I would add another thing to this I wish the author would talk about instead of immediately projecting onto their own prejudices: People generally prefer the “good” option in games.
And I don’t even necessarily mean whatever the game calls Paragon-vs-Renegade. I mean the fact that for a game where you recruit characters to your “camp”, naturally losing characters feels like a fail state. Like you messed something up. As a result, players will intuitively lean to options that present the least “bad outcome”, in this context meaning the less often NPCs leave your camp the better. Recruiting someone is a victory, someone leaving is a defeat. The games present it as such, so it’s no wonder players err towards wanting everyone there.
I know she’s supposed to turn good (maybe?) in sequels, but, hey, you’ve got to sacrifice someone at the end of 1, because cheap emotional engagement trick.
Yeah but that’s the other thing, that’s how you get gamers to let somebody from their group go: You force an obvious “One or the other”-pick. I can totally see how we as consumers can more readily accept that than we can accept the very understandable part of Karlach leaving as that was not presented right in the moment you made the choice. It didn’t feel like there should not be any Option C at all.
That made me think about the most arbitrary and broken player “moral choice” I know : the end of Fable 2.
spoilerBad guy enslaves lots of people for years for his project, killing many of them. Then kills your family and your cute puppy because fuck you. After you beat bad guy, magic ascended girl appears, rewards you with one of three wishes for post-game : revive everyone enslaved by bad guy, revive your family and cute puppy, or give you lots of useless monies. The player is not really responsible for the slave deaths. The ability to “fix” ten years of history by magically erasing all the deaths is weird and undermines the impact of the whole story a lot. Also, and perhaps more importantly on the player’s side of things, the dog is a freaking gameplay mechanic, not having it prevents some actions and blocks a few minor quests. Well, sorry, nameless, faceless theoretical people who died years ago, I really need my cute puppy. Really, the game never even establishes why that very specifically determined choice has to be made. It feels very rushed, very cheap and the whole thing is over in 5 minutes.
the one-dimensional specist asshole with absolutely no other character trait.
I used to think that about Ashley until I did what I nicknamed my Asshole Run. I was an Adept, so I usually had Ashley and Tali around me. I ended up listening to their elevator conversations, and Ashley treated Tali a lot differently than she did Wrex or Garrus (the ones she saw as a military threat) - she warmed up to her and treated Tali like a little sister. So when Tali died in that run on 3, Ashley was gutted and was crying when you go talk to her afterwards. Seeing her actually have a character arc made me like her a lot more.
You never met one of those capital G Gamers who have never seen a woman that’s not their mom? The ones that get mad if there are black/gay/trans people in their videogames because of “muh escapism”?
those gamers wouldn’t be the ones who want powerful women in the first place. The article is imagining gamers who want powerful women AND are afraid of them.
Sure, but I’ve also just read about a black gay Trump voter. Extremes exist, it is upon the one presenting a theory to show the extend of the problem.
I’ll readily believe that focus testing and the safety-only design of companies such as Ubisoft augments any problem massively but it’s still easy to accept “Oh it’s because gamers are too afraid of powerful women in their games!” as a rhetoric without having anything indicating it’s actually happening.
The whole gamergate thing lends some credence to the words of the author I would think. A lot of the big gaming influencers are toxic, racist and misogynistic. Remember when people freaked out about some unflattering screenshots of female characters in a lot of games? Like Aloy in Horizon: Forbidden West, MJ in the new Spiderman game or even Abby in The Last of Us 2. There are surprisingly many people that don’t like any western games because they “push their woke agenda” or some such bullshit.
It is the same in many online games, although that has gotten a bit better over the years, where you get berated, insulted and catcalled if you dare to have a feminine voice.
gAmErS were shitting their pants over the mere possibility of choosing “they” as a pronoun in Starfield. Also apparently voice actors having accents is “woke”
Of course, I’m not saying that it cannot be the case, but it’s also not something I’d leave just standing.
Just from the examples you list, the same issues essentially show up:
First to show that the influencers (as a whole) and their gaming audience (in specific) aren’t just a hyper-specific echo chamber that gets amplified in volume due to suddenly being actively reported on. Like the “Only 1% of players ever will let you know if they’re unhappy”, it’s difficult to know whether for every angry idiot manchild basement dweller there’s 99 or 999999 happy gamers that didn’t even realize something big was happening because their life has bigger issues than something posted on Twitter or in a blog post.
And then second to also show that this is still relevant. Gamergate was in 2014. GamerGate was closed to Half-Life 2 than to today, and consider just how different gaming as a societal landscape was back in the HL2 days.
Again, totally not saying that it’s not very much a relevant comment that is being linked to here, but to me what is weird is that it presents an idea as fact with absolutely no evidence that the basis that fact would need to be true even exists. “Gamers” is not a single group of people. And the implication that this in turn affects game design is also entirely unverified and not something a reader can verify or falsify for themselves.
Minthara, a companion who could previously only be recruited by joining her side and more or less committing genocide on a grove full of tieflings, can now simply be knocked out and talked to at a later point in the game where all of that drama can be ignored.
Minthara was being mind-controlled. When she’s free, she’s still evil but not that evil - she even asks the player character what his excuse for killing the tieflings is, since he wasn’t mind-controlled.
(Knocking her out still doesn’t make sense, but mostly because at that point in the game the player has no in-character reason to think that she’s special aside from the fact that all the other enemies are goblins and she’s a Forgotten Realms BDSM sex symbol drow.)
Yeah, I blew her the fuck up. I didn’t think she was a companion until I looted her and she had underwear and a backpack. Strangely only companions wear underwear in BG3. I don’t know what’s up with that.
So the author argues that unlikable characters should be liked because: buzzword, buzzword, woman, buzzword and that the customers are wrong. It’s art, it’s subjective, and that means people can also not like it. If it is indeed the case a vocal group of customers are finding it hard to get into the game because some characters are perceived as badly written, I doubt this is because they are all misogynistic neck-beards.
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