As someone who occasionally goes on Resetera, I agree with your points when you said that nobody was making friends there. Every thread has some people butting heads and baiting each other to feel morally superior. It all feels very condescending and there's almost no discussions to be had there, has the place always been that way? Do people actually like being there?
Coasting on the vibes that carried NeoGAF originally, which was that it used to be a forum where all the big games media press people would post at. Posting at GAF gave you the ability to say you were rubbing elbows with industry celebrities.
Era continues that trend but the landscape has changed so much that it doesn't really matter anymore. But the notion that Era is "important" still continues regardless. And it still attracts celebrities who only know it by that dusty old reputation.
But a lot of people only post there because they have big heads and think they're the main character.
So, Resetera's completely blacklisted Hogwarts Legacy from its allowed forum discussion topics, assuming that any discussion of the game is inextricable from Rowling's sociopolitical stances. However, they've also encouraged people to donate the cost of the game to their local trans charities and support orgs.
Two things:
I wholeheartedly applaud the second decision. If anyone wants a more active contribution to LGBTQA rights, being reminded of available assistive bodies and orgs is a great way to kick things off. I'd even contend that if you're fine with tossing sixty or seventy bucks their way, I'd up the ante to a bigger number. Make it a hundred, and maybe cumulative effects will allow volunteers to transition (heh) into full-time employees.
Snuffing out the discourse, however, is an empty gesture. They've taken a stance, sure, but nothing's stopping the regular Potterheads from finding another platform to discuss the game on. A simple blanket statement would've sufficed - let the fans handle the moral weight of their acknowledgement or rejection of the game on their own. We can assume most of those involved are adults, at this point.
Troy Leavitt is a lead designer at Warner Bros. development studio Avalanche Software currently working on controversial Harry Potter game Hogwarts Legacy. He also ran a reactionary YouTube channel focused on attacking feminism and social justice for over a year.
In follow-up tweets, Robertson claims that he's not trying to "cancel" Leavitt. None of this information is particularly private, but he felt it important to share to help people make more informed choices over whether to support Hogwarts Legacy.
Yeah, mhm. I believe you. Totally. Your intentions were 100% pure. For sure. Yup. Funny how one minute it’s “cancel culture isn’t real” and the next it’s “I’m not trying to cancel anyone!! Honestly!!!”
Many fans have expressed concerns over Leavitt’s involvement with Hogwarts Legacy since his YouTube history came up a few days ago, spurred on by the controversies already surrounding the upcoming game.
I can almost guarantee you that not a single person genuinely interested in this game after JK Rowling’s mishaps is expressing concerns over this. If they actually cared about this, they would’ve abandoned ship after the JK thing. No fan cares about this. Not a one.
Several users on popular gaming forum ResetEra have asked moderators to ban Hogwarts Legacy discussion altogether due to both Rowling’s influence on the franchise and Leavitt’s work as lead designer, a request moderators seem to be taking seriously.
Define “popular” because again, no one legitimate actually uses ReeeesetEra. You couldn’t have picked a worse sampling of “gamers”. I’d have taken a subreddit more seriously than anything from ResetEra.
Video games are made by massive teams of people with vastly different backgrounds, viewpoints, and opinions. Even as lead designer, it’s very unlikely Leavitt has single-handedly infected every aspect of Hogwarts Legacy with an anti-feminist agenda. That said, it’s obvious why folks might be wary of interacting with a game developed by someone with his beliefs, adapted from works that have been sullied by their creator’s own bigoted worldview.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
I’m sorry, what’s that? You’re complaining about possible politics in video games? Gee, I thought video games were “inherently political”! Whatever happened to that?
Just what the hell is going on eith big game companies nowadays
Sony Interactive Entertainment have fired VP George Cacioppo, after he allegedly appeared in an amateur pedophile sting video.
And of course ResetERA's administration is defending this man by locking down threads and issuing bans. Then again it isn't suprising sunce alot of the moderators did get outted as cp supporters.
Disclaimer: i love Persona 5, it is one of my favorite JRPG's of all time, and i am eager to eventually play Royal, i went the extra lenght
ResetEra continues to be full of the dumbest, most obliviously xenophobic motherfuckers on the Internet. Does someone want to explain to these bozos that two different Japanese games with political undertones can be about two completely different things? Imagine making this kind of comparison with, say, a pair of superficially similar Canadian games: "Deus Ex: Human Revolution handles social commentary better than Watch Dogs." I mean, yeah, Human Revolution has more interesting things to say about transhumanism than Watch Dogs does about surveillance, but what the fuck is the point of that comparison???
Yakuza: Like a Dragon, broadly speaking, is about the socioeconomic structures that lead to marginalization. Persona 5, broadly speaking, is about how apathy and inattention permit exploitation by the powerful. The former centres the marginalized; the latter centres the exploiters. "Don't judge people by their circumstances; judge them by how they respond to their circumstances" and "Wake the fuck up; powerful assholes are fucking us over!" are two completely different messages. But there are so many faux-woke gamers out there who don't conceive of Japan as a place with its own massive set of complex social and political issues; in their minds, there's "good politics" and "bad politics" (which map roughly to Democrats and Republicans, respectively), and the extent to which a game mirrors the American tenets of "good politics" determines how good it is at "social commentary." The typical ResetEra poster asks not "What is this game trying to say about the society whence it came?" but rather "What parts of this game can I interpret as commenting on American politics and culture, and how well does my interpretation line up with the progressive Anglosphere's consensus?" For fuck's sake, actually try to understand what you're consuming instead of whining that Ryuji Sakamoto didn't join the #Resistance.
ResetEra is an even bigger trainwreck than I thought it was, holy shit.
Imagine being warned about a massive data breach, and not only refusing to warn ANY of your users that their login details have been posted online for all to see, but also denying that there was a data breach, deleting posts trying to warn people about it, and slandering the person who blew the whistle as “alt right”.
Not to mention the screenshot leaks of ResetEra’s general manager B-Dubs using racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, and transphobic language, as recently as 2017. So much for having the moral high ground there, eh?
My ‘favorite’ thing about gaming culture is how some groups will deliberately wait a x mount of years for an issue to cool down just to b ring it up again in effort to downplay the severity of the issue as “not that bad”.
Effectively, the point is not to move forward and change the medium with the critiques made, but to construct a narrative wherein the critique itself was “too emotional” and not “rational”, in order to maintain the status quo. Learn nothing and remain comfortably couched in ignorance.
Case in point: This entire thread determined to reinterpret criticisms of thehyper-sexualized artwork of Dragon’s Crown as overblown.
Honestly the fact that Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan of all places came together to thrash Resetera over the lies they are attempting to spread about Reuben is beautiful and definitely the highlight of my day.
