Senator Mark Warner’s letter follows an ADL report about extremist content on the platform.
US Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) has sent a letter to Valve CEO Gabe Newell asking if the company intends to take measures to curtail extremist content on Steam. The letter references a report by the Anti-Defamation League that identified a large number of user accounts and user-created groups “that glorified antisemitic, Nazi, white supremacist, gender- and sexuality-based hate, and other extremist ideologies” on the PC gaming platform.
The letter features a high-level view of the kind of hateful content the ADL found on Steam. That includes “40,000 groups with names that included hateful words, with the most prominent being ‘1488,’ ‘shekel,’ and ‘white power’.”
I agree with most of what you said, but your example could probably serve as a textbook definition for “pushing an agenda”. A still very controversial real life topic that you must engage with and can only respond to in one way.
I think it would have been more elegant if the player can choose to treat the trans person negatively, with negative story impact down the line as a penalty for being a dick. Much better way to get the point across without feeling like a lecture.
Can you treat the women negatively because they are women? Can you treat the Grey Warden Davrin badly because he’s a black elf? Can you treat the Dwarf Harding badly because she’s a Dwarf?
The answer to all of these is no. Why should someone being trans be any different?
Edit: is it purely pushing an agenda because it’s a “controversial” topic for some people? Would the same be said if accepting Black rights in our society was more recent and the game had allowed you to simply accept a black person for who they are? Making your character accept your companions for who they are is a core theme of the game, Taash is no different.
Fuck that’d actually be really cool of them to let you play a shitty racist for real, more games need to let you actually be a truly vile piece of…
😞of course
You can be a truly vile piece of shit without having to resort to prejudice. If anything, resorting to racism to be a piece of shit is cheap, as if the writer didn’t want to think of an actually shitty thing the character could do. For instance, if you could turn one of your companions over to a bounty hunter who wants them because of some gambling debts. But you’ve gotten to know them and understand those debts were only a result of them being blackmailed into gambling by some mobster. Then when the bounty hunter comes a knocking, you say “Don’t care, you shouldn’t have gambled” and turn them over. Mind I’m not a writer so this isn’t the best example. But that’s still being a piece of shit without having to be racist. There are more ways to be a piece of shit and have it be interesting than resorting to prejudice.
Doesn’t mean I can’t want the option to be a racist asshole to every race in a video game
Bonus points if I can pick a race to consistently (or not) not hate rather than just always being a general racist or not