No one writes about video game failures like Jason Schreier (his Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry is a fantastic book).
Multiple people who worked on the project say their growing concerns were often met with promises from management that Suicide Squad would eventually coalesce at the last minute, just as the Arkham games had. Several employees adopted the term “toxic positivity” to describe the culture of the company, which discouraged criticism.
I love the term "toxic positivity." It gives me a phrase for something I see everywhere.
Then the people likely responsible for last minute coalescing left:
In the fall of 2022, Warner Bros. announced that Hill and Walker were leaving Rocksteady to work on “a new adventure” and that a pair of longtime employees, Nathan Burlow and Darius Sadeghian, were being promoted in their wake. The change in leadership shocked the Rocksteady staff, and Hill and Walker said little in public to elaborate on their reasons for leaving.
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I actually had this article open in another tab, though the toxic positivity there is more of a clinical thing than around company culture..
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Oh fun, a possible cause of affluenza:
It also divides people along socioeconomic lines. Many studies show that socioeconomic status is linked with people’s feelings of control over their lives, and psychologists have found that worse-off individuals tend to see their situation as caused by bad luck – they have what is known as an external locus of control.
Instead, when someone close comes to you in a time of emotional turmoil, one of the best things you can do is listen.
A therapist once told me the best thing to do when someone is distressed is try to enter the same emotional state. They want company in their feelings. It's like a more advanced form of listening.
They found that, regardless of culture, greater mental well-being is linked with feeling emotions that we believe are appropriate to our situation, rather than just having positive emotions regardless of context – “feeling right” as opposed to “feeling good”, is how they put it.
This makes sense - resilience should atrophy in the absence of "negative" realities.
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AAA gaming is a perfect case of our fiat existence destroying video games. Video games never got bad until quarterly results and greed ruined it.
Excellent to see this happen, but we now need gaming on a bitcoin standard.
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Few understand this
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