(These are some ramblings I've been cobbling together for a while, but I tried to organize them into something coherent.)

know this song and dance already.

A new game gets announced, there is a female character whose design is not optimized for the sole purpose of gooning, and the anti-woke activists throw a months-long temper tantrum all over social media about how beauty and femininity and sexuality are dead and all wEsTeRn female characters are ugly and unattractive and sexless or whatever.

We could discuss how sexualization and objectification are not the same, or how what is considered attractive/hot is ultimately subjective(although how self-obsessed do you have to be, to demand only your tastes should be catered to?), but let’s focus on one aspect in particular:

These people are provably wrong.

Because sexy videogame girls never went away, even if marketing bean-counters are not as obsessed with frat boy pandering as they used to, ‘idealized beauty, sexually desirable’ is still the status quo when it comes to female character design, in videogames and beyond.

Sometimes they may be a little plain-looking or grizzled, sometimes they may look older than 25, sometimes they may be more muscular or plump, sometimes they may wear outfits designed to look cool rather than goonable, sometimes they display intense facial expressions, sometimes their model is photorealistic and may include microscopic details like stretch marks or pores or peach fuzz, sometimes (god forbid) a brown woman may look actually brown instead of looking like a lightly-toasted mukokuseki...but the overwhelming majority of the time, these female characters are still conventionally attractive, including some that are clearly intended to be beautiful in an idealized/unrealistic way, and often still sexualized.

But for these people it’s not enough, their ‘beauty standards’ become narrower and narrower every few months or weeks, they’ll still foam at the mouth and soil their pantaloons all over social media even when faced with female characters that are obviously designed to be attractive if not provocative, calling them ugly or masculine or trans or whatever.

See: Their reactions to games like Hades 2, GTA 6, Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse, Overwatch (especially regarding Mei), Marvel Rivals, Mortal Kombat 1, Baldur’s Gate 3, the incoming Tomb Raider, and other games(feel free to mention more) full of smoking hot women, that in some cases you can see naked and have explicit sex with.

(In BG3, if you kill everyone in the druids grove, a dark elf baddie gives you head and sits on your face, does anyone think Stellar Slop has anything on that?)

That’s why they obsessively comb through every single quectosecond of every female character’s screentime to cherry pick the most unflattering shots of her, and then doctor them with Photoshop or ChatGPT to make them look worse, they know they have no leg to stand on so they have to lie.

But remember, it’s not them that are puritan weirdos trying to police arousal, it’s other people that are ‘Safe Horny’ or whatever buzzword came out of their imageboard echochamber.

You lust after women that look older than 21? SAFEHORNY!

You lust after women taller than 5-foot-nothing’? SAFEHORNY!

You lust after women with any distinctive facial features? SAFEHORNY!

You lust after women that are not submissive moeblobs? SAFEHORNY!

You lust after women with skin tone darker than snow? SAFEHORNY!

You think Purah is hotter as an adult than as a toddler? SAFEHORNY!

But how can they be so prudish while posturing as perverted?

In the face of all this, my personal conclusion is that these people’s purported horniness and attraction to women are entirely performative (and all the “Safe/Woke/Whatever Horny” accusations they fling at the opposition are pure projection), this entire culture war debacle regarding fanservice and female character design is not about beauty standards or traditional femininity or even gooning, and arguably never was.

It’s about tribalistic hatred and parasocial egotism.

These mouth-breathers spent their formative years building their self-esteem and identity on playing videogames, deluding themselves about being an exclusive, elite cabal of superior beings, and cultivating a parasocial relationship with videogame corpos, deluding themselves about developers being their friends who made videogames for them and only them, not for the inferior normie sheep.

But then gaming became more mainstream, corporations have taken baby steps to expand their consumer base, developers have enjoyed greater artistic freedom(especially indie developers), and their parasocial delusion has been shattered, thus these people cry, seethe, throw up about the normies invading their elite circlejerk and stealing videogames from them.

Before GroomerGape, it was the ‘Fake Geek Girl’ tripe, they declared war against FEEEMALES who dared invading their exclusive circlejerk and not staying silent, so they invented a boogeyman to justify bullying them out of the hobby without looking like sexist weirdos.

After, we got six years of trump, and being a sexist weirdo was normalized, so now they feel brazen to bray the quiet parts loud.

When they see women or minorities, either in a game or adjacent to a game, they writhe and wheeze and hyperventilate because they are reminded their beloved corporations never cared about them, they just used to cater to a small demographic as declared by their out-of-touch marketing bean-counters, and abandoned that demographic the second they realized there was a much bigger potential base to extract money from.

