uncanny valley wrote:Framing people's legitimate concerns as "trying to make others feel bad" is so strange. The time period that this event is based upon was an era of genocide for native people in N. America, and people affected have the right to have concerns about the way this event is handled. Put another way, would it be easier to understand people's concerns if the event was "Nazi Germany" themed or "antebellum South" themed? Because that's a fair historical equivalent to westward expansion in the United States.
I don't think there's anything wrong with a Southwest themed event, btw. Lots of great aesthetics come from the southwest. But I'm not a fan of the way people are being dismissed on this subject. It's not right to just handwave these concerns and pretend that this isn't a potentially fraught theme that can harm some of the userbase.
Nobody is trying to "make people feel bad." People are just voicing concerns in the hopes that the staff hears them and takes them into consideration. For instance, it might have been a good idea to hire a sensitivity reader to look over the storyline, etc. These are pieces of player feedback, nothing more and nothing less, and seeing people circle the wagons is uncomfortable to say the least (particularly as this site is meant to be inclusive to all.)
I've seen multiple people in this thread be treated poorly because they believe staff are already handling this theme well, or because the repeated detailing of how "awful" this theme is directed at the users who say they enjoy it, and it causes real harm to those individuals.
It's not anywhere close to the extreme comparisons you're making, not when staff has repeatedly said that they were careful to consider the real history behind the time period. A more accurate comparison would be "World War II" era or "Civil War", which again, is an extreme comparison of "time of country's expansion with many different communities and events" to "literal widespread wartime". I could see CS doing a Victorian Era themed event for the European players, which is also a time period rife with issues, but it's fine to enjoy the time period and concept in a fictional setting.
There's no "circling the wagons". I just think it's wrong to demand that staff and site users repeat over and over that they know about all the bad stuff during this time period as some sort of disclaimer to enjoying it. We can't expect staff to reveal the entire plot ahead of time for it to be scrutinized in their fictional borrowing of a time period. Other examples are Red Dead Redemption and Oregon Trail for video games. Spirit, Rango, Home on the Range, and An American Tale: Fivel Goes West for movies aimed at kids specifically.
Unlike Spirit or Fivel, I don't think this event is going to get into War or Military happenings. CS hasn't done that in their past events- and this event is pretty clearly set to be focused around the ideas of the Pony Express and Trains, both things that children adore and that we should not be adding brutality (in actual events or as historical disclaimers) to
on a children's site. The adults here are all, as my original post points out, very aware of history and the real world and the awful things it contains. Any children will learn about it through their own schools, adults, their own curiosity or reading- hopefully with supervision to protect them from some of the things that are simply not age appropriate. An event on a web game is not the time or place to do it, nor is the forum for discussion of said event.
