The Natural Evolution of Games (Everything)

Adam is still uh... Adam. Flip a coin and spin the the offensive wheel. See what comes up. Throw that out. I'm not saying it's true, but as long as we're all getting offended over how reality is represented in pixels, we might as well go to the irrational extreme.

I am all for the natural evolution of a game and a gaming genre. But I will strongly resist the idea of change for the sake of making change in order to appease any outside special interest groups, whatever the change or whomever the group may be.

I'm all for fighting special interests. Except they're damn hard to define! Are gays a special interest? Women? Men who get a sex change to become women? People who add dried fruit to their otherwise bland cereal? People who eat generic-brand bland cereal? Cereal manufacturers? At this rate we're all going to end up as randomly associated individuals who do not easily fit into any category.

Women are a special interest and for countless years they've been manipulating society to achieve their special ends. Did you know that this special interest group was once held in check? Once upon a time they couldn't vote, so they couldn't advance their radical feminist agenda. Then the first domino fell and next thing they could vote. Before long it was illegal to beat them and next thing we knew rape was being blamed on men rather than on what was clearly a scarlet woman just asking for it.

For any group which is down, politely asking to be equal or waiting to become equal will not be enough. When women in all their feminist plotting gained the right to vote it came not from waking up one morning and seeing that the world had evolved. Instead they spent years advocating, fighting, pushing. Some gave up. Some claimed that women shouldn't act that way, that voting was bad, that rewriting voting laws was too dramatic.

Do I appear to be equating gaming and voting? That is intentional. As we all go deeper into virtual worlds and as they become more important (though still secondary to the real), representation in those worlds matters more. Games, as all media, are both mirrors and projectors. They reflect society and they shape society. So while we create a fantasy of a world of strong men and emotional princesses needing rescue, the game says back that our fantasy should be a world of strong men and emotional princesses. When games act as escape they also attempt to replicate some ideal aspects of a world. We like that our characters do not starve and likely would not enjoy if we needed to log in a couple times a day to feed them. The ideal world doesn't have so much daily maintenance and it doesn't have some uppity bitch getting out of line telling me what to do when I am the man here and I will fucking do what I want even if that means killing someone! See that last bit is a slightly dangerous ideal.

Why do minority groups so often seem to be striving to be more equal, in the sense of "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others"? Because that's the only way to become equal. It sound paradoxical, but consider this analogy: if you start a race running slower than someone else, can you ever catch up by running at the same speed? This isn't the end solution though. Going faster may cause the other person to speed up as well, notice all the backlash to affirmative action? Once caught up, continuing at the accelerated pace will only cause the original bad situation to reverse, which is acceptable, so there must be a way to measure equality and even out the pace when it is reached.

We may be close to that point, as far as women are concerned, in the Western world. There is still a significant gap, but it is closing very quickly, though obviously that rate is too slow for anyone stuck on the losing end of it. The current economy seems to favor women as men lose physical jobs while women are actually going to college, and graduating, more than men. So in some areas the imbalance has flipped, and so it may be necessary to stop or even reverse the trend. But overall women are still behind. Maybe at this point time will fix that 'soon enough' if we leave things alone.

But what about those devious deviant fags and their radical gay lifestyle agenda? Let me put it this way: a parliamentary figure in Uganda is pushing a law that would impose the death penalty for homosexuality, and he's supported by many conservatives in the US, though they claim that the death penalty is a bit much, preferring the clearly reasonable approach of imprisonment and conversion.

Games shouldn't be developed just to represent this or that group, but the developers should ask themselves what sort of world they are creating, what that world reflects, and what it teaches.