I recently read a piece by David V. Stewart about the PS5, and it gave me a welcome reminder of all the money I've saved by no longer playing video games. "Ha ha ha," I kept saying, "I don't have to worry about any of this bullshit any more."
Two things on the character designs:
One, in that screen shot for Daveers, it says they're a 'breacher' and that dodging gives them damage resistance for a brief time. That's -nothing-. I just about fell into a coma typing the sentence. It has nothing to do with this person's Generic Space Gun and shitty plastic Covid helmet. I have to imagine it's the same for all the other characters.
Two, I notice that the Overwatch character are cartoony where they need to be and they feature a wide range of textures - metal, plastic, fabric, ceramic, energy. Whereas Concord tries for a weird pseudo-photo realism, and it winds up with everything looking like it's made from cheap, puffy plastic.
David V. Stewart is, these days, one of my lifelines to the game industry. He's a great writer.
As for the Concord characters, when it comes to what they do (or don't do), they did seem very... mismatched. The fat dude is, upon more research, supposed to be a healer of sorts, but he has only one healing ability. When I said the game was perfectly serviceable, I should have it was "playable" on a base level. Apparently, all the characters moved fine, the gunplay was solid (even if the guns looked like Fisher Price toys), but their kits were very poorly balanced and thought out.
Also, I agree that the cartoonish look for Overwatch was the right approach. Team Fortress 2, despite being over twenty years old at this point, still looks fine because the art style is so hyper-stylized. In my opinion, it's always better to lean on stylized art in video games than photo-realism. I love Rainbow Six Siege but, since it ostensibly takes place in reality (just ignore the genetically enhanced super-terrorists and crazy tech), they opted to make it look as real as they could. Still fun but the graphics have not aged well.
Another fantastic piece. The mark of good writing is grabbing the attention of a reader who has close to zero interest in the primary topic (haven't played a computer game in many, many years) and keeping them engaged all the way. If you've not already come across it the history of the Liverpool game production scene from the early 80's (Software Projects, Denton Designs, etc) is worth checking out. The story of Imagine Software is a wonderful examination of hype, hubris, and bankruptcy - there's a documentary from back in the day where you can watch it all going to the wall in real time. Tiny amounts of money compared to today but just as painful. Once again, great read.
I'm glad you enjoyed. I actually am really fascinated by old video game companies and the games they developed and the often forgotten stories behind them. I've recently been watching a very thorough retrospective on the Ultima stories, Origin Systems, and Richard Garriott, and the entire industry and the people in it are so vastly different than they are today. And far more interesting, too. Likewise with the story behind GameFreak and Pokemon - hard to believe an autistic young man's bug catching hobby and a pipe-dream to make games with his high school friends would lead to them more or less jerry rigging a game with spare parts and a shoe-string budget donated as charity from Nintendo resulted in the creation the single most profitable intellectual property on Earth. I've never heard of the Liverpool gaming scene before but it sounds right up my alley, so I'll definitely seek it out.
The genius of those early programmers getting so much out of so little goggles the mind. I found the Imagine Software documentary on YouTube - it’s called “The Rise and Fall of Imagine Software”.
Welp, you summed it up perfectly, I think. I followed the Concord debacle from a cautious distance, just for the sheer entertainment factor and the unbelievable ugliness of the characters. I expected it to last longer than two weeks, though! I thought they'd just toss some fresh skins on the characters and press on with advertising. But instead they canned the whole game? These kinds of decisions are unbelievably weird to me, kind of like Bungie's entire history with Destiny. There must be a lot of ego wrapped up in these projects behind the scenes.
I don't really either understand it either because I could see an alternate future where, with enough persistence, the game could have come to a point where it developed a small but solid playerbase that could have kept it afloat. But you're right, I think, that unchecked egos kept them from eating the crow necessary to ever concede that the game needed serious retooling. Given the way that both Sony and Microsoft have been acting, it seems as if both are pathologically averse to making good decisions. I also have a friend who worked for Microsoft and 343 Studios on the later Halo games and, if his stories are to be believed, it's a mix of the egos of the people at the top and the absolutely abhorrent "create by committee" approach that necessitates every decision being run through a board of directors that are not video game players, do not like video games, and do not understand them. When you hear that no one who plays video games is ultimately making the decisions at these companies, it makes a little more sense.
If there's ever been a better example of corporate heads and creative bankruptcy combining catastrophically I'll eat my PS5 games collection (I am safe, there are no games)
Don't worry - give it a few months, I'm sure there's another trainwreck on schedule to arrive. I thought Suicide Squad and the collapse of Rocksteady Studios would be the greatest meltdown in the video game scene of 2024 but then Concord swooped in and snatched that dubious honor away.
