"Woke" games
"Woke" games
196 comments
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A game is only called "woke" when it's bad. Balder's Gate 3 is one of the most "woke" major releases in the last few years but you hardly hear them complain about it.
It's the same thing with cyberpunk 2077. The anti-woke crowd can't agree on whether it's woke because many of them like it.
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I think the problem isn't the wokeness for most people, but the awkward shoehorning of stereotypes and forced messaging that makes everything feel cheap and doesn't 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.
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How do you differentiate between a character "written for the sake of checking a diversity box", a poorly-written diverse character, and a "random fact of the world"? It's a fictional world. Nothing is random. It's all creative decisions made by a team of writers and producers.
I don't 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 don't 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 don't think the result of that will be "better representation".
I think the result will be devs being harrassed and pushed out of an already brutal industry.
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An LGBTQ person doesn’t need “a good reason” for being written that way. If they did, then so would the straight person, no? Unless, of course, we’re trying to say that every story’s default needs to be a straight white man who doesn’t 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 here’s a sticker.
It’s not about checking a diversity box, it’s about the barest amount of representation. The LGBT people in my life don’t exist because they fit some kind of plot-point in my life; they exist because that’s just how the dice landed and they don’t owe me a justification for why they are that way in order to be my friends. That would be absurd, right?
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Sidenote: Everyone complaining about Veilguard(for example) forgets that a) Bioware is famously unclear about what dialogue choices do and b) they just don’t, historically, seem to have the capacity to write terribly creative games. They’re fine and I’ve enjoyed playing the ones I have but still.
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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.
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I bought BG3 due to constant negative comments about it. It's 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.
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There were absolutely people calling that game woke. You didn't hear them because they were drowned out by the good press. It's not that game is only called woke when it's bad, it's that when a game is good there's enough positive publicity to drowned out the negative.
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I heard complaints about BG3 characters being romanceable independently of MC's gender and race, that it's against lore and statistics. But my guess would be that it would've been the thing devs wanted to do not because of wokeness, but because it seems fairer towards the player.
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BG3 doesn't lecture you like other games though. There is a difference between having these people live in your world vs being the spokesperson for BLM.
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The difference isn't in subject matter, but writing quality. I like retro shooters and considering Build Engine(think Duke Nukem) style games are based on movie genres, I'd love a blaxploitation game were I'm 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 "wokeness", you signal that you're just gaming the algorithm for the lowest common denominator of viewer to drive that ad money up.
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Which games are like that, though?
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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 "not actually progressiveness" 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 don't have to "look like" anything, but then you wouldn't know they're lesbians, and the companies don't understand how to do this.
Gamers can tell when a company is trying to "be progressive" 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 Baldur's Gate 3) it no longer is "woke", 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 "fake progressiveness corporate virtue signaling" until recently and I think gamers really only care about this happening. So it isn't 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 you're either pro woke slop, or you're racist/sexist/transphobic. But reality is that most gamers (even those who complain about wokeness) actually are progressives. They actually don't 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.
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If that’s the case, then they’re just criticizing bad writing, like all of us are.
But it’s 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 they’re not backwards, the protagonist has one gay friend. And, from that alone, the target base complained about the show being “woke”.
So the term is both wrapping a long way around towards the simple term “bad writing” and instantly called upon anytime demographics include minorities. I’d go for the Occam’s Razor explanation. It’s just hate.
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If that’s the case, then they’re just criticizing bad writing, like all of us are.
They're criticising a specific type of bad writing. There are many ways a story can be written poorly. "Bad writing" isn't 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 that's not everyone who uses the term, and I agree.
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This, the kind of gamer who make lists of woke games that you shouldn't 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 I'm sure that the mass layoffs and the fucked up development cycle are a major cause of these problems.
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Agreed, and I feel like the big issue here is there are two versions of “anti-woke” 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 “woke” which fall flat because it’s just virtue signaling.
But it’s been conflated with the sort of 4chan style mentality of “gamer men” who criticize anything, even historically accurate stories who call a game woke just because it doesn’t fit their favorite narrative of muscular white dude or scantily clad woman being the protagonist.
An example of this is Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The game should by no means be labelled “woke” by anybody. It’s 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 “forcing a narrative” or whatever which simply isn’t true. It’s a real person, from history, and they are telling a video game version of his story.
It’s annoying that the improper “wokeness” criticism there gets conflated with true criticism of studios adding barely fleshed out token elements of “inclusion” that by and large benefit nobody but instead detract from titles.
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Personally I'd rather woke slop to straight slop - at least it's clumsily including different narratives, rather than just clumsily reinforcing the same old narratives.
Obviously I would rather no slop, and I would rather artful représentations of all characters, but writing is hard - even moreso when you've got producers, investors, and a committee working as editors.
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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
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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 that's fine, but for me poor representation is just as bad as none at all.
