Like all other forms of culture, video games offer a way to escape from, or reflect on, reality through fiction. Unlike almost any other form of culture, they are interactive – you, the player, control the experience.
Nowhere is this more true than with immersive role-playing games (RPGs), in which the player embodies a character forced to make moral (or wildly immoral) choices in a fictionalised world, which change the narrative of the game for good or ill. That might sound nerdy (it is), but it’s big business. Baldur’s Gate 3 has comfortably topped $1 billion in global sales, and won numerous industry awards.
It did this despite being criticised as ‘woke’ for its various inclusive options. In Baldur’s Gate 3, your character can be gay or trans, have heterochromia, vitiligo, and be of almost any race.
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