That's IMO a very limited view on art...What is the political message of Super Mario Bros? Or Race the Sun?

I really don't know what you're talking about. Some people use ideological symbolism like "we have a trans character" in the same way others use boobs as "fan service" to the "young male gamer" - to cash in on that. It's just cheap, but the latter is at least entertaining for some...

Narrow minded people can be found on any side of the spectrum, and even the Nazis created impressive (if often terrifying and sometimes inhuman) art.

For instance? IMO esp. AAA games are most often about minimizing the risk - they are rather expensive. Just like every Netflix production must have a "diverse" cast (fitting the setting or not), just so nobody can complain they'd be "racist". It's rather funny that in signalling "We're avoiding stereotypes!" the whole new stereotype of the "diverse cast" has been created, sometimes bordering on it's own caricature.
And it's the same with games (which, at least in the fantasy genre, always have been more diverse than RL) - you now have to have your gay character, your trans character - which most of the time are "characters" about as deep as cardboard standups, just the devs can say "look at us, we're so tolerant and progressive!". It's just cheap and disgusting.
Having a trans person as the main character would open up so many opportunities for a "quest for identity", the struggle to find out where to belong that most of us know from some point in our lives, it's just sad to see potential like that wasted.

PS: I also don't think that "war is bad" or "oppression is bad" are "very broad political subjects".

The Last of Us - a game that focuses heavily on story-telling - already had gay characters before the sequel (and portrayed as humans, neither good nor bad), so I don't know why anyone having a problem with sexual identity being part of a story would even take interest in the game. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that many who get upset about it don't even own a Playstation.

The themes are not the issue, bad writing is.

but..... a youtube video told me to be angry....

Depends on the reviewer,

super intelligent, pompous poets, the normal college kid, the "this was my own hilarious or tense experience....

they all have been there, and still are

when younger i enjoyed the british version of pc gamer a lot, so much they became my standard for several years, beats looking at programs where you see so called game kings talk about console releases...

these days i follow on and off the reviews from rock paper shotgun and wargamer/strategy gamer. nothing outside those 2(3)

Good points, not hard to agree there. So yeah, my NPC can be transgender or a black lesbian woman or a gay horse, but please don't try to convince me that horses are better than white meat eating hetero men.

I didn't mind playing a black character in e.g. GTA San Andreas because the setting made it relevant and believable. It didn't even occur to me that for diversity the game should have allowed me to play also as a white hetero man. Same with Mirror's Edge, I didn't mind playing an Asian chick in it even though in real life I am not one.

The problem is it is obvious that in games and other media they are actively trying to sway people's leanings via seemingly "harmless" entertainment filled with their own messaging.

If they gave each side a balanced take and didn't demonize one side and promote just one, or made it more about entertainment(Bioshock series) than pushing a message more of us would likely be ok with it.

(i.e. it's not what message is being pushed.....it could be of any leaning....but the fact that they are trying to promote such messaging via entertainment media & also trying to influence people that way)

Also as for your "provoking nerds" comment....the problem(as I see it) is that some don't just make their own media with said messages, but they & their supporters shame and pressure other devs to cut content or change things to suit their sensibilities and leanings as well.

Heck, many games like Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior(classic) can't even be made as they were before because it might offend someone or give the devs bad PR....this then limits the dev's creativity and impacts the games made as well.

I am really curious as to what happened to change the way we told stories before the start of the past decade. Even story-driven games like CRPGs from back in the day were so excited about just getting you the player out of your real house and into a new fantastical place, not necessarily just telling you a story.

Thief is kind of about Garrett, but it’s actually about putting you in weird situations through the eyes of Garrett. Baldur’s Gate was about Bhaal’s descendants, but it was actually about having you walk through forests and encountering people and situations, and uncovering mysteries on your own.

Now the standard story is just a story about someone. Someone who might represent the developer, or someone who just acts as a mouthpiece for the developer. You just follow their story blindly, maybe get a decision or two, and ... It’s just a little sad. It’s as though we lost the fun in fantasizing about completely different worlds and can’t help but be stuck in the real world.

In that game it wasn't so obviously pushed.....more a minor footnote, really.

In the new game supposedly white christian males bad, lgbt characters good.

Heck, in Modern Warfare 2, the "Globalism good, nationalism bad" message was so blatant they even posted such as quotes during level loads.

Not sure if this an utterly brilliant satire post on how your average self proclaimed 'apolitical/centrist'[but actually leaning hard right on every single issue]epic GAMER is. Couple of things:
1)No artist/entertainer is obligated to ever treat every side the same(and they never ever are the same anyway).
2)A game merely having a character/plot/setting/themes connected to politics is not the same as a 'message'.
3.)You treat Duke Nukem/Shadow Warrior as games that coudn't exist anymore. Except Un-PC humor driven,edgy games are made all the time. Last I checked GTA V was like the second best selling game of all time.

I could go on and on but your peoples points are all the same. Based on hyperbole,lies and treating games as some product that should be personally tailored for you and no one else.

Who decides if it's virtues signalling? Where do you draw the line between "this excellent story is told equally to men or women, gender regardless, independent of race or background" to "they added a token black gay woman to the story"?

