So Kate had a viral political tweet back then which ran like wildfire over the right-wing media and I’m reading her ever since and her twitter survived the purge of political posters from my life, because mostly she doesn’t talk about politics but games and media. And this series of posts are just perfect:
Nowadays many games have more effort invested into the character creator than into the progression system. They want to make sure that every possible race, gender identity and sexual orientation are properly represented or else they get bad press. But the demand is indeed just being shallow. I identify as a capitalist, as a rational, as a blogger, as a gamer and not as “white” or “male”. I’m absolutely sure that I could have a better talk with a black, old, French woman who likes Ayn Rand than with a white, Hungarian (my nation) “dude” of my age who wants to get drunk, have some fun and pick up girls (any girls, no specification). When I was a kid I watched the adventures of Sisko and Janeway with awe, liking both of them more than Pickard (granted, I liked Garak and Seven more than them).
In a game I look for challenge (and by extension competition), not diversity. I made my PUBG character by just clicking OK, OK, OK on every default option. My last “proper” MMO character was in Black Desert Online:
She got serious effort, because the default was unacceptably sexualized and that’s not a surface issue, that’s a conscious signal that one is interested in sexual affairs instead of slaying demons. Such characters send a message that the game isn’t taking itself seriously, the proper way of consuming the content it is not doing your best to slay the dragon but zooming on your character and masturbating.
But if the character fits into the narrative, I don’t care how it looks. I care what it does.
If the characters gender/race/ect doesn’t matter… then what’s the matter? It’s all arbitrary, right? Then there is no big deal if there is some trans character, or if the main character is woman, or whatever else. Kate should be fine, you should be fine, and we’re all fine exploring what non-traditional fantasy tropes look like.
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The problem is that extreme amount of design resources go to “proper” design of player and non-player characters at the expense of designing the game itself.
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I think that dropping money into character generation and options is all fine, if you plan on making it your prime monetization method. They made the base models in BDO look fantastic, because they wanted to sell armors, clothes and stripper outfits for a good chunk of their revenue. Same with skins in MOBAs, or cosmetics in general.
If that’s not the case, if you want to add diversity to your character creation, it better have impact on the gameplay as well. Original Sin 2 (a single player RPG) did it right and even went one step further by allowing you to make an undead version of everything available, drastically changing the way the game is played. But that’s the exception, not the rule.
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I always thought the character creators spent too much time on the front. I spend all my time looking at their back. For MMOs all the pretty falls away after about hour 5 except when going to new places, then I get 10-30 minutes more of oooh. For the most part character appearance doesn’t matter, I’m also more interested in the game. That said, clunky character movement can drive me up the wall, even if it’s still perfectly playable.
Game makers also do it for a reason. Retro games can sorta get away without it, but they also pull off visual tricks that couldn’t have been done in 8, 16, and 32 bit eras. Mentally I call them Retro++. Things HAVE to look pretty now days. You’re complaining about character creation resources, but that pales in comparison to The Interface. A bad UI will sink a game for players faster than anything. Stupid amounts of time and money are spent on it instead of being spent on the game it’s trying to display. Resources go where it’ll get them the most money for time spent. Unfortunately sanding the rough edges down is more important than anything else from a money perspective.
We(the largest part of the public) don’t actually want to play the game, we want spectacle and a cool memory. It’s why Uncharted keeps selling stupid amounts of units. That game makes it effortless to have a Hero Moment. Hell, they are built in. CoD as well. MMOs are going the same way. Sooner or later I have faith MMOs will bounce the other way, gameplay will matter again, it’ll just happen after tools and equipment make it easy to create the Hero Moments. Gameplay will start to be something they compete on again. Just don’t expect it anytime in the next decade.
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@Azuriel all of that stuff shouldn’t matter, but don’t pretend it starts with backlash against those things when they show up. lets use the example of that Baldur’s Gate expansion for a year or two ago, you remember all the controversy around it the trans character being put in? well if you do you remember wrong, that whole mess started with the fact the expansion was utterly broken, corrupting save and making things generally unplayable, but one thing that was available in what wasn’t broken was an NPC that pretty much flat out stated it was trans, so more than a few people trans and otherwise were annoyed by how sloppy the character was done, not the inclusion, the execution. This was picked up as people hating the inclusion of the character and completely ignoring every other criticism.
we could also look at star wars aftermath, the stilted prose and story beats such as death fakeouts happening multiple times to the same character, established information in the story being ignored to allow those fake outs, subjective criticisms? Yes, actual criticism none the less, I actually read most of the reviews myself before any began being deleted due to the controversy, in over a thousand I only can across maybe two even mentioning the fact the was a non-straight couple in the story. then we got the articles about how people were hating the story because of the fact there was such a thing in the book. that was when the homophobic comments started coming interestingly enough, pure coincidence I am sure.
we could even look at Gone Home, considered to be the pinnacle of LGBT games by some, is it any good, no it is a poor excuse for a west coast 90’s nostalgia trip that contains the same level of game-play as a picture search game and writing that is literally below a good deal of fanfiction, oh and the main couple of the game get together after one molests the other in her sleep, but hey the game is making a positive statement somehow or something so whatever. not a well liked game by a lot of people but hey they surely only hated it because it was about a girl returning home to an empty house and learning about her now runaway sister’s lesbian relationship.
These depictions are not about exploring non-traditional tropes i mean look at mass effect 3 and DA:I you have Dorrian who while pretty good for most of the game, has his personal story boils down to: “parents didn’t accept me so I left,” which is also Gone Home’s plot theme: and a huge amount other stories to the point of cliche.
Cortez has no identity outside of being a widower who is still grieving for his dead husband. most of these characters are so stereotyped and cliche that to say it is exploring new ground requires forgetting about things coming before.
The point I’m getting at, and I believe Kate is getting at too, is that these depictions don’t act as anything other than deflection from criticism. the characters are usually badly created, along with the games because who cares about quality when you can just shove slop at the people all this is supposedly done for, to disagree with Gevlon this isn’t a case of budget going too much into the characters it is a case of pretending that bare minimum effort is acceptable. which draws ire from people in general, but that is always deflected as being hate, and those who speak out, in those groups this is supposedly for, Kate, myself, and others, we are erased, merged into a group that preserves the Narrative, or flat out told we hate ourselves or worse.
We are people. We are not some defense against actual criticism. We are not the coin that you use to pay your indulgences so you can sleep sin free at night. Stop pretending that we are. This false compassion and false innocence is sickening
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Well, look at the audience.
Kids today are told that “everyone is equal” and that every one of us is an identical, interchangeable cog in a bigger machine. That’s not the intent, per se… the intent was to preach social justice and fairness.
Step back to when I was a kid. We were told none of that. But it was clear that talent rose to the top, so we identified with our strengths. I discovered engineering when I was 18 and in the Navy… but that was all I needed, never once did I ever hold myself back because of “white privilege” guilt or any other fairness crap. That’s how you do it, you go balls out you take no prisoners.
So, people bent on ‘fairness’ and in the process, ignoring their own strengths, focus on the petty and mundane to make themselves stand out.
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Imagine playing an MMO where every character and NPC was female. No explanation, no lore reason given, just an all-female character creator. You might reasonably ask where all the men went. It doesn’t seem plausible that the devs would create such a game without some kind of agenda.
The same situation with lack of, say, trans characters probably doesn’t trigger your “agenda alert” the same way. I say that because of the statistical likelihood that you don’t know anyone who’s trans (because trans people are rare), so the in-game world matches your experience. A world with no men is weird enough to you that it raises flags.
But people tend to hang out with other people like them, so trans people generally know lots of other trans people. An MMO world with no trans people might raise the same flag for them as an all-female world world would for you, just based on their different daily experience.
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@Ravanna: in a fantasy World I’d accept “all female” without question. I had no problem with the Valkyre class (chosen after its abilities) is female only in Black Desert Online. Just like I have no problem with only the Elf races in WoW can be demon hunters. Why should a fantasy world represent the real world.
Finally, “trans” makes no sense. If someone makes a gender change, others cannot know (or have reason to care) that the current and birth gender do not match. If I’d meet Kathleen Jenner without knowing anything of her, I’d just assume that she is a woman. If I look at a “transwoman” and realize that “she” is a man, then he is sucks at being trans.
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“When I was a kid I watched the adventures of Sisko and Janeway with awe, liking both of them more than Pickard (granted, I liked Garak and Seven more than them).”
Ah, seven of nine, ex borg drone trying to regain her ‘humanity’. Janeway’s first officer Tuvok, a Vulcan with absolute control over his emotions using ‘cold’ logic. Star Trek definitely had it’s fair share of interesting characters.
The most interesting way a game has dealt with the topic of race has been Rust. You just get randomly assigned a randomly generated character, including skin color. And you don’t get to reroll unless you literally buy another copy of the game. See this video for a more detailed explanation.
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multiculturalism. per default silently accepting that “the other” can’t change and will not assimilate in the local “culture”. contrary to western propaganda.
SJW. hammering down on changing people on their whim by force.
I guess, like with other trolls and racists it is best to don’t feed them.
as for playing with virtual dolls. the more a doll can the better options, animations, style, clothing, voice. tech wise it is just another module for marketing to advertise about, the more you can list the better. I see people using their dolls as extension … the more animations and mood states the better. but if SJW are already triggered by char design and uninstalling … I can’t be more happy about this.
personally I like “random buttons” clicking that a few times and making sure the char is as ugly as possible under 5mins. doing this since 2 decades now. If gear appearance change is a thing I try to get the most hated and garbage one. If I could make pepe I would. The most time I spend on Names, in the end the Name is the pvp identity, and that needs to be as widely triggering as possible yet EULA and TOS abiding.
Also I don’t get the trans thing. they just hit female or male in the designer the way they want it … Or am I missing something here?
Garak
Huge fan of Garak, this character helped me to stand my ground an be myself no matter the cost. I’m also a bit claustrophobic so after that klingon prison episode, where he gets outed as claustrophobic, I really looked up to him. Also as with all the star trek doctors I really enjoy the effort they put into making them very strong and interesting personalities. For the fantasy Star trek is, it is nice. For the regressive message and lefty communist propaganda and the lack of explanation why this world came to be .. it rubs me on several occasions very wrong. But I’m not a treky enough to search for more official backstory (I appreciated TOS, loved TNG, DS9 and VOY and enjoyed the enterprise series after VOY, even though they lack many answers to my questions. Yet I can’t get into the reboot and what I read about ST: Discovery (“STD”? How appropriate), CBS primary tomorrow btw, It will be a beta cucked bullshit identity politics extravaganca I will most likely not watch).
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ESO does it by having a different pallete
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