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Is wokeness really retreating from nerd culture? The political winds may be shifting in the west, but our cultural institutions are still run by woke activists.
Tomb Raider Catalyst looks "safe horny", the new Star Wars game is apparently another female lead.
Witcher 4 is going all in on feminism vs patriarchy, which was already a central theme in the previous titles and books (conveniently ignored by nostalgic "chuds").
Expedition 33 is touted as an industry rebel and yet, suspiciously, it sold 2 million copies in 2 weeks, was hyped up across games journalism, astroturfed online AND locked in a Hollywood film deal before it even launched.... all the makings of an industry plant, funded by an "indie publisher" with a paltry $120M investment from Netease, by a studio of teams and partners from diverse backgrounds, cultures and perspectives, that "suddenly" went woke with the sequel like the bait and switch Sony catalogues.
Where Winds Meet's character creation gives you "body types" in English, but the Chinese version says male and female.
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 was going to be the chud GOTY made by a pro-GG studio lead, yet it pinkwashes its two male leads and crowbarred an ahistorical Malian man into the main campaign.
GTA 6 is already putting the female lead front and centre, while the male lead looks like the sub. His writing and appearance is oriented to the female gaze, he looks like a billboard model unlike the "average looking" male leads of previous titles.
There's been a concerted effort to create a female fandom for all the male oriented IPs to expand their TAM, especially in gaming where the average budgets keep ballooning every year. The rationale is that male gamers (existing fandom) will remain loyal to the IP and get incalculated into feminism. But females need to be interested. So do away with the fratboy culture! Let HR screen the environment, kick out the milquetoast Gen X techbros and onboard woke millennial women. Accommodate all of their favourite social justice causes (BLM, LGBTQ). Fight the male gaze!
But men consistently remain gaming's biggest consumers. Despite the marketing push for the female leads in RPGs like AC Odyssey, Mass Effect and Cyberpunk heavily pushing the female leads into the marketing, the actual buyer demographic heavily prefer the male lead in all the games. Yet, people's tolerance levels keep going up as games get increasingly woke. In other words, some "tepidly woke" themes are ok because even "beloved classics" like Cyberpunk featured LGBT themes. Anti woke influencers and "trusted friends" promise up and down that condescending Malian and ahistorical synagogue in 15th century Bohemia was totally a creative decision, not ideological corruption. In 20 years, they'll be telling us that black Samurai lead in Japan is also perfectly acceptable.
The structural nature of the industry and investors expectations necessitates an indefinitely expanding fanbase. And the so called anti-wokes silently gaslight themselves so studios realised they can just make them happy by grifting away like Daniel Vavra.
In fact, I believe wokeness had its antecedents decades ago. I'm watching Star Trek DS9 right now. And when it's good, which is far from always, it's not good because it's racially diverse. If Sisko was white, it would not make the show any worse. In fact it would probably save you from bad preachy episodes like "Far Beyond The Stars". Set aside the nostalgia and compare it to the "woke" standards of the time, the "woke" creators of yesteryear fully back the "woke" creators of today.
We might be at least 40 years too late to expect a return to form (whatever that is). Maybe we'll simply just live with it like an amputated limb, occasionally recalling the good old times.
PS: Apologies if my post reads like a brain dump, I'm returning to TheMotte after a long hiatus.
All the occupations required to work on game dev, or media, are overwhelmingly liberal or progressive. Even software engineers are only 16-27% conservative. They might not be on board with some of the woke extremes - same way not every conservative is an ethno-nationalist - but they’ll still support LGBT rights, and diversity initiatives. I would think that conservative software engineers are less likely to work in game development as well - why not work at Anduril where you get paid more and you don’t have to hide your political views?
Richard Hanania’s article on Why is Everything Liberal still applies. There’s no talent pool to make “non-woke” games. Plus, I never got the feeling that the market actually penalised wokeness at any point - my impression was that wokeness was used to shield mediocre work of criticism, or to excuse its underperformance.
There is very much a talent pool for making non-woke media: it's called the country of Japan. Just because the West is incapable of making anything other than woke agitprop doesn't mean nobody else is.
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