Simple, everyday gamer Davin Andersen reportedly wishes video games would stop pushing unneeded political agendas and instead focus on just being fun. He’d also support…
I think that actually might be where they’re going, it’s just quite difficult to differentiate rainbow capitalism from bad writing.
I know I had a hard time realising why I hated a lot of representation in modern media, despite loving the old Bioware games, Fallout New Vegas and Life is Strange. And newer titles like BG3 and Disco Elysium.
They’re all well written and take time to establish real characters, and all the minority characters would still have a lot of depth to them.
Whereas in these poorly made modern AAA games a diverse cast seems to be used in two ways:
As marketing material
As a crutch for bad writing
Point 1 draws attention to said characters race/gender/sexuality. And the poor writing is likely to draw more.
Then when a company is bragging about it’s black lesbian lead, then writes an unambiguous pro-diversity storyline that doesn’t explore anything in much depth or provide any nuance, while making heavy use of tell don’t show. Maybe with only evil or incompetent portrayals of white men. You end up with people associating a diverse cast with preachy and ill thought out media. It almost comes across as propaganda. Which is why it gets called political.
But I think it takes a lot of effort to realise that and undo the pattern recognition, so it’s really difficult to explain why you hate “politics in video games”.
Obviously, there are some people who are legitimate bigots and go above and beyond with their hate. But the average person that isn’t passionately hateful seems to fall into what I described above
I think that actually might be where they’re going, it’s just quite difficult to differentiate rainbow capitalism from bad writing.
I know I had a hard time realising why I hated a lot of representation in modern media, despite loving the old Bioware games, Fallout New Vegas and Life is Strange. And newer titles like BG3 and Disco Elysium.
They’re all well written and take time to establish real characters, and all the minority characters would still have a lot of depth to them.
Whereas in these poorly made modern AAA games a diverse cast seems to be used in two ways:
As marketing material
As a crutch for bad writing
Point 1 draws attention to said characters race/gender/sexuality. And the poor writing is likely to draw more.
Then when a company is bragging about it’s black lesbian lead, then writes an unambiguous pro-diversity storyline that doesn’t explore anything in much depth or provide any nuance, while making heavy use of tell don’t show. Maybe with only evil or incompetent portrayals of white men. You end up with people associating a diverse cast with preachy and ill thought out media. It almost comes across as propaganda. Which is why it gets called political.
But I think it takes a lot of effort to realise that and undo the pattern recognition, so it’s really difficult to explain why you hate “politics in video games”.
Obviously, there are some people who are legitimate bigots and go above and beyond with their hate. But the average person that isn’t passionately hateful seems to fall into what I described above