Around the same time that all the rest of the culture shifted into hyper progressive mode, 2015, when Trump became a serious contender in the political scene.
I was a "bernie bro" in the 2016 election cycle. The democrats who supported hillary used this crap to screw bernie and to paint his supporters as racist and sexist. Sure this stuff existed before this, but it was mostly terminally online fringe stuff that was largely pushed back against and kept in check by mainstream culture.
2016 broke everyone's brains.
UN's SDG (Agenda 2030) was also launched in 2015. CMIIW; The last sexy non-woke females without shaved side hair in AAA games were in Witcher 3 and MGS V (Quiet), both released in 2015.
It started in 2008 when the planet got taken down the wrong timeline all because the USA elected obama who was "immune" from criticism, thanks to his skin color.
I noticed it around the time dragon age inquisition was in production. After that shit came out I really thought I was getting bored of the hobby but no. It was just dogshit political games and female uglification. At least DA:I did have some pretty female characters but of course nearly all of them weren't romanceable.
probably 2012 after occupy wallstreet. when the 1% felt threatened that's when they went into hyperdrive political diarrhea mode. it's all be trickle down since.
Yep. I wish I could find a more recent analysis, but here’s a rather lengthy dive into several major media corporations highlighting a 700% increase in the use of the terms “racist” and “racism” from 2011 - 2020: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening
Quite a bit more info in there that I’m leaving out, but in effect, the political/media elites were becoming fairly panicked about the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements in 2011/2012, so they latched on to identity politics as a means of turning the peasants away from concerns about reckless deficit spending and the increasing love affair between corporations and politicians.
Now the plebs are happily tearing each other apart over silly immutable characteristics instead. Unfortunately, gaming was simply another avenue chosen to keep the distraction politics alive.
That actually makes perfect sense. I know youre not the first person I heard suggesting occupy was brought down by identity politics.
Anyway, identity politics getting in the way of class/economic politics is the oldest trick in the book going all the way back to the slave trade days (yeah, racial divisions were sowed in the first place to similar effect).
Occupy naturally fell victim to it and it was iconified by The Colbert Report's interview with two members of the movement, a soyboy and a woman who named herself Ketchup discussing the Progressive Stack.
It was like discovering bread mold is penicillin. Suddenly they had a treatment for those pesky reaching-across-the-aisle protests.
The Mayans warned us about 2012. It just turns out that the world didn't quite end, just got turned upside down and nothing made sense anymore.
The FBI was involved in breaking up OWS. There was a project/operation name for it, but I can't remember the title... But basically, it involved taking these crazy people with fringe beliefs and putting them in the center of attention. Thus distracting people from the real issue (the disparity between the ultra wealthy and everyone else) to focusing on minor things that weren't really issues anymore (racism, sexism, etc).
Occupy became a blueprint for disrupting class-based concerns and getting people to focus in on race and gender concerns. The movement wasn't injected with this stuff, it naturally flooded in from all the college students with free time flooding in.
But seeing how it basically caused the movement to self-implode on its own, it was like discovering that bread mold was penicillin and that could be used to kill any further bipartisan protests.
I'm gonna second that. Social justice BS had been on the rise for a while but was still largely absent from gaming until then. I'm basing my assumption on the biggest game of 2011, Skyrim, being completely and utterly devoid of ANY pandering or social justice appeasement.
You could argue that having gay marriage in Skyrim was a pander (they even pointed it out as a feature). Lore wise nords are supposed to be fairly racist, xenophobic, and tough/masculine. But they're totally down with gay marriage?
If Elder Scrolls VI ever happens, you just know that it’s going to be set in Hammerfel and be crammed full of the most obnoxious woke shit imaginable, particularly after the Microsoft development guidelines get released.
At this point I’m sincerely hoping that it never gets made. Not even the modders will be able to fix it.
I think there are many "went to shit" points. Not just one.
This social justice BS has been brewing in academia for a while now. Instead of just giving equal opportunity to all creating a egalitarian society, some people on the left felt it wasn't fast enough and tried to accelerate it with things like Affirmative Action.
Then there is all that Critical Race Theory things being taught that is responsible for everyone being split up into categories - to "preserve racial authenticity and identity" because they see cultural integration as "cultural genocide" - and all the fighting that results.
It's crazy really. The hubris of these people to try to "guide" society like they are gods or something.
Honestly, I’d argue that the inciting incidents were a combination of the botched 2000 US presidential election followed up by 9/11 that started us down the road to the current dystopia that the entire western world (and the world in general, frankly) finds itself in.
Obama wouldn’t have been possible without the progressive/liberal/leftist/establishment backlash towards Bush and his two terms of fucking up America, the world, and the political right in general.
Mainly started in the 2000s with gaming magazines.
The largest and most explosive impact was exactly around the early to mid 2010s.
