Rimworld, because of the whole kerfuffle about how it handles sexuality/gender. It seems to be right up my alley and I was planning on picking it up for a while, but then it became clear the creator isn’t the kind of guy I want my money going towards.
And definitely Kingdom Come: Deliverance. It actually sort of annoyed me how many sites that claim to care about these sorts of issues ran plenty of articles about that game while completely failing to address all the ways in which its problematic. Or even worse, the ones that presented it as “some people feel this way, while others feel that way” kind of issue while simultaneously posting guides to benefit from its sudden popularity. Everything surrounding that game is just gross.
Anyway, in most of these situations I find that it’s not necessarily the actual content of the game that pushes me away, it’s almost always how the creators defend that content. I fully get that sometimes you create something that betrays your own areas of ignorance in ways you couldn’t anticipate, and I’m sympathetic to the fact that we all have issues we need to be working on. If you just offer a genuine apology and work to correct however your beliefs manifested themselves in your game, I’m willing to give you another shot. But these guys almost always take the criticism personally, lash out at those calling them out, and double down on whatever toxic behavior got them into the situation in the first place. And I just don’t want to participate in that.
My personal rule on irony and shock value s: once it has been stripped away by time and shifting context, is it still awesome?
Mel Brooks created The Producers as a weapon against fascism.
The Producers uses Hitler to get folks in the door, but then MERCILESSLY mocks him and the notion of fascism. Never ONCE in the text of that movie does hitler ever look like a good or worthy human being. Only as a lost ideal that, when translated to reality, looks sad and pathetic. An observer from the future watching the movie would see a story of something ill advised and awful, and a clear mockery of those who seek to profit from the ignorance and fear of others.
Wolfenstein 2 uses Hitler in a similar way but adds a note of terror. The Hitler that shows up in Wolfenstein is no longer in control of himself, but demands that everyone around him act as if he is. Because the terrifying thing is that, though he cannot control himself, he has full control over others – the juxtaposition of power and frailty, horror and comedy – shows exactly what hitler was and is. The game also gives you an achievement for killing him, and then immediately kills you afterwards. Stripped of context, an anthropologist could use this to reconstruct EXACTLY what Hitler is and was.
And then there’s Secret Hitler. If I found a copy of Secret Hitler in a bunker beneath the smoking Ruins of America, I would be able to tell that Fascists were something that some people didn’t like, were good at being hidden, and wanted to get someone named Hitler into power and that that was how you win.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
We still laugh about this shit a year later and I can no longer think about J Blow without imagining him as some absurd anime villain convinced his dumb bullshit is the most important endeavor the human race has ever undertook lol
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
