Gamers Doing Battle Against Nebulous Wokeness!

broad and reductive, potentially stifling creativity in game design. What does the divide say about the intersection of gaming culture and identity. Join us as we unpack the complexities on this issue from a skeptical humanist perspective. The story is from Dual Shockers by Abdullah to care to Cretty, I'm so sorry, I'm going to do that again, Thanks Glenn.

This story. This story is from Dual Shockers by Abdullah out to Kreti on September ninth, twenty twenty four, and my first question, I'm coming to you Aja, as the other resident strong female character on this particular broadcast. How can gamers balance the desire for a transparency with the need for inclusive storytelling.

analyze and interact critically with narratives and mechanics. But that was the quote that they said about that, And I am a firm believer in freedom of speech, even when I disagree with someone's statements or ideas that might be hateful or harmful. Although we can clearly draw a line on what is simply hateful and what can lead to,

you know, physical or real tangible harm. I don't think that censorship is dissolution to preventing people from having hateful beliefs, but rather using our own communication skills to engage people in discussions and encourage them to use critical thinking in order to learn to grow and to adjust the world years to the society that we live in today. We can remove hate by helping people understand why it's wrong,

not by forcing them to hide it through censorship. That would just be sweeping it under the world, and it is not helpful in destroying hate from its root.

point where we're pushing this same idea on other media like games, right. And and even if like games happen to seem to be too woke, strong female characters that they were saying previously, or even if they could be kind of hateful, I don't necessarily believe they should be banned or censored. I think that, you know, people should

be able to make the decisions themselves. I think that they should actually have like a familiarity with the content itself, but that's only so that you can be informed on if you want to buy it or not. But as far as like trying to slap some type of label that this is something that you shouldn't be able to get because it's dis orces that I don't really agree

with that. But you know, Scott, I want to know, you know, going back to this whole thing about woke, like how do you define woke in context of media? And should that? You know?

that kind of thing. And perhaps it's going the extra step in assuming that maybe you care about how other people you know, the results of things that you do or say or be or that kind of thing. And so, I mean, to me, it seems obvious that's what woke mean. That's why it seems odd to me when people, uh proudly proclaim that they're anti woke. I mean, are you're so you're asleep? Is it? What is that is that?

Are you bragging about that to me that you're that you're Yes, I am ignorant, and I don't give a ship how anybody feels, and and it's it's it seems odd. But just when we were reading through the story, you know, they were talking about thinking you know, you already mentioned strong female protagonists. That was one of the tags that they use to label games. That was I mean, really,

that's something you should be warning about. They also had things like includes pronouns, oh really okay, and to these pronouns or character with modern features. I mean, it's it's I don't it almost seem and I don't think this is what's happening, but it almost seems like it's a bunch of people, like like if they were aliens or something and they saw human beings acting this way and they're like, oh, this is the way that we act

to be human. Hello, humans, we are anti woke, and watch out for those pronouns, and hey, watch out for those modern features. They're gonna come and get you. So it's uh, but it's tough to it's tough to keep up with. And so I was saying that it almost seems funny that like they're just trying to pretend like like they maybe they see their parents or somebody acting, you know, protesting against you know, gay marriage or something like that, and they're like, oh, what should we protest about? Oh,

strong female protagonists. Okay, there there's something that we need to worry about. But I think what this shows is that people are going to people right. People are going to be are gonna have things to disagree about. And I agree with AJ. I'm kind of two minds of this. I think that, you know, shutting them down and saying no, no, no, you can't say that is I don't. I don't think that's the way to do it. I think that, you know, in this particular case, and I don't want to cast

gamers as being immature. And I'm a gamer myself, and and I'm well into my fifties and so well that I suppose that doesn't mean I'm not immature, but that doesn't mean I'm not young, and so so it's not like we're just talking about kids here, and so it's we don't want to cast them as being immature, although it does it does have some aspects to that. It's hard not to because it's it's immature behavior. It's immature behavior. It's it's lumping people together, it's lumping these games together.

