gaming_again
Member
If every corporation, bank, politician, institution, news outlet and social media platform is pushing exactly the same message it most likely isn't an artistic vision.
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Are characters personalities and original writing being replaced by unified political views? Is escapism dying?
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gaming_again
Member
This is true but it makes me so sad. I like the West. I think it is the superior culture. I hate that it wastes time and energy and youth with this crap.
{insert code here}
Member
It WAS superior, but now I think it's up for grabs. We are witnessing the slow, inevitable collapse of western society. One small piece at a time. The faster the good folks in society realize this and plan/prepare accordingly, the less chaotic the collapse will be.
64bitmodels
Reverse groomer.
oh come on. This is ridiculous. the United States and European Union are still some of the richest areas in the world and still control much of the global stage. The only non Western country with as much power as the US and EU is China.
The West won't be falling apart anytime soon. Maybe superseded as the #1 global superpower by something else, but if that happens it sure as hell isn't gonna be because of fucking wokeness.
SlimeGooGoo
Banned
unlurkified
Member
What’s your verdict on Forspoken? Did Amy Hennig and co. consult the Panderstone?
A lot of people want to point at Miles Morales as a good example of a minority lead role that’s done right (i.e not forced for representation’s sake), but I find his character a little uninteresting. I remember his creator even said they wanted to make an Obama-esque character, so maybe it fits in the realm of forced.
I think Uncharted Legacy is an example where it was done right cuz the devs didn’t mention anything about DEI surrounding the game.
I think if a dev just narratively hits it out of the park with a minority role, the complaints will die down.
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gaming_again
Member
Wokeness holds the seeds of our destruction. No civilzation that sees its past as a sin has a future.
gaming_again
Member
Everybody who downplays the danger of wokeness always uses the same self-satisfied reductionist language. It's an unserious argument.
Pegasus Actual
Gold Member
Dirk Benedict
Member
This is so spot on. It's short but very-very sweet. It is what it is.
Raonak
Banned
Wow, you're actually like SCARED of "wokeness/diversity".
Like do you actually get nightmares? Or do you just get the nervous around interracial couples?
Regardless, I love how unhinged you are, keep it up!
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Torrent of Pork
Banned
I never played the 2nd Wolfenstein game cause of the chick rocking the Hammer and Sickle pin without censure, told me everything I needed to know about the game. Same with Disco Elysium with the devs who praised one of humanities most notorious mass murderers.
Have the self respect enough to not patronize these people.
Have the self respect enough to not patronize these people.
64bitmodels
Reverse groomer.
Does Japan not have a future then? Because many Japanese are not exactly very proud of the WW2 warcrimes.... How about Germany? I guess they're going to die off soon since they wouldn't be proud of the Nazis. You LEARN from the past, not glorify it. That's why history is taught. We want to preserve the good parts of past culture and remove the shite parts.
Moreover I fail to see how western society hates its past. The US glorifies 1776 to no end, romanticizing the ever living fuck out of its colony and early days. Western society's past is one of the most celebrated things about it.
Because this is genuniely stuff a troll would say. "wokeness will cause the fall of western civilization." How is a normal person supposed to take this seriously? Even to conservatives, a couple SJWs wouldn't ruin the US. they got their guns.
Tal Shiar Agent
Member
Perhaps what you see as a message being pushed is in reality the new mainstream cultural norm for the majority, or at least a growing plurality, of people?
Star Trek TOS pushed a message that prompted the same kind of backlash in the late 60s as many of the titles mentioned in the OP do today, except we look back at TOS with our modern lens and see nothing that would be out of the ordinary to us.
ResurrectedContrarian
Suffers with mild autism
These mechanically repeated defenses that "gaming is just getting more diverse" (eg.
Raonak
and
rabbity-thing
on this page) are borderline incoherent in their denial of the obvious.
