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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?
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.
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.
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.
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