Epic Games host Tim Sweeney delivered a keynote address at this week's DICE conference in Las Vegas. The talk touched on many topics, including data privacy, loot boxes and problems with lack of platform games. It seems like it requires that politics not get into games, or at least be excluded from sales, or something.
Linked to various threads of Sweeney's speech in front of a conference full of game executives and senior creative people together was a request by companies and developers to break away from the "customer-facing" culture that caused players to break apart at a time when, in Sweney's opinion, games served more as public spaces than entertainment products. Sweeney recognizes the need for these positions of political neutrality, but if you are going to mobilize people, you will have to deal with politics.
Quotations from Sweeney's speech have it distributed since speaking at Dice Wednesday, which has many people on social media echoing his comments about "players' rights and freedoms" and his assertion that there is no need & # 39; t to pull apart topics & # 39; such as politics in sports. "We as companies need to keep away from politics and say that we have to get people involved and we as platforms should not be neutral," said Sweeney in his speech, later going to Twitter to clarify some of his points.
IGN made a video of the key book for Sweeney & # 39; s Dice available last evening.
Sweeney seems to think it is appropriate for players to express their politics: “When a broadcaster crosses and shares a political message in the form of an esport or a Reddit commentator or commentator expressing their opinion, we see games increasing as a social network, whether we like it or not we will have to accept that gambling now it is a platform for global discourse. ”
Later, paradoxically, he turned to the fact that marketing teams should add politics to the games: "We need to separate the comments of the designers … in the commercial departments. We have to get rid of the political marketing departments. The world is truly filled now: yet your political position decides which fast-food chicken restaurant you go to, There is no need to pull off divisive topics like that at all. ”
Fast food comments seem to refer to the Chick-fil-A chicken market, which has been criticized donate to anti-gay organizations. On Twitter, Sweeney specified that he meant that "a company like that should not take a position on a matter like this, because they are out of their business." Him he has clarified his comments about the department of commerce By explaining that, when games are about politics, those politics "should come from the heart of the creators and not from the marketing departments who want to make money separately." This specification looks like good ideas in a vacuum, but we don't have a vacuum. In his Dice speech, Sweeney said, "We need to create a clear division between church and state where our businesses operate as resorts with employees, customers, everyone who can hold their opinions and can be judged by us."
The platform, however, cannot be neutral, as it is convenient for it stakehold them as the case may be. Politics is about power structures that affect people's daily lives. People's access to platforms is political – the ability to play Fortnite in a console that you can afford and pay for in your own house is political, as you can play on your mother's phone while riding the bus. Having a credit card so you can buy a war pension is a political thing. Where Fortnite it gets its dances politics; Which franchises and artists work with in politics. What games Epic allows in its store are political, even though Seeney seems to think no. Sweeney's comment places politics as something that people can and cannot voluntarily enter into, unlike the physical conditions of our lives and how we relate to one another. There is no a billion—I stay neutral in politics. The closest they can get is just not talking about it.
Sweeney's call for political neutrality sounds like an extension of the belief he expressed in his speech that removing some of the barriers that give companies artificial edge will make everything a success. "It's a mental illness, the idea that publishers have to be consumers or have a majority in customer relationships with some sort of entry and ecommerce, and that's just a bad idea," Sweeney argued while talking about expanding cross-platform gaming and storefronts. "It's against the ideals set up for Epic Fortnite and on. ” Fortnite , in particular, the cross platform, which means that players can log in to the game and access most of the purchases they've made in one place. This is certainly a part FortniteSuccess: "The numbers prove that this is the future of gaming," said Sweeney. “Just come in Fortnite and our latest efforts with the Epic Game Store, gaining 300 million users across seven platforms, and building over 1.6 billion connections to friends, as the traditional network. ”
However, no matter how the platform is opened, what you put into it seems to carry some political message. In his speech, Sweeney cites the need for clearly established rules regarding content limitations, suggesting that his view may not be absolute.
In October, responding to Blizzard's reaction to the Hearing player BlitzchungIdeas for Hong Kong, Sweeney wrote on Twitter, “Epic upholds the rights of Fortnite Players and creators will talk about politics and human rights. "The content of a platform that measures or allows people to talk about politics is not politically correct. legal standing, perhaps, but that can keep you from being a victim of abuse and hating your competitor Value find yourself in that moment. It seems that Sweeney is just a form of political ambition that was not a problem to deal with, that we can be technologically aware of because we are human.
I'm with Sweeney at the stupidity of the debate over the Chick-fil-A sandwich. As a line person, I have dedicated so many times of my life and the only one of my life to think of a good sandwich. But that's not because I come into politics when my family passes to Chick-fil-A on a road trip. Because the decision of where to stop for lunch has consequences that we cannot avoid. It's because my family chooses to eat Chick-fil-A and makes a statement, albeit I'm not saying, about their prices. It means I don't get lunch and that we are all a little more connected when we get back to the car. It's a stupid battleground with a stupid sandwich, but just wish companies didn'tlet the political positions do not make the news consistent, or even mean that employees and their customers can just leave their lives at the door. Even though Chick-fil-A didn't, say, fund Anti-LGBT groups, will still have to deal with these meat eating politics, too wage equality, again access to food. Politics just don't exist play on the platform: they play between people. And that will happen in the Epic Games Store, here it is Fortnite, and in all other sports, it would be Tim Sweeney love it or not.
