Hogwarts Legacy Will Allow For Transgender Characters

[Hawki]

To expand it to other stuff there was a big cry that anyone objecting to Battlefield V was a sexist who hated women. I made a complaint based on the Demo that the default skin for the Assault class was a black guy and had people try to spin it was racism. My actual complaint was maybe don't make the single default black guy skin the frontline troop mostly likely to be getting shot and killed while claiming to be doing this in the name of diversity and progress when in reality it makes the game look like something from a South Park joke.

Actual complaints get ignored unless "the right people" with "The right kind of perceived view" make them. Battlefield V could have made the engineer class default skin black and that would have come off as progressive and not so problematic.

I'm sorry, but even that strikes me as bizzare. You see someone who's black in the Assault class, and not only think that Assault = Cannon Fodder (which it isn't, Assault is Jack of All Trades), but of the joke from South Park based on the colour of their skin? Really?

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

America Is Now the Divided Republic the Framers Feared

John Adams worried that “a division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the great political evil.” And that’s exactly what has come to pass.

www.theatlantic.com

Divide and conquer. That’s what a two party system ultimately does, and neither party let alone the people will likely be pleased with whoever ends up doing the latter.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

I'm sorry, but even that strikes me as bizzare. You see someone who's black in the Assault class, and not only think that Assault = Cannon Fodder (which it isn't, Assault is Jack of All Trades), but of the joke from South Park based on the colour of their skin? Really?

When the game is claiming to be some inclusive thing and the progressive damn right I'll look at it from the angle it wants to be looked at also Assault is mostly cannon fodder in Battlefield V it's far from jack of all trades in V.

Also as I specified it was the default skins and the only default class skin that was black was the assault.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

I've clarified above that I wasn't really referring to actual reporting outlets there, but to average online commentators. CriticalGaming's post seemed to be talking quite broadly about people complaining, not restricted to members of the press or professional pundits. The latter have a greater responsibility to weigh their words.

Well in the UK actually making malicious accusations against a person to smear them online has been tested in court when a member of the house of lords found a number of people online (including some quite high profile people) spreading round the claim that he was a pedophile who had abused kids and the law just hadn't ever caught up with him. No evidence of it. He won the case and a number of fairly high profile people ended up paying out for spreading the lie.

OK, well, I can't really comment about that because I've never seen that hashtag or seen an online campaign to that effect. It can't have been especially large.

Funny because Fire Gina Carano trended at 3,000 tweets. Cancel Disney Plus managed 120,000

Right, but that obviously crosses the line into threatening behaviour, stalking, and harassment. I'm talking about mere criticism.

Ah but is it criticism when it's throwing out claims based on no evidence at all? It's deliberate use of weighted terms to smear rather than actual criticism often in the belief that it will get other people to believe it too and get the more radical elements to take action.

The issue is that I remember that discussion. And that wasn't really how the complainants were presenting the case back then. You're presenting quite a... convenient description of the whole discourse.

I said some of my complaints. Also yes the complaints mostly were presently in fairly sane ways. The argument from EA was "Well some women did fight so we can make up whatever woman we like and pretend she also fought regardless of history of the nationality of the women who did fight" to which at the time I wrote another piece arguing that by that logic I should be able to play as a bear because a bear did fight and hold a military rank in World War II. They also claimed they'd tell the stories of real women who fought in WWII and then didn't and changed out the operation done by a commando unit for a mother and daughter single handedly doing it rather than have a mission as a Night Witch, or Middle Eastern woman fighter or one of the Russian Sniper women.

 

[Hawki]

When the game is claiming to be some inclusive thing and the progressive damn right I'll look at it from the angle it wants to be looked at also Assault is mostly cannon fodder in Battlefield V it's far from jack of all trades in V.

Also as I specified it was the default skins and the only default class skin that was black was the assault.

