Lately I keep seeing comments like:
“It’s just virtue signaling devs whining.”
“Saudi Arabia isn’t open-minded, so at least games will finally be more neutral, without ideologies shoved down our throats.”
“They also have big stakes in nintendo, activiosn, capcom and nothing changed”
Let me be clear: if BioWare actually goes “neutral tone,” Dragon Age and Mass Effect stop being Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
also, Nindendo’s franchises (Mario, Zelda, Pokémon, Smash), Capcom’s (Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Street Fighter) and Activision Blizzard’s games (Call of Duty) don’t touch LGBTQ+ themes or social commentary in the first place. There’s nothing “controversial” to censor…”
So of course nothing obvious changed, those publishers already weren’t leaning into progressive storytelling.
These games have always been political
Mass Effect: Entire arcs are about systemic prejudice (krogan genophage, geth/quarians, council xenophobia). Shepard is literally trying to unite clashing civilizations. Romances — including queer ones — aren’t optional fluff; they’re woven into the emotional heart of the trilogy.
Dragon Age: Mages vs. templars = authoritarian religion vs. oppressed class. The Dalish = displaced, colonized people. Party members like Dorian (gay), Krem (trans), Zevran, Leliana, Anders, etc. embody themes of identity and resistance.
This isn’t “virtue signaling.” It’s core BioWare storytelling. If you remove the politics, you’re left with generic swords and lasers.
🛑 “Neutral” ≠ neutral
“Neutral tone” under authoritarian or ultra-conservative ownership doesn’t mean “fun escapism.” It means stripping out diversity, sanitizing themes, and avoiding messy questions.
The result? Games that look AAA but feel hollow — worlds without queerness, without marginalized voices, without allegories that hit close to home. That’s not Dragon Age. That’s not Mass Effect.
Why this matters now:
People point to PIF’s investments in Nintendo, Capcom, Activision and say “nothing changed.” True, but those companies weren’t pushing queer or political themes in the first place. BioWare is different. Its brand identity is built on exactly the kind of representation that makes authoritarian investors squirm.
David Gaider (lead writer on Dragon Age) already said it bluntly: guns and football are safe, queer content is not. If EA’s new owners steer BioWare toward “neutral,” it won’t just be censorship., it’ll be the death of the very thing that made these games beloved.
TL;DR
If you’re saying “good, make games neutral again,” you’re really saying:
“Make Dragon Age not feel like Dragon Age.”
“Make Mass Effect not feel like Mass Effect.”
These games have always been about politics, identity, queerness, and resistance. If you want them stripped down to “apolitical escapism,” you might as well play something else.
I have a different take. The problem in the writing room of these companies is not diversity, it is class.
The style of writing and the topics and conflicts that writers choose is often tied to their personal experiences, writers write what they know. The issue in these large corporate tech companies is that these people are, by and large, from middle-income suburban families with good backgrounds and good upbringings and nice middle class experiences.
What they write ends up being largely informed by the only political conflicts they see in american life as a suburban liberal. Which is largely what we see in culture war battles online day to day.
They also tend to write content that lacks edgyness, often because they themselves lack edgyness, or have never really been around edgyness to understand it. They write boring middle class liberals, without trauma, without edge, without neuroses, without mental health issues, without particularly compelling motivations or fears.
The people that write the good stuff have seen it. And the people who have seen it are not liberals from good upbringings in middle class families in the suburbs.
Put a queer writer in that room who has seen trauma, struggle and conflict from living at the edge of poverty and you will get completely different and significantly more compelling writing than you will get from the current people who make it to these positions in tech companies.
The problem is that this queer writer with that background does not get the opportunity. Or at least it is rarer.
And this isn’t just a thing in games either, you have it in tv and movies too. That’s specifically why we have film groups actively seeking out people from those class backgrounds and telling the kinds of stories you can only get from that experience. Gaming has no such thing though. There has never been a conversation about the class of the writers in videogames like there has been critical analysis of the same in tv and film.
