I think that the general hatred for the whole Kardashian clan is a bit more complicated and has to do, whether people specifically recognize it or not, with the plutocracy of which it is indicative. In the simplest terms, a super rich person sucks a dick in a home movie, and a career is born complete with television shows, merchandise, and video games. Anyone else sucks a dick in a home movie and they end up on Pornhub.com or worse. Our cultural obsession with wealth above all else, especially things like intelligence and character, is a signal of cultural decline in my opinion. Not that I particularly care, as the result of all of this for me has meant a kind of mental expatriation from American culture. I'm not saying the Kardashians or Hiltons are the cause of cultural decline, they are symptoms exacerbated by a faltering education system and a kind of cut throat capitalism that labels those within society in binary terms like rich and poor, haves and have-nots.
There was a lot of similar rage around Angry Birds, as I recall. You're right - there's an outsized sense of outrage whenever a game succeeds by pandering to someone other than teenaged white males. I want to say "on the other hand, I certainly wouldn't want my daughter to use Kim Kardashian as a role model" but you're right - I wouldn't want her to use Lara Croft, either. I guess the difference is Lara Croft isn't real? Know what this comment needs? More smizing.
I don't know if you played any of the the new Tomb Raider, but holy shit was it garbage. The narrative dissonance was off the charts, and the fact that it still had to exist as an ultra-violent shooter shows how far gaming has really progressed in any standpoint. And that doesn't even include the fetishistic death-scenes that happened whenever you failed the hundreds of QTEs. If that's what passes off as "good literature" in gaming circles than count me the fuck out. Also Update I'm banned from Polygon:
Played it and beat it! Goddamn was that a frustrating game. "oh, I'm a poor defenseless waif with big boobs! Oh! I'm trapped on this island of misanthropic animists! Oh! I just found a machine gun I guess I'll have to use it! Oh! apparently parachutes and trees do not go together unless you're a fan of repeated gruesome impalement! Oh, I'm a defenseless pacifist who must open a 64oz can of whoopass in order to get my equally defenseless pacifist friend from the clutches of human sacrifice!"
YES YES! I was going to link that review, that's pretty much exactly how I feel about it. I couldn't believe people were lauding that game for its story. When you try to build an emotional story around the shell of a violent third person shooter like all the other violent third person shooters, it's gonna be a bad time. Problem is shooters sell, and rather than take any imposed risk from a gameplay perspective, they tried to shove the two together. Square peg, meet round hole. At least the Last of Us was a violent world with an experienced, violent protagonist, so the gameplay made sense, even if it was boring as fuck and you could easily cut the cutscenes away from the gameplay, paste it together, and get a Last of Us movie with nothing lost.
My big beef with Tomb Raider was how completely locked down all the gameplay was. You go here, then you go here, then you go here, then you get through this completely stupid, completely pointless semi-cutscene where you're coached to smash this button or you die gruesomely and by the way, you're going to need to keep doing this for half an hour to return to normal gameplay. What a shitshow.
It's pretty hypocritical to decide that a game is awful because it's encouraging vanity. Vanity being primarily a female fault in this case, because the game is marketed to girls. What's wrong with fantasizing about it? Frankly, it's better than fantasizing about an otome game like Amnesia, where young girls are taught that they should accept mental and physical abuse from a guy they don't know because "he loves her". Yet, no one complains about that. Or at least, the people that complain are in the clear minority.
I see no intrinsic problem with the Kardashian game. From what I've seen, it looks like a vapid embrace of consumer culture. Despite what the Sims may have started out as, it turned into the same thing over the years, and it's certainly wildly popular. Most game developers and publishers are companies and make whatever kind of games are profitable. Sure, there are small developers who will make games for their artistic qualities, but on the whole, like with movies, they aren't going to invest millions of dollars into a project that they don't think will sell well. Nine times out of ten, those projects are not going to push culture forward in any progressive direction, they're going to pander to the current culture.