Another TF2 clone bites the dust. I didn't even like TF2 (TFC is where it's at) so I was never gonna play this. But the endless aesthetic abortions would have turned me off had I otherwise been interested.
It's like their answer to the question, "what sets this apart from other games in the genre," was "everything's so butt-ugly it would be run out of a drag show!"
Who was this for? Yeah, yeah "modern audiences," sure, but seriously, who was this for? Fat, depressed, retarded, color blind mutants who resent when the characters in a game look better than they do?
Well apparently they captured that whole audience and it didn't amount to enough to keep a single server online.
Great success. Congratulations.
Hopefully this is a good reference point for anyone else thinking of bucking the trend of making video game characters attractive and interesting.
"Fat, depressed, retarded, color blind mutants who resent when the characters in a game look better than they do" was probably exactly who they were banking on buying the game, but, like I said with the absentee father analogy, they never show up. You can comb through the Steam forums and find those exact types of people vociferously defending Concord, but when you check their player pages... none of them actually bought it. Those types of spiteful mutants so routinely convince companies to follow their deleterious demands and then so predictably never buy the product that one might think they do it out of spite.
It's definitely heartening if it turns out there isn't actually a large enough market for this kind of stuff to justify the ideological capture of so much of the industry (and adjacent ones? Hello, Wizards of the Coast). Also an interesting question if the developers did this because they honestly expected to sell more or if it was politically based first. Either way, would be nice it if this kind of agenda-pushing turns out to be unprofitable. I guess that'll flush out most of the opportunists and leave only the hardcore ideologues.
"but seriously, who was this for? Fat, depressed, retarded, color blind mutants who resent when the characters in a game look better than they do?"
Another thing I don't get is the complete failure at basic competency here. I mean, in theory you could make characters that are "woke" and not conventionally attractive, but at least competently designed. How did all these professionals fail so badly to apply the fundamentals of color theory, character design and so on, as pointed out by the designer in the linked video? Even if they're political zealots, shouldn't they know how to do their jobs at a base level?
I think that it was not politically based first. I think those elements were baked into the cake from the beginning, so to speak, but, again, some of it, if not most goes back to the fact that Concord was in development for so long. In 2016, when it began to development, GamerGate was still cooling down and the backlash and vitriol against "wokism" had yet to reach the fever pitch it has today. I think the gaming media could have run a lot more defense for it had it come out a year or two after, but they let it foment and sit in the fridge until a point in time where incorporating those elements wouldn't just result in backlash but a brutal and public struggle session with the gaming masses, who've become much less tolerant of progressive grandstanding than they were in 2016. That being said, as I stated in the article, I think they were using the woke material to hopefully court and audience that simply never actually materializes at the end of the day.
As for the failure of basic competency, I think a lot of it had to do with the long development cycle and corporate meddling, as well. Not only did the studio doubtlessly cycle through dozens and dozens of employees at that time, but constant shifting between owners also most likely exacerbated the issue. New employees were having to pick up the half-finished scraps of what old ones had left behind mid-stream and were constantly being pushed and pulled by whoever owned the coinpurse at the time. I think a lot of that resulted of it changing so many hands and being reworked so many times means that there was never a coherent and cohesive vision for the game that ultimately resulted in the schizophrenic mess. Like I said, the people at Sony who were giving the yay's and nay's at the end of the day aren't artists. They don't play video games. They don't understand the basics of graphic design, color theory, none of that, and if those are the people ultimately approving or rejecting material, it makes sense that the end result is going to be ugly as sin.
This might be giving the artists who worked on the game, though. I'm sure general incompetency and a lot of nepotism was involved as well.
> How did all these professionals fail so badly to apply the fundamentals of color theory, character design and so on, as pointed out by the designer in the linked video? Even if they're political zealots, shouldn't they know how to do their jobs at a base level?
Not really.
In large teams there's always your A-team people: the passionate, hyperproductive ones that do that do 90% of the work that you experience as the consumer. That's not to say 90% of the total work, but it is the stuff that really matters to your experience: the art direction, the game design, the plot.
Then there's your B-team people: the ones just punching the clock, capable of doing good work when they're well-managed and riding the coattails of the A-team people. They do the plumbing: thankless work designing background characters, itemization, implementing miscellaneous mechanics, scripting NPCs, playtesting, etc. The innumerable things that don't really catch your eye but have to be there to make the game feel full.
If there are good people at the helm, they are making sure all this stuff fits together into a coherent whole, guiding the B-teamers, correcting things that don't quite fit or feel good.
Problem: the zealots don't believe in competence beyond institutional certifications of basic literacy in the field, and think any outward signs of competence or recognized merit are the product of systemic oppression and general nastiness. So the A-team people are automatically suspect.