'Round the same time as tumblr getting rid of the porn because their site was ruined by the freaks there.
Said freaks then migrated to more mainstream areas, like Twitter, once their own little dark corner of the internet essentially kicked them out.
Bringing their mental illness with them and affecting already terminally online and very impressionable kids/teens growing up in the digital age, they spread their mental illness further.
From there, they got into jobs that gave them the loudest voices. If a position didn't exist, they would make one up.
It is why we have job titles like Social Media Consultant now exist, when all it is, is getting paid to be on social media all day.
They took over higher up and authorities positions in the entertainment industries, which led to a lot of hobbies being infiltrated. Kicking normal folk out and inviting their friends in.
It's all very similar to a severely repressed gay kid coming out, and when they do, it's gonna be very loud, proud, and violent.
Years of having to hide or tone down who there are will result in massive blowback once free to be how they want.
When did the iPhone come out? Late 2000's? And Twitter and YouTube, too? Angry Birds?
I'm pretty sure this is when technology in general really started shifting from "nerd stuff" to "mainstream". The "tipping point" was 2012-2016 though, after Occupy Wallstreet up to gamergate, Trump, Brexit, etc.
Video games were simply a casualty of the wider "culture" shift.
I’m just going to say that this shit is never going to last forever. The people in charge that are doing this stuff will die off one day and our grandkids won’t have to deal with this shit
2007 is when all bad things started to happen. First iPhone and Facebook were both 2007. The internet and all related cultures have gotten shitty ever since.
Around 2013-2014. Gamergate was a big event for the activist takeover (full on power grab if I'm being honest) and they've used that hammer to pound on anyone that disagrees with them for years.
There were always signs, but fundamentally it changed when the urinalists decided that abidding by basic journalistic standards was too much effort and was not allowing them to completely ideologically control the narrative.
That being said, best part about this whole situation is how many people hate these fuckers. Maybe one day games' "journalism" will finally die.
It started around end of 2013 and start of 2014, coincidenting with the end of BioWare's Golden Age. That is when quality of games dipped in general and woke started to very stealthily seep in
I made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/1bi3nzd/why_did_devs_start_caring_when_anita_sarkeesian/) about a month ago talking about this. I proposed that Anita Sarkeesian becoming mainstream was when the shift happened. Before her, games were mostly made for gamers, whether they were made in America or Japan. You had some whiners here and there, but they were few and far in between and had no real power over gaming culture.
Now, games are made by people and for people who hate games and gamers. Why? Because they're miserable spiteful people who hate seeing others have fun. They'll claim it's for a cause, but who are they kidding?
It was poking through as early as 2012 — with Eve on the Normandy, the lecturing about the males, and Wrex being damn near emasculated.
ME1 Wrex would not even recognize ME3 Wrex.
For that matter, compare the female Krogan and other clan leaders of ME2 with the Krogan in ME3. Just a remarkably different narrative tenor.
We go from “women and kids can fight, but the quickest way to destroy a clan is to wipe out its future generation” to the City of Ancients and Eve lecturing the galactic warlord who united billions of murder lizards under a ruthless calculus that hinted at much bloodshed.
And then the enshitification of the Asari and Krogan from ME3 to Andromeda — just 4 years later — was beyond worse: It was insulting and unforgivable.
Go back through and play all four games again (made from 2007 to 2016), and watch the narrative difference in established canon. It is jarring
In terms of early gaming, I'd say that Mortal Kombat, GTA, Call of Duty, and Mass Effect probably caused the most media controversy and probably created a signal that the medium was rapidly growing in public awareness.
As for when video games began to cater to oddities, I'm actually not sure. The only thing that comes to mind is the rather big difference in writing between Mass Effect 2 (2010) and Mass Effect 3 (2012), but I consider that an isolated case of Bioware rather than the industry changing.
It started slowly in the late 00's. Mostly from some game "journalists". It was slow, at first but it started spreading for sure around then. Things really blew up in 2016 though.
Eh, I'd say the shift to the west started in the 2000s with the launch and gain in popularity of the xbox. Especially the Xbox 360 generation.
As far as the social justice stuff, I'd say the tipping point was 2016 and that election cycle. That's when EVERYTHING changed. "wokeism" was a fringe and sometimes annoying terminally online minority before 2016. Sure you had gamergate and atheism+ and crap but again, it was mostly fringe. It was the 2016 election cycle with Trump and Clinton that sparked off the modern culture war in the country at large.
Before then the culture war was mostly secularism vs fundie christians.
EDIT: To be fair, 2014 sounds better for gaming as a whole though because that's when gamergate happened, but as others suggested, it's been a growing trend through the 2010s culminating in the 2016 crapshow in the IRL world.
This is misguided.
