2. Do gamers - especially those who play games with subscription fees - have a responsibility to preferentially patronize game makers that follow the standards in #1?
That's their call, but I hope not. I don't want games to succeed or fail because the main character is a transgendered bisexual Chinese-Nigerian woman or the only Italian person in the game is a 2D caricature villain. I want them to succeed or fail because they're good or bad games, not good or bad expressions of political, ideological, or social Rightthinking.
3. Do you personally feel that an overt effort to be more "inclusive" or "diverse" harms the overall enjoyability of a game - or, alternatively, enhances it?
Overt? Yes. Intentionally injecting political bullshit into things tends to make them worse products on the whole. If you can seamlessly integrate favorable examples of minorities you like or parables on political issues you care about into a work, then great- but far more often, in my experience, it just ends up preachy and obnoxious.
For that matter, I don't tend to find "diversity" very compelling in general, or at least not on those lines. Consider the current trend of having a black guy and a woman in every media squad. Does that make the work more enjoyable, or just give it another arcane rule everything follows? For me, it's the latter. Even if it were better done or those characters were ones I liked a lot, would they be better because they're black and everyone else isn't? For me, again, no, not that I've noticed.
What I can't accept is that this entire sexy paradise collapses the moment you introduce a female character that wears clothes and has motivations, or a homosexual character that isn't a jibe at gay men or a fetishization of lesbians - and yet, this is the view that I see most represented in the "too much inclusiveness is bad" camp. My understanding of this position is that video games are perceived by some as a place where the crass and the juvenile is accepted - to an extent, they are - and that scantily-clad babes and no gays are an integral part of this. Thus, under this model, to make video games "grow up" and incorporate a more adult understanding of gender relations would be like ordering steak au poivre at McDonalds' - if you wanted something that fancy, you should have read a novel/gone to a french bistro.
But obviously, that's not the case; not all video games are World of Warcraft and Tomodachi Life. The go-to counterexample, Bioware, has strived to both create complex storylines and write a diverse cast (both to varying degrees of success), and faced a fairly strong internet backlash for it, which suggests to me that people aren't just reacting to the "political correction" of their more basal pleasures, but are instead repulsed by the very notion that the simplicity of the gaming experience - immersion into a different world, disconnection from your own - could be complicated by the inclusion of a nuanced conception of who likes to bang who and why. Or maybe I'm just ridiculously projecting my own insecurities.
I think - and I'm putting on my flame goggles here - that a great deal of this cringing away from diversity has to do with the fact that the dominant group that is now being challenged, heterosexual, predominantly white men, has not, as a group, experienced exclusion to any significant degree. Thus, when different groups clamour for representation, they lack the context to view that as a simple request to be allowed to play with all of the other reindeer - and not as a political statement.
I have to wonder how representative this is. Of anything, really.
Sounds to me like you might be confusing a handful of raging internet assholes with... well, a larger, more coherent group, at least.
Whatever your definition of "the majority" is - in ascending order of granularity, men, white men, straight white men, straight white cissexual men, straight white cissexual Christian men, etc - it is a logical conclusion of the framework our society is based on that members of that majority enjoy mastery over popular culture and historiography. This means that the "default" perspective of your average cultural work - be it a novel, a film, or a video game - is that of a member of the majority.
Without in any way calling into question your intelligence or argumentative acumen, let me state that it is extraordinarily difficult for members of the majority to conceptualize what it is like to not enjoy this cultural mastery - whether this is inherent human nature or a by-product of our current society is for someone better versed in the humanities to decide. I'm not knowledgeable enough to define it beyond that, but it is an excellent chance to segue into...
I find this an incredibly dubious claim, for three reasons.
One,
everyone has shades of it. By your reasoning even straight white cissexual Christian men can have
some glimpse of what it's like to not be in the majority, provided they're of the wrong sect or lineage or preferences or history. Straight white cissexual men should have a bit more, and so on, so trying to say "look, these groups aren't positioned to understand this" is a sloppy generalization at best.
Two, even this minority majority of perfectly culturally representatives is going to experience works outside of that viewpoint, even if not terribly frequently.
Three, "you can't understand! How could you understand!" tends to be a complete bullshit argument.
So... if the argument goes that somebody in this master category is constantly surrounded by food they consider delicious, and thus can't fathom what it's like to
not be surrounded by delicious food... I'd still say they can puzzle it out from their pretty much guaranteed knowledge of what not-tasty food is and is like. Maybe not to the exact extent as some less fortunate diners, but trying to claim it's simply beyond their comprehension strikes me as pretentious and, to be blunt, a cop-out.
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Topic: Video Games and the Fun-Diversity Dichotomy (Read 23150 times)