I've played Battlefield V. Assault isn't cannon fodder. Yes, they'll arguably die the most since they're at the frontlines, and you'd have more Assault than other classes, but I don't think that's the equivalent of cannon fodder.

Also, if we agree that Assault is cannon fodder in the series, and you want to look at that through skin colour, Assault was black for the USMC in Battlefield 2 for instance, along with the anti-tank. So, apparently in BF2, having an Afro-American as an Assault is problematic, but the anti-tank isn't.

As for the game claiming to be progressive...okay, I don't know if that's really the way I'd look at it. The outrage over BF5 had nonsense from both the developers and the SQWs who shouted it down, but it's so silly. "We want more of group X in our game, but don't put them in certain roles, because that would be offensive." It's so silly. And it's splitting hairs to hone in on a default in the alpha, when in the final release, the classes were fully customizable.

It's yet another mountain made out of yet another molehill.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

I've played Battlefield V. Assault isn't cannon fodder. Yes, they'll arguably die the most since they're at the frontlines, and you'd have more Assault than other classes, but I don't think that's the equivalent of cannon fodder.

Also, if we agree that Assault is cannon fodder in the series, and you want to look at that through skin colour, Assault was black for the USMC in Battlefield 2 for instance, along with the anti-tank. So, apparently in BF2, having an Afro-American as an Assault is problematic, but the anti-tank isn't.

As for the game claiming to be progressive...okay, I don't know if that's really the way I'd look at it. The outrage over BF5 had nonsense from both the developers and the SQWs who shouted it down, but it's so silly. "We want more of group X in our game, but don't put them in certain roles, because that would be offensive." It's so silly. And it's splitting hairs to hone in on a default in the alpha, when in the final release, the classes were fully customizable.

It's yet another mountain made out of yet another molehill.

No maybe don't make the 1 default skin be that for that class. Or have skin options from the get go (The Demo seemingly had all other skins locked).

 

[Hawki]

No maybe don't make the 1 default skin be that for that class. Or have skin options from the get go (The Demo seemingly had all other skins locked).

Or maybe don't see everything through the lens of skin colour and assign messages to it that aren't there?

 

[Kae]

Yes and no.
Yes we know the differences are only visible in adults.
No as the whole documentary is exploring we don't know if it is nature or nurture and we may never know because to find out would require some seriously unethical experiments on children. What we can say is at present adults do show neurological differences in the brain between men and women (worth pointing out that present research into trans individuals based on Dr Verma's research shows their brains to be more in line with their gender identity than birth sex). The other thing pointed out in the documentary is seemingly the differences exist regardless of lets say professional acumen. As was shown the woman scientist in the program had one of the same reactions to other women to one of the experiments (the Swivel chair thing)

Yes but the latter study comes to the conclusion that those changes vary by culture and that the standards of what's feminine mental behaviour and male varies depending on culture and that people tend to match what their culture expects of them, meaning that study very firmly comes to the conclusion that gendered behavioural patterns are a social construct rather than "human nature" or "instinctual", which is to say they are learned.
Also, this is probably a personal flaw as I never went to a College or University and maybe simply don't know how to look for scientific papers, but I can't find Dr Ragini Verma's studies available to the public which means I cannot see her results in the same manner that I can consult the results of the study I linked earlier, so it's really impossible for me to know what she was actually documenting and what her results where, and as such I have no idea what she means with "The results show very clear differences between men & women", this isn't aided by the fact that all I know is what the documentary says and one of the things it says about her research is that it's controversial in the scientific community, likely meaning contested, so if you can like help me find it so I can read it and compare it to other studies so I can make up my mind about it, that would be like super helpful.

Her results technically agree with him in so far as "Well adults are like this so this is the reality we have to work with for now unless we can prove somehow we can modify peoples brains somehow to form into something other than one or the other main overall structure.

Relying on technicalities to present something from a perspective that it does not fully represent is a bit disingenuous, it would've been better to present as what it is in it's own terms, mainly because it's science and that's just a better way to present science in general.

