actually good at the same time if they were actually interested in doing so. The new ugly women in the game don’t take so many resources that they can’t make the rest of the game work as a game. It doesn’t cost so much that they then can’t afford servers for the game (or couldn’t simply make the game playable offline).

And I think honestly this kind of thing is doing more to turn off audiences to “diverse” choices because they’ve been so often used to deflect from bad entertainment and media that people see it as a red flag for poor quality. And it doesn’t have to be that way if they’d simply make a good product around the DEI. Benjamin Sisko was widely accepted and considered a badass in 1990. He was certainly a “diverse” casting choice, but because they show around him, and the character himself were both very well done, it was a popular show. Nobody was upset by it. Wonder Woman has been a popular character since she was created. We had She-Ra in the 1980s. It wasn’t seen as a bad thing until studios got lazy and decided that wha5 audiences cared about more than quality was diversity.

Except that there’s no reason not to make the game good (or movie, or TV show) actually good at the same time if they were actually interested in doing so. The new ugly women in the game don’t take so many resources that they can’t make the rest of the game work as a game. It doesn’t cost so much that they then can’t afford servers for the game (or couldn’t simply make the game playable offline).

Indeed, some games that are criticized for things like unnecessarily masculine women are well received by many gamers for being otherwise good, such as the Horizon games and The Last of Us: Part 2 (neither received anywhere near universal praise or disdain). But it's not as if making a good game is just something someone can choose to do; even if every resource in the company was directed with laser-like focus on the goal of "make a good game," I'm doubtful that the odds are good that they'd create a good game. If priorities are split between that and injecting messaging into the game - and particularly the perspective is a "woke" one where the ideological messaging is considered to supersede other factors when determining how "good" a game is - then it becomes that much harder. Who knows how much the "woke"-ish messaging of the Saints Row reboot contributed to its many issues both with bugs and just basic game design, but given how much the entire narrative and tone of the game was steeped in it, I imagine it had a more parasitic effect than what the character models in those other aforementioned games did.

And I think honestly this kind of thing is doing more to turn off audiences to “diverse” choices because they’ve been so often used to deflect from bad entertainment and media that people see it as a red flag for poor quality. And it doesn’t have to be that way if they’d simply make a good product around the DEI.

This is true, but the entire point that they're pushing is that they're already making a good product by injecting DEI and other "woke" messaging into the games. If players don't consider it so, then that means that they are wrong, and we need to put in more messaging until they get it. At their core, the ideologues who push this stuff truly believe that their ideology can never fail, it can only ever be failed. As ideological and political proselytizers, they see themselves as having no responsibility to check how effective their messaging is and to make adjustments based on that checking; rather, their only responsibility is to spread the message in the way the ideology tells them to, and if that doesn't work, then it's everyone else's fault.

It is a cliche at this point, that people labeled as sexist/racist keep pointing out that there are plenty of great works with diverse characters from yesteryear in gaming as well as in TV and film. "Woke" is a response and rejection of that; the idea that, in order to be praised, a work with women or minorities should also be good by traditional measures such as "entertainment" or "thought provoking" is, in itself, sexist/racist/White Supremacist/bigoted/etc. Rather, because we've now "awakened" to how the most salient way humans relate to each other in our society is through power dynamics between different demographic groups, we should realize that simply having these people represented in a positive way in entertainment works intrinsically make the entertainment works better. And, again, if the audience doesn't buy it, then the beatings will continue until morale improves.

I think we’re talking past each other. To be blunt, my thesis is that these people know they cannot release a good product, and have been wrapping their rather poor offerings in Woke to cover it up. Benjamin Sisko was a badass. The show was entertaining and actually did deal with racism during its own time. It wasn’t exactly subtle when they had a story about a show very much like DS9 not being able to be published if it were known that the author was a black man. I don’t think they’d be able to write a story like that today — and the story itself is pretty woke — because it requires skill to produce a story like that. It requires skill to show rather than tell, it requires thought to make a woman an actual badass (Sara Conners) without having her whine about sexism.

It’s a great way to deflect attention and criticism from your story or game because any time someone says they don’t like the product, you can always default back to “the fans are just mad about inclusion.”

Yes. This is very common now in all sorts of media.

DEI injection > Bad content > Bad reviews > 'Bigots are review bombing our content because they are bigots!' > Roll hard left and die

It’s clear that wokeness isn’t the cause of bad game writing. The very suggestion is ridiculous.

Firstly, game writing has always been terrible barring a number of exceptions that can literally be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Secondly, countries with less ‘wokeness’, like Japan, have even worse, more hackneyed and more cringe game writing than their western counterparts.

Thirdly, some of the rarest examples of good game writing, like Disco Elysium, are explicitly leftist, woke fiction (bordering on actual political propaganda) far to the left of the average ‘Sweet Baby Inc’ employee.

The vast majority of bad game writing since the invention of video games, and probably still today, can be lain squarely at the feet of straight white (and Japanese) men. This is not in any way to suggest that wamen or minorities are any better (just look at modern YA fiction to see they are not), but it’s clear that the dire state of game writing is not their fault.

  • -12

You made this point the last time, and just like last time, it's still wrong on multiple facets. I'd like you to list what games you think clear the standard of "good writing," because when I think of games lauded for their story or writing, I can think of a fairly deep list, and that's mostly limiting myself to computer games (Half-Life, Deus Ex, the "Shock" games, Myst, Command & Conquer, Ultima, Spec Ops: the Line, Max Payne...)

Your post also seems to discount the large number of impactful Japanese games, a number of which I'd imagine are lauded because their storytelling or writing struck a particular chord with people (Metal Gear, Zelda, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, most any FromSoft game from like Armored Core 4 to today).

I feel like responders to 2rafa's post would have benefitted from defining what it is "good writing" means to them. Whenever conversations start about writing quality it seems like every person takes their own idea into it without explaining what that is.

Is good writing the overall feel of the narrative to you? Is it the plot itself? The prose, the dialogue, the characterization, the worldbuilding?

If I think of a great video game narrative, I tend to think of games that do something interesting with the medium, something like the adventure game 999. However, I wouldn't describe 999 as having good writing - the plot and dialogue are merely ok, it's how it utilizes the medium to deliver everything that makes it shine.

Similarly, some games basically abandon "writing" altogether; someone below mentioned Ico, and Ueda's games always opt for very minimalist stories, which is something you can get away with in a game but not in other mediums. However, simply opting out of writing shouldn't be called "good writing" even if it produces a very good game.

