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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28032 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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I want to talk about game mods.

I cut my teeth on Doom WADs back in the day. WADs that committed flagrant copyright infringment like Alien or Star Wars TC WADs. WADs that replaced all the pinkies with Barney the purple dinosaur so you could shoot him with your shotgun. I played wacky maps like border1 for Team Fortress. And lets not forget the nude hack for Drakan: Order of the Flame. Or the plethora of offensive or innapropriate character models modded into every Quake.

Back then, I don't remember there being any sort of centralized modding sites. The Doom wads I actually found at local computer shows, probably sold "illegally" on a handful of floppies. Many of the maps or models would just download automatically when you joined a private server in Quake 1/2/3. At least I think they did? Maybe not Quake 1. And it's utterly inconceivable to me that id Software would have issued any sort of statement about the offensive material being made for their game, counter cultural as they were. I sincerely doubt they would have put any thought to it what so ever. It was simply somebody else's business.

Perusing Based Mods, a collection of mods generally banned from everywhere else, paints a grim picture of the political landscape of modding. I hate that I even have to use the phrase "political landscape of modding". Doing whatever the fuck you want with something you own should not be a political act. Alas, here we are.

Many of the mods follow a theme. Removing LGBT flags or pronoun selection from games. A few go further and remove homosexuality as content from games. Some remove anachronistic or nonsensicle diversity from games. Some just make all the people white because fuck it why not? A few are more accurate localizations versus whatever Americanized nonsense activist put out stateside. Like restoring the submissive personality to characters which localizers decided had to be more girl bossy.

The latest one I've seen which hasn't been banned everywhere, but which none the less appears to be walking a thin line, is the Better Aesthetics mod for Baldur's Gate 3. I'll let it speak for itself.

Baldur's Better Aesthetics is an attempt to make Baldur's Gate 3 look more like Faerûn as we know it. More Dwarves will have beards, more Duergar will be bald (including the women!), and fewer Githyanki will be sporting big ol' whiskers. You will also notice fewer people from Chult, but more from Calimshan, and there will no longer be ANY Half-Orcs with pink hair. Please note, these changes aren't universal. A couple of Dwarves have assimilated and gone clean-shaven, and a few lore-accurate descendants of Chultan foreigners remain (like the legendary Duke Ulder Ravengard). But you will certainly notice a difference!

I actually found this thread discussing the changes it made, and the lore reasons for them, interesting. In fact, it turned Baldur's Gate 3 into the Sword Coast I more or less recognize from Baldur's Gate 1 and 2! None the less, at an object level it makes Baldur's Gate 3 less "diverse", and thus it's problematic. I can't say for certain, but I find it suspicious there is zero mention of it on the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit. The single mention of it on the Steam forums is locked. Zero mention on the GOG forum for the game. I can't say for certain the existence of this mod is being broadly censored from the usual captured spaces. But I can't rule it out either.

It's just all so tiring. I go back and play old games, and I'm reminded just how different and natural they are. They don't have weird diversity polemics oozing out of every nook and cranny. Or the crypto-racism of having every evil or stupid character look like me, and every cool, heroic and most importantly moral character look like a Gen Z Nonbinary Zirboss. You aren't constantly confronted with the equivilent of a pride parade every time you meet a new cast of characters. And all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.

My wife and I have a lot of discussions about what we'll expose our daughter to, and we've more or less decided the cut off is the 90's just to be safe. There were still normal shows, books or games that generally depicted normal cis hetero white families like ours positively. To subject her to modern media feels like child abuse. To the 90's it is. Everything after that is just too damned gay for children.

Or the crypto-racism of having every evil or stupid character look like me, and every cool, heroic and most importantly moral character look like a Gen Z Nonbinary Zirboss.

Being a bit of a devil's advocate here, but I can't help but see this as validating the other side's concerns about representation. One of the main defenses against culture being remade was that the old one was serving everyone just fine; that black kids were identifying just fine with a white Little Mermaid. Of course, there's an obvious over-representation of diversity now, but after how many decades of under-representation? The thinking here, which I can't agree with, is that dragging our faces in it for a while is necessary for straight cis whites to learn not to do this again. But your reaction seems to be exactly what they're going for and is likely to embolden them; your unease is the mirror of the one they claim every non straight cis white has felt for decades before they established institutional and cultural dominance.

Being a bit of a devil's advocate here, but I can't help but see this as validating the other side's concerns about representation.

That's the thing... If it's so harmful, why do it at all? Is this about justice and fairness? Or is it about revenge...

Like pretty much every point the left has, there's a genuine underlying issue that they identify: a kernel of truth, and then it has been exaggerated and distorted and taken way too far.

Representation matters a little. You should have a reasonable diversity of characters in different roles in different media. People should be able to identify with different characters that share characteristics with them other than just skin color. But not every single film has to have a rainbow cornucopia matching every single distinct subset. Every character in Mulan is Chinese (or a Hun), because it takes place in ancient China. Most characters in Peter Pan are English, because it's a story from England/Scotland. A lot of characters in Disney's Princess and The Frog are black, because it's set in New Orleans. A lot of American TV shows have a large diversity of characters interacting, because there's a lot of diversity in America. As long as all of these things exist, you will see both heroes and villains of each race. You will see bullies and victims and romantic love interests and weak cowards and loyal friends and scheming backstabbers, and lots of different people slotted into those roles. That doesn't require that every single piece of media have every single race in every single role. In some films the bad guys might be black and the good guys might be white. In some it might be the other way around. The point being: anyone can be anything, you are the arbiter of your own fate. As long as Hollywood does not converge all around the same consistent patterns such that one race is always slotted into a particular role, in which case children will pick up on those patterns and form those stereotypes. The left is right that this is bad. The left is wrong that doing it in the opposite direction to how it was in the distant past is good.

We already solved this problem. How many decades of under-representation, you ask? I turn the question, how many decades did we have it solved for? I don't know that every single issue was completely hammered out, but the 90s and early 2000s seemed reasonably fine to me. My generation grew up with healthy diversity and colorblindness on TV, and then we threw it away to punish our ancestors. The 50s were 70 years ago, who are you trying to teach "not to do this again"? Kids today are just going to learn that race and gender and identity categories are super important and you need to treat people differently according to their category and stereotypes, they're not unlearning stereotypes from the 50s because they didn't grow up in the 50s. They have no decades of learned racist baggage to unlearn because they haven't been alive for decades. They're learning the racism they're being fed on TV right now.

Kids today are just going to learn that race and gender and identity categories are super important and you need to treat people differently according to their category and stereotypes

I just read an article where the UC system dropped 75% of faculty applicants for insufficient DEI commitment. Apparently it was a huge demerit to agree with the idea, "I try to treat everyone the same." It's not just kids today, it's being burned into institutions intentionally.

I agree. I think the 80s, 90s and early 2000s had struck a good balance of representation though colorblindness. But that's what I'm not seeing in OP's post: commitment to the colorblind (or gay/trans-blindness? we need a better term) principle.

To show that this over-representation is unnecessary you need to commit to judging cultural products on the merit of their content and not the color of the skin or the sexuality of people in it. It doesn't mean you HAVE to watch race-swapping remakes: most of them ARE bad on their merit because the point was the race-swapping/race-baiting, not creating a lasting cultural artefact. But if you pre-commit to reject them out of hand you are telling them that representation is a battleground, a zero-sum game and that you intent to fight them for it; that's not likely to produce a truce in the culture war.

But if you pre-commit to reject them out of hand you are telling them that representation is a battleground, a zero-sum game and that you intent to fight them for it; that's not likely to produce a truce in the culture war.

I mean, sure, that's their take on it and the frame that they insist on using, but that's not generally the intent. The intent is "Orwellian editing is morally wrong and we will fight you if you do it". There's much, much less of this pushback against new properties that "represent" than there is against retconning established ones.

colorblind (or gay/trans-blindness? we need a better term)

I'd argue that given the symbolism of the rainbow flag, "colorblind" works fine.

They don't want a truce, and they don't see the necessity of one since they think (and not without reason) that they can sweep the board utterly. Before you can even think about truce, you have to win a bunch of battles.