Game narrative are decidedly not becoming more "diverse" in any meaningful sense of that word. If you read the overall complaint voiced by many across this thread, it is a recognition of saturated uniformity across all corporate gaming. You can't miss it; every single game now takes place against the same familiar current-year-thinking backdrop, the same narrowly restricted moral horizon and worldview, the same sense that its authors were born in a test tube ten minutes ago with no memory of even one decade prior. You can predict the dialogue lines about to be delivered by nearly every character, and you can know in advance who will be heroic or a villain by plotting their position on this simplistic moral spectrum of identities and victimhood.
In other words, the complaint in this thread (and others) is that gaming is now drowning in a corporate-enforced uniformity of thought, value, and expression all the way down, where it begins to feel like the same HR-like committee is in the room writing every genre. That's the opposite of "diversity" if the word carries any weight at all.
Of course, that's the thing about "diversity" as a progressive political aim--it has always been a fraud. It's always a marker of either intentional dishonesty or self-deception when used as it has been in this thread, and we can leave the question open as to which.
Genuine diversity of values has never been the goal of the progressive approach to the world--it's the thing it obsessively tries to eliminate. It does so with the simple trick of trying to overlap so many kinds of edge cases that any one human axis of difference can be subsumed under others. Eg.: men and women actually have different approaches to the world and interests? Well, we can blur that line by inverting the female characters in every scene, bundling a series of disorders under "trans" to create a convenient victim-weapon, and recasting sexual difference as "body types." Now this human barrier of difference is overcome. Or, races and groups have disparate histories and sometimes distinctive cultures? We can just mix up all characters with a random palette-swap generator even in historical-setting games, to blur the lines so that any realities of difference fade into a blur.
The only goal is to create a kind of bland individualism where we're all just picking little meaningless pieces to cobble together for a harmless consumer identity ("oh, I'm a menstruator who is pansexual") where all the genuine, hard lines of human difference are softened and neutered by their reduction to a random skin or costume. Real human differences are the very thing this approach desires to obfuscate and hide, both at the biological level (sex, strength, intelligence differences between individuals) and at the cultural level ("diversity is our strength" means a fantasy like "even the nominally Muslim family next to me watches superhero nonsense and wants legalize abortion"). They hate when real diversity of viewpoint emerges, like when Muslim immigrant parents strongly protested against trans propaganda in their US schools.
Raonak
and
rabbity-thing
on this page) are borderline incoherent in their denial of the obvious.Game narrative are decidedly not becoming more "diverse" in any meaningful sense of that word. If you read the overall complaint voiced by many across this thread, it is a recognition of saturated uniformity across all corporate gaming. You can't miss it; every single game now takes place against the same familiar current-year-thinking backdrop, the same narrowly restricted moral horizon and worldview, the same sense that its authors were born in a test tube ten minutes ago with no memory of even one decade prior. You can predict the dialogue lines about to be delivered by nearly every character, and you can know in advance who will be heroic or a villain by plotting their position on this simplistic moral spectrum of identities and victimhood.
In other words, the complaint in this thread (and others) is that gaming is now drowning in a corporate-enforced uniformity of thought, value, and expression all the way down, where it begins to feel like the same HR-like committee is in the room writing every genre. That's the opposite of "diversity" if the word carries any weight at all.
Of course, that's the thing about "diversity" as a progressive political aim--it has always been a fraud. It's always a marker of either intentional dishonesty or self-deception when used as it has been in this thread, and we can leave the question open as to which.
Genuine diversity of values has never been the goal of the progressive approach to the world--it's the thing it obsessively tries to eliminate. It does so with the simple trick of trying to overlap so many kinds of edge cases that any one human axis of difference can be subsumed under others. Eg.: men and women actually have different approaches to the world and interests? Well, we can blur that line by inverting the female characters in every scene, bundling a series of disorders under "trans" to create a convenient victim-weapon, and recasting sexual difference as "body types." Now this human barrier of difference is overcome. Or, races and groups have disparate histories and sometimes distinctive cultures? We can just mix up all characters with a random palette-swap generator even in historical-setting games, to blur the lines so that any realities of difference fade into a blur.
