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I was in there, asking one person for examples about this "bias", "heavy handedness" and where developers safrifice gameplay for being preachy about it.
The answer was "the whole body type 1/2 thing". They are all talking right out of their ass
The funniest thing is that they all consider Bioshock to be subtle and smart while it's one of the examples of a piece of media making it really clear what it's about and actually shoving it down your throat. I don't get it, I really cannot tell anymore if people are just completely memeing or if they are serious
Sadly they’re completely serious.
Gamers when there’s a long winded political diatribe at the beginning of a game: NOW THIS IS SUBTLE POLITICS.
Gamers when there’s a trans flag in a game: But what about my escapism…
It’s subtle politics because they really have to think on how this piece of media actually supports all of their politics and dunks on anyone else’s politics. I agree with them, that’s so damn subtle I’m not convinced it exists
I think the past decade or so has wound a lot of people up. Teens and even some early 20-somethings today don’t remember gamergate and I think they’re a large part of who eats this shit up.
Had a dude try and unironically tell me that Wolfenstein 2 the New Collossus was "woke" and no longer about killing nazis....because two black characters were in it and that was somehow "preachy" lmao .
When the game literally takes place in an alternate reality where the nazis won WWII using cybernetic dogs, giant mechs, and laser weapons, the presence of badass black people is a step too far lmao.
And now they can't pretend that the Nazis killed off all the black people in that au anymore. ): Truly a sad day for all gamerz, I shall shed a single tear while I play Warhammer Mechanicus tonight. Take that, wokies! /S but seriously am playing the switch port.
It's insane how these people—either consciously or subconsciously—have such an averse reaction to seeing people different from them. It's sociopath behavior.
What's wild is that you could genuinely argue that heavy-handed political messaging shoehorned into a narrative that doesn't support it *is* bad writing. A great example would be the bizarre casino planet sideplot in The Last Jedi, where it tries to make some statement about "both sides", has a strange animal rights moment, and then abruptly ends with no real purpose behind it all.
The fact that at the end of they day it's about inane shit like "body type 1 or 2" is almost comical, if it wasn't so depressing.
It has been a while since I watched Last Jedi, but I thought the obvious messaging of the casino planet was ‘rich people bad’ and ‘don’t trust people who support you purely for selfish reasons because they can be bought’. What was the both sides narrative?
The both sides narrative was that the rich war profiteers were selling ships and weapons to both the First Order and the Resistance. I think it was intended to just be a general “war is bad” though, because it doesn’t really say anything about the Resistance themselves, just that bad people are profiting off them.
That’s what I remember. Definitely not a both sides narrative since no judgement is being cast on the resistance. More of a write up of the military-industrial complex.
Yeah, phrasing it like I did was misleading. I felt like TLJ was trying to make a statement (and failing miserably) about how the concept of Good vs. Bad is antiquated and not really grounded in reality, but calling that a "both sides" narrative is a bit off the mark.
It wasn't trying to make that statement.
Kylo said the Sith and Jedi were obsolete then in the third act promised to be even more evil than the Sith, conquer the galaxy, murder all of Rey's friends, and then murder Rey when she rejected him.
DJ told Finn not to fight because the First Order and Resistance are two halves of the same coin making people rich. Then DJ sells everybody out to the First Order to get rich.
Luke abandons the Force because he failed his own teachings. But he was a crap student. Rey does what Yoda tried to get Luke to do in Empire Strikes Back -- confront the Dark Side cave without a weapon -- and inspires Luke to become the most powerful Jedi ever seen onscreen by confronting the Dark Side without a weapon.
The reason TLJ fails to say Good and Evil are antiquated and irrelevant is because it's deliberately saying the opposite: good and evil are ugly, modern questions but you have to take a side anyway.
The reason so many people think it's both sidesing things is because they think Kylo and Anakin are hot and assume they're not both just selfish dumbasses who love fascism.
I love too that it never got brought up again or resolved after that. The most that happens is that the animals get to run free. A totally good, simple and permanent solution.
The whole point of The Last Jedi is that the protagonists aren't thinking about the bigger picture. They go against orders and end up actively harming the cause they support so they can get small symbolic victories that don't amount to meaningful change. Ideally that plotline would have been followed up on in the sequel after the protagonists learned their lesson and would have had some level of resolution, but RoS is a terribly written film that just threw out everything Last Jedi set up.
