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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.
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.
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:
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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