Trent Oster's interview about Dragonspear controversies
JuliusBorisov
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An interview with Trent Oster has been published.
About Mizhena
“If there’s an aggressive agenda that’s being pushed into someone’s face, I disagree with that,” Beamdog CEO Trent Oster tells Develop. “It needs to be representative. You need to tackle any social milieu appropriately, and aggressive agenda pushing is incorrect. It’s not the right way to do it. All you do is strengthen the resistance.”
“[The revelation that she is transgender] is what we consider three dialogue nodes deep,” Oster explains. “We put an arbitrary limit on our writers for our support characters of just three nodes deep, just to control wordcount. Siege of Dragonspear is over 500,000 words of dialogue, so we had to put limits on writers so they didn’t create more.
“There’s two sides of the argument [against Mizhena’s inclusion]. One is ‘I don’t want a transgender character in my game’, and while I don’t agree with it, I guess I can understand that perspective.
“The other is that the character goes from ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ to ‘I’m transgender’ in three conversation lines. That’s a really shallow way of telling me a life-shattering event. The transgender people I know are not going to blurt that out as quickly as that – it’s going to take a while, you’re going to have to get to know them.
“Obviously we wanted to explore her story in a broader, deeper way, but the three-line limitation cut it off. If anyone was going to get to the fact that this character is transgender, they had to do it pretty fast. Upon my review of the character, I think that within three lines it’s actually quite well done.”
“We have this character, we have a series of reasons why she is the way she is, it’s obviously captured the attention of a lot of people, so we should expand her story,” he says.
“To us, having a transgender character wasn’t that big a deal,” he says. “In a world where there’s half-orcs – so a human and an orc had an offspring together – and dragons can transform into humans and gods can walk the earth as male or female, whatever choice they make – it just didn’t seem like a big detail to us.
“Personally, I think it shows a progressive world view that we didn’t think a transgender character was a big deal. It was just a character to us, part of the world, helping to drive the story along.”
“I firmly believe that there is no ‘they’, there’s no group with a specific agenda,” says Oster. “There’s just a bunch of individuals – each with their own sensitivities, likes and dislikes – and the internet seems to package people together. You see a tempest in a teapot.
“When a topic blows up on the internet, it’s hard to tell how ‘big’ it is. I think social media has created this echo chamber world, where everyone lives in their own little social group and are essentially self-reinforcing.
“All of my news feeds are centred on video games, so when something happens in that space, it seems huge. If I talk to someone else, they don’t know about it, they’ve been talking about the Panama Papers – and I’m like, ‘what are the Panama Papers?’. Because I’ve been in my little universe and it’s different to theirs.”
About harassment
“When we look at feedback, we listen to our community of Baldur’s Gate fans first and foremost,” he says. “If the internet freaks out about something – well, it’s the internet and pretty much hates everything. If our fans bring it up, though, we’ll take it very seriously.
“If someone challenges me on something in our games, if someone expresses a concern about something, I’m going to take another look and think about whether we made the right decision and should stay by it?”
“It hits everybody in the studio differently,” he says. “For the person directly receiving attacks, its obviously overwhelming – and it makes me really mad. There are few things in the world that truly get me angry. Watching someone close to me get attacked drives me up the wall.
“It took me a long time to draft a statement to respond. I wanted to take the time to calm down, go over it, get back to the core issues that had been raised and address them. I maintain that for a three-line dialogue limits, this was well executed. If we remove that limit, we can execute it even better.
“If other developers ever face this level of harassment, I suggest they calm down, take a step back, wait and then prepare a statement. Tell your staff on where you stand on the issue. If someone hijacked your game and inserted their own agenda, something not approved by the company, you’ve got to figure out what to do from an internal management perspective. But if it’s representative of the company’s views, and you agree with it, you need to stand up and support that person. Personally, I think throwing someone under a bus is a bad thing to do.”
About the Minsc's line
“I had played the game quite a bit and never seen that line, because it’s a rare select line,” he says. “You have a click a lot of times before he fires it off. After the reaction, I sat and clicked on him until the line appeared, and I agreed that, y’know what, this doesn’t actually make sense.”
About refugees
“The fact is, there are refugees in the world,” he says. “Anywhere where there is a horrible conflict, there will be refugees. It fits with the story we’re telling: there’s an army forming in the north, forcing people into the ranks and displacing others – that generates refugees.
