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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.
I think we are all prone to nostalgia bias as we age, and move out of the prime time as it were. But we also want to avoid philosophical relativism, the idea that there can be no privileging of anything because everyone has their own view.
I think there's always been a lot of crap, and pop culture has generic things that appeal to different generations. For youth, it's enough probably that it's their thing, and not their parents. That it's new.
But I still think you can make good arguments that politics and creativity usually don't go together. Because a lot of woke decisioning is political it's probably deteriorating the artistic product. Famous authors have been critiqued for introducing too much of a political slant in this or that novel and there's some consensus that these works are qualitatively 'less-good' as a result.
I agree with some of this and disagree with other parts.
Certainly we should never decide that we are just too out of touch to understand modern culture and can't meaningfully critique it any more; I don't mean to give that impression.
But when someone says 'I won't let my kid watch anything made after the 90s because it's all corrupted by socjust lunacy' or w/e, that's a pretty strong signal to me that they're not carefully considering each piece of media on its own merits and forming a reasoned critique. It looks like just being mad about the culture in general moving on from what was familiar and comfortable to you, which is what I was calling out.
Honest critical analysis is always important, but it's also always in danger of being biased by other influences, and you always have to be on guard against that bias. I'm trying to point out what I think is a pretty likely bias affecting this particular judgement that everything after the 90s is dangerous or bad.
I think the word 'politics' is ambiguous in a way that makes this point hard to talk about.
Certainly the two-party campaign-focused culture-war version of 'politics' is such a powerful influence that it can corrupt or derail any other messages that it is paired with. Note that I don't think that means you can't make good art motivated by that type of politics - I like West Wing, I like Rambo - but when you are trying to make art that's about something else but still let that type of politics influence it, it's easy for the politics to overwhelm your actual message.
But there's also the much broader understanding of politics form the phrase 'the personal is political' and so forth.
Whether the women in a piece of art are actual characters or sexy lamps is very much a core part of the artistic message, but it's also influenced by cultural and political trends that made one type of media more likely to get made or more appealing to audiences. An artist might legitimately be interested or uninterested in depicting non-heteronormative relationships or exploring minority cultures in their work, but politics and culture will influence how the audience reacts to those depictions.
This is my real objection to and point about OP"s post. It seems to come from a common perspective that, any time there's a gay character or more than one minority character in something aimed at wide audiences, any time something aimed at younger audiences acknowledges non-heteronormative relationships or flaws in the American justice system, any time a woman character exhibits the same power fantasies that male characters normally get or rescue themselves instead of waiting helplessly, this is obviously only due to the influence of political activists corrupting the culture and ruining the media.
And I think that's just wrong. Certain specific cases of it are that, for sure, but you can't paint with such a broad brush. More often, it's simply that the culture had 'straight white guy protagonist and the world reacting to him' movies and shows and games for a lot of decades (or centuries), and has simply gotten bored with that, realized that the actual world is more complex and interesting than that, and decided to move on to exploring more topics.
(not that we've even stopped featuring that story in tons of media, we're just adding additional elements and looking at new things too)
I agree with a lot of what you say. There's obviously a range of material from good to bad put out in any particular generation, a lot of it I'd suggest is pretty shit. But also gems.
Agreed also that most forms of art are molded by the societal norms of the time, as they act on the film makers/ producers and audience at large, and as those individuals interact/ react against those norms, while also being more or less aware of them.
These norms will include the politics of the time (the negotiation of norms), whether that be issues politics along tribal lines or political in the manner of 'the personal is political', which is a truism in the sense that a political act has to be done by an individual, who always acts 'personally'.
For example, an author may put specific political polemic into the mouth of their interlocutor, or they may seed their version of the norms in a more subtle but equally intentional way, therefore acting politically-- in addition to their other creative acts. Nothing precludes subconscious molding by social norms either, this is the sea we all swim in, but I'd argue this isn't the case for political acts, which seem to me to have a conscious intention by definition, operating at the level of polemical belief, in that politics involves a certain forcefulness, or righteousness.
I think it's this intentionality that gets at the root of why, beyond a certain threshold, it deteriorates the quality of the work down an exponential decay into the zone of 'forced', 'contrived', 'preachy' etc. While we can be a mindless milieu, we can also have a fine ear for being told what to do or think. This is most evidenced by the general reaction to most advice, which has an element of actual resentfulness.
This element of 'too much', or 'against the grain' will vary with each individual, so there does have to be a defense of why this should be more than just taste, pitching reactionary responses against early adopters of the political message or culture shift.
Or to frame it as another commenter, isn't this just the culturally new coming into being? With the usual railing against the wind kind of response?
This feels to me like a familiar relativistic slight of hand, along the lines of 'global warming is a hoax', temperature has always been changing. To find out if things are qualitatively different in the creative merit of a particular artistic work, or a trend in the production of them, we need to do some kind of analysis against some objective marker. An individual can have a sense of it, I would argue, but to prove it's not just taste, they have to demonstrate it somehow, with reference to the works themselves and a rubric.
But in this task we will quickly be flung into dealing with philosophical assumptions. If we were to adopt a relativistic stance, it would be quite hard to measure any differences over time, because there is no measure sufficiently privileged over its material, or it's own substrate, for it to be able to do the job. In contrast, if we adopt an aesthetic stance, we may be able to get somewhere, though it doesn't seem easy to bridge to the definitive answer on the matter.
I think, at the level of metaphysics, we come up against something like Judith Butler's problem. In her case, What is the space--that is Us--that allows for us to perform against the norms, despite being subject to them? Where does it come from and how does it resolve existentially?
If the performance is 'naturally adopted', then where then really was the subjection, or what is the extra element that allows for it? And if subjection rules, how is the reaction able to pass up and out and reconcile the existential split of being the subject and the performer against subjection? This is all just wank at this point- but I think it's something analogous to the current question of how we are molded by culture, which also arises from us as a collective, in this case problematizing the conception of 'right adopted' v 'wrong reactionary', or 'inevitable adoption' v 'railing against the wind', because there's some extra ingredient needed beyond just being washed over by culture, or reacting against? Is there the possibility we can definitely privilege a stance or are we stuck in an arbitrariness?
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