Starfield is the latest game to be boycotted by conservatives. This time because of pronouns
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to 
theconversation.com
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.
Oh no... the biggest assholes in the universe are threatening to avoid these games... whatever will we do? Who is going to call people racial slurs over multiplayer now?
SF is single player only.
Yeah Ok, but there are message boards and mod communities and social media. Anytime bigots voluntarily remove themselves from the conversation is a win.
They don't though. Look at the Steam forums. Lots of accounts not owning the game are pushing their garbage rage bait every day.
Saw some steam discussions about Homefront: The Revolution (was only interested in it for the TimeSplitters 2 rom in the game) about how people think this is exactly how China will invade the US. I'm sitting here like "...no."
For now. It's possible it can go multiplayer though like Skyrim and Morrowind through 3rd party apps/mods. I currently host a for fun pop up multiplayer Morrowind server using tes3mp. Skyrim has a similar 4 person co-op mod.
Not the way it is relevant for the point he was trying to make.
Oh no! Developers will have to choose between catering to bigots and catering to literally everyone else! What ever will they do?!?
Seriously, I hope bigots continue to just remove themselves from all aspects of society.
If the bigots would remove themselves from the voting booth that would be awesome. Is there some way we can link voting to being open minded?
Get voting sheets to list the candidates’ pronouns and the problem will immediately resolve itself.
In the voting booth, you can pick male, female and other.
I went to a comedy show in a somewhat "progressive" red area last night and the comic made a joke about pronouns (not in a negative light) but as soon as he mentioned pronouns pretty much the whole audience started booing at pronouns. It was pretty sad to see.
I genuinely cannot understand why anyone gets hot and bothered over pronouns. It's crazy. They're crazy people.
Because rather than have empathy for others and realize how their actions might affect others, they'd rather focus solely on themselves and make everything about them and how they're inconvenienced.
it’d make some amount of sense if they were actually inconvenienced but i’m still not understanding the inconvenience tbh
It goes against their view that everybody is "normal" like them (white, cisgender, etc.)
It makes them have to remember things about people rather than assume based on their appearance.
Because the american education system failed them and they don't even know what pronouns are, they just know that someone told them that they have to hate it with a passion.
Stops them hating the late-stage capitalist society which is what's ACTUALLY causing them grief
OMG that's a pronoun!
Most of those people are unable to identify a pronoun in a sentence.
They can't understand it and their brains are small enough that not being able to understand something makes them mad.
Subscribe to some conservative YouTube channels or Instagram accounts. Pronouns, LGBTQ, racec etc. are brought up and criticized CONSTANTLY.
Conservatives do excel at being outraged over nothing so this makes sense.
Who gives a shit?
Good. Less jerks then.
You'd think so, but weirdly enough, conservative "boycotting" more often than not seems to include buying and engaging with the things they claim they're not using.
Conservatives boycotting means they'll buy something they wouldn't buy otherwise and then bitch about it.
It's bizarre.
Like with the Budd thing a while back, sure, they do in fact normally do buy some Budd, but when they got their panties in a bunch over the LGBTQ stance Budd took, they bought truckloads of it, to then destroy it. They still bought a shitload more Budd than they normally would.
It's bizarre.
But in line with the rest of their behavior, since everything they do and say these days is completely unhinged.
They deliberately make their world a darker place and then complain about how dark the world is.
It's their universal shtick.
Like, complain about the economy, then when they are in power, ruin the economy.
I was looking at the Steam forums for Starfield earlier after googling some quest I was on.
Dear lord are they out in force.
And the twists and turns they are making to explain why they think the pronouns should be removed from the game without saying it's because they are easily triggered right wing fucklets is almost impressive.
And as expected, quite a few phrased as "as a libtard, even I think this should be removed for xyz retarded reason".
And as we all know, any post that starts with "as a POC/WAMAN/RATIONAL PERSON" means some MAGAt jackass trying to be clever.
