Most people and especially most gamers don't give a shit either, unfortunately the insane gender ideologues that two of this site's staff seem to have been brainwashed into want this forced down hard into everyone else's throats
"Insane gender ideologues", also known as people who'd like to see cultural products reflect all of humanity, instead of just part of it.
So what's so terrible about seeing women, people of color and other minorities in video games more frequently and in more diverse roles? Why are people getting so upset that people are asking for more equal representation? Maybe you don't care about the issue, and that's fine, but why would you actively fight this?
Why do people think YouTube videos are a good medium to discuss academic papers? This annoys me to no end. If you're going to try to do in-depth discussion, mediums which require constant, focused attentions with no easy way to reference back and forth are the worst.
Anyway, in the first video he's only looking at protagonist identification rather than representation as a whole, and he misrepresents the paper in question. For instance, more narratively well-developed characters see more identification, and even very poorly-developed characters see some identification. The paper also speaks exclusively to the use of diversity as a means of altering people's perspective (to give them a sense of what it's like to be someone with a different identity) or as a marketing tool. It does not speak to the value people place on seeing themselves represented and the benefits gained thereof, nor does it speak to the role that stereotyping and exclusion play in forming and confirming consumers' views, nor does it speak to any of the other arguments used to support diversity by cultural critics.
The second video is completely useless as a critique, as it discusses a paper that discusses whether or not people who play video games identify as a member of the 'gamer' identity and how this interacted with marketing constructs and other personal identities. The paper says nothing about the value of diversity in games, only about the way games are marketed. This question has nothing to do with whether or not gamers identify with protagonists, yet he constantly tries to tie in that old study by misunderstanding both papers. The only assumption Shaw makes in this paper is that it would be better if games as a whole spoke to all audiences. If you disagree with that assumption, then there's no point in discussing it. Making a 20-minute video to make that point is asinine.
Even so, none of this is actually an argument
against diversity in games. If identification doesn't matter, then why would you be upset if we'd see more diverse characters? This doesn't actually hurt you, right?
Akratus said:
I want to restate an argument made in that first video: It is an assumption that players of video games identify with the character they play as at all.
We could go all media theory on this and investigate what "identifying with" even means. But perhaps it's more interesting to note that many people who do belong to minorities have written and spoken about the first time they saw themselves represented, and how important that was to them. While you may not identify with characters, it is clear that other people do find this important and that diversity and representation means a lot to them. There's no assumption that every single gamer finds this important, and it's not particularly relevant, either.
