Several eras ago — before algorithms came to dictate our every breath and Nazis re-infiltrated popular discourse via extremely uncreative and shitty memes — Twitter was alright. Now it’s a suckhole that eats negativity and barfs conflict. The developers of indie classic Sword & Sworcery don’t want anything to do with it any more.
Earlier this week, developer Capy announced that its cult classic side-scrolling adventure will be coming to Switch in October. The original iOS version allowed users to instantly tweet any of the game’s dialogue prompts, but the Switch version won’t include that feature.
All of Sworcery’s dialogue is 140 characters or less for easy tweeting, but now that Twitter upped the character limit to 280 so that conspiracy theorists could cram even more wackadoo nonsense into messages that eventually filter up to the President of the United States, things aren’t super great. Thus, the feature removal.
“Twitter support has been cut from the Sworcery Switch Edition,” said creative director Kris Piotrowski, somewhat ironically, on Twitter. “The reason for this is simple: When we first launched Sworcery many moons ago, Twitter was fun & nice & cool. Now, in the year 2018, Twitter is a vat of toxic waste and we want nothing to do with it.”
When reached for comment, Capy did not directly answer my questions about what responsible and ethical Twitter usage in the year 2018 looks like, but it did send this image:
“Since our prior experiment in 2011, social networks have proven to be catastrophic for society, so we now encourage isolation & regretful reflection,” it reads.
Truly, a message we can all get behind.
Comments
7 responses to “Sword & Sworcery’s Switch Port Won’t Support Twitter Because It’s A ‘Vat Of Toxic Waste’”
Aww man I loved that feature. Actually I thought there was some API permissions pulled a few years back because I haven’t been able to tweet out the games dialogue in a few years. That said. Twitter’s only even been a positive place for me, honestly it’s been a pretty fun place to hang out. Who’s everyone else hanging out with? It’s not that hard to stear clear of the poisonous parts if the site. : /
Got any examples of how it worked? I don’t really understand from the article what the significance of it is, versus just like… I dunno, tweeting out screenshots manually.
You gave the game permission to access your Twitter account and then every line of dialogue had a little twitter button that you could tap and it would tweet it on your account.
Every line of dialogue is 140 characters or less and often written in a pithy or poetic style.
At the time no one really understood what Twitter was. It was a dumb feature that basically spammed all your followers with random lines and a hashtag for the game. Just more white noise on Twitter really. Most people used it once, if at all, because they realized it was going to piss off their followers.
It’s just like real life, hang out in insulated circles and keep to yourself and friends then you’ll most likely avoid being involved in anything particularly nasty. Just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time though and it’s pretty easy to find yourself staring into the maw of a beast with a million mouths, all spewing vitriol and profanity indiscriminately.
Yeah if you go back through the #sworcery hashtag, the tweets from the game seemed to disappear some time in 2013-2014. Hard to tell for sure if it was the game fading out, people being more sensitive about spamming on twitter, or the APIs changing. Probably all three.
Fantastic game though. Reason I bought an iPad back in the day.
Twitter has always been hot garbage, it ain’t just the recent nazis and nutjobs.
I come for the news updates, stay for the crazies. 🙂 Twitter has just the right amount of RWNJs and SJWs that a happy moderate can coast through Twitter relatively unscathed!