Honestly sick of hexbear getting worked up about that post, it's literally the same kind of crap as the chud in OP but with the reactionary sentiment being hidden behind concern trolling about cottagecore aesthetics.

[–] Enjoyer_of_Games@hexbear.net 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Noone on hexbear is concerned about cottagecore aesthetics. The post is just oddly tone deaf, it's the equivalent of saying this soup is great but it would be better if it was icecream.

[–] SerialExperimentsGay@hexbear.net 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nah, that's not what is said there at all and i don't think your analogy holds any water. A disco like doesn't need the DE dead of winter depression vibe or the post soviet shock therapy wasteland grimyness to work, Esoteric Ebb has clearly proven that the gameplay can be transplanted to other settings when you have a good and prolific lead writer and a skilled art team, and that this is a viable way to create good RPGs with a very modest budget. The bright colors, the lighter tone, the emphasis on Pratchet-style comedy, that all worked perfectly for EE.

Yes, i get it, EE had shit politics compared to DE, we've had threads about that were i went into that part of the game myself, but that liberalism was not due to the setting being Pratchet style fantasy instead of magical realism in a bombed out liminal space version of Estonia. You can do good political commentary in literally any setting if you know how to take its base and superstructure apart dialectically, and EE did try to comment on fantasy racism in a postcolonial environment, it had takes on Fantasy Palestine and everything, and that could have worked as smoothly as the rest of the writing, but it was written by a Swedish socdem who thinks we should babysit 4chan nazis until they turn into nazbols so it really fell flat in that regard.

I don't see why it would be impossible to write a good disco like with the "witch searches missing cat in the alps" premise. I really don't. That critique doesn't make sense unless it is an aesthetic one that objects to doing girly stuff instead of wallowing in manpain.

[–] Enjoyer_of_Games@hexbear.net 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The point of my anology is not that icecream is bad or cannot exist, it's that it's weird to comment on soup by saying that it should be icecream.

[–] SerialExperimentsGay@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Like i've said elsewhere, i stand by the take that "i liked DE except that it's meh to play as a gross dude" is literally the most relatable criticism of DE anybody could have. And i'm not alone in that, literally any woman i have introduced to the game was like "this is amazing, it's just kinda sad the protagonist is this ultra-divorced guy".

[–] ashinadash@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Alas you still cannot say to gamers "I would rather not play as a gross dude". In fact if you say "the protag is a gross dude, not interested" about any media people will go feral. buggy-disappointed

[–] SerialExperimentsGay@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago

We have to face the fact that men are bourgeois. cindy-the-skull

[–] Enjoyer_of_Games@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I have no issue with that take. But that is only one sentence of the tweet.

The negative reaction to the tweet is that it, intentionally or not, comes off as criticizing struggling Estonian writers living in the wake of shock therapy for writing a gloomy game about the despair of post-communism instead of a saccharine apolitical game set in the west.

Why are these artists expressing themselves instead of catering to my tastes?

It's not how art works.

You cannot create a game by mixing "game concept" with "good writing" and "great design" together in a beaker. These are things that develop organically... if you're lucky.

[–] SerialExperimentsGay@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago

Eh. I agree that DE's story is inseperable from growing up as a burned-out Marxist with substance abuse issues in post-soviet Estonia, that the entire gameplay organically grew out of the material reality of being underfunded and having zero people who had worked professionally on a video game before, and that the entire project was a hair's breath away from turning into the remains of Fortress Accident that we see ingame. And i agree that this is what made DE as impactful as it ended up being. It would not be the same without these biographic and economic factors.

But recognizing and respecting that does not change the fact that i still 100% feel the tweet you have presented for our ridiculing in a thread that is actually about misogyny among G*mers. Yes, this is now my hill to die on. Buckle

DE's origin does not change the fact that "Disco like" is an actual genre now. It also does not change that the conditions DE was made under have, by sheer necessity of how the endavour was funded and staffed, produced a highly viable workflow for indie gamemaking that is not just able to, but purpose-built to function with little more than a ton of text and cool concept art, which will allow a bunch of people to make games that would not have been possible before. We have seen that this is already happening and it will happen again, that way of making games is here to stay because it is one of the rare cases where you have an economically viable way of making a finished, professional-looking game that sticks very close to its original concept.

Also, i stand by the assertion that taking the sentence "a young witch trying to solve the disappearance of her neighbor's cat in a small village in the Alps" and reading it as necessarily apolitical and saccharine is inherently misogynist. It just is, i'm sorry. If you think that stereotypically feminine things are by their very nature unserious, vapid, infantile, frivolous, removed from actual real life problems worthy of consideration and a fair target for public ridicule, you have misogyny to work through, that's such a textbook example of how patriarchy discredits femininity.

It really isn't hard to make the cat-seeking witch in the alps pitch a political game or to make it gloomy and desperate if that is so important for a true Disco like in your opinion (which it isn't, it's important for Disco Elysium, not for the genre it invented). Just look at Night in the Woods, i bet the girl who wrote that tweet loved it and it's a pretty good cosmic horror take on the death of labor and the material conditions of the working class in Appalachia, yet it is entirely told by cute cardboard cutout artwork of gay animals.

Do you think if i took that alpine setting to combine Silvia Federicci's Caliban and the Witch and Thomas Bernhardt's hatred of Austrofascism and the group psychology of social control and ostracism in small, closed-off communities with a story about the Munich Soviet Republic, the persecution of communism under Hitler and how climate change destroys glaciers and would throw a couple t4t lesbians in the mix for good measure, it would have less impact just because it features cozy artwork about teenage witches and cats? Do you think the cute witch with the collection of potted succulent plants in her plushie-filed bedroom is taking the politics out of the game? Do you think the toe beans on a cat's paw being shown on screen make a story more superficial? What if that artwork is just the needed contrast before the protagonist finds the cat in a ravine full of the bones of people that got disappeared in the 1930s? What if that is followed by the eldritch abomination that has telepathically infected the community since its inception shambling out of the last remains of the thawed glacier to set its way too large number of compound eyes on the stars for the first time in 6000 years?

And even if we leave ideas like that aside, if the presence of cute girly things is inherently apolitical and offensive to you, then it becomes a political statement again. One that clears a very low bar for when something is political, but it's not my fault when people decide that girls are so horrible that their interests must be shamed to such a degree that they must be presented as the "see, women are having really bad takes as well" counterargument in a thread about the elaborate revenge fantasies of a literal fascist.