I'm 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 Zevran... It kinda feels like the games is telling me "gay men are campy and promiscuous, a sensitive and strong guy like Alistair is clearly heterosexual". It didn't 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 'woke' representation rubs people the wrong way. If I as a queer man find the gay character tokenistic, underdeveloped and kinda annoying then it doesn't surprise me that other folks would too. And being willing to say "this is good representation, but that is shallow box ticking" would help us all get to better place.
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I think most of the criticism about “wokeness” is unwarranted. I don’t know of any video game or movie that has been ruined because of “wokeness”.
Is Suicide Squad a bad video game? Probably. I haven’t played it myself.
Is Suicide Squad bad because the DLC has an old tired lesbian stereotype? No, I don’t think so. Even if it was a good game, I don’t think it would’ve mattered much.
It’s kind of like Jar Jar Binks. People use him as a scapegoat for why Episode I is bad. It’s a character who’s easy to attack, but he’s 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 it’s bad.
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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 they're only selectively included. Of course it feels like it's only tangentially attached to the content: it is, by design, and you can easily prove it.
That's what people mean when they say it's forced.
You want to write a gay character? Do it, but stop half-assing it because it won't sell in China. Do it right or fuck off.
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True that.
I even found it very funny when they accused kingdom come: deliverance of being racist because no black characters were in the game.
The setting is fucking medieval! There were no black people in Europe back then.
On the other hand I only know some Netflix series where they add all characters of the lbqt+ spectrum but give them no story or any meanings to that.
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no black people in medieval Europe
In general, there’s almost always an exception which disproves any such rule. People across history have lived all sorts of lives.
https://www.simon-hartman.com/post/the-presence-of-africans-in-european-history
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Is that dude waiting for an American Black Woman to invent punctuation marks?
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Oh, I like you.
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To be fair, what the OOP is describing is "diversity in the video game industry", not "woke games", per se. While I doubt anyone here has objections to the former, I also doubt that anyone here is a fan of "Dustborn", as an example.
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I hate this kind of comment. A bad game doing poorly that happens to be "woke" isn't evidence that being "woke" made it bad. For example, Dragon Age Origins is pretty "woke" (especially for its time) but it's recognized as an amazing game by pretty much everyone. If you make a great game that's written well, it's 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 "woke" doesn't matter. Being good matters.
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Dustborn is a good game that has been incredibly misrepresented. Take the "you are racist" scene copied and pasted from video to video for example. It's presented as the game's Black protagonist just accusing two cops of racism for no reason.
In the actual game, it's one of the multiple dialogue choices that may not even happen if one of the protagonist's friends intervenes. The context that is omitted from the culture war videos is that the protagonist comes out of the bathroom of a diner and sees two Justice officers:
- Talking about arresting her friends for no reason other than being tired of waiting for the waiter.
- Going on a long rant about Anomals (read as mutants of the X-Men, which is one of the inspirations behind the game), saying they're monsters whose babies come out damaged, missing body parts, and that they shouldn't procreate at all so that there are "fewer scourges on the planet".
- Asking the protagonist questions (which is fine for a police officer) while being disrespectful, like when she says she's in a band and they ask if she's the groupie.
- Depending on the player's actions, the same officers may also ask if the protagonist and "the Black kid" from her crew are related, then among themselves argue on whether that's racist, to which the protagonist may reply with the Trigger Vox, which results in the "you're racists" phrase.
Also worth noting that from the very first scenes of the game, the player is discouraged from using the special abilities, Vox, as they force people to do things against their will, so many players would never see that reaction intended to be over the top (as evident from the in-game post-chapter choice stats indicating that the majority don't use Vox on other occasions).
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I'm going to come at this from a movie rather than a video game place, but:
Which is more "woke:" Enemy Mine, or She-Hulk?
Enemy Mine is about a human and an alien (played by a white man and a black man) starting the movie as enemies. Actual shooting war "We were in a dogfight and I was trying to kill you with guns" enemies. And when marooned on an inhospitable planet they learn to understand and even love each other.
She-Hulk is about Nth-wave feminism talking points. "They catcalled me in a parking lot and it made me mad."
You know that guy who does "honest movie trailers" on Youtube? He did one for Star Trek TNG, and he says "It's the future, and the Future. Is. Woke!" And he said this before the word "woke" was co-opted by the right meaning "anything regressives don't like."
Gene Roddenberry had a vision for the future where we were past it all. Humanity is beyond racism, beyond sexism, beyond classism. Even if he couldn't live up to it himself (He did put Marina Sirtis in a minidress and in a chair with no console in front of it to make it easy to look at her legs. And there was that really cringey episode where they go to the black people planet where everyone is all tribal and primitive, that was ugly) he aspired to that future. Probably the most powerful to me, he wrote characters who, when confronted on their ideas, would re-evaluate and even change their minds. Data called Picard out in "Measure of a Man" and Picard changed his stance and fought for what he now realized is the truth. That is the manliest moment ever broadcast on television.
