As opposed as I am to the constant infusion of politics into media (and I'm quite opposed to it) this also seems pretty bad. Why restrict the streamers? More importantly, why would any streamer listen to a video game developer? Literally nothing is at stake.
What's at stake is the reputation of developer Game Science, which isn't great atm.
There was an exposé a year ago (https://www.ign.com/articles/how-black-myth-wukong-developer...) for leaked documents revealing sexism, misogyny, talking about genitals, etc. Apparently the lead creator is prone to saying stuff on social media, like "I want to expand my circle and hire more people, get licked until I can’t get an erection."
Those are gross mistranslations, and that article has been widely pilloried as yellow journalism.
The "reputation" of games companies is something these games journalists use as "protection racket" strategy -- whereby they obtain access/credibility/etc. by "protecting" the reputation of the companies for which they otherwise concoct accusations.
The strategy is a common media tactic today: 1) find some way of drumming up an accusation; 2) demand an apology "on behalf of" some group involved in your attack; 3) thereby centre yourself as the important arbiter of online drama; 4) profit from views/access journalism/etc.
The only counter-strategy to this is to ignore it.
Widely pilloried by Mark Kern, and really only Mark. Every followup article points back to them, or the single reddit comment he uses as his source.
Mark is not someone I'd trust to be even handed when it comes to people being sexist or not. There have been China based news outlets who have remarked how sexist the statements were.
Plus, he conveniently ignores the statement which isn't so easily misconstrued, where the developer claims Black Myth Wukong isn't for women, since they aren't good enough and should stick to sims games.
There's a pretty clear distinction between the following scenarios:
- A work of art contains political and social messages, not in the least because it's impossible for any author to wholly avoid coloring their work with political or social viewpoints. The author's experience and ideas do not exist in a vacuum, and will necessarily be a product of their time and environment.
vs.
- A work of art was primarily conceived to push specific political messages, and the actual "art" takes a clear back seat to the specific moral, political, or social messages being conveyed.
vs.
- A work of art cannot get funding unless it bends the knee to an outside group of ideologues who modify the work of art so that it specially conforms to the "correct" social values.
Please can we rollback everything to scenario #1 already? I'm starting to think that #2 and #3 are actively counter-productive and the pendulum is going to swing back too hard.
2 and 3 are and always have been counter-productive. You’re some kind of -cist or -phobe if you don’t want to listen. Normal people have normal people problems. Normal well-adjusted people don’t want to go to the movies, play video games, go to work, go outside and be constantly bombarded with what the “correct” viewpoint should be. The group preaching tolerance seems to always tend towards moral panic and intolerance.
The ship on changing the pendulum back to the average has sailed. A lot of people who’d normally be amicable to listening have been run off by the impossible constantly changing moral standards of the group pushing 3. It’s gone from “good to know” to propagandizing. People just want entertainment that doesn’t make them feel horrible. People want to be entertained without the feeling certain aspects of some movie/video game/music only exist to “convey the message”.
#2 and #3 were always there, just with different targets. You could easily get shut down for not confirming to (depending on your time frame and location) McCarthyism, the comics code, the wishes of the Nazi party, saying things the King didn't like, etc.
#2 has also been a thing basically forever, from "look how great $REIGNING_MONARCH is" to "hey look how screwed up our system for taking care of orphans is" (Oliver twist) to 1984, etc.
Your #3 is interesting because how this manifests with real-world media is the ideologues are typically countries of executives who don't want things like gay relationships shown and creators have to fight, often for years and years, to get their vision shown. But this thread is praising this Chinese studio for doing exactly that under the guise of being apolitical. So I agree with you wholeheartedly #3 is really bad, and creators should get to make the art they want to make and shouldn't have to censor to get into specific markets.
I genuinely can't think of an example of #2 that goes the direction you want. Because in the wider context I think you imagine that one trans character in the new harry potter game to be an example but she doesn't exist to push a political message, but because the creators just wanted to have some representation and piss JK Rowling off. But shit like Call of Duty or Top Gun where it's literally military propaganda making the armed forces look cool to increase recruitment is the strongest #2 that's out there. But if you intend any story that has a moral to be an example then we're back to "that's how stories work," we like art that has a point.
