One fun thing about the mod is that it doesn’t disable crawling on the walls/ceiling or descending from a web, so sometimes you’ll wander into a cave and a massive bear will just roar at you as it slowly floats down from the ceiling before it can charge at you properly. All the cobweb/spiders’ eggs items were replaced with “Cave Bear Honeycomb,” too.
Definitely it doesn’t need to exist for every phobia or in every game, but for phobias that really are only present audio-visually (blood splatters, certain noises, monster models, etc) and not narratively (quest-lines and dialogue), I think it is simple enough to have a model-swap setting or similar. I don’t mind the ludo-narrative dissonance of an NPC telling me to go fix their spider infestation in their cellar and then finding a den of cob-web surrounded werebadgers or whatever. Games like Don’t Starve already let the player fully customize the spawn rates of difference monsters, while other games let the player disable their character drowning or burning, for example.
Phobia-friendly settings/modes. There are so many games that I can’t play or have to find a mod for because the fantasy genre is obsessed with giant spiders. The only way I could ever play Skyrim was with the Arachnophobia mod that replaced all spiders with bears. I haven’t played Grounded, but I know it has an arachnophobia setting that can simplify/cartoonify the spiders or replaces them with floating orbs. I’d love to see these types of settings in more games, and ideally similar settings available for other common phobias/triggers besides spiders and blood.
Apparently your comment really got to them, because the blogpost now contains a direct quote of you and a response.
The whole transphobic claim of being seen as our AGAB by future archeologists is especially ridiculous considering that modern ones are already saying things like this:
While the skeleton’s biological sex is not in dispute, Gowland cautioned that nothing is known about the Ivory Lady’s gender identity, and scholars shouldn’t impose modern gender norms onto past populations.
As an American, there isn’t any official paperwork I’ve ever seen in the US that requests, let alone requires, my skin tone or race, with the sole exception of the US census and the occasional optional and anonymous EEOC questionnaire that some job applications have, neither of which record anything to do with skin color or appearance.
Can we get a transcript/archived copy of the survey questions? Not the answers people provided, but just what questions were and the answers available to select from. Also an image transcription of the graphs would be helpful; the text in the images is difficult to read on Jerboa.
I’m curious where the decision to separate nonbinary and genderfluid into different categories came from. In the various queer communities I’m in, genderfluidity is considered to fall under the nonbinary umbrella, so breaking it out as a separate option while not breaking out other nonbinary identities looks a little odd to me.
I would be interested in knowing the trans/cis demographics as well; if, for all we know, Beehaw has equals numbers of trans men to cis men, this survey wouldn’t reveal that or any other notable proportions.
I also want to include myself as another person who found the white/non-white question a bit uncomfortable. If it had asked me about being a person of color or some other phrasing, I wouldn’t have blinked, but there is something unpleasant about being asked where I stand in a racial dichotomy as a biracial person. I don’t know a better way to phrase the question that still captures the intent, though.
My parents are in their 50s and do not view video games as an unusual hobby. My father regularly plays games with his friends (aged 30s to 50s) on Friday nights and the weekend.
The only person I’ve met who viewed video games like what you describe was a mid-60s gentleman who struggled to believe that I played video games regularly and had a good GPA in college. His hobbies were golf and walking, though, so he wasn’t about to call anyone else’s hobby “boring.”
There is no age or demographic for whom video games are an unacceptable pastime. There are merely individuals who have their own weird hangups regarding the hobbies of others.
Edit: wanted to add that I love to hear of parents gaming together with their kids! Some of my favorite childhood memories are playing games with my family and we still sometimes get together to play a co-op game.
Following that concept, a platform called Ripple where individual posts are called Pebbles and responses/reshares are called Waves wouldn’t be half-bad, branding-wise.