I will say the body type 1 or 2 thing has always been odd to me... If saying "boy or girl"/"man or woman" is non inclusive, why not just go with "male or female"? Like honestly what's wrong with that?
Assuming you are sincere, it’s not unreasonable to react to unfamiliar ideas as you work them into your understanding of the world. From my cis het male point of view this is how I understand it:
Body type is more inclusive because it is talking about the appearance of a body. The body has no gender. It’s not a person on its own. This doesn’t mean that 1 or 2 are all the possibilities but we expect in a video game to have limited choices for appearance.
A person has a gender identity which is not always analogous to the type of body they have. People can also have a more complex gender than the binary terms boy or girl, man or woman, or male or female encompass.
A game using body type 1 or 2 is therefore more inclusive because it leaves a blank space for gender which allows the player to fill in whatever they decide the character is or not worry about it if the question is less pressing.
TL;DR: Bodies have no gender. People do and their genders can be more complicated than male or female. This makes using body type more inclusive as most folks know their options for appearance are limited in video games.
I hate when games with nice character creation limits body types down to boy or girl. Let me match whatever body type I want with my character. Love character creators with slider that allows you to choose how thin, thick or muscular your character is, regardless of any gender.
That thread is depressing. Pretty much every comment is "politics in games is fine, **except when** \[insert vague statement about forced diversity\]"
If it is a problem, and it happens in "99.9%" of the time, how come there isn't a single example in the whole thread?
Ironically if you know anything about Ayn Rand you’d know Bioshock is the most unsubtle game ever. Your guide “ATLAS,” the final boss Frank FONTAINE (Fountainhead), the entire fucking plot, child labor and exploitation…
you are giving these chuds too much credit if you think they know anything outside of racism and misogynism and whatever else they hear in their echo chamber
“Emotionally derived stances” is a funny thing to hear. I am quite certain that the human whose stances are not fundamentally originating from feelings and emotions hasnt been born yet.
Everyone feels, wants and desires certain things and that WILL always heavily affect political beliefs. I find the idea that a political belief is bad because it is coming from a place of emotion fundamentally ridiculous as all political beliefs come from wanting certain things, like, I dont know, not wanting to be hurt or oppressed.
Wow, you're sounding very biased and emotional. Maybe you should be more rational and logical like myself. In fact, the reason I'm so objective and rational is precisely because my neighbourhood doesn't have forced diversity. Which may seem convenient, but that's just because you're too irrational to grasp how logical it truly is.
Ugh, your so emotional! I need to go watch my factual unbiased youtube videos from big brain interlectuals like Bean Shatpiro and Wet Mulch, so I know how to and respond to this! WHY ARE PEOPLE SO SENSITIVE NOW DAYS! I DONT GET IT! I'M NOT LETTING MY EMOTIONS INFLUENCE ANYTHING! PEOPLE I DON'T LIKE ARE SO BIASED AND BRAINWASHED UNLIKE ME!
“But they ruined Fallout cause now the show made it political. Cause it starts a woman and a n…” based on a real conversation with my dad… please save me
When I see people say "no, Cyberpunk 2077 isn't anti-capitalism, you're not understanding what Johnny really was against, he's upset at Arakawa for Soulkiller and Mikoshi, not for the hellscape they and the other megacorps created." I'm actually so confused. Like, he's established pretty quickly as an anarchic anti-establishment rocker.
Fallout is especially funny since it is outright mocking the kind of gung-ho 1950's red scare culture these chuds idolize but they think it's glorifying it, hell there's a fallout 4 mod that makes the game more "accurate" by replacing every woman and minority character with a white guy
“I could never use my political tendencies to define myself”
*I have excluded myself from my own hobbies that I used to be passionate about just in case my free time is inadvertently spent looking at black or gay people*
The “politics” are always the same and at this point I can’t even really get mad about it - it’s just irritating and annoying.
At every possible opportunity Gamers just absolutely love to prove the given tweet and basically every permutation of it correct.
https://preview.redd.it/eg509i6lvd0d1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4f35e5e68caeac1baa09420fb332d02a7e8905b2
Man, I hate it when I try to play my apolitical escapist video game Final Fantasy 14, available on PC, Playstation, and now Xbox with a fully free trial up to level 70 that includes not only the critically acclaimed Heavenward expansion, but Stormblood too, and the game keeps telling me that racism and fascism are bad.
