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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.
I'm confused, is there some special browser I'm supposed to use to see this?
Silly thought: the based mods are using the wrong approach. You need to launder your political preferences through accepted victim groups.
To get the gay out, just call it a muslim friendly mod. Now the owners of Nexus have to choose to ban muslims, or keep banning the anti-gay stuff. For extra bonus points, try and make some of the anti-gay muslim nations aware of these games enough to ban them (and then the company will do the work for you and create the mod, like they did with spiderman).
To white wash the game, just call it a monument to the Ukrainian people. Put in some Ukraine flags, give everyone Ukrainian names, and make them all white. Then give options in the mod to switch out the flag, and to switch out the names.
More serious thought: this is all very tiresome. I always feel this way when I see politics intruding into hobby spaces. I very much blame the Woke for starting this fight within gaming specifically. I can't help but feel it was also their single largest strategic blunder (not that I think anyone is pushing a high level strategy for either side). It was probably the single greatest red-pilling of American youth. They created Trump's youth base. Or maybe this kind of fight was just destined to happen. If you believe the culture is rotten and you want to change it, then eventually you are going to find yourself in conflict with the people who enjoy the culture as it currently exists. I feel some sense of cosmic justice that in return for messing with the hobby I love they created their worst enemy.
My future goals:
I have slowly been volunteering to help out more organizations in my life. I've been a moderator on here for years. I'm on the board for a non-profit recreational sport in my area. I'm on the Parent-Teach-Association for my daughter's school. I do feel that the previous generation failed me. They neglected these side aspects of public and social life, and left them wide open to capture by leftists with an agenda.
I will generally be pushing a line of non-politics. As well as trying to be helpful. I do believe that most volunteer organizations will easily follow the incentive gradient. They will do whatever is easiest, and whatever their members are willing to do. I just intend to be a roadblock that makes the incentive gradient flow towards non-politics. If I was involved with Nexus mods, I would have advised them to take a non-politics approach. Let things happen on your platform, and only get involved in the legal stuff. If anyone makes a push for you to get involved, say "sorry, but we don't have the resources to deal with such and such, we are trying to make this a great platform"
The recreational sports league I'm in had a bit of drama recently. Some of you might have followed along in the Wednesday wellness threads. The situation has mostly resolved itself at this point. But one of the board members now wants to put in place a code of conduct agreement to our mailing list. I'll be fighting to change the "code of conduct" thing to basically be a waiver of liability for what our members say/do. And my simplest argument will be: none of you want to enforce a code of conduct.
Children's Culture:
I have two daughters myself. I do watch the content they consume. Most of it for toddlers has seemed to not have gay themes. Peppa pig is whimsical and nonsensical. Paw Patrol is full of action, and a bit of silliness. Daniel Tiger's neighborhood seems entirely composed of nuclear families. Bluey tends to stay away from politics, even though it is clearly made in mind with the parents watching alongside their kids. I might have missed things in any of these shows, but if I'm missing the things, I think my daughters are missing them too.
I've lately had my daughters singing along with me to a song that contains cuss words in it. Usually I feel weird when I hear cusswords in a song and I'll skip it rather than dealing with the discomfort. Looking back, that was probably unnecessary. There is a very clear "shit" in the song, and my oldest daughter just says the word "chick" instead, because "shit" is not in her vocabulary so she just latched onto the closest word she knew. The song is of course: Rich Men North of Richmond.
Daddy pig is portrayed as a doofus sufficiently consistently that both my wife and I found Peppa Pig problematic. We can't stop our kids watching it, but we don't seek it out for them.
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