It's saying that if a game uses pronouns, then something there's something bad about that. They're trying to get us to believe a certain way. They're trying to get us to think a certain way, which I don't know. There might be some truth to that. I generally don't think that that's that's really we're going to change the world

by using pronouns in this video game. It's it seems kind of silly to me, but you know, but at the same time, it's it's these gaming communities are a way that a significant portion of the population lived their lives, and there are people that that's really their whole life

is their gaming community. And so as somebody who's basically a casual gamer like myself, it's easy to see this as, oh, it's just the gamers acting up again, But you know, we have to take it seriously because it's a reflection of the people that are playing those games, many of whom are just like you know, just like us, And so I don't see this as really being something surprising or different from the rest of society. But you know,

there it is. It makes the headlines. Game games make money, and so money makes headlines, and so it's on the headline. So we're talking about it today.

like this in the first place. But you know, I'm wondering what ways can the gaming community because like we have these people, right, that's like coming up with ways for you to basically censor or telling other people, you know,

not to buy certain games because they're too woken. This is what you can use to have your WOCO meter on, so it would determine what you will and want not buy, right, you know, But I wanted to, like, what's the opposite side of it, in ag I kind of want you to start on this when it comes to like fostering a more nuanced conversation about representation without resorting to divisive labels, What would you think that would actually look like?

And the reason that I'm saying this is because there were just so many reviews talking about, you know, these strong female characters. There was one one specific review of the Indiana Jones and the Great Circle game that said they forced a girl boss character into the game in order to push agendas, and several other games were labeled as informational or meaning that they weren't neither recommended, but

they were also you know, not recommended. They were simply review to inform people of what had been updated or other to the game, but included in this category where several games were having forced diversity or an extremely ugly strong female protagonist, and complains about games adding pronouns as a Scott mentioned earlier and replacing gender female and male with body types which they will being labeled sort of like body type A or body type B rather than

you know, as we said, the typical male and female. And it seems like the pushback against equal representation is just a reminder of how misogyny and homophobia are so deeply embedded in all aspects of a modern society, including video games, and sadly, children grow up playing and all of these video games, and they see all these reviews and they see this type of vocabulary being used, and ultimately they are exposed to all these hateful ideologies and

they take that into adulthood. So we all have to be responsible for shaping this type of conversation and bringing awareness to it and bringing it up and continue talking about it and making sure that people realize how harmful they are.

head white men? Do you know that there are other people in the world that are not sis head, turbo sexual quite men, Are you familiar with other people were right here?

I mean, online communities are not known for their nuance, and this is an online community, but it's our online community, and so I think we do have responsibility not only to acknowledge what we see here, but also to tow we can we can you can promote positive thoughts, positive approaches to to these issues. Like you said, what does it matter if you have an option?

I think I support somebody else's right to promote whatever whatever they want to. I mean, I don't think that this is something that should be shut down, as we said before, but I think there are ways that that the community can kind of take it by the reins and kind of promote the kind of morph this into something good. I think discussion, at the very least can be helpful as long as long as ideas can be brought in, and that's in this fight against these options.

Can take those away, can take those those types of discussions off the table, and that that I think is the real damage that's being done here. It's not necessarily specifically particular ideas, but it's that it's it's taking those it's taking the option of discussion off the table. Which can be frustrating and makes it difficult to to deal with.

of caught right. They want to sell their games, but you know, maybe some of them don't care about the messages that they put up. Certainly there's video games with bad messages and mixed messages and good messages, and so they are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. They need to react to the marketplace, but they also need to react to their consciences. And so you know, I actually we have there's a former nonprofit

that now works at a huge video game company. I'm not going to say who, but those of you long time viewers of the nonprofits know exactly who I'm talking about. But anyway, in any case, but yeah, I think that if we can promote discussion, promote conversation, I think that the good ideas have the opportunity to bubble to the top.

Is in that they have had the power to shut down certain games, and although the reason why these games were truly shut down seems to be in question and not necessarily directly related to the reviews, I think that we can all agree that consumer reviews often do s way people's decisions on whether they're going to buy a

product or not. And you can see that an Amazon or any other type of product when you buy and sell something, right, So the action of these few people can certainly have a negative effect on the game sales, and it contained the game developers' reputations for themselves as well.