Meanwhile, titles like Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid have very interesting plots and worlds, but the prose and dialogue are distinctly sub-par. I think this is what 2rafa means when they say the writing is bad.

Of course, both titles offer a lot to discuss in that regard. For example, how much of their experiences are defined by the technology of the time? Infamous lines like "What a shame" and "A bomb!" in Deus Ex might work a lot better with modern animations and voice acting. On the other hand, Kojima's 4th wall breaking was bold at the time but would be passé if done now. Plus, if they weren't very good games in other aspects, would anyone remember them?

I can’t take seriously someone who thinks that Kojima’s writing is good. Cult classic in a weird, schizo, Japanese man has fever dream based on American popular media and current affairs type way, maybe, but good? Deus Ex’s writing is OK, the reboots are better and less hackneyed (and I think Mary DeMarle is one of the best game writers), but it still doesn’t reach network TV level, let alone beyond. Spec Ops does something interesting with narrative, the moment to moment dialogue is rarely impressive but I do really like it as a narrative experience and I’d say it’s on the list.

Writing doesn’t have to be good to strike a chord with people. Harry Potter struck a chord with many people even though Rowling isn’t a great writer (she’s not a bad one either). Sitcoms like Friends strike a chord with many people even though the writers frequently phone it in. Characters, their vibe, parasocial relationships with them, these are all big reasons why people find themselves drawn to very long stories (which a sitcom in syndication is, to some extent) like Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate, Persona, I’ve met people deeply invested in World of Warcraft’s ongoing story lol. But that doesn’t make it good.

This seems to be hyper focused on writing, which is odd because a lot of the most popular games ever made have basically no writing at all. Surely video game quality is not singularly determined by writing quality, I would contend that writing quality is actually pretty low on the priority list of things that matter when determining game quality.

Japan is a weird example to bring up when a manga like Demon Slayer can out sell the entire American comic industry. Demon Slayer is no The Sun Also Rises, but Japan is clearly doing something right. They are a lot less woke than the west, and are probably the second most powerful cultural exporter behind the US, Korea might be close, but they don't necessarily do better on the woke dimension.

DE feels way more leftist than woke, but it does have some woke elements.

Yes, the vast majority of video games have been made by white/asian men including (all?) of the greats.

I think this is mostly just that you are using a scale for evaluating writing such that 95% of writing is all crammed together in the 'shit' category and then acting like it can't be further differentiated. Shit contains multitudes.

I don’t think game quality is determined by writing at all! But the discussion was about a writing consultancy, so writing was the topic. Some of my favorite games have very little writing, like certain puzzle titles.

Oh, I didn't really get that it was supposed to be writing consultancy specifically. I feel like the two main complaints about woke in video games that I read here on TheMotte are with ugly female character models, and then random woke signaling (trans characters, pride flags), specifically that it can be hard to have anti-woke mods that remove such things because the mod hosting sites are all ideologically captured.

Still I think that woke ideas can and do make the 'writing' in video games worse in a number of ways.

One example might be illustrated by comparing Mass Effect and BG3, both being games that do not have 'great' writing in the general sense, but I think woke impulses make BG3 a worse story in specific ways. Mshep is far and away the most common play through, and Garrus (who can't be romanced by Mshep) might be the most popular video game companions of all time. Meanwhile people had to make mods for BG3 to turn off the entire approval gain function because it is literally impossible to be friends with any of your companions, they are all romantic interests who tend to get very sexual and often physical with you from the very first approval cutscene. This does not mean that any given scene has worse writing, or that the overall plot is worse, and yet, I think the story as a whole is weaker because of the inability for your character to have deeper friendships.

Then there are the generic ways that woke writing is bad, as it often does things that are just broadly considered bad writing. Being preachy, making the subtext text, and breaking suspension of disbelief by importing modern (American) issues into settings and situations where they do not organically fit the story.

There is a sense in which all video game writing is bad so woke isn't the thing stopping video games from being literary masterpieces, but I am not sure how relevant that is compared with the general complaint that woke makes things worse.

Another thing with video games and writing is that a number of games approach writing and storytelling in different ways vis-a-vis the gameplay. You have games where you just wander around to learn about the setting (Myst, Gone Home), games that attempt to immerse you in the world so that you can directly participate in the story (Half-Life, System Shock), games that attempt to be movie hybrids (Metal Gear, Wing Commander), or games where the story feels more ancillary to your progression gameplay-wise and you aren't always the sole driver of the plot (Command & Conquer, MechWarrior).

Why do you feel Disco Elysium is explicitly leftist? I'm not disagreeing necessarily, just curious. I thought the game satirizes and mocks all political leanings, including leftists.

Because the authors are commie goons (ex Something Awful posters). If you choose explicitly fascist or strasserist options "the world" (the writers) will punish you.

As @Stefferi says, it makes fun of leftists the way leftists do so, communists are essentially occasionally misguided but pure hearted, liberals/centrists are greedy, venal, stupid or all of the three, and rightists are evil. The focus on making fun of the center-left is really the most telltale sign that the game is a socialist one rather than just generic lib. That and the fact that the game is literally made by self-identified communists who praised Marx at an award speech, I suppose.

I should say I don’t think it’s a terrible thing for art to carry the strong ideological views of its creators, I just think it’s an example of the fact that it isn’t leftist politics that’s responsible for poor writing in games, at least mostly.

Thirdly, some of the rarest examples of good game writing, like Disco Elysium, are explicitly leftist, woke fiction (bordering on actual political propaganda) far to the left of the average ‘Sweet Baby Inc’ employee.

It's a common complaint on 4chan that Disco Elysium is super leftist, but actual evidence for it is quite thin. You can espouse communist viewpoints but in the end the character admits it probably wouldn't work out if implemented. There's also the blatantly corrupt union boss which is not something you'd normally see in a leftist work.

Beyond communism, I haven't heard many complaints that DE is actually woke. There was the lower class racist near the hotel who's made out to be repugnant, but he's a fairly minor character. There's the strange pseudo-black nationalist on the wall if I remember correctly, but his weird political theories are meandering and incoherent.

Beyond those I can't think of anything else.

Disco Elysium goes hard after leftists, but it goes after them in a way how leftists go after leftists, ie. all the burns about leftists just infighting and getting nothing done are stuff I've heard about (and witnessed) countless times myself in leftist circles. Also, many of the most notable leftist characters in the game are the sort of types leftists would encounter themselves: I've noted a number of times to friends that Evrart Claire literally not only behaves but kind of looks like a somewhat notorious minor Finnish left-wing union boss who features in news from time to time, and "The Deserter" (an old bitter communist who thinks he's fighting fascists but is homophobic, racist and sexist enough to pass as one himself) is not an unfamiliar figure, either.

