Totally agree, especially regarding Wolfenstein 2. I thought the game did a great job of demonstrating what a person who had complete power over everyone and that no one could challenge or question would eventually come to be like.
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Honestly that I still see Max Temkin retweets on my timeline from time to time is not fucking cool. Really should have been apparent right from the start with CAH that he isn’t using shock value in good faith and reflective of how he views things.
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FWIW I just proposed a humanities class for next year using it as an entry point to talk about how Hitler rose to power.
Art representing atrocities, whether it be those perpetrated Hitler or Columbus or any other party, is always ethically finicky. (I enjoy this Lindsay Ellis video essay about Nazi satire.) Even art that attempts to show the horrors of history can come off as exploitative of suffering. There’s no easy answer to what is acceptable and what is appropriate. I would argue that there isn’t any answer. It’s all a mess.
I don’t really feel comfortable with the way Wolfenstein portrays Nazis or the Holocaust, and I don’t ever intend to pay money for them. But I also find the Wolfenstein games to be very interesting (and campy) narratives about fascism. So when people talk about Wolfenstein, I tell people why I’m not really comfortable with those games, and try to ask them to critically address the ethics of that representation, but I also don’t chide them for playing them.
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I think that’s the best approach you can take: Know your limits and be polite but firm about them.
That’s mine too. A narcostate. NARCOSTATE???
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So… some shit came out about certain male developers regarding harassment over the weekend. To not break Rule 10 of the forums, I won’t name names or give a source, but the following companies are dead to me while said men who work there are still there:
- Riot (League of Legends)
- Raw Fury Games (Publisher of The Last Night (ew), Night Call, and Sable among others)
Then there was the whole shit with Microsoft and ICE and I know they are very different parts of a huge company, but I just can not feel comfortable giving any company money that helps those terrorists.
Just for the record for everyone, Raw Fury is the publisher not the developer.
I changed the wording just to be sure.
Jonathan Blow games. Like he thinks women are biologically predisposed against an interest in technology and that’s why there are fewer of them in the industry, and he readily tried to defend that perspective, it just annoys me to see him mentioned any more.
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The Witness is a scientific puzzle game built on the idea that rationality and logic are the only way to save us so you’re really not missing much.
Gosh I was stuggling to think of something for this thread but you just reminded me Jon Blow is a person who exists and makes games.
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I used to have this exact feeling about Fortnite, especially as someone who was a big PUBG fanboy. Then it came out on the Switch, and I was hooked.
I love puzzle games so I had a great time with the witness (it is gorgeous and legitimately creative with its mechanics!) up until a point where I found an underground theater room that when I entered a code played a video of some sweaty 1970s dipshit explaining that all art is worthless and science is the One True Religion and got the sense that the game earnestly believed this so I just immediately shut the game off and uninstalled it. When I later found out that Jonathan Blow thinks women are objectively inferior I was completely unsurprised. Fuck that guy and his misogynistic STEMbro faux intellectualism.
At least I got it in a humble bundle where all my money went to charity and Blow didn’t get a single dime out of it, I guess.
EDIT: it also lead to my GF and I just constantly roasting the game for weeks afterwards, during which a Neon Genesis Evangelion title card generator was floating around twitter and I so naturally I made this:
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The Atlantic:
At his Berkeley office many months later, as I was playing a more polished build of The Witness, I turned to Blow at the next desk and asked if I was missing some clue for a specific puzzle. He fixed me with a stare that could hammer a nail into a wall. “The clue is, you’re doing it wrong,” he said.
The profile this is from is actually incredibly illuminating and fascinating, and I highly recommend it regardless of how you feel about Blow.
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Oh yeah, I’ve read that before. There’s a lot of breathless hyperbole about how amazingly Artistic Braid is that really oversells how deep that game’s subtext actually is but there’s also lots of interesting stuff about how Blow sees the world and sees games and approaches making them. The fact that Blow seems like a legitimately intelligent person in many regards and is clearly a talented game designer makes his retrograde attitudes and unending condescension even more frustrating. Honestly I may even try whatever game he makes next because it’s guaranteed to be different if nothing else. I just will be going into it extremely skeptical of whatever points he is trying to make with it.
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Yeah, the praise for Braid is unnecessary, though helpfully contextual for readers who know nothing about games. However, as an examination of a strange, flawed, intelligent, and socially challenged person, I thought it was frank in a way that is totally unflattering, but deeply incisive. It took off for me when Heck started talking around Blow’s abrasive personality - like, even his friends have a difficult time with him. An asshole? Egocentric? Clearly, but he’s nothing if not an interesting subject of analysis.
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Another additionsto my ever growing list of developers that can fuck the hell off is Arenanet, for firing two of their writers after fucking trash gamers and internet manbabies organized hate mobs against them.
I’ll stop there, but I’m glad the good part of game dev twitter is having none of this bullshit.
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A close friend of mine is on the ArenaNet animation team and is pretty outspokenly against bullshit and has already caught side eye for it, so now I’m real worried it’s gonna cost her that job.
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I recently started playing Guild Wars 2 again after taking a break for a couple of months and even spent some money on it. Asked for a refund today because there’s no way I’m touching that game again now. It’s a shame because I quite liked it, but the response from ArenaNet has been unacceptable.
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