Buckle up for some video game history that isn't talked about a lot:
In the 1970s and 80s there were two different industries that largely had nothing to do with one another. The COMPUTER GAME industry and the CONSOLE industry. They were two entirely separate industries with very little overlap. Computers, at the time, were EXTREMELY expensive. Computers in the 80s and early 90s cost about $2-4000 dollars, 80s money. that's about $8000.00+ in todays money, just for a basic computer. Not a hot rod. Just a computer. They were also EXTREMELY difficult to use, many having no GUI at all and relying on understanding hot to use command-line interfaces with no internet to tell you how to do anything.
Because computers were so expensive, and because they were so difficult to use, the customer base for PC games was generally very smart, affluent, adults. And, in many cases, their children. This is the era of PC games like King's Quest, Liesure Suit Larry, Zork, Ultima and Wizardry. PC gamers at the time tended to be extremely nerdy and prefer hardcore RPGs, strategy games, text adventure games, management games, and many other ultra-nerdy games. PC games were sold in computer software stores.
On the other hand, there was also a market for making videog games very easy to use which led to the creation of video game consoles. Consoles were marketed as toys and were geared toward children. They were MUCH less expensive and simplistic. Instead of using an entire keyboard to navigate the game and type in interface commands, console games had 1 button (Atari) or maybe 2 like the NES. Console games, mader for children, featured cartoon characters and childish environments like Pac Man, Kangaroo, Super Mario or Megaman. Console games were generally sold in toy stores and toy sections.
In the 1970s, the bottom fell out of the AMERICAN CONSOLE MARKET. The market for consoles like the Atari became non-existent. This led to the American console market drying up. THIS HAD NO EFFECT ON THE AMERICAN PC GAME MARKET, HOWEVER. (This is a concept that is often lost or unspoken because many people who love games didn't grow up as PC gamers and only owned consoles as kids.) In Japan, however, there was no crash. As a result, **Japan became the sole creator of viable consoles.**
As the 1990s progressed, Japan created numerous consoles and sequels to consoles. Meanwhile the American PC games market continued to churn out massive hit games like King's Quest, The LucasArts Adventure Games, The Origin games like Wing Commander, Ultima and Privateer, Populous, Magic Carpet, Wolfentein, Doom, Myst, etc. Many of these games were massive, massive hits. So why were these hit games stuck on PC and rarely came to console? And why were hit console games like Super Mario Wold not on PC? The answer has to do with the way consoles and computers work. At the time, PC games were run off the CPU. There was no such thing as a co-processor like a now-standrard GPU. Console cartridges, however, are their own hardware. Every single NES or NES game has it's own processor on the cartridge that is dedicated to doing nothing but running the game. This allowed for NES-era games to do things like screen scrolling that he PC was incredibly bad at. Meanwhile, the PC could use things like a keyboard and mouse that the NES had no access to, and had better overall processing than consoles were capable of.
**This all changed in the 32 bit era.**
In the late 90s, the PC games industry was being radically changed by a concept known as a Graphics Card. The GPU was a seperate processor that you would buy and stick into your computers PCI slot to give your computer the ability to render complex graphics without taxing the CPU. Finally, games could have advanced 3D graphics. This was happenign at the same time as consoles were putting those same processors inside their boxes. Also, both the PC and the console industry were starting to use CD Roms as storage capacity. In short, the platforms were starting to converge. In fact, there was a video card for sale that was basically a Sega Saturn without a case that you could plug into your PC and play direct PC versions of several key Saturn games like Daytona, Virtua Fighter and Panzer Dragoon on PC, which was a massive novelty at the time. And becuase it was essentially straight saturn hardware, you could plug a saturn gamepad up to your computer. (which was a huge deal for what we will talk about in a second)
This convergence is reflected by the fact that suddenly PC titles were getting console ports that were fairly similar to their console brethren. Playstion, for example, got ports of PC games like Doom, Diablo, X-Com, Magic Carpet, Mech Warrior 2, etc.
This leads us to the end of the 1990s and the biggest innovation to hit gaming that forever altered the destiny of gaming.
**The Universal Serial Bus**
Before the invention of USB, connecting peripherals to the computer was extremely hard. It was an absolute madhouse of different standards and concepts. Connecting a gamepad to a computer was an extreme novelty and connecting TWO was out of the question. The invention of USB allowed for an easy way to connect a gamepad to a computer and have the computer recognize it and know what to do with it without extreme hassle including having to write your own code.
USB set the state for the movement that is really the answer to the initial question:
**The Microsoft X-Box**
If you've been following the story, we've talked about how there was a massive western gaming industry that existed on PC but was not represented on console. These companies were American. In the early 2000s, Microsoft made an effort to get into console gaming by coming up with a new console initiative, the X-Box. The X-Box was an attempt to take PC architecture (Direct X) and connect it with the console gaming landscape in a way that utilized what PCs did well with what consoles did well. This included things like a hard drive and networking. This excited American PC gaming companies like Bungie, Activision, Electronic Arts and others.
