'There are no clear conditions for victory in the culture wars.' Leon Neal / Getty Images
There’s a memorable line from The Dark Knight that sums up the curious trajectory of Czech video game developer Daniel Vávra: “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
Gamergate, an idiosyncratic consumer revolt of angry gamers against the video game industry and journalists that erupted in 2014, initially made Vávra and his Prague-based Warhorse Games folk heroes for not embracing DEI in their development of a game called Kingdom Come: Deliverance. But in the wake of Trump and Elon Musk’s political triumph, Vávra has been branded insufficiently anti-woke. Gamergate keeps waging new battles against every phantom of woke cultural depiction, no matter how minor, illustrating the sisyphean nature of the online culture wars — it’s a virtual game no one can ever truly win.
Vávra is not your typical blue-haired social justice warrior. The barrel-chested, bearded Czech looks like a character in his own medieval European action game and once led a street protest outside the Greek embassy in Prague to protest colleagues’ arrest. Yet, a decade ago, he became a pariah among many of the press and his peers. They hated that Vávra was sympathetic to Gamergate. In 2015, progressive activists accused Warhorse Games of racism for not including people of colour from a game set in rural 15th-century Bohemia, which Vávra defended as part of a commitment to historical accuracy. The controversy prompted him to speak out against the wokeification of the games industry. “The future of our biz is at stake, and ‘progressive’ media are destroying it with their hateful narrative,” he said.
The keyboard jockeys of Gamergate applauded Vávra’s stance but the fallout of the controversy was ugly: Warhorse got hate mail from progressives, and news outlets such as Vice refused to cover Kingdom Come. Vavra likened the backlash to living in the USSR. “I had the ‘privilege’ of growing up in a totalitarian communist regime,” he told a games journalist in 2015, “so I have first-hand experience with censorship and… going to prison for your opinion or shitty propaganda on TV, in literature and even music.”
Explaining how reception to a video game gets compared to life in the last days of Soviet communism isn’t easy. What sparked it all was a laughably low-stakes morass involving the ex-boyfriend of a game developer who posted an angry rant about their relationship online. Each side of Gamergate insisted they had the moral high ground, with one claiming they were defending “ethics in videogame journalism” and the other side saying they were righteously fighting “misogynists lashing out at women in gaming”. More broadly, Gamergate was a kind of clash of online civilizations. In her 2017 book Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle described the dynamic as “hysterical liberal call-out culture produced a breeding ground for an online backlash of irreverent mockery and anti-PC”.
In other words, they were two sides of the same coin: shrieking online bubbles — one self-righteous and woke and the other conservative and/or trollish that worked out of the same terrible playbook: bad faith character assassination, public shaming, or getting someone fired. I say that from personal experience; keyboard warriors and even some of my colleagues tried to get me fired from my role writing about video games for The Onion because I was inaccurately perceived as a Gamergate foot soldier.
Gamergate might sound arcane now, but it was the perfect moral panic for the peak Twitter era, a funhouse mirror version of the scapegoating of video games of the Eighties and Nineties. Blaming games for society’s ills used to be a bipartisan effort: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have all tried to restrict them (Biden even once called game developers “little creeps” who make games that teach people how to kill). But instead of being blamed for inspiring school shooters, Gamergate became a useful liberal talking point among Democrats. They cited video games’ power to allegedly groom young white males and turn them into bitter incels and extreme Right-wingers.
For most of Gamergate’s lifespan, the movement looked like a lost cause. It became a reliable punching bag for the mainstream media, part of the founding myth of the alt-Right, which begat Q-Anon, which begat Trump’s presidency; indeed, Trump has even been called the “Gamergate” of Republican politicians. For instance, Vox argued that Gamergate was “a watershed moment and learning experience for many future Trump supporters”. For his part, Steve Bannon admits that he viewed Gamergate as an opportunity for recruiting what he labelled “rootless white males” into a standing Right-wing army online. “You can activate that army,” he told Joshua Green, the author of Devil’s Bargain. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”
Yet Gamergate had the opposite effect as intended: games got more identitarian — not less — since 2014. As Gamergate’s online forces fumed, new games increasingly incorporated more racially diverse characters and LGBTQ storylines. In Dragon Age: Veilguard, you can get a call-out for misgendering a non-binary character — an eye-roll-inducing HR lecture in a fantasy game about dragons.
But perhaps not for long. As others have noted, there’s been a noticeable vibe shift against progressive political correctness. Game journalists and activists failed miserably in their attempt at a reverse Gamergate — a boycott of Hogwarts Legacy due to J.K. Rowling’s “transphobia”. Now, the media says that Rowling may have just won the culture war.
