I recently watched a video about an unpolled change in old-school runescape that added the ability to change your character’s pronouns, as well as have beards as female characters, and the community’s reaction to it. Sadly, most of the runescape playerbase is pretty right leaning, with the expected reactions of “this is dumb why would they add this,” “why add this unpolled,” and “this is a medieval fantasy game not a dating simulator”
I wonder what people’s thoughts on this are, as if you are a paying customer for a game, and the game has been promised to only add poll-approved changes, is this unreasonable and why? The game is “old-school runescape,” the players are notoriously resistant to change, and are paying to keep the game as they like it. Can you pay to keep your uninclusive game uninclusive? I don’t have a great argument against it past “this literally doesn’t matter” which won’t convince people who believe it does.
As I already said I think, yes it is unfair.
However, you really have to differentiate a bit here, because all the things you talk about that are changing in OSRS seem like they’re entirely ignorable. If there’s a gay pride event, yeah it doesn’t need to be there, but you can also just not participate in it. If it’s possible to change your character’s gender and appearance, you can simply not do it.
There is no core game mechanic being changed or even tangentially touched. So yeah, it’s unfair that they change it when the promise is to not change anything, but it’s really also an incredibly small change that has a minimal if not non-existent impact to the majority, but a very huge impact to a small amount of people. At that point it becomes a bit more grey what “should” be done.
In the video you added this statement to, there are maybe like 10% of YouTube comments that say they’re fine with it. So you saying “I cannot find one positive comment towards it” is a little weird. This is also imo a high amount of positive comments even if it’s just like 10% because the 10k views it has will probably mostly be watched by people looking for the controversy and speak their dissent.
If the red icons are protestors, and the blue hearts are the counter-protestors (which is what it looks like to me) then it looks more like 60/40, which I wouldn’t call a very small amount.
But what you really have to compare is how many people participate in the pride march compared to how many protest, that is the real difference that needs to be measured. I look at this video https://youtu.be/jr1XAa2cx_M and there seems to at least be 20 times as many people as what you showed in your protest video. Which is funnily enough about the 5% minority we talked about xD
For me as an outsider looking in, this seems like exactly the kind of mindset by people opposing these changes that is problematic and they need to change, which is about 50% of the population of the US which I suspect is also reflected in OSRS playerbase. I’ve spoken with people before that are like this.
They think their opinions are being censored and that is a huge problem and they don’t want to see this stuff because it shouldn’t be political etc.
These are all completely valid arguments theoretically. Like these are not bad views to hold. But they entirely miss the point because that’s what humans do, human minds work by compartmentalizing and by “explaining away” their natural behavior. Humans are an incredibly irrational species that try to, after the fact, explain the irrational behavior with rational sounding explanations.
The natural behavior here is the disgust of gay and trans and queer people. Fear/disgust of the “foreigners” or “people very different from myself” is one of the base human behaviors. The reason they can’t ignore these events, even though they are entirely ignorable, is because this disgust reaction is triggered within them. Their automatic compartmentalizing brain then searches for acceptable reasons to dislike it, and comes up with “OSRS was said to never be changed” and “politics shouldn’t enter the game”. This process in a human mind is entirely automatic and not conscious at all. But the real motivation why they can’t ignore it is the disgust/hatred of queer people. But they don’t even see that this is what’s happening, as I said, this process is entirely automatic.
Everyone, including people that hate queers, has this image in their mind of being good. But hating queers isn’t good. So “hating queers” doesn’t even consciously enter the mind, even though you can easily see it from their behavior. If they didn’t have a problem with queers they’d just ignore these easily ignorable things. But they don’t.
And even this mine explanation will be vehemently denied by these people. Because that would be too painful, because they would be admitting they’re not the wonderful people whose image they have in their minds. Doing this would break them. So they continue consciously saying “of course we don’t hate the gays” while subconsciously still hating the gays. And I completely understand this behavior because I was exactly the same at some point. I personally was mysoginistic and racist against immigrants at one point in my life and completely oblivious about it. At the time, I didn’t think that I was. But I had all these little unconscious behaviors that showed my true subconscious beliefs. I know how painful it is to confront yourself being terrible. It is not possible to bear this pain for most if your life is already mostly miserable. I was lucky in that I had a relatively good life and a strong self-improvement mindset instilled from my environment, and thus was able to face and bear this pain and effect real change within me. But it was real pain, and had I been in a slightly worse situation, I might have not been able to do this.