There's plenty of things in DE that would code as woke (fascists are consistently portrayed as bad and Harry becoming a fascist is basically equivalent to him choosing the "evil" path in a standard RPG, Harry's complicated relationship with women is on stage several times, "race-neutral casting" of NPCs etc.) but I rather feel people don't see it as woke simply because it's good; the same thing as with some other media with similar features I've seen like Bojack Horseman, The Expanse etc. that some anti-woke people evidently just see too good to be woke.

but I rather feel people don't see it as woke simply because it's good

That's not it. Get Out is both woke and good. It's really just that there aren't that many good woke pieces of media.

Based on my own limited experience with Disco Elysium, I'd agree that it's not particularly "woke," and whatever political or ideological messaging it had seemed to be in the form of "fictional character has this opinion" rather than "this fictional narrative serves as a lesson for why this opinion is the correct IRL." I'll add, though, in my personal experience was that the only people who ever called the game leftist were leftists praising the game for pushing forward leftist (not necessarily "woke" or progressive) messaging. Such folks were the only reason I'd heard of the game and got interested enough in it to start playing, actually.

I'll add, though, in my personal experience was that the only people who ever called the game leftist were leftists praising the game for pushing forward leftist (not necessarily "woke" or progressive) messaging.

Interestingly, I've only ever experienced the opposite. I've only ever heard the game denigrated as leftist by right-wing forums complaining about the Communist bias. Although it should be mentioned that I don't browse a lot of leftist video game forums (are there even that many besides Resetera?).

Admittedly I mostly play murderhobo games nowadays bc I consider many stories so bad that not having one is an improvement over the average in my book, but there is a large difference between catering to your audience and catering to something else. The first creates bad writing in a general sense, but as long as it's in a way your target audience wants you're fine. In the latter case - and catering to DEI is just a subtype here - you're just obliterating all goodwill for no goddamn reason. And DEI people have a particular knack for outright insulting the main userbase of beloved franchises to boot.

Though I guess we agree overall. I'm just pissed by my niche interest games always eventually getting captured by casualization in terms of game mechanics on one hand, and by wokification in terms of the story on the other, and it always seems to go this particular direction, never the other. I even agree on DE, while I think 'bordering on political propanganda' is an understatement, he tailor-made the entire setting to suit his political beliefs, but I did genuinely enjoy most of the story and he skillfully just barely dunks enough on marxists and unionists.

'bordering on political propanganda' is an understatement

I don't think Kurvitz and Hindpere made it to spread leftist ideas, although they probably aren't unhappy with it doing so. I suppose it's similar to the question of whether you consider Narnia to be 'Christian propaganda'. Certainly Lewis wrote it as Christian, and deeply informed by his Christianity, and with a positive Christian message, but at the same time his commentary is pretty clear that a lot of it just came to him as an interesting story, and he didn't set out to write it teach children to become (better) Christians in a real sense, it's not pure propaganda designed to proselytize.

Yes, Narnia has always been a bit too much of an obviously christian setting with a christian message for me to really enjoy. I wouldn't feel awkward calling it "christian propaganda", I guess. I'm not full on death-of-the-author, but authorial intent is not very high in my book and so I only marginally distinguish between "explicitly intended for propaganda" and "the author is so steeped in a certain ideology that his entire writing is indistinguishable from propaganda, even if he does not intend to do that".

Yeah, I can see that for sure. There's a scale along which every writer, especially if they're a politically involved or strongly opinionated person (which most great authors are), pushes their views. I don't disagree that most art is in some way political. But I think if there is a distinction between intentional propaganda and "the author is so steeped in a certain ideology that his entire writing is indistinguishable from propaganda, even if he does not intend to do that" as you say, it's more about the fact that the author consciously employing tools to convince the audience of their politics usually translates into poor storytelling.

I actually feel like Narnia is a good example of this, in that I think that through the series, there's a very real change in it that pushes it more towards what I would consider to be propaganda, in a negative sense. Maybe that's my own tastes or whatever, but I think it makes something clear, that it's not such a cut or dry thing. It's not that certain ideas or concepts are in your book, it's how they're presented. (Although I still argue that I think it would be absurdly difficult to present the content of the last book in a way that doesn't go deep into this)

good game writing, like Disco Elysium

This... this is perhaps the single most offensive opinion I've ever read on this forum.

It's not the greatest writing in the world, but it is a different kind of writing and pretty funny. Yes, I'm rolling my eyes when any kind of centrist/liberal content gets criticised, and as for being a conservative well that's just straight up Fascism, but I really like Kim Kitsuragi, the one sane person in Martinaise and noted speed-freak, as well as the adventures of Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau.

I'm rolling my eyes when any kind of centrist/liberal content gets criticised

I think the burns on Moralism make the most sense when one understands two things: firstly, Moralism is basically EU: The Ideology, and secondly, Harry specifically choosing to be a moralism is basically him going "Yup, I live in a colonized hellhole that's being exploited by foreign powers and serve as their enforcer, and I'm completely OK with it, because hey, what's the alternative?"

Within the context of Revachol's particular situation, at least the other ideologies are trying to do something to the situation (even the ultralibs if Joyce can be trusted), while the Moralists are just sunk into self-serving complacency that allows this shit to go on indefinitely.

The game is fair-minded that the Communist revolution was shit for the people, and the Communists once they lost started on piling up the mountains of skulls as well. Moralism has a good ideology, but as it's practiced it's inane at best and actively repressive at worst. But so is Communism! Mazovian ideology was also good, but putting it into practice meant the mountains of skulls and the People's Nuclear Pile that irradiated everyone to death.

The digs at the EU are really spot-on for a European, but it's also that Luxembourg/Monaco/Switzerland rich person's playground and tax haven life that is criticised. For countries such as Ireland, the EU was a godsend in, basically, hosing money into the country for development that our own government could never do. That's how it should be for Revachol, but because of the Revolution, they're making an example of it. Though even there, parts of it are already comfortably on the middle-class, fuck the poor lifestyle, it seems to be Martinaise that is being deliberately neglected as an object lesson.

