"Woke" games

A game is only called "woke" when it's bad. Balder's Gate 3 is one of the most "woke" major releases in the last few years but you hardly hear them complain about it.

It's the same thing with cyberpunk 2077. The anti-woke crowd can't agree on whether it's woke because many of them like it.

This is just my take on things. Feel free to agree or disagree.

Woke nowadays has a different meaning depending on where you are on the political spectrum, but I think most gamers think of it as corporate virtue signaling with often counterintuitive "not actually progressiveness" and ends up just stereotyping minorities. For example the DLC character in Kill the Justice League is an old lesbian stereotype and rarely represents what modern lesbians actually look like. In fact lesbians don't have to "look like" anything, but then you wouldn't know they're lesbians, and the companies don't understand how to do this.

Gamers can tell when a company is trying to "be progressive" while also having no idea how to do it properly, and it all comes off as incredibly cringe (Like DragonAge: The Veilguard) But when the developers are capable of telling a story, and integrate their modernized views into it, while making a great game (like Baldur's Gate 3) it no longer is "woke", just great.

Games with progressive views have existed for a very long time, and have generally been well received. But they never really started this "fake progressiveness corporate virtue signaling" until recently and I think gamers really only care about this happening. So it isn't about and never was about the political messages themselves. And proof of this lies in the fact that the same people who complain about woke games also complain about censorship in other countries (like the Arcane lesbian relationship being erased in the Chinese release, or game companies logos not having rainbows only in middle eastern countries).

I know a lot of people see in black and white, and you're either pro woke slop, or you're racist/sexist/transphobic. But reality is that most gamers (even those who complain about wokeness) actually are progressives. They actually don't care if someone is gay or trans or not. They only care about how that is portrayed, how belittling the message is, and how honest it is.

Is that dude waiting for an American Black Woman to invent punctuation marks?

To be fair, what the OOP is describing is "diversity in the video game industry", not "woke games", per se. While I doubt anyone here has objections to the former, I also doubt that anyone here is a fan of "Dustborn", as an example.

When a game puts it in your face that this character is is gay/trans/ethnic in a way that feels arbitrary to the setting or effected character, it comes off very much like a political move for sales.

Let's use soldier 76 from overwatch as an example. The way he was written on top of the are they aren't they thing he had going on with Ana didn't support him being gay at all. The announcement that he is gay came completely randomly and really fealt like a political move to add a little more representation.

On the other hand, we have good characters who happen to be LGBT, Ellie from the last of us, or my personal favorite Veronica from New Vegas.

Oh, this Lara Croft chick has to be a strong, independent woman, huh? Tired of shit like this and Metroid. Quit hamfisting women into things and virtue signalling

Never, ever, not in the entire 90's decade I was alive did I even hear anything remotely similar to anything like that. It was unheard of.

No one even thought about it like that, or even had the concept to consider them that way.

...until 2016

To be fair, though the early video game industry was created by and included a diverse group of people, the games themselves were made to sell their niche demographic. At the time that was young white boys. As a result not many games of the early era showcased the positive side of diversity, and often times portrayed it negatively, even if it wasn't intentional.

The past these people are comparing modern games to isn't imagined, it's real. As the gaming industry has grown to the now extremely large range of people it has, and through a shift in social culture over the years, the content, intent, and purpose of the games themselves have drastically changed.

The people who complain about "woke" games main program isn't an issue with games, but more about their inability to accept the societal and cultural changes happening around them. They refuse to accept that the types of games they loved as a kid had a lot of problematic cultural issues.

So basically they're mad that the racist and/or homophobic and/or sexist themes that they loved in old in games aren't acceptable anymore.

There’s nothing wrong with calling a bad game woke if they’re trying to cover their blatant flaws by tokenizing minorities and lgbt. See: Concord

Remember when Sierra had to hire an outside company to do King's Quest 8, and they completely ignored Roberta Williams' notes, instructions, and design simply because "You're a woman, you don't know anything about games, shut up and let us work. This is going to be an RPG, not an Adventure game, and you're going to like it little lady!... Who is also the wife of the owner, the co-founder of the company, and the creator+headwriter of the series we're currently working for."

And it kept happening no matter how much she complained, so eventually they had to kick them out, but there wasn't enough time to make a new game so the "Not King's Quest" King's Quest game had to be released to try to make money back..

And it was basically a shitty version of Ultima 9, an already shitty game, and was so bad and tonally out of place with the rest of the series that the King's Quest Collection on Steam only has 1-7 and the Reboot?

Yeah I normally like to root for the underdog game of a franchise and try to defend it, but KQ8: Mask of Eternity can get fucked.

I'm not even a King's Quest fan, but it's one of the most infuriating cases of sexism I've ever had the displeasure of learning about.

Imagine this happening in any other context. Imagine Square Enix hires a bunch of white guys to do Dragon Quest, sends in a higher-up to make sure it stays on brand, and they just tell him "You're asian, what do you know about good games?", and turn in a grimdark first person shooter that just happens to be called Dragon Quest, and Square Enix is in such a dire financial state that they're forced to publish it as a mainline entry.

That's basically what happened.

There are two kinds of wokeness I complain about:

1. Hernia level virtue signaling - this is when a production company is straining super hard to make sure we know they're the good guys, but the writers don't have the brains to come up with interesting allegories, or even super-transparent ones like the half-black/half-white dudes in the TOS episode. All they can muster up is character dialog like, "Wow, look how backward this time period is! So much misogyny and discrimination!" Yeah duh, I live in this time period and I'm not stupid. (talking to you, Picard season 2)

2. Misrepresenting the past - this is when they portray let's say Victorian England or 1950s America as a fully integrated society where characters of all races mix freely, with equality at all levels. That's not how it was, kids. The black housewife in 1953 Ohio would not have a white maid, although she might work part time as one in a white household. You don't raise social consciousness by painting a fake picture of history to avoid upsetting your audience. That does no service to the people who still feel the effects of those times.

But oh right, I forgot, the point is profit not genuine social consciousness - sorry, my bad.

/edited for grammar

I'm just going to say that a lot of creative, innovative, or interesting things, regardless if they're physical items, narratives, gameplay mechanics, or even just a new process for handling a particular task, is borne from diversity.

We are different. That difference is a strength. The more different we are, the larger of a gap between how I approach an issue and how you do the same. The Delta between your approach and mine is beautiful. One may be more efficient, one may be easier, one might be less expensive to do.

If we all thought the same, and we were extremely similar in what we knew and how we thought, nothing would ever change. Progress would not be possible.

A great example of this is with the blue LED. Most companies have been able to make blue LEDs for decades. The problem is, they were expensive, and shit. They couldn't brighten up a shoe box.

One guy took a blue LED manufacturing process that everyone else abandoned, and worked with it for the better part of like, 5 years or something. He invented the modern blue LED in all its glory. Bright enough to blind you from across the room, and cheap enough to produce that they ended up in a lot of places they probably shouldn't have been. That experimentation also yielded a near ultraviolet version that with a simply phosphor filter, can be converted to visible light, and white LEDs were born

Please choose body type:

• Body Type 1 (with large shoulders and no ass)
• Body Type 2 (with large ass and boobs)

Ah yes, progressive inclusiveness. So much better!

You know what was surprisingly woke? Smokey & The Bandit.

You'd think the truckers would be all white guys, and they'd be casually racist through the whole thing since it's the 70s. But it wasn't. Truckers of all shapes and sizes. And the main trucker character is friends with black people.

In the 70s. In a trucker movie. Set in The South.

As much as I despise the “anti-woke” crowd, this is not a good argument and completely misunderstands what they’re angry about.

They are angry about what they perceive as “forced diversity” that destroys modern media and that corporates like Disney are pushing a “woke agenda”.

I disagree with this view. I think representation in media is good. Games and movies usually turn bad for unrelated reasons (like rushed production or poor management).

You only have to look at any anti-woke review for a few seconds to figure out it's only ever racism, misogyny, and anti lgbtq hate. They aren't like ''This is why it's woke'' with some philosophical discussion, it straight up is ''there's a black in this game, that's wrong.''

