site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26468 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Is the video game industry woke? Or are you just updating on a few high profile titles?

As others have pointed out, Japanese games are largely not woke. The big mobile titles and Mihoyo stuff coming out of China are very much not woke. Indies are rarely woke. Eastern Europe and similar nations largely don't produce woke stuff.

So we're largely talking about AAA/AA titles from the larger publishers in NA and Western Europe. How many of their titles are woke? Is Call of Duty woke? Fortnite? FIFA/Madden/NBA?

Before we dive into other titles, we need to define what is and isn't a woke game. Something like recent (indie) flop Dustborn is clearly, explicitly woke, but most titles aren't nearly so clear cut. The biggest seller of 2023 was Hogwarts Legacy. Is this a woke title? Supposedly it had a very diverse cast for 19th century England, but Rowling's reputation has become poison amongst woke-types, so much so that there was a big backlash against the game.

How about Battlefield V? I recall there was a furore around the announcement trailer because one of the main characters was a 'girlboss' in WW2. But as far as I'm aware there wasn't much else that would be woke in there. Is a single character enough to make a game woke or not?

What some of the big GaaS titles? LoL's character design branched out from big titty anime girls years ago, but are a handful of 'diverse' characters enough to deem it woke? Rainbow Six Siege has get some shit recently because of a character in a wheelchair, and I believe the much criticized recent 2B design was a skin from that game. But again this is just a handful of characters available.

Here's the top selling US games from 2023, 22, and 21 (with duplicates/yearly entries removed). Which ones are woke?

Hogwarts

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Spider Man 2

Diablo 4

Jedi: Survivor

Mortal Kombat 1

Starfield

Call of Duty

Elden Ring

Madden

God of War: Ragnarök

LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

Pokémon

FIFA

Horizon: Forbidden West

MLB: The Show

Battlefield 2042

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Resident Evil: Village

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury

Hogwarts Legacy. Is this a woke title?

Yes, JK Rowling is very progressive, and only differs from woke orthodoxy along a single axis.

I recall there was a furore around the announcement trailer because one of the main characters was a 'girlboss' in WW2.

LoL's character design branched out from big titty anime girls years ago, but are a handful of 'diverse' characters enough to deem it woke?

Rainbow Six Siege has get some shit recently because of a character in a wheelchair, and I believe the much criticized recent 2B design was a skin from that game. But again this is just a handful of characters available.

Yes, all of these seem like central examples of the kinds of things people are complaining about when they complain about woke in video games.

If individual characters or elements are enough for a game to be woke, and thus the industry, then the OPs question has a very simple answer. Companies are putting these things in because they want to make more money. Adding a women or similar is a very low effort way to make a game more appealing to a wider audience

It's not about the individual characters or elements though, it's about the philosophy behind them. The idea of having a character in a wheelchair in your fps about elite spec ops units is bugnuts retarded and can only come from a brain warped by a perverse concept of inclusivity. World war 2 was not won by girlbosses and jamming one in your game immediately demonstrates a fealty to diversity over anything else like pleasing your fans or historical accuracy.

But yes, the justification used to do all that was easy money. It was an overly simplistic perspective that equated to cooking the golden goose to smuggle in the progressive agenda, but that was the justification.

This is the stated theory. Does it actually work? Are they actually successful at drawing in a wider audience? And if so, is the incoming audience large enough to offset losses from the previous one?

I've never been convinced on this.

Just getting regular sales data for retail games is difficult enough, let alone trying to parse out how an ongoing GaaS title is affected.

I think League has probably done well out of it, research suggested female players overwhelmingly played female characters while men played an equal mix - indicating that the male playerbase was unbothered while attracting new female players.

Battlefield V sold less than its predecessor according to Wikipedia, but still sold more than 7 million copies. Presumably there is some percentage of regular players who decided not to buy the game due to the woke marketing, alongside some percentage of new players who were attracted by it. 2142 looked a lot more regular in its marketing, so perhaps EA decided it wasn't worth it overall?

Women overwhelmingly play attractive female characters, the kind riot was always making. They are not champing at the bit to play Rek'Sai or Ambessa.

The pervasive myth that women want fat ugly characters in video games is so out of touch with the revealed preference of women who play games. If you want to know what kind of 'diverse' characters women want in games, look at the character designs coming out of Hoyoverse, not Firewalk Studios.

If we're talking about LoL specifically, I'd say female preference appears to tilt towards pretty/cute rather than attractive/sexy. Lux rather than Miss Fortune. And I think Riot's redesign of some earlier characters and move away from the high level of sexualisation (and general huge tits that a lot of the early female champs had) was probably a big deal for potential female players.

Nah, they don't play MF because she is an adc. Sona is just as busty, and is probably the number one most played character for women playing league. You can just look at the games that women actually play, they only play games where they can play as a hot girl, and they more or less exclusively play as hot girls*. In fact, I would say Lux (and Zoe, specifically these two) preference, codes trans woman more than woman, as far as league players go. There is probably a line where your game goes too far into the male gaze, like, Nikke is in theory a waifu collector like Genshin, but with no husbandos and outfits that look like they came from a slutty Halloween shop, it has basically no women playing it.

Of course, this is all miles away from woke injections, which look like Ambessa (Buff Old Black Girl Boss Brusier), not Lux. If Concord was full of characters that looked like Mercy, nobody would have complained about how Woke the character design was.

*Edit, this is overstated, they will also play cute games, like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Pokémon, etc.

There is probably a line where your game goes too far into the male gaze, like, Nikke is in theory a waifu collector like Genshin, but with no husbandos and outfits that look like they came from a slutty Halloween shop, it has basically no women playing it.

Ironically, women do seem to love Eve from Stellar Blade, ShiftUp's newest game.

