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Iāve got a few concerns with Chrisā post, particularly the use of logical fallacies that undermine his main argument. Letās break this down:
Straw Man Fallacy #1:
People who complain about wokeness in new video games donāt actually care about the past, just their imagined version of it.
This statement misrepresents the position of those who critique āwokenessā in media. It assumes that everyone in this group shares a simplistic, uniform, and flawed perspective on history, which is neither fair nor accurate.
Isnāt it ironic to advocate for inclusivity while reducing the opposing view to a stereotype? For example, I personally dislike overt āwokenessā in games, yet I donāt fit the imaginary box youāve described. My position isnāt rooted in a denial of history but in the belief that games, music, and films are creative, self-contained domains to be enjoyed on their own meritsānot as platforms for political messaging.
Itās not about rejecting inclusivity or denying the contributions of diverse creators. Rather, itās about questioning why politics should take center stage in these art forms. Why must every creative work be a vehicle for ideological statements? Art can reflect politics naturally when itās intrinsic to the story or setting, but forcing it risks alienating audiences who value the escapism and creativity of the medium.
Straw Man Fallacy #2:
Games we love are created by diverse people [ā¦]. Just because youāre unaware of them doesnāt mean they donāt exist.
Who exactly is denying the existence of diverse creators? This statement uses vague, accusatory language aimed at a generalized āyouā without specifying who or what is being addressed. This lack of specificity makes it difficult to engage with the argument constructively.
If the intent is to highlight the contributions of diverse creators, thatās absolutely valid and worth celebrating. But framing the point as an assumed rebuttal to an undefined group of people not only creates unnecessary division but also fails to advance the discussion meaningfully.
When addressing criticism, itās more effective to engage with specific ideas or individuals rather than casting a wide net over an entire group. Otherwise, this risks becoming the very thing being criticized: stereotyping and marginalizing others based on assumptions.
A game thatās got well written characters representing minorities or which includes political theming and executes it well (e.g. Bioshock, Fallout 2 or Disco Elysium) is more woke than any other. That kind of gameās core concept is to make a strong point about structural injustice in society.
Games with token representation or the plot is thin but the main character is a woman so youāre sexist of you donāt buy it are generally not woke at all. Theyāre only pretending to be as a marketing strategy. Theyāre not doing anything to make anyone think about structural injustice in society, and are instead appealing to the common donāt be horrible to groups that it was normal to be horrible to decades ago that their market research team determined were already agreed with by most of their potential customers. Itās just capitalism noticing that mysogynists etc. are no longer the largest demographic and being very unsubtle when signalling that the product thinks women are people.
There are a small number of very vocal people who complain about both kinds of game. They donāt want people to acknowledge that treating women as people is now the default, but even more than that, they donāt want people to play Bioshock as then if theyāre shown anything by Ayn Rand, theyāll be immediately able to spot the flawed logic on her philosophy. Theyāre careful to make sure to present it as if theyāre only complaining about the virtue-signalling-as-marketing kind as everyone recognises that theyāre generally crap, so it makes it look like theyāre making a reasonable argument. It also means people amplify the argument, but by using phrases like woke instead of badly written it makes it easier to correctly label well-written games containing politics they disagree with as woke, too, and have people make the association with being badly written annoying slop by themselves, without having people whoāve played the game point out that it is well-written and someone saying otherwise is an idiot.
Ugh, DEI has even infected the past now!
Thereās nothing wrong with calling a bad game woke if theyāre trying to cover their blatant flaws by tokenizing minorities and lgbt. See: Concord
Picking a game that was already bad for 700 reasons doesnāt make the idiotic āwoke = badā label okay. The writing in a live service game was never going to be great.
Starfield is another good example.
Some of you may have seen HeelVsBabyfaceās infamous āpronounsā rant video and taken it a bit out of context. Many said he was upset at the sight of a pronouns selection option on the character creation menu. His rant actually came a few hours into playing after a series of quests with incredibly contrived dialogue.
Yes this man is absolutely correct. Aside from the obvious strawmanās. The difference between the games he mentioned and the games currently coming out showcasing āwokenessā is that the old games are good.
No one actually cares how āwokeā a game is as long as itās good.
Baldurs gate 2, arguably one of the best games ever made. Concord on the other handā¦ Ya.
