I’d say a vocal minority do. A common form this takes is resentment over perceived “shoe-horning” of “politics” into games that “leads to bad games”.
The thibly-veiled bigotry becomes clear when the shortcomings of the game are attributed primarily to the diversity representation, rather than anything else, with the assumption that it would have been better without it. “The writing is bad because they wanted to make a political statement above all else.”
This becomes especially apparent when you consider that those same people would never blame bad writing in a game on making all the characters in a game heterosexual.
Some people are just straight-up haters, no veil necessary.
I can sympathize a little with people who had a romantic expectation for a character that they might have fantasized or self-inserted and feel disappointed or even betrayed by having their expectations subverted, especially if they had a strong attachment, as in franchise characters. But they also need to get over the fact that not everything has to be made for them. 95% of whats out there is already made for them.
Ironically, most of the people I hear engaged in gamergate/anti gamergate noise don’t actually play games. Maybe they did back in school, but now they’d rather listen to some podcast or like twitter posts for whatever team they chose.
That’s funny, in my bubble I’ve only heard references to gamergate recently from game developers in podcasts. I wouldn’t imagine non-gamers know what it is these days.
Huh, I did a quick search and interestingly, there are a couple mainstream news articles referencing gamergate re: recent anti-DEI in games. Lol I guess games really are part of mainstream culture now.
The people I know are nerds, but don’t play video games. They play ttrpgs or use to play video games and read comics. I brought up how EFAP seems to have a one sided feud with RLM to a friend of mine and he got really defensive of EFAP. This was a little longer ago, but when Battlefield included female models for the player, it caused a bit of a stupid uproar online that the ttrpg friends mocked. I think BF is a bad franchise, so I only commented that they should also include a bear option for the USSR. This was a reference to Woktek, not the more recent meme.
I got tired of hanging out with both groups who were more interested in complaining about shit then talking about what they do enjoy and stopped reaching out to them.
When you’re fine with taking a quote from a subset of a group and applying it to the group itself, you can make any group of a large enough size say anything!
nobody talked much about gay romances in baldur’s gate
but every bigot whined about Dragon Age Veilguard
tbh, i think lgbtq+ topic is just being used by stu#ios as a scapegoat, so the people would whine about it rather than how shallow the game is with or without “them gays”.
Yeah, people are mad about execs forcing shitty decisions into games, and are being told it’s “because woke”. When in reality it’s just that shitty checkmark-ticking games tend to have superficial progressive elements because some marketing surveys or the podcast the ceo heard last night said that people want a gay character.
Some (sadly kinda many) then also take that and start complaining about everything they perceive as woke even in otherwise fine games, when it doesn’t affect the game quality at all. Like the oblivion remaster renaming gender to body type (or sth similar).
execs forcing shitty decisions into games, and are being told it’s “because woke”. When in reality it’s just that shitty checkmark-ticking games tend to have superficial progressive elements because some marketing surveys or the podcast the ceo heard last night said that people want a gay character.
Is this even true? This always came off as gamergate BS propaganda to me.
I’m a straight, white, cis male, and I want more gay (and other underrepresented) characters in games. The more variety of experiences available to me to interact with, the better.
No one except the people involved can say for sure. But general game design of so many AAA games feels like checkbox ticking with no actual vision, and those games are also usually the ones that superficially pretend to be woke. Those games do also often sell pretty decently, because often the dev teams are still competent and can make something fun enough that is also safe enough.
It’s the same as with movies where they just get too big to fail. And then when a movie completely misses the mark, the “anti-woke” will blame it on whatever they think is woke. The vast majority of people I’ve seen talk about it said that the new ghostbusters sucked, but only the “anti-woke” crowd blamed it on the main cast being women. (I don’t watch enough movies, especially the bland safe blockbusters, to have an example i watched, so if this was some kind of right wing reviewbombing tell me - but most of my social media is fairly left biased so I’m assuming it was actually just kinda bad)
And it’s not like they’re wrong, most people will either like or not be opposed to some more diversity/some renaming of a menu option. Myself included.
And to be clear, I’m not saying that this superficial wokeness is making the games worse (or that it’s a bad thing - it’s a sign that the status quo is shifting a bit, and much like the overton window will help push it further). Just that the bland checkbox ticking games will almost always have these elements because it certainly won’t hurt sales. So it’s easy for grifters to say that’s the reason, and if they like a game that has any (superficial or not) wokeness they will ignore it or make up some reason why it’s ok here.
(Also to clarify since I sometimes refer to “anti-woke” perspective here so it might come off differently: I don’t use the term woke as a negative)
btw, i fucking hate that oblivion remaster wasn’t hated into the pits of hell. One of the most lazy, mediocre, UE asset store and aigen remasters i’ve ever seen.
What can i say, corpos played up their marketing game, it’s high time users learn to see their bullshit for what it is. Consume conciously, kids
Is it actually “gamers” saying this?
I’d say a vocal minority do. A common form this takes is resentment over perceived “shoe-horning” of “politics” into games that “leads to bad games”.
The thibly-veiled bigotry becomes clear when the shortcomings of the game are attributed primarily to the diversity representation, rather than anything else, with the assumption that it would have been better without it. “The writing is bad because they wanted to make a political statement above all else.”
