The latest Stephanie Stirling video dropped a tantalizing mention. There exists something called a “woke content detector“, which is basically a small group of self-appointed censors who are busily telling everyone which video games are bad. Not particularly interesting, except that the criteria they use to decide which games are too woke are hilarious. They have a spreadsheet listing their reasoning.
Here are some examples of things that make a game unrecommended or too woke. These are things the censors consider bad.
- “The Myplayer clothes shop features apparel with BLM slogans.”
- “has Non-binary gender option”
- “Features a diverse cast and LGBTQ+ characters”
- “Pronoun selection including an option for they/them”
- “POC soldiers on both sides”
- “LGBTQ+ decorations/furniture, diverse students, students can enter same sex relationships”
- “LGBTQ+ and diverse characters including a plus size POC queen”
- “Pride flags displayed in the police station and fire station”
- “Optional homosexual romance”
- “Pronoun selection including an option for they/them. Homosexual and non-binary romance options”
- “Contains overtly pro-climate action messaging. ‘an environmental card strategy game with climate change as your opponent.'”
- “Demonizes golfers and golf-courses by highlighting potentially negative environmental impacts of the sport”
- “The player character is a woman with depression. Features a story about living with depression”
- “Features a story about living with a disability”
- “Features a story about a world where ‘climate change has made life hard'”
- “Contains overtly anti-capitalism and anti-western society messaging”
- “The player character is a WOC who can fix any antique. She immediately finds plenty of work in a town she has never been to before”
- “Features a diverse cast of 1st gen immigrants to the USA. Features a female CEO of a green tech startup”
I’m impressed with the pettiness, and how they can be offended by just the existence of LGBTQ+, women, disabled people, pronouns, and decorative features that don’t affect the game. I’m amazed that anyone would want to play such culturally impoverished video games. Checkers is probably a safe game for them.
You will be relieved to know that “Alex Jones: NWO Wars” is recommended and has no woke content, so there are some games you can play.
antiques?
Don’t you wish you had the magical power to fix antiques?
Oh really?
Have you ever seen a checkerboard?
Half of the squares are black.
A politically correct checkerboard might be OK.
Half the squares would be white.
Half the squares would be light tan.
That would be 5 year old cell phones.
Five year old computers running Windows 8 and previous versions.
Ten year old cars.
Humans over 60.
Pong. Centipede. Zork.
Some of those sound oddly specific. I wish they would name the game so I could give it a try.
… “Alex Jones: NWO Wars” is recommended and has no woke content…
But if there’s any money-flow involved, some of it might eventually go to Sandy Hook
familiescrisis actors, so players still run the risk of supporting anti-fascism!“The player character is a WOC who can fix any antique?” What the AF do those anti-woke warriors find so triggering about black women fixing antiques? Like, is there a “Terminator” game scenario where a WOC gives a T-800 some upgrades so it can beat a (white cop) T-1000?
Do any of these crusader-wannabees have real jobs?
Is the woke part the homosexuality or the fact that the romance is optional?
Checks if Cyberpunk 2077 is on the list… Hey! They forgot “Contains overtly anti-capitalism and anti-western society messaging.”
That’s oddly specific.
The golfing and antique repair are both oddly specific.
I don’t play video games but this particular sign of wokeness is bizarrely silly.
Sooo, Noah’s Ark is too woke? Mad Max and Thunderdome are clearly unacceptable too.
LOTR must really be terrible, with the Mordor and eye of Sauron making life difficult, and the whole winter is coming in the GOTS franchise is obviously espousing the nefarious climate change agenda.
They are obsessed with gender and sexuality, even though it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever what gender or even species anyone might choose as their character in a game of make-believe.
The blatant saying-the-quiet-part-loud has me wondering why they even bothered adopting the “woke” dogwhistle in the first place.
@ Tethys
You’ll be pleased to know that the Mad Max videogame is “Not Woke Contains no Woke content.”
Alba is apprantly woke because it “Features a story about stopping a hotel development on a nature preserve”, which makes me think the authors are secretly Captain Planet villains, while Aliens: Dark Descent is woke because there are “Many female authority figures including the player character. Most important characters are female”. Dave the Diver is woke because “The player character is a fat guy who can somehow deep-dive and swim long distances without trouble. The sushi chef is black”.
I leave inferences as an exercise for the reader…
It just amazes me that they can be so blatant about their shallow reasoning and people will still enable them by saying it’s about games journalism or whatever the excuse is.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has been a huge problem for the anti-woke mob and their thesis that woke games are all financial disasters. It ticks many of their “woke” boxes yet has likely earned more than a billion dollars so far across all platforms and was almost universally hailed as the best game of 2023.