To be fair, what the OOP is describing is ādiversity in the video game industryā, not āwoke gamesā, per se. While I doubt anyone here has objections to the former, I also doubt that anyone here is a fan of āDustbornā, as an example.
I hate this kind of comment. A bad game doing poorly that happens to be āwokeā isnāt evidence that being āwokeā made it bad. For example, Dragon Age Origins is pretty āwokeā (especially for its time) but itās recognized as an amazing game by pretty much everyone. If you make a great game thatās written well, itās probably going to be received well. The issue is modern AAA gaming just makes mass audience slop that is devoid of passion and dictated by suits to chase trends. Being āwokeā doesnāt matter. Being good matters.
You are on the right track, but it did not āhappen to be wokeā, some people bring politics into things that should not and the higher ups just want to cash on modern trendsā¦ The only thing everyone should care about is making something good. I very much doubt that the people OP described had an agenda or were annoying and thought the only thing good about them were their gender or color or religionā¦ No! They were trying to be pioneers and make money š¤
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Woke isnāt being progressive. Itās being progressive to an extent beyond any sort of logic, virtue signaling constantly, and then calling anyone who disagrees with you morally or intellectually inferior.
In entertainment, that often results in some really annoying elements that I think we can all acknowledge are a thing after almost a decade of this:
- There is a minority protagonist. Said protagonist is disproportionately a straight coded conventionally attractive white women in their 20s.
- The only flaw the protagonist will have is not being confident enough
- There is then a minority side character. Said character will disproportionately be a black woman obviously less attractive than the protagonist, or a upper middle class gay fuckboi.
- If there is not one of these two things, a minority side character will be shoehorned in somewhere. The character will feel visibly out of place, and no explanation will be given. For example, theyāll do some random black character in a fantasy setting thatās clearly based off Scotland in the 1200s.
- Important character goes on a monologue that feels like a political PSA
- The IPās understanding of progressive politics and social justice is roughly equivalent to Tumblr circa 2013.
- Absolutely terrible writing. Even if you swapped all the āwokeā elements for generic entertainment elements, the IP would still be terrible.
- Likewise, the IP itself is often put together in an extremely lazy and mediocre way. If said āwokeā content was not there, it would be universally panned for its low quality.
- Amazing reviews. All aspects of the IP get 10/10 from the āprofessionalā critics. All the reviews are similar enough that the critics either collaborated or read off the press release.
- The critics care more about the social justice aspect than the game itself.
- You get the sense both the creators and the critics of the IP not only donāt consume this type of IP in their spare time, but actively resent people who do.
- Constant fucking gaslighting. Anyone who doesnāt like this ultimately mediocre IP is either morally and intellectually inferior. This usually comes in the form of accusations of being a bigot, a Nazi, or a Trump supporter.
- Bigots, Nazis, and Trump supporters will then try to recruit people who are pissed about the gaslighting.
- At some point the IP itself fades into the background, and it just becomes yet another culture war battleground.
I think thereās a reason Star Wars gets more shit for being woke than Spiderverse, or that Arcane hasnāt become a culture war battleground in the same way She-Hulk did. The reason being those shows are actually good, and most people are happy to watch good shows.
Your last bit is the only part that matters. Good content is good. Thereās so much well written progressive āwokeā stuff that does well, but itās easy to point at a shitty flop and say it failed because itās āwokeā rather than doing the hard work and actually analyzing why itās bad. āWokeā content isnāt an issue in media. Itās that weāre getting so much bad and lazy writing in AAA games (and other big media). They arenāt allowed to be creative, so it ends up being garbage.
Add on top of that that the games industry has laid off TENS OF THOUSANDS of devs in the last three or four years.
I know a lot of talented people who are no longer working as devs, or who have been job searching for months.
Of course this doesnāt mean that the studios still producing games have narrowed their scopes, they just dump more work on the survivors.
And āwoke DEI SJW snowflake game devā is far from the only thing making games worse, itās just what a lot of gamers can easily identify as a problem.
By the time I left, my last industry job had been reduced to what felt like manning the slop hose of mtx store items made by overseas outsource studios producing soulless trash under fuck-knows-what kind of nightmare working conditions.
We started seeing more diversity in games because devs are diverse and wanted to see themselves and their friends in their art.
The problem has never been queer or black characters in games. It is, and always has been, the prioritizing of profit over quality craft.
Iād argue that forced diversity is primarily because so many higher ups donāt give a fuck about gaming or making good content.