Further, the A-team people care about *the work* more than radical politics born of resentment toward *people like them*. So they're not particularly enthusiastic about playing the politics game.
So what happens is the A-team people get filtered out. Lefty A-team people tend to have some sketchy to outright criminal interpersonal behavior, which makes it real easy to get rid of them. Many such cases.
Meanwhile the B-team people insist on new hires being "good cultural fits", read "adherent to the same politics". When you're shopping for job candidates and your criteria is "willing to bend knee to niche political ideology" you're not going to get the best, you're going to take what you can get.
So not only do you lose your best people who are doing all the highly visible work - your art directors, game designers, etc. - you're also selecting for below-average quality for their replacements. The whole thing rots from the head down and inside out.
This happens in other contexts too. Why you so rarely see "good christian media", or "historically/scientifically accurate movies", or whatever else your personal obsession happens to be.
"Problem: the zealots don't believe in competence beyond institutional certifications of basic literacy in the field..."
Maybe this is naive, but I'll admit I assumed that was more a pose and that they didn't seriously believe that or act on that belief, at least not in their own fields, where they could immediately see the results. Or at the very least that they'd accept competence and merit from people on their own political team.
"When you're shopping for job candidates and your criteria is "willing to bend knee to niche political ideology" you're not going to get the best, you're going to take what you can get."
Seems plausible, but I'm also tempted to say that this ideology doesn't seem to be that niche in this field, at least surface level allegiance to it. And since this was such a huge project with so much money involved, I assumed they could have their pick of some good candidates simply by paying enough.
Those quibbles aside, this explanation does make sense, especially combined with our host's points about design by committee and "too many cooks". As for historical/scientific accuracy, I suspect that's another issue: they could easily get it right if they really wanted to, but it's just not worth the extra time and money when it's an inconvenience to the plot and the audience doesn't care. With stuff like Christian media, see our host's comments in another thread here: setting out to make something to push an agenda first and tell a story second rarely works well.
Great summary of the situation, but I think you could have mentioned two important details:
1. there have been many high-budget games this year which likely failed due to being marketed as woke
2. Overwatch has itself been dying rapidly since OW2 came out and Blizzard has also been going downhill for some time now, so there was possibly a receptive audience to market the game to
I'm definitely aware of big budget projects that towed the progressive line failing in other media (e.g. the Acolyte, Madame Web, maybe Furiosa) but as for video games, the only other one I'm overly aware of is Suicide Squad. I'm dimly aware of another trashfire called Dustborne being excessively "woke" and not doing well but I didn't include it because I don't know enough about the situation and I also wanted to focus on Concord. If you have any other examples, do share though because this year has been so catastrophic for "the message" I might do a round-up of the biggest losers of the year at the end of 2024 and do some more digging into them. I also think that the woke trappings were only a small part of Concord's ultimate failure. I really do think the lion's share of the blame comes down to the total lack of competency in the design department, since other companies have integrated "woke" elements and still seen some success since they at least look... alright.
As for Overwatch, I've heard that isn't hasn't been doing well but with my finger not really on the pulse of video games and definitely not in tune with Overwatch, I'm not aware of how bad the situation is. I knew it wasn't great - I really enjoyed Overwatch for a few years after launch but the constant and egregiously poor balancing patches that would routinely nerf characters to the point of uselessness (my man Torbjorn was done so fucking dirty) and others to the point they were broken (Symmetra...), along with them trying to so desperately brute force a professional e-sports scene, turned me off of it and I abandoned it. As for Blizzard, I actually had a few paragraphs at the opening about their general decline, but I had to cut it since it wasn't entirely pertinent to Concord's story and it read like me just kvetching about the current state of World of Warcraft (I have friends who've recently started playing again and are getting me to try to come back, so... it's been on my mind). I said that they have the "reverse Midas touch" these days. Those guys could fuck up a steel ball. Apparently, Microsoft is taking a chainsaw to their staff at present and thinning the herd dramatically. I doubt it will turn the ship around but, still... one can hope.
Another great essay! Man this one rocked. It's odd, but since joining substack and focusing on writing serials, and fiction analysis stuff I've not thought of woke in some time. It just hit me how quickly I forgot about it and how little impact it can have on oneself if one focuses on self-improvement and such.
Thanks, brother/s, I'm glad you enjoyed. I envy your approach but, as a cultural critic (and an avowed fan of trash fires that can't look away from a good disaster), I'm always on the lookout for the newest woke disaster. Staying in your own lane and focusing on making your own material as good as it can be is a solid approach that a lot of other fiction writers should really focus on. I see so many projects in the mainstream try to be aggressively anti-woke that they completely fail to write a good story... it may or may not be the subject of an article I've had in the works for a bit.
