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Well, like I said, depends what your threshold for bullshit is. I'm so fucking exhausted by it, I nope out the moment I see "Body Type" instead of male or female, or if a game lets you pick your pronouns. Is that petty? Perhaps. Am I missing out on otherwise good games? Once again, perhaps. I just fucking can't anymore. I'm tired. And yet those are increasingly standard features across AAA and indie games. Even a lot of those Switch games being held up as standout titles in a world of AAA slop are getting that nonsense.
It doesn't seem petty to me at least. I have much the same reaction. It's often not even because things are obnoxious in and of themselves, but because I know (given the current climate) that they are likely to be deliberate inclusions of politics. Like, 20 years ago I wouldn't have thought much about "body type A/B", but these days the odds are very high that someone made the game that way as a deliberate reflection of their culture war beliefs. And like you, I have very little patience for it because games (and other entertainment) are my escape from all the unpleasantness of the world. So when they push it back in my face, it's so much more annoying.
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I'll be frank, this does look like deliberately seeking to be offended by woke, given that phrasing "male/female" as "body type" is about one of the least intrusive things ever. Are you "exhausted", or are you hypersensitive?
One side of this political debate believes in consciousness-raising uber alles. They deliberately seek opportunities to shoehorn (and then brag about shoehorning) their values. They want people more aware of this stuff and why they do it.
It works. People become "hypersensitive" (aware) as a result. Some people appreciate it and go along, some won't. But they don't get to pretend it isn't a result of their actions.
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I don’t think so. It’s just that after a certain saturation point of woke, you just get tired of picking up a game that you just want to turn off the world for a while and play in another universe. Except you don’t ge5 to escape because the designer insisted that he can’t keep away from real world politics for 10 minutes.
I feel the same way, I’m rewatching old sci-fi movies from the 1980s because honestly it’s absolutely refreshing to jus5 see a story that doesn’t have to preach at you.
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Hypersensitive, perhaps. Deliberate seeking, certainly not. I can assure you that the reaction (to the aforementioned video game features) is as spontaneous and vigorous as the left’s reaction to, say, confederate flags and statues.
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You ever have the same argument with a family member over and over again for decades? To the point where the moment they slip in an oblique reference to your deep seated differences in world view, all those negative feelings come rushing back in. Especially because they give you a look when they do it that says they know exactly what they are doing? And yeah, the people who don't know might look at your (possibly restrained) anger towards what you know is a direct provocation like you are being over sensitive. But your antagonist knows exactly what they are doing.
It's like that.
Horse!
Mule!
Horse!!
Mule!!!
HORSE!!!!
MULE!!!!!
(Fiddler on the Roof, referenced by Slate Star Codex, March 2016.
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This is just the "what does it matter to you that we support Basic Human Decency, seems like you're the problem" gaslighting trick everyone's seen a billion times. It's manipulative and vile, and weird to keep using on someone who's immune to it.
"Our world-view is Basic Human Decency/Objectively Correct Reality; therefore, explicitly acknowledging it as true is un-remarkable, while disagreeing with it, or even not explicitly affirming it, is Shoving Your Politics In My Face."
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What do you have against basic human decency? What it looks like is exactly the same as wokes getting triggered by a nonmixed heterosexual family because it's a dogwhistle for fascist racism or something.
And if I were, in fact, aiming to manipulate, it's not like I would be cowed by you declaring that you're immune to my manipulations.
Who gets to decide what basic human decency constitutes. Your basic human decency many be "enabling the delusions and fetishes of mentally ill people" for others.
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Out of curiosity, what's your opinion of Christian Rock as a musical genre?
"Basic human decency" is an appeal to shared values. When the values are not shared, the term loses all meaning. Making an appeal to shared values when values are not shared is straightforward deception. Attempting to change the definition of "basic human decency" to point to some novel, bespoke value set you invented five minutes ago and which have no buy-in from even a significant plurality of the public is an extremely central example of dishonest rhetoric.
The history of the Culture War over the last several years has essentially been a case study in the long-term downsides of such a strategy. The strategy burns scarce trust that cannot be replaced, with woeful effects for the community in question long-term.
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Yes, that's the party line I'm talking about, thank you. It's an effective consensus enforcer, I'll give it that.
We're on the motte, if anyone of the two of us is enforcing consensus it's you and your plentiful ideological allies with the "party line" and "manipulative trick" dismissals.
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Show me an example of a woke person advocating for "basic human decency" for someone who they consider privileged.
No, I don't think you'll be convinced by any example of people I'd assume are "woke" advocating for what I consider "basic human decency", since you ask for such an example as if it's supposed to be vanishingly rare.
You think correctly and it is vanishingly rare. You're probably redifining "woke" to mean "basic liberal".
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See I care less than I did a few years ago. My politics haven’t changed, but I think I’m probably less afraid of these people than I was, so I’m more willing to accept it in the “weird quirks of a foreign culture” way.
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