We’ve Got to Talk About ‘Pragmata’
I’ve been so far out of the loop with regards to AAA gaming that Pragmata is a title I had not heard of until its release day review scores dropped. Debuting at a strong 87 on Metacritic, backed by a 90% favorability rating from users, my interest was immediately piqued. I watched SkillUp’s review of Pragmata and his recommendation pushed me to install the demo, Pragmata: Sketchbook, which contains about half an hour of the game’s early encounters with enemies. By the time I reached the “Thank you for playing!” screen, I had purchased Pragmata and started my full journey. But then something awful happened: I opened Twitter.
To be fair, opening Twitter is a grave mistake at the best of times, though I am one of those masochistic veteran users who remains on the hellsite against her better judgment. After about three hours of booting up Pragmata, I encountered a Tweet that I would rather not repost here, but for the sake of having a meaningful discussion about Pragmata, I will quote in full:
“Pragmata is a psyop to counter decades of anti-natalist propaganda and bring up global birth rates.”
With 5.9 million current impressions, this Tweet exploded discourse onto my social media feed in a way that I haven’t seen in years. I know we truly live in the worst timeline, but Gamers (capital G) have a tendency to ruin anything they touch.
The Tweet in question bears some brief unpacking, as it’s not exactly common to hear human beings outside of freshman level ethics courses utter the phrase, “anti-natalist.” Simply put, the phrase refers to the moral view that bringing about a new being through procreation is indefensible or reprehensible due to issues like a lack of consent (I didn’t choose to be born!), prevention of harm (I can get killed!), and concerns about anthropogenic impacts on the natural environment (more people means more resources abused). And while I personally do not ever want kids of my own, I can honestly say that I am repelled by this view espoused in the tweet – especially in proper context.
The elephant in the room: the “propaganda” in question involves the sexualization of women’s bodies, notably that of a small child in Pragmata. The Tweet I quoted depicts a highlight reel of the game’s little girl dancing around and having fun, meanwhile this is somehow supposed to “bring up global birth rates.” Either, in one view, this game will make players want to become parents themselves, or more sinisterly, make unloveable, unshowered cretins feel vindicated in their view that they “deserve” to have kids.
This attitude towards games and women is obviously sickening. It exposes a broken worldview in which women are valued in terms of how submissive they are to the control exerted by men over their bodies. It suggests that reproduction is a social obligation, a burden that women should gladly bear. This pathetic ideology espouses the excuse that lonely men who end up alone and childless can reliably blame both media and societal programming for their inability to find someone who would genuinely want to pursue a relationship with them.
But then the discourse gets even worse.
If you’ve been online for more than five minutes, you’ll surely know the central audience this viral Tweet was catered to: grown men who want to have sex with little girls. I mean, it shouldn’t be a surprise – I should know better by now, what with the Epstein files remaining largely unreleased, protecting the elite social classes, or hell, even just rewind a few years and reread the GamerGate discourse. Gamers are upset, claiming that upskirt camera angles of Diana is “censorship.” Again, it’s an issue of entitlement to the control of women and their bodies. Pedophilia is fundamental to right-wing culture, full stop.
When I first heard about Pragmata last week, it didn’t for a millisecond occur to me that people’s interest (or lack thereof) in this game largely anchored itself to the presence of this little girl, who notably, now that I know what sort of creeps have latched onto the game, bears the old-lady name Diana. As someone who proudly bears an old-lady name, I didn’t read anything into the naming convention of Diana’s character at first. After all, as a “pragmata” or humanoid android with incredible hacking prowess, Diana’s given name was originally D-I-0336-7 – a bit of a mouthful for the protagonist Hugh. I just knew she was designed to be seen as cute, even if accidentally a bit uncanny.