The suits just want money, and for some reason corporate thought that weighing in on social and political issues was a huge money maker in the 2020s. The journalists just want to promote their own political agenda and get ragebait clicks. The project director is someone with a corporate background but a progressive flair that makes them seem āhipā to the suits.
Meanwhile the people who give a shit, regardless of their identity, donāt have a voice in the room.
Iām sure there are plenty of minorities that are super pissed about what happened to bioware, but the only way youād hear from them is by looking at sales figures because they donāt have a bully pulpit.
I get what youāre saying, butā¦
For example, theyāll do some random black character in a fantasy setting thatās clearly based off Scotland in the 1200s.
While I donāt know about 1200s Scotland specifically, the notion that black people didnāt exist in old Europe is a false narrative by racists who seem to believe immigration was invented around the 1700s (like, Iāve seen them claim black people donāt fit into Ancient Greece, which is definitely wrong.)
I mean immigration existed, but it wasnāt nearly as common as today. A lot of these IPs just plop a minority in an area where their presence would turn heads, have everyone act super casual about it because they are too lazy for a backstory, and then call everyone a bigot who points out this is sort of silly. On the flip side, there are people who will call creators bigots for not including minorities in some quasi historical setting, even if their presence was rare.
Like pretend someone was making a movie in present day central Africa. Everyone is central African. Except one dude who is pure blooded Navajo. No explanation is ever given, and the only people who seem to even notice his race is the villain.
While itās perfectly possible for someone of Navajo descent to find themselves in central Africa, itās not really that likely. Audiences would want an explanation, and would consider it unrealistic if absolutely nobody commented on it except some over the top villain.
Thereās also an aspect of gaslighting going on here. Over the past decade historians have made a lot of claims about racial compositions of historical groups that were later exposed to be largely inaccurate. While historical inaccuracies are always a thing, itās pretty convenient that all these inaccurate claims fit into the narrative pushed by American progressive identity politics.
Woke isnāt being progressive. Itās being progressive to an extent beyond any sort of logic, virtue signaling constantly, and then calling anyone who disagrees with you morally or intellectually inferior
I fucking hate that the idea of being woke was poisoned and turned into this when it very much is not and never was.
Woke is acknowledging the systemic racism playing out daily in the United States of America.
I think most of what you wrote isnāt even true to be honest, itās a well strung together list of annoying tropes which doesnāt even happen nearly as much or widely as some would suggest. Itās a neat little āhereās a bad way of caringā package but it aināt the truth.
I appreciate the effort you went through to write the post and I understand your viewpoint. At the same time, this is a great example of how the term āwokeā has been co-opted into meaning something it never really did. Being awake to the injustices present in our lives isnāt a bad thing. Turning woke into a slur to wrongly characterize and misdirect away from its true original intent has been an effective, and gross, way to get people to automatically reject real critique.
Woke is acknowledging the systemic racism playing out daily in the United States of America.
If only. But like all of your societal problems, itās being exported to all kinds of places, often where it has little relevance, but where it can be used for political gain by soulless individuals.
Youāre both right, but itās far too late to take the word back, no point in going on about the origins.
No it isnāt.
I am woke, and that is a good thing, and anyone complaining about that is an idiot.
Great comment, youāve nailed it.
I think thereās a reason Star Wars gets more shit for being woke than Spiderverse
Funny enough even within the Star Wars universe there are good and bad things. Mandalorian and Rogue One? Pretty great. Episode 7+ and Acolyte? Pretty shit. Youāll notice though that the more forced the progressivism is in a given piece of content, the more it sucks. In other words: bad writing doesnāt just fuck the story up, it bakes in messaging that doesnāt even make sense contextually.
Anyone who has ever read the Sword of Truth series and encountered the authorās obsession with hating socialism has seen what happens when right-wing folk do it: it ruins the experience. Why would we excuse it from progressives?
I disagree with your premise that that āforced progressivismā messes things up. Andor, for example, is the most progressive Star Wars media ever, and itās amazing for it. (Itās literally about a leftist, or at least leftist coded, rebellion against Fascists, and wears it proudly.) The reason is because the people making it were allowed to be creative and were passionate about what they were making.
