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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.
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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