In 2023, three major games introduced they/them pronouns into their character creation options: Baldur's Gate 3 (Larian Studios), Starfield (Bethesda); and Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life (Marvelous). Each of these games comes from companies or series with a history of enforcing binary gender. Making such shifts to include both gender equity and same-sex romance sparked backlash, particularly at a moment when “woke” cultural production is under intense cultural scrutiny. By examining the responses to these three very different, but culturally significant, games, we contextualize the importance of meaningful gender and sexuality inclusivity in gaming given a history of reactionary movements in gaming culture (most notoriously Gamergate). Critically, all of these games became bestsellers, suggesting that while “go woke, go broke” might remain a rallying cry in small portions of gaming subculture, the move towards inclusivity is ultimately not harming the commercial success of these games.

Following a successful Kickstarter campaign, hybrid dating simulator and dungeon crawler Boyfriend Dungeon was released in August 2021 and was quickly met with significant fan critique. The game's advertised promise of cozy or “wholesome” play was contradicted by the presence of a content warning and an antagonist character exhibiting threatening, stalker-like behavior. The strength of the fan reactions caused the developers, Kitfox Games, to revise the content warning while simultaneously resisting requests to fundamentally remove or sideline the game's central conflict. Contextualizing this response through news coverage and Twitter discussion demonstrates the challenges of the fan-developer relationship, augmented by the disproportionate responsibilities and expectations placed on queer creators and the power dynamics of fan-supported indie development. This incident stands as a warning of the consequences of centering a constraining mode of “consent” and aesthetic demands of “coziness” on genres associated with relationships and queer romantic play.

Initially released in 2018 to minimal attention, Among Us (InnerSloth) is a retro-style multiplayer game that employs both cooperative play and betrayal. In 2020, the game was catapulted into the popular culture spotlight thanks to a combination of pandemic play conditions, Twitch streamer attention, and political resonance. In this critical examination of the game and its reception, we consider how Among Us demonstrates both the importance of situated play and the potential for impact of minimalist indie games. The language of the game and its players (including the particularly notorious use of “sus”) has spread to play a significant role in culture more broadly. Transformed by its contextual moment into a force for memes and broader cultural conversation, the game transcends gaming and gamer identity to intertwine with how we understand the 2020 US election and American political polarization.

In this paper we examine the representation of crafts in video games, particularly in “crafting systems” – collections of mechanics that are described as crafting within a game's narrative. Real world crafting practitioners value creativity, expression, and mastery of material, but the act of crafting itself is often viewed by society as reproductive, feminized labor and therefore devalued. Because of this, crafting systems in games have been designed to more closely resemble masculinized, productive labor in the form of repetitive, manufacturing-like mechanics. These representational choices persist even across games lauded for their crafting systems, as our analysis demonstrates. Through an examination of both user-generated tutorials and game mechanics for three games that frequently appear on “best crafting games” lists, we show that games persist in devaluing the reproductive labor of crafting, reducing creative expression and material mastery to marginal and repetitive tasks while catering to the palates of masculine gamers by emphasizing stats-driven progression rather than creative making.

Since the first Pokémon game launched in Japan in 1996, the series has been a balancing act between casual and hardcore gaming. While the first iteration and "core" series has emphasized a modified, accessible version of traditional JRPG mechanics, other titles have frequently emphasized so-called casual play; most recently, Pokémon Go lured in a new set of players with mobile, locative Pokémon hunting. The 2018 release of a hybrid game, Let's Go, Pikachu! and its sister release Let's Go, Eevee!, has drawn renewed attention to the casual-hardcore dichotomy, meeting considerable resistance and criticism for its perceived casualization of the franchise. Through analyzing the discourse of the new game's reception as demonstrated by a dataset of user reviews on Metacritic alongside published game reviews, the gendered nature of the casual-hardcore dichotomy in the Pokémon franchise becomes clear. Key themes coded from the reviewed data include grinding, difficulty, nostalgia, and "cuteness." Placing this discourse alongside the game's own internal representations of reproductive labor through Pokémon caretaking and the contested definition of "grinding" demonstrates a fundamental resistance from the so-called hardcore game community to what are viewed as feminized play mechanics. The revealed tension is particularly remarkable given the emotional, reproductive labor of training and loving Pokémon that is front-ended in the franchise's overarching narrative and core values-a set of values that inherently conflicts with the "hardcore" gamer mentality of play.