Trading US narrative control for Russian narrative control isn't really any better... And what's worse is that he responded to the article saying, Shame, I enjoyed ArmA. After everything with...
[Španěl] added that he sees recent "US/Western approaches to free speech and attempted control of thinking and narrative to support [a] single ideology" as comparable to what the Czech Republic experienced under communism during the Cold War.
Trading US narrative control for Russian narrative control isn't really any better...
Since Španěl and Pavlíček's purchase of the outlet in 2023, Parlamentní listy has run stories referring to Ukrainians as "scum," published a number of stories accusing trans women in sports of being men in disguise, promoted the right-wing talking point that President Biden declared Easter a "transgender holiday" (he commemorated International Transgender Day of Visibility, which takes place on March 31 every year, and overlapped with Easter in 2024) and regularly draws thin connections between European institutions and billionaire George Soros. Conspiracies about Soros are a pillar of modern antisemitism in the far right. There are conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic, regular stories about migrant crime, and anti-vaccination talking points.
And what's worse is that he responded to the article saying,
"It's encouraging to see improvement in this situation now, as what appeared to be a U.S.-originated censorship industrial complex extending globally is being dismantled." [Španěl said]
Shame, I enjoyed ArmA. After everything with Kingdom Come II, the Czech Republic isn't getting good press right now.
I want to add some context to this. It's a wall of text, so tl;dr is still that yes, it's bad - there are some sane causes that might lead people in this direction and one needs to be careful...
Exemplary
I want to add some context to this. It's a wall of text, so tl;dr is still that yes, it's bad - there are some sane causes that might lead people in this direction and one needs to be careful about their US cultural bias when assessing actions and opinions of people from other cultures, but this goes a couple steps beyond sane causes. When deciding whether to buy their games, know that most Bohemia Interactive employees are not like this.
[Španěl] added that he sees recent "US/Western approaches to free speech and attempted control of thinking and narrative to support [a] single ideology" as comparable to what the Czech Republic experienced under communism during the Cold War.
Imo him framing this as "west bad" veers into conspiratorial thinking, but in the context of czech culture I don't think he's exactly wrong or that this on its own is an indication that he's bigoted. People hate terms like woke or cancel culture, but I don't think anyone would disagree that there has been a push towards limiting free speech as an ideal, meaning not locking people up (though that is happening in parts of western Europe and I also find it alarming) but more and more opinions and styles of expression being at the very least strongly frowned upon by the elites and causing a chilling effect and moving away from the ideals of classical liberalism, which around here we still mostly see as the right solution.
This is made even more visible in Czechia because our history and therefore our current social problems are quite different from the US (for example, in the 50s when in the US many women were stuck in the suburbs not having a life of their own outside of taking care of their family, communists here sent women to work in factories and declared not working illegal), but the globalization of culture causes people to try to import and fight for anglosphere issues that do not really exist here, exist on a much smaller scale or are simply different.
In other words the tools to change society, which are perceived as unwelcome and annoying, are used to push for issues that are perceived as not particularly relevant here, which together can be infuriating. And if you're already somewhat conservative, having to sit through a nonsensical western-biased sensitivity training in your corporate job and pretend that you believe it because doing otherwise might get you fired is quite far from living under communism, but quite close to one of the fundaments that the regime relied upon. Pretending to believe in something that almost nobody really believed in and everyone knew that nobody believed in it but everyone pretended to avoid consequences was incredibly prevalent.
So people who already have some right-wing bias (common in post-communist countries and common among entrepreneurs) are naturally pushed to the right because they feel a need to oppose this. That has been the case with Warhorse creative director Vávra as well. This is why they see Democrats losing in the US as a good thing, and honestly - yeah, if I believed that Republicans are going to push society back towards more open discussion and attempts at cancellation becoming less acceptable, I'd view it as a good thing as well.
The question is where this ends and where straight up stupidity or malice starts (and it does start in both of those cases).
The owners of BI bought several online and printed magazines with some right wing bias that produce decent content and despite some tremendous stupidity here and there from some of their writers are no doubt traditional media with value, like Echo, also mentioned in the article.
However Parlamentní Listy, the one this article is about, is not that. It's not even a tabloid, it's just straight up disinformation drivel with (at least in the past) semi-anonymous writers and unclear funding suggesting ties to Russia. The article also briefly mentions the BI CEO giving donations to SPD, a mostly far-right (populism makes this definition unclear, they're not literally nazis) hyperpopulist party - that on its own is about as ridiculous as buying Parlamentní Listy, even though he also gave funding to other parties iirc. We were all quite surprised by this, because most right wingers here (including Warhorse's Vávra) are russophobic, for good reasons.