Ohhhh can’t wait to read it! And yeah, we Fiction writers need to focus on just our own works or those of those long past to learn what we can from them.
That's an important point for sure. I don't know if you read John Michael Greer, but one thing he often emphasizes is that it's much better to build up what you want to see more of rather than focusing on what you dislike, and that it's better to focus on improving yourself first. Not that he's the first to say these things, of course. Or as the old saying goes: "what you contemplate, you imitate". That's one reason I try to make an effort not to let the woke live rent free in my head too, but then again it can be hard not to when they have their hands in so many things I at least used to enjoy (video games, Warhammer, Magic the Gathering etc). At least the Christian zealots back in the 00s mostly stayed in their own hermetically sealed bubbles where I didn't have to interact with their grandstanding.
"What you contemplate, you imitate" is exactly why I think any story that consciously tries to be anti-woke inevitably fails. It doesn't just take away from the focus of writing a good story, but it actively warps you mindset into seeing everything through a binary lens that ultimately colors the whole project in ideological dressings that ultimately dilute the entire project.
the first Guardians of the Galaxy film succeeded in being the best Star Wars film since the Return of the Jedi, and yes, they did it with a C and D list of characters. It's still my favorite MCU film, hands down.
Personally, I think that the entire Guardians trilogy is the best one to come out of the MCU. I know people weren't crazy about 3, but I really liked it. I liked 2 a lot, too.
"No one expected Concord to last very long. No one expected it to die so quickly, though.
Concord was online for a grand total of twelve days. Less than two calendar weeks."
So what you're saying is that this thing is the gaming equivalent of Liz Truss? ;)
Anyway, an impressive failure to be sure. I haven't been keeping up with video games much, so appreciate this breakdown of the catastrophe. It's hard to understand how a project with so many professionals and so much money involved could fail on such a basic level.
Re. Baldur's Gate 3: I don't know, maybe this is childish of me, but the combination of obnoxious wokery, another totally unnecessary sequel to an old series, my lukewarm feelings on Larian's other games and a pinch of hype aversion makes it easy for me to pass it up, even if BG1 and 2 were some of the most important games of my early teen years. From my admittedly uninformed and biased vantage, it looks like a worse and more 2020s Dragon Age Origins. Or: I trust Larian's writers about as far as I can throw them. :P
Apropos, re. "woke": IMO it's can be a useful term, as long as everyone involved is honest enough to acknowledge that it's always pejorative and don't pretend it's neutral. Sometimes it's handy to have a snappy shorthand for "authoritarian identity politics largely based in post-modernism and critical theory" or the like. Or like that infamous old porn definition, we all know it when we see it. Especially the version that tends to show up in nerd culture and popular media, usually based around forced "representation" and gender activism. They seem to have settled on the term "DEI" for themselves now, so I'd say it's another word for the same thing, just with a negative value judgment instead of a positive or neutral one.
Re. constant re-releases of The Last of Us: Well, at least it's a damn good game, if you have to choose one to release over and over, haha. (The original, I never played the sequel) A remaster of a four year old game is pretty sad, though.
"And, when they play video games - which is an escapist, wish-fulfillment activity, in a way - they want to live out those fantasies. And, that’s fine. That’s human nature. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be better than what you currently are. In fact, I think that’s a good thing."
There's certainly a time and place for this, but I also think this sentiment holds the medium back from realizing its potential. All of it is always and only wish fulfillment? No one would talk about movies, books or theater this way. It's easy for games to slip into that role, sure, and again, I'm not saying it doesn't have its place, but why should the entire medium be pigeonholed into that niche? And to be clear, that doesn't mean I agree with the whole "art has to be miserable and boring to be art" approach, but I do think video games would do well to challenge the player (in a non-mechanical sense) a little more sometimes. Are those fantasies actually healthy? And even if they might be, are we being sold too many of them, at the expense of variety?
The "wanting to be better" comment is interesting too. Are those mega-populist, idealized cartoon characters actually "better"? Or just more superficially appealing? Better at fighting, but what else? I do get what you mean, but I also suspect there's a deeper discussion to be had there, one that might frankly be as interesting as Sony's beached whale of a game...
BG3 wasn't great. The intro cinematic was the best part of the whole game. Second best was the act 2 boss, though act 2 was a slog. Falls far short of the iconic entries in the genre, including DAO. Totally skippable unless you're a Forgotten Realms superfan or just desperate for a crpg.
I recently read a piece by David V. Stewart about the PS5, and it gave me a welcome reminder of all the money I've saved by no longer playing video games. "Ha ha ha," I kept saying, "I don't have to worry about any of this bullshit any more."
