Cyberpunk 2077

[Roderick]

[I_smell]

Yeah I was talking about Human Revolution before. I didn't know if people actually used that sub-header.

 

17 hours ago, Gormongous said:

 

I think that is the core of cyberpunk, at least in my experience? The problem, as demonstrated by steampunk, is that there's a contingent of people who are just there for the aesthetic, rather than the themes that dictate those aesthetics. So many people who "like" cyberpunk actually just like high technology, violence, and super-beefy dudes. The themes of human commodification and atomization, societal and cultural alienation, and the ubiquity of corporate control in most classic works of cyperpunk are, at best, adjuncts to the fantasy of being a badass with a big gun to such people. If those themes go missing or are subsumed in more overt pandering, they won't complain.

 

Oh phew I'm glad people get where I'm coming from. I had a conversation in the office today where I felt very guilty for dumping on everyone's most anticipated game.

 

These characters are talking about motherfucker this and bitch that, but I just want a history lesson on this "Euro-Dollar" concept! 

[osmosisch]

6 hours ago, Roderick said:

Mmmmmm classic. Such a good game.

[eot]

7 hours ago, I_smell said:

Yeah I was talking about Human Revolution before. I didn't know if people actually used that sub-header.

For me "Deus Ex" is always the original

[Cordeos]

Interesting article about the politics & assumptions in 2020 and on display in the demo for 2077

 

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2018/09/13/cyberpunk-2077-doesnt-have-to-be-progressive-but-its-when-the-genre-is-most-exciting

[dium]

I was being willingly naive about it because I really like The Witcher games (all of them), and I really wanted to fall in love with a cyberpunk game. But the marketing and PR departments of CD Projekt companies have made it impossible to ignore that they're a really quite regressive group.

[TychoCelchuuu]

12 hours ago, dium said:

I was being willingly naive about it because I really like The Witcher games (all of them), and I really wanted to fall in love with a cyberpunk game. But the marketing and PR departments of CD Projekt companies have made it impossible to ignore that they're a really quite regressive group.

They fuck up so badly in so many ways. Like, they're bad at PR (remember the whole "we're shutting down GOG" shit?) and they just can't stop being tremendously transphobic at every possible opportunity, including opportunities they invent for themselves just to fuck up when there was no reason to fuck up in the first place! And what's better they always just make it worse with their "apologies." Like I mean come on this would be a bad look for Linus Torvalds, and it's coming from the PR team? Is there really nobody in Eastern Europe who you can find to run your twitter account better than this?

[dium]

Yeah, the faux-apologies might as well be them doubling-down. I can no longer imagine this isn't intentional; they can't find someone "better" to run their twitter accounts because they're getting the reaction they want from the people they care about.

I'm a shameless consumer slut, so there's a way I might overlook all this (and all the horrible labor practices that I really shouldn't be overlooking) and still play this game. And that's if, by some surprising twist, the release version has extensive positive trans representation. But this is a fantastical hypothetical situation that will never happen: for one, we'd have seen at least some evidence of it in the preview footage by now. And even a little positive trans rep would piss off rightist lifestyle-gamers royally, and it's pretty obvious that's the group CDP cares about the very most.

[Henke]

In case anyone else is as confused as I was about what these last few posts are about, here: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/10/24/gog-makes-another-offensive-tweet-offers-non-apology/

 

Yeah this sucks. The original Cyberpunk tweet I could chalk up as just a thoughtless joke, but two of these from the same wider organization is a worrying trend. Despite being quite big, CD Project Red and GOG nevertheless had this image of scrappy good-guy underdog to bigger western developers and Steam, but this is really tarnishing that image. :|

[I_smell]

I feel like that's the 100th time I've seen a corporation co-opt a protest hashtag to sell cheeseburgers or something.

 

Why do these community managers keep doing it!? Do they not read the news, or meet up and chat to each other, or anything? Does every company just hire some random kid on 4chan to make funny parody posts of trending topics? We should all instinctively know to slide this tweet idea aside by now.

[TychoCelchuuu]

In this case it's because vast swathes of hardcore gamers are bigots, including the community manager himself, who I guess is a gamergator from what I've heard. If you hire gamers to do gamer things, then you'll get gamer things, bigotry and all!

[Gormongous]

I think there's a "silent majority" element to it, as well, as there is to most reactionary bigotry since at least the Goldwater and Nixon years. These racists, homophobes, and transphobes think that the general public (and especially the gaming public) overwhelmingly think that race, sexuality, and gender issues are a ridiculous fad and therefore they're only offending a hundredth of a percent of the people who'll view Cyberpunk 2077 tweets (and most of them are faking that offense because... reasons). That entire population is contained to Tumblr and a few SJW-aligned gaming sites, and the rest of the people who see the tweet probably think it's really funny but they're afraid to speak up. It's all a sick, self-reinforcing worldview.

[Vainamoinen]

The tweet was made by the very same guy who made the gamergate tweet back in July. Apparently back then, the GOG suits failed to tell new guy that his job isn't to make GOG look like reactionary shitheads, so, he did this.

 

Disclaimer: I thought the guy did a fairly good job moderating the GOG forums, and he wasn't afraid to piss off the outraged reactionaries, which seem to amass in this particular forum like fruit flies on a two week old corpse.

 

GOG has fired him in the meantime – which led to a hilarious 'support group' forming on their forums. Part of those supporters still pretend to think that the provocation was accidental, others fully acknowledge it was a planned provocation, but think of it as 'not a big deal'.

 

I don't condone the firing, but then again, he was really crappy at this particular part of his job. It was strike two and I wouldn't have let him continue after strike one.