What I take away from the game is that you honestly don't know who to trust or believe; the bad guys have good points and the bad guys pretending to be the good guys are both doing good and doing bad, while the good guys who ostentatiously set themselves up as the good guys aren't that good. You can trust Kim because, ironically, he's been an outsider due to his Seolite ancestry all his life, hence he's not plugged in to any of the networks of influence or power, but he does his job. You can trust Harry because all he has left is his job, which he is scarily good at, and he's gone so batshit insane that he too is outside the webs of connections.

All that may be left is a miracle, and even miracles are not unalloyed wonders. There is a different reality outside what they all think they know, and it may be destroying them right this second while they squabble over history and economic systems.

I do recall liking Kim the best during my 8-10 hours in the game, just for being the reliable straight man most of the time, though I also found him a bit on the dull side. Some of the other characters had really fun and outlandish personalities, but what got me for those was how much the writing just took me out of the game. It constantly made me picture some writer sitting at his desk typing out all this clever dialogue out in between break sessions to sniff his own farts. To some extent, I'm consciously aware that all video game writing is created this way, but when I think of writing in works like this being "good," part of it is that it momentarily, and perhaps only on an emotional level, makes me forget that the people I see on screen are merely marionettes being puppeteered by an author for the purpose of manipulating my emotions and instead makes me believe that this is a real person with a real history in some real world expressing himself. I want the writing to manipulate my emotions, not to remind me that it's trying to manipulate my emotions.

(Aside: this is a major part of the criticism - tangentially "woke"-related* - of the drop in quality of writing in the MCU, where everyone is a clever quip-machine all the time. When a handful of high profile characters like Tony Star talk this way, it was funny and somewhat plausible, but when almost every major character talks like this, the suspension of disbelief is harder to maintain, on top of just being tiresome).

To be fair, I think the voice acting, particularly the (likely intentionally?) overdramatic ones for the various emotions or characteristics of yours who would speak to you, didn't help. And the game started right off the bat with such internal monologue and never clawed its way back in my eyes ears. So I may be unfairly docking it points for that instead of just the writing.

* Obviously there's nothing about the "woke" ideology that insists on stilted writing in and of itself. But it's still tangentially related, because the "woke" influence being discussed is modern political messaging being inserted into the writing for the purpose of influencing the audience's behaviors, and due to the totalizing nature of the "woke" mindset, the authors have trouble doing this with a soft-enough touch to feel natural within the fictional world. Which then reminds the player that they're being lectured to by a script writer, rather than being immersed in a fictional world.

I think if you enjoy good (largely classic) literary fiction it's still pretty mediocre and does indeed read like the kind of fiction aging Baltic communists who overestimate their English writing ability would create, but by game standards it's certainly in the 99th percentile, I think it would be hard to dispute that.

by game standards it's certainly in the 99th percentile, I think it would be hard to dispute that.

As they say, there is no accounting for taste. I'd say it's probably close to 30th percentile, only avoiding going lower due to generally being coherent and internally consistent, grammatically correct, and lacking typos.

Fair enough, happy to disagree. What would consider the best (not necessarily your favorite) game writing, of what you've played?

I'd say Ico is probably the one game with the best writing I've played (aside: don't read the novelization Ico: Castle in the Mist; it takes a 5 hour game with a fairy-tale-basic story about a cursed boy and girl, a castle, and an evil queen, and stretches it to 400+ pages, including the first 100+ focusing on the religious back story of the boy and his village), though Bloodborne came close in the similar minimalistic style. For a game with lots of dialogue, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis stands out to me as one with particularly good writing, though I'd probably place the original Knights of the Old Republic and Odin Sphere at around the same level.

though Bloodborne came close in the similar minimalistic style.

I think Bloodborne is an interesting game to bring up because it's an example of how comparing the writing in games to that of other media can be a difficult exercise. Many of the things that go into making the narrative of Bloodborne what it is, like item descriptions, optional NPC interactions as well as mandatory cutscenes etc are things without obvious parallels in films/novels. In particular, the ways these elements synergise mean that a Bloodborne film/novelization would necessarily provide a very different experience from playing the game, even from a strictly story-focussed point of view.

With all that said, I agree that Bloodborne is a well written game but I prefer to make that argument less in terms of the actual quality of something like the dialgoue (for example) in comparison to that found in films or books and more by emphasising how effectively it leverages the storytelling options that gaming provides and that no other medium does.

I think it's not that great compared to all the games you dismiss as being terrible. I absolutely dispute what you're saying. How do we go about resolving this? What criteria are you using?

I don't know, do we agree on books? On film? Some of my favorite books of all time are Ulysses, Brothers Karamazov, Wuthering Heights, Mansfield Park, Dorian Gray, The Leopard, The Waves, almost everything by Waugh (esp. Sword of Honour trilogy, but also Brideshead of course). All very classic /lit/ babby's first canon stuff, I don't claim any esoteric taste. My favorite films, likewise, are Before Sunset (not the other two) and Taxi Driver. Metropolis is good. All basic again.

They're all stories that have something to say, that are written in an entertaining and well-flowing way. They largely respect their characters, treat human motivation as both suspect and organic, deal with interesting themes. They're obviously immensely well-known for a reason. Disco Elysium doesn't remotely approach their heights, but it respects its characters, has something to say (even if it is, of course, something I disagree with), respects its genre(s), understands people in a way that well-written fiction does. We can agree to disagree.

They're all stories that have something to say, that are written in an entertaining and well-flowing way. They largely respect their characters, treat human motivation as both suspect and organic, deal with interesting themes.

Those are good criteria, but the only one games are habitually not fulfilling is "having something to say", the thing is I don't think that makes them horrible. In fact, having something to say but doing it badly is way worse than knowing your limits and focusing on the other parts of the story. That's why I think most games aren't so bad, and why Disco Elysium is not so hot.

edit @ArjinFerman, you deleted your comment, just wanted you to see my reply.

Sorry for the mess, was hoping to avoid it by deleting.

No problem, I do this occasionally only to find someone has replied to a deleted comment, it happens!

Yeah... I wanted to take issue with calling it woke to begin with, but saying it's particularly better than other games appreciated for ti's story is wild.

I wanted to take issue with calling it woke to begin with

I mean, it's definitely woke, it's not class reductionist leftist fiction that rejects wokeness in a Zizek-type way, it's very explicitly in support of American-style blank slatist wokism even if it occasionally makes fun of its excesses in an in-joke type way. Stuff like the way the game responds through Kim and your own thoughts if you make Harry a reactionary or sympathize with nativists is pretty clear about that.