Two things on the character designs:
One, in that screen shot for Daveers, it says they're a 'breacher' and that dodging gives them damage resistance for a brief time. That's -nothing-. I just about fell into a coma typing the sentence. It has nothing to do with this person's Generic Space Gun and shitty plastic Covid helmet. I have to imagine it's the same for all the other characters.
Two, I notice that the Overwatch character are cartoony where they need to be and they feature a wide range of textures - metal, plastic, fabric, ceramic, energy. Whereas Concord tries for a weird pseudo-photo realism, and it winds up with everything looking like it's made from cheap, puffy plastic.
David V. Stewart is, these days, one of my lifelines to the game industry. He's a great writer.
As for the Concord characters, when it comes to what they do (or don't do), they did seem very... mismatched. The fat dude is, upon more research, supposed to be a healer of sorts, but he has only one healing ability. When I said the game was perfectly serviceable, I should have it was "playable" on a base level. Apparently, all the characters moved fine, the gunplay was solid (even if the guns looked like Fisher Price toys), but their kits were very poorly balanced and thought out.
Also, I agree that the cartoonish look for Overwatch was the right approach. Team Fortress 2, despite being over twenty years old at this point, still looks fine because the art style is so hyper-stylized. In my opinion, it's always better to lean on stylized art in video games than photo-realism. I love Rainbow Six Siege but, since it ostensibly takes place in reality (just ignore the genetically enhanced super-terrorists and crazy tech), they opted to make it look as real as they could. Still fun but the graphics have not aged well.
Another fantastic piece. The mark of good writing is grabbing the attention of a reader who has close to zero interest in the primary topic (haven't played a computer game in many, many years) and keeping them engaged all the way. If you've not already come across it the history of the Liverpool game production scene from the early 80's (Software Projects, Denton Designs, etc) is worth checking out. The story of Imagine Software is a wonderful examination of hype, hubris, and bankruptcy - there's a documentary from back in the day where you can watch it all going to the wall in real time. Tiny amounts of money compared to today but just as painful. Once again, great read.
I'm glad you enjoyed. I actually am really fascinated by old video game companies and the games they developed and the often forgotten stories behind them. I've recently been watching a very thorough retrospective on the Ultima stories, Origin Systems, and Richard Garriott, and the entire industry and the people in it are so vastly different than they are today. And far more interesting, too. Likewise with the story behind GameFreak and Pokemon - hard to believe an autistic young man's bug catching hobby and a pipe-dream to make games with his high school friends would lead to them more or less jerry rigging a game with spare parts and a shoe-string budget donated as charity from Nintendo resulted in the creation the single most profitable intellectual property on Earth. I've never heard of the Liverpool gaming scene before but it sounds right up my alley, so I'll definitely seek it out.
The genius of those early programmers getting so much out of so little goggles the mind. I found the Imagine Software documentary on YouTube - it’s called “The Rise and Fall of Imagine Software”.
Welp, you summed it up perfectly, I think. I followed the Concord debacle from a cautious distance, just for the sheer entertainment factor and the unbelievable ugliness of the characters. I expected it to last longer than two weeks, though! I thought they'd just toss some fresh skins on the characters and press on with advertising. But instead they canned the whole game? These kinds of decisions are unbelievably weird to me, kind of like Bungie's entire history with Destiny. There must be a lot of ego wrapped up in these projects behind the scenes.
I don't really either understand it either because I could see an alternate future where, with enough persistence, the game could have come to a point where it developed a small but solid playerbase that could have kept it afloat. But you're right, I think, that unchecked egos kept them from eating the crow necessary to ever concede that the game needed serious retooling. Given the way that both Sony and Microsoft have been acting, it seems as if both are pathologically averse to making good decisions. I also have a friend who worked for Microsoft and 343 Studios on the later Halo games and, if his stories are to be believed, it's a mix of the egos of the people at the top and the absolutely abhorrent "create by committee" approach that necessitates every decision being run through a board of directors that are not video game players, do not like video games, and do not understand them. When you hear that no one who plays video games is ultimately making the decisions at these companies, it makes a little more sense.
(Don't want you back)
Na na na na
(Don't want you back)
If there's ever been a better example of corporate heads and creative bankruptcy combining catastrophically I'll eat my PS5 games collection (I am safe, there are no games)
Don't worry - give it a few months, I'm sure there's another trainwreck on schedule to arrive. I thought Suicide Squad and the collapse of Rocksteady Studios would be the greatest meltdown in the video game scene of 2024 but then Concord swooped in and snatched that dubious honor away.