My naivety keeps slapping me in the face regarding Diana’s character, because instead of having an interesting discussion about the puzzle-based hacking combat, engaging in analysis of worldbuilding and the tightness of level design involved, here we are mired in fabricated controversy. Yet, right as my feathers get all ruffled and I want to come out swinging in defense of Pragmata, another avenue of perverted discussion catches my attention, and it’s not any better: the decision to design Diana’s character to be barefoot.
You can see where this is going, I imagine. The already-creepy among Pragmata‘s audience are hyperfixating on elements of Diana’s design, using AI image generation to scale her up in terms of age. The feet thing, though I’m not normally one to kink-shame, feels quintessentially representative of the disgusting behaviors being exhibited towards Diana online. In Pragmata’s lore, Diana is barefoot because it allows her to more efficiently charge her unique hacking abilities. Perhaps it’s a threadbare bit of lore, especially considering the spends combat almost exclusively on Hugh’s back, but the game does at least offer some sort of explanation to the player for this choice. Nevertheless, the wrong crowd of people latched onto this character and made, I’m sure, every developer involved with Diana’s character design ache with cringe at their decision. Though the portrayal of Diana’s character suggests otherwise, Capcom has incidentally created a term that I’m now all-too-familiar with: pedo-bait.
Digging further into this controversy, I learned to my horror that Diana’s design caught fire so quickly in right-wing circles that there soon was child pornography of her character which was banned from Reddit, and the sexualizing of Diana was so severe that /r/Pragmata was shuttered entirely. That alone should end the discussion, but I would like to live in a world where a few sadistic creeps don’t get the heckler’s vote on what games I play. I hold onto the irrational hope that a little girl can appear in a video game without people whose hard drives should be handed over to the authorities frothing at the mouth and ruining it for everyone. And yet, if you keep floating around online in spaces discussing Pragmata, you will regularly run into arguments like the following, both of which I will quote directly in order:
“Misandrists are literally unable to fathom men feeling the urge to fulfill their biological duty to protect and provide for their daughters. They will forever label any game that even loosely falls under the umbrella of ‘dad simulator’ as pedophilic.”
“Funny how y’all only have ‘paternal instincts’ for a child with a model woman’s face plastered on it. Make her look like an actual kid w/ missing teeth, short hair, bare face, snot & see if those ‘instincts’ kick in the same. This game openly caters to pedos, the gaslighting is over.”
What I’m witnessing within the discourse is a game of mutual defensiveness. When called out on the predatory attitude with which people have engaged with Diana’s character design, the conversation quickly boils itself down to discourse about the “dad game” trope we’ve seen too many times over the years in games like Telltale’s The Walking Dead. The pedophiles bend over backwards to sexualize this fictional child, yet earnestly pretend like they offer a strong argument in defense of Pragmata when they call critics “misandrists” and reduce imagined critiques of the game to a simple vacuous pejorative. The response I included makes an interesting objection to this line of defense, pointing out that Diana’s character model does not truly look like a child but a facsimile of one – I see the term “American Doll” being thrown around quite a bit alongside the pejorative “uncanny.” In other words, though Diana is billed as a (robotic) child, she is presented in some ways as a woman, and, to me at least, Pragmata‘s initial reception proves that the incels couldn’t possibly handle a more realistic depiction of her character while still feigning interest in the game itself. We saw how Gamers reacted to Bella Ramsey’s character in HBO’s The Last of Us.
If you search Pragmata on Twitter (don’t do it, spare yourself), you will see frequent posts about how this game is the answer to “woke” games, how this is a game that could never be designed by a western game developer, and a personal favorite, how Pragmata is “destroying years of leftist programming and activating women’s ovaries in real time.” Like, it’s genuinely astonishing to me how frequently the phrase “birth rates” appears alongside the game’s title. To borrow from Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, these “unfuckable losers” care so much about the idea of (white) birth rates that it’s all they can see when encountering women, even little girls, in games. Imagine being so detached from reality that the only way you can envision women is in terms of sex: how incredibly hollow.
