There are No Such Things as Woke Games

[seeker1]

Since wokeness is a slang connotation word which like all slang words has several meanings and no agreed upon meaning, complaining about wokeness is simply stating a subjective feeling about a game which has no real objective meaning.

And while you are entitled to your subjective feelings, just don't pretend there is anything objective about what you are saying. And you have every right to not buy a game because you FEEL it is woke, but stop complaining about changing the game to suit your feelings. The developers do not have to care about them. It's their creative product and their freedom of expression.

The latest whines are about Assassin's Creed: Shadows. But most of the people whining about the Black Samurai, Yasuke, seem to be white people, not Japanese folks, who understand that Yasuke, by embracing Japanese culture and becoming a Samurai, was just as much Japanese as the native born other protagonist. It's people outside of Japan who say Yasuke isn't Japanese because of his race. Yasuke was a real life person, an African slave brought to Japan by Portuguese missionaries, not a made up character (though Ubisoft HAS said as always the game is not a historical sim and isn't meant to be taken as such).

It's interesting, even the Japanese PM got involved, but the real issue he mentioned is he was afraid the game would encourage "real world" vandalism of Shinto Shrines in the country.

There were many foreign born Samurai in Japan. "Nathan Allgren" (Tom Cruise) was a fictional one, but there were white people who became Samurai. You can find a list of foreign born Samurai on Wikipedia, there were many of them. I wonder if there would have been as many complaints about the game if the Samurai was named William Adams (he was another historical figure, but was a white British guy who became a Samurai around 1600 or so).

[Tito Shivan]

Escrito originalmente por Princess Luna:

https://wokedetector.cirnoslab.me/full-list

Didn't you get the memo?
That list is a false-flag operation by the wokist to smear the anti-woke.

Or at least that's what they say now that people have actually looked at it and found how utterly bananas the list is.

[Myrth the Plague]

Escrito originalmente por Princess Luna:

https://wokedetector.cirnoslab.me/full-list

Yeah... I'm no fan of woke nor DEI but that is just completely garbage. Several of them may be "valid" but almost all of them are "woke" because of reasons like female leaders and female frontline fighters. There is a difference between a game having women and lgtbq or things like that and a game being woke. That website is an abomination made for idiots by idiots.

[superblake_]

Escrito originalmente por Myrth:

Escrito originalmente por Princess Luna:

https://wokedetector.cirnoslab.me/full-list

Yeah... I'm no fan of woke nor DEI but that is just completely garbage. Several of them may be "valid" but almost all of them are "woke" because of reasons like female leaders and female frontline fighters. There is a difference between a game having women and lgtbq or things like that and a game being woke. That website is an abomination made for idiots by idiots.

The list doesn't even have my game collection on it. So it is not even up to date.

[Amaterasu]

I'm also going to point out that high budget games isn't a good thing when you have this much volume right here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubisoft_games:_2020%E2%80%93present

In 6 years(2020-2025) They have pushed out 51 games/ports made by Ubisoft out of 65. And I didn't even know like 90% of these games existed. So they've basically been pissing away money in the hopes that something will strike it big and naturally with that kind of a release schedule(1 game every 1 and a half months pretty much), it doesn't spark a lot of confidence with customers or investors. Ubisoft's least active year, 2022, they released 7 different games. And at their most active in 2020 and 2024, they released 17.

Compare this to Capcom's 27 games released in the last 6 years. Which averages at 4.6 games per year. Or roughly one game every 3 months and around 27 days. With their most active years being 2020, 2021, and 2023 with 6 games each.

Meaning that Ubisoft, at their least active has released more games than Capcom at their most active.

And if I were to plug in the numbers for ubisoft's 2020, 2021, and 2023 and compare that to Capcom's 18. Ubisoft released 35 games in those years, or almost double that of Capcom.

And for anyone who wants to try to check my math, I'll post the numbers for all to see

Ubisoft: 2020(17), 2021(7), 2022(11), 2023(12), 2024(17), 2025(3, with one coming out in 3 days as of this post)

Capcom: 2020(6), 2021(6), 2022(3), 2023(6), 2024(5), 2025(1, with another one being announced)

Also I'd like you to keep in mind that I'm adding the collections of ports to Capcom's total to give Ubisoft a fighting chance. Otherwise, Capcom's total would be a whopping... 17 games in the last 6 years.

