Hogwarts Legacy: The-Game-That-Must-Not-Be-Named
Hogwarts Legacy comes out on Friday.
Wanna watch the release trailer? Here it is:
The story takes place a couple of centuries ago, I guess. I mean, top hats exist but this is prior to Dumbledore and Grindelwald. Googling tells me that Top Hats were invented in 1793 and Dumbledore and Grindelwald fought for the first time in 1899. So I’m guessing early 1800’s. I mean, it *COULD* be earlier than that (maybe wizards invented Top Hats in the 1600s!) but, as far as I can tell, it’s set before the prequels.
So you should feel free to be a student in *ANY* of the houses, I guess.
But, of course, there is drama surrounding the game’s release. JK Rowling is a controversial figure and there are a *LOT* of discussions dealing with how to deal with the game despite JK Rowling being controversial.
IGN jumped in with both feet. In the middle of their review of the game, they point out:
The elephant in the room with Hogwarts Legacy is Harry Potter’s creator, J.K. Rowling, whose comments about transgender people in recent years have left a sour taste in the mouths of many current and former Potter fans, both at IGN and in the world at large. This has driven some to call for a boycott of the Wizarding World altogether – including Hogwarts Legacy, though Rowling was not directly involved and there are good reasons (both in-game and out) to believe the developers at Avalanche don’t necessarily share her views. Regardless, IGN has always and will continue to champion human rights causes and support people speaking with their wallets in whatever manner they choose.
As critics, our job is to answer the question of whether or not we find Hogwarts Legacy to be fun to play and why; whether it’s ethical to play is a separate but still very important question. So just as in virtually all cases, we’re choosing to expose and address the views of the franchise creator separately from our consideration of the work of the hundreds of game developers and evaluate Hogwarts Legacy as it stands, leaving behind-the-scenes context to be considered in addition to that evaluation, rather than in place of it, so that it can be weighted according to your own values.
Game Journalist Patrick Klepek put it like this:
Watching gaming outlets jump through rhetorical hoops to justify coverage on Hogwarts Legacy isn’t surprising, but it’d be more honest if they played it straight and just said “our shaky business model does not allow us to ignore any game that might sell 10 million copies.”
— Patrick Klepek (@patrickklepek) February 6, 2023
Games like Elden Ring justified salaries last year. If Hogwarts Legacy can provide a fraction of that value, websites that live and die on SEO will have no choice but to engage with it. Morality and ethics did pretty quickly under something that arcane. It sucks.
— Patrick Klepek (@patrickklepek) February 6, 2023
To complicate things, if the pre-release ratings are anything to go by, it appears that the game will actually be good.
Metacritic, at this moment in time, has the game scored at an 89:
That’s not the score with the hoi polloi mixed in. That’s the aggregate score of 15 different “official” video game review sites.
IGN scored it at a 9. PC Gamer’s Morgan Park’s review-in-progress has the title “Hogwarts Legacy review-in-progress: It’d be a lot easier to dismiss Hogwarts Legacy if it weren’t so good“.
Forbes reports that the game is the best selling game on multiple platforms even outselling games that are actually released or on deep discount:
- Hogwarts Legacy as the top-earning game on Steam, higher than CSGO’s microtransactions and the actually-released, highly praised Dead Space remake.
- Hogwarts Legacy is the best-selling game on the Epic Store, over Dead Space and Borderlands 3 on a 90% off sale for $7.
- On Amazon, the Deluxe and Regular editions of Hogwarts Legacy are the #1 and #2 best-selling games for PS5.
- On Amazon, two Deluxe editions and the regular editions of Hogwarts Legacy are the #1, #2 and #3 best-selling games on Xbox Series X.
There is at least one person who, finding Rowling controversial, made a tool to help you figure out whether your favorite streamer streamed the game:
Introducing https://t.co/q3Qq5j7f0M – find out if anyone you follow on twitch has streamed THAT new wizard game pic.twitter.com/i1VIBU64dk
— Sam Gibbs (@iamsamgibbs) February 6, 2023
Though it might be best to assume that they did, given that Insider Gaming points out: “HOGWARTS LEGACY BREAKS TWITCH RECORD WITH OVER 1.3 MILLION VIEWERS“. And that’s with the Deluxe “get it 3 days early” version. I imagine that once normies are able to get their hands on the cheaper “same day as everybody else” version, the streams will go down a bit as people will be too busy playing (and perhaps streaming) themselves.