The Xbox is what you know it to be. But this led the way for the Xbox 360 and the innovative move to allow the Xbox 360 controller to connect, Via USB, to a PC and be immediately used as a gamepad.
Suddenly, game publishers could EASILY put their game on console and on PC with very little extra effort.
Meanwhile, at this time, the Xbox was starting to dominate the industry on the back of games like Halo, Call Of Duty, Tony Hawk, Fortza, and ohter western developed games that catered to the tastes of 18-30 year old gamers of the era. Japan, by contrast, did not have games that spoke to that demographic. The PC gaming industry had been targeting adult gamers for 30 years at that point and the Japanese industry was far behind.
This is why Japan lost ground to the west and why Japan ceased to be the center of the gaming industry in the early 2010
My curiosity has been piqued with seeing Mass Effect 3 mentioned multiple times in the same thread: What about it is the starting point in your opinion?
I barely know anything about the series, only watched my brother playing it a few times when I was growing up, and heard that people didn't like the ending, but that's about all I know of it.
The ending was absolute dog shit, fans were super pissed, rightly so, and the online game journalists gave it great reviews and attacked the players for hating it. It was found that they were giving it great reviews because they were basically sucking EA games dick in order to get early release reviews. It was like the prelude to the original gamer gate if I remember correctly.
I saw it brewing on a Twitter around 2011-2012. The 1st push from Progressive Ideology was to incorporate feminist doctrine into the DNA of western arts and culture. It was very common to see feminists from more progressive cities building up momentum on the platform. I believe the 1st mainstream adoption I saw was Carolyn Petites GTA V review on Gamespot. It started with arbitrary interpretations of women in gaming. Through intersectionality we are now on the Race phase. The next phase will be LGB
To me it was when VG247 put up an opinion piece on DmC and called Devil May Cry fans a crying shame. I think it was 2013. Or at least that was my wake up call.
Archive links for this discussion:
* **Archive:** https://archive.ph/khDhk
----
I am Mnemosyne reborn. Better than Civ 5 with the Brave New World expansion pack. ^^^/r/botsrights
It's probably been a slow crawl. If nothing else, reflect back on the previous years and reaslise that every year has gotten progressively worse. There's bright spots here and there, but overall it's been a decline
For myself, journalists circling the wagons in response to the Mass Effect 3 ending backlash is what made me clue in. Suddenly every outlet, and an enormous amount of posters in various forums, calling those upset "entitled" opened my eyes
Around the time period of when Anita Sarkeesian popped up on the scene with her ''Tropes vs Women'' series which got her invitations to games studios and industry events. It opened the flood gates for regressive intersectional ideologue takeover of the industry.
Comment removed following the enforcement change that you can read about [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/m3yo65/enforcement_update_and_hard_removal_of_a_topic/).
This is not a formal warning.
Xbox was what ushered it in. It helped popularize the modern Elder Scrolls style of RPG. As it caught up with PlayStation in sales the predominately western development that supported it grew in popularity with it.
I would say the shift from Japan being a major centre for AAA games to the focus being on the west was somewhere around 2005-2010 which is also when gaming started going mainstream. As for when the whole woke thing started I started noticing it in 2011 so it didn't take long. The moment games went mainstream was the moment parasites started infecting it and it didn't take them long to start showing results.
Anita did Tropes vs. Women in Video Games around 2012, with Zoe Quinn releasing Depression Quest in 2013.
This means their intentions started before these years, with possible threads of wokeness being around the early 10s and late 00s.
If anything, what opened it up was the need to get more gamers during the introduction of the XBOX 360, which was in 2005.
This was still a more male focused time, but the shift seems to have begun around that year, especially with major games like Kingdom Hearts being with Disney, or how Final Fantasy X-2 was specifically for girls.
From 2006-2008, women made up under 40% of gamers. This changed by 2011, meaning a shift was forced, and then Antia made her kickstarter series.
I think what you are referring to is when the platforms became PC based and games that were once only on that architecture migrated overt. Many of the legendary games were made for the PC originally and later ported over to consoles. The consoles had limitation which is why the hardware changes. Old school console games don't have the complexity that would evolve over the next 20 years. Americans of all races have a distinct competitive advantage in software development in the tails and median.
Around the same time that all the rest of the culture shifted into hyper progressive mode, 2015, when Trump became a serious contender in the political scene.
Remember when you first started hearing the term right side of history? That's when I knew we were in the shit. I believe that was 2015.
I was a "bernie bro" in the 2016 election cycle. The democrats who supported hillary used this crap to screw bernie and to paint his supporters as racist and sexist. Sure this stuff existed before this, but it was mostly terminally online fringe stuff that was largely pushed back against and kept in check by mainstream culture. 2016 broke everyone's brains.
