Going back to being just plain, normal gamers.
- Thread starter Jamcie Kerbizz
- Start date
Worgen said:
My point being that the Suits grasped the wrong end of the stick. They never cared about inclusivity in games, they cared that people were complaining about it. So they just used the simplest tropes they could to appease, but it was all utterly bland and token.Addendum_Forthcoming said:
So instead of Justice League Unlimited, we have characters in ME:A just going "I'm a transgender character!" and you can fucking hear the confetti falling from the sky and a great big banner reading "WE DID IT!" flying.
Minorities became traits. So instead of a fully developed character who happens to be black or a woman, we got character who's sole identity was Black or Woman.
And then the press release, positive coverage for finally having a playable woman in Assassin's Creed, and then Unity happens, an utterly bland and generic title with a female lead who's sole identity is that she's a woman.
And that ruined ME:A? Yeah. No. What ruined ME:A was being a buggy mess. After all, plenty of thoroughly disinteresting NPCs in all other Mass Effects. Tropish white dudes. Tropish sexy aliens. Tropish mentor former CO. Tropish racism allegories... Still played them.Silentpony said:
And? Sorry to point this out, but 99% of videogame characters are bland tropes with a singular trait that defines. That was more than apparent in videogames. A shred of an industry trying to actually include characters that aren't generic, grizzled, cisgender white dude isn't some failing. After all, we got the same reactionary commentary about Crem. Narratives like the one you're spinning, entertaining as it is, is why I'm far more interested in the boardgaming scene. That seems to have no problems attracting men, women, trans or otherwise and none of this fucking stupid drama.
If you want an answer as to how the VGI could create more inclusively representative gaming, it could do the obvious and actually talk to people and research the matter.
But then again someone like you will run the commentary like that is also somehow, magically bad ... and it somehow ruined gaming. And more and more people like me will realise how thoroughly stupid all this fake gamer drama is. I'll be there having fun with real gamers at a table or LGS somewhere.
You know ... with friends.... gaming...
Are we really trying to fight these battles again? Really people, nobody has literally anything else to do? Can you people just fucking move on with your life already?
No, I'm calling reactionaries like you fake gamers. I do so because people seem to have a problem with developers who at least put in a sincere attempt of populating their worlds with a diversity of characters and call it an 'agenda' or somehow bad on its own. Regardless of how relatively important it is to gameplay.Silentpony said:
After all, more inclusive representation is a facet of games like the Netrunner reprint.
Just look at the Runners. You have what apprears to be a Filo G-Mod, cybernetically charged technosavant ala Chaos Theory...
Who seems to have interracial gay couple for parents!
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And all the storyline comes from the cards. That reprint of the CT Shaper ID was because CT got rotated out of the card pool last cycle.
But don't stop there ... you also have a gender fluid Anarch ID...
And so many IDs that have as much backstory as basically what the cards themselves featuring them will allow. Chaos Theory is one of the few written up story characters of the Android Universe. And at best it's a page and a bit. Three quarters of which is just a single run she did.
Nobody gave a fuck.
You want to know why? Because there's no real reason not to be diverse with representation. Even if it's simply for the sake of showing a diversity of people who live in the world that the player can select as an ID and feel like, for a moment, that they can find new means to invest themselves into the story that you create for yourself through the game.
The game that lets you be a techno-anarchist running highly dangerous operations to subvert the power of the corps for whatever personal reasons you might have. How you construct your deck is precisely how you approach the problem of the corporation, the problem of the job, before youe.
It was nice to feel represented on its own, and even if you don't care the game is pretty fucking awesome on its own. And I wouldn't play it if the game wasn't awesome. I don't even run Quetzal, I run predominantly CT (until rotation, but now they're bringing her back...) and then I started running Smoke as my core runner IDs go-to when I'm bringing my A-game... as I'm a Shaper player through and through. On the corp side of things, my love will always be Sync NBN deck... occasionally Blue Sun.
I also occasionally like playing Jesminder, and sometimes Omar Keung when I'm feeling feisty and experimenting beyond Shaper.
These were the three Runners you had in the core. Their backstories were non-extant. Still nobody gave a fuck and nobody complained how there weren't any assumed WASPs or how they were 'shoehorning' in *gasp* diversity of character representation!