“We needed an instigating event to get you our of Baldur’s Gate – otherwise your character just sits there, getting fat. That instigating event is the pressure caused by people fleeing the army in the north.
“Even given the reality of today with Syrian refugees, I don’t think we’d go back and change it because it’s part of our story. To use the usual disclaimer: any resemblance to actual events, persons living or dead… and so on.”
About writers
“We know Baldur’s Gate through and through,” he says. “There’s a number of us here who have been through the development of the original Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and other BioWare content – we live this stuff.
“Ultimately, the writers write the dialogue. In order to make interesting dialogue, you take your personal experiences, your beliefs, what interests you and what drives you, and that’s going to feed into whatever character you create.
“Individual writers are going to bring different things to your game. That’s why you have editors, who edit content down to make it fit within the overall game.”
“Ultimately, there’s a story we’re trying to tell,” he says. “Along the way of telling that story, there’s a core cast and there’s supporting characters. And it’s all about telling the best story we possibly can, and making characters that are interesting, believable and engaging. If following those priorities leads you to a transgendered character, or a female or male lead, or a gay or straight character, it’s what’s right for the story.
“My advise to developers would be to be sensitive about these issues – apparently, a transgender character is still a big deal in the modern world. If you’re going to do it, do it well, do it in-depth and do it respectfully.”
http://www.develop-online.net/interview/beamdog-ceo-we-never-thought-a-transgender-character-was-a-big-deal/0219033
About Mizhena
“If there’s an aggressive agenda that’s being pushed into someone’s face, I disagree with that,” Beamdog CEO Trent Oster tells Develop. “It needs to be representative. You need to tackle any social milieu appropriately, and aggressive agenda pushing is incorrect. It’s not the right way to do it. All you do is strengthen the resistance.”
“[The revelation that she is transgender] is what we consider three dialogue nodes deep,” Oster explains. “We put an arbitrary limit on our writers for our support characters of just three nodes deep, just to control wordcount. Siege of Dragonspear is over 500,000 words of dialogue, so we had to put limits on writers so they didn’t create more.
“There’s two sides of the argument [against Mizhena’s inclusion]. One is ‘I don’t want a transgender character in my game’, and while I don’t agree with it, I guess I can understand that perspective.
“The other is that the character goes from ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ to ‘I’m transgender’ in three conversation lines. That’s a really shallow way of telling me a life-shattering event. The transgender people I know are not going to blurt that out as quickly as that – it’s going to take a while, you’re going to have to get to know them.
“Obviously we wanted to explore her story in a broader, deeper way, but the three-line limitation cut it off. If anyone was going to get to the fact that this character is transgender, they had to do it pretty fast. Upon my review of the character, I think that within three lines it’s actually quite well done.”
“We have this character, we have a series of reasons why she is the way she is, it’s obviously captured the attention of a lot of people, so we should expand her story,” he says.
“To us, having a transgender character wasn’t that big a deal,” he says. “In a world where there’s half-orcs – so a human and an orc had an offspring together – and dragons can transform into humans and gods can walk the earth as male or female, whatever choice they make – it just didn’t seem like a big detail to us.
“Personally, I think it shows a progressive world view that we didn’t think a transgender character was a big deal. It was just a character to us, part of the world, helping to drive the story along.”
“I firmly believe that there is no ‘they’, there’s no group with a specific agenda,” says Oster. “There’s just a bunch of individuals – each with their own sensitivities, likes and dislikes – and the internet seems to package people together. You see a tempest in a teapot.
“When a topic blows up on the internet, it’s hard to tell how ‘big’ it is. I think social media has created this echo chamber world, where everyone lives in their own little social group and are essentially self-reinforcing.
“All of my news feeds are centred on video games, so when something happens in that space, it seems huge. If I talk to someone else, they don’t know about it, they’ve been talking about the Panama Papers – and I’m like, ‘what are the Panama Papers?’. Because I’ve been in my little universe and it’s different to theirs.”
About harassment
“When we look at feedback, we listen to our community of Baldur’s Gate fans first and foremost,” he says. “If the internet freaks out about something – well, it’s the internet and pretty much hates everything. If our fans bring it up, though, we’ll take it very seriously.
“If someone challenges me on something in our games, if someone expresses a concern about something, I’m going to take another look and think about whether we made the right decision and should stay by it?”