They don’t praise goonslop because they are actually horny (after all, their arousal is nothing but virtue signaling for their in-group), they praise it because they see it as a secret signal that the developers are their friends and the game is for them specifically, and thus they can indulge their parasocial delusions again, every goonslop waifubait is a “No Feeemales Allowed!!!” sign that will keep the undesirables, especially women, away from their precious circklejerk.

THEY are the true ‘performative horny’ and accuse others because that’s what they do and assume everyone else acts the same way as them, otherwise they’d have to admit they are a bunch of socially-castrated, terminally online weirdos.

Ludeon Studios, the developers behind the game RimWorld, are enabling hate through their advertisement of the 'main' community server.

I apologise in advance if this is not the right place for this, but I've done my best to try and resolve this through official channels and haven't had any luck, and I'm not particularly sure about where to go public with this.

So, a bit of context:

RimWorld, developed by Ludeon Studios, officially only has a development Discord server strictly meant for reporting bugs, helping translate the game and making modder requests. However, there absolutely is a 'main' RimWorld Discord community, to the extent that official Ludeon staff recommend this main server in their development server, on official Ludeon channels:

At least one member of Ludeon's official staff serve as moderators in this community server:

And many Ludeon staff members are present in the server:

I will now be referring to this server as the main RimWorld community server, because that is what Ludeon's official community manager calls it on official Ludeon channels. It is ostensibly the primary Discord community around the game, to the extent that it is advertised by official Ludeon staff on official Ludeon channels, even if the studio denies any official ownership.

Now, for context, I'm currently going through an exploratory period of my life. What exactly I am, and what I can be given that I currently reside in a country that pretty heavily cracks down on queer people just existing, is a matter I'm still considering.

However, I've made my wishes pretty clear:

I've made it clear that I now go by they/them pronouns, that I consider 'turkler' to be a deadname, and that I'd like people to respect my gender identity.

However, many users in the main RimWorld community server have made posts mocking this stage of my life and the staff has not only allowed this abuse, but some staff members have even participated in this harassment:

This exchange was later deleted (see below) but one of the users dismissing my gender identity here is a moderator of the server.

Yes, I've decided to adopt the name of one my OCs because that OC was already a reflection of my inner self, who I wanted to be. I've felt rather distressed over the last month or so and my characters are a source of comfort for me. It's cruel to use that comfort against me to justify bigotry.

In another very egregious instance of this, a user was directly confronted with this announcement regarding my gender identity and proceed to dismiss it:

This post is still up and can be found in the main RimWorld server.

The same user also proceeded to deliberately misgender me. Do keep in mind that we explicitly know this person is aware of my gender identity because they have reacted to it:

This was also accompanied by overt transphobia:

Once again, this post is still up and can be found in the main RimWorld server.

There was a later discussion about this, and one of my friends was muted because they reminded users that misgendering people was not acceptable. The overtly-transphobic statements above are still up, but a message reminding users to not misgender people 'they don't like' was quickly removed. Do also note that this is the very same moderator that previously mocked my gender identity:

For the record, any information about my friends here have been censored because I don't want them to see any harassment over this.

To try and resolve this, I've contacted Ludeon's community manager who is also a moderator in this main RimWorld community server. To this date, I've only gotten one response:

It was rather vague, mostly trying to avoid blame due to this main community server's 'unofficial' status. I checked in later, multiple times, giving plenty of time for them to respond each time, and they never responded:

None of the messages I've reported were ever acted upon. No one was punished and all messages I've reported are, at the time of me making this post, are still up.

In short, Ludeon Studios continues to promote a RimWorld community Discord server as the game's main community, despite reports of transphobic harassment there and apparent failures by its moderators to address it.

I've tried to resolve this basically every way I could think of and nothing has come out of it, and I simply no longer want to be constantly bullied in the so-called 'main' community quasi-enforced by Ludeon! I'm tired.

For example, I posted on the subreddit where, once again, the game's official developer Tynan Sylvester and the same community manager I've contacted are present as moderators, and that post was predictably removed:

I’d like Ludeon to either enforce basic anti-harassment standards in the server they promote on official channels, or stop promoting it as the main community. All my attempts to resolve this have fallen through, and I just... want it to stop, really.

