Are video game devs inherently dirty commies, or did blackrock make them that way?

[Tangerine]

Weird obsession with me

This is also very feminine.

Delaying responding in kind to a hostile comment is the mark of personal power and virtue. But rabid plebs such as @logincrash @Kalarion @Bertram_Tung @Tangerine consider it insufficiently alpha. Tell me you are in a different social class without telling me.

Weird obsession with me

[Norfleet]

It's the centerpiece of the game and players are forced to engage in it

I wouldn't call it the centerpiece, but rather, ubiquitous background noise. Unlike Failguard, the player isn't lectured and then forced to affirm it: You can just kill everyone.

[weaselus]

Posting reaction images with people more attractive than you like this 3/10 bearded doofus is also a mark of the lower class.

[logincrash]

Posting reaction images with people more attractive than you like this 3/10 bearded doofus is also a mark of the lower class.

Could you put more wontons in the soup, please?

[Segata]

Posting reaction images with people more attractive than you like this 3/10 bearded doofus is also a mark of the lower class.

Delaying responding in kind to a hostile comment is the mark of personal power and virtue. But rabid plebs such as @logincrash @Kalarion @Bertram_Tung @Tangerine consider it insufficiently alpha. Tell me you are in a different social class without telling me.

I hope rusty reads this bro

[weaselus]

Posting reaction images with people more attractive than you like this 3/10 bearded doofus is also a mark of the lower class.

Could you put more wontons in the soup, please?

Dumbass.

[rusty_shackleford]

hehe funny cat image that looks like my cat

[weaselus]

Posting reaction images with people more attractive than you like this 3/10 bearded doofus is also a mark of the lower class.

Delaying responding in kind to a hostile comment is the mark of personal power and virtue. But rabid plebs such as @logincrash @Kalarion @Bertram_Tung @Tangerine consider it insufficiently alpha. Tell me you are in a different social class without telling me.

I hope rusty reads this bro

We need to move away from the three-decade psyop that being a "competitive" kid is a virtue. "My kid is very competitive." Good goy ready to fight your fellow goy. You show him!

[Tangerine]

Insecure middle class fat kid confirmed.

[weaselus]

Insecure middle class fat kid confirmed.

Combining weak takes with maximum obnoxiousness. Violence will cure you.

[Tangerine]

Insecure middle class fat kid confirmed.

Combining weak takes with maximum obnoxiousness. Violence will cure you.

Being an internet tough guy is aristocratic behavior.

[weaselus]

Being an aggressive midwit is herd behavior.

[Tangerine]

Agreed. You should stop doing it.

[rusty_shackleford]

buy hq platinum

[WhiteShark]

Let's change the topic: Are video game devs inherently dirty commies, or did blackrock make them that way?

[Bertram_Tung]

Weird obsession with me

This is also very feminine.

Delaying responding in kind to a hostile comment is the mark of personal power and virtue. But rabid plebs such as @logincrash @Kalarion @Bertram_Tung @Tangerine consider it insufficiently alpha. Tell me you are in a different social class without telling me.

hahahahahahaha

[Oyster Sauce]

Cool website for everybody to look at

https://gamecompanies.com/map

[Magick]

Let's change the topic: Are video game devs inherently dirty commies, or did blackrock make them that way?

I think if Rusty's argument was FULLY (I'll accept partially) correct, that "most/all game devs were always libfags and it was ONLY censors (publishers) who stopped censoring", then you'd have seen more low budget, smaller studio / indie games be completely full of flaming faggotry, back then. You'd expect only the bigger budget ones with strong publishers to be based / neutral.

I know from personal experience that isn't true. While small / indie projects have always (naturally) been beds of experimentation (solo projects / small teams can easily follow personal visions rather than profit), I don't recall the majority of them being full of gay ****. Something changed over time, AND there's been a big corporate push.