I've only done one playthrough, and hardly paid that much attention to the dialogue, I recognize that "woke" lost a lot of it's meaning through overuse, but no, I do not recognize being anti-reactionary, and anti-nativist as woke.

Yes, I think it's frequently very witty, I laughed out loud many times while playing it (which almost never happens in games except guffawing at the worst pun-laden vanilla WoW quests), there are a huge number of well-crafted references to interesting history, philosophy and literature and the debate around them that's shared with a lot of fiction I enjoy (like Joyce, Wilde, etc). There's good wordplay, the underlying mystery is interesting as a fan of mystery/detective fiction which is a rote but often underappreciated kind of writing. It gets its noir tone mostly correct, I think the lore of the setting is just the right side of weird fiction and historical analogy to be interesting, I very much enjoy the effort put into minor details like fonts and fashion, and I think the cohesive setting as a kind of 'what if Königsberg had been the epicenter of a communist revolution' is fascinating. I never skipped a line of dialogue and was often positively surprised by it, and I think the dice rolling was well-integrated with the narrative.

Königsberg

It's Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, more than anything, down to its name (Tallinn used to be named Reval).

the underlying mystery is interesting as a fan of mystery/detective fiction

Oh, definitely. It starts off looking as an open-and-shut, it's clear what happened here, we know who dunnit but we can't ever prove it case. Then Harry goes crazy and blows the entire thing wide open and it's all turned on its head - nothing happened the way we thought was so obvious and plain. And they make the twist work, even with the miracle ending.

I think the cohesive setting as a kind of 'what if Königsberg had been the epicenter of a communist revolution' is fascinating.

It does work for a European setting; the Sunday Visitor being a guy who's some sort of EU bureaucrat in Strasbourg but just popping over every week to slum it in Martinaise, with all his development agency bullshit lines, is convincing. So is the idea of the descendant of the ex-royal house working as a merchant banker in Luxembourg (see the last Habsburg.) After the failed Revolution, the ordinary people are still living in bad conditions and maybe even worse off than before, while the displaced high status types landed on their feet elsewhere.

Yeah I agree, I do think the writing has a bitterness I find distasteful (especially because, come on, life in Estonia is way, way better than it's ever been), but it has a way of producing interesting characters that I think is really great.

More comments

Sorry I moved the question on the general quality over to the other (now deleted) comment.

Well, good for you, but it's hardly objective, wouldn't you say? For me it was kinda enjoyable, and had some interesting ideas, but after the first playthrough I was done. I definitely didn't find it funny, the ending was dismally bad., and that you like the mystery / detective fiction bit also comes off as a surprise, because that's one of the bits that fell particularly flat to me (there's not really that much detective work in the game). I liked the worldbuilding, but "I have amnesia, give me a history dump of everything that happened in this world" wasn't a fun way of uncovering it.

It’s clear that wokeness isn’t the cause of bad game writing. The very suggestion is ridiculous.

Obviously. This still doesn't really say anything.

I agree that Dragon Ball Z is badly written in many ways. The bloat is infamous, the way it handles succession to new characters (it doesn't) is bad, the plot is built on a loop of new transformations that boil down to differently colored hair and so on. These are all recognized flaws. So recognized that they literally invented their own Abridged series to handle the bloat. They charged people twice to get a passable viewing experience! And the fans bought in anyway. They know what they're getting.

Handing it over to woke American show runners would lead to a very different sort of bad.

Which is what fans care about.

I guess it shows how "good writing" really depends on the medium and the time period. DBZ worked great as an 80s/90s after school special, when there wasn't much else on TV for adolescents. You come home every day, hyped up to find out what will happen next, and get just a few minutes of action. Then the suspense just builds and builds and builds, and the kids don't realize it will never end because they're kids. It's just like pro wrestling. It wouldn't work at all now with so many entertainment options, and if you marathon it as an adult it's stupid, but watching it back in the day was amazing.

So recognized that they literally invented their own Abridged series to handle the bloat. They charged people twice to get a passable viewing experience!

DBZ Abridged is a fan production, not an official one.

I think he's referring to the official Dragon Ball Z Kai series.

Secondly, countries with less ‘wokeness’, like Japan, have even worse, more hackneyed and more cringe game writing than their western counterparts.

Which Japanese games have you played, which weren't filtered through non-Japanese translators? Because Japanese to English video game translation is notoriously plagued by rewrites, "punching up", and general disrespect for the original text.

I can't turn down an opportunity to introduce more people to Ghost Stories. Specifically the English Dub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Stories_(Japanese_TV_series) https://dubbing.fandom.com/wiki/Ghost_Stories

Ghost Stories was picked up for dubbing by ADV Studios in 2005. According to voice actor Greg Ayres, they were told to "do whatever it took to sell the show." The only condition was that the basic story and names of major characters and ghosts had to remain intact, but everything else was fair game. To that end, director Steven Foster reworked the show into a pure Gag Dub by throwing out nearly all of the original script. When the voice actors were called in to record scenes, whoever got there first would set the tone and subject for the scene, which meant the other cast members had to follow in those footsteps. This approach produced a dub full of random characterization, fourth-wall-breaking jokes, political and cultural references.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=c8JRb3-W8uQ

It really is...something.

That is the greatest dub of all time!

Translation might well impact on prose and characterisation, but I've never heard of plot being altered. And it doesn't take much effort to find Japanese games with absolutely nonsensical plots

And it doesn't take much effort to find Japanese games with absolutely nonsensical plots

Sometimes that's part of the fun.

Several Yakuza games, the Zelda games, FF7, 8, 14, Prof Layton, Chrono Trigger on DS, most recent Persona games and many more in English; I don't speak Japanese.

I don’t really buy that it’s the translation making things much worse; if anything, translation to English by professional translators who also do books and TV scripts usually improves the writing quality of bad game writers (eg. my Polish friends have said the Witcher 2/3’s writing is more hackneyed and cliche in Polish than in English where there was some smart editing).

translation to English by professional translators who also do books and TV scripts usually improves the writing quality of bad game writers

except that they aren't translators, they are localizers, and they proudly declare themselves as such. Jelly Donuts is their work's infancy. You may be interested in the current Unicorn Overlord drama brewing on X.

I don't really play AAA games very much, so the actual effect of Sweet Baby on those games is not very salient to me, but when reading and hearing about it, I can't help but notice that they usually aren't giving many examples of of aspects of these games that people really think are bad because of Sweet Baby. In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.

