Only this motherfucker could make a blockchain based product in 2023 and think he’s still ahead of the curve (and not, y’know, turning up to buy tickets on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg).
Originally he was a well liked, well respected autuer game designer from back in the days when that was still a thing. He made games like Populous, and people thought he was pretty cool.
Around the time of Black and White, the cracks started to show. He had bought into his own hype, and had a real tendency to over promise and under deliver. But, even though it didn’t exactly match up to some of his more grandiose descriptions, Black & White was still a very good game, so people didn’t mind.
Fable was where things really went off the rails. The thing is, Fable was a very good game, a fun but largely quite contained RPG, feeling more like a western take on a Zelda game than anything (as in the N64 Zelda games).
But it was not the game that Molyneux promised. Not even slightly. The game he described was one that would have nearly photo realistic graphics, and a vast open world where you could literally see a distant mountain peak and set off to climb it. A world where you could kill a man in a duel, and his son would grow up dedicating their life to one day hunting you down and killing you. A world where you could conquer whole nations with armies of darkness at your command.
Think Skyrim crossed with Mount & Blade crossed with Crusader Kings crossed with Star Citizen. Now imagine that game releasing at the same time as Morrowind.
So by this point people were starting to understand that Molyneux was fundamentally incapable of a) reigning in his imagination, and b) operating in the modern world of game development.
And then we got to Curiosity. If you don’t know, it was a mobile game where all you did was tap on a big cube made of layers of little cubes. Every time you tapped on a little cube it got destroyed, and everyone was working together on this, so each cube was destroyed for everyone. The goal was to destroy all the layers and reveal the centre, and whoever destroyed the last layer would win a prize. Kind of dumb, very simple. But Molyneux, Molyneux hyped this to the heavens. This wasn’t just a “game”, oh no, this was a grand social experiment the likes of which the world had never seen before, and the winner would recieve something “truly life changing.” Molyneux hammered that point a lot. “Life changing.”
What they recieved was that a character would be named after them in Godus, the Kickstarter game Molyneux was making. Oh, and they’d get “a portion” of the revenue from the game (it was never publicly stated how big that portion would be).
That was back in 2013. Ten years later Godus is still in early access, backers are clamouring for refunds after basically none of the Kickstarter promises were met, and the winner of Curiosity has not been contacted by the company since 2016.
He has never seen a cent of the money he was promised.
Honestly, it’s a really good game now. The writing is solid (not winning Oscars, but there are engaging and well written characters who will make you feel things), the combat is fun, you can flow freely between stealthy and loud as suits your preference, and there are hours upon hours of really enjoyable side missions. As a longtime Shadowrun tabletop player/gm I especially loved the gigs, each of which is just a self contained run. Go to this place, steal/plant/kill/ferry/rescue, get paid, done. They’re all great little puzzles to be solved in dozens of different ways.
I’m not trying to justify a day one purchase; I held off for over a year and I’m glad I did. But the game as it is now is well worth the money.
You’re coming at this from the angle that this is some strange new reality that the world has never encountered before, but it truly isn’t. This is not an “evolving new situation”, we’re not on the bold frontiers of strange new norms. It’s just bigotry. Bigotry isn’t new, it’s as old as mankind.
There’s a reason we’re all citing philosophical principles laid down in the 1940’s, almost like the world suddenly had a pressing need to reckon with the true cost of allowing violent intolerance to grow unchecked… Maybe some recent event prompted that?
The fact that bigots are communicating their bigotry through mods for videogames now doesn’t change what bigotry is, or how we fight it. This shit is older than any of us here, and the tools and principles are well established.
And the fact that bigots will frame their bigotry in dog whistles with just enough ambiguity that people like you can say “Maybe this was completely innocent” isn’t an accident, it’s by design. That quote from Lee Atwater I shared earlier? He’s talking about the politics of the early 1970s. Most of us weren’t alive then. Again, this is nothing new. The only change is that right now their target is trans people, because they always point their hate at the target society is least willing to defend. Pick off the weak from the herd.