I understand what you're saying, but I think that OP's point is that it means a different thing when the woke do it, as opposed to when us anti-woke folk. This is because the woke have stated exactly what it means to them, that they do think that this sort of representation can have a negative influence. So it speaks to them trying to have negative influence on certain people, that they hate white men, and they're not just trying to bring other people up through positive influence.

Perusing Based Mods

I'm confused, is there some special browser I'm supposed to use to see this?

Silly thought: the based mods are using the wrong approach. You need to launder your political preferences through accepted victim groups.

To get the gay out, just call it a muslim friendly mod. Now the owners of Nexus have to choose to ban muslims, or keep banning the anti-gay stuff. For extra bonus points, try and make some of the anti-gay muslim nations aware of these games enough to ban them (and then the company will do the work for you and create the mod, like they did with spiderman).

To white wash the game, just call it a monument to the Ukrainian people. Put in some Ukraine flags, give everyone Ukrainian names, and make them all white. Then give options in the mod to switch out the flag, and to switch out the names.

More serious thought: this is all very tiresome. I always feel this way when I see politics intruding into hobby spaces. I very much blame the Woke for starting this fight within gaming specifically. I can't help but feel it was also their single largest strategic blunder (not that I think anyone is pushing a high level strategy for either side). It was probably the single greatest red-pilling of American youth. They created Trump's youth base. Or maybe this kind of fight was just destined to happen. If you believe the culture is rotten and you want to change it, then eventually you are going to find yourself in conflict with the people who enjoy the culture as it currently exists. I feel some sense of cosmic justice that in return for messing with the hobby I love they created their worst enemy.

My future goals:

I have slowly been volunteering to help out more organizations in my life. I've been a moderator on here for years. I'm on the board for a non-profit recreational sport in my area. I'm on the Parent-Teach-Association for my daughter's school. I do feel that the previous generation failed me. They neglected these side aspects of public and social life, and left them wide open to capture by leftists with an agenda.

I will generally be pushing a line of non-politics. As well as trying to be helpful. I do believe that most volunteer organizations will easily follow the incentive gradient. They will do whatever is easiest, and whatever their members are willing to do. I just intend to be a roadblock that makes the incentive gradient flow towards non-politics. If I was involved with Nexus mods, I would have advised them to take a non-politics approach. Let things happen on your platform, and only get involved in the legal stuff. If anyone makes a push for you to get involved, say "sorry, but we don't have the resources to deal with such and such, we are trying to make this a great platform"

The recreational sports league I'm in had a bit of drama recently. Some of you might have followed along in the Wednesday wellness threads. The situation has mostly resolved itself at this point. But one of the board members now wants to put in place a code of conduct agreement to our mailing list. I'll be fighting to change the "code of conduct" thing to basically be a waiver of liability for what our members say/do. And my simplest argument will be: none of you want to enforce a code of conduct.

Children's Culture:

My wife and I have a lot of discussions about what we'll expose our daughter to, and we've more or less decided the cut off is the 90's just to be safe. There were still normal shows, books or games that generally depicted normal cis hetero white families like ours positively. To subject her to modern media feels like child abuse. To the 90's it is.

I have two daughters myself. I do watch the content they consume. Most of it for toddlers has seemed to not have gay themes. Peppa pig is whimsical and nonsensical. Paw Patrol is full of action, and a bit of silliness. Daniel Tiger's neighborhood seems entirely composed of nuclear families. Bluey tends to stay away from politics, even though it is clearly made in mind with the parents watching alongside their kids. I might have missed things in any of these shows, but if I'm missing the things, I think my daughters are missing them too.

I've lately had my daughters singing along with me to a song that contains cuss words in it. Usually I feel weird when I hear cusswords in a song and I'll skip it rather than dealing with the discomfort. Looking back, that was probably unnecessary. There is a very clear "shit" in the song, and my oldest daughter just says the word "chick" instead, because "shit" is not in her vocabulary so she just latched onto the closest word she knew. The song is of course: Rich Men North of Richmond.

Peppa pig is whimsical and nonsensical.

Daddy pig is portrayed as a doofus sufficiently consistently that both my wife and I found Peppa Pig problematic. We can't stop our kids watching it, but we don't seek it out for them.

It sounds like you were the cultural default for a long time, and enjoyed that.

Now people younger than you and different from you are the cultural default, and you're enjoying that less.

I know how you feel, it happened to me too.

You enjoying one thing less than another makes it feel like the other thing is worse. But be reassured, the people it is catering to like it just as much as you liked the things that were catering to you. Things aren't getting worse, they're just moving on.

Of course, you can believe that 'No, it's the children who are wrong' for as long as you want, it's a valid ego defense mechanism. Don't expect your daughter to thank you for trying to shield her from the culture that she is actually living in, though, any more than we thanked our parents for trying to stop us from playing Doom or listening to rap or w/e.

  • -18

This comment makes an excellent point and the poor quality of replies and downvotes are telling of that.

It absolutely does not make an excellent point. Check history: if it's not darwin2500 it's his identical twin. The account alternates between manipulative negging and dogmatic consensus enforcement.

Which is irrelevant to the fact that they made an excellent point here that wasn't properly addressed.

Where do you see the poor quality replies? WhiningCoil's is a bit short but he makes his point with supporting examples, The-WideningGyre is perhaps a bit low effort, but your's seems to be at about the same level.

"Old man yelling at clouds amirite? Afraid of change much?" is neither interesting or novel. Everybody here has heard it, nobody is ever persuaded by it. As somebody else mentioned in response, it's highly likely that tune would change if the OP (or anybody who says something so insipid) felt their ox was getting gored.

Your follow-up post is better than goodguy's.

Persuaded of what? I don't understand this disposition towards the topic.

People complain about the state of media and entertainment. It is pointed out to them that everything they have tacitly or fully supported for the last decades is the cause of their woes. They proceed to stick their head in the sand so their worldview can remain safe and sound whilst everything they held dear gets whisked away in a BIPOC LGBTQI+ friendly reiteration. Where every element of the creative process sees what you cared about as being a symptom of a problem that needs solving.

You can not have what once was because of what now is. The culture you like is dying a demographic death. You will never get it back. The final nail in its coffin being the culture makers themselves. Instead of writing a 'good' story, they write inserts that compliment modern victimary discourse. They do this because that is the dominant culture. It's the dominant culture because of the culture that came before it.

Once you start tracing the thread of the modern moral fabric back to its source you don't find what you are looking for, you find everything that the modern moral fabric has conditioned you to reject. Which is what a lot of people do, which makes their complaints sound extremely hollow.

Your first paragraph is the interesting bit. That many people who are negative on these newly-dominant strains of our culture may have inadvertently paved its way previously - and enjoyed the ride up until they didn't - is a thought I have reflected on a fair bit recently. I myself am torn between renouncing some of my previous sensibilities or arguing for their selective defense in contrast to 'wokeness'.

That's a neat thread to pull on, and also nowhere in goodguy's post, and so I am not sure what compels you to defend it against downvotes. It's like you're reading a superior argument they did not actually make, and then using that as an opportunity to dunk on some ignorant detractors for reasons I don't fully understand.

I think we are all prone to nostalgia bias as we age, and move out of the prime time as it were. But we also want to avoid philosophical relativism, the idea that there can be no privileging of anything because everyone has their own view.

I think there's always been a lot of crap, and pop culture has generic things that appeal to different generations. For youth, it's enough probably that it's their thing, and not their parents. That it's new.

But I still think you can make good arguments that politics and creativity usually don't go together. Because a lot of woke decisioning is political it's probably deteriorating the artistic product. Famous authors have been critiqued for introducing too much of a political slant in this or that novel and there's some consensus that these works are qualitatively 'less-good' as a result.

I think one could easily argue for the objective merits of yesteryear. That did not preclude the new generation from consuming the new stuff more. You can give some objective measure of why that stuff is worse, but it doesn't matter at all to those who consume it more. This repeats all the way back to whatever time you want.

Entertainment always has a form molded by those who make it. You can argue that the form we now see, with regards to 'woke' stuff and politics in media, is worse than something else. It's designed by committee, it's politically motivated, whatever. What people seem to be failing to see is that the point made by @guesswho encompasses all of that.