But, at this point, it looks like the game has managed two different difficult things:
1. It’s very popular
2. It doesn’t suck
This seems to indicate that the game will have legs.
Stephen Totilo, of Axios Gaming, writes “Hogwarts Legacy game launch becomes referendum on J.K. Rowling“.
At first glance, it seems like the referendum passes and passes quite handily. I guess the question now becomes “is the referendum non-binding?”
(Featured image is promotional art for Hogwarts Legacy.)
Let’s say — not wish, but just hypothesize — that Ms. Rowling died tomorrow. FTR I do not hope for such a thing and you shouldn’t either. This isj ust a thought experiment.
If that happened, all this controversy goes away, right? Right?
it doesn’t? Why not? If it doesn’t then it’s not really about That Woman and her Awful Opinion. (With which, FTR, I disagree.) If it’s about tribalism, or moral impurity, then this isn’t really so different from the Calvinist critique of Mr. Beast, is it?Report
It might? I mean, Kotaku’s article about it is “PS5 Subreddit Doesn’t Want Players To Bring Up Harry Potter Author“.
Yesterday’s “Kotaku’s Week in Games” points out that “Hogwarts Legacy isn’t the only thing dropping this week”.
And that’s it. Those are the two articles that mention the game for February. You can go back to January 25th and see that Brother Ethan Gach has an article called “Hogwarts Legacy Doesn’t Care If You Use Unforgivable Curses” (subhed: “Sounds like the Harry Potter game will let you wreak havoc with little consequence”).
And that’s it. Kotaku doesn’t seem to be covering it much at all.
Rock Paper Shotgun is having a week dedicated to magical games but Hogwarts Legacy is not being mentioned. Here’s from the announcement:
Again: Neither Hogwarts nor Rowling is mentioned. But if you’re hoping to play a game about magic, they’ve got a bunch you can play without being transphobic.
TheGamer’s article called “No One Is Asking You To Give Up Harry Potter” opens with this:
All that to say:
I think that this goes deeper than “Well, Rowling is still alive and getting money from her properties.”Report
If you just read *ONE* article about the Hogwarts Legacy controversy, it should be “Games Media Has Failed The Hogwarts Legacy Test“.
This is from the middle of it (I’m guessing that the reference is to IGN’s review of the game):
This is worth discussing in the same breath as support for Palestine.
I don’t think that this goes away if Rowling becomes a painting in Hogwarts somewhere.Report
I still think that the cancellation of J.K. Rowling is vastly over estimated by the anti-woke chronically online who are experts at nutpicking and hyperbole on the power of online dialogue*. Are there some teachers who removed Potter from their classroom libraries, yeah. There are still many bien pensant liberals who have young kids in Pottermania and let them continue.
*Let’s be radically honest, most people really do not care about twitter on online dialogue very much and I think Rowling’s transphobia or anti-trans views are not very well known outside of those (myself included) who spend way too much time online. I have to keep on reminding a former OTer that tweets like “friendly reminder that you don’t get to celebrate lunar new year unless you’re literally from a country that does or if you are invited by someone from a country that does.” by someone named Kassy Cho are not common views found in real life. *
*Tweet is from 2019 and a man named Andy Wang responded by tweeting “friendly reminder that I hereby formally invite everyone to celebrate lunar year.” I bet dollars to donuts that Mr. Wong’s view is much more common among ethnic Chinese than Ms. Cho’s. Ms. Cho is based out of London apparently and her phrasing is pretty awkward for American Born Chinese, British Born Chinese, Canadian Born Chinese, French Born Chinese, etc. Though California just made Lunar New Year a state holiday. Maybe she thinks it is okay for this Jewish guy in California to celebrate it.
Twitter was apparently down for a bit today because of Musk’s rampant cost-cutting, seemingly unending manic phase, dexy bender, and pathological narcissistic views. Life might get better if twitter goes down because twitter seems to basically allow dorm room radicals and their former dorm room enemies to keep antagonizing each other and imaging they are both more numerous than they really are.Report
The Jewish calendar is solar-lunar. If you really think about it, Passover, which falls on the 15th of Nisan the first month of the Jewish calendar, should be the real Jewish New Year. I’m wondering how Rosh Hashanah became the Jewish New Year even though it falls on the 7th months of the year.Report
The very online types don’t like it when you push back a little against them and remind them that their views are not very common even among the groups they claim to advocate for. There is a very online speculative fiction site called Mythcreants, where the politics are pretty close to being a parody of Twitter liberal politics, and some casual reminders that most people don’t think like they do aren’t really liked.Report
I’m pretty sure that the “anti-woke chronically online who are experts at nutpicking and hyperbole” believe that Rowling isn’t even close to canceled.