Complaints about Assassin’s Creed: Shadows’ usage of a black samurai hero in a game about historical Japan led to the game being delayed three months until early 2025 to “better incorporate player feedback”. Wired is calling the controversy “Gamergate 2.0“, but what they don’t mention is that Japanese gamers have been the most vocal and got over 100,000 signatures for a petition to cancel the game, saying it’s “a serious insult to Japanese culture and history, and may also be linked to Asian racism”. In this case, the politics of “cultural appropriation” butted up against the “underrepresentation” of black characters and won.
Then came Trump’s re-election in November, which signalled the ultimate triumph of the anti-woke regime, with outspoken Gamergater Elon Musk suddenly wielding incredible power. Some game developers have even started to pitch themselves as anti-DEI, while liberals’ attempts to invoke Gamergate as a rallying cry are falling on deaf ears. Lin Manuel Miranda recently released a DEI-inspired concept album based on of The Warriors, the 1979 cult movie about New York gangs, but this time with all-female protagonists and an incel villain that Miranda says was inspired by Gamergate. If you haven’t heard of the album, it’s probably because it’s hopelessly corny, an embarrassing relic from the Obama years that deservedly died on the Billboard charts.
Likewise, Dragon Age: Veilguard earned half the expected sales, and Concord, a target of Gamergate for its gender-fluid characters and awkward pronouns, got shut down by Sony after only two weeks due to a historically dismal performance.
No wonder there’s been a distinct tone of triumph amongst the extremely online denizens of “Kotaku In Action” — a subreddit that’s been the unofficial home to Gamergate for a decade. Some of the group’s 157,000 members have gone as far as to declare a victory in their decade-long battle against “Social Justice Warriors”. “Ten fucking years after the thing, we were proven to be right even though anyone not dishonest or mentally disabled knew we were right,” one poster proclaimed recently in a thread titled Gamergate Won. “Now that we’ve won, can games start being good again?”
However, there are no clear conditions for victory in the culture wars and little interest in calling for a truce. So, the crusade keeps expanding to absurd lengths until it begins to resemble the thing that progressives accused it of being — a Right-wing reactionary political force. “Gamergate went from [being] about games journalism to a wider culture war to what it is now — a last attempt to stop globalists from taking full authoritarian control of the West,” went a recent Gamergate Reddit post.
What does it mean to Reddit post your way to a populist Right-wing crusade against “globalists?” Not much, so it’s much easier to keep targeting video games for wokeness, no matter how petty the offense. Just ask Warhorse Games.
Vávra is being cancelled once again, but this time, ironically, it’s by Gamergate. The just-released sequel to Kingdom Come includes an optional same-sex romance option and an added element of racial diversity because the game is set in the Czech city of Kuttenberg, which, like other cities in the Holy Roman Empire, was a hub of trade and cultural exchange. Vávra and Warhorse insisted that they were going once again for historical accuracy, such as the inclusion of a Jewish quarter. Still, Gamergaters accused them of “going woke” and began boycotting the game and spamming Metacritic with bad reviews like: “Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a gay woke historically inaccurate DEI game.”
Now, Vávra is speaking out against his former comrades-in-arms: “[It] turns out that we are once again in the middle of a rather bizarre culture war, this time from the opposite side than usual.”. His colleague, Tobias Stolz-Zwilling, stated that Warhorse would rather not be connected to any political battle. “It seems like someone is always trying to brand us somehow, and we are just trying to make a cool video game,” he said.
Either way, Vávra may have the last laugh. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II has been a critical darling and sold over 2 million copies in its first two weeks. The growing sentiment in “Kotaku In Action” is that the Gamergate boycott of the game may have been an overreach. As one commentator noted, “It’s lame when anyone of any political or cultural stripe engages in a witch hunt or a purity test, especially when it isn’t even sincere.”
Who just wants to play some video games instead?
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SubscribeI miss the good old days of the 1980s, when video games were only ever about two things: stomping on turtles, and furthering the vanguard of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Sometimes they were about both, like Dig Dug, but I would be happy to have either.
Super Mario Bros was commie agitprop too, a clear Stalinist avatar of the workers revolution, going around collecting coins, overturning false consciousness, stomping on turtles, etc.
When you get bitten by a shark it’s understandable that you might become hyper aware of going back in the sea. Gamers reacted to a ‘real’ cultural politicisation of their games, is it any wonder if they are overly hyper sensitive now ? Or, as the old saying went ‘Once bitten, twice shy’.
