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What is the benefit of games portraying human demographics as if they were set in New York of today? You could argue that a game might go overboard with sex appeal and just look sillly, but I can't think of a game that would be improved with more of human races that did not develop it, being represented in it. In fact, the opposite is true: games that have no internal reason why racial diversity must be present in every village of 5 NPCs, still having it, for purely ideological reasons.
I do not share the visceral disgust for shades darker than white some people seem to have, and consider having them in the game to be generally an improvement in the same way having several sprites for weapons (that perform the same thing) would be.
It's a game. I don't care about unrealistic female frontline combatants or "historically accurate" racial representation (especially in the games that are not even set on Earth). I want to see many different things in it unless the game, or the particular part of it, is explicitly about everything being the same. I don't want a gaggle of generic anime waifus as a cast.
The problem is that because often diversity is done in bad faith - especially trans/blacks in historical setting people notice it. And often doesn't bring much to table.
If we're going to argue about bad faith then the chuds on xitter who are angry that a game isn't 100% white males by volume are just as guilty.
I think you'll be hard-pressed to find any number of chuds arguing for that
I've found this group rating games as woke because they have a woman or a black person in a military game in Europe (or Europe-esque fantasy) more than once. I wish I was exaggerating. Some people are beyond parody.
Doesn't want women in a war game != Gets angry at any game that isn't 100% white men.
Similarly I'd bet good money that the chuds in that Steam group wouldn't like it if most of the characters in recent indie hit game Dressmaker were male.
And they'd be some of the first to complain if Capcom decided to do a remake of Resident Evil 5 and made Sheva (a black woman) ugly and/or made all of the zombies white (the game takes place in Africa). They likely would have made a similar stink if the Resident Evil 4 remake had made the rural Spaniard villager zombies into a racially diverse group of zombies (they already complained about them changing some of the lines, like Luis's line about Ashley's "ballistics").
There's some actual nuance and reasoning behind chud opposition to this stuff, not just kneejerk "anything not white or not male bad". I'm sure you could find a very small number of chuds that outright hate anything not white and male motivated by pure racism and sexism, but they are few and far between.
Simplistic dismissals like yours basically just come across as the whole "leftist discourse is pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible" meme.
They would never do that, it'd be completely counter to their ideological vector, but more importantly I highly doubt that chuds would complain too much about uglification of a non-white/asian character. Were it to happen, I'd expect the response to be mostly tongue-in-cheek commentary praising the game's increased realism.
I again doubt that a.) this would ever happen and b.) chuds would be up in arms about Dressmaker being full of crossdressers, at least not nearly to the extent of their ire towards women in masculine contexts. This is because everyone perceives masculine occupations as cool and important and feminine occupations as lame and frivolous; the universality of this sentiment is seen in how woke pushes women into male fields and rarely/never the other way around. The debate is over whether this is due to amenable social values or an inherently malformed nature, and I can't blame woke too much for pushing the former view.
Some male occupations.
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