I don’t know if this is a hot take, but I think allowing straight and cis people to identify as such is appropriate, because the alternative assumes that we live in a state of default heteronormativity.
If anything, I want to live in a world where homophobes get mad that if they want to be assumed to be straight online they have to identify like anyone else. No one gets assumed to be straight any more. That’s better imo.
No shade to my Ace friends intended. Totally possible to be horny for art or rock collecting or whatever. Doesn’t have to be a sexy thing. I’m horny for none of the above is totally valid.
heh, this totally reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s dwarves, that spend a lot of time trying to find out what’s under the beard of the other first without asking that akward question xD
as an almost maximally privileged person (cis straight etc), i want my whining fellows to shut the fuck up. Just stop. Stop taking up all the god damn space. Just be quiet. It’s okay not to be included in every scene all the time.
Your point about not assuming people are straight by default is valid. But I mostly just want some cis-het folks to stop embarrassing me by being fucking insufferable.
Calling Warcraft Rumble an RTS is like putting a hamburger patty on a plate and calling it a steak. You’re technically correct, but you’ve also completely missed the point in what people want.
One of those games I intended to check out for a couple hours, but have spent way longer than I’m willing to admit chilling and chatting while in between things.
No, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Politics are good in games when done right, but they can also be nothing more than a distraction when the narrative has huge errors or lacks and depth in general.
It’s the concept of pushing real world politics in games that is the problem.
Sometimes they can overlap, but they needn’t to. Some things are just obviously pushing the agendas of developers, instead of making it feel like a legit part of the game universe.
Not just in games, but often times the point of the story’s fake politics is to be a parable for real politics. But that’s also the fun of it, even if you disagree with the story’s intended message.
Elves being racist towards dwarves is acceptable in a game, but white humans being racist towards hispanic humans is “pushing agendas”?
I fault Bioware for a lot of things, but failing to invent a fantasy equivalent of the concept of gender is not one of them. Not everything needs to be moved to an otherworldly analogy just to avoid hurting the feelings of bigots.
This isn’t right either. Inserting politics into anything serves that that up for discourse, and getting people discussing and thinking critically about a topic is a fantastic achievement for any medium that delves into the subject.
It’s when partisan messages about politics are inserted into a game that poses problems. Instead, video games should explore as many takes on an issue as capable in service to the story being told. Wow, it’s terrible that the horned people are aholes to the perfectly normal looking people, but how did that come to be? Is there any historical precedent where the shoe was on the other foot? I think of Jews and how 70 years ago they were facing extermination at the hands of Germans find themselves now in the position of the exterminator. How did that happen? That’s great material for exploring politics in games, to me.
In a world that is controlled almost entirely by heteronormativity, policing straight representation in a queer-friendly game made by a queer developer does not seem like an equivalent situation at all.
Alternatively: people have gone out of their way to foster a space where LGBTQIA+ people feel comfortable. In a world full of heteronormativity, this is a bubble where they can truly be themselves. It’s one of the few places where a gay dude can flirt with another dude, without the fear of being punched in the mouth just for being gay.
And then a straight guy walks into the gay bar, and starts a fight when another dude tries to flirt with him. He starts ranting about how it’s not okay to assume he’s gay, and that he feels oppressed for being straight. He wants the heteronormativity to extend even into LGBTQIA+ spaces, despite the fact that he could go to literally any other bar in town and not have this issue. Instead, he has chosen to make a scene at the gay bar, because he’s upset it’s a gay bar.
Nobody normal complains about politics in games, what people complain about is poor writing and US cultural idiosyncratic defaultism in games. Perhaps if ESA members hadn’t laid off the lion’s share of adult writers in the room to hire cheap, overwhelmingly ignorant, uneducated and straight out of college dev teams with a superiority complex, we could get good narratives. There’s a reason why everyone and their mothers keeps harping about indie games now, that’s where the laid off talent went, they make independent games now. But it’s cheaper to take “journos” to Disneyland than keeping a roster of devs with 10+ years experience. In the past, there was already a backlash on journos for their habitual prostitution to the companies they cover but that message was quickly erased in favour of “gAmErS aRe MiSoGyNiStIc”. Now, most traditional game news outlets are owned by a handful of holding companies, and most of their articles are AI generated drivel by, you guessed it, people not holding journalism degrees. Gaming journalism has become the off ramp of untalented and incompetent language/social science majors who are too inept to actually find a job in their field. That’s why we get this level of shitty journalism, because technically, they really don’t know what being a journalist is, from the ethics standards to the reporting without inserting personal bias. No self respecting journalist chooses covering hatsune miko’s latest release when there are so many conflicts in the world that need covering, so we get Felicity, Mars and Bruno, English major extraordinaires, who end up on a dead end career with wages capping at below 40k pounds per anum that justify their lack of journalistic ethics by “It’s the perk of the profession since we don’t get well paid”.
