I'm not personally friends with the person I RTed and so I don't want to QRT her and suggest I'm implying she'd agree with any particular take I have here, so - her tweets are just upthread.
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What she basically said is exactly what I have been saying I suspect is true about video games: that women gamers (and by extension LGBT gamers, I believe marketers this bigoted and clueless absolutely lump the two together with stereotypes) are INTENTIONALLY framed as "casual"
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The story I RTed recounted working on what the poster described as a "gritty FPS" where nearly all female players surveyed and 80% of male players wanted to see a playable woman in the next game. It was unequivocally shot down bc the game couldn't be "a girl game."
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That's just for *female player characters*. Not even getting into LGBT. I think it's important to note that she mentioned it was a gritty shooter. Not an offbeat platformer,not an adventure game, not a charming high budget indie,but a gritty shooter. That's where we're unwelcome
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We may be unwelcome in other places too, but definitely there. This story was stated to be from some time ago, but I truly do not believe a huge amount has changed.
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So, to circle back around to why I find the ongoing media feeding frenzy on TLOU2, the absolute desperation to find a reason to hate the game, and the defense from the gaming left that the game is just too violent, upsetting and distasteful -it's that corroborating evidence there
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If just getting a woman protagonist into a gritty shooter was off the table a few years ago, having two women protagonists, one of whom is a lesbian, in a generation-defining title is a HUGE shift. One of two things had to be possible for this to happen:
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1) The industry moved forward, realized that since the audience was demanding more diversity, they should give in and do more diversity; or 2) the creatives at one particular studio with a phenomenal record for money making got to do basically whatever they wanted for one game
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I think TLOU2 is clearly a case of 2. Naughty Dog may have been wanting to foreground women and LGBT protagonists for a while, but they only got to do that after successfully making game after game with basically no duds in terms of financial success
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Even with that in mind, their marketing department starting *four years ahead of release* - when *Barack Obama was still President,* for a sense of scale - sensitizing the poor manboys who play gritty shooters that they were going to have to be a girl, a gay girl, this time
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This marketing also included the active *lie* that the gritty manbro from the previous game would be a companion for a significant part of the game. These were likely preconditions of getting to do the game, *even with all of Naughty Dog's successes*
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On top of this, I'm still not even sure they would have been allowed to pull it off if they hadn't essentially created a situation where narratively Ellie as the protagonist was the only way forward that made sense, *and* made her gay in a DLC when not much attention was paid
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So if we have someone in the industry saying recently *even with overwhelming player support from men and women* for having a (presumably straight) female lead wasn't enough to make it happen, because of an industry desire to preserve gendered divides re: gritty shooters?
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we should understand that as meaning that when we manage by what amounts to a miracle of sympathetic creatives who happened to have nearly unprecedented success and therefore creative freedom to get a LGBT, women-focused blockbuster gritty shooter, we cannot take that for granted
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Let me elaborate further: 1) this is an issue that pertains, again, to "gritty shooters" more than other genres. It undoubtedly applies elsewhere, but, say, a T-rated superhero game or a psychadelic platformer would probably not face the same barriers
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2) That means that we have to understand that TLOU2 being one of the grittier, darker, grimmer titles of its generation and also featuring the most diverse cast in terms of gender and sexuality is a feature, not a bug.
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Doing a happy game about a lesbian superhero who saves people in a morally upstanding world *would not have faced the same barriers* nor would it have challenged the same barriers or norms.
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TLOU2 is a paradigm shift because it says "women and LGBT people are an important part of the audience to, at least, this one major developer." and that developer believes that we are not more squicked than cishet men by brutal violence, moral compromise, and so on
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My fear throughout all of this has not been that women and LGBT people will disappear from AAA games altogether. We've been there for a while - in optional paths in the Bioware/Obsidian niche, in, again, offbeat games with an artsy vibe but AAA values, in high budget adventures
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It's that we will forever be separated into that. And all of the folks saying "take heart! The sales bear you out, the corporations want money!" should, again, read the thread I RTed. They aren't purely or even primarily rational actors on this.
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They are going to look for any excuse to not make gritty shooters that are also "girly gay games" or whatever. And the endless editorials about how TLOU2 is too violent, anti-dog, secretly Israeli propaganda, etc. are giving them the cover to keep LGBT ppl and women in subgenres
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It is time for games journalists to realize that they need to step above their desire for games to somehow be "better" and accept that, as the sales of TLOU2 show, there is a MASSIVE audience of LGBT and female players who want exactly what the dudebros have always had.
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We don't want just The Sims. We don't just want RPG dating sims. We also want bloody action-adventure survival games with high production values. We aren't inherently more troubled than the dudebros by killing fictional video game people or by horror or moral ambiguity
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We are actually gamers, and that means that we want in on the "hardcore games" that we've been playing all along, but not seeing ourselves in. Not all of us want that, but a huge number clearly do. But Naughty Dog is NOT the game industry. They, and their audience, got lucky.
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For other developers and publishers to follow in TLOU2's wake, they are going to need to understand that LGBT and women gamers didn't buy TLOU2 in massive numbers in *spite* of its dark and intense themes, that those aren't cishet guy things
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Because that's what they are going to want to do. They are going to want to say "clearly, these people are a market, and they want to be represented, but they would probably buy even more if we gave them AAA Stardew Valley."
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That is why "queers are healers," "we are better than this," and all the various whataboutism, gaslighting, and so on coming from major games press around The Last of Us Part II is dangerous to the future of representation in gaming. We aren't better than this. I'm not.
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Approximately 2 million of us are not "better than" The Last of Us Part II, and we did not buy it just because the lead was a gay woman and we were willing to tolerate that icky male violence. We bought it because we wanted the cinematic action games cishet men have always had
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If we allow ourselves to fall prey to vicious hot takes and attempting to prove our moral superiority over this game, I believe we may lose this fight forever. We will be forever segregated to (probably higher budget, better crafted) versions of The Sims, Stardew Valley, etc.
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TLOU2 is the game that can break the gender segregation of the game industry but that can only happen if we stop the disingenous whining. /thread
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End of conversation
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