the censorship was wrong then and wrong now. How does this help?
we were told that this wasn’t happening for ten years. WE might as well censor forheads or necks because censoring a chest is just as arbitrary.
We were told this wasn’t happening but the newest stuff from Del Walker (a self alleged game dev) may suggest a lot.
the youtuber JUST SOME GUY made a fantastic video on the subject free of the grifter and opinionated filth.
“This Trend in Gaming Needs to Stop”
The male models aren’t treated this way. and nor should they be censored. I just want some consistency. to make proportions more modest and less feminine… it’s insulting. I think the consulting agencies are incorrect. i think anti censorship would send a far better message. Especially with the goings on in the company.
Censorship is sexist. simple as. You even censored cards! what is going on?
It was a misstep then and a mistake now. Times change. This refers to all your games but i’ve been trying to contact you for some time on this.
I know i will get Flamed. i know i will get called “oh you just want to [inappropriate comments]”. no i’m a homosexual man.
It just proves the point.
I come at this from a totally different angle. Jokes and the like have been removed in that patch and it’s just… insulting.
Why would people want a diminshed product.
All this activity doesn’t seem sensible ethical. changing of quests and other things in World of Warcraft like “demon slavery” in to Demon subjugation. that’s benevolent racism treating POC and minorities as dumb chidlren that need to be protected from words; as if words are harmful in the same way that someone breaking in to someone’s window is. i’m a minority and i’m not a fan. you removed jokes and flirting too? For what purpose? who does it serve? it’s Bowdlerizing and al though you have every right. it’s censorship de facto.
The people who think otherwise are wrong as per the ACLU definition. It doesn’t come from just de jure actions or government force. Quite the contrary. Such ideas limit our understanding and our brains.
it’s the stuff that makes things boring. makes games not fun. and is unethical to free speech, creativity, and any good idea of social justice.
But we can go in to that later. why is censorship or bowdlerization of any kind happening at all? Such actions are the OPPOSITE of diversity and inclusion. It’s the poison and manipulation of “social proof” and mass myths.
an amazing video game feminist, says the following: She’s livid and angry and rightly so.
"We’re talking about Blizzard replacing images of women in World of Warcraft with fruit bowls.
This may not seem like a big deal, but hear me out.
Okay, so I am still not at full strength, so maybe this is why I was just like, “ugh,” about this whole thing. Intellectually, I’m pissed off about this, but in my gut, it’s just so expected. It’s so expected from Blizzard and the gaming industry at this point to confuse something on a wall in a game that is an object with the treatment of actual living, breathing people in the real world.
And this is not just about women. Notice I said people. I think we’d all be doing a lot better in this industry if we recognized that a company that shamelessly mistreats any single group of people is probably mistreating all their employees in some way, shape, or form. Keep that in mind when we talk about this. I wish that was more of a thing, okay? I wish that was more of an understood thing, but it’s not. So here we go.
So there was a patch late last week, and it did little changes like taking a portrait that looked like a regal, kind of magical sorceress looking down her nose at somebody and turning it into—I don’t know what this is—Mayim Bialik costume reject from Jeopardy. Like, they didn’t just cover up the chest area; they changed her face. It goes from something that actually says something about the environment to, like I said, Mayim Bialik hosting Jeopardy.
Okay, but that’s not the one everybody went “ugh” over, though. I will maintain that taking an image of an obviously powerful woman and changing her neckline is fine, but they changed her facial expression as well. That says so much. This isn’t just about robbing women of cleavage; there’s a power issue. There’s a discomfort with powerful women going on here. But this is the one that everybody kind of went “ugh” about.
There’s a really tame art homage image of a woman lying on her side, and you can kind of see her navel, but not her face and not much of anything else. And they replaced it with a bowl of fruit. A bowl of fruit, because it is so much the same thing. An image of a woman—who is she, how does this connect, what does this say about this room—with a bowl of fruit. Because they’re totally the same thing, right? They totally say the exact same thing.
This background stuff, it’s not just placeholder stuff. Thought went into this, until it didn’t. Now, this isn’t the first time World of Warcraft has nerfed something like this. They stupidly changed Jaina’s outfit in early 2019. I don’t know what happened there; I’m sure there was something that caused panic there. But they actually kind of wrecked this outfit for me.
Okay, I don’t find the—first of all, when this is supposed to be armor and it doesn’t protect the vital organs around the midsection, it’s already stupid. Putting a modesty panel here but not actually offering protection where it matters means that giant-a** pauldron is just going to get in the way. This does absolutely nothing. It destroys the whole line of the outfit, right? Like, no one would wear this. No woman would wear this. If you’re going to wear something like this, you’re going to go all in, right? You’re not going to go, “Oh, when I bend over I show a** crack, but I’m going to totally cover up my cleavage here.”
