This Week in Barrel Scraping: You’re Telling Me a Pro Nouned This Game?
Basement dwellers everywhere are FURIOUS to have more customization options for their Starfield characters in game.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
It is 2006. I am installing Oblivion on my grandmother’s desktop computer. Everybody is mad that the game is riddled with bugs. I am thirteen years old.
It is 2011. I am playing Skyrim after purchasing it at GameStop with the money I earned from my very first job. Everybody is mad that the game is riddled with bugs. I am eighteen years old.
It is 2015. I am playing Fallout 4 in the second home I’ve moved into after leaving the nest. Everybody is mad that the game is riddled with bugs. I am twenty-two years old.
It is 2018. I am not playing Fallout 76. You can’t make me.
I feel very old
It is 2023. I am playing Starfield, a game I was so awestruck by in its pre-release advertisement cycle that I pre-purchased the game for nearly $100. Everybody is mad that the game… has pronouns?!
We aren’t going to talk about how old I am.
screenshot from Starfield, a video game with pronouns (not pictured)
Oh, dear. Todd Howard’s done it again. He and his company and their latest product are dominating a news cycle because of crybabies on the internet… but this time, very little is being said about the game’s performance issues, quirky bugs, or the DLC that they announced—and that I purchased!—before the game was even released.
That’s right, folks. Big time internetainment boys, certified based YouTube Chads even, are throwing actual hissy fits, honest to goodness crying meltdowns, about a feature that appears for approximately two seconds at the very start of the game: choosing your pronouns.
Starfield is a massive space sim-come-roleplaying game, and like most roleplaying games, you spend a tremendous amount of time chatting with the hoi polloi. The local yokels want to bend your ear about everything under the sun, whatever sun that may be, and they’re gonna have to use the proper words to address you from time to time. She said this, he wants that, they went there. It’s nice that Starfield explicitly disconnects your pronouns from your character’s presentation, and even nicer that the game takes place in a society where people can telepathically intuit your preferred pronouns without ever asking you for them.
But for YouTubers HeelvsBabyface and Dr. Disrespect—the former having 344,000 subscribers and the latter boasting over 4.5 million—the inclusion of pronouns selection in a roleplaying game, where you typically enter into the shoes of a fictional person and get to decide things about them, was the last straw.
screenshot from YouTube video by HeelvsBabyface
There’s Mr. Heel “We’ve Got Matt Lucas at Home” vsBabyface YouTube himself shrieking and wailing like a banshee about being “current day[ed],” a new verb he has just invented. I guess we will no longer be using pronouns to address one another by 2330.
He goes on to scream, at the top of his lungs, about “gender ambiguity” and “fucking current day Californian shit,” which is the only place people use pronouns.
HeelvsBabyface later posted a seventeen minute video rant titled ‘Man "Cancelled" For Having Opinion on Internet!!,’ and I’d love to tell you more about it but, no, sorry, I’m just not going to watch that. Come on. Of course I’m not. Be serious, would you?
Meanwhile, famous ex-Twitch streamer and racist guy Dr. Disrespect, who also hates components of language with a fiery passion, tweeted that “politics should stay out of the video games industry.” Like any good form of art, video games are notoriously apolitical, and never feature overarching political commentary or stories with deeper meaning.
Another insufferable dweeb of note who is upset about normal words is YouTube streamer Nina Infinity, who first threatened to refund the game because of pronouns, then actually went through with it the next day because the game is “terribly glitchy.” Nina describes heavily desynced audio from NPCs, which is caused by running Starfield on a hard drive despite the fact that Starfield explicitly requires a solid state drive.
I don’t know if these people are trying to upset us, but I do know that the only thing they’re managing to do is amuse us! How are you supposed to take this kind of goofy buffoonery seriously? How could you possibly believe I’m the snowflake when six words and three forward slashes send you into an apoplectic rage from which you may never recover?
But we know what this is. It’s a shameless, transparent attempt to garner attention and views by soulless husks who have devoted their entire lives to being frothing at the mouth angry on the internet. I’ve sunk damn near seventy hours into Starfield since early access started on the first, and I haven’t had this much fun with a video game since I was a kid. So forget the pronouns, forget the silly bugs, and enjoy video games without concern for woke propaganda, because baby, the woke moralists are here to stay!