Alan Turing... Nuff said

I'm just tired of being lectured in video games. Sorry if that makes me anti woke.

Spiderman 2, veilguard were both worse off because of poorly done DEI. BG3 was fantastic and created characters that weren't talking about pronouns like I'm a 5 year old. Sorry not sorry.

Woke isn't being progressive. It's being progressive to an extent beyond any sort of logic, virtue signaling constantly, and then calling anyone who disagrees with you morally or intellectually inferior.

In entertainment, that often results in some really annoying elements that I think we can all acknowledge are a thing after almost a decade of this:

• There is a minority protagonist. Said protagonist is disproportionately a straight coded conventionally attractive white women in their 20s.
• The only flaw the protagonist will have is not being confident enough
• There is then a minority side character. Said character will disproportionately be a black woman obviously less attractive than the protagonist, or a upper middle class gay fuckboi.
• If there is not one of these two things, a minority side character will be shoehorned in somewhere. The character will feel visibly out of place, and no explanation will be given. For example, they'll do some random black character in a fantasy setting that's clearly based off Scotland in the 1200s.
• Important character goes on a monologue that feels like a political PSA
• The IP's understanding of progressive politics and social justice is roughly equivalent to Tumblr circa 2013.
• Absolutely terrible writing. Even if you swapped all the "woke" elements for generic entertainment elements, the IP would still be terrible.
• Likewise, the IP itself is often put together in an extremely lazy and mediocre way. If said "woke" content was not there, it would be universally panned for its low quality.
• Amazing reviews. All aspects of the IP get 10/10 from the "professional" critics. All the reviews are similar enough that the critics either collaborated or read off the press release.
• The critics care more about the social justice aspect than the game itself.
• You get the sense both the creators and the critics of the IP not only don't consume this type of IP in their spare time, but actively resent people who do.
• Constant fucking gaslighting. Anyone who doesn't like this ultimately mediocre IP is either morally and intellectually inferior. This usually comes in the form of accusations of being a bigot, a Nazi, or a Trump supporter.
• Bigots, Nazis, and Trump supporters will then try to recruit people who are pissed about the gaslighting.
• At some point the IP itself fades into the background, and it just becomes yet another culture war battleground.

I think there's a reason Star Wars gets more shit for being woke than Spiderverse, or that Arcane hasn't become a culture war battleground in the same way She-Hulk did. The reason being those shows are actually good, and most people are happy to watch good shows.

People are mad about the weirdest thing.

When I was fully a gamer(tm), I used to get mad when people said that video games would make people to murderers. Now a bunch of the people, who probably used to get mad with me, are afraid that somehow video games makes you gay. Like dude, you know it is bs. You said it is bs.

"But it is about how the narrative suffers from the woke shit" yup totally true which is why the political right hated the harry Potter game for jk rolling's wokeness with Dumbledore's homosexuality and her rewriting of history by lying about what her notes would mean. Because they "hate" when authors don't respect the story but go for clout. (For those, who don't know, once jk said in an interview that a David star meant that the character is a wizard, later she claimed the same David star meant the character was a Jew) oh wait, they didn't boycott the game but hyped it up? Surely not because jk is a terf. No way.

Not that there would be any game that meets their "unwokeness" purity standards.

So that fact is wrong, it was a Jewish man who escaped nazi persecution. I dont think this is historical appropriation on purpose. Clap back politics don't provide anything, and in this case accidentally lied. It's usually free nowadays to check your facts before posting.

I’ve got a few concerns with Chris’ post, particularly the use of logical fallacies that undermine his main argument. Let’s break this down:

Straw Man Fallacy #1:

People who complain about wokeness in new video games don’t actually care about the past, just their imagined version of it.

This statement misrepresents the position of those who critique "wokeness" in media. It assumes that everyone in this group shares a simplistic, uniform, and flawed perspective on history, which is neither fair nor accurate.

Isn’t it ironic to advocate for inclusivity while reducing the opposing view to a stereotype? For example, I personally dislike overt "wokeness" in games, yet I don’t fit the imaginary box you’ve described. My position isn’t rooted in a denial of history but in the belief that games, music, and films are creative, self-contained domains to be enjoyed on their own merits—not as platforms for political messaging.

It’s not about rejecting inclusivity or denying the contributions of diverse creators. Rather, it’s about questioning why politics should take center stage in these art forms. Why must every creative work be a vehicle for ideological statements? Art can reflect politics naturally when it’s intrinsic to the story or setting, but forcing it risks alienating audiences who value the escapism and creativity of the medium.

Straw Man Fallacy #2:

Games we love are created by diverse people [...]. Just because you’re unaware of them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Who exactly is denying the existence of diverse creators? This statement uses vague, accusatory language aimed at a generalized “you” without specifying who or what is being addressed. This lack of specificity makes it difficult to engage with the argument constructively.

If the intent is to highlight the contributions of diverse creators, that’s absolutely valid and worth celebrating. But framing the point as an assumed rebuttal to an undefined group of people not only creates unnecessary division but also fails to advance the discussion meaningfully.

When addressing criticism, it’s more effective to engage with specific ideas or individuals rather than casting a wide net over an entire group. Otherwise, this risks becoming the very thing being criticized: stereotyping and marginalizing others based on assumptions.

Caper in the Castro came out on BBSs in 1989 to encourage people to donate to AIDS research.

I thought I had read somewhere that Zoid Kirsch is also gay. He had quite an impressive career in gaming.

He created Threewave CTF, which was an incredibly inspirational mod for the original Quake. Practically defined team deathmatch arena games to this day. Got hired by the legend John Carmack to work at id Software shortly after and helped develop QuakeWorld and subsequent Quakes.

Ugh, DEI has even infected the past now!

Wokeness isn't diversity lol

There's room to split hairs over the first cartridge based console, or the first console with interchangeable games. But no matter what, the Channel F was designed by Mr. Lawson from first principles.

Mrs. Williams' pet project series remains one of my favorite duologies in gaming - Laura Bow. If you say that she was the cofounder, you also have to point out that Ken & Roberta were a married couple, so no matter what she'd have been involved. It's more about what she contributed to gaming and her skill with crafting coherent stories both AGI and SCI - and you can see that in KQ4, since it was released in both AGI and SCI!

I have to admit that I never got into the BioWare D&D games - my preference remained with Black Isle's development (Planescape: Torment); but I respect others like them more than me.

The first person to put together principles on programming was a woman (Ada Lovelace). One of the most influential programming languages in the world, and the origin of the term 'computer bug', come from a woman (Captain Grace "Amazing Grace" Hopper). Women programmed the computers that put men on the moon and got them home safely. Dr. Ellis, a black man, was the first black person to get a Computer Science PhD, and (arguably) created the first known GUI.

These are all good people who made our lives better.

Out of sight out of...

Why would sex or sexuality matter for anything, unless you're actively interested in having sex with someone?

You don't get it, they like the women, gays and non whites providing labor, they just want them hidden, so it doesn't ruins their gamer experience. They are just labor, and there is no place for them in the exclusive gamer space.

It's like the old days, you want your slaves and servants just to serve you, like machines, you don't want to acknowledge their existence as human beings. They are not equal to you, they just sustain your life style, because they deserve so. And only that, no humanity for them.

Yes this man is absolutely correct. Aside from the obvious strawman's. The difference between the games he mentioned and the games currently coming out showcasing "wokeness" is that the old games are good.

No one actually cares how "woke" a game is as long as it's good.

Baldurs gate 2, arguably one of the best games ever made. Concord on the other hand... Ya.

B-b-but I don't want to actually see those people in my games! I just want them to make them! /s

The majority of complaints about wokeness in games is not that alternative lifestyles exist....

It's that the game, story, or environment is being sacrificed to shove a political message down your throat.

What people complain about online doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is revenue. If the revenue isn't enough then the discussion about wokeness dominates the discussion... I don't think making bland/bad game "woke" in order to get more attention will save it. Controversy doesn't sell that many games, might make more people aware of a product, but if they already didn't like the product (or were just meh about it) - controversy wont move the needle in a positive direction.

Update: since I'm incapable expressing myself succinctly here. I refer everybody to this nutsa video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJS4JHYgj50 which is my basic position