It is perhaps no surprise to readers of my publications or those who follow my Twitter feed that I am basically what many may call a “GamerGater”. Now while I take no shame in saying I condone holding games journalism to the standard of having a consistent set of ethics and not devolve to throwing passive-aggressive ridicule at their primary demographic, I will admit that the attempt at a pejorative has thrown me for a loop with news in gaming this past month. To start from the top we have Overwatch, a game that I originally pre-ordered in anticipation for a Team Fortress 2 competitor that might actually get Valve to produce some proper content for the genre. Blizzard recently came under some PR fire after a user posted on their thread about how an unlockable pose, according to him, was against her spunky character as he found it too sexual due to seeing her posterior. Throw in some statements referring to his daughter and how this pose is bad because she might be playing the game (the shooter game where you murder people with little motive and no remorse I might clarify) and suffice it to say, the backlash was more visible than Tracer's rear in the original pose. Despite a majority response in said thread crying foul and explaining how absurd the request for the pose's removal is, the Game Director Jeff Kaplan responded with: And then he closed the thread. This unsurprisingly led to a wide variety of responses, one from a mother who was “sick of” Blizzard ignoring the fanbase “to cater to a small minority” that poses as a “very annoying voice in the gaming industry” and another from popular gaming pundit John Bain of “TotalBiscuit” fame parodying the original post in relation to an unlockable pose for the simian scientist character Winston. Though Blizzard originally took to closing threads that tried to call Kaplan out for censorship (both the pose and the thread closing), the Game Director reopened the original thread a day later and explained himself. Of course, by this time, many fans found the excuse to be “a likely story”. “Oh suuuuuuuure you had a pose already set up and ready to go. And yeah, I toooooootally bet that it is better fitting to the character and not just your pitiful damage control” folks muttered to the response. The whole kerfuffle was such a PR disaster that I myself cancelled my pre-order for the title before the new pose even came out, I found the whole event so frustratingly dumb, I didn't want to give them my money for their poor form. And then Blizzard released the new pose and, I admit it, Jeff was right. Posing like a pin-up to be plastered on a fighter plane, the new “Over the Shoulder” pose seemed to win over just about everyone with its reduced exposure that offended the original complainant's perception and its sexual overtones forming a “take that” at “the Social Justice Warriors” fans accused of this controversy to begin with. Of course, that didn't remove the fact such poor PR work was at play as a result of this but it led to some readers of gaming press to ponder that value and meaning of “censorship”. Was this good censorship? Was this even censorship? Who influenced who? Was that a good thing? All these questions, and it was about to get a whole lot more deafening when Beamdog would release downloadable content for the beloved “Baldur's Gate” in the form of “Siege of Dragonspear”. I will disclose that I personally never played the DLC or even the original game in question though the specifics of the contents of the game are not quite the focus of this editorial. To establish the issue, Beamdog released Siege of Dragonspear on their website, GOG and Steam, consumers found the expansion sported many problems, the new User Interface caused issues, the game featured some nasty bugs in general including ones that retroactively harmed non-DLC content, Steam users particularly found their mods were completely broken and everyone in general realised the multiplayer was broken too. The icing on the cake that news media latched onto and rode harder than a bullet train set in a Mad Max apocalypse was the game's rather poor writing with claims of a Mary Sue villain, a once sexually confident and manipulative Safana turned into spiteful thieving vessel hosting the living spirit of sarcasm and a reference to a meme at GamerGate's expense spouted by a character fans stated was VERY out of character were frequently mentioned by the disgruntled players. The cherry on the game writing complaints however was a transgender character named Mizhena whose development could be explained by the following image: The fact Beamdog writer Amber Scott admitted that she did not care if the writing was forced on Beamdog's forums and willingly forces as much diversity as possible probably didn't help alleviate the writing critiques. Suffice it to say, the complaints were pretty clear on reviews at GOG and Steam, “Fix these blasted bugs! Also, your writing could do with some work, BUT FIX THESE BUGS FIRST DANG IT!” If you believe Beamdog immediately made an official statement thanking fan feedback, announcing their plans to fix such game breaking bugs and address writing concerns with more context for characters to develop to such points, congratulations, you are the community manager and PR spokesman Beamdog desperately needed. Instead of such reasonable action, Beamdog's CEO Trent Oster begged on forums for positive reviews. Then moderators started shutting down threads critical of the game or of the developers misrepresenting consumer response or of the moderators shutting down threads (both on the site and on the Steam community page) and journalists joined Beamdog in blaming GamerGate for trans-phobia because (supposedly) they only hate the expansion because of the Mizhena character EXISTS (not at all because some critics felt she was written poorly with the aforementioned development of a name label). Recently, Oster has announced Beamdog's intention to address the bugs, remove the GamerGate meme reference and improve Mizhena's character, a decision that has resulted in articles sniping at GamerGate and complainants in general that were caught under the pejorative label, calling them hypocrites for their stance on censorship, including self-censorship.
The first issue however is the meaning of censorship. To summarise, censorship is generally seen as amendments to the work that goes against the vision of the product, be those edits done by an external party or by the creator in question. If one treats Beamdog's recent announcement as self-censorship this suddenly all gets really complicated, for you see, the developers of this DLC are not the exact same developers of the base game of Baldur's Gate, that award goes to BioWare. BioWare being a developer who built the title on Forgotten Realms, a very popular campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons designed by Ed Greenwood, with Dungeons & Dragons owned by Wizards of the Coast and originally crafted by the late Gary Gynax. So the question that responds to the question of “Is it censorship for Minsk's GamerGate meme reference to be removed?” is “Is it censorship for Minsk to have made a GamerGate meme reference at the expense of his original character?” Well, surely so, seeing as it goes against the creator's wish for Minsk to not be some anti-GamerGate meme spouter and Amber Scott was not the series' original writer. But wait, the current developers are mostly made of former BioWare developers who did in fact work on the original Baldur's Gate, how do we know that they didn't tell Amber that the reference fits their vision, assuming that they even had the creative vision of Baldur's Gate in the first place? And what about the Forgotten Realms themselves, do references to memes here on Earth by characters in the Forgotten Realms fit in Mr. Greenwood's vision? Seeing as he admitted to never being shown the DLC's licence for his approval, we can only presume Wizards of the Coast are the visionaries that said yes to it and then that leads into the kettle of fish that Gynax's vision probably entails (who I can only assume would object on the grounds that Minsk did not say the reference in his alignment language or something). Sadly, it is easy for censorship trails to devolve into arguments of people's testimony, what fortunately is NOT so hard to prove is bad community management, the second issue here. Perhaps a far more worrying trend from these “censorship” alerts is the growing trend for developers to silence their fan base, misrepresent their complaints as bigotry and harassment and then throw them into the lion's den of opinionated bloggers to start slandering them, when said bloggers should really be advocating for them and calling the developers to stop such childish behaviour (after all, if a blogger like myself doesn't support the consumer, who'll support me when I become a complaining consumer?). Worse still is when the dust settles, whose unblocking those users and threads with apologies for such terrible PR practice? I doubt its the developers as much as they should. It seems saddening to think that in terms of public relations and community management, developers like Blizzard and Beamdog especially were better off shutting up and doing nothing, instead they engaged and exploited the situation and their contacts, leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of just about all gamers involved. A truly shameful series of events that leaves me yearning for the days where publishers filtered everything to the point there was no communication between us and the developers, true it meant there was less chance for post-release patches and smaller gaming news outlets would have a harder time getting news without regurgitating from the big boys the publishers spoon-fed, but with cases like these, I can't help feel like we gamers are getting treated like trash.
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October 2020
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