A group of Hakoan Crystal Farmers gather at the foot of the walls of the Crystal Plateau. The trader, Caimin, their giant form looming over her, barely greets Sable and gives away nothing of the tribe, but another, Tohta, talks freely, openly and enthusiastically to her about their people, their customs and culture, how the one informs the other, and how gruelling the work of crystal farming has become since the giant robots that did the work previously, simultaneously and inexplicably, stopped. Sable suggests it must have felt like a terrible omen.
“Oh, nothing like that, no,” says Tohta, “There is some sort of explanation in the mechanics or the chemistry, even if we don’t know it. And in that, at least, we take great comfort.” In another conversation, they add, “We turned a bane into a boon, and a boon into a culture. All the chemicals and coincidences that conspired to create the Crystal Farmers.”
And still, to the player, and perhaps more so the male player, a problem is raised, a solution can be found: just let me take a spanner to your knackered old robots, and I can fix this for you, that your culture is intertwined with your work be damned. And so, half an hour or more is spent attempting to climb the frozen colossi looking for purchase, foothold and entrance point, before deciding this is not a hidden quest, there is nothing to gained from this, scaling these once magnificent robots is the work of another game, and when Tohta said this was now their culture, they really meant that. This was not a problem to solutioneer, it was not a situation I had to insert myself into: the help of middle-aged white man, despite playing as a young female on her coming-of-age journey, was not required here.
Whether or not the intension of developer Shedworks or the result of the involvement of narrative design consultancy Sweet Baby Inc., the moment made me ask how often I’ve tried to leap in with a solution that is not asked for, required or wanted, a solution that is often incorrect. In this instance, an example of some ingrained racial stereotype that the local foreign types just weren’t trouble-shooting the right technological problem, one with a simple fix, one that I, the technically superior wannabe-Machinist can fix. In the same way, I’ve leapt to a colleague’s aid, asked for or not, with computer problem that I can’t help with and often make worse, before retreating, muttering something about USB-C compatibility before my colleague finds that the cable I said couldn’t possibly be loose was actually loose.
“it’s getting to the point that I’m loathed to call myself a gamer”
Relying on only a single trusted, canonical source for my video game news (that of Edge magazine), having been ‘kicked off’/abandoned Reddit when support for third-party app was dropped, and binning Twitter when Musk took over, I have been blissfully unaware of ‘the second Gamergate’. The first I knew of “the SBI controversy” was seeing the phase in a Steam review for Sable and wondering what it was. Some Googling and rathole later—one that now has the Wikipedia recommending to me “right-wing commentators” (seemingly code for “arseholes”)—I am now more familiar with the SBI controversy than I would like to be. In a more sane world, the involvement of a studio like Sweet Baby Inc. would no more an issue than having Tom Stoppard, Carrie Fisher or Aaron Sorkin as script doctor on a movie, but in this world, that has seen one Trump presidency and will likely see another, sanity and safety are no longer guaranteed, and employees of Sweet Baby Inc. have “faced harassment and attempted doxing” for the studio’s alleged promotion of the “woke agenda” in video games like Alan Wake 2, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
Being a player of games (it’s getting to the point that I’m loathed to call myself a gamer) of a certain age, and of predictable complexion and gender, one with responsibilities and nowhere near enough time to play an expanding wishlist of games, I rather enjoyed my 6am, awake-and-playing-games-while-I-can epiphany that sometimes I am the problem.
I have been blissfully unaware of ‘the second Gamergate’
Oftentimes, in fact, because at best I shrug with indifference when I see the harassment an even slightly progressive world-view attracts, and, at worst, my assumptions will tend to the conservative and reinforce racial and sexist stereotypes. I am not the sort of idiot who believes pride flags in Spider-Man are causing a decline in quality of AAA games, nor do I think a studio of 16 people is responsible for the the many thousands lay-offs from tech firms, across the sector, not just in video games. But neither have I so much as posted a positive review of Sable on Steam, to counter the negative reviews encouraged by a list of games the curator believes Sweet Baby Inc., and studios like it, have been involved with. I’ve not contacted Steam to report the list as the obvious attempt at harassment it is. My spending habits with Valve have not changed. I’ll remedy two parts of the that immediately, and perhaps take to Game Pass and my wishlist there, for all the difference it will make. And then I’ll positively-review-bomb the games on the unmentioned list. Some small thing to be less of the problem… until the next time someone in my female-dominated workplace mutters something about a computer not working and I leap into mansplaining action to embarrass myself all over again.
Wandering witch.boo 