Phil Fish takes his ball and goes home

Briareos H on 29/7/2013 at 09:06

Dethtoll dude, you totally forgot to rant about privilege against non gender-binary people.

june gloom on 29/7/2013 at 09:18

I realize you're just trying to bait me but I have to admit I don't really know enough on the topic to really discuss it, especially as pertains to games.

DDL on 29/7/2013 at 10:16

I thought it was a pretty well-nuanced rant, myself. Thanks for sharing!

Given that an awful lot of the issues you touched upon are present (and prevalent) in "the western world as a whole" rather than specifically video games (hands up who can name 5 black/female/gay CEOs, etc), I'm wondering why you focus on the gaming side quite so fiercely? Is it just because this is fundamentally a gaming forum and you don't want to dilute the message? Or because games are capable of propagating these negative stereotypes in a way other aspects of discrimination cannot?

I mean, media as a whole is pretty bad for propagating an awful lot of stereotypes (action movie black guy: choose either "skinny and mouthy" or "huge and taciturn"), so focussing on games seems oddly specific.

I admit, my personal vague standpoint is that demographic phase-change kinda 'just happens' and brings the medium along with it (i.e. more female gamers = more female game devs = more realistic representations in games), but it's certainly possible that highlighting the issue upfront and encouraging women to become game devs is more of a driving force than I give it credit for (chicken/egg issue). Affirmative approaches are inherently contentious, but they almost certainly "get you to a place you should be aiming for anyway, faster".

Either way, Castle doctrine sounds fucking awful. It also sounds like you're basically required to go rob other people to progress, which thus sounds like it can't even maintain its own silly libertarian fringe crazy logic.

On topic, count me in the "wait, who is this guy and why is this an issue" boat: I mostly get all my indie game "must play" recommendations from here (and avoid twitter like the fucking plague), so crazy indie game dev political shenanigans and twitterfests miss me entirely. Interesting links, though. Makes me feel like 'avoiding twitter like the fucking plague' is still a wise decision, certainly.

Also, I think he kinda lost auteur hipster indie game guru status the moment he started work on "my previous game, II".

demagogue on 29/7/2013 at 10:49

Just jumping in to say I'm completely for encouraging & supporting minorities & women (& people from more countries FTM) making games, not only because games are too biased towards younger white American/European hetero men and have a slanted view of the world, but for the same reason I like watching foreign movies & reading foreign books... I'm curious to see the world through perspectives a lot different than mine.

Somebody should support game-making workshops for alt groups or something... The tools are so accessible these days, but I think people just don't know what's out there.

Edit: I mean, thinking of the long term solution, I'd rather put a lot more voices on the table, all with their own slants, than to lecture any one group to cut out its own slant & be "totally independent" and expect that to work, which I'm not sure is all that possible anyway, and forced-PC or "neutrality" often ends up being worse in the end itself.

Edit2: All that said, as I recall, there actually have been activist groups before that tried to make "minority friendly games" (or whatever their cause is), but as I recall, putting aside a few exceptions I can think of, they often make games that suck (worst of all are like the flash games you see on activism sites, like Greenpeace had a flash game and some others I can think of like for developing countries or gay rights; that's what I'm thinking of), probably because they don't come from the game world into activism, but from the activism world into gaming. IMO the move needs to be made from within gamers first, and they should be legit good games & not like "well this is from a minority group so we should pretend it's good", if it's going to have any real impact.

DDL on 29/7/2013 at 11:05

That's kinda my view. Forcing the issue carries the risk of trivialising the issue (aggressively promoting content when the content isn't actually that good yet) and of generating backlash and trench-mentality in the generic status quo mindset (because it feels "threatened").
Though conversely not forcing the issue carries the risk of paving over the issue entirely and continuing with the generic status quo.

Of course in this particular field I kinda wish we could just judge a game on its merits as a game, rather than on who wrote it.

Mind you, I'm pretty much in the 'status quo' demographic (generic white educated middle-class male) so my perspective may be limited.

