The Last of Us

Szlia said:

There is a lot to unpack here. First there is a false equivalence : people deciding to not play a game because there is something they find objectionable in it (Not enough diversity ! Too much diversity !), is not the same as academics analyzing a game and commenting it through the lens of gender and/or racial representations (something that has been done in other media for decades). Deciding before hand that some story is not one you want to experience (which is obviously anyone's prerogative) is not the same as analyzing a story and finding it lacking in some aspects that are your interests. So no, saying "I am not playing this game because of this gender ambiguous character" is not in the same category as saying "Games should do a better work when it comes to diversity and representations."

Then, trying to paint a gut reaction of rejection as some sort of rebellion against "creators and activists colluding to appropriate artistic platforms for propaganda" would be pretty laughable if this line of thought was not the one used to ban "gay propaganda" in Putin's Russia or forbid gender studies in Orban's Hungary. Not only are global cultural industries that are split in countless entities and sub-groups pretty much immune from the paranoid fantasy of some sort of dogma imposed on all creations, but, first and foremost, it's not the end goal of the Druckmanns and the Sarkeesians of the world (the Putins and the Orbans on the other hand...). People pushing for more diversity and better representations in video games and creators that find merit in their plight are not plotting the takeover of a medium. They are not in the business of preventing others to tell whatever story they want, they are simply working on what they see as the maturation of the medium based on the notion that there is much to gain for the stories told in video games to not be isolated from the world in which they are told. Obviously, trying to do that is not a guarantee that the result will be any good and people looking for pure escapist entertainment might not be interested and in fact even be deterred by narratives that explore real world themes and issues.




From my point of view this is also a false equivalence and a gross miss-characterization. The false equivalence is that while fans and academics alike are hoping games will conform to expectations they voiced, only members of one of these two groups react as if creators personally killed their dog if these hopes go unfulfilled. The idea that creators only listen to academics and never listen to fans is also, of course, absurd. Creators listen to everyone and chiefly themselves.

The gross miss-characterization is one I am also partly responsible of in this discussion : the idea that two homogeneous blocks are facing each others. Academics that focus on video games did not stumble their way there by accident. Gamers, just like readers or movie goers, have different tastes and expectations. So when a creator brings a franchise in a direction that is not the one you hoped, said creator did not "betray the fans" because there most certainly are fans that are happy about the direction taken or, at the very least, willing to be open minded about it.



On a side note, you will notice that people were pretty fast to bump this thread when it was believed the leak was caused by an employee slighted by the awful management at Naughty Dog, but now that it appears it was allowed by awful security management the thread stayed silent. Apparently, the credentials Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us use to connect to multiplayer servers can be found in the games code and be used to snoop around and, inexplicably, Naughty Dog uses the same servers to store some of their development material ! That's good for a laugh or three. Unless you are the person responsible for this at Naughty Dog that is !

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Noodleface said:

Sony is saying it wasn't Naughty Dog but "HACKERS!!!! !OMG"

I feel like that's extremely dubious. It's easy to blame a nebulous HACKER, especially since no one took fucking credit for the leak. This would also mean that the hacker found out

1) All the files needed to build t he game
2) Somehow built the entire game
3) Somehow ran it
4) Played through major portions of the game
5) The source leak mysteriously is nowhere on the internet

Color me skeptical.

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