Alt-white wolf?

erik · Post by **erik** » Thu Jul 12, 2018 1:26 pm

While I think there is some sort of line where I cannot be fucked to care if any single thing I say is offensive to some minuscule quantity of persons, I cannot say if the amount of people offended by (mis)use of triggered exceeds that threshold. I’m at a similar point to in the past where I didn’t know saying “gypped” or “sitting Indian style” was offensive, but now that i do, I refrain. Once you know something is offensive you can either continue it and be a dickbag or not.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Jul 12, 2018 7:22 pm

Anyway, the original essay is long, meandering, and in many places poorly argued. It is fighting an uphill battle because telling people that things they loved as a child have been taken over by the worst elements of society and are now unredeemably toxic is something that people aren't going to want to hear. Weird asides about some mentally ill dude from the late 90s wastes the reader's time and make it easier for the underlying message to get rejected.

But the core assertion, that NuNu White Wolf is a vile company that deliberately aligns itself with vile social movements and serial harassers is true. The core idea that you should boycott them not just because their product is going to be bad, but because spending money on it would support bad people is also true. You should not give NuNu White Wolf your money. Both on a quality level and on a moral level. They are bad people who do and say bad things and you just should not financially support them.

I'm not sure how one would go about making a persuasive essay that would actually get that across and not fill the author's in-box with death threats. Honestly, the very fact that the core premise of the article is correct probably means that angry death threats are pretty much going to happen to anyone who goes viral on social media complaining about the direction of NuNuWhite Wolf. They genuinely have allied themselves socially and politically with people who are aggressive serial harassers, and they are going to harass people who they think are vulnerable to that sort of thing.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Jul 12, 2018 9:28 pm

I mean, I feel like the first step in that persuasive essay is not making it 9000 words, like this one.

Iduno · Post by **Iduno** » Thu Jul 12, 2018 10:53 pm

Prak wrote:I mean, I feel like the first step in that persuasive essay is not making it 9000 words, like this one.

Better or worse?

https://twitter.com/HoldenShearer/statu ... 2569747458

https://twitter.com/root_of_all_eli/sta ... 9012093952

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Thu Jul 12, 2018 11:02 pm

Iduno wrote:
Prak wrote:I mean, I feel like the first step in that persuasive essay is not making it 9000 words, like this one.
Better or worse?

https://twitter.com/HoldenShearer/statu ... 2569747458

https://twitter.com/root_of_all_eli/sta ... 9012093952

Holden's twitter is a trip.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Jul 12, 2018 11:05 pm

Well, more succinct, at least...

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Jul 12, 2018 11:08 pm

Longes wrote:
Iduno wrote:
Prak wrote:I mean, I feel like the first step in that persuasive essay is not making it 9000 words, like this one.
Better or worse?

https://twitter.com/HoldenShearer/statu ... 2569747458

https://twitter.com/root_of_all_eli/sta ... 9012093952
Holden's twitter is a trip.

Holden is my new favorite game designer.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Fri Jul 13, 2018 12:12 am

Iduno wrote:
Prak wrote:I mean, I feel like the first step in that persuasive essay is not making it 9000 words, like this one.
Better or worse?

https://twitter.com/HoldenShearer/statu ... 2569747458

https://twitter.com/root_of_all_eli/sta ... 9012093952

The first one is good but I think that a lot of people should share the second one. The 1488 reference is an open marker for the nazis now a days. Mainstream media even highlighted Milo getting in trouble over its use.

Mord · Post by **Mord** » Fri Jul 13, 2018 5:19 am

So this is an uncomfortable question, but... Is all this horrible shit actually coming from the head office at Paradox? Their games fairly blatantly are Eurocentrist Holy Roman Empire (i.e. German) alt history fantasy generators, as such they tend to attract way more than their fair share of Nazis, and the official moderation policy explicitly does nothing to curb the horrible discourse in the community (including full on "Hitler in Crusader Kings" mods).

saithorthepyro · Post by **saithorthepyro** » Fri Jul 13, 2018 5:49 am

I’m uncertain on it, the game certainly have the potential to be but for paradox themselves the studios response seems mixed. The forum’s moderation policy is as bad as you say, but they have removed more from the steam workshop for being alt-right. They actually got some backlash for it as well. Overall I just haven’t been able to find enough info yet.