I strongly disagree.
E.G. I have Coeliac (Genetic gluten / wheat intolerance). There's actually a character in the Arrowverse who says he's gluten intolerant at one point. I thought cool so finally people will understand a bit better and I won't have to deal with feeling bad having to create possible extra work for people due to it. Nope next episode he's drinking a beer, the same beer as everyone else. if it were good representation he wouldn't be able to because while there is Gluten free beer out there it's not that widely available and it's far easier to just have something else instead. If it's about people learning about things then that's bad representation of a condition I have because now people will think I can just crack open a beer with everyone else no problem and if I say otherwise I'm just being awkward because their perception of it if they don't know me but do remember the character on TV would be that it would be fine for me to have the beer.

That's a medical condition though, that's different from like a general state of being as it's whole relevancy is in how it very specifically affects the person medically and as such portraying it fairly is based on medical accuracy, while I won't pretend that my opinion is the right one as I can myself see a lot of reasons why it can suck pretty badly and I don't think the argument for not having it is bad, I will say that I'm coming to it from a perspective from cultural alienation, if for example a lot of people say that what you are doesn't exist, like it just plain doesn't exist and you're probably crazy or traumatised or stupid and what you are isn't really acknowledged by culture generally it can lead to some pretty weird trains of thought and a whole lot of existential angst where you wonder if you're even feeling what you're feeling or if perhaps you're just delusional, and seeing people talking about it can just help calm down those feelings and maybe even encourage you to seek medical attention, because let's say that seeing someone that is the same as you talking about receiving medical, psychological or psychiatric attention and how that's helped them is far more encouraging than people saying you're probably completely insane and need to see a doctor so that they can give you meds for you to stop being that way or just lock you up for being crazy.

But anyways that's just the way I see it, not necessarily the right way just my perspective.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Or maybe don't see everything through the lens of skin colour and assign messages to it that aren't there?

Which I wouldn't had the game not touted itself as being some grand act of diversity and being so progressive......That's how the game wanted to be viewed seemingly.

 

[Silvanus]

Well in the UK actually making malicious accusations against a person to smear them online has been tested in court when a member of the house of lords found a number of people online (including some quite high profile people) spreading round the claim that he was a pedophile who had abused kids and the law just hadn't ever caught up with him. No evidence of it. He won the case and a number of fairly high profile people ended up paying out for spreading the lie.

Yes, but that's a concrete, demonstrably false claim. Calling someone "alt-right" or whatever is just a political descriptive term that you consider exaggerated; it's not a factual claim.

Funny because Fire Gina Carano trended at 3,000 tweets. Cancel Disney Plus managed 120,000

I thought you said they were "the same people"? Quite the discrepancy for the same people.

I said some of my complaints. Also yes the complaints mostly were presently in fairly sane ways. The argument from EA was "Well some women did fight so we can make up whatever woman we like and pretend she also fought regardless of history of the nationality of the women who did fight" to which at the time I wrote another piece arguing that by that logic I should be able to play as a bear because a bear did fight and hold a military rank in World War II. They also claimed they'd tell the stories of real women who fought in WWII and then didn't and changed out the operation done by a commando unit for a mother and daughter single handedly doing it rather than have a mission as a Night Witch, or Middle Eastern woman fighter or one of the Russian Sniper women.

Look, I don't want to just rehash the arguments we all already had in the other thread. Suffice it to say, you're offering a very one-sided description in this thread in an effort to make the other side look totally unreasonable.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Yes but the latter study comes to the conclusion that those changes vary by culture and that the standards of what's feminine mental behaviour and male varies depending on culture and that people tend to match what their culture expects of them, meaning that study very firmly comes to the conclusion that gendered behavioural patterns are a social construct rather than "human nature" or "instinctual", which is to say they are learned.