What people are doing with pride events and these trans-inclusive changes is yes, forcing diversity down people’s throats. You could say that it’s wrong to do that to people, entirely true, it is authoritan of them. But the goal is to reduce hatred of queer people. There’s just no way you can really argue against these motivations. A gay pride event hurts nobody. No one is forced to participate. They’re forced to see it, yes, because studies have shown that exposure to different cultures and lifestyles increases acceptance of them. If they were tucked away, that wouldn’t happen. And this triggers their disgust. You probably can’t change these people, but maybe all the new ones that haven’t been tainted to much by disgust of others behaving “differently”.
So in the end, I think these changes and events are good even though they don’t strictly “belong” in OSRS.
Yeah I think the gray area is what made me want to make this post, but it being a gray area might be the most satisfying answer I get.
I looked through about 50 comments and didn’t see any comments positive towards the event, could you show me what you mean? Or did you mean a comment that was supportive of lgbtq? The closest I found is “I’m all for gay pride but it has no place in runescape” which is perhaps not hateful but misinformed. I think it’s a bit unfair to say this video was only searched by those looking to express dissent as this creator gets about 10-40k views on their videos just in general (during those years). If anything this video underperformed which would mean people are not seeking it out.
I would probably agree there was a decent amount of counter protest, but most people who disliked the update just begrudgingly ignored it, where if someone feels like their friends way of life is being protested against, they’re more likely to turn up.
The pride event was on I think 1 or 2 “worlds,” where each world has a limit of 2k people and there are about 150 worlds. It was also scheduled to start at a certain time, and this looks like the beginning with the most people. The protests against the event were on uncoordinated worlds with no set times, people were live streaming it and the size of the protest crowd remained essentially the entire day (with I don’t know how many/few on other worlds). This is just to say I feel like exact numbers aren’t comparable, I was just showing there are a large amount of players that are angry enough to actually protest it for hours. I could maybe find one of the streams if you’d like (for the pride event and for the protests)
Speaking of the comments on the video, someone posted this (I’m not sure how reliable you’ll find it, but this is what I recall being the case too)
This was a poll done on a live stream, so obviously not a full player base sample. I suppose for me I see the player base as not wanting change and being stuck in the past, quite literally people will say this skill in runescape is terrible but I had to do it so changing it now is unfair. This to me is basically right in line with slightly right leaning, as they are using the values of 20 years ago when they started playing to make decisions today. Not truly hateful but just stuck in how things were before all these “politics” got pushed into their game.
I think you actually did kind of answer my “gray area” question with all that. You’re going against the wishes of the many for the good of society as a whole, which is unfair but what’s the alternative? lgbtq+ people aren’t allowed to exist? humans are resistant to change so sometimes you have to force it on them for anything to improve.
I think I would argue that most of them aren’t hateful, I think especially in this case most of them are just in the mindset of “this is weird and irregular and I don’t want to deal with it” and another portion says “this does matter but I don’t want to see it in anything because it makes me feel uncomfortable.” Neither really hateful, but if you have 0 exposure to something it’s going to seem weird and scary. They don’t want to see it because it’s unfamiliar and it’s unfamiliar because they don’t want to see it. Definitely a large portion has some hatred mixed in, though that too might just be because they don’t have a single friend who is even partially involved with minorities.
What you said about needing to be in a good place to stop being hateful is true in I think even more ways, such as just the way you communicate in daily life. I used to think similarly to “I don’t care but don’t shove it in my face” so I get where these people are coming from, even if it is misguided.
The demographic of osrs I would wager is 50% people who are just addicted, most polls I’ve seen run by creators have people saying they are somewhat unhappy and are just addicted to the game (it’s pretty similar to cookie clicker, just with a game built around cookie clicker mechanics). That’s why I don’t think these people are hateful, they’re just me back when I was a lot younger but never had the experiences I did that changed my mind. Maybe I’ve just been lucky enough to not meet many truly hateful people.