The people who mold media today are doing so because of the conditions they find themselves in today, just like the people who molded media back in the day were. And that's the funny thing about this whole thing. You could not be were you are today if the people you are complaining about were not excellent at what they were doing. You are the product of the exact same political media you complain about. You are being left behind just like every other cultural conservative got left behind. You support every single step of that process up until the point where you find yourself replaced.

Another response to the op in case you're interested-https://www.themotte.org/post/667/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/138982?context=8#context

Yes, I largely agree with you. I know I am a tiny agent in a hugely complex network that periodically consolidates into swarms. I would say that because I can stand outside with perspective taking, I am not entirely the product of political media, though as you say that may make no difference as I'm replaced.

I've also sometimes fashioned an argument that media is qualitatively different in the level at which PR operates. I'm no scholar of it but my understanding of the 70s, 80s say was that foreign affairs/state Dept issues was entirely the realm of govt propaganda, distributed through the major media networks. But that there was still a mainstream concept, and application of, mainstream investigative journalism and a framing that understood the concept of balanced reporting. Obviously that may have been cynically applied at outlets for various political reasons. And the political things didn't extend as much into the personal domain as they do now. While it was perpetuating other myths, US exceptionalism etc, it also had a recognisable civic function. I'm not a US citizen so don't have as much a handle on it.

The problem that you allude to initially that culture is shaped as the zeitgeist of the times, is that it is question begging, or ambivalent about the problem of agency. I mean it's also manifest in the way that you say, but the question of whether we can influence it as individuals is high-stakes.

I may have misunderstood you though so just take it as a rant...

I agree with some of this and disagree with other parts.

But we also want to avoid philosophical relativism,

Certainly we should never decide that we are just too out of touch to understand modern culture and can't meaningfully critique it any more; I don't mean to give that impression.

But when someone says 'I won't let my kid watch anything made after the 90s because it's all corrupted by socjust lunacy' or w/e, that's a pretty strong signal to me that they're not carefully considering each piece of media on its own merits and forming a reasoned critique. It looks like just being mad about the culture in general moving on from what was familiar and comfortable to you, which is what I was calling out.

Honest critical analysis is always important, but it's also always in danger of being biased by other influences, and you always have to be on guard against that bias. I'm trying to point out what I think is a pretty likely bias affecting this particular judgement that everything after the 90s is dangerous or bad.

But I still think you can make good arguments that politics and creativity usually don't go together.

I think the word 'politics' is ambiguous in a way that makes this point hard to talk about.

Certainly the two-party campaign-focused culture-war version of 'politics' is such a powerful influence that it can corrupt or derail any other messages that it is paired with. Note that I don't think that means you can't make good art motivated by that type of politics - I like West Wing, I like Rambo - but when you are trying to make art that's about something else but still let that type of politics influence it, it's easy for the politics to overwhelm your actual message.

But there's also the much broader understanding of politics form the phrase 'the personal is political' and so forth.

Whether the women in a piece of art are actual characters or sexy lamps is very much a core part of the artistic message, but it's also influenced by cultural and political trends that made one type of media more likely to get made or more appealing to audiences. An artist might legitimately be interested or uninterested in depicting non-heteronormative relationships or exploring minority cultures in their work, but politics and culture will influence how the audience reacts to those depictions.

This is my real objection to and point about OP"s post. It seems to come from a common perspective that, any time there's a gay character or more than one minority character in something aimed at wide audiences, any time something aimed at younger audiences acknowledges non-heteronormative relationships or flaws in the American justice system, any time a woman character exhibits the same power fantasies that male characters normally get or rescue themselves instead of waiting helplessly, this is obviously only due to the influence of political activists corrupting the culture and ruining the media.

And I think that's just wrong. Certain specific cases of it are that, for sure, but you can't paint with such a broad brush. More often, it's simply that the culture had 'straight white guy protagonist and the world reacting to him' movies and shows and games for a lot of decades (or centuries), and has simply gotten bored with that, realized that the actual world is more complex and interesting than that, and decided to move on to exploring more topics.

(not that we've even stopped featuring that story in tons of media, we're just adding additional elements and looking at new things too)

I agree with a lot of what you say. There's obviously a range of material from good to bad put out in any particular generation, a lot of it I'd suggest is pretty shit. But also gems.

Agreed also that most forms of art are molded by the societal norms of the time, as they act on the film makers/ producers and audience at large, and as those individuals interact/ react against those norms, while also being more or less aware of them.

These norms will include the politics of the time (the negotiation of norms), whether that be issues politics along tribal lines or political in the manner of 'the personal is political', which is a truism in the sense that a political act has to be done by an individual, who always acts 'personally'.

For example, an author may put specific political polemic into the mouth of their interlocutor, or they may seed their version of the norms in a more subtle but equally intentional way, therefore acting politically-- in addition to their other creative acts. Nothing precludes subconscious molding by social norms either, this is the sea we all swim in, but I'd argue this isn't the case for political acts, which seem to me to have a conscious intention by definition, operating at the level of polemical belief, in that politics involves a certain forcefulness, or righteousness.

I think it's this intentionality that gets at the root of why, beyond a certain threshold, it deteriorates the quality of the work down an exponential decay into the zone of 'forced', 'contrived', 'preachy' etc. While we can be a mindless milieu, we can also have a fine ear for being told what to do or think. This is most evidenced by the general reaction to most advice, which has an element of actual resentfulness.

This element of 'too much', or 'against the grain' will vary with each individual, so there does have to be a defense of why this should be more than just taste, pitching reactionary responses against early adopters of the political message or culture shift.

Or to frame it as another commenter, isn't this just the culturally new coming into being? With the usual railing against the wind kind of response?

This feels to me like a familiar relativistic slight of hand, along the lines of 'global warming is a hoax', temperature has always been changing. To find out if things are qualitatively different in the creative merit of a particular artistic work, or a trend in the production of them, we need to do some kind of analysis against some objective marker. An individual can have a sense of it, I would argue, but to prove it's not just taste, they have to demonstrate it somehow, with reference to the works themselves and a rubric.

But in this task we will quickly be flung into dealing with philosophical assumptions. If we were to adopt a relativistic stance, it would be quite hard to measure any differences over time, because there is no measure sufficiently privileged over its material, or it's own substrate, for it to be able to do the job. In contrast, if we adopt an aesthetic stance, we may be able to get somewhere, though it doesn't seem easy to bridge to the definitive answer on the matter.

I think, at the level of metaphysics, we come up against something like Judith Butler's problem. In her case, What is the space--that is Us--that allows for us to perform against the norms, despite being subject to them? Where does it come from and how does it resolve existentially?

If the performance is 'naturally adopted', then where then really was the subjection, or what is the extra element that allows for it? And if subjection rules, how is the reaction able to pass up and out and reconcile the existential split of being the subject and the performer against subjection? This is all just wank at this point- but I think it's something analogous to the current question of how we are molded by culture, which also arises from us as a collective, in this case problematizing the conception of 'right adopted' v 'wrong reactionary', or 'inevitable adoption' v 'railing against the wind', because there's some extra ingredient needed beyond just being washed over by culture, or reacting against? Is there the possibility we can definitely privilege a stance or are we stuck in an arbitrariness?

It sounds like you were the cultural default for a long time, and enjoyed that.

I do not believe this is the attitude you adopt when culture goes against you; it seems much more likely that it is a script you apply to other peoples' concerns, not your own. That is not a charitable or productive way to approach discussing these issues.

Of course, you can believe that 'No, it's the children who are wrong' for as long as you want, it's a valid ego defense mechanism.

Alternatively, some things actually are bad, and demand action to limit the harm they cause.

Don't expect your daughter to thank you for trying to shield her from the culture that she is actually living in, though, any more than we thanked our parents for trying to stop us from playing Doom or listening to rap or w/e.

I thank my parents for attempting to protect me from malign cultural influences, and believe that my life would have been significantly improved if they'd done a better job. Maybe my child will not feel this way. On the other hand, maybe my child will decide to be a junkie. I cannot control their decisions, but their ability to make meaningful decisions evolves slowly over time. All I can do is to try to raise them well and teach them to be wise.

