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