So this is a long way to say that I completely agree with you, I just think that most of the common examples of #2 "gamers" get mad at is really #1 where creators are just artists in a liberal environment and are inspired by a new archetypes of people they can make characters with or just want to see their own experience represented. I think it just feels one sided because one of the core attitudes of half the political spectrum is saying how useless art is and how not worthwhile it is as a career so almost every artist is liberal (source: my partner went to art school, I'm a red-blooded conservative compared to them goddamn).
I agree with your point on #3, but I think it'd be pretty disingenuous to suggest that your proposal for how #3 manifests is the most common way it manifests currently. In other words, at least in American media, it feels like it's the opposite of what you've suggested: media must contain gay characters, or contain characters who are not heterosexual in the traditional sense, and that other representation check boxes must be met. Now to be clear, I think what you've suggested for #3 is also bad. I think it's bad for outside forces to twist art to ensure it follows the "correct" social values, and I feel this way regardless of whether or not I agree with the social views present in a given piece of art. I also agree with that you the Chinese studio is not being a-political here, but instead is saying something more like "don't infect our Chinese social values with your modern progressive western values." I think people are forgiving of this mostly because they're so exhausted by the incessant push for modern media to have the "correct" progressive values. (I'm not suggesting that people _should_ be forgiving of the Chinese company in this case, but just describing why I think it's happening.)
For #2, I think it's a lot more of a grey area. In principle there's nothing wrong with a piece of art pushing its own social and political agenda, but it can become oppressive if it becomes too widespread or forceful. I can imagine that any era prior to the late 90s, the refusal to show anything other than heterosexual and traditional relationships on screen must have been frustrating for some folks, even if they did not have any issue with traditional heterosexual relationships in principle. The same could be true now: an audience could exhaust on having the same moral message crammed down their throat, even if there's nothing particularly wrong with the given moral message in piece of art when taken as a singular instance. A non-social and non-political version of this might be similar to super hero movie fatigue. The first run-up of Marvel films was a lot of fun, but after another decade of them and 60 more films (or whatever it's been) I'm much less tolerant of each new entry, even if I would have enjoyed prior to becoming so over-saturated. And, as I tried to outline in my initial comment, I think there are better and worse ways to go about this. Something like Pan's Labyrinth is aggressively anti-fascist and pro-feminist, but it's universally loved because it didn't put its message above its art, and didn't cram its message down its viewer's throats. It did not alienate its viewers by attempting to winning culture war points, but instead told a beautiful story.
Lastly, I'll say that I agree with a lot of your points, and I think hiding behind BOTH SIDES of this debate is an elephant in the room: people are leaning on principles, but often just find the speech itself to be objectionable. In other words, if they agreed with the speech then scenarios #2 and #3 wouldn't bother so many people as much. I think this is sort of unavoidable when it comes to contentious cultural topics, but I've done my best to stick to the "principles" side of things here. It's important to be open minded here, and understand that the free speech principle (eg: an artist is free to create any work they want) should be separate from my perception of the art. (eg: I really hate this piece of art because of the social values present in the art.)
This only applies to streamers who got the game for free.
I think this is a bad practice, but it's an already well established practice with 'review outlets'.
I remember seeing a yt video a while ago where a reviewer talked about the review embargo they received for some tech gadget(phone?) and how ridiculous it was. But in the end if they wanted to publish a video on lauch day the only option they had was to play ball with these rules.
Seems entirely reasonable. And something that more media companies should do. If you want to yell politics don't do it while showing someone else's product.
I think this is probably the right take. Streaming a video game is a legal grey area, and effectively the video game developer giving you the right to show copyrighted material for free -- a benefit with enormous value (given how many millions flow into streaming).
It seems a reasonable limitation that the game developer can require people profiting from their copyrighted works to do so with some limitations.
These should not apply to fair use situations, eg., parody/review/etc. But it seems highly plausible that streaming a video game is outside of fair use, and enabled by video game companies as a marketing strategy. For many video games, a stream of them replaces the point of playing them, so anti-fair use.
Any sense of entitlement streamers have to this IP I think is misplaced.
This feels like an inflection point where the Chinese gaming industry might start to dominate. The game is certainly popular and there's a lot of positive buzz around the gameplay.
A lot of people are tired of hamfisted messaging in their entertainment so I don't think the publisher's ban on the topics mentioned in the article is going to dissuade many of the target audience.
