Someone did a study on sexualisation in video games, and GGers mocked them for…doing research? Because they were doing it instead of ““““making their own games.”““““ So I guess not only critique but, like, literal science isn’t valid now?
WE ARE making our own games and these dudes cry about “forced diversity” or “tokenism” or “political agendas” or w/e!! You legitimately cannot win!
I saw it put in the most interesting way a while ago: They don’t expect us to have the skill, time, effort, or desire to make our own games. They just want us to be silent.
They assume that we just want to “complain” and “be offended at everything” and they want to hand-wave away any concerns we have, regardless of their validity.
Then they assume we don’t have the skills to make our own games because they don’t think we love games as much as they supposedly do, nor do they think we haven’t been doing that since forever, and now it’s just so much easier for anyone to do.
So, they tell us to “make our own games” if we don’t like theirs, and then we do, and they pitch a fit that people are even paying attention to them or saying they’re actually good. We research, we make our own games, we do everything they tell us to do, and we still aren’t valid to them.
And we never fucking will be, because it’s never been about any of their pitiful excuses. It’s always been about shutting us out by any means necessary.
No matter how they dress it up with their bullshit about “ethics”, it’s always been about exclusion of the “undesirables” for GG. They just don’t want our “kind” here, and by that they mean anyone who isn’t a cishet white dude or isn’t okay with gaming being a “male space” for cishet white dudes.
The big issue with the “stop complaining and make your own games/shows/books/comics” rhetoric is that it’s unwinnable by design.
When someone’s not a content creator, but a critic, researcher or even just a fan casually sharing their opinion, the Status Quo Warriors would shut them down for “doing nothing” or “just whining” or “not appreciating” the media as they already are.
If someone is a content creator, the Status Quo Warriors would accuse their work of all the above “political agendas” (not realizing every creative work is political by nature) and blow every minute problem the work might have out of proportion.
And then they have the audacity to say that it’s the critics who are never satisfied.
“Go make your own thing” is really yet another variation of making up arbitrary conditions to prevent status quo-upholding media from being critiqued.
~Ozzie