I appreciate Square Enix supporting LGBT rights in FFXIV.

[Makeda]

Does anyone remember a time when games could just be games without political or social motivated agendas being pushed out to random people?

Well...

What does that statement mean really other than "Can anyone remember a time when games were 100% perfect representations of my perspective of the world as I perceive the world now, and not perhaps how I did even back then?"

It's really impossible to NOT make social or political commentary from the perspective of someone.

Even if you just walk up and say "hi"... someone is gonna wonder why you didn't say "bonjour" or "Ohayo gozaimasu". Not to mention the person who sits there and wonders why "all you got is hi, how do I form a conversation with only that?"


What we really need here is some education on communication, and... dare I say it... 'diversity comprehension' - as in how to understand and process that other people have different perspectives without getting 'offended' by it or by the fact that not everyone wants what you want.

[SeverianLyonesse]

Well...

What does that statement mean really other than "Can anyone remember a time when games were 100% perfect representations of my perspective of the world as I perceive the world now, and not perhaps how I did even back then?"

It's really impossible to NOT make social or political commentary from the perspective of someone.

Even if you just walk up and say "hi"... someone is gonna wonder why you didn't say "bonjour" or "Ohayo gozaimasu". Not to mention the person who sits there and wonders why "all you got is hi, how do I form a conversation with only that?"


What we really need here is some education on communication, and... dare I say it... 'diversity comprehension' - as in how to understand and process that other people have different perspectives without getting 'offended' by it or by the fact that not everyone wants what you want.

Agreed. Nothing exists in a vacuum, everything we do, say, or publish is informed by and informs the social organism. To be social is to be political.

And, on a somewhat related note, it is impossible to separate the art from the artist. No one makes art without having an idea they want to fix in some form. The fact that there is an idea means that it will be constrained and defined by the artist's worldview, so the idea is always going to have some degree of bias, opinion, and objective. And the fact that it will be fixed means that the idea will inevitably be communicated to someone else in society. I.e., all art, whether intentionally or not, communicates aspects of the artist's worldview, which in turn can't help but propound or deny the artist's opinions on truth and politics.

I think you are right that it is partly a sign of empathy for people to be able understand art as an expression of the artist rather than as merely what they want to see. But it's also just a sign of being more thoughtful and analytically honest about things generally, and recognizing that, despite what the past few decades of advertising have taught us to believe, it is not the consumer that has the final say on what has meaning. It is the artist, and indeed the publisher who has any say at all whether and how that idea even reaches you, or if was ever worth creating in the first place.