Originally posted by IFIYGD:

It's always been there.

Tend to agree with this; the classical Greek philosophers used to publish real burns against each other that are not too dissimilar to the Red/Blue/Green nonsense that we see today.

This thread makes me laugh. Pretending "woke" in media was new. Like Star Trek didn't have a woman first officer in the original pilot, a black woman as a bridge officer and the first kiss between black woman and white man on tv back in the 60's.


There have ALWAYS been 'woke' games and media. Mrs Pacman was woke.

I get what you’re trying to ask, but the premise is kind of shaky.

There isn’t a real “starting point” where game developers suddenly adopted an “activist mindset” and stopped caring about players. That idea mixes a lot of different things together: marketing decisions, corporate strategy, cultural themes in storytelling, and modern internet backlash cycles.

Games have always reflected ideology or social themes in some way, long before the internet era. Even early titles had clear messages about war, politics, class, or morality. The difference now is that:

* games are bigger and more mainstream
* development budgets are massive (so publishers play it safer or more marketable)
* social media amplifies disagreements into “culture war” narratives

So what people often label as “activist devs” is usually just:

* writers including contemporary themes in stories
* companies trying to appeal to broader audiences
* or marketing teams making tone-deaf PR decisions

There’s no single “first game” that “introduced it,” because it’s not a feature like QTEs or turrets—it’s more about interpretation and context.

Also, the comparison to a movie “flopping as proof” doesn’t really hold up as a pattern. Commercial success or failure doesn’t cleanly map to whether audiences “accepted” a message; there are tons of high and low performing games across all kinds of themes.

If you want a more grounded way to look at it, a better question might be:

> “When did big publishers start paying more attention to cultural messaging and audience segmentation in marketing and storytelling?”

That shift is mostly tied to the late 2000s–2010s era of live-service games, global markets, and social media feedback loops—not a single title or “activist origin point.”

There’s stuff to be discussed but the foundation for dialogue needs to be carefully constructed.

This question’s wording is too loaded with poisonous buzz and tribal triggers. We can see that it will go nowhere productive.

I don't think much has really changed over the years. Game devs have always done what game devs have wanted to. They were always pushing the envelope. Remember, there was a time when DOOM was vilified as teaching children about satanism and devil worship. ESRB wanted to give it a M rating. That was back in the early 90s.

Now as the devs keep pushing social norms, we still see the same kind of backlash. It's just more nuanced now and with a larger number of voices. Back in the 90s there was no social media mega-sites like today so any kind of public response was hidden in the depths of BBS and newsgroups. Now they change the shape of Lara Croft's chest and the Tomb Raider fans are having a meltdown on every conceivable site and service, influencers are taking sides, sponsors are distancing themselves from whichever one is the most bad for their social awareness, kotaku, verge, IGN, RPS, all writing articles about it.

So not much is different except for the amplitude of the responses.

Originally posted by rawWwRrr:

I don't think much has really changed over the years.

I think anyone who is interested in this dialogue would benefit themselves to read Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Heresy of the Didactic” to realize just how much things haven’t changed.

https://poets.org/text/heresy-didactic

The difference now, in my opinion, is that the conversation is dominated and led by people who barely understand their own positions, much less their opposition’.

Originally posted by Kai Shan:

Originally posted by The nameless Gamer:

and there's the rather "anti-capitalist" messaging in the Fallout franchise.

Such as?
I do enjoy Fallout (except that the dog won't stay put at home), but I do not see any 'anti-capitalist' progaganda in it. It is dystopian, but I don't see it laying blame on either the USA or Communist China, just stating that it was a war between them that ended the world.

It's mostly in the New Vegas game, which I couldn't play personally. It's second-hand information, to be honest. Someone might argue that the Megaton City quest from FO3 is painting the ruthlessness and money-worship of capitalism in a negative light too. Choosing not to blow up Megaton City is way more rewarding in every way than choosing to do so.

Originally posted by The nameless Gamer:

Originally posted by Kai Shan:

Such as?
I do enjoy Fallout (except that the dog won't stay put at home), but I do not see any 'anti-capitalist' progaganda in it. It is dystopian, but I don't see it laying blame on either the USA or Communist China, just stating that it was a war between them that ended the world.

It's mostly in the New Vegas game, which I couldn't play personally. It's second-hand information, to be honest. Someone might argue that the Megaton City quest from FO3 is painting the ruthlessness and money-worship of capitalism in a negative light too. Choosing not to blow up Megaton City is way more rewarding in every way than choosing to do so.

Epexegetically, Tim Caine rejected that anti-capitalism was the intended message of the work.


Exegetically the primary message of Fallout is contained with the intro and the outro narration by Ron Pearlman.

But it is flawed to look at the whole series as if there is some consistency when so many different people at different times of their lives worked on different iterations. The prominence of anticapitalist messaging (although I’d say it’s superficial tbh) came more once Bethesda acquired the series.

