It's maddening how much "anti-woke" stuff gets shoved down your throat trying to engage with gaming discourse

Funny thing is that it feels like there is no end. A few channels have pushed back, even at the ire of their money. And all the rest on the podcast were in shock. I recall a video where one person said if we don't like ____ why are we talking about it...and another said because insert agenda...then they said we brang that up lets talk about a good show...we like, and they all kinda looked like robots trying to calibrate for a unknown till it went back to...okay feed the machine. I sadly would ignore it, but negative discourse online has grown so powerful that algorithms push it.

My pals went from loving stuff to hating the same stuff they said they love and regurgitating stuff i know they heard from youtube to impress me given they never in their life brought up stuff like "well i just think it's poor writing that the ___ character is character assassination and not doing what they said post episode 2". Worst of all they get pushed back with evidence and say...well if you believe that. Just hate that this internet filled bot infestation for elections is forcing or helping towards people off the rocker.

A bit off topic, but i recall ign being alot more well geek culture (besides the babes era) in that they just allowed anyone to just discuss and most conversations were really in depth and about the game or show and excitement. Now someone will post i hope this game is good under a preview and get called a slur. Often it used to be trolling for giggles, then i think some bots got into it.

I remember and never forget how people (never watched the show besides one episode finale and thought it was...) watched arrow each week and talked on episode reviews. They all loved one character so much i just had to watch clips or something to get the hype. Felicity i think. I watched the flash and she was in an episode and she was cool. Come later she was the most hated thing in existence for them, all the writing was bad, the show was never good etc. It doesnt end there though, jump into (political or social political shows and its worst as people dont know their the ones the lesson is for) Attack on titan discourse about the ending...(not gonna spoil) the show went from beloved to hated (but in reality beloved given most still love it outside those circles of hate (it was the most pirated show surpassing live action series like game of thrones...yet people wanted to say it was trash.) Overall internet is like another reality and it's become (the start) mostly interesting to (now) ways to push hate and get grifts off hate. Look how much easier it is when i poll a negative topic vs positive and i notice that too. (what's the most overrated game vs what game really surprised you this year in a good way)...

I'll preface this by saying I'm a left-leaning non-American who generally find both sides of this topic to be unbearable non-sense.

What did people expect to happen after the videogame press and industry has spent over a decade pushing the liberal perspective ? Ofc there's gonna be pushback. Looking at this from a fairly neutral standpoint the amount of anti-woke content being pushed these days is still nowhere close to the amount of liberal pushback we had to deal with during the 2010s. And the right is still very much on the fringes and easy to filter out. I've yet to see any mainstream press site post anything in support of the anti-woke crowd. I'd rather have some manchild scream on his YT about pronouns than major news outlets writing articles about how there should be more black people in Witcher 3.

I have a weird history of engagement on the forums here. I don't read or post as much as I rarely watch Giant Bomb any more, but when I did post anything remotely "woke" it felt like talking to 95% normal people and an irrationally angry 5%. The culture war garbage being shoved down all our throats has a lot to do with algorithms, but it's also all the money that funds right-wing media "critics". The tactic seems to be to yell and scream about manufactured controversies, and then turn around and pretend it's a minority's fault for the yelling and screaming. So it's bigger than gaming, it's everywhere. Movies, music, there's no escape from these talking points. It's honestly exhausting.

For gaming specifically, I think there's just a lot of garden variety ignorance that can be spun into reactionary narratives. A lack of knowledge of how games are made, how much influence minorities have, etc. I remember back in 2014 reading these forums and seeing people say "well why shouldn't Giant Bomb have hired Dan Ryckert -- he was the most qualified candidate!" with very few people saying otherwise, or understanding the pitfalls of that thinking. That's not a moral condemnation of folks 10 years ago, that's just how these spaces were.

A lot of people playing or talking about games treat them as an escape from the real world, but somepeople's definitions of what breaks that fantasy or is "political" are very skewed because of real world nonsense. The bar for what is considered to be "pushing the liberal perspective" is absurdly low. And until that real world nonsense blows over or changes, we're going to keep seeing this looping conversation in gaming spaces. For my sanity, I just block certain videos on YouTube and move on.

