The real drama is unfolding over.... YELLOW PAINT! So this discourse has been brewing for a couple of days, but since it seems to stick around, I figured I'd put something together. Prepare for the worst - this is about autism, bad faith xitter dunks and worst of all - g*mers. 
Background
All of this started... 19 years ago, in January 2005.
That's when Resident Evil 4 was released. 
Since it was a popular and well-received game, like all vidya slop it was eventually remade. The remake came out in March of last year and it set the stage for an eternal discourse - the infamous yellow paint:
One of the more significant changes in the remake compared to the original was the introduction of this yellow paint, smeared over interactable objects. The purpose is clear - set these objects apart from their environment to guide players and help them navigate, find objectives, etc. Now it is well known that g*mers are fricking r-slurs that would literally eat their video games unless they're made to taste bad and obviously need all the help they can get, but nonetheless this practice ruffled some feathers. It was seen as lazy, blunt, excessive handholding and destroying their immersion. The more unhinged g*mers saw it as an insult to their intelligence. This ladder in particular drew ire and was the subject of memes:
At the time this was a small, short-lived discourse. But it was a precedent and established yellow paint as a symbol for all that is wrong with modern video games (allegedly). 
But now, it reared its ugly head again...
Final Fantasy 
and THE DISCOURSE 
Since the video game industry is creatively bankrupt, the inciting incident this time is yet another remake. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth released a demo about a week ago and just what did the poor g*mers have to see there? YELLOW PAINT! 
Who isn't familiar with random mountainsides splattered with paint all over? This was seen as an exceptionally silly example of this sort of player guidance and for whatever reason, this time, the drama really took off. As far as I can tell, the following was the initial tweet that started the drama:
I personally have a feeling the use of "virus" reminded people of the "woke mind virus" phrase that gets thrown around and it infused the whole thing with some of that culture war zeal, leading to it becoming a bigger deal this time around. Plenty of shitflinging in the comments, but we also see some of the early strategies deployed, such as accessability.
However, the main angle of discussion seems to split the neurodivergents into two camps. One the one side, those that think developers are lazy and should do better than resort to yellow paint. And on the other side those that believe g*mers are fricking stupid and need visual aid. For those of you paying attention, you might notice these are not actually contradictory views, which makes this massive drama just funnier because it's so pointless and in my opinion supports my idea that this is really just another culture war front in the most serious business of video games. 
Anyway, as with any good discourse, both sides rallied around a shitty comic portraying the other side as stupid:
And then people argued a whole lot about dumb shit. 
What follows are some selected "tentpole" posts for your reading pleasure. 
Righteous paint enjoyers
Need I remind you guys of that really dumb streamer trying to play TOTK?
DSP catching strays in this as well as advertising Ame 
. DSP in general morphed into the archetypical "r-slurred g*mer" used by both sides as an example to illustrate what devs need or should not cater to, respectively.
oh no i can clearly see the things i can interact with, god forbid
Rare occurence of the gaming r-slur everyone tries to enable speaking up 
This guy in particular started a sub-discussion about the realism of colored indicators in general:
Leading to many,
And what had the other side to say for themselves? Let's check it out.
Stupid, whiny paint deniers
The original comic drew quite a bit of ire, with many questioning the premise:
Yes, that is it. 
to the rescue
chimes in :
"But without the paint, people would easily miss what you're supposed to do!"
But a somewhat curious thing that happened is that many of the paint opponents started to notice that the paint supporters seem awfully beligerent, considering all people are complaining about is clumsy design. Isn't that a good thing? 
The "Yellow Paint" discourse is people raising a design point
Very true. It almost sounds like....
...there was bad faith in the air: 
Grillpilled enlightened centrists 
This is all I'm going to say about the yellow paint discourse
Couple of great examples of less intrusive player guidance in that thread. One of many such threads that popped up. 
This last humorous take brings us to...
Memes and general clownery 
Also apparently there's a limit for adding files, so you're just going to have to actually click the links for once. 
the yellow paint discourse was a punchline 12 years ago and no one has done it better since
Stanley Parable mentioned 
Added some yellow paint to our browser so g*mers know what they can click on
World's least funny browser just had to get in on the action. 
Put a bunch of yellow paint on my front door so I don't get lost when trying to leave.
covering my toes in yellow paint so she knows theyre interactable
the yellow paint virus strikes again ... lazy butt level designers ...
vintage meme 
surprised there's no splatoon marsey
Conclusion
Not much to add here if you paid any attention. Obviously g*mers need guidance and obviously there are better ways to do it than just dumping a bucket of paint everywhere. Really groundbreaking stuff that apparently people feel the need to endlessly discuss. In summary:
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My favorite take was /r/gamingcirclejerk deciding that disliking yellow paint was ableist against blind people and r-slurs.