Adding a [certain style of] women or similar is a very low effort way to make a game more appealing to a wider audience

I don't think that's the case. Rather, I think it's a low effort way to convince oneself that the game is more appealing to a wider audience, assuming that the oneself in this case buys into a certain ideology. The question then becomes why so many decisionmakers buy into this ideology, to such an extent that it overrides their greed.

You could ask this about millions of bad business decisions: I think the consensus is that there is a bias to action in corporate settings, because people need to be seen to be doing something. In a lot of media, not just games, this ends up as "Put a chick in it and make her lame and gay"

The bias to action is orthogonal to the question, though. There's no limit to the types of actions they could have taken in order to expand their audience, but for some reason, they chose to "put a chick in it and make her lame and gay" instead of one of the other options, such as, say, making the chick sexy and gay (a tactic that was likely more common a couple decades ago, though the expansion target was a different group than women).

The answer to that is pretty obviously their ideology, but then the question becomes, why this ideology in particular, and why follow the ideology off a cliff?

I don't think the woke additions do all follow the one option though, that was just an expression. In some responses below, people are complaining about minor changes like using "Body type" instead of Sex or Gender. Plenty of female characters added into games are good looking and the bizarre non-binary examples from Dragon Age are much rarer.

So I'd say corpos are deciding they need to do something to attract wider audiences. And then the developers themselves are choosing implementations as simple as body type and a female protagonist to full blown Dragon Age. I'd imagine explaining these would need to focus much more on individual studio effects.

So I'd say corpos are deciding they need to do something to attract wider audiences. And then the developers themselves are choosing implementations as simple as body type and a female protagonist to full blown Dragon Age. I'd imagine explaining these would need to focus much more on individual studio effects.

The beginning of this paragraph seems true enough, but I don't think we'd need to focus necessarily on individual studio effects. The various things people are complaining about might not all be specifically "add a gay lame woman to it," but they all still fall within the same one ideology or tight cluster of ideologies. Why that specific cluster of ideologies and why follow that off a cliff are the questions at hand.

Because people like to play characters that look like them? If you want women, you add women. If you want blacks or hispanics, you add them. If you want lqbt, you add lgbt.

I brought up LoL earlier and just responded to someone else on the game; it's a good case study. A Riot study found that among female players, 97% exclusively played female champions.

This doesn't mean that it's a good strategy to target what are likely niche audiences, but I don't think it's confusing why people believe in it.

More comments

Hogwarts

Definitely woke, even if it was inspired by the works of a woman who later became a wrong-thinker. 1890s rural Scotland having the same demographics as UCLA, plus the deliberate inclusion of a wizard in a dress witch with a croaky voice.

It's worth remembering that JKR was very politically correct back when it was called that. She retroactively made Dumbledore gay, and in the stage show made Hermione black (and then tried to gaslight her fans into believing she always was).

Of course, the success of the game in spite of the attempted woke boycott probably strengthened the belief among dev companies that they can just ignore an angry twitter X Bluesky mob and sell games anyway.

and in the stage show made Hermione black (and then tried to gaslight her fans into believing she always was).

It wasn't actually Rowling who decided to cast a black actress. She did praise the choice, however, and then said "The books never specified Hermione is white." Which is technically true, but while I wouldn't go so far as to call it "gaslighting" (Rowling didn't actually claim that canonical book-Hermione was black) she was pretty obviously taking the piss out of people who were complaining about the casting.

I wouldn't call Harry Potter "woke" in general, unless anything liberal is woke. It's got some multiculturalism and very tepid feminism, and nothing else that would offend your average conservative. Rowling is a standard liberal feminist Gen-Xer with slightly heterodox (by today's standards) views on trans people. You're right that gay Dumbledore was a retcon. (Rowling claimed he was always gay in her head; whether or not you believe her, she clearly knew it wasn't something she could put on the page in the 90s/early 2000s.)

The movies and games have been much woker than the books (no doubt with her approval).

Regardless of whether Dumbledore was gay in Rowling's head when she wrote the first book, I think it's worth keeping in mind that she had pretty clearly already decided on it by the time she wrote the seventh, which seems to be designed around the gay Dumbledore even though it doesn't make it explicit. I think the common suggestion that she more-or-less invented it on the spot in the interview where she announced it is clear copium.

I think the common suggestion that she more-or-less invented it on the spot in the interview where she announced it is clear copium.

Sure, but that's the [classical] liberal argument where "it doesn't actually matter, it never actually says in the books, Just Like You (angers the traditionalists), It's Not Special (angers the progressives)".

Which, I'll point out, is generally how those who are feminist-but-not-gynosupremacist treat womanhood in general (because that is how they were raised). It's common in media properties created by Gen Xers (because they were the most exposed to that viewpoint); that's why 4chan loves My Little Pony (G4 only), for instance.

I can't figure out whether Diablo IV is woke because it has a non-binary boss (Lord Zir), or anti-woke because ze's monstrously unattractive and ill-tempered.

That would be anti-woke by the current paradigm, in which negative representation is generally considered worse than non-representation for the same reason that 'don't concede the existence of excesses since it will give the bad people grounds to continue criticizing' is a norm.

A paradigm of prioritizing beneficent representation doesn't go well with making light (or villains) of it. The viewpoint of 'any representation is bad representation' being replaced by 'you must endorse' is one of the distinctions between liberalism and woke.

I was just joking about the name. Lord Zir is not actually canonically non-binary.

Horizon: Forbidden West
Spider Man 2
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Mortal Kombat 1 ( heard they are covering the women up, haven't played it myself)

Mortal Kombat 1 ( heard they are covering the women up, haven't played it myself)

One wonders if this is done by region-specific graphics, a la gay pride flags being replaced by black flags in the Middle East release of the latest Spider-Man game (or was it Assassin’s Creed?)

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats