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Author Topic: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?  (Read 10679 times)

Battlemaster
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OK picture if you wil,l a RPG comes out and the ads for it say clearly it is "non woke"? The writers declare it non woke. They say they avoided the woke agenda when they wrote it.

How do you think this would affect the game's sales?  Would DTRPG refuse to carry it?  Would woke.net not allow positive reviews? Would enough gamers seek it out just for rejecting wokust attitudes?

I'm just curious if taking an anti woke status would help, harm or kill a game?

And I define "woke" as adhering to a radical extremist left agenda that ignores reality, demands utter and complete submission to it's views, bans long used and commonly accepted words like gypsy because a tiny number of people claim them are offensive and organizes harassment of people refusing to submit to their demands.
Fuck the fascist right and the fascist left.

migo

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Re: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?
« Reply #1 on: April 26, 2022, 12:55:27 PM »
I don't think it would benefit sales. I wouldn't explicitly seek it out because it's not woke.

What would probably work well is if they design a game that they think is fun, and it gets attacked for having some element that the woke object to. And then the designers tell them to fuck off.

VisionStorm

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Re: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?
« Reply #2 on: April 26, 2022, 01:15:39 PM »
If anything that would just draw negative attention to the game, ensuring that it will be cancelled by the woke crowd and probably rejected by DTRPG, while not impressing anybody who's anti-woke, unless the game actually has any redeeming qualities other than being "not woke.

hedgehobbit

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Re: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?
« Reply #3 on: April 26, 2022, 01:17:06 PM »
OK picture if you wil,l a RPG comes out and the ads for it say clearly it is "non woke"? The writers declare it non woke. They say they avoided the woke agenda when they wrote it.

Wokeness is a pretty nebulous term. People say that the new Batman movie wasn't woke when it has all the hallmarks of wokeness. I agree with the other post that it is trivial to signal non-wokeness without specifically saying it.

Besides, if you are selling your product on DTRPG, you've agreed to a minimal level of wokeness already.

Cat the Bounty Smuggler

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Re: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?
« Reply #4 on: April 26, 2022, 01:22:11 PM »
I think your average roleplayer would rather forget the Culture War exists.

Battlemaster
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Re: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?
« Reply #5 on: April 26, 2022, 01:34:11 PM »
OK, say a company didn't openly declare it non wpke, but just used normal pronouns, (he,  she) used long accepted terms like gypsy,  etc,  and if called out on it just shrugged and said 'Wr eont be dictated too by extremists. "

Btw,  on rpggerk a review of the 7e of battlelords made it clear the game was non woke on his review.

https://rpggeek.com/thread/2495585/weaponry-attitude-and-grit-angsty-effetes-need-not
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amacris

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Re: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?
« Reply #6 on: April 26, 2022, 01:40:37 PM »
Can I modify this query slightly? Because woke games don't bill themselves as woke, they just *are* woke. So the counterpoint would be a game that is self-evidently not woke in its setting, though it never talks about that per se. Imagine you discovered *that* game. Would the average RPGSite reader support it for that reason alone? I think the answer is "no". In general our crowd doesn't go out of its way to support product on ideological grounds.  Whereas the other team does.

I get why the individualistic and meritocratic right does what it does; we put quality ahead of ideology. However, taken as a whole, when fighting a culture war, it results in an outcome that's not good for our crowd. Mathematically this has been modeled as "ethnocentric" vs "humanitarian" competition: https://www.jasss.org/16/3/7.html

"Recent agent-based computer simulations suggest that ethnocentrism, often thought to rely on complex social cognition and learning, may have arisen through biological evolution. From a random start, ethnocentric strategies dominate other possible strategies (selfish, traitorous, and humanitarian) based on cooperation or non-cooperation with in-group and out-group agents. Here we show that ethnocentrism eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates. Selfish and traitorous strategies are self-limiting because such agents do not cooperate with agents sharing the same genes. Traitorous strategies fare even worse than selfish ones because traitors are exploited by ethnocentrics across group boundaries in the same manner as humanitarians are, via unreciprocated cooperation. By tracking evolution across time, we find individual differences between evolving worlds in terms of early humanitarian competition with ethnocentrism, including early stages of humanitarian dominance. Our evidence indicates that such variation, in terms of differences between humanitarian and ethnocentric agents, is normally distributed and due to early, rather than later, stochastic differences in immigrant strategies."

Simplified, imagine two groups of consumers, colored red and blue, who encounter games coded red or blue and good or bad.
Red consumers buy games coded good, regardless of color. They prefer red but not enough to buy red bad.
Blue consumers buy games coded blue, regardless of quality. They prefer quality but not enough to buy red good.
Run an agent-based simulation and you'll end up with a market dominated by good blue games. The blue consumer gets everything he wants while the red consumer only gets half of what he wants. That's the state we are in today.

EDIT: While I was writing you said the same thing I was saying about how the game would be presented.

BoxCrayonTales

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Re: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?
« Reply #7 on: April 26, 2022, 01:47:38 PM »
bans long used and commonly accepted words like gypsy
I looked this up. Some Roma find it offensive, some don't. Some people use it as a slur, some don't. Rather than get bogged down in that issue, I'm just gonna use bohemian from now on. So I'll call it the bohemian moth rather than the spongy moth.

FingerRod

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Re: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?
« Reply #8 on: April 26, 2022, 01:58:05 PM »
Can I modify this query slightly? Because woke games don't bill themselves as woke, they just *are* woke. So the counterpoint would be a game that is self-evidently not woke in its setting, though it never talks about that per se. Imagine you discovered *that* game. Would the average RPGSite reader support it for that reason alone? I think the answer is "no". In general our crowd doesn't go out of its way to support product on ideological grounds.  Whereas the other team does.

