Infestation 88 developer, Nightmare Forge Games, have responded to claims that the ‘88’ in the game’s title refers to the Neo-Nazi salute.
I can see the devs having no clue about the alternative meaning, but a game about gassing rodents called “Infestation 88” is a terrible look. I’m glad the devs changed the name right away.
Yea, if they say “we didnt know what that insinuated”, and there are no other dog whistles, I’m happy that they responded so well and quickly!
I think just changing it to “Infestation 1988” would have also been enough…
Though, “infestation 88” a game about killing nazis, would also work!
there are no other dog whistles
Relevant reply from the developer. I’ll transcribe it here.
@everyone // Our game “Infestation 88” is set in the 1980s, with the year 1988 chosen simply due to its symmetrical design in the game’s artwork/logo. Unfortunately, we were unaware of any additional meaning the number ‘88’ has. However, after learning about this, we’re changing the game’s name to “Infestation: Origins” We apologize for our ignorance on the and appreciate that this was brought to our attention so we could address it ASAP!
With respect to our Discord server, we also apologize for the current lack of moderation in place, and will be working on remedying this ASAP. As per the rules, any hateful speech or content in any regard will result in a ban. We also plan to update our FAQ soon when we have a chance to address common questions that pop up. We greatly appreciate your patience and support!
@here Due to the overwhelming number of posts and rule-breaking content, we’re temporarily pausing discussion until we have better moderation in place. We hope to have things back online soon! Thank you again for your patience.
… Those aren’t the devs or discord mods, they’re literally random people that just joined their server.
🤦
You can find edgy teens with shit eating grins anywhere.
oof. yea, thats not a good sign.
IDK, what else do you do with rodents in a game? Set traps? Shoot with guns?
I’m guessing the devs were born in 1988 or thereabouts and wanted to set the game in their birth year or something like that. Or they picked a number that’s somewhat long ago but not too long, and ~35 years ago is something I’d probably come up with (it’s not a neat number like 25 and 50), it’s far enough back that it’s old, but recent enough to feel familiar.
Occam’s razor: they’re probably not Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. I had never heard of the meaning behind “88” (granted, I’m not that interested in neo-Nazi symbolism), and I was born near 1988. Maybe I’d change the name, IDK, even hearing the arguments here I really don’t see an actual connection so it’s really no big deal to me. Then again, I think it’s a stupid name regardless, so I probably would’ve been more clever.
Especially considering Walt Disney’s views…
That is an unfortunate coincidence.
Fuck nazies appropriating shit. People should stop associating things with nazies instead of not being able to enjoy things. Like apparently runic script is associated with nazies for some god forsaken reason and I have a old native myth tattooed in runes on my arm. I have gotten tons of weird looks and I was very confused until someone accused me of being a nazi.
Yeah I see it constantly here on lemmy, the word being thrown around like it’s nothing, imagine holocaust victims reading this shit
So would it change your mind if Holocaust victims were calling MAGA a fascist movement?
There’s a difference between people having clear statements and actions that show they’re fascists, and using an accidental number choice and numerology to find an excuse to connect something to fascism.
The resurgence of open fascism is an issue that’s only minimized by using flimsy logic to find it where it isn’t.
This is a word game that cryptofascists play; they’re quite open about using it to recruit people.
They love the plausible deniability, because it makes people who don’t know about the word game think the people who do are being ridiculous.
Was this a false positive? Perhaps. Is the game worse off for changing the name away from a fascist dog-whistle? I don’t know, it looks pretty terrible in any case.
Regardless, there are ways for a company to make it clear that they are not fascists even if they want to stick to their name. Maybe you’re right and we should just ignore the cryptofascist messaging game, but that just presents more problems in my opinion.
I mean, they already changed the name and said they had no idea about other meanings of the number 88.
My issue isn’t with the concept of dog whistles, it’s that when that’s all you have, it’s not a falsifiable accusation.
A subtle or weak connection doesn’t weaken the accusation, it almost makes it stronger.
Denying it makes it stronger, and responding to it to get rid of the connection entirely doesn’t even get rid of it.I mean, look at your own language. A game briefly had the number 88 in it’s name, which was also 14 letters long if you count the space. They changed the name when someone told them there was a connotation, and said they didn’t know.