I will admit, it's certainly amusing to see someone break out the dusty old "all media is totally fine, stop being a square" argument. Because of course media has no effect on our beliefs and actions, right? Anyone who cares about representation or diversity on the positive end, or racism or sexism or or heteronormativity or any of the million other problematic issues raised against media over the last decade was just a lame-o stick in the mud, right?

FWIW this comes across as quite condescending. You're so sure you're right you don't to actually provide any evidence of it, or even an argument.

Nobody was advertising Doom or rap to children, or if they did it was with the faintest of plausible deniabiltiy. Whenever there was some media firestorm over kids consuming 'inappropriate' content, the creators would perfunctorily gesture towards the ESRB rating system or parental advisory labels. The culture of days old was hidden from your parents, not championed as good medicine by media and its authority figures (official or otherwise). You hid the M-rated game from your Mom, and you didn't pop Eminem into your parents' car stereo on the way home from your school. If the opposite was the case, other families thought it was strange if they found out. There was - for lack of a better word - shame, feigned or otherwise, around letting your kids wildly consume subject matter above their intended age range.

I'm not sure what youth culture is into these days, partly because times do change, partly because it's hard to separate a clear signal from all the 'modern audience' astroturfing. But I find it hard to believe that the current environment - laid on thick by a PMC class of 30-somethings and older, still steeped in yesteryear's cultural battles - is a genuine, undistorted expression of the real thing. You had to overcome some barriers to reach the naturally-alluring experience of shotgunning demons to bloody ribbons in your favorite heavy metal album cover. Who today has to seek out or hide away woke content, as opposed to having it dumptrucked into their mouth by Disney or similar?

I think there's a big distinction between the actual culture of today's youth and the one being pushed by over-correcting revanchist millenials. The super woke media is not the DOOM or rap music of this era, it's its complete opposite. It's what today's kids' parents would prefer they like instead of what they actually like. I'm not fully understanding what the majority of kids actually like these days, they're quite secretive and tend to share around in small groups online instead of in the public square, but sometimes I get glimpses of it and it's very much not what the OP is complaining about. They don't like it either.

Don't expect your daughter to thank you for trying to shield her from the culture that she is actually living in

One day she'll discover her country hates her. But hopefully she can develop a stable sense of self that isn't totally self-loathing and demoralized by propaganda before that day comes. Because the kids around me I see immersed in "the culture" are not all right.

She will probably not 'discover' that unless her parents guide her into culture war foxhole where believing that is part of the price of admission. That is not in fact the conclusion that the majority of people come to when they are just allowed to explore their culture naturally.

Teen mental health certainly is at a bad point, pandemic is a pretty obvious recent factor and social media plus never going outside seems to account for a lot of it. That's not at all the same thing as the culture war argument being leveled here.

I think your first sentence is mostly true but entirely contingent on the word "she" as opposed to "he". I think that if you took a top-10 of movies and TV from each year you would definitely find at least a few "men suck lol" speeches in each of those lists, in a way that I don't think I've even seen for "whites suck lol" (though of course social media has quite a bit of the latter).

I mean yeah everyone is going to encounter some number of cultural artifacts saying that men suck, that women suck, that white people suck, that black people suck, etc. With varying levels of directness and specificity.

That's one artist showing one perspective in one piece of art, not evidence that 'your country hates you'.

That's one artist showing one perspective in one piece of art, not evidence that 'your country hates you'.

You've landed quite a large number of borderline comments into the mod queue lately, and I think the pattern I would describe them as following is "low effort. In this case, the "low effort" approach is "contradicting people without bringing anything valuable to the conversation." Essentially, a slightly more eloquent "nuh uh!" This is a way of making low-effort points (even when you put effort into the word count).

On one hand, there's probably some value in interrogating the idea that a large number of people are "out to get you," individually. But "this is just one instance" is an especially frustrating form of low-effort objection, since every concrete example anyone can give is always just "one instance." But concrete examples are every bit as important a form of evidence as aggregated statistics (at least arguably, concrete examples may often be better evidence, despite what anyone rhetorically says about "anecdata").

You've also made some good posts in your brief time here so I don't want to discourage those! But being offhandedly or insultingly dismissive of the claims others make is not really something we allow here.

I think you would in fact have a much harder time finding "blacks suck" and "women suck" speeches; the rate's not zero, but in big-budget productions you will find those exclusively portrayed negatively (either in the mouth of a villain, or explicitly retracted by end of episode).

The two live-action Western 2022 things I've seen are Wednesday and The Batman. Wednesday has at least one time when the eponymous heroine accuses someone of "mansplaining" (despite how weird that word sounds coming out of the generally-old-fashioned Wednesday's mouth) and this is presented as correct (IIRC there are other examples of "men suck" in there, but it's been 9 months and I don't think I watched the whole thing); The Batman has Catwoman lay into Batman for his "privilege", although I forget exactly which attributes she picked on out of rich/white/male (Catwoman is black in that film), and we're clearly supposed to agree with her.

Now, technically I did watch one other 2022 Western thing in the form of one episode of Rick & Morty. But 2/3 chosen at complete random is enough for me to start seeing a pattern.

Don't expect your daughter to thank you for trying to shield her from the culture that she is actually living in, though, any more than we thanked our parents for trying to stop us from playing Doom or listening to rap or w/e.

Some people grow up to be adults and do thank their parents for the limitations they had as children. My wife is one of them. Her parents stopped her from watching "vulgar" shows like the Simposons, and she still doesn't like those shows.

I had basically no limitations. I had access to the internet, and my parents mostly had no idea what I could get to on there. I don't think I would have appreciated any kinds of limitations.

I do have a sense of self that is separate from the culture I inhabit. I got that by exploring a bunch of culture and realizing that it was not me. My wife got that sense of self by having walls and barriers placed in front of the "bad" parts of culture.

Different approaches work for different personalities. I'd suggest seeing the personalities of your kids and not taking a blanket approach. But things that worked for the parents are probably more likely to work for their kids.

Sure, I won't argue that different people have different personalities and will benefit from different parenting styles.

And if you start from an in-depth examination of your child and their personality and consideration about what is best for them as an individual, maybe you can sometimes correctly find that things I find weird are teh best thing for your kid.

But if your starting point is 'I am on the opposite side of a culture war from the people that make almost all modern culture, so everything they produce must be harmful and I will forbid all of it' then the odds that your decisions will coincidentally coincide with what is actually best for your specific child are very low.

I had basically no limitations. I had access to the internet, and my parents mostly had no idea what I could get to on there. I don't think I would have appreciated any kinds of limitations.

Yep I grew up with the same 'parenting' approach. I regret it every day, and truly wish I had more discipline and was forced to do something other than spend 12-14 hours a day gaming during my youth. It has caused me no end of problems and issues to work around.

I'm glad a lack of limitations worked for you - I'd argue that it's a total abdication of parental responsibility, and while every now and then we get a gem like you cjet, the majority of kids that grow up with no guidance or limitations have an extremely difficult road to climb to become mature adults. @guesswho, I would caution you that it is possible to live in a sick culture. If a culture will teach your child to be weak, to never develop, to stew in anger and blame others constantly for their problems, it is absolutely better in every conceivable way to shield them and instill good values in them.

To be fair to my parents I think they just didn't know. They protected me from the dangers and bad decisions that they knew about. They saw me on the computer all the time and thought "well at least he isn't out doing drugs and drinking like we were at his age, or having sex and risking pregnancy".

I suspect we had similar exposures to the internet, and parents with similar caution towards it. Because my parents were also glad I wasn't out drinking, doing drugs, or getting girls pregnant. Although I'm sure my dad thought it wouldn't hurt if I showed at least a little more interest in girls, as opposed to being so intimidated by them.

On the one hand, the internet in the 90's wasn't as bad as it was now. The social networks you were exposed to were far more fractured, numerous, and heterogenous. I hung around a StarCraft forum, the Battle.net chatroom for it, and an enthusiast forum for Riva 128 users. Because back then a lot of video cards needed some aftermarket attention companies really didn't provide.

