Woke Culture

[Vyk]

I feel like if Saints Row 2 were released today there's a chance that it would receive the same outcry that Saints Row Reboot received for very much the same reasons. Which is wild to me. You can create a character that isn't just male or female. You can make a buff chick, or a dude with lipstick that runway-walks, and the current woke-hate would go ape over that

Though there are developers who are insincere and guilty of just shoe-horning, pandering, and tokenism stereotypes just to complete some diversity checklist. But I hate how actual genuine sincere creators are getting lumped in with them during the outrage when they legitimately want to tell a gay minority story or something..

[Shadowdust]

I'm super late to this conversation but I had to comment on the whole woke thing. Adding items that have been inherently associated with the word woke doesn't make them bad. What makes things upsetting is when big business treats it like a checklist to achieve higher sales or whatever their reason is. I assure you, that reason isn't for natural storytelling though. Let our developers tell the story they want to tell us. Let our developers give us their vision as they see it. Sometimes that will result in certain perceived imbalances but if it is what the story and vision needs so be it. And that goes for the flip side. If the story is naturally diverse, the haters need to get over their issues with perceived wokeness. Honestly, people need to just play games and enjoy them. If it ain't your cup of tea, no one is twisting your arm to play it. This same rant applies to movies as well. Between social media psychos and big business interfering in hobbies I have loved since childhood, it's taking the fun out of something that should never stop being fun.

[Iceglow]

I don't believe you can be super late to a topic anymore on EOFF...

My 2 cents on this. There is good and bad ways of introducing woke ideas into games, same as TV and film. The thing that often upsets people is the fact that creators want to take a beloved franchise or book series and do something that is not true to that franchise/series/book.

I think that you can take core characters from a book/film/game and re-cast them in a gender bend etc and do them well, hell just look at Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica as a great example of a character fans of the original 80s TV show loved but was well done in the modern version by casting a woman. Where a lot of people get upset is because their beloved characters are changed but not for the better, not in a way that adds depth or value to their character but instead dillutes them, cheapens them in some way.

I was trying to think of a game example of this but if I am honest, there's not one coming to mind right now for me. But in terms of film/tv adaptations of books the one that comes up often for me is Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. Amazon kept trying to shoehorn the idea that the Dragon Reborn could be a woman into the story for the entire first season. But that didn't make sense based on the lore of the world a lore they did not change. Men were the only ones who went mad using the power, the fear of the Dragon being reborn is because the Dragon being reborn would mean he was doomed to go mad and destroy the world. It just came across as a very stupid distraction that didn't actually pay off at all because instead of actually following to any conclusion i.e., a shocking revelation that The Dragon was actually Nynaeve, they instead settled on following the established character of Rand Al Thor being The Dragon. They added characters needlessly to empower character development when reality was the character they created a Wife for to give a tragic reason for personal growth and development doesn't need that trigger. He had many reasons for his development that came from embarking on the journey, in fact all the T'Averen from Emmonds Fields in the books develop well on their own terms.

But as Psy put it, anger and outrage = publicity and then people will buy the game. They buy on the basis of it'll piss off the outraged even if the game is bad.