Stop Trying To Help The Butch Lesbians Gain Acceptance With Your Awful Video Game
Forced 'representation' via bad media hurts every 'marginalized community'
Aeta, a young knight errant, undertakes a “brutal journey through Italy” to rescue her true love, Bianca (see above): this is the plot of 1348 Ex Voto, a new video game that centers the ‘representation’ of lesbians right in its marketing.
Now, I am not a butch lesbian, but I am quite sure the butch lesbians I know are not about to fall in love with Bianca, just like the very-male video game audience being asked to buy the game has not fallen in love with the game at all.
The term ‘ex voto’ refers to holy offerings displayed in fulfilment of religious vows. Thus the most remarkable thing about the game is the provocative title paired to the premise. Even Kotaku, among the most ‘woke’ of gaming websites, calls the game itself “unremarkable”.
Reviews on Steam, the biggest English-language video game download and discussion platform, are decidedly mixed. A consensus finds it unfinished, unpolished, and incomplete as a work. Buggy, middling, could have been better: the commentaries do not encourage purchase.
Here is a short conversation from one of the most popular cultural commentariats of YouTube about the underwhelming performance of the game-makers. Note that none of them are criticizing homosexuality, or gay marriage, or lesbianism. All of them say the game simply stinks, that its ‘representation’ is the only part which stands out. And that is a problem for the ‘community’ that such content purports to represent.
It does not appear that any butch lesbian, indeed any sort of lesbian, was involved in this project. The studio has not highlighted LGBTQMOUSE+ representation among its development team or the motion capture actresses in promotional materials, behind-the-scenes content, or responses to the controversy.
This ‘representation’ is not even coming from actual representatives of the ‘marginalized community’ being portrayed by the game and inhabited by the player. The result is a “highly sapphic” game, according to GO Magazine, which promotes itself as “the cultural roadmap for city girls everywhere”. A highly sapphic game that somehow fails to excite boys? Amazing.
Lesbian in theme, it is nevertheless not interesting to lesbians, either. Turns out the ‘modern audience’ that supposedly demanded this video game does not actually exist in the real world. No great hidden mass of queer folx was waiting for this thing to come along so they could feel seen.
The game was developed by Sedleo, an independent Italian studio consisting of an international team (red: virtual office), and published by Dear Villagers, a French company. Sedleo received approximately €656,131 (about $752,000) in funding for the game’s development through Italian government tax credits and grants from 2021 to 2024.
A “Ministry of Culture Video Games Tax Relief” program sounds like communism for bad creators because that’s what it is. The program provides “incentives” to studios based in Italy — even virtual ones, published in foreign countries — to “foster job creation” with “cultural projects”. 1348 Ex Voto is what heterosexual European communists think lesbian representation in video games should look like.
They are not proles, either, these creators. They are the pampered kids with a view from nowhere. Unable to portray real human beings — for they have never lived among normal people — they create terrible video games on intersectional premises, doing actual harm to the actual representation of the intersectional categories they wanted to promote.
At the end of their shambolic development process, those ideological purposes are left as the only remarkable trait in any given game. To communists, profitability is beside the point. “Ah, but we have defeated the male gaze in gaming! Worth it” is how they actually see the world. The cost of the virtue is the signal.