I grew up with that show, I was born in 1987, same year the show premiered, some of my earliest memories is watching TNG on my parents' Zenith console TV. That idea of "we're past that now, we put aside our differences and we work together as a team of equals now" vision is what I thought we were all working toward. That that was the future we all wanted. Couldn't be farther from the truth. The radical right are actively avoiding it clinging to some weird idea of a white hegemony. Surprised they don't call the invention of the diesel powered tractor an affront to their heritage because it deprives them of a reason to harm black people.
Most other groups of people are busy fantasizing about having their turn as the despotic rulers. "When we come to power, we'll enslave you and see how you like it." That type of shit.The people who call themselves "Woke" like the aesthetic of people who aren't straight and/or white and/or male doing creative things, but the things they create are basically never about everyone learning to get along and building better futures for each other. They make talking point grievance airing revenge porn and dare their targets to dislike it.
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That idea of “we’re past that now, we put aside our differences and we work together as a team of equals now” vision is what I thought we were all working toward. That that was the future we all wanted. Couldn’t be farther from the truth. The radical right are actively avoiding it clinging to some weird idea of a white hegemony
This is true about Star Trek, and the TNG era in particular. No way you could watch those shows and not come away with the understanding that people struggled to be the better human being and had achieved significant gains in the fictional universe.
I wonder what TV shows the racists preferred.
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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.
Let's use soldier 76 from overwatch as an example. The way he was written on top of the are they aren't they thing he had going on with Ana didn't 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.
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I agree with you, slapping a veneer of diverse identity on a character post-facto is often just performative bullshit. At best it's bad representation, at worst it's cynical pinkwashing and pandering for profit.
But that's not a distinction I have ever seen an "anti-woke gamer" 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 Ellie's sexuality? Honestly I think FNV only escapes a lot of that kind of vitriol because it was released pre-gg.
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I won't disagree that Soldier's gayness came pretty much out of the blue, but I don't think it's a good example of something that was "put it in our face". I play Overwatch regularly still with people who have no idea he's gay - the game itself doesn't say anything about it, at least not that I've seen. The only way you'd 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.
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good characters who happen to be (whatever)
There it is!
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Oh, this Lara Croft chick has to be a strong, independent woman, huh? Tired of shit like this and Metroid. Quit hamfisting women into things and virtue signalling
Never, ever, not in the entire 90's decade I was alive did I even hear anything remotely similar to anything like that. It was unheard of.
No one even thought about it like that, or even had the concept to consider them that way.
...until 2016
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They gave Lara depth and humanized her, and this made the horny gamer boys angry cause they just wanted to look at boobies and not think too much.
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She had all that in the PS2 era and none of us cared then.
those games were also kinda mid...
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To be fair, though the early video game industry was created by and included a diverse group of people, the games themselves were made to sell their niche demographic. At the time that was young white boys. As a result not many games of the early era showcased the positive side of diversity, and often times portrayed it negatively, even if it wasn't intentional.
The past these people are comparing modern games to isn't imagined, it's real. As the gaming industry has grown to the now extremely large range of people it has, and through a shift in social culture over the years, the content, intent, and purpose of the games themselves have drastically changed.
The people who complain about "woke" games main program isn't an issue with games, but more about their inability to accept the societal and cultural changes happening around them. They refuse to accept that the types of games they loved as a kid had a lot of problematic cultural issues.
So basically they're mad that the racist and/or homophobic and/or sexist themes that they loved in old in games aren't acceptable anymore.
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the games themselves were made to sell their niche demographic. At the time that was young white boys
In the beginning, before Nintendo started hammering the idea that video games were for kids, games were often targetted for an older audience. This is particularly true of home computer gaming, the bread and butter for the likes of Sierra and LucasArts. Even after the Nintendo there was still a lot of mature and even adult content being made, as well as content in genres less popular to children such as simulators.
From my own experince: Sierra's Roberta Williams was the designer of the whole King's Quest series (I believe?), and I remember a lot of discussion about them (and especially hints lol) on my BBS by men and women alike, nearly all working adults. I can't speak for the entire demographic of King's Quest players but I mean people logging into BBS's probably were the main demographic lol.
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And they dont buy the game and vote Trump. (or over here the dutch dude with the weird hair.)
In the end the videogame industry is not about being politically correct. Its about making money.
I for one am very curious how this all will work out.
I do think we all should "chill out" a bit about these "issues". A lot of people, everyone even, do not care what you do or don't do. Nobody wants to tell you how to live your life. But that goes both ways. And if you don't respect that you get a push back, an overreaction. And that is what's happening now.