Its the lack of creative freedom and passion that kills things. Most things with a lot of money put into them are directed by suits, not creatives. They donāt want to take risks, so they just follow trends and formulas. This leads to the media not having anything to actually say, and just a veneer of trying to appeal to certain people, without actually doing anything with it.
I havenāt seen Andor so I canāt comment, but Iāll take the plunge on your advice.
I think corporate āprogressivismā is certainly one of the culprits, but sometimes itās the creatives themselves who ruin things. Some creatives have even intentionally uprooted an IP like The Witcherās show, and Rings of Power. Sometimes progressive ideals are merely a shield against criticism, other times itās a creatorsā own ideals that made them ruin things, and sometimes itās just rainbow capitalism. Itās not a simple issue to talk about really.
I generally agree with you, with some caveats.
I think that most IPs have subtext, and a lot of time this is in the form of a deeper political message. I think it would be silly to say progressivism in IPs is always a bad thing. Thatās part of the reason I mentioned Arcane and Spiderverse by name.
The problem comes from the fact that IPs are supposed to be entertainment first, messaging second. A lot of creators make a lazy and mediocre product, and somewhere in there is a ham-fisted political message. Some creators also seem to be making IPs bad on purpose as a fuck you to their target audience, which is an absolutely baffling choice.
Thereās also the concept of nuance thatās sort of been lost. A lot of the creators will write something in some super reductive black/white way thatās basically guaranteed to turn off everyone who doesnāt already emphatically agree with them. This is a huge departure from a lot of older movies. For example Forrest Gump is a Republican movie, but doesnāt just portray republicans as automatically good or liberals as automatically bad. The end result is that there are a lot of liberals who love Forrest Gump.
The part that I strongly disagree on is that you seem to be blaming the corporations. I think ultimately a lot of the problem here is at the fault of the creators. There have been a lot of high profile cases where studios donāt interfere, give the creators a massive budget, and have their backs when controversy hits. The creators will still end up making mediocre culture war content. Todd Philips was allowed to do whatever he wanted in Joker 2. It turns out what Todd Philips wanted was for the Joker to be permanently defeated by the power of prison rape. Thereās no studio head in the world who would have told him to do that.
I disagree with this:
The problem comes from the fact that IPs are supposed to be entertainment first, messaging second.
Maybe you just want entertainment, but the purpose of art has almost always been message-first. If a piece of art isnāt trying to say something, whatās the point? People trying to act like gaming, or any other form of art, should only focus on entertaining, and always has, are not very media-literate. I canāt think of a single classically well received movie that doesnāt have a message itās trying to tell.
Nuance, yeah. Thatās important. The goal of art is to get someone to feel like the idea youāre trying to give them came from themselves. Thatās when itās effective. It doesnāt really work when youāre just telling them how to think. It just annoys people.
Also, of course some garbage will also be made when people are allowed freedom to be creative. The difference is that good things can be made in that situation, not that it always will. It pretty much never will if everything is targeted towards mass appeal. That ensures no one in particular will care because there isnāt a target. They do it because itās a safe bet. This implies the alternative is more risky, meaning more failures (like Joker 2), but also the opportunity for greatness.
To be fair Iām sure if it was stylish to insert overt conservative themes into IPs those would be also too.
I donāt think progressivism is the problem. I think the problem is mediocre creators either deciding to turn an expensive IP into their own political soapbox, and executives giving it the green light because they either are completely disconnected to what makes a good product or thinks the culture war will allow them to pretend that bad products are good.
Anyone who has ever read the Sword of Truth series and encountered the authorās obsession with hating socialism has seen what happens when right-wing folk do it: it ruins the experience.
And unions. Really drove that home when Richard was in the Old World.
Oh you have definitely read it. I come from a family of union men, and am myself a union executive. Reading that stuff felt surreal lol.
The one character that felt shoehorned in to me was Idris Elba as Roland in The Gunslinger. Why?! Handsome, buff, young and black are not adjectives anyone has ever used to describe Roland Deschain. LOL, King might as well come out and say he ripped the description off a 40-something Clint Eastwood.
When a game puts it in your face that this character is is gay/trans/ethnic in a way that feels arbitrary to the setting or effected character, it comes off very much like a political move for sales.
Letās use soldier 76 from overwatch as an example. The way he was written on top of the are they arenāt they thing he had going on with Ana didnāt support him being gay at all. The announcement that he is gay came completely randomly and really fealt like a political move to add a little more representation.