It would be so funny if someone made a genuinely fantastic video game, and it starts with picking a gender and all, and then the first cutschene is that person transitioning. It doesn't matter for the plot and never comes up again in the game, because he or she is now just that. Can you imagine how they would freak the fuck out? I saw that other cunt's artery explode because there was a screen in starfield that asks you for your gender and you had more than two options.
"As a black trans man I think there's too much wokism and POC in this game, and all the females are ugly and shouldn't be in leadership positions because that's unrealistic and they also talk back way too much."
Pronouns, body types, "replaced white people", female leaders, etc. - all part of the daily threads I've seen on the Steam forums.
Some of the dumbest people I've ever encountered are present on steam communities and comment sections.
Not enough white people in space!!!
I think this is what conservatives call "virtue signaling".
They already gave up a few days after release when the initial troll rush got bored. They usually aren't the ones actually playing the game, they're absolute loser fragile snowflakes.
I'd it wasn't a problem in call of duty shoot a man when Richard Nixon respected our pronouns it isn't an issue now. They just hate whatever they're told to.
What a bunch of fucking snowflakes.
Sci-fi and Horror two genres that really aren't know for their conservative values and the media often pushes social norms. Not sure what they were exspecting
If conservatives were smart they wouldnt be conservatives.
Yes, but, a lot of the capital-g Gamers are reactionary howler monkeys who can not handle anything not specifically geared towards cis, straight white men, so I’m not surprised they lost their shit at a menu option.
Objection. It's obviously a huge genre, but there is certainly conservatism to be found there. I point to the xenophobia of Lovecraft as an example and the tropes of teenager slashers where "slutty" women die and "pure" women live, and Black people tend to not live long.
Never look up the name of Lovecraft’s cat. Dude was every kind of The Other-phobic there WAS.
Honestly, the "cosmic horror" or the mere fear of the unknown kind of plays into that as well.
One could argue there's something inherently racist in sci-fi horror that depicts aliens as monsters when in fact they might just simply be different intelligent lifeforms with their own set of needs...
There might be sometimes problems among intelligent lifeforms to properly understand / communicate, or conflicts in our goals. But painting everything alien/unknown as inherently scary is kind of racist, even if in some situations it might be written in our instincts to not trust that which is unfamiliar.
TOS Star Trek had a great episode called Devil in the Dark dealing with that subject, where an inhuman monster is killing miners and it turns out that it was an intelligent life form that was protecting its eggs.
The Horta did nothing wrong!
Yeah maybe my mind is getting muddled with age but I vaguely remember several sci Fi settings with that kind of "from a certain perspective" moments in the 80s/90s. The matrix backstory is another just replace aliens with robots. Hell mars attacks though the late 90s early 2000s kinda flips that on its head by having several scenes where humans think they're just misunderstanding the martians diplomacy and the martians having 0 interest in diplomacy.
I think in most of them, the aliens were basically anthropomorphic. The only one I can think of off the top of my head that's similar to Devil in the Dark is the movie Monsters (which I personally did not like), where the aliens were viewed as a threat, but they actually just didn't care about humans.
I wasn’t even talking about his horror, to be honest. The man himself was a hot mess of being afraid of everyone different. As well as being oddly picky about who he applied it to - he was extremely antisemitic but married a Jewish woman. He hated gay people but one of his best friends was gay. It was like he hated the idea of Others but was ok with an very few individuals on a very personal level.
As for what you’ve brought up, that’s often, I think, why SF can be used to explore racism or themes of racism. By making a complete alien The Other, you can look at and explore ideas that would nowadays get folks screaming “WOKE!!!” if you tried to explore it with races of people.
Yes, his relationship with the idea of "Others" is strange... like a love/hate relationship. In fact, the cat which you mentioned (named after a racial slur, though it seems it was not him who named it) was deeply loved by him... he using his cat's name in one of his works was more of a way to honor it rather than anything else, there's letters from him claiming he was still mourning even though it was more than 20 years since it vanished.
A lot of people can hold low key prejudices against the abstract notion of a group of people but make exceptions for people that they actually know, it's really weird but that's humans for you...