People see "gay stuff" (..) everywhere. The sociatal change is too much too fast and like in IT projects, we're reaching or have already exceeded, the change capability of our society.
So ease back and it all will work out. Give it a few more years. We've come so far, maybe it is time to just sit down for a while and smell the flowers.
Or don't, feed the overreaction some more and see if it implodes. But it can also explode in your face, its 50/50.
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So ease back and it all will work out. Give it a few more years. We’ve come so far, maybe it is time to just sit down for a while and smell the flowers.
This attitude is acceptable when you're talking about something that is purely a matter of preference. I could say that to someone who tells me "Oh, it sucks that I can't eat out at 99% of restaurants, because I only eat biodynamic food, and nobody knows wtf I'm talking about with my weird dietary questions."
When it comes to something inherent to people, which cannot be changed and causes them to face discrimination, I find this take to be naïve, at best, and entirely ignorant and dangerous, at worst. At every turn, there are people actively trying to strip women, minorities and LGBTQ+ people of their rights in spite of active pushes to ensure they don't lose their rights and can enjoy equality with everyone else. I find it rather callous to suggest that members of these groups should just chill out and hope for the best in a few years while they face potentially existential threats from complacency.
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There’s nothing wrong with calling a bad game woke if they’re trying to cover their blatant flaws by tokenizing minorities and lgbt. See: Concord
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Picking a game that was already bad for 700 reasons doesn’t make the idiotic “woke = bad” label okay. The writing in a live service game was never going to be great.
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I think part of what has happened is a group of people has identified that a lot of modern writing is garbage, but doesn't know exactly what's wrong with it. The issue gets blamed on whatever seems like the most obvious change to them. There are some stories with better writing that have a diverse set of characters, and while there are still weirdos on the internet that complain about it, the general market response suggests people are most interested in good media, and good media can represent a diverse range of people.
As for my take on modern writing, I think "design by committee", by means of publishers and marketing specialists grasping more control over the creative process is the major culprit in its declining quality.
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I realized this when I got into DBD and realized the game is in fact, very "woke", and that it's a core point of the game's identity.
But it's not a problem because it feels like a geniune effort by the Entity to capture a wide variety of survivors and killers from all walks of life, which translates into a lot of players able to look at the heroes and villains and go "Hey, s/he's like me!", which translates to putting in small things referencing sexualities and cultures to pander to those individuals.
The writing for all these characters are consistently good, except for when they aren't (Looking at you Skull Merchant)
DBD IS a "Woke" game by every definition, but it isn't shit and the story's actually good because it's clear the people making it give a shit about what they're doing and the "woke" aspects simply come from exploring the ramifications of having the kind of cast it does.
I began to suspect it when people were removed about how "Rey's a giant Mary Sue!" in Star Wars
Because she isn't. She actually LOSES most of the fights she's in, can't control her powers well for most of the films, and "How can she fly the Falcon so well!?!?!" was a common complaint even though she literally breaks the damn thing while doing so, meaning she can't "fly it so well", Rey as a character is clearly not the problem, but people latched onto her because she was something they could point to and say "HERE'S THE PROBLEM!"
So what WAS the problem with the sequels? The problem was they were so scared of doing something new with the Star Wars brand (Due to the fact that the prequels did something new and were lambasted for it) that they largely rehashed IV, V, and VI, without a plan for actually weaving one consistent story (Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker are great movies.... that feel like they belong in separate trilogies)
And yeah... that and I will agree with the bashers in that making Luke's Jedi Order fail and killing off all of his students off-screen without introducing any of them was basically Disney throwing money away.
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that's horseshit. there is no such term for games that use sex to appeal to young boys to cover their blatant flaws.
plus that's not why they're doing it. two things can coexist without causing one another. that's very disingenuous.
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Don't call it "Woke" though. Call it Faux Woke or Rainbow Capitalism. The term "Woke" carries specific baggage.
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Starfield is another good example.
Some of you may have seen HeelVsBabyface's infamous "pronouns" 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.
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I really hate how too many games, and it's games especially that do this feel the need to pretend that gender doesn't exist.
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Remember the Dead Rising Remake that removes the erotica category from photos, changes Larry from being asian to being a new yorker (Cause Asians can't be evil, unlike White people!), and removing all reference to the Vietnam War (Because Communists can't be evil?)
Yeah.... Dead Rising kept getting worse with every entry, but damn the fact that they went back and made the first game seem shitty is an accomplishment (Especially since between the Wii Version and the Remake, they did that twice!)
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Remember when Sierra had to hire an outside company to do King's Quest 8, and they completely ignored Roberta Williams' notes, instructions, and design simply because "You're a woman, you don't know anything about games, shut up and let us work. This is going to be an RPG, not an Adventure game, and you're going to like it little lady!... Who is also the wife of the owner, the co-founder of the company, and the creator+headwriter of the series we're currently working for."