The Chinese gaming industry seem to make games for gamers, while the western gaming industry seems obsessed with unsuccessfully "converting" people that don't play games, as if they are some kind of untapped market.
Well King and Blizzard are in Activision, and at least some years ago in their balance sheets we saw that King has a similar operating income as Blizzard. Those silly mobile games rake in some cash.
One can also ask how Tencent and NetEase is buying up stakes in everyone if they were not making money. There cannot be that much free money from CCP...
Valve just announced that games existence a few days ago and it's still deep in development. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make based upon its count of early play-testers?
The gaming industry, regardless of where it's headquartered, is actually focused on aggressive, shameless monetization, and the Chinese segment were pioneers in this.
This feels like a more verbose version of "keep politics out of videogames", which ignores how videogames have always had political messages. Every call of duty game has been a commentary on the military industrial complex and war. Final Fantasy VII had an eco-terrorism group fighting against an evil corporation. Short of perhaps pacman, videogames have and will always carry a message.
Also, if this is how the Chinese industry dominates, they're going to give up a good half of their userbase. The streaming prohibition against feminist messaging aside, the leadership of the development studio has been exceptionally sexist and misogynist in their public messages. Even if you set aside the potential to misconstrue idioms (which even Chinese news sites have called sexist), they've outright said that Black Myth Wukong is not for women, since they're only interested in sims style games.
Most of the people I see posting about "politics" (not actual politics like elections and legislation) mean "anything I personally disagree with is political and should be shut down because I don't like it".
This applies equally to both sides before someone calls me a partisan hack.
Well said. Imagine if the Nazi regime had a "no politics" clause that they used to censor things that went against them. This is what is happening here.
Like maybe take two recent high enough production value games that have done extremely great doing this. Dustborn and Concord. Massive number of players of this large community representation. Dozens and hundreds.
Sell copies and have players? Isn't that reasonable metric for entertainment product?
My point is that two contemporary examples of games targeting and recognizing these new diverse groups of players have utterly failed. Indicating that either they totally failed in their marketing in informing that finally there is game for not gamers. Or there simply is no demand...
> Sell copies and have players? Isn't that reasonable metric for entertainment product?
What your argument was, was unclear. Not everyone knows what is going on with every game at every time. I personally have not payed any attention to either of these games so had no idea what your point mentioning was.
Counter Point:
Boulders Gate 3.
Overwatch.
Mass Effect.
Dragon Age.
Apex Legends.
Life is strange.
The list goes on
The fact is that there are a ton of games that introduce "politics" (diversity) into their video games that do just fine and trying to choose 2 as "failing" isn't proving your point.
They could just be bad games with basically zero hype or marketing, I knew they existed but barely knew they even came out.
The Wukong devs probably want the world to be more yellow if anything but you're so stuck in your western mindset that you can only see the world in a literal black and white, ironic.
I find it ironic that I now have 2 comments focusing on a single word while ignoring the other 3.
Also ignoring that in the phrasing for that message I think it is pretty clear that I am talking more generally and most of the people that are mad at "politics" in video games fall in that category.
At least in the US, which yes that is where I am from so that is my exposure to this particular issue so that is what I am commenting on. Never claimed otherwise.
> Gaming is probably the most diverse pastime on the planet.
Yes and no, it really wasn't that long ago that Dragon Age had their whole "straight male gamer" controversy because someone was upset at it having diversity.
LGBT representation is a lot better now but that is really only a recent change.
Non sexualized female representation has been lacking for a long time. Even look at Horizon, and you could find people complaining that in Forbidden West they made her face a bit fuller.
It is very easy (just look at this thread) to find people complaining about the idea of "politics" or diversity in gaming and who represents it. Anytime a female character in a sequel gets a less skin tight or revealing outfit it's "politics".
Yes there is a lot of diversity in the gaming audience and who makes the games. A lot of that is more in the open today. But it has not always been like that and for a long time it was largely associated with being straight and male.
Just look at comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41367392 and tell me that the gaming community is just fine. I fully acknowledge that those opinions are likely in the minority, but we see it a lot. I mean Xbox Live had a reputation (and still has) of being very homophobic in the Halo 2 and 3 days.