The purchase was probably a decent business decision, they could have also bought it to make it milder without killing it altogether (which would undoubtedly just spawn a different alternative) to reduce the harm - let's be fair here and say that it's really hard to say whether something like that would have been happening, most of us who hate Parlamentní Listy just do not read it, so we don't know. Quick glance says that it seems about as bad as it always was though.
If we take his claims at face value, he seems to be suffering from something like "woke derangement syndrome". I have no other explanation.
As for whether it's necessary to boycott BI and not buy their games, you may consider that there are some conservative people in the management, though most of them afaik not this deranged, and most other employees are just normal people, some of them very liberal (I'm friends with one of those).
I begin to wonder if perhaps the "woke derangement syndrome" as you put it is primarily a reaction to the increased visibility of personal opinions wrt purchasing decisions. A lot of the people I...
I begin to wonder if perhaps the "woke derangement syndrome" as you put it is primarily a reaction to the increased visibility of personal opinions wrt purchasing decisions.
A lot of the people I know who make decisions on where to buy and what artists to support based on the stated political opinions of those outlets have always done so. The same people who chose not to buy from Walmart 25 years ago because they disapproved of their labor and anti-competitive practices still do so today; the major difference between then and now is that they're able to express and broadcast their reasoning much more effectively to the world at large. To be sure, this is in turn amplified and reinforced by the similar opinions of others, and the means to determine which companies and individuals hold incompatible beliefs are much more accessible now, but the basic premise "I choose not to do business with those who support politics I find abhorrent," the essence of what right-wingers call "wokeness" and "cancel culture," hasn't changed.
Decades ago, changes to market share that were influenced by political advocacy were much harder to pinpoint, and much easier to dismiss as quirks of statistical analysis of polling. Now, you don't need to sponsor consumer polls to see immediate emotional responses from consumers to a firm's political statements. Simply log into any social media and those responses are plain to see–overwhelmingly so, in fact.
This hypothesis goes some way to explaining why cancellation and "wokeness" has really come to the fore in reactionary sentiment in the past 20 or so years, as people have grown more accustomed to expressing their political beliefs and the impacts they have on purchasing and patronage online. It also turns up the contrast on the hypocrisy of free market rhetoric on the part of reactionaries from decades past, as I can think of no more clear example of consumers voting with their pocketbooks than the choice of whom to patronize based on political activities.
Of course, this impulse to dismiss isn't new itself–it's really just today's dressing on the 90's fixation on "political correctness"–but whereas in the 90s and early-aughts a reactionary could dismiss PC culture as the abstract ramblings of intellectuals and liberal elites, it's much harder to ignore people when they tell you directly "I'm not buying from you because I think your politics are toxic," and then see a direct correlation to revenue.
This is all a pretty simplistic way of putting it, and by no means am I declaring it explains the phenomenon entirely. There's been a constant erosion of market competition via consolidation and the gutting of market regulation at the same time as the right's fixation on "wokeness" has grown, especially in the US. I think this influences the situation as well, as growing monopolization has increased the pressure on both consumers to respond to politics and on companies to increasingly cater to popular criticism on political matters. But it is a new (for me) perspective on the issue.
All of this leads me to wonder what exactly the endgame is for critics of "wokeness." If people don't like your politics and choose to exercise their economic discretion on that basis, what's the solution? "Too bad. Your business belongs to us, and we'll enforce that by governmental action"? That seems like the kind of kneejerk solution a Trumpist might concoct, but I can't see how that's tenable or congruent with their stated ideology at all. It might feel good to the one who thinks they're being persecuted, but as policy it seems like it would crumble to dust almost immediately.
I don't think there's evidence for this hypothesis. One thing that doesn't exactly fit here is that I don't believe either Španěl or Vávra started with this anti-woke crusade as a consequence of...
I don't think there's evidence for this hypothesis.
One thing that doesn't exactly fit here is that I don't believe either Španěl or Vávra started with this anti-woke crusade as a consequence of people online declaring to boycott their games due to them and their political opinions, it seemed like it was the other way around. Maybe with Vávra I could imagine that, but even there it would not be one-sided as you describe it, because if I recall it correctly, the timeline was 1. KCD1 is in development, Vávra is not very controversial 2. Game is nearing release or releases, some of the controversy about the game itself arises and it's really stupid (like the famous complaints that there are no black people in rural medieval Bohemia), Vávra pushes back and creates some drama, but not a ton 3. The game sells well 4. Over time Vávra gradually really becomes controversial, keeps posting shit on social media etc. and gains the image he has now, but by that time KCD1 already sold most of its copies and had a big fanbase.