Well the paper you linked was the about the Mosiac model not the same as Dr Verma's and I'm not sure of any other ones relating to Dr Verma's research other than some relating to trans people.

Also, this is probably a personal flaw as I never went to a College or University and maybe simply don't know how to look for scientific papers, but I can't find Dr Ragini Verma's studies available to the public which means I cannot see her results in the same manner that I can consult the results of the study I linked earlier, so it's really impossible for me to know what she was actually documenting and what her results where, and as such I have no idea what she means with "The results show very clear differences between men & women", this isn't aided by the fact that all I know is what the documentary says and one of the things it says about her research is that it's controversial in the scientific community, likely meaning contested, so if you can like help me find it so I can read it and compare it to other studies so I can make up my mind about it, that would be like super helpful.

I'd say try Google Scholar if you're not using it already

Google Scholar

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Search across a wide variety of disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.

scholar.google.com

Being controversial in the scientific community is more an issue of peoples belief and refusal to accept things, it is a nice idea to think science is some field that strictly follows the evidence and changes quickly based on it but there are issues of ego and entrenched beliefs often pushing back against evidence and it can take a big push to overcome that. I've met some Scientists who had to push against that or were pushing against such entrenched beliefs on ideas.

Relying on technicalities to present something from a perspective that it does not fully represent is a bit disingenuous, it would've been better to present as what it is in it's own terms, mainly because it's science and that's just a better way to present science in general.

Well it's the reality of what we have and as was shown by the macaque monkey experiments in the documentary I linked it shows similar kind of differences (by action) exist in primates and suggest the differences have been with us for a long while and so the question is do we consider it nature at this point or not?

That's a medical condition though, that's different from like a general state of being as it's whole relevancy is in how it very specifically affects the person medically and as such portraying it fairly is based on medical accuracy, while I won't pretend that my opinion is the right one as I can myself see a lot of reasons why it can suck pretty badly and I don't think the argument for not having it is bad, I will say that I'm coming to it from a perspective from cultural alienation, if for example a lot of people say that what you are doesn't exist, like it just plain doesn't exist and you're probably crazy or traumatised or stupid and what you are isn't really acknowledged by culture generally it can lead to some pretty weird trains of thought and a whole lot of existential angst where you wonder if you're even feeling what you're feeling or if perhaps you're just delusional, and seeing people talking about it can just help calm down those feelings and maybe even encourage you to seek medical attention, because let's say that seeing someone that is the same as you talking about receiving medical, psychological or psychiatric attention and how that's helped them is far more encouraging than people saying you're probably completely insane and need to see a doctor so that they can give you meds for you to stop being that way or just lock you up for being crazy.

But anyways that's just the way I see it, not necessarily the right way just my perspective.

Thing is there are a fair few people who think it doesn't exist or people are putting it on

'You need a medical certificate if you want gluten-free food'

A cafe has come under fire for telling customers they need a doctor's note if they want gluten-free food.

nz.news.yahoo.com

Thing is I didn't know I had it for a while because one of the main initial symptoms can just seem like teenage acne but along the arms it was only when I had a very bad reaction to drinking some squash that had barley in it that I had the fun of about a year long series of tests and investigations that eventually found it. The thing that tipped the doctor off who found it in the end was my arms with the spots on them.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Yes, but that's a concrete, demonstrably false claim. Calling someone "alt-right" or whatever is just a political descriptive term that you consider exaggerated; it's not a factual claim.

Except it is rather a factual claim to associate them with said group and damaging considering the claims and general things deemed to be associated with being part of said political group.

I mean the IRA are technically a political group, a political terrorist group but a political group too and being falsely associated with them would likely be harmful to people

I thought you said they were "the same people"? Quite the discrepancy for the same people.

I didn't say they were the same people. I said the people against #CancelDisneyPlus were the ones who were all for #FireGinaCrano

Look, I don't want to just rehash the arguments we all already had in the other thread. Suffice it to say, you're offering a very one-sided description in this thread in an effort to make the other side look totally unreasonable.

