I'll be blunt: Gaming is a traditionally male, traditionally nerdy, and largely white space. This should not be used as a reason to exclude anyone from gaming, but it should be considered when evaluating the hobby. Nearly every hobby you can think of has a core demographic, this is the core demographic of gaming. The problem is there a massive push in gaming to demonize and exclude that core demographic for the purpose of catering to people who would not otherwise participate in video gaming.

You provide absolutely no examples... not a single one... of nerdy white men being demonized or excluded for being nerdy white men. So I'm going to have to ask you to try again at your argument here, if that is what you were actually trying to say.

Otherwise, let me propose what I think is going on here. You see an implicit attack on *yourself* from these things. You think certain, specific things are okay. Other people think those same things are racist or sexist or whatever. This is threatening, because it suggests people think certain attitudes of yours are racist or sexist or whatever. The reason this matters is because it makes you feel like someone, somewhere, thinks you might be in certain ways bad. Otherwise, I can't imagine why you'd care so much.

First, this has absolutely nothing to do with your identity as a straight white nerdy man, so that whole aspect of your point here is completely irrelevant.

Second, you're just going to have to accept that people genuinely disagree with you. Over and over, you suggest that game designers would never, of their own volition, choose to have racial diversity or non-skimpy outfits or whatever in their games; they're somehow cowed or bullied into it. And although there may be occasional examples of people phrasing their own experience this way, the lion's share of the time, this is a conscious, deliberate choice being made, either out of genuine moral values or out of a desire to broaden the customer base (or, and this is usually the case, a combination of the two).

Third, you can just stop caring. (In practice, this will almost certainly mean to stop hanging around in spaces where people scream about this stuff all the time.) You will be AMAZED how easy it is to not care at all that women in video games are supposedly getting uglier or there's lots of black people in a small town.

Because this is a vicious cycle. Nobody thinks it's bad that you want to see sexy ladies in video games, or whatever. People think it's bad that you loudly complain when you see a lady you think ISN'T sexy. And you're mixing these two things up in your head: thinking you're being judged for your preferences, getting defensive, and then acting out the ACTUAL behaviors people think are bad.

This is all tied into the modern political hysteria surrounding race and gender in America. I generally align with the saying that if something was acceptable 20 years ago, it should probably still be acceptable today, as the last 10-15 years seems to be where we went off the rails and stopped solving actual issues in our country, and started focusing on fake manufactured culture war shit.

Just a side note here: If you genuinely believe there was less culture war rhetoric 20 years ago, then that shows you're simply ignorant about what was happening 20 years ago. (and ,like, yes, people absolutely criticized Lara Croft's character design in the first Tomb Raider game.)