sohois
1yr ago
If individual characters or elements are enough for a game to be woke, and thus the industry, then the OPs question has a very simple answer. Companies are putting these things in because they want to make more money. Adding a women or similar is a very low effort way to make a game more appealing to a wider audience
sohois
1yr ago
Concord was supposedly in development for 10 years.
Everytime I see facts about this game, the budget and development time grow larger.
Wikipedia currently lists an 8 year dev time for Concord. But it's not directly sourced, and it doesn't seem to match reality. The studio that created the game wasn't even founded until 2018. Maybe some of the founders were had an idea for a hero shooter in 2016, but if you included all ideation for a game everything would have ridiculous development times
sohois
1yr ago
Is the video game industry woke? Or are you just updating on a few high profile titles?
As others have pointed out, Japanese games are largely not woke. The big mobile titles and Mihoyo stuff coming out of China are very much not woke. Indies are rarely woke. Eastern Europe and similar nations largely don't produce woke stuff.
So we're largely talking about AAA/AA titles from the larger publishers in NA and Western Europe. How many of their titles are woke? Is Call of Duty woke? Fortnite? FIFA/Madden/NBA?
Before we dive into other titles, we need to define what is and isn't a woke game. Something like recent (indie) flop Dustborn is clearly, explicitly woke, but most titles aren't nearly so clear cut. The biggest seller of 2023 was Hogwarts Legacy. Is this a woke title? Supposedly it had a very diverse cast for 19th century England, but Rowling's reputation has become poison amongst woke-types, so much so that there was a big backlash against the game.
How about Battlefield V? I recall there was a furore around the announcement trailer because one of the main characters was a 'girlboss' in WW2. But as far as I'm aware there wasn't much else that would be woke in there. Is a single character enough to make a game woke or not?
What some of the big GaaS titles? LoL's character design branched out from big titty anime girls years ago, but are a handful of 'diverse' characters enough to deem it woke? Rainbow Six Siege has get some shit recently because of a character in a wheelchair, and I believe the much criticized recent 2B design was a skin from that game. But again this is just a handful of characters available.
Here's the top selling US games from 2023, 22, and 21 (with duplicates/yearly entries removed). Which ones are woke?
Hogwarts
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Spider Man 2
Diablo 4
Jedi: Survivor
Mortal Kombat 1
Starfield
Call of Duty
Elden Ring
Madden
God of War: Ragnarök
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Pokémon
FIFA
Horizon: Forbidden West
MLB: The Show
Battlefield 2042
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Resident Evil: Village
Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury
sohois
1yr ago
Status is a thing outside of the UK, perhaps 2rafa was guilty of miswording it. Think about it like this, if you're introducing a potential spouse to your family, what would come off better? "He/She is a doctor" or "He/She is a nurse practitioner"? I don't think it's building consensus to state that everyone would agree on the first option.
sohois
1yr ago
There are two issues here:
first, ERCOT is perhaps the most liberal energy market in the world. Gov assistance can help to reduce barriers to nuclear investment, but it's still going to come down to largely private companies making the choices to build or not to build. However, as the below response says, Texas already has ideal conditions for more fossil fuels or more renewables. Unless the funding assistance is massive, it's hard to see much interest in new nuclear.
The one exception would be interest in co-location with a data centre. I can see Musk, with Tesla now in Texas, publicizing a carbon-neutral AI centre using nuclear power next door. But such deals are unlikely to transform the generation landscape of the state unless every data centre in the US moves to Texas.
Second, ERCOT's liberal attitudes led it to separate almost entirely from the rest of the US. There are almost no interconnections with other states, just a few tiny ones with SPP and Mexico. A lot of the red states surrounding Texas are still regulated, with vertical utilities that follow federal rules and/or have their own ISOs. So even if they succeeded, it won't necessarily provide a path for other states to follow.
sohois
1yr ago
I think negative sentiment towards Indians can be narrowed down to one dominant factor: the English language.
Indians are, what, 1 in 6 people on the planet? In the past this number didn't mean much as the vast majority rarely leave their home country, but the internet and outsourcing means you have a much greater chance to encounter Indians. The thing is, India's cultural issues and level of social niceties are no worse than any other developing nation. China has many of the same problems, with a vast underclass of people that have awful hygiene and manners, a massive scam industry, nepotism and dishonesty, and even the "incel" characteristics that are ascribed to indians can be found in many Chinese men.
But people will very rarely encounter Chinese people because they don't speak English. There are no Chinese call centres, and while there are plenty of English language Chinese scammers you are still much more likely to get a call from an Indian. And on the internet, the Chinese are essentially banned from many of the most popular Western sites, while Indians will likely soon become the majority on places like facebook, reddit, youtube, and tiktok. The majority of the time an average Westerner is encountering someone from China will be Chinese tourists, and they have a godawful reputation.
sohois
1yr ago
Nothing speculated on by 4chan users is a "known phenomenon". It's just pattern matching and confirmation bias.
sohois
1yr ago
How many RPGs were even published in the 90s? Particularly if you're excluding Japanese games where the localization decisions would play a huge role in perception of writing quality.
sohois
1yr ago
I've had posts appear in the "Highlights from the comments..." threads under a username in the past. Not seen any bias towards real names, the bigger issue is that it's likely too late for a comment to get noticed amongst thousands of others
sohois
1yr ago
Given Scott's endorsement in 2016, I'm not at all surprised he's not changed his mind this time around.
