games

I agree it's political but ME's politics feel so War on Terror coded.

Recently replayed Mass Effect and it felt more reactionary than when I play thru the franchise 12 years ago as a lib

I have a different take. The problem in the writing room of these companies is not diversity, it is class.

The style of writing and the topics and conflicts that writers choose is often tied to their personal experiences, writers write what they know. The issue in these large corporate tech companies is that these people are, by and large, from middle-income suburban families with good backgrounds and good upbringings and nice middle class experiences.

What they write ends up being largely informed by the only political conflicts they see in american life as a suburban liberal. Which is largely what we see in culture war battles online day to day.

They also tend to write content that lacks edgyness, often because they themselves lack edgyness, or have never really been around edgyness to understand it. They write boring middle class liberals, without trauma, without edge, without neuroses, without mental health issues, without particularly compelling motivations or fears.

The people that write the good stuff have seen it. And the people who have seen it are not liberals from good upbringings in middle class families in the suburbs.

Put a queer writer in that room who has seen trauma, struggle and conflict from living at the edge of poverty and you will get completely different and significantly more compelling writing than you will get from the current people who make it to these positions in tech companies.

The problem is that this queer writer with that background does not get the opportunity. Or at least it is rarer.

And this isn't just a thing in games either, you have it in tv and movies too. That's specifically why we have film groups actively seeking out people from those class backgrounds and telling the kinds of stories you can only get from that experience. Gaming has no such thing though. There has never been a conversation about the class of the writers in videogames like there has been critical analysis of the same in tv and film.

The bad writing that the chuds hate is, in my opinion, a product of class rather than diversity but they do not have the class consciousness to recognise it so they just see the boring writing tropes that middle class liberals put out and scream at the wrong thing.

The Mass Effect games are fascist as fuck though

bioware is already dead and even they already made those games not like those games. play the first one then the second one in each series

Both of these franchises suck ass

They're not going to "change" the game studios, they're going to sell off all the most valuable properties to pay for the acquisition then load EA down with debt to their own credit lines and bankrupt the corporation after transferring all the value to themselves.

People are dragging on ME for being reactionary (which it is), but it's also terminally End-of-History brained. Humanity and multiple advanced alien species all somehow came to the conclusion that free market capitalism with representative liberal democracy (albeit with matriarchs, scientists and military officers being politically prominent for Asari, Turians and Salarians respectively) was the zenith of civilization and should be made the default on galactic scale. Poverty is a natural phenomenon which no one questions when productivity is stupidly high and literal FTL travel is ubiquitous (Shepard even goes as far as to say it at one point). Governments being slow to do anything, much less get off their asses in an extinction level event, is simply politics (which leads to the reactionary stuff like the very concept of a Spectre) and surely isn't an indication for a much needed galaxy-wide reorganization if not revolution in the immediate aftermath of the Reaper war.

Listen, I was too young to understand the deeper themes of these games when they came out which means that they are now woke and political, but only the remakes! And no, I can't just go back and play the original, because the remakes retroactively transformed it to be woke too! That's how wokeness works, it's like a time virus that makes my nostalgia bad and therefore is the worst thing ever!

I'm going to share something I've noticed being old and grumpy, there is no such thing as neutral, not irl, not in any form of media. Everything you interact with, or dare I say consume has a tone by virtue of political reality and being at once point shaped by humans.

Those supposedly neutral games? They're still pushing themes, its super subtle but it totally is there, however, I agree 100% Bioware games being equally vague on these themes will kill the storytelling-immersion framework in their games resulting in blander slop and a shitter experience.

Anyway, even Tetris has themes, based ones for sure, nothing is neutral

are we really going to pretend that callof duty which is literally cia propagnada (cia has directly worked in it's development) is politically neutral.

dragon age veilguard is so good and i'm happy to see nonbinary characters in my fantasy rpg