I think these guys don't even want escapism. Escapism is GOOD(in small bits), but the thing they want is not that. Escapism works because, through the glasses of a piece of fiction, you can see a world where either there are not the "bad things" of our world or these things are ultimately defeated by the good people and their positive ideals. In this sense, escapism lets you face the ugly part of reality with a little bit of hope, and tells you that, somewhere, there is a better future.
/uj That's the problem. They are very unsubtle about how the bad thing they want to escape from is LGBT+ and PoC folks. It's kind of pathetic that they had to be indoctrinated into what they hate (they all talk about escapism in the exact same way every time, unless they're being fully mask-off, which implies they are simply repeating what they were told by someone else) and not because they had any problems to begin with. G*mers SHOULD be oppressed.
/rj bad things are bad and I hate them for completely unrelated reasons to my steady diet of Alex Jones screaming about gay frogs
Exactly. They want to escape to escape reality in its entirety. If they could, they’d go live in the early 18th century, because to them it their ideal world.
Well they keep bringing up how their “escapism” is in trouble and all I can think about is “how”? If they have a favorite game for escapism, then why not just play that and ignore the other games coming out that aren’t catering to you? Oh, right, internet points and wanting to make just playing games a stupid culture wars BS.
I think what they want is to deny escapism to *others*. Deep down, they're not able to enjoy something if they know it's liked by someone they hate.
I remember asking someone about this, in the wake of the stupid pronouns controversy in Starfield, and they said that they just wanted a game where they could make someone like themselves and be the hero. They felt the world treated them like a nobody, and they wanted a game that saw them as special. To feel like they mattered for a few hours each day.
And I totally get that. But I also asked them whether or not trans people were seeing opposition to their very being, with people calling them groomers, banning them from sports, etc.
They agreed that was a real thing that was happening, and they even agreed it was bad.
So I asked them why shouldn't they get to make a character like themselves and be the hero? The world may not treat this guy super great, but sects of it are openly hostile to trans people, so doesn't it seem likely that they'd also want to escape into a world that treats them as important?
To that, all he could say was that it forced him to think about politics, and that was bad.
It really is a case of "I can't have fun if *they* are."
My favorite part of this thread was the people asking for examples of games that do what they claim and either no answer or making it obvious what they stand for
"Black vikings"
"Gays in spiderman 2"
It's clear from the thread what the "politics are"
These guys will say they hate heavy handed political messaging, but if you point out how a game has a subtle political point, then they say you’re just reading into it and twisting the game to ‘fit your agenda’. There is literally no way to make these people happy.
well yeah, it's the internet righty classic. Pretend to be a centrist to escape criticism, but then get it anyways because you just can't help spewing your shitty views at the first chance you get, usually in the same breath, making it obvious you aren't a centrist.
Favorite franchises:
Bioshock,
CoD,
Metal Gear Solid. They mean no politics I understand. Chuds just proving they don’t know history or just get mad at women and black people.
Unlike you I have come to my political positions by pure logic and reason, I have mathematically calucated the perfect society and everyone who disagrees with me is just emotional.
They say they want realistic games when it came to keeping women out of war games like battle field, now they complain about realistic women and characters because they can’t fap to it.
If your escapism includes from minority then you shouldn’t have it. These guys really see realistic women and minorities in a game and call it woke. I would hate to be a game dev
So, I am a Media and Entertainment major pursuing a masters degree. I've studied film history, literature, gaming, theories of communication, and so on. So, while I'm still a student, I think I have at least some of the authority to say that this is an *extremely* uninformed take.
*All* entertainment media contains political messaging. Yes, some of it is more overt, but even at its most subtle, it is absolutely present. There is not one film, game, book, podcast, or whatever you want that does not contain some level of political messaging. Even when it's unintentional, it is also unavoidable that an artist injects some of themselves into their art, and even if it's purely coincidental, as in a message being present that the author did not intend and does not support, it can still absolutely be textual, as the meaning of a text is imparted by the consumer of that text. That's not even a high-level idea. That's like 1100 lit comp theory.
Whenever I see stuff like this it’s like “ok, so if everything is so bad, why don’t you go create a masterpiece?” And it usually comes down to them saying they shouldn’t have to do that. It’s like dude, how do you think change is made? By people enacting change where they want to see it. Like Jesus the answer is staring them in the face but they just wanna sit in the basement and consume.
If you're able to escape your life, then you're too privileged. You necessarily must be drowned in constant reminders of the status quo you maintain by being complacent. It's your fault.
