In the Age of the Clown being able to play and enjoy video games is a cardinal sin under the orthodoxy of the Intersectional Inquisition. If you just want to have fun and be entertained? You’re doing it wrong. That’s how the Social Justice regime views entertainment. For Ubisoft, they actually fall closer to the SJW side of things than not, with a recent Q&A revealing that they’re not quite as apolitical as they put on. However, Ubisoft’s admission to using their games to “educate” wasn’t enough for most prefects of Progressivism.
It started with a post over on the Ubisoft website that was published on June 7th, 2019, where an interview between Ubisoft staff and VP of editorial at Ubisoft, Tommy Francois, addressed the hot button topic of politics in Ubisoft’s titles. Majority of the Q&A is filled with unsubstantial fluff, stating that they try to use their platform to present as many points of view as possible and let players decide how to think about what they present, but near the end they finally reveal that they don’t want to be apolitical, but rather to use their games as a platform for players to “learn” and “share” multiple points of view in order to educate them.
Near the bottom of the Q&A session it states…
“[Ubisoft staff:] To clarify, what we want players to get out of these games is an education, or at least an experience of different ideologies, different worlds, different environments, different experiences, so that they can then formulate their own ideas, and then bring those with them, and interact with real world people with those ideas and those experiences. Would you say that’s correct?
“[Tommy Francois:] That’s correct. We don’t want them to be apolitical. We want them to be include multiple political themes so players can experience multiple points of view, learn from them, educate, and share.”
This angered the politically minded game journalists who continue to pester and agitate developers to make their games more political, or rather, to make their games more Left-leaning since any perceived elements of Conservativsm in games has been met with disdain from game journalists.
GamesIndustry.biz had a somewhat middle of the road article about the Ubisoft interview, but GamesIndustry.biz North American editor Brendan Sinclair took a far different tone when he began expressing his own opinions about the piece on Twitter.
Ubisoft went and said some more dumb stuff about not being political in their political games.https://t.co/SSpxgsG5t2
— Brendan Sinclair (@BrendanSinclair) June 7, 2019
It’s frustrating that the AAA publisher that makes the biggest deal about games being art is the one that is the most terrified of its games having anything to say.
— Brendan Sinclair (@BrendanSinclair) June 7, 2019
Actually, no where in the Q&A did Ubisoft infer that all sides were equal. Francois even went as far as to say that they would like to include as many perspectives as possible but want to extend it beyond just politics in order to give gamers more to delve into, both in terms of lore and mechanics. Francois said…
“We are scared sometimes as we are world-building. That was the case for Far Cry 5. It is a great game, but it just wasn’t possible to present all points of view and perspectives. We believe that ultimately, in the future, players should be able to go in the game world, have as many different experiences as they want, experience as many different political views as they want, as many religions as they want … as many different fantasies as they want.
“There’s an avid intent to make these games as rich as real life. But we don’t want to narrow it down to just political systems or views. We’d like everything life has, the systems from real life that create the immersion that makes every day different, because we want each player to have a different experience and ultimately share and grow from it.”
To be fair, Ubisoft’s games just suck in general and the overall structure of their open worlds are oftentimes boring and devoid of any kind of memorable artistic personality. None of the characters are worth caring about and the gameplay systems are oftentimes trite, repetitive, and lack any kind of meaningful or mechanical depth.
Nevertheless, what Francois states stays consistent with what he mentions later in the interview regarding how they didn’t want their games to be used as vehicles for radicalization, but would rather they give gamers moments of pause for insight and perspective. He hoped that their games would never be used as tools to incite radicals, but also acknowledged that games, movies, and music oftentimes get blamed for these things.
Francois also intimated a preference that people come away from their games having parsed through their content with “granularity”, saying…
“That is a difficult subject to discuss, because we know entertainment often gets blamed. Movies have been blamed. Certain types music used to be called the devil’s music because of all these kinds of fears.
“I seriously hope we never have this impact, and that we don’t make someone think a cult is a great place to go. But that’s why I would love for people to see more granularity in points of views and see the pros and cons of any type of situation. It’s a very difficult question to answer. I would hate for someone to suffer that way. Then again, people have agency over their life. But no, I would be very sad.”
However, all of this gets skipped over so Social Justice Warriors looking to go out of their way to damage the industry and gaming culture can rack up virtue signal points from the anti-gaming crowd, such as Twitter user 9Volt, who has done as much harm to damage the perception of the gaming industry as the average game journalist.
i’ve been tweeting about video games for too long i’m out of jokes
— 9 V O L T (@9_volt_) June 7, 2019
Others, like Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail, also continued to perpetuate angst within the industry by furthering the instigation Ubisoft’s castigation for not embracing Left-wing politics.