Another TF2 clone bites the dust. I didn't even like TF2 (TFC is where it's at) so I was never gonna play this. But the endless aesthetic abortions would have turned me off had I otherwise been interested.
It's like their answer to the question, "what sets this apart from other games in the genre," was "everything's so butt-ugly it would be run out of a drag show!"
Who was this for? Yeah, yeah "modern audiences," sure, but seriously, who was this for? Fat, depressed, retarded, color blind mutants who resent when the characters in a game look better than they do?
Well apparently they captured that whole audience and it didn't amount to enough to keep a single server online.
Great success. Congratulations.
Hopefully this is a good reference point for anyone else thinking of bucking the trend of making video game characters attractive and interesting.
"Fat, depressed, retarded, color blind mutants who resent when the characters in a game look better than they do" was probably exactly who they were banking on buying the game, but, like I said with the absentee father analogy, they never show up. You can comb through the Steam forums and find those exact types of people vociferously defending Concord, but when you check their player pages... none of them actually bought it. Those types of spiteful mutants so routinely convince companies to follow their deleterious demands and then so predictably never buy the product that one might think they do it out of spite.
It's definitely heartening if it turns out there isn't actually a large enough market for this kind of stuff to justify the ideological capture of so much of the industry (and adjacent ones? Hello, Wizards of the Coast). Also an interesting question if the developers did this because they honestly expected to sell more or if it was politically based first. Either way, would be nice it if this kind of agenda-pushing turns out to be unprofitable. I guess that'll flush out most of the opportunists and leave only the hardcore ideologues.
"but seriously, who was this for? Fat, depressed, retarded, color blind mutants who resent when the characters in a game look better than they do?"
Another thing I don't get is the complete failure at basic competency here. I mean, in theory you could make characters that are "woke" and not conventionally attractive, but at least competently designed. How did all these professionals fail so badly to apply the fundamentals of color theory, character design and so on, as pointed out by the designer in the linked video? Even if they're political zealots, shouldn't they know how to do their jobs at a base level?
I think that it was not politically based first. I think those elements were baked into the cake from the beginning, so to speak, but, again, some of it, if not most goes back to the fact that Concord was in development for so long. In 2016, when it began to development, GamerGate was still cooling down and the backlash and vitriol against "wokism" had yet to reach the fever pitch it has today. I think the gaming media could have run a lot more defense for it had it come out a year or two after, but they let it foment and sit in the fridge until a point in time where incorporating those elements wouldn't just result in backlash but a brutal and public struggle session with the gaming masses, who've become much less tolerant of progressive grandstanding than they were in 2016. That being said, as I stated in the article, I think they were using the woke material to hopefully court and audience that simply never actually materializes at the end of the day.
As for the failure of basic competency, I think a lot of it had to do with the long development cycle and corporate meddling, as well. Not only did the studio doubtlessly cycle through dozens and dozens of employees at that time, but constant shifting between owners also most likely exacerbated the issue. New employees were having to pick up the half-finished scraps of what old ones had left behind mid-stream and were constantly being pushed and pulled by whoever owned the coinpurse at the time. I think a lot of that resulted of it changing so many hands and being reworked so many times means that there was never a coherent and cohesive vision for the game that ultimately resulted in the schizophrenic mess. Like I said, the people at Sony who were giving the yay's and nay's at the end of the day aren't artists. They don't play video games. They don't understand the basics of graphic design, color theory, none of that, and if those are the people ultimately approving or rejecting material, it makes sense that the end result is going to be ugly as sin.
This might be giving the artists who worked on the game, though. I'm sure general incompetency and a lot of nepotism was involved as well.
> How did all these professionals fail so badly to apply the fundamentals of color theory, character design and so on, as pointed out by the designer in the linked video? Even if they're political zealots, shouldn't they know how to do their jobs at a base level?
Not really.
In large teams there's always your A-team people: the passionate, hyperproductive ones that do that do 90% of the work that you experience as the consumer. That's not to say 90% of the total work, but it is the stuff that really matters to your experience: the art direction, the game design, the plot.
Then there's your B-team people: the ones just punching the clock, capable of doing good work when they're well-managed and riding the coattails of the A-team people. They do the plumbing: thankless work designing background characters, itemization, implementing miscellaneous mechanics, scripting NPCs, playtesting, etc. The innumerable things that don't really catch your eye but have to be there to make the game feel full.
If there are good people at the helm, they are making sure all this stuff fits together into a coherent whole, guiding the B-teamers, correcting things that don't quite fit or feel good.
Problem: the zealots don't believe in competence beyond institutional certifications of basic literacy in the field, and think any outward signs of competence or recognized merit are the product of systemic oppression and general nastiness. So the A-team people are automatically suspect.
