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.
Likewise, there is a subscription model that allows you to maintain access to the title and is divided into two types: Centurion (€12.22 per month or €134 per year) and Imperator (€24.44 per month or €268 per year). The Imperator offers, unlike the Centurion, exclusive events and an allocation of in-game money per month to rent ships and weapons.
Some pretty sloppy work here. The subscription options have nothing to do with playing the game; it’s a buy once product with no subscription system at all. The Centurion and Imperator subscriptions are better thought of as a kind of “backstage pass”, they mostly just give you patreon style content and extra in game flair items. Are they worth the money? Unless you’re a die hard fan, absolutely not. But it’s not like you have to pay up “maintain access” as the article puts it.
Holy fuck, this looks incredible. For context, Fat Shark have been working very hard to address the criticisms of the game at launch, and they’ve really, really listened to the community in a big way. Many concerns have been addressed already, and the two big ones left were the lack of missions (which is slowly improving, but mapmaking takes time, so I can’t be too salty on that one) and the lack of class variety. This looks like it completely addresses that last issue.
Back when the game launched I wrote a review on steam that basically said “Despite all its flaws I enjoy this game a lot and will continue to play it, but I can’t in good conscience recommend it.” Every now and I go back and ask myself if it’s time to go back and finally flip that review to a “Recommended”. Every time so far the answer has been no, not yet. This might finally be the thing that pushes it over into a yes.
It’s not for everyone. The combat is extremely tactical; you have different firemodes, different ammo types, the ability to set overwatch zones, different stances, stealth, the ability to choose exactly what body part you’re aiming at (you can literally shoot people in the junk), and the game expects you to fully utilize all of these tools right off the bat.
This is a total sandbox. There are quests that will be presented to give you some guidance, and the game starts you off on a very small island compared to the rest of the map, but other than that there is zero handholding. You’ll get advice, you’ll get hints, but you’re fully allowed to fuck up in any way you like from the moment you press start (down to and including fucking up your team selection). Helpfully though, the game does keep an extensive history of autosaves, including your last three turns in combat.
Thing is, if this game is for you, then everything I just described sounds fucking awesome.
And let me tell you, it is fucking awesome. This game is like Elden Ring as a tactical squad based RPG. It presents you with an array of tools, and a vast world to use them in, and then just says “Go, have fun!” and takes all the constraints away that most games like this would have.
Aside from the lack of hand holding, the B one other thing that will turn some people off is the tone. What Jagged Alliance has always gone for is “pastiche of eighties action movies.” This is Rambo meets Die Hard meets The Expendables. The dialogue is cheesy as fuck. Every character is a stereotype, including the westerners. Most of them are awful people, because they’re mercenaries. You’re literally funded by blood diamonds. But, FWIW, your enemies are explicitly fascists. You’re basically killing West African Jan 6ers. So that’s neat.
The humour is mostly dumb. The writing is cornball. And I completely get that for some people this goofy tone might feel strongly at odds with the brutally unforgiving combat. That’s just how it be I guess, and if you can’t jam with that, I understand.
The one other point of contention I’ve seen in a lot of reviews is the lack of a hit percentage. The game gives you a detailed breakdown of every single factor that affects your shot, but never the actual numbers. This is a conscious design choice. If you hate it, the game is extremely modabble and there’s already a mod for that. But I’m begging you to please try playing as is first. I didn’t know how I’d feel about the lack of hard numbers but going in, but now I absolutely love it. It’s so freeing. I find myself actually thinking about the tactics I’m using, looking at the battlefield and the enemies instead of just running down a spreadsheet.