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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Is Baldur's Gate 3 woke or parody of woke?

I am character creation screen - you can choose between body type 1,2,3,4 . After that you can choose between voice 1 and 2 , Your Identity can be Male / Female or Non Binary, then you can hide your clothes (at this point I decided that developers were actually trolling because nudity in D&D BG series was rare to nonexistent) and you can choose your genitals if the default doesn't suit you to Vulva A, Vulva B or Penis A-D ,

So you can make a decent futanari I guess.

Have you noticed that Man and Woman were nowhere to be mentioned and you can't choose your gender? That everything is deconstructed and presented in the most cold, indifferent, clinical way? I don't think that it shows welcoming or acceptance. More like indifference and very subtle contempt while not giving reasons for complaining - the video game equivalent of sliding benches that make impossible for homeless people to sleep on them.

For the longest time in Early Access (see this video) the "Identity" slider was simply called "Appearance." It apparently didn't use the term man, or male. People on the forums gave feedback during early access that it should be more woke, although I don't remember what the exact verbiage in the requests were: It could have been to use the words man or woman, or it could have been to add a pronoun slider, or it could have been to add a gender option.

When I booted the game up for the first time at launch, I did chuckle a little at the appearance slider being renamed "identity." It seemed like the least-development cost to satisfy an argument over words, that has no substance. Upon further reflection, BG's implementation of identity is probably the most woke-respecting it could be. Your, and my, initial response most likely reflects an inability to empathize with our opponents.

If I was given the task of changing the Early Access iteration to satisfy the feedback, I probably would have added a separate slider for identity or pronouns, because it fits (1) my model of reality and what I think is true, and (2) my model of gender ideology and what it thinks is true.

  1. I think biology is real, and pervasive. I would have kept a slider that determines physical aspects of the character, because in real life, things like bone structure, voice, muscles, and height tend to cluster.
  2. I think wokeness talks about a gendered soul. I would have added a pronoun slider or something. It would be an additional fact about a person to appease the feedback.

In my character creator, it would be feasible to create the woman from a post I made awhile back (A post I don't think many people understood?).

On the other hand, BG's character creator is pretty woke-respecting. All features of a person are uncorrelated with their identity: you can mix and match voices, looks, and genitals. If anything, the genital slider, being at the bottom of the appearance section, serves as a biological sex slider, an "additional fact" about a person that is basically inconsequential save for the intimate cutscenes.

To be honest though, one of the most woke things I hate in modern videogame character design is what I'll call the "boring and conformist way of creating exciting and nonconformist characters." This could probably warrant its own top-level post. Like Admiral Holdo from Star Wars, almost the entire cast of hero-shooters like Overwatch, Apex Legends, and Valorant feature quirky appearances that look straight out of well, the 2020s. There is an overuse of dyed hair and modern body jewelry. I suspect this is because the person who used to dress that way in high school - or whose theatre-kid friends did - became a journalist that complains about representation.

If 5e was actually transhuman escapism like some posters here claim, shouldn't there be some options like charmed limb prosthetics held together by magic?