It would be lovely, to be able to laugh about it, that it’s all ‘Stuff and nonsense’, or a ‘Storm in a teacup’, but it’s not……..
as someone who follows the game industry , there is no better demostration of going woke, going broke. From Concord, Dragon Age 4, Dustborn, Avowed, Suicide Squad.all failed miserably, losing in some cases 100’s of millions. Dragon Age probaly lost Bioware/EA 300 million +
As Nintendo recently released their audience demographics (Nintendo being a developer whose games are more likely to appeal to women) but 86% of Nintendo Gamers are Male.
So it’s fair to assume that for other companies like From Software, Capcom, Rockstar that’s more like 95% of their gamers are males.
To be blunt if your game does’nt appeal to Males (mostly White or East Asian) you are not going to sell.
Game Devs have been slow to understand this and we see with multiple studio closures, project cancellations that they can hate it all you want but Videogaming is Male
They will release surprious figures half of gamers are women, yep if you include mobile games
Just seen the woke Feminazi fantasy Last of Us has been cancelled
So do they want to sell games or make poitical points that appeal to in say Dustborn’s example around 100 people brought it
We see games like Space Marines, Black Myth Wukong, games that don’t pander to the non existent ‘modern audience’ do gangbusters
The target audience for Dragon Age 4 is hardly that different from those of previous installments, and those sold well.
Yes, a blockbuster game has to do well with males in order to do well overall. And as Nintendo’s demographics show, male tastes span a wide range.
I think what the Gamergaters and the PC Brigade both forgot was that most people just wanted to play games that were good, regardless of the politics. Veilguard and Concord were both openly progressive, but more importantly, both weren’t very good.
‘Vice’ is now tagged as the stereotypical example of ‘go woke, go broke’ but its story is a bit more nuanced than that.
It occasionally surfaces as part of a collection of almost-dead 90s outlets eg, ‘The Onion’, George Takei’s media feed and so on, to operate in sync as one of the last repositories of ol’ fashioned woke tut-tuttery & finger-wagging.
The Lin Manuel Miranda thing on ‘The Warriors’ sounds truly awful. Where can one see it?
Gaming is in a bit of a crisis because it is transmutating into something which closer resembles TV. I think streaming has a lot to do with this as well as cut budgets.
If there are far less blockbuster or even mid-budget titles around for the console (compared to the Xbox and PS2/3 heyday) then the reason is that games prefer to watch and participate in endless replays of their favourite games, propped up by Twitch, YouTube, the hitless stars and pretty girls who stream them.
Melonie Mac and co may go on about the woke culture war and although that too is entertainment for X, the studios have deeper problems because most gamers can no longer reach into their pocket for at least $100 a month or every couple of weeks for a new product.
The scale of budgets has grown since the PS2 days, and so has the overall games market. It’s still growing.
But every healthy competitive market has products and companies that fail. Sometimes expectations grow faster than the market. Some were overly optimistic and had to adjust their expectations. A necessary adjustment, but far from a big crisis.
Lin Manuel Who? Lin Manuel What?
If anyone isn’t familiar with the nuances of Gamergate 2.0 or Warhorse’s relevance to it, this article won’t help much. It’s very misleading.
Here are the issues.
Vávra headed up an independent studio (Warhorse) for Kingdom Come Deliverance, and held his ground when the progressive blue haired types started yelling and demanding representation in medieval European society. For that he was celebrated and the game was a massive success, mainly because it was brilliant.
Vávra has reflected in interview on the decision not to allow the player to customise the main protagonist (Henry) and commented that this is Henry’s story, and not a chance for the player to self insert. Henry holds views and attitudes consistent with a character of that period and is NOT gay in the first game.
Owing to the success of Kingdom Come, Warhorse Studios were purchased by Austrian venture capitalists (Koch, no relation to Koch Brothers) who promised to be hands-off owners.
Vávra releases Kingdom Come Deliverance to generally excellent reviews and high sales. Some people are annoyed by the fact that Henry now appears to be bisexual. One of Koch stakeholders confirms in an interview that they demanded the changes to “appeal to a younger audience”. Long term fans of the series call out Vávra for his hypocrisy.
That’s it. The game is still excellent and has sold really well. Vávra really isn’t under attack, and gamers have much bigger and easier targets to go after.
> What sparked it all was a laughably low-stakes morass involving the ex-boyfriend of a game developer who posted an angry rant about their relationship online
It want about that, it was about evidence coming out that games journalism was horribly corrupt, had no ounce of integrity and was being played by massive studios to disenfranchise who were seeking to root out opposition to the massive bloated shambling abominations they were calling games.