The only goal is to create a kind of bland individualism where we're all just picking little meaningless pieces to cobble together for a harmless consumer identity ("oh, I'm a menstruator who is pansexual") where all the genuine, hard lines of human difference are softened and neutered by their reduction to a random skin or costume. Real human differences are the very thing this approach desires to obfuscate and hide, both at the biological level (sex, strength, intelligence differences between individuals) and at the cultural level ("diversity is our strength" means a fantasy like "even the nominally Muslim family next to me watches superhero nonsense and wants legalize abortion"). They hate when real diversity of viewpoint emerges, like when Muslim immigrant parents strongly protested against trans propaganda in their US schools.
semiconscious
Member
my point is that woke ideology is already fundamentally a form of escapism - a fantasized re-imagining/remaking of reality. the insertion of it into 'escapist' games is only the intrusion of a 'preferred' form of escapism into another, & has nothing whatsoever to do with making a game more 'mature', but simply with making it espouse a particular viewpoint...
i'm not personally all that interested in having more genuinely 'mature' content in games, or what that'd entail, & don't, therefore, have any opinions on that one...
rofif
Can’t Git Gud
Is the big games that represent the industry and are played by most
rofif
Can’t Git Gud
You can see they tried being modern or something in forspoken because every major character is a woman. Every boss you fight is a woman.
But ai don’t feel as bad about it. It fits the game and you don’t discuss race or sex. They are women just so. Like matriarchs.
So it’s a clunky Japanese “let’s try to fit modern trends” and actually failing to hit the woke spot
But will it ever end?
Hypereides
Member
Honestly, one of the most detrimental things to happen to gamedev was when computer science nerds/geeks, with little life experience, discovered politics and somehow got it through their heads that they can solve all the world's problems through activism in video games. Its ridiculous.
Its even more absurd how some developers seemingly treat escapism as a negative now or look down on it. Its even more bewildering when some of these giga brain western (US) developers consider or believe it has no place in video games. It doesn't help when the mainstream game press keeps perpetuating this nonsensical notion either.
Its even more absurd how some developers seemingly treat escapism as a negative now or look down on it. Its even more bewildering when some of these giga brain western (US) developers consider or believe it has no place in video games. It doesn't help when the mainstream game press keeps perpetuating this nonsensical notion either.
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ResurrectedContrarian
Suffers with mild autism
"diversity" = condescendingly telling Latinos that the correct word, the one that keeps the upper-class progressive whites happy, is "Latinx" so please use it and suppress your actual gendered culture and language
"diversity" = every game or movie sooner or later trots out the totem of the strong-bald-black-female, paraded around like a minstrel show to embody all the tribal power of femininity that white progressive women need to feel, but can only do so through the fetish of the black woman's performance
"diversity" = absolute hegemony of a certain cultural niche dominant in certain affluent US circles, so that even something like the US bishops of the Methodist church will try to lecture and suppress the overwhelming majority of conservative African bishops in the conference, and tell them to get in line with very-white 2020s sexual ethics
"diversity" = every body configuration is the same, even in D&D your characters races and sexes are just costumes with no meaning
"diversity" = plainly evil and cynically profit driven corporations like Disney eat up all IP into a monopoly that embodies the worst ends of consumerism, but with one weird trick (a long series of sex / race swaps in remakes) the "progressive" crowd loves and defends this corporation like a patriotic duty
"diversity" = telling every other emigrating culture how important their lived experiences are, but actually believing that the traditional cultures from which most immigrants come are backwards relics to be eliminated by proper re-education, and a good use of NGOs to funnel the cash to remake their home nations
etc
"diversity" = every game or movie sooner or later trots out the totem of the strong-bald-black-female, paraded around like a minstrel show to embody all the tribal power of femininity that white progressive women need to feel, but can only do so through the fetish of the black woman's performance
