There will always be a background level of online misanthropes labeling everything woke, but that only gets attention if there nothing else remarkable about the game.
So if the only online dialog about a game is how woke it is, the game probably isn’t very good.
I can probably find dozens of games in my library that had mediocre, unremarkable stories. If we change their white male protagonists to someone black or gay, suddenly it’s “bad because it’s woke”. Doesn’t that make perfect sense???10&@?
Honestly this sort of thing happening is extremely rare. In reality either the story/environment gets sacrificed to pander to some audience to make more money, or the game is from the ground up built to support that political message.
What also happens is devs deciding that they’d rather have diversity than trying to emulate some real historical setting in their unrealistic fantasy world, which for some reason gets people crying too, but has nothing to do with pushing a political message and rather just changing the expectation of white male default in western games (and probably pandering to the sensibilities of the majority of their audience to make more money).
It’s not wrong that the complaints about “woke” are mostly precisely about this perceived lowering of quality for some agenda or pandering, it’s just that that is rarely what’s happening. Like this whole idea that some people like to push that if not every woman in your game is conventionally attractive, it’s “woke” and you’re “ignoring your actual audience”. When usually these games have a ton of hot women (and men) anyway because they’re fully aware many people like playing hot characters, they just have other options too.
I did not say writing a good game about gay, black, or women is political.
These statements are different.
So if the game is good and centers around those things its a good game.
But if its bad and centers around those things, its woke. Am i understanding you correctly?
Kinda -
There will always be a background level of online misanthropes labeling everything woke, but that only gets attention if there nothing else remarkable about the game.
So if the only online dialog about a game is how woke it is, the game probably isn’t very good.
When has this happened?
I can probably find dozens of games in my library that had mediocre, unremarkable stories. If we change their white male protagonists to someone black or gay, suddenly it’s “bad because it’s woke”. Doesn’t that make perfect sense???10&@?
If the writing sucks, the writing would still suck even if it was pro-oppression.
Honestly this sort of thing happening is extremely rare. In reality either the story/environment gets sacrificed to pander to some audience to make more money, or the game is from the ground up built to support that political message.
What also happens is devs deciding that they’d rather have diversity than trying to emulate some real historical setting in their unrealistic fantasy world, which for some reason gets people crying too, but has nothing to do with pushing a political message and rather just changing the expectation of white male default in western games (and probably pandering to the sensibilities of the majority of their audience to make more money).
It’s not wrong that the complaints about “woke” are mostly precisely about this perceived lowering of quality for some agenda or pandering, it’s just that that is rarely what’s happening. Like this whole idea that some people like to push that if not every woman in your game is conventionally attractive, it’s “woke” and you’re “ignoring your actual audience”. When usually these games have a ton of hot women (and men) anyway because they’re fully aware many people like playing hot characters, they just have other options too.