The pornography you could find sure was a lot different. It would take 5 nervous minutes of hoping nobody came home and saw me on the family computer slowly downloading a single grainy picture of boobs. It would have taken too many terrifying minutes to print it off to risk getting caught, so the best you could do was commit it to memory for later. If it even finished downloading, because it often froze somewhere between the neck and the row of pixels right above the nipple.

Things today couldn't be more different. Activist run most communities, and love bomb vulnerable people to groom them into deviant lifestyles. Porn seems dominated by bizarre fetishes that I'm unsure even existed back when I was a kid. And parasocial relationships between content creators (adult or otherwise) have horribly stunted the socialization of the people trapped in their orbit. The sort of guy who participates in live camshows used to be universally derided, not necessarily because of the pornographic nature of it, but because of how creepy the unnatural parasocial relationship is. Now everything is a sort of camshow in that creepy way. From the earliest age kids are watching twitch streamers, tipping them to get a rote shoutout.

I just don't think the internet was as habit forming, or interfered with socialization, to the degree it does both now. Nor were the infohazards on it as potent. We tricked each other into going to goatse. We didn't lovebomb the lonely autistic kid into becoming goatse.

I was growing up with the internet in the early 2000's. And I did some objectively sketchy things.

I was in chatrooms sharing pictures with girls my age when we were both underage. Or I was sharing pictures with random old men who just happened to send me pictures of girls back. I don't know, I don't like to think about it too hard.

I joined a political movement that I found and learned about entirely online (libertarianism). I then went and met some of those people in person. That turned out well, but it could have gone worse depending on what movement I found.

I had access to (crappy) video pornography. I'm a little confused why everyone else seems to get into weirder and weirder stuff when they watch porn. I've gone the opposite direction, I mostly just like regular couples having sex. If they are laughing and having fun I enjoy it more. I dodged a bullet there I suppose, but I'm unsure how I dodged it.

I had facebook and myspace in highschool and college. It was prime time for posting things that would later get you fired. I did go back and scrub my facebook at one point, there was one embarrassing picture of a tasteless joke, and an embarrassing post I made about not liking a movie. I scrubbed it almost a decade ago though, and since then I have treated all my online stuff as semi-permanent. Or as semi-possibly something that could be linked to me.

Back before the internet I get the sense that these things just happened offline. Cults have been around a long time, charismatic sociopaths are as old as human society, and sexual degeneracy has a reputation for being one of the oldest professions.

I dodged a bullet there I suppose, but I'm unsure how I dodged it.

Proliferation of porn is probably one of the most underrated social changes... since the invention of the printing press? Repeating firearms? Who knows?

It seems to me that there's a serious disconnect between the popular narrative and the evident reality about porn and its mental impact on the individual. Sexuality seems a whole lot more malleable than people want to admit, with the "weirder and weirder stuff" slippery slope being only one aspect. from the inside, it seems pretty clear that brains have different hooks, specific things snag the hooks and pull the brain toward them. Porn's pure reward stimulus, but the brain's reward demand is so high that even when a piece is actively trying to max out all the sliders, gradients still appear in chaotic and unpredictable ways, and the brain is smart enough to latch on to these and then chase them endlessly. How much is innate propensity and how much is acculturated is probably unknowable, but you can in fact be altered, and even consciously steer the process.

Looks like I predate you a bit more than I thought then. What a difference a few years makes. When I was a kid, it would have been manifestly impossible to send pictures over the internet. I'm not sure widespread consumer digital cameras were even a thing in the 90's. I know my family, and no family I knew, had one in the 90's.

When I was a kid, it would have been manifestly impossible to send pictures over the internet.

In the 90s? GIF came out in 1987, and it wasn't the first graphics format. Consumer digital cameras were a bit later, but scanners were around. Slow and low-res and often not in color, but they existed. There were even high-res color images as far back as the 70s, though you couldn't reasonably create them at home.

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Back then, I don't remember there being any sort of centralized modding sites.

ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames ?

This makes me feel old: these days browsers don't even support FTP.

I use filezilla for ftp. There are a smattering of ancient ftp repositories still out there hosting files that have otherwise totally vanished from the modern web.

I think one of the big issues is the old core playerbase were nerds who approached fiction from the point of view of External Immersion.

"What is this world? what is it's culture? How would their people approach things? What has the universe made clear is normal and what is abnormal"

This is why Grognards still bring up "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura"

Or they'll play fantasy mods (Anbennar) of Europa Universalis and not think twice about how every primary human faction is European inspired and fantasy races take up the entire rest of the world, creating and effective all European humanity. All with in universe expalantion of Orc slavery explained as reparations to humans for former Orc invasions. Because "well that's just what this universe is"

And this older nerd playerbase thrives on this. The actual diversity of settings is what's appealing about fiction and then their internal logic is to be followed through on.

But that approach to fiction is actually really rare! Most people are Inserters, not Immersers. They play games in order to insert themselves into a universe. What interests them is the challenge of achieving their mindset in each new circumstance. (sidenote: it's a matter of degree. not an either or.) To these people the setting itself is significantly devalued. There's nothing 'there' about making the Forgotten Realms setting stay in character with previously established lore. No instinct of dissonance. In fact each shift in the setting to better align with their perception of the world around them (and remember, most people have an astoundingly poor sense of what the demographics of any given country are. along with a complete inability to distinguish between what's normal in their local area vs the country as a whole) only makes more sense to these people. It feels more immersive for their insertions because it's more intuitive. And it's more intuitive because it's now more familiar. And that's normal.

Even though, personally speaking, I don't find very interesting.

Most people are Inserters

"Most" people aren't. Women on average are. Also normies on average are. But that's not "most people".

I'm perfectly happy to describe 80%+ of the entire population (aka a large majority of women plus a sizeable majority of men) as "most people".

80%+ seems sufficient to be described as 'Most'

I also believe that women and normie men are 'People'.

this is why I distinguished in the beginning about old core playerbase demographics being a distinct population. They were a skewed population, where a minority approach to matters had a majority control over marketshare. Within that small population the majority culture was different.

is it really your contention that the best way to decribe "Most People" is to exclude the near entirety of one sex and the majority of the other sex?

Yes, he seems to be experiencing what has happened to many in the past: the Cool Thing went Mainstream.

It's always a wonderful experience when you find a corner of the art world that caters to people that think like you. It opens a realm of discussion, building on other's ideas, and just plain having fun that isn't otherwise possible.

But then the space gets invaded by "normies" and it stops being fun. The same rules that exist in the rest of society get implemented there as well, and the whole game is up.

The only solution I can see is to make things, and to join together with others who like to make similar things. You can't rely on others to do it for you.

I mean look at the furry community. It's full of people who self-taught drawn animation because they wanted animated furry content. Now it's a thriving art scene, and if that makes you go "eww" that's just proof of my point.

You want stories with old-school values? Make them. You want videogames with Nazis and hot women? Make them. You're gonna make the normies say "eww," and the only people who will appreciate what you've made are others like you, but that's okay because those people are who it's for.

And as a final note for all those who say "but I don't have an artistic bone in my body,": you can help in other ways. Anything more complex than a text-only work requires a lot of hands, and even text benefits from editors and the like. Provide funding, organize groups, bring in connections, manage projects, etc etc.

One of the starkest examples of distinction between these two types of fictional world I can think of is the difference between Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II. DA:O built an interesting and complex fantasy world. In DA2 it seemed to be reduced to a stage on which the player character plays with moral puzzles. But I guess the existance of those Inserters is why DA2 was still well received by the gaming press and on gaming forums, reddit, etc... They just didn't feel or cared about how much poorer the worldbuilding felt.

From the writers' perspective, I would expect professionals who write genre fiction (even if it's "just" writing for videogames) to be mostly in the Immersers camp. Almost all great enduring literary classics in fantasy and sci-fi are more works of worldbuilding than character studies. I don't know if the current state of affairs in videogames is deliberately pandering to Inserters over Immersers or the result of a misunderstanding of what made a hit game. Maybe it's game director/designer interference? Make a world interesting and give the player some ability to influence it and some tough decisions along the way. Then player feedback is that people particularly remembered the hard moral decisions, and so the next installements are nothing but hard moral decisions. It's like a director that has one or two popular "twist" movies and then veers into doing just that.

