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.
They’re entirely right. If they paid for it to not change anything except when polled, then the company broke their promise. They should now vote with their wallet and leave.
Because while they are right that they didn’t get what they were promised, the company that makes the game is also entirely right with doing whatever the fuck they want with the game. If they want to break their promise, that’s entirely up to them.
I’m pretty sure the company didn’t enter a contractual agreement with the playerbase to never make unpolled changes. So the only thing you can do is voice your discontent and leave. Which is exactly what seems like it’s happening and what should happen.
Now what I would strongly disagree with is your assessment of “most of the playerbase is pretty right leaning” and upset with it. How do you know this? Did you personally poll/study all, or an accurately representative sample of RuneScape players, ensuring an unbiased evaluation of the data? I suspect not. I suspect what has happened, again, is the vocal minority doing what they do, being vocal and a minority. There’s a loud outcry from, just guessing, 5% of the players, while the silent 95% like it or don’t care and just continue on.
I just got around to reading this, I’m not even sure what my real question is and I agree they should leave if it bothers them so much.
My best analogy would be imagine you’re playing your favorite game of all time, and the devs add a feature that bothers a majority of the player base including you, but 5% of the player base feels like they are finally spoken to. The majority of players are upset and want it changed back. You don’t want to leave because it’s still your favorite game, but it does feel unfair when the people already playing the game who are paying to keep the game as they like it, have the game changed out from under them adding parts they really dislike.
I’m not trying to say this is a reasonable complaint, or that it should “ruin the game” for them.but hypothetically if it did ruin the game for them, is it unfair to make things better for some when the majority is paying to keep the game as it was before?
I know the playerbase is right leaning because most (all that I have seen) videos on diversity and inclusion posted on OSRS YouTube will be 70% dislikes (before dislike counters were removed) with 250k views. This has been a huge controversy in the game for years
https://youtu.be/EXE8p8jTKhM pride event first suggested by jagex (almost universally disliked update, I cannot find one positive comment towards it)
https://youtu.be/u40feYnbYKU video of huge gatherings of players to protest the event
https://youtube.com/shorts/1Ad8xwv7bnU protest with a very small amount of people counter protesting
None of these are studies or statistics, and maybe most people actually don’t care and just log in and play the game, I am just stating that from all the players I have seen and all the comments left on every video about inclusion, this is either a large portion of players, or the majority is nearly completely silent (which I doubt because these protests are about 35% of the total population on that runescape world)
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.