Starfield is the latest game to be boycotted by conservatives. This time because of pronouns

They still call liberals fragile snowflakes. Cognitive dissonance has never been an obstacle.

Everyone has to think like them. Everyone has to act like them. Any deviation from what they consider the norm is bad and evil and must be avoided.

Then they get angry when you marry in-game and it doesn't specifically say "Man and Woman". They literally cannot ignore it. They need to be called a man, and they need their SO to be called a woman by a video game.

It's all marketing.

I am too, but it turns out they're trying to build a parallel economy and support only oppressive vendors and producers. They'll start clawing their own eyes out when they've watched their thirty-seventh movie featuring only non-Woke performers like Gina Carano and Kevin Sorbo and they get tired of crying into their MyPillows.

Its refreshing, actually.

Cause everything is someone elses fault, So you never have to have an ounce of self-reflection, so you never have to blame anything on your own deeds and behavior.

Funny how a game about fearing the unknown is being hated on by a group that fears the (relatively) unknown.

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.

Not fair to lump all conservatives into one group. That's like saying liberals and leftist are all the same when they're clearly not.

PS: I'm center-right and I fucking love Starfield!!!

They either own and play the game and tell people that they boycott it or never had any intention of playing the game and that's their boycott

You forgot "children being taught evolution", that was a pretty big one. Also birth control pills, which many of them are still fuming over.

You can also keep going back to when they were insisting radio would rot children's brains or even further back to when they opposed electrification.

But at least electricity can kill you. Modern reactionaries take entitled whining to a whole new level, growing physically violent because there's people out there who are unhappy with the genitals they were born with.

I guess we'll never understand the horror of having an extra checkbox in a character creator that they have to look at (but not click, since it's already what they want by default).

Anyway, fuck em. They can either accept that society is going to treat minorities with basic human decency or they can stare at the wall for 8 hours a day waiting for new far-right approved content. It's their live to piss away.

every decade conservatives whined about something

And by the following decade they had been proven to be not just wrong, but actively impeding basic human decency

Religion thrives the most when people are ashamed of what they like.

Maybe swap "gay people existing" for "gay people dying in droves while the government ignored it"

90s. Video games. Rap music.

80s. D&D. Gay people existing.

70s. Rock music. And interracial marriage?

60s. Hippy culture. Being antiwar.

50s. Fucking hips shaking on TV?

Both sides were against all of that in those times, you're clearly young.

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.

They won't go mask off again.

Rebranding neo-nazis as "alt right" allowed them to ride a wave of plausible deniability onto platforms they'd never dreamed of.

When they triumphantly revealed themselves at Unite the Right, they lost a huge amount of that ground.

So now they never admit it, no matter how obvious they're being. They will remain unnameable.

Call them bigots and they'll tell you you can't or else you're a bigot yourself. 100% projection and deflection, every time.

It comes up any time an NPC refers to your player to another NPC, and there are quite a bit of multi-NPC dialogues in the bigger quest lines. But I mean, how likely are you gonna remember or think about every instance they say "he" or "she" or "them?" For most people, this is so insignificant that it's almost like you didn't even have the choice; but for those that hearing their preferred pronouns is uncommon IRL, it would be very apparent and likely very uplifting to be validated.

It comes up every so often in battle. You will hear the enemies, both on a planet and in space yell something to the effect of "someone stop him/her/them". It is so quick you can easily miss it.

Really the outrage is probably nothing more than click bait. Like a video made the rounds shortly after it came out of some guy yelling for 2-3 minutes about pronouns.

Fortunately you've got this left wing echo chamber to vent in for solidarity.

I'm with you comrade 🫡

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.

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.

Steam administration as well.

Makes the game sound even better to me!!

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.

Weirdly, the worst frame drops are in the cut scenes.

When you're in New Atlantis, taking mass transit anywhere, the train pulls out of the station at a good 5-10 fps.

I'm easily running it on a 2 year old 1200€ laptop.

A desktop that can run it would be closer to 800€

Tbf most conservatives probably haven't played BG3 or know much of anything about it/forgotten realms. They aren't exactly the target audience

BG3 was so well received, they couldn't use the term "Go woke, go broke".

Starfield has a lot more flaws in that regard.

The BG3 steam forums were full of alt-right shills screaming about pronouns when the game launched. It's just that starfield is newer so that's where they all moved.

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 love all Bethesda games since I've been a fan since the buggy Daggerfall. But I wouldnt recommend playing this just for this.

It's like playing Cyberpunk because you can pick your genitalia. The game will barely acknowledge your choices. Literally zero impact. I'm annoyed there's no button to wave my massive dong around.

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's a popular conservative idea that the word "pronoun" is bad in itself, so I don't doubt this is a thing at all

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.

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.

I wish it would be astroturfing but I'm pretty sure conservatives are just that fucking stupid

But wouldn't it be great it they did? I could start playing games online again.

To be fair, money would still be going to Rowling. She is probably the most vocal advocate against trans rights and she has been cited in policies that endanger the lives of trans people. I think that is a much more reasonable boycott than being upset about pronouns

She definitely gets money from the game in licensing. Thus the boycott.

Conservatives lost their shit over one beer can being sent to a trans streamer and en mass posted memes of them blowing up and shooting their beer.

Honestly at this point I think we can just leave the bunch of the bigoted whiners behind and stop giving a shit that they are unhappy. Giving someone the option to play a trans character in a videogame is just giving all players more options on how to experience the game. If you decide to not take the option meant to be someone else's yum then it's not gunna impact your gameplay aside from checking a box at the beginning of the game around the same time you are deciding the exact slope of your nose.

It's like when people find themselves unreasonably annoyed that a vegan option is available on a menu. Why the hell should anyone give a damn that you're unhappy with food you ain't gunna eat when you can order whatever you like?

I believe it will be more in the vein of "Those people complained about having more options in a game? What a dumb hill to die on"

The site the guy used to host the mod (Nexus) has the rule that no mods pertaining the removal of diversity are allowed. Simply put, Nexus made use of their right to host what they want, and told the guy to host his mod somewhere else.

Also, fun fact: the mod was so badly made that it removed the she/her and he/him choices, only leaving they/them as a choice in character creation

This is a fun comment from a downvote dumpster account that’s spent the last hour spastically vomiting out shit take after shit take. tRiGGeRED muCh 😂🤣😂

Wow, you seem incredibly unpleasant. I'm sorry your life is such that this is how you choose to spend your time.

I hope things get better for you!