Your feverish set of comments here tell me that gaming has a lot of work to do pushing moral busybodies (CCP censors included!) out and bringing back places for people that just want to make and play games.
> bringing back places for people that just want to make and play games.
What exactly does that mean?
No one is stoping you from playing and making games. There isn't a law that says that every game has to be diverse. You can do whatever you want.
If you are playing a heavily story driven game like Spiderman, Horizon, or the many other games from Sony that are diverse and sell quite well. You should want it to reflect reality instead of a narrow view of the world. That is good story telling.
The ability to see yourself in media is a powerful thing. Something that many people take for granted since they are in a group that was already largely represented by video games, movies, tv shows, etc.
If you just want to play a game for the sake of playing a game, skip the story, play online games and just do whatever. That still exists also.
The community you insist so much on everyone bending over for is dozens, maybe hundreds of people. Two games were released that cater to this very audience and this is how successful they are:
I love that we again bring up 2 games that failed as if this is the only reason they failed.
When there are plenty of games with a diverse set of characters that sell just fine. First party Sony games are (generally) a fantastic example of this, that sell very well. SpiderMan 2 is a great example. Horizon, etc.
I already mentioned other games like Overwatch, Mass Effect, Apex, and many others that have diversity are just fine.
Simply having a gay character, a black character, a woman that isn't a sex object, isn't "bending over backwards".
I am sorry but you need to face the fact that gaming is no longer male dominated. That is a good thing. A gay person (or character) existing, is not "political" or shoving it in your face. At least no more than every single straight relationship that I see every single day in media my entire life is “shoved in my face”. But that’s fine because it’s normalized.
A man and a woman can be all over each other and no one bats an eye, but 2 men dare to express the simplest of affection and suddenly it’s “political”.
All of these things seem like "issues" facing nearly every subgroup or hobby I can think of. When is enough diversity enough? I don't think things are perfect in the gaming community, especially in multiplayer competitive online environments, but most of these complaints are leveled against most subgroups or hobbies that are traditionally male-dominated. It just gets tiresome after awhile because this doesn't seem like an issue with the international gaming community, but an issue with society. It's tiresome.
> instead of actually representing the community at large
You mean, representing what your idea of the "community at large" is.
There's been no shortage of games lately trying to represent your imaginary version of the world where white and asian people don't exist. Games like Concord and Dustborn. Why is nobody playing those games? Why aren't you playing those games?
> Here is a little secret you may not know. Diversity, includes also having white and asian people.
Does it? Why do I never see anyone complaining about a lack of diversity in the NBA?
> But those games are the exception, most games do not fit that category.
You're right, the majority of games take place in entirely fictional worlds that aren't meant to accurately represent any specific real life location or time period, which is why it makes no sense to apply real world politics to them, or to imply that they are all inherently political in some form.
> You're right, the majority of games take place in entirely fictional worlds that aren't meant to accurately represent any specific real life location or time period, which is why it makes no sense to apply real world politics to them, or to imply that they are all inherently political in some form.
You could just as easily say the exact opposite, they take place in fictional worlds so there is no reason they can't have diversity.
That sounds like it is just an argument to have fully white games.
But wait they are fictional, so maybe every character should be trans? Maybe gender doesn't exist. Because it's a fictional world. That is what you are saying. So if a game would do that it's not politics, it's a fictional world.
You're not justifying why a video game has to be a certain way, other than wanting to conform to your narrow view of the world. In reality you are justifying a game that, in your own words is an "entirely fictional world", can do whatever they want to do.
It is depressing that you feel like you are under attack by an increase in diversity. When all that is happening is the world is no longer catering to you (or me for that matter). But even with the efforts to make things more diverse, most media is still white dominated.
Honestly, I am done with this conversation. It is depressing that apparently enough people think like you to take what I am saying as an offense. To flag this entire article but also my post.
Diversity is going to happen, most people recognize the value of diversity. Your choice is going to be whether or not you will continue to be part of society or just be mad all the time.
> they take place in fictional worlds so there is no reason they can't have diversity.
There is one reason and it's the only reason you need: the developer wants it to be that way. If you don't like it, play something else.
If you want to make a game with no white people and full of political propaganda, you're free to do so, just don't cry when nobody buys it, as we've seen recently.
