Have you watched their stuff? Rooster Teeth is literally in the business of cracking stupid jokes. I wouldn’t place a machinima hack in the same industry as game design and production.
But regarding Peter, being soft is not his best play. It was the “this conversation doesn’t have enough ME in it” attitude that started his problems. My advice were I addressing him would be: it’s a shame you had a setback – but stop feeling sorry for yourself as soon as you possibly can, and take your career seriously by learning from this shitshow, at the very least by learning that social media drama is not a positive for you, and that these platforms have ended a lot more jobs than they have created.
Well, I hope you remember that if someone fires you out of the blue and someone mocks your hard work right afterwards. Will you defend their right to make (bad) jokes at your expense?
Kicking people when they’re down is not humor. It’s called being a jerk. A lot of people confuse the two nowadays, by the way.
Now, we don’t know the whole story. I don’t think Anet would fire them without stronger motives. This looks like a “final straw” kind of situation. But even if Fries and the other person are in the wrong (and I’m not saying they are), kicking them when they’re down is not a nice (or the right) thing to do.
The author uses way to many words to get to the point, alas, but at least there’s section summaries.
The game’s alpha playtest release included several choices of language and content that dog-whistled (spoke to in a language that they understand and that many others will not) modern-day neo-nazis.
new White Wolf chose to employ somebody with a documented history of harassment targeting women as part of a hate campaign which was met with the approval of far-right extremists, and went on to dismiss that person’s victims as ‘liars’.
When a company hires people with known outspoken political affiliations and actions, and make public statements in which they voice their support of those employees, that puts out a complicit approval of those people’s affiliations.
Fucking hell, people. White Wolf literally said to neo-nazis that they have a character type all set up and ready for them to play!
Fascinating. Adam Koebel was mentioning the other week how he found Vampire’s marketing distasteful, mainly because of its "outsider’ and patronizing messaging. Interesting.
I owned a copy of the original hardback green cover Vampire: The Masquerade rulebook, but I never got the chance to play it. My Army gaming group got invested in a Champions campaign and by the time we were ready to move on to something else, VtM had this really weird reputation for attracting unsavory folks.
I mean there also the same kind of problem with mainline Paradox games. There are certain types of unsavory folks who congregate there. Religious and ethnic nationalist zealots, your admirers of the third Reich, and many other broadly racist groups. It’s not that Paradox has actively sought out these groups to market to, as far as I am aware, but that the games themselves allow them to fulfil their fantasies.
I wanted to say, real quick, that I’m not trying to disparage people who like Vampire or White Wolf, it’s just a weird thing I noticed. Playing Vampire, and a live action Vampire game my girlfriend talked me into, were the first and only places I’ve seen people have a freak out, go outside and start cutting themselves. One girl wanted people to beat me up IRL because I killed her ghoul servant.
To be expected to a degree, in games that allow you to replay WW2, or go back further in time and change history as you see fit.
It’s dis-proportionally attractive to neo-right-wingers, I believe, because their idealised version of history is markedly different from recorded events, and because neo-right wingers tend to be, imho, overly presented %wise amongst the same demographic that play long, complicated, in depth strategy games. I mean, there aren’t many predominantly Muslim demographics playing Crusader Kings 2, so the fact that the ability exists to create an actual global spanning Caliphate in-game is largely irrelevant.
I mean, there are plenty of grannies playing Candy crush, but they don’t get to rewrite history there, and the probably wouldn’t care to anyway!
Does that make sense?
FWIW, I didn’t get any “weird” vibes at Paradox Con, although there was that one guy dressed as a German WW2 officer.
Oh certainly. I can mentally map out why these groups tend to be attracted to Paradox style games. I don’t think, however, it has anything to do with the deep mechanics. There’s nothing in a far right mentality to suggest that complex grand strategy. If anything games like Call of Duty would have more mechanically to that.
Instead it’s the ability to recreate history into their idealized form, i imagine that is he draw. Like you said, history didn’t play out the way they wanted.
And to be clear, I think they are nothing but a very small minority of players. A very loud one, yes, but nothing more.
But it always strikes me as strange when some guy flips his shit because Serbia is so hard, but insists on only playing Orthodox nations, and daring to suggest playing a catholic country will get you pilloried with a whole range of religious epitaphs. And why doesn’t Paradox cater to his desire to play an easy Orthodox nation that isn’t Russia.
Just back away slowly, and hope you don’t run across too many more of his ilk.
Vampire devs have replied on a reddit thread, it’s only fair I link their version too. Giving them the benefit of the doubt that they’re not lying (I haven’t looked into their background), that’s still some questionable marketing decisions.