“It hits everybody in the studio differently,” he says. “For the person directly receiving attacks, its obviously overwhelming – and it makes me really mad. There are few things in the world that truly get me angry. Watching someone close to me get attacked drives me up the wall.
“It took me a long time to draft a statement to respond. I wanted to take the time to calm down, go over it, get back to the core issues that had been raised and address them. I maintain that for a three-line dialogue limits, this was well executed. If we remove that limit, we can execute it even better.
“If other developers ever face this level of harassment, I suggest they calm down, take a step back, wait and then prepare a statement. Tell your staff on where you stand on the issue. If someone hijacked your game and inserted their own agenda, something not approved by the company, you’ve got to figure out what to do from an internal management perspective. But if it’s representative of the company’s views, and you agree with it, you need to stand up and support that person. Personally, I think throwing someone under a bus is a bad thing to do.”
About the Minsc's line
“I had played the game quite a bit and never seen that line, because it’s a rare select line,” he says. “You have a click a lot of times before he fires it off. After the reaction, I sat and clicked on him until the line appeared, and I agreed that, y’know what, this doesn’t actually make sense.”
About refugees
“The fact is, there are refugees in the world,” he says. “Anywhere where there is a horrible conflict, there will be refugees. It fits with the story we’re telling: there’s an army forming in the north, forcing people into the ranks and displacing others – that generates refugees.
“We needed an instigating event to get you our of Baldur’s Gate – otherwise your character just sits there, getting fat. That instigating event is the pressure caused by people fleeing the army in the north.
“Even given the reality of today with Syrian refugees, I don’t think we’d go back and change it because it’s part of our story. To use the usual disclaimer: any resemblance to actual events, persons living or dead… and so on.”
About writers
“We know Baldur’s Gate through and through,” he says. “There’s a number of us here who have been through the development of the original Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and other BioWare content – we live this stuff.
“Ultimately, the writers write the dialogue. In order to make interesting dialogue, you take your personal experiences, your beliefs, what interests you and what drives you, and that’s going to feed into whatever character you create.
“Individual writers are going to bring different things to your game. That’s why you have editors, who edit content down to make it fit within the overall game.”
“Ultimately, there’s a story we’re trying to tell,” he says. “Along the way of telling that story, there’s a core cast and there’s supporting characters. And it’s all about telling the best story we possibly can, and making characters that are interesting, believable and engaging. If following those priorities leads you to a transgendered character, or a female or male lead, or a gay or straight character, it’s what’s right for the story.
“My advise to developers would be to be sensitive about these issues – apparently, a transgender character is still a big deal in the modern world. If you’re going to do it, do it well, do it in-depth and do it respectfully.”
http://www.develop-online.net/interview/beamdog-ceo-we-never-thought-a-transgender-character-was-a-big-deal/0219033
59
Comments
LOL
Man in a dress and wig-"Trent we've known each other for a few weeks now and I think you should know something"
Trent-"ohh errr ummm what could this be I errrr"
Man in a dress and wig-"I wasn't actually born a woman"
Trent-"reeeeeeaaaaallyy oh I would have never of guessed well thanks for letting me know".
'Chuckles'
Good statement by the fellow, though.
is that political??
"Sorry I can't say anything more, I'm at my three node limit." I didn't know what she was talking about before but it makes sense now.
But seriously, I understand wanting to limit dialogue but shouldn't you have as many people talking as much as needed? If you have 50 guys with 100s of lines or something maybe drop a few NPCs instead of limiting the lines of each? Oh well I don't know just seems strange to set a hard limit on your character's depth.
Did you notice Corwin says "Sometimes I dream I'm a chaotic good elfe" ? I haven't read a single complaint about it, and that's awfully immersion breaking.
The gamergate line was no doubt added as a simple joke. No malice behind it. But in this day and age it just rips open a wound that should be left to heal (if it is able). I think that is why that line gets focused on a lot.
As a progressive, I don't think trans inclusion is a big deal either. That's all the guy said.
https://www.gog.com/game/baldurs_gate_the_original_saga
You can literally play it right now and forever in its unaltered form. What are you so angry about?
1. Be excellent to one another.
2. Party on dudes!
I would be very surprised if an upcoming patch doesn't add options re: sprite smoothing that some people are seeing.