Watch out for the AOE, you'll take Splash Damage! This week we get a look at the gaming press's hot takes on Horizon: Forbidden West. Reposting from Reddit:
Journalists are digging up the old criticism that Horizon Forbidden West is problematic because it features the aesthetics of Native American culture. We discuss how cultural appreciation is not appropriation along with references to racism in The Cuphead Show!, Kotaku being upset that attractive women exist in Lost Ark, censorship of Lost Ark for Western audiences, a female gaming pro being fired over a joke about men, and more.
Listen to the episode here or on your favorite podcasting app. Thank you!
Standard disclaimer: I'm not Scrivonaut, I'm just reposting this for a signal boost for the show
I've not played either of the games however I did see guy on kia saying that everyone is diverse except for the bad guys that are all white dudes.
If this is true then Horizon Forbidden West is in fact racist, just not the way Kotaku thinks.
I'm not planning of playing it so I just can't bring myself to care to much, not for it being woke, is the setting that just does not resonate with me. I have a huge backlog and little time so I can safely skip this one.
The whole "erhmagerd cultural appropriation" attack point is really starting to wear thin with me. There's a huge difference between using a cultural style as a backdrop out of respect for it (Ghosts of Tsushima, for example), or just representing that culture by showing interest in its traditions and ceremonies, and having puppets dancing around as racial stereotypes. Kotaku seems to miss the forest for the trees, in that if a society were to be knocked back to proto-stone-age, there's a pretty damn good chance that humanity would revert back to a hunter-gatherer subsistence lifestyle, and there's a pretty damn good chance it'd resemble the tribal societies of pre-expansionism Europe/America.
As far as the Lost Ark thing goes, I can't say as I'm surprised that the devs bent the knee in the censorship they did to to the version that's available in the US, but what really makes me shake my head is the typical "it's never enough" reaction on the part of the wokies. I swear, they're not going to be happy until every female video game character every looks like a butch transwoman or is just covered head-to-toe in a burka.
Go look at the idiots that were saying the new pokemon game was "colonist" or whatever made up garbage that is.
As "bullshit wokeist talking points" go, that's another one that gets right up my nose. Sure, Europeans were "colonialist" - as were every other group of people who expanded beyond the boundaries of their tribal lands, killed the people in the area they moved into, and took over the land. It's the way of every culture under the sun up to the point of modern society. Absolutely zero groups out there, upon migrating into other lands, took a look at the people that were already there and said "oh, no, this place already has another group living here, we must turn around and go back". Not unless they realized they were outnumbered, outgunned, or outmatched. The only difference between older cultures and expansion-era Europe is that the Europeans had already figured out how to wipe out the other bastard better, faster, and with more efficiency than any other group on the planet. It's not their fault that the other cultures were sitting around with their thumbs up their asses and hadn't progressed outside of a nomadic/subsistence lifestyle or developed beyond spear-chucking and obsidian knives.