> Diversity is going to happen, most people recognize the value of diversity. Your choice is going to be whether or not you will continue to be part of society
And there's the classic progressive gaslighting: "everyone agrees with me except you, you must also agree with me or you will be pushed out of society"
I only became aware of all the bruha about "Black Myth: Wukong" after i'd already bought it and my first thought was OMG is tripitaka missing ????(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8_bNY_4VF4)
Anyhow the politics and commotion only exists if you follow twitter.
62 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadIt's nice, you all can discuss politics literally anywhere else.
Getting early access to the next game is at stake. It's the same "access journalism" playbook gaming companies have always run.
There was an exposé a year ago (https://www.ign.com/articles/how-black-myth-wukong-developer...) for leaked documents revealing sexism, misogyny, talking about genitals, etc. Apparently the lead creator is prone to saying stuff on social media, like "I want to expand my circle and hire more people, get licked until I can’t get an erection."
The "reputation" of games companies is something these games journalists use as "protection racket" strategy -- whereby they obtain access/credibility/etc. by "protecting" the reputation of the companies for which they otherwise concoct accusations.
The strategy is a common media tactic today: 1) find some way of drumming up an accusation; 2) demand an apology "on behalf of" some group involved in your attack; 3) thereby centre yourself as the important arbiter of online drama; 4) profit from views/access journalism/etc.
The only counter-strategy to this is to ignore it.
Mark is not someone I'd trust to be even handed when it comes to people being sexist or not. There have been China based news outlets who have remarked how sexist the statements were.
Plus, he conveniently ignores the statement which isn't so easily misconstrued, where the developer claims Black Myth Wukong isn't for women, since they aren't good enough and should stick to sims games.
- A work of art contains political and social messages, not in the least because it's impossible for any author to wholly avoid coloring their work with political or social viewpoints. The author's experience and ideas do not exist in a vacuum, and will necessarily be a product of their time and environment.
vs.
- A work of art was primarily conceived to push specific political messages, and the actual "art" takes a clear back seat to the specific moral, political, or social messages being conveyed.
vs.
- A work of art cannot get funding unless it bends the knee to an outside group of ideologues who modify the work of art so that it specially conforms to the "correct" social values.
The ship on changing the pendulum back to the average has sailed. A lot of people who’d normally be amicable to listening have been run off by the impossible constantly changing moral standards of the group pushing 3. It’s gone from “good to know” to propagandizing. People just want entertainment that doesn’t make them feel horrible. People want to be entertained without the feeling certain aspects of some movie/video game/music only exist to “convey the message”.
#2 has also been a thing basically forever, from "look how great $REIGNING_MONARCH is" to "hey look how screwed up our system for taking care of orphans is" (Oliver twist) to 1984, etc.
I genuinely can't think of an example of #2 that goes the direction you want. Because in the wider context I think you imagine that one trans character in the new harry potter game to be an example but she doesn't exist to push a political message, but because the creators just wanted to have some representation and piss JK Rowling off. But shit like Call of Duty or Top Gun where it's literally military propaganda making the armed forces look cool to increase recruitment is the strongest #2 that's out there. But if you intend any story that has a moral to be an example then we're back to "that's how stories work," we like art that has a point.
So this is a long way to say that I completely agree with you, I just think that most of the common examples of #2 "gamers" get mad at is really #1 where creators are just artists in a liberal environment and are inspired by a new archetypes of people they can make characters with or just want to see their own experience represented. I think it just feels one sided because one of the core attitudes of half the political spectrum is saying how useless art is and how not worthwhile it is as a career so almost every artist is liberal (source: my partner went to art school, I'm a red-blooded conservative compared to them goddamn).
For #2, I think it's a lot more of a grey area. In principle there's nothing wrong with a piece of art pushing its own social and political agenda, but it can become oppressive if it becomes too widespread or forceful. I can imagine that any era prior to the late 90s, the refusal to show anything other than heterosexual and traditional relationships on screen must have been frustrating for some folks, even if they did not have any issue with traditional heterosexual relationships in principle. The same could be true now: an audience could exhaust on having the same moral message crammed down their throat, even if there's nothing particularly wrong with the given moral message in piece of art when taken as a singular instance. A non-social and non-political version of this might be similar to super hero movie fatigue. The first run-up of Marvel films was a lot of fun, but after another decade of them and 60 more films (or whatever it's been) I'm much less tolerant of each new entry, even if I would have enjoyed prior to becoming so over-saturated. And, as I tried to outline in my initial comment, I think there are better and worse ways to go about this. Something like Pan's Labyrinth is aggressively anti-fascist and pro-feminist, but it's universally loved because it didn't put its message above its art, and didn't cram its message down its viewer's throats. It did not alienate its viewers by attempting to winning culture war points, but instead told a beautiful story.