On the other hand, we have good characters who happen to be LGBT, Ellie from the last of us, or my personal favorite Veronica from New Vegas.
I agree with you, slapping a veneer of diverse identity on a character post-facto is often just performative bullshit. At best itās bad representation, at worst itās cynical pinkwashing and pandering for profit.
But thatās not a distinction I have ever seen an āanti-woke gamerā railing against.
What I do see them railing against is any representation in games that does not pander to their own personal preferences.
Did you not encounter any of the backlash to Ellieās sexuality? Honestly I think FNV only escapes a lot of that kind of vitriol because it was released pre-gg.
I wonāt disagree that Soldierās gayness came pretty much out of the blue, but I donāt think itās a good example of something that was āput it in our faceā. I play Overwatch regularly still with people who have no idea heās gay - the game itself doesnāt say anything about it, at least not that Iāve seen. The only way youād know originally is if you followed Overwatch social media or read the blog post they announced it in, something that only a small fraction of players actually do.
good characters who happen to be (whatever)
There it is!
Please choose body type:
- Body Type 1 (with large shoulders and no ass)
- Body Type 2 (with large ass and boobs)
Ah yes, progressive inclusiveness. So much better!
Caper in the Castro came out on BBSs in 1989 to encourage people to donate to AIDS research.
A game is only called āwokeā when itās bad. Balderās Gate 3 is one of the most āwokeā major releases in the last few years but you hardly hear them complain about it.
Itās the same thing with cyberpunk 2077. The anti-woke crowd canāt agree on whether itās woke because many of them like it.
There were absolutely people calling that game woke. You didnāt hear them because they were drowned out by the good press. Itās not that game is only called woke when itās bad, itās that when a game is good thereās enough positive publicity to drowned out the negative.
I think the problem isnāt the wokeness for most people, but the awkward shoehorning of stereotypes and forced messaging that makes everything feel cheap and doesnāt contribute to the experience or story. For example having a lgbtq+ element for the sake of checking a diversity box, instead of it being a random fact of this world or character.
How do you differentiate between a character āwritten for the sake of checking a diversity boxā, a poorly-written diverse character, and a ārandom fact of the worldā? Itās a fictional world. Nothing is random. Itās all creative decisions made by a team of writers and producers.
I donāt think shoehorning in of diverse identities and character backgrounds is good representation or good art, and I completely agree with your point there.
But I donāt think that the people driving the current backlash bother to make those distinctions.
What I see is a lot of outrage being stoked by people using the (updated) language and tactics of gamergate, and I donāt think the result of that will be ābetter representationā.
I think the result will be devs being harrassed and pushed out of an already brutal industry.
An LGBTQ person doesnāt need āa good reasonā for being written that way. If they did, then so would the straight person, no? Unless, of course, weāre trying to say that every storyās default needs to be a straight white man who doesnāt need to be constantly justifying his existence.
Frankly, these days you better have a damn good reason why we have to deal with the ten-thousandth same old shoe-horned straight relationship that only exists because two main characters happen to be opposite genders and roughly the same age. Like, yeah, who could have seen that coming wow good job hereās a sticker.
Itās not about checking a diversity box, itās about the barest amount of representation. The LGBT people in my life donāt exist because they fit some kind of plot-point in my life; they exist because thatās just how the dice landed and they donāt owe me a justification for why they are that way in order to be my friends. That would be absurd, right?
ā
Sidenote: Everyone complaining about Veilguard(for example) forgets that a) Bioware is famously unclear about what dialogue choices do and b) they just donāt, historically, seem to have the capacity to write terribly creative games. Theyāre fine and Iāve enjoyed playing the ones I have but still.
I didnāt say they need a reason to exist. I said basically the same thing as you. A character is supposed to just exists with their traits and act naturally, instead of making diversity their whole personality. Itās the same thing as the classic token black guy in movies. Only present to serve the quota, not actually contributing to anything. And having a character make their straight-ness and whiteness their whole personality would be just as infuriating.
I dispise forced romance just as much as you seem to, it doesnāt matter to me what the genders involved are, if itās there I want it to make sense and add something, not just tick a box.
Woke activists have already said that they are willing to annihilate and scorched-earth and salt-the-fields if DEI ESG woke things arent put front and centre into video games.
So maybe we dont need people who actively hate video games and gamers to be in the video game making industry. The woke can go be part of Hollywood leave the gamers alone.
