Starfields is one of the biggest games of 2023 – but it’s joined other recent games like Baldurs Gate 3 in being boycotted by conservatives because of the way it interacts with gender.
“you can’t help shovel your dogshit fucking crap ideology into everything.” he froths, while shovelling his dogshit fucking crap ideology into everything. What a weapons-grade bellend.
Must be exhausting being a conservative and being terrified of everything.
I don’t know, my parents managed for years. Nice being an adult and getting Halloween. Maybe you are right that it is exhausting they just get used to being in a continuous state of it. Like a pack a day smoker vs someone who has never smoked. One can handle nicotine levels that could kill another.
Great metaphor! In both cases personal decisions lead to a shorter life span.
Funny how a game about the fear of the unknown is being hated on by a group that fears the (relatively) unknown.
Baldur’s Gate over here wiping its tears with hundred dollar bills
I’ve put in a hundred hours and counting, and I have yet to figure out what pronouns they’re screeching about. It may have been such an inconsequential thing at character creation that most people have completely forgot about it lmao
The diversity is done quite well too. It’s never grabbed my attention for more than a second of going “neat, they’re black/wearing dreads/gay” and then right back into it. I found it more jarring when I had an unexpected dialogue with Shadowheart giving her a flower.
It’s the fact that gay characters exist and the fact that you can roll a transgender character if you want.
I don’t know if anyone knows this, but the Steam forum moderators are pretty far right as well. I’m currently banned for mentioning Nexus mods, in a 100 page thread about the site itself. The conservative attacking pronouns and free speech, are not banned. You can find plenty of threads with conservative alt-right talking points about pronouns and anti-transgenderism, including insulting and degrading behavior. These threads stay up. Meanwhile, myself and others who defend trans activism, are banned. I appealed the ban, and get no replies from any moderator over multiple days. It’s fucking disgusting how the site is being moderated. I’ll post the ban reason and what I said, below:
“Nexus only bans mods made for bigots They don’t want to support any content that promotes bigotry and allows people to pretend certain marginalized groups don’t exist. Trans people are part of the game, and anyone trying to erase them is acting on bigotry. You are perfectly free to mod the game yourself or get the mod elsewhere. You just can’t get it from nexus mods.”
Ban Reason: This post contains material that promotes software piracy. cheats, or exploits. This type of content is not allowed on the Steam Community.
Is this a surprise? Many gamers unironically use the PCMR term. We all know where master race idea came from. Even those that use it ironically often reveal themselves when talking about BLM etc.
I’m honestly really pleasantly surprised that Nexus Mods are willing to take this fight head on. That they are willing to tell these potential customers to sod off, and that they have the tact and understanding to tell the difference between a superficially benign mod with a malicious purpose like this, and the many vulgar mods that they do allow on the site. (Shout out to Schlongs of Skyrim, you magnificent beast)
Gamers, in the general, being the worst people I don’t have high expectations from gaming companies but it all seems to be moving slowly in the right direction, even as gamers gnash their teeth and waddle their fingers.
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Unfortunately, the far right has deeply inflated and influenced make gaming culture, particularly since Steve Bannon weapon’s then for Trump’s original election campaign.
When Twatter finally dies the media is going to have to work that much harder to find the one guy somewhere who is outraged by something. I wonder if we are going to see a return of the Midwest Safaris, complete with interviews with retired folks in small town diners.
Conservatives when basic linguistic morphology groups are present in the language of any given media.
Starfield and BG3 aren’t being boycotted. Those are just empty threats. Remember all the other times people said they were going to boycott their favorite games, and actually did it? Neither do I.
I remember back in 2016 conservatives screaming they were going to boycott Hamilton because of the cast making an appeal to Pence at final curtain, and people laughing hysterically at them because back then, there was no way any of them claiming they were going to boycott would have been able to get tickets in the first place.
No, they try to boycott, but since they only represent a small fraction of the world, it doesn’t pan out as such.
Where is that Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 boycott-failure screenshot when you need it?
And that is the result every time.
I don’t know any conservatives irl who have complained about this, has anybody actually met someone who said that to you in person?
This just feels like people are trying to make something out of nothing to stay relevant
Media coverage has gotten real lazy and sloppy, so they’re pretty much pulling their stories from Twitter now. “Conservatives” could be like 100 people, max. Obviously it’s whatever gets clicks, and hey, here’s somebody from Lemmy, driving traffic to the site for free.
Starfield has been a real experience from the outside. My stepfather started playing it religiously (Xbox) as soon as it came out. I get the very strong impression that he’s not alone. Much sleep has been lost over the newest Bethesda game. It looks like a hit for ol Todd.