Lastly, I'll say that I agree with a lot of your points, and I think hiding behind BOTH SIDES of this debate is an elephant in the room: people are leaning on principles, but often just find the speech itself to be objectionable. In other words, if they agreed with the speech then scenarios #2 and #3 wouldn't bother so many people as much. I think this is sort of unavoidable when it comes to contentious cultural topics, but I've done my best to stick to the "principles" side of things here. It's important to be open minded here, and understand that the free speech principle (eg: an artist is free to create any work they want) should be separate from my perception of the art. (eg: I really hate this piece of art because of the social values present in the art.)
I think this is a bad practice, but it's an already well established practice with 'review outlets'.
I remember seeing a yt video a while ago where a reviewer talked about the review embargo they received for some tech gadget(phone?) and how ridiculous it was. But in the end if they wanted to publish a video on lauch day the only option they had was to play ball with these rules.
It seems a reasonable limitation that the game developer can require people profiting from their copyrighted works to do so with some limitations.
These should not apply to fair use situations, eg., parody/review/etc. But it seems highly plausible that streaming a video game is outside of fair use, and enabled by video game companies as a marketing strategy. For many video games, a stream of them replaces the point of playing them, so anti-fair use.
Any sense of entitlement streamers have to this IP I think is misplaced.
A lot of people are tired of hamfisted messaging in their entertainment so I don't think the publisher's ban on the topics mentioned in the article is going to dissuade many of the target audience.
https://steamdb.info/app/721180/charts/
https://steamdb.info/app/2443720/charts/
Also, if this is how the Chinese industry dominates, they're going to give up a good half of their userbase. The streaming prohibition against feminist messaging aside, the leadership of the development studio has been exceptionally sexist and misogynist in their public messages. Even if you set aside the potential to misconstrue idioms (which even Chinese news sites have called sexist), they've outright said that Black Myth Wukong is not for women, since they're only interested in sims style games.
This applies equally to both sides before someone calls me a partisan hack.
Like maybe take two recent high enough production value games that have done extremely great doing this. Dustborn and Concord. Massive number of players of this large community representation. Dozens and hundreds.
Doing what exactly?
It isn't clear to me if you are advocating for recognizing a diverse group of players or to focus on a narrow definition of what a gamer is.
My point is that two contemporary examples of games targeting and recognizing these new diverse groups of players have utterly failed. Indicating that either they totally failed in their marketing in informing that finally there is game for not gamers. Or there simply is no demand...
What your argument was, was unclear. Not everyone knows what is going on with every game at every time. I personally have not payed any attention to either of these games so had no idea what your point mentioning was.
Counter Point:
Boulders Gate 3. Overwatch. Mass Effect. Dragon Age. Apex Legends. Life is strange.
The list goes on
The fact is that there are a ton of games that introduce "politics" (diversity) into their video games that do just fine and trying to choose 2 as "failing" isn't proving your point.
They could just be bad games with basically zero hype or marketing, I knew they existed but barely knew they even came out.
Also ignoring that in the phrasing for that message I think it is pretty clear that I am talking more generally and most of the people that are mad at "politics" in video games fall in that category.
At least in the US, which yes that is where I am from so that is my exposure to this particular issue so that is what I am commenting on. Never claimed otherwise.
This is a game made by a Chinese company primarily for a Chinese audience and set in China. I doubt there's a single white character in there.
Yes and no, it really wasn't that long ago that Dragon Age had their whole "straight male gamer" controversy because someone was upset at it having diversity.
LGBT representation is a lot better now but that is really only a recent change.
Non sexualized female representation has been lacking for a long time. Even look at Horizon, and you could find people complaining that in Forbidden West they made her face a bit fuller.