@ares42: If you're actually left-leaning then you should understand how non-equivalent these things are. I'm kind of indifferent to whether there are black people in the Witcher 3 but I understand the argument that there should be. There were black people in Medieval Europe but even if there hadn't been this is a fantasy game. I guarantee that your chances of running into a black person in Toruń in the 15th century were much higher than your chances of running into a harpy.

But even if you take more extreme and offensive positions, like that people shouldn't play any more games written by white men, which you do see from time to time, it's not the same. For one thing the power balance is completely opposite, white men are in no danger of being denied writing jobs on games as a general matter, and for another the tactics are usually just rage baity articles on websites, rather than brigading, harassment, doxing etc... that the gamergate 2 people use. Sweet Baby Inc. isn't just criticized (which is fine) they are subject to harassment and attacks, and the right wingers know they are frothing this stuff up.

The idea that "there have been some bad lefty thinkpieces since the 2010s so it was inevitable that the right wing would initiate campaigns of oppression and harassment" is very off base. Those people made choices to be horrible people.

@lapsariangiraff: the right wing outrage campaign has been well funded for a long time, but was relatively easy to avoid if you wanted to in the past. The algorithm makes it harder, because you can't just not listen to Ben Shapiro or read publications that publish his drivel, you get it shoved in front of you regardless and are at least exposed to the headlines/video thumbnails even if you never click (which I don't.)

Ignorance and reactionary thought have always been with us and always will. But there used to be a greater taboo against it in some parts of society. It's much more accepted these days as just part of the media landscape. There are a lot of reasons for this (much of it has to do with polarization and increased extremism on the right, so a lot of horrible ideas have become more mainstream and acceptable to say.) I also think that a lot of the defenses of hiring Dan had to do with people liking Dan as a performer. Heck, I often like Dan as a performer. He was deserving of the job. It's a lot harder to think "but maybe there was someone else who was even more deserving but never even got a chance to show what they could do" than to just think "well Dan is great, of course he deserved it!"

@bigsocrates: You're saying people being upset about pronoun options in games is far different from people asking for more black people in a Slavic themed video game ? In my eyes they are both about equally silly and irrelevant opinions. But that's the big problem with trying to quantify which side is "worse", it's all subjective. I don't agree at all with anything that the right is talking about, and I don't disagree with anything the left is asking for, but I dislike the methods used by both sides. It doesn't matter if one side is the bad one or the other is the good one, or if one side is better or worse, they're both still making the topic a nightmare to discuss.

@ares42: Yes I do think they are different. Asking for more inclusiveness isn't hurting anyone, it's asking for a positive thing. The vast majority of the time they're not saying all characters should be black or trans or whatever, they just wish there was some more diversity (which there actually was in the time period.)

That's different from getting mad because someone else is being included. Asking to be included is different from asking that someone else be excluded.

But I'm really talking about the methods much more than the content. If the right wingers just wrote calm essays about why having to chose a pronoun bothers them that would be a different world than what they live in. Instead at best you get screeds that try to invalidate peoples identities and deadname them etc... and at worst you get a lot of actual harassment and doxing and the like that just doesn't happen from the left.

@bigsocrates: Remember what happened when Hogwarts Legacy came out ? That's basically what put this whole anti-woke trend in gaming into full motion.

@ares42: You're going to have to point me to what you're specifically talking about. A few people saying they would boycott the game that went on to be the top selling game of the year? That's what we're talking about? An extremely ineffective call for a boycott?

Because that's not equivalent. Right wingers are completely within their rights not to buy or play games that espouse values they don't agree with, like inclusiveness and diversity.

@bigsocrates: I don't wanna go too deep into it, but a fair amount of streamers got a ton of backlash for playing the game and someone made a website to track who had been streaming the game (pretty much creating the blueprint for the Sweet Baby inc list that came later). Plenty of websites and streamers avoided the game just to not deal with the whole controversy. If you wanna see some of the worst of it you can check out Girlfriend Reviews video on the topic.

The Witcher discussion in particular is a really interesting one because there are multiple factors that play into it. Objectively, we know that much of medieval Europe was more diverse (and unrelated to this, also more clean) than is generally shown in media. Not everyone was white. The Witcher was made in Poland--an extremely ethnically homegenous country--for a primarily American audience, which is at least an order of magnitude more diverse. The way that Americans conceive of "race" is historically quite new and somewhat unique to us, only around a century old. The medieval Polish would likely draw a distinction between a number of ethnic groups that Americans today would simply refer to as "white."

