i think this a problem that spans society and many issues, and it's related to how the internet has changed the way people communicate.

1. the internet has brought together huge numbers of people. the numbers are so large that even a tiny, disgruntled minority is a large number of people. With 6B people, even 1/10th of one percent is 6M people.

2. the angriest or most disgruntled people are necessarily going to be the ones that disagree most strongly with the status quo (the way women are/were depicted in games). in a market, like gaming, the status quo is often a representation of what the majority of the consumers want. in this case the majority is or was straight men.

3. the kinds of people who are disgruntled and form movements or mini-movements to air their grievances about things like gaming, tend to be in western society where quality of life is extremely high, and so small discomforts feel enormous to many people (especially younger gnerations).

4. human beings are extremely adept at rationalizing avoiding discomfort or acquiring comfort and will quickly learn creative arguments to help them achieve what they want. this means they will quickly learn to weaponize the most sacred ideals or talking points, or even hijack existing movements that have a lot of momentum.

Applying these 4 observations to the situation with e.g. sexualized women in gaming, what you have are

A minority of female and lgbt gamers who were not the original target audiences of games and so standard depictions of gaming characters did not traditionally represent them. Those standards became well-established both culturally and as marketing strategies. And those standards have had a ton of momentum because because the 'typical' straight male gamer has grown accustomed to them and wants the to continue.

That minority of female+lgbtq gamers is large because a tiny minority of a large population is still a large population, and they've been able to come together across geographical space on the internet to become a loud voice in unison.

That loud voice is doing three things

1) Even if it's only tens or hundreds of thousands of people (which is far smaller than the 100s of millions of gamers), that is still a number that will feel overwhelming to game companies when that minority boycotts.

2) that community has learned to align its grievances with large, existing leftwing movements like women's rights and lgbtq rights (even though it isn't clear there is any rights issue here).

3) there is pressure on gaming companies to align with those same large, existing leftwing movements, because doing otherwise could attract harmful media attention.


To me, the underlying problems that need to be addressed are:

1. Weaponization of ideological movements (like social justice) to things that are not really social justice issues but that creative, clever people have been extremely successful at framing that way. That's something that society needs to identify and put an end to. But more importantly, it means reframing these grievances for what they really are: businesses creating things that are designed to appeal to the majority, which leaves out minorities whose tastes greatly differ. That's not a justice issue, it's just a marketing issue. The key difference is that that solution is not to demonize straight male gamers or sexy depictions of women, but to start designing games that can appeal to different types of gamers (including men who want to see sexy characters AND women and lgbtq gamers who don't). Character customization anyone?

2. Vocal minorities are far more motivated to be vocal because they have more to gain since the status quo already tends to align with the majority (so the majority is sufficiently comfortable that they aren't moved to exert energy to protest in the other direction). The solution to that problem may be to teach people to proactively defend certain aspects of the status quo even though it's already the status quo.