Sophia Narwitz
is a writer and journalist from the US. Outside of her work on RT, she is a primary writer for Colin Moriarty's Side Quest content, and she manages her own YouTube channel. Follow her on Twitter
@SophNar0747
8 Dec, 2020 19:28
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Cyberpunk 2077 — Official Gameplay Trailer © YouTube; (insets) Screenshots from cbr.com, thegamer.com, polygon.com
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The hotly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 has become a hotbed of gender politicking controversy, but with all of it forced by a gaming media more focused on activism than anything else, it’s time for gamers to push back.
For well over two years now, activists disguised as journalists have been heaping unjust criticism on Polish game development studio, CD Projekt Red. Most well known for the universally beloved Witcher 3, a title which itself was thrown into non-troversy when critics complained that it didn’t feature enough black people, the dev team has constantly fallen under the ire of so called ‘jactivists’ for perceived social justice sleights. The most prevalent of which are baseless accusations of transphobia.
This all began in 2018 when the CDPR Twitter account jokingly replied to someone by asking if they had just assumed their gender. Within no time at all, the press latched on and cried about how the joke was harmful. To anyone paying close attention as it all went down, it was obviously nothing more than a lame attempt to push an agenda. A bullying tactic of sorts as it wasn’t a coincidence that months prior the very same members of the media were losing their minds over the lack of nonbinary gender options in the game that was still ultimately over two years away.
Fast-forward to this week where reviews of the game are finally coming out, and the media’s petulant cry-bullies are once again using their platforms to throw a tantrum.
An op-ed on website TheGamer.com writes that Cyberpunk 2077 will lead to trans people getting killed. Comic Book Resource echoes the sentiment by saying it’s creating an atmosphere of violence toward the trans community. Meanwhile, actual reviews of the game aren’t much better with Gamespot, Vice, the Verge, Polygon, RPG Site, the Washington Post, and others all lamenting how the game handles trans people.
The grievances bring up a lack of nonbinary pronoun options, a lack of significant trans characters, and a lack of trans politicizing. That last point being particularly eye-opening as Kotaku straight up complains that it doesn’t feel as if the developers want to specifically address queerness and transness. A blatant admittance that what the gaming press seeks is affirmative propaganda. They want their games to be vessels for promoting their activist agendas, and not you know, what the consumer seeks, a good game.
Even the Polygon review which spends the first seven paragraphs focusing on trans issues still somehow manages to spin the presentation of a trans flag within the game as a bad thing.
Representation, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Being that I’m a tranny myself, I take issue with all of this. There is no single entity more significantly harmful to the widespread acceptance of trans people than the overly woke crowd. Put me in a room with one woke person and nine actual bigots, and I guarantee you, if that single woke person has access to Twitter, then they’re doing more widespread harm to people like me than whatever insults the other nine may levy my way.
This never ending cycle of outrage only serves to make trans people look mentally ill. It is further unaided by the fact that any and everything is enough to get a person labeled a bigot. It is peak insanity, and it is emblematic of a group of self made victims who would rather burn bridges than build them. Everything they do, the nonstop toxicity and whining and anger only pushes potential allies away. And I honestly can’t blame normal people for up and walking away. I wouldn’t want to associate with the people I’m lumped in by default with, how can I possibly expect others to.
Back to the Cyberpunk issue at hand, none of the anger stands up to scrutiny. It is a mix of entitlement and warped world views to the extreme. No game owes anybody socio-political affirmation, and we now have a gaming press that doesn’t view titles based on the merits of being a good game, but instead on whether it contains a set amount of activism. And if a game doesn’t meet a set leftist quota, they have proven time and time again that they will trash it unless it conforms.
These thrashings don’t even make logical sense. Consider a fake advertisement in 2077. It depicts a woman with a bulging penis under her leotard promoting a drink. It is being painted as transphobic because it
“fetishizes” trans people, but it is actually a depiction of peak equality. Open your eyes and take a look at the billboards and adverts that surround us. Men and women are constantly sexualized and objectified in order to sell products, and so in a future where a woman can proudly show off her big dick energy, that clearly means society is accepting of such people. That is not transphobia, that is normalization.
But the ‘problem’ with normalization is that it means victim status goes bye-bye, and the current mainstream trans community thrives off of being victims. They don’t want equal treatment, they want special treatment. It’s why they are reviving decades old debunked claims that video games lead to violence. They have not a care in the world for rational thought. They would rather just be angry. They would rather just be emotional. Because emotions bring attention, no different than a child crying in a store aisle because mommy said “no” to buying them a 100 dollar toy.
As for the gaming press, they are using this predilection for attention to push very far left ideals. They are propaganda machines, pure and simple. Toe the ideological line, or get smeared. They are running an operation meant to scare game developers into giving them what they want. Pay attention to how they weaponize their platforms.
Thankfully for CDPR’s sake, Cyberpunk is so big a game the press couldn’t do much damage no matter how hard they tried, but consider smaller developers who can’t survive without the aid of the press.
This is where it is time for gamers to step up. Push back against all of this. That’s not to suggest you buy bad games or promote ones which carry little worth, but for those titles which do make for a good time, promote, buy, and discuss them. Show solidarity with studios that the media inaccurately paints as villains. It is time to strip them of their influence. Let all these sites crush themselves under the weight of their own hubris.
It is frankly time to kill the cancer, because the longer it festers, the more this medium will rot.
