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Lets head this off at the pass: is wokeness ruining western games, while chad east asians just remain shameless? My own answer is: Wokeness seems to magnify the problems in bad engagement loops, making the poor underpinnings of the material especially evident and creates a failure cascade.
I don't think we need to delve into what media passes the smell test for Wokeness. saltierthancrait and other refugees from normie fandoms all complain that they actually do like 'Diverse Media' like Andor, Arcane, Balduts Gate 3, but thats missing the point.
The point is that Diverse Media typically has poor core engagement loops, leaving its flaws especially glaring to see. Rings Of Power was a terrible concept to begin with and it failed to hook with girlboss galadriel, making the decent performance of beardless dwarf lady inconsequential within that sea of garbage. Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League is speedrunning fan disappointment with terrible skins and character expansions on top of a mediocre gameplay loop hanging on the scaffolding of a bad narrative thesis. The greatest contrast can probably be seen in the difference between Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda. There are criticisms about Peebee being shrekified and amazon lesbian reverse colonizer Karen, but those are secondary to a mediocre core gameplay loop on a once again thin narrative skeleton. Mass Effect 3 was already wearing out its welcome and had too many additional gay romances, but it at least limped Commander Shepards ending across the finish line. Andromeda shit itself right out the gate and just wheezed out in the open for all to see, forgotten and decaying.
So why are Asian games/media 'successful'? For one there is a shitload of it, since Asia is gigantic and the northeast trifecta churns out tonnes of garbage that does not meet the escape velocity to catch western attention. Secondly, they mechanize skinner box loops in a predatory manner that makes Blizzard blush. The dopamine optimization mechanics Asian game gacha unboxing are reinforcing rewards for the core gameplay loops of explore to kill enemy by test of will or see number go up by minmaxing your gacha rolls.
For skill based games, Asia hardly has a monopoly on it, but I do agree that the sauce has been diluted in the west. Doom is probably the only AAA kinetic skillfest that hits the same dopamine hit of Elden Ring or Stellar Blade or BM Wukong (though the bitching I've seen on weibo sees some players blame optimization failures on difficulty spikes). I don't think the open world action RPG Assassins Creed clones have the sauce anymore, with even good games like God Of War getting a bit bloated with sequelitis trash.
So where does wokeness fit into this? Fundamentally, if a game looks like it doesn't have the sauce, wokeness is the fastest exploitable gap to get more eyeballs to dissect the game and expose all its flaws Dragon Age Veilguard put the blandest most soyface qunari as its trailer thumbnail, on top of it actually being a bad trailer full of Quirky Character Introductions, so much so that Bioware scrambled to release a gameplay preview to shore up the damage... and that gets picked apart by butthurt fans looking for flaws. Without the wokeness, the gameplay trailer would not have attracted so much scrutiny. If anything, attacking Noticers of wokeness in media seems to be the indicative failure signal for public consumption: it means there is nothing redeeming to otherwise direct attention to.
Finally I will say that wokeness is all negative feedback loops, no upside. Girlfriend Reviews got fucking terrorized for daring to cover Harry Potter on her channel, Lindsay Ellis got hounded off the internet for an inoffensive video on Raya The Last Dragon, etc. Solid work can weather some crazies, like how Hbomberguy and Sarah Z have no issues with the Sherlock Fandom, and my queen Jenny Nicholson has torn down woke and unwoke media alike to great delight, but that skill ceiling is hard to achieve. By contrast, shamelessness is an easy path to attention in this starving market, and Stellar Blade, Nikke or other shameless games witb decent gameplay loops saw a bump when they catch the fleeting attention of shameless streamers.
Asians don't actually have the Sauce for excellent media (Korean grindfests and Japanese cash shop meta breakers are still notoriously bad tropes), but the lack of political presshre to force enshittification elements means smaller mistakes can escape notice.
It's a matter of cultural differences. In Japan, I assume you're considered a wokescold if you say that the emperor gave permission for the attack on Pearl Harbor or that the imperial dynasty has Korean roots in part or that the imperial armed forces forced Korean women to be their barrack whores or that the Korean minority is discriminated against in Japan etc. These arguments may be hugely controversial there, but are of little consequence to a Westerner, so if an exported Japanese cultural product of any sort includes them, Western consumers will not identify any of this as woke.
It never really comes up, though. At least as far as I've seen (I don't have a huge social circle) there's no Japanese equivalent to the wokescold who takes smug pleasure or moral gratification in bringing up controversial topics. If something is controversial people just don't talk about it.
In Japanese media, the closest to that you'll likely get is Japanese right-wing themed focus on re-militarization.
If you want a hilarious example of this, check out Deep Blue Fleet. Basic premise is that when Yamamoto was assassinated in WW2, instead of dying he got isekai'd into... his younger self in 1905 with all of the knowledge of what would happen. He rapidly modernizes the Japanese fleet (including creating a bunch of submarine aircraft carriers, which is where the title of the anime comes from) and Japan basically dominates the world.
Absolutely hilarious revanchist slop, but a fun insight into the mindset of revanchist Japanese anime nerds.
Oh, sure, but AFAIK it’s not being done to troll the pacifists, it’s because nationalistic military nerds like it when their country conquers the world.
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Look the woke-scolds have their problems, but just being woke doesn't disqualify you from creating great art. If anything, great artists are notorious for associating themselves with questionable movements through the ages.
Take some of the best western games of the last decade - Borderlands 2 or the God of War reboots. They were written by a famously woke cuck. The games were still great. Larian studios of divinity original sin and Baldurs Gate 3 fame allow characters in their games to date and fuck any gender, race, creature you like.
The things that makes woke-scolds bad at games is the 'scolds' part. HR ladies of any kind, make horrible games. Just being woke......well, it's a mental affliction. But, mental afflictions tend to be positively associated with good art.
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Pet peeve, but you mean vicious circles, a negative feedback loop is when a system has a tendency to reduce its own fluctuations. Like a thermostat.
“Positive feedback loops” could also be apropos, if the claim is that the system amplifies its disturbances.
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