You’re right; I have been unclear. Allow me to try to clarify.

My issue is specifically with the headline here using the word “political.” This implies, whether by design or accident, that this inclusion in the game is BioWare specifically making a political stance to push some sort of politically-motivated agenda.

This is, 100%, not the case.

BioWare is a subsidiary of EA; the only agenda they care about is making money. This is not making some kind of political statement; this is pandering to ensure free media coverage and to attempt to appeal to what they see as a currently valuable demographic. Fucking blast them to hell for that, blast them to hell for their poor writing—whatever. But calling this political is doing exactly what I stated before: allowing the conversation to happen on the terms of gamergate/right-wingers who insist that anything in the entire fucking world that doesn’t specifically cater to their own individual interests is somehow inherently “political.”

edit: typos

I understand that, but my point is that there is no shortage of shoehorned comic relief characters, or awkwardly placed fanservice, etc. Critique the actual fault at play, bad writing, rather than letting the gamergate right-wing nutsos have the benefit of having the conversation on their terms. Make the headline “DA:tV falls short in the writing department, here are some examples” and include the flimsy way the character is written as the valid critique. Games are going to pander to us, that is what I was saying; when we place special emphasis on this particular type of pandering all we’re doing is letting the right define the conversations we’re having.

Chronic cynicism and the abhorrent decisions of a madman in a foreign nation thousands of miles away have done a lot obscure it, but I think there is a lot positive things to be said about Biden’s term and political legacy. I think the long rearview on history will look back on Biden with mostly favorable opinion, personally.

I don’t know if I agree with that. I think Alton was vastly more New Guard, Question Tradition than many of the other notable celebrity chefs and cooks during his come up. If you want to talk about people enforcing tradition, let’s take a look at Giada DeLaurentis, or hell even Rachel Ray whenever it comes to anything with Sicilian origin.

I think the Old Guard mentality is vastly more rigid about these sort of traditions and giving people a critical understanding of the processes behind cooking doesn’t, at least to me, imply any kind of singular authoritarian approach to cuisine.

edit: typos and cleaning up for clarity

As a wise man recently said:

🎵 (Don’t) Give a fuck about tradition, stop impressin’ the dead 🎵

I guess I should add that I’m not speaking to this game specifically since I’ve never played it. I really enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins but frankly felt like I got everything I needed of the world from it and haven’t been interested in any of the sequels. So I won’t be playing DA: The Veilguard, but that reason has absolutely fuck all to do with the inclusion of any social politics.

I feel like I have a outside the norm third-take opinion on this topic, tbh.

I think including the hot social topic of the day often time is pandering.

But I also don’t think pandering is a problem. The muscles on the main character is also pandering. When McDonald’s does market research and then releases a new product, that is pandering.

Games are a sales industry; they are going to pander to potential buyers, period.

So yes, a potentially trans-centric storyline in a game is unnecessary. But so is including a longsword, or a tavern, or a comic relief character. Unnecessary doesn’t mean bad; all of those things are likely only adding to the depth and value of the game.

So all this to say that when crazy right-wingers talk about SJWs and pandering and all that nonsense don’t waste your time trying to fight them on the irrelevant bits - go ahead and acknowledge the pandering aspect and fight the real fight by telling them it’s not negative pandering and minorities deserve to be pandered to and represented just as much as anyone else. They just don’t recognize the market targeting the white male demographic as pandering because it is the sphere of normal under which they operate.

For exactly the same reason we enjoy seeing the useless number next to our comments and posts.

People enjoy engagement; it doesn’t necessarily have to have any deeper motivation than that.

Engagement bait. People love pointing out mistakes

You know, I’m well aware of their reputations and I’ve had a small number of encounters with users from those instances that I’ll charitably leave at “bad faith,” but by and large I don’t really bump into communities hosted on their instances or see overtly bad behavior from their users often.

I’m not trying to defend them or say it doesn’t happen (largely because frankly, I just don’t care one way or the other), but I can only be honest and speak to my individual experience.

I have 9 users blocked, 10 communities blocked (mostly based on taste, not due to toxicity though), and 0 blocked instances.

There’s a scene in NCIS where somebody is losing a “hacker fight” so to turn it around a second person joins in and starts typing on the same keyboard.

I’m not exaggerating.

Like there’s suspension of disbelief, and then there’s whatever psychological issue watchers of NCIS suffer from.

I think the difficulty will be the slippery and nebulous definition of “toxic”

Meh. Maybe I’m just not in the wrong corners of the Lemmy fediverse, but honestly I’m not really seeing very many of the banned finding their way here. That was a huge problem in the cesspools like Voat, but for whatever reason it seems like Lemmy has mostly been spared, in my limited experience at least.

That said, yeah there’s a fair amount of blunt talking and general mild misanthropy, but frankly I almost welcome that as a change from the overmoderated sterility of corporate spaces like Reddit which have to think in terms of advertiser-friendliness.

Dude for real - if this dude ends up being the victim of a home invasion who the hell is he going to call to show up 8 hours later to interrogate him like he was the culprit and probably shoot his dog for some reason?

So what, you’d rather just cook alone in silence?

I’m with you, and I’m worried about it because I see this sexual puritanism as both counter to good efforts of the sexual liberation movement and frankly as a trojan horse for future conservatism to take root.

I’m of the radical acceptance, not abstaining from the topic mindset on this topic, personally.

I think a huge part of the problem that not enough people are talking about are these kids grew up in heavily corporate controlled spaces and have begun to confuse advertiser-friendliness for social acceptability, and I think that is a huge problem.

The whole thing is full of that kind of “drink their own kool-aid” propagandist thinking. It’s wild they expect anyone to take them seriously here.

I blame Meta. My Oculus Rift CV1 was working great until some random software update and now for some reason it won’t read my sensors as being connected via USB3.0 cable despite them being so, instantly rendering my expensive VR device a giant paper weight.

I’m still salty about Oculus starting out crowdfunded then selling to Facebook. What a fucking betrayal.

I can’t speak to the new update, but the pre-relesae version lets you face and beat the main boss multiple times just like in Hades 1. However (and I’m trying to avoid spoilers here), there is a “second path” in Hades 2 that didn’t exist in Hades 1 which currently only allows you to get partway through before you receive a “thanks for playing Hades 2!” win screen obscuring the rest of the game.

Random guess, I’d say the game is like 60-70% playable to players right now, but as the game is larger it’s already close to equivalent to Hades 1.