The guys who claim the woke agenda is why corporations are ruining games... how do they explain the overwhelming high quality and popularity of queer indie games? These games are not made by corporations, they're made by small teams (some times just one or two people) of passionate and dedicated people who love games. They typically have long development cycles and sell for low prices despite being high quality and beloved classics that are defining gaming this generation.
Celeste: Trans main character
Undertale and Deltarune: Unabashedly queer. Non-binary lead. Butch Lesbians that aren't male gazey, etc etc.
Webfishing: Do I even need to say anything? This game was made by one person When this game was accused of being too queer, they doubled down and became even more queer.
Lisa: It's about misogyny and toxic masculinity.
Shovel Knight: Has a gender swap option and strong non sexualised female characters.
There are many more that have positive non-white cis-male characters.
All without the "scary Chinese" or "Sweet Baby" or "DEI mandates".
These are what actual fans of video games are making. It seems that the deciding factor of the difference in quality of AAA games seems to be capitalism, not inclusiveness.
Are the anti-woke crowd so out of touch that they can't see this? Or maybe they're so infested in gifting reactionaries that they turn a blind eye.
They're tourists. They don't think about small indie games, and any big indie game they can't ignore is folded into their overall narrative and treated as DEI woke etc. They'll just straight up lie about sales and/or state that sales aren't important when it is convenient to them. Or they go for non-falsifiable statements, like that a game would do/be "better" if it wasn't woke.
Yeah, Shaun's latest video explained this really well (just in a loooong time)
If popular = not woke. If unpopular = woke. If being talked about right now for being woke = woke. If not being talked about right now for being woke = I don't know what you are talking about.
There are hundreds of indie games released every week. What the ones you listed have in common is that they were all wildly successful. I don't think indie games as a whole are overwhelmingly queer and progressive, but there is a market for games that are.
Yeah but I mean that those are the ones that tend to be high quality and become popular.
It kind of flies in the face of the whole idea of "Go woke get broke" and the implication that the thing ruining games is progressive ideology.
Also I love your profile pic. Lmao.
Shaun was talking about this in his stream a bit. He suggests that if a game gets popular enough they back off because people enjoy playing it and they won’t get traction, so that leaves the bad games nobody wants to play and they can say whatever they want because nobody is checking.
It’s all quite hilarious — one person makes a YouTube video about some game then a bunch of other reactionary video game nerds just play the stupidest game of telephone all just repeating the first guy.
Like 2/3rds of the time "Go woke go broke" is used, the thing they're accusing of going broke made like $642 trillion in a weekend. They were throwing it around regarding the Star Wars sequel trilogy...as though everyone didn't go see it and it didn't make stupid amounts of money.
They are disingenuous and say the wrong things on purpose.
If you flip through itch, everything is either super gay, completely abstract, or an extremely low effort horror game. With the very occasional Super Gun Arcade Man.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Sartre, anti Semite and the jew
It's the same or similar mechanism. They don't care about truth. They want certain outcomes or they feel certain things, so they say words (or make videos or whatever) to support that.
They feel a thing. Stuff to support it is true, and stuff that doesn't is wrong, a lie, or just ignored.
So how is it explained? It's not. That's not the goal.
These people usually don't play video games, the same way they don't play/watch women's sports. But they sure do love to complain about shit.
How can you say "indie and queer" and not mention hades :(
Celeste: Trans main character
I remember them not being very happy about this but since so many loved the game and had sunk time into it they just had to fucking cope
i honestly had no idea the main character was trans... whoops. thats what i get for really enjoying the game portion of the game and completely ignoring the story
Lmao neither did the dev!
From what i read she made the game pre-transition while questioning and then came out afterwards and was like "a lot of the plot subconsciously was me realising that" or something like that and the main character was confirmed trans.
I think, I'm sure other bears will know what I'm probably misremembering.
Fluoride or vaccines or something.
They don't really spend a lot of time thinking about indie games tbh
They usually aren't playing any game that is more ambitious than online shooter and wasn't pushed in their throats by huge advertising campaigns.
One of the narratives in GamerGate tried to explain this with the belief that the institutions that promote video games do so selectively in order to put inclusive, mediocre titles over those that are less progressive. The belief being that there is an anti-white, anti-straight fifth coloum that works to astroturf the sucess of these games at the expense of white men.
The anti-woke crowd is largely a bunch of grifters who want to stir up attention over the latest AAA game because it gets them more attention. Indie games get less attention and are very unabashedly queer, whereas AAA games might do something more subtle like add pronouns. It's a lot harder to claim there's a conspiracy or looming threat when the supposed threat is right there in the open and not mysterious.
They have to make the supposed woke agenda all mysterious, otherwise they can't make a video or series of tweets. They can't say "Celeste is normalizing being transgender" because that's just true, it's a sweet game made by trans people and has a trans main character. They have to instead hook gullible dipshits on some ominous looming threat that will someday change all video games, including the ones made with millions of dollars and huge teams. And they can't have specific enemies, otherwise they'd have to talk on the terms of whoever they're supposedly fighting. They can't ever get specific because otherwise people might start agreeing with whatever "woke" stuff the games have.
The woke agenda can't ever be specific individuals with specific goals. It has to always be a shadowy cabal with nefarious intentions who have literally no reason to be woke. Another reason is they can't just outright state what they mean, because they'd all instantly get banned from whatever platform they're on. They can't say "trans people, gays, and brown people shouldn't be represented in games" because that's simply hate speech that'll get them banned instantly. Instead they have to say "there's an occluded group of interlopers who are making games worse for monetary gain and their own sick pleasure." Because that sentence on its own is true, but they rely upon transphobic/bigoted context for their gullible audience to fill in the gaps
I don't think they even like video games that much, they like attention or whatever meager amounts of money they get
Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.
Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism
