Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Letter to the Homies about the Creator of the Game

Maybe you got to thinking, what are people saying about Demon City? You may then have found in a blog post or in a section of a wikipedia page or in a post on a subreddit something that disturbs.

A couple years ago, the creator of Demon City, his ex-wife accused him of being a terrible person. The theme was sex and coercion so the stakes were high.

If you had been involved in the hobby back then you might've been like:
  • 1) oh no, what is going on?
  • 2) oh yeah, proof of what i figured was going on 
2) boosted "this guy did terrible things". 1) did nothing and waited. And now: things are the way they are. It's a bad situation. 


What the ones who were waiting could have been waiting for --

  • for the accusations to be contradicted by signed statements made by family members, close friends of the couple, a partner who lived with the couple, and a personal assistant who daily attended to the couple
  • for an avowed internet troll involved in spreading the accusation as a form of harassment to be successfully sued for defamation, have to make a public apology, and pay out a fine 
  • for dozens of influential people in the hobby who willfully lied about things and then participated in the dog-pile to get, over the course of the next couple years, cancelled for their own indiscretions
  • for his ex-wife to perjure herself on the stand and be fired by her lawyer
  • for another woman who accused him of doing terrible things to be successfully sued for defamation 
  • for there to be records of harassment by those who boosted the accusation that are literally a decade long
All of which, by now, has happened.

Why the ones who figured terrible things were happening might’ve figured that:


This goes back I guess to when the hobby was a mysterious nerd thing, there wasn't yet real-time video of every kind of person playing it, or comedians using it as a vehicle for improv. Also involved was the kind of nerds who wanted to fix the hobby by making it nerdy in a more smart-ass way: hipsters, basically. 

The creator of Demon City, at the time, he had a show -- the first like it -- with his friends, where he ran Dungeons & Dragons for them, and they happened to be people of all kinds with tattoos and piercings and also they had jobs where they got naked. 

Anyways, because of that, the guy and his friends were in conflict with incel and hipster types who assumed sexy things in RPGs were either the result of or the cause of men being bad, and that the only reason to play or be interested in an older version of a game was either nostalgia or because you had serious personality flaws like racism, sexism, homophobia, et cetera. 

Aaaand it was years of the guy and his friends getting harassed. It never went away.

This is kind of a lot of game-blog lore for me


I mean yeah but the problem has been anything that supposedly substantiates the accusations is stuff on game blogs, which link to other game blogs for their sources, which end up linking to these incel-hipster type places where, it turns out, people have a lot in common by dint of avoiding questions and being willing to lie. 

So nobody working in good faith takes this stuff seriously. But for a while, nobody did anything to rectify the situation either. The result was that the scene around the hobby literally flatlined... 

Like I say -- bad situation. 

But don't take my word for it


You can at the link below read everything that was said in the accusations and how each thing is either contradicted by someone else who was there or otherwise falls apart. It's a lot of stuff but if you're unsure, it matters to look at the evidence. If theres any doubts you have, let's talk. 

link <----------------------





















 


1 comment:

Scare Tactics: Yucky vs Odd - O Week

. . Big Bad The thing about THE THING is that I like the movie better than ALIEN, but the Alien from ALIEN is such a better thing than the T...