If anything nowadays when everything IS full of gay ****, it's the few smaller studios and indies that are the only things worth playing. Because the "censors" (especially those beholden to funding terms...) are now doing the opposite of what Rusty says (correctly in some instances), that they were doing back then. (2000s era and earlier).


Also the likes of Blackrock wouldn't be saying it to your face that they ARE doing what they're doing, lol...

[AmericanMonarchist]

That's not the case for everything else though. The silly ****** above is wrong. Rusty I've personally sat in the corporate meetings and experienced with my own **** eyes and ears the heads-of declaring that we HAVE to implement (specifically) "ESG" policies in everything blabla, AND force client companies (that mine invests in, being a middle-man money-funneler) to comply with such standards and prove they do so, else they don't get the investment. They also displayed how that same funding originally flows in from the likes of Blackrock etc., and has those conditions attached.

How much would I have to pay you to make a game about ********?

Are we talking hypothetically or are you going to share some of those platinum bucks? I am willing to sell out my creativity for $100,000 + expenses. $250,000 and I will make a game portraying Robespierre as the hero France needed against the ****, dirty, monarchists.

Everyone has a price where they will find a way to justify selling out. If you waved a check in my face to make Rusty's Big ****** Adventure then I can start the justification process. I mean, what is one more pozzed game in a sea of pozzed games if it gives me a nice nest egg? I say that as a very political person. Some suit who cares about green more than red or blue will take a much smaller check.

[Oyster Sauce]

That's not the case for everything else though. The silly ****** above is wrong. Rusty I've personally sat in the corporate meetings and experienced with my own **** eyes and ears the heads-of declaring that we HAVE to implement (specifically) "ESG" policies in everything blabla, AND force client companies (that mine invests in, being a middle-man money-funneler) to comply with such standards and prove they do so, else they don't get the investment. They also displayed how that same funding originally flows in from the likes of Blackrock etc., and has those conditions attached.

How much would I have to pay you to make a game about ********?

Are we talking hypothetically or are you going to share some of those platinum bucks? I am willing to sell out my creativity for $100,000 + expenses. $250,000 and I will make a game portraying Robespierre as the hero France needed against the ****, dirty, monarchists.

Everyone has a price where they will find a way to justify selling out. If you waved a check in my face to make Rusty's Big ****** Adventure then I can start the justification process. I mean, what is one more pozzed game in a sea of pozzed games if it gives me a nice nest egg? I say that as a very political person. Some suit who cares about green more than red or blue will take a much smaller check.

How much for you to suck a ****?

[AmericanMonarchist]

How much would I have to pay you to make a game about ********?

Are we talking hypothetically or are you going to share some of those platinum bucks? I am willing to sell out my creativity for $100,000 + expenses. $250,000 and I will make a game portraying Robespierre as the hero France needed against the ****, dirty, monarchists.

Everyone has a price where they will find a way to justify selling out. If you waved a check in my face to make Rusty's Big ****** Adventure then I can start the justification process. I mean, what is one more pozzed game in a sea of pozzed games if it gives me a nice nest egg? I say that as a very political person. Some suit who cares about green more than red or blue will take a much smaller check.

How much for you to suck a ****?

A king sitting in Washington, leftists exiled to Venezuela, Amerinds repatriated to Mongolia, Africans repatriated to Africa, and a small manor out in the countryside. If western civilization can be saved by closing my eyes and thinking of Columbia, then what kind of person would I be if I refused?

[Roguey]

Can you guys claiming this is a top-down corporate push even name more than a single digit number of chud devs? Because all the big names from the 80s on I can think of are liberals. You'll get a rare unorthodox exception here and there like Sandy Petersen (the man with a leaky memory https://x.com/search?q=sandy from:romero&f=live)

[asf]

gay

[Magick]

If you waved a check in my face to make Rusty's Big ****** Adventure then I can start the justification process.

Just rename the forum.

