Comment

Comment on GOG seemingly shares that they are considering physical PC 'big box' games. Maybe?

Anyone know what was up with the Nazi symbolism they emailed purposefully? I would really want to support them but I need to know that it wasnt something terrible they did. Physical releases is definitely a plus as well.

source

Sort:hotnew top

mushroommunk@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
They released a standard non-apology claiming it was part of their culture and that people just didn’t understand. They also stated their German team raised issue with the email and that they just ignored it

source
- Lumisal@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Wait really?
  
  source
  - mushroommunk@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Image
    
    They went back and forth with the community more and the devs but basically repeated themselves
    
    source
gamesieve@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The explanation which makes most sense to me - but which hasn’t been confirmed by GOG - is that the newsletter person did a web search for “slavic emojis”, for which the top hit is a horribly racist website masquerading as an emoji site, which lists all the used glyphs on the first line of the results. (There is no “Slavic” unicode block or anything similar, and the characters used are from Malaysian, Greek and Cameroon script blocks, so not something you’d easily assemble on your own, no matter what your intentions were.)

Image

That site (or at least the users contributing its content) intended all the dog-whistling which was picked up on. However, with a default macOS font installed, the most objectionable “SS” (presented on that site as a single glyph) shows all curly and non-objectionable (5th ‘character’ in the screenshot). So with the newsletter person in a hurry and never scrolling down to the more obviously racist content (or using an AI-assisted interface?), the characters they saw didn’t trigger any alarms. As GOG is perpetually understaffed plus it was a long-weekend, QA was nearly non-existent and communication fumbled.

This was their final apology and communication about it: gog.com/…/c1cdf9fda39aaa5532ee375b38abb04376c7505… - so an apology about the newsletter, but nothing about the tone-deaf first followup from the new-on-the-job “community specialist” who was posting the heritage stuff on reddit and ineffectually trying to make sense of the rendering differences without any proper understanding of unicode characters and glyphs and thus muddying the waters further.

source
DarkMetatron@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
It was not Nazi symbolism, well not intentionally at least. They used Slavic runes that, in the intended fonts, looks very different from the Nazi symbols. It came to the issue because in some fonts the Slavic runes are displayed without serifs and with hard lines which makes them appear problematic. So it was kind of a self inflicted homographic attack.

source
- mushroommunk@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Except their excuse that it was part of their culture and why they use it in the first place holds no water according to the developers of the game (part of said culture) as well as many others.
  
  source
  - DarkMetatron@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Well the games name is “End of the Sun” and it is a Slavic game, so using a slavic sun rune is not that extremely far fetched. Why using it double, which lead to the SS appearance, i``s another question and it was dumb at least. But I still don’t see ill intent, when something like that happens once I am fair enough to accept that people can do things in error. I still try to see the good in people
    
    source
  - DarkMetatron@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    I can’t find a official statement from GOG with that content, only statements where they say that it was a error both in the internal processes, with not waiting for the responses of all internationale, especially in this case the german, teams before sending the newsletter and with checking if the runes could be problematic in some fonts.
    
    The runes themself are both from the intended design and from the connected meaning and symbolism unproblematic, yes they can look problematic in the wrong fonts but that is more a problem of font design then of ill intent.
    
    source
    mushroommunk@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    www.reddit.com/r/gog/comments/1txmcyd/…/opxtour/?…
    
    Second sentence is literally the GOG rep stating is part of their culture. The reply is the dev explicitly stating they avoided several of the runes sent because of the connotations. Comments are full of people pointing out that they did not use the rune they claimed they did based on the Unicode and pointing out that in history using the double rune has had no meaning.
    
    The developers also pointed out in a different spot they changed their logo because the old one had connotations they wanted to avoid but that GOG used the old one, despite having the new less problematic one.
    
    Nothing GOG said passes the sniff test.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
- Lumisal@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Well, I know the cause now but it’s still not that good a reason if they were warned and decided not to use it in Germany…
  
  source
  - DarkMetatron@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    The warning from the german team was not ignored, as far as I understood it, but just arrived to late while the newsletter team was already sending the mails. I also work in a international company with teams all over the world, stuff like that can happen without any ill intend, and so far GOG has shown no negative signs at all. So I tend to accept the explanation that it was only a error, especially with the very bad history that poland had with the nazi regime, Blitzkrieg and all.
    
    Sure one can, and should, put GOG on a personal “watchlist” in case other strange or ugly stuff like this happens, but as long as that is not the case I don’t see any reason to change my use of GOG at all. Humans, and with that companies too, can make and will make errors and I am a big fan of second, or even third, chances. I try to judge by intend not by looks.
    
    source
    PerfectDark@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    
    The warning from the german team was not ignored, as far as I understood it, but just arrived too late while the newsletter team was already sending the mails.
    
    Nope, it was blocked. They asked, were told this is wrong and knew why.
    
    The reason you had it delivered in Germany is because your email preferences are set to English. They only skipped Germany by blocking the German language. They knew it was wrong, avoided the German language and set it to everyone else. Rather than hitting backspace once or twice.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments