This may seem conspiratorial and I know gamer chuds will be gamer chudding, but I’m thinking particularly about The Last of Us II and Grand Theft Auto 6. Muh feminazis are ruining muh games, gamergate etc. Abby being the focal point of transphobic and misogynistic jabs, and GTA 6 going “woke” by including a new female playable character. Hear me out: similarly to how the feds love stoking “culture war” tensions and issues to distract from and defang revolutionary movements, unionizing, etc. the misogynistic, racist and transphobic reaction to modern gaming does a hell of a job from distracting left-leaning people from talking about issues like crunch and overwork in games development, sexual harassment and assault in the industry, and more insidious messaging within games themselves – The Last of Us II is thinly veiled Zionist apologia for instance. Leftist media criticism becomes hyperfocused on countering braindead chud arguments rather than on tackling systemic issues within the industry as well as the pro-corporate, pro-military, pro-violence and pro-police themes of many games.
This is not to say that fighting the big -phobias and -isms is not important, it absolutely is. It just seems quite fortuitous for industry “leaders” that leftist critics are preoccupied with dealing with nonsense chuddery. There may be some corporate subterfuge going on, too. GTA 6 had a big data leak that showed pre-alpha footage from the game, and gamers round the web began making absolutely ignorant comments about how “shit” it looks, how poor it seems to run, and nit-picking really dumb stuff. On my mind because Stephanie Sterling dropped a vid on it very recently, and when she was reading off some of the reddit posts bad-mouthing the pre-alpha footage it just read as so absolutely shallow, so grotesquely robotic, that the bot detecting hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Rockstar’s competitors could benefit from people dismissing their new game before it even drops because it “looks like shit”, is what I’m saying.
Like I said, maybe conspiratorial nonsense on my part. Gamers are gamers after all. Something about gamer outrage just feels so plastic and artificial especially recently that I’m not sure how to feel about it.
Tangential but Zoe Quinn, the main target of Gamergate harassment, is a comrade. I had the pleasure of being in a comment thread convo with them in a Marxist gaming group on Facebook a while ago. They seemed like they were doing better after the ire dissipated.
People shitting on GTA 6 being woke for having a female protaginist because “GTA is about offending as many people as possible” don’t know shit about GTA, Yk GTA 5 story did include a black protagonist escaping the hood, dealing with racism, the feds involving in and making references about torturing scummy stuff manipulating the market and everything else the feds do, and there was the whole speech in the end of the game about capitalism, Hell the entire series is a parody of capitalist America, GTA San Andreas’s first cutscene was about police brutality on black men, the GTA was always “woke” and the new game is just no different than the ones before it, Also, I am not making up Rockstar to be this Marxist Leninist game company since they unironically do the same shit they parody, Like if I remember correctly the studio in the UK had a tax cut thing reduced for “British representation in media”
spoiler
Another thing that disgusts me is the horrendous transphobic representation in GTA V, it was removed but it still felt out of place and tasteless, there was no joke other than “Haha he’s a man… DRESSED AS A WOMAN 😱😱😱” it was just a few NPCs and nothing related to the story still bad though.
maybe censor the picture, the transphobia could be triggering.
I can’t believe that was put in the game! Usually libs are better about making their bigotry below the surface.
I’ll censor the pics next time, yeah it makes me uncomfortable like I feel this is how people imagine me whenever I feel comfort wearing what I like, like I feel very nice wearing my dress but this picture appears in my mind and I have to look in the mirror for a long idk but it’s not nice