As much as I’d like to move on, I have to briefly discuss one of the most egregious examples of Pragmata discourse I have seen — even setting aside the pedophilia — includes allegations of racism from those who until the day of writing this article previously expressed interest in the game. I guess I should consider myself lucky that I’m insulated from this sort of braindead hatred, but one Tweet that bothered me more than most involved the author realizing that the voice actor for Diana’s character is a black woman, which led to an abrupt heel-turn on their defense of Pragmata. They wrote, “So why is it when a White child is depicted, a grown black woman is playing her for the English dub? They’re netflixing voice actors now too lmao.”
I have so many problems with this that I barely know where to start. Even at the level of capitalization, they afford proper noun status to the white person but not the black person — tell me you’re racist without telling me you’re racist. But even the phrase, “Netflixing,” as though that signifies anything just reads like a toxic dogwhistle that I’m exhausted by seeing iterations of — many of which contain quite literally hostile reinterpretations of Pragmata using the term Netflix as a synonym for blackness. If there’s any silver lining, the revelation regarding Grace Saif’s role as Diana has been the garlic to the vampires within this Pragmata‘s fandom, leading many of these pedophilic racists to abandon their myopic commitment to this game — it’s nevertheless depressing how much scorched earth they’ve left in their departure’s wake. The AI-generated monstrosities these psychopaths produce along these lines makes me consider logging off entirely, because even as a cryptic sociological observation, I don’t want to be subjected to this level of hatred.
And on that note, as with so many things included in this article, do not under any circumstances search “Pragmata” and “white” on Twitter. Disgusting people harp on about white girls being “extinct” in media, while detractors of the game claim Diana to be “pulled right from the patriarchal white supremacist imagination.” Going further, the same person elaborates, “The perfect, pure white girl child that must be protected so she can produce the next white generation.” Even one of my close friends coincidentally posted, as I was installing the full game, asking whether The Last of Us and season one of The Walking Dead didn’t also trigger “the same parental impulse” so many defenders of Pragmata have spoken about regarding Diana. My friend continues, “or does this only happen to you when the fictional child is lily-white and femme?” And she has a point, though it pains me greatly that this is what discussions about Pragmata boil down to, as though it were some totemic political stance against “wokeness.” While I personally don’t know a single person who rejected Telltale’s father-daughter bond because Clementine wasn’t white, this conversation around Pragmata makes me realize that my head was probably buried in the sand for too long. People are suddenly disavowing Pragmata simply because a voice actor is black; I can’t wrap my head around that without wanting to implode.
If anything, I’ll echo the sentiment I encountered online when considering whether to write this piece: “I’m very happy Pragmata exists because the game itself is a good litmus test to determine who’s normal and who desperately needs to seek therapy.”
Setting aside online controversies surrounding Pragmata, I want to emphasize that I truly enjoy the game despite the discourse. That being said, Pragmata is an inflection point for the industry, provoking questions about whether a major studio will ever release a “dad game” but from a mother’s perspective, for example. It also throws 3D action combat design into scrutiny, as the outright excellent hacking mini-game Diana offers during combat is compelling and only ever enhances moment-to-moment pacing. And finally, Pragmata provides one of the cleanest and most addictive upgrade trees I’ve seen in a modern game recently, where every action you take forms a tight progression loop that almost reminds me of Hades in terms of how frequently you are rewarded just for playing the game and going back on another run. Alas, these more interesting critical elements are drowned out by a tone-deaf discourse around obviously evil people on one hand, and people who offer no quarter to an audience for Pragmata that doesn’t sexualize children on the other.
It’s in these moments where I doubt whether I should continue writing about games, where the discourse is so fraught, so vile, that I am inclined to keep my hands clean and stay out of it. Alas, I roll up my sleeves and wrestle in the mud anyway. For my hope is that this article will allow certain readers to give another look to Pragmata, and hopefully in a vacuum apart from gaming Twitter. Because I honestly believe Pragmata is a great video game; it’d be a shame if the discourse prevented people from experiencing it.
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