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I took a glance over there today and it only supported my idea that this time, this discourse is infused with the culture war. Though even on that sub where anything g*mers complain about is instantly mocked, some people were like "uh, I dunno, paint on a random rock formation seems pretty stupid".
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I think they're just wingcucks who can't see the world through any other lense.
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It's weird that they believe anyone who votes for GOP candidates is a low-information, low-IQ cretin who can't even spell GED, and deserves disdain for being born poor or stupid or in the wrong state; but also ableism is bad and video games and math class should cater to the absolute dumbest r-slur, and advanced classes and hard video games shouldn't even exist because it might make people with Down syndrome feel bad.
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Nah you're confusing the /r/politics libs with /r/gcj tankies. Its the libs think GOP voters are stupid. Tankies believe people who vote for GOP are evil, not stupid. After all, It wouldn't be fair to stupid people to equate being stupid with voting for evil. (They regularly make this exact comparison for the mentally ill).
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Also note the disparity in how they treat fatties and racists.
The time has come for the Necromaster. The unleashing of the fourth joker's card. The arrival of The Great Milenko
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Every single circlejerk sub gets wingcucked by contrarians eventually
It's a sign the main sub is getting too big and soon the normies' r-slurred posting will outjerk them anyway
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Do you think they know the original context of this meme or
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What's wrong with meeting GOT white dragon girl have a black grand daddy chud?
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The soys can and will coopt racist chud memes for their own benefit
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Any discussion of difficulty and they Helen Lovejoy this hypothetical supremely disabled strawtard who can't see or think or wipe his arse but plays videogames.
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What's nuts is that even ResetEra is self aware enough to know that most of these people are just losers hiding behind hypothetical disabled g*mers in order to justify their whining about hard games. There was a thread about Elden Ring posted a while back. It seems to be a Reddit and twitter thing to pretend that video game difficulty is an accessibility issue
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Games journos do the same thing frequently. Which backs up your idea that it's a reddit and Twitter thing.
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The accessibility discourse all seemed to happen when Sekiro released. Suddenly it was the hot button topic and every game journ*list was talking about the same thing and using the exact same talking points 🤔 I think because it was a pretty weeb game and there's little to no cheesing the difficulty. You just have to buckle up and git gud.
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It goes before that, there was a massive butthurt wave of journostrags bitching about difficulty with cuphead, specially after that takahashi or whatever released a video where he couldnt get past the fricking tutorial
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It is ableist and that's a good thing
Trans lives matter
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Accessibility settings to change the color of the paint. Every game should have this chud.
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Same people who think all games should have a “story mode” difficulty and pretend like it has anything to do with accessibility when it's really just FOMO because Fromsoft games are popular.
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What's wrong for disliking r-slurs?
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If I had to have a Chud moment it'd be over people who take video games too seriously, unless they manage to make as much as a doctor over them, should be in a camp.
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Like all circlejerk subs it has become the actual circlejerk the og sub made fun of
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Accessibility cute twinks can frick off
THIS IS A NO CRIP ZONE
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i'm thinking about making a psychological horror game
wonder if I need a screen like that
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You are free to make a psychological horror game, but as a trve and honest g*mer I do not consent to be made uncomfy at any point
Trans lives matter would work well in a genre rife with insanity and mental illness
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Do it and make it as lame as possible so you get free press from people mocking it.
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I was thinking about putting
Trigger Warning: Yes
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Hope that url is a jumpscare
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my fav part of the yellow paint thing is that it's always there for purely linear games, or games with full mapping systems
like girl you literally have to be genuinely r-slurred to not be able to follow the hallway, and weirdly distrusting of a game that required 500 million dollars to make to look at a minimap and go "nothing here" cause there's a wall you were taught to climb an hour ago
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look up a walkthrough like the rest of the r-slurs
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gettin real sick of shitlibs and the "but why do you care??" attitude seeping into every facet of life. it's ruining literally everything
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Yeah but why do u care tho, b-word? Let people enjoy terrible things.
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Remember when all the direction you needed was to just go right?
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Ironically, the 3D Mario games are full of very obvious directional aids (coin paths, arrows, sign posts) but because they're more stylised, fantastic and arcade-y, they don't have to struggle with suspension of disbelief the way (pseudo)-realistic games do.