The bad writing that the chuds hate is, in my opinion, a product of class rather than diversity but they do not have the class consciousness to recognise it so they just see the boring writing tropes that middle class liberals put out and scream at the wrong thing.
This reminds me of something Dave Anthony said when talking about the West Wing, that he was in a writing room for some project and was frustrated with everyone’s complete disinterest of understanding of framing something from the POV of oppressed people. He was confused at first cause it was a decently diverse writing room, eventually he asks “who here didn’t go to an Ivy League?” and no one raises a hand. It hit him that while several people there had plenty of sympathy and could understand their own specific oppression ag the black writers know police are often racist, NONE of them have ever been black and anything under upper middle class. Any progressivism is purely intellectual and academic and even then not something anyone seemed deeply interested in.
Yeah that’s exactly what I’m getting at here. This issue is rampant across gaming because the tech industry hires are only from well educated middle class backgrounds or above.
Someone else suggested an exception to this rule is when these people are doing adaptations of other works, such as books or manga written by people from those backgrounds. Then they do a good job. Netflix adaptations and anime are fairly good examples of this.
I have never watched One Piece, but iirc the Mangaka was directly involved in casting for example. So many of the things chuds complained about in the netflix adaptation are things he directly wanted to drive home the purpose of his stories
in fact chuds don’t even notice it when it’s been done competently, or they bark up the wrong tree like being mad about the wrong last of us 2 character in their fit of transmisogyny
Yeah exactly. They don’t complain about diversity when the writing is really good. They don’t even really notice the existence of the lgbt themes or characters either, they’re just “good” and “not the entire personality of the character”, usually because their stories are about other things the character is struggling with while also being queer or something, like growing up in a fucked up deprived poverty stricken neighbourhood and struggling with family illnesses - but also queer. Along with a whole cast of characters that have all kinds of fucked up personalities that derive from the trauma that lifestyle gives each of them.
Time and time again I see a lack of depth in character writing and it is usually a lack of trauma, I suspect that a lot of these people writing who come from good backgrounds simply do not have that much trauma so they don’t even imagine writing it. Maybe a family member died but that’s often the extent of their experience with trauma.
Anyone from poor backgrounds will be able to tell you that there is not a single person around them without half a dozen traumas. Whether it’s from drugs, drink, abuse, desperate struggles for money, or incredible fallouts that occurred over the terrible days that just surviving in these lifestyles can bring on. We are moody animals that get tired, stressed and crotchety as things stack up, and we fuck things up for ourselves when all these things stack on one another causing outbursts. But none of this shit is ever in middle class writing.
What do I see in middle class writing most? Superheroes. Superheroes in a fantasy world. With mostly the same depth as marvel superheroes, which again is practically none outside of Spiderman, the hero deliberately written for the working class.
Interesting stories come from people who have lived interesting lives to write interesting experiences. The problem is that the people with interesting lives do not get the opportunity to be writers in these kinds of companies, and in fact, often have personalities themselves that make being in these kinds of companies very difficult. They are not environments designed to have sympathy for those with problematic dispositions or life stories.
Also the other side of this is that the middle class people are scared of even talking about trauma. They are scared of being edgy too. It’s uncouth in their social rules.
I’d add that a television writer’s room might have some class diversity, but ultimately any trauma-informed ideas need to gel with the room and the showrunner, and then somehow pass muster at the studio and network level. It’s the bodies in those executive roles that are most likely to have no experience or interest in those stories.
I think a huge exception is when a trauma-informed work is adapted - something like the memoir that became the Netflix show Maid. It helps that the tone is clear to everyone at the outset, they don’t need to spin the story into two or three seasons, and the underlying message is (I’m assuming) an American Dream success story.
Yeah this is a really good point. It’s also how this makes it into anime writing often too as they’re adapting manga written by a single person most of the time. Someone like Tatsuki Fujimoto (chainsawman writer) would not be able to write the things he has written if he were in a large corporate team. They wouldn’t get it but Fujimoto has a knack for writing interesting characters with very clear traumas and issues.