In 2016, you could argue for "high variance". There were plenty of supporters who believed that Trump would bring his business acumen to bear to sweep away inefficiency and to make deals, or that he would successfully take on the establishment and "drain the swamp". There was a positive case to make for him.
But this didn't happen. In his 4 years, Trump was a pretty generic Republican, average to below-average in most respects. He failed to achieve most of his policy goals and was not a dealmaker or businessman in office. Perhaps the only area you might praise his achievements was in foreign policy, but even those successes look very short lived. Then right at the end, he veered towards the down part of the high variance argument.
It seems like now the overwhelming arguments for Trump are all "He's not Harris" or "He's not the democrats". For Scott whose policy positions are probably closer to the democrats, this is not going to be particularly convincing, as he lays out.
sohois
1yr ago
Make your point reasonably clear and plain. Try to assume other people are doing the same.
What does this mean? Are you suggesting that Israel Jews have engineered fertility crises in every country except their own? You're not supposed to put words in posters mouths but such a vague assertion forces people to speculate.
If this is what you mean, why would Israel Jews do this? What do they have to gain from plummeting the birth rate of, say, South Korea? How would they engineer a plummeting birth rate in South Korea?
sohois
1yr ago
I wouldn't recommend Buster Scruggs as your first film from the Coen brothers, it's a collection of short stories that I suspect was made largely to satisfy Netflix's insatiable lust for content. Not that it's a bad collection, just not what I would recommend if you wanted to get introduced to the directors. I would heavily recommend starting with Fargo
sohois
1yr ago
I expect any Biden supporters could create a list of negatives about Trump just as large as your Biden list.
And indeed, a huge swathe of Democrats did proclaim everything was rigged when Trump beat Hilary. A subject that was much mocked by posters on the right of the spectrum.
sohois
1yr ago
Who knows? But any explanation needs to account for why both candidates saw a massive increase in their vote numbers. Biden wasn't the only candidate who got more votes than Obama ever did.
sohois
1yr ago
Trump went from 63 million votes to 72 million votes. How do you explain an average first term producing that amount of extra votes, unless there was a general increase in voting turnout for 2020?
sohois
1yr ago
I dismissed a terrible line of logic. I didn't comment on the other points. This place is for rational discussion, and the argument that a poster thinks a candidate is bad therefore it is impossible that they attracted votes is just not at the standard of the motte.
Even Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote. Why would it remotely be a surprise that a far less divisive candidate attracts more votes, after a mediocre term for Trump that had the misfortune to end with a pandemic?
sohois
1yr ago
Do you seriously expect me to believe that the candidate that I hate could be successful? How is that possible when I hate him so much?
sohois
1yr ago
Yeah, the only reason they had the challenge system was the recognition that human line judges would make mistakes. There's no point getting an electronic system to review itself
sohois
1yr ago
Your calculations need to account for working age population. Of that 7.2 million figure, how many will be too old or too young?
I think the bigger issue is: Does the world know that this sudden IQ transformation has occurred in Liberia? If not, how are hedgies and AI firms going to discover all this talent? I'd imagine only a small amount of the country even has the computer and networking capabilities to begin working remotely for overseas firms.
sohois
1yr ago
Because the West is a culture of engineers, and we should play to our strengths
But renewable generation also requires engineering effort, why is that not playing to strengths? Fully solving issues related to storage, grid connection, forecasting, etc. will require plenty of engineering skill.
Manufacturing of renewables is not my area of expertise so I can't comment on your second paragraph. Although the domestic security issue is presumably not going to apply equally to every Western nation.
sohois
1yr ago
Most nations have some nuclear in their generation mix and will continue to have nuclear for the foreseeable future, but I'm not sure anywhere in the West outside of France will have a significant percentage covered by it. Peaking plants will probably continue to be gas or hydro as nuclear is not suited for this purpose. But ultimately as with renewable generation, the investment in battery technology mean that storage plants and DERs are simply better placed in terms of cost/benefit again.
sohois
1yr ago
Skibboleth alluded to this point below: the time to build nuclear was 30-40 years ago when the cost/benefit made sense. In the intervening decades, money has poured into solar, wind, and more niche renewables, such that they are now well ahead in terms of marginal cost per unit of energy, even taking into account the intermittency downsides.
There's probably a ton of room for research into fission to produce similar advances, but the question you have to ask now is why? Renewables are already there. Other than an aesthetic preference for major engineering projects or a desire to poke greens in the eye, the only benefit is just to cover intermittency, but there are plenty of alternatives for that as well
Just getting regular sales data for retail games is difficult enough, let alone trying to parse out how an ongoing GaaS title is affected.
I think League has probably done well out of it, research suggested female players overwhelmingly played female characters while men played an equal mix - indicating that the male playerbase was unbothered while attracting new female players.
Battlefield V sold less than its predecessor according to Wikipedia, but still sold more than 7 million copies. Presumably there is some percentage of regular players who decided not to buy the game due to the woke marketing, alongside some percentage of new players who were attracted by it. 2142 looked a lot more regular in its marketing, so perhaps EA decided it wasn't worth it overall?
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