How could you guys let that Eurogamer piece go by without playing a hearty round of “Good Writing/Bad Writing?”
This kind of chipper, non-committal platitude has become as natural as breathing for Ubisoft, even as its various Clancy properties bury their expensively accessorised noses in topics like the South American narcotics trade or the ethics of torture.
He seldom suffers a piece of lethal gimcrackery to pass by without treating you to a breakdown, be it a glimpse of a Browning automatic pistol whose “flat-black finish” suggests that it was designed for military use, or the “pounding” of plasma towards lithium compounds inside a detonating nuclear bomb.
As with accounts of crime scenes in detective fiction, Clancy’s books are essentially about raising order from chaos, but where detective yarns celebrate the mess and dazzle of human intuition, Clancy’s sleekly choreographed infiltrations, airstrikes and gunfights are homages to something vast and unlovely - the resources and reach of the US war machine, its construction and mobilisation of time and space.
All righty then, for each of those sentences – that’s right, each one of those is just a single sentence – tell me: good writing or bad writing?
“Once again, the outside world is wondering how a company periodically left for dead keeps revitalizing itself. But seesawing is nothing new for Nintendo. It has long alternated between fallow periods, in which the media churns out reports of pending doom, and boom times, during which Nintendo Mania is cast as an unstoppable force.”
Ubisoft’s CEO responds to criticism that their games skirt around politics while using political imagery for marketing.
“Our goal in all the games we create, is to make people think,” he says. “We want to put them in front of questions that they don’t always ask themselves automatically. We want players to listen to different opinions and to have their own opinions. Our goal is to give all the tools to the player in order for them to think about the subjects, to be able to see things from far enough away.”
Well, it certainly made the BSG remake better. No reason it couldn’t, in principle, have made the A-Team better. But it’s also OK that you got a somewhat (I would say extremely) silly action show.
Capitalism aspire to become a “ult” ideology. If you are comunism, then capitalism want to sell you a t-shirt of che-guevara. If you are anarchist, want to sell you a t-shirt with the anarchism symbol.
Some type of conflicts sells. Other type of conflicts don’t sell. Feminism sells just now, so they sell that. Corporations want to be your friend, and to do so are going to say they believe in what you believe. Theres no money in making the customers angry.
Corporate talk is a type of Newspeak where entire concepts are removed and the right term is different the original ones. To hide reality, or better, to not face it because would cause the lost of one sale.
We are not free. We are under the boot of this type of fascism, one with good publicist.
I personally don’t need Ubisoft games to have a political message, because … please, save me from a Corporation political message, I think I have already a idea of the message, and they talk with actions more than words.
Ok, I am naive. But all of the above is fucking obvious, so I don’t think I can’t be all that wrong.
I think you misunderstood my facetious reference to our terrible’ president’s terrible remarks on Charlottesville as some sort of endorsement for corporations, instead of the indictment of coporate speak for bothsidesism it was meant to be.
One other point I’d like to make is that you shouldn’t presume that these big publishers are going to do a good job inserting politics into their games. We’re just now getting to a place where some games have a good story. Very few have a very good one, and you can count on one hand the number of games with a great story in this generation.
Why does anyone think adding politics would turn out any better? It’s not going to make the game more fun, and it’d probably make it way, way worse.
I think if someone wants to use WWII as a setting, they shouldn’t be docked points because they avoided politics. And that’s for the same reason as they shouldn’t be docked points because they decided to make their game arcadey instead of realistic. Or be cell shaded. These are all creative choices that the designers should be able to make.