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

And then they introduced Coke Zero (pronouns) and suddenly everyone is debating the natural of singular "they"

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

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.

A lot of great choices already: Persona 5, Hades, Katamari Damacy.

A kind of odd left-field one I'd like to add specifically for great music in-game, is Guacamelee 2. I don't know that it's the kind of music I'm likely to put on just to listen to randomly, but as far as in-game atmospheric music goes I think it's both tremendous and refreshingly unique amongst the landscape of video game music.

40,000 monthly active users is probably a more useful number here.

I fully agree. Again, I did not think that the random figure, which I tried to appropriately caveat, was the salient part of my comment.

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 🎵

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 may take slight issue with your last statement. To be clear, I’m not trying to have a “dishonest discussion”, I genuinely don’t understand the distinction and there isn’t really an article or anything here for me to clarify.

I apologize, I sincerely wasn't trying to imply you were being willfully dishonest or disingenuous, I was just trying to offer the correction to ensure clarity. I promise, I intended no offense and did not mean to imply anything about your character. I hope this clears that up and am legitimately sorry if you felt wronged.

I believe the objection is not to Snoop for his gang affiliation, but rather to the dance specifically which is being claimed as a more overt gang symbol, sort of like if they added the blood hand sign.

Of course I don't think this is even remotely an issue of concern for most of the reasons others have already commented on this post (it's a pop culture thing now, essentially), but I do think it's worth acknowledging the distinction between person and symbol here to be able to have honest discussion of the topic.

I appreciate the clarity, thank you. As I said, I pulled a random googled number and wasn't trying to use it as the sticking point of my commentary. But also for what it's worth, it's not exactly a fair comparison to the larger giants either as lemmy's smaller scale means it is also less trafficked by bots, fake accounts, secondary novelty accounts, etc. Depending on what source you're looking at, twitter is claimed to be anywhere between 15-75% bot or fake accounts. In general my point was there are still a large number of people using lemmy on most scales, we are just choosing to view it on the scale of established corporate social media metrics.

I think we're going to need to start by defining what "popular" means.

According to https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy, there are 462,745 total Lemmy users. (Note: I know nothing about this site or their metrics; I literally just Googled "Lemmy users.")

If 462,745 people showed up to my birthday party, I would feel like the most popular person on the planet.

So, I think we need to consider a less abstract figure to answer this. Will Lemmy ever be as popular as a place like Reddit? I think that's extremely unlikely, at least not anytime soon. But will Lemmy ever be popular enough to sustain an engaged community? I dunno; I kind of think we're already there.

Maybe this is the old head in me, but I remember the decentralized days of the early internet, where communities weren't oceans of people on social media giants, but rather smaller, close-knit forums and message boards. If you spent a few months interacting, you would likely get to know and have specific opinions about individual users that you would regularly engage with, unlike the sort of hit-and-run buzz style of the modern social internet. I think right now, Lemmy is almost treading a special sweet spot between the two eras, and I'm pretty happy with it.

Although I will concede that I'm as addicted to social media as everyone else is these days, and I would certainly welcome the increase in on-the-minute activity that additional users would bring.

I'm sure my whimsical entry won't be divisive.

imgur version in case the lemmy image upload breaks

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.

Forever the goat

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