Further, the A-team people care about *the work* more than radical politics born of resentment toward *people like them*. So they're not particularly enthusiastic about playing the politics game.
So what happens is the A-team people get filtered out. Lefty A-team people tend to have some sketchy to outright criminal interpersonal behavior, which makes it real easy to get rid of them. Many such cases.
Meanwhile the B-team people insist on new hires being "good cultural fits", read "adherent to the same politics". When you're shopping for job candidates and your criteria is "willing to bend knee to niche political ideology" you're not going to get the best, you're going to take what you can get.
So not only do you lose your best people who are doing all the highly visible work - your art directors, game designers, etc. - you're also selecting for below-average quality for their replacements. The whole thing rots from the head down and inside out.
This happens in other contexts too. Why you so rarely see "good christian media", or "historically/scientifically accurate movies", or whatever else your personal obsession happens to be.
Thanks for this.
"Problem: the zealots don't believe in competence beyond institutional certifications of basic literacy in the field..."
Maybe this is naive, but I'll admit I assumed that was more a pose and that they didn't seriously believe that or act on that belief, at least not in their own fields, where they could immediately see the results. Or at the very least that they'd accept competence and merit from people on their own political team.
"When you're shopping for job candidates and your criteria is "willing to bend knee to niche political ideology" you're not going to get the best, you're going to take what you can get."
Seems plausible, but I'm also tempted to say that this ideology doesn't seem to be that niche in this field, at least surface level allegiance to it. And since this was such a huge project with so much money involved, I assumed they could have their pick of some good candidates simply by paying enough.
Those quibbles aside, this explanation does make sense, especially combined with our host's points about design by committee and "too many cooks". As for historical/scientific accuracy, I suspect that's another issue: they could easily get it right if they really wanted to, but it's just not worth the extra time and money when it's an inconvenience to the plot and the audience doesn't care. With stuff like Christian media, see our host's comments in another thread here: setting out to make something to push an agenda first and tell a story second rarely works well.
Great summary of the situation, but I think you could have mentioned two important details:
1. there have been many high-budget games this year which likely failed due to being marketed as woke
2. Overwatch has itself been dying rapidly since OW2 came out and Blizzard has also been going downhill for some time now, so there was possibly a receptive audience to market the game to
I'm definitely aware of big budget projects that towed the progressive line failing in other media (e.g. the Acolyte, Madame Web, maybe Furiosa) but as for video games, the only other one I'm overly aware of is Suicide Squad. I'm dimly aware of another trashfire called Dustborne being excessively "woke" and not doing well but I didn't include it because I don't know enough about the situation and I also wanted to focus on Concord. If you have any other examples, do share though because this year has been so catastrophic for "the message" I might do a round-up of the biggest losers of the year at the end of 2024 and do some more digging into them. I also think that the woke trappings were only a small part of Concord's ultimate failure. I really do think the lion's share of the blame comes down to the total lack of competency in the design department, since other companies have integrated "woke" elements and still seen some success since they at least look... alright.
As for Overwatch, I've heard that isn't hasn't been doing well but with my finger not really on the pulse of video games and definitely not in tune with Overwatch, I'm not aware of how bad the situation is. I knew it wasn't great - I really enjoyed Overwatch for a few years after launch but the constant and egregiously poor balancing patches that would routinely nerf characters to the point of uselessness (my man Torbjorn was done so fucking dirty) and others to the point they were broken (Symmetra...), along with them trying to so desperately brute force a professional e-sports scene, turned me off of it and I abandoned it. As for Blizzard, I actually had a few paragraphs at the opening about their general decline, but I had to cut it since it wasn't entirely pertinent to Concord's story and it read like me just kvetching about the current state of World of Warcraft (I have friends who've recently started playing again and are getting me to try to come back, so... it's been on my mind). I said that they have the "reverse Midas touch" these days. Those guys could fuck up a steel ball. Apparently, Microsoft is taking a chainsaw to their staff at present and thinning the herd dramatically. I doubt it will turn the ship around but, still... one can hope.
Another great essay! Man this one rocked. It's odd, but since joining substack and focusing on writing serials, and fiction analysis stuff I've not thought of woke in some time. It just hit me how quickly I forgot about it and how little impact it can have on oneself if one focuses on self-improvement and such.
Thanks, brother/s, I'm glad you enjoyed. I envy your approach but, as a cultural critic (and an avowed fan of trash fires that can't look away from a good disaster), I'm always on the lookout for the newest woke disaster. Staying in your own lane and focusing on making your own material as good as it can be is a solid approach that a lot of other fiction writers should really focus on. I see so many projects in the mainstream try to be aggressively anti-woke that they completely fail to write a good story... it may or may not be the subject of an article I've had in the works for a bit.