Ironically, this is a case of Americans (with good intentions) imposing their cultural values on art from another place in the world. Whether foreign art made for an American audience should cater to American cultural views or not is a question that can't really be answered, but there's a reason that people make the art that they make.

When I see a black elf or hobbit or dwarf in some fantasy media, I simply accept it. Complaining about it is fucking insane. At the end of the day, who cares? It's also really weird to be bothered when Achilles is rewritten to be a woman, or whatever.

An interesting wrinkle in the Witcher conversation is that I think Sapkowski kind of failed to really consider certain aspects of the ethnic makeup of the Witcher world to begin with. The Witcher world just sort of defaults to a basic understanding of medieval society where The Continent is clearly meant to represent stereotypical medieval Europe, meaning very white, while foreign lands with warmer climates like Zerrikania have darker skinned natives.

However, it feels like Sapkowski failed to account for the fact that humans are not native to that world. Humans are interdimensional refuges that arrived in the world only 1500 years earlier. They arrived to The Continent even more recently, having first been transplanted from their home dimension in other parts of the world and then migrating to The Continent centuries later. Given these facts, it doesn't make sense for this world to have the regional ethnic distribution of our world, which is the result of ethnic traits arising among populations native to different climates over a much longer period of time.

If there is any medieval fantasy property where it actually makes perfect sense for the ethnic makeup of the population to closely resemble modern multicultural societies, it is The Witcher. But Sapkowski just defaulted to "this is medieval Europe," probably without really even thinking about it.

@ares42: Hogwarts Legacy has sold over 24 million copies. It is now closing in on games like Super Mario Bros. 3, Black Ops 2, and Elden Ring as one of the best-selling video games ever.

If there is some woke/leftist agenda to shame and bully streamers, developers, publishers, and whomever else into playing only certain games with certain kinds of content it is wildly failing.

It's almost as if there isn't any large organized effort. Perhaps what you see is the work of small groups of passionate people who would like their voices heard more clearly on issues typically ignored.

@finaldasa: As I've said before I'm not gonna argue about which side is worse. I have my opinion about that, and I'd bet it's fairly similar to most peoples opinion about it in here as well. But that's always gonna be highly subjective. My point in bringing it up was to show that I think it's pretty safe to say that bad actors are not exclusive to either side. There might be way more of them on one side than the other, but they are both making enough noise to repel people from even wanting to engage with the topic.

I'll bite: I think having "narrative consultants" working on media is generally a very negative trend that runs the risk of diluting the art being produced. Obviously this has become a culture war issue because everything has to be in TYOL 2024, but fundamentally I think this is more about how art gets made. Hiring these kinds of people to change the game developers are making is basically just outsourced design by committee.

If you're making a videogame with a story and characters and whatnot, clearly you have an idea for how you want all of that narrative stuff to be. As a player, I would prefer to have the unadulterated version of that developer's narrative, rather than one which has been tweaked and prodded by people who tweak and prod for a living. Sometimes the narrative created by the developers will suck or be misguided or whatever, but I'd rather evaluate that for myself than to have these consultants proactively smooth everything out before I ever get the chance. Bringing in these people smooths out the rough edges, and in many cases renders a game which might have otherwise been narratively flawed but interesting into something more palatable and bland.

Deadly Premonition is a pretty good example, I think. Most people would agree that Thomas' character is not handled in the most sensitive fashion, but at the same time, it's interesting to see that topic handled by such an eccentric auteur as Swery, who comes from a very different cultural context. I firmly believe that there's merit in seeing those kinds of not-quite-right takes, as they can lead to interesting conversations that prompt us to better understand what we actually want in our media. It's also important to be exposed to these kinds of not-quite-right takes and learn how to handle them, because that's where a lot of people are in society.

I think a lot of this is rooted in the very black-and-white thinking that's become common in western society over the past decade. There's a big difference between a piece of media (or a person) espousing a hateful message and one which is genuinely just not quite perfect in their understanding or performance of the currently acceptable political/social mores. Outside of progressive social bubbles, most people fall into that category of "trying to do the right thing but are maybe a little clumsy about it." It's naive to pretend that those people don't exist, and it's deeply counter-productive to paint them as hateful or backwards when they get something not quite right.

