Since gaming’s inception, players have been modifying their games to improve the experience or tailor it to their own needs. For some games like “Skyrim” and “Grand Theft Auto,” their modularity became part of their charm. Want ultra HD graphics that make every blade of grass look like a work of art? There’s a mod for that.
Want all the dragons to be replaced by Thomas the Tank Engine? There’s a mod for that too.
There’s a strong community-based element around sharing mods with other players, but at the end of the day they’re really more of a personal thing allowing gamers to construct their own experience as they like it. Which is why the radical left has decided mods need to be controlled.
A popular Twitch streamer named John Wolfe took to Twitter last week to bemoan the fact that some gamers were modding their copies of the “Resident Evil 4” remake to change the physical appearance of some of the female characters to better match their voice actresses. “Looking through the Nexus Mods list for RE4 remake mods makes me want to gouge my eyes out,” he tweeted.
You know, for people who endlessly chant we have to respect other people’s choices, they seem really intolerant when people make choices they don’t agree with.
Wolfe also took offense at a mod that allowed players to mute a female character’s heavy breathing noises, something he claimed meant “women are to be seen and not heard!”
Hey John, here’s a wild idea. If you don’t like those mods, don’t use them! Isn’t that what leftists keep telling everyone? If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married. If you don’t like abortion, don’t get one. Seems like that laissez-faire attitude only extends to important things like video game mods that only the person who downloaded them sees.
And that, by the way, is the craziest part about Wolfe’s little temper tantrum. All the mods he’s complaining about are for use in the game’s single-player mode, meaning if he hadn’t intentionally gone on Nexus Mods in the first place, he never would have seen them!
But maybe if enough lefties complain about these “Resident Evil 4” mods, Nexus Mods will engage in some good old-fashioned censorship like they did last year. When “Spider-Man Remastered” hit the PC in 2022, gamers noticed that there were an overwhelming number of gay pride flags in the game.
One user, who preferred his web-slinging to be free of LGBT propaganda, decided to release a mod that changed all the pride flags into American flags. Because who doesn’t love a little patriotism while they’re fighting the bad guys? Nexus Mods promptly lost its mind and removed the mod.
They also banned the user saying, “In regards to the replacement of Pride flags in this game, or any game, our policy is thus: we are for inclusivity, we are for diversity. If we think someone is uploading a mod on our site with the intent to deliberately be against inclusivity and/or diversity then we will take action against it.”
They tried to justify their actions by claiming the mod was uploaded by a troll using a sock puppet account to be provocative. OK … so what? Why does it matter if it was a troll? There are plenty of mods that exist on the site that are purely for shock value but they get to stay up.
In fact, a mod that replaced all the American flags with gay pride flags in the game was allowed despite the fact it was clearly designed to counter-troll the original mod. So trolling is allowed now? Only if it advances the left’s politics, apparently!
It bears repeating that both mods dealing with the flags only worked on the system of the person who downloaded them. There was literally zero risk that some fragile alphabet snowflake was going to encounter this mod in the wild.
Removing the mod was all about control: “I don’t like this thing so you can’t have it either.”
What Wolfe is doing now with the “Resident Evil” mods is an apparent attempt to get Nexus Mods to cull them like they did the flag mod. Leftists like Wolfe think that if they can just force their politics into video games, people will have to believe what they do. But Wolfe can’t get his politics to stick if gamers can just mod their games to get rid of the woke crap.
If players have the option to change their games as they see fit, there’s a real danger that they’ll choose different options than what the radical left wants. That’s why this desire to censor modding is so dangerous. It traps gamers into playing only what the radical left approves of. If Wolfe is any indication, that’s not gonna be very fun.
Instead of accepting this depressing reality, gamers should do what they’ve always done: Keep on modding our games the way we want to, regardless of what the woke puritans say. Don’t give another inch of ground to people whose only mission is to push a political message, at the expense of enjoying one of the last few cultural hobbies not completely infected by wokeness.
Unfortunately, there’s no mod to remove annoying leftists from gaming yet. Maybe somebody should get on that.
Douglas Blair is a producer and special correspondent with “O’Connor Tonight” on the Salem News Channel.
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