Gwen

Dumbass in a dumb land

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I was born in the late Holocene and I've seen some shit



fish
@fish

We asked how the studio culture changed at ZA/UM after the departure of most of the original writing team and the airing of the People Make Games documentary looking into the legal battle that ensued afterward. “It’s like transitioning from the Soviet Union to the fascist Russian Federation,” Tuulik said. “Wearing the dead cultural movement like a skin costume, roleplaying communism, lying for dollars and yen. PMG doc changed lots of things in the studio. Personal dynamics. None for the better.”

Last Disco Elysium writer laid off by ZA/UM speaks out

besides their video about ZA/UM, i'm not familiar with People Make Games. they might do good reporting on other subjects, i wouldn't know.


but i'll always be wary of people who jump at the chance to document current and contentious topics for the sake of "journalism" or wanting to find out "the truth"—particularly when their findings are published as a youtube video, which is fundamentally more entertainment-driven than, say, a written article or podcast. there's a certain sensationalism and opportunistic sheen that's hard to shake from the platform.

publishing a youtube documentary about an ongoing legal dispute—where every person interviewed cannot be candid because of pending lawsuits or potential loss of employment—was incredibly naive and misguided at best. it's even more naive to believe that such a documentary wouldn't affect the situation going forward (again, it's an ongoing legal dispute!). i see a tendency in investigative journalists to throw their hands in the air whenever they're criticized for potentially exacerbating an issue: don't blame me, i'm just reporting the facts, and so on.

of course, the work culture at ZA/UM would still have "crunch, burnout, and conflict" with or without the documentary. but, according to the above quote, it seems like it didn't help.

edit: tuulik directly refuted that the PMG documentary was harmful to the workplace on twitter. i still question the doc's objective (again, considering how everyone involved can't be forthright due to pending lawsuits or potential loss of income), but it's good to have additional context for the quote.


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in reply to @fish's post:

I was a big fan of PMG when their video dropped and I was really really disappointed after watching the video. Not to diminish the problems from the crew, but that really wasn't the time to bring that up, and honestly it's the kind of problem that should have been settled privately.

Their videos up to that point were normally exploring really interesting topics from mostly old incidents in game development. I think they pivoted into being investigative journalists after their Roblox video, which was similar to the ZA/UM in tone but at least it was calling out a big corporation exploring children, and AFAIK involved other journalists that were deeper in the trenches of that investigation.

...but, for what it's worth, the writer who said the quote you included in your post is one of the ZA/UM workers with the most screen time in the PMG video, so it's a bit hypocritical of him as well to criticize it as if he hadn't any involvement with it.

thanks for providing some context for what PMG does! i wasn't aware of them until the ZA/UM video.

and, yeah, it's easy for people to do a 180 once they're fired. the writer didn't have any involvement in the video's editing process, though, so i don't want to call him or any of the other interviewees hypocritical. it's a messy situation!

Yeah I concur. PMG's video on ZAUM was soft on the company and crucifying on the fired crew. It didn't earn them any points per se, but it also presented new info that neither ZAUM or Kurvits, Taal/Rostov and Hindpere hadn't had a chance to air prior. But they guilted Kurvits and Taal/Rostov and brushed Kompus soft.

seems like i misinterpreted his quote! thanks for providing the link, i wouldn't have known otherwise.

i still can't shake my feeling of the doc's opportunism, but that's just my personal reaction as someone who isn't familiar with PMG's body of work.

PMG was so naive to the inherent power imbalance between the two sides of the issue. naturally the guys with all the power in the situation get to speak more candidly than the guys who are fighting like hell not to lose everything, both inside the company and outside of it.