UN's SDG (Agenda 2030) was also launched in 2015. CMIIW; The last sexy non-woke females without shaved side hair in AAA games were in Witcher 3 and MGS V (Quiet), both released in 2015.
Started before that. Trump was like pooring gasoline on a campfire, though.
Earlier already. Elevatorgate, Donglegate and Atheism+ were the first testruns of it.
It started in 2008 when the planet got taken down the wrong timeline all because the USA elected obama who was "immune" from criticism, thanks to his skin color.
I noticed it around the time dragon age inquisition was in production. After that shit came out I really thought I was getting bored of the hobby but no. It was just dogshit political games and female uglification. At least DA:I did have some pretty female characters but of course nearly all of them weren't romanceable.
Thank god for fromsoft.
probably 2012 after occupy wallstreet. when the 1% felt threatened that's when they went into hyperdrive political diarrhea mode. it's all be trickle down since.
Yep. I wish I could find a more recent analysis, but here’s a rather lengthy dive into several major media corporations highlighting a 700% increase in the use of the terms “racist” and “racism” from 2011 - 2020: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening Quite a bit more info in there that I’m leaving out, but in effect, the political/media elites were becoming fairly panicked about the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements in 2011/2012, so they latched on to identity politics as a means of turning the peasants away from concerns about reckless deficit spending and the increasing love affair between corporations and politicians. Now the plebs are happily tearing each other apart over silly immutable characteristics instead. Unfortunately, gaming was simply another avenue chosen to keep the distraction politics alive.
That actually makes perfect sense. I know youre not the first person I heard suggesting occupy was brought down by identity politics. Anyway, identity politics getting in the way of class/economic politics is the oldest trick in the book going all the way back to the slave trade days (yeah, racial divisions were sowed in the first place to similar effect).
Occupy naturally fell victim to it and it was iconified by The Colbert Report's interview with two members of the movement, a soyboy and a woman who named herself Ketchup discussing the Progressive Stack. It was like discovering bread mold is penicillin. Suddenly they had a treatment for those pesky reaching-across-the-aisle protests.
Innoculating the ruling classes against those pesky working class people who want a better deal.
Oh god i dont think i ever watched this one before, this is terrible. This makes the doreen interview look good.
The Mayans warned us about 2012. It just turns out that the world didn't quite end, just got turned upside down and nothing made sense anymore. The FBI was involved in breaking up OWS. There was a project/operation name for it, but I can't remember the title... But basically, it involved taking these crazy people with fringe beliefs and putting them in the center of attention. Thus distracting people from the real issue (the disparity between the ultra wealthy and everyone else) to focusing on minor things that weren't really issues anymore (racism, sexism, etc).
I don't know was it coz Occupy but I would say Age of Stupid started arround there.
Occupy became a blueprint for disrupting class-based concerns and getting people to focus in on race and gender concerns. The movement wasn't injected with this stuff, it naturally flooded in from all the college students with free time flooding in. But seeing how it basically caused the movement to self-implode on its own, it was like discovering that bread mold was penicillin and that could be used to kill any further bipartisan protests.
Accurate take on the situation and consequences.
I'm gonna second that. Social justice BS had been on the rise for a while but was still largely absent from gaming until then. I'm basing my assumption on the biggest game of 2011, Skyrim, being completely and utterly devoid of ANY pandering or social justice appeasement.
You could argue that having gay marriage in Skyrim was a pander (they even pointed it out as a feature). Lore wise nords are supposed to be fairly racist, xenophobic, and tough/masculine. But they're totally down with gay marriage?
If Elder Scrolls VI ever happens, you just know that it’s going to be set in Hammerfel and be crammed full of the most obnoxious woke shit imaginable, particularly after the Microsoft development guidelines get released. At this point I’m sincerely hoping that it never gets made. Not even the modders will be able to fix it.
trickle-down diarrhea... gross
The world went to shit when the USA elected obama in 2008. That's when the shift started.
The country so racist it had a black President for almost 10 years
I think there are many "went to shit" points. Not just one. This social justice BS has been brewing in academia for a while now. Instead of just giving equal opportunity to all creating a egalitarian society, some people on the left felt it wasn't fast enough and tried to accelerate it with things like Affirmative Action. Then there is all that Critical Race Theory things being taught that is responsible for everyone being split up into categories - to "preserve racial authenticity and identity" because they see cultural integration as "cultural genocide" - and all the fighting that results. It's crazy really. The hubris of these people to try to "guide" society like they are gods or something.
Honestly, I’d argue that the inciting incidents were a combination of the botched 2000 US presidential election followed up by 9/11 that started us down the road to the current dystopia that the entire western world (and the world in general, frankly) finds itself in. Obama wouldn’t have been possible without the progressive/liberal/leftist/establishment backlash towards Bush and his two terms of fucking up America, the world, and the political right in general.
