I suppose so. You’re also correct about the power of escapism. It’s just disappointing behaviour to see in groups known for their intelligence whose once-despised interests now define large swaths of global culture and form the basis of the modern economy.
Afraid so…
The media cons get the most overt problems, but even the literary SF cons have been swamped in sexual harassment and assault.
It’s always been there, but it’s only in the last few years that the cons have been forced to take it seriously.
And, of course, Bradley and Breen.
The established SFF scene is hyper-toxic, and probably requires a rebuild from the ground up. Fandom delenda est.
This is a good point, #BlackLivesMatter was created in July 2013, but didn’t take off until November 2014.
Maybe go as a friendly, monocled panda? Just throwin’ that out there.
I do have the monocle
Maybe not your neighborhood games store or comic shop, but my FLGS and comic shop has been welcoming to everyone for a long time.
But I totally get what you’re saying. In my experience Comic shops are more likely to be skeezy than gaming stores.
Online games, too. After a few outstanding incidents of jackholery and driving trollies, a lot of people in the online game I used to play said “I’m not okay with paying to be someone else’s content.”
Well they were initially criticized for using the “Aug lives matter” slogan in an ad campaign at a point in time where black lives matter was heavily in the news. Came off as a follow on marketing campaign that minimized and sought to take advantage of an important issue. Especially since “Aug lives matter” barely features in the game. Very much a “too soon” kind of thing.
Now they’re being criticized because their response to that criticism was to shrug it off with “we thought of that before it was cool”.
It certainly wasn’t subtle. And it suffered from that whole scifi/fantasy thing there the heavy-handed allegory for racism weirdly replaces actual racism and serves to and there by down plays or erases actual racism and/minorities. Your in a near future world that supposedly follows on directly from our current state of affairs. And somehow there’s no actual racism, ethnic strife, or weirdness from real world religions? It’s all conveniently been replaced by these new bigotries and groups with no explicit ties to race nationality or religion? As if that’s more realistic. And carries more meaning. And is more grittily realistic. And makes the case better than. All those people with shitty Augs packed into ghettos being from real world oppressed groups while all the pretty white (and Chinese!) people having classy augs and freedom of movement having anything to do with race, social class etc. Rather than being coincidence.
It tried hard and came close to doing something interesting. But it seemed to miss it’s own point thematically.
But I don’t think they were ever criticized for making the commentary. Certainly for that commentary not working. And for it making very little point besides racism bad as bluntly as possible. The clear, obvious allusions to black lives matter seemed to primarily be something played up in the marketing. I don’t remember it appearing much in the game aside from some graffiti and signage in the backgrounds in a few sequences. Though the plot features protests and rioting. Very much not a thing overall. Some of the marketing seemed to be trying to explicitly tie it to BLM, make the game topical and relevant. That came off as crass. And they were criticized, I think rightly, for that.
I never played the follow up, i played the previous title which was excellent. I was looking forward to the sequel but looking at the promos and trailers i just got the impression that it just didn’t seem interesting. When the reviews panned the game for being unfinished and short i passed, which is a shame because i quite like the setting and themes.
I still feel that the series has a lot of promise and potential, should they do a follow up that has something meaningful to say beyond looking flashy i would be all in.
Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, for example.
Plenty of other good stuff in the underground comic scene, too.
I am being a bit harsh for effect. The first games store I went to was very welcoming. I still fondly remember joining a summer D&D club there in the early 1980s where there were just as many girls as boys participating.
When that one closed, though, I moved on briefly to another local store that had an unstated and (due to the nature of the owner) particularly weird “girls not welcome” vibe (apparently this was an improvement on the attitude of the previous ownership). Since then I’ve seen and heard about even worse places, where staff and patrons regularly join in on the toxic misogyny and racism. Unfortunately, those kinds of stores seemed to be the rule rather than the exception, especially when it came to women.
It was actually pretty damn good. I don’t tend to pay much attention to early reviews of games like this. Big rpgs, open world stuff etc. The rush to publication tends to see reviewers rushing through the “main” plot and missing a lot. Which leads to complaints of too small or not enough content. Later reviews tend to be able to dig into it more and better cover everything. Both games in the dishonored series ran into similar complaints in the first run of reviews. Whereas latter coverage was far, far more positive. Mankind divided has an 84 ATM on metacritic. Which is pretty good, And it’s probably being skewed by negative early reviews. Many of which were negative due to bugs and publisher weird.
It’s generally better written than the previous outing. With more compelling characters (both in that they’re more compelling and there are more of them). Mechanically it’s awesome. Level design is quite a bit more inventive than human revolution. The hubs are bigger, denser and more varied. And there’s a lot more leeway in terms of how you deal with things and move about the world. The main storyline is shortish in terms of number of missions. But many of them are pretty dense so they’re actually pretty time consuming. And there’s a lot less of the "here is some misremembered freshman level philosophy and common misunderstandings of science make your choice now! " dynamic from human revolution.
It’s got some issues. The launch was buggy. And the game was certainly unfinished in that regard. It’s saddled with a lot of bullshit big publisher micro transactions, social, And multi-player horse shit that doesn’t fit in at all.
And there’s that big thematic problem. Visually and setting wise there are obvious intimations of serious class, social, and racial/ethnic decides. The poor people, criminals, and what have with their broken mods are more often “ethnic”, more often from Third World or developing countries. They have junky construction grade or older augs that they struggle to maintain or gain access to medical support for. The pretty Euro protagonist with political and law enforcement connections gets top grade mods, more anti rejection drugs then he’d ever need, And travel papers. There’s talk of refugees and workers being exploited by big tech companies.
So you’ve got this setting that clearly designed and ready made for some serious social commentary. And then all of the social commentary is off put onto a blunt as hell “metaphor” where augs stand in for all those people and dynamics who are visibly present in the game. And it just all sort of goes nowhere. I dunno if they chickened out, or there was a serious misunderstanding between the creative team and whoever was running the show. It’s quite frustrating.
The blunt ending certainly is blunt. Less a cliffhanger than things just sort of ending. But supposedly that was deliberate rather than the game being literally unfinished. And it doesn’t read as unfinished and cut in the game here. The plan was to get a very direct sequel out very quickly using the same engine and what have. And the technical end was definitely designed with more powerful future hardware in mind. That now seems to have been cancelled due to the poor reaction to the game and disappointing sales. Which upsets me.
Oh, here’s today’s example of a missing stair in geek fandom:
It’s true, but we can break the cycle…
I fluv that man; truly.
Yes, that was a brilliant and heartfelt speech, and your point is well made; the cycle can be broken… but it takes a lot of time, and hard work, and sadly, therein lies the problem for many people.
Seen this one?
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