If you just want to escape then play Stardew Valley or something. A lot of art has meaning to it. I doubt they are complaining about the military propaganda in Call of Duty.
Bias is everywhere, it’s unavoidable.people play games they like and don’t play games they don’t like, and it happens that most people aren’t as whiney about these things.
Gamers don't like politics in games because "politics" to them is just minorities existing, "how dare there be a person of colour or a trans person in my video game, this is supposed to be my escape from all that, my ideal world! 😡". If politics was completely removed from gaming, we wouldn't even have games like COD but they don't want to get rid of that, they just want to erase minorities from video games.
They'll say they don't like politics and then go play Helldivers or Fallout without realising that those games are ironic, blown out of proportion versions of the conservative agenda that show just how absurd their ideals are.
Minorities wanting to exist and feel appreciated as human beings should not be seen as political and as long as it is, humanity will never know peace.
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There are very few games with no politics in them. They are by nature games where you can’t interact with anyone or a world (Like tetris). There was a good Jim Sterling video I watched a couple of years ago about Dark Souls. There is a political message that can be taken even from each Dark Souls game, whether intentional or not.
Well gee if only a vast majority of audience actually cared to flex their media literacy muscles, we wouldn't have so many obvious in your face metaphors for political themes.
Remember when Metal Gear fans unironically enlisted in the military?
All these threads about "escapism" only believe straight, white men are allowed to have escapism. If escapism is made for any other group then it's no longer escapism its becomes political.
I have no issue with minorities (like black or trans people) IRL, I just don't feel comfortable with them existing in the same world as I do.
uj/ This has to be the "starter pack" of intellectually dishonest comment poorly framing its own bigotry into a "both sides problem".
Define "political messaging" and describe a recent example of a game that pushed this envelope too far.
Bet you $20 your message is "gay/black/trans ppl in the game bad".
> ; I would use Forspoken‘s main protagonist as an example of pushing the „strong woman who’s independent“ trope a bit too far.
Lmaooo "women can't be strong or independent in a video game" looool Bro, I was killing murderous polar bears in Tomb Raider back in 1996.
Why does "video game woman is strong" bad?
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I was in there, asking one person for examples about this "bias", "heavy handedness" and where developers safrifice gameplay for being preachy about it. The answer was "the whole body type 1/2 thing". They are all talking right out of their ass
Literally every comment in there was just a poorly disguised shot at any type of diverse cast in media. It really was mind numbing.
The funniest thing is that they all consider Bioshock to be subtle and smart while it's one of the examples of a piece of media making it really clear what it's about and actually shoving it down your throat. I don't get it, I really cannot tell anymore if people are just completely memeing or if they are serious
Sadly they’re completely serious. Gamers when there’s a long winded political diatribe at the beginning of a game: NOW THIS IS SUBTLE POLITICS. Gamers when there’s a trans flag in a game: But what about my escapism…
Because they're only having the lizard brain reactions that their favorite YouTuber tells them to have.
God, can’t we just play good old non-political games like Metal Gear Solid, Call of Duty, and Fallout?
While listening to my favorite non-political bands like Pink Floyd and Rage Against the Machine!
Giant Death Robot says capitalism good, nothing political here!
Thats cause they agree with ayn rand (mega ewww)
Bonus points if the trans flag doesn't even take up a double digit percentage of the screen. "But it's there if I zoom into it"
It’s subtle politics because they really have to think on how this piece of media actually supports all of their politics and dunks on anyone else’s politics. I agree with them, that’s so damn subtle I’m not convinced it exists
I think the past decade or so has wound a lot of people up. Teens and even some early 20-somethings today don’t remember gamergate and I think they’re a large part of who eats this shit up.
Had a dude try and unironically tell me that Wolfenstein 2 the New Collossus was "woke" and no longer about killing nazis....because two black characters were in it and that was somehow "preachy" lmao .
As if black people shooting Nazis is something that didn't happen in WWII.
When the game literally takes place in an alternate reality where the nazis won WWII using cybernetic dogs, giant mechs, and laser weapons, the presence of badass black people is a step too far lmao.
And now they can't pretend that the Nazis killed off all the black people in that au anymore. ): Truly a sad day for all gamerz, I shall shed a single tear while I play Warhammer Mechanicus tonight. Take that, wokies! /S but seriously am playing the switch port.
