There are a few words/phrases that make me instantly enraged. PC used to be one of them because people used it in a pejorative fashion. If someone was crass enough to bring up diversity issues, they were admonished for being PC. That has morphed into ‘woke’, which also makes me grind my teeth. What I said or thought when someone bleated PC was, “Oh, you don’t want to treat people who aren’t like you with even the rudimentary courtesy?”
Same with woke. I saw a video on the home page of YouTube by a gamer guy titled, “No one wants to play ‘woke’ characters”. I immediately blocked him with extreme prejeudice. It’s astounding to me that white straight cis men in gaming are STILL whining about how minorities are destroying the industry. I’m trying to think of a game that is specifically minority-focused and can’t think of any triple A game. In the last year, I mean. Granted, I mosttly play From games and indie games, so I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the gaming industry.
But, I used to play casual games. Hidden Objects, Match-3, Time Management, etc. The Hidden Objects games have morphed (pun intended because there are morphing objects in the games now) into wanting to provide storylines.
Side note: Hardcore game series are often maligned for being repetitive and just churning them out every year. Your Collar Duties, your AssCreeds, etc. Which, true. But in the casual gaming world, it’s even worse. They pump out the same damn game with just a palette swap. They can do two or three a year beacuse the mechanics are the same for the series. The first one ore two are interesting, and then it gets boring. Granted, it’s only seven bucks per game, so it’s a bit more forgiveable, but still.
Anyway. Most of the stories have a female protagonists. I would estimate 75% when I played the games on the regular, which was a decade ago. More than. I figured it out that it was because it was women who played the games, by a wide margin. I used to read the reviews every now and again. One was from a guy who complained about the protags being women. It was for a game in which you could choose male or female (only two genders acknowledged back then), and he was saying it was nice to have the choice. Which is fine. But then he went on to say how horrible it was for him as a man not to feel a connection with the protag.
Which, wah, wah, wah. I will admit that my first response was not one of sympathy, empathy, or compassion. As someone who is never the target demo, it seemed a bit precious to me for a man to go into an area that is predominately for women and demand more.