Like when we think of what makes games bad, we usually think of things like bugs, glitches, muddy and untextured graphics, broken and janky controls, broken physics, character's limbs stretching ridiculous distances, confusing UI, game freezes and crashes, your character falling through the world. That sort of thing. There have been plenty of infamous examples of bad games with these problems - Superman 64, Bubsy 3D, Big Rig: Over the Road Racing, Drake of the 99 Dragons, Animal Soccer World, Action 52, Ninjabread Man, Flatout 3, Postal 3, Ride to Hell: Retribution, Life of Black Tiger, Hunt Down the Freeman, any game made by Digital Homicide. Like real bottom of the barrel, some of the worst games of all time and that's barely scratching the surface.

Now when people today say how games are bad they'll say things like "They made this character "ugly", "They inserted this minority group", "There's a strong female character", "They made the male character a simp", "They hired this certain group of people", "There's a rainbow or multicolored flag". Like, what? Those don't feel like criticisms, they just come off as petty nitpicks. How is a game bad despite the positive reception that it got? This is what's been bothering me these past few years. Hell, this year alone we've have the likes of Code Violet, Samson, Agefield High: Rock the School, and Welcome to Doll Town. Those are actual bad games right there, yet people are directing their anger at Wolverine, Halo: Campaign Evolved, Gears of War: E-Day, and the upcoming God of War: Laufey and GTA 6 like they're the worse things since the Bubonic Plague.

I've had similar frustration when Spider-Man 2 was on shelves. I wanted to play it since I enjoyed the Insomniac Spider-Man games (although I personally think Miles Morales is a better game, but that's a discussion for another day) but videos I've seen have endlessly bashed on this game left and right, mostly in part to how Mary Jane looked among other small things. Another is Ghost of Yotei which I really wanted to play since I like Japanese culture, I like its history, and Japan is one of my favorite countries so it looked right up my alley, but even before it released people has endlessly bashed on it mostly because the protagonist is female. Can you believe that? Like this game is worse than Mindseye and the House of the Dead 2 remake that also came out the same year, yet Ghost of Yotei deserved to be lynched? Spider-Man 2 has a score of 90 on Metacritic and Ghost of Yotei currently sits at an 86. How are they bad?

In 2023, we've had the worst games of that year - Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Skull Island: Rise of Kong, Avatar: The Quest for Balance, The Walking Dead Destinies, and The Day Before. But what deserved to be bashed into the ground? Starfield.

I feel like we're at a point now where people are forgetting that there are much worse games out there, like look at the endless amount of shovelware and asset flips on Steam and the Switch eShop? Are we going to pretend those don't exist?

There are tons videos on Youtube that covered bad games, including from content creators like Rerez, Tennings, Spice Lord of Cinder, YourFavoriteSon, TripleJump, Confused_Dude, and Gamescrap. They even made playlists dedicated to ripping on those games. I recommend checking those guys out so to get an idea to what bad games actually look like.

There are worst games iceberg videos which I'll link one to check out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-gJhKBEWrA&t=2303s

I've been seeing a trend where people online say that modern video game characters has gotten "ugly", and they always point the finger at characters like Mary Jane Watson in Spider-Man 2, Aloy in Horizon: Forbidden West, Ciri in The Witcher 4, Atsu in Ghost of Yotei, Kay Vess in Star Wars Outlaws, Faye in God of War: Laufey, Lucia in GTA 6, and the character in Intergalactic. When I first saw this, I was like, "Huh? How?" Am I missing something? Is grounded and realistic no longer appealing to people? When did this turn into a conspiracy?

Like when I play a game, a character's face would be the least of my concerns. Because I have SEEN ugly, so I don't get what's so ugly about this. Spider-Man 2 and Ghost of Yotei weren't even bad games to begin with, so I don't get all the hate.

Especially when the characters themselves don't even look that bad. Even when compared to games with worse looking graphics and character models. If you want to see ugly characters, look at games like Fight Club on PS2, Ride to Hell: Retribution, Rambo the Video Game, Life of Black Tiger, The Walking Dead Destinies, Skull Island: Rise of Kong, and Welcome to Doll Town, and get back to me about what is ugly.

I'm sorry, but at the end of the day, beauty is subjective. As long as the game itself is not a broken, buggy, unpolished, and unplayable mess, who cares?

Granted this could be said about any awards show. But it's literally just a random group of people arbitrarily deciding what the best game for the year is. What makes these jurors so special that their opinion matter more than the rest of us?

Granted 10% of the verdict is from fan votes but that also leaves the issue of it partially being a popularity contest ultimately it's still mostly a random group of people deciding what they think is the best game of the year.

This has nothing to do with any new gaming discourse for the record I felt this way for a long time even if my favorites won I'd still feel the same. If you're there for the announcements then fair enough but man people take the results way too seriously.