The point of the game is fun not proving superiority of one agenda over another. The point of variety in game are choices not representation. When you forget about such simple thing you steer away from being a plain gamer - someone who enjoys a hobby and stumble towards identities/politics/social values etc.Addendum_Forthcoming said:
Point of this thread was presenting someone moderate, experienced and open to others. Please remain (all) civil and don't engulf yourself in bilateral squabbles over some of the notions touched on by Troy. Point of OP was rehashing times when being called gamer didn't determine anything beside aknowleding that you are someone who (perhaps too much) likes to spend time playing games.
Are you trying to tell me that identity politics is a waste of time? What if these people enjoy fighting useless battles? What if that's their hobby?BreakfastMan said:
Why don't we have a name for people who engage in identity politics? Since they like labels so much, we could give them another label to fight about. It's the gift that keeps on giving! Plus, then you could get all the gamers, punks, and all the other annoying, myopic twats to all fight each other. We'd be expanding their hatred-base by orders of magnitude.
Garbage. When people bring out whoppers like Anita somehow being responsible for Ubisoft bringing out a ridiculously shitty product, quite clearly the agenda is simply ignoring how shitty the product is and why.Jamcie Kerbizz said:
Anita wasn't the only one talking about inclusivity in gaming ... it was abounding elsewhere across all forms of gaming. People were having a supreme disconnect between just how the fuck could videogames be as blandly generic and often offensive as they are, while other media (also within gaming) actually seems to be wishing to improve its representation of various people because people consume media.
The whole point of the Netrunner example was to show you precisely that it's been happening in boardgaming for awhile now. And that hasn't actually weakened its product. It's a pretty fucking phenomenal game ... if people would actually sit down and play a game that is made up of a diverse batch of runners facing off against 4 consolidated megacorporations with numerous interplanetary branches. Also comprising their own tapestry of different executive characters from all sorts of walks of life. From clones, to androids, to G-mods, to cybered up sysops, to Our Lord and Saviour...
Now just imagine if all the fake gamers might not pretend that having a diversity of characters is somehow an 'agenda' beyond attempting to populate it with diverse characters and actually sat down to fucking play the game.
99% of the time, yeah. Especially when it is an identity based solely on what you consume.Ironman126 said:
Because everyone does it. We might like to call our ideological opponents out on it when we think they are being unusually narrow minded, but the truth is that we all engage in identity politics. We do it all the time in our daily lives and it is so hardwired into us humans that we can't escape it. Doesn't matter if our identity is social, cultural, political, religious, medical or whatever, we will end up making decisions and hold beliefs based on our identity.Ironman126 said:
The stupid part is not identity politics (because why would I not be in favor of decisions that favor Swedes, nurses and geeks, since those are all things I am?), the stupid part is the attempt to make it an insult and to use it as an attack on people you disagree with. The particular irony of the "identity politics battle" in gaming is that those that are ferociously defending their identity as gamers are also the most vocal about how stupid their opponents are because they practice identity politics. There's an amusing dissonance there between the insults they use and what they themselves actually believe, you know?
....no, no one cared about Net Runner because it's Net Runner.Addendum_Forthcoming said:
Diversity doesn't equal fun or a good game, and don't try to pretend it does.
Diversity as an idea is great. Good for it! But token diversity really does bring a game down. Watered down, one note characters are a bad thing and you shouldn't want to defend them simply because of tokenism.
Totally not my point and you fucking know it.Silentpony said:
As proof that you really weren't paying attention. The most fleshed out of any of those characters storyline wise is CT ... at a popping 3/4s of an A4 page. Most of her storyline, her character, is fleshed out through the cards...
It's about as 'tokenistic' as it gets, and yet it's still a phenomenal fucking game. It's almost as if 'gamers' who are fucking gamers should sit down and play some fucking games. Not see bogeymen wherever they can. After all, the Android Universe itself would be pretty fucking mediocre if it hadn't explored the multitude of corporate conflicts, and looked at the social relationships between people and megacorporations whose influence spanned all of Earth, the Moon, and even to Mars.
