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NCSoft president: "The games industry's evolution towards acceptance and diversity is ongoing"
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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I feel the problem is not the industry but the fanbase. As of the last few years, it's become pretty common to see videogames become target of hatred for "going woke": H:FW's Aloy's "peach fuzz", TLOU2's Abby being too masculine, women not living to the average beauty standard, LGBT characters "shoved down people's throats", character editors decoupling gender and sex or using gender-neutral language, narrative being cringe because it targets millennials (as if older games didn't target young audiences, too)... The industry is going forward, but I don't think the fanbase is ready yet.
Sometimes I think the fanbase is regressing, even. I've seen people lamenting increased "politics" in their videogame, yet saying that MGS or FFVII or Bioshock are their favourite games. Gamers don't even pay attention to what they consume, they merely parrot whatever their favourite influencer says. "Woke" is a meaningless term that gets thrown around whenever they don't like something.
Fan base isn't regressing - there's just an increasingly polarized contingent that won't stop wailing about every snub.
Overall the gaming fan base is growing because of this embracing of diversity.
Yeah it’s just a loud group of dipshits that want games to be a safe space for their regressive views.
They can't go 3 words without saying "woke".
Wokewokewokewokewoke...
The Helldivers 2 Steam ~~review page~~ (edit: it's comments on announcements) is covered with reviews from accounts that don't even own the game begging Arrowhead to "not add WOKENESS!" to the game.
What review page are you talking about??
I went to check out the reviews and all I see is people complaining about Sony blocking out so many countries. I don't see a single "woke" complaint.
Are you sure you're not just hearing that people have complained and then assuming they actually did?
Sorry, you're correct- it's not the reviews, but the comments on any announcement made by the devs that I was remembering.
The lack of mouse icon next to their names means those Steam accounts don't own the game.
I wonder how many of them are just bots tbh
Cause the game is pretty inherently political. The setting is a farcical fascist govt...
It's a coordinated effort to make those bigoted assholes seem to be a larger number than they actually are. And we can blame Steve Bannon for that.
Also everyone who participates in the narrative that “regressive are swamping the gaming industry”.
I mean on the plusside, you always know that whenever anybody uses the word "woke" as if it were a real word, you can immediately add them to the blocklist or ban them. Nothing they can add has any value any more.
I see three comments, two of which mention wokeness and one of which mentions sending the dev team to re-education camp.
None of the comments is solely about wokeness. Wokeness is mentioned in conjunction with politics.
One of the comments wants to make sure the game stays “neutral”.
Note that zero of these comments are complaining about diversity. To those who criticize wholeness, it is a distinct thing from diversity.
Do you know what people are referring to when they use that word?
I provided a screenshot as an example. Obviously I'm not going to link to every fucking bigoted comment. Those were the top three comments; two of which were useful to my point.
Here, let me make one bigger for you:
They "think" adding more diversity in the form of inclusion and LGBT representation would make the game worse, since apparently that point wasn't as clear as, say, a fucking foghorn.
Yes. "Woke" means "anything that threatens my worldview of white masculine superiority and reminding me that non-white, non-straight, non-male people exist and should be represented in art hurts my fee-fees."
But sure, explain how it's really about "ethics in gaming journalism".
Can you make that bigger? 😛
How they can review a game without own it on steam?
I edited my comment, but I was wrong in that it's not the review page that gets swarmed but the comments on announcements that Arrowhead makes. Anyone can comment on an announcement (which makes sense, if [for example] it's about an upcoming feature that isn't out yet.)
I see, steam community foruns.
It's better to not go into these, full of fanboys, haters and stupid people farming fake points.
I'm guessing they buy, review, refund? Not sure if that also removes the review as I almost never refund or review games.
Ding ding ding
I feel like that's just a very loud minority among those who play games. As you've so stated, the majority of people who play these games either do not care for politics in video games, and another subset prefer it that way.
If even the greediest of companies in the video game industry keep doing that, that means they've analyzed the market and having politics in video games might have between no to a positive impact on sales.
I heavily agree with this. If there's one thing I've learned about video games and gamers, it's that people who are happy with their games, are playing their games! The people who aren't happy, are going to Reddit and the forums to bitch and moan. The anti-"woke" crowd is fueled by outrage. And that's all it is: senseless outrage. There's no substance to it. Let them scream into the void until they tire themselves out.
That hatred comes from like 0.1% of gamers, if that.
No, the fanbase is regressing, but they're also not getting products that suit their tastes. There's a lot of stuff to play that's different, and the people that removed go back to the dwindingly bad quality AAA Live Service slop. They're not for us. When the AAA bubble bursts, they'll fuck off to another form of media.
