Hogwarts Legacy gets great reviews

JK Rowling's "well documented stance" on trans people remains "firmly rooted in a callous disregard for human life", apparently.

It's an interesting one, because Glinner goes on about Gamergate a lot (something that seemed to pass me by), and how a lot of it was actually misogynistic (and no doubt many of those involved became TRAs, Transmaxxers etc).

It started due to the assumption that reviews were biased based off deals publishers did with the media outlets. Ironically now reviews for this game are biased based off of the political beliefs of the reviewers.

I don't see similar outrage to Star Wars and George Lucas's political beliefs (where the prequels had a lot of racial stereotypes), but probably because he's a man and hasn't waded into trans rights. Many of these racist arguments made against HP can be made against SW.

I still hold the belief that a lot of these campaigners have "mummy issues" and take it out on a woman like JKR.

@NicolaSturgeonsSOGIbottom
I wonder what will happen to those media orgs long term? Gaming culture is such a weird mix of free speech edgelords, extreme TRA leftists and normies who just want to play a game. You can’t please all of those types at once, and presumably the staff of these media orgs are more likely to be TRA sympathetic than the general readership are?

What is a new and seemingly demented battle for common sense for gender critical woman, gamers have already been through and come out the other side. It's old history for them. The games media orgs spat in the face of gamers, and gamers just walked away from them.
If you look at the gender critical movement having to fight the mainstream media and go around it to get their voices heard you are looking in the mirror when you look at gamer free speech edgelords. Of course they like to be more coarse in their language, but the driving force is exactly the same.
The only reason games outlets are covering the Harry Potter game is money. The outlets are barely staying afloat financially after pissing off the gamers, and as much as they would like to slag off Harry Potter, they don't have enough of a financial safety net to be able to afford to do so. The primary income for games media outlets is advertising from games publishers. HP probably has an amazing marketing budget. Media outlets simply can't afford to lose that cash. The game "journalists" ( woke activists ) hate HP, the management wants the ad money. The ad money is spent by the publisher, in this case Warner Brothers games. Any media outlet doing a hatchet job on HP is going to lose thier HP ad money, and probably not get ad spend on the next Warner Brothers game. They've had to make do with side panels in the articles calling JKR transphobic to avoid turning the whole reviews into a screeds.
The media can no longer afford to bite the hand that feeds them as much as they despise and hate that hand, and gamers.

It’s fascinating.

I wonder what will happen to those media orgs long term? Gaming culture is such a weird mix of free speech edgelords, extreme TRA leftists and normies who just want to play a game. You can’t please all of those types at once, and presumably the staff of these media orgs are more likely to be TRA sympathetic than the general readership are?

I’m not remotely interested in gaming really (just interested in learning about the contemporary online/gaming world so as not to have an unbridgeable generational gap between me and my kids - thanks to KiwiFarms for a far more in-depth education than I ever set out for!)
Nonetheless I think this game looks beautiful and I love that it’s a historical prequel (I like fashion and architectural history).
I imagine there might be a few middle aged mums that spring for this to play through their teenagers PC/console, based on the imagery/general fondness for Potter/like for JK Rowling).

My mum LOVED Tetris on the original Gameboy 😂

A significant part of the gaming media is sending out a message: you cannot trust our reviews because when it suits us we'll be actively biased.

An interesting business model. It requires the mass audience to want to have ideological alignment with you, and not to change.

Yes, I daresay it'll do really well. Historically movie tie-in video games have had a long tradition of being terrible [with the odd honourable exception, showing my age, such as the N64 goldeneye and going even further back the 8/16 bit late 80s 'batman' game]. Reviews for this new game seem to suggest that it's, at the very least, modestly good, & probably a fair bit better than that, this combined with the huge HP fanbase [especially amongst 2010s and late 2000s-born kids who are still too young to know or care much about niche TRA interpretations of JKR's Twitter output] surely mean it'll sell bucketloads. Subject to decent reviews I'll almost certainly let my kids have it when the Nintendo Switch version comes out in the summer.

I have more respect for those who really do boycott it (which seems to be the case in your example) than I do in those who post endless stories about the boycott and their own virtue at deciding to boycott. They are commercially benefiting from the outrage surrounding the game (clicks!) and adding to the Streisand effect.
I really have no issue with people having differing opinions and exercising their principles, it’s just the hypocrites I find fascinating (and the conspiracy theorists and the authoritarian bullies)!

Few interesting tweets from Sophia (who is a friend of Rose of Dawn and holds a similar position on being transgender, that is, that they both publicly talk about being male and preferring to be perceived as female. They aren’t GC as such, but they don’t expect society to completely reshape itself around them, both think current trans activists are transgender people’s worst enemies)

Bonus tweet: The Sims now have mastectomy scars! What the fuckery is this!

