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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

My position isn’t rooted in a denial of history but in the belief that games, music, and films are creative, self-contained domains to be enjoyed on their own merits—not as platforms for political messaging.

The issue here is that every time I see someone complaining that a game is “woke” is when suddenly there are gay people, or people of colour, or women not looking like a hooters waitress in the game. And the reality here is that this isn’t being woke, it’s that the game is being based on reality. Gay people exist, always have, so do people of colour, and women of all types and men too. The people that make it political are the people that don’t want to see the real world and the people in it.

Now, I don’t know what you feel is “woke” and I’m not saying this is directed at you, but just because there are people that don’t fit some preconceived mold, and they are included in a game, doesn’t make it magically political.

A game that’s got well written characters representing minorities or which includes political theming and executes it well (e.g. Bioshock, Fallout 2 or Disco Elysium) is more woke than any other. That kind of game’s core concept is to make a strong point about structural injustice in society.

Games with token representation or the plot is thin but the main character is a woman so you’re sexist of you don’t buy it are generally not woke at all. They’re only pretending to be as a marketing strategy. They’re not doing anything to make anyone think about structural injustice in society, and are instead appealing to the common don’t be horrible to groups that it was normal to be horrible to decades ago that their market research team determined were already agreed with by most of their potential customers. It’s just capitalism noticing that mysogynists etc. are no longer the largest demographic and being very unsubtle when signalling that the product thinks women are people.

There are a small number of very vocal people who complain about both kinds of game. They don’t want people to acknowledge that treating women as people is now the default, but even more than that, they don’t want people to play Bioshock as then if they’re shown anything by Ayn Rand, they’ll be immediately able to spot the flawed logic on her philosophy. They’re careful to make sure to present it as if they’re only complaining about the virtue-signalling-as-marketing kind as everyone recognises that they’re generally crap, so it makes it look like they’re making a reasonable argument. It also means people amplify the argument, but by using phrases like woke instead of badly written it makes it easier to correctly label well-written games containing politics they disagree with as woke, too, and have people make the association with being badly written annoying slop by themselves, without having people who’ve played the game point out that it is well-written and someone saying otherwise is an idiot.

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.

Shaun hits a lot of my major concerns in his new video.

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.

good characters who happen to be (whatever)

There it is!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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?

Oh, I like you.

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.

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.