So the actual players are too busy playing the game to be part of this conversation. That leaves people with no real involvement to be responsible for all this jabberjawing.
Complaints about the game not being good enough are pretty much not real, and are coming from people who aren’t playing it.
This “conservative backlash” is legit fake news, and is probably a handful of nobodies on X pissing and whining about it performatively while some useless journo fills up his quota acting like it’s a story.
It’s a Bethesda game, and they really aren’t known for pushing a lot of political boundaries, even things like the Fallout series ultimately boil down to “nuclear war bad” as a political statement. Edgy. I don’t think there’s much to talk about with Starfield other than the game having the very broad character creator with lots of options that people have come to expect from a modern RPG. There’s nothing here.
Blue hair and pronouns? Sir, you could be a lizard in Skyrim.
Ultimately it just kinda shines a light on how bad things have gotten, lately, and how much journalism is pure filler, probably written by ChatGPT now. None of this is happening. There’s no story here. That’s the “real experience” I’m on about. This game isn’t terribly controversial in any meaningful way, so it’s very glaring how much babble is going out there trying to MAKE a controversy where the subject just refuses to support any of that.
Except for the poor optimization turning everyone’s 3080 into a lump and making even the newest GPU struggle, even though the game is not throwing anything at the screen to justify all that. That controversy has some real heat to it, I’ll admit. Anything else is trash noise to be ignored.
My impetus for posting it was seeing someone on lemmy posting links to where to get the mod to remove the pronouns from Starfield because Nexus Mods won’t host it. They posted to two gaming communities, and both had about a 2:3 like to dislike ratio as of last night - meaning a lot more people were quietly liking getting those links but weren’t saying anything in the dumpster fire comments sections. It was still on my mind when I saw this article right after I went over to Mastodon to check my feed there. So yeah, not in person, but these folks really are out there.
It is mainly spread by conservative grifters who made a following being outraged on stupid issues like these.
The 13-year-old brother of one of my son’s friends, the other day… sigh
It’s a popular conservative idea that the word “pronoun” is bad in itself, so I don’t doubt this is a thing at all
That concept is popular but no conservative that i have met (and i know some who are pretty far on the right) has really reacted with such strong hate towards pronouns.
At most they just say well that’s idiotic or removed or fucking bullshit (which is rare since the ones i know rarely curse), however its not really a big deal to them. Not as much as the rest of the culture war at least
I’ve encountered plenty who roll their eyes and start to whine whenever they see someone with a different pronoun on TV.
An eyeroll and a sentence or two is all i hear, which is no where near how its represented on the internet
IRL? No. Every conservative I know IRL doesn’t even play video games (every conservative I know is also old as fuck). And it’s not like I know a lot or hang out around a lot; generally every one I’ve met IRL has been someone I don’t like. Those I know are by necessity (employers, friends of family, etc).
But I’ve seen plenty of them online. Particularly in threads like this one.
thats has the same energy as the people who think pretty much anything can turn someone gay
I’m convinced anyone that thinks (insert item here) can turn people gay are just closeted gay people who are afraid to come out cause their politics are more important than their happiness.
This is nothing new. Why do you think they make such a big deal about sexuality being a choice? Because for them, it is.
PROJECTION!
Pretty sure that even closeted gay dudes keep their bum holes clean.
No they aren’t
Imagine being such a snow flake that what words people use to describe themselves makes you so mad
You can go as Cis-conservative as you want with your pronouns in the game. No-one is forcing those conservatives to give in to their innermost desires.
The temptation is sinful to them in the same way that their murders and violence are righteous.
They don’t realize the God they worship is Mammon.
I feel like this whole pronouns in starfield thing is actually astroturf to draw attention away from Bethesda being evil and abusive to trans people who worked for them. Plus it drowns out any news about the game’s actual qualities or merits, which like all Bethesda games at launch, seems to be lacking.
There’s so many reasons to be actually mad at so many things, and all this culture war bullshit is deliberate smoke to keep people running in circles.
I wish it would be astroturfing but I’m pretty sure conservatives are just that fucking stupid
I like to have hope for humanity
hope being that it’s astroturfing
at this point, I have to question if real articles are satire lmao
It’s a single prompt during character creation. The default option is always cisgendered. Literally 30 seconds or less and you never have to think about it ever again. In fact, you can ignore it entirely and it’ll have been as if it was never there. Woooow such controversy.
I refuse to believe anybody is actually dumb enough to boycott the game over this. There are plenty of fucking legitimate reasons to not buy it, but having the option to select alternative pronouns during character creation is not one of them.
Oh no!
Anyway…