Saw The Wild Robot a couple of days ago. Great film, but I guess that’s a no from the anti-woke mob too since there’s a brief shot of a mostly submerge Golden Gate Bridge in it.
I recently fell into a Reddit rabbit hole of horrible relating to Baldur’s Gate 3. There are anti-woke mods now that ensure none of the male companions will come on to your buff, manly character. Boys get penises, girls get vulvas and the non-binary option is right out!
Wow, 100%! I approve of literally every entry on their hate list.
They also criticize it (Assemble With Care, BTW) for being “overtly pro-DEI” which I misread as pro-DIY and couldn’t understand. I have actually played the game and has fun. That and Alba (stops a hotel development) are both really chill games, but in 2020 when they came out, that’s what you needed. Played them to death.
Checkers is too egalitarian. Anyone is allowed to jump a king anytime they have the opportunity. And anyone can become crowned king with the right amount of pushing forward.
Fucking golfers.
Some folks made a really amusing response to this list. The “who WOKE are your games” site allows you to enter your Steam username and it tells you how many of your games are Woke (only works if your Steam profile is public).
https://wokedetector.cirnoslab.me/
@6
They do: in the actual spreadsheet they list the name of the game in one column and the reason it’s “woke” in another column.
It’s actually Sterling with an “e”, like the silver, not Stirling with an “i” like the Scottish city.
This could be the modern equivalent of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum – and just as valuable a service to tell people which games are worth playing.
I like the one that says: “Improbably diverse npcs in all areas”. In other words, they’re upset that the “normal” and expected level of societal discrimination doesn’t exist in this game’s environment. These people spend so much time openly denying that discrimination towards people of color, women, or minority groups exists, yet here they basically admit their awareness of such discrimination and that they wholeheartedly approve of it. It’s as annoying as the dedicated racists who know they’re racist, but will go to the ends of the earth to publicly deny it.
I saw the video this morning. People are getting upset over options. For those who don’t keep up on video game news, there was a similar upset over easy modes in hard games. “How dare someone I never met play a game I like in a different way!” To me the worst part is if a game has actual problems (buggy, poor writing, awkward interface) and is also “woke” people are going to blame poor sales on the “woke” part and not the “it’s a functionally bad game” part.
@ Tethys #12:
“They are obsessed with gender and sexuality, even though it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever what gender or even species anyone might choose as their character in a game of make-believe.” ??
Why not? After all, the world they live in is make-believe.
Trump plays golf and owns several crappy golf courses so he must be ultra-woke.
Because if the black woman is amazing at fixing antiques and can find work easily (go figure, amazingly capable people finding work easily), that means a black woman is heroically competent at something, and that’s a terrible horrible awful attack on the sanctity of Western civilization. Only white dudes get to be heroically competent.
They used to say “Mary Sue,” now they scream “DEI!!!” Same idiocy, different packaging.
I can only assume stories about living with depression are bad because they resemble Depression Quest. That, or these assholes are angry about depressed people existing instead of being purged to improve the gene pool. Or both.
queen coke francis recently did a video about the same list. it’s hilarious how they made little exceptions here and there for games whose themes they otherwise approve of, if not completely misunderstand.
Vereverum @26
True words, and a reasonable explanation of why they are so terrified of getting woke from their dream.
I wonder how Monopoly rates in their sad world?
Would they rail against the shoe, or car? Which game piece is most likely a DEI imposter? Is the Top Hat gay or pansexual?
Those would be the same people who also can’t stop whining about censorship, cancel-culture, safe-spaces, political correctness and lots of other ways they think their behaviour is being policed, eh? And yet here they are, publishing something that can only be described as an attempt on enforcing a fucking Hays Code for videogames.
Of course the option of simply not buying and playing videogames they find objectionable never occurs to them, or it does but they can’t stand the thought of someone enjoying something they don’t. Why exactly should these narrow-minded busybodies be treated like respected members of society again?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Gamingcirclejerk/comments/1gew7vx/ironic/?rdt=57574
Tethys @30
On the one hand, Monopoly was originally intended as a devastating critique of capitalism (since it ends with one person monopolizing everything and everybody else goes broke). So if they understood that, they’d definitely blast it as being woke.
On the other hand, it’s pretty bold of me to assume they’d actually be capable of understanding that.
tacitus @16:Well, there’s never been any truth to their slogan of “go woke, go broke” no matter how hard they try to wish it into being true. Meanwhile, anti-“woke” media has consistently been shown to be dismal failure after dismal failure, interrupted only by the grifts.