Vávra also almost never explicitly complains about people hating his game (I think there were some complaints after the release of KCD2, but I've never seen it before that), let alone not buying it. And he is mildly politically active in a platform that's pushing against unregulated social media censorship or algorithms affecting visibility and non-transparently promoting content, completely unrelated to videogames. I see those things as decent evidence that this is not about people not buying his product but about politics and society in general, as he claims.
As for Španěl, as far as I know there has not been any visible boycott of ARMA games and it has always been business as usual, so I see no link there. Again, his attempts to influence the development of societal trends through pouring money into select media or political parties seem hard to identify with and some would say malicious, but genuine and unconnected from the work of Bohemia Interactive.
It also seems that you're suggesting that there hasn't been a change in behavior that could be described as "wokeness" or a tendency to (try to) cancel things and people, and it's just a matter of perception and added visibility. I disagree with that strongly, but I don't know how to prove that.
It's out now! A cursory glance at the reviews seems to tend towards an excellent initial reception by the fanbases. I myself can attest to the well-written dialogue, voice acting, and...
It's out now! A cursory glance at the reviews seems to tend towards an excellent initial reception by the fanbases. I myself can attest to the well-written dialogue, voice acting, and world-building undertaken by the devs.
The person who replied to you and the person you initially replied to are two different people (and I am yet a third), but I suspect this has something to do with things the dev has said online...
The person who replied to you and the person you initially replied to are two different people (and I am yet a third), but I suspect this has something to do with things the dev has said online (there was a recent thread on Tildes discussing this), though iirc I don't think any of it was remotely as bad as the stuff described in this article.
Oh, huh, I hadn't realized. I mean, it still isn't really an answer to the question I asked as such, though as I mentioned there it was interesting to hear it being out since I missed that. On...
Oh, huh, I hadn't realized.
I mean, it still isn't really an answer to the question I asked as such, though as I mentioned there it was interesting to hear it being out since I missed that.
On topic: Hmm, I guess I'll have to look for it at some point, see what he was talking about. Thanks for the general pointer, I guess
I'd attempt to give more info myself, but I'm not very familiar with what happened and only really participated in the Tildes thread about it to discuss the more abstract side of "should you buy...
I'd attempt to give more info myself, but I'm not very familiar with what happened and only really participated in the Tildes thread about it to discuss the more abstract side of "should you buy art made by someone who does/says bad things", rather than weighing in on this particular dev. If I can find the thread easily, I'll edit in a link to it here.
I'm confused, is this not using what Russia did in the past and is still doing to describe what the West is doing?
[Španěl] added that he sees recent "US/Western approaches to free speech and attempted control of thinking and narrative to support [a] single ideology" as comparable to what the Czech Republic experienced under communism during the Cold War.
I'm confused, is this not using what Russia did in the past and is still doing to describe what the West is doing?
This is pretty big news in my arma bubble. Most of the people i play with are heavily on the right on the political spectrum and many of them keep bohemia on a pedastal, so this news was a heavy...
This is pretty big news in my arma bubble. Most of the people i play with are heavily on the right on the political spectrum and many of them keep bohemia on a pedastal, so this news was a heavy blow to them.
Trading US narrative control for Russian narrative control isn't really any better...
And what's worse is that he responded to the article saying,
Shame, I enjoyed ArmA. After everything with Kingdom Come II, the Czech Republic isn't getting good press right now.
I want to add some context to this. It's a wall of text, so tl;dr is still that yes, it's bad - there are some sane causes that might lead people in this direction and one needs to be careful about their US cultural bias when assessing actions and opinions of people from other cultures, but this goes a couple steps beyond sane causes. When deciding whether to buy their games, know that most Bohemia Interactive employees are not like this.
Imo him framing this as "west bad" veers into conspiratorial thinking, but in the context of czech culture I don't think he's exactly wrong or that this on its own is an indication that he's bigoted. People hate terms like woke or cancel culture, but I don't think anyone would disagree that there has been a push towards limiting free speech as an ideal, meaning not locking people up (though that is happening in parts of western Europe and I also find it alarming) but more and more opinions and styles of expression being at the very least strongly frowned upon by the elites and causing a chilling effect and moving away from the ideals of classical liberalism, which around here we still mostly see as the right solution.