Like, I’m pretty sure that they take the viewpoint that the woke are far more represented by such things as game journalism websites than the culture at large warrants. And that this will have a backlash of some sort. But not, like, a scary one. A funny one.
If I had to guess.Report
Freddie had a relevant post yesterday on how this sort of dynamic impacts music journalism:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/pitchfork-and-the-death-of-things
I’m not sure it’s quite an apples to apples, as my understanding is that the line between game journalism and game advertising has always been a bit fuzzier with music at least once having a prestige component to it. The reality though I think is that this is just how writers are being taught to write, or, if your goal is to one day write for legacy media, this is the path to showcase your (cheap boring total lack of IMO) writing skills. Those stories about how bird watching is really racist aren’t going to write themselves.Report
Yeah, tastemaking that doesn’t take flavor into account.
Making explicit how “popular” and “fashionable” are not merely orthogonal to each other, fashionable now exists in opposition to what is popular. The *WORST* thing that could happen to something fashionable is that it becomes “popular”.
So you have to choose. Are you popular? Or are you fashionable?
Having fun is popular, unfortunately.Report
“[M[y understanding is that the line between game journalism and game advertising has always been a bit fuzzier [than music]…”
one might say that there are ethical considerations involvedReport
I still think a lot of very online conversation is basically things that happened in faculty offices and activist spaces before the Internet came big carried out in public. I can see a bunch of activists muttering these things to themselves in the 1980s in some rented space in NYC or Berkeley and everybody nodding sagely while another Asian-American faculty member at NYU or UC has big Chinese lunar New Year Party at their home. There is something just really doctrinaire and unworkable about their belief systems.
I also find when we Jews and Asians engage in this type of dialogue it comes across as trying to hard and we too are oppressed minorities. There is something basically inauthentic about we Jews and Asians doing this compared to African-Americans, Native Americans, and other groups. The real pure rage is not really there.Report
HP Lovecraft died before most of current SF&F fandom’s grandparents were born but they were still so angry about his Odious Opinions that they changed a long-running industry trophy that was based on his visage.
So A) no, the controversy won’t go away when she does, and B) you’re right that the reasons for the controversy aren’t really about the author, but the author still serves as the focal point. (People are not mad about Derleth the way they are about Lovecraft, even though both told the same sorts of stories for much the same reasons, and in fact most of what we consider “Lovecraftian” was created by Derleth…)Report
I think a lot of it will depend on whether Rowling’s specific positions are vindicated. Lovecraft’s racialism has been anything but, maybe except for the weird mirror image of it that lives on in college humanities departments and DEI activism.
Twitter, which again, isn’t real life, seems to be of the position that they can’t be, and that they have already been decisively rejected. However, the direction the medical establishment is going with regard to children in the better health care systems in the world (spoiler that ain’t the US), tightening of standards in womens sports, and the reaction to stories of predatory men abusing the self-ID standard, suggests we may be on a different trajectory, or at the very least are not out of the woods.Report
Heh, I’ll say it: the TERFs are winning everywhere but twitter… we’ll see the quiet adoption of their positions and everyone will cover their tracks, look around and say it never happened like we remember.Report
Out of curiosity, what would this world look like?
What would be allowed, what would be forbidden? What would be socially acceptable, what would be taboo?
I have to ask because conservatives have a terrible history of, well, lying their a$$ off about what their “specific positions” actually are.
I mean, right here we have seen the stated position start out as “Well, just curb the excesses of bad DEI” which then become laws like “Arrest parents who allow their adolescent children to dress different than their birth gender”.
So maybe we just need to hear some straight talk about what – specifically- this imagined victory will look like.Report
I’m not a TERF; have to ask them.Report
Yeah, this happens a lot.
*Joe Biden voice*
So we’re agreed then, that trans people should be welcomed as respected equals living their lives with dignity and their preferred gender respected.
We have unanimity, folks!Report
At the very least, the boundaries for “respect” seem to include avoiding purchasing Hogwarts Legacy.