Because the claim that anyone with objection to Battlefield V just hates women gets repeated again and again with the other wise presented as just totally unreasonable again and again which in itself is totally unreasonable a claim because it refuses to acknowledge the other side having any validity. Which is why I'm portraying said side as some of the media supporting it has been acting.

 

[Silvanus]

Except it is rather a factual claim to associate them with said group and damaging considering the claims and general things deemed to be associated with being part of said political group.

I mean the IRA are technically a political group, a political terrorist group but a political group too and being falsely associated with them would likely be harmful to people

"Alt-right" is not a specific group with a membership. It's a descriptive term like "neoliberal", "traditionalist", etc. You can't place restrictions on descriptive phrases because of the associations others might draw from them.

I didn't say they were the same people. I said the people against #CancelDisneyPlus were the ones who were all for #FireGinaCrano

OK, but you're basing the latter on some miniature non-movement of 3,000 tweets.

But regardless, I don't know why you're putting these Twitter randos to me as if it rebuffs what I said. It's all just people moaning on Twitter. We're not talking about professional outlets or reporters, and the employer is still the one retaining the employment rights. What do you want to do about it?

Because the claim that anyone with objection to Battlefield V just hates women gets repeated again and again [...]

Stop, no. You're doing it again. You're just presenting a wildly exaggerated and one-sided description of an argument that already played out in another thread.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

"Alt-right" is not a specific group with a membership. It's a descriptive term like "neoliberal", "traditionalist", etc. You can't place restrictions on descriptive phrases because of the associations others might draw from them.

Oddly it actually was for a while as specific conferences did exist for the alternative right and in a rather funny twist it actually did dis-invite people from speaking after it was found they had direct tied to Neo-Nazi groups.

It's since taken on the connotation of being mostly the more extreme groups.

Originally the term was just "Alternative right" as in different to the traditional more evangelical right wing (at least this is my understanding of it) so it was a case of you could be more economically right wing but not socially right wing. But yeh that kind of changed and the present case of what it means has become more defined by it's use to try and associate people with rather awful group than what it may or may not have been intended to be about.

OK, but you're basing the latter on some miniature non-movement of 3,000 tweets.

Which is what actually got her fired in the end because a twitter employee manually added it to the trending tab on twitter. (and yes that trending tab is curated on twitter by staff)

But regardless, I don't know why you're putting these Twitter randos to me as if it rebuffs what I said. It's all just people moaning on Twitter. We're not talking about professional outlets or reporters, and the employer is still the one retaining the employment rights. What do you want to do about it?

I was using it as an example of how certain people get to see the press give them far more of a platform.

I mean if the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle were now there would be more than the handful of outlets at the time pushing the EA narrative that everyone hating the ending was just using it as an excuse to hate the game cause they're homophobes who just hate the gay romance option in the game.

Stop, no. You're doing it again. You're just presenting a wildly exaggerated and one-sided description of an argument that already played out in another thread.

Except it's not an exaggeration. Not that long ago Heather Alexandra repeated the claims without nuance in her piece about something like "Why do we keep having the same arguments over and over again in gaming" presented the position that somehow the arguments were settled and the oppositions claims had no real merit.

 

[Silvanus]

Oddly it actually was for a while as specific conferences did exist for the alternative right and in a rather funny twist it actually did dis-invite people from speaking after it was found they had direct tied to Neo-Nazi groups.

It's since taken on the connotation of being mostly the more extreme groups.

Originally the term was just "Alternative right" as in different to the traditional more evangelical right wing (at least this is my understanding of it) so it was a case of you could be more economically right wing but not socially right wing. But yeh that kind of changed and the present case of what it means has become more defined by it's use to try and associate people with rather awful group than what it may or may not have been intended to be about.