Ohhhh can’t wait to read it! And yeah, we Fiction writers need to focus on just our own works or those of those long past to learn what we can from them.
That's an important point for sure. I don't know if you read John Michael Greer, but one thing he often emphasizes is that it's much better to build up what you want to see more of rather than focusing on what you dislike, and that it's better to focus on improving yourself first. Not that he's the first to say these things, of course. Or as the old saying goes: "what you contemplate, you imitate". That's one reason I try to make an effort not to let the woke live rent free in my head too, but then again it can be hard not to when they have their hands in so many things I at least used to enjoy (video games, Warhammer, Magic the Gathering etc). At least the Christian zealots back in the 00s mostly stayed in their own hermetically sealed bubbles where I didn't have to interact with their grandstanding.
"What you contemplate, you imitate" is exactly why I think any story that consciously tries to be anti-woke inevitably fails. It doesn't just take away from the focus of writing a good story, but it actively warps you mindset into seeing everything through a binary lens that ultimately colors the whole project in ideological dressings that ultimately dilute the entire project.
I never even heard of Concord until now, and I’d say I’m a pretty avid gamer.
I kind of envy that, honestly. I'm sorry you had to hear about it here.
the first Guardians of the Galaxy film succeeded in being the best Star Wars film since the Return of the Jedi, and yes, they did it with a C and D list of characters. It's still my favorite MCU film, hands down.
Personally, I think that the entire Guardians trilogy is the best one to come out of the MCU. I know people weren't crazy about 3, but I really liked it. I liked 2 a lot, too.
"No one expected Concord to last very long. No one expected it to die so quickly, though.
Concord was online for a grand total of twelve days. Less than two calendar weeks."
So what you're saying is that this thing is the gaming equivalent of Liz Truss? ;)
Anyway, an impressive failure to be sure. I haven't been keeping up with video games much, so appreciate this breakdown of the catastrophe. It's hard to understand how a project with so many professionals and so much money involved could fail on such a basic level.
Re. Baldur's Gate 3: I don't know, maybe this is childish of me, but the combination of obnoxious wokery, another totally unnecessary sequel to an old series, my lukewarm feelings on Larian's other games and a pinch of hype aversion makes it easy for me to pass it up, even if BG1 and 2 were some of the most important games of my early teen years. From my admittedly uninformed and biased vantage, it looks like a worse and more 2020s Dragon Age Origins. Or: I trust Larian's writers about as far as I can throw them. :P
Apropos, re. "woke": IMO it's can be a useful term, as long as everyone involved is honest enough to acknowledge that it's always pejorative and don't pretend it's neutral. Sometimes it's handy to have a snappy shorthand for "authoritarian identity politics largely based in post-modernism and critical theory" or the like. Or like that infamous old porn definition, we all know it when we see it. Especially the version that tends to show up in nerd culture and popular media, usually based around forced "representation" and gender activism. They seem to have settled on the term "DEI" for themselves now, so I'd say it's another word for the same thing, just with a negative value judgment instead of a positive or neutral one.
Re. constant re-releases of The Last of Us: Well, at least it's a damn good game, if you have to choose one to release over and over, haha. (The original, I never played the sequel) A remaster of a four year old game is pretty sad, though.
"And, when they play video games - which is an escapist, wish-fulfillment activity, in a way - they want to live out those fantasies. And, that’s fine. That’s human nature. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be better than what you currently are. In fact, I think that’s a good thing."
There's certainly a time and place for this, but I also think this sentiment holds the medium back from realizing its potential. All of it is always and only wish fulfillment? No one would talk about movies, books or theater this way. It's easy for games to slip into that role, sure, and again, I'm not saying it doesn't have its place, but why should the entire medium be pigeonholed into that niche? And to be clear, that doesn't mean I agree with the whole "art has to be miserable and boring to be art" approach, but I do think video games would do well to challenge the player (in a non-mechanical sense) a little more sometimes. Are those fantasies actually healthy? And even if they might be, are we being sold too many of them, at the expense of variety?
The "wanting to be better" comment is interesting too. Are those mega-populist, idealized cartoon characters actually "better"? Or just more superficially appealing? Better at fighting, but what else? I do get what you mean, but I also suspect there's a deeper discussion to be had there, one that might frankly be as interesting as Sony's beached whale of a game...
BG3 wasn't great. The intro cinematic was the best part of the whole game. Second best was the act 2 boss, though act 2 was a slog. Falls far short of the iconic entries in the genre, including DAO. Totally skippable unless you're a Forgotten Realms superfan or just desperate for a crpg.