If you’re trying to better understand how this stuff works, I respect that. Just because things have been understood for a long time, doesn’t mean everyone knows them. I didn’t start out magically knowing this stuff either. In my college days I styled myself as a free speech absolutist, someone who would on sheer magnificent principle defend the rights of a Nazi to be a Nazi. I learned better when I actually met and talked to the people that my “principles” were actively harming. So yes, I get it, and if you’re here to learn I commend that.
But please, don’t frame it as a debate. “Should we tolerate the free speech of bigots” is only a debate for the bigots, because like any guilty party they will never stop trying to relitigate their case. They can only benefit from this “debate” and the rest of us can only lose.
They will say things like “You’re just as bad as us if you censor us” to which we say “No, we are not, because our refusal to engage comes from clear moral principles, while yours comes from hatred.”
They will say “If you censor us, where do you draw the line?” to which we say “At the limits of your intolerance. We will tolerate, within reason, everything that is not an expression of bigotry and hatred.”
They will say “You cannot judge our intent or know our souls. How can you assign blame to our actions?” to which we say “We will judge you by your actions. The drunk driver doesn’t mean to cause harm, but we still criminalize the behaviour because it is harmful. If you do not intend to be a bigot, but you choose to actively express bigotry, we will hold you accountable for your actions all the same. A racist prank is still racist. Saying ‘Just kidding’ doesn’t undo the harm spread by your words. It is on you to learn these things and be better.”
They will say “But you could get it wrong. What if you misjudge the innocent?” to which we say “This could apply to any action of society. The innocent are convicted of crimes they did not commit, but this does undermine the value of having laws, it only reinforces that we must apply those laws as carefully and as justly as possible, that we must never forget the human cost of these decisions. It does not invalidate the decisions.”
They will find every angle, seek every accommodation, because they have nothing to lose by trying. They will never stop, and we can only let their arguments fall on deaf ears.
I’m not saying that there is absolutely no room for discussion to be had within this realm. There is always room for discussion in any subject. But you need to be mindful of the difference between “I think our models of climate change could be improved in this specific way…” vs “Is climate science real?” You won’t get any traction by arriving at a school and trying to dig up the foundations. Educate yourself on the fundamentals, and from there you can seek out specific areas where meaningful argument can be made, without needlessly relitigating core principles.
OK, I’ve read all your comments throughout this thread - I’ve responded to quite a few of them - and now I’m going to say this, and sign off.
Even assuming - as I have tried very hard to do so far - that you’re asking these questions in good faith, there’s very simple reason why no one wants to engage with you, why you’re getting down votes and tired, dismissive answers… this is a settled issue.
There is no meaningful or useful new debate to be had here. You’re turning up in the middle of a PhD physics lecture demanding to have a discussion about whether the Earth orbits the sun. We’ve been there, we had that argument, and the fact that you’re not willing to educate yourself sufficiently on the subject does not mean that you get to throw it out to the floor for fresh discussion as if there’s anything to be gained from that.
That’s why no one wants to have a thrilling intellectual debate with you about this. Because it’s boring, it’s old, and you have not raised a single new or interesting point in this entire thread. And while you’re treating this as intellectual exercise, real people’s lives are being destroyed by the bigots that you are - knowingly or unknowingly - carrying water for.
If all this is news to you, if you thought you were somehow at the forefront of cutting edge intellectual discussion here, then please take this as an opportunity to do some learning and growing. Spend some time listening to marginalized voices. Ask questions - respectfully and without making demands of people’s time - instead of asking for debate.
If you really do mean all this in good faith then I wish you the best and I hope to see you grow and learn from the experience, for your own sake as much as anyone else’s. We all have to start somewhere.
While that might be true for some, it could also simply be a matter of personal preference for others, without carrying any ideological baggage.