I think the current state of gaming has phased out casual gamers. Why can’t we just play for fun anymore? Why are we constantly getting wiped out by people who haven’t seen the sun in days? It’s tiring to pick up and learn a new game these days, because the strain of building your skills under constant competition just isn’t worth it.
Jarring!!!

/uj I just find this humor to be so uninspired, they could've gone more interesting ways with this skit but it just goes with the typical "Zelda is for girly boys, GTA is for real men" view that people have. It's like nobody except the costume designer understands these game series outside of watching the trailers. Feels like the kind of safe boring humor we get a lot from SNL these days.

Something that I thought was really funny and wanted to share it here.

(before you ask yes i have played tf2. for just shy of 200 hours in fact)

i legitimately dont understand why the tf2 playerbase gets the most upset out of the various valve game fanbases if you point out the overwhelming amounts of racism from the playerbase. a lot of them either cry "but muh free speech" or get on their cod lobby soapboxes. it makes me feel really alienated from the wider playerbase :(

I'm not against paid expansions on their own and I understand the nuance using such expansions to continously support a game even though there are many games sustain themselves without the same kind of pay walling. But without baking a huge portion of the old DLCs into the base game so you only need to pay for the newer stuff it makes base game + all the dlc incredibly expensive.

Their policy would've been tolerable if they at least did that so the base game + the remaining newer dlcs aren't that much more expensive than the base game but they won't they do that because that's not as profitable and how else would they justify their subscription model. I genuinely cannot believe this is seen as an acceptable solution by paradox fans, literally a case of creating a problem and selling solution the idea of paying a subscription just to play all the dlcs on a game you already paid for, how does that not sound ridiculous? Sadly this is pretty much the only affordable way to play the full package for many including myself. The thing is you absolutely need the DLCs I've done a full run of EU4 without any of the dlcs and with the subscription and the difference is night and day a lot of features should be in the base game.

What's crazy is that people defend this go to paradox forums and subs and you will see posts criticizing this policy get downvoted while posts defending it get upvoted what people forget is that paradox isn't a small company anymore they can afford to provide a more affordable dlc policy but they won't. EU5 was the last straw for me the series is on it's 5th title and yet is pretty lackluster compared to EU4 and the meta kept changing making taking the time to learn the already complex game very discouraging. It didn't feel like a game it felt like an investment just to eventually pay for features that should've been at the base game at launch. This made me done with paradox and I don't think I will be playing another game from them again outside of Imperator rome with the free invictus mod.

Gaming will never be what it used to be back when my dad and his daughter and friends could play, now Gaming is like a chore

back in the 90s and 2000s and even through most of the 2010s we got real creative games that broke the social norms and stuff games like wolfenstein, papers please,fallout new vegas ect but they were not hated at the time but people definitely didn't like it and stuff and there might be a few groups specifcally who didn't like it.

But today were more accepting more than ever and yet companies are the ones doing 180's sure would think every once and awhile a game is very creative and goes for stuff like saying the N-word and it is a white saying but idk i hate how nobody has balls now and it isn't just gaming its:

films
shows
books (i think)
and even toys.
we can't make anything that just goes against society like i am a person who doesn't judge and i would want to play a game like rdr2 again and look at a film like the simpsons movie i can tell you the second one will be more calmed down you know? does anyone agree with me

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"Am I the only one who thinks modern gaming is dying, both on mobile and consoles/PC?

Let's look at mobile games first. Developers keep making cheap excuses. Why is Mortal Kombat Mobile reduced to a brainless 'tap and swipe' game instead of having real fighting mechanics and live PvP like the console versions? Why does NFS No Limits force us to race against 'ghosts' instead of letting us play 1v1 with real friends, climb local leaderboards, or compete in a global Most Wanted ranking? They claim it's about network stability or player queue times, but that's just a cover-up for their greed. They don't want fair competition; they just want to milk players through pay-to-win mechanics and loot boxes. Even a basic LAN mode via Wi-Fi/Hotspot would fix this, but they refuse to add it because they can't monetize it.

This laziness has infected console and PC gaming too. The beautiful era of split-screen couch co-op is dead. Modern developers constantly make the lazy excuse that 'graphics are too advanced' and that rendering split-screen would crash the game.