I also think organizations like Sweet Baby Inc are enriching themselves riding on the coattails of the marginalized groups they purport to represent. If you think about them functionally (that is, why soulless, publicly-traded publishers are willing to shell out the money to pay them), they're the outfit that management brings in to proactively defuse any allegations that your game is offensive. In actuality, I bet that most of the actual changes or suggestions they offer are probably fairly negligible and innocuous; it's the act of hiring (and crediting) them to work on your game that matters. It's the same type of crass cover-your-ass mentality that leads to nonsense like Hulu pulling the episodes of TV shows that make fun of blackface. This kind of shallow identity-politics-oriented behavior doesn't help anybody except the risk-management people at the media corporations.

Where the Gamergaters get it wrong, of course, is their tendency to see a conspiracy in all this. There's no cabal orchestrating air-drops of token minority characters into AAA games. Publishers are just cynically pushing these diversity consultants onto dev teams because they think it will reduce the chances they need to mount a costly PR campaign to defend the game from accusations of insensitivity or offensiveness.

You do realize that this is a conspiracy theory too, right? That it can't possibly be the simplest and stated answer that people want to make more inclusive art and hire people knowledgeable to help in that process. That this is all just some money-making grift being forced onto creatives in the name of censorship and ass-covering by big wig company execs, despite the fact that a company like Sweet Baby Inc. works with a variety of game studios, including indie devs.

I'll just chime in and say, this is why having differences of opinions are good for dialog. Yeah, screaming into the echo chamber can be easy, but it makes for a boring conversation when it comes to important topics like this. Carry on...

@notkcots: There have long been examples of so-called "design by committee" or "focus-grouped" media having its creativity undercut or lacking a purpose and voice, but I don't think it's fair to lump all attempts at inclusivity into that group. Creatively bankrupt art is something that's been around for as long as there's been art, and it's not something that's come around just because of diversity initiatives. I know the GGers may think it's impossible, but some developers do genuinely want to create diverse and inclusive games.

I also feel that nearly all of the changes (or perceived changes) the GG types love to shout about are totally inconsequential and do nothing to shift the overall tone or intent of a piece of media. For example, removing that one transphobic joke from Persona 3 didn't ruin Persona 3 Reload.

Listen guys, we all saw those ladies kiss in Lightyear...well I didn't see it, but I heard about it. THe guy on the Youtube in front of his shelf of toys was very angry about it, so now I'm angry too. The internet was ruined the moment "regular" people could scrape together a living from it. Streaming, Youtube, eSports have absolutely ripped the soul out of video game discourse and online play, the level of sweat in Overwatch is ridiculous. It was always toxic, but the toxicity wasn't incentivized in the way it is now. There is an incentive to be a toxic anti woke rage baiter and there is an incentive to being a left wing video "essayist" who feels anyone who played Hogwarts Legacy must be a transphobic racist monster(I didn't play it..be cool bro). Both points of view are algorithmic-ally pushed, I just find the person ranting about transphobia in games far more palatable than the person ranting about it all being a Jewish conspiracy to make women in games ugly.

The internet was better when everyone didn't have a platform to easily share whatever empty headed nonsense they have bouncing around inside their skull. Instead of looking at actual issues and coming together to find real solutions for our societies ills, people would rather argue about how Star Wars is peak culture and the new trilogy is NOW the thing that ruined it. Everything is a mess, I'm in my mid thirties now and I really wish everyone would just take a breath and a step back.

@chaser324:

Indie devs, sure. It's very possible they're motivated ideologically to bring on these consultants and are willing to pay out of pocket for their advice. That's their choice, which is fine, although to my way of thinking if you're so worried that you're going to be wildly offensive about your subject matter that you're bringing on consultants, maybe you're better off just avoiding the issue to begin with and leaving that subject matter to developers who do understand it.