There were more articles covering game character sexuality than the mass lay offs of the last two years that left entire families without sustenance. Then people are surprised that orange nazi cheeto gets elected by the dumb yanks? The megaphone holders for social issues have room temp level IQ. When was the last time that a “game journo” or major dev from a AAA outlet seriously addressed relevant issues like social inequality or poverty? Do yourself a favour and compare the google interest in the topics “transgender”, “hunger”, “unionization” and “lay offs” and tell me that it isn’t by design that an issue that affects an infinitesimally small percentage of the population has so much air time in comparison to an ongoing genocide and hunger crisis in the global south. I guess rich white teen problems are more serious than brown people dying. The bourgeois left has set back the class struggle for 100 years. Enjoy the hard right turn of modern western society.
Edit: Jason Schreier is a good example of how to conduct yourself, he mostly keeps his private ideas to his social media but his work focuses on more relevant issues to a majority of the population.
Both GPT4 and Gemini estimate a 3:2 ratio between articles addressing video game character sexuality and those addressing lay offs and unionization in the games industry.
I won’t continue this discussion because “Schreier’s politics come out in his writing as well as social media. The drum he’s been beating for a long time has been about labor and unionizing.” is basically what I wrote on Schreier using more words, which indicates you’re more interested in being a confrontational than engaging in an honest discussion on the topic. Enjoy the Cheeto for 4y.
If you want to talk about an honest discussion, consider the sample set you plugged into your search. You didn’t go through two years of articles on VGC or GameSpot. You plugged indiscriminate search criteria into an AI. We just had a discussion a few days ago about how mainstream media is not covering major gaming news, but if you’re reading gaming news outlets, it’s been layoffs for the past two years dominating the news. Gaming news outlets would have very little reason to ever use the word “hunger”, for instance, and “transgender” would apply to far more articles than those about fictional characters.
Ai, google trends in english, what else does one need? Even after I gave precise google trends inputs so that the observations are reproducible? Your reply proves my point yet again. Peace.
I see you have a 10 days old account. I can’t imagine why you had to create a new one… This one won’t last long, ironically you can go to r/gamergate and feel accepted.
Yes yes, whatever illusion you created in your head to make me some kind of monstrous being because I dared question the ubiquitous distortion of the class message in favour of bourgeoisie invented flags. I’m also the boogey man on my free time. It’s funny, all the replies I got fit just in line with the ones I’d get in r/conservative every time I shared climate change evidence.
But of course you’re DARED question the distortion of the class message… By complaining about diversity in video games…?
The funny thing is how everything you said so far would fit in a conservative forum, reddit or otherwise. It seems that’s where you have you go to find people agreeing with you. Should make you think (but it won’t)
You must be salty, coming back two days after. Did you practice the perfect answer in the mirror?
At least now it’s not ChatGPT! Anyway, I’m sure Bernie is not going to be bitching about too many blacks and gays in videogames (he’s not an incel after all), so I’ll assume this is yet another non argument.
What point have you raised? You bitched that there is too much diversity in games and used an LLM as proof. You mentioned a few games that had failed… So? Concord failed when overwatch was a success, with much more diversity. Hades, Persona, final fantasy rebirth, Hogwarts legacy … Those are the games I played in the past few months with much more diversity than your examples, and successful. The likes of you claimed those games were doooooooooomed and then proceeded to shut up when people played them.
Then started telling that those who disagree with you sound like redditors and conservatives and send a Sanders video. How can you complain about red herrings if everything you do is rant and go on tangents?
You’re also the one who somehow couldn’t shake this conversation for your brain and had to come back. If that’s not a sad fucking life, I don’t know what is. What a sad, miserable existence you have you have, really.
I can’t say I enjoyed this conversation even though at least I could laugh at you a bit.
The original comment is still available. At no point did I complain about diversity in games, I complained about incompetence in games and lauded indie games. I see you’re having a Quixotic moment and are arguing with a figment of your imagination. In fact, one could argue my point is the exact opposite, clumsy amateurish depictions of diversity do not do the importance of the topic justice. I understand not everyone can be as talented as Naughty Dog (Amy Henning is the GOAT) but at least something passable would be desirable. Keep fighting windmills.
I’d even consider the possibility he’s right, but not for reasons that support his argument.
Games and media present transgender and minority groups in an unobtrusive way, and bigots create 17 articles complaining about their basic inclusion for the sake of “DEI”.
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Aktywne