Count Arioch the 28th · Fri Jul 13, 2018 6:28 am

My only regret is not being able to boycott White Wolf because I've never been one of their customers (they lose out on exactly nothing by me not buying this). Did not know about the "trigger warning" jokes mocking rape victims specifically, I assumed it was mocking PTSD (which I have myself, and do have certain things that make me disproportionately upset). I'll not make jokes like that in the future.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Fri Jul 13, 2018 7:51 am

There's nothing to regret. The point I brought up earlier that flew over Frank's head is that the general public doesn't think much about the word triggered. If you're not one of their customers and can't actually boycott them in any meaningful way you can still convince other people who would buy the product that wouldn't if they knew what you now know.

Iduno · Post by **Iduno** » Fri Jul 13, 2018 3:08 pm

MGuy wrote:The point I brought up earlier that flew over Frank's head is that the general public doesn't think much about the word triggered.

True. If the general public doesn't think a slur is racist, it's automatically fine, and you aren't an idiot for making that very very stupid argument. Thank you for your time.

Count Arioch the 28th · Fri Jul 13, 2018 3:32 pm

MGuy wrote:...you can still convince other people who would buy the product that wouldn't if they knew what you now know.

lmao, I couldn't convince anyone water was wet if I shoved them in a lake first. I have never literally convinced anyone of anything without some sort of bribe or form of extortion. And that last one kind of became out of the picture when I turned 18.

Wumpus · Post by **Wumpus** » Fri Jul 13, 2018 4:56 pm

Of all places to follow the "triggered" meme, *Vanity Fair* leads the attached and otherwise unrelated article with "On Thursday, every member of the House Oversight Committee turned into a triggered snowflake."

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07 ... ring-recap

Not disagreeing with Frank on the roots of this but it sure seems to be mainstreaming

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Jul 13, 2018 7:09 pm

Iduno wrote:
Prak wrote:I mean, I feel like the first step in that persuasive essay is not making it 9000 words, like this one.
Better or worse?

https://twitter.com/HoldenShearer/statu ... 2569747458

https://twitter.com/root_of_all_eli/sta ... 9012093952

There's a lot to unpack there. First of all: holy shit that 1488 thing is bad. Someone thought it was a reasonable life choice to put a Nazi gang sign in "sneaky" in a place where they could claim plausible deniability. That's so much worse than just having a picture of a Nazi vampire or something. This isn't some sort of "it's a dark world so of course there are bad people in it, and we just happen to celebrate far right bad people all the time for no reason." There's no excuse at all. By "hiding" it, they've made it so it's no longer part of the text of the book, but instead part of the deliberate subtext. It's a coded message sent to Neo-Nazis, and the message is "We are on your side." And yes, it was obviously put there deliberately, because such an example only has a 12 in ten thousand chance of coming up randomly, and they've already shown themselves familiar enough with Neo-Nazi troll-speak that they obviously would have noticed it had it come up on accident.

The Werewolf thing is much more complicated. Obviously, Werewolf: the Apocalypse was always horrible, and it was specifically horrible in a way that gets much worse when you think about it particularly hard. I had reservations about it when I was in my teens, but in retrospect there's really nothing that can be done with that property except burn it down and pretend it didn't happen. People who write new material for a new edition of Werewolf have obviously made a bad life choice.

Further, when you write as a freelancer, the company owns your work. And they can - and will - change it however it suits them. Game companies changing the entire meaning of a designer's writing piece is not uncommon, and it is fairly frequent for such changes to be for the worse. I can and will tell you about various ways my drafts got fucked up by FanPro and then Catalyst when I was writing for Shadowrun.

But here's the thing: when the company makes changes to a freelancer's work, that's on the company. If they choose to write in a bunch of bizarre trans-phobic tirades, it's probably because they wanted there to be a bunch fo trans-phobic tirades. Which is odd, because while there are definitely people on the far right who spread the hateful "There Are 2 Genders" meme, the vast majority of people either want positive portrayals of trans-people or don't. The limit of trans-phobia in most of the general public is wanting various groups from LGBT to just go away. There aren't a lot of people who are hankering for rants about performative cruelty to gender non-conformers.

