Mind the GAP: Gaming And Politics

Will gaming survive the "woke" war?

Politics has ruined the NFL, country music, and even compromised NASCAR. Gamers are waging a battle to save one of the last frontiers, gaming, from ideological annihilation.

Modern gaming has boiled down into three categories for me, with the over-inclusion of politics ruining the experience. The categories are simple: Players that play old games, players that enjoy new games with a retro aesthetic, and players that suffer through games that incorporate the new “woke” agenda. I will only use that word once, it's oversaturated these days.

I have been playing games since my family could afford to get me a GameBoy Color, before moving onto consoles like the Wii, the Xbox, and now only in the last few years have I really gotten into computer gaming. Out of everything I have played, I have noticed a large decline in modern games simply due to how bad the game is and how hyper-focused the creators are on pushing some sort of narrative over actual gameplay.

This isn’t a knock on political messaging in video games. Most of the political messages in gaming have been tame. The Fallout series was always discussing the impact of war while also showing how it was viewed by different groups of people. Metal Gear does the same thing, with the brutality of war and its near pointlessness being highlighted. Metal Gear was also able to make a very eerie prediction about modern day America, in the creepiest way possible:

The idea of putting a bigger message in video games came from Gonzalo Frasca, a game designer and academic researcher focusing on serious and political video games. In video game theory, yes that's a real term, Frasca belongs to the group of "ludologists" who consider video games to be simulations based on rules. He saw the rise of video games as a new media outlet to convey messages to a younger audience, which means a paradigm shift in media consumption and production. His push in 2001 to make games have a message left some resounding marks, but I believe that it hasn’t carried over well to today.

The modern-day narrative isn’t anything profound or thought provoking, there's no message about the current world that would reflect in a positive change, or even a change period. Today, the narrative being pushed is that a small group of people make up more of the populace than facts support, and that group is the LGBTQ+. The overrepresentation and inability to drive a story without some form of toxic feminism and anti capitalist agendas has been washed in right alongside the weird inclusion of multiple gay characters, which does more harm in the name of inclusion than simply showing an accurate percentage.

A good example of a game failing to be “inclusive” comes from the long line of “Saints Row,” with the most recent one being released last year sparking controversy for just how left leaning and annoying it got. Well known faces in the gaming world also criticized the game as well.

It’s not the only one: Gearbox’s “Borderlands,” which was always somewhat “woke,” grew so aggressively rainbow-annoying that the nonstop messaging distracted from actual gameplay. There just isn't any love from these big companies that goes towards games that people actually like to play. Despite this, games have been going strong for lesser known developers, and even some studios that achieved fandom by doing things their own way.

I can personally attest to the rise of games that overall have a majority of its focus on the gameplay and aesthetics over the story. Don’t get me wrong, the stories are still cool, but it’s not the focus of a video game, it’s merely an addition if at all included. One type of game I’m talking about are retro FPS games, or “boomer shooters.” Most triple-A modern shooters today have a lot of problems with the gameplay, a weird and rushed story, and overall focus on how realistic it looks. To top it all off, additional content would cost you a handful, even for a small piece. Add this to the fact that the message being conveyed is skewed and downright insulting, especially with historic inaccuracy for games revolving around both world wars, and you have an overall mess that really appeals to maybe 4 people on the planet. This focuses on the narrative, not the gameplay, which ends up making these games non user friendly.

In contrast, not only was modding a lot more difficult on consoles but many of the companies who made “Call Of Duty”-style FPS games also got greedy too. Thanks to the utter mistake which was adding internet connectivity to games consoles, they realised that – as well as selling unfinished games and then patching them later- they could literally sell content which once would have been free mods as smaller pieces of “DLC” – paid add-on content.

It got worse as time progressed, with things like “Loot Boxes” (randomised gambling for small pieces of DLC) becoming more popular too. The combination of the difficulty of modding console games and the utterly mercenary attitude of some large game companies means that modern-style FPS games don’t always have a modding scene.

But, not only did modding keep people playing retro-style FPS games, it also had a more important role than this too. It gave ordinary people practice and experience with things like level design and game design. It taught people how to design these types of games. You can probably see where I’m going with this…

Game studios like New Blood Interactive have paved their own way into fame with the majority of their focus being on how their games play, and how they stand out in their style. This isn’t to say there isn’t a story being written either, but they don’t have messages that are particularly controversial. Take “DUSK,” for example. A great game with great mechanics focused around killing cultists in Pennsylvania that worship an elder god straight out of H.P. Lovecraft, all while staying within the style of a product that came out in the late 90s. It’s fresh, fun, and most importantly, original!

So a game focused on gameplay and maybe sticking to its source material should be fine, right?Surely there are triple A titles out there that have managed to achieve this and they do just fine. Wrong, the action RPG “Hogwarts Legacy” had an estimated sale of up to 20 million copies sold, still had issues with the public simply because of the book author's individual views.

Harry Potter author JK Rowling’s public statements about transgenderism used Steam’s customizable tags feature for some left-wing activism, and labelled this children’s game as ‘transphobic’. They also added a few unrelated, unpleasant tags such as ‘psychological horror’ and ‘World War 2’, just to cause some damage. Since then, Steam’s operator Valve stepped in and removed these tags, but screen shots of the product of the shenanigans still exist on the internet. The voice actor for one of the characters in the game, Sebastian Croft, even went as far as publicly apologising on Twitter for his involvement in the project. Croft also plays a character on the LGBTQ teen drama Heartstopper on Netflix, so many in his audience were triggered by the fact he worked on a game that is based on the creation of someone they do not agree with.

I just want to play good games without having political correctness or agendas shoved in my face — right or left wing. Some things should be gate-kept to an extent, because allowing people who never cared about gaming to dictate and influence the product for their own bias and preference often alienates the core fandom and harms the industry. This is ideological warfare in culture and its being targeted on our youth via the biggest companies out there, and it needs to fought against while there is still ground to save.

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L. Grey is a researcher, gamer, and Chapter and Verse contributor.