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Notes -
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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