"diversity" = absolute hegemony of a certain cultural niche dominant in certain affluent US circles, so that even something like the US bishops of the Methodist church will try to lecture and suppress the overwhelming majority of conservative African bishops in the conference, and tell them to get in line with very-white 2020s sexual ethics
"diversity" = every body configuration is the same, even in D&D your characters races and sexes are just costumes with no meaning
"diversity" = plainly evil and cynically profit driven corporations like Disney eat up all IP into a monopoly that embodies the worst ends of consumerism, but with one weird trick (a long series of sex / race swaps in remakes) the "progressive" crowd loves and defends this corporation like a patriotic duty
"diversity" = telling every other emigrating culture how important their lived experiences are, but actually believing that the traditional cultures from which most immigrants come are backwards relics to be eliminated by proper re-education, and a good use of NGOs to funnel the cash to remake their home nations
etc
MagiusNecros
Gilgamesh Fan Annoyance
And I also don't agree with you. Tough luck Chuck. If you are hoping I will present an essay that will change your mind forever it isn't going to happen. You clearly like games grounded in realism. And that's perfectly fine. But gamers such as Danjin and I do not find realism all that engaging and find more meaning in a video game that has a unique setting, plot and fun gameplay.
I will grant you realistic games are challenging. Challenging to get into. But that seems to be more a preference.
----------------
A question I would ask about diversity(which only serves to divide people instead of unify them) is are these political themes making the games play better? Are the staff involved talented at the job they are doing or are companies just hiring people that have certain superficial traits that have no relation to the job at hand? Probably not.
Seems more like this corporate agenda only serves to inhibit creativity as these corporations have clearly made secret handshakes with other companies for money. It's just that gaming is used as a media outlet to spread whatever message they want to spread.
Hypereides
Member
I really hope Teyon doesn't bend and compromise on their creative integrity if they choose to expand. If anything, they should rather analyze, learn and understand from their post-mortem on why and how their game achieved this success/adoration while standing their ground instead of submitting to unwarranted pressure. Their success most certainly did not have anything to do with injected political nonsense.
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rabbity-thing
Member
Gaf is in many ways an echo chamber. Seeing your opinions reflected in others doesn't necessarily validate them the way you think it does. You are lamenting uniformity of thought while nestled within the warm embrace of uniformity of thought.These mechanically repeated defenses that "gaming is just getting more diverse" (eg.
Game narrative are decidedly not becoming more "diverse" in any meaningful sense of that word. If you read the overall complaint voiced by many across this thread, it is a recognition of saturated uniformity across all corporate gaming.
It's all just preference. Like I said in my post. Gaming's a big enough tent. Play what you like and ignore what doesn't appeal to you. If you want to see, conversely, a contagious hivemind dangerously spreading, then I guarantee that you'll see just that. Echo chambers and confirmation biases will show you whatever you want. That's their whole thing.
Raven117
Member
Yeah. You are probably right with the sales figures dropping.
It may take a bit longer because video games can get by on gameplay alone… stories are often afterthoughts….
Some of those folks I think know deep down so much of it is bs, but there are some true believers….but that’s another topic.
crackajack
Member
That's hardly new, brainwashing inside a story.
What else do you think "moral of the story" were in all fairy tales? The grimm stories or any folklore entertainment are non religious but do pretty much the same as the bible, tora and quran, just outright calling wonders fantasy and applying kinda similar lessons to different situations.
I dislike stuff pushed down my throat, which includes eg Spec Ops trying to make me feel guilty for a choice I had no choice at all in or supposed bad characters being predominantly kinda good in almost every pseudo depressive but thoughtful often almost enlightened drivel. Characters should be flawed, even psycho- and sociopathic if a story requires it, not everything should be pushed towards doing good deeds and an happy or bittersweet forgiving ending for a douche criminal.