That's never been my experience of people who self-described as "alt-right"; socially conservative views were very much a part of it. The whole "culture war", anti-"woke" stuff was always front-and-centre in my experience. It's that, really, that gave the term its distasteful connotations.

Which is what actually got her fired in the end because a twitter employee manually added it to the trending tab on twitter. (and yes that trending tab is curated on twitter by staff)

Well, not quite, she won't have been fired because of some tweets per se. The comments garnered negative publicity across a wide range of outlets & social media. And I can see why: they're deeply inflammatory. It's the employer's call, and the employer recognised that making hugely alienating comments like that is bad for PR.

Disney can soak up a little bit of bad PR. If the comments hadn't been quite so off-the-wall, then they probably wouldn't have budged.

I mean if the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle were now there would be more than the handful of outlets at the time pushing the EA narrative that everyone hating the ending was just using it as an excuse to hate the game cause they're homophobes who just hate the gay romance option in the game.

I don't believe you.

Games with progressive elements in them receive valid criticism all the time, and those valid criticisms don't become the subject of a social media backlash.

But it's also unavoidably true that some sectors of the community respond badly to diversity in games. There's a reason that whenever a gay character exists in a prominent position in a game, there's always a group of people whining about how they're only there for "pandering" or blah-de-blah, or how storytelling is being ruined, etc. Every damn time. Often the criticisms will be dressed up as concerns around storytelling... yet more often than not they'll be hyper-focused on the mere presence of a gay guy.

That's what provokes a social media backlash. That's what has created a negative image of a subset of the gaming community as regressive or toxic.

Except it's not an exaggeration.

It's a complete invention. Nobody is saying that "anyone with objections to BFV hates women". That's transparently, obviously made up.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

That's never been my experience of people who self-described as "alt-right"; socially conservative views were very much a part of it. The whole "culture war", anti-"woke" stuff was always front-and-centre in my experience. It's that, really, that gave the term its distasteful connotations.

Well first of all there's a difference between "woke" and progress.

Woke: We added women into the game by changing real life stories of the action of men to be women.

Progress: We actually told stories about the real women in that period in history.

Woke: We made 007 a lesbian now

Progress: We made a different character whose also a badass secret agent who is a lesbian.

Woke: Plastic pollution is bad but feel free to keep taking long haul flights.

Progress: Hey have you maybe considered the Ozone layer recently?

It's funny really because a lot of the culture war comes down to corporations not wishing to take risks or expend extra effort in the end and trying to do the bare minimum to try to market their program as socially conscious to try and make people more willing to support it thinking they're helping something.

Well, not quite, she won't have been fired because of some tweets per se. The comments garnered negative publicity across a wide range of outlets & social media. And I can see why: they're deeply inflammatory. It's the employer's call, and the employer recognised that making hugely alienating comments like that is bad for PR.

Disney can soak up a little bit of bad PR. If the comments hadn't been quite so off-the-wall, then they probably wouldn't have budged.

She was fired because it got trending mostly. Some Disney exec likely saw it trending and freaked out a bit not knowing Trending on twitter is curated.

As for "Deeply inflammatory" it's a similar sentiment to what the Auschwitz museum shared previously. The only inflammatory stuff about what she actually said would be what people read into it.

It's an employers call but I can still call bullshit.

I called bullshit on removing James Gunn even if I could see Disney's reasoning based on the tweets I also could see the context of him being linked to Troma Entertainment at the time.

I called bullshit on Wallmart trying to fire employees who were using birth control or fought against Walmart denying them coverage on their medical insurance for birth control.

I call bullshit now.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

I don't believe you.

Games with progressive elements in them receive valid criticism all the time, and those valid criticisms don't become the subject of a social media backlash.

More and more recently though from some outlets they don't get criticism. Also social media backlash sees outlets trying to protect them and frame the backlash as awful terrible people.

It's easy to try to shift a narrative in the press.

Remember the Battlefront 2 developer getting death threats and harrassment?