Based on that, you say there’s a possibility that they’re not secret fascists.I’m not saying to ignore fascist messaging, but that literally every instance of the numbers 88, 14 or the word “ok” shouldn’t be assumed to be secret fascist messaging without some other reason to be suspicious.
If your entire reason to suspect then consists if secret messages with plausible deniability, the reality is that the rational thing to do is to not believe they’re fascists.Those are some good points, I think we agree more than not. I was a bit sloppy with my language, too so thanks for the check.
:)
From what I’ve seen, no one here has been fundamentally disagreeing, but there’s been a lot of “unscientific” reasoning on display, which is a thing that I care about,
“Your name has two letter S’s in it, you must support the SS YOU FUCKING NAZI😤”
It really is annoying how many alt right dog whistles there are
You seem to hear the dog whistle. Are you a dog
Okay… I think that it’s worth to look further at the Twitter comment chain from Josh Fagundes, mentioned in the text.
I’ll use the exact same [lack of] reasoning that the author used to “prove” that he’s a Nazi. (I don’t think that he’s a Nazi, mind you; I’m doing this to show how bloody stupid his witch hunting is):
- Josh ‘Anoriand’ has 14 characters, including the quotation marks. Coincidence? Perhaps not!
- Look, I’m not saying it’s IMPOSSIBLE that this game wasn’t made with ill intent is exactly 14 words. And it’s immediately followed by “but 88”. Coincidence? Perhaps not!
“Conclusion”: I’m going to play it safe and treat Josh Fagundes as a nazi!
…yes, it is that tier of stupid. And if the developers are actually Nazi trying to push a Nazi discourse into the players, Josh is not “denouncing” them. He’s actually helping them to push said Nazi discourse, since now they can say “ah, that’s just someone being silly. Pay no mind, look at the ridiculous shit that he’s using to “prove” that our game is Nazi.”
Here’s a better approach.
What’s “88” in the title conveying to the player, within the context of the game? Through all the screenshots being shared, I’ve seen it being consistently used to refer to 1988, and nothing else. Is there any other element contextualising it to be interpreted as “heil Hitler” instead of the year?
Tankie user defends obvious Nazi dog whistles. Now I’ve seen it all.
More like “tankie user defends basic reading comprehension”.
What Josh is doing here is witch hunting like a moron. That only helps the Nazi by giving them a believable cover.
Not the point. “Infestation” + 88 + gassing vermin is absolutely not comparable to the mental gymnastics you just vomited out as an example. Even if the developer was truly this oblivious, it would still not change the issue of it, and the Nazis that posted on their Discord for so long were clearly proof of that as well.
Not the point. “Infestation” + 88 + gassing vermin is absolutely not comparable to the mental gymnastics you just vomited out as an example.
You didn’t read the Twitter thread that I’ve linked, right? Do it. It’s actually way worse mental gymnastics than my shitty example. (“1-4 players = Nazi dogwhistle” tier.)
Even if the developer was truly this oblivious, it would still not change the issue of it, and the Nazis that posted on their Discord for so long were clearly proof of that as well.
Give this a check. The developers are changing the name of the game, and addressing the Discord server by pausing discussions there until they get better moderation.
EDIT: by the way you’re already doing less worse than he did. At least you’re trying to connect discursive elements, like “gassing vermin”, instead of doing conspiracy shit tier things like “they’re active from 2010 to 2024! That must be a sign of
an enemy Stand14 words!”. And the fact that you called me a “tankie” shows that you at least checked my profile to see if I was potentially a Nazi, seriously, props for that.I’ve read your “points” several times throughout this thread already and none of them actually address the issue. lol
lol
I’m not surprised that you didn’t get it.
The mental capacity and denial of reality from tankies on display once again.
I’d hate to live in your world, where literally everything and anything is a Nazi dog whistle
Buddy, if you’re unaware of literally the most common Nazi dogwhistle out there, then that’s simply ignorance and naivety on your part. Just because you chose to look away, does not mean they aren’t there.
deleted by creator
“Look, I’m not saying it’s IMPOSSIBLE that this game wasn’t made with ill intent, but 88 is an immediate red flag,” said streamer Josh ‘Anoriand’ Fagundes on Twitter. “As are the facts that they use the word ‘Infestation,’ they use rat-based imagery, it involves gassing them, and counting the space ‘Infestation 88’ is 14 keystrokes.”
That’s quite the quinkydink.
counting keystrokes goes too far into chemtrail conspiracy theorist logic for me, ngl.