Prios @33: the anti-woke fools won’t understand that because they’re never likely to play the game long enough to see how it inevitably ends. Which is, in fact, how people tend to justify capitalism itself: the end we’re predicting won’t show any really definite sign of happening in our lifetimes, therefore it won’t ever be a problem.
For shits and giggles, I used the link that 183231bcb provided to run my Steam library through the site which declared my game choices as “WOKE!” Now, they don’t have all the games in my account, but here’s what they came up with:
Darkest Dungeon, WOKE
Gasp! An armored WOC with a crossbow… how horrifying,
Alien Isolation: NOT WOKE
Huh? Not to give the clowns any ideas. but the game features a female protagonist. You complain about female combatants in the first game, but ignore a game where the female character get’s access to a revolver, a shotgun, and a freaking flamethrower!
Cyberpunk 2077, WOKE
I’m currently playing a female V who is romancing Judy, and damn proud of it. Also, as I wrote above, the game, like most examples of the cyberpunk genre, is squarely anti-capitalist. How did these fash morons miss that?
Shadows Over Loathing, WOKE
Yes a stick-figure parody of Lovecraftian horror is pit of sexual subversion.
And finally…
Aliens: Dark Descent WOKE
Again, women being in charge of anything, especially a job that requires weaponry, terrifies these clods.
tacitus@16–
“Go Woke, Go Broke” was always a lie intended to scare financiers away from progressive topics in entertainment. In reality, lots of products that reactionaries would call woke have been hugely successful. Dragon Age, Last of Us, The Sims, Fallout, Hades, Borderlands, Final Fantasy, Ultima, Chrono Trigger, WoW, BioShock, Nier…and this is just a small selection of AAA game franchises. Wikipedia has a long list of games with lgbt characters.
I remember all the GWGB idiots predicting Black Panther would bomb abysmally because audiences hate black leads (actual box office $1.3B worldwide). Funny how being wrong over and over does nothing to shut them up.
@36– Not only does Alien: Isolation have a resourceful female protagonist, she is canonically the daughter of the resourceful female protagonist of the first four Alien movies. Consistency, as you point out, is not their strong suit.
Akira, I’ve spent some hundreds of hours playing Darkest Dungeon II. I like it.
In that game, relationships are a thing: https://darkestdungeon.wiki.gg/wiki/Relationships#Positive_Relationships
Any character can be in an amorous relationship with one (or more) of the others, which vaguely amused me the first time the grizzled Man-at-arms became the Leper’s lover. Relationships are very important in this game, abstractions though they are.
This is hilarious.
And scrolling through that spreadsheet, and some of the titles on there (“A Gay Story About Gay Love”, “Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender”, “OscarWildeCard”, etc.) well, sound pretty “gay”
part of me is wondering if some of this is more along the lines of “OMG, that’s disgusting, tell me where it is so I can make sure to avoid it”
But, yeah, the list of things they are offended by is just so fucking ridiculous. That same-sex relationships exist, that some people use they/them pronouns, fucking rainbows, that NPCs may be black and/or women, solar panels.
I guess it must be nice to not have any real problems in life, so that complaining about options in video games is their biggest struggle…
None of those idiots noticed that the whole damn Alien franchise is anticapitalist, either. (Note how the human(oid) villains are always suit-and-tie types, usually from Weyland-Yutani, and their androids, while the protagonists tend toward working-class, such as freighter crews, and in one case included prisoners. Plus, almost every competent character in any of them is female…)
chrislawson @38: Well, they’re the same people who also complain that all the new Star Trek shows have gone woke, unlike the originals.
microraptor@42– Indeed. Same as the Sad Puppies who complained that the Hugos had gone woke and sure it had its Starship Troopers (which would not likely to win if were published today), but overall the Hugos have always been “woke” more often than not. The first ever Hugo for Novel went to Bester’s The Demolished Man and over its first thirty years included Canticle for Leibowitz, Case of Conscience, Man in the High Castle, Lord of Light, Stand on Zanzibar, Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Forever War, Where the Late Sweet Birds Sing, Dreamsnake, The Snow Queen…
The “wokeness” of these novels varies considerably, but none of them is the rip-snorting socially conservative sci-fi adventure that the Sad Puppies believed was the historical legacy of the Hugos.
Holy shit, this thing is hilarious:
Dwarf Fortress:
So it’s only an informational warning, because apparently dwarves are queer in game at a rate commensurate with their real-world queerness?
I’m surprised that Factorio got a pass – since at least in the earlier editions I played the aliens react negatively to your polluting their environment. Isn’t that a Woke precept?
For Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillan
I’m probably overthinking this drivel, but are they upset because the computer is claiming to be nonbinary in a gendered sense? And they object to that? What gametes do they think a computer has (or whatever thing they’ve decided is the ‘true’ source of gender this month)?
Or do they think it’s claiming to be analog and that’s whats got their knickers in a twist?
Pulling No Punches
Funny, there is no mention elsewhere about action/tactical/fps games spreading ‘false information’ about the efficacy of potions, medkits or crouching behind cover at instantaneously treating bullet wounds. Surely these sticklers for accuracy would require any player who gets wounded in a game of COD to spend at least several in-game months in recovery and phisiotherapy before regaining function after a limb-hit….. They must have forgotten to include that.
These people seem like they’re incapable of enjoyment….. I’m going to have to stop reading this list before my brain melts.
That’s pretty much a checklist for making videogames.
Every game should include a WOC that can fix any antique!
@40 “But, yeah, the list of things they are offended by is just so fucking ridiculous. That same-sex relationships exist, that some people use they/them pronouns, fucking rainbows, that NPCs may be black and/or women, solar panels.”
And they call us “snowflakes.”
I am slightly disappointed that out of my 4 games on Steam, only one is “Woke” and the remaining three are merely “Slightly Woke”. Serves me right for not playing videogames that much.
If those are the criteria, then apparently one can never be too woke. Nice to know really.
All the rest of the list are st least social issues that you’d expect them to hate.
Then they included demonizing GOLF. I think that reveals precisely who the censor’s are!!!
Clearly male. It’s got xy variables, after all.
I’m sure someone thinks computers must be male, since they’re ultra logical etc. just like men. Especially the men who get easily upset at games having heavily female casts.
Akira MacKenzie@36 it’s funny to see Cyberpunk 2077 being critiqued for Transhumanism, since that seems to be a idea heavily dominated by men, and often men who are prone to being upset by supposed woke. If they think it’s heavily connected with the trans rights movement they need to do more research.
foobar: small gametes
foofoo: large gametes
Reminds me of evangelicals who had a phase where they would find “Satanism” everything, including video games. Same psychology, different ideology.
It’s Gamergate mixed with a little Dove Foundation. Did they not get the memo about how this crashed and burned last time?
I’m lousy at golf. The rest can go.
@lochaber:
Honestly, most of this is probably just ‘outrage fuel’. It’s less that these people actually want to avoid such things and more that they want ‘proof’ that the world is against them and they need to be upset and take it back. It’s playing to the same sort of attitude as ‘Trump Will Fix It’… because in order to claim to be able to fix things you also have to claim that they are currently broken, and get people upset enough that they won’t look too closely at the claims.
With those precepts, having as long a list with as many different grievances as possible is the point: you want to make sure that at least some of the grievances of any particular member of your audience will be there.
Whenever some chud starts bleating about “go woke go broke”, I ask them to point me to a successful alt-right game. If they don’t pretend they didn’t hear the question at most they can stutter about Stellar Blade or Black Myth Wukong. It’s especially funny in case of the former because Stellar Blade’s protagonist is a headstrong clearly ethnic-looking woman who later SPOILER merges with a clearly ethnic-looking man into an amalgamation and becomes the saviour of mankind /SPOILER, which is apparently OK and totally not woke because she’s running around in skintight gear while doing this or something. BMWK is even better because the entire point of that game is a rebellion against the fascist and corrupt forces of Heaven who are incidentally also clad in white armor.
They can’t even claim Space Marine 2 for themselves because the hero there is flanked by two ethnic-looking Ultramarines which I can’t help but think the developers put in just to spite the chuds…I would call it sad, but that would require me to have any sympathy with that scum.
All “woke” means to Republicans, is having empathy and a conscience.
@ 51
It seems transhumanism has raised the paranoid, antisemitic ire of the right over the last few years:
https://www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/english/news-and-events/right-now/2023/far-right-covid-19-conspiracism.html
Alverant @25
I don’t mean this as an insult but anyone who gets angry over something like that has to be neurodivergent. The people who care about stuff like that would, by their own criteria, make a game “woke” if they were included as characters.
I always found the whole “go woke go broke” line ridiculous on the grounds that they are more of less admitting something the left has been saying while the right denies: That an economically significant portion of the population are knuckle-dragging bigots
@ 39
I haven’t really gotten a chance to play DD just yet. Right now I’m focused on CP2077 and Telltale Games’ The Expanse, another title I’m sure these morons would declare WOKE because you play as Carmina Drummer, a pansexual WOC.
It just staggers me that people as fragile as these censors are taken seriously and not treated as children who refuse to grow up and live in the real world.
Well, its moot now. All these games will be banned in a few months anyway.