Alternative headline: Ubisoft believes maturity is only engaging with meaningless, message-less content. Collecting feathers is maturity. Politics is not maturity. https://t.co/oeyyeqsUIw
— Rami Ismail (@tha_rami) June 8, 2019
Others mocked Ubisoft for trying to cater their games to the majority of people who actually buy games, which is not representative of the loudest voices who dominate the Left-wing social structures of social media like Twitter.
The thing that bugs me the most about Ubisoft’s laughable claim that their games are devoid of political message is that it’s transparently just an appeal to the “get ur politics out of muh gamez” crowd.
Maybe don’t capitulate to a tiny crowd based on an uneducated premise.
— ᴡʜʏ ɪs ASHLEY LYNCH ᴏɴ ᴍʏ ᴛʟ (@ashleylynch) June 8, 2019
Mike Bithell, a game director and writer who worked on games like John Wick Hex and Thomas Was Alone, chimed in on the criticisms of Ubisoft as well, creating a multi-tweet thread airing his grievances with the way Ubisoft approaches the messages (or lack thereof) in their games, writing…
“A big issue of this is Ubisoft claim they’re showing multiple perspectives and teaching players about different viewpoints. But they don’t, they dress up a (very good, usually) game structure to look like it’s about something current and edgy, but they don’t engage, or share any viewpoints at all. This creates super odd readings, like the ‘gay phase’ in AC:O, or the cult that has no ideology in FC5. They treat politics and current social justice discussions like a post processing effect. Like ps2 bloom.
“This isn’t new: Star Wars is a great example, being a world which makes massive use of nazi imagery to inform their villain design.. it was so effective that we don’t see it as weird when kids dress as storm troopers. But ubi feel creepy because they’re referencing the present.
“They get all the benefit of making watchdogs 3 ‘about’ brexit, I’m sure there’s a campaign built around it. But it’s entirely possible the game itself won’t even use the word outside the opening. It certainly won’t name a politician or debate an issue. Which seems like a waste.
“(If I’m wrong, that’d rock. I’d love a game that engages with the actual meat of something as massive as brexit)
(Don’t @ me, Mike Rose ;D)”
E-sports coach for Rainbow Six: Siege, Thomas Ray, actually addressed Bithell’s point by calmly explaining how economics work, and mainly that Ubisoft is selling these sociopolitical husks to people who don’t want their games filled with Left-wing agitprop.
Totally. My issue is they always use politics in their marketing, or do interviews like this where they claim there is politics in their games.
— Mike Bithell @ E3 (@mikeBithell) June 7, 2019
Rock, Paper, Shotgun was also quick to jump in on the digs, but they don’t even hide that Centrism is equivalent to Conservatism in their eyes. They outright state that Ubisoft should make “dicey” political beliefs depicted as “abhorrent” and accuse Ubisoft’s walking the middle line as being more in-line with Conservatism than their brand of culturally degenerative beliefs, writing…
“Trying to play both sides and avoid that some points of view are actually terrible isn’t mature, it’s toothless. It also leads to messages like “gay people will probably go ahead and have kids with someone of a gender they’re not attracted to” but that conversely let white supremacy off the hook by erasing it entirely from Far Cry 5’s Montana. Fighting to remain firmly in the bullseye of the status quo isn’t just deeply political, it’s conservative in and of itself, acting as though everything is just fine like the dog in the house on fire in KC Green’s comic strip. Coincidentally it also makes me feel like my skin is melting off like the less-seen lower panels.”
Other journalists, like Jennifer Locke from Windows Central held similar views, but was a lot less wordy about it, simply using the overused and toddler-tier clown meme.
Ubisoft this is how y’all look with this whole “balancing player freedom with politics” thing so just quit while you’re behind because you’re digging a deeper hole pic.twitter.com/cVxwi261nc
— Jennifer Locke (@JenLocke95) June 8, 2019
This has been an ongoing issue for some time now, and really escalated with the announcement of Far Cry 5, where a bunch of Left-wing extremist who dominate the media wanted Ubisoft to portray the game as an anti-Trump, Christian murder simulator. When Far Cry 5 didn’t mete out their brand of political violence, journalists turned against Ubisoft and began accusing them of not making political statements in their games.
This has only continued to metastasize as Ubisoft releases more games, forcing the company to keep making statements about not taking political sides, despite constantly including content that placates and sides more with Left-wing ideology than not, especially with the heavy focus on gay romances in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey that served zero purpose in the game, or rewriting history in Assassin’s Creed: Origins to make the depiction of females in the game to avoid “historical sexism” and make the game more “inclusive”.
Ubisoft definitely has politics, and it certainly moves in one direction, it’s just not extreme enough for the activists posing as journalists.
Ultimately, why would any normal gamer want to boot up a game just to have their time wasted being lectured to about politics that they could very easily find on any Twitter thread by an intellectually deficient sub-human propagating degenerate sociopolitical views? In the same way that SJWs don’t play games to have fun, real gamers don’t play games to be preached to about politics.
(Thanks for the news tip Lyle)