Now that I think about it, it seems like it's a thing Bioware pretty much always ends up doing with their franchises if given enough time.

This is why Grognards still bring up "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura"

Man, that takes me back. Back to a time when I could have engaged with the lore of a fictional universe in good faith. When, at least it felt like, or I was naive enough to believe, the authors of these games were doing honest speculative fiction and not blatant agenda pushing.

The games have certainly changed. But so have I. The trust I had that these entertainment companies weren't pushing weird, fringe, hateful ideologies is broken. There have been enough overt examples, and enough anti-white racist tirades on Twitter by game devs, that I can't help but side eye every narrative choice through my knowledge of the overt racism that is on open display in the industry.

I mean, it's an oldie but a goodie. Manveer Heir.

Here he is making all the right mouth sounds about "inclusivity"

BioWare developer Manveer Heir challenges colleagues to combat prejudice with video games

BioWare's Heir On Sexism, Racism, Homophobia In Games

Mass Effect developer makes emotional plea to eliminate social injustice in games

And here he is just being a fucking anti-white racist.

And so it's just impossible to get around that obvious fact that all the mouth sounds he makes about inclusivity are just cover for his visceral hatred of white people. And, IMHO, this is really representative of the industry these days. It's representative of the entire "inclusivity" movement. Every forum I used to frequent that got taken over by the inclusivity police shifts from "Just trying to be inclusive" when they are the minority, to naked visceral hatred of white people when they get enough positions of power in the community.

FFXIV's modding world is interesting in a lot of ways, starting with any mod usage technically being an account-bannable offense, and then a broadly progressive-leaning playerbase on top of that. As a result, there's a couple major redistribution sites (NexusMods, xivmodarchive, heliosphere) and then a ton of people who've moved into Discords. And then the more lasse faire mod redistribution sites, in addition the normal array of free speech witches, also had a bunch of things show up that I'm >95% sure were intentionally troll uploads made to highlight contradictions.

To some extent FFXIV Discord's started a philosophy similar to webrings, but it's gotten more of the bad drama parts (up to and including creepy bot-programming stalkers) than the nice community ones, so not impressed.

Vintage Story's modding community seems reasonably laid-back, but then again I just ran into the first furry drifter porn yesterday, so who knows if it'll mostly appeal to that sort of ethos or just be a matter of time before something stupid explodes. One would hope that Seraphs (or kobolds) being clay-colored would avoid some problems; I'm not optimistic.

On the flip side, BasedMods kinda looks pretty pathetic. Yes, it avoids the 'anatomically correct fat cat' problem, but whites-only Rimworld? "Sensible Demographics" for the X series doesn't look like it's even be banned from Steam yet, and it looks like it's just tweaking autogen npc race/genders with some fault lore assumptions (not that anyone /should/ read X-universe lore; it's a mess). Making Fallout New Vegas's two factions literal nazis is so on the nose it's funny, but it's also still the sorta thing that would be derided, rightfully, as shovelware asset flips.

There's some stuff with effort or some grander philosophy, here, but it's a small minority: Fire Emblem and Persona's respective translation controversies (and maybe Atomic Heart? for whatever Russian blackface cartoons count) are presumably the touchstone, perhaps followed by Minecraft's textures, but they're both pretty weak central examples. So ultimately it's kinda hard to make a serious assessment of whether these style of mods are getting ignored in mainstream discussion because they're being censored, or if it's just that no one outside of a few engagement bait farmers (and yes, the don't-force-me-to-pick-pronouns guy couldn't have targeted engagement bait better if he's spelled "morans"). I'd bet both, but I'd not be able to give hugely persuasive arguments.

There's a fairer counterargument that the same standard doesn't get turned the other direction, or even to internal development. P5R's original translation was genuinely garbage, and Spiderman doing the no-pride-flags bit on its for UAE own says a lot; that extra-Prideful Spider-man Remastered Mods don't even bother with the figleaf of the Real World Issues tag that was used to justify banning the no-pride mod is kinda overkill. Most of NexusMods isn't shovelware, but not a small amount is.

On the other hand, even if they're trying to make a political point, they're not exactly needing to do so, or talking to any but the already-converted.

What was wrong with P5R's translation to English? Do you have examples?

From a non-culture-war perspective, there are a number of places that are still stilted, messy, or misleading. This piece is written from a progressive perspective, but it highlights a couple "little goofs", and the game has no small number of them. To be fair, P5R's translation is a vast improvement over the original P5 translation, which had a variety of plain errors almost everywhere, either words being untranslated or entirely incorrectly translated, sometimes to random unrelated words or even opposites of their original meanings. And there's still some janky stuff that's more under the broader problem of localization, like being quizzed on shogi rules in ways that would be hard to English-speakers to even Google.

From a culture war one, P5R is a heavily political piece even compared to the typical Persona game, and a lot of those politics are complex when anyone tries to handle them in other cultures. Previous Persona games have sometimes had this issue: is Naoto Shirogane a trans male or tomboy, greatest thread ever, locked by moderators after a thousand pages -- under Japanese cultural assumptions it's a lot easier to see her pronoun troubles are tied closer to how the often-serious problems Japanese authorities have taking women seriously, while under American (even pre-current trans snafu) this screams gender identity stuff.

((For a more consistently translated (albeit easier) example from the same game, P4's Kanji reads pretty similar, as far as I can tell, from either Japanese or American culture assumptions. His Shadow's very clearly gay, but the Jungian shadow is what a person represses, rather than the whole of what they are; Kanji might be gay or bisexual, but that's just a small portion of his fear of being seen as unmanly for his interests.))

But where P4 is more focused on finding the truth, P5 is about corruption, and aggressively about the interfaces of power between adults and minors, including related to suicide, parenting, and sexuality. So this meant that it touched on things that were far redder-hot. One particularly controversial scene occurs when the protagonist Joker and Ryuji running into and being hit on by a pair of gay guys, first when they visit a local gay district for unrelated reasons and then later at a normal beach.

This is incredibly creepy from a Western perspective, partly because the first scene depends on a lot of context that might not even be obvious to native Japanese speakers (the two are basically sneaking into the Folsom Street Fair for unrelated reasons) and partly because of different social norms and expectations about personal space. It's still meant to be weird in the original, but it's not an actual assault and that's kinda important: part of Ryuji's character arc is explicitly about separating attacks from self-defense from fair punishment and so on, in both directions. These guys are doing something that's outside of the normal and Ryuji doesn't want, but the real answer's that he needs to say no and Ryuji hasn't internalized that -- something that impacts everything from his backstory to some of his behaviors very late in the game.

But it came across as homophobic because these were the only 'real' clearly gay guys you run into through the whole game and they're trying to get into a high schooler's pants so it ... instead had the pair trying to give Ryuji a makeover? Which... doesn't really solve the problem either direction.

There's also a minor character that's probably intended as a transwoman in both translations, and probably was originally a crossdresser (or more accurately something like a Molly) by Western standards, but I don't know that the sorta people that use Based everywhere noticed that one.

Doing whatever the fuck you want with something you own should not be a political act. Alas, here we are.

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.

And all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.

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.

And all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.

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.

I do not see the relevance of that man to the point at issue, unless your point is that this man is some sort of Dalek against whom all games are zero-sum and existential and therefore both brushing off his complaints as trivial and also banning mods that cater to him are justified tactics to oppose and destroy him.

The relevance of that man is to explain why complaints of "WOKENESS IN GAMES REEEEE" is met with "it's not a big deal". The OP was arguing that he was being gaslit, I'm telling him that the gas lights are on because there's a gas leak.

I agree with him. Your argument would make sense if he complained about ANY game EVER catering to the pronouns crowd, it makes no sense in a context where mods that cater to him are censored.

Except the original post was the one to bring it up in games in general. I'm responding to that.

