Everything like me is normal. Everything not like me is political!
There are
Two genders: male and political
Two races: white and political
Two orientations: straight and political
Don't forget the two faiths: Christian and political
This is the single worst take in existence. I see it everywhere and it contributes nothing. There’s a difference between a game having politics in it and a game being political. A game with politics in it typically has a message with complexity and nuance and attempts to get people to ask questions by immersing them in an environment where philosophical ideas can be explored. A game that’s political typically has no message beyond “straight white men are inherently evil and cause all of the world’s problems”, and forgoes subtlety, nuance, and often even basic storytelling in favor of shouting that message in the viewer’s face as often and as loudly as it can, vainly attempting to tell its audience outright what the writer thinks they should believe no matter how much the end product’s quality suffers.
There are always people who will complain about black people, gay people and trans people being in a game at all. But don’t lump those people in with people who are simply sick of their entertainment trying to guilt-trip them into hating themselves for having physical traits they never asked for and can’t control, otherwise your message becomes this:
“There are
Many genders: The good ones, and male
Many races: The good ones, and white
Many orientations: The good ones, and straight”
And that’s an opinion only possessed by those narcissistic enough to consider their own prejudices more justified than anyone else’s. I don’t want to hear any of that “prejudice plus power” nonsense. Bigotry is bigotry is bigotry. And we all deserve better.
Are you the person in the article’s picture?
Don’t you have something better to do with your time than baselessly call people white supremacists on the internet?
Why can't black people simply exist in a place I can't see them? I'm no bigot or anything. I've eaten a watermelon.
I have heard people earnestly say that shit. Also about hispanics and gays. You’d think at some point they would realize the “keep those people away from me” rhetoric is about the most snowflakey shit a person can do.
Oh my god the number of times I have heard people, in Los Angeles county, give me the 'the gays are our misfortune' speech. And I'm just sitting there with my blue hair and a pic of me with another woman as my phone background just kinda nodding. Thinking about exits and if I can get this bastards address.
Honestly biggest perk of not being cis passing is that I don’t even get that shit in rural Ohio. I’ll get the racist versions though unfortunately
This fucking country.
"Snowflake" is, and always was, just projection. They'll never get it unfortunately
I have a guy who used to be a good friend. His wife cheated on him and it was slow move from that, to misanthropy, to his Facebook feed being a constant stream of parroting right wing outrage.
Every so often, posts about how ridiculous it is for liberals to be so outraged all the time and how fragile they are because of it. I really just want to smack him, grab him by the cheeks, forcefully turn his head so he has to read his own wall.
To me the real problem with political games is that a political game, to be enjoyable, has to be more good than political.
Disco Elysium is extremely political. It is also a very well written game. So I enjoyed playing it.
AAA studios tend to make a game with an LGBT character or a minority character and when people don't like it, they blame representation. While people are actually mad at a game being a bad game.
Why do minority characters have to justify their existence in a AAA game? Diversity is not political, it's a fact of life.
They don't have to justify their existence. But they are often just poorly done characters whose race, orientation or ethnicity is their entire personality.
I agree and a great example is Ellie and Riley in The Last of Us Left Behind. They are very well done characters in a very well done game. They have depth aside from their orientation, gender, race etc. When they explore that it feels natural, not just checking a box.
Very much agree. So much hollow writing for minority characters that make them feel tokenized instead of as real people. I suppose it must start somewhere, but when you see it done well it really points out weaker characters.
Ellie and Riley are wonderful, Bill too.
Key appears to be writers who write a character, who happens to be gay instead of a caricature to check the box as you said.
Loras in the game if thrones tv show is one of the worst examples of a butchering of a gay character. Dudes a young Jaime in the book vs the show where he's a bloodhound looking for dick.
Dorian in dragon age inquisition is a character I loved. His orientation is a part of his character and identity. Fits into his backstory with his father that meshes with lore of world to make a connection to real events.
"You tried to change me." Line is one of my favorite deliveries in games.
I honestly agree - these groups deserve to have well-written and compelling characters, instead of hollow shells that barely tick the diversity checkbox while being walking stereotypes. Invest in good writing and create interesting and iconic characters!
there are thousands of games who have a proganist that's just angry white man, military white man, or protective dad man. Do you get as annoyed by these games?
It's about well written characters. You can do whatever you want and you don't have to justify it to have it exist, just do it well.
Not a AAA game but look at Stardew Valley. Their race, gender, orientation is not their characters, it's a part. They have likes and dislikes, skills and struggles, hobbies, friends etc. The are just little pixel sprites but they have depth that makes them feel way more human.
On the other hand, well animated, voice acted, high res Ubisoft characters feel hollow because they don't bother to go deeper than "dude with sword and diverse friends that mark your map"
I agree but it doesn't change the fact that they are very often poorly written or poorly represented in these games. It's not that diversity in games itself is bad it's the way it's done.
As an example, I really like how it was seamlessly integrated in games like the ones by NomNomNami. Obviously those are more cosy slice of life type games but I've seen other games that seamlessly integrate it well too. The trick is the characters need to be well written as real people who happen to be a minority, not simply characters who's whole purpose is that they are a minority.
Or just make the player character macho idiot with the gun have his gaze linger on the male stripper as long as the female stripper in the cutscene on the gratuitous strip club level, in between cringe dialogue and doom-y gun shit? You really don't need much. The standard here is low.
