One of the worst trends in the video game industry today is that developers feel the need to pander to people who suffer from the mental illness of gender dysphoria. Those who are afflicted with this disease are also known as transgenders or trans people. This pandering is done in the name of inclusion.
The Cult of Inclusion
The amorphous doctrine of inclusion is a boutique theory that originates from various sources such as feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, and intersectionalism. In practical terms, inclusion means including more non-white, non-heterosexual, non-male characters and themes in works of entertainment such as films, TV, advertisements, board games, and video games. By its very nature inclusion is discriminatory and divisive.
Inclusion is not just a theory, it has been transformed into a virtue and a holy command that the public never asked for or ever voted for.
To a progressive, everything must be inclusive. To be inclusive is to make sure that the target audience which is typically white heterosexual Christian males is no longer the prime focus. The manifestation of this is unavoidable as most TV commercials now feature blacks and whites are becoming rarer. Although blacks make up 12-14% of the population, they are now vastly overrepresented in all forms of media. Conversely, whites who are the majority in America are underrepresented.
EverCraft: EverQuest Meets Minecraft
The cancer of inclusion has hit video games. In role-playing video games where the player is allowed to create their character, the biological sex designation which lets players choose male or female has been replaced with body type. Body type is not a synonym for biological sex. Body type is more like a skin or a costume than a designation of biological sex.
A new voxel-based MMORPG called EverCraft Online by h1ddentree Entertainment recently came on my radar. The game looks like a delightful combination of EverQuest and Minecraft.
The game looks very promising, except for one thing: the creators have replaced biological sex with body type. Unfortunately, other video games such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and Amazon’s New World, Pax Dei, and Enshrouded have done the same.
Here’s a screenshot of their character window. You can see that there is no sex designation:
I believe the reason they are doing this is to make their video games trans-friendly. By being inclusive they are in effect excluding people who want to role-play males or females in their respective game worlds. Let me be very clear: nothing is stopping a trans person or non-binary person from role-playing themselves with characters created with a designated sex if that is what they wish to do.
I let the developer of EverCraft know my concerns on X:
The simple solution would be for these games to allow players to select male, female, or other. That would be true inclusion.
The Importance of Verisimilitude
The problem with eliminating biological sex from a game world is that you are downplaying and eroding the importance of biology in your game world. It is a fundamental truth that humans and animals that populate game worlds require biological sex to reproduce. How can you explain life in your game world if you are unwilling and afraid to admit the reality that biological sex plays in the reproduction process of life?
Creating a believable game world is no easy task. You must do everything you can to convince the player that your world is as real and believable as possible. This sense of realness is called verisimilitude.
Verisimilitude is a concept widely used in literature, art, theater, and film to describe how convincingly a work of fiction mimics reality. The goal is to create a sense of realism that allows the audience to suspend disbelief and engage with the fictional world as if it were plausible or actual.
In storytelling and narrative construction, achieving verisimilitude involves careful attention to detail, consistent internal logic, and the realistic portrayal of characters, settings, and events. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the story must strictly adhere to the factual truths of the real world but rather that it should convincingly portray its own reality in a way that feels authentic and coherent to the audience.
If you don’t take the importance of verisimilitude seriously, you are foolishly jeopardizing the suspension of disbelief that is critical in creating a sense of immersion for your players.
Chesterton’s Fence
Years ago, G.K. Chesterton, a brilliant Roman Catholic philosopher, thinker, and author coined a theory called Chesteron’s Fence.
Chesterton’s Fence is a principle that underscores the importance of understanding the purpose of existing traditions, laws, or social norms before attempting to change or remove them. The principle is derived from a metaphor in which Chesterton describes coming across a fence or gate across a road and the folly of removing it before knowing why it was put there in the first place. Chesterton argues that reform should not be made until the reason for the existing state of affairs is understood, as there may be a valid, though perhaps not immediately apparent, rationale for it.
This concept emphasizes a cautious approach to reform, suggesting that innovations and changes should be made with a full understanding of the traditions they aim to replace, to avoid unintended consequences. Chesterton’s Fence essentially advocates for the preservation of institutional or societal knowledge and wisdom, highlighting the value of historical context and reasoning in making informed decisions about change.
