How The Left Is Destroying Video Games exposes how "woke" ideology reshapes gaming, from Cyberpunk 2077’s transgender genital customization—dismissed as performative activism—to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s rewritten villain Eorfawine, where developers bowed to ableist backlash. Critics argue these changes enforce ideological conformity over artistic freedom, stifling creativity under diversity quotas and political correctness. The segment frames resistance in sci-fi circles as a last stand against cultural erasure, warning that gaming’s once-boundless imagination now bows to leftist mandates. [Automatically generated summary]
So I want to talk about this new game, Cyberpunk 2077.
This is not a review.
It's actually just something I want to talk about about the way the game is being greeted.
This is an RPG, a role-playing game that is based on a pen and paper role-playing game that was kind of like Dungeons and Dragons.
This takes place in Night City, a fictionalized dystopian city in California.
Although why you would need to fictionalize a dystopian city in California when you could just pick one, I don't know.
One of the things about this game is you can choose your character, not only choose your character, but you can choose your character's genitals.
And I'm just imagining, you know, what it would be like to have a 13-year-old boy choosing his character's genitals.
If a 13-year-old boy could invent himself as a character with female genitals, he would never leave his own room.
I remember when I was 12 having discussions about how do women ever leave the room when they could just sit and admire themselves and touch themselves.
And I think that that's, so that I think is what they're going to be playing into.
But they think what they're going to be playing into is this wonderful woke transgenderism.
Well, nothing, nothing, as you should know, as of course you know, is ever enough for the woke.
You can never be woke enough because the point of being woke is to be woker than thou.
So even though they have these transgender characters all over the place and you can make your character transgender, which I just, I mean, the idea of two 13-year-old boys in a room discussing which genitals to give their characters is just too comical for words.
However, this is being attacked by various critics as just not woke enough because you're never woke enough because they have to be woker because that's where the virtue of being woke comes from.
So just to choose one, I mean, there's one from Polygon review from a writer who is a trans person and doesn't like the fact that, for instance, there are ads for a beverage in this that feature a female coded model, I have to use this word, with a penis visible through her skin-type clothing, making it clear that in Cyberpunk 2077, trans bodies are objectified and commodified.
Some cis bodies are too, of course, but the crucial difference is that we constantly meet, interact with, and form relationships with cis characters who have far more dimension than the surface of any sexualized image on a billboard.
The same can't be said of trans characters.
Even if you opt to play as a trans V, that's the character.
She's not particularly well-defined.
The game is about what you see through her eyes and what she goes through, not about who she is as a person.
And, you know, there's so many things I could say about this, so many ways in which all of this trans stuff is such a fantasy and so foolish and so ridiculous.
But that's not what I want to talk about at all.
Why Art Expands Our Minds00:02:57
In our country, hopefully, this trans writer can have any opinion she wants.
She can have any point of view she wants.
She can, or I don't know if she's she or he, I'm not sure which trans she is or he is, or doesn't matter to me at all.
You know, I'm perfectly happy for her to live as herself as long as I can live as myself and refer to her by whatever pronoun I please and discuss that situation in any way that I please.
However, this is a stupid way for anyone to approach a cultural work.
It's stupid.
It is limiting.
It is limiting your own mind.
One of the reasons that we have the arts, one of the reasons we tell stories, one of the reasons we have pictures that we look in and play video games is to let other minds into ours.
That is part of what we used to call loving your neighbor.
Loving somebody is allowing their point of view to come into yours.
Art is practice for love.
It is.
That's what it is.
Art is a way of communicating the human experience, my human experience, to you through metaphor.
There's no way for me to describe what it feels like to be alive.
There's no way for me to describe that.
The simplest question about, you know, a baseball player pitching a no-hitter, how did it feel, Champ?
He will immediately go to metaphor.
He will say it was like waking up on Christmas morning.
He will tell you a story about how he feels because there's no way to communicate how it feels to be alive except through metaphor, except through music, pictures, stories, right?
And when other people make works of art, they are communicating their experience to you.
They are broadening your experience by putting their experience inside you.
So I, for instance, like reading works of art, like reading books, seeing movies that have a different point of view.
It doesn't bother me to see a woke movie.
But if I went around and insisted that every work of art have my conservative, right-wing, pro-American, pro-freedom point of view, I would never expand myself at all.
I would never be able to understand the world at the level at which I understand it, which comes about a lot of it, not just through living for a long time and keeping my mind open, but through the arts, which help me to keep my mind open to other points of view.
The entire idea of woke art is a mistake, and it's a stupid mistake that makes you more and more stupid.
This person, this writer, and all these writers who are attacking Cyberpunk 2077, and all of them who are attacking all the arts as not representing their point of view, are making themselves smaller and smaller and smaller and eventually will be so locked down within their own consciousness that they have no tolerance whatsoever.