This is the kind of stuff that actually doesn’t make things more female-friendly. It actually insults women’s intelligence. What I find interesting is that this whole Blizzard thing is causing Kotaku to have this sort of existential crisis. All of a sudden, instead of them being, you know, the Tropes vs. Women PR agency, they’re running headlines like this: “Blizzard reduces ti**y in World of Warcraft but not sexism at the company.”
No, they didn’t actually reduce tiy, Kotaku. Even when you’re trying to get it right, you get it wrong. They didn’t remove tiy; they removed images of women. Like, there was navel, there was no real cleavage in that fruit bowl thing. Tiy, not woman. Women have tiy. Ti**y, not woman.
This ridiculous clickbaity headline at Kotaku actually accidentally gets to the core of what the problem is here: too many people in the video game industry are still treating ti**y and women like they’re the same thing. Instead of recognizing that the goal, the idea, the ideal we’re supposed to be moving towards is that women—everybody—but in this case, women should be respected regardless of what they’re wearing. Even if somebody does something awful, you still respect them as a human being. You do not objectify anybody, which is what you do when you decide, “Oh, why don’t we replace this picture of a woman lying on her side with a bowl of fruit? Same thing.”
Now granted, it is a picture and a picture. However, holy sh**. Repeat after me: women, not tiy. Women have tiies. Women, not ti**y. This should be simple for people making decisions at major gaming outlets and video game companies. They are in a lot of trouble right now. They still don’t understand this, and this is basic. This is something that gamers who have objected to the nerfing of cleavage, boobs, and butts, let’s face it, for a while now, this is what they’ve been objecting to. We know that we look but don’t touch. We know that just because a woman is dressed sexually doesn’t mean she’s less worthy of respect. In fact, a lot of these women, as I dealt with on Boss Fight, have a lot of respect from gamers because of what they do in the game, and their overt sexuality is a symbol of their power, not an idea that you can treat them like crap.
The fact that rank-and-file gamers have been taking crap for this stuff for years, and they’ve been saying pretty much exactly what you’d like them to say, I maintain, even though people have not figured out how to advocate their position effectively yet, and so sometimes the things some gamers say sound terrible when they’re freaking out about nerfing boobs, but if you actually talk to them, they do know how to have a conversation with a woman as an individual and treat her with respect, whether or not she has boobs. I mean, I have a little tiny bit of cleavage here. Does that mean I’m a fruit bowl? Does that mean there’s something wrong with me? Does that mean my opinion has no merit? No.
Then why are they removing these images that have been in the games for years? I mean, this was like vanilla WoW content, okay, I think. It’s been in the game for a while. So why are you going back? A lot of the vanilla WoW guys are pretty much gone. They’ve all moved on to other things. So those guys, for the most part, weren’t the problem. I’ve worked with some of those guys; they are great. It’s a lot of the issues with Activision that are the people that came in with Blizzard when they were like the sh**, they were like the big deal, and they acted like sh**, as so many companies do, so many employees at companies do, when they’re the big sh**. I mean, God, Bungie circa Halo 2, Halo 3 was fu**ing insufferable to deal with. Everybody has their turn, right?
I will say I’ve been continually impressed by how gracious the God of War devs have been about everything, no matter what the fortunes of their game were. That matters. And I see that. You know, and that game didn’t need game journalists to make up awards so it could be the most awarded game ever. People just legit liked the game.
But yeah, we need new people who are thought leaders about this stuff. We need people who recognize that "Blizzard reduces tiy in World of Warcraft but not sexism at the company" is not helping. It’s clickbait. That headline’s not helping. It’s really not. Not in the context of this story, when they didn’t just take out tis, they took out an entire woman. I can’t stress this enough. If it’s just the cleavage, then you can say they took out ti**y. But they changed one woman’s face and turned another woman into a bowl of fruit. That isn’t about boobs anymore. That’s about, "Ah, it’s a woman! Get it away, get it away, it’s bad, it’s bad, it’s bad.
This is the problem. If you think women and their bodies are bad, and you don’t want to see them in video games, what the f*** is going on in your head? I want to understand this better, I really do, because I don’t think it’s, “Oh, we’re just being pure.” No, it’s like, “Ew, women are gross.” And that’s super bad! That’s not diversity and inclusion, right? I mean, is this more or less gross than the image of the male statue in WoW that they didn’t change? I mean, this is the issue, right? The messages that they send to everybody in these games that are supposed to be for everybody.
