You also conflate us with corporate shittyness, even though we're doing more to push back against it than anyone. We form unions to challenge these suits that are only good at squeezing money.

You think getting mad at woke games will challenge the forced references or overpriced celebrities? If anything, you're only ensuring the industry gets more soulless and creatively bankrupt. Game devs become "woke" after exploitation awakens them.

[+] parpol@programming.dev 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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[–] TotallynotJessica@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago

Are you saying the main driving force behind these unions is wokeness?

Yes. This is because "woke" is a term that originated from the African American community to describe being "awake" to the racism and unfairness in the system. It's about not taking society at face value, understanding that words are just words and popular narratives often conceal exploitation. Unions are woke because you need to know you're being exploited to stand up against the owners.

The reason unions make games better is that they empower workers to do better quality work. People are actually more productive when they aren't overworked, especially for a job like game development. Crunched employees make more mistakes, think less creatively about problem solving, and take longer to do a task.

If you want to get something done more quickly, it's better to not overwork your employees, instead hiring more if you need more work done. The business people don't see it that way, assuming they can have their cake and eat it too. They push long hours and tight deadlines, which lowers the quality of the work while risking employee burnout.

Crunch weakens the entire product. A common truth in writing is that the first draft will suck, with most good ideas coming after you sleep on the idea, get feedback, and critique it through multiple iterations. The same is true for making things look high quality. It takes time to make a virtual world look good, so if that time isn't given, it will suck. Time is necessary for quality. There aren't any magical workarounds.

Additionally, when the owners have so much control over their employees, they listen more to the marketing team on what boxes to tick to make the most money. This is often why we see poorly done minority characters and plot lines. They exist to reach a demographic and weren't given the resources needed to be good. The DEI department isn't responsible. In fact, the DEI workers often quit because they have no influence.

Being anti-woke is choosing to be asleep to the truth. The things you're mad about aren't a result of us woke minorities, but the uncreative executives who only understand money. We're textbook scapegoats, and things only get worse when people waste their energy on us.

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Those games would have been shit with more... traditional characters as well.

It's like with comic books. The writing has never been great, but incels only had a problem with it when they can't self insert into a power fantasy.

I recently learned there's at least one writer who has worked on both Halo 5 and Forspoken. A lot of people have issues with the writing quality of Halo 5. One issue I personally have is how many scenes don't really start or end. The scenes often open with the conversations already having started and don't seem to conclude by the time it ends. The lines I've heard of Forspoken are also awkward, but there's way more vitriol for Forspoken. Now why could there be so much more negative attention for that game?