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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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You know what angle I never see brought up in the "gamers are up in arms about X or Y" events? Most people who spend many many hours playing games aren't playing the traditional boxed story games that everyone talks about. The best selling game of the year might move 15 million copies and take up 80 hours of the average buyer's time. Meanwhile 151 million people will play a game of league of legends in the average month. Final fantasy 14(an mmo) and World of Warcraft have 2.5 million and 2.2 million active subscribers. Most hours played by games are not spent on these story games and yet it's all that is ever really discussed.

Nobody cares enough about the stories of a dota likes, not unless they are putting the clothes back onto the women (League of Legends).
The other main contender to LoL, Dota2 has Gaben on top, so there isn't any "woke shit" going on there. Thus you will not be hearing about wokeness in Dota likes.

A recent hit like Last Epoch which is sort of a middle ground between Path of Exile and Diablo has apocalyptically bad story telling, yet the gameplay is fun enough and forgiving enough for it to get like 90-100k daily players.

I guess any sort of diversity and cringe writing just isn't as much in the face of players in gameplay-focused games. Whenever some new character who isn't a male and/or isn't white drops in Apex Legends, the Noticers flare up for a bit but there isn't really much else to talk about, and the gameplay is good (usually).

League of Legends does have a substantial amount of lore and story, it just isn't told through gameplay. Judging from the subreddit, a sizeable amount of the dedicated players are aware of and do care about the story. It's very much not immune to identity politics either, although I think it handles it fairly well. They do actively consider what nationalities aren't in the game yet when designing new champions, creating characters like K'Sante who's a fantasy version of a sub-Saharan African, or Akshan who's south-Asian, or Kai'Sa who's white South African, even when trying to fiddle with the character's lore to justify them having a certain accent doesn't really jive with the wider setting's lore. One of the champions released a few years ago, Neeko, being gay was a sizeable news story- my roommate at the time didn't play the game but he still heard about it.

FF14 kind of is a story game. Even if that's not what you spend most of your time doing.

There's a lot of people who put FF14 as the #1 story in gaming. Including myself. Yeah, the way the story is told is kinda weird because of the MMO format, but the story beats themselves, I believe, are top-notch, or at least for me they resonate super hard.