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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.

I think it really speaks to the utter incompetence of the types of writers that work at and are sympathetic to Sweet Baby Inc that even by these extremely low standards, the writing they produce is recognized as significantly worse than the standard dreck of AAA game writing. The way that they allow their ideology to completely subvert their ability to write "good" characters and narratives - again, "good" only by the extremely low standards of AAA video game writing - is actually pretty fascinating, especially given that these are people who specifically claim to have insight about how to write good characters and narratives. This seems to be the same phenomenon as in the film/TV industry where even literal Marvel movies have had what little artistic merit they had nearly completely destroyed in a large part due to this type of writing, with the financial consequences that follow.

I think it's a good reminder of the fact that, in life, things are never so bad that they couldn't get worse, and whether or not it does get worse matters.And, in fact, it's often the case - certainly in this one - that many people are actively pushing to make those things worse while telling you that it's better.