There are models being marketed as being therapy dispensing models that in their terms of service are correctly described as entertainment and not endorsed by actual therapists because what AI therapy actually is is just a tool that tricks users into being their own unlicensed therapists. AI “therapy” flatters negativity bias and agrees with whatever it’s users think sounds right about themselves walking people into danger.

We are in the zone of cocaine being available over the counter for toothaches here. Companies are being legitimately reckless in their marketing and AI is a black box by nature where companies cannot tell what is happening inside their products, they can only test them without having the manpower and counter ingenuity to test everything. If any other product lead to the death of multiple consumers or demonstrates harm to multiple people you usually pull it from the shelves and go back to the drawing board.

The widespread idea that peasants could not read is something of a falsehood. While certainly they were not considered “literate” by census at the time that is in part because literate had a different bar to meet. If you could only write whatever language you spoke as daily vernacular and hadn’t gone through a six year set of schooling with a specific reading list (known as completing your letters) you were considered illiterate by the measure of the time. It is true that peasants rarely could afford to become “literate” by this definition so if someone says only the clergy and nobility were literate technically speaking they are correct.

However.

Archeological evidence posits that in medieval Europe writing vernacular was a fairly widespread and vital skill though most surviving examples of peasant writing were on birch bark and were missives under 20 words in length. There is evidence that both men and women demonstrated and used the skill primarily for placing orders, sending invitiations, IOUs, sending personal news and messages. The skill was widespread enough that peasants in England and France were written to by clergy and nobility as audiences with things like manuals for peasant farmers and housewives to read.

Sadly because reading vernacular didn’t count as a skill unique enough to note in medieval census reporting we have to guess at how much of the population actually could read and only know the skill spread and became more common with time.

Oh man, if she put that arm holding the sign down it would barely extend past her torso. Proportions are not kind.

Because I don’t find you terribly sympathetic. Yes, I would like better inclusion and more variety in games and can look at past examples and point out what worked and what didn’t from a queer perspective but you came in hot with your nose out of joint about how what is being asked is bad “for everyone” as though you are the arbitor of the everyman.

It’s worthless to conceed ground over and over again to people who always wanted us to disappear. It doesn’t work. You want to go on the woke advisory board on Steam and see how nit picky they get? This isn’t about media. This is part of an interconnected effort to get all of us to disappear from public life forever and it didn’t start, it never stopped and the point is it won’t until it all goes back to the way it used to be.

What is “in it” for the non-queer gamers is realizing they aren’t the center of the fucking universe. That they can show their support for something that isn’t explicitly for them and leave homophobic assholes with no wonderful jungle of slightly less homophobic assholes to hide behind. But no the second it costs you anything suddenly it’s the end of the fucking world. People want to feel all nice and accepting and open minded but they never want it to actually inconvenience them.

By all means keep on harping your one fucking studio you hate. I hope it keeps you warm.

Was it worth it? Coming down hard on queer and telling us we’re terrible people for daring tp ask for something better and throwing your lot in with the oppressors at the smallest hurdle?

Are these “bad things in the name of inclusion” just making a game you don’t like? The push against “inclusion” on a general scale has lead to real world harms because a bunch of babies can’t come to terms with there being pieces of media with choices they don’t like and threw a fucking tantrum. There isn’t really a side anymore where railing against the harms of “inclusion” isn’t propping up the arguement that minorities “earned” the actions against them by asking “too much”.

People will take your words as tacit endorsement that queer people “had this coming” because a bunch of businesses responded to a body of queer theory and made some fucking games. The anti-DEI crowd is the Conservative crowd and you might be on the fringe but you aren’t outside the radius.

There’s no “actual homophobes” vs " not homophobic but still unhappy that queer people and ‘forced inclusion’ are in a game people" - that’s just different degrees of homophobia.

Games changed a bit so that they aren’t all made for you specifically. Those franchises didn’t belong to you and for some people those ‘ruined games’ are their favorite games. Everyone has studios they don’t like. Not all representation is gunna be great because not all writing is going to be great but when inclusion “ruins it for everyone” in your veiw look around and ask if the people around you who are discussing it is actually a good cross section of “everyone”.

Ah yes, the two sexualities - political and non-political. You really aren’t as far along as you think.

I can accept that you are unhappy and want your games to not make you feel uncomfortable. Gods forbid they ever be like every other form of media and actually have a message they want to convey or try anything new. I can say having something tailored specifically for you is quite nice - now that more of us actually get to experience that.

By making the player make the first move, they empower the player to choose.