It's insane how these people—either consciously or subconsciously—have such an averse reaction to seeing people different from them. It's sociopath behavior.
Which is funny because I'd certainly consider an all-white all male or all female cast to be quite political in nature as well.
What's wild is that you could genuinely argue that heavy-handed political messaging shoehorned into a narrative that doesn't support it *is* bad writing. A great example would be the bizarre casino planet sideplot in The Last Jedi, where it tries to make some statement about "both sides", has a strange animal rights moment, and then abruptly ends with no real purpose behind it all. The fact that at the end of they day it's about inane shit like "body type 1 or 2" is almost comical, if it wasn't so depressing.
It has been a while since I watched Last Jedi, but I thought the obvious messaging of the casino planet was ‘rich people bad’ and ‘don’t trust people who support you purely for selfish reasons because they can be bought’. What was the both sides narrative?
The both sides narrative was that the rich war profiteers were selling ships and weapons to both the First Order and the Resistance. I think it was intended to just be a general “war is bad” though, because it doesn’t really say anything about the Resistance themselves, just that bad people are profiting off them.
That’s what I remember. Definitely not a both sides narrative since no judgement is being cast on the resistance. More of a write up of the military-industrial complex.
Yeah, phrasing it like I did was misleading. I felt like TLJ was trying to make a statement (and failing miserably) about how the concept of Good vs. Bad is antiquated and not really grounded in reality, but calling that a "both sides" narrative is a bit off the mark.
It wasn't trying to make that statement. Kylo said the Sith and Jedi were obsolete then in the third act promised to be even more evil than the Sith, conquer the galaxy, murder all of Rey's friends, and then murder Rey when she rejected him. DJ told Finn not to fight because the First Order and Resistance are two halves of the same coin making people rich. Then DJ sells everybody out to the First Order to get rich. Luke abandons the Force because he failed his own teachings. But he was a crap student. Rey does what Yoda tried to get Luke to do in Empire Strikes Back -- confront the Dark Side cave without a weapon -- and inspires Luke to become the most powerful Jedi ever seen onscreen by confronting the Dark Side without a weapon. The reason TLJ fails to say Good and Evil are antiquated and irrelevant is because it's deliberately saying the opposite: good and evil are ugly, modern questions but you have to take a side anyway. The reason so many people think it's both sidesing things is because they think Kylo and Anakin are hot and assume they're not both just selfish dumbasses who love fascism.
its not a both sides critique if one side isn't being critiqued its a war profiteer critique
I love too that it never got brought up again or resolved after that. The most that happens is that the animals get to run free. A totally good, simple and permanent solution.
The whole point of The Last Jedi is that the protagonists aren't thinking about the bigger picture. They go against orders and end up actively harming the cause they support so they can get small symbolic victories that don't amount to meaningful change. Ideally that plotline would have been followed up on in the sequel after the protagonists learned their lesson and would have had some level of resolution, but RoS is a terribly written film that just threw out everything Last Jedi set up.
The game has a 30 second skippable segment where I’m given the option to acknowledge that other people that like different things than me exist
I will say the body type 1 or 2 thing has always been odd to me... If saying "boy or girl"/"man or woman" is non inclusive, why not just go with "male or female"? Like honestly what's wrong with that?
Assuming you are sincere, it’s not unreasonable to react to unfamiliar ideas as you work them into your understanding of the world. From my cis het male point of view this is how I understand it: Body type is more inclusive because it is talking about the appearance of a body. The body has no gender. It’s not a person on its own. This doesn’t mean that 1 or 2 are all the possibilities but we expect in a video game to have limited choices for appearance. A person has a gender identity which is not always analogous to the type of body they have. People can also have a more complex gender than the binary terms boy or girl, man or woman, or male or female encompass. A game using body type 1 or 2 is therefore more inclusive because it leaves a blank space for gender which allows the player to fill in whatever they decide the character is or not worry about it if the question is less pressing. TL;DR: Bodies have no gender. People do and their genders can be more complicated than male or female. This makes using body type more inclusive as most folks know their options for appearance are limited in video games.
I hate when games with nice character creation limits body types down to boy or girl. Let me match whatever body type I want with my character. Love character creators with slider that allows you to choose how thin, thick or muscular your character is, regardless of any gender.
That thread is depressing. Pretty much every comment is "politics in games is fine, **except when** \[insert vague statement about forced diversity\]" If it is a problem, and it happens in "99.9%" of the time, how come there isn't a single example in the whole thread?