Which, if you ask me, pushes the boundaries of “respect” into places that I’m not used to it being in.Report
I know that from your perspective as a person deeply enmeshed in both the gaming and online world, the controversy over this game and trans activists probably features large on your cultural radar.
But I really don’t think that more than 0.1% of Americans are even aware of it much less care one way or the other.
I mean, if the commenters here at OT were to go to their regular jobs and ask if anyone had an opinion about Hogwarts Legacy and whether one should buy it or shun it to be an ally of trans people, how many would get anything but blank stares?Report
Oh, okay. So if we agree that the *REAL* boundaries are stuff like “respect them as equals” and we can still buy the games and read the books and watch the movies, then we’re in a place that I find recognizable.
I’m good.
But there are seriously people out there arguing stuff like this:
Report
Chip has the privilege of not caring about that sort of person.Report
These people you are hearing…are they with us here, at OT?
Seriously man, “there are people online saying stuff” is about the weakest claim you could make.
I can find you a person saying trans people should be killed.
Is that what Marchmaine means by “TERFs winning”?
Or is that nutpicking?Report
Hey, if we agree that these people do not have opinions that are within the Overton Window, then I’m good.
Those people have opinions outside of the bounds of acceptable discourse and we should not take their opinions seriously.Report
There is no right life in the wrong one.Report
Truly, there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism.Report
It seems to me that is going to evolve over time as society grapples with the various issues. And along with that the question of who gets to decide who or what is transphobic. Strident activists or the normie public? I don’t think anyone knows how this will shake out over time.Report
“Out of curiosity, what would this world look like?”
It would look like same-sex marriage does; accepted so long as it buys into the “monogamous cishet suburban child-raising” paradigm.
Like, maybe Joey’s mommy was called “Steve” when she was younger, but she presents as femme…Report
This sounds about right.
I don’t know if you were around in the 70s when it was called Gay Lib, versus Anita Bryant, but the conversation was nearly identical.
Conservatives would pass around stories of decadent and perverse things gay men did, horror stories of straight young girls terrorized by dykes on the LPGA locker rooms all to demonstrate how awful it was.
Then, as now, there were a lot of gay people themselves who reveled in their outlaw status and thrived on shocking the straights.
But in the end, most people really just want to live and let live.Report
Chip, don’t use slurs. It’s not the early oughts anymore.
It’s unfashionable.
Some even think it’s morally wrong.Report
SSM too. When Sullivan et all brought the subject of same sex marriage up in the 90’s the only people who hated it more than the social conservatives were the gay rights activists. It’s easy to forget since they eventually got wise and jumped to march at the head of that parade but for quite some time SSM was considered grotesquely heteronormative and erasing of same sex relationships.Report
The person in my private life who is most vocal about this issue is a close friend from high school. She is a very liberal married lesbian and she and her wife are raising their 3 kids in the burbs. Several times she has mentioned to me that she finds the way this subject is being approached in blue world, especially public schools, to be anti-parent, anti-woman, and at times anti-gay. That last one is not something I feel comfortable weighing in on and I approach the second in a more reserved way.
I don’t bring that up because I think her identity necessarily gives her particular opinion greater validity or special insight. I do because the idea that this is all goodies versus baddies neatly sorted into little identitarian buckets to be ridiculous and wrong headed. We need to work this out as a society in a way that grants freedom and tolerance to trans people, but that involves navigating some legitimately thorny issues (and before someone jumps in at me, no, I am not remotely interested in the approach of DeSantis, Ron or Abbot, Greg, or whoever Republican).Report
In what sense do you think the TERFs are winning offline? They certainly aren’t winning among young people (let’s say under 25, but especially teens), where gender has way more fluid than you’d think just from the Twitters. Perhaps it’s just a fad, and in a few years, the kids will be back to performing gender like old folks tend to want them to, but man does it look like the TERFS are losing offline right now.
Obviously, there have been strong reactions among reactionary lawmakers in “red” states, but that looks a lot less like winning than a fighting retreat.Report
I think he’s referring to the EU where a lot of government regulatory bodies and medical establishments have rolled back or paused medical/chemical interventions with regards to gender diasphoria in under aged patients. In the UK, IIRC, some doctors got their asses fired over being a little to quick on the “wham bam thank you now ma’am” reassignments.
I would not describe that as TERFS or social conservatives “winning” per say since no one is taking their ideas and implementing them. It’s more of just a conversation happening about what the best/healthiest long term way to help these individuals is.Report
This is, uh, actually entirely wrong. Like, every part of it is wrong.