Okay, so they don’t just touch women. There’s a male statue in WoW, where the guy’s got like, a**, and it’s right in your face, but they didn’t change that. And so it’s like, what is the problem here? Like, oh, women are gross, but guys’ butts are okay? I don’t know what the thing is. But I do know that, just judging from what I see on Twitter and various gaming forums and in comments and stuff like that, there are a lot of women and people in the LGBT community who really like those women, those characters, those designs, and that’s who you’re hurting when you make those changes.
Like, who are you protecting here? I guess it’s this mythical person who will have a conniption fit and somehow connect images of women in video games with how women are treated in the real world, and it’s like, okay, but that’s not what’s going on here. That’s not what’s happening. And if you remove images of women from video games, or put them in these hyper modest costumes, or make them less powerful in some way, shape, or form, what you’re doing is you’re saying, “Oh, you know what? You need to be afraid of being a woman in real life too, because if this isn’t safe in a video game, where is it safe?”
And you know, I know from experience that a lot of gamers are super awesome, and they get it. They understand that women are not to be objectified. Women are people, not just bo***, not just a**. We are people. We have thoughts and feelings and personalities, and we are gamers. And I think the reason that there is such a backlash about this kind of censorship is because it feels like, okay, well, you’re not just censoring an image, you’re censoring an identity. You’re censoring something that a lot of people can relate to. And I think that’s where a lot of the frustration is coming from.
It’s not about wanting to see tiies in video games. It’s about feeling like your identity is being erased. It’s about feeling like you’re being told, “You’re not welcome here.” And that sucks, because video games are supposed to be for everybody. And I think the industry, especially companies like Blizzard, need to understand that. They need to understand that it’s not about the bo*. It’s about the representation. It’s about feeling seen and feeling like you matter, and feeling like you belong.
And I think that’s where a lot of the anger and frustration comes from. It’s not about wanting to see more skin. It’s about wanting to see more of yourself. And that’s something that I think a lot of these companies don’t get. They think that by covering up or changing these images, they’re making the game more inclusive, but they’re not. They’re making it less inclusive. They’re taking away something that a lot of people can relate to, something that makes them feel seen and understood.
And that’s why I think it’s so important to push back against this kind of censorship. Not because we want to see more tiies, but because we want to see more of ourselves. We want to feel like we belong. And that’s something that video games have the power to do. They have the power to make us feel seen and understood and included. And that’s something that we need to fight for, because it’s important. It matters. It’s not just about the bo*. It’s about the people behind them. It’s about all of us.
So yeah, I’m not okay with the censorship. I think it’s harmful. I think it’s wrong. And I think it’s something that we need to speak out against. We need to make our voices heard, and let these companies know that we’re not okay with it. We’re not okay with being erased. We’re not okay with being told that we don’t belong. Because we do. And we’re not going anywhere.
Now, the interesting little nugget in the Kotaku story that I’m like, “Here, see, I can be objective,” but this little thing was buried in the story with ti**y in the headline, okay? “Activision Blizzard employees file unfair labor practice charge against the gaming company.” Note, this was last week. Workers at Activision Blizzard—for well, Activision King, I guess King Gaming, it’s a cross—oh, I guess it owns King now. But the Communication Workers of America filed unfair labor practice charges against the company for worker intimidation and union busting.
Apparently, Activision Blizzard King workers launched a “Better ABK” on July 23rd as a movement to help pressure leadership to improve working conditions. You guys probably have heard me rant about this before, but game companies do this thing where they sh** all over their employees in the rank and file, they treat them like crap, and then they put out all this progressive messaging like they are somehow being diverse and progressive by replacing women with fruit bowls.
No, no, no. Because they say they’re progressive, you know, there’s some sort of left-leaning virtue signaling while they treat their employees like crap. And the very people they claim to care about, they’re not treating them very well. It’s all window dressing, right? It’s all not very practical, not very meaningful. And so now there are charges filed against the company for union busting.
Now, does this make sense? That this is all performative? This is all a smokescreen? We see you, Blizzard. The fact that these employees are brave enough to actually go and file these complaints while Blizzard is on the run like this, mad props to them. We all know this is going on. We all know this is happening. That is where sexism is happening. The pictures on the wall, the cleavage on the woman, that’s not hurting anybody. There are paintings in the real world that have some cleavage showing. You know, classic art. It’s not hurting anybody.