Gone Home is a good example of this. A heartwarming story about a lesbian/bi pair, that benefitted from the fact it was LGBQT - arguably wouldn't exist or be as good if you removed that aspect from it.

What happens? Applauded rightfully so for its storytelling by critics and some minority of gamers who could care less about politics, amongst the majority of them it becomes a beacon of prejudice, bigotry and hatred against minorities. Literally the same discussion as here - "Why did they have to make the characters gay???" "They're pushing an agenda!!"

Gone Home is a clear cut example of this, but for most cases the lines cannot be drawn so easily. How many is too many black guys in a video game? What about lesbians? When does an entertainment good start sending out 'progressive messages based on ideology'?

If you leave it up to the haters and bigots, it seems too many means like, at all. We should all go back to period when vidya games and entertainment goods catered to the dominant 'class' in society - white straight male. Women should be objectified, their boobs to hip ratio increased 500%, LGBQT people shouldn't even be in stories, and race minorities shouldn't be equal. Society was like this not too long ago, prove me wrong.

The whole point is that people should accept diversity and diverse people as nothing more than, people. No different or special than anyone or anything else. If the character happens to be gay, it shouldn't be expected that they have to have a backstory of how they struggled in their life constantly to get to where they are. It could just be that they are normal people, with nothing to explain or be ashamed about, like if there were a straight white male protagonist.

It's frankly none of anyone's business if the writers decide to tell their stories including diversity in the characters, or not for that matter. If anything, having diversity relates to *more* people experiencing the entertainment good in a globalised world.

Actually, Gone Home story is far from heart warming as if you actually pay attention to the relationship of the two girls in question, it's extremely controlling buy one of them. There is a whole diary entry when the main characters sister describes how here girlfriend forces herself on her while she was asleep. Change her into a guy and we would have a rape scenario.

Also, Gone Home got shit for being a basic walking simulator that was praised to the high heavens by the progressive gaming press ONLY because the lesbian relationship.

^ That's exactly what I mean, people.

They shouldn't push one side over the other to sell their message, though.....or if they do they should have to put a warning on the box or do something similar, imo.

Especially as they are marketing such to the easily influenced(teens/etc) in some cases.

True, but the message in some games is so obvious it couldn't be more obvious unless they tied it to a brick and tossed it at the player's head.

Stuff still gets cut from them, or counter messages added in, to appease those who might shame the devs/etc and cause a stir online.

=========================== Could someone call Reset Era and tell them one of their own wandered from the pack? Thanks, y'all.

It's up to the recipient to decide of course - in the end. But to me - and I think many more people - it often feels forced, artificial, seeing the same PoC or nowadays also homosexual character type "shoved" into games, TV shows or movies. Like I wrote - the "diverse team" has become a caricature. In the times of Star Trek Classic the diversity actually meant something. It was a revolution. TNG was less obvious, playing it's humanist approach more subtle (and often brilliantly) through the stories. DS9 brought a black captain, Voyager a female one (and a black Vulcan, which makes no sense, only for signalling "black people can also be brilliant minds" - which nobody doubted in the first place - and is is exactly what I mean). Virtue signalling is explicitely flagging characters as "different" - and doing nothing with it. Making a big deal of having a black person, a latino/a, and someone of Asian origin, a gay person, a trans person on the team, wether it makes sense or not - and then doing nothing with it.
If you want for instance a gay person on a team IMO you can do it in two ways: Either it turns out some day they are gay, and it's no big deal, or you confront it, make a story out of it. In the first case you create a reality how it should be. Being gay is perfectly normal. Nothing to see, move along. The other way you can tell of the difficulties minorities deal with.
But "we have a gay character" in large letters - and then not making it count in some way, that's Chechov's gun not firing. It's pure marketing, and a disservice to the minorities you claim to represent.
Worse - in shows like The Witcher the "Netflix-Diversity-Formula" is IMO actually more harmful than doing good. A world, which is obviously based on a xenophobic medieval Europe (which is actually one of the points of the books and (in lesser degrees) the games, is suddenly populated by wild mix of white, Asian, Latin and black people living (more or less) happily together. People notice that, and many feel the "diversity thing" is shoved down their throat, antagonizing them to the very idea that nowadays how someone looks should be no big deal. On the contrary - where I see simply people, no matter what colour or sexual preference, those "virtue signallers" point at all the differences, make them stand out and scream in my ear "you have to be fine with that". Yes, I am, have been since before you were even born, jerk.

I seriously have to play it... I even have it installed. You know - backlog.

I agree completely. People were fine with Lara Croft. Many would have been fine with a black Lara Croft (from the beginning, not reconned of course) I'm sure. Probably even a black gay Lara Croft. *shrug*
But then don't make a big fuss about it. But of course if the main character of a game is advertised as special in some way (like the mentioned trans character in Last uf Us 2, mentioned above) you really need to do something with that. Or leave it out. Think if the first thing you know about your character is they had superpowers. Or cancer. And then this would never again come up.

It's the business of the recipients to judge what the writers put out. In the end, they pay for it. Most recipients react rather badly to preaching, but most love a thrilling story. So it's the writers' job to earn their money and deliver. And if they want to make people relate to diversity in a good way, they sound tell good and meaningful stories about it.