Agreed, and I feel like the big issue here is there are two versions of “anti-woke” in gaming.
The first is gamers that want real progressive storylines that tie into the story well, and are critical of corporations trying to shoehorn random aspects of culture to be “woke” which fall flat because it’s just virtue signaling.
But it’s been conflated with the sort of 4chan style mentality of “gamer men” who criticize anything, even historically accurate stories who call a game woke just because it doesn’t fit their favorite narrative of muscular white dude or scantily clad woman being the protagonist.
An example of this is Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The game should by no means be labelled “woke” by anybody. It’s telling a dramatized tale of a real person that existed within feudal Japan who was by all measure a black samurai. However the second group in my description above has taken it upon themselves to criticize the studio for “forcing a narrative” or whatever which simply isn’t true. It’s a real person, from history, and they are telling a video game version of his story.
It’s annoying that the improper “wokeness” criticism there gets conflated with true criticism of studios adding barely fleshed out token elements of “inclusion” that by and large benefit nobody but instead detract from titles.
Agreed, and I feel like the big issue here is there are two versions of “anti-woke” in gaming.
The first is gamers that want real progressive storylines that tie into the story well, and are critical of corporations trying to shoehorn random aspects of culture to be “woke” which fall flat because it’s just virtue signaling.
But it’s been conflated with the sort of 4chan style mentality of “gamer men” who criticize anything, even historically accurate stories who call a game woke just because it doesn’t fit their favorite narrative of muscular white dude or scantily clad woman being the protagonist.
An example of this is Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The game should by no means be labelled “woke” by anybody. It’s telling a dramatized tale of a real person that existed within feudal Japan who was by all measure a black samurai. However the second group in my description above has taken it upon themselves to criticize the studio for “forcing a narrative” or whatever which simply isn’t true. It’s a real person, from history, and they are telling a video game version of his story.
It’s annoying that the improper “wokeness” criticism there gets conflated with true criticism of studios adding barely fleshed out token elements of “inclusion” that by and large benefit nobody but instead detract from titles.