It’s the treatment of the people making these games. That’s what’s hurting people. And they’re acting like they’re doing something progressive by doing these things. And in the process, the coverage is like, “they’re fixing sexism.” NO, because they’re doing this crap. When we start hearing people actually write about the people making these games, and these corporate structures, and when are we going to get the like, you know, masterful book that somebody writes about this period of gaming? Not about the games, but about the corporate cultures, because that is the issue. And it’s a very complicated issue, and it’s a nuanced issue, but it’s really interesting.
So once again, the players get the shaft because Blizzard thinks it can pacify players with fruit bowls and faceless women. They think they’re doing something progressive. Kotaku actually did something reasonable by calling them out on their crap. I don’t even think they meant to; it just sort of fell out of their mouth, but here we are.
And this is why gamers push back against this stuff. It’s not because they’re all “Unga Bunga, me want bo***.” That’s not what it is. It’s that they recognize this stuff is all smoke and mirrors. They recognize that, in a sense, this is objectifying women more. This is treating women as if there’s something inherently wrong with being a woman. “Oh, you can make her less sexual, but women are fine.” No, you still can’t leave a woman on the wall. It’s still a bowl of fruit, okay?
This is the frustrating part of this stuff, that the players are getting treated like crap because the players are savvy enough to see through this bullsh** and are willing to talk about it. So, yay, Kotaku, for actually doing something right, but you still had to f*** it up. Okay, you can tell I’m getting into this. So I’m going to leave it there. Be a good person."
We’ve got that corporate push to make everything like milquetoast, safe, and then we have, on the other side, the extreme culture warriors from the right and the left saying it’s bad because it’s too far. When you’ve got both extremes saying the same thing about a product, chances are that product is probably somewhere in the middle.
That’s the thing about gaming, and that’s why I wanted to talk about the Saints Row reboot. This sort of wraps up the stuff I was talking about yesterday, so I guess this is part two of that. The things I just don’t like about the Saints Row reboot — my biggest thing is not necessarily the content, it’s that they took the soul of what the Saints Row games were and made them generic.
That’s what a lot of corporate overlords in gaming are trying to sell us: that modern young people want boring. They don’t. I don’t know a single modern young person that thinks, “Oh, I don’t want anything that’s funny or spicy or larger than life. I want everything to be as bland and safe and homogenized as possible.” Nobody thinks that way. They want interesting characters, they want interesting stories, they want stuff that pushes boundaries. Maybe it’s a little bit weird and not their thing, but they can go find something that is their thing. The idea that we’re going to limit what creators can do because we’re so worried about a small number of people getting offended is ridiculous.
Then you look at stuff like the Saints Row reboot, and it just makes you sad. It makes you sad because you look at what it was and what it is now, and you just think, “Who is this for? Who is this made for?” It’s certainly not for the fans of the original games. It’s not even for new fans, because new fans aren’t going to look at that and think, “Oh wow, that looks really cool and edgy and interesting.” They’re going to look at it and think, “Oh, that looks like everything else. That looks like every other game out there. Why would I play that?”
And that’s the problem. We’re just making everything the same, making everything safe and boring and uninteresting, and we’re losing what made games special. We’re losing what made games an art form.
This is where I want to tie in something that has been bugging me about what’s been happening with the Lollipop Chainsaw remake. Now, if you’re not familiar with Lollipop Chainsaw, it was this really weird, really funny, really edgy game that came out a while back. It was kind of a cult classic, right? It was made by Suda 51 and James Gunn, two guys who are known for their really unique, really out-there sense of humor and style.
And now they’re doing a remake, and there’s all this talk about how they’re going to tone it down, how they’re going to make it more appropriate for modern audiences. And it’s just depressing, because Lollipop Chainsaw was one of those games that was unapologetically itself. It was weird, it was funny, it was edgy, it was controversial, and it didn’t care. That’s what made it special.
Now they’re talking about making it more appropriate, and it’s like, no, don’t do that. Don’t take what made it special and unique and water it down for the sake of modern sensibilities. Modern sensibilities are killing creativity. They’re killing what makes things interesting and unique and special.
So, in conclusion, let’s stop trying to sanitize and homogenize everything. Let’s stop trying to make everything safe and boring and uninteresting. Let’s embrace what makes games special, what makes them unique, what makes them an art form. Let’s embrace the weird, the funny, the edgy, the controversial. Let’s embrace the creativity and the innovation and the uniqueness, because that’s what makes games great. That’s what makes games worth playing.
IN FACT, no one has these modern sensibilities, it’s part of social engineering that started with less than ten people.
I was told by support to put it on the forums. i can’t do that for WOW because i’m trying to do my best to stay financally afloat. I also just wanted to make a level ten character just to post.
apparenlty that’s the only way to be heard outside of sending snail mail. Sadly that didn’t work. I guess free trial characters don’t work. alas.