You don't even need good. You don't even need writing! Only got one 16 bit sprite for each character class? Cool, differentiate similarly equipped classes with skin colors beards and tits. They literally don't even need names; you just get better DOT spells and debuffs with robes and tits, better AOE damage and teleports with robes and a beard.
This is not hard to do, and if youre fucking it up you're doing it on purpose. Anybody who doesn't believe me: hit me up; I'll write your shit in like twenty minutes.
inFamous Second Son did this well. Deslin, the main character is from the Akomish tribe and ... oh hell I just came in from rebuilding a retaining wall outside and that's all I got.
Deskin, Akomish, good game, well written character.
gay and minority people are not any more or less political than straight white men. representing them in games is not inherently politically motivated. there are plenty of people complaining about good games in these terms, so you're not really addressing what they're mocking here.
if you want to talk about rainbow capitalism and diversity marketing bullshit we can go there, but that doesn't seem to be the point you're making here.
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
Well you gave us an example of an "acceptably political" game so why didn't you include an example of one that you think missed the mark? Surely, that was an innocent, if embarrassing, oversight... Right? "Gee wiz, I forgot to support half my argument! Shucks!"
Hold your horses, the point they were trying to make is “don't have some fleshed out straight white characters in your game and then add diverse ones as a two dimensional afterthought”
If everyone is a 2D caricature, that's fine. If the main cast is diverse, that's great!
The fact that people are downvoting you for speaking an objective fact is a travesty. Diversity is only as political as the writer chooses to make it, and having characters of different races, genders and orientations without putting in the effort to make them feel three-dimensional will not magically make a badly-written game into a good one.
They're getting downvoted because their real concerns with game writing is getting tangled together with culture war buzz words.
Game writing isn't bad because it gets political. It's bad because the writers aren't very good. Halo 5 doesn't really do much in the way of topical political commentary, but it's not better or worse for it. It has bad writing because there's this weird feeling like all the cutscenes had their opening and closing segments cut. Take this one for instance. It's like the writers thought the player wouldn't have the attention span for more then a minute and a half.
Maybe they think I'm doing a dog whistle of some sort.
Maybe they are mad because I didn't name AAA games which do that, I found it difficult to name examples because I haven't played any recently.
Or
Hear me out
Or it's fully idiotic that existence of girls that likes girls and shit like that has nothing to do with politics?
Is it possible maybe that the only cognitive mistakes possible that lead to uttering something that stupid, or even engaging in the "debate" about if these people should be allowed to live or not, or exist in video games, is the stupidest possible thing to call "political"
It's not political is just systematic hate, aka fascism, aka so obvious that even the onion has no problem putting out an article like this and everyone understands intuitively who they are making fun of,. and what idea they are making fun of, which happens to be this very fucking stupid ideas uttered
Which we as a society have moved on pretty far away from it, except some very immature people that don't understand that it doesn't count as politics to opress people
I mean, one of those is a reasonable ask.
It's not a reasonable ask because it implies that non-political games don't exist. It also kind of implies that games didn't used to be politic. And finally, it implies that having non-white male protagonists is somehow political.
I think you're reading more into "I want non-political games" than is actually there.
I don't think youre reading into it enough because every time I see people complain about politics in games it's because it doesn't have a white male main character. People were praising Helldivers 2 for not being political when it has a satirical fascist government running the planet in it but it's okay because there's no black or gay people in it since they wear helmets.
I think you two are thinking differently about what non-political means. The other person probably just meant a game without overt politics and not what some others mean by it that you talked about.
The satirical government in helldivers 2 is overt af. It is extremely on the nose and they hammer away at it with the spoken lines and propaganda. That game is fucking dripping with politics. That's the point.
Did @FaceDeer@fedia.io use Helldivers 2 as an example of a non-political game or wdym
I most certainly didn't, I've never played it and know nothing about it other than recognizing it as the name of a game that's quite popular right now.
It's kind of funny in a meta way how what I thought was an amusing little comment has blown up into an intense argument about the politicization of games (in an explicitly satire-related community no less). Thank goodness nobody jumped on the ambiguity I put into it as my attempt at humour and thought I was implying that wanting a white ethnostate was the reasonable one instead. Though I suppose seeing the thread fly off the handle in that direction instead would have been even more amusing in an appalling sort of way.
I think on Lemmy it's pretty common to go really into the weeds with political discussion on every comment.
"I like boats"
"Wow, uhm, let's unpack the problematic bourgeoisie mindset behind your statement and how that reveals you are a racist, hate free software and probably kick dogs."
"I just said I like boats..?"
"Oh you're backpedaling now are you?!?"
It's pretty funny tbh. I've had some interesting conversation because of that.
It can be funny, but it's also kind of exhausting. I often want to just chat about whatever the topic of the thread is, not end up in a verbal fist-fight over whether I'm a misogynist or whatever other imaginary offence that I've given through my random comment.
I guess I simply want the option for non-political discussion. And an ethnostate for deer.
Could you elaborate or give an example of unwanted politics in a video game?
It would be a reasonable ask in a world where no or only few non-political games exist. However, in our world, there are plenty of non-political games, and this criticism is usually directed at specific games that contain elements that don't fit the critic's political leanings. "I don't want games featuring diverse characters or progressive messages" would in most cases be the more honest statement.
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