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