This is made even more visible in Czechia because our history and therefore our current social problems are quite different from the US (for example, in the 50s when in the US many women were stuck in the suburbs not having a life of their own outside of taking care of their family, communists here sent women to work in factories and declared not working illegal), but the globalization of culture causes people to try to import and fight for anglosphere issues that do not really exist here, exist on a much smaller scale or are simply different.
In other words the tools to change society, which are perceived as unwelcome and annoying, are used to push for issues that are perceived as not particularly relevant here, which together can be infuriating. And if you're already somewhat conservative, having to sit through a nonsensical western-biased sensitivity training in your corporate job and pretend that you believe it because doing otherwise might get you fired is quite far from living under communism, but quite close to one of the fundaments that the regime relied upon. Pretending to believe in something that almost nobody really believed in and everyone knew that nobody believed in it but everyone pretended to avoid consequences was incredibly prevalent.
So people who already have some right-wing bias (common in post-communist countries and common among entrepreneurs) are naturally pushed to the right because they feel a need to oppose this. That has been the case with Warhorse creative director Vávra as well. This is why they see Democrats losing in the US as a good thing, and honestly - yeah, if I believed that Republicans are going to push society back towards more open discussion and attempts at cancellation becoming less acceptable, I'd view it as a good thing as well.
The question is where this ends and where straight up stupidity or malice starts (and it does start in both of those cases).
The owners of BI bought several online and printed magazines with some right wing bias that produce decent content and despite some tremendous stupidity here and there from some of their writers are no doubt traditional media with value, like Echo, also mentioned in the article.
However Parlamentní Listy, the one this article is about, is not that. It's not even a tabloid, it's just straight up disinformation drivel with (at least in the past) semi-anonymous writers and unclear funding suggesting ties to Russia. The article also briefly mentions the BI CEO giving donations to SPD, a mostly far-right (populism makes this definition unclear, they're not literally nazis) hyperpopulist party - that on its own is about as ridiculous as buying Parlamentní Listy, even though he also gave funding to other parties iirc. We were all quite surprised by this, because most right wingers here (including Warhorse's Vávra) are russophobic, for good reasons.
The purchase was probably a decent business decision, they could have also bought it to make it milder without killing it altogether (which would undoubtedly just spawn a different alternative) to reduce the harm - let's be fair here and say that it's really hard to say whether something like that would have been happening, most of us who hate Parlamentní Listy just do not read it, so we don't know. Quick glance says that it seems about as bad as it always was though.
If we take his claims at face value, he seems to be suffering from something like "woke derangement syndrome". I have no other explanation.
As for whether it's necessary to boycott BI and not buy their games, you may consider that there are some conservative people in the management, though most of them afaik not this deranged, and most other employees are just normal people, some of them very liberal (I'm friends with one of those).
I begin to wonder if perhaps the "woke derangement syndrome" as you put it is primarily a reaction to the increased visibility of personal opinions wrt purchasing decisions.
A lot of the people I know who make decisions on where to buy and what artists to support based on the stated political opinions of those outlets have always done so. The same people who chose not to buy from Walmart 25 years ago because they disapproved of their labor and anti-competitive practices still do so today; the major difference between then and now is that they're able to express and broadcast their reasoning much more effectively to the world at large. To be sure, this is in turn amplified and reinforced by the similar opinions of others, and the means to determine which companies and individuals hold incompatible beliefs are much more accessible now, but the basic premise "I choose not to do business with those who support politics I find abhorrent," the essence of what right-wingers call "wokeness" and "cancel culture," hasn't changed.
Decades ago, changes to market share that were influenced by political advocacy were much harder to pinpoint, and much easier to dismiss as quirks of statistical analysis of polling. Now, you don't need to sponsor consumer polls to see immediate emotional responses from consumers to a firm's political statements. Simply log into any social media and those responses are plain to see–overwhelmingly so, in fact.
This hypothesis goes some way to explaining why cancellation and "wokeness" has really come to the fore in reactionary sentiment in the past 20 or so years, as people have grown more accustomed to expressing their political beliefs and the impacts they have on purchasing and patronage online. It also turns up the contrast on the hypocrisy of free market rhetoric on the part of reactionaries from decades past, as I can think of no more clear example of consumers voting with their pocketbooks than the choice of whom to patronize based on political activities.