This is the nonsense that the _UK media_ is pretending is true, but in actual fact, it is not happening at all.
What has actually happened, and this is pretty easy to confirm, is that the UK media has gotten astonishingly transphobic in the last few years.Report
…why do you think this doesn’t go away if she dies tomorrow?
Like, you posed that like what you’re saying has a clear answer of ‘No, it doesn’t’, but failed to produce, uh, any evidence that position is correct. There are plenty of people who take a very clear position they will not purchase the game while Rowling is control of the IP, and they would if she died or simply was not anymore.
…although I will point out there are a fair number of _other_ issues with the game, including allegations of antisemitism. I have to suggested that making the _goblins_ and a conspiracy allegations of dark magic and kidnapping children the center of the game was…uh…not really a good idea.Report
For myself, I’ll probably pass, just because the E-ticket games are kind of not my thing these days. But I wouldn’t disqualify based on views I don’t like by the creator, or, in this case, the creator of the IP, but not the game. If the game itself had content that bothered me, that would be a reason to not engage.
But if I disqualified every game and every film that had someone who worked on it be a less than perfect person (by my lights) I wouldn’t play or watch much.
These works are made by large teams. Somebody on the team has a poor view of trans people, guaranteed. In some sense Rowling had less to do with the making of this game than the people who did the lighting effects. I know nothing about those people, perhaps they might get my seal of approval, it’s just an example.
Others, of course, may manage their engagement with works of art and entertainment differently.Report
I admit: I am projecting some of my experiences with the buildup to Cyberpunk 2077 onto Hogwarts.
There was a lot of discourse. There are a lot of exceptionally high scores from professional review sites. There are a lot of articles talking about how you can’t trust professional review sites.
I have even seen a tweet flying around with major spoilers for one of the last major cutscenes of the game with the tagline “RETWEET TO UPSET A TRANSPHOBE”.
So, like, is the game good? I mean, Cyberpunk 2077 was *AMAZING* but it was downright unplayable for half of the people who bought it right out of the gate. A whole bunch of people out there *HATED* it and reviewed it accordingly.
But I didn’t know whether the reviews that said that it was good were based on the game being good or if it was because IGN gives high scores to AAA games that buy the Unobtainium Advertising Package. I didn’t know whether the reviews that said it was bad was based on the game being bad or if it was because the game’s treatment of Gender was an act of violence.
Is Hogwarts going to be good? The indicators seem to be there? The two reviews mentioned in the main post talk about personal experiences that include joy and stuff like thinking about the game when making dinner.
So maybe it’s good? Maybe?
But the Unobtainium Ad Package is expensive and purchases a lot. Here are some phrases from IGN’s review:
Does that sound like a 9.0 to you? It doesn’t to me… but the review also finishes with “In nearly every way, Hogwarts Legacy is the Harry Potter RPG I’ve always wanted to play.”
Is that accurate or part of the Unobtainium Ad Package?
If it’s accurate, I want to run, not walk, and pick this up. I hope it grabs me like Cyberpunk 2077 did.
If it’s just part of what goes with Unobtainium, well… jeez. I’ll get it on sale used from Entertainmart in a year.
So I’m mostly irritated that gaming journalism has shot itself in the foot. Is the game good? I have no idea. Even after reading a couple of reviews from a couple of the biggest gaming sites.
But if it’s as good as those couple of gaming sites say? This might be a rare $70 game that is worth $70.Report
There were a lot of trans-related controversies with CP2077 which basically ended when it was released and it turned out they were overblown at best.
And I think the reviews of CP2077 were good because CDPR only allowed, IIRC, PC review copies of the game – in other words, they hid how bad it was on consoles from reviewers.
I think reviews at this point for Hogwarts Legacy are almost entirely based on the PS5 and PC. It could be CP2077 terrible on Xbox One and the last-generation consoles as well.
Hogwarts Legacy does look good, but I’m going to wait and see before buying. And when it comes to JK Rowling’s personal views, they do not factor at all in my decision.Report
I assume it’ll suck on the last-generation consoles. The XBone and PCs have enough overlap that I don’t think that there will be *THAT* much difference (feel free to correct me when I’m wrong about this).
I just hope the PS5 version is good. The PS5 metacritic page has the score at an 86 rather than 89.
And 86 ain’t bad?