And it kept happening no matter how much she complained, so eventually they had to kick them out, but there wasn't enough time to make a new game so the "Not King's Quest" King's Quest game had to be released to try to make money back..
And it was basically a shitty version of Ultima 9, an already shitty game, and was so bad and tonally out of place with the rest of the series that the King's Quest Collection on Steam only has 1-7 and the Reboot?
Yeah I normally like to root for the underdog game of a franchise and try to defend it, but KQ8: Mask of Eternity can get fucked.
I'm not even a King's Quest fan, but it's one of the most infuriating cases of sexism I've ever had the displeasure of learning about.
Imagine this happening in any other context. Imagine Square Enix hires a bunch of white guys to do Dragon Quest, sends in a higher-up to make sure it stays on brand, and they just tell him "You're asian, what do you know about good games?", and turn in a grimdark first person shooter that just happens to be called Dragon Quest, and Square Enix is in such a dire financial state that they're forced to publish it as a mainline entry.
That's basically what happened.
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Jeez. I played and enjoyed that game as a kid, but I had no idea why it was such a bastardized tonal shift from the other games.
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There are two kinds of wokeness I complain about:
- Hernia level virtue signaling - this is when a production company is straining super hard to make sure we know they're the good guys, but the writers don't have the brains to come up with interesting allegories, or even super-transparent ones like the half-black/half-white dudes in the TOS episode. All they can muster up is character dialog like, "Wow, look how backward this time period is! So much misogyny and discrimination!" Yeah duh, I live in this time period and I'm not stupid. (talking to you, Picard season 2)
- Misrepresenting the past - this is when they portray let's say Victorian England or 1950s America as a fully integrated society where characters of all races mix freely, with equality at all levels. That's not how it was, kids. The black housewife in 1953 Ohio would not have a white maid, although she might work part time as one in a white household. You don't raise social consciousness by painting a fake picture of history to avoid upsetting your audience. That does no service to the people who still feel the effects of those times.
But oh right, I forgot, the point is profit not genuine social consciousness - sorry, my bad.
/edited for grammar
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While I agree with your first point - corporate pseudo-progressivism is a stain - I don't really think it's fair to call it "woke". In fact, it's almost the opposite of what woke is supposed to mean. To be "woke" originally meant having "woken up" to the reality of systemic racism... Corpos thoughtlessly stuffing games/films with "diverse" casts are not really respecting that reality. It's performative. There is an argument that it improved things for actors regardless, but I still don't think it's "woke".
On your second point I have to slightly disagree. Taking Bridgerton as an example - set in something like Victorian England, but a racially diverse one. The Queen is black, there's a black Duke. I think these things immediately set the story apart from real Victorian England. Ok, perhaps if you know nothing about history it might be confusing, but to me I see those things and immediately one of two things is true:
- We are suspending our disbelief. Just like the pantomime dame, within the world of the play, is a woman and not a man in costume, we can assume that we're seeing black actors playing characters who would have really been white... Like Queen victoria.
- The world we see is not an accurate representation of history. In this world we might assume that slavery was abolished sooner, or never started, and black people moved not just into the lower but the higher echelons of British society.
Given that it's fiction, I don't mind either of these things. I think it's nice for people who aren't white to be able to imagine themselves in those stories, even if in the real history things would have been much different. Bridgerton isn't trying to present a vision of real historical events, it's primarily a romance. Just like mediaeval fantasy isn't really medieval, Victorian romance doesn't need to really be Victorian. We don't need to see the systemic racism any more than we need to see the cholera or dropsy or whatever.
I will also just briefly shill for Taboo which I just finished - that's a historical show which incorporates a "realistic" amount of diversity into it's cast while maintaining (at least what appears to me) a level of historical accuracy. The story is fictional, although it appears around real events... But the world it presents feels genuine. Crucially by contrast to Bridgerton, slavery plays quite an important role in the story - so here it would feel absurd to have a black Queen or Duke.
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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!
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I'm just going to say that a lot of creative, innovative, or interesting things, regardless if they're physical items, narratives, gameplay mechanics, or even just a new process for handling a particular task, is borne from diversity.
We are different. That difference is a strength. The more different we are, the larger of a gap between how I approach an issue and how you do the same. The Delta between your approach and mine is beautiful. One may be more efficient, one may be easier, one might be less expensive to do.
If we all thought the same, and we were extremely similar in what we knew and how we thought, nothing would ever change. Progress would not be possible.
A great example of this is with the blue LED. Most companies have been able to make blue LEDs for decades. The problem is, they were expensive, and shit. They couldn't brighten up a shoe box.