[Chika Ogiue]

Escrito originalmente por seeker1:

The latest whines are about Assassin's Creed: Shadows. But most of the people whining about the Black Samurai, Yasuke, seem to be white people, not Japanese folks, who understand that Yasuke, by embracing Japanese culture and becoming a Samurai, was just as much Japanese as the native born other protagonist.

It should be noted that for the Japanese language store page, Ubisoft replaced "Samurai" with "legendary warrior". A change they would not have made if the general consensus among Japanese historians was that Yasuke did indeed have Samurai status, but it is very much a contested point given how little reference there is to him in historical documents. Also, Ubisoft never publicly explained why they changed the store pages for Japan only, even when Japanese gaming sites noticed and reached out for comment.

[Wolfgang]

Escrito originalmente por Princess Luna:

https://wokedetector.cirnoslab.me/full-list

That list makes for an awesome drinking game btw.

[Princess Luna]

Prince of Persia... Why is he African? https://steamcommunity.com/app/2751000/discussions/0/4514381284532884443/

[Amaterasu]

Escrito originalmente por Princess Luna:

Prince of Persia... Why is he African? https://steamcommunity.com/app/2751000/discussions/0/4514381284532884443/

This might blow your mind and the minds of everyone screaming about realism, but the white dude prince in the original games wasn't realistic either. Persia was in the middle east. So they basically race swapped the prince back then to be white, instead of looking middle eastern.

[Amaterasu]

Escrito originalmente por Wolfgang:

Escrito originalmente por Princess Luna:

https://wokedetector.cirnoslab.me/full-list

That list makes for an awesome drinking game btw.

People should look up Dave the Diver on that list. A game I will never stop referencing.

Contains overtly pro-DEI messaging. Features an improbably diverse cast. The player character is a fat guy who can somehow deep-dive and swim long distances without trouble. The sushi chef is Black.

Literally copied from the list to here.

[Flame]

if you're talking about people on twitter, "woke" to them means any tiny thing they don't like

[Myrth the Plague]

Escrito originalmente por Amaterasu:

Escrito originalmente por Wolfgang:

That list makes for an awesome drinking game btw.

People should look up Dave the Diver on that list. A game I will never stop referencing.

Contains overtly pro-DEI messaging. Features an improbably diverse cast. The player character is a fat guy who can somehow deep-dive and swim long distances without trouble. The sushi chef is Black.

Literally copied from the list to here.

"The sushi chef is black" ... and? That's the entire website. It's actually a hilarious read, thanks for pointing out this description.

[Wolfgang]

Escrito originalmente por Amaterasu:

Escrito originalmente por Wolfgang:

That list makes for an awesome drinking game btw.

People should look up Dave the Diver on that list. A game I will never stop referencing.

Contains overtly pro-DEI messaging. Features an improbably diverse cast. The player character is a fat guy who can somehow deep-dive and swim long distances without trouble. The sushi chef is Black.

Literally copied from the list to here.

As I said, perfect drinking game. Let them guess if a game is "woke" and if it is, why.

[Tito Shivan]

Escrito originalmente por Amaterasu:

This might blow your mind and the minds of everyone screaming about realism, but the white dude prince in the original games wasn't realistic either.

Wait till they hear what they did with Jesuschrist.

Escrito originalmente por Myrth:

"The sushi chef is black" :Proposition_Emmrich:... and? That's the entire website. It's actually a hilarious read, thanks for pointing out this description.

When they have to find something 'woke' to latch their content and discourse to every new thing trendy in this rat's race for attention and clicks you end up having to find the most idiotic perspective to fit their content through.

That ends up with hilarious moments like a full adult man, shouting and crying like a 7 year old whose mum grounded without ice cream on camera because the character creation screen has a 'pronoums' menu or a rainbow flag can be seen in the middle of a city or there's a single character of the wrong pantone.

[Zefar]

Escrito originalmente por seeker1:

Since wokeness is a slang connotation word which like all slang words has several meanings and no agreed upon meaning, complaining about wokeness is simply stating a subjective feeling about a game which has no real objective meaning.

Then you just do not know what it means. It's that simple.

