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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.
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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