Give me one single scenario in which a person needs to remove the option to select your characters pronouns, without that decision carrying, as you put it, ideological baggage.
No, I haven’t offered an extreme example. I’ve offered an identical example. Escaping from the reality that black people exist, and escaping from the reality that people can in fact just choose their own pronouns are not meaningfully different in any way. In both cases someone is trying to erase from their personal reality the existence of an entire group of people, in a way that is targeted on specific lines of bigotry.
If you’re not willing to acknowledge that simple fact then you’re not ready to have this conservation.
That’s why there is a meaningful difference between this and the kill all children mod. While tasteless and gross, there’s never been any meaningful indication that the people installing kill all children actually want to see children, as a class of people, erased from existence. They’re engaged in some extremely unpleasant roleplaying, but barring the rare exceptions that will exist in any sufficient sample size they’re not actively expressing views about the real world through this choice. OTOH the pronoun removal mod is very much about expressing a desire to, at best, refuse to acknowledge the existence of a group of people, and far more likely a desire that said group not exist at all. And if you don’t believe that desire exists in a not insignificant number of people then I beg you to look outside your window for once in your life.
We can draw a moral line between these two things by applying Popper’s paradox of tolerance; the only thing a tolerant society cannot tolerate is intolerance. There is a clear moral justification for the suppression of expression when it is an expression of intolerance. That is the moral principle that Nexus are applying here (whether they are conscious of it or not).
Not only can you be a defender of free speech and still support the suppression of intolerant speech; it is in fact absolutely necessary to do so. If tolerated, the intolerant will use their freedom of speech to destroy everyone else’s while pushing their intolerant ideals. It is therefore - paradoxically - impossible to support free speech while supporting the free speech of bigots. To be true champions of free speech we must be intolerant of the intolerant.
If the reality you want to escape from is that “sometimes people use pronouns that are different from the ones I think they should use”, you’re an intolerant bigot.
If someone made a mod to remove black people from the game because “sometimes I want to escape from the reality that black people exist” it would be entirely justified to call that person a racist. This is no different.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nr, nr, nr.” By 1968 you can’t say “nr”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nr, nr.”
Republican strategist Lee Atwater.
Atwater’s point here is that dogwhistles work, and they’ve been a core strategy of regressive bigots for decades.
Today’s hateful bigots understand that they can’t openly say “I want to legislate trans people out of existence, even if that means they all die.” So they engage in layers of abstraction, and wrap their abstractions up in leftist talking points. They claim to be defenders of “free speech” even as they support laws that empty out libraries of books, remove shows from television or make discussion of anything LGBTQ related impossible online.
So to you, the innocent rube, removing a pronoun selection from a game might not sound like an attack on trans people, but it very much is. The mod was a rallying cry, a call to fellow bigots to express themselves while pointedly saying to every trans person watching “You are not safe. We are here, we hate you, and we want to erase your existence.”
The existence of the pronoun selector impacted them in absolutely no way, shape, or form. There was nothing to be gained from its removal other than the statement it made, the proud declaration of their hatred encoded in a language of abstraction that made it visible only to their allies and their targets.
And the fact that they can get away with this; the fact that they can openly torment their chosen victims while the average idiot pats them on the head and calls them a “victim of censorship”… That’s their favourite part.
You’re actually making some valid points here, in regard to the trend of companies losing money as a strategy to obtain market dominance and then turning to monetization after. It’s exactly how Uber and AirBNB got where they are, and it’s a strategy that people need to get more wise to. You’re right, and you should say it.
But for the love of God, say it better than this. The “users only have themselves to blame because they got hoodwinked by a pack of liars and thieves who are very good at being liars and thieves” angle kills any chance of anyone listening to the actual point you’re making because you went and wrapped it up in a giant dose of victim blaming.
If you cook an absolutely perfect hamburger and then spit in it right before serving, you can’t act surprised when no one wants to even try a bite.