Once again, no one fucking cared there was a non-binary runner, no one cared of an Indian Shaper, no one cares there's a Aged Chinese conspiracy theorist runner, no one cares there's a black anti-corporate mercenary runner ... and yeah, I'll go on the record and say I'm less inclined to believe a universe of high mobility, megacorporate entities bigger than governments and not have a whole lot of diverse runners who opposed them for various reasons. Whether because of clone rights, hyperglobalism (hypercelestialism?), and the growing insecurity of the individual in the face of privately run companies that employ hundreds of millions, or in the case of CT simply because she wants to pit her rig, her custom programs, her mods, and her brain against the biggest opponents she can find.
Please explain to me the mechanics of having a gender non-conforming protagonist being simply gender-nonconforming making it the dreaded 'tokenism' (oooohhh, heaven forbid)? Surely it's enough that they're gender non-conforming, and maybe show to be actual regular people, with a regular day job, with a regular education, that suffers an extraordinary event, and is shown to react to it like other normal human beings?
Is that then the dreaded tokenism?
I assume there are some sort of arcane mechanic for this given, you know, why nbot just make any futuristic setting have 1 in 7 be of Chinese descent, make 1 in 8 be Indian, and so on ... all in order for maximum 'non-tokenism'. Given 12% of humanity is gay we might actually get good representations of homosexual relationships. You know... jmore gay people adopting kids in games. Raising them like your average parents. Perhaps show them struggling to clothe and feed their kids in the face of some social injustice like a company refusing to pay them their dues leading to an act of desperacy?
Hell, if we go by maximum non-tokenism, we could show 1 in 100 characters trans and non-binary characters trying to lead a life of basic dignity ...
All for the sake of being non-tokenistic, you agree?
Given trans people are over-represented in the military by a factor of twice to treble the elistment rate of cisgender people, maybe we can have 1 in 30 people in a military shooter be trans!? For the sake of non-tokenism... In fact, I'd argue the diversity of the Netrunner cast is itself maximum non-tokenism solely because obviously white people for 5 generations or so are curiously a minority compared to the number of other people that populate the setting.
You know what's fucking funny? Divinity:OS2.
You can play as fucking Lizardmen and Undead ... having a trans person in a game simply be trans and explore the crushing normality of human existence? Clearly tokenism... Glad to know that if there are Lizard people, they won't face the same barriers to their normalcy... but frankly I don't think that's a good thing.
Agreed.BreakfastMan said:
So, I was writing this big, long "well, actually" dissertation, then it occurred to me that I was playing right into your hands. Wily Scandinavian.Gethsemani said:
Then I realized I had wasted whole minutes of time I could be using to do other things. So, yes, identity politics is a waste of time. Just because everyone does it doesn't mean it's good, it just means it's hard to avoid.
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Then you should be for Anita since we tended to get a lot of token females in games then. We still get them but to a lesser extent. Games have always had the token representation characters, look at Cole Train from gears, at least in the first one, I forget if he was more fleshed out in the second... I kinda don't think so. Diverse characters can easily make a much more interesting story which can make a much better game. Would Shadowrun be better if your only choice was playing a white human male? Would Divinity Original Sins2? Of course not.Silentpony said:
I wouldn't deny that Anita is a snowflake. But you're showing your own snowflakeness right now.Ogoid said:
It's funny how the general tact for dealing with Anita was becoming Anita (crying over insignificant/imaginary stuff, generally going on rants, not accepting criticism and generally play the victim card)
The way I view it is analogous to the current 8th Edition on Warhammer 40k. There are now keywords, simple factional terms use to designate what units belong to what faction. A Space Wolf has the Imperium, and Space Marine, and Space Wolf keywords, so that any rules that apply to Imperium, Space Marines, and Space Wolf applies.Worgen said:
Anita and her ilk complained about a lack of diversity, and whatnot. and the Suits all said "Holy shit, how can we get her to shut the fuck up?! I know! Keywords! She wants more Powerful, Independent women. So lets just create an utterly bland character, but give her the Powerful, Independent and Woman keywords so everyone shuts up"
And that's how you get the new Lara Croft or what's her face from the Robot Dino game.
We get NPC_02, with Transgender and BlueHair as keywords, and suddenly its diverse. But they didn't actually make a new character, let alone a relate-able person. They just stapled on keywords that filled some nebulous requirement, and moved on.