One guy took a blue LED manufacturing process that everyone else abandoned, and worked with it for the better part of like, 5 years or something. He invented the modern blue LED in all its glory. Bright enough to blind you from across the room, and cheap enough to produce that they ended up in a lot of places they probably shouldn't have been. That experimentation also yielded a near ultraviolet version that with a simply phosphor filter, can be converted to visible light, and white LEDs were born
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Yeah, and the guy that invented the blue LED - essentially saving the company - got shit upon because he did so against the orders of the company head. They then went after him legally when he took a job at another company.
He actually won a lawsuit against them later but my understanding is that after legal fees etc didn't really come out ahead. It's a pretty sad story.
Diversity in entertainment is important, and ultimately done right it's also good for profits. Having a game, movie or produce that appeals to a broader audience is good for sales.
At the same time, some entertainment does come with an existing core audience and a bit of a "formula", so altering that too much does risk alienating that core, and frankly some duds get blamed on 'ism when the reality is they're just not that good or changed too much. "The Witcher" flubbed because those writing the scripts were increasingly out of touch with the original material, but if they'd also done something like make a Geralt (or somebody else significant) a different orientation, race, gender or whatever then some would have blamed that failure on the anti-diversity crowd.
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There's been a ton of Blame on both the show being 'woke' and the internet hate machine. The first season was pretty good imo, well done outside he fact it was a TV show with limited resources. But the second season was so badly written. You can change all you want as far as I care, but they wrote that season after completely ignoring who any of the characters were in season 1. And giving them intentionally the opposite personality, and motivations from the books they were supposed to be adapting. It was just bizarre, and insulting to watch, I get why Cavill bailed, anyone with the financial means should have done the same.
But it wasn't because they had black actors, female characters that talked and wore clothes, or mentioned empathy, and it didn't fall out of favor with audiences because internet trolls stank on it. It was just badly done in ways that felt lazy and dumb.
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You know what was surprisingly woke? Smokey & The Bandit.
You'd think the truckers would be all white guys, and they'd be casually racist through the whole thing since it's the 70s. But it wasn't. Truckers of all shapes and sizes. And the main trucker character is friends with black people.
In the 70s. In a trucker movie. Set in The South.
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As much as I despise the “anti-woke” crowd, this is not a good argument and completely misunderstands what they’re angry about.
They are angry about what they perceive as “forced diversity” that destroys modern media and that corporates like Disney are pushing a “woke agenda”.
I disagree with this view. I think representation in media is good. Games and movies usually turn bad for unrelated reasons (like rushed production or poor management).
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Yeah, exactly... no one tries to understand one another anymore.... just assumptions and rage. Of course, people believing in forced diversity ought be met with rage, but only after truly understanding it
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It’s easy to win arguments against straw men.
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You only have to look at any anti-woke review for a few seconds to figure out it's only ever racism, misogyny, and anti lgbtq hate. They aren't like ''This is why it's woke'' with some philosophical discussion, it straight up is ''there's a black in this game, that's wrong.''
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This was very evident with Concord the week it shut down. People in the YT comments were inevitably blaming woke politics because it had an arguably diverse cast even though the trailer was one of the most bland, unimaginative and unpolished pieces of advertisement I've ever seen. Oh, but it was the blue haired people's fault for reasons! 🙄
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I'm gonna get the quote wrong, so I wont even try, but some internet person basically said that any time there's a failure, the worse people will come out to claim it as a victory.
Game had cringe writing and was glitchy as hell? Oh, well it was the minority characters that caused it fail. Just ignore all the other games with minority characters that have succeeded.
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Alan Turing... Nuff said
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Woke isn't being progressive. It's 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, they'll do some random black character in a fantasy setting that's clearly based off Scotland in the 1200s.
- Important character goes on a monologue that feels like a political PSA
- The IP's understanding of progressive politics and social justice is roughly equivalent to Tumblr circa 2013.
- Absolutely terrible writing. Even if you swapped all the "woke" 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 "woke" 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 "professional" 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 don't consume this type of IP in their spare time, but actively resent people who do.
- Constant fucking gaslighting. Anyone who doesn't 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 there's a reason Star Wars gets more shit for being woke than Spiderverse, or that Arcane hasn't 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.
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Woke isn't being progressive. It's 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 isn't even true to be honest, it's a well strung together list of annoying tropes which doesn't even happen nearly as much or widely as some would suggest. It's a neat little "here's a bad way of caring" package but it ain't 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 "woke" has been co-opted into meaning something it never really did. Being awake to the injustices present in our lives isn't 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.
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Woke is acknowledging the systemic racism playing out daily in the United States of America.
If only. But like all of your societal problems, it's 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.
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Your last bit is the only part that matters. Good content is good. There's so much well written progressive "woke" stuff that does well, but it's easy to point at a shitty flop and say it failed because it's "woke" rather than doing the hard work and actually analyzing why it's bad. "Woke" content isn't an issue in media. It's that we're getting so much bad and lazy writing in AAA games (and other big media). They aren't allowed to be creative, so it ends up being garbage.
