#oneaday Day 161: Too Much Offense

Representation in video games is a hot topic these days. It's absolutely great that more and more games are providing examples of different types of leading characters — different genders, races and sexualities are all getting increasing amounts of positive representation, particularly in the indie sphere and productions from smaller developers and publishers (including Japanese outfits) — though of course there's still further steps that could be taken.

However, one unfortunate side-effect of this growing trend for representation is the increasing likelihood that someone is going to get offended about something, and use the idea of representation as a crutch to prop up their argument. Today it is the turn of Chris Plante from Polygon, who is upset that the mutants in Rage 2 have cleft lips, suggesting that the game and its developers are indirectly calling him a freak because of this particular design choice.

I get the idea of his argument, but this feels like yet another example of just getting offended for the sake of being offended. He even notes in his article that Bethesda have been making a point of making one of these characters in particular something of a "mascot" character for Rage 2, even going so far as to include a figure of him in the special edition of the game. This is a bit of a confused message; are these mutants "freaks" (Plante's words) or fondly regarded mascots along the lines of Borderlands' Claptrap (also Plante's words)?

On a related note, Mike Fahey of Kotaku (a man who, let's not forget, has a tattoo of Etna from Disgaea) got upset about current Cover Game Our World is Ended recently because there's a middle school-age character in there who he thinks is unreasonably sexualised.

What he failed to point out in his pearl-clutching was that the character in question is a child genius, and thus much of the interesting humour and dialogue surrounding her comes from the juxtaposition between her maturity and intelligence in some regards, and her utter childishness in others, as well as the fact that prior to her first on-screen appearance — she's only heard through voice chat in the game's early hours — she deliberately misrepresents herself as someone that she isn't. The game's characters also make a point of repeatedly pointing out that if you find her in any way sexy or want to do anything obscene to her, you would get arrested, beaten up or worse.

And let's not even get into the "depiction is not endorsement" angle. That's so obvious it should go without saying at this point.

We've been through this before; there's one reason and one reason only that these outrage-bait articles get published: hateclicks. I don't even know (or really care) if these writers are actually offended over the things they're writing about; what I do know is that they're cynically using the Internet's habit of dogpiling anything vaguely "wrongthink" in order to secure clicks and advertising revenue for themselves. Even if they just attract someone to make an angry comment on these articles, they've already got your click; it doesn't matter if you agree with them or not.

Offense for the sake of offense hurts real representation, because it makes people more cynical and less likely to listen when something that actually needs drawing attention to or criticising comes up. It's "boy who cried 'wolf!'" syndrome, and it's getting to a point where it's really holding us back from meaningful and interesting conversations.