Again and again, NuNu White Wolf takes positions that there does not appear to be any particular reason to take. Indeed, to weigh in on issues that are divisive but not need to be commented on by a minor gaming company at all. And in case after case, the choice is to take sides that "virtue signal" to hateful right wing extremists. It's exactly like they are hateful rightwing extremists who want to ingratiate themselves with other hateful rightwing extremists. The only difference between NuNuWhite Wolf and MyFaRoG is that to my knowledge the Swedish edgelords involved haven't literally murdered anyone. Yet.

-Username17

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Fri Jul 13, 2018 8:14 pm

Wumpus wrote:Of all places to follow the "triggered" meme, *Vanity Fair* leads the attached and otherwise unrelated article with "On Thursday, every member of the House Oversight Committee turned into a triggered snowflake."

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07 ... ring-recap

Not disagreeing with Frank on the roots of this but it sure seems to be mainstreaming

The House Oversight Committee calling Peter Strzok to testify is a part of a political witch hunt lead by its Republican members intended to discredit the FBI and set the stage for disbanding the Mueller probe should that become politically necessary. Vanity fair isn't using those words in a neutral sense detached from their origins. They're using them specifically because they are vapid conservative hatebarks and a bunch of conservatives reaching for the smelling salts because someone called Trump a "douche" is exactly the sort of bullshit that, were the shoe on the other foot, conservatives would mock with those exact words. "Lulz did I trigger you by calling [insert name here] a douche, snowflake?" It's a jab at the completely hypocritical standards of civility Republicans demand. It's not really an example of mainstreaming it, it's satirizing the discussion around it.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Sat Jul 14, 2018 1:15 am

Iduno wrote:
MGuy wrote:The point I brought up earlier that flew over Frank's head is that the general public doesn't think much about the word triggered.
True. If the general public doesn't think a slur is racist, it's automatically fine, and you aren't an idiot for making that very very stupid argument. Thank you for your time.

So notice how you only quoted part of that? That part that says a thing that isn't the argument you just asspulled? See how you had to add stuff on to it make it mean something else? That's you not being able to read. I'd say it is a Strawman but I don't think you're even trying to form a legit argument. What's worse is that the advice I gave in the post you quoted clearly shows to people who aren't idiots that it being 'ok' isn't even what I've implied. I get that Frank can be an idiot sometimes but damn dude learn to read for yourself so you don't fuck up every time he does.

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Sat Jul 14, 2018 4:25 am

Any word from Kenneth Hite on this? (the man behind the game's actual system). It's hard for me to believe (or accept) a friend of Robin D. Laws is okay with this shit.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jul 14, 2018 5:11 am

I mean, it's not quite the same thing, but as an analogy, Jon Stewart had no idea that Louis CK was masturbating at women...

Horrible people seem to have some kind of self-awareness that tells them to hide their horrible-ness from others.

shlominus · Post by **shlominus** » Sat Jul 14, 2018 10:20 am

https://www.geeknative.com/61962/white- ... t-fck-off/

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jul 14, 2018 10:54 am

Hrmmm... it's a start. I'd like to know how the fuck shit like the 1488 roll happened, because that's a very fucking specific dogwhistle to "accidentally" hit upon. Also it'd have been nice if they'd hit back against the idea that antifa was in anyway similar to the alt right a bit more firmly...

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jul 14, 2018 2:38 pm

Dogbert wrote:Any word from Kenneth Hite on this? (the man behind the game's actual system). It's hard for me to believe (or accept) a friend of Robin D. Laws is okay with this shit.

I think you've answered your own question. Robin Laws was the primary author for the 4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide 2, a major core rulebook for a game that Robin Laws did not like or particularly even understand. Sometimes a paycheck is a paycheck. People who want to keep working as professional game designers have to keep sending in submissions on time whether they "still" or ever believed in the project in the first place.