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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 doesn't mean that the studios still producing games have narrowed their scopes, they just dump more work on the survivors.
And "woke DEI SJW snowflake game dev" is far from the only thing making games worse, it's 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.
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I get what you're saying, but...
For example, they'll do some random black character in a fantasy setting that's clearly based off Scotland in the 1200s.
While I don't know about 1200s Scotland specifically, the notion that black people didn't exist in old Europe is a false narrative by racists who seem to believe immigration was invented around the 1700s (like, I've seen them claim black people don't fit into Ancient Greece, which is definitely wrong.)
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I mean immigration existed, but it wasn't 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 it's perfectly possible for someone of Navajo descent to find themselves in central Africa, it's 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.
There's 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, it's pretty convenient that all these inaccurate claims fit into the narrative pushed by American progressive identity politics.
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Great comment, you've nailed it.
I think there’s 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. You'll notice though that the more forced the progressivism is in a given piece of content, the more it sucks. In other words: bad writing doesn't just fuck the story up, it bakes in messaging that doesn't even make sense contextually.
Anyone who has ever read the Sword of Truth series and encountered the author's 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?
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I disagree with your premise that that "forced progressivism" messes things up. Andor, for example, is the most progressive Star Wars media ever, and it's amazing for it. (It's 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 don't 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.
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To be fair I'm sure if it was stylish to insert overt conservative themes into IPs those would be also too.
I don't 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.
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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.
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I'm 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 weren't talking about pronouns like I'm a 5 year old. Sorry not sorry.
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Spiderman 2... worse off because of poorly done DEI
Played it, loved it, no fucking clue what you're talking about
The deaf girl?
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People are mad about the weirdest thing.
When I was fully a gamer(tm), 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.
"But it is about how the narrative suffers from the woke shit" yup totally true which is why the political right hated the harry Potter game for jk rolling's wokeness with Dumbledore's homosexuality and her rewriting of history by lying about what her notes would mean. Because they "hate" when authors don't respect the story but go for clout. (For those, who don't 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 didn't boycott the game but hyped it up? Surely not because jk is a terf. No way.
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Not that there would be any game that meets their "unwokeness" purity standards.
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So that fact is wrong, it was a Jewish man who escaped nazi persecution. I dont think this is historical appropriation on purpose. Clap back politics don't provide anything, and in this case accidentally lied. It's usually free nowadays to check your facts before posting.
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Which is the incorrect part, the console itself or the person who invented it? You weren't really clear on that and it shows the Fairchild F was designed by a black man in Google but I didn't search too deep.
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The tweet makes a false statement about who invented the first video game console, and what the console was. Neither were correct I'm afraid. It was invented a year earlier.
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did you point at something when you typed "that"? because the rest of us can't see what you're pointing to.
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Just correcting some historical appropriation.
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Clap back politics don't provide anything
Clap back politics isn't for the opposition but for others on your side to gain a new perspective by pointing out the things people knew but couldn't put into words. It's a tool for our collective awareness. I wouldn't say it's useless.
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I thought I had read somewhere that Zoid Kirsch is also gay. He had quite an impressive career in gaming.
He created Threewave CTF, which was an incredibly inspirational mod for the original Quake. Practically defined team deathmatch arena games to this day. Got hired by the legend John Carmack to work at id Software shortly after and helped develop QuakeWorld and subsequent Quakes.
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Wokeness isn't diversity lol
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The actual definition of wokeness isn't diversity, but the term "woke" has just become synonymous with any left-leaning ideas (including diversity) because of how commonly people on the right continue to use it as a word to define "anything I don't like."
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Diversity isn't a left leaning idea. People do use "wokeness" to describe forced/pandering diversity, but I've never seen that to describe just people who happen to be black or a woman in games. Sadly can agree though that it happens with gay/trans characters- but I think part of that is people reacting to forced romance that I think a lot of people don't like but fail to articulate when its straight characters.
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Ugh, DEI has even infected the past now!
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Caper in the Castro came out on BBSs in 1989 to encourage people to donate to AIDS research.
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There's room to split hairs over the first cartridge based console, or the first console with interchangeable games. But no matter what, the Channel F was designed by Mr. Lawson from first principles.
Mrs. Williams' pet project series remains one of my favorite duologies in gaming - Laura Bow. If you say that she was the cofounder, you also have to point out that Ken & Roberta were a married couple, so no matter what she'd have been involved. It's more about what she contributed to gaming and her skill with crafting coherent stories both AGI and SCI - and you can see that in KQ4, since it was released in both AGI and SCI!
I have to admit that I never got into the BioWare D&D games - my preference remained with Black Isle's development (Planescape: Torment); but I respect others like them more than me.
