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I really liked your breakdowns of the characterization. I agree that blockbusters are absolutely willing to toss in stock characters and skimp on realistic human dialogue.
Thing is, stock characters have worked since at least the commedia dell’arte. They’re a very efficient way to skip exposition and set expectations for a character. Anime examples abound. Clearly, a script can have familiar archetypes alongside human dialogue…Can.
This feels Too Good To Check. It would be convenient if we could write off the people who produce bad entertainment as moral mutants, but is it likely?
Now this is probably true. No matter the capabilities of individual writers, there’s got to be some mechanism keeping blockbusters from having good characters. Here’s a few possibilities.
I lean towards 3 or 4. It would suck if quality (as we understand it) was different than quality (as the market understands it), but…it also wouldn’t really be unique. If you can’t put a price on it, the market isn’t going to take it into account. Option 4 is more optimistic; maybe that makes it cope? Still, I can’t rule out the idea that these people really want to make something good, and are only temporarily barking up the wrong tree.
My comment here mentions Dead Space, which I find to be possibly the best example of the bizarre shit coming out of writing teams now. To reiterate, the people making the Dead Space Remake clearly loved the original game and endeavored to remake it in about as respectful-to-the-source-content a way they could, and I think that it was a resounding success - except for the writing. Not only did they make significant additions to the story that dilute the original formula and make it feel not nearly as tight, they started radically changing what was already there, to wit: One of the characters you see in game has been made a hypergamous bisexual, evidenced by the fact that he refers to several of the necromorphs (monsters born from the crew of this ship that's only been together a few months at most) as "old boyfriends". None of this existed in the original game. Many characters are changed in how they look to the point where they're unrecognizable. Furthermore, many of their styles look like they belong on people from Los Angeles marketing firms. I will note it's not literally everyone - the main character, Isaac Clarke, is completely changed in his appearance from the original series, apparently to match the face of the voice actor, and he looks like a more generic looking white guy. That aside, his characterization is still different (rather than being aware of his breaking sanity and fighting it, he's instead rewritten as a deranged lunatic).
Given the fact that these changes were made across the board for everyone except the most central characters, I actually don't find a Sweet Baby-esque motive to making these changes - namely, an ulterior pandering or cover-your-ass angle to it. I don't think they're people who hate the hobby, and want to destroy it because it didn't appeal to them, as is often the indictment of culture warriors talking about video games. The passion exuded from this project in every other aspect, and the way they changed the characters so universally, makes me think they're "true believers" of the fact that their way of viewing the world right now is objectively correct and would simply be a boring fact of the future.
In a way, it makes me hate it a lot less, because it feels like I'm seeing how these people genuinely view the world. In another, it's a lot worse than it simply being a grift, because how myopic do you have to be to think everyone in the future will hold your exact belief system, straight down to the hair styles that are so often correlated with it? Pair that with most of the new voice actors really really sucking, and sounding like mid-20s kids, and it really makes me think something has gone very very wrong with creatives, insulating them from having a realistic sampling of the world. This, I think, was my deeper thesis, and my original comment sort of obfuscated it while trying to control for other changes in the gaming landscape that have affected game writing. Contrast that with the original Dead Space character designs, which I think are a lot more timeless (maybe Kendra Daniels's hair looks a bit early 2000s, but everyone else has very utilitarian, timeless styles that are certainly not indicative of the subset of "creatives" of the time).
I've written off the entire sector.
If it's AAA, I'll play it if you pay me. Unless it's from Japan ofc.
Is Indie really better in that respect? I'm currently playing Outward and enjoying the gameplay, but in terms of setting it has quite a few insufferably woke moments. Before, it was Battletech, which is also very woke. It just seems to be in the water supply at the moment.
Being non AAA is no guarantee of not being woke, because a lot of devs are normies, and woke is in the air.
Better odds: non-western developers who aren't woke. There's a few RW or die-hard liberal guys making games in the West. Also Outward was published by a major studio, so..
AAA, or published by a big publisher almost guarantees it's going to be woke. For this reason people are worried about new Kingdome Come game.
There may even be devs barely aware of 'woke'. E.g. the guys who developed Dyson Space Program, a 3d riff on Factorio are likely Chinese who grind code all the time and may not even be aware of it.
I guess Outward was a worse example than i thought. It definitely "feels" indie in many ways, but probably is more like A game instead of AAA.
Nevertheless, even if I think about "true" Indie such as Trese Brothers, I struggle to think of examples that aren't noticably woke unless they literally have no story involving humanoids whatsoever (and even then, they sometimes somehow manage).
Well, non-woke story having games I know of are Highfleet (made by a single Russian orthodox programmer) and Underrail (from Serbia).
There's also Starsector, a spaceship tactical/RPG game with a storyline. Russians, again.
Also there's the Colony Ship RPG. Made by 'Irontower Studio' whose website says this:
And so on.
Thanks a lot for the recs. Irontower indeed seems quite interesting.
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I have bad news about starsector. The writer who took over making the campaign is straight out of "he/him in bio" central casting.
But I don't think the main devs have sympathies towards wokism so it shouldn't get too bad.
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