It's also important to remember that Vampire used to be the biggest RPG, just as D&D did. So a lot of people who have any aspirations at all in the fireld of game design would be willing to take on writing credits for a new edition of Vampire even if there were a lot of aspects of the job that were questionable or even undesirable. The "exposure" would normally be expected to be worth a lot (though obviously less than it would have been 20 years ago when Vampire was the big dog rather than a "hit from the past someone is trying to resolve").

Kenneth Hite in particular has done a lot of thinking about RPGs and Vampires (Night's Black Agents, GURPS: Cabal, to name two examples) and almost certainly has said the words "If I was in charge of Vampire, I'd do...." like actually hundreds of times in his life. I think that it would have been very difficult for him to turn down an offer to be part of an attempt to revive the brand. Especially early in the project, when it looked less like some vaporware being helmed by some detestable Swedish edge lords. Heck, I probably would have agreed to be their rules guy, and I am significantly less sympathetic to edge lord vampire sensibilities than he is.

Prak wrote:Hrmmm... it's a start. I'd like to know how the fuck shit like the 1488 roll happened, because that's a very fucking specific dogwhistle to "accidentally" hit upon. Also it'd have been nice if they'd hit back against the idea that antifa was in anyway similar to the alt right a bit more firmly...

It's well beyond that. This shit storm has been storming for a while now. And the company's earlier press releases on the matter were much more hostile to leftists. Like when the Dotmeister made a bunch of insulting screeds about leftists and the company supported him. But also that they did their playtest scenario 13 months ago. People complained at the time, and previously Nu White Wolf has done absolutely nothing but double down repeatedly.

They claimed earlier that "triggered" meant something different in Europe. It doesn't. It means exactly the same thing, and it is used by and for the same horrible people for the same horrible reasons over here. Even now they aren't completely copping to their mistake, claiming that they did not realize it had a use that was socially unacceptable. Mother fuckers, the socially unacceptable use is the only one that makes any sense in the context it was written!

So basically they've been double downing and winking to the deplorables about this shit for over a year. And now you have people talking about a boycott as more than just the rantings from the fever swamps of RPG.net and now they suddenly remember they have a corporate conscience? Good. It means that social pressure works. That even shitty companies with shitty people making shitty decisions realize that basic human decency has a larger consituency than whatever fucking pond scum failsons they were trying to market to before.

But that doesn't mean I forgive them or that I'm going to give them any money. Paradox buying White Wolf gave themselves a window of opportunity where they could convince me that they had what it took to make a new World of Darkness for a new era. They failed. Pretty spectacularly. They told us what they thought was important about making a new version of Vampire and it wasn't "making a decent and playable system" or "giving us the no-bullshit reboot we all wanted from when NWoD came out" or "making it so that we could actually play mixed teams like you've been teasing since 1993" or any of the other things that sensible people wished the World of Darkness could have had in 1995 or could be today. Hell, they didn't even decide the world needed "a game system that gets published remotely on time."

No. Instead they decided that what we needed was a new World of Darkness that... pushed socially acceptable boundaries of good taste. Like seriously, what? Your takeaway from the success of Vampire in the 90s was just that it was considered socially transgressive at the time? That's fucking it? Fuck you!

-Username17

ArmorClassZero · Post by **ArmorClassZero** » Sat Jul 14, 2018 5:50 pm

INB4 NuNu WhiteWolf is appealing to the Nazi crowd in order to lure them in and then sell them on the idea that stories about "Jewish world domination" is actually part of the Vampire's Masquerade.

"Woah, if we just replace 'Jews' with 'Vampires' and 'Goyem' with 'Kine' then The Protocols of the Elders of Zion reads like VTM's core conceit!"

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Sat Jul 14, 2018 7:40 pm

It's well beyond that. This shit storm has been storming for a while now. And the company's earlier press releases on the matter were much more hostile to leftists. Like when the Dotmeister made a bunch of insulting screeds about leftists and the company supported him. But also that they did their playtest scenario 13 months ago. People complained at the time, and previously Nu White Wolf has done absolutely nothing but double down repeatedly.

Can I get a link to these?