I was going to skip writing about Battlefield and the latest shitstorm it’s caused as it’s almost exactly the same thing that’s happened the last time, but the shitstorm persisted and it’s still here for some reason, so I figured I’d tackle the ‘issue’ myself. Using metaphors to describe the concurrent happenings would only desecrate our beautiful language, so I will avoid doing that and say it as it is: it’s an overblown, hive-minded, ball-dangling idiocy that hardly surprises me at this point.
I’ve been a ‘gamer’ practically my whole life, staring in mid to late 90s’ with the Atari and Nitendo, moving onto PC around 2004 and I never moved off of it since. I have roughly 20 years of experience in this field, but I can’t even go out and about and be proud of it anymore. Gaming – and its communities – have been on a diving spiral for almost a decade now, and things have only been getting worse year after year. The grand-standing community turned into a conglomerate of whiny, crying babies whose entire lives orbit around being exactly that – whiny, crying babies. It’s impossible to satisfy us. It’s impossible to please us. We will cry. We will whine. We will bitch about something, even if there’s nothing to bitch about. However, when push comes to a shove, that’s all we ever end up doing. We have been whining and crying about bollocks DLCs, pre-orders, microtransaction and Jesus knows what else for years now, yet, year after year, games with exactly those things keep being successful. We are fundamentally broken creatures that have no clue what to do with themselves, and for some reason we take pride in it. The latest example comes with the newest Battlefield game, specifically that already infamous trailer where a hard-bred, prosthetic-arm-wearing, gun-toting woman is running across the field and shooting shit up. That singularity had caused the entire community to cleave up, and has resulted in yet another ‘war of words’ that have been so common in the community recently. It’s hardly a wonder why gamer’s public image comes with tags of ‘sexist and racist bunch’, as it’s weirdly and bizarrely earned. However, I very much doubt that it’s actually the case. However much we deny it, though, our behavior speaks volumes, and it’s speaking rather loudly recently.
When I first watched the trailer, all I’d seen was over-blown, over-produced, over-saturated nonsense that had as much to do with WWII as ‘Space Jam’ had to do with basketball. Did the woman catch my attention? Sure. Did the fact that she was wearing a prosthetic arm bug me? Sure. Did the black, katana-wielding ninja stick out like a sore thumb? Sure. Did I care? Not in the least.
What I find odd about the whole situation is the focus on the example itself, not the context behind it; so many people have focused entirely on the woman or the black man that they seemed to have lost the story behind those two. For me, personally, anything in the games go; for all I care, you can make a game about a dildo-wielding, jet-pack strapped sci-fi dino, and my reaction would still be the same. There’s only one question I ever ask when it comes to things that stick out: why? What’s the purpose? For what reason was this included?
Let’s face it: I very much doubt that neither the women nor the whole ‘customization’ that Battlefield is marketing will go anywhere beyond aesthetics. I’m fairly certain they won’t include a debuff for women characters whereas randomly through the round they’d fall onto the floor because they just got lady cramps. I also very much doubt you could press a button to flash your goods as a ‘charm’ CC. Nothing about the gameplay will change. It’s purely aesthetics. So… what other purpose do the inclusions serve? If it’s not for gameplay, why add them in such prominent light whereas that wasn’t the case before? Well, considering the title of this post, I gather you’ve already figured out.
I hate agendas. I hate propaganda pieces. I hate anything that’s trying to shove ideology down my throat. And that’s exactly what the inclusion is. The topic of diversity has been hotter than the Earth’s core in the past few years, and it’s finally encroaching upon gaming in large strides. Remember the openly-trans person during the Victorian Age in Assassin Creed? Yeah, it’s only going to get worse. Whenever something is included to serve as a prominent image of an agenda, or a backdrop of a propaganda, I barf. I don’t need this in movies, in TV shows, in books, and I especially don’t need it in games. Yet, the last bastion has been breached, and we’re standing on an equilibrium with all other entertainment mediums. I don’t expect things to get much better; there are people willing to push for this agenda of inclusion, and angry YouTube and Reddit army is hardly enough to stop them. The aspect of representation on any screen is a dull, self-whoring concept. The idea of inclusion is borderline communist propaganda that serves no other purpose but to segregate and alienate people from one another. Don’t be bothered that women and black, katana-wielding dudes were included in the game, be bothered that they’re there to serve a very specific narrative, a hand-designed purpose.
However, I know that nobody’s going to bother. Gamers have a history of doing exactly this: crying out in droves and growing silent shortly after, as though nothing had happened, receding into their basements and waiting for the next ‘big bad thing’ to come out. We are a community of lunatics, of people lacking a conviction to better their own surroundings, a gathering of people either too afraid or too dumb to ever go through with anything other than disliking reddit posts and YouTube videos. We haven’t changed a damn thing worth a while in over a decade, and you’re a fool if you think we have. We have whined about borderline abusive DLCs, yet they’re still here. We have whined about pointless, digital pre-orders, yet they’ve only gotten worse as the time went on. We’ve whined about microtransactions, about lootboxes, about anything and everything, yet all these things are still here and still getting worse. We are now whining about completely pointless things whereas we should actually be uniting to shove out an invasion that’s been polluting mainstream media for years. But, we won’t. This will stay, and it’s only going to get much worse. Much, much worse.
Enjoy your day.
Roundabout 