I think there's no actual way to know what Sweet Baby Inc influenced in these games unless you work for SBI, the company, or there are leaks. Before SBI was put on as a face to the concept, though, the "woke" direction of the industry had been criticized for a long time, so the issue was never SBI specifically or even companies like SBI, but rather that devs actually seemed to want their narratives to receive influence from the type of ideology espoused by people working at or defending SBI.

One recent fairly prominent example of a game that SBI had worked on according to that curator (but whose exact influence is a mystery AFAIK) was Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League which, as the title implies, involved killing the Justice League heroes, where the one heroine Wonder Woman apparently got a noble and dignified death with the male heroes getting fairly muted or pathetic ones (apparently there was some extra controversy cuz the Batman VA died before the game was released, and he got a rather unceremonial death). The game was apparently shit for many non-narrative-related reasons, and this kind of thing could easily be chalked up to coincidence, but it does fit very neatly into a pattern we've seen in a lot of visual media of legacy franchises the last 5-10 years.

There have been a number of mini-controversies over patterns like this, such as (mainly western) devs making heroines more masculine/ugly than players tend to prefer seeing, with the Horizon games, The Last of Part 2, and even the aforementioned Suicide Squad with Harley Quinn compared to her depiction in the old Arkham games by the same dev, being examples. Last year's Resident Evil 4 remake was criticized for cutting out 2 of the best lines in the game: "Well, if it isn't the bitch in the red dress" and "I see the president has equipped his daughter with ballistics," but the game was well received for being good. On the other hand, the previous year's Saints Row reboot was criticized for making the protagonists soft 20-something roommates getting into crime to pay back their student debt while rebelling against the current societal order or whatever, along with censoring in-game stores like Freckle Bitches to FB's.

I don't think any of these rose to the level of being a major, or anything more than a tiny, controversy, and it was the rare person who was actually worked up over any of it, but certainly lots of people noticed the pattern of the direction things seemed to be going and were making some noise about how devs were just making games worse for no good reason. The SBI Detected curator probably created a focal point where players who were noticing this could direct their ire, but, again, the issue was never SBI specifically or even the specific devs that they worked with.

What people are mostly talking about is how their employees conduct themselves on social media. And even though the way they often conduct themselves is unprofessional and dumb, It's also understandable when there's a hundred thousand people telling you how bad your work is and trying to stop people from doing business with you.

I actually don't think it's understandable. Like you said, they're conducting themselves in an unprofessional way. They are industry professionals, and there's a standard of conduct they ought to hold themselves to as professionals. I'd say it's understandable only from a cynical perspective, as an attempt to build a "we're getting harassed" narrative out of whole cloth to build sympathy.

I think there's no actual way to know what Sweet Baby Inc influenced in these games unless you work for SBI, the company, or there are leaks.

Isn't that the point of the complaint, though? Sweet Baby Inc didn't do anything of substance, they just grifted their way through "let us do the DEI box-ticking, be a shame if you got cancelled for being -phobes and -ists". They're just parasites latching onto games studios and offering nothing really helpful.

Pretty much isn't a good look either way; either they're just grifting, or they're having a direct, concrete impact (and by the words and deeds of their founder and employees, they sure seem like they are).

the Horizon games

She looks like a pretty-ish redheaded woman (without makeup, she'd be conventionally hot with it because redheads tend to need mascara and more defined brows to be conventionally sexy, plus lipstick would go a long way for her). Just earlier someone was lamenting that media had been systematically avoiding the depiction of redheads, Aloy is a relatively 'feminine' portrayal, she doesn't come off as hugely masculine in the games, her face model is pretty etc.

She got subtly uglied between game 1 and 2. She also ditched all her (masculine) friends and allies from game 1 and replaced them with PoC simps.

And after going through the effort of making a post-racial future with new societies to be the cast of heroes and antagonists (the 1st game bad guys were Carja political extremists being manipulated by an AI) , in the 2nd game they brought in DBZ floating space hwite people to be the villains, complete with a floating crew-cut southern-accent straight white male goon. Everything about 2 just fucking bugged me.

Also, how many spunky oseram wrench-wenches who are way better at engineering than the men but are fighting against patriarchy do you need? I'd say two, three max, because I like wrech wenches. You dont need 8.

"Uglier" is not the fitting word in the vast majority of such cases. It's loaded and implies the end result is below average. Going from 8 to 7, or even from 7 to 6 is hardly "uglification".

2 points:

it's uglyer, if the word was ugly you would have a point.

she now looks like a wester Muk Bang Youtuber

Yes, I've seen this cherry-picked frame before. An actual comparison doesn't quite fit that narrative.

interesting that they gave her rosacea, or at least it is more pronounced in your link. At 3:21 she still looks like Nicado, at 3:23 not so much, so lighting may be a contributing factor to the imitation.

I think there's no actual way to know what Sweet Baby Inc influenced in these games unless you work for SBI, the company, or there are leaks. Before SBI was put on as a face to the concept, though, the "woke" direction of the industry had been criticized for a long time, so the issue was never SBI specifically or even companies like SBI, but rather that devs actually seemed to want their narratives to receive influence from the type of ideology espoused by people working at or defending SBI.

Realistically, yes, SBI is only a symbol here. There's no way of knowing what SBI is actually responsible for, or if it was bad.

But sometimes the symbol is enough. The point is "wokeness in games is bad", and SBI consult on games and are (or at least the SBI employees who post on Twitter are) woke, so they stand for the whole fuzzy concept. If there's any kind of strategy here, I doubt the aim is to specifically end SBI influence on games, but rather to send a general message that the audience disapproves of wokeness. The goa may not be for SBI to change, but for the next developer to think to themselves quietly, "Hm, my audience doesn't like woke stuff, I guess I won't include that."

FWIW this is more of a meta fight than anything else. And I mean, for me I always thought that eventually all the culture wars really settled into the "Who, Whom" question. Who creates the rules and on whom are they enforced. I think everything else falls away to the side next to that. Modern Online Progressivism falls particularly hard into that I think, being that the Oppressor/Oppressed dichotomy is stupid toxic to actually internalize/actualize, and I think everybody knows it. People focus on diversity and representation, but I don't actually think that's the issue...I think it serves more as a sort of MAGA hat, a visible symbol of personal politics, although certainly nowhere as clear. In fact, I would certainly say that I think people are oversensitive in that regard.

But that doesn't mean that the "Who, Whom" question isn't a problem.