Can you guys claiming this is a top-down corporate push even name more than a single digit number of chud devs? Because all the big names from the 80s on I can think of are liberals. You'll get a rare unorthodox exception here and there like Sandy Petersen (the man with a leaky memory https://x.com/search?q=sandy from:romero&f=live)

Focusing on named/well known individuals first rather than studios first, is always going to lead you to *******. Because where do you mainly hear about them? Social media. What type of person is the most vocal on social media?

[adad]

What type of person is the most vocal on social media?

I hate this misconception that leftists are somehow more vocal and passionate and thus they have more success. No, leftists are crybaby ******* that get bullied off every single website that allows right-wingers to say half of the things they would have been able to say without censorship. How many leftists are there in this forum? Left-wing sites ban right-wingers, while right-wing sites have zero need to ban left-wingers because all of them get bullied off the site regardless. Understand the difference, right-wingers never get bullied off of left-wing circles, they only get banned, and that is because the same people that have bought off all gaming industries to make them feminine and gay, have done the same with social media. These (((elites))) are the only passionate and capable part of the entire leftist movement. The median leftist is far, far more useless and pathetic than you give him credit for. Xe is like a child with a gun. You will never lose against the child because he was stronger or smarter or better than you in any percievable way. You might however lose because the child had a gun and you didn't. Acknowledge that you lost to the people who gave the children guns. Never acknowledge that you lost to children, as it is utterly untrue.

[Roguey]

Focusing on named/well known individuals first rather than studios first, is always going to lead you to *******. Because where do you mainly hear about them? Social media. What type of person is the most vocal on social media?

In the 90s and 00s they weren't posting on social media, they were hanging out in forums.

[rusty_shackleford]

Focusing on named/well known individuals first rather than studios first, is always going to lead you to *******. Because where do you mainly hear about them? Social media. What type of person is the most vocal on social media?

In the 90s and 00s they weren't posting on social media, they were hanging out in forums.

many of them weren't ideologically captured in the 90s and 00s, you know this


(This is Joshua Sawyer for those unaware)

[Roguey]

many of them weren't ideologically captured in the 90s and 00s, you know this


(This is Joshua Sawyer for those unaware)

Yeah he became even more ******** economically to fit in with the new kids, but he was always socially liberal. From 2011 http://twofoldsilence.diogenes-lamp.inf ... lized.html

E3 was held this week in Los Angeles. Among the myriad games shown at the convention was a "reboot" of the Tomb Raider franchise. In both the CG trailer and gameplay demonstration, the series' central protagonist, Lara Croft, is presented in a fashion that is distinctly different from earlier titles in the series. Her new appearance is more realistic, her physical and emotional reactions to injury and danger are more fragile, and in general she comes across as more human, less superhuman.

Whether this is a good or bad shift for the franchise, I have seen a sizable amount of gamer (and developer) scrutiny directed at the changes. The attention goes beyond what is typical for changes to the main character of a franchise (cf. reactions to Dante's redesign in Ninja Theory's DmC) because Lara Croft is a rare thing in video games: a high profile female protagonist. Because most console gamers are male, most game developers are male, and most game protagonists are male, successful female protagonists draw an inordinate amount of attention.

A good portion of the discussions I've seen have focused on Lara as a representation of women and on how female gamers will react to Lara's new design: her reduced physical strength, her physical brawls with intimidating men groping at her, and virtually everything that could relate to her attractiveness. Though women make up pretty darn close to half of our world's population, they are still largely under-represented in games and in the online gamer community. This marginalization, whether actively caused or passively continued, means that many people will hold individuals of the marginalized group up as representatives of that group. Not many people debate Marcus Fenix's value as a representative of Caucasian male protagonists in video games because he's one of hundreds that cover a range including Guybrush Threepwood, Mario, Alan Wake, and Cloud Strife. Whatever type of Caucasian male you like (assuming you like playing as a Caucasian male) is there for you somewhere. Go hog wild.

