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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6260 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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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.

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.

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