I guess that's why, recently, I've been playing a lot of older games like Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi (which was fantastic), and if not older games then remakes of older games, like the latest Gauntlet (which is definitely not bad with friends). But, apparently, not even old and old-school games are safe anymore.
Last week, the Siege of Dragonspear expansion for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition was released, and the Internet exploded upon discovering in the game some sparse but hard-to-overlook examples of what many believe to be ham-fisted progressive agenda-pushing and unnecessary injection of obnoxious political correctness. One controversial scene in the game is a cringe-worthy exchange with what appears to be a token transgendered character who, of course, brings up her gender transition so that we all know how progressive the writers are.
But hey, like, whatever. Let's all chill out and stuff. Right? Ultimately, as Siege of Dragonspear writer Amber Scott already pointed out back in August 2015 — in response to another discussion of the appropriateness of putting token minority characters in video games — she has the same right to creative freedom as any other writer.
Creators have the right to create whatever they want, just as customers have the right to refrain from buying those products if they don't like what they see. "Don't like it, don't buy it" is the law of the universe, as always. Sure, the character might have been a deliberate social-justice insert, but is it really hurting anyone? Of course not. So, if that's really what the developers want to do, I can only wish them good luck with it.
But then there's the character Minsc blurting out some line about "ethics in heroic adventuring" as if it were meant to get big laughs. Someone, please, just stab me in the face.
For readers who are not aware, the "ethics" gag is a reference to a stale joke from the early days of the GamerGate controversy that started back in 2014: "Actually, it's about ethics in game journalism!" The frequently repeated but rarely funny phrase, delivered sarcastically, was usually intended as dismissive mockery of the voices behind the #GamerGate hashtag, who claimed their interest was in ethics (i.e., the radical idea that game journalists should not write positive coverage and positive reviews for their friends or for others in return for personal favors). The implication here is that the true goal of GamerGate is not ethics but rather the random harassment females/minorities/liberals in video game journalism/development/fandom (take your pick of each), as GamerGate's opponents and the mainstream media have often claimed with cherry-picked online posts from anonymous nobodies as evidence.
I say this is usually how the joke was used because, occasionally, the most strongly anti-GamerGate folk seemed to be taking it a step further by actually making ethics itself the butt of the joke, unironically implying that good ethics is not something to which people should aspire but rather some kind of tool of oppression. Presumably these are the same people who balk at the use of evidence and facts and the idea of "innocent until proven guilty" when it comes to judging those accused of crimes against members underprivileged groups, for which, I guess, an accusation is supposed to be as good as a conviction. Likewise I can only assume these are the same people who criticize the very idea of free speech in the same way, as if they don't realize that free speech is exactly what allows them to be so annoying.
But none of this has anything to do with video games, right? Really, I shouldn't be able to come up with any excuse to bring up these issues on a video game blog. But in following "gaming" news, and in paying even a minimal amount of attention to the goings on in "gaming" culture, I've found that this social "justice" insanity is nearly impossible to avoid.
Regarding the "ethics" line, it's even less funny now than it was back then. It's not even topical anymore. The joke was already old when, in yet another slightly altered form, it was awkwardly slapped onto a page of a Thor comic last year. I'm sure all the social justice warriors high-fived each other, but readers who hadn't had the misfortune of stumbling upon idiotic Twitter drama were probably left bewildered by the extremely forced and obscure reference to something that had pretty much nothing to do with comics or anything about which actual comics readers are likely to care.
Putting this nonsense in Baldur's Gate is even more pathetic, given the timing. A year ago, some people might still have cared enough about GamerGate to be offended or amused by this, depending on their political views, but now I find it hard to imagine any reaction from anyone except a cringe and perhaps a disappointed sigh. It's frustrating to see a professional writer leave such a poop stain of an esoteric inside "joke" in a game which might otherwise have been good. Now, at least in the one moment in which a player hears that line, it's not good. While this single line isn't really capable of spoiling the whole product, it sure is a "wow that was stupid" moment. At worst, it's an inappropriate political statement shoved into a game where it doesn't belong. At best, it's a meme shoved into a game where it doesn't belong. And, last time I checked, game developers who use Internet memes as jokes in their games are no-talent hacks, regardless of your political leanings.
Honestly, though, in all seriousness, it's not just the one line that convinced me not to buy this game. I very much doubt that the overall writing quality is any good in a game written by someone who feels compelled to put anything like this in a final product.
To make matters worse, Siege of Dragonspear developer Beamdog's CEO, Trent Oster, can be seen on the Beamdog forums begging for positive reviews to counter-balance the negative ones which he sees as illegitimate:
Whether the severity of the low scores given to the game in those negative reviews are fair or not, asking customers to post positive reviews en masse with the specific goal of affecting a game's overall score is unprofessional. People who like the game enough to warrant a positive review will post one without being asked. More importantly, when one of those people does write a review, the given score should be a reflection of the game's quality according to that individual, not an attempt to exert the maximum influence on the average. When customers start writing reviews with the overall score in mind, the result is a misleading pile of zeros and tens with nothing in between, which is helpful to no one.
This last part doesn't really apply to Steam in particular, where "recommended" and "not recommended" are the only two scores that exist, but attempting to raise an army of like-minded reviewers is still an attempt to game the system. And yes, customers will often try to manipulate the average even when they aren't told to do so; there are already too many zeros, according at least to Oster, and he seems to think this is the reason. But I think it's likely that a lot of the negative reviews (many of which don't even mention the controversies described here) are not from trolls but from legitimately unhappy customers. It's not up to Oster to say that their reviews are any less real than the ones he's encouraging Beamdog's forum users to write.
Update (Wednesday, April 6, 2016)
I fully expected Beamdog to stick to their guns, to double down, to meet every complaint about any aspect of their game with an automatic accusation of bigotry while hiding behind a female writer and her poorly received (albeit well-intended) minority character. I didn't expect any acknowledgement of the game's shortcomings, and I certainly didn't expect any promises to make things better. But they surprised me. In another post on the Beamdog forums, CEO Trent Oster gives a quick recap of the negative reactions to the game and outlines some future changes.
While he expresses pride in the game (of course), and takes a clear stance against the harassment directed at the company's employees by angry internet people (of course), he also accepts the negative feedback on the transgendered Mizhena, namely that there wasn't sufficient character development to make her anything more than a token gesture of inclusiveness. Further down in the post, he mentions plans to patch up various bugs, to fix problems with the game's multiplayer mode, and even to remove the controversial (but mostly embarrassingly dumb) "ethics" line uttered by Minsc.
Like Oster's plea for positive reviews, this post is likely a reaction to the negative reviews flooding various sites. Last time I checked the reviews on the same three sites Oster had mentioned in his April 3rd forum post, my findings were as follows:
- average feedback for the game was "mixed" on Steam, with 69% of reviews being positive, but with negative reviews absolutely dominating the "most helpful" list;
- the user score on Metacritic was 3.8 out of 10, again with negative reviews rising to the top of the "most helpful" list;
- the average rating on GOG was three-and-a-half out of five stars, with lots of negative reviews in the first few pages of a list which appeared to be sorted by helpfulness ratings like the others.