The other thing I'll add on that, is that you're talking about in-game transactions...I'm going to make the argument that these things might not be as far unrelated as you think, for a couple of reasons. First, I think there's the issue of Moral License, which I think is real here, and essentially, that MOP culture is a Moral License factory. It has to be to prevent itself from self-destructing in a spiral of pain, self-destruction and shame. It has to believe itself is not part of that Patriarchal, White Supremacist, Colonialist society on an individual level. So...does this Moral License extend to kinda justifying exploitative business models?

But I think there's another thing. I do think there's an assumption that the Blue Ocean audiences being looked for are of a higher socioeconomic class. And I think there's a belief that they tend to be more monogamers, I.E. people more focused on a title or two rather than something much more broad. (My understanding/experience is the people who are upset about the double standards/hypocrisy in Progressive journalism tend to be more Polygamers, people who play a wide variety of gaming experiences...but that means that we don't spend as much on individual titles...although I'd argue there's a higher level of value sensitivity there as well) But more than that, I think they're fishing for the so-called whales. The people who will drop absurd amounts of money on a single game.

That's my take at least. I do think that this is a meta issue and it's a class issue, as across the board, entertainment and culture companies are looking to replace lower-status with higher-status audiences.

Edit: I just want to add one thing I've been thinking about this. One of the thing I'm seeing from the Progressive side, is that none of the critiques aimed at them make sense. I disagree entirely. I think raw anti-Progressivism is actually rational for some people. Not all people. But some. I think if you're more vulnerable to internalizing those models of power, or you think you lack the social cred to not be judged based on those models of power (and let's be honest, that's what's going on here by and large) it makes complete total sense why people would be straight-up reactionary against this modern Progressive culture. I actually wish there was a better alternative to be clear. But it kinda is what it is.

I do think there's an assumption that the Blue Ocean audiences being looked for are of a higher socioeconomic class. And I think there's a belief that they tend to be more monogamers, I.E. people more focused on a title or two rather than something much more broad. (My understanding/experience is the people who are upset about the double standards/hypocrisy in Progressive journalism tend to be more Polygamers, people who play a wide variety of gaming experiences...but that means that we don't spend as much on individual titles...although I'd argue there's a higher level of value sensitivity there as well) But more than that, I think they're fishing for the so-called whales. The people who will drop absurd amounts of money on a single game.

This is a really interesting argument, and I can see what you're getting at if I squint, but I'd love for you to flesh out your position here. Is your view that gaming companies believe progressivism appeals to a higher-class subset of the gaming population that is simultaneously more likely to be interested in putting big money into microtransactions? Could you spell out how that works, because I don't necessarily see the straight logic there -- my guess is that progressivism is orthogonal to monogamers/polygamers.

It seems likely to me that polygamers are more concerned about journalism and progressivism in video games because their gaming interests are so broad that they need to follow news and pay attention to new titles in order to learn what they want to play next.

With monogamers, they're just focused on their particular title so whatever new thing is going on in the new story game doesn't matter so much to them. They're more likely to be incensed by a mechanical change to balance in their obsession than the woke story beats in the new blockbuster. The number of people who care about specific balance tweaks in League of Legends are a distinct subset of the population. But the number of people who can quickly scan a character roster for skin color or can develop an opinion about the sexual orientation of NPC romance options is much higher. It might just be bike-shedding.

Someone on an earlier thread about this controversy suggested that the narrative-based games which trigger both the progressive story beats and the backlash have an outsized place in discussion relative to the number of gamers who actually play them. I actually think it's the opposite: the big story games trigger such major discussion because they're the ones played by the largest plurality of the gaming populace. Maybe not a majority, though that wouldn't surprise me, but the largest and most mainstream chunk of committed gamers.

Could you spell out how that works, because I don't necessarily see the straight logic there -- my guess is that progressivism is orthogonal to monogamers/polygamers.

At least what I said is my experience. I feel like people who play a wide variety of games simply are not going to waste the resources picking up expensive DLC/Microtransactions? For what you could pay getting an outfit for your Diablo 4 character (which is stupid expensive), there's a lot of options out there for great experiences you could get. There's simply more competition for the gaming dollar, I think.

But the number of people who can quickly scan a character roster for skin color or can develop an opinion about the sexual orientation of NPC romance options is much higher. It might just be bike-shedding.

I think also, people who are watching a large number of games see trends, even if they're there or not. And one of the big trends people see right now is downplaying the attractiveness of female characters in a way they are NOT doing for male characters. And of course, people tie that (not necessarily incorrectly) into various Progressive theories and models, and you get what you get.

Previous discussion on the topic, which might enlighten you as to the more specific issues.

In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.

I didn't know Sweet Baby Inc existed before a post about the new Suicide Squad game was on the front page of /r/all on reddit which was a dossier in the game written by Lex Luther praising the Amazonian culture of Wonder Woman for not having "toxic masculinity" and the comments were talking about Sweet Baby Inc as the reason this kind of writing exists.

That aside people complain about "woke" writing in videogames all the time. It's just that the people that do it usually either do it very badly or the ones that do it badly are very heavily exposed and then completely dismissed. The Last of Us Part 2 was heavily criticized for bad writing and injecting woke themes to the detriment of its plot aside from people not liking the plot itself or the way it was told. That was huge in the gaming sphere and was a much bigger bone of contention than Sweet Baby Inc is now, mostly because the culture war was used as a cudgel to deny any merit to criticism of the game.

From what I've seen, on reddit at least, there's nothing like a culture war touchstone like gamergate, everyone just shits on the writing of Sweet Baby Inc and there's not even any pushback at all which is really rare. Probably because it's like that diversity tool that blizzard made, people who don't care or like woke content will defend it at all costs if they think it's real artistic intent but the fact that it's counterfeit corporate checkboxing to make sure the game is woke probably pushes any defense the people who would defend the games woke content would have away. Naked corporate manipulation for profit (though, I can't imagine how this is profitable, but I also can't imagine how to spin these things any other way that's not them nakedly saying they're paying people to create propaganda tools/writing) is on the same level as being generally right wing. Which is a long way of saying I don't think people are heavily invested in this because most people are at the very least vaguely aware this was happening already, they just maybe thought it was from agenda pushers involved in the game dev process, the reveal that it's ingrained at a corporate level doesn't change much for people who didn't like the fact that it was there and definitely isn't a damsel that people need to rescue like Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkesian.

I was just perusing /r/kotakuinaction to look at what they were saying about it and one of the comments was "might as well call it Jan 6 "Insurrection" part 2 since they have as much in common."