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Except for gorillion hidden passages through pipes and such. Checkmate liberal
Now admit that trans lives matter
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Already mentioned
https://x.com/giovan_h/status/1756845608927739939
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It was a trend back then to literally have a button which pulled a line to tell you where to go. Bioshock infinite had it as did Dead space 2
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Skyrim had this basic spell that would display a physical line to where you had to go. It was the kind of thing you would use for 2 minutes and then forget its existence for hundreds of hours thereafter.
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Starfield has one lol
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The timid yellow paint enjoyer fears the Mash The Action Button Continuously Chad
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Plenty of games have used color aids the issue is yellow paint is super glaring and dumb. See mirrors edge or superhot where the world was desaturated expect interactable stuff or even uncharted which used a slight gleam to mark climbable stuff.
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Yeah, a decent artist ought to have a lot of subtle ways to draw your attention.
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Mirrors edge was smart enough to make it a part of the aesthetic.
Souls games usually use torches and the like to mark stuff.
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Mirror's Edge is literally my favorite game.
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But yellow paint in the real world is literally for the stupid and impaired?
So wanting that in your game just means that you are stupid and impaired? 
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I'm actually very offended by gold toe socks for this reason. We've had some tumultuous Christmases because people give me gold toe socks. Apparently you're not supposed to call them "r-slur socks" in front of the extended family.
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The consistent dumbing down of expectations of the average consumer is so fricking alienating to people with an IQ above 90.
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The reason the wii was so casual friendly was because Nintendo discovered the average modern g*mer can't even beat 1-1 of mario after over 10 tries. A game I beat when I was 5.
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remember all the great puzzles in hl2? I felt like einstien when i solved the use empty barrels to rasie the bridge so you can jump with your buggy
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In the thread I linked about great examples, HL pops up too I think (or a different thread). The point is, games absolutely need some guidance, but the best guidance is one where the player doesn't even realise they received some.
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I can't find the gow compilation video but this one makes some very good points about how shit gow was with hints, !g*mers
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I prefer the one where they outright designate DSP as the average player representative
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works fine for me
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ff
chr 
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try now
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still the same
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who is dsp??
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DarkSydePhil, a rather oldschool streamer infamous for a) being terrible at video games while loudly blaming "poor design" for his own incompetence and b) jacking off for like 5 minutes without realising his camera was on the entire time.
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Also Jinxxthinker wants to be his wingman at an orgy or something.
!jinxxthinkers
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Didn't he turn on him? Not quite sure.
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I like 39daph, a not-tiddy streamer who is loud, obnoxious, apathetic and casual to the maxx about the games she plays while refusing to take anything about them seriously. It's a fun thing to see her trample all over any attempts by the devs to get their vision through.
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God I miss old gaming content, however terrible it may have been.
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Sounds like the average g*mer to me
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I don't understand what people see in GoW.
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Someone wished on a monkey paw to end the era of silent protagonists
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Valve games are probably the most focus tested games ever.
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True but there are different ways of using testing.
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That requires good design though and the games industry is now being flooded with shit designers.
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Great effort.
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Thought it looked stupid in RE4 R, but every screenshot of every FF game looks fricking r-slurred so it doesn't exactly stand out there.
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WHERE?!
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I'm firmly a yellow paint fan. I hate games that waste my time by making me run around trying to tell what is and isn't interactable.
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I don't play sony games
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any game with gay yellow paint is probably either post current year (sony esq slop) or sony slop
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tbh I don't even remember what I last played so I can't argue
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Play simplistic indi games then
you r-slurred BIPOC?
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Yeah, who could guess that you could interact with a ladder.
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Unfortunately there are games where some ladders are interactive and some are just decorative.
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omg hi
@Cobra_Commander!!! okay so this is like super awkward omg but basically i had to remove ur comment bc u didnt say
trans lives matterlol. don't worry though, we like wont let you post anything that like doesnt havetrans lives matterin it. anyways im like just a robot 😲 but if u want to talk 2 somebody you should do it here lolJump in the discussion.
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I'll give u that one
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In some games, ladders are just set pieces you can't climb. But surely climbing them is the first thing someone would try.
Trans lives matter
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omg hi
@Count_Sprpr!!! okay so this is like super awkward omg but basically i had to remove ur comment bc u didnt say
trans lives matterlol. don't worry though, we like wont let you post anything that like doesnt havetrans lives matterin it. anyways im like just a robot 😲 but if u want to talk 2 somebody you should do it here lolJump in the discussion.
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