Similar to how I define it when some leftist tard tells me "you chuds cant even define woke!!!". It's not just any diversity like they want to pretend. It's performative. "this is the most diverse cast ever!" "this is the first black Jewish non binary amputee lead in a major motion picture!" It's also used a shield from criticism. They rely on the Redditors to shout down any criticism of a product and blindly support it out of a hivemind fear of being called a bigot if the product is woke. What sucks for Hollywood and AAA game devs is that normal people are so tired of this bullshit.
It's a bit like pornography, in that a firm definition is elusive but you absolutely know it when you see it.
An example from the boardgaming realm: I'm a big fan of FFG's Arkham Files (except, oddly, for the Arkham Horror LCG, which is the most popular game by far). Arkham Horror 2E came out back in 2006. All the available investigators were white, half male and half female. Eek! Come the first expansion, they introduced a few black characters. This being 1920s New England, justifying such characters could be tricky, but they did it: all of them were in the sort of roles you might expect for that time and place. A jazz musician, a singer clearly inspired by Josephine Baker, a college athlete (they were rare but existed). Plausible diversity.
As expansions continued, they introduced a few more non white characters, some more plausible than others. A female African shaman is fine for a quasi-RPG, but what the heck is she doing in Massachusetts? Still, Lovecraft Country has plenty of port cities, so it was still in the realm of believability.
All of this became
much more plausible in the followup game, Eldritch Horror -- that game is global, so an African shaman, a Chinese martial artist, and a grizzled expedition leader all fit quite well.
The last Eldritch Horror expansion introduced investigators from another line, Mansions of Madness: two of them were gay. In both cases, this was a background element that had no bearing on the character: a dead same sex lover for one; a throwaway line about the female mechanic liking pretty girls for the other. A bit eye-rolling, but nothing absurdly intrusive.
Fast-forward to Arkham Horror 3E, and we have (from the card game originally) a M2F tranny mail carrier. Half "her" bio is devoted to discovering "her" identity. Further, in the core game,
all the allies -- NPCs who serve as powerful boosts -- are some flavor of female, minority, or both, including a black university professor (in 1920s New England!) and a female police captain. Things are starting to get silly.
Now come to 2020, the Year Everything Went Crazy, and we have a game called Unfathomable (a reskin of a Battlestar Galactica game). It takes place on a steamship in 1913. And here is where things go, just, just wild:
- The captain is a female Indian.
- The sergeant-at-arms (the physically toughest character) is a non-binary they/them who wears dresses and makeup.
- A Senegalese deaf woman (a twofer!) whose biography goes on endlessly about colonialism and oppressors.
- Another African woman who is also an albino (another twofer, although since she's a stowaway this sort of works).
Where the two gay characters in Eldritch had their sexualities defined by a sentence or two, in most of these cases significant portions of the bios are devoted to their various grievances.
I don't know exactly what happened -- a trans designer worked on Eldritch and was in charge of Arkham 3E, but he was gone by the time they did Unfathomable -- but something clearly went badly wrong. The journey from "unlikely but plausible" to "absurd on its face" is undeniable ... which, I would argue, is why people start to grouse about wokeness the second a gay or implausible minority character shows up.
