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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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