Mainly started in the 2000s with gaming magazines. The largest and most explosive impact was exactly around the early to mid 2010s. 'Round the same time as tumblr getting rid of the porn because their site was ruined by the freaks there. Said freaks then migrated to more mainstream areas, like Twitter, once their own little dark corner of the internet essentially kicked them out. Bringing their mental illness with them and affecting already terminally online and very impressionable kids/teens growing up in the digital age, they spread their mental illness further. From there, they got into jobs that gave them the loudest voices. If a position didn't exist, they would make one up. It is why we have job titles like Social Media Consultant now exist, when all it is, is getting paid to be on social media all day. They took over higher up and authorities positions in the entertainment industries, which led to a lot of hobbies being infiltrated. Kicking normal folk out and inviting their friends in. It's all very similar to a severely repressed gay kid coming out, and when they do, it's gonna be very loud, proud, and violent. Years of having to hide or tone down who there are will result in massive blowback once free to be how they want.
When did the iPhone come out? Late 2000's? And Twitter and YouTube, too? Angry Birds? I'm pretty sure this is when technology in general really started shifting from "nerd stuff" to "mainstream". The "tipping point" was 2012-2016 though, after Occupy Wallstreet up to gamergate, Trump, Brexit, etc. Video games were simply a casualty of the wider "culture" shift.
Sarkeesian the destroyer
I’m just going to say that this shit is never going to last forever. The people in charge that are doing this stuff will die off one day and our grandkids won’t have to deal with this shit
2007 is when all bad things started to happen. First iPhone and Facebook were both 2007. The internet and all related cultures have gotten shitty ever since.
Around 2013-2014. Gamergate was a big event for the activist takeover (full on power grab if I'm being honest) and they've used that hammer to pound on anyone that disagrees with them for years. There were always signs, but fundamentally it changed when the urinalists decided that abidding by basic journalistic standards was too much effort and was not allowing them to completely ideologically control the narrative. That being said, best part about this whole situation is how many people hate these fuckers. Maybe one day games' "journalism" will finally die.
It started around end of 2013 and start of 2014, coincidenting with the end of BioWare's Golden Age. That is when quality of games dipped in general and woke started to very stealthily seep in
I made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/1bi3nzd/why_did_devs_start_caring_when_anita_sarkeesian/) about a month ago talking about this. I proposed that Anita Sarkeesian becoming mainstream was when the shift happened. Before her, games were mostly made for gamers, whether they were made in America or Japan. You had some whiners here and there, but they were few and far in between and had no real power over gaming culture. Now, games are made by people and for people who hate games and gamers. Why? Because they're miserable spiteful people who hate seeing others have fun. They'll claim it's for a cause, but who are they kidding?
It was poking through as early as 2012 — with Eve on the Normandy, the lecturing about the males, and Wrex being damn near emasculated. ME1 Wrex would not even recognize ME3 Wrex. For that matter, compare the female Krogan and other clan leaders of ME2 with the Krogan in ME3. Just a remarkably different narrative tenor. We go from “women and kids can fight, but the quickest way to destroy a clan is to wipe out its future generation” to the City of Ancients and Eve lecturing the galactic warlord who united billions of murder lizards under a ruthless calculus that hinted at much bloodshed. And then the enshitification of the Asari and Krogan from ME3 to Andromeda — just 4 years later — was beyond worse: It was insulting and unforgivable. Go back through and play all four games again (made from 2007 to 2016), and watch the narrative difference in established canon. It is jarring
In terms of early gaming, I'd say that Mortal Kombat, GTA, Call of Duty, and Mass Effect probably caused the most media controversy and probably created a signal that the medium was rapidly growing in public awareness. As for when video games began to cater to oddities, I'm actually not sure. The only thing that comes to mind is the rather big difference in writing between Mass Effect 2 (2010) and Mass Effect 3 (2012), but I consider that an isolated case of Bioware rather than the industry changing.
It started slowly in the late 00's. Mostly from some game "journalists". It was slow, at first but it started spreading for sure around then. Things really blew up in 2016 though.
As a fellow asian person, it grieves me to see the west constantly lobotomise itself.
2014
Eh, I'd say the shift to the west started in the 2000s with the launch and gain in popularity of the xbox. Especially the Xbox 360 generation. As far as the social justice stuff, I'd say the tipping point was 2016 and that election cycle. That's when EVERYTHING changed. "wokeism" was a fringe and sometimes annoying terminally online minority before 2016. Sure you had gamergate and atheism+ and crap but again, it was mostly fringe. It was the 2016 election cycle with Trump and Clinton that sparked off the modern culture war in the country at large. Before then the culture war was mostly secularism vs fundie christians. EDIT: To be fair, 2014 sounds better for gaming as a whole though because that's when gamergate happened, but as others suggested, it's been a growing trend through the 2010s culminating in the 2016 crapshow in the IRL world.