And this is why the people who parade themselves as tolerant are actually the most intolerant people in the country.
The arts expand your mind, but they can't do it if you shut them down whenever you disagree with them.
Face Burned, Mind Closed00:05:44
So here's some news from the world of gaming.
I am a gamer and one of the franchises I've enjoyed is Assassin's Creed.
I played the first one and one or two of the others and enjoyed it.
It's a game, if you're not a gamer, it's a game of stealth where you creep up on people and assassinate them.
And it had the first one had a really clever time travel aspect to it that was really smart and different and I enjoyed it.
So they've got a new one coming out and this is called Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
They're putting them in different cultural settings and all this.
And you have all these targets that you have to go and kill.
And one of them in this game is someone named Eeyore for Wine, Eeorforwine, I guess.
And she is described this way, horribly burned in a childhood accident.
Eorfawine is terrified someone will see her disfigured face.
She relieves her fury with bursts of violence.
Now try and guess what we were outraged about when we heard this.
The outrage, of course, we must be offended.
It's always important to be offended because being offended is the way the left controls the culture.
It makes you feel that you're doing something wrong and it puts pressure on companies to change that.
And the point is really not the change that you're making.
It is that you make the change.
It is that you are bowing to the system of manners that the left is imposing on you.
That's the important thing about these things.
Never think that anybody is actually defending gay people or black people or anybody else.
They're always defending leftism, which is the power to control you from above, as opposed to freedom, which is the power to make your own decisions from below.
So they immediately began attacking this description of this villain, Eorfawine, who is horribly burned in a childhood accident.
She's terrified someone will see her disfigured face and relieves her fury with bursts of violence.
It's absolutely unacceptable, says one person, to talk about facial differences this way, facial differences.
Writers for games and otherwise need to do better.
And the Assassin's Creed developers said, thank you so much for pointing this out.
We apologize for unintentionally reinforcing ableism.
It's ableism.
It's giving privilege to people who are able through this language.
We will remove this language in an upcoming update.
Now, the Assassin's Creed people have always been politically correct.
It was very important, even in the first one, that the hero be Muslim, because it came out right at a time when people were saying, hey, some of these Muslims are kind of blowing things up.
Maybe there's something wrong with their philosophy.
Maybe we should check this out.
And so it was very important to them that they were multicultural and they have always been responsive to political correctness.
So it's not a total loss to lose them.
But games in general, games in general, have been resistant to political correctness.
And the feminists especially have been whining and moaning and shrilly crying that there are too many brave male white heroes or whatever, and boys are having too much fun because boys are the people who play games more than girls.
And that's just the fact.
And so they've been playing to that.
But now there's all this pressure, all this pressure to bring gaming into the corral of all the other arts, the movies, which are now saying, well, we won't make a movie if it doesn't have the proper number of black people in it.
TV, the same thing.
And, you know, are they going to cancel cop shows because we need to defund the police?
And novels, publishing, basically, has got this entire racist and racial preference system being put in place through this kind of pressure.
But we always have to, and so it's, but it's a shame to see them do this because let's, first of all, let's talk about the illogic of it.
First of all, if you're burned, if your face is burned, you are not as happy about your face as you would be if your face weren't burned.
How do you feel about your face, Yorfor Wine?
It's great.
I love having a burned face.
It's just what I wanted.
You know, I actually set my face on fire because I thought, I'm too good looking.
I would rather have a burned face.
Nobody thinks like that.
And that is inhuman and stupid.
Of course, you might be bitter.
You might be angry.
You might be insane if your face were disfigured in a fire.
That is just human nature.
And to eliminate human nature, because this is, of course, the leftist theory, that if they eliminate human nature, if they stop, if you don't say that a man is not a woman, then the lie that a man is a woman will come true.
This is leftist philosophy.
It's all language.
It's all about what we say.
It's all about social constructs.
If we have a new social construct where someone with a penis is a woman, then someone with a penis will be, in fact, a woman.
It's just nonsense.
It's just taking the meaning out of words.
All of this, all of this, taking the meaning out of words, enforcing a code of manners, making the language, forcing people to acknowledge what is not true as true, all of this is just leftism.
It doesn't help people with burned faces.
It doesn't help black people.
It doesn't help gay people.
It doesn't help anybody.
And that's why, that's why you get these crazy things where people say, well, if you don't believe this, you ain't black.
If you don't believe this, you ain't gay.
Because it's not a system for helping you be yourself.
It's a system for helping you be what they want you to be and to believe what they want you to believe.
And it's a shame.
It really is a shame because games are a wonderful place for young men to experience heroism, to play out their dreams, their fantasies of heroism.
It shouldn't be a place for leftists to strip the joy out of life as they've done in every other venue.
And it's too bad.
I hope some gamers will fight back.
The science fiction world is partly fighting back.