> I don't think religions should appeal to outsiders
You'd have made strange bedfellows with cranky Catholics who thought so too, 60 years ago after Vatican II's modernization reforms.
> You can see this with the number of members for Unitarian churches (declining) vs Amish (growing).
Hold on a sec, you ought to clarify what you mean by "gain more members" - the Amish have a very high birthrate, averaging 6.1 kids per woman. While Unitarians are below the replacement rate.
> Games which chase inclusivity often fail, because the very people they appeal to don't actually want to play video games.
How is this old culture-wars canard still being rolled out? A glance at the character rosters on the Game of the Year winners for the past 10 years proves you wrong.
>Ah yes, the total failure of checks notes 5 million copies of Slay the Spire 2 sold.
You forgot these gems:
+-----------------------+------+--------------------+---------------------+
| Game / Publication | Year | Estimated Loss | Layoffs / Fallout |
+-----------------------+------+--------------------+---------------------+
| Concord | 2024 | ~$400,000,000 | Studio Closed |
| Suicide Squad: KTJL | 2024 | ~$200,000,000 | 50%+ of QA Cut |
| Skull & Bones | 2024 | ~$150M - $200M | Heavy Global Cuts |
| Star Wars Outlaws | 2024 | ~$100M - $150M | Massive Studio Cuts |
| Hyenas | 2023 | ~$100,000,000 | 240+ Staff Cut |
| Saints Row | 2022 | ~$100,000,000 | Studio Closed |
| Highguard | 2026 | ~$80M - $100M | Studio Closed |
+-----------------------+------+--------------------+---------------------+
| MEDIA & JOURNALISM STATUS UPDATES |
+-----------------------+------+--------------------+---------------------+
| Game Informer | 2024 | Brand Dissolved | Shuttered by Owner |
| Polygon | 2025 | Sold / Gutted | Mass Editorial Cuts |
| Eurogamer Network | 2026 | Multi-Wave Cuts | Core Teams Laid Off |
| Giant Bomb | 2025 | Dismantled | Core Talent Left |
| Inverse & The Verge | 2026 | Verticals Closed | Sections Abolished |
| Launcher (Wash. Post) | 2023 | Verticals Closed | Division Shut Down |
+-----------------------+------+--------------------+---------------------+
We still have to wait for Mixtape to see how much Larry Ellison's daughter lost out of her trust fund to make that garbage.
See the last two columns? Those are rookie numbers, we gotta pump those numbers up till we send them all to Doordash and Chili's, then the gaming industry can start to heal.
For better or worse, the Catholic church has shaped most of western philosophy for at least 1500 years, including topics not necessarily related to existence of a deity or belief in that existence. It's not surprising that some of their thoughts seem sound and consistent with your ethics.
> I'm an atheist too, but I don't think religions should appeal to outsiders.
Why not? When i was an agnostic I liked the Catholic church as an institution (and many other religious organisations too).
> The idea is that by relaxing norms, he wants to gain more members.
That is a ridiculously cynical take. People join the church, and even more the priesthood because they believe. Why would they corrupt the message to get the numbers up?
I do not know what norms have been relaxed by the church anyway? Changing the mass used by the majority of Catholics? Its happened many times historically.
> But it doesn't actually go that way. It alienates the core, and the people for whom compromises are made don't want to join anyway.
I see no sign of alienation except in small fringe groups (so not the "core").
> You can see this with the number of members for Unitarian churches (declining) vs Amish (growing).
You seem to be responding to OP line by line instead of understanding their overall point.
OP doesn't appear to be saying Catholicism ought not to grow - rather that they believe trying to appeal to a wider audience than that which is already interested in religion is likely to fail, or worse, backfire.
The overall point fails because it requires those points.
Religions grow by appealing to a wider audience than that which is already interested. That is precisely how Christianity spread in the first place.
What the Catholic Church is doing is not backfiring even in the terms of the original argument, and I would challenge the assumption that losing people is "backfiring". The church has a duty to preach what it believes to be the truth, rather than what all its members want to hear. Losing some members might not be a bad thing.
MOST games lose huge amounts of money, and the "many" games you -- without a shred of evidence -- claim DEI caused to lose hundreds of millions are overwhelmingly offset by one single game, The Sims, earning the studio many billions of dollars, continuing to this day.
And which itself inspired and gave permission and financial justification for many other inclusive games, indie to AAA, by proving there was a huge female audience for games, 14 years before Gamergate got it all wrong by attacking women while pretending it was about journalism.
So of course Gamergate didn't mean to be about The Sims, because The Sims totally undermines its claims. That's why they avoided mentioning or attacking The Sims, pretending it didn't exist and have millions of female players, and why you bristle and bluster and bullshit without evidence when I bring it up.
What receipts do you have to prove the brash claims of your Gamergate apologetics, to counter the design document receipts and first hand experience in the industry developing successful inclusive games popular with gays and girls and even boys, that I just shared?
This video essay by Alexander Avila is right on, and the comments are wonderful:
>It's no doubt The Sims is an influential video game. In this video essay, we're going to talk about its GAY influence, particularly the role it plays in queer people's identity development. Enjoy the presentation as we go over how the Sims influenced a generation in letting them live out their Tumblr dreams...
Thanks for posting those PDFs! It is a rare insight into the often secret world of AAA game development. I can’t believe people are still hung up on and defending Gamergate after all these years. Absolutely unhinged.
Especially pathetic and revealing when they still try to argue it was "Ackchyually" about "unethical journalism". Yet look where we are today, and the streaming influencer "journalists" they follow.
The Sims wasn't just inclusive -- it was chock full of social commentary, from its simulation mechanics to its object descriptions to its storytelling support. What Ian Bogost calls "Procedural Rhetoric": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric
>Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and models they construct. The term was first coined by Ian Bogost in his 2007 book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.
>Bogost argues that games make strong claims about how the world works by the processes they embody. Procedural rhetoric analyzes the art of persuasion by rule based representations and interactions rather than spoken or written word. Procedural rhetoric focuses on how game makers craft laws and rules within a game to convey a particular ideology. [...]
>Frasca mentions the simulation games SimCity and The Sims as examples of procedural rhetoric and uses the handling of same-sex relationships as an example: "[T]he way that The Sims's designers dealt with gay couples was not just through representation (for example, by allowing players to put gay banners on their yards), they also decided to build a rule about it. In this game, same-gender relationships are possible. ... By incorporating this rule, the designers are showing tolerance towards this sexual option."
If Gamergate were really about "ideology in games", The Sims should have been its ground zero central target, and they would have been attacking journalists who wrote about it positively. It wasn’t, and they weren't. That tells you their stated concern wasn't the real one. It was all about attacking and excluding women from day one.
Gamergate was a dry run for MAGA. It pioneered the same online tactics later used by the Trumpist right: coordinated harassment, grievance politics, memes, conspiracy theories, anti-"SJW" culture war framing, and the mobilization of angry online communities into a political movement.
Steve Bannon and Breitbart recognized its potential early, refined and amplified it, and used it to recruit and radicalize a generation of online activists who later flowed into MAGA politics.
Many researchers, journalists, and historians now describe Gamergate as a precursor or template for the alt-right, QAnon, and Trump-era online organizing.
Encyclopædia Britannica -- Gamergate entry: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gamergate-campaign ("Bannon and Yiannopoulos would use that platform to draw Gamergate supporters into the larger alt-right movement.")
