Gamergate II - The Guardian comes out swinging for Sweet Baby Inc

submitted by xoenix from (theguardian.com)

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[–]Hematomato 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

So much has changed.

I was against GamerGate 1.0.

I played Depression Quest on the day it came out, before the whole brouhaha. I thought it provided a perfectly adequate amount of value for my $1.99.

I watched Anita Sarkeesian's series. I thought: yeah, she's being fair. She's saying she loves these games, she's not objecting to their right to exist, and she's pointing out tropes that definitely exist.

GamerGate 2.0 is different. You know why? Because AAA games have fucking sucked since GamerGate 1.0. They've been unplayably shitty. And the focus on "DEI first, story second, never be edgy" is exactly the reason why.

I haven't bought a AAA since Ghost of Tsushima four years ago, and even that was frankly pretty underwhelming. And that sucks! I used to love AAA titles. Now my excitement is just gone. A new Bethesda or Bioware or Valve or CD Projekt Red title used to be an event. Now it's just "Ah, more DEI shovelware that's gonna fucking suck."

If companies keep hiring consultants like SBI, the industry just has no future.

[–]xoenix[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

The industry has a future. The companies that have allowed themselves to be overrun by SJWs will just go out of business.

[–]Hematomato 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Well, for the time being, I'm pretty much only playing games made by one to three people. Games like Undertale or Rimworld or Terraria or Slay the Princess or whatever.

Ayn Rand once observed that there is nothing uglier than a sentence written by eleven people, and I'm inclined to agree. As soon as you're hiring story consultants at all, it means your story sucks and now it's only going to suck more.

[–]xoenix[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Wokeness aside, there is probably some practical maximum amount of money that can be riding on an entertainment product before every line is written by no less than 11 people.

[–]Hematomato 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It's another lesson that the moneymen need to relearn: you have to find someone brilliant, put your money behind them, and trust them to deliver.

It's not like we haven't learned it before. We were doing it constantly in the '90s. Japan still does it sometimes. "Wait, your game is about Norman Reedus throwing bags of his sweat and piss at ghosts? Well.... you're Kojima. Here's two hundred million dollars."

Try to please everyone with committee writing, and you'll just get bland, uninspired shit that pleases no one. "Woke" is not the sole industry problem here. It's that they refuse to take risks, to surprise, to challenge. All they can do is make sludge that vaguely reminds us of good games from fifteen years ago.