Movies especially the supposed blockbusters also are on a similar path. Only books and tv-show seem to take risks in having assholes and fucked up worlds where good is losing. Games seem to not want to risk offending people, ie not anyone, once you as a writer and game director hold back even a bit a ton of stuff becomes impossible, and the result is often too safe and the lack of a daring, boundary pushing identity is obvious.
What else do you think "moral of the story" were in all fairy tales? The grimm stories or any folklore entertainment are non religious but do pretty much the same as the bible, tora and quran, just outright calling wonders fantasy and applying kinda similar lessons to different situations.
I dislike stuff pushed down my throat, which includes eg Spec Ops trying to make me feel guilty for a choice I had no choice at all in or supposed bad characters being predominantly kinda good in almost every pseudo depressive but thoughtful often almost enlightened drivel. Characters should be flawed, even psycho- and sociopathic if a story requires it, not everything should be pushed towards doing good deeds and an happy or bittersweet forgiving ending for a douche criminal.
Movies especially the supposed blockbusters also are on a similar path. Only books and tv-show seem to take risks in having assholes and fucked up worlds where good is losing. Games seem to not want to risk offending people, ie not anyone, once you as a writer and game director hold back even a bit a ton of stuff becomes impossible, and the result is often too safe and the lack of a daring, boundary pushing identity is obvious.
Kupfer
Member
Is there a way to identify games which make use of ESG scores, like looking at the box and see : "Aaah it's ESG rated *something*", so I can put it back to the shelf and looking for a game without this stuff?
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StueyDuck
Member
Whoa haven't seen Craig in forever... I thought he bounced from gaming when the pink haired mob started getting riled up
Also in regards to modern game writing this video still pretty much nails it on the head
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whilst some of this stands, and does occur, I can’t agree with other parts. Alan wake 2 in particular, there’s no “sneaky wokeness” or agenda in that game. Sam lake just wrote the story he wanted to write, he’s a middle aged guy whose life experience informs his writing and character, no agenda is needed, particularly and conscious thought of “ooo how can I be super sneaky and slip in some political ideology, so subtle no one will notice”.
There is another side to this coin too, which I think is often overlooked, which I do think can be very detrimental to writing, which is the cost profile of games is so high, that risks can’t be taken; which can manifest in overly safe stories, and subsequently bad writing. And this means implicitly and intentionally choosing not to have a full spectrum of human existence portrayed from either ideology, as commercially you don’t want to piss off anyone one the left OR the right. This makes stories meh and forgettable.
At my own company we do an awful lot of self censorship, partly for that reason, but also because anything that is remotely triggering for anyone would go against the entire point of the product, and the content/writing is intentionally and needs to be “quite dull”.
One reason I think we see so many failures in game and film stories currently is playing it safe, and the need to try and please everyone (and in turn pleasing no one)
There is another side to this coin too, which I think is often overlooked, which I do think can be very detrimental to writing, which is the cost profile of games is so high, that risks can’t be taken; which can manifest in overly safe stories, and subsequently bad writing. And this means implicitly and intentionally choosing not to have a full spectrum of human existence portrayed from either ideology, as commercially you don’t want to piss off anyone one the left OR the right. This makes stories meh and forgettable.
At my own company we do an awful lot of self censorship, partly for that reason, but also because anything that is remotely triggering for anyone would go against the entire point of the product, and the content/writing is intentionally and needs to be “quite dull”.
One reason I think we see so many failures in game and film stories currently is playing it safe, and the need to try and please everyone (and in turn pleasing no one)
rofif
Can’t Git Gud
She says “white assholes” or aomething like that. For no reason.
But it’s not about that. It’s about her magical role in the game. She doesn’t really bring much to the game.
rofif
Can’t Git Gud
Cringe stranding might be cringe and flawed but it’s one of my favs because how original it is in concept and gameplay. And it’s just cringe. Nothing woke about it thank godYeah thank god we still have masterpieces of writing like cringe stranding and vaatyvidya recap number 345
But yeah modern AAA gaming writing is mostly terrible, especially in AAA games.
rofif
Can’t Git Gud
You are missing the point.