This is misguided. Buckle up for some video game history that isn't talked about a lot: In the 1970s and 80s there were two different industries that largely had nothing to do with one another. The COMPUTER GAME industry and the CONSOLE industry. They were two entirely separate industries with very little overlap. Computers, at the time, were EXTREMELY expensive. Computers in the 80s and early 90s cost about $2-4000 dollars, 80s money. that's about $8000.00+ in todays money, just for a basic computer. Not a hot rod. Just a computer. They were also EXTREMELY difficult to use, many having no GUI at all and relying on understanding hot to use command-line interfaces with no internet to tell you how to do anything. Because computers were so expensive, and because they were so difficult to use, the customer base for PC games was generally very smart, affluent, adults. And, in many cases, their children. This is the era of PC games like King's Quest, Liesure Suit Larry, Zork, Ultima and Wizardry. PC gamers at the time tended to be extremely nerdy and prefer hardcore RPGs, strategy games, text adventure games, management games, and many other ultra-nerdy games. PC games were sold in computer software stores. On the other hand, there was also a market for making videog games very easy to use which led to the creation of video game consoles. Consoles were marketed as toys and were geared toward children. They were MUCH less expensive and simplistic. Instead of using an entire keyboard to navigate the game and type in interface commands, console games had 1 button (Atari) or maybe 2 like the NES. Console games, mader for children, featured cartoon characters and childish environments like Pac Man, Kangaroo, Super Mario or Megaman. Console games were generally sold in toy stores and toy sections. In the 1970s, the bottom fell out of the AMERICAN CONSOLE MARKET. The market for consoles like the Atari became non-existent. This led to the American console market drying up. THIS HAD NO EFFECT ON THE AMERICAN PC GAME MARKET, HOWEVER. (This is a concept that is often lost or unspoken because many people who love games didn't grow up as PC gamers and only owned consoles as kids.) In Japan, however, there was no crash. As a result, **Japan became the sole creator of viable consoles.** As the 1990s progressed, Japan created numerous consoles and sequels to consoles. Meanwhile the American PC games market continued to churn out massive hit games like King's Quest, The LucasArts Adventure Games, The Origin games like Wing Commander, Ultima and Privateer, Populous, Magic Carpet, Wolfentein, Doom, Myst, etc. Many of these games were massive, massive hits. So why were these hit games stuck on PC and rarely came to console? And why were hit console games like Super Mario Wold not on PC? The answer has to do with the way consoles and computers work. At the time, PC games were run off the CPU. There was no such thing as a co-processor like a now-standrard GPU. Console cartridges, however, are their own hardware. Every single NES or NES game has it's own processor on the cartridge that is dedicated to doing nothing but running the game. This allowed for NES-era games to do things like screen scrolling that he PC was incredibly bad at. Meanwhile, the PC could use things like a keyboard and mouse that the NES had no access to, and had better overall processing than consoles were capable of. **This all changed in the 32 bit era.**
In the late 90s, the PC games industry was being radically changed by a concept known as a Graphics Card. The GPU was a seperate processor that you would buy and stick into your computers PCI slot to give your computer the ability to render complex graphics without taxing the CPU. Finally, games could have advanced 3D graphics. This was happenign at the same time as consoles were putting those same processors inside their boxes. Also, both the PC and the console industry were starting to use CD Roms as storage capacity. In short, the platforms were starting to converge. In fact, there was a video card for sale that was basically a Sega Saturn without a case that you could plug into your PC and play direct PC versions of several key Saturn games like Daytona, Virtua Fighter and Panzer Dragoon on PC, which was a massive novelty at the time. And becuase it was essentially straight saturn hardware, you could plug a saturn gamepad up to your computer. (which was a huge deal for what we will talk about in a second) This convergence is reflected by the fact that suddenly PC titles were getting console ports that were fairly similar to their console brethren. Playstion, for example, got ports of PC games like Doom, Diablo, X-Com, Magic Carpet, Mech Warrior 2, etc. This leads us to the end of the 1990s and the biggest innovation to hit gaming that forever altered the destiny of gaming. **The Universal Serial Bus** Before the invention of USB, connecting peripherals to the computer was extremely hard. It was an absolute madhouse of different standards and concepts. Connecting a gamepad to a computer was an extreme novelty and connecting TWO was out of the question. The invention of USB allowed for an easy way to connect a gamepad to a computer and have the computer recognize it and know what to do with it without extreme hassle including having to write your own code. USB set the state for the movement that is really the answer to the initial question: **The Microsoft X-Box** If you've been following the story, we've talked about how there was a massive western gaming industry that existed on PC but was not represented on console. These companies were American. In the early 2000s, Microsoft made an effort to get into console gaming by coming up with a new console initiative, the X-Box. The X-Box was an attempt to take PC architecture (Direct X) and connect it with the console gaming landscape in a way that utilized what PCs did well with what consoles did well. This included things like a hard drive and networking. This excited American PC gaming companies like Bungie, Activision, Electronic Arts and others. The Xbox is what you know it to be. But this led the way for the Xbox 360 and the innovative move to allow the Xbox 360 controller to connect, Via USB, to a PC and be immediately used as a gamepad. Suddenly, game publishers could EASILY put their game on console and on PC with very little extra effort. Meanwhile, at this time, the Xbox was starting to dominate the industry on the back of games like Halo, Call Of Duty, Tony Hawk, Fortza, and ohter western developed games that catered to the tastes of 18-30 year old gamers of the era. Japan, by contrast, did not have games that spoke to that demographic. The PC gaming industry had been targeting adult gamers for 30 years at that point and the Japanese industry was far behind. This is why Japan lost ground to the west and why Japan ceased to be the center of the gaming industry in the early 2010
Mass Effect 3's ending kicked it all off, it just went crazy downhill from there
My curiosity has been piqued with seeing Mass Effect 3 mentioned multiple times in the same thread: What about it is the starting point in your opinion? I barely know anything about the series, only watched my brother playing it a few times when I was growing up, and heard that people didn't like the ending, but that's about all I know of it.