Care to explain yourself
Maybe the real nazis were inside us the whole time.
I mean in seriousness that is the premise behind the banality of evil…
Hanlon’s razor. I myself had no idea that 88 had any nazi-related meaning before I read this article and thought nothing of the title when I first heard it. It seems perfectly reasonable that the dev could have done the same, especially since they were willing to almost immediately change the name and remove all existing promotional material once they found out.
Resetera (among other outlets) have done a bit more digging and it is more or less an orgy of red flags
So we have:
- A game about a rat invasion (anyone who’s read Art Spiegelman’s Maus should already know where this is headed);
- Where one plays as exterminators using gas masks, who coincidentally use poison gas as their weapon;
- On a game titled “Infestation 88” (which, as another user pointed out, has 14 characters, besides the obvious 88 dog-whistle);
- Which also happens to supposedly reference the StG 44 German WWII assault rifle;
- And if you want to add my original dog-whistly speculation, it wouldn’t be a stretch to be suspicious of that “SS” at this point.
And, to add on, the studio’s website claims they have been making games since 2010 with this being their first game. 2024-2010=14 (words).
combine that with the official discord being full of “pronoun jokes” and similar bigotry and it is really hard to view this edgelord game as anything other than a giant dog whistle.
This. Cryptofascism relies on being able to scream, “It was just a joke / I didn’t know!”
Mistakes can happen and you might accidentally engage in a dog whistle as a normal person.
A dozen mistakes all pointing to the exact same thing are unlikely.
And to be fair, it could be one person at the top putting all these wink wink indicators in, and the majority involved might just be normal folks.
I still won’t be buying the game.
So, out the door any media playing with steamboat Willie being public domain is suspect because of rat adjacent symbolism?
Counting characters seems like basically numerology, if you want to get to a specific number it’s not hard. If you count the space it’s 14 characters, but you could just as easily not count the space. What if it had been "infestation: 88”? Not Nazi because of the colon, or do we skip the space now?
Using the conclusion of your argument as evidence to make further leaps is also not super sound reasoning.
It’s an asset flip game capitalizing on steamboat Willie and the “make a now public domain children’s character scary” money grab. It’s exactly what happened with Winnie the Pooh.
It’s a horror game with a mouse as the scary creature. The only cultural touchstones we have for mice are either cute, infestation or disease. Exterminators are who you call when you have a mouse problem, and people wearing gas masks are one of the most prolific assets you can buy models for in asset shops.
Dogwostles exist, but it’s important to actually look at context.
Oooh. Thanks for reminding me of the other important reason to be aware of dog whistles and to look at the context in which they are being applied.
The people who aggressively insist everything is just a coincidence while trying to nitpick everything to death are almost never acting in good faith. Best case scenario, they are an edgelord kid on 4chan who doesn’t understand they are being manipulated. More likely they are angry that people understand their “secret code”.
Either way, they aren’t worth interacting with.
So… good job demonstrating what a bad faith dipshit would insist upon. You missed the
/sthough. Be careful with that. Some people might actually think you woke up and said “I need to defend some neonazis from criticism”.Or, you know, I don’t think that literally everything I can justify with numerology is Nazism, and so I don’t think I’m defending neonazis because someone used 14 letters in a game title.
Your argument is unassailable, because in your mind anyone who finds in unconvincing is a literal Nazi.
Think to yourself what someone would have to discover for you to decide they weren’t Nazis.
I know what I would need to see to think that I was wrong: statements, affiliations, something beyond numerology, refusal to make changes in the face of an unfortunate coincidence, or almost anything.What would make you say “shit, I was wrong and listening to numerology”?
Oh… you were serious. Ewww
This is on a similar level of derangement as QAnon people spotting Satanist references in pictures of the Clintons. Please touch grass.
AFAIK the steamboat willie version of Mickey which is public domain now wears no gloves
Imagine believing a dev would do this on purpose, your game would just get cancelled
It’s amazing how hard it is for them to say “we’re not Nazis, we’re going to change the name” instead they drag it out.
Only the guilty do this.
They literally did all that, though. It hasn’t even been 2 hours since your post and their name has changed.
Lol why would a dev intentionally do this only to get cancelled
Games are made to make money not cater to nazis haha
Making a game not for money but for nazis would be a really effective way of endearing yourself to the nazis though.
