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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26468 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.

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.

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.

"Look like them" can cover a wide range of things. Yes, women often tend to play as women, much like men often want to play as men. But I've yet to see any good evidence or good reasoning that women would want to play as women who look like typical women, i.e. within the typical range of looks, as posited by the ideology in question, rather than women who look extremely attractive (whether they be cute or hot or sexy or whatever else). Same goes for men; if we presume that the video game industry of the past had properly marketed to men in terms of playable characters (posited by the ideology in question), then certainly men don't tend to want to play as men who look like them; they want to play as men who look like the top 0.1% of the population in terms of physique.

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.

Again, the confusing part isn't why you'd want to expand playable characters (and NPCs as well, really) to include all sorts of sexes or other demographics. That tends to be just good common sense and also empirically supported and only tangentially related to the "wokeness" being discussed here. I've written elsewhere that Genshin Impact has seemingly done a good job expanding the waifu gacha game market to include many women who would otherwise not be interested in such things, by filling it with women who would almost certainly be at least in the 95th percentile in looks in most places (this extends to NPCs and enemy characters as well, with multiple female enemy characters getting lots of fans purely on their hotness alone).

The confusing part is why attempt to expand the market to women by putting in ugly (or more charitably typical-looking) women, as dictated by this specific ideology.

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