According to over a dozen current and former employees, Life Is Strange developer Deck Nine’s management has long let a toxic work culture fester at the studio, including protecting multiple abusive leaders, encouraging crunch, and allowing bullying of individuals advocating internally for more authentic representation.
It’s an escapist thing. People just trying to escape the reality of their lives.
I definitely play games for the escapism (have you fucking seen this shit that’s going on?) but I manage to not be a bigoted conservative sociopath just fine. I don’t think that’s the cause
You asked why it attracts them. Which is escapism. Not everyone looks for escapism for the same reason. And it explains why GTA VI has so much outrage around it.
You know there are mods to remove/replace all the pride flags around the map in Spider-Man (2018)?
I didn’t but that does not surprise me at all. Apparently reich-wing chuds even made a mod to remove the ability to choose “they” as a pronoun in Starfield – I guess the fragile little flowers felt that they were being forced to accept the existence of us queers?
Harvestella let me play identifying as They and even though I identify as They on a different spectrum it’s still kinda nice.
Mods are a different beast and not representative of the game, devs, or player base. Mods like this often get removed from big modding sites like Nexus, forcing them to be mostly in their own spaces. (There is/was a bg3 mod overhaul that makes every black npc white, some lesbian npcs into men so they are straight couples, the ability to change your gender and lock it to the body types. Etc and so on. But you can’t find it on Nexus. I remember the white Wyll mod but it got removed within 3 days)
It’s another matter entirely when a developer bakes this kind of shit into the game. Not every game has mod support and not everyone mods.