Assassin’s Creed, Concord: has video games really become politicized?

It’s difficult to be interested in video games without having heard about the regular attacks including Assassin’s Creed Shadows objects against the inclusion of Yasuke (one of the two main playable characters). Although the samurai is a historical figure who would (obviously) have been in the service of the daimyō Oda Nobunagasome players accuse Ubisoft of having included it to please pro-social justice activists to the detriment of a historical reality, with which the series has never claimed to want to stick perfectly.

Very recently, some also complained about the announcement of Ghost of Yotei whose heroine is Atsu, a new protagonist accused of replacing Jin Sakai, hero of the first game, just to comply with feminist demands. All this went as far as attacks directly addressed to Atsu’s interpreter, Erica Ishii, who has never hidden her support for LGBT causes and considers herself genderfluid. These accusations are quite recent and are a reaction to the rise of feminist movements and questions about the representation of minorities in our media.whether games, films or series. From this arose long and arduous debates which today aim to determine whether a game is “woke” or not as soon as a minority (from the West’s point of view) or a female character is highlighted.

The term “woke” emerged in the 2010s from American demonstrations to define the fact of being “aware” of the problems of social justice affecting our societies.. The cause? The over-representation of black Americans in murder statistics by police intervention, without any other statistic being able to justify such a disproportion. Over the years, this term has been taken up by opponents of social justice policies, becoming a catch-all term for any initiative where sexual, ethnic (or other) minorities are represented.

Suicide Squad : Kill the Justice League et Concord have both been pointed to as evidence that a supposed “excess of representation” would prevent a game from being successfuleven though their respective failures were primarily attributable to creative decisions (Suicide Squad was a co-op looter shooter where players were hoping for a new Batman Arkham, Concord was a hero shooter, a particularly competitive genre and always dominated by Overwatch). Conversely, games such as Black Myth Wukong et Space Marine II have been praised as examples of “anti-woke” works, this even though their successes are independent of these questions. After rejoicing that “Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2 will not have female Space Marines”, a player on the Steam forums concludes: “This is not a game for woke people”. A celebration of Space Marine IIconsidered here as a sort of spearhead of opposition to “the politicization of video games”, all the stranger when we know that the universe of Warhammer 40K deliberately places at its center a theocratic and xenophobic empireone of whose most powerful institutions is literally a religious inquisition. The moral and political deterioration of the Imperium of Man is one of the main narrative elements necessary to understand this universe and what it tells..

Suicide Squad is perhaps a particularly telling example of the agitation surrounding this question since it was the subject of a particularly poor reception even before its release. Suicide Squad : Kill the Justice League was Rocksteady’s first production after the Batman Arkham Knight of 2015, after rumors circulated about the cancellation of a Superman game as well as a sequel to the saga Batman Arkhamnot to mention the players’ wait for the return of Rocksteady on a single-player game, if possible in the universe that made their reputation. The announcement of the game via a 100% CGI trailer in 2020 met with a doubtful public whose doubts quickly turned into discontent when they learned that Suicide Squad : Kill the Justice League was designed as a cooperative looter shooter in addition to being a service game. The result of all this was a game sold at €70-80, announcing even before its release that it would ask players to checkout again.while being neither particularly expected nor particularly helped by a marketing campaign which had failed to convince many people. Needless to say, Rocksteady’s game already seemed doomed to fail. However, a section of the public found itself singling out the company Sweet Baby Inc. as the catalyst for the failure of the game, accused of having forceps included LBGT characters and ethnic minorities, pointing out the presence of LGBT flags and the change in Deadshot’s skin colorwhite character in theArkham Origins of Warner Bros. Montreal went black in the Rocksteady title, although it was also black in the films. However, Sweet Baby Inc. is only a subcontractor whose work on Kill the Justice League stopped at writing minor dialogue, Kotaku even reports that the company helped write the dialogue “long after the story was written”.

It is particularly blatant that the question of this “politicization” only concerns social issuesthose of representation of women and ethnic minorities in particular. Because if politics is really the subject, he is a creator whose name has become famous even beyond video games thanks to his use of political and mature themes in his works: Hideo Kojima. Sa series phare, Metal Gear Solidis widely considered one of the few video game works to deal seriously with war, the violence inherent in it, the soldiers who are stuck in this cycle of violence, the war economy and even the military complex. -industrial: so many themes which were quite rare in a video game (at their respective times) and which, in a sense, have remained so since. In 2012, Spec Ops : The Line recounted the horrors of war and the moral perdition of soldiers stuck in a fictional conflict in Dubai, at a time when the United States was still actively engaged in Afghanistan ; GTA IV et V attempted a critique of the American dream and American society as a whole, from its social inequalities to the shenanigans of its secret services; even the Call of Duty of Activision, including Modern Warfare (since 2007) and Black Ops (since 2010), have stories that revolve entirely around geopolitical conflicts and American intelligence attempting to foil terrorist plots. That is to say, if we are strict, video games have never really avoided the political questionmaking recent reviews on Suicide Squad or Concord all the more irrelevant.

There are some who defend the idea that recent years have seen an acceleration in the politicization of video games, pointing to the resurgence of characters from various minorities as evidence of pressure exerted on or by developers to include by force a representation deemed unnecessary. These critics deliberately ignore the fact that video game heroes have long been predominantly white men whose presence was sometimes forced on studios by marketing departments who believed that games featuring a woman and/or a person of color minimized their chances of success. These searches for increased representation are in no way intended to make men or Caucasians invisible but simply to allow developers to include whoever they want in their game (including a white man).

We must not forget that every work is the vector of a certain vision of the world, whether conscious or not. In this sense, video games have long mainly created worlds centered around a white man, and in which minorities (ethnic and sexual) were marginal, relegated to secondary roles, when they had the chance to be represented. Furthermore, debates surrounding the representation of women very regularly end up having particularly sexist overtones, where female characters are judged based on what these players perceive as an attractive body or not, then evaluating the quality of said female character on her ability to be or not be attractive. Even Aloy, the heroine of the games Horizon by Guerrilla Games, was the subject of comments from players accusing the heroine of being “too masculine”, testifying to a fixed idea turned into obsession.

Finally, there are some players who ask video games to maintain a neutral position on political issues, these players sometimes not realizing that their voices are being exploited by people who have very strong opinions and definitely politically positioned on these questions. The fight then led only defends the interests of a group of activists with an anti-progressive ideology who use the support of their audience to defend their personal vision of what society should be and represent : this is obviously a deeply political position.

Since Gamergate in the mid-2010s, a part of the debate surrounding video games has been appropriated by far-right movements around the world, claiming to be fighting a “culture war” against a poorly defined “wokism”. defined. Be sure that the question of the existence of minorities in fiction is never very far from that of their right to exist in the public spacein addition to constructing a narrow vision of the world in which minorities must be on the margins and women judged according to their desirability. As the video game industry diversifies, it is consistent to see the stories carried by this industry also diversify. This diversification is in no way an attack but rather the possibility of finding works in which everyone can feel represented, existing. There is value in variety and what previously existed is not intended to disappear, only its over-representation is called into question. White protagonists and female characters with model physique will undoubtedly continue to exist, they will simply no longer be the default setting by which the industry designs the individuals that populate its creations.