In an escalation of the ongoing controversy surrounding Bethesda latest release, Nexus Mods founder Robin “Dark0ne” Scott has confirmed that the popular PC game mod hosting site will work to delist any uploads that seek to remove the option for players to choose their pronouns from their own personal copies of Starfield.
Word regarding Nexus Mods’ stance towards such Starfield mods was first brought to widespread attention on September 5th, courtesy of Twitter user @MetalMa90357143.
Sharing a screenshot from a now-deleted post made to Starfield‘s Steam discussion page wherein user wemicgod can be seen excitedly announcing that Nexus Mods would “NOT be supporting any mods that remove pronouns”, @MetalMa90357143 criticized the Starfield community’s cognitive dissonance in their rhetoric regarding the pronoun modifier.
“Starfield Community: ‘The Pronouns are just a minor feature thats not important’,” the user wrote. “Nexus Mods: ALL ANTI PRONOUNS MODS ARE BANNED!”
However, upon further inspection, @MetalMa90357143 discovered the next day that the situation was less clear cut than originally portrayed, finding that in reality, “Nexus does not appear to have made a statement of declaring such a ban currently. Though I am seeing a lot of conversations on the matter in the Steam forums.”
He also noted that original poster, weimcgod appeared to have been banned for openly admitting that, in their unspecified professional life, they actively discriminated against white males.
With social media left torn between the believability of the claim and the lack of any official word from the site itself, these “conversations on the matter” eventually caught the attention of Nexus Mod member t3hWAR10ck, who in turn took to the site’s official forums to suggest that its administration offer clarification on this “disinformation” in order to avoid the eruption of “another controversy”.
Following a brief discussion amongst some of the forum’s patrons, t3hWAR10ck’s thread was joined by Scott, who pointed to the site’s official post regarding their previous Marvel’s Spider-Man pride flag controversy and declared, “Our policy on this sort of content is laid out in this news post. Specifically paragraph 3.”
“Whether you continue to use our site based on this policy is entirely up to you,” he concluded, locking the thread. “However, pay particular attention to the second to last paragraph and last paragraph in that news post. The same applies here.”
In the first of the cited paragraphs, Scott asserts that the site’s “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. The same goes for people attempting to troll other users with mods deliberately to cause a rise. For our part, we will endeavour to do a better job of moderating our website to this ethos ourselves.”
“We don’t want to and won’t argue this with you,” begins the two set of paragraphs subsequently pointed to by the site’s founder. “We’ve now explained our stance and we won’t be providing a platform for you to distort our position in order to feed an irrational and paranoid narrative. You can do that elsewhere, where we won’t care enough to read it.”
“If this policy upsets you,” they conclude, “if we’ve broken some moral code of conduct as a business that you can’t accept, then please, delete your account (bottom option) and move on, as we will.”
