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…
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.
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.
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.
There are plenty of non-political games out there; games with no story, or games that are very simple, or games that are geared toward children.
Games that don't fall into those categories tend to get political because politics are closely linked to systematic oppression, which is often a hallmark of stories with emotional stakes in any medium. Lord of the Rings? Very political. Hunger Games? Very political. Dune? Very political. Star Wars? Very political. Star Trek? Very political.
So... if you want to avoid media telling you "fascism == bad" then maybe stick to Overcooked and Beat Saber.
Overcooked highlights the struggle of working in a restaurant, and anything that paints the working class as anything other than lazy freeloaders is political. /s
Maybe overcooked is the game the capitalists want, politically. You have employees willing to work even as the kitchen careens through the sky out of control or down a rushing waterfall with no OSHA involvement and docked pay for every failed order regardless of distraction. Employees work more for gold stars than any real salary. And they never take bathroom breaks
Doesn't it do more than that, pretty sure there's some kind of evil king profiting off the land and abusing the peasants of some sorts, I'll be honest the story wasn't my number one priority when I played it so memories are a little fuzzy...
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.
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.
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.
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.
The headlines have long been the best part of Onion articles. It's like enjoying the premise of an SNL skit without having to watch the cast beat it to death.
Gamer Simply Wants Non-Political Games, White Ethnostate
I miss the days when satire was subtle and non-political.
I honestly can't tell if you're continuing the joke by pretending to be the gamer in the article or actually believe that non-political satire is a thing that can possibly exist.
Why couldn't satire exist independent of politics? Not saying satire should never be political, just that non political things can also be satarized too.
There are thousands of games released every year by indie devs that don't have any political message. Why don't you just play one of those instead of getting buried in culture war YouTubers?
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.
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.