NoeL said:
Making games more enjoyable and accessible to others doesn't, or at least shouldn't make them less enjoyable for you. If you need your games to be sexist, homophobic etc. in order to enjoy them there's something wrong there, and I don't think the games industry should be encouraging that - regardless of whether or not it's more profitable.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. It probably wasn't deliberate but I think a bit of a bait-and-switch has just happened. Just because a game isn't - and doesn't aspire to be - an exemplar of progressive thought and inclusion, doesn't make it racist or sexist, and just because the fanbase is nonplussed by the idea of it becoming more inclusive, doesn't make
them racist or sexist.
Let's take for example, hell, I don't know, Halo as a franchise. It's not a game that anybody could, with a straight face, call sexist, racist, homophobic or whatever in nature. However, it's also not a game series that goes to any particular effort to be a flagship for equality. Sure, there are some female characters, and at least one well-developed black character, but they weren't put in the game to meet some quota - their inclusion in probably more to do with variety than some progressive vision of diversity.
Now, let's say that there's a lobbying group who thinks Halo, as a triple-A franchise, has a moral duty to be more inclusive.
Demands eager suggestions get made that Master Chief could be made a female, of he could have a gay love interest, and hey, would it kill 343i to include a character in a wheelchair? All small adjustments that would barely change the nature of the core game. Many fans probably wouldn't notice, and even if they did, what kind of bigot would object to more diversity? It could actually improve the game and make the plot more interesting. Who doesn't like diversity and choice and a broadened set of narratives? I mean, possibly some people require Halo to be sexist, ableist and homophobic in order to enjoy it, but really, are they they kind of people we should be pandering to?
See what I mean? A bit of mental gymnastics and a few verbal backflips and we've represented
"Well, these ideas are interesting and possibly they'd make for a good game, but I don't feel they fit within the established narrative and characters of this series. Why not make your own game from scratch rather than appropriating and modifying something that's already successful, and if it's good, surely it'll stand on its own merits?" as
"I cannot smile unless I have my reassuringly hateful virtual bigotry simulator game to enact oppressing minorities, this stems from my deep-rooted fear of women and homosexuals and the worry that they're coming to take away my guns and cut off my penis, also I'm a manchild, waah waah".
NoeL said:
The problem with not addressing these things in the AAA market is that the AAA market is far and away the most visible face of gaming to anyone not already part of the culture (and even within the culture there are plenty of people that will avoid any game that has the "indie" label because they assume it'll be cheap, artsy shit). For many people it is gaming. It presents that barrier to entry, and it's also needlessly divisive to have "games" (for young, straight, white males), then "girl games", "black games", "gay games" etc. "Games" should appear accessible to everyone, rather than the narrow (though large) 'young, straight, white male' market. It's kind of the same thing with "hardcore" games vs "casual" games. The "hardcore gamers" spit on casual gamers because they're seen as the "other", but if we were able to culturally lump hardcore and casual gamers as "gamers" we'd see comradery instead of conflict. It's human psychology.
I don't understand why this is an inherently bad thing, why it should change, or in fact
how we'd change it without blatently rigging the market to represent a progressive agenda rather than mainstream tastes. What are we going to do, force developers to gamble millions of dollars and years of development time on experimental games? Pop music is the mainstream face of the music industry, but indie music exists. Hollywood blockbusters are the mainstream face of film, but arthouse cinema exists. There's no need to directly intervene in the medium; just provide the choice and if there's a demand for games with transsexual Maori wheelchair users, people will buy it, it'll be profitable, and the market will have broadened itself to accommodate the demand.
Batou667 said:
As I mentioned before, the visibility of the AAA market makes the playing field severely unlevelled. A AAA game with a metacritic score of 10% is still almost certainly going to sell more copies than an indie game rated 98% (with rare exceptions like Minecraft that breach obscurity). You could show both of those games to the people that bought the AAA game and find that 90% prefer the indie game, but they still bought the AAA game because they didn't know about the indie game. Smaller games will very rarely outsell AAA games based on quality and appeal because they just don't have the same market visibility.
...and? Again, that's the reality of the market at work. Not all games are created equal, nor are they all entitled to the same degree of exposure - that's why multi-million dollar ad campaigns exist. I'm not sure how we'd even go about "correcting" this, or why it'd be beneficial.
And anyway, indies and crowdsourced projects arguably have it the best they ever had. With the Internet, publicity is essentially free and word-of-mouth can operate on a global scale. There are plenty of examples out there of games that started off as bedroom projects and have snowballed into million+ user titles - not just Minecraft, but things like Dwarf Fortress, World of Tanks, Day Z started off as a user-created mod, Alien Hominid was a Flash game, Team Fortress was originally a total conversion of Quake, Counterstrike was a Half Life mod, and so on. If it's a good enough game, it'll attract attention and thrive.
That's why I get the impression that the progressive/SJW crowd have an an inexplicable expectation of entitlement about them. Nobody else gets to dictate to developers what they should and shouldn't include in their games, nobody else gets to wag their fingers at the gaming public and tell them their tastes are wrong, nobody else gets to demand AAA games and publicity. I understand some of the arguments in favour of extra diversity, but this entitlement is just plain, pie-in-sky, moralistic fallacy. And no, I'm not trying to "silence" or "censor" anybody -people can make demands as loud as they want, just don't be surprised when publishers say "lolnope, we're not doing that". Pick your battles, start off small and realistic, and show us that the alternative is worth playing and investing in. You can't just say "X is crap, ergo we should shift to making Y" and stand there arms crossed and tapping your foot impatiently.