Publicly traded publishers are where I have serious doubts. They don't spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars unless they think it's going to yield material returns. I don't consider it conspiratorial to say that EA and Activision don't give a rat's ass about inclusivity except insofar as it translates into a fatter bottom line for their investors. I guess I can't prove that, but I would think that it's fairly self-evident that corporations pursue profit above all else. It seems naive to me to think that the recent DEI push in AAA games is somehow totally unique and separate from the overarching motivation of the corporations who publish them. It's the same thing as all of Target's pandering during Pride Month or Monsanto's tweets about BLM. If you believe that these corporations actually care about these causes and would part with the opportunity to make a single extra penny in order to advance them (not counting short-term expenditures to buy good PR), I have a bridge to sell you.

@brian_:

Agreed that the changes are largely pretty inconsequential. Much hay has been made about fairly minuscule tweaks to characters' facial renders and similar nonsense.

And you're right that design by committee has always been a thing, but bringing in outside agencies who don't actually develop games themselves to consult on a game's narrative just feels a bit weird to me. I think of it like developers using AI in their asset generation pipeline; it's not necessarily going to have a deleterious effect on the final product, but it makes me look at the game a bit differently. It's like knowing that a movie studio added in extra scenes that the director hadn't originally intended to be in a film; you're going to be thinking about it and wondering which scenes are new, even if none of them are bad and some, in fact, make the movie better. Inclusivity is certainly a good thing, but there's something a bit bizarre about it occurring so inorganically through these kind of for-profit consultants.

In any case, I think the whole narrative consultant thing is really a separate issue from the culture war stuff OP originally brought up, but it's nearly impossible to have a conversation about it without falling into these very polarized positions the algorithms are pushing. I'd certainly like to see more diverse and inclusive games, but I want it to come about organically from more diverse or cosmopolitan developers rather than from corporate consultants.

Unless I am seriously misunderstanding what these "cultural consultants" do, aren't they essentially just the video game equivalent of "sensitivity readers" for books? People who look at the story and point out when things might cross a line that offends people, particularly when that offense is unintended? It's insane to believe that these people have any real control over a game's overall narrative.

And, I have to bring this up every time someone mentions how soft/weak/pro-censorship/unable-to-read-for-context (take your pick) people are today: Mark Twain's works have been banned, debated, and edited for more than a century because people can't do media literacy. The internet did not destroy our ability to read for context. People in the past were just like us: they were prone to outrage and bad faith arguments and scorchingly bad hot takes. The medium of the internet and the technology of smart devices just makes it so that those arguments are deliverable, searchable, and shareable by anyone at any time.

@bladeofcreation said:

Not necessarily. Some companies have a variety of services they offer beyond just being sensitivity readers, including helping with any form of writing a game might need or even development. It's up to whoever's paying them to determine what level of help they want or need.

Oh, "people are just too sensitive these days" is another dogwhistle because "PC-Police" fell out of favor. You don't even need to go back to Mark Twain: "Fight Club" is one of the most universally misunderstood books/movies ever made. People didn't "get" when Doogie Houser came out dressed as a nazi in Starship Troopers that Earth were the badguys all along (I know the book's different). Before Twain, people thought "A Modest Proposal" was put forth as a sincere solution to overpopulation and starvation.

I listened to the Nextlander podcast on Batman (1989), and the funniest thing (well one funny thing) was: they played a news broadcast of comic book fans talking about the movie before it came out, and they were SO WHINY about Michael Keaton being cast because "he's a comedy actor! He's too small! I don't like it! IT'S NOT HOW I IMAGINED IT IN MY HEAD!!!!"

People aren't getting dumber, but they ARE getting louder.

@chaser324: It's also very, VERY weird/expected how the people who rend garments and shriek loudest about "artist intent" are the first ones to turn on an artist that doesn't "intend" what they want. People losing their minds about "Control" and "Horizon" because the artists dare to envision women who aren't sexy to their exact gaze.

Chiming in on narrative consultants specifically, I think it's a little silly to say that using them would dilute the studio's vision. For example, in a much less charged discipline, environment art is outsourced to third party studios all the time. Games are often too big these days for one studio to do everything alone, so they hire partner studios. Is it "diluting" the vision when a contractor works on an aspect of the game, totally supervised by the existing leadership, their work only getting in if it's approved? Of course not.

Similarly, Sweet Baby Inc writing a few lines of dialogue if a studio is short-staffed on writers isn't undermining the team's artistry and intent. At the end of the day, it's the studio who hired them that needs to approve whatever they create or suggest. There's no pressure. If the work is good, they take it, if it's not, they reject it/ask for a revision.

