Joined 17 years ago
You can call it bullshit if you want, I call it an argument made from a position of privilege.
But once again, I don't think you really understand privilege. Privilege does not mean that you never have to deal with discrimination. It simply means that there are kinds of discrimination you will never have to deal with.
White people have inherent privilege over black in north america. Men have inherent privilege over women in work settings. Tall people have privilege over short people when it comes to shopping for clothes. But one privilege absolutely does not imply all privilege.
If you are a white dude, you've never had a bank officer refuse you a loan for bullshit reasons because of his own racism. You've never had your resume skipped from a stack because the person looking at it didn't like your foreign sounding name, or because they were worried you might get pregnant. You've never had coworkers contribute to a climate of harassment because "it's just a joke" about rape, sexism, race, etc.
I grew up really poor. Like, collecting bottles and exchanging for food poor with my single mother and sister. I had to work my ass off to get where I am today, but I did it by being able to get loans, being able to get apartments, by connections I made because of other white dudes.
It took me a long time to realize that privilege isn't "you have everything"; privilege is "you don't have drawbacks that other people have to deal with daily no matter their situation."
I'm unsure which popular and lucrative options are being removed though. Could you provide examples of what you think will magically disappear?
Frankly, yes. Yes it does.
In fact, what leads most of us to losing the passion is making yet another grimdark white dude game. So this push towards inclusiveness and diversity is actually revitalizing for most of us.
Which is true but if you want your games to be exclusionary then don't be surprised when people call you on it.
It's easy for us white dudes (as I assume you are, based on your post) to say "games should just be whatever!" because we implicitly have the privilege of identifying with the inevitable white dude main character. The few times the character isn't a white dude washes right off of us because we are absolutely used to a character that conforms to us.
Others don't have that. This isn't 'politics' it's about being inclusive and realizing that it's actually trivially easy to do so in most cases.
I've been making games professionally for over 15 years now. The progress we are making is fantastic because the main problem with games is that game designers are lazy. When we go with grimdark white dude, it is lazy. When game developers are forced to not be lazy, everybody wins. Because at the very least, you cannot argue with the fact that lazy design is always going to be inferior to non-lazy design.