Escrito originalmente por seeker1:

The latest whines are about Assassin's Creed: Shadows. But most of the people whining about the Black Samurai, Yasuke, seem to be white people, not Japanese folks, who understand that Yasuke, by embracing Japanese culture and becoming a Samurai, was just as much Japanese as the native born other protagonist. It's people outside of Japan who say Yasuke isn't Japanese because of his race. Yasuke was a real life person, an African slave brought to Japan by Portuguese missionaries, not a made up character (though Ubisoft HAS said as always the game is not a historical sim and isn't meant to be taken as such).

Ubisoft went out of their way to try and state that he was a Samurai and they source a person who sourced himself. When in reality the person had nothing to do with being a samurai and had never been mentioned to be one. Which btw is a pretty big thing back in the olden days of Japan. They actually have records dating way back and they like it being like this.
So now you have a Western developer coming in trying to claim this is real history. Quite disrespectful. Specially when they get so many other things wrong.


It was proved wrong by Japanese researchers and the person who is quoted as the source of truth got called out hard. Not sure if he left Japan or not. You can read up on it and it's a laugh.


As playing as Yasuke you get to sleep with the Nobunaga sister(She is a princess) Oichi who is known to be very loyal to her husbands and not a cheater. She was married in the game too. This is just downright disrespectful of the source material.


I'd imagine British people would be pretty mad if they made Queen into basically a sex worker. It didn't take much to fire up the flames of British people when some radical leftist made some nasty statement on the Queen just a day or hours after she had passed away.
The topic was on Reddit and even it was locked within some hours in order to stop it from continuing.


Are you being paid to run defense for Ubisoft? Because it's ridiculous to think anyone would defend this.

There is more. They used that broken Tori gate as a merchandise item not knowing what it was about. It was one of the gates that survive the nuclear bomb on Nagasaki. Pretty touchy subject.

They have repeatedly been unable to get Japanese wording right on marketing materials that they send out. Even though they like to state that they are doing big research on the matter.
Is it hard to get Japanese text translated? They had teams all over the world. Surely one of them would know the meaning of the Japanese text.

https://gamerant.com/assassins-creed-shadows-historical-research-japan-interview/
"Meticulous Historical Research Went Into Creating AC Shadows' Japan"
This was released on March 5 this year.

Now Ubisoft might have gone back on their wording but they absolutely tried to push it as historical fact.

Escrito originalmente por seeker1:

It's interesting, even the Japanese PM got involved, but the real issue he mentioned is he was afraid the game would encourage "real world" vandalism of Shinto Shrines in the country.

It was such a common issue to talk about that it was just referred to "The problem everyone talks about" or something. I think it's a bit more than just the vandalism of Shinto shrines.
The Shinto shrines was brought up most because they have had people like Johnny Somali causing problems and other Kick Streamers.

Escrito originalmente por seeker1:

There were many foreign born Samurai in Japan. "Nathan Allgren" (Tom Cruise) was a fictional one, but there were white people who became Samurai. You can find a list of foreign born Samurai on Wikipedia, there were many of them. I wonder if there would have been as many complaints about the game if the Samurai was named William Adams (he was another historical figure, but was a white British guy who became a Samurai around 1600 or so).

Play Nioh 1. You play as William Adams and the reason people are not mad about it is because it doesn't claim it's historical accurate. It also includes a lot of demons. So anything goes. Last boss is in England too.

We also have the Black Afro Samurai game which no one has an issue with. Because it doesn't try to claim it's historical accurate.

The Tom Cruise movie had inaccuracy but apparently Japan likes Tom Cruise quite a bit so people like the movie.

The thing about those people you mention is that they have history written about them. Yasuke supposedly where in Japan for a while but then left never to be heard of again. It's also weird how he gets a Japanese name and not any of the other people.

[seeker1]

Escrito originalmente por Zefar:

Then you just do not know what it means. It's that simple.

No, what I said was it has multiple meanings, ... which is often the case for slang words that are actually not often in the dictionary.

In the case of "woke," it is in the standard dictionary as the past tense of the verb to wake, it's just that using it as an adjective is a slang/nonstandard connotation use of the word.

I know what ONE of its meanings is: I cited it earlier in this thread, from Merriam-Webster's. Definition 1a.

Are you being paid to run defense for Ubisoft? Because it's ridiculous to think anyone would defend this.

I think it's all the usual tempest in a teapot, honestly.

Now Ubisoft might have gone back on their wording but they absolutely tried to push it as historical fact.

None of their games are historical sims, nor have they ever advertised them as such. Using historical characters != game is a history simulation.