So you can get banned for saying black lives matter? How about all lives matter? How about police lives matter? How about dog lives matter? How about all dark matter? Where do we draw the line here?
Yeah, all of it IMO. Because usually the people who say that stuff nowadays are mainly using them as political virtue litmus tests. Some of those things in particular (not the last two you mention...I've never heard of those xD) have become highly politicized along partisan lines, some are even affiliated with certain organizations with sketchy histories.
That's why I'm of the opinion, ban all that kind of stuff on
both sides. They're both toxic at this point IMO even if there were good intentions originally.
He means no room for your politics, not his. Can't have you making fun of the Chinese government for example.
Weird how we can't discuss politics but we can have games force feed the politics to us and be upset when Ubisoft takes a mutual stand.
Hmm...yeah that could end up being a sort of loophole.
TBH, I think some of these games should also chill out on the forced political narratives. Moderate allegories or grand-scope concepts that might fall under political bodies spanning hundreds or thousands of years (and are generic enough to be universal) are okay. I'm not going to complain about the next MGS story having political themes, for example, but that's generally because those games don't date themselves with extremely time-specific, trending political events acting like the bedrock for the stories. That's the type of game that can use political themes intelligently and sensibly, and not in ways to try dictating which way their audience should think.
But playing a game where you're a BLM, Antifa, MGTOW or "race realist" type of
? Nooooo thanks. Same for any game trying to push/dictate/indoctrinate the player to fall into that type of thinking. There's already enough people on Twitter, Youtube, the internet in general etc. who do that stuff in one way or another.
True but corporate America is much more sympathetic to one side of that and Xbox often proclaims its support for activist causes.
So what Phil Spencer is saying even if the Xbox social network is for games, only the political causes endorsed by Microsoft/Xbox are allowed run unopposed on Xbox social network.
He is not stating that Xbox is neutral platform that keeps politics out of games or its platform.
TBF this isn't just something WRT Xbox; all of the big gaming platforms and companies "lean" left, particularly progressive-left (in terms of optics, anyway). The reason why, and I'm probably gonna get some flack for this but...the reason why is kind of because it's much easier to sell people on making things better for everyone by advancing forward, versus trying to sell people on the idea that the best times are way in the past (to "regress", socially).
Truth is that society would be best off with a mix of some things that have come about in more recent times and bringing back some of the standards and sanity of things from less-recent time. Unfortunately neither side wants to admit to any of that. One side plays ignorant to the fact that a lot of their being "progressive" wrongly punishes a lot of otherwise good people in a very specific demographic group (that happens to be the majority), the other side plays ignorant to the fact that some of the things they want to return back to "normal" are antagonistic to, if not downright regressive for, certain minority groups (or push their points in ways that use those groups as the problem).
The worst examples of both are usually the loudest (who also are generally only a very small portion), but they tend to have a lot of influence on discussion as all this culture war crap goes on, so you get more and more who would otherwise lean to the middle getting tempted and radicalized (stuff like Youtube algorithms don't help) closer to the extremes, that's why things become more and more hyper-partisan.
@
DryvBy I would advise just not playing games that you feel are too preachy (vote with your wallet) and let the creatives have the freedom to create the stories they want to tell (even if you don't like some of them).
Sadly that does start to get more difficult as more games trend to pushing a certain school of political thought. And it's not actually that games need to do that with their stories; there could be forms of self-censorship (due to perceived backlash from certain people) that hampers types of creative expression, but the vast majority of that censorship leans in favor of a certain school of political thought.
If voting with your wallet eventually means leaving the hobby because literally everything even slightly associated with a certain side of politics becomes considered "hateful" or "toxic", then that's a problem. If being conservative with your
money someone ends up getting twisted as a form of bigotry and discrimination using intersectionalism and identity politics (simply because of the act of being conservative with it), then that's a massive problem.