[quote=@Vilageidiotx]
What I always found funny about it is the accusation that women or gays in video games are pandering. Of course they are pandering, because that's what successful companies do; they pander so they can expand their market. Maybe there was a time when video games were purely artistic, in the sense that they were made without marketing in mind by people concerned souly with creation, but that time was long long ago. Video games are a big market, and in the last ten years or so they've became completely mainstream. Used to be you marketed games to that "core market" of young men because breaking out of that market was unfeasible. But now it is completely feasible to increase their marketing base by enlarging the demographic they appeal to. So of course they are going to do that. It isn't a concerted attack on conservative values, it's bland marketing pure and simple. They were doing that before, specific to their base, it's just that nobody complained because they were the ones being pandered to.
[/quote]

This is a thing too that's not restricted only to video games. Movies, TVs, and even music (or music videos) do it too and have been for decades. It could be argued ever since the 1980's made being gay hip and acceptable and a discussion worth having on TV it's entered into every accessible medium or every mainstream accessible medium.

It may have started off as that campy thing that certain characters were rolled up in to be "funny" or strange, but homosexuality is now an acceptable thing to market in the post-sexual revolution world.

Maybe it isn't always well-written, in which case you can hem and haw over it. But zero'ing in on the "omg its homosex panda ring" perhaps the better thing to say would be, "they could have handled the writing between these characters to explore the fact". It might even be suggested that writers for video games are the nerd types who grew up on Rambo and Lord of the Rings where romance isn't really a core element of the plot so it any time its handled in anyway it's done so awkwardly. But beyond making a joke about it it may be a low blow to go further, especially given that now-a-days writing for mainstream video games doesn't have much pressure to be particularly intriguing or insightful because it has to now sell to highschoolers and College bros.

We still get a few very well written games, like Witcher and New Vegas. But I have a running bias that anything advertised on Facebook and shit is going to be concentrating more on the spectacle of things going on than the art and wonder of world and plot. I doubt we're going to anywhere like...

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLN_UanuUTs&t=24s[/youtube]

Though if someone were to try something of any considerable depth, analytical or otherwise in video games someone'll bitch and moan about the game trying too hard to sound smart in the same way they're trying too hard to be progressive and they need to be more Berry Goldwater.

But on the point about games being art once upon a time: I would say Undertale is that sort of art game. And even without a AAA marketing strategy and elements included to give it broad appeal it writes in some gay plots, lesbian and otherwise.

[quote]
Same schtick with the "War on Christmas" that you hear about every year. People see seasonal products marketed in a secular way, replacing "Christmas" with "Holiday" and shit like that, and they think that it's an atheistic scheme, when really it's a corporate decision to try to sell flashing lights to Jews.

The left is not the only force at play when it comes to the erosion of tradition; I'd even argue it isn't by far the most powerful force at work to that end. It's capitalism that wants everything to be marketable to everybody, and it has been capitalism that has, both for better and for worse, most completely dismantled the conservative traditions of the first world. Conservative tradition pigeon-holes markets, and capitalism does not want to remain cooped up in traditional limitations. 
[/quote]

This reminds me of a post I read on /leftypol/. In it, an anon was responding to an alt-right, super-conservative visitor who was asking why any of it matters, why bother for some socialist paradise where we don't work and we own all the means of automated production, or why no one there bothers to get a job or something; I forget the specifics. In any case, the anon responded to him by spelling out that all the classic arts, literature, and everything traditional he stands for were invented by people who didn't labor in the sense they went to factories and worked 12 hours a day to make bread. All the art, literature, and what not from the time of the cavemen were made by people who had the time to because society provided for them, or these individuals worked only so much to provide for themselves and their community because there was no other expectations on them to do so.

He cited his family history as Appalachians and that during his grandfather's time all the family and cousins would get together at the end of the day and make and perform music. Everyone could play an instrument and his grandfather had a piano he would play during these affairs. But eventually, the capitalist world caught up and the family could no longer hang on doing that. The farm went under, the family had to separate to find work elsewhere, and now even working eight hours shifts no one had the time, money, or energy to learn to perform folk music as they had and these days no one in his family can do as they did and pursue their old art.