Individuals often express this process of comparison and criticism in relation to an individual's expectations of normativity and how a character should relate to the individual's normative standards. The individual does not judge the validity of the character primarily on its representation as a human being (i.e. simply as a realized, believable character), but on its representation of the marginalized classes people associate with it. Of course, this is an impossible standard for any character to meet: despite normativity being established through social interaction, the standards are still understood and judged by individuals.

Though this process happens with minority groups in real-life professions constantly (e.g. female firefighters, Muslim American politicians), audiences often don't see their expectations of characters meeting normative standards as critically flawed because characters are fictitious, the products of one or more writers and the actors who portray them. Audiences believe that it is not only possible, but an admirable goal for writers to meet their particular normative standards.

This brings me to my own experience with normative audience expectations of a character in a marginalized group: Arcade Gannon. Arcade is a companion I wrote for Fallout: New Vegas. In addition to being a Caucasian male, a doctor, and a swell guy, Arcade is also gay. Though Arcade has no more than five lines out of several hundred that relate to his sexuality (and even those are, at most, strong implications), players have given more attention to his sexuality than any other aspect of his character. Perhaps the most heated discussions were generated by an article Jim Sterling wrote titled Homosexuality and Fallout: New Vegas: A gay marriage made in gay Heaven. At the heart of the debate was Jim's assertion that Arcade was a great gay character because his sexuality is so downplayed, so "unremarkable". Internet posters far and wide both supported and contested this view, often explicitly stating their preferences for how gay characters should be portrayed. Like Lara Croft's sex, Arcade Gannon's sexuality dominated the definition and discussion of his character.

The obvious problem is that no character can meet every individual's expectations of how a group should be represented. Despite this, as long as a group is significantly marginalized among characters in media, whether due to simple omission or active exclusion, audiences will continue to turn rare specimens into exemplars. So, what should we do? I think that writers (game or otherwise) are already on the right track, but should continue to do the following:

* Represent marginalized groups when sensible. Diversity helps broaden the appeal of our media, can add interesting dimensions to thematic exploration, and in some cases may even generate themes that would otherwise go unexplored.
* Consider your audience, but remember that they don't have one voice and they aren't all loud. We write, broadly, to entertain. Under that expansive canopy, we direct our efforts toward specific groups. It's a little dehumanizing to reduce them to demographics, but still, we aren't writing for everyone. It's our job to be the arbiter of propriety among them.
* Write good characters. It's important for all characters, but it's especially important for a character drawing inordinate audience attention because she's an Asian lesbian Muslim. Audiences perceive a character as having depth if the various competing aspects of its personality resonate believably with each other, with the story, and with the themes you're trying to explore. This also applies in comedy, where a writer's temptation to use minority association as a punchline is often high.
* Understand and accept that we cannot write the Perfect X to meet all fan expectations of X. The best we can do is continue to broaden the margins of the marginalized, provide enough nuanced X characters that there's no need for any individual to stand in for the whole group.

Though it may be a long time before we see as many female protagonists as male protagonists -- and we may never see a high percentage of gay, black, or transgendered characters -- we can hopefully reach the point where audiences discuss these various descriptors and associations within the context of the story and its themes. When we get to that point, audiences will see them as more than just Platonic forms struggling to escape from yesterday's margins.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I don't think so. People would be buying them more if that were true.

have you heard of this game called Baldur's Gate 3 (2023)

I think it was an outlier: untapped prestigious legacy IP + long, iterative early-access dev cycle + massive hype and viral memes + perfect market timing + cross-generational nostalgia + official D&D license/cultural legitimacy + influencer/streamer amplification + perceived lack of moralizing + genre scarcity (high-fidelity, big-budget tactical CRPG).

It had a lot going for it. By comparison, the vast majority of woke games have been failing miserably.