I can't get over the fact you're crying about "activism in gaming" while you have a They Live based PFP.

Originally posted by raidee8shun:

I can't get over the fact you're crying about "activism in gaming" while you have a They Live based PFP.

Consider this concept:

the act of deliberately posting provocative, offensive, or nonsensical content online to bait people into an emotional argument or upset them.

Originally posted by O Ri O:

Originally posted by The nameless Gamer:

It's mostly in the New Vegas game, which I couldn't play personally. It's second-hand information, to be honest. Someone might argue that the Megaton City quest from FO3 is painting the ruthlessness and money-worship of capitalism in a negative light too. Choosing not to blow up Megaton City is way more rewarding in every way than choosing to do so.

Epexegetically, Tim Caine rejected that anti-capitalism was the intended message of the work.


Exegetically the primary message of Fallout is contained with the intro and the outro narration by Ron Pearlman.

But it is flawed to look at the whole series as if there is some consistency when so many different people at different times of their lives worked on different iterations. The prominence of anticapitalist messaging (although I’d say it’s superficial tbh) came more once Bethesda acquired the series.

My bad, it wasn't the most fortunate wording. It is a potential interpretation which some people had. Still, Fallout games tend to generously reward selflessness and altruism, which can be perceived as "activist development" by some users of this forum. Only they're glazing over it since Fallout is an acclaimed franchise some of them grew up with.

Originally posted by The nameless Gamer:

My bad, it wasn't the most fortunate wording. It is a potential interpretation which some people had. Still, Fallout games tend to generously reward selflessness and altruism, which can be perceived as "activist development" by some users of this forum. Only they're glazing over it since Fallout is an acclaimed franchise some of them grew up with.

I really appreciate when that sort of thing can be implemented ludically.

The rarest one I think is satire through pure gameplay. The Bard’s Tale has this as I remember; it has a jump button, but there’s no use for it. Why does it have this? They don’t bring it up as far as I can remember. I interpreted it however as making fun of a Baldur’s Gate game that had a similarly useless jump button because they also referenced that game at the time for the pointless barrels that don’t have anything in them and only exist to be smashed. Might be the same engine even Im not sure.

Originally posted by Kai Shan:

Originally posted by IFIYGD:

It's always been there.

Tend to agree with this; the classical Greek philosophers used to publish real burns against each other that are not too dissimilar to the Red/Blue/Green nonsense that we see today.

Go further back. Cave art, hieroglyphs, petroglyphs- which in modern times we see through a "modern mindset" lens. Some view it as the street art or graffiti of the times. It was art- meant to pass along a story, told by the artist from their perspective, or the tribe's perspective, through the artist(s). Tribal dances- where the dancers played the part of the tribe and their "greater cause" against those dressed as the "evils and enemies" they fought against- again, passing down stories from one generation to the next, imparting their beliefs and what we now call "ideologies" into the dance and the ritual.

It's always been there (here), for as long as humans have been on this planet. It's just delivered at speed now, thanks to the internet, and the anonymity it allows us. It didn't start in the 21st or even the 20th century. Again- it's always been there (here), as long as we have been there (here). And in gaming- it's been around as long as games (any form) have been.

Humans have *always* taken sides.

Originally posted by Kai Shan:

Originally posted by wesnef:

The belief in some terrible "woke"/SJW/"activist" developer thing was truly launched by the Gamergate idiocy.

Just so we are clear; ''GamerGate" was the audience publicising that the industry was bribing gaming journalists to write articles to script. The industry responded by falsely claiming that it was 'right wing incels' crying about feminists; which is totally not what it was. So anyone that subscribes to the gamergate myth is a tool of a corrupt media industry.

Nah, it was true - the whole "ethics in game journalism" narrative was pushed by a bunch of Real Man Gamers to cloak their "how dare wimmins pollute my Holy Gaming Hobby" manufactured outrage and bigotry. Hypocrisy is a core platform of these guys - just like the anti-woke/"cancel culture bad" crowd are all about canceling anything they declare to be woke/DEI/etc. And the "stop shoving your agenda down our throats" guys are shoving their agenda down everyone's throats. (and the "stop the weaponization of the justice department" crowd have been blatantly weaponizing the justice department when it *hadn't* been before, and so on.)

Originally posted by sfnhltb:

Books, Movies and Computer Games made about ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that only look out for themselves and screw everyone else tend to be pretty niche,

But games where the chartacter screws everyone else over based on thin internal justification... Oh ho. That's basically 70% of all comics. and a fair number of novels.

Originally posted by Pepe:

whereas those about the opposite sort of people tend to sell quite broadly.

Because those usually give the character some bland justification.
You know like a rich kid losing his parents going around punching people.

Originally posted by Pepe:

So right wing topics and interests are rarely going to get a huge amount of support in entertainment media, except in parody, and "activists" will always be present because they have a positive tale to tell that most people react well to.

Aren't like 70% of hollywood action movies from the last 30 years right-wing?