The problem often becomes that the entire sexuallity of mechanically bi characters or all characters in the game are often under player control. In a some circumstances games with this mechanism will have the characters who are not chosen as romantic options pair with no one ever or defer to straight behaviour. This is in deference to games wanting to have it’s cake and eat it too.

Examples of this in action :

Stardew Valley where if you don’t choose a same sex option to romance - no other characters ever have any romances ever. The one exception is Leah who has an ex who shows up late in the romance pursuit who tries to win her back. However, the ex is whatever gender the PC is so if it’s a hetero relationship, it still appears to be a hetero relationship.

Harvest Moon Mineral Town (later editions) give the player to options to romance same sex options… But everyone you don’t choose pairs up in hetero relationships and no other characters.

In both games there is no other queer rep so the player essentially opts in or out to all queer representation in the game. Blanket Heterosexuallity or bi-invisibility until given player approval is the default.

Indy games are generally the leaders for actual queer rep that isn’t optional to the game’s plot where characters sexuallities are not revealed by the player opt in.

Hey, just a heads up assuming “gender politics” don’t matter and being upset if a character is noticeably queer - makes you a part of the homophobic conservative circles. People, irl are queer, omitting queer people from settings where they would just exist as part of the world because “they shouldn’t be there” is a little queerphobic.

Conservative circles have been screaming about woke games forever just when options to have non-binary people exist at character creation or when there is one gay side character. A lot of folks in the arts, including in game development, are queer and like to make stories that didn’t exist when they were growing up. Your opinion is your own but assuming it’s universally considered “good game design” to force developers to exclude the things they are passionate to put in their games to appease a howling mob that is never happy even when they get what they say they want is a bit rich.

What you are describing is a concept of the mechanically bisexual. The options as given often allow players to choose in a sandbox game whether they experience the game as a completely non-queer experience or not. It sometimes creates queerness as an option rather than a core part of an experience which rep wise is considered a step better than when all romance options in games were mandatorily heterosexual but also kind of a cop out where player choice means all characters are often Shrodinger’s bi. If you want to experience say Skyrim as an almost entirely queer free experience - you can. Your choices flip that representation on and off like a lightswitch so if you have queerphobic tendencies the game doth not offend much. No one ever hits on you first.

Rep wise Gay characters are ones specifically ones where the queerness isn’t optional, it’s a part of the canon of the character. Straight characters often are so in fixed story narratives where they have hetero relationships and if they have brushes that look like same sex romance it’s played for laughs and treated as not really an option. Since culture still sort of assumes straightness as a default if the character only ever is coded romantically by the frame of the game to be attracted to the opposite sex they can be termed a “straight character” because as a player the game’s interfacing with that character’s sexuality is mandatory. An example is the Prince of Persia games or the Final Fantasy series which have a romantically coded opposite sex paramours that you don’t have an option not to interface with the character’s sexuallity.

This is way more common in older games and fixed story franchises.

Some people in a general sense are sluts. This is an old assumption that bi and gay folk are more sexually careless that hasn’t really been true since the aids crisis.

Fun fact, wherever there is stigma or barriers in seeking health care or populations that are discriminated against you see higher rates of STIs because people wait longer to check on things that go wrong and don’t catch them before they take hold. This includes immigrant populations, religious minorities in hostile cultures, queer people, racial minorities, homeless populations… They aren’t all rawdogging it, these groups often feel they can’t be honest with a doc or fear being rejected from healthcare situations. Some queer folk have trauma around medical care in the past. Where management and early testing drops off disease transmission becomes more common.

You will see old studies positing the multiple partners thing but the cutting edge data has seen this is a problem faced by multiple populations with the core of the problem sourced and traceable to the degree of stigma against the patients.

It was more your entire second paragraph that hinges on the idea that just because bi people are potentially attracted by both sexes that it is unfair and “abuse” to expect bi folk to desire monogamy or make monogamy work. That’s a pretty old fashioned form of biphobia that projects that a bi person is either incapable of being satisfied by any one person like a straight or gay person is or that they are more likely to stray or be a problem for their partners.

It isn’t abuse to expect a partner to be faithful.

Some bi people cheat or go in for polyamory because some people cheat or go in for polyamory regardless of gender or sexually . Bi people are not especially predisposed. Projecting your own wandering eye and assuming that is a more universal problem for people of a different sexuality that negates their viability in a form of romantic relationship isn’t cool.

Dude… Bi people still do monogamy and a lot of them don’t want polyamory or cheating. If you have a problem keeping to a single person that’s a you thing, don’t project it onto others.

Calling it “abuse” is really fucking weird.