Brainstorming Reducing Silicon Slavery [Warning: Potentially Upsetting Topic!]

[Love]

This just seems really bizarre to me and I genuinely have no idea how you came to these conclusions.

I've tried to make it clear in other replies that I'm not uncomfortable with it, that I have no trauma in this, and that I do not believe it is a thing that is actually intended or present. I love playing my (unopressed, unenshackled) borg. But it's a lot of text to go through.

Myself, and others in this thread, have run into the theme over and over and over. There are threads on this very forum with examples.
Since there has been a push to distance themes of slavery in game in other places, I was hoping this was a good time to bring it up, and hope it would be put to bed by reducing some of the root mechanical causes or lack of clear negations that makes it such an oft-repeated theme.

Clearly, I was incredibly wrong. Or clearly I put things incredibly badly.

I was trying to reduce people's potential discomfort with an icky and ugly theme. Which I thought we were all for.

I was also wrong to do that.

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I think the biggest reason i see this entire thread as absurd is that it kinda misses the point of the entire setting of the game.

[...] NanoTrasen is cruel, that's the intent.


[...] The inhumane treatment is inherent to all of NT's subjects.

I am not against NT being mustache-twirling evil. It's one of my favorite themes. I'd have been totally fine with the older, eviller NT too. I think it's good fun.

But let me remove the emotionally charged language to hopefully be clearer. We aren't talking about slavery (or other objectionable things we disallow and distance ourselves from) now, we're going to talk about geese, in our game about ponds.

We are starting to remove mention of geese in our farty pondgame. Some goose mentions have been removed. Talking about geese will make an admin frown at you. This is fine, and uncontroversial. Everyone hates geese. Geese make people feel bad. Nobody will complain if they're gone.

Then we have something that in our pond that is, for all appearances, a goose. It looks like a goose, it sounds like a goose, it was probably originally a parody of a goose, or was meant to bring geese to mind to make a point about the pond. We obviously do not want it to be a goose, and really haven't for a while. We want it to be a duck, since ducks are almost the same, but are cool and don't bite. But talk about it being a goose persists, because its qualities would suggest that, well, it's very gooselike.

I am just suggesting we maybe make minor changes to the goose sprite to make it look more ducklike. Maybe change its description to make it clear it's a duck. So people will no longer make assumptions of goositude, or make gimmicks or RP or pondlaws about it, and so it doesn't inform design decisions in the future.

I made this thread hoping we could figure out a noninvasive way to resprite the goose to a duck, because we all enjoy having a flying, swimming bird, but don't want geese.