Random reactionary musings
Hey my fellow progressive-flavored gamemakers.
I'm lately getting a little concerned over the amount of attention we've been giving to a certain subsection of the internet that loves becoming upset at us taking marginalized voices seriously.
The thing I've come to realize is that we're not really the audience of GG-eske outrage. It's a community meta-game that these people are playing as to gain admiration and respect in their own subculture. A Let's Play (We're Angry), if you will. The content of our products is irrelevant - they'll latch onto anything that is a deviation from their established normality (judging the call-to-action threads dominating their fora). Beamdog's 'crime' was a one-line dialogue from a minor NPC FFS.
Knowing this, I feel we're engaging this negativity too much. Spending more time assuring each other how stupid these people are, rather than talking about our productions or our insights or what makes games fun for us. There is a whole slew of games with interesting mechanics and fascinating approaches that we don't hear about, in favour of spending energy typing up thinkpieces about things we essentially already agree with each other on. Worse, the victims are making cool stuff - but we're more talking about their woes than their work.
I also feel we're less talking about how to achieve progressive goals and more talking about people attacking us for trying so. Our discussions keep circling around and around, never really breaching the surface because we keep letting ourselves be interrupted.
That said, we should support the people falling victim to this insanity. Absolutely. We should criticize the culture feeding this shit to its adherents. We should criticize the companies tolerating this insanity.But we shouldn't *all* fall victim to this insanity. We shouldn't let GG-eskes dictate the discourse in our hobby/job.
I'm absolutely open for being wrong*. And I understand & share the need to see others validate your bad feelings about something. But much like how representation is more than just "oh, but my setting has gay people", the degree we express concepts and ideas publicly, indicates the importance we give to ideas and their place in our discourse.
TL;DR - support the harassed, call out the harasser, but don't let harassers dominate our discourse. Chances are the harassed makes interesting stuff - talk about that more.
(I also acknowledge the irony of my long post ;-) )
*Whenever you read something I said and go "How DARE she imply that" - I'm probably not implying that. But y'know, Death of the Author and all that :P
