Thread by @spacetwinks

got told that game informer straight up asked one of the CoD: Modern Warfare devs about "okay but are there politics", and that question following an answer of "it's a very relevant war story" and y'know

this is obvious BS, but it feels different, actually saying the BS out loud

the obvious bullshit game PR sells in text has a very different feel than actually getting to hear them say it, watch their expressions while they say it, and it's also a peek into seeing game reporters showing the exact frustration everyone else feels reading that stuff

just this atmosphere of "i know i'm lying, and you know i'm lying, and i know you know i'm lying, but none of us are allowed to say it out loud, so both of us show 'humorous' frustration on camera"

the rapid fire format lays it out too, just "a very relevant contemporary war story" that is also somehow "not political"

like it's obvious bullshit, and it will always be obvious bullshit, until someone doesn't care that it'll get them fired and blacklisted to say otherwise

i don't think joe emslie is stupid, but i do think he has a job to protect

so these questions keep getting asked, knowing we're going to get the same answer, because you can't just go "okay, but you're obviously lying"

an endless loop

anyway boy what i wouldn't give to be able to hear some of the off the record conversations people have about these very questions to devs

oh yeah - while "don't get fired" is the obvious motivation for telling obvious lies about a game and whether or not it's political, the youtube comments tells us the other motivation

it's not just selling to them, it's avoiding having them calling for your blood

it is very frustrating for AAA game devs to tell very obvious lies about their games not being political

it is very understandable that they don't want xXxOptimus FUCKxXx threatening their grandma over the phone cuz they said they wanted to talk about politics in their shooter

one less heated example of this behavior from game devs that always leaps to my mind is the answer from MvC: Infinite devs about why no x-men

i don't think michael evans believed this answer, i don't believe he's stupid, but i do believe many AAA devs have to feign stupidity

"do modern marvel fans even know who the x-men are?" is an incredibly stupid answer, and while we've gotten our fair share of dumb, this is the kind of dumb that comes off to me as "i can't be honest with you and tell you the obvious truth: disney didn't have the license yet"

so instead both participants know the actual answer, but neither of them are allowed to affirmatively state it, so instead you get feigned stupidity and a neutrally phrased graf about 'possible' reasons the x-men weren't in

legit, 90+ percent of the interviews i've read of journalists in pretty much every medium trying to get creators to admit to having any sort of politics at all is just the Patrick and Man-Ray scene on repeat forever

https://twitter.com/GunTurtle/status/1159301789050650630

surprise addendum to this thread: game informer asked more about the "is this game political" thing in a longer format, and the answers are still obvious bullshit, but the phrasing of that BS and dancing around the subject is still useful

when this question is asked to a dev at any AAA company, the answer is always going to be some form of "no" - it's not a coincidence that you could ask 100 AAA devs on "is this game political" and they'd all say "no", so making them try to justify that answer is the real meat

this chunk at the end is the most useful part, where jacob minkoff defines for him what a "political" story would be, and it's, to paraphrase, "it has to comment on *specific CURRENT politicians* and it has to have a *viewpoint*"

first half of that answer is one part corporate PR bullshit, and one part "people actually believe that". you can holler (rightly!) from all the hills that everything is political, especially what they bring up, but lotta people have a specific idea of "political"

it's useful to companies like infinity ward and others that a lot of people do have that definition of "political", that, unless you are talking about *current* politics, and talking about *existing, named, real life politicians*, you aren't saying something "political"

it's bullshit, of course, but it's bullshit people believe - including some writers, some genuinely aren't yanking your chain, some are genuinely this kinda dumb - and it's useful bullshit for infinity ward, or ubisoft, or etc, etc

the second half, the "we don't have a viewpoint" is mostly just corporate PR - some writers honestly believe what minkoff is saying here too, but it's overwhelmingly "we know this is bullshit, but you can't prove we don't believe it"

its the PR avenue greatly favored by ubisoft, and by many AAA devs in general - "we're just showing you a lot of viewpoints, we're not judging, we want the player to learn/decide". the 'empathy' angle is a new one, which adds a viewpoint to their game (which they'd deny, but)

it was the angle favored for the recent deus ex games too, "we're giving you lots of perspectives, we're not judging anything, we have never had an opinion in our life", and they may honestly believe some of that, but it's impossible to believe every single dev honestly thinks it