It is very easy (just look at this thread) to find people complaining about the idea of "politics" or diversity in gaming and who represents it. Anytime a female character in a sequel gets a less skin tight or revealing outfit it's "politics".
Yes there is a lot of diversity in the gaming audience and who makes the games. A lot of that is more in the open today. But it has not always been like that and for a long time it was largely associated with being straight and male.
Just look at comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41367392 and tell me that the gaming community is just fine. I fully acknowledge that those opinions are likely in the minority, but we see it a lot. I mean Xbox Live had a reputation (and still has) of being very homophobic in the Halo 2 and 3 days.
What exactly does that mean?
No one is stoping you from playing and making games. There isn't a law that says that every game has to be diverse. You can do whatever you want.
If you are playing a heavily story driven game like Spiderman, Horizon, or the many other games from Sony that are diverse and sell quite well. You should want it to reflect reality instead of a narrow view of the world. That is good story telling.
The ability to see yourself in media is a powerful thing. Something that many people take for granted since they are in a group that was already largely represented by video games, movies, tv shows, etc.
If you just want to play a game for the sake of playing a game, skip the story, play online games and just do whatever. That still exists also.
I don't understand what your complaint is.
- dustborn: all-time peak 83 people playing
https://steamdb.info/app/721180/charts/
- concorde: all-time peak 696 people playing
https://steamdb.info/app/2443720/charts/
Gamedev is a business and these projects clearly failed to deliver any return on the investment.
When there are plenty of games with a diverse set of characters that sell just fine. First party Sony games are (generally) a fantastic example of this, that sell very well. SpiderMan 2 is a great example. Horizon, etc.
I already mentioned other games like Overwatch, Mass Effect, Apex, and many others that have diversity are just fine.
Simply having a gay character, a black character, a woman that isn't a sex object, isn't "bending over backwards".
I am sorry but you need to face the fact that gaming is no longer male dominated. That is a good thing. A gay person (or character) existing, is not "political" or shoving it in your face. At least no more than every single straight relationship that I see every single day in media my entire life is “shoved in my face”. But that’s fine because it’s normalized.
A man and a woman can be all over each other and no one bats an eye, but 2 men dare to express the simplest of affection and suddenly it’s “political”.
Edit: I literally see nothing wrong with the comment you linked (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41367392). Is this what you meant to link?
You mean, representing what your idea of the "community at large" is.
There's been no shortage of games lately trying to represent your imaginary version of the world where white and asian people don't exist. Games like Concord and Dustborn. Why is nobody playing those games? Why aren't you playing those games?
Does it? Why do I never see anyone complaining about a lack of diversity in the NBA?
> But those games are the exception, most games do not fit that category.
You're right, the majority of games take place in entirely fictional worlds that aren't meant to accurately represent any specific real life location or time period, which is why it makes no sense to apply real world politics to them, or to imply that they are all inherently political in some form.
You could just as easily say the exact opposite, they take place in fictional worlds so there is no reason they can't have diversity.
That sounds like it is just an argument to have fully white games.
But wait they are fictional, so maybe every character should be trans? Maybe gender doesn't exist. Because it's a fictional world. That is what you are saying. So if a game would do that it's not politics, it's a fictional world.
You're not justifying why a video game has to be a certain way, other than wanting to conform to your narrow view of the world. In reality you are justifying a game that, in your own words is an "entirely fictional world", can do whatever they want to do.
It is depressing that you feel like you are under attack by an increase in diversity. When all that is happening is the world is no longer catering to you (or me for that matter). But even with the efforts to make things more diverse, most media is still white dominated.
Honestly, I am done with this conversation. It is depressing that apparently enough people think like you to take what I am saying as an offense. To flag this entire article but also my post.
Diversity is going to happen, most people recognize the value of diversity. Your choice is going to be whether or not you will continue to be part of society or just be mad all the time.
There is one reason and it's the only reason you need: the developer wants it to be that way. If you don't like it, play something else.
If you want to make a game with no white people and full of political propaganda, you're free to do so, just don't cry when nobody buys it, as we've seen recently.
> Diversity is going to happen, most people recognize the value of diversity. Your choice is going to be whether or not you will continue to be part of society
And there's the classic progressive gaslighting: "everyone agrees with me except you, you must also agree with me or you will be pushed out of society"
Anyhow the politics and commotion only exists if you follow twitter.