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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.
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.
If I wake up each morning, retreat to the privacy of my closet, and spend ten minutes meditating on how awful black people are and how much I hate them, would that actually be being racist, given that there's no black people there to be racist to? Is racism necessarily interpersonal, requiring some form of direct interaction/exchange?
This is an interesting definitional question. I would say No to both questions, though it's almost a Yes for the latter one. Racism is necessarily interpersonal, but it doesn't require some form of direct interaction/exchange. But it does need to play out in some form of interaction/exchange, even if theoretical or intended. If I go to a bunch of other Korean-Americans like myself and tell them to go out and shoot up a bunch of Slavs because Slavs deserve to be shot or whatever, I'm not directly being interacting with Slavs to be racist towards them, but I'm clearly setting up a chain of events meant to create a direct interaction between members of different races to act in racist ways towards each other.
If you spend 10 minutes meditating on how much you hate black people, but then that meditation doesn't affect how you treat black people or how you tell others to treat black people during the other 23 hours and 50 minutes of the day, then I don't see how it could possibly be racist.
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