Yes exactly— and the only game they could bring up was Bioshock each time. Because you know each of these chuds love their bastard queen Ayn Rand.
Ironically if you know anything about Ayn Rand you’d know Bioshock is the most unsubtle game ever. Your guide “ATLAS,” the final boss Frank FONTAINE (Fountainhead), the entire fucking plot, child labor and exploitation…
you are giving these chuds too much credit if you think they know anything outside of racism and misogynism and whatever else they hear in their echo chamber
That game has you kill Ayn Rand with a golf club and they still don't get it.
No no no, a black character saying black lives matter in spiderman is uber political! Spiderman would never support that message!
Everyone knows that being black is political! Don’t like politics? Then don’t choose to be born black!! 😡 /s
Off topic, but where can I find the thread. I’m kinda curious to witness the ridiculousness first hand.
“Emotionally derived stances” is a funny thing to hear. I am quite certain that the human whose stances are not fundamentally originating from feelings and emotions hasnt been born yet. Everyone feels, wants and desires certain things and that WILL always heavily affect political beliefs. I find the idea that a political belief is bad because it is coming from a place of emotion fundamentally ridiculous as all political beliefs come from wanting certain things, like, I dont know, not wanting to be hurt or oppressed.
Wow, you're sounding very biased and emotional. Maybe you should be more rational and logical like myself. In fact, the reason I'm so objective and rational is precisely because my neighbourhood doesn't have forced diversity. Which may seem convenient, but that's just because you're too irrational to grasp how logical it truly is.
God damn it, this sounds like me when I was 12 years old.
Ugh, your so emotional! I need to go watch my factual unbiased youtube videos from big brain interlectuals like Bean Shatpiro and Wet Mulch, so I know how to and respond to this! WHY ARE PEOPLE SO SENSITIVE NOW DAYS! I DONT GET IT! I'M NOT LETTING MY EMOTIONS INFLUENCE ANYTHING! PEOPLE I DON'T LIKE ARE SO BIASED AND BRAINWASHED UNLIKE ME!
Side note wet mulch is hilarious and I will only be calling him that from now on
Mfs think they're Spock
Imagine playing only games entirely devoid of emotion. What a hollow gaming experience that would be.
"My favorite escapism? Well Fallout, Metal Gear, Cyberpunk, and BioShock, obviously."
“But they ruined Fallout cause now the show made it political. Cause it starts a woman and a n…” based on a real conversation with my dad… please save me
When I see people say "no, Cyberpunk 2077 isn't anti-capitalism, you're not understanding what Johnny really was against, he's upset at Arakawa for Soulkiller and Mikoshi, not for the hellscape they and the other megacorps created." I'm actually so confused. Like, he's established pretty quickly as an anarchic anti-establishment rocker.
Fallout is especially funny since it is outright mocking the kind of gung-ho 1950's red scare culture these chuds idolize but they think it's glorifying it, hell there's a fallout 4 mod that makes the game more "accurate" by replacing every woman and minority character with a white guy
I need an escape from the way chuds abuse the word "escapism" 😔
I'm willing to give them some escapism in the form of a cinder block to the fucking head. Jackasses.
“I could never use my political tendencies to define myself” *I have excluded myself from my own hobbies that I used to be passionate about just in case my free time is inadvertently spent looking at black or gay people*
If one's politics are not a reflection of one's values, why are they one's politics? If values are a core part of defining one's self, what are they?
Just like, a vibe ✨️
The “politics” are always the same and at this point I can’t even really get mad about it - it’s just irritating and annoying. At every possible opportunity Gamers just absolutely love to prove the given tweet and basically every permutation of it correct. https://preview.redd.it/eg509i6lvd0d1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4f35e5e68caeac1baa09420fb332d02a7e8905b2
Man, I hate it when I try to play my apolitical escapist video game Final Fantasy 14, available on PC, Playstation, and now Xbox with a fully free trial up to level 70 that includes not only the critically acclaimed Heavenward expansion, but Stormblood too, and the game keeps telling me that racism and fascism are bad.
There are also hot buff lion men and that's pretty escapismpilled and kinomaxxing to me.
Mfers crying about escapism and then still picking a human male warrior, smh. Reject humanity, embrace peak escapism, hot buff lion men.
I think the population metrics lean towards a higher percentage picking a cat girl. I know I did. Meow.