Of course, this impulse to dismiss isn't new itself–it's really just today's dressing on the 90's fixation on "political correctness"–but whereas in the 90s and early-aughts a reactionary could dismiss PC culture as the abstract ramblings of intellectuals and liberal elites, it's much harder to ignore people when they tell you directly "I'm not buying from you because I think your politics are toxic," and then see a direct correlation to revenue.
This is all a pretty simplistic way of putting it, and by no means am I declaring it explains the phenomenon entirely. There's been a constant erosion of market competition via consolidation and the gutting of market regulation at the same time as the right's fixation on "wokeness" has grown, especially in the US. I think this influences the situation as well, as growing monopolization has increased the pressure on both consumers to respond to politics and on companies to increasingly cater to popular criticism on political matters. But it is a new (for me) perspective on the issue.
All of this leads me to wonder what exactly the endgame is for critics of "wokeness." If people don't like your politics and choose to exercise their economic discretion on that basis, what's the solution? "Too bad. Your business belongs to us, and we'll enforce that by governmental action"? That seems like the kind of kneejerk solution a Trumpist might concoct, but I can't see how that's tenable or congruent with their stated ideology at all. It might feel good to the one who thinks they're being persecuted, but as policy it seems like it would crumble to dust almost immediately.
I don't think there's evidence for this hypothesis.
One thing that doesn't exactly fit here is that I don't believe either Španěl or Vávra started with this anti-woke crusade as a consequence of people online declaring to boycott their games due to them and their political opinions, it seemed like it was the other way around. Maybe with Vávra I could imagine that, but even there it would not be one-sided as you describe it, because if I recall it correctly, the timeline was 1. KCD1 is in development, Vávra is not very controversial 2. Game is nearing release or releases, some of the controversy about the game itself arises and it's really stupid (like the famous complaints that there are no black people in rural medieval Bohemia), Vávra pushes back and creates some drama, but not a ton 3. The game sells well 4. Over time Vávra gradually really becomes controversial, keeps posting shit on social media etc. and gains the image he has now, but by that time KCD1 already sold most of its copies and had a big fanbase.
Vávra also almost never explicitly complains about people hating his game (I think there were some complaints after the release of KCD2, but I've never seen it before that), let alone not buying it. And he is mildly politically active in a platform that's pushing against unregulated social media censorship or algorithms affecting visibility and non-transparently promoting content, completely unrelated to videogames. I see those things as decent evidence that this is not about people not buying his product but about politics and society in general, as he claims.
As for Španěl, as far as I know there has not been any visible boycott of ARMA games and it has always been business as usual, so I see no link there. Again, his attempts to influence the development of societal trends through pouring money into select media or political parties seem hard to identify with and some would say malicious, but genuine and unconnected from the work of Bohemia Interactive.
It also seems that you're suggesting that there hasn't been a change in behavior that could be described as "wokeness" or a tendency to (try to) cancel things and people, and it's just a matter of perception and added visibility. I disagree with that strongly, but I don't know how to prove that.
As someone who didn't get around to playing Kingdom come but planned to eventually, what's up with an apparent sequel?
It's out now! A cursory glance at the reviews seems to tend towards an excellent initial reception by the fanbases. I myself can attest to the well-written dialogue, voice acting, and world-building undertaken by the devs.
Nice to hear, although I meant more the part:
What's that everything?
The person who replied to you and the person you initially replied to are two different people (and I am yet a third), but I suspect this has something to do with things the dev has said online (there was a recent thread on Tildes discussing this), though iirc I don't think any of it was remotely as bad as the stuff described in this article.
Oh, huh, I hadn't realized.
I mean, it still isn't really an answer to the question I asked as such, though as I mentioned there it was interesting to hear it being out since I missed that.
On topic: Hmm, I guess I'll have to look for it at some point, see what he was talking about. Thanks for the general pointer, I guess
I'd attempt to give more info myself, but I'm not very familiar with what happened and only really participated in the Tildes thread about it to discuss the more abstract side of "should you buy art made by someone who does/says bad things", rather than weighing in on this particular dev. If I can find the thread easily, I'll edit in a link to it here.
That's fair.
If you do stumble upon it I'd be much obliged.
I'm confused, is this not using what Russia did in the past and is still doing to describe what the West is doing?
This is pretty big news in my arma bubble. Most of the people i play with are heavily on the right on the political spectrum and many of them keep bohemia on a pedastal, so this news was a heavy blow to them.