I bought BG3 due to constant negative comments about it. Itās woke, everyone is bi (sign me the fuck up), random misogyny, etc. I figured if they were that mad it had to be good, and 427 hours of gameplay later I am glad I did that.
BG3 doesnāt lecture you like other games though. There is a difference between having these people live in your world vs being the spokesperson for BLM.
The difference isnāt in subject matter, but writing quality. I like retro shooters and considering Build Engine(think Duke Nukem) style games are based on movie genres, Iād love a blaxploitation game were Iām shooting Nazis and throwing molotov cocktails at clansmen. The subject matter would absolutely be in you face.
Remember, people got offended at how Nazis were portrayed Wolfenstein, a game solely about killing Nazis.
We can critique the writing of games like Dustborn, but the moment you start complaining about āwokenessā, you signal that youāre just gaming the algorithm for the lowest common denominator of viewer to drive that ad money up.
Which games are like that, though?
This is just my take on things. Feel free to agree or disagree.
Woke nowadays has a different meaning depending on where you are on the political spectrum, but I think most gamers think of it as corporate virtue signaling with often counterintuitive ānot actually progressivenessā and ends up just stereotyping minorities. For example the DLC character in Kill the Justice League is an old lesbian stereotype and rarely represents what modern lesbians actually look like. In fact lesbians donāt have to ālook likeā anything, but then you wouldnāt know theyāre lesbians, and the companies donāt understand how to do this.
Gamers can tell when a company is trying to ābe progressiveā while also having no idea how to do it properly, and it all comes off as incredibly cringe (Like DragonAge: The Veilguard) But when the developers are capable of telling a story, and integrate their modernized views into it, while making a great game (like Baldurās Gate 3) it no longer is āwokeā, just great.
Games with progressive views have existed for a very long time, and have generally been well received. But they never really started this āfake progressiveness corporate virtue signalingā until recently and I think gamers really only care about this happening. So it isnāt about and never was about the political messages themselves. And proof of this lies in the fact that the same people who complain about woke games also complain about censorship in other countries (like the Arcane lesbian relationship being erased in the Chinese release, or game companies logos not having rainbows only in middle eastern countries).
I know a lot of people see in black and white, and youāre either pro woke slop, or youāre racist/sexist/transphobic. But reality is that most gamers (even those who complain about wokeness) actually are progressives. They actually donāt care if someone is gay or trans or not. They only care about how that is portrayed, how belittling the message is, and how honest it is.
like the Arcane lesbian relationship being erased in the Chinese release, or game companies logos not having rainbows only in middle eastern countries
There was a mod for one of the Spiderman games (that got removed from Nexus Mods lol) because it activated the flags from the Saudi release of the game that override the pride flags in other releases, which got people discussing how serious these companies are about progressive ideals if theyāre only selectively included. Of course it feels like itās only tangentially attached to the content: it is, by design, and you can easily prove it.
Thatās what people mean when they say itās forced.
You want to write a gay character? Do it, but stop half-assing it because it wonāt sell in China. Do it right or fuck off.
If thatās the case, then theyāre just criticizing bad writing, like all of us are.
But itās not necessarily the case. There was an adult animation that came out endorsed by Ben Shapiro that was meant to be all about conservative values. To show theyāre not backwards, the protagonist has one gay friend. And, from that alone, the target base complained about the show being āwokeā.
So the term is both wrapping a long way around towards the simple term ābad writingā and instantly called upon anytime demographics include minorities. Iād go for the Occamās Razor explanation. Itās just hate.
This, the kind of gamer who make lists of woke games that you shouldnāt play, or go on review bombing a game for been woke do not have the nuance to criticise the bad writing. They follow the fascist strategy of offering a simple solution to a more complex problem, ignoring the real causes of that problem.
Bad writing can be caused by many things but Iām sure that the mass layoffs and the fucked up development cycle are a major cause of these problems.
If thatās the case, then theyāre just criticizing bad writing, like all of us are.
Theyāre criticising a specific type of bad writing. There are many ways a story can be written poorly. āBad writingā isnāt being honest about why and how the writing is bad.
