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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7365 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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In no particular order of importance-

  1. People like looking at gorgeous women, but people also like looking at a variety of designs. Presenting gorgeous (monoracial) women as the default and variations from that as being inherently ideologically driven doesn't seem correct to me.
  2. I disagree that people like looking at beautiful women and having fun equally, at least within the context of a video game. There are plenty of fun, popular games with ugly characters, e.g. Psychonauts. Having fun is typically much more central to the idea of a game than the specific character aesthetics. They aren't the same kind of "like."
  3. This is less a response to you and more a thought I have about general gaming discourse, but fun is another lever that creators use to determine the experience they want you to have. Game designers are happy to frustrate and annoy you if it'll add to their vision. I don't think Pathologic is designed to be a fun experience, but it's certainly a worthwhile one.

Briefly:

  1. Calling it ideological is also just historically accurate. Pre 2010 men generally just put hot women in their games because they liked to and their audience liked them to. There was no pre-gamergate movement I’m aware for making girls hotter in video games. There was a movement for making them diverse, less monoracial, and less attractive, to get gaming away from young men, even if they didn’t use those words.
  2. Yes, I’m flattening here for the sake of the metaphor, with inevitable distortions.
  3. Like I keep saying, “ fun is another lever that creators use to determine the experience they want you to have” isn’t strictly speaking wrong but it’s a very dangerous way of thinking. It signifies that you are losing your perspective on the fact that you are trying to make people enjoy themselves in a way they pay money for. It is, in its way, an extremely narcissistic impulse.

The professionalisation of specialised career paths, the proliferation of games designers and university courses and YouTube lectures, the idea that success or failure boils down to implementing your ‘vision’ instead of entertaining your customers is I believe the main reason why games have started to struggle. You see it in poetry, you see it in art. They slowly get strangled as they pander to the visions of increasingly segregated artistic communities over pleasing an audience/patron. Then they start needing subsidies from said community to survive because there isn’t enough of an audience left to fund it organically, and then it’s all over.

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