Social Justice Warriors
Social Justice Warriors expresses frustration with how people use divisive labels – like “SJW” and “troll” – to discredit and silence each other. No matter what social values you have, attacking and ridiculing other people not only fails to achieve progress but has an additional effect of escalating the conflict while exhausting your patience and eroding your reputation.
The Warriors
- Social Justice Paladins duel foes with 140 characters or less while shrugging off attacks with a press of the Block button, at least until their foes create new accounts.
- Social Justice Clerics serve in the name of their patron sub deity, taking solace in its comforting presence to heal and summoning its divine power to smite their enemies.
- Social Justice Mages conjure powerful constructs of fact and opinion to alter minds and reality while occasionally summoning an activist organization or hurling a scathing fireball of a blog post.
- Social Justice Rogues fight fire with fire. Throw flurries of vitriolic character attacks, confuse enemies with smokescreens of alternate accounts, then delete your accounts and withdraw into the shadows of the net.
The warriors and their opponents fight and fall by the measure of their Patience and Reputation meters. Trolls confound your patience with logical fallacies and ad hominem attacks while actively working to destroy your reputation with wild accusations and photoshopped evidence of your misdeeds.
How you choose to respond to these attacks is up to you. Relying solely on logical arguments to change minds doesn’t work very well online, but resorting to personal attacks and mudslinging will erode your moral high ground.
With the aid of your warrior allies and a few mysterious outsiders, you have the ability to reshape the conflict. Take down a multitude of trolls to attain a new high score or make sacrifices to become a noble Social Justice Champion, who takes no joy in tearing down other human beings. The Champion relies on mediation and reconciliation, listening to their concerns and proposing mutually beneficial compromise. The utility of compromise is just as uncertain as destroying opponents, but a Champion values its beliefs more than temporary gratification.
Game Discussion
Steam User 106
Social Justice Warriors is a bit of a clunky game, not always clear to new players, and at times, blatantly unfair. So as a playable version of internet arguments, 10/10, extremely realistic. But there's a whole lot more to this game than you can tell from screenshots and comments.
For starters, despite playing as an SJW and battling a variety of trolls, the game doesn't pick a side as much as you'd think. Yes, the narration describes you as a valiant force of good against internet ne'er-do-wells, but it's so over the top at times that it's clearly not expecting to be taken completely seriously.
The actual depiction of the trolls does a lot to help the balance. While they're helpfully labelled 'Rabid Troll' or 'Popular Troll', they actually look just like you, an ambiguously-sprited person tapping away at a keyboard. And your actions in, erm, 'battle', can sometimes mirror their's, since you have the option to always try to maintain the moral high ground, or lose your patience (and reputation) and start mudslinging.
There's a lot of variety in the game. You can choose four different classes, each with unique play-styles that coincide with different areas on the internet. The Paladin uses Twitter, the Cleric uses Reddit, and so on and so forth. And each has a multitude of choices in conflicts. Try to logically defeat the troll, or wreck their reputation until nobody takes them seriously, or take a second to regain your composure. Each of these choices has their own impact on your own Sanity and Reputation, which act as dual-health bars.
That's not to say the game plays fair, at all. My biggest complaint is the amount of sheer randomness you can encounter if things don't go your way. If your sanity or reputation ever get too high, any troll can instantly use a powerful attack and wreck them. A rumour or exposed phone number, and you're back to square one. If left alone, they'll call upon the dark forces of the web, and even though they'll occasionally get a reassuring answer of 'NOT YOUR PERSONAL ARMY', you stand the risk of total online annihilation. And every once in a while they just completely disregard any move you make. It's not a very consistent game to play.
But the game puts a message above the gameplay, and the message is good. If you somehow managed to get high sanity/reputation, you transform into the Social Justice Champion (yes, I cringed a little writing that,) and how does this mighty warrior fight their battles? Well, all your combat options are replaced with things like 'Listen to their concerns', 'Defend opponent from attackers' and 'Propose a compromise', and the goal changes from 'Try to ruin the troll' to 'Acknowledge their point of view and try to raise their sanity/reputation until they no longer feel the need to argue with you. I don't see how anyone who isn't a genuine troll can't see this as a pretty good message to portray in what I expected to be a silly game about internet fights.
In short, it's not an incredible game, but as a representation of arguments on the internet, it's accurate in a way that's comedic but not shallow. Plus, if you took one glance at the game, decided it was 'pro-SJW propaganda' and immediately started frothing at the mouth, thank you for confirming on a slightly meta level just how accurate the game can be.
Steam User 39
It's amusing for a fair bit but it's not much of a game after the point it's trying to make gets driven through the earth and straight into China... then again, engaging trolls isn't much of an enjoyable persuit either.
Steam User 95
It is not surprising that this game stirs up attention.
Its a social commentary, a satire. And it hits where it hurts.
For all those who engaged in internet arguments before, it is a mirror that they have to look into, and what they see is that there is no winner in these bitter arguments on twitter, reddit or wherever they happen. It makes people reflect and they don't like what they see.
From a perspective of someone who doesn't take part in such arguments, its a humoristic experience, that shows the absurdity of the human behavior on the perceived anonymity of the internet. The Social Justice Warriors and the Trolls they fight are one and the same, just with different coloring. In the end there is no winner.
The Gameplay is solid, 4 classes with different abilities, high score table, lots of references, funny and sad at the same time. It's good to be played for short bursts but gets repetitive relatively fast. No bugs encountered.
The asking price is probably too high for the length of the entertainment that might be provided.
Still it is a worthwhile experience,
and it's probably the game people deserve.
Steam User 5
Even though this game came out in 2014, it's eerily similar to being online in 2022. Trolls still say the exact same things as a decade ago!
Steam User 5
Felt the same way as many other reviewers here and couldn't figure out how to 'win', but then I read the guides, tried again, and went 'Ohhh.... That's how this game is meant to be played". :D
Steam User 6
A perfect summary of most, if not all internet arguments. Adore the satirical style and virtual manifestation of RPG classes that assist you in linguistic skirmishes with trolls. The replay value needs to be expanded to justify the price tag.
Steam User 0
I have mixed feelings about this 'indie game.' It's novel from a certain point of view regarding a topic that has already been frequently discussed over the past few years.
Past that, the actual gameplay mechanics are so-so and it's easy to run into a brick wall regardless of how you play and which class you pick.
But I don't regret getting the game on sale.