The decision to remove biological designations and replace them with body type is a clear example of the failure to understand the importance of principles that constitute Chesterton’s Fence. Biological sex designations have always existed in RPGs for a very good reason and removing them to appease a tiny minority of people who suffer from a mental illness or because it’s trendy in design circles is folly. It’s also very inconsiderate to the majority of your players who want to play as male or female.
Good designers value and appreciate game design conventions that came before them; bad designers do not.
A Perception Experiment
I’d like to conduct a quick experiment:
What is the first thing you notice about the person on the left?
What is the first thing you notice about the person on the right?
I believe most rational people would say that the first thing they notice about the person on the left is that she is a woman. The first thing they would notice about the person on the right is that he is a man.
Even if their silhouettes were observed from a far distance, their biological sex would be easily noticeable. Their sex is not incidental nor is it unimportant, rather it is a fundamental component of who they are. Their biological sex is not an identity, it is not a skin, it is not a persona, it is not a costume.
Conclusion
The principles outlined in Chesterton’s Fence should be considered by every game designer worth their salt. You are standing on the shoulders of giants who made your career possible, so show some humility and respect.
Video games have an established format and a set of rules that have proven be to successful. There are other maxims such as if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it that also come to mind that are equally applicable. This does not mean that you cannot break rules or innovate but at the very least you should understand why certain design conventions exist before you decide to remove them.
I suspect the developers for EverCraft removed the biological sex designation because everyone else was doing it. It’s also quite possible that someone on the dev team is either transgender or non-binary. Self-insertion is another dangerous trend in the video game industry where developers find sneaky ways to memorialize themselves as characters in their games.
EverCraft is somewhat of a homage to EverQuest and traditional fantasy RPGs that allowed their players to create characters with biological sex designations. The studio would do well doing some serious soul-searching about this issue and seriously reconsider their decision.
Would I love to play EverCraft? Yes, I would. Will I play EverCraft? Unless I can choose the sex of my character, I will most certainly not. Woke propaganda has no place in fantasy video games and I don’t appreciate video game studios that disrespect their players by trying to indoctrinate them.
If h1ddentree Entertainment is already putting needless performative wokeness into their game, what other forms of woke nonsense will they be adding in the future? Pride Month, Black History Month, Juneteenth, and other immersion-breaking virtue-signaling stunts? This is not a good sign of things to come. Hopefully, they will come to their senses.
–Wolfshead
Too bad I never had the chance to try the game.
EverCraft is still in alpha and they have occasional stress tests. It’s a real shame they have decided to go woke.
The idea behind the body type descriptor rather than traditional ‘male’ and ‘female’ is to remove all kind of sexual markers. In doing so, it is hoped that boys and girls will be raised in a ‘gender-neutral’ way. Note that the term ‘gender-neutral’ always comes to mean passive and accepting, never strong and discerning.
Despite the label on the box this is not about equality, it’s about socially-engineering a caste of sexless worker drones who become increasingly reliant on Big Government to protect and affirm their dysfunctional ‘identities’. This is being pushed forward under the umbrella of LGBQT astroturfing which is actually rainbow fascist ideology masquerading as a civil rights movement.
I’m not sure what the solution here is. It’s spreading rapidly across the Western world, particularly those countries in the Anglosphere. Most of this comes from the US, but countries like Australia, Canada, and Scotland are taking it many steps further by introducing a slew of hate speech laws surrounding protected classes. The recent one in Scotland (Non-Crime Hate Incidents) is most worrisome as it means ordinary citizens can be informed upon by those with malicious intent. What this does is create a form of arbitrary governance whereby all citizens are deemed criminals and can be punished as such the moment they step out of line.
I’m not sure how this ideology will be defeated. I feel like I’m living in 1930s Germany, but weirdly I’m the one being denounced as a N*zi for not going along with all of this totalitarian foundation-laying. Those applauding these nasty hate speech laws seem completely unaware that ‘hate speech’ is a constantly moving target and can easily be applied to any who criticize government policy no matter their ‘woke’ credentials.