I disagree with Baldur's Gate (1 and 2) being a "prestigious legacy IP" and "cross-generational nostalgia". Before BG3, Baldur's Gate was something I had seen spoken of mostly as trivia rather than as a fond cultural memory like Final Fantasy. Lots of people on forums, on blogs, lots of people on reddit or 4chan or Youtube comments sections and so on talked about how they had played Playstation Final Fantasy (7 through 10). And I also saw that a lot of people were discovering classic Final Fantasy years later. I know lots of people who had played FF. But I saw nowhere near as much beloved talk about Western WRPGs of the same time period, and it did not seem to have long legs. There would be occasionally mention of KotoR, but it seems to me that WRPGs don't become really popular until Mass Effect/Skyrim/Witcher, which a lot of people do have a fondness for. It always seemed to me that BG was only brought up in internet history trivia like in reviews or in youtube videos rather than something that a lot of people had played and was really beloved. And then when you look at sales, FF games were selling 10+ million copies each.

I don't think D&D is that big either. People have heard of it, but I never knew anyone in real life who had read the books or played tabletop D&D or played the old videogames.

I think the old Nintendo of American President Reggie (in regards to Operation Rainfall) was correct when he said that you have to beware niche, vocal cult fandoms that try to make something out to be more popular than it actually is when you are considering what to sink a lot of money into developing, localizing, and promoting.



I'd attribute BG3's popularity to:

1. it being a high production value, high fidelity command based party RPG in a time where there is a dearth of such games. It had been many years since FF13 and Dragon Age had come out. There are lots of command based JRPGs and Chinese gachas, but they have an anime aesthetic that doesn't appeal to everyone (and was being sandbagged for nearly 15 to 20 years by Westerners). The only other high production value WRPGs like WoW, Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Kingdom Come, etc, are action games where you control a single character.

2. the early access led to good word of mouth. Before BG3 had released, I was hearing on some discords I was in that people who I thought had good opinions were saying good things about it, so therefore it was put on my radar as something to pay attention to. And I know from the Star Citizen kickstarter how having a group of invested superfans who sink money into your game and religious follow every update will evangelize your game. (This overlaps with fandoms in general being secular religions revolving around a product. Live service games like MMOs and kickstarters seem to be very good at cultivating this behavior). Having that core group of evangelists might become a foundation or a launching point for good word of mouth.

3. The game had no negative brand reputation going into it. It seems that people have soured on a lot of the historically big RPG devs and franchises. A lot of Final Fantasy fans became discontent with the franchise with games 10 through 13, and then 15 being an action game was the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of people, and now we have reached the point where people have written off the franchise and FF16 only sold 3 million copies instead of 10+ million copies like in the days of yore. (Though a lot of this had to do with the many years between releases, so the franchise hasn't been bringing in newblood to replace oldtimers losing interest). It became popular for people to declare that they were deleting their Blizzard account after Blitzchung and the mythical lawsuit. People did not like Dragon Age 2 and 3, and Mass Effect 4 was infamous. CDProjekt Red enjoyed a few years of being "the good boy" after Witcher 3's release and has since fallen from grace. Once acclaimed game directors coming back to make a mediocre overdue game via kickstarter like Star Citizen, Shroud of the Avatar, Mighty No. 9, etc, became a joke.

In contrast, there was no bad stigma going into BG3. No one had really played BG1 and 2, and if they did there was nothing really bad to say about them. I had only seen a handful of people on forums say that they had played DOS2, and they didn't have anything really bad to say about it. Larian was not popularly hated. Tangentially, WotC was popularly hated due to their wokeness and the license thing, but that seemed to have been separated from how the BG3 videogame was perceived.

4. The videogame is overall good and fun on a moment to moment basis.

[rusty_shackleford]

The idea that brand recognition helped BG3 is an incredibly big cope I've seen repeated a lot. D&D was effectively a dead name in video games, BG games are too old to have moved any significant number of copies. Perhaps it's people not understanding just how many copies BG3 sold?

A well-liked developer made a game that didn't run like ****, is fairly fun to play, doesn't actively insult the player's intelligence, and isn't trying to nickel and dime you with DLC/cosmetics/etc.,
Wow, I can't imagine why it sold well.