1. obviously there's the fact that her critiques of DE are so unabashedly surface-level that you cannot tell if she's actually played the game or read a plot summary/review of it.
  2. but there's also the fact that she's proposing a supposed improvement on what DE is with her own prompt, which in-and-of-itself is the lowest form of critique in my eyes–'what if you had an entirely different idea?'
  3. and then the prompt itself is a doozy:
    1. she somehow found a way to both critique DE for being unimaginative with its scenario/having a white man protag and propose, in alternative, the absolute whitest possible scenario imaginable
    2. in the implicit shift from a grimy Eastern Europe to a comfy Western Europe, she's managed to gentrify her scenario proposed in a critique about diversity
    3. she wants to keep disco elysium's, unexamined by her, 'wonderful writing', while stripping it of all the rawness and deliberate confrontation that is at the heart of it that would conflict with the idyllic nature of her scenario and her stated opposition to griminess
    4. her idea of a more diverse story, if we're taking it as she's presenting it, is swapping a white guy with a white gal, which, I mean, diversity win, I guess.
    5. the fact that this is the most generic, safest-possible indie game idea imaginable. I could go on itch.io and find 50 of pretty much that game. this is the idea that like 50% of developers have when they're thinking of a quick point-and-click game for a game jam.

i could go on, but the most scathing possible point I could make to this tweet is that this person is a BAFTA Judge strangelove-wow

  • Sons_of_Ferrix
    ·
    7 months ago

    a) Reducing the diversity of the game to "main character is white" reaches bad faith territory for me. The entirety of Revachol is filled with weird and wonderful people, and we're able to glimpse into each and every one of their struggles precisely because we're not one of them, we're strangers, and we're only there in passing. If harry was instead a white woman protagonist but then all these working class and poor people were removed from the game then that would be a net negative for inclusion.

    I was going to say this too, yeah sure Harry is a middle aged white guy but the world is DE is very diverse, and diverse in an extremely well fleshed out and complex way that honestly put a lot of other fantasy and SciFi to shame. Like so many stories just do the lazy "wut if elves/aliens were like black/gay people, hun?" while DE has this whole complex history, that's presented to you in a fractured way so you're never sure if you're getting the whole story or just being fed BS, that makes the complex race and class relations feel a lot closer to they work in the real world. Also it portrays and condemns racism in what I think is probably the best ways it ever has been in media.