This becomes especially apparent when you consider that those same people would never blame bad writing in a game on making all the characters in a game heterosexual.
Some people are just straight-up haters, no veil necessary.
I can sympathize a little with people who had a romantic expectation for a character that they might have fantasized or self-inserted and feel disappointed or even betrayed by having their expectations subverted, especially if they had a strong attachment, as in franchise characters. But they also need to get over the fact that not everything has to be made for them. 95% of whats out there is already made for them.
Ironically, most of the people I hear engaged in gamergate/anti gamergate noise don’t actually play games. Maybe they did back in school, but now they’d rather listen to some podcast or like twitter posts for whatever team they chose.
That’s funny, in my bubble I’ve only heard references to gamergate recently from game developers in podcasts. I wouldn’t imagine non-gamers know what it is these days.
Huh, I did a quick search and interestingly, there are a couple mainstream news articles referencing gamergate re: recent anti-DEI in games. Lol I guess games really are part of mainstream culture now.
Steve Bannon basically used gamergate as a fascist breeding ground, and a model for our modern political discourse.
I’m not even kidding. Just because you weren’t aware of it, doesn’t make it unimportant.
Edit: sources:
https://qz.com/901761/donald-trump-and-steve-bannon-are-using-gamergate-culture-to-attract-angry-white-men
https://www.axios.com/2022/10/20/gamergate-right-online-harassment-joan-donovan-meme-wars
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001/
The people I know are nerds, but don’t play video games. They play ttrpgs or use to play video games and read comics. I brought up how EFAP seems to have a one sided feud with RLM to a friend of mine and he got really defensive of EFAP. This was a little longer ago, but when Battlefield included female models for the player, it caused a bit of a stupid uproar online that the ttrpg friends mocked. I think BF is a bad franchise, so I only commented that they should also include a bear option for the USSR. This was a reference to Woktek, not the more recent meme.
I got tired of hanging out with both groups who were more interested in complaining about shit then talking about what they do enjoy and stopped reaching out to them.
When you’re fine with taking a quote from a subset of a group and applying it to the group itself, you can make any group of a large enough size say anything!
Gamers, posters, gaming press people, also idiots…
It covers an awful lot of people.,
It’s really complicated, and on per-game basis
nobody talked much about gay romances in baldur’s gate
but every bigot whined about Dragon Age Veilguard
tbh, i think lgbtq+ topic is just being used by stu#ios as a scapegoat, so the people would whine about it rather than how shallow the game is with or without “them gays”.
Yeah, people are mad about execs forcing shitty decisions into games, and are being told it’s “because woke”. When in reality it’s just that shitty checkmark-ticking games tend to have superficial progressive elements because some marketing surveys or the podcast the ceo heard last night said that people want a gay character.
Some (sadly kinda many) then also take that and start complaining about everything they perceive as woke even in otherwise fine games, when it doesn’t affect the game quality at all. Like the oblivion remaster renaming gender to body type (or sth similar).
Is this even true? This always came off as gamergate BS propaganda to me.
I’m a straight, white, cis male, and I want more gay (and other underrepresented) characters in games. The more variety of experiences available to me to interact with, the better.
No one except the people involved can say for sure. But general game design of so many AAA games feels like checkbox ticking with no actual vision, and those games are also usually the ones that superficially pretend to be woke. Those games do also often sell pretty decently, because often the dev teams are still competent and can make something fun enough that is also safe enough.
It’s the same as with movies where they just get too big to fail. And then when a movie completely misses the mark, the “anti-woke” will blame it on whatever they think is woke. The vast majority of people I’ve seen talk about it said that the new ghostbusters sucked, but only the “anti-woke” crowd blamed it on the main cast being women. (I don’t watch enough movies, especially the bland safe blockbusters, to have an example i watched, so if this was some kind of right wing reviewbombing tell me - but most of my social media is fairly left biased so I’m assuming it was actually just kinda bad)
And it’s not like they’re wrong, most people will either like or not be opposed to some more diversity/some renaming of a menu option. Myself included.
And to be clear, I’m not saying that this superficial wokeness is making the games worse (or that it’s a bad thing - it’s a sign that the status quo is shifting a bit, and much like the overton window will help push it further). Just that the bland checkbox ticking games will almost always have these elements because it certainly won’t hurt sales. So it’s easy for grifters to say that’s the reason, and if they like a game that has any (superficial or not) wokeness they will ignore it or make up some reason why it’s ok here.
(Also to clarify since I sometimes refer to “anti-woke” perspective here so it might come off differently: I don’t use the term woke as a negative)
thus we may derive that
lgtv+ is a psyop
:D
btw, i fucking hate that oblivion remaster wasn’t hated into the pits of hell. One of the most lazy, mediocre, UE asset store and aigen remasters i’ve ever seen.
What can i say, corpos played up their marketing game, it’s high time users learn to see their bullshit for what it is. Consume conciously, kids
“”““gamers””“”
Since gamergate “gamers” in this context stands for the most vocal and bigoted group of people.
Not the majority, I’d wager