Only Lovecraft wasn’t low-key at all. Dude was high-key, so much that people in his own time were saying he was racist. I mean, there’s a Hitler or Lovecraft quiz out there.
Lovecraft had very complex thinking about race, oddly enough. He was ok with his Jewish wife because she was “assimilated enough” because at the time he thought assimilation was best. Later, he went against that and thought non-whites should keep their own cultures (but those cultures were inferior) and praised groups trying to do so, and looked down on anyone not Anglo-Saxon. Dude was a paradox and how.
Hey cool that's by Zoe Quinn!
Point taken though - didn't do the whole thing but more then a few I thought were Hitler turned out to be Lovecraft. Never actually read any of his books. (Lovecraft's that is. Well Hitler's either thinking about it...)
There's also that old slasher trope where teenagers making out in a car = they're about to get murdered by the monster or serial killer.
Society's general hatred of young people doing basically anything.
How are they even so sure how the world looks like in a couple hundred years? And what about all the highly dystopian sci-fi settings where people live under basically total control of their daily lives? Why is that not outrage for them? Instead they go after scenarios that are simply more inclusive, the horror.
Oh no…please …stop
…don’t—-come back…
All because some fat man baby shat his/their depends.
If you look at his previous track record, he specialized in making fake outrage videos for attention in the World of Warcraft scene
I'm only somewhat aware of the Starfield issue, but this headline is raw clickbait.
Pronouns make them angry a lot. I am not that shocked.
If you misgender them, suddenly they care A LOT about their pronouns.
Maybe that’s the key to shutting them up. In person, anyway.
“Ma’am, everyone has a right to exist”
anger intensifies “I’m not a woman, I’m a MAN!”
“Oh, so you do care about pronouns then”
I like this a lot.
Generally speaking, it's poor form to use the bad behavior of a person against them, and often considered "taking the low road". But when they keep flinging their shit up in the air, it seems only fair that some of it gets shoveled back down onto their heads.
I'm betting a lot of them will still play it--and just claim boycott to fit in with the other chuds. Wtf difference does it make anyway? They like to pretend they have major influence while in reality all they get is a silly blurb like this pointing out their snowflake behavior.
I wonder if they realize you can name a male character a female name and that there are same-sex relationships. Of course that is all optional, but don't let that stop a good outrage. In fact the pronoun thing is nothing unless you deliberately change from the defaults.
Star field already made it's cost back right..... so what the fuck does a boycott do?
"We made enough money," said no capitalist ever. To be clear, I don't support this boycott, but it is an effective form of protest because the company expects to make more money. Which they will, because bigots are more powerful than they should be, but aren't as powerful as they like to imagine
I mean something that has to be realized is that this isnt like bud light. Bud light has very low margins, video games are dependent on most of the money coming in when the game is released. To assume the lowest confirmed numbers Starfield has already made 420 million dollars. Even if Bethesda is the worst run company, that's enough money to run the game for a while
Virtue signal to their fellow hatemongers.
lmao
15 idiots big mad.
This is just rage bait. You folks are predictably taking the bait and running with it.
My dude, I have literally seen, on the Fediverse in a gaming comm today, someone linking to all the places you can get the mod to take the pronoun option out since Nexus Mods won’t host it, and it’s currently at a 50-50 like to dislike ratio. These people are legit out there. It’s not as fringe as we want to think it is.
Luckily it’s now gone / removed
And nothing of value has been lost.
Lol you are talking about 20 people living in their basement. You really need to touch grass and get perspective. A few people on fucking lemmy 🤣 is not even a remotely representative population.
Oh wow your name makes actually sense. Carry on good sir, don't forget the narwhal bacon
They're just here to troll, I've never seen a post from them that wasn't trying to get a rise out of someone.
It's an old code but it checks out.
I don't see any rage here. Can you please quote the rage?
The rage is within them, and it's coming out as smug finger pointing. They don't know what The Conversation is, and they think they can just cargo cult criticize it.
Sorry... you think finger pointing is the same as rage? I don't think you understand what 'rage' means. And now everyone here is also in a cargo cult? You say a lot of very silly things.