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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.
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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