Now, if someone's worried about "design by committee," I'd look at the publisher micromanaging more than third party consultants/studios for hire. Those notes (with actual pressure) have much more to do with monetization and features they think they "need" to make the game profitable.

@undeadpool: I must have blissfully missed that one about Control, I figured Jessie Faden was pretty universally liked as a protagonist. and I question those that didn't think she was sexy enough because I found her plenty sexy in how she was presented.

I agree wholeheartedly, but she also just looks like a real-ass, "normal" woman. It was pretty tame, compared to how these things usually go, so it's unsurprising you missed it, but it really stuck in my craw precisely because the game kind of seemed to lean into characters who look like real people. Nobody's "glamorous" in the game, everyone looks like someone you'd meet in an office.

Cultural consultants in the same vein as SBI have been around forever across nearly all creative mediums...don't buy into any of the bullshit. It used to be CELEBRATED when a team wanted to tell a story and felt it important to get it as culturally accurate as possible.

A few thoughts I had when reading pt 1

@bigsocrates: I get how that can be frustrating & I hope it helped to vent. GB is a safe place for myself as well. I don’t post on the forums much, but your posts create interesting conversations & good reads when I have time to browse.

I had to google a lot (there doesn’t seem to be a bluey controversy? At least reddit wasn’t on fire when I looked lol), and I realized how much of this toxic sphere I seem to avoid by visiting only GB & podcasts for the gaming part of my brain.

@bigsocrates @brian_ @chaser324

I don’t really use social media at all except my YouTube, which is mostly music/psych/neuroscience/motivation/cars. I get some nintendolife coverage. Come to think about it, my focus on the switch & indie scenes means even when I get gaming suggestions, they’re usually not about the new AAA PC game (which happens to be where a lot of controversy resides). Most of my news of the AAA sphere comes from the crew here, so even the controversies are delivered with a thoughtful & inquisitive approach. Thanks, staff. :)

One thing I’ve noticed about YouTube the past few months is I will get videos recommended from new independent channels with not many views. However, it’s recommending music, not gaming. I get these indie bops & bedroom guitar solos with 30-3000 views. I read up on this in the context of music, and a lot of it comes down to YouTube’s balancing act of algorithms & discoverability.

I wonder if we are all experiencing this to a degree, and an indie video on a AAA game is more likely to be incendiary than an indie wrestling journalist or an indie band. That also relates to what you said about hate culture finding its way into gaming particularly. We can start by keeping this place amazing.

—

Apparently I don’t know how to tag ppl here lol

@bigsocrates: @AV_Gamer:

Just wanted to touch on the two examples of inclusion you mentioned, one being pronouns & one being adding black ppl to the Witcher 3.

One is representation, one is representation in a historical context. Pronouns are happening now, let ppl be who they are…the Witcher 3 bit I have a few thoughts on.

So, the Witcher 3 is a fantasy game, based mostly on the mythology of Poland. Which is a really cool mythos. And rare…practically non-existent in western culture. I have Scottish descent & Celtic mythology is mainstream. I have Austrian descent & that’s basically German (modern day Austria sitting geographically where the Bavarian heartland once was). But Polish mythology? The Witcher was cool creature after cool creature that I’d maybe seen one of in SMT. I know the werewolf & the faerie but a kikimora or a bruxa? What’s that? Autocorrect doesn’t even know. It was interesting to see something Polish for once besides a deli.

In regards to black representation in the game, Poland’s population is <0.1% black, and most of that demographic emigrated from the 1950s-1980s. So adding more black ppl to a medieval Poland setting just because seems silly. But also I learned something. It’s not that there were *almost* no black ppl in the game. There were *no* black ppl in the game. Most ppl here have heard of the Black Knight. The Black Knight was Sir Zawisza the Black. Yes, the black knight was literally Polish. Yet if you search the black knight the Witcher, the black knight in that game is Cahir, who is white & based on the archetype instead. Even if black ppl in that setting would’ve been rare, they couldn’t have put a badass good dude on a horse that happens to be black?

I also think it’s valuable not to lose sight of The Witcher being the first mainstream representation of polish history that I’ve encountered.

Hope that makes sense. Good vibes sent