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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28479 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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To add some more context to this post, there is currently a huge flare up in the modding community with Nexusmods (one of the largest modding communities and hosting sites) banning 'anti-woke' mods for some of the recent AAA releases of Starfield and Baldurs Gate 3. Besides the example of the BG 3 mod above, a recently banned Starfield mod involved the removal of pronouns during character creation.

Based on the past banning of a mod for Spiderman Remastered (involving the replacement of LGBT pride flags with American flags), Nexusmods' justification for banning anti-woke mods is as follows:

"We aren't the authority on what users can and cannot mod. Us removing a mod only means it cannot be found at Nexus Mods, nothing more, nothing less. We also note that we are not the only site that has removed this mod from their platform. As a private business, we have a right to choose what content we do and do not want to host on our platform. Respect this right the same way you want respect for your rights."

Starfield Steam discussion forum is currently a raging dumpster fire of trolling, woke and anti-woke commentary.

/r/kotakuinaction, one of the residual anti-woke communities still around after gamergate, has a lot of discussion about the forced inclusion of diversity in gaming issue and seems to 'follow the money' of forced diversity in modern games into the prevalence of ESG scores attracting investors.

Edit: Large discussion thread of this issue in the Starfield Steam forum here.

The Spider-Man one is particularly egregious, because the modder just combined the textures from the Saudi Arabian release of the game with English text. As it turns out, the game makers are totally happy to make and profit from LGBT-free version of the game, as long as it’s not Americans who enjoy it.

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