I am sometimes confused about how we can reconcile the legitimate call for a better and fairer representation of all races, genders, cultures and the artistic representation of a dystopian society (or, if that matter, even a realistic society) which will most likely include a depiction of it's wrongs.
I know I wouldn't stand for anything making the "apology" of racist, homo/trans-phobic or even violence. But on the other hand, I'm quite at ease with having games full of a**holes if this is part of the world. The "dem" is maybe a bit too much here for me as it comes from the protag'. The "ad" with the trans looks more like a satire of excessive marketing deviance from this world though.
I don't know, I don't have a clear answer to that, but I am actually less troubled by that than a lot of the satire pieces in a GTA V for instance.
It's a really hard question! My thinking is that when you're working in a medium where the dominant form of relationship the player has to the world is "power fantasy", you have to be really careful.
Baseline, the "scope" of the realism of the game is a choice. You're making a cyberpunk game, and then you decide what you want in the game/simulation: can your character swim, are there vehicles, what are the character customization options, what are the weapon options, is the world racist/bigoted, is there one big map or various gated off sections, and so on.
Then, you scope the game and decide what you're able to include in the game while still delivering a good experience. It's no use including motorcycles if your engine or level design isn't able to support that choice, and it's no use adding them in - they won't be fun, and (in the case of, say, Arkham Knight don't @ me) whatever you do add in might actually make the game worse.
For any choice you make, that's going to be "believable" in the final product: we don't actually expect games to be actually realistic simulations, and we're perfectly happy to accept "oh there are no delivery trucks in this city" or "my character can't swim" or "this waist-high barrier is impassable I have to go around it instead of jumping." By the same token, "there are various ethnicities in this world and it doesn't matter" is a perfectly fine choice that next-to-nobody would complain about. If you're
making the choice to include bigotry in your world, you have the responsibility to make sure that it's part of the narrative and isn't just going to make people who play the game feel shitty, in kind of the same way that you're going to only include motorcycles if you're able to make them satisfying, but with much higher real-world stakes. That's where CDPR looks to be on shaky grounds - they've made the choice to include bigotry, and crucially to *have the PC occasionally commit racist acts* but they haven't shown that they have the sensitivity or a plan to actually make that *interesting*.