I'm sorry, I don't see how that changes anything. OP was talking about games in general. You made a point about the gaslighting being justified, because a lot of people seem to agree with the guy you linked to. I'm saying that argument would only make sense if he wanted to purge all wokeness from all games, rather than just complaining about how top corporations are pushing it through it's media.

It's not gaslighting if it's true.

I'm saying that argument would only make sense if he wanted to purge all wokeness from all games, rather than just complaining about how top corporations are pushing it through it's media.

The problem I have with this argument is that the OP called multiple popular kids shows "too damned gay". One of those was Peppa Pig, which the linked article literally just says had a lesbian couple with a child who was friends with the titular character. I assume OP is linking the part he finds problematic, but if so, then he finds it to be unacceptable that a kids show literally depicts a gay family. I even asked explicitly and didn't get a response on what exactly he found problematic about that. The other linked articles aren't much better for making his point.

It is true that one can have separate opinions on video games and kids shows. But I have yet to meet anyone who thinks Peppa Pig is LGBT propaganda and can't comprehend the criticism levied against their modding choices who doesn't also think "wokeness" in video games is a problem, period. I don't place much confidence in WhiningCoil breaking this mold. But I leave it to him to at least offer the defense if he cares to do so.

It's not gaslighting if it's true.

How can it simultaneously be true that woke messaging is not a big deal, and that people should not be allowed any option to remove it?

But I have yet to meet anyone who thinks Peppa Pig is LGBT propaganda and can't comprehend the criticism levied against their modding choices who doesn't also think "wokeness" in video games is a problem, period.

I'm having trouble parsing this sentence. You're saying that if he had his way, he'd just turn the tables on the woke, and censor them, including their mods? If not, I'm not sure I see where you're going with this argument.

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Like, even if you discount that episode, there's literally dozens of episodes without anything gay in them at all. I should know, I have two small children and have thus watched dozens of episodes of Peppa Pig. And Paw Patrol, similarly lacking in gay themes. Or Cocomelon. Or basically any of the Finnish kids' shows I've seen.

There is a Canadian series called Chip & Potato where some of the titular pug's neighbors are a pair of male zebras raising adopted twins who feature from time to time, but even there they don't actually draw attention to them being gay in any way that I've seen. If anything kids's shows that I've seen almost conspicuously seem to be treading very carefully with this theme.

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.

Sure, those are two different things, but the important thing is that they're both true. Deliberate modding choices don't tell us anything about where your lines are, except strictly within the realm of deliberate modding choices. To extend any implications outward to something else, like one's political opinions or personal ethics or whatever, is something that needs actual external empirical support. One doesn't get to project one's own worldview onto others and then demand that they be held to that standard.

Sure, we can certainly discuss what it says and how we would go about proving it and so on and so forth. What I reject is that idea that it doesn't say anything about you.

Edit: to more directly address your point, I do not believe that people's modding preferences are so obviously segregated from the rest of their views. In the context of Stardew Valley, I'll afford any person who wants it charity when they say they downloaded a mod that only made the only black person white because they didn't like his art or whatever, but I'll conclude that this person is more likely to be a racist than not.

Anecdotal evidence: there are several mods for Darkest Dungeon that are lewd. I don't believe that people who use them, including me, are misogynists, but I do think people using them aren't opposed to all objectification of people.

What I reject is that idea that it doesn't say anything about you.

In the literal sense, nobody takes the other side of this, though. Trivially, if I make deliberate modding choices, then that tells the world that I made those deliberate modding choices. I think so few non-schizophrenic people would disagree with this as to be irrelevant. So claiming that it says something about me is meaningless: of course it does, because every choice I make trivially tells the world that I made that choice.

The point of contention is on the specific claims about what else these choices imply about me or any other generic choice-maker. E.g. if someone modded Stardew Valley to transform some brown pixels to beige ones, it's entirely possible that such a decision was motivated by the modder's deeply held philosophical/political/personal/etc. views which are bigoted, hateful, or whatever, but that can only be supported by additional external information. And merely knowing that this person made such a mod doesn't actually add any information or give us any data from which to construct the truth about that modder's motivations or beliefs or where their lines are. Again, with the exception of the trivial truth that it tells us a lot about the modder's desire to transform certain pixels.

In the literal sense, nobody takes the other side of this, though. Trivially, if I make deliberate modding choices, then that tells the world that I made those deliberate modding choices.

The OP is clearly saying you cannot infer anything about their beliefs or worldview on the basis of the mods they play. That is what I don't agree with. Those are not trivial things.

if someone modded Stardew Valley to transform some brown pixels to beige ones, it's entirely possible that such a decision was motivated by the modder's deeply held philosophical/political/personal/etc. views which are bigoted, hateful, or whatever, but that can only be supported by additional external information.

Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.

Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.

I will absolutely sign on that race bending established characters is a good sign you are racist. Are you sure you've thought fully through who the racist are as a result of that?

I just said context matters. Why are you trying to get me to say that it doesn't?

Depends. Does your context boil down to "It's only bad when white people do it to black characters"?

Edit: Not a rhetorical question BTW. I'm too used to people using ambiguous claims of "context" to justify blatant double standards. I'm not sure if this is what your invocation is, or if you are agreeing with me that the relentless racebending, genderbending and sexuality bending of established characters is a pretty solid sign of hatred.

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The OP is clearly saying you cannot infer anything about their beliefs or worldview on the basis of the mods they play. That is what I don't agree with. Those are not trivial things.

Indeed, and I agree with the OP and disagree with you. "Anything about their beliefs or worldview" is different from "anything [at all]." The deliberate choices one makes when modding falls into the latter category but not in the former category. E.g. if someone decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, it tells us that that person decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, which falls into the latter, but not the former. I doubt the OP would disagree with the notion that a modder deciding to change some pixels from brown to beige tells us that the modder decided to change those pixels from brown to beige, but he can speak for himself, I suppose.

Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.

Does it? It's possible that it does, but I dispute that you can believe with any meaningful level of confidence that it does make it more likely. This is the kind of nice-sounding narrative that intuitively makes sense and sounds plausible, and as such, if we believe it without doing the hard empirical work to check that it's true, then we should be highly suspicious that our belief in it is due to how plausible it sounds and how much it is in concordance with our intuitions, rather than how true it is. Again, in that SV example, it is, by itself, absolutely not enough to say the person is racist. Is it enough to imply that that modder is more likely to be racist than the typical SV modder or player? It might be, and it might not be, and we haven't done the hard empirical work to figure out which.

if someone decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, it tells us that that person decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, which falls into the latter, but not the former.

Man, if I killed someone with a gun, I'd love to have you as my defense attorney. "My client didn't intend to kill someone, your honor, he just pulled a piece of metal/plastic on a product he owned while it was aimed at a person for two minutes straight!"

Seriously, what kind of argument even is this? How far do you take this idea that the only thing you can infer from what mods a person downloads is that they downloaded it? By this logic, I could download a mod that changed "white" to "cracker" or "cracker-colored" and no one should assume I'm being racist.

Again, in that SV example, it is, by itself, absolutely not enough to say the person is racist. Is it enough to imply that that modder is more likely to be racist than the typical SV modder or player? It might be, and it might not be, and we haven't done the hard empirical work to figure out which.

So great to hear you agree with me!

Man, if I killed someone with a gun, I'd love to have you as my defense attorney. "My client didn't intend to kill someone, your honor, he just pulled a piece of metal/plastic on a product he owned while it was aimed at a person for two minutes straight!"

This is, to be frank, an insane comparison. Pointing a loaded gun at someone and pulling the trigger is the literal physical act of killing someone, or at least causing injury with the high likelihood of killing. This has no comparison to how changing some pixels - or anything else - for a virtual game relates to racism. There is no physical reality that connects the playing of a game with racism the same way physical reality connects shooting a gun at someone with murder. Many people believe that the contents of a modded game can exacerbate racism, but this is by no means a well-supported view, and is certainly a far less consensus view than "shooting someone with a gun has a high likelihood of kill them," and the leap from "I personally think this mod could exacerbate racism" to "therefore, this modder, even if possibly subconsciously, had racist motivations in creating this mod" is unjustified.

By this logic, I could download a mod that changed "white" to "cracker" or "cracker-colored" and no one should assume I'm being racist.