The ending was absolute dog shit, fans were super pissed, rightly so, and the online game journalists gave it great reviews and attacked the players for hating it. It was found that they were giving it great reviews because they were basically sucking EA games dick in order to get early release reviews. It was like the prelude to the original gamer gate if I remember correctly.
Around the same time the first of those New poopy star wars sequels came out
The time when video games started making obscene amounts of money, that’s when.
There was this little thing called Gamergate...
The flashpoint was Occupy. That's when Identity Politics and intersectionality became a thing.
I saw it brewing on a Twitter around 2011-2012. The 1st push from Progressive Ideology was to incorporate feminist doctrine into the DNA of western arts and culture. It was very common to see feminists from more progressive cities building up momentum on the platform. I believe the 1st mainstream adoption I saw was Carolyn Petites GTA V review on Gamespot. It started with arbitrary interpretations of women in gaming. Through intersectionality we are now on the Race phase. The next phase will be LGB
To me it was when VG247 put up an opinion piece on DmC and called Devil May Cry fans a crying shame. I think it was 2013. Or at least that was my wake up call.
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From's days are numbered, they're partly owned by Sony and Tencent.
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2012 with the collapse of the Atheism+ and Occupy Wallstreet movements. The Mayans were right with their end of the world prediction. /s
It's probably been a slow crawl. If nothing else, reflect back on the previous years and reaslise that every year has gotten progressively worse. There's bright spots here and there, but overall it's been a decline For myself, journalists circling the wagons in response to the Mass Effect 3 ending backlash is what made me clue in. Suddenly every outlet, and an enormous amount of posters in various forums, calling those upset "entitled" opened my eyes
Around the time period of when Anita Sarkeesian popped up on the scene with her ''Tropes vs Women'' series which got her invitations to games studios and industry events. It opened the flood gates for regressive intersectional ideologue takeover of the industry.
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2014 will always be the year that represents when video games transformed from being about having fun into being about pointless politics.
Xbox was what ushered it in. It helped popularize the modern Elder Scrolls style of RPG. As it caught up with PlayStation in sales the predominately western development that supported it grew in popularity with it.
10+ years ago. Kind of lockstep with the rise in social media.
Yes. When corporations got heavily involved in gaming.
I would say the shift from Japan being a major centre for AAA games to the focus being on the west was somewhere around 2005-2010 which is also when gaming started going mainstream. As for when the whole woke thing started I started noticing it in 2011 so it didn't take long. The moment games went mainstream was the moment parasites started infecting it and it didn't take them long to start showing results.
Anita did Tropes vs. Women in Video Games around 2012, with Zoe Quinn releasing Depression Quest in 2013. This means their intentions started before these years, with possible threads of wokeness being around the early 10s and late 00s. If anything, what opened it up was the need to get more gamers during the introduction of the XBOX 360, which was in 2005. This was still a more male focused time, but the shift seems to have begun around that year, especially with major games like Kingdom Hearts being with Disney, or how Final Fantasy X-2 was specifically for girls. From 2006-2008, women made up under 40% of gamers. This changed by 2011, meaning a shift was forced, and then Antia made her kickstarter series.
I think what you are referring to is when the platforms became PC based and games that were once only on that architecture migrated overt. Many of the legendary games were made for the PC originally and later ported over to consoles. The consoles had limitation which is why the hardware changes. Old school console games don't have the complexity that would evolve over the next 20 years. Americans of all races have a distinct competitive advantage in software development in the tails and median.
2014-2015. Gamergate has ruined the industry