The problem is when character exists just to have this or that racial trait and for no other reason. Then they work against the story.
I don’t care if someone is white or pink. As long as they are real character
I’m no great fan of wokeness but this constant whining about it is just as bad as the people on (Great) Resetera whining about games not being woke enough. If you all clubbed together you could fund a QAnon game where you fight the blood drinking elites and steal back the election from Biden.
You obviously do care or you wouldn’t have made this thread. I think you’re just looking for an excuse to be offended. Hmm - that sounds familiar…
I'd say the writing is the whole issue here, a lot of the 'woke' characters in recent games are just plain insufferable and toxic, and you're constantly fed a stream of dialog that makes not relavence to the games story.
As for pronouns, pure bloatware. They add nothing to the game, especially since these games will often ask to enter your own name and will use that when addressing you.
As for pronouns, pure bloatware. They add nothing to the game, especially since these games will often ask to enter your own name and will use that when addressing you.
rofif
Can’t Git Gud
Nah. Not at all. It is clear as day what’s happening.
Eiknarf
Banned
Like Kamala ?
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Yeah and it’s just the latest fad. Why get so upset about it? People are already starting to get sick of it. In five years time it’ll be as passé as New Atheism.
Hypereides
Member
I genuinely support varied characters from differing background/origin, but modern day "diversity" comes off more like "selective exclusion" and forcefully inorganic more than anything. No to mention they some time have deliberately mangled unique cultural traits in the name of "progress".
Originally, I was very supportive of this idea from the get-go, but I didn't anticipate it to evolve in this direction.
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rofif
Can’t Git Gud
Let’s hope it goes away because it’s still intensifying. It’s just annoying if anything. I waste money to have agendas shoved down my throat
Flutta
Banned
These guys are about to change for the worse. Their new studio is somewhere in the US. The next Cyberpunk and Witcher Will be tainted with woke garbage. Believe that
I also believe that the woke push on Larian is inevitable.
When it comes to Japanese devs the push their is going slow but you can sense it in some of their games. Will FROM and Nintendo be forced one day to bend the knee? who knows..
StueyDuck
Member
It's an account made 3 years ago with only 8 messages...
Safe to assume it's an undercover account for a purple person or an alt of someone else who likes to troll
tommib
Member
I can see an Ukrainian flag from my balcony, in the south of Limburg, in The Netherlands. Why would they not be in New York of all places?
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I don't feel like games in general have a good record for developing complex characters and offering challenging narratives. Even Max Payne is just a caricature of caricature, wrapped up in snappy sounding dialogue, and is elevated by the paper thin plots of the games that launched around the same time period. Half-Life is lauded for its story yet I think you would struggle to write more than a paragraph about the message it was trying to convey, and most of the NPC lines are designed to be "funny" or "expositional" rather than communicate anything meaningful.These mechanically repeated defenses that "gaming is just getting more diverse" (eg.
Game narrative are decidedly not becoming more "diverse" in any meaningful sense of that word. If you read the overall complaint voiced by many across this thread, it is a recognition of saturated uniformity across all corporate gaming. You can't miss it; every single game now takes place against the same familiar current-year-thinking backdrop, the same narrowly restricted moral horizon and worldview, the same sense that its authors were born in a test tube ten minutes ago with no memory of even one decade prior. You can predict the dialogue lines about to be delivered by nearly every character, and you can know in advance who will be heroic or a villain by plotting their position on this simplistic moral spectrum of identities and victimhood.
If these games had "woke" dialogue in them and there was a similar culture war going on at the time, I am sure a huge amount of outrage would have been generated, and there would have been an outcry about the coming "uniformity" of gaming. When a title is unimaginative but inoffensive, we often forgive it. When it's unimaginative but offends our political sensibilities, the inclination is then to go back and try to find reasons to discount what it is doing.
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