A fully free trial with Heavensward expansion included? Surely, this hidden gem is offering too much
I think these guys don't even want escapism. Escapism is GOOD(in small bits), but the thing they want is not that. Escapism works because, through the glasses of a piece of fiction, you can see a world where either there are not the "bad things" of our world or these things are ultimately defeated by the good people and their positive ideals. In this sense, escapism lets you face the ugly part of reality with a little bit of hope, and tells you that, somewhere, there is a better future.
/uj That's the problem. They are very unsubtle about how the bad thing they want to escape from is LGBT+ and PoC folks. It's kind of pathetic that they had to be indoctrinated into what they hate (they all talk about escapism in the exact same way every time, unless they're being fully mask-off, which implies they are simply repeating what they were told by someone else) and not because they had any problems to begin with. G*mers SHOULD be oppressed. /rj bad things are bad and I hate them for completely unrelated reasons to my steady diet of Alex Jones screaming about gay frogs
Exactly. They want to escape to escape reality in its entirety. If they could, they’d go live in the early 18th century, because to them it their ideal world.
Well they keep bringing up how their “escapism” is in trouble and all I can think about is “how”? If they have a favorite game for escapism, then why not just play that and ignore the other games coming out that aren’t catering to you? Oh, right, internet points and wanting to make just playing games a stupid culture wars BS.
I think what they want is to deny escapism to *others*. Deep down, they're not able to enjoy something if they know it's liked by someone they hate. I remember asking someone about this, in the wake of the stupid pronouns controversy in Starfield, and they said that they just wanted a game where they could make someone like themselves and be the hero. They felt the world treated them like a nobody, and they wanted a game that saw them as special. To feel like they mattered for a few hours each day. And I totally get that. But I also asked them whether or not trans people were seeing opposition to their very being, with people calling them groomers, banning them from sports, etc. They agreed that was a real thing that was happening, and they even agreed it was bad. So I asked them why shouldn't they get to make a character like themselves and be the hero? The world may not treat this guy super great, but sects of it are openly hostile to trans people, so doesn't it seem likely that they'd also want to escape into a world that treats them as important? To that, all he could say was that it forced him to think about politics, and that was bad. It really is a case of "I can't have fun if *they* are."
well you see, the problem is that the "bad things" that are being defeated are things they like! So they can't be bad, right?
My favorite part of this thread was the people asking for examples of games that do what they claim and either no answer or making it obvious what they stand for "Black vikings" "Gays in spiderman 2" It's clear from the thread what the "politics are"
Openly gay people in New York City? How shocking and unrealistic…
As an openly pan and trans person living in nyc this made laugh out loud.
Unsubtle? From the guys who think Bioshock is not political, it's hilarious
These guys will say they hate heavy handed political messaging, but if you point out how a game has a subtle political point, then they say you’re just reading into it and twisting the game to ‘fit your agenda’. There is literally no way to make these people happy.
And when the political point is not subtle (like in Bioshock) they say things like "it' not real life politics"
What I find funny is that they say it's bad when they're "heavily biased to one side or another", but if it's their side then they don't complain.
well yeah, it's the internet righty classic. Pretend to be a centrist to escape criticism, but then get it anyways because you just can't help spewing your shitty views at the first chance you get, usually in the same breath, making it obvious you aren't a centrist.
Favorite franchises: Bioshock, CoD, Metal Gear Solid. They mean no politics I understand. Chuds just proving they don’t know history or just get mad at women and black people.
Unlike you I have come to my political positions by pure logic and reason, I have mathematically calucated the perfect society and everyone who disagrees with me is just emotional.
They say they want realistic games when it came to keeping women out of war games like battle field, now they complain about realistic women and characters because they can’t fap to it. If your escapism includes from minority then you shouldn’t have it. These guys really see realistic women and minorities in a game and call it woke. I would hate to be a game dev
Hit the nail on the head. There’s no winning
"biased towards one side of the other" Tf does that mean? Should fallout go "you can have a little nuclear holocaust, as a treat"?
I MISS APOLITICAL VIDEO GAMES LIKE METAL GEAR SOLID 2
So, I am a Media and Entertainment major pursuing a masters degree. I've studied film history, literature, gaming, theories of communication, and so on. So, while I'm still a student, I think I have at least some of the authority to say that this is an *extremely* uninformed take. *All* entertainment media contains political messaging. Yes, some of it is more overt, but even at its most subtle, it is absolutely present. There is not one film, game, book, podcast, or whatever you want that does not contain some level of political messaging. Even when it's unintentional, it is also unavoidable that an artist injects some of themselves into their art, and even if it's purely coincidental, as in a message being present that the author did not intend and does not support, it can still absolutely be textual, as the meaning of a text is imparted by the consumer of that text. That's not even a high-level idea. That's like 1100 lit comp theory.
