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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.
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.
"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.
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.
Why this specific ideology dictates it is very simple.
Women gatekeep beauty + the interests of women are supreme = beauty is a zero-sum game.
The less beauty in the world, the less competition women have for it; if we assume
maximum selfishnessrational self-interest it is thus logical and justifiable for them to hoard it. Therefore, female characters in media should ideally be as ugly as possible.Giving in and creating beautiful (enough) characters is negotiating this self-interest with reality (if all the characters are ugly the game might not sell- not everyone is a True Believer, after all). Designing ugly characters is specifically meant to appeal to the group of women who understand this.
Cultures whose circumstances restrict that kind of selfishness tend to produce works with more human beauty; that's part of why Eastern countries do it more often, and why Western countries used to do this but don't any more.
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