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"Woke" games (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago (22 children)

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.

In entertainment, that often results in some really annoying elements that I think we can all acknowledge are a thing after almost a decade of this:

There is a minority protagonist. Said protagonist is disproportionately a straight coded conventionally attractive white women in their 20s.
The only flaw the protagonist will have is not being confident enough
There is then a minority side character. Said character will disproportionately be a black woman obviously less attractive than the protagonist, or a upper middle class gay fuckboi.
If there is not one of these two things, a minority side character will be shoehorned in somewhere. The character will feel visibly out of place, and no explanation will be given. For example, they'll do some random black character in a fantasy setting that's clearly based off Scotland in the 1200s.
Important character goes on a monologue that feels like a political PSA
The IP's understanding of progressive politics and social justice is roughly equivalent to Tumblr circa 2013.
Absolutely terrible writing. Even if you swapped all the "woke" elements for generic entertainment elements, the IP would still be terrible.
Likewise, the IP itself is often put together in an extremely lazy and mediocre way. If said "woke" content was not there, it would be universally panned for its low quality.
Amazing reviews. All aspects of the IP get 10/10 from the "professional" critics. All the reviews are similar enough that the critics either collaborated or read off the press release.
The critics care more about the social justice aspect than the game itself.
You get the sense both the creators and the critics of the IP not only don't consume this type of IP in their spare time, but actively resent people who do.
Constant fucking gaslighting. Anyone who doesn't like this ultimately mediocre IP is either morally and intellectually inferior. This usually comes in the form of accusations of being a bigot, a Nazi, or a Trump supporter.
Bigots, Nazis, and Trump supporters will then try to recruit people who are pissed about the gaslighting.
At some point the IP itself fades into the background, and it just becomes yet another culture war battleground.

I think there's a reason Star Wars gets more shit for being woke than Spiderverse, or that Arcane hasn't become a culture war battleground in the same way She-Hulk did. The reason being those shows are actually good, and most people are happy to watch good shows.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Add on top of that that the games industry has laid off TENS OF THOUSANDS of devs in the last three or four years.

I know a lot of talented people who are no longer working as devs, or who have been job searching for months.

Of course this doesn't mean that the studios still producing games have narrowed their scopes, they just dump more work on the survivors.

And "woke DEI SJW snowflake game dev" is far from the only thing making games worse, it's just what a lot of gamers can easily identify as a problem.

By the time I left, my last industry job had been reduced to what felt like manning the slop hose of mtx store items made by overseas outsource studios producing soulless trash under fuck-knows-what kind of nightmare working conditions.

We started seeing more diversity in games because devs are diverse and wanted to see themselves and their friends in their art.

The problem has never been queer or black characters in games. It is, and always has been, the prioritizing of profit over quality craft.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I'd argue that forced diversity is primarily because so many higher ups don't give a fuck about gaming or making good content.

The suits just want money, and for some reason corporate thought that weighing in on social and political issues was a huge money maker in the 2020s. The journalists just want to promote their own political agenda and get ragebait clicks. The project director is someone with a corporate background but a progressive flair that makes them seem "hip" to the suits.

Meanwhile the people who give a shit, regardless of their identity, don't have a voice in the room.

I'm sure there are plenty of minorities that are super pissed about what happened to bioware, but the only way you'd hear from them is by looking at sales figures because they don't have a bully pulpit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

What happened to BioWare, in your estimation?

Who's this project director with a corporate background? Are you referring to an actual person, or is this how you assume the industry works?

Of course there are minorities who don't like Veilguard. No group is monolithic. I found two quite different critiques of the trans representation in Veilguard by trans creators, but yeah I'll admit I had to do some digging, not because I had to sift through so many agenda-pushing journalist reviews, but because youtube is absolutely FLOODED with anti-woke reactionaries pushing - guess what? ragebait content featuring thumbnails of the Qunari companion.

Complaining about forced diversity and wokeness isn't critique. When it comes down to it, these are buzzwords that wind up meaning different things to different people. This bandwagon-jumping VEILGUARD BAD, BIOWARE DOOMED shit adds nothing of value to games discourse. People who claim to care about games need to stop engaging with it and seek out or create constructive critiques instead, because it only damages the most human parts of the industry, not some corporate bottom line.

As for sales figures, it seems like it's doing just fine tbh, but I think you're wrong to assume that you could really find any sort of critical opinion by sifting through that data.

And just for the record, re: my first two paragraphs:

Over the course of development, the franchise lead writer, the EP (and actually maybe a second EP?), the creative director, and the art director all changed. This is extremely unusual not only for BioWare, but any game.

That said, the people who replaced them were not, from what I can tell, people with corporate backgrounds. They all appear to be industry veterans, many of them internal promotions and longtime BioWare employees. Go check the mobygames credits if you want to see for yourself.

Additionally, BioWare laid off "approximately" 50 people, many from the Edmonton studio, in August of 2023 partway through development of Veilguard.

Dragon Age 4 was not developed in a stable, secure environment. From what I've read, significant changes were made between the game's inception as Dreadwolf, and its release as Veilguard.

That the focus is now almost exclusively on the game's minority representation speaks volumes about what these supposed "people who care about games" actually value.

I wound up spending a significant amount of time today looking into the development history of Veilguard, and what actually got released, and what people have liked and disliked about it.

And you know what? I don't think it's an example of forced diversity at all.

I think a team trying to make a game under immense external pressures made something imperfect, but earnest and deeply personal to some of the team. And it isn't for everyone, and that's fine, actually.

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