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

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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.

Bro maybe if you weren’t so prejudiced you’d be willing to accept that women can be beverages

This is tangential and barely related, but this makes me think of Watsky’s ‘Tiny Glowing Screens’ trilogy of songs.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

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.

Yeah, reason #2937 exactly why I support a nationalized NASA rather than the outsourcing of space travel to corporations and capitalism.

Space should be ours, all of ours, not just theirs.

Call me the fun police, but I don’t think we need to raise Lemmy power users to the position of micro celebrities, and I don’t find this kind of circle jerking cute.

And I say this as somebody with positive opinions of many of the people referenced.

It’s just like… Weird and kind of lame, tbh.

I dunno, I see a lot of value in living on a planet with no conservatives

Sure, whatever. The point is I think the key to Lemmy, at least during this community-building stage, is narrowing in on the right level of specificity of niches which can be supported here. Maybe “NFL” is too niche, so we try “sports.” But then maybe “sports” is too broad so “US sports” is the solution. The point is negotiating the level of specificity to find the more zeroed-in on option that can still receive enough engagement to be viable.

Like another user said, if Lemmy doesn’t have the numbers to support the niche communities you want, maybe you need to move one level up the niche.

Like maybe there isn’t enough NFL activity on Lemmy yet to keep the NFL community active… But could there be enough sports fans to keep a sports community active? Could you perhaps settle for sharing a space with NHL, MBL, and/or soccer fans in a community that sacrifices a little bit of specificity for broadness to encourage activity?

Gotcha, thanks for clarifying.

Vivaldi browser, desktop, 4k screen, window maximized, lemm.ee interface here, and they look the same to me.

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.

Honestly at this point it’s just engagement bait. Yes, the trend is awful and terrible and stupid, but also people cannot resist the temptation of calling that out as well, so now it serves double-duty of being easy comment farming (note: this applies more to places like reddit than here on Lemmy, but I’m speaking in generalities here).

It’s a kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t thing in terms of responding to this stupid self-censorship.

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.

To be clear though, I also agree that the comic book version of Thanos’s motivation was way better. Like not even a competition. But I don’t think the MCU version is so nonsensical so as to be unbelievable as a motivation.

I dunno man, “a madman thinks he understand the universe way more than he really does” doesn’t break suspension of disbelief for me. I agree with you that his plans are flawed, but he’s not infallible. I’m not trying to gage whether or not his plan makes sense, I’m trying to gage whether or not him believing it makes sense. History is full of arrogant men with half-baked plans for salvation; I don’t see how Thanos is any different.

I don’t get why we keep acting like this is such a strange idea. Thanos saw the universe as over-populated. So he could have changed the framework of the universe to accommodate this bloat, or he could have preserved the universe’s structure as it is and tamped down the numbers to fix the bloat.

The key here is understanding that he doesn’t see the universe as flawed, he sees the life as flawed; why would he fix the unbroken part of the equation to accommodate what he sees as the broken part?

It’s like if your garden gets overrun by gophers - do you eradicate the gophers to get your garden back or do you decide “well I guess I’ll just double the size of my garden so we can both share it!”?

Also the Infinity Gauntlet is neither a genie’s lamp nor a Monkey’s Paw. There’s no clever tricks, no perfect wording needed. It’s based on his intent. He may have said “half of all life” but any amount of nuance he wanted to enact in that moment of omnipotence, he had. I’m sure half of the plants didn’t die just because he didn’t say the word “sentient”