Xbox

Pretty hilarious and depressing all at the same time.

In 2024, there has rarely been a game announced without a small but tiresomely vocal group of grifters attempting to whip up a controversy for their social media followers. No matter what the title, and no matter who the developer, every announcement is meticulously scrutinized for any faint sign of a thoughtcrime, an element that could be construed by these charlatans as proof of “wokeness,” something they can decry as “a DEI initiative,” and then this speculative notion is spun out to followers as the latest attempt to TAKE AWAY YOUR GAMES! The latest target is Avowed, but in picking on it, those running the grift have rather shown their hand.

Like any online scam of any note, it’s so brazen that it’s only more depressing that it works so well. As much as it might infuriate you that someone you know would fall for a cold caller telling them they need to send gift certificates to fix an issue with their Windows operating system, it should equally upset you that these legions of people fall for the same woke gaming grift over and over and over. But with Avowed, the forthcoming Obsidian role-playing game set in the world of Pillars of Eternity, the con is so brazenly laid bare. Yes of course it still works, but it’s so much easier to see how.

The schtick works like this: A game is announced, and because it’s 2024, that game may not exclusively focus on a white dude saving the world for the lady in a bikini, (or a sexy lady playing dress-up in various bikinis while saving the world). I mean, some still do, but this is an industry that creates games that feature a broad range of characters. The grifters recognize this as a useful target for their grift, making claims that the game is artificially altered from what should have been, based on a desire to be perceived as progressive. They then use this to convince large numbers of disaffected young men that the world is trying to take away from them their last vestige of entertainment, the only place left where they feel represented and prioritized. The only hope is to rise up and fight, fight for what’s rightfully theirs—and if they like, give some money to the grifter for a project that never sees daylight.

Except, with Avowed, those behind the grift forgot to include a couple of vital stages. They forgot to develop the spurious claims on which to condemn the project, failing to identify something that had been artificially included or an element that had been censored in the name of wokeness. And in doing so, they made incredibly clear what it is that’s really at the bottom of all of this: bigotry.

Around the time of Gamescom this year, the usual people started loudly condemning Avowed as the next piece of woke mind virus-addled DEI. Why? What sin had it committed? Had a mission leaked in which you’re forced to help a gay polycule adopt a cat-identifying trans child at an abortion clinic? Nope, it was this image:

See it? See the intolerable act of evil? No? Goodness me, don’t tell me the woke mind virus has got to you, too!

There’s no white man. That’s right, this violently racist piece of marketing includes a black woman, a white elf-like woman, a blue man, and an ambiguous-race dwarf. How more clearly could the developer be saying that it wants this game to be exclusively played during drag queen story hour at your local library?

Honestly, to even notice the fact feels kinda weird. I’m a white guy living in a country that’s 90 percent white, in an area of the country that’s 95 percent white, and as such, I’m fairly used to seeing people who look like me everywhere I go. But the thought didn’t cross my inherently racist mind. I’m the last person who can deliver that ghastly, “I don’t even SEE race!” bullshit people like to say instead of thinking. Yet, I saw…some people. People in a fantasy world. Fantasy game people. I’ll give them this, though: I noticed one of them had blue skin. That stood out. Fucking typical DEI inclusion initiative. If I see a blue person flying a plane, I’m getting off there and then! Etc.

And in this, in this alone, the entire scam was shown for what it really is: just unabashed racism, homophobia, and misogyny.

That’s it. It’s so boring, but it’s all it is. Racism, homophobia, and misogyny are profitable, so they’re the focus. But don’t worry, they’ll prove how not-racist they are by pointing to their furious ongoing (although mostly forgotten) campaign against Ubisoft for including a black man in an Assassin’s Creed game set in Japan.

That first Avowed fuss came and went in the summer, the game permanently marked to be condemned. When I wrote about my excellent hour with the game on Kotaku in August, the replies on X were bilious complaints about how the game was going to promote a woke agenda. Based on, you know, that picture. And then everyone forgot they were so outraged about that, and moved on to the next topic.

But oh boy, what bigger gift could the grifters have received when November’s Avowed previews came around? Because, when a bunch of journalists (boo! hiss!) were given access to the opening few hours of the game, it was revealed that the game’s character creator had the option for “they/them” pronouns. SOUND THE KLAXONS!

I was one of those SJW lamestream media “journalists.” I spent six hours playing the game and had an absolutely brilliant time with it, and that’s despite there not being a single mission in which I had to paint rainbow flags on the walls of a church, nor any plotline in which I helped a blur-haired immigrant gain access to free healthcare. Instead, I was…I was fighting spiders and shit.

Because this is the third game set in the Pillars of Eternity canon, which is a world primarily focused on matters of the misuse of dark magic and the questionable nature of its deities. Avowed is a game about a disease called the Dreamscourge causing people to grow mushrooms all over their bodies and go insane. Your character, who can be the whitest man you ever fucking saw in your life, if you’d like, is an envoy for a wannabe-colonial nation, and you can choose to be as pro- or anti-that as you want with the game’s broad choices of dialogue. As much as I tried, I couldn’t find a single woke thing to do! I even chose boring old “she/her” pronouns in the character creator, because my character was a woman with excellent fungal madness growing out of her face.

But oh boy, are the grifters on fire about Avowed. They saw the previews about how you could hit spiders with swords, and they saw the few that mentioned the pronouns (it didn’t seem particularly exciting to me, so I didn’t think to mention it), and that was it. They were proven right! That earlier picture failing to feature Jeff from accounting was all the evidence they’d needed, and they’d been proven correct to declare the game would cause their DEI detectors to start shrieking. In the last week, they have been sending out absolutely deranged messages about how the game is “doomed” because one of its art directors tweeted something about Elon Musk. “Avowed is in deep trouble,” they post to each other on X, their brows furrowed in concern over the severity of it all.

Because, yes, horrendously, the world’s richest bigot has been posting about Avowed too, condemning its use of pronouns, and deliberately re-interpreting the art director’s mocking sarcasm to be a statement of intent to be “racist” against “white guys.”

It’s the exact same playbook described above, of taking something incredibly minor entirely out of context (the guy is laughing at those who think the game is negative toward white people, given that’s not even vaguely something the game’s about), reframing it as something serious (“It should not be acceptable for any company in the gaming industry to be racist & sexist against ‘white guys’,” wrote Musk), and then acting entirely on that reframed, imaginary version, declaring that the game is already doomed to fail based on this fictional enormity.

Hot off the back of their success in destroying another RPG, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which utterly flopped thanks to their efforts with a miserable million sales in its first two weeks, they refer back to that extraordinary win as proof that Avowed is doomed to the same terrible fate. “We’re winning,” they endlessly message their gullible followers, and then that’s true too.

It’s just boring racism, homophobia, and misogyny, folks. That’s it. That’s the entire grift. You play to the venal nature of the disaffected, you feed latent bigotry and resentment, and you drop in a way to give you money. Cha-ching. But a quiet “cha-ching,” because it’s only so effective, such that you have to exhaustingly maintain the loop until eventually someone with a louder voice usurps you.

Avowed reveals this for what it truly is. The game hasn’t “replaced” anyone with a minority-representing character, it hasn’t changed the length of a schoolgirl’s dress, it hasn’t removed a reference to something unpleasant that got through in a version from the 1990s. None of the usual massive crimes. It just had a picture of some people, an entirely ignorable tickbox on the character creator screen, and a sarcastic art director who thinks toolbag Elon Musk is a toolbag. But they’re going after it too, because, more than anything else, it hasn’t made any special effort to center a straight, white man in its marketing. Because, when it’s all stripped away, that’s all this is about. Pure bigotry.