That said, there are definitely far right people who regard well written minority characters to be woke. I understand the user above to be explaining that thatās not everyone who uses the term, and I agree.
the post you replied to brought up a counter-exampleā¦ but is it really?
i think it probably is yet another example of āpoorly written character exists only to be gayā
so basically just reinforcing the point GP made
Absolutely this. I can only speak for myself, and I know that some folks are so starved for representation that they are happy with anything and thatās fine, but for me poor representation is just as bad as none at all.
Iām a guy married to a guy, and I do like to see queer characters and same sex romance options. But playing DA: Origin and crushing on Alastair, only to have the option of Zevranā¦ It kinda feels like the games is telling me āgay men are campy and promiscuous, a sensitive and strong guy like Alistair is clearly heterosexualā. It didnāt make me feel included or represented, quite the opposite.
Obviously, times change, and sometimes these clumsy first steps are how we get to somewhere better. But as well as disappointing me, I understand why awkward āwokeā representation rubs people the wrong way. If I as a queer man find the gay character tokenistic, underdeveloped and kinda annoying then it doesnāt surprise me that other folks would too. And being willing to say āthis is good representation, but that is shallow box tickingā would help us all get to better place.
Agreed, and I feel like the big issue here is there are two versions of āanti-wokeā in gaming.
The first is gamers that want real progressive storylines that tie into the story well, and are critical of corporations trying to shoehorn random aspects of culture to be āwokeā which fall flat because itās just virtue signaling.
But itās been conflated with the sort of 4chan style mentality of āgamer menā who criticize anything, even historically accurate stories who call a game woke just because it doesnāt fit their favorite narrative of muscular white dude or scantily clad woman being the protagonist.
An example of this is Assassinās Creed Shadows. The game should by no means be labelled āwokeā by anybody. Itās telling a dramatized tale of a real person that existed within feudal Japan who was by all measure a black samurai. However the second group in my description above has taken it upon themselves to criticize the studio for āforcing a narrativeā or whatever which simply isnāt true. Itās a real person, from history, and they are telling a video game version of his story.
Itās annoying that the improper āwokenessā criticism there gets conflated with true criticism of studios adding barely fleshed out token elements of āinclusionā that by and large benefit nobody but instead detract from titles.
Personally Iād rather woke slop to straight slop - at least itās clumsily including different narratives, rather than just clumsily reinforcing the same old narratives.
Obviously I would rather no slop, and I would rather artful reprĆ©sentations of all characters, but writing is hard - even moreso when youāve got producers, investors, and a committee working as editors.
Also slop meamd the industry is at least not actively hostile to my existence. There are much worse fates than being pandered to and patronized
I think most of the criticism about āwokenessā is unwarranted. I donāt know of any video game or movie that has been ruined because of āwokenessā.
Is Suicide Squad a bad video game? Probably. I havenāt played it myself.
Is Suicide Squad bad because the DLC has an old tired lesbian stereotype? No, I donāt think so. Even if it was a good game, I donāt think it wouldāve mattered much.
Itās kind of like Jar Jar Binks. People use him as a scapegoat for why Episode I is bad. Itās a character whoās easy to attack, but heās far from the reason why anyone would think Episode I is a bad movie. They would still dislike the movie even if he had been removed.
People are often good at telling when something is bad, but rarely understand why itās bad.
Iām just tired of being lectured in video games. Sorry if that makes me anti woke.
Spiderman 2, veilguard were both worse off because of poorly done DEI. BG3 was fantastic and created characters that werenāt talking about pronouns like Iām a 5 year old. Sorry not sorry.
Spiderman 2ā¦ worse off because of poorly done DEI
Played it, loved it, no fucking clue what youāre talking about
The deaf girl?
People are mad about the weirdest thing.
When I was fully a gamerā¢, I used to get mad when people said that video games would make people to murderers. Now a bunch of the people, who probably used to get mad with me, are afraid that somehow video games makes you gay. Like dude, you know it is bs. You said it is bs.
āBut it is about how the narrative suffers from the woke shitā yup totally true which is why the political right hated the harry Potter game for jk rollingās wokeness with Dumbledoreās homosexuality and her rewriting of history by lying about what her notes would mean. Because they āhateā when authors donāt respect the story but go for clout. (For those, who donāt know, once jk said in an interview that a David star meant that the character is a wizard, later she claimed the same David star meant the character was a Jew) oh wait, they didnāt boycott the game but hyped it up? Surely not because jk is a terf. No way.
Is that dude waiting for an American Black Woman to invent punctuation marks?
Oh, I like you.
