Transcription
[Music] I don't know. Hey everybody, did you know that there's a new Turf game coming out? It was just released this week, based on the books by J.K. Rowling. You may have heard of Harry Potter. It's that thing that let Daniel Radcliffe have a career where he could play a farting corpse. Literally one of my favorite movies. Anyway, the Turf game is out this week, and none of the focus is on the gameplay or the frame rates or whatever else gamers care about. The focus is on the fact that it's a Turf game, and there is really no way around that.
From my vantage point, there appear to be three camps. The first camp despises J.K. Rowling's politics and is steadfastly refusing to buy the game or play the game because doing so would put money in the pockets of an already wealthy billionaire transphobe. Even if the boycott does not change much of the income acquired by the game, the backlash itself is meaningful because it lets transphobes know that dangerous rhetoric will not go unchallenged, and that those who speak transphobic rhetoric will face public condemnation at every turn. Allowing the game to prosper without backlash essentially seeds ground to transphobia, regardless of the sales figures. Rhetoric against transgender people has reached a fever pitch, passing the threshold of eliminationist rhetoric that has already had disastrous results. Whenever a famous transphobe is able to raise their profile and damage the trans community without consequences or pushback, it invites more transphobia, more eliminationist rhetoric. The campaign against this game is not about gaming. It's about drawing a line in the sand and refusing to let J.K. Rowling go unchallenged. People in the first camp do not believe that this boycott will completely tank sales of this high-profile AAA game, but they recognize that doing some damage is better than doing no damage, and that the public backlash itself has meaning and creates consequences for Rowling and her ilk.
The second camp adores J.K. Rowling's transphobia and will purchase the game without a second thought because they too are worthless toilet monsters. I can't reach those people, at least not in this video.
There is a third camp, a camp full of Harry Potter die-hards who might superficially disagree with Rowling but prefer their billion-dollar wizard boy franchise over trans allyship. They have twisted themselves in knots to rationalize this choice. If you are in this camp, this video is for you. Welcome. I'm not planning on making an exhaustive essay on why J.K. Rowling is bad, as the definitive videos on the subject have already been created by transgender content creators like Jesse Gender and Natalie Wynn. Links to their videos will be appearing on the screen right now, and these links are also in the description. I simply want to create a short, practical guide for people in the third camp. Here's my advice: If you're a big gamer and a big Harry Potter fan, here comes the kicker. You can just buy another game. Do you know how many video games there are? Me neither, because there are so many that it would be challenging to count them all and literally impossible to play more than a small fraction of them to completion in your lifetime. Isn't that cool? Just play another game. Harry Potter fans might find that unreasonable because they want something with magic and schools and all the other trappings of the Wizarding World. But that's the thing, there are so many games out there that there simply must be an enormous amount that would scratch that particular itch. I love playing Doom, and there are always more Doom levels to play because enthusiasts have never stopped making them. If it turned out that buying Doom on Steam helped the makings of a transphobic eliminationist campaign, or even just signaled that I am not a trans ally, I would stop playing Doom. That would be okay because there are other games similar to Doom that I could play instead that would satisfy that desire, like Cultic, which is really good. I love Mega Man. I love shooting, jumping, and shoot-jumping. That's basically all you do. If it turned out that buying the new Mega Man game would embolden transphobes and make them even more eager to arm themselves and endanger people's lives, I would not buy the new Mega Man game. I would just play Explodemon instead. It has the same DNA. I hear Shovel Knight is also good. Should I play Shovel Knight? Like I said, if you're just a straight-up transphobe, these arguments won't matter to you. I'm speaking to the hardcore Harry Potter fans who went to midnight releases for the books and need that sweet, sweet magic release, but are on the fence about buying the game because maybe they feel a little weird about it. Do you want to play a game in which you are a student in a magic school? Ikenfell has you covered. It's a turn-based role-playing game that takes place primarily in a school for magical students. You play Marit, an ordinary girl with a magic sister who has gone missing. What's most appealing about this game compared to the other game is that it features a lot of LGBTQ+ characters, including non-binary characters and same-gender relationships. And unlike the other game's last-minute panic edition of one transgender character with a suspicious name, Ikenfell was built from the ground up with these sensibilities in mind. Now, you might be thinking, "I don't care about magic schools. I just wanted to play a new action RPG, and I like Harry Potter well enough." Okay, but do you know how many action RPGs there are? There is no shortage of them. Here's Darksiders, for God's sake. And here's Dark Souls. And here is me trying and failing to do well at Dark Souls. There are countless games that have the same vibe and probably almost the exact same controls, but without all that Rowling sauce covering it. I can already hear your complaint, "But I want to play a game as a Harry Potter character!" Alright, listen. You read the books, right? Presumably, that's how you came upon Harry Potter. I am confident that you can use your imagination here. Look, I just made Hagrid in Pillars of Eternity. Oh, and the game has magic. So many games have magic. If you want to play a game that reminds you of your childhood, then play a game from your childhood, not a game based on some books from your childhood. Wouldn't that make more sense? Anyway, I love Pac-Man. I play it to this day, and even having never played the new Harry Potter game, I am 99% sure that Pac-Man is better. Or maybe you can just get Harry Potter out of your mind altogether by playing an altogether different game that has nothing to do with the Wizarding World. I'm sorry, but if you sympathize with transgender people, and transgender people are asking you to do one small thing, one tiny thing, which is not buying one game out of hundreds of thousands of games, you should consider doing that. There are countless games that will give you the same dopamine rush. In fact, you will probably find something you enjoy more than this one game. You can't possibly say with a straight face that the new Harry Potter video game is going to be head and shoulders over the hundreds of thousands of other games you can play right now. Statistically speaking, you will almost certainly find something you enjoy more than the Harry Potter game. Those are just the numbers. This is worth all the bad that comes with it. It's no great sacrifice to choose to not play this game. It's not a moral conundrum. It will not negatively affect your life in any meaningful way to not play this game, but the continued success and elevation of J.K. Rowling will negatively affect trans people. Come on, just play Pac-Man. It's great.
Hi everybody. If you like what I do, make sure to subscribe to my channel and click the notification bell so that you never miss an episode. Also, check out my Patreon link. See you soon.