Warner Bros. Discovery is telling developers it plans to start “retiring” games published by its Adult Swim Games label, game makers who worked with the publisher tell Polygon. At least three games are under threat of being removed from Steam and other digital stores, with the fate of other games published by Adult Swim unclear.
The media conglomerate’s planned removal of those games echoes cuts from its film and television business; Warner Bros. Discovery infamously scrapped plans to release nearly complete movies Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, and removed multiple series from its streaming services. If Warner Bros. does go through with plans to delist Adult Swim’s games from Steam and digital console stores, 18 or more games could be affected.
News of the Warner Bros. plan to potentially pull Adult Swim’s games from Steam and the PlayStation Store was first reported by developer Owen Reedy, who released puzzle-adventure game Small Radios Big Televisions through the label in 2016. Reedy said on X Tuesday the game was being “retired” by Adult Swim Games’ owner. He responded to the company’s decision by making the Windows PC version of Small Radios Big Televisions available to download for free from his studio’s website.
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He’s got a point though. Shakespeare goes into painstaking details to set up contexts and the portrayal of character emotions with the limited tools he had (remember these are 15th century plays).
A Reddit/Mastodon comment has very little background information to work from. You may know the comment they’re replying to, but you don’t know the content of their character. Are they a bit of a facetious troll? Do they genuinely believe what they are writing? Chances are you’ll never know unless they explicitly state it.
Text communications also lack the nuances of vocal tones, of facial expressions, of body language. We have to explicitly state our emotions over text, and that’s something many people aren’t used to doing.
Like how I rolled my eyes when you said ‘I recommend you learn how to understand context.’, to which the main reasonable response is often ‘what context? There is too often no context that decisively points one way or another’.
I’m sorry, but if someone’s defense is “I can’t read” there’s not much you can do to help them.
It’s not that they can’t read, it’s that you didn’t put enough info in there to distinguish it from the genuine article.
If, for example, I were to satirise an antivaxxer over text (like here!) without being able to use any giveaway symbols like /s or alternate casing, I would have to go for the most batshit insane example, to the point where its not funny, just stupid. Something like ‘I got vaccinated and turned into a fucking velociraptor. Jurassic Park is real! Don’t believe the lies!’
Fair enough if that’s your humour, but if I try to go for anything more subtle than this, I can easily be mistaken for a genuine antivaxxer, because it’s not far off the BS they actually spew. In real life I can put on an exaggerated Karen voice with exaggerated resting-bitch-face and people will know I’m playing a character, rather than espousing my genuine beliefs. I can’t do that over text though, so what’s the alternative?
I didn’t make the comment