This same guy wrote an article two years ago titles "Video Games are Better Without Characters".
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/video-games-are-better-without-characters/387556/
I think he kinda just doesn't like video games.
This was Ian Bogost's take on representation and identity in videogames was to restate the status quo, where he says people who aren't straight white males shouldn't care about that (he as a white dude who doesn't have to worry about identification and representation in this medium), it's selfish and self-indulgent and might have actually played a part in increasing anti-diversity gamers, and why aren't you more worried about "commercialism run amok; climate change; wealth inequality; extortionate healthcare; unfunded schools; decaying infrastructure; automation and servitude"?!
At this years Game Developers Conference, the educator Rosalind Wiseman and the game voice artist Ashly Burch presented results from a survey of students between the ages of 11 and 18, suggesting a marketplace exists for diverse characters that the industry is ignoring. Among their findings, less than 40 percent of high-school boys preferred to play as male characters, while 60 percent of girls preferred female ones. Wiseman and Burch encouraged developers to offer more diverse characters, noting that women and girls are more valuable customers than the industry believes. For years now, others have made similar appeals for better representation of minorities of all stripes, both in games and in game development. If we must have characters in games, lets do make them represent the diversity of their players and of our society. And if we must make games at all, lets see them created by developers who represent the diversity of their playership.
But, an unpopular question lingers, one that Maxiss closure calls to mind. Why must we have characters in games at all? Or, more gently put, why have we assumed that the only or primary path to video-game diversity and sophistication lies in its representation of individuals as opposed to systems and circumstances? In truth, weve all but abandoned the work of systems and behaviors in favor of the work of individuals and feelings. And perhaps this is a grievous mistake.
Maybe the obsession with personal identification and representation in games is why identity politics has risen so forcefully and naively in their service online, while essentially failing to build upon prior theories and practices of social justice. And perhaps it is why some gamers have become so attached to their identity that they've been willing to burn down anything to defend it. Surely a better understanding and appreciation of these underlying systems (not the least of which involves the corporatized Internet that has offered such an effective accelerant for grotesquerie) would have raised the question of how and why the gamer identity became cherished to the point its advocates would be willing to sabotage its progress in the public imagination. Surely it would have stymied the sense of entitlement among gamers who have sought to exclude anyoneparticularly womenwho challenge their ideas about what games and gamers look like. The very idea of the gamer assumes that identity is predominant, even before that identity seeks either protection or expansion. And then, for everyone, games primarily become an apparatus for exercising self-identity rather than just a kind of media, like the books and magazines that filled the B. Dalton.
The assumption that games are a medium of individual identification that would provide self expression and personal validation, as Wiseman, Burch, and others hope, is an unexamined ideology. Why not ask, at least, why we should bother? Other narrative media succeed more often and more profoundly at producing identification and empathy with individuals of our own creed, color, gender, and sexual identificationor with those of other identifications. Sure, film and literature and television also have problems with representation, but their character-driven narratives match well to their forms. Yet, alas, at their best, game characters and game stories are still mostly like bad books and films and television, but with button pressing. Perhaps the only reason not to let these other media do the work they do best is if we fancy games a world unto itself, a private media ecosystem.
Theres another way to think about games. What if games role in representation and identity lies not in offering familiar characters for us to embody, but in helping wrest us from the temptation of personal identification entirely? What if the real fight against monocultural bias and blinkeredness does not involve the accelerated indulgence of identification, but the abdication of our own selfish, individual desires in the interest of participating in systems larger than ourselves? What if the thing games most have to show us is the higher-order domains to which we might belong, including families, neighborhoods, cities, nations, social systems, and even formal structures and patterns? What if replacing militarized male brutes with everyones favorite alternative identity just results in Balkanization rather than inclusion?
...
Perhaps there is warning there, within a bigger system, among a different cabal of people playing at being gods. Amidst arguments on Twitter and Reddit about whose favorite games are more valid, while we worry about the perfect distribution of bodies in our sci-fi fantasy, the big machines of global systems hulk down the roads and the waterways, indifferent. It is an extravagance to worry only about representation of our individual selves while more obvious forces threaten them with oblivioncommercialism run amok; climate change; wealth inequality; extortionate healthcare; unfunded schools; decaying infrastructure; automation and servitude. And yet, we persist, whether out of moralism or foolishness or youth, lining up for our proverbial enslavement. Well sign away anything, it would seem, so long as were still able to express ourselves with the makeshift tools we are rationed by the billionaires savvy enough to play the game of systems rather than the game of identities.