I'm not sure.

Yes it was Ereshkigalangcleg. For archive.DOMAIN NAME links, is it only the .fo domain name that's banned or are others too?

Oh, so today links to archived pages aren't allowed. Let's try again:

Here's an example of a review from www.gameshub.com that takes as its inspiration the Cultural Revolution:

web.archive.org/web/20230207082727/www.gameshub.com/news/opinions-analysis/hogwarts-legacy-does-not-deserve-to-be-reviewed-on-its-own-merits-40246/

Did you post an archive link, @nauticant ?

my favourite gaming website (to be honest the only one I bother reading) is RockPaperShotgun. I think they are boycotting it. The most recent article about it is over 2 years old (Jan 21)

www.rockpapershotgun.com/hogwarts-legacy-is-delayed-to-2022#comments

First comment

"diamondmx 2799
2 years ago
Let's just delay it indefinitely.
Ikenfell is a great wizard game, we don't need TERF wizards."

Follows a long and tortuous thread. I think looking at that thread, I can understand why they are bargepoling the whole thing, regardless of any blue-haired staff writers (which they may or may not have, like meh, care).

I personally don't care at all that they are boycotting the game, and I will still read the site, because it has good content.

Reminds me of The Trace when Dumbledore supporters used He Who Must Not Be Named's name.

Apparently a couple of the more politically vicious gaming sites were not given advance copies to review 🤣

Bit of a Kafka trap there, do they whinge about being excluded? Complain about Portkey Games for deliberating avoiding their outspoken critics?

If they do, it will expose them as being hypocritical over the boycott, after all, they shouldn’t WANT to review it anyway.

That leaves them with arguing that they were entitled to a free copy purely to chuck straight in their bin, which y’know, is bad for the environment.

I’m enjoying the pushback involving copy and paste comments re: smart phones and real, tangible human suffering.

The key thing here is the amount of games websites refusing to review the game, they need to be called out for not doing their job, and for being at odds with their readers (particularly as the game is a best seller).

Those streamers were even raising money for The Trevor Project to atone for the sin of playing Hogwarts Legacy (which they got for free) but no, no quarter shall be given to the impure! Many of the people doing the attacking & boycotting [are fans of people who] identify as communists & insist there is no ethical consumption under capitalism to justify a quite grotesque level of consumerism. (Quite frequently amongst this demographic people with prominent requests for funding on their social media seem to think that rent & bills are something others should pay for them; their money is for tattoos/gaming/literal toys.)

That conspiracy theory about the name is WILD @NicolaSturgeonsSOGIbottom - am slightly disappointed they’ve not looked into Sinister Anagrams. Absolutely bananas. “We’re determined to find transphobia so we’re going to play truly ridiculous polylingual word games to create some! YAY US!” I just hope they warmed up really thoroughly before stretched because this sort of thing could result in permanent disability, never mind a mere injury 😶

Tweets about the above story from (sensible!) trans gaming journalist/streamer Sophia Narwitz:

twitter.com/sophnar0747/status/1622747954489569280

Streaming couple bullied offline:
www.dexerto.com/hogwarts-legacy/twitch-chat-berates-streamer-to-tears-for-playing-hogwarts-legacy-on-launch-day-2053952/

Someone made tool to hunt Twitch streamers for wrongthink (wrongplay?)

Stalking people. "Are we the baddies?"

Someone made tool to hunt Twitch streamers for wrongthink (wrongplay?)

also, check this wild Reddit conspiracy post:

Re game prices - I remember GTA3 being £40 when it came out and that was the best past of 20 years ago...

Absolute scenes on Twitter over the trans character’s name, too - “Sirona abbreviates to ‘Sir!’” & “They gave her a male[-coded] surname!” - plus complaints about the voice being done by a male actor. (Excellent reminder there that we do not hear our voices as others do…)

Lots of “ahahaha penises in girls’ dormitories JKR must be dying” which, you know, says a lot about the people imagining such things. We all know Real Hogwarts (it’s real in the ways that matter, any would-be joy-crushers of the “it’s MADE UP!” variety 🙄) would yeet any such student off the staircase faster than Malfoy would swerve Moody post-ferreting; so people can dwell in their fanficification all they want. The castle is a big old TERF, insistent on the reality of biological differences: just as it separates Muggles from the Magical; so it separates the sexes in some spaces. (The one girls’ loo used solely for Dramatic Exposition rather than as an actual loo it doesn’t seem bothered about; & I’m not actually sure what the situation is with the Prefects’ bathroom 🤔🤨)