Helldivers 2: Another victim of right-wing media illiteracy
I've been playing a lot of Helldivers 2 lately. If you're even remotely media-literate you can tell the game is a satire of authoritarian, conservative politics. Unfortunately, media literacy and gamers are two lines that tend not to intersect. Recently, this has become most clearly manifest through a debacle in which a Community Manager at Arrowhead Games, Katherine Baskin, declared the obvious: the game is woke. You can read more about that on this That Park Place article . It should be obvious enough that a parody of jingoism would be woke but unfortunately plenty of gamers are avid practitioners of doublethink. They can, on some surface level, understand that Super Earth -- the game's setting, sort of -- is an evil authoritarian government. In the same breath, they can valiantly lead the charge against human rights and basic decency by throwing tantrums about the hypothetical possibility of a rainbow cape being added to the game. Regardless, controversy has exploded on