But I remember when Gamespot gave Doom 3 a score of 8.9 and I thought “That’s pretty good!” instead of “Uh-oh. That’s after they bought the unobtainium package.”Report
What Harry Potter fans who are aghast at JK Rowling’s statements seem to be doing is death of the author strategy where Harry Potter is separated from the creator.Report
We’ve already seen one suggestion that this problem goes away when Rowling dies.
It certainly solves the issue of how Rowling will get a dump truck full of money for Hogwarts Legacy 2: Legacyer.
But, until then, we have to deal with the issue of Rowling getting a dump truck full of money every time a new property comes out and how purchasing *THIS* one makes the *NEXT* one more likely.Report
Why do we, whoever “we” are, “have to deal with this”? And what does it mean to “deal with this” beyond blowing off steam? Or exercising consumption choices?Report
Because of stuff like this:
People streaming the game are experiencing bullying at the agency of activists out there.
If you want to stream the game, you will get to experience the bullying as well.
Is that something that you “have to deal with”? Is occasional bullying just the pricetag of living in a country with freedom of association and freedom of speech?
“Hey, that person is just blowing off steam”?Report
You sound like Anita Sarkisian.
Do you know who she is?Report
Oh, yeah.
She’s one of the people who argued that online bullying was horrible. She argued it in front of the UN!Report
On-line bullying is a real thing, but a thing that people tend to recognize and condemn only very selectively. Anyone who wants to condemn on-line bullying, of whatever kind, is free to do so, however selectively. If that’s what this is about.Report
Well, if we’re going to dismiss online bullying, I guess there’s not much for us to have to deal with. People out there will have opinions.
Opinions are like Loverboy albums. Everybody has them and they all stink.Report
These people who are dismissing online bullying….do you see them in the room here?
Can we speak to them?
This rhetorical device of nutpicking the framing it as something “we’re ” doing is transparent and unpersuasive.Report
So we agree that online bullying is bad? And, like, all of us agree that it is?
Okay. It’s silly to argue that anybody would think that it’s not worth worrying about.
Fair enough.
The question then becomes “does playing Hogwarts Legacy itself constitute online bullying?”
If we agree that we can dismiss the people who say it is as being outside of the Overton Window, I’m good.
There remain people who say stuff like this but if we agree that this is a her problem rather than an us problem, I’m good:
Report
Yes, I think it’s fair to say that “We” agree that online bullying is bad and that playing a video game is not bullying and “We” can ignore people who do.Report
Hey. Then I am 100% in agreement.Report
Who is this “we” who is dismissing on-line bullying? Your reading comprehension skills are slipping.
And how, exactly, do you propose to “deal with” on-line bullying other than saying on-line that it’s bad. While that isn’t literally the least one can do, it’s pretty close.Report
I suppose that I see some overlap between “dismissing” and “doing the least one can do” (or pretty close to it).
If we’re going to just going to yell “quit it!” at the people who cross the line and agree that online bullying is bad the rest of the time but it’s not worth doing much more past that… well, I am okay with that too.Report
You really need some remedial reading help. Who, exactly, is “dismissing” on-line bullying. As far as I can tell, nobody. Now how do we “deal with it,” which is the question I asked? I don’t know. All I know is what I see here, people saying it is bad and should stop. Which is fine, but unlikely to do much. So how do you propose to deal with it? Or do you even propose to deal with it?Report
Who, exactly, is “dismissing” on-line bullying.
I am saying that I see overlap between “dismissing” and “doing the least one can do” (or pretty close to it).
Given that, I see you saying “Who, exactly, is “doing the least one can do” (or pretty close to it) regarding on-line bullying?”, my answer is “us”.
So how do you propose to deal with it? Or do you even propose to deal with it?
I’m proposing we yell “quit it!” at the people who cross the line and agree that online bullying is bad the rest of the time but it’s not worth doing much more past that.Report
The mountain has labored….. Of course, people familiar with the original folk tale will point out that the way the phrase is used today means pretty much the opposite of the point of the original folk tale, but that’s language evolution for you.Report
Well, like… let’s say that you saw someone using slurs in comments. Like, not a slur against a group to which you belonged but against people who were in a different group.
What would your response be?
Would it be to ignore it?Report
Use/mention distinction anyone?Report
So you’d explain that there are circumstances under which it’s okay to use slurs and hammer out that this was one of those circumstances?