It feels like outlets that got a lot of traffic from gamergate are trying to push the name again to generate more ruckus for clicks or attention on both sides.

a dossier in the game written by Lex Luther praising the Amazonian culture of Wonder Woman for not having "toxic masculinity"

We're supposed to believe Lex Luthor, of all people, wrote this? Instead of a plan about how to invade and conquer Themyscira, steal its tech, enslave the Amazons as his personal army?

We're supposed to believe Lex Luthor, of all people, wrote this?

Frankly, I don't think we are. I think we are supposed to praise it, and whether or not we believe it isn't really a consideration.

The way a free market works is that consumers get to choose, for whatever bespoke reasons they so desire, which products they will purchase and consume. Producers would much prefer that they themselves got to choose which products consumers had to purchase. Corporate PR gets a lot of flak for being simple and predictable, but it is glaringly apparent when these simple predictable rules are violated. The fact that companies wish that their customers were pigs who they could shovel slop to every day and come home with an easy profit should be apparent from first economic principles, but consumers understandably take offense to that. Imagine if the CEO of InBev posted a tweet publicly asking Elon Musk to shut down all Dylan Mulvaney/Bud Light trending topics and ban Kid Rock. I’m sure that’s exactly what they wanted, but InBev has enough sense and tact to understand how condescending and contemptuous that would come off as.

In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.

Maybe it's just because lean right in my media consumption, but I've heard a lot of complaints about woke nonsense in videogames. Horizon Zero Dawn made the main character way less attractive, The Last of Us killed off the main guy from the first game in a disrespectful way. GTA 6 looks like a woke disaster. And of course I've seen quite a few games with the weird lefty art-style that indicate them as obviously woke that nobody ever plays or cares about because they aren't beloved franchises (though I don't think it's reasonable to complain about these. If woke people want to form their own IP and let people freely choose to play or not play, good for them, as long as they aren't co-opting non-woke franchises and destroying them)

I don't know that Sweet Baby Inc was involved in the games I mentioned. The Sweet Baby Inc Detected only has 16 reviews and those aren't any of them, so either they're not thorough, or something else is involved. But some sort of woke force has been going around corrupting games just like it has in comics and movies, and people have been complaining about it for the last decade. Not as much as they complain about in-game transactions, because it is less prevalent, but it's been there.

In reality, I think the touchpoint really comes down to 3 games, all of which did quite poorly, objectively. Saint's Row, Forsaken and Suicide Squad. I think 2 had technical issues (I thought the demo for Forsaken was decent), but I think all three, story wise, had issues in that they just came across as bad, tone-wise. I think that certain cultural tone simply doesn't have the wide appeal that the bigwigs think it has. Now, I think Suicide Squad the issues were more with the gameplay than the story, (people didn't want a shoot the purple glowing button live service game) but still. I do think it's a problem.

My own personal viewpoint is that it's larger than one consulting firm. And considering that Alan Wake 2, IMO was actually pretty good, and SBI DID consult on that, I do think the problem is somewhere else. Myself? I've given up on North American AAA. And yeah, Forsaken was Japanese developed, but they WANTED to be a North American game in so many ways.

I do think there's something wrong in the NA AAA space, and I do think the explosion of Progressive politics plays a role, but it's not a direct one, other than the moral license issues. I think it's just a narrow culture, much more narrow than it thinks it is, and that's the problem. Outside of NA, and I disagree, GTA 6 I think will probably be fine if it's still rooted in the nascent anti-Americanism, I think around the rest of the world, even Left/Progressive coded games are fine.

I think part of the problem is simply a failure to optimize for quality. An absence of merit and meritocracy. It's not required for wokeness to be an objectively negative property in games as long as it distracts from quality. If you had a substantial fraction of people obsessed with blue flowers to the point that they start hiring people to work on their game on the basis that they are fellow blue-flower enthusiasts rather than their programming and game design skill, that alone would decrease the quality of games (or productivity in pretty much any industry). If you insert a bunch of fanservice characters whose main appeal is that they wear blue flowers, and fail to make them appealing in other ways because the blue-flower-wearing takes care of that in the minds of the developers, then you end up with lackluster characters from the perspective of anyone who doesn't care about blue flowers. If all mainstream games all start to share similar plotlines of evil villains trying to poison all the blue flowers, or worse, dye them red (the horror!), people will get tired of it. Nobody cares about blue flowers, tell some good stories!

Any overly ideological creator that gets too self-absorbed in their own niche obsession will struggle to make good content that appeals to anyone who doesn't share their obsession because they get too many false-positives from self-masturbatory appeals to their own niche and stop optimizing for more objective quality once something meets their own distorted subjective view.

This is why any overly preachy content is cringe and lame even when it contains a message that I agree with. The fact that wokeness in many instances happens to be toxic and destructive is just the cherry on top. The ideological obsession is the majority of the problem.

I don't even think this requires actual ideology. Nepotism gets you to the same place. And there are people that would argue (including me) that a lot of these culture wars in gaming and the media are based around nepotism, and see identitarianism as a way to distract from this.

I know at my workplace, they're having to redo the diversity training because it put nepotism on the same level as other forms of discrimination and people did not like it.

I'm not sure you can disentangle that, as the majority of these cases are not biological nepotism, as in people hiring their siblings and cousins, but ideological nepotism: people hiring their friends and colleagues who think the same way that they do because they have a shared ideology. The ideology and the nepotism feed into one another. Without the ideology they wouldn't feel such hatred for outsiders that they would feel the need to discriminate against them. It's not simply self-interest because they're not (usually) hiring actual family members.

And considering that Alan Wake 2, IMO was actually pretty good,

that may be your (and game Journos) own bias, it looks like thought it is Remedy's fastest Selling Game (at least according to estimates), the last news about the topic is that it still didn't turn a profit.

Yeah. I thought it was pretty good. Not great 'tho.

I would have cut the budget on that thing significantly 'tho. And I don't mean that as a critique per se. Just that I think they way overestimated the interest in such a game. Just to be clear, I think Control (their previous game) is a much better game overall.

One of the big complaints about the modern trends in gaming is the disappearance of the "AA" game. That sort of middle-ground between budget/indie and AAA. I think Alan Wake 2 should have been an AA game.

One of the big complaints about the modern trends in gaming is the disappearance of the "AA" game. That sort of middle-ground between budget/indie and AAA. I think Alan Wake 2 should have been an AA game.

I think that is more the realm of the Japanese and other Asian devs. Things for example like the recent Unicorn Overlord.

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