Being Upset at a Game Developer Doesn't Give You an Excuse to Harass Them

Today, it's 'Battlefront 2.' Tomorrow, it'll be another game. There are better ways to express yourself than yelling at someone.

www.vice.com

“So I'm up to 7 death threats, and over 1600 individual personal attacks now (and yes, for legal reasons I'm keeping track),” said one EA developer on Twitter, known for being regularly outspoken. “And why, you might ask? Because of an unpopular feature in a game.”
This developer became a target after defending Battlefront II’s approach to grinding, loot boxes, and microtransactions, the latest skirmish in an ongoing conversation in games. Most notably, this developer did not work on Battlefront II. Their crime is also working for EA. What set off this firestorm? A rather banal remark.


“No, it is not P2W [pay to win]. It does not fit the definition,” said the developer in a tweet over the weekend. “And with paid DLC the playerbase gets divided. The game may not be perfect, but we literally did what ppl asked of us - and low and behold - we just can't win.”

Only problem. It wasn't true the person wasn't an EA developer at all.

https://kotaku.com/the-curious-case-of-the-ea-game-dev-who-said-he-receive-18204744587

Which throws into question the death threats claim too. It's been a consistent thing for a number of outlets to report on such threats without evidence presented or indication they'd even see evidence of such threats.

The LARPER in twitter claiming to be an EA developer threw a huge wrench into the pushback against lootboxes and for a little while until Jason Schreier looked into it and found it wasn't an EA developer at all that the pushback was in full force. The thing was before then part of the forming narrative was about the threats not the issue of lootboxes.

Earlier this week, a man with “Game Dev @EA” in his Twitter profile wrote that he had received death threats from angry Star Wars Battlefront II fans. His story was covered by news outlets like USA Today, the BBC, and Yahoo. Vice wrote an editorial about it, CNBC ran a headline about it, and the tweet was retweeted by hundreds of people. There’s just one lingering question: Does he actually work at Electronic Arts?

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

But it's also unavoidably true that some sectors of the community respond badly to diversity in games. There's a reason that whenever a gay character exists in a prominent position in a game, there's always a group of people whining about how they're only there for "pandering" or blah-de-blah, or how storytelling is being ruined, etc. Every damn time. Often the criticisms will be dressed up as concerns around storytelling... yet more often than not they'll be hyper-focused on the mere presence of a gay guy.

At worst a very tiny sector. Which is then often used to smear everyone else. The "Oh you're really just mad about x and using your complaints to cover it". I mean it's a rather insidious tactic to see deployed because PR wise it shifts the focus onto the group wit the objections having to defend against accusations rather than the actual complaints.

http://archive.fo/uSZbU

EA Admits It “Can Do Better” But Blames Worst Company Success On Homophobes And Whiny Madden Fans

That's what provokes a social media backlash. That's what has created a negative image of a subset of the gaming community as regressive or toxic.

No it's somewhat an engineered thing.

#NotmyAreial when it started trending on twitter after the new little mermaid actress was revealed to be black was traced back and twitter users quickly found it was started by and spread round by a number of bot accounts on the platform and not seemingly actual users.

It's was Engineered to try and present some huge backlash so at some point a PR rep could leak to the media about it or push out a statement condemning the racism and how Disney stood for inclusion. Problem is twitter users found out about it and it became public enough knowledge it was started by bots that almost 0 outlets reported on it.

A few years back in a video (I forget which one) Moviebob said how in Hollywood there had been 30 companies pop up that offered services such as "Managing fan expectations and controlling fan reaction online".

In Politics there was Hillarys correct the record PAC

Correct the Record - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

It's a complete invention. Nobody is saying that "anyone with objections to BFV hates women". That's transparently, obviously made up.

So no-one said it eh?


if that's not enough

EA on the backlash against women in Battlefield V: ‘Accept it or don’t buy the game’

‘I’m fine with either or’

www.theverge.com

Battlefield V fans who failed history are mad that the game has women in it

Has anyone here read a book?

www.theverge.com

I could go on

 

[CriticalGaming]

I don't believe you.