Fair enough.Report
Of course, I can only guess at what your “this” is, an all-too-common problem, but the general principle is sound enough. I litigate a lot of discrimination cases and it is often essential to nail down whether A called B a n****r or whether he called him “the N-word.” There is an actual case where a verdict was overturned on appeal and the case remanded for retrial because it wasn’t clear whether the Bad Guy referred to the plaintiff as a “n****r” or as an “N-word” — largely because witnesses and lawyers were too squeamish to use the slur itself in the questions or the answers.Report
Well, Chip used a slur for lesbians above.
Maybe you could demonstrate what you would hypothetically do in such a situation.Report
Did he “use” it or “mention” it? I read it as a “mention,” though some might disagree.Report
So you’d explain that there are circumstances under which it’s okay to use slurs and hammer out that this was one of those circumstances?
Fair enough.Report
Again, you insist on “use” when the issue is “use” or “mention,” for which the rules are different. When I ask an evasive or embarrassed witness: “Let’s be clear about this–A called B a ‘n****r,’ didn’t he?” that’s mention, not use. If I call B a n****r, that’s use. I think we all understand free indirect discourse.Report
Then allow me to amend:
So you’d explain that there are circumstances under which it’s okay to put the slur into a sentence and hammer out that this was one of those circumstances?
Fair enough.Report
I’ve been “debating” online since the dialup BBS days in the 1980s. One thing I can say with some confidence is that human behavior hasn’t changed.
There will always be bullies, trolls, and overly-sensitive narcissists who want everyone else to conform to their particular behavioral and ideological norms.
And in the case of bullying like this, the tools are available to stop that behavior. No one is forced to watch Twitch or scroll Twitter or social media. And Twitch streamers have lots of control over their own chat spaces. I don’t watch Twitch much, but every stream has rules and most streamers (and their mods) are always at the ready to ban or timeout people who don’t follow the rules. This streamer could have (and should have) set rules for appropriate behavior in his chat stream and then enforced those rules. Yes, that will piss some people off, but standing up to bullies and self-righteous narcissists is the only way to disincentivize that behavior.Report
Point of order: I suggested the problem does not go away when Rowling dies, because it’s not really about her. The problem is one of the indelibility of moral impurity, so that dump truck full of money for Hogwarts Legacy 2: Wizardly Boogaloo is doomed to be morally tainted even today, before the first line of code is yet written.Report
I apologize. I misread “If that happened, all this controversy goes away, right? Right?”
I assumed that that meant that the implication was that it would.
Jumping to “If it’s about tribalism, or moral impurity, then this isn’t really so different from the Calvinist critique of Mr. Beast, is it?”
Well, if it’s *REALLY* about moral impurity, then I have a handful of tools in my belt for dealing with moral impurity and Calvinist critiques from the days when AC/DC and Twisted Sister were putting out cassette tapes.Report
I bet you do! Plus la change…Report
For or against?Report
There’s a spectrum of how reasonable it is to separate the art from the artist. But Rowling is very public about her transphobic views and uses her famer and success with Harry Potter as a tool to advance those views. Barring the (literal) death of the author, or at least her resiling from her views, I don’t think its feasible to separate art from artist in this case.Report
Parker Hartzler, a technician for the mo-cap for the game, has publicly said that he will not be purchasing it:
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he sure was willing to get paid for working on the game thoReport
He talks about that:
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“I only worked there because I needed the money” that didn’t seem to stop people gettin’ super mad at that person who was a very vocal critic of supposed transphobia and it turned out they worked for Lockheed Martin
also, “I have principles, so long as it doesn’t cost me anything” isn’t exactly a demonstration of one’s Allyship.Report
The Ana Mardoll situation was a hair different. Mardoll spent many years berating people for how they needed to be more sensitive and more inclusive and take more things into account before doing something harmful and leading pile-ons against people who were not more sensitive or more inclusive or who failed to sufficiently take more things into account. Had occasional fundraisers as well.
Then the Lockheed Martin thing came out and we got a short speech about how complicated the world is and that went the way that all such things go.Report
Heh, capitalism makes perpetrators and victims of us all, everywhere and all at once.Report
Mardoll’s profile was high because they made it high, but the denunciations weren’t “if you hadn’t been such a jerk maybe this would go differently”, they were “taking the King’s Shilling means you’re One Of His, regardless of your reasons”.Report
Well, there was also a bit of a backlash against the fundraising. “You asked for donations?!? AND YOU’RE A HOMEOWNER?!?”
