Social Justice Warriors
Release date: Feb 27, 2015
Developers: Nonadecimal Creative
Publishers: Nonadecimal Creative
Genres: Casual, Indie, RPG, Simulation
Categories: Single-player, Steam Achievements, Full controller support, Steam Trading Cards, Stats, Steam Leaderboards, Family Sharing
Supported languages: English

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. 

Press reviews: “Social Justice Warriors fascinated me because it shows the potential that video games have beyond entertainment: to be instruments of education, and conduits through which ideas can be disseminated, shared, and discussed.” IGN “It’s brilliant! I’m just smiling right now at how I went from being judgmental and angry about a game I hadn’t even touched to happy and giggly once I’ve taken my time to review and check every knack possible.” Indie Juice 

Notes: The game contains the kinds of comments internet trolls made around the year 2014 related to race, gender, orientation, other demographic classifications, and other forms of online harassment. They are associated with their accompanying logical fallacy to educate people about how these statements are used to subvert the conversation and hurt the player character. The player character is given a choice of rebuttal to each comment.