The first person to put together principles on programming was a woman (Ada Lovelace). One of the most influential programming languages in the world, and the origin of the term 'computer bug', come from a woman (Captain Grace "Amazing Grace" Hopper). Women programmed the computers that put men on the moon and got them home safely. Dr. Ellis, a black man, was the first black person to get a Computer Science PhD, and (arguably) created the first known GUI.
These are all good people who made our lives better.
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You don't get it, they like the women, gays and non whites providing labor, they just want them hidden, so it doesn't ruins their gamer experience. They are just labor, and there is no place for them in the exclusive gamer space.
It's like the old days, you want your slaves and servants just to serve you, like machines, you don't want to acknowledge their existence as human beings. They are not equal to you, they just sustain your life style, because they deserve so. And only that, no humanity for them.
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Out of sight out of...
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Yes this man is absolutely correct. Aside from the obvious strawman's. The difference between the games he mentioned and the games currently coming out showcasing "wokeness" is that the old games are good.
No one actually cares how "woke" a game is as long as it's good.
Baldurs gate 2, arguably one of the best games ever made. Concord on the other hand... Ya.
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B-b-but I don't want to actually see those people in my games! I just want them to make them! /s
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The majority of complaints about wokeness in games is not that alternative lifestyles exist....
It's that the game, story, or environment is being sacrificed to shove a political message down your throat.
What people complain about online doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is revenue. If the revenue isn't enough then the discussion about wokeness dominates the discussion... I don't think making bland/bad game "woke" in order to get more attention will save it. Controversy doesn't sell that many games, might make more people aware of a product, but if they already didn't like the product (or were just meh about it) - controversy wont move the needle in a positive direction.
Update: since I'm incapable expressing myself succinctly here. I refer everybody to this nutsa video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJS4JHYgj50 which is my basic position
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If the writing sucks, then talk about how the writing sucks. If I see someone crying "woke bs" without backing anything up I'm going to automatically assume that person is a bigoted moron.
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As soon as someone calls something "woke", I know immediately to ignore whatever they're saying, they're almost surely incapable of proper critical thinking. If they could form an actual critical opinion they'd be talking about that instead of using a generic political term that equates to "anything I don't like or understand".
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I think most people lack that level of self awareness.I think if the most interesting thing about the game is how woke it is, thats a really bad sign.Consider Cyberpunk 2077 as an example, there was a hot minute where people were getting their transphobic panties in a bunch over the hermaphroditic ingame advertisements, but There was so much MORE to talk about in cyberpunk 2077 that it wasn't the only discussion about the game (even before it launched).If I see someone crying “woke bs” without backing anything up I’m going to automatically assume that person is a bigoted moron.
If I see someone downvoting thoughtful comments I'm going to automatically assume that person is a closed minded moron.
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These outrage tourists call every "woke" if it fits their narrative.
Zelda: echoes of wisdom features Zelda as a playable character? Woke! Hades 2 having gay gods and Hephaistos being in a wheelchair? Woke! A game having the option to chose your pronouns in the character creator with no change in the actual story/narrative? Believe it or not: woke! /j
Disco Elysium is an actually very political and leftist game, but no one calls it "woke", because it's incredibly good and popular (also: these chodes probably wouldn't even get the game).
Baldur's Gate 3 has everything they complain about, but it's not criticized, because it is loved by the community.
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The fact you consider people being gay, or black, or women political says a lot about what kind of person you are.
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It's that the game, story, or environment is being sacrificed to shove a political message down your throat.
... said by people who only know of this because today we talk about that message. The same people who loved Starship Troopers without realising it's a tale about the dangers of fascism. Who cheered Fight Club not realising it criticized male stereotypes. And lauded the Fallout video game series even though it on purpose allows same sex relationships since Fallout 2.
Sheep. Led by Russian propaganda filtered through their current favorite "I tell it like it is"-influencers.
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said by people who only know of this because today we talk about that message
So what you're saying is that those games didn't shove their message down people's throat while modern games do? That while they did have a political message, they didn't make it core to the experience and presented it in a way that allowed people who only wanted to play to completely ignore it?
You are validating the above comment's point.
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"The majority of complaints about wokeness in games is not that alternative lifestyles exist...."
Could not disagree more. That's exactly what the majority of complaints are about. Existence.
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Controversy does sell games and can drive sales of bad games (GTA, Dark Souls, DND). People are more aware of it. They buy it and play it because "what's the big deal". They like it, despite its flaws, then they share it.
The complaints about "wokeness" are only created by bigots. Just because games have a queer or religious character doesn't mean there's an agenda to make more money. It's just a trait that exists in the real world. And more than likely, the character takes traits from someone who made it, or someone they know.
Queer people exist. Being upset about a person existing in a game is a personal problem.
That being said, there are things I personally don't like in games, so I just don't play them.
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