Edition Warring
Nov. 9th, 2022 08:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
citrakayahSo Werewolf: the Apocalypse 5th edition, while not being released yet, has had enough information released on it that it's pretty clear what we'll be getting: A human-centered game where you are unable to affect any change as part of an organized group and instead can, at most, keep things stable in your bit of territory as things continue to fall apart.
I'm not very pleased, to say the least.
Just ignoring for the moment any Discourse about lupus, Kinfolk, the Get of Fenris, the Umbra, whatever, Werewolf has always been a game with radical politics. Incompetently done and occasionally incoherent politics, but at its base, "Save the planet by beating the shit out of the embodiment of social ills and ecological destruction" was always going to end up with a leftist tinge even if everyone making it was a committed capitalist. That's even more true if one of your main enemies is a capitalist holding company that owns a lot of other companies that are basically supernaturally shitty versions of the mundanely shitty companies we all know andlove hate.
I won't say that every Werewolf player I've met has been committed leftist; that would be a blatant lie, but it would be accurate to say the politics of the Werewolf players I've encountered leaned left.
And now we get what is, in a way, an actually anti-radical game, in terms of its most basic premises. We've been told that in this edition, the planet is dead or dying but that humans as a whole have barely noticed. There's no longer any larger networks of anyone trying to make the world a better place, it's all scattered groups of people who, at most, are trying to protect a few square miles (because protecting the world is out).
I fundamentally do not get the thought processes behind this sort of design decision. "Protect your turf" is an idiotic approach to a biosphere because everything is interconnected; unless they're ripping out the environmental themes of Werewolf (and they might, I suppose), you can't just focus on your little bit of territory. Not when global warming and pollution exist. You need to be able to act at a regional and global level.
There are actually large networks of people who do not totally suck and are trying to do something about our problems. Some of them only exist on a regional scale. Some of them span entire states. Some of them span most of the world.
The situation does actually require extreme urgency and radical action. Which I will admit the designers haven't actually come out and said isn't a thing for players in the game, but given comments regarding the Get falling into radical extremism and the themes of the game it does read as if they're taking the position that radical drastic action is bad.
And this all combines to create the feeling that the game will--despite some statements that they're working on fixing some of the game's more problematic aspects (which did need to be dealt with even if I don't like how they did it; the people making it might've meant well but they were ignorant white dudes in the 1990s)--be fundamentally antiradical on a thematic level.
It's possible that when the actual edition comes out (which isn't planned until next year, and given the troubled production history and the fact that they don't even have a full first draft yet it could be longer) I'll be proven wrong. But from what I've read, I doubt it.
It is all rather unfortunate.
I'm not very pleased, to say the least.
Just ignoring for the moment any Discourse about lupus, Kinfolk, the Get of Fenris, the Umbra, whatever, Werewolf has always been a game with radical politics. Incompetently done and occasionally incoherent politics, but at its base, "Save the planet by beating the shit out of the embodiment of social ills and ecological destruction" was always going to end up with a leftist tinge even if everyone making it was a committed capitalist. That's even more true if one of your main enemies is a capitalist holding company that owns a lot of other companies that are basically supernaturally shitty versions of the mundanely shitty companies we all know and
I won't say that every Werewolf player I've met has been committed leftist; that would be a blatant lie, but it would be accurate to say the politics of the Werewolf players I've encountered leaned left.
And now we get what is, in a way, an actually anti-radical game, in terms of its most basic premises. We've been told that in this edition, the planet is dead or dying but that humans as a whole have barely noticed. There's no longer any larger networks of anyone trying to make the world a better place, it's all scattered groups of people who, at most, are trying to protect a few square miles (because protecting the world is out).
I fundamentally do not get the thought processes behind this sort of design decision. "Protect your turf" is an idiotic approach to a biosphere because everything is interconnected; unless they're ripping out the environmental themes of Werewolf (and they might, I suppose), you can't just focus on your little bit of territory. Not when global warming and pollution exist. You need to be able to act at a regional and global level.
There are actually large networks of people who do not totally suck and are trying to do something about our problems. Some of them only exist on a regional scale. Some of them span entire states. Some of them span most of the world.
The situation does actually require extreme urgency and radical action. Which I will admit the designers haven't actually come out and said isn't a thing for players in the game, but given comments regarding the Get falling into radical extremism and the themes of the game it does read as if they're taking the position that radical drastic action is bad.
And this all combines to create the feeling that the game will--despite some statements that they're working on fixing some of the game's more problematic aspects (which did need to be dealt with even if I don't like how they did it; the people making it might've meant well but they were ignorant white dudes in the 1990s)--be fundamentally antiradical on a thematic level.
It's possible that when the actual edition comes out (which isn't planned until next year, and given the troubled production history and the fact that they don't even have a full first draft yet it could be longer) I'll be proven wrong. But from what I've read, I doubt it.
It is all rather unfortunate.