Maybe generally speaking, yes, but I know some who have gone out of their way to purchase products who avoid being woke. You, Pundit and Raggi all have reputations for creating nice games/supplements. Before I even knew who you were I was modded for talking about one of your products. Out of spite I purchased several of your products and DM’d the mod and told them they provoked the purchase.

I did something similar for Pundit. And when Raggi was getting canceled a couple summers ago, I literally purchased a physical copy of everything on both the EU and USA store for any LOTFP product I did not already own. I never did get my fucking orange bucket btw… :)

So I will say there are some out there who will kick purchases your way because you eat shit for not bending the knee. But I do not know how much, if at all, it actually moves the needle.

Battlemaster
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Re: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?
« Reply #9 on: April 26, 2022, 02:12:25 PM »
Can I modify this query slightly? Because woke games don't bill themselves as woke, they just *are* woke. So the counterpoint would be a game that is self-evidently not woke in its setting, though it never talks about that per se. Imagine you discovered *that* game. Would the average RPGSite reader support it for that reason alone? I think the answer is "no". In general our crowd doesn't go out of its way to support product on ideological grounds.  Whereas the other team does.

Maybe generally speaking, yes, but I know some who have gone out of their way to purchase products who avoid being woke. You, Pundit and Raggi all have reputations for creating nice games/supplements. Before I even knew who you were I was modded for talking about one of your products. Out of spite I purchased several of your products and DM’d the mod and told them they provoked the purchase.

I did something similar for Pundit. And when Raggi was getting canceled a couple summers ago, I literally purchased a physical copy of everything on both the EU and USA store for any LOTFP product I did not already own. I never did get my fucking orange bucket btw… :)

So I will say there are some out there who will kick purchases your way because you eat shit for not bending the knee. But I do not know how much, if at all, it actually moves the needle.

So you did get ban hammered then,  right?

OK the consensus seems to be that wokusts are more likely to shun a product that is non woke but non wokusts are less likely to gravitate towards it, with some exceptions, right?

Btw, how long do you think it'll be before some game company starts calling bsnshees "bantheys" and woke.net begins redtexting people for not using the new term?
« Last Edit: April 26, 2022, 02:16:37 PM by Battlemaster »
Fuck the fascist right and the fascist left.

Godsmonkey

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Re: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?
« Reply #10 on: April 26, 2022, 02:22:54 PM »
OK picture if you wil,l a RPG comes out and the ads for it say clearly it is "non woke"? The writers declare it non woke. They say they avoided the woke agenda when they wrote it.

How do you think this would affect the game's sales?  Would DTRPG refuse to carry it?  Would woke.net not allow positive reviews? Would enough gamers seek it out just for rejecting wokust attitudes?

I'm just curious if taking an anti woke status would help, harm or kill a game?

And I define "woke" as adhering to a radical extremist left agenda that ignores reality, demands utter and complete submission to it's views, bans long used and commonly accepted words like gypsy because a tiny number of people claim them are offensive and organizes harassment of people refusing to submit to their demands.

Can we get Jeremy Boreing to do the ads?

Armchair Gamer

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Re: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?
« Reply #11 on: April 26, 2022, 02:24:23 PM »
The problem is that there are several different ways of being 'not woke', and very few people are going to be sympathetic to all of them. Pundit and Venger are 'not woke', but I look askance at Pundit's stuff for various reasons and wouldn't touch Venger's with a ten foot pole. :)

David Johansen

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Re: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?
« Reply #12 on: April 26, 2022, 02:32:20 PM »
So, like a game with naked titties?
Fantasy Adventure Comic, games, and more http://www.uncouthsavage.com

Trond

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Re: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?
« Reply #13 on: April 26, 2022, 02:59:30 PM »
I think it might work. Some shitty games got a lot of attention simply for pissing people off. If it does have something going for it besides that it might actually sell.

FingerRod

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Re: what do you think would happen if a game was billed as "Non woke"?
« Reply #14 on: April 26, 2022, 03:13:53 PM »
Can I modify this query slightly? Because woke games don't bill themselves as woke, they just *are* woke. So the counterpoint would be a game that is self-evidently not woke in its setting, though it never talks about that per se. Imagine you discovered *that* game. Would the average RPGSite reader support it for that reason alone? I think the answer is "no". In general our crowd doesn't go out of its way to support product on ideological grounds.  Whereas the other team does.

Maybe generally speaking, yes, but I know some who have gone out of their way to purchase products who avoid being woke. You, Pundit and Raggi all have reputations for creating nice games/supplements. Before I even knew who you were I was modded for talking about one of your products. Out of spite I purchased several of your products and DM’d the mod and told them they provoked the purchase.

I did something similar for Pundit. And when Raggi was getting canceled a couple summers ago, I literally purchased a physical copy of everything on both the EU and USA store for any LOTFP product I did not already own. I never did get my fucking orange bucket btw… :)

So I will say there are some out there who will kick purchases your way because you eat shit for not bending the knee. But I do not know how much, if at all, it actually moves the needle.
So you did get ban hammered then,  right?

OK the consensus seems to be that wokusts are more likely to shun a product that is non woke but non wokusts are less likely to gravitate towards it, with some exceptions, right?

Btw, how long do you think it'll be before some game company starts calling bsnshees "bantheys" and woke.net begins redtexting people for not using the new term?

Fortunately, I have not been banned since my PlanetDiablo days around 20 years ago. No, in this case it was a light modding for “tone” or something like that in how I responded to others who came in guns blazing soy lattes extra hot.

As for your last question, I’d need a translator to understand a lot of those words, but I will guess 118 days?? :)