What a joke! Let’s look at history. Back in the PS2 and PS3 eras, RAM was extremely limited. The PS2 had only 32MB of RAM, yet developers pulled off miracles like GTA San Andreas. The PS3 had a tiny 256MB of RAM, but they managed to run GTA V and delivered incredible 4-player split-screen experiences in games like Blur, Split/Second, and Call of Duty at 60 FPS. Those developers had true grit, passion, and optimization skills. Today's game devs have 16GB of RAM and massive GPU power, but they lack the determination to make things work. If split-screen is really that heavy, why not just add a setting that slightly lowers the graphics for split-screen mode?

Look at Gran Turismo 7. It has some of the most stunning, photorealistic graphics in modern gaming. Yet, it includes a split-screen mode. Did anyone call its graphics 'trash' because of that? Absolutely not! It proved that when developers actually care and put effort into optimization, it is entirely possible.

The real truth is simple: major corporations don't want us sharing one game on one couch. They want to force you and your friend to buy two separate consoles, two copies of the game, and two online subscriptions.

I wish I had the chance to stand in front of these corporate game developers at a massive event and look them in the eyes. I would tell them to stop hiding behind tech limitations. Modern gaming has lost its soul to greed and laziness, and it’s time we, the gamers, call them out on it."

Não aguento mais , toda hora lança um novo jogo e se o personagem não for um homem branco tem uma onda de ataque dizendo que o jogo é woke e lacrador.

Não aguento mais esses vídeos desses canais chamando o personagem de gay , dizendo que a personagem do jogo é do baranga verso , só porque não sei ela não é uma mulher que eles consideram 10/10 ela é sei lá 7/10 , mano as pessoas ofenderam o jogo e chaman ele de woke o jogo Horizon zero Dawn , eles chamam a Aloy de feia porque sei lá quando você entra no modo foto e da zoom tem dois fiapos de pelo no rosto dela ( e todo mundo no mundo tem isso inclusive) não sei porque o jogo colocou esse detalhe eu nunca nem tinha notado mas as pessoas porque sim querem odiar e chaman a personagem de feia e woke porque sim.

Tô jogando o novo gears e gostei bastante, mas tem uma mulher no grupo dele e ela as vezes fala sabe , KKK e por ela saber falar e expressar opinião e tomar a dianteira as vezes o jogo é woke e gears morreu e começou a lacração , cara eu caí num vídeo por acidente que no começo dessa mesmo jogo aparece um memorando dizendo pra você respeitar o próximo e não xingar o coleguinha e o cara do vídeo disse que isso é lacração e vídeo game é coisa de homem e sempre homens se zoaram em jogos e isso é woke , ou seja pode ser racista a vontade no lol que é coisa de homem , ofender e ter preconceito reclamar é preconceito.

E agora tem Wolverine que eu nem joguei nem sei se e bom mas todo dia nasce um novo vídeo com a thumb do Wolverine como se ele fosse gay porque não sei , porque o rosto da mística é mais quadrado KKK e pronto jogo e gay , agora os jogos não são gostado ou odiados baseado no jogo e sim se o homem espanca idosa na rua e se a mulher tem peito grande e digo mais , Stellar Blade é um jogo fraquíssimo, super genérico mas simplesmente ganhou um status a mais porque tem uma mulher considera bonita. Esse jogo não era nem pra ter destaque ele é mais fraco que todos os souls que já joguei , super sem graça mas tem destaque porque sim enquanto jogos bons simplesmente porque a personagem não sei é 8/10 são um lixo porque sim.

Every time extraction shooters come up online, people act like the genre is exhausted, repetitive, and something nobody asked for. Yet these games keep attracting huge audiences, and the same people complaining often put hundreds of hours into them.

I think the tension of entering with valuable gear, risking everything, and escaping with a great haul creates a feeling most multiplayer games cannot match. People might hate losing, but that risk is also what keeps them coming back.

Are extraction shooters actually overhated, or do people enjoy complaining about the exact mechanics that make the genre addictive?

Now he hates Gears of War: E-Day aka Queers of War: Estrogen Day. ANDYPANTS, THIS IS THE LAST TIME YOU DENY THAT AI CSAM GAME OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

YOU HATE EVERYTHING. YOU HATE GEARS, YOU HATE COD, YOU HATE BATTLEFIELD, YOU HATE EVERYTHING!! HATE AND SUFFERING IS ALL I HAVE NOW. I WILL HATE EVERYTHING YOU SAID. I JUST WANT TO DIE ALONE. ALL BECAUSE YOU HATE WOKENESS OVER A VIDEO GAME

YOU WILL HATE MODERN WARFARE 4 AND THEN YOU WILL CLAIM THAT CAPTAIN PRICE IS NOW PUSSIFIED OR SOME BS. I AM DONE!!