During a game’s development, narrative consultants will be hired by studios to help with fleshing out or tweaking narrative elements, Kenney said. “Narrative consultants do not get final say,” Kenney reiterated. "It doesn’t get into the game if we [as the developer] don’t approve it.

“They consult. They do research, pitch ideas, give feedback, and maybe even write scripts. But none of that gets into the game unless the core dev team agrees with it. I’m going to keep saying that, because it’s key. Sweet Baby is not, nor is any consulting group, coming in to wreck games. They’re helping smooth out plots and deepen characters. They ease the burden on the core narrative team. They’re additive in every way.”

  • @otp@sh.itjust.works
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    359 months ago

    At this point I want more woke stuff in games just to bother the losers out of the hobby, or to get them used to it

    • @LazyForest@sh.itjust.works
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      69 months ago

      Woke has always been around they just mad that its more common. Woke used to be sjw. And then politically correct. And other terms. And they all mean the same thing really. “to be aware of genocides, crimes against life, and injustices aginst others” if someone is against that. And they still say theyre for democracy i question their intellect. As well as their sanity. It doesnt seem that hard to understand analogies or metaphors but apparently a lot of people dont realize these things that anti politically correct and anti woke and stuff is against is literally general freedom. They dont seem to understand they are essentially saying “freedom for me but not for thee”.

      Ah well, will have to see how things go over the next 5+ years.

      • @otp@sh.itjust.works
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        119 months ago

        They dont seem to understand they are essentially saying “freedom for me but not for thee”.

        Around my parts, the anti-vax movement during the pandemic was basically a recruitment rally for the anti-trans movement which gained traction after pandemic restrictions were phased out.

        You’d think the people who spent two years chanting about freedom would have been on team freedom for minorities… nope! Lol

      • @Qual@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        You know what, if that inclusion was done in a way that makes sense for the game and the lore then I don’t have a problem. But we have saw time and time again that they do it to have the “See me, I really care about the problem” type of thing. And I say this as an integrant of the same minorities this companies try to gain support. We don’t need a forced bullshit like this, we need just normal things and a normal inclusion without makes feel forced or unwanted.

      • @Godric@lemmy.world
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        149 months ago

        “Video games are worse when I see a dude in a wheelchair” is a take.

        Out of curiosity, do you work in the sanitation field? It’s clearly seen you’re a garbage person, just wondering if you’re a garbageperson as well.

      • @otp@sh.itjust.works
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        49 months ago

        The games are not worse for having woke stuff. To me, it’s no different from having guitars in the soundtrack.

        “I want guitars in game soundtracks because it annoys the people who want game soundtracks without guitars”.

        Sounds petty when you put it that way.

        Now replace “guitars” with something that’s objectively positive for society (e.g., inclusion), and any reasonable person would see that it’s ok.

  • @neatchee@lemmy.world
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    299 months ago

    Good. They deserve the support. And unfortunately these companies have already dealt with harassment from these lunatics and can provide useful guidance on how to handle them.

    I really hope none of their staff are scared away from the industry, even though they have every right to be under the circumstances.

  • @fckreddit@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    I don’t get hate towards Sweet Baby Inc. Sure they consulted on some bad games but that is on the developers, not on them. They also consulted on Miles Morales and I loved the story in that game, even more than the story of 2018 game. Sweet Baby don’t deserve the hate.

    • @SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      You don’t get it, they’re responsible for anything woke in all of these games, and clearly are responsible for the failure of Suicide Squad, due to all the wokeness that they orchestrated into every game they work on, because obviously they are a tool of the VCs that fund these games and therefore despite being a company with only double digits employees they control the entire games industry!

      I wish I was being sarcastic, this is literally the conspiracy theory that has all this hate swirling around this absolutely tiny dev company that specialises in subcontract writing tasks, dictated by the main dev…

      I’ll edit this comment when I find the article that goes over all the finer points.

      Edit: Found the article I was looking for, looked at a few others, but this one was the first one I read and I found it to be the most clear.

      Edit 2: Just wanted to be clear, this is not my personal opinion of Sweet Baby, I’m trying to explain the current conspiracy theory that has everyone up in arms against this tiny studio.

        • @SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
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          9 months ago

          Yeah, sweet baby worked on like background speech of NPCs in Suicide Squad from what I understand.

          Say even if they are responsible for this, the games

          The games what? I’m dying here!

          Edit: I think you misunderstood what I was saying in my previous reply.

    • @Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip
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      119 months ago

      Look at their ceo’s tweets. The project may be fine but the person that leads it and the way they deal with “anti-woke” crowds is essential. They could’ve easily ignored a few weirdos making a group but they decided to make a post promoting some report and continued it with racist and sexist comments. They 100% deserve the hate. The consultancy part isn’t the problem but the management is.

    • body_by_make
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      39 months ago

      It’s just gamer gate 2, same bullshit, just more people pulled into the stupid side than previously.

    • Schadrach
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      19 months ago

      As far as why I might want to preemptively know what games they’ve been involved in, looking at games they’ve been involved with there are a lot with…not great writing. So either involving them has a negative effect on quality or they mostly get hired for games that are doing badly enough that their involvement brings them up to bad. Either way, it seems like something that might be a red flag, at least a conditional one.

      That’s without invoking “diversity” or “woke” at all, though sometimes the two overlap like with Lex Luthor’s files in Suicide Squad, especially the one on Wonder Woman. If you asked most DC fans what Lex Luthor might mention when writings his musings about Wonder Woman, fawning over how Amazon society defeated toxic masculinity wouldn’t be in the top thousand ideas of most. His views of the other JL members are generally pretty dark (and arguably insightful), but the worst he says about Wonder Woman is that she might perhaps be the worst of her people, after writing a couple of paragraphs about how great the Amazons are.

      I’m not sure invoking “diversity” or “woke” is unfair though, since diversity and inclusivity are things they explicitly advertise themselves for.

      Miles Morales was probably the best thing they’ve been involved with, to date.

      Even then, let’s look at what the hate entails - people noticing they keep popping up related to games they looked forward to but were disappointing to them for various reasons. So one Brazilian PoC makes a curator list on Steam listing games they were involved with and tagging them Not Recommended, which anyone can see if they opt-in to the list. This is apparently a harassment campaign against minorities.

      In response, their CEO calls out the curator and it’s creator’s personal Steam account and calls for people to mass flag it and calls for Steam to ban them both. This is apparently not in any way a harassment campaign against minorities, despite targeting a Brazilian PoC for making a list of products they were involved with and labeling them Not Recommended.

      Frankly, I’m all for the curator existing, for precisely the same reason I’m happy the curators that identify Denuvo and Easy Anti-Cheat exist, and why I’d love to see a curator pop up identifying works involving any other well known and/or controversial companies or figures that aren’t the listed developer or publisher. More information for the end consumer is always better, even if you have different preferences than they do.

  • @CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
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    -49 months ago

    A Sweet Baby Inc co-founder said at GDC that they rely on fear to force developers to bring in DEI consultants. One of their founders also has had some spicy things to say about white males.

    Sweet Baby Inc is not likely responsible for AAA gaming largely being disappointing (I blame that on monetization and an unwillingness to innovate), but why would I want to support people who extort their way into business and hate me for my immutable characteristics?