I want to include a preface to this before I start getting to the meat of the article:
If you’re here because you think I’m going to talk about how games are all woke now because of whatever bullshit reason of the day or DEI or Sweet Baby Inc bullcrap, save yourself now and stop reading. This article isn’t for you because it’s not about that, not in the way you want it to be.
And I guess that’s the crux of the issue, but I’m getting a head of myself here.
I’ve been gaming essentially my whole life. My cousins one year at Christmas talked about Pokemon and Final Fantasy and it tickled my interest. I got Pokemon Yellow and started playing, falling in love with it immediately. I hunted down a PC copy of Final Fantasy 7 at a game store at a local mall (which dropped a bit after the PS1 game dropped) and couldn’t believe what I was seeing as the initial cut scene played out. I watched my mom play Ocarina of Time on a tiny TV in our basement, sitting on the spare bed in the office. I ended up finding her original NES but the cords were lost so we could never get it working (she had the OG Final Fantasy & Legend of Zelda). I don’t know how to make it anymore clear that gaming has been such a core aspect of my childhood and now my entire life up until now. And it’s a hobby I love.
The flip side to this is, I grew up feeling unrepresented in games. Many of the characters I played were men. It didn’t put me off of playing or anything but certainly was something I noticed. I remember the first time Pokemon included the option to play as a girl in Pokemon Crystal, I was so excited. It’s likely why it’s my favourite Pokemon game to this day (sorry NAA). Little kid me felt so happy feeling represented, which is why I as an adult understand the need for better representation is needed in media, but since this is about games here, in games specifically.
Things have been getting better in that regard. Not only are there more women (cis, trans) in leading roles, but we’re also getting more women (and men) of colour, games with character creation give the player the freedom to be anywhere on the gender spectrum, and outside of character creation, we have also seen trans characters/non-binary in games. We’ve also seen more queer characters as well. We’re also getting better representation when it comes to women as well, they’re not just sexist representation of women. And all of this is *good*. The world is vast with so many different people, games should reflect that. This is supposed to be a good thing.
But if a certain pocket of Twitter is any indication, that could be further from the truth.
If you are somehow fortunate to be blissfully unaware of the state of gaming according to Twitter, I will give you this chance to back out now. Don’t read any further if you don’t want to know how infuriating and insufferable these folks are.
This is your last chance.
Okay, still here? Well, I’ll give you the EIL5. A subset of white men think their opinions and viewpoint on games are the end all and be all. A new game trailer drops with the lead as a woman and they start going on tirades about how her face anatomy is all wrong, using words to identify parts of the face even I, as someone who has studied anatomy, wouldn’t pick up without using a book/diagram. They’re also call her ugly, maybe talk about censorship because her tits aren’t showing. Now that woman is also a woman of colour? Holy shit that’s some DEI bullshit, that’s the only reason they’re doing this. And then they’ll probably Google to see if Sweet Baby Inc, a consulting firm that essentially helps studios properly represent characters of colour, has worked on the game. Oh that woman also doesn’t look like a big titty anime girl? Woke. Woke did that.
And it’s almost like clockwork.
Game gets announced.
Gamers™ cry and whine about it until the cows come home.
Next game announced.
Forget about previous game and cry and whine about the new one. May only bring up previous ones if it helps prove their point.
And it’s just rinse and repeat.
I’m not even mentioning the whole woke thing here in detail because to be frank, while I do know the official AAVE definition, majority of these folks absolutely do not. Case in point, Metaphor ReFantazio is legitimately the wokest game by the AAVE definition. There is *no* arguing this. I saw someone point this out and one of the Gamers™ said it wasn’t woke at all.
The fuck is up with that!!! ANYWAY.
If you’ve been online at all since The Game Awards, you’ll see these Gamers™ going off about two games in particular: The Witcher 4 and Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. Both games have women in leading roles and both have been targeted by Gamers™ for the same bullshit reasons I previously mentioned. They’re not hot enough, they’re only doing this because of woke/DEI, blah blah blah. It’s even exhausting trying to write about this because it’s just the same song and dance every damn time.
And I’m legitimately sick of it.
I don’t even know what we’re supposed to do about it, which is the truly frustrating part about this. I know there’s many ways people have gone about these folks—some won’t give them any attention or engagement because that’s what they seem to crave. Others do but, quite frankly, they might as well argue with a wall because they don’t care what we have to say. They just want us to listen to them and them only.
I replied to someone on Twitter talking about how they don’t understand how people are like this. And I feel like this really is the crux of the issue:
They just want to be mad for the sake of being mad. Everything is a slight to them and them only, while the rest of us have very normal reactions to the games we play or don’t play. I saw plenty of game trailers that weren’t for me at The Game Awards. And I was okay with that because not everything is *for me*. I’ve always been okay with that. Even when I play something I may not enjoy, say one Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, that’s a game that legitimately pisses me off. But it’s not because of some woke-ass bullshit crap. I have legitimate criticisms that don’t involve erasing people’s existences, such as the game was too long (when Ubisoft themselves said it was shorter) or it was padded with so much filler or the true ending wasn’t worth the pay-off.
Valid criticisms studios can work with to improve on their games.
You never once see me talk about how the issue with the game is that you can play as a woman and change between male and female Eivor at will and that female Eivor isn’t hot enough or she looks like a man or whatever else they spew.
Because these are not issues, full stop.
The problem with these Gamers™ is that they don’t want to ever step into someone else’s shoes. They only want to see themselves represented in games and no one else. And if they do want to play women, they better be big titty girls so they have something to ogle. If they don’t get their way, they start. They want their wants met and don’t care what the rest of us want to see in games.
Gaming has been dominated by white men both in the creation of games and within the games themselves. They have always had their way. And just because gaming (both the industry and the games) is starting to get better at representing everyone, it’s not a slight to white men. They still make games that have white men as protagonists. It’s meant to be *inclusive* since so many people enjoy playing games. That should be reflected *in the games we play*.
We shouldn’t have grown men whining on Twitter about how some 3D model of Ciri or Jordan (the name of the protagonist from Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet) look like men in 2024.
If you don’t like the way something looks in a game, be a fucking grown-up and don’t play it. The industry shouldn’t need to cater to you and only you. You do not exist in a bubble; you are not the only person on the planet. They are not making games just for you and only for you.
They are making games for all of us. ALL of us. Every single one of us. And we deserve to see that reflected whether you like it or not.
I don’t have an answer for how we fix this problem. I don’t know if it can be fixed. I do know one thing though: we should *never* cater to the demands of these people. We’re already seeing this in other forms of media, specifically Disney cutting two trans storylines from their shows, catering to the crowd who refuses to acknowledge trans people’s identity in any shape or form. And it both saddens and frustrates me because everyone deserves to be represented, everyone deserves to be seen. It meant so much to me when Pokemon Crystal dropped when I was a kid, I can only imagine how it feels for more marginalized groups.
I think diversity and less sexism in games is something to be celebrated, not anger inducing. And if you can’t understand that, well, I guess that’s on you now, and not the rest of us.