Thirith on 29/7/2013 at 11:29

Re: demagogue's point on diversity in gaming:

If I remember correctly, Robert Yang's "Radiator" mods for HL2 do some interesting, subtle things with homosexual characters. Nothing terribly in-your-face, though (but then any mention of Teh Gay is in-your-face to bigots). They're very much 'art games' of the kind that elicit the P word, mind you. Anyway, I think he's also said some interesting things on the topic in blog posts and interviews, but I won't be able to access most of them from work.

demagogue on 29/7/2013 at 11:37

There was another punchline I wanted to make in my last post, which is that if there's a really open field with a lot of diversity, that'd also take pressure off "white" games having to be the standard for neutrality too, I think, so they could actually go back to being true to their own vision of the world and that'd be better in the end I think.

I mean, I don't think having a white suburban perspective is bad in itself... If that's your perspective on the world, there's little sense in trying to pretend it isn't and feeling you have make a game that suits everybody. The issue for me has always been more a matter of what's out there in the market, and seeing perspectives missing, and I'd rather see the solution going in the direction of *more* games that are more different than restricting what's already there and seeing less.

I have to admit I'm that kind of classical "free speech" liberal that thinks a good starting solution is getting more speech out there to compete with the crap than restricting the crap itself.

For that matter, even a dev being an eccentric asshole is ok if they're making good games in the meantime (and we don't have to get sidetracked by their rants). I also kind of expect some people who can focus on auteur game making are going to have some egos & be ranty; it's part of the profile -- although personally I really value the modest type that's more interested in honing the perfect game than promoting themselves.

But like I said I'd rather see more games than less, even if the price for that is more crap & putting up with some measure of assholery. I'd rather let the criticism put a game in its place rather than culture-police deigning to say what games are good or bad to be made from on high.

Edit:

Quote Posted by Thirith

That game was actually one of the exceptions I was thinking about when I said "a few exceptions I can think of"... I didn't play it up though because the game itself was just ok to me; not ground-breaking but I thought it was interesting & worth playing and had some fun ideas. And the way it just had homosexuality in the background was a good way to have it, so it's a good model for that kind of thing.

DDL on 29/7/2013 at 11:40

Actually, that raises another question: games (particularly indie games) that address "minority issue X" have a tendency to make it the central issue, or at least a major point, rather than perhaps "here's a game about people doing stuff (also some of them are gay)".

I realise this is often the point, certainly, but I can't help feeling that even bioware's (frequently hilariously hamfisted) efforts come across as slightly less awkward.
"Here's your quartermaster. Also, he's gay, but this is of no relevance to the plot, really. Still, people can be gay. Deal with it"

Edit: partially ninja'd by demagogue

Thirith on 29/7/2013 at 12:56

Quote Posted by demagogue

I mean, I don't think having a white suburban perspective is bad in itself... If that's your perspective on the world, there's little sense in trying to pretend it isn't and feeling you have make a game that suits everybody.

I think that this is rarely the real issue - it's more that this white, suburban, male perspective is seen to be the norm to such an extent that people become blind to it being a perspective and not the world as it really is. There's too little self-awareness to along with the dominant mainstream perspective. Add some self-awareness and the willingness to acknowledge that there are different perspectives and yours (not as in "demagogue's", obviously) isn't the *right* one just because it happens to be dominant, and that's already a lot.

demagogue on 29/7/2013 at 13:15

Hmm, maybe I could tweak my sentence "that'd also take pressure off "white" games having to be the standard for neutrality too" into "that'd help release suburban white games from being put in the position of being some de facto neutral standard" and they could be seen as being from a perspective that's not necessarily everybody's... It's just interesting that that might have to come from outside the game itself, in people's expectations or awareness or whatever.

One of my old saws is that being forced to swallow some diversity, even if it's uncomfortable at first, is good in the long run not least because then you can look at your own background as one in a field of many that could have gone another way. That's the value I got out of studying abroad (I learned as much about America looking from the outside-in as I did Israel), and it could go for games & movies & books too.