this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
-6 points (47.9% liked)

Games

32511 readers
2445 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Lae'zel and Shadowheart can be mean sometimes, and it's okay to embrace women in video games like them.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 93 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Nobody's afraid of them. This article created its own problem to complain about.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago

Lae’zel and Shadowheart

This feels a lot more like the author is upset by the way these two were done, and is in turn projecting that upon "other gamers".

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (4 children)

You never met one of those capital G Gamers who have never seen a woman that's not their mom? The ones that get mad if there are black/gay/trans people in their videogames because of "muh escapism"?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Sure, but I've also just read about a black gay Trump voter. Extremes exist, it is upon the one presenting a theory to show the extend of the problem.

I'll readily believe that focus testing and the safety-only design of companies such as Ubisoft augments any problem massively but it's still easy to accept "Oh it's because gamers are too afraid of powerful women in their games!" as a rhetoric without having anything indicating it's actually happening.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The whole gamergate thing lends some credence to the words of the author I would think. A lot of the big gaming influencers are toxic, racist and misogynistic. Remember when people freaked out about some unflattering screenshots of female characters in a lot of games? Like Aloy in Horizon: Forbidden West, MJ in the new Spiderman game or even Abby in The Last of Us 2. There are surprisingly many people that don't like any western games because they "push their woke agenda" or some such bullshit.

It is the same in many online games, although that has gotten a bit better over the years, where you get berated, insulted and catcalled if you dare to have a feminine voice.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Of course, I'm not saying that it cannot be the case, but it's also not something I'd leave just standing.

Just from the examples you list, the same issues essentially show up:

  • First to show that the influencers (as a whole) and their gaming audience (in specific) aren't just a hyper-specific echo chamber that gets amplified in volume due to suddenly being actively reported on. Like the "Only 1% of players ever will let you know if they're unhappy", it's difficult to know whether for every angry idiot manchild basement dweller there's 99 or 999999 happy gamers that didn't even realize something big was happening because their life has bigger issues than something posted on Twitter or in a blog post.
  • And then second to also show that this is still relevant. Gamergate was in 2014. GamerGate was closed to Half-Life 2 than to today, and consider just how different gaming as a societal landscape was back in the HL2 days.

Again, totally not saying that it's not very much a relevant comment that is being linked to here, but to me what is weird is that it presents an idea as fact with absolutely no evidence that the basis that fact would need to be true even exists. "Gamers" is not a single group of people. And the implication that this in turn affects game design is also entirely unverified and not something a reader can verify or falsify for themselves.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

gAmErS were shitting their pants over the mere possibility of choosing "they" as a pronoun in Starfield. Also apparently voice actors having accents is "woke"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I've never seen a hill as ridiculous for anyone to die on besides "they."

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

those gamers wouldn’t be the ones who want powerful women in the first place. The article is imagining gamers who want powerful women AND are afraid of them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

Then you are luckier than me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Thankfully, I only know those gaymurrs from youtube videos that are brightly titled as [game] IS WOKE PROPAGANDA, so it's easy to avoid them.