I agree with you, slapping a veneer of diverse identity on a character post-facto is often just performative bullshit. At best it’s bad representation, at worst it’s cynical pinkwashing and pandering for profit.

But that’s not a distinction I have ever seen an “anti-woke gamer” railing against.

What I do see them railing against is any representation in games that does not pander to their own personal preferences.

Did you not encounter any of the backlash to Ellie’s sexuality? Honestly I think FNV only escapes a lot of that kind of vitriol because it was released pre-gg.

Shaun hits a lot of my major concerns in his new video.

Add on top of that that the games industry has laid off TENS OF THOUSANDS of devs in the last three or four years.

I know a lot of talented people who are no longer working as devs, or who have been job searching for months.

Of course this doesn’t mean that the studios still producing games have narrowed their scopes, they just dump more work on the survivors.

And “woke DEI SJW snowflake game dev” is far from the only thing making games worse, it’s just what a lot of gamers can easily identify as a problem.

By the time I left, my last industry job had been reduced to what felt like manning the slop hose of mtx store items made by overseas outsource studios producing soulless trash under fuck-knows-what kind of nightmare working conditions.

We started seeing more diversity in games because devs are diverse and wanted to see themselves and their friends in their art.

The problem has never been queer or black characters in games. It is, and always has been, the prioritizing of profit over quality craft.

How do you differentiate between a character “written for the sake of checking a diversity box”, a poorly-written diverse character, and a “random fact of the world”? It’s a fictional world. Nothing is random. It’s all creative decisions made by a team of writers and producers.

I don’t think shoehorning in of diverse identities and character backgrounds is good representation or good art, and I completely agree with your point there.

But I don’t think that the people driving the current backlash bother to make those distinctions.

What I see is a lot of outrage being stoked by people using the (updated) language and tactics of gamergate, and I don’t think the result of that will be “better representation”.

I think the result will be devs being harrassed and pushed out of an already brutal industry.

Fuck yeah anomalocaris

I was just playing Powder a few weeks ago! My friend and I used to play on a work laptop during slow periods, and I got nostalgic for it.

Had some good fun with unidentified ring of polymorph, don’t remember that from 2010.

Worm 1 [Healthy] Age 2 quadrums (32000) of Russia Consuming nutrient paste

Worm 2 [Healthy] Age 1 (41700) of Russia Consuming nutrient paste

Only if you’re completely unwilling to unpack what things like “be a man” and “like a man” generally mean in the anglosphere, and how phrases like that have often been employed to reinforce the worst and most destructive aspects of masculinity.