And the response was something to the effect of “I am not a homeowner; I have a mortgage.”
This upset a lot of the renters who did stuff like donate in the past.Report
The controversy has officially made it to the New York Times!
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I’m sure I’m going to be made a fool for saying this but there’s something refreshingly 2015 about that headline, or at least closer to 2015 than 2020, and I think that’s a good thing.Report
Agreed: if we’re arguing about the moral purity of a video game, that may suggest we aren’t arguing about things like “Do we even WANT democracy?”
(OTOH it may be we haven’t resolved the bigger issues after all and are instead distracting ourselves. But let’s try to be positive if we can.)Report
Now *THESE* are shots fired:
(I will grant that I cast four spells while playing Elden Ring. Two were healing spells of different strengths. One was a cure poison/rot spell. One was a buff.)Report
I won’t go anywhere near this game; not because I’m boycotting it but because it just doesn’t interest me (the books were good; the movies were trash). But I still listen to Michael Jackson, Marilyn Manson, and Pantera (and I’m also “too old to cancel”) so maybe my opinion should matter less than everyone else’s. If you’re a person who feels you must reject all things JKR then by all means do so, but let people find joy where they can.Report
Wired has reviewed the game and given it a 1/10.
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The twit comments are hilarious….basically “the reviewer didn’t actually review the game”.Report
Some of Twitter thinks the game is anti-Semitic. No idea id that true, false, or questionable.Report
I suppose it depends on whether you see the goblins as Jewishly-coded.
Here’s the goblin scene from the first movie:
On top of that, there is an item in the game (one of the bajillion collectibles) that is a Goblin Artefact of a horn that was used during the 1612 Goblin Rebellion. The argument is that the horn looks similar to a shofar and 1612 was the year of the Fettmich Uprising in Frankfurt.Report
It doesn’t really matter if _you_ see the goblins as Jewishly coded. The question is what people do with things that have repeated been called out as antisemitic.
Just…question here: As a major corporations, if you’re making a game 20 years after a property comes out, and there is a fantasy race in there that has been repeated called out as antisemitic, what do you do?
Maybe you agree with that allegations, maybe you disagree.
But you don’t make a plot about them stealing children. Or just being accused of that.
In fact, you probably shouldn’t focus the game on them at all, and you certainly shouldn’t make them the purported villains…and, no, it doesn’t matter actually how the game’s plot turns out.
The goblin artifact stuff…I honestly have no idea if that was an accident, but there has been a _lot_ of historical analogs between Jews and goblins, repeated rebellions and oppression, being forbidden from certain social positions. I honestly suspect the year is a coincidence, but the shofar part might not be. Because it is a _really easy_ analogy to make, Jews and goblins, one that keeps sorta showing up in the properties.(1)
Which, again, is really _really_ problematic considering how goblins are portrayed. (And the fact that Rowling seems to have our heroes have _literally no problem_ with their treatment…or with slavery, or torture prisons, or whatever, but that’s because Rowling and her stories have literally no ethical center whatsoever except the incredibly facile ‘People trying to mass murder people is bad!’.)
You can have a race that is fantasy Jews…but you have to be at least slightly responsible in the depiction. Vulcans, for example, are sometimes seen as ‘space Jews’, including things lifted straight from Judaism thanks to Leonard Nimoy, but notable, Vulcans are not normally the bad guys. And even in the few places where they are (Some of Enterprise where they are overprotective, that weird baseball episode of DS9, etc), they aren’t bad guys in a way that fulfills antisemitic tropes.
And I would say that this storyline is actually wildly irresponsible of a major corporation and almost inexplicable…but the lead dev was apparently some sort of anti-SJW, anti-feminist chud, and…it is entirely possible he did this game on purpose.
1) And I just want to get something out of the way here, because I see it a lot as a defense: J.K. Rowling did not accidentally pick a fantasy race that was already antisemitic. In European history, goblin were basically the same thing as orcs and kobolds, just a word for a malicious forest spirit, some sort of fey. It’s D&D that really made them into their own concept…a bunch of small squashed-faced underground murder thieves. Weird. That doesn’t sound like _her_ goblins at all, except the small part. They aren’t good people, but they don’t seem to have any of these tropes we’re talking about. So I don’t really give her the benefit of the doubt there.Report
Dunkey has posted his playtime with Hogwarts and his apology:
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Lol!Report
We have entered the conspiracy theory portion of the backlash.
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