Absolutely. I would 100% not assume you were a racist and I would defend you as being a non-racist, at least on the basis of this one decision. This would remain just as strong even if, say, you modded Doom to change all demons to cis white men and the player character to an amalgamation of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The only conclusion we could draw is that you wanted to make a Doom mod with these properties, and any sort of speculation about your personal beliefs about the politics surrounding people like Kendi, DiAngelo, and cis white men would be just that, speculation, and you would be responsible for exactly none of the speculation that many people could (and would likely) speculate about your principles and beliefs that motivated you to create such a mod.

And, needless to say, in neither your example nor mine, would you actually be being racist, since there's no one to actually be racist towards in a situation where you're just writing some code in a computer and offering other people the choice to download and use that code.

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It's entirely valid to ask why someone may want a mod that turns this character white.

Why?

Because only God himself could alter reality to the point that I wouldn't be capable of wondering why people do what they do, and that guy hasn't been seen in a while.

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.

I wouldn't particularly care about any of the examples you mentioned (my opinion, in as much as it might be "colored" would be forgotten immediately) unless I had a considerably more influential presence on the person (I e the person enamored of horny mermaids was my young son). This whole idea of "public scrutiny" of others in the way you're describing is foreign to me, though it's possible I haven't clearly understood you.

For the same reason it's "valid" to judge anyone's media consumption habits when you become aware of them.

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.

Once again I'm torn, because I kind of agree with both of you. The biggest problem I have with woke propaganda is the reasoning behind it. If you* are the kind of person who thinks that representation is important, that children who grow up seeing blacks only portrayed as villains will be demoralised or think they can't be heroic, that they can't identify with Luke Skywalker because of the colour of his skin, and that only hateful race obsessed cunts would target a race and paint them as evil - well I can only really assume one thing when you lump every fair skinned ethnicity in together and then consistently paint them as evil. You already said that's how you think. Same with men and women.

I am happy to include others, and I think it's totally fucked to interfere with how someone else wants to mod his game even if it's in a way I find disgusting - I am a hajnalbrain cooperatebot after all - but as far as I am concerned the DIE crowd and the neo nazi crowd are two sides of the same coin. Except there's a shitload more of the DIE crowd.

I don't think that's hyperbole. Keep in mind that back when it was black people copping it it was generally out of ignorance at worst - vanishingly few actual racists have held positions of power in the media in the past few decades. Most people were just trying to tell their story the way they'd pictured it while writing, and in a white majority country that's going to consist mostly of white people. But the DIE people are actively malicious. They want to put racists and sexists and homophobes in their place, and the rest of us better cheer them on or they'll come for us next. Fuck that and the horse it rode in on.

*I am sure you will understand I'm using the royal you here, but reading it back I see the way I wrote it is ambiguous, and while you've made your position on the topic quite clear, if I were in your centre left shoes I would be concerned that there was some confusion and that maybe I was expected to answer for the DIE crowd. But I am also not in the mood to rewrite this post, because I can't find a way to sit comfortably in this chair, so I am including this disclaimer instead.

if I were in your centre left shoes I would be concerned that there was some confusion and that maybe I was expected to answer for the DIE crowd.

Not really. I expect anyone reading my post to get to the part that says I don't have a problem with mods that don't flatter DEI.

Ultimately, I do not have a problem with someone wanting to discuss why the DEI messaging in media is offputting to them. I am sympathetic to the idea and think that creators of all sizes can do better with this. IF you want to say that the anti-men message in a piece of media makes you feel unwelcome, I'm totally onboard with that. But I often find that people don't cleanly cut away at what they find okay or don't, even when they have the tools to make this clear.

Yeah that's fair. The disclaimer was more for Quincy than for you - for a hypothetical centre left me who got it in the queue and thought it was a passive aggressive end run around the be kind rule. Especially since the last sentence is a statement directed at the royal you, which I should have fixed regardless of my discomfort.

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.

I mean, I think I made my case clear. There is "inclusive" and then there is weird, demoralization propaganda where everyone who looks like me is evil and families that look like mine have been utterly extirpated or portrayed in a manner of existential horror. And having found myself facing an abundance of media which very plainly hates me, I'm extra sensitive to the slightest hint of it anymore. Because not unlike how there is a weird bundling of political positions that theoretically have nothing to do with one another, but are none the less all or none, and sorted (perhaps falsely) as being either Republican or Democrat, I've long been subjected to "inclusive" media that barely seems to be about being inclusive, and instead seems to be about promoting hatred of white people and all their works. So I want all of it gone from my household.

I mean, I think I made my case clear.

No, I don't think you have. In particular, it is unclear to me which of the following you would agree with.

  1. Any depiction of people in a way I don't like is not acceptable.

  2. Some depictions of people in a way I don't like is not acceptable.

People appeal to 2 quite a bit, but they never quite shake the impression that they actually agree with 1. In particular, when you cite all those kids' cartoons and say that they're just all too gay, you suggest to me that you actually have a problem with gay representation, period.

Full disclosure, I haven't watched those episodes of those shows. Maybe they're just actively trying to make political activists out of your kids. If so, I'll fully agree with you that those shows are not necessarily appropriate for children. But if they're just showing gay people existing like straight people, then yeah, I'm starting to think you at best just aren't differentiating as you say you do.

And having found myself facing an abundance of media which very plainly hates me, I'm extra sensitive to the slightest hint of it anymore.

I see people say that all time. What media are you referring to? Because even in 2023, there is plenty of media that doesn't only demonize straight cis white people.

I've long been subjected to "inclusive" media that barely seems to be about being inclusive, and instead seems to be about promoting hatred of white people and all their works. So I want all of it gone from my household.

Is this really present in Baldur's Gate 3? Two of the most prominent party characters, Gale and Astarion, are white men (Astarion is, in fairness, a half-elf). Halsin is a white guy (another elf, though). Then there's Minsc and Volo, both white male humans.

I guess Wyll, the one black guy, is arguably the most "moral" character in the party.

The three main "bad guys" are Ketheric Thorm (white male elf), Gortash (white male human), and Orin (uh, I guess she's a white woman? She's visually an eldritch abomination). Ketheric, especially, is a pretty tragic character, though, and not portrayed as generically evil. Minor bad guys include Cazador, an Asian human vampire, and the Mother Superior, a female drow.

All of that to say, I feel like BG3 is definitely trying to be "diverse," and it's certainly very, very gay... but I don't get that it's "anti-white guys."

In fact, it seems like a really good example of "inclusive media" that isn't trying to promote "hatred of white people and their works." Maybe you could start trying to pick it apart, but then I think that would be pretty similar to the "woke" people who try to do that to other innocuous media.

To add some more context to this post, there is currently a huge flare up in the modding community with Nexusmods (one of the largest modding communities and hosting sites) banning 'anti-woke' mods for some of the recent AAA releases of Starfield and Baldurs Gate 3. Besides the example of the BG 3 mod above, a recently banned Starfield mod involved the removal of pronouns during character creation.

Based on the past banning of a mod for Spiderman Remastered (involving the replacement of LGBT pride flags with American flags), Nexusmods' justification for banning anti-woke mods is as follows:

"We aren't the authority on what users can and cannot mod. Us removing a mod only means it cannot be found at Nexus Mods, nothing more, nothing less. We also note that we are not the only site that has removed this mod from their platform. As a private business, we have a right to choose what content we do and do not want to host on our platform. Respect this right the same way you want respect for your rights."

Starfield Steam discussion forum is currently a raging dumpster fire of trolling, woke and anti-woke commentary.

/r/kotakuinaction, one of the residual anti-woke communities still around after gamergate, has a lot of discussion about the forced inclusion of diversity in gaming issue and seems to 'follow the money' of forced diversity in modern games into the prevalence of ESG scores attracting investors.

Edit: Large discussion thread of this issue in the Starfield Steam forum here.

The Spider-Man one is particularly egregious, because the modder just combined the textures from the Saudi Arabian release of the game with English text. As it turns out, the game makers are totally happy to make and profit from LGBT-free version of the game, as long as it’s not Americans who enjoy it.

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