Whether you consider it a GOTY contender or not, we’ve certainly got our first big game of the year in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, an open-world RPG that goes for it despite the inevitable jank that comes with such immense scale. This week, many were surprised to learn that the game’s director, Warhorse Studios founder Daniel Vávra, was a big supporter of the first Gamergate movement. This felt like common knowledge back when the original Kingdom Come (kingdom) came out, but years later, that crucial context has faded into a footnote. What happened? On the latest Aftermath Hours, we talk about that.
We’re joined by special guest Rowan Zeoli of Rascal, an independent, reader-supported, worker-owned outlet for journalism about tabletop roleplaying games not unlike Aftermath. The site is celebrating one year of life on the increasingly tumultuous planet Earth with a subscription drive, so we ask Rowan how things are going (pretty well!) and then dig into a harrowingly powerful piece she recently wrote about roleplaying the January 6 insurrection in a Brooklyn warehouse. What can we learn from living out these moments in a controlled, game-like environment? And why don’t wargames recreate modern history more often?
Then we discuss Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and its director’s support of the original Gamergate movement, which everybody seems to have forgotten about. Why, though? And what does it mean for a sequel that seems at least somewhat interested in exploring more diverse stories – despite the objections of an audience that’s partially turned on it for that very reason? Finally, at listeners’ request, Nathan gives everyone a special pre-release preview of a passage from his book (preorder now!), and he’s not nervous about it at all.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can grow this humble website into a vast kingdom that will deliver you from the horrors of the modern internet.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Nathan: The new Kingdom Come kind of goes back on that idea of [an almost entirely white cast] and says “Actually we are gonna have characters of other backgrounds and from other places, and we’re going to engage in these ways that – at least based on the reviews I’ve read – sound kind of interesting and nuanced.”
Rowan: They turned woke!
Nathan: So it feels like the director of this studio is one thing, and some of the people working for the studio are another thing, and you’ve got people at the studio being like “Man, we don’t want anything to do with all this culture war shit. We just want people to like our game and play it on its own terms.” And this is the funniest part: Back in the day, the Gamergater types were like “Yeah, this game is doing whites only! We love that shit!” And now that the series has added other people of different backgrounds into the series, they’ve turned on it.
Rowan: The leopards would never eat my face, though!
Nathan: I know, right? So then you have some of the other developers disavowing the culture war and asking why people are doing this to them. Well, because you’re working with a guy who set a lot of this stuff in motion [and kept behaving that way in the intervening period]. How can you be surprised?
Riley: It’s been confusing to me. People are writing about it and talking about it in a way that makes me feel a little bit crazy, where I’m like “Doesn’t everybody remember what happened before?” And because I’m broken inside, I want to leave space for the idea that times have changed and maybe the guy has changed. Nathan tells me the guy has not changed.
Nathan: Yeah, if you look at his posts, it doesn’t seem like he’s changed substantially.
Riley: But it seems like the game itself [is fine]. I remember that was the controversy with the game the first time, too: There are things in the game that are probably good and interesting. It’s not a wholesale write off.
Nathan: Definitely not. That’s the dilemma that I think a lot of people who are more left-leaning are facing. You have this context around how the game was made and who made it, and then the game itself is not the horrible polemic you’d expect it to be. It’s more nuanced than that. And of course, as with any video game of this scale, it was made by hundreds of people – many of whom probably do not share that director’s opinions. But they also did choose to work at that studio.
Rowan: Do you guys have this issue in video games? In tabletop games, there’s a real lack of institutional memory. Like even maybe the people writing about this game just have no idea.
Riley: Yeah, everybody keeps getting laid off, which certainly doesn’t help.
Nathan: Times have also changed. When the first Kingdom Come came out [in 2018], a lot of the conversation around games was still happening on websites and blogs and stuff. YouTube was definitely a presence, but it was a little more nascent. Now that dynamic has totally flipped. Now most of the conversation is happening on YouTube and Twitch and Discord, and video game websites are becoming more and more dinosaur-like by the day.
So I think part of it is probably the age of the audience and the demographics of who was present for that first conversation [about the original Kingdom Come], and the other part is just where it’s all happening – how much more diffuse it is. That means, especially with websites closing down and people getting laid off, that there’s really no institutional memory whatsoever. So even people who’d want to know about this and who’d care about this are not finding out, at least until the very last second.
Rowan: I feel like tabletop journalism is about 15 years behind video game journalism, because I’m like “Ah yes, I know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s gonna take us a decade to figure out.”
Nathan: Yeah, exactly. And even then, so much of it is cyclical. So many of the conversations happen again and again and again, and nobody fully figures it out.
