this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Games if anything are less woke now than they used to be. Forget games featuring female protagonists; well-loved classics like Final Fantasy 7 have strong underlying themes regarding pollution, climate change and environmentalism, and Metal Gear Solid was a biting critique of the military industrial complex all the way back in the 90s!
Prior to the current, rampant commercialisation of video games - they used to be viewed as art or at the very least passion projects, intentionally designed with a strong underlying message.
The problem now is that with the ubiquity of the internet, Gamers™ have unintentionally collaborated into creating echo chamber where the worst of humanity is given the largest soap box.
There are plenty of modern games that deliberately make these kinds of discussions. A handful I’ve played recently with strong political or at least philosophical themes:
I wasn’t trying to imply that there aren’t any games with strong messages nowadays - we’re discussing all the hullabaloo about games being “too woke” now, after all.
More-so I was just pointing out the hypocrisy of everyone railing against most modern games that dare to illustrate even the most milquetoast opinion counter to their own, while at the same time venerating the ‘good old days’.
For real, check out this dude complaining about anti-religion in Castlevania lol (I feel okay sharing this because account is deleted and thread is ancient by internet standeds, otherwise I always wanna prevent brigading etc): https://www.reddit.com/r/castlevania/comments/d57q9m/does_anyone_else_feel_like_the_antireligion/?rdt=55043
Or consider that God always dies in SMT games, or there’s a path to always do that
I think it's the same issue as conservatives suddenly realizing their favorite band or movie/tv franchise is gasp woke!
They passively consume media without analyzing it beyond the surface level, then are personally offended that they were "baited" into consuming what they see as woke propaganda.
Then they also notice a trend of more overt progressive elements in media because of an increase in surface-level corporate pandering, and they blame "wokeness" for bad storytelling without realizing people who are actually woke hate the shallow pandering too.
Repubs be like, "Rage Against the Machine was really good until they got all political and stuff."
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