You may have come across, in recent
times, new terminology during your wanderings
through the ether, crossing all modern social media among reels, content and tiktokers
with embarrassing choreography. Woke culture,
forced Englishisms and supposed gurus of video game entertainment who
point to this or that title as being or not being little or too politically correct, and this is the
problem.
Dal cinema alle serie tv proposte
dalle più famose piattaforme streaming, dalla musica fino ad arrivare ai nostri
amati videogiochi, la questione censura,
mitigata on paper with a heavy revision of all the elements present
within a narrative work, has created, by contrast, an almost total rejection
of any borderline element, which has gone hand in hand with another phenomenon, namely
the implementation of everything that until today had been the object of
discrimination or satire, even harsh satire, in the name of inclusivity which, however, has often produced diametrically opposite effects
to the noble and necessary initial purpose.
Capolavori recognized,
undeniable, of storytelling as well as gameplay like The Last of Us 2 have been widely criticized for presenting
an outright queer couple, claiming that the focus on Ellie and
Dina can distract attention from everything else: this is obviously a gigantic load of crap,
but if we have come to this, it is because polarization between right and wrong, between normal and strange, has
become far too predominant.
C’era un tempo in cui la creativity did not
take all this into account, for better or worse: let’s think of Carmageddon, a racing video game, so to speak, from 1997 where players
could, among other modes, earn points and win by running over people, and I don’t mean on the stock exchange. At the time, do-gooders and self-styled expert psychologists lashed out against the video game, generalizing as usual, and
its being so educationally harmful, a demonization
that did not take into account the only truth in all this: it was
a video game, just as any horror film is only a film where even teenagers can end up very badly in gruesome ways. In the Divine Comedy, oh yes, today we are even invoking
the classics, Dante finds himself in an infernal circle full of unbaptized children who suffer the torments of the place where they are, yet no one has
ever raised controversy. A provocation? Perhaps, but it is also an incontrovertible
fact.
Two weights and two measures.
Leisure Suit Larry, a decades-long saga about a brazen and
improbable playboy, flaunts a strongly sexist narrative where women are
represented with stereotypes that have finally been left behind, at least
on paper, yet the game itself is fun and the puzzles are challenging.
How to do it?
The politically correct certainly did not inhabit the minds of the creators of Duck Hunt, the legendary game included with the Nintendo Entertainment System distributed in Italy complete with the Zapper gun: a title meant for children as well, in which the user goes hunting, perhaps even without a license, who knows, would be criticized and Nintendo would probably never launch it today, adapting to modern times.
Con questo non si vuole dire che
non debbano esserci paletti a determinati quantitativi di violenza eccessiva o
rappresentazioni fuori scala di razzismo, intolleranza o l’orientamento
sessuale, tuttavia the ability to tell a story with everything that narrative designers want
to implement, must never be stifled at the root, ever.
The risk, which is now
becoming a gray reality we have to deal with, is the tendency to
destroy the integration process, and inclusivity, the real kind, pays
the price: every person of color we will find in a video game from now on
“is there because it’s politically correct,” every depiction of relationships or
love between characters of the same biological sex “was put there because it’s woke”
and so on. You just have to be at least a little intelligent and use some common sense to
understand that it’s not really like that.
A massacre game that does
no one any good.
