Infestation 88 developer, Nightmare Forge Games, have responded to claims that the ‘88’ in the game’s title refers to the Neo-Nazi salute.
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 /s though. Be careful with that. Some people might actually think you woke up and said “I need to defend some neonazis from criticism”.
