amok: If anything, the "progressive" camp is against censorship and bans, as many of their topics are banned in many places. AFAIK they where advocating diverse games, topics and target audiences, not restriction. having more divers representation and whatnots, do not mean that
all games must have it. they are critical of lack of diversity, yes, and wants more, but that does not mean that all games must have. I have not seen a single person saying so. Making games for "non-gamers" as well, does not mean that all games have to be so.
Honestly I am not 100% convinced that when peoples complains about the lack of people of color in "Witcher 3" or in "Kingdom Come : Deliverance" that's because they want "
others" games to feature more diversity; or when they complain about female character outfit or story role in game X, Y or Z that's because they
another, totally new game, with characters meeting their expectations....
I think that's the root of the problem, if it was really only peoples asking for original, more diverse, games for a more diverse audience, I doubt that, apart from a minority, most peoples would mind.
The problem is that most of the time that's not the case, or at least that's how it is perceived; when you have articles after articles attacking a game or a franchise for it's lack of "diversity", it's lack of female characters, etc... it's hard to convince peoples, especially fan of said franchise, that's it's not an attack on something they enjoy, that it is not peoples asking for an existing game/story to be altered to meet their "requirements".
And the fact that at the same time in other media, we have multiples, sometime beloved, franchises rebooted or continued with more "diversity" oriented casts replacing the original one, with of course the press praising said new version while insulting anybody daring to criticize it, it doesn't help defuse the situation.
Concerning your "
call for censorship" part, I don't know if you are actually serious or just jesting with LootHunter; but I think it's a little too simplistic and that's actually why I consider today climate to be more dangerous for gaming than what happened during the Jack Thomson era.
You don't need to ask for outright ban, or censorship laws when you can instead simply use peer pressure to have developers stop making things you dislike: "
We don't ask for this type of games to be banned; we will just shame the developers until they stop doing them"
We live in a time when somebody can be fired for a joke he made 10 years ago, where companies needs to make public excuses because they posted a seemly innocent picture (and no I am not talking about Gog Postal Gif in particular), a joke or worse because they liked the wrong tweet.
So if altering characters outfit, changing the main character gender, sexuality, skin color, or even altering the story or gameplay to remove any potentially "problematic" sections, can help them avoid the usual suspects from screaming at them on Twitter or making billions of articles calling them all sort of 'ism, 'ist or 'phobe words, they will probably decide to do it. (Or be "
gently suggested" by their publisher to do so)
For examples if you take the self-censorship in Pillars of the Earth or the new DoA games replacing the jiggling physics with more blood and bruises, did those changes really happens because the devs "
wanted" to do them for purely artistic reasons or did they happen because they were afraid of being called evil sexists misogynist pigs on Twitter and on gaming sites ?
You might call that conspiracy theory and maybe it is, but honestly I am personally convinced that five years ago neither of those changes would have occurred and I am worried about what other changes we might see in the future.