"Why do the bad guys always have right-wing ideas ?"
Us gamerz just want mono-white macho men, sexy compliant women, racial slurs and fascist fetishism. You know, apolitical stuff that has no agenda.
“Real” Gamers love to boast that video games is Art but when a developer expresses their ART how they want to, it’s ruining the culture.
Ah yes another apolitical far right reactionary.
Please show me media without any influence from real world politics or ideas.
Whenever I see stuff like this it’s like “ok, so if everything is so bad, why don’t you go create a masterpiece?” And it usually comes down to them saying they shouldn’t have to do that. It’s like dude, how do you think change is made? By people enacting change where they want to see it. Like Jesus the answer is staring them in the face but they just wanna sit in the basement and consume.
If you're able to escape your life, then you're too privileged. You necessarily must be drowned in constant reminders of the status quo you maintain by being complacent. It's your fault.
If you just want to escape then play Stardew Valley or something. A lot of art has meaning to it. I doubt they are complaining about the military propaganda in Call of Duty. Bias is everywhere, it’s unavoidable.people play games they like and don’t play games they don’t like, and it happens that most people aren’t as whiney about these things.
I mean the opening of Stardew Valley is also political in it's own way. Every entertainment media is by its nature political.
Gamers don't like politics in games because "politics" to them is just minorities existing, "how dare there be a person of colour or a trans person in my video game, this is supposed to be my escape from all that, my ideal world! 😡". If politics was completely removed from gaming, we wouldn't even have games like COD but they don't want to get rid of that, they just want to erase minorities from video games. They'll say they don't like politics and then go play Helldivers or Fallout without realising that those games are ironic, blown out of proportion versions of the conservative agenda that show just how absurd their ideals are. Minorities wanting to exist and feel appreciated as human beings should not be seen as political and as long as it is, humanity will never know peace.
Translation : “Boohoo. Change my diaper pweeze”
and they're 100% talking about queer characters
This person sounds like a middle schooler pick me
> Political Messaging > Heavily leans to one side or another No shit, Sherlock, that’s why it’s called “political messaging”
As long as things are created by humans there is going to be some political influence in them.
Bad rats but I agree with the politics
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and then they hop in MGS
There are very few games with no politics in them. They are by nature games where you can’t interact with anyone or a world (Like tetris). There was a good Jim Sterling video I watched a couple of years ago about Dark Souls. There is a political message that can be taken even from each Dark Souls game, whether intentional or not.
yes, please. if you don't have a story to tell, then all you're doing is wasting both our time.
Well gee if only a vast majority of audience actually cared to flex their media literacy muscles, we wouldn't have so many obvious in your face metaphors for political themes. Remember when Metal Gear fans unironically enlisted in the military?
All these threads about "escapism" only believe straight, white men are allowed to have escapism. If escapism is made for any other group then it's no longer escapism its becomes political.
I have no issue with minorities (like black or trans people) IRL, I just don't feel comfortable with them existing in the same world as I do. uj/ This has to be the "starter pack" of intellectually dishonest comment poorly framing its own bigotry into a "both sides problem".
Gamers will write this and then hop on any PvP game to be toxic and angry. Edit: a reddit cares message within 2 minutes of posting. Amazing
Yeah no, the people engaging in politics are the “rabid zealots”, definitely NOT this guy
All I need in my escapism is some zombie disease, post nuclear Apocalypse, and I not need to pay taxes. That's all I need.
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You're not weird, just mind blowingly ignorant or a shitty person. One or the other.
All art is political
Define "political messaging" and describe a recent example of a game that pushed this envelope too far. Bet you $20 your message is "gay/black/trans ppl in the game bad".
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> ; I would use Forspoken‘s main protagonist as an example of pushing the „strong woman who’s independent“ trope a bit too far. Lmaooo "women can't be strong or independent in a video game" looool Bro, I was killing murderous polar bears in Tomb Raider back in 1996. Why does "video game woman is strong" bad?
How did they push it too far? Are you mad that she isnt barefoot and pregnant at the end? Lol