I don’t know that I a) agree that American progressives are making that claim or b) that is in any way related to the cultural assumptions behind the article that I was referencing.

Ah, so that’s the misunderstanding. No, I didn’t make the case that US critics don’t apply that lens to US media. That was never the argument.

I mean, you may question their use of language, which is a frequent issue with these things, but there is zero ambiguity about the setting. Hell, the game was known as “Project HK” until recently, I’m pretty sure they are depicting something very specific. It’s also super weird and pretty telling to refer to people…

I am looking at it as an aspect of culture right over here and an aspect of racism (not race, which is itself debatable as a concept) over there. The part of US identitarianism that weirds me out is the part that conflates the two. Culture has absolutely zero things to do with the way you look and while US racism is…

Different people have different accessibility needs (five minutes of using the Steam Controller or Steam Deck touchpads can give me wrist pain for hours). An important distinction, though, is that you can always add grips (plenty of Switch cases and third party controllers do) but you can’t remove them. You know,…

Look, we all generalize when we speak because synecdoche is important and you literally can’t say anything without it.

It’s all a sponsored thing. I don’t think they have any non-sponsored content. Which is fine. Ad-driven TV has to ad.

I don’t know if we’re understanding each other here. I mean, there’s clearly something lost in translation or across cultural barriers, because man, none of those things seem to apply to the conversation we were having and none of them are like each other and most of them are still in the pretzel logic of US…

So much weirdness to unpack in that take, though.

First of all, yes I have. But also, if you follow the thread, the comment isn’t that US progressives ignore colonial genocide in the US, it’s that when fiction depicts a contemporary US setting the baggage is seen as implicit and not necessary for accurate representation, while other cultures don’t get to be a default…

I’ve had one of these for months and... trust me you don’t want anything making this thing any bigger than it already is. If anything there may have been a case for removing the grips and going for a Switch-like form factor you can actually carry without needing a dedicated backpack (the portable backpack battery joke…

The case they’re using is a sponsorship deal. If  nothing else I’m surprised they managed to squeeze a second bit of revenue out of this monstrosity well enough that Kotaku thought to piggyback on it. 

I swear, whenever Americans complain about people “not looking like me” it freaks me out so much.

As a leftist progressive, the logic behind the arguments in this article makes no sense to me and some of America’s views on how culture work are utterly broken regardless of political leaning. American conservatives live in a fantasy world of authoritarian theocracy but unfortunately American leftists have grown up…

This is a key point to me. Kotaku always brings such a US-centric view to this stuff that reeks of navel gazing. When a French studio sets their games in the US there is no eyebrow raising or “grappling” with anything because America is default location with default humans. The English text in the game that is in…

Meanwhile, in the real world...

I’m not even sure that race reproduces sexually at all.

Yeah, there’s a ton of that dumb zero sum thinking in gaming, too. “But they made a game I don’t like, hence wasting the resources for the game I do like”.

The comments are full of people literally saying “Do they expect me to buy this a third time for $70?” and the answer is... no. They expect someone else to do that. This is not for you.

Yeah, this is the key thing that pisses me off about this situation. Gamers (and Kotaku, apparently) are stuck in this frame of mind where everything is... you know, specifically for them.