Re: DEI based game design

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 13:20:44 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
On the other hand, there isn't one game made that's 100% realistic.
And making games accessible to people other than grungy bros is a good
thing as far as I'm concerned. God forbid we make a game with Vikings
that an Asian woman might want to play.
>
"Hey, I can take a sword to the gut and ten seconds later I'm fine,
and that's cool, but there's a black Ninja and that's too
unrealistic."
>
That shit can fuck right off.

Maybe a couple of examples are in order to at least help illustrate my
perspective here (which is not 100% on topic with the purpose of the
thread, but worth clarifying anyway).

In Red Dead Redemption 2, the online mode can get a bit silly and the
immersion floor starts to drop because of the "pimpingly colorful"
outfits that can be acquired and upgraded to.  This is a shame because
the characters inside the game start to take on a look that is just no
longer characteristic of the old wild west setting. 

Call of Duty games have become the same way... outfits and guns so
colorful and cartoonish that it betrays the traditionally serious /
semi realistic tactical setting of the franchise.

Note that those two examples have nothing to do with race/gender etc.,
rather they are examples to illustrate how immersion can get fucked by
runaway design decisions that are rooted in something other than
simply keeping the game fun (in those cases, I believe the
unnecessarily diverse styles of clothing / weapons etc. have the root
cause of their particular variation of cancer in monetization schemes,
and the goal of making the player want to spend more on upgrades in
order to solve FOMO on lots of cosmetic digital content.  But for
purposes of this thread, I'll just refer to the syndrome as
"frutifying the game setting".  It can happen for DEI based goal
reasons and/or monetization strategy reasons....

...***however, the two are largely inseparable***.  This is because
cunty marketing douchebags figure the larger the audience, the more
profits to potentially be had.  And, the primary game buying
demographic is no longer GenX'ers.... (its GenZ, who have been largely
taught in school that they should experiment with their sexual
orientation and identity, even if the idea would have never occurred
to them before, and have been taught that straight white males are
primarily toxic and racist by default).  So the path to profit
maximization (in the feeble mind of a marketing douchebag) is to
target that audience with game design decisions and therefore sell
more titles.

Howevever, marketing douchebags are well known for there
short-sightedness, and that's what Mack (WorthABuy dude's) rant is
really about.  How the intentional injection of politics has come
around full circle and resulted in a bunch of shit games that nobody
wants to play.  Ubisoft is a perfect example of a company that went
all in on DEI based game design and they are now getting crushed by
the weight of their own stupidity.