This isn’t right either. Inserting politics into anything serves that that up for discourse, and getting people discussing and thinking critically about a topic is a fantastic achievement for any medium that delves into the subject.

It’s when partisan messages about politics are inserted into a game that poses problems. Instead, video games should explore as many takes on an issue as capable in service to the story being told. Wow, it’s terrible that the horned people are aholes to the perfectly normal looking people, but how did that come to be? Is there any historical precedent where the shoe was on the other foot? I think of Jews and how 70 years ago they were facing extermination at the hands of Germans find themselves now in the position of the exterminator. How did that happen? That’s great material for exploring politics in games, to me.

Games have a large male audience and many of those males are white. When new games focus on protagonists and issues that do not resonate with white males, this aggravates the audience and it only takes a few vocal few to whip the group into toxic online behavior.

Metaphor is set in a fantasy world populated by Japanese. The characters may seem to be of a multiracial society, but it’s understood that this is not a western game but an eastern one through a western lens. It could have the most radical political discourse but as players we quietly accept that this is a foreign story and not one that reflects on western issues and prejudices.

…for maybe two months. Dude is laughing his ass off.

If it’s worth playing, reward them by purchasing not pirating.

He’s literally running for his freedom. If he loses, he could be jailed.

Thanks. I was wondering—isn’t this backwards. It is! It’s backwards as all get out.

But is it filled with the people that many want to follow and interact with? Twitter was popular for this reason, and people will tolerate being advertised to and sold on if it recreates that experience.

I had brief conversations on Twitter with Ice-T and John Carmack. Twitter’s nature enabled that remarkable connection. Could it happen on Mastodon? Absolutely, but those celebrities and geniuses need to embrace it. If it’s Bluesky, it’s better than X if only for a time.