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Friday Fun Thread for September 8, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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redo the racial makeup

What’s the problem with the racial makeup of Starfield?. Interestingly the game is actually a lot ‘whiter’ than a linear extrapolation of earth demographics would suggest, like at least half the population is white when whites will be like 5-10% (or less) of the earth’s population by the end of this century.

I don’t believe that complete mongrelization of the lightcone is an inevitability, or even likely. The motivation to present the game with a striking (vitiligo anyone?) medley of brown and black character races, and mostly ugly regardless of race, is to pay tribute to the Current Year (not 2330!) preoccupation with DEI. I reject that. As far as I know, not having played it, it is not to bring forth some worthwhile narrative exploring ethnic strife of some afrofuturistic faction causing a planetary-scale South African catastrophe - it’s window dressing and it’s not my window dressing.

And my conspicuous rejection (see Nexus Mods preemptively banning the pronoun mods) makes my enemies upset and anxious, and I want to maximize this.

Edit: I just realized that a character designer for Bethesda is some Brazilian mutt, gloating about his mystery meat creations in Starfield. Go figure.

Edit2: looks like possibly more ESG influence?

In order to understand why Starfield turned out so awful, and to show how bad AAA gaming has become, we have to look at the place developers ironically least expect us to check: The end credits. Starfield's takes over 45 minutes, and this is because despite Bethesda having hundreds of employees, a laundry list of voice actors, support from ZeniMax and backing from Xbox, they have nonetheless outsourced the game to - and this is not an exaggeration - 27 global studios, who do everything from sound design to VFX to modeling and so on. It's a total racket, worse than any of Todd's lies • (You Tube] Starfield Credits 4K (embed) [Embed] In the order in which they are shown in the credits, we have: Sonic Boom Sound, JSR Post, Iron Galaxy, The Multiplayer Group, Spera Soft, Snowed In Studios, GameSim, The Forge, Nobody Studios Undertone FX, Wardog. Sparx*, Scyth Games, Rouge MoCap, RedHot, Kaptured Motions Inc., Airship Interactive, Lakshya Digital, NXA Studios, Goodbye Kansas, GL33k, FuryLion, Cubic Motion, Cloud Mark, M aka Original Force, WIlF aka Mindwalk Studios. You probably picked up on the Chinese ones, but these companies operate everywhere from Ukraine to Vietnam to India About half of these companies are owned by Keywords Studios, a shady as fuck company using investment dollars and ESG points to help give what is effectively sweatshop labor to AAA developers They work with literally everyone. EA, Tencent, Capcom, Bamco, ActiBlizzard and of course Bethesda. Remember the whole rigamarole about crunch? Well, look at this https://www.keywordsstudios.com/prevention-of-modern-slavery-statement/

mongrelization

some Brazilian mutt

Antagonistic

[this whole post]

Wrong thread, this is friday fun thread.

1 day ban.

From my understanding of physics, "a linear extrapolation" of our knowledge of the universe doesn't lead to instant fast travel by end of this century. Yet Bethesda didn't ask space engineers how fast they think spaceships might go in the period the game takes place, and prevented the player from going faster.

Yeah but my point is that most ‘anti-woke’ criticism of diversity in medieval fantasy settings is stuff like how it doesn’t make sense for a small village to be ethnically diverse, or complaints that the demographics of the Northern Kingdoms were altered dramatically by Netflix or whatever. This can extend to stuff like the Elder Scrolls or Dragon Age that have settings loosely inspired by medieval Europe.

But complaining about diversity in a game set in 2330 seems…misguided. Whether @grognard likes it or not, it doesn’t really seem far fetched for Starfield to have a diverse “racial makeup”, so I’m interested in what offends him about it.

A broken clock can still be right twice a day. If these racist companies enjoy erasing white people from everything, eventually they'll get lucky and strike upon a fiction where it's plausible.

Doesn't change that I already know they are racist and don't wish to give them my money.