Starfield is the latest game to be boycotted by conservatives. This time because of pronouns
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to 
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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.
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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.
Complaints being from people not playing it is not true. I'm playing it religiously but I have a lot of complaints. None significant enough to stop me playing, obvs
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'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.
The 13-year-old brother of one of my son's friends, the other day... sigh
It is mainly spread by conservative grifters who made a following being outraged on stupid issues like these.