PierreMenard
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User ID: 2675
PierreMenard
7hr ago
Well, I was referring to all people in general. Even for white Westerners, I wager that the effect you describe is driven by a significantly different demographic than the average gamer. I'd be surprised if this was not also a factor in the rising popularity of Japanese/Korean animated media over Hollywood's muddied productions.
PierreMenard
9hr ago
The trans wedge has been a good development for anti-feminists.
Abortion is not a woman's choice and it is not an issue that men cannot talk about. Similarly, as the trans tidal wave keeps crashing over the ruins of society, wamen may find out that liberal men offering their physical and legal protection was a mere accident of history, and perhaps going out with a chaperone is a good idea, once there is literally no space free from the towering presence of a trans stasi agent.
PierreMenard
9hr ago
I'd wager it'd just be a pragmatic decision. The majority, wealthiest portion of consumers is 40+ years old, age groups where you can't seriously compete in most sports. People who are both wealthy enough to spend money on competitive sports equipment and in an age range where competition even makes sense are a very small fraction of the population.
I wouldn't be surprised if these brands' marketing started looking more like drug ads 'after my hip-replacement surgery I wasn't sure I would still be able to run, but the new Nike SwiftMax give me just the right amount of support to keep going...'
PierreMenard
14hr ago
That's the 'women are wonderful' effect. Everybody loves women. Everybody of any race has some women they care about.
On the other hand, aside from some with exotic racial preferences, people usually want to see people that look like them in the media they consoom. Moreover, adding characters that look blatantly out of place from a historical, common sense point-of-view, takes away from the immersion.
For a lot of (male) gamers, adding attractive women in skimpy clothing is just a bonus. It does take away from the realism, still. The problem these days is that Western content creators have a tendency to pair a 'realistic, gritty' aesthetic with feminist fantasies. So the male fantasy of a scantily-clad (it's magic armor ok) Amazonian goddess turns into a rough-looking, middle-aged, square-shouldered she-man.
PierreMenard
14hr ago
Plenty of gamers loved playing CJ, an African-American character, in his GTA San Andreas adventures, fighting for his street gang and taking part in various criminal activities per the GTA formula. It's a great game because it mixes good gameplay (guns, cars, open-world which was somewhat new then), and an interesting story with characters that are both colorful, memorable, and also somewhat realistic, with the usual humorous exaggeration of the series.
The player, who is most likely not a would-be criminal from an impoverished inner-city black neighborhood, gets to experience a fascinating (exaggerated, fictionalized) facet of contemporary American life, with hundreds of references to TV shows and movies, music, sports, etc.
And of course, plenty of opportunities to drop the gamer-word while playing.
In this case, what does a black samurai bring to the experience of the game? Do we get some special scenes of the main character experiencing racial discrimination and having to take revenge? Does not sound like a lot of fun to me.
In the best case scenario, they'd bring some flashbacks of the main character's past life in Africa, with some neat well-researched African culture on display. Somehow I'm skeptical, unless they can somehow place the character in a part of Africa that wasn't having a ton of enslaving, public executions and human sacrifices going on all the time.
I think there's a significant possibility of disagreement on that point. Wasn't Athena the goddess of war?
I'm sure there are many other examples, from the common witch to the royalty/divinity, where female characters gained the might to defeat men through supernatural means.
Another aspect of it is that having out-of-context female characters opens up different modes of storytelling such as romance, motherhood, which randomly making one of the character browner does not really do.
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