When you take offense to people arguing that you want to try and force game devs to change, it's because your Witcher 3 race piece leaned unabashedly towards one side of this question:
"Do you think they have a obligation to add diversity to their media, even if it never existed in the source material?"
When you write an entire piece in favor of developers being obligated to add diversity, regardless of the source material, people are naturally going to assume that's what you want them to be.
If you stop the whole "When I hear this argument, it sounds like they're being racist", which you so clearly did in your Witcher 3 race piece, it'll be much more fun debating with you. But at least you didn't go and call a world in which women can be business owners, fighters, political leaders or the most powerful beings in the world "oppressively misogynistic".
And I'd like to point out that while a review or opinion piece that gets hundreds or thousands of people to complain to companies and publishers might not force a game company to change, Animal Crossing in no way "forced" you to worry about your skin color for half an hour every day:
"When a game made me spend a half hour of my real time every day just to keep my skin color on point, I was told that, no no, of course games have a problem with race, but why did I have to go after Animal Crossing?"
How on God's green Earth did that game in any way force you to spend that much time on your skin color? Did the game stop working if you didn't? Or was this an instance of you wanting the game to portray a specific cultural value that it didn't, which you then made the game's responsibility?
But I feel you're missing a very key ingredient in critic influence over game devs: Metacritic. This is where critics can directly impact a developer, positively or negatively. We've all heard how some devs have bonuses tied directly to metacritic scores, and if enough critics take a game they would normally have give, say 8/10, but then score it 6/10 because "not enough women or POC", they you are forcing the devs to include those things next time. And not because the devs want to, but to avoid losing parts of their paycheck. You critique can do so much more than just hopefully reach the ears of the devs. In the end, a developer needs to make money to put food on their tables. And if they suddenly get paid less because a bunch of critics decided to utilize their influence on Metacritic, we've moved beyond critics being completely unable to force developers to do certain things.
And from what we learned from the whole Paid Skyrim Mods, it cost Valve $1,000,000 to process the amount of angry feedback. And if enough critics garner enough support for complaining to a developer, and that developer gets a flood of angry feedback based on certain e.g. reviews, then the critics have once again asserted very notable influence. Much more beyond just hoping for the best.
Critics are not these uninfluential dreamers anymore. With social media and Metacritic, critics hold so much potential power and influence.
"Those of us who write about things like race, gender, class, and sexuality in games do so because we fucking love games."
Now I'm curious: When was the last time a critic wrote about class in games? When was the last piece talking about e.g. the importance of making poor people feel represented? What problems to video games have with class exactly?
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