Sure, it is largely the fanbase, however I also think that the game industry seems to sometimes do somewhat of a "woke-washing", meaning opically supporting the LGBTQIA movement because of financial, shitstorm-prevention or other reasons than just wanting to create more diverse and inclusive games.
For instance I like Hogwarts Legacy, but it also takes place in the Victorian era, and it seems to project the modern tolerant society ideals onto the wizarding world of that time.
Depicting the society as inclusive and diverse is somewhat history revisionist. If you play as a non-binary or trans person at that time, then you should have to deal with prejudice and marginalization, otherwise it is just "woke-wash" the history.
So, IMO there are some cases, especially in historic (fantasy) games, where injecting modern ideals and standards might not fit or needs to be better addressed, than just let it be cosmetic.
They shouldn't do a halfhearted job.
I disagree. The rule is "sex sells", always has, always will be, period.
The people that complain about "wokeness" in games are a small but loud minority. The majority doesn't care, hells seeing the steam achievements for some games the majority doesn't even care to finish a game past the tutorial yet alone care about story or characters.
The problem is the approach to game design has changed. In the earlier stages of gaming, you would take a fun concept (finding perfect fits for boxes) and make it into a game (Tetris), that was all there was, Super Mario was literally called "Jump & Run Man" at one point. It was the essence of fun presented in a replayable form. Now games have to have a story, morals, relatable characters or some sort of overlaying message. This together with good gameplay can create a very good game no doubt. But each aspect has to be good on its own.
Take away the story from Last of Us and it's essentially a 3rd person arena shooter, but it's a good one at that. This alone would be a good selling point, add on top the story and you have an objectively good game.
But take Saint Row 5 as an example, take away the story and it's a less than mediocre 3rd Person sandbox game, the fact that the story isn't compelling either makes it objectively bad.
Rember the Hot/Crazy scale from His I Met Your Mother? Well there is also a Hot/Boring scale for games. If your game is boring it has to compensate by having hotter characters, if it's fun it can get away with uglier ones. I can name countless examples where this is true.
Studios often overlook this connection. I'm all for diversification of the actual development environment but not the games themselves. It should always be fun first.
Never in my life have I heard anybody say "Are you going to get new game ...? I've heard you can play as a black woman in this one. So cool."
Studios then get upset because their model "Here diversity. Where money?" isn't paying off.
It's like not wanting to buy a cheaply made plastic valve for a boiler over a solid metal one and the company asks "Why are you not buying it? We made it blue."
The fanbase is never going to change, because at some point we all realize that we want value for our money and often times studios spend so much time and effort making a game diverse, they forget to make it fun.
Hrm, anecdotally I have quite a lot of formerly non-gamer friends who were really hyped for say, Life is Strange: True Colors, specifically because they were excited about how Alex breaks some beauty norms and gets to flirt with Steph on top of that.
Of course, anecdotally.
But it's important to keep in mind that we're no longer an industry of 5 teams creating 20 games a year. There's so many games that there is more than enough space for every game. From absolutely purist near-identityless gameplay-only designs (Which exist in droves) to huge mass-market hyper-produced open worlds all the way to purist story/feels only visual novels and experimental art pieces.
And each of these categories has more games each year than the entire market around the Gameboy time had. Gaming is insanely big now.
You're blaming games not being fun on devs "wasting time" to ensure diversity in their games? You realize the people who work on the story and characters aren't the same as the ones coding the game mechanics right? The two have almost nothing to do with one another. Studios aren't forgetting to make games fun due to diversity lmao. They are having to spend a lot more man hours than they did in the past because of the advancements in development tenchology.
I have. It was more along the lines of, "Dragon Ball FighterZ has no waifus" or "there's no one with any melanin in this game [until they found out about Nagoriyuki in Guilty Gear Strive]". I would not be the least bit surprised if Street Fighter 6 is more popular with women than any previous entry after taking the bad male characters from previous entries and remixing them as women (Manon, Lily, A.K.I., Kimberly).
I definitely play a few horny games, and don’t recommend them to anyone. In the other hand, I have actually skipped certain games, and hated some others, because they were trying to tell an engaging story and got hung up on cringey sexualization of their female leads.
As you said, it’s all up to consumer preference. It isn’t just watch-dogging and shaming of sexualization, it’s also that there’s a lot of people that find lazy sexualization to be disengaging and hardly unique. Plenty of the time getting the characters to look unique and interesting is also a challenge; and diversity often helps with that.