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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.
I do not see the relevance of that man to the point at issue, unless your point is that this man is some sort of Dalek against whom all games are zero-sum and existential and therefore both brushing off his complaints as trivial and also banning mods that cater to him are justified tactics to oppose and destroy him.
The relevance of that man is to explain why complaints of "WOKENESS IN GAMES REEEEE" is met with "it's not a big deal". The OP was arguing that he was being gaslit, I'm telling him that the gas lights are on because there's a gas leak.
I agree with him. Your argument would make sense if he complained about ANY game EVER catering to the pronouns crowd, it makes no sense in a context where mods that cater to him are censored.
Except the original post was the one to bring it up in games in general. I'm responding to that.
I'm sorry, I don't see how that changes anything. OP was talking about games in general. You made a point about the gaslighting being justified, because a lot of people seem to agree with the guy you linked to. I'm saying that argument would only make sense if he wanted to purge all wokeness from all games, rather than just complaining about how top corporations are pushing it through it's media.
It's not gaslighting if it's true.
The problem I have with this argument is that the OP called multiple popular kids shows "too damned gay". One of those was Peppa Pig, which the linked article literally just says had a lesbian couple with a child who was friends with the titular character. I assume OP is linking the part he finds problematic, but if so, then he finds it to be unacceptable that a kids show literally depicts a gay family. I even asked explicitly and didn't get a response on what exactly he found problematic about that. The other linked articles aren't much better for making his point.
It is true that one can have separate opinions on video games and kids shows. But I have yet to meet anyone who thinks Peppa Pig is LGBT propaganda and can't comprehend the criticism levied against their modding choices who doesn't also think "wokeness" in video games is a problem, period. I don't place much confidence in WhiningCoil breaking this mold. But I leave it to him to at least offer the defense if he cares to do so.
How can it simultaneously be true that woke messaging is not a big deal, and that people should not be allowed any option to remove it?
I'm having trouble parsing this sentence. You're saying that if he had his way, he'd just turn the tables on the woke, and censor them, including their mods? If not, I'm not sure I see where you're going with this argument.
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Like, even if you discount that episode, there's literally dozens of episodes without anything gay in them at all. I should know, I have two small children and have thus watched dozens of episodes of Peppa Pig. And Paw Patrol, similarly lacking in gay themes. Or Cocomelon. Or basically any of the Finnish kids' shows I've seen.
There is a Canadian series called Chip & Potato where some of the titular pug's neighbors are a pair of male zebras raising adopted twins who feature from time to time, but even there they don't actually draw attention to them being gay in any way that I've seen. If anything kids's shows that I've seen almost conspicuously seem to be treading very carefully with this theme.
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