Games with progressive elements in them receive valid criticism all the time, and those valid criticisms don't become the subject of a social media backlash.

SO I did some digging, and I couldn't find anything that was directly talking about ME3's ending being particularly sexist. However there were people complaining that the FemShep box art was too "Aryan". Basically Femshep was defaulted to a white chick and attractive and people took issue with that because of course they fucking did.

However as it turns out, Bioware held a pole on Facebook for people to VOTE on the version of Femshep to be on the box. Ideally allowing the playerbase to use their character creator freedom to have some input on what she would be on the box. https://www.destructoid.com/stories...-femshep-vote-was-the-wrong-move-208186.phtml

So turns out the majority of people voted of the version of Femshep that made people angry which would be a funny troll if some ugly abomination version of the character had won, but that wasn't the case, people simply chose the version that they liked the best and that's what won because no amount of sexist diversity is going to change what people find attractive.

I don't know where Dwarvenhobble is getting the sexist accusations in regards to the ending, but perhaps a mixture of the ending being a bigger issue and possibly mixing it with the story i linked above?

As for the Battlefield V female hate. People did use the stupid "historical accuracy" arguement and blamed BF for going woke. However Dice and EA simply issued statements of "Don't like it, don't buy it."

Which unfortunately for EA, people didn't. BF5 sold less than half the copies that the previous entry in the series sold, and did so poorly that there has yet to be another Battlefield game almost 3 years later. Now I'm not suggesting people were THAT upset about chicks on the battlefield, because the vast majority of complainers still likely bought the game.

However objective players were simply unhappy with the gameplay in BF5 as a whole. The maps were bad, the guns were unbalanced, the gameplay was lacking, and the story mode was trash.

And perhaps some feminists with platforms might have blamed toxic masculinity, as they do with anything involving women that fails. But as usual it's just an excuse for a shitty product being shitty.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

SO I did some digging, and I couldn't find anything that was directly talking about ME3's ending being particularly sexist. However there were people complaining that the FemShep box art was too "Aryan". Basically Femshep was defaulted to a white chick and attractive and people took issue with that because of course they fucking did.

However as it turns out, Bioware held a pole on Facebook for people to VOTE on the version of Femshep to be on the box. Ideally allowing the playerbase to use their character creator freedom to have some input on what she would be on the box. https://www.destructoid.com/stories...-femshep-vote-was-the-wrong-move-208186.phtml

So turns out the majority of people voted of the version of Femshep that made people angry which would be a funny troll if some ugly abomination version of the character had won, but that wasn't the case, people simply chose the version that they liked the best and that's what won because no amount of sexist diversity is going to change what people find attractive.

I don't know where Dwarvenhobble is getting the sexist accusations in regards to the ending, but perhaps a mixture of the ending being a bigger issue and possibly mixing it with the story i linked above?

As for the Battlefield V female hate. People did use the stupid "historical accuracy" arguement and blamed BF for going woke. However Dice and EA simply issued statements of "Don't like it, don't buy it."

Which unfortunately for EA, people didn't. BF5 sold less than half the copies that the previous entry in the series sold, and did so poorly that there has yet to be another Battlefield game almost 3 years later. Now I'm not suggesting people were THAT upset about chicks on the battlefield, because the vast majority of complainers still likely bought the game.

However objective players were simply unhappy with the gameplay in BF5 as a whole. The maps were bad, the guns were unbalanced, the gameplay was lacking, and the story mode was trash.

And perhaps some feminists with platforms might have blamed toxic masculinity, as they do with anything involving women that fails. But as usual it's just an excuse for a shitty product being shitty.

EA pushed the narrative people not liking ME3 was due to homophobes not sexism just to point that out / correct it if I said sexism by mistake and didn't realise.