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It's one thing to say that, for example, watching MCU movies because they're "in" at the moment doesn't mean you endorse the idea of capitalism, it's quite another to say that your very deliberate modding choices don't at the very least say something about where your lines are. I explicitly use mods that many others find discomforting or crude because I don't ultimately care. But I wouldn't turn it back around and ask "Why are these people criticizing me????" The criticisms are coherent, I just reject them in the end.
Stardew Valley has had mods that turn the sole canonically black character and his half-black, half-white daughter totally white. I very much doubt this is because people thought he didn't fit in organically, he explicitly has an outsider background (comes from the city to the town). It's entirely valid to ask why someone may want a mod that turns this character white.
I say this as someone who agrees with your position on such mods. I truly don't give a fuck about someone making everyone in a game white or removing LGBT flags from a game, and I think mods that allow you to do those things are ultimately fine, just as mods that do the opposite are equally fine. But I'm not going to pretend the criticisms are invalid - I just don't share the values of those critics.
Probably because there's a lot of people who seem to think this man had a valid point. But what do I know, maybe all the people making a stand against indoctrination are shaking their heads at a man complaining about the expansion of an option that he could have gotten through in seconds.
By all means, I'll march alongside you when you want to complain about "pale, male, stale" is a thing. But I'm going to look at you quizzically if you also want to defend the idea that games shouldn't even try to be inclusive to people who aren't like you.
Why?
For the same reason it's "valid" to judge anyone's media consumption habits when you become aware of them.
If you organically learned that the only media your coworker had consumed in the last year was hardcore mermaid hentai, then that might color your opinion of your coworker, even if you were totally okay with harcore mermaid hentai. Similarly, if you learned your female coworker only consumed reality television, trashy romance novels and fan fiction for series she had never read or watched, you might not look at her the same way afterwards.
If someone in your orbit decides to add a mod that turns all the characters into BIPOC they/thems, and you became aware of it, would you not immediately jump to a conclusion on why they might have done such a mod? Modifying the media you consume is theoretically morally neutral and apolitical, but once your media habits become public they are subject to public scruitiny.
This crystalized something for me I didn't really vocalize.
Nobody needed to be aware of how I modded Doom in 1994. There was no social media. There were no centralized modding repositories making executive decisions about what mods to allow or not. There were people at computer shows slinging floppies, random personal pages, sometimes CD-ROM compilations of just dumps of WADs scraped from god knows where.
I never needed to complain that the Kill Barney mod got taken down. There was never a pro shooting Barney and an anti shooting Barney faction arguing about it who you had to cast you lot in with. Nobody needed to set up a dissident host for Barney shooting mods. It was just... in the aether. It was out there. You knew some people liked it, and maybe some people didn't, but it was unquantifiable and frictionless, and totally nobody else's business.
It's this spirit of "nobody else's business" that has been lost. Because now it seems broadly accepted that media can be harmful, and so it's in everybody's interest to police all the media everyone else is consuming to make sure they aren't a harmful person. Shit, it's gotten to me too. My above screeds absolutely betray that I to believe the media you consume can be harmful. My bugbear is demoralization propaganda. I want it out of my house, away from my children. I refuse to patronize peddlers of it. I despair at how prevalent it is in our culture. I die a little inside when old friends I haven't seen in a while, who've been getting all the NPC updates, make casual disparaging remarks about how terrible white people are apropo of nothing. There is a sense of "Shit, they got to you too?"
There were actually a pretty big moral uproar about video games modding post-Columbine -- one of the shooters allegedly modded Doom! and this drove a whole bunch of activism -- though it's (thankfully) been mostly forgotten since.
Yeah, but that was people on the outside throwing an ignorant temper tantrum. Not people on the inside proactively instituting wide ranging systems of control to try to suppress illicit mods.
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