You have a whole agenda that is unrelated to what I am talking about. I’m not playing into it. you’ve left 3 comments pushing your agenda and this will be my only response. Make your own post about this if you believe so and deeply care about it.

I think it’s both. I do think they’re in the room, they have elbowed in a spot at the table and I’ve seen it first hand, however I don’t think like in the video they are the only say. I think you’re spot on in saying that bit, “If a product is appealing to everyone, it appeals to no one.”

I think HR in the room is another symptom, I think it’s executives trying to make sure no one feels put off by a game so that everyone plays it and they have the biggest audience. Then you have Legal come in and neutralize more dialogue because it could be considered rude or offensive. Then marketing comes in and says that they don’t know how to market this to this group, and then at the end you get a very boring game that is perfectly safe for everyone to play, but that no one wants to play.

It’s simply that corporations don’t understand creative work. Creative work and art are subjective, and they are meant to heighten emotions and make people think about it. They are meant quite literally to go counter to everything a corporate environment pushes for.

I also agree that I have been going Indie more because you can tell they aren’t as over-encumbered by corporate pressure. They have something they want to make or say, they are passionate and they get it done. I guess my thesis, seperate from Laura’s, is that HR and these other teams need to let creatives be creatives. Step in when you need to for sure, but stop at that line and go no further. HR should be there for HR reasons, Legal should protect the company from liability, and marketers should market the product, but none of them (or the executives) should be swaying the creative process to make their jobs easier. It’s their jobs to protect the creative process, not the other way around.

Then have a conversation instead of making accusatory statements about what I must believe like calling me a gamer gater and saying “I’d like to see some sources on this proving that the rampant sexism and toxic work environments have been done away with in the last 5 years before being this confident about it.”

Of course things aren’t great still, of course there are still bad toxic places to work. I’ve worked at both pure toxic and toxic positivity and they both suck and both should be removed. I’ve had places where I myself went to HR and watched them do an investigation which then ended up with me terminated after I reported people for being godawful. I have also had the opposite happen, where simply disagreeing with an approach means that I’m an agitator and the dreaded “Can we have a few minutes to speak”. They went from doing nothing to protect the employees to now overprotecting everything.

I’ll agree that she should have talked about why the bell swung in this direction, and she has previously mentioned about her own sexual harassment in the past and that would have been a good time to bring up how she told us how she felt ignored by it. It’s important to understand context to understand why it’s swinging the other way, but now it’s become where everything is so coated in foam that there’s only the “approved” way to do things, which means covering the user in bubble wrap before sending them through the feel-good forests, and it’s making things very boring to play.

Who said they’re done with? You’re pulling out just as many extreme examples as you say the video is. God forbid I talk about a nuanced subject where the answer can lie in the middle somewhere. Why must everything here be that there are two polar opposite views and nothing can ever exist beyond those two? I’m not interested in having a conversation with you are going to keep arguing that if I have this position that I must have the most extreme version of the position.

Honestly I have worked at companies where the head of people and culture is in the room with executives, they are at the top levels and involved in PR/marketing. I think Laura here has a point, HR was needed for exactly what you said with the Blizzard type situations. Obviously horrible, and should be stopped. However, the bell has swung the in the other direction now, to the point that nothing can be done without sixteen layers of approval. I think that’s very bad for a creative medium, and needs to come back to somewhere in the middle.

Christ do you need some Bengay for that overreach?

This has been a personal pet peeve for a while, but man did it hit for Dragon Age: Veilguard.

Dragon Age was always personal choice matters. If you choose something seemingly benign it could cause massive ripples. You could have teammates leave. You could have entire factions turn their backs on you. You could have people who were once friends try to ambush you in a back alley! It had real stakes and made you pay attention.

The 4th installment, Veilguard, was so obviously written with HR (People & Culture) in the room. No one was ever angry! There were decisions, but they were so low stakes because no one would ever get angry at you. You could literally destroy someone’s home and they’d say “It’s okay, I understand why you had to”. WHAT? They should be threatening me - OR WORSE. No one truly died, no one ever got mad, the game literally has “team meetings” where all you do is talk about how great everyone is.

Then each character was whittled down to one specific trauma that you had to help them through. Multifaceted characters with actual emotions? No, that might make someone feel things. This one has a hard time talking to people. This one had a mean dad. This one is trans and can’t come out to her mom. Each thing individually is fine, but that’s literally their only character trait. Friendship with every person was immediate and permanent. If you talked to them it would only be about their exact trauma, maybe one sentence about the last mission and how we all tried our best. It was so fucking annoying.

Even the antagonists kept repeating how good you were and how you were trying your best! They were gods who thought of mortals as puny ants and you were… a single person, yet they still stopped to mention over and over “You are sure doing a super job at defeating us!”. Absolutely immersion breaking.

You could just tell that HR had the only vote on every single line of dialog. No one ever gets their feelings hurt, no one ever is mad, the player might feel something and that could be bad. By trying to make everything so “positive” they’ve carved out the very humanity from these games.

Anyway, thanks for letting me rant, the video does a great job at summing up my feelings. These people should have no say in the creative process or work culture. They are toxic to anything art related.

Please feel free to share if you have other games like this where you can feel the palpable taint of HR.

Edit: Apparently it needs to be explicitly said that while I do absolutely blame “People and Culture”, that blame is not a one-dimensional thing and that I can also blame executives? There are also some big leaps of saying that me saying that someone is a one-dimensional character means that I must be a gamer gater who hates wokeness? I actually liked the trans storyline, what I didn’t like is that they made trans people seem like all they have is being trans, instead of that there could be a person there too. To me that seems more reductive and even more harmful to the trans community, but again nuance isn’t really a thing on the internet. I said a thing, it must mean I’m a horrible person.

I was on a train crossing the border and border patrol came on and asked everyone if they had fruits or veg.

This group ahead of me said “we don’t eat that stuff” and then all four laughed. The sad punchline is that he thought he was so clever, but alli saw was 4 obese people not realizing how much they just said about themselves.

I can honestly put up with a lot, especially in a doctor’s office. Hell it’s the only place I’m okay with something up my ass. I would walk out if my doctor came in with those glasses. I will go and find a new doctor. There is no way I am okay with a personal camera in that exam room.

Our parents. My mom is addicted, spends every spare moment endlessly scrolling. I tried for a while to get her off but you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. No shit she spent 10 straight hours on it once. Didn’t move at all, she is their ideal consumer.

Didn’t they just force it today or something? Not sure if I’d call that a huge commercial success if they’re forcing all of their users to use it

That LLM response from the search bar when you were just searching for a file? That’s not free, we have to pay for that! If you didn’t want it you shouldn’t have accidentally triggered it by needing to search for a file. That’s on you.

There’s no way a corporation can. It’s a very human experience, and corporations are the polar opposite.

Congrats! I know it’s yet another app but I think you’ll find the audiobooks tailored experience is so much nicer

Holy shit 25 fires? It’s too bad it took this one to catch him. 1 million seems low for the sheer property value at risk alone, not counting everything else

Right? Now I’m wondering if it was for some bullshit gambling payout.

Yes that would be the joke.

Yeah, I had a town of 15k and 5 miles up the road we had one around 300. They just contracted ours out. 300 peoples’ taxes is not a lot, why waste it on police who will what, catch that one kid every once in a while, or have to throw a drunk out of the only bar? Not worth it.

I was honestly rfully ready to be a sucker to buy a ps5 and gta6 on release day. Was ready for it. Money saved and set aside. All this anti consumer shit just made me not immediately.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe the last thing they would do is sell off the up to better firms.