playing a video game vs. building a fantasy.

People reach for “it’s just a game” whenever a fantasy makes them uncomfortable. The phrase serves a real purpose. It separates imagination from belief. The problem is that it often gets treated as a complete answer, even though it only resolves part of what’s being argued.

I saw this play out after a screenshot circulated in a Facebook group that shares examples of people oversharing online. The image came from a separate Skyrim group, where someone had anonymously asked how to mod naked women and multiple wives into the game. It wasn’t shared as a technical question. It was shared because it came across as revealing in a way that made people react.

The responses followed a familiar pattern. Some dismissed it as harmless fantasy. Others pushed back, reading it as a reflection of something deeper. One comment summarized that frustration directly. A woman wrote that if someone’s fantasy is being a “sexist asshole,” there was a problem with that.

My first response was resistance, but it wasn't that I supported the mod. My reaction skipped straight to moral judgment, because games are full of actions people don’t endorse in real life. In Grand Theft Auto (GTA), players run over civilians, rob stores, visit strip clubs, and cause chaos for hours, yet few people take that as evidence of real-world values. Fantasy and real life aren't the same thing, and that distinction matters.

Fiction allows people to explore power, control, curiosity, and darker impulses without acting on them. Treating fantasy as a direct expression of belief would make imagination itself suspect. Playing an immoral role in a game does not automatically say anything useful about someone’s ethics, and collapsing fantasy into confession removes a boundary that fiction depends on.

What I missed at first was that the disagreement was not really about fantasy in general. It was about how a fantasy appears and what it takes to make it central rather than incidental.

There is a difference between engaging with what a game already contains and deliberately reshaping a game around a specific desire. Skyrim, like many role-playing games (RPGs), already includes familiar issues such as sexualized armor, gendered tropes, and power dynamics that mirror the real world. Most players encounter those elements because they exist in the environment, not because they seek them out. Participation in that context, by itself, does not communicate much.

Modding changes the situation because it requires intention. Installing mods to strip women naked and collect multiple wives in a game that was not designed around that fantasy restructures the experience around it. At that point, the fantasy is no longer background detail. It becomes the organizing focus of play. What someone actively chooses to add says more than what they merely tolerate.

This distinction explains why people read meaning into the mod more readily than they would into built-in chaos like running over non-player characters (NPCs) in GTA. The pushback was not about banning fantasy. It was about pattern, emphasis, and repetition. The screenshot did not appear in isolation. It was framed as excessive, and that framing shaped how the fantasy was interpreted before anyone debated it.

There is also a broader context shaping these reactions. The video game industry already has a long history of sexism and racial exclusion. Sexualized depictions of women are not rare exceptions. They are common. In that environment, appeals to “just fantasy” are often heard as dismissive rather than neutral. When a fantasy aligns with a dominant pattern people are already exhausted by, it is more likely to be interpreted as reinforcement than as isolated imagination.

Seen through that lens, the intensity of the reaction makes more sense. It was not about a single anonymous post. It reflected accumulated frustration from having the same conversation repeatedly and being told it does not matter. Each new example is read in relation to everything that came before it.

Once I understood that, I acknowledged that I had missed the point and deleted my comment. Not because I was silenced, but because I was still working through the distinction and recognized that social media comment threads are a poor place to do that in real time. Her response was not dismissive. It was relief. She said she tries not to label things sexist when they are not, but that making these arguments often feels futile.

That exchange clarified the actual gap in my initial reasoning. Emphasizing the separation between fantasy and reality was not wrong. Assuming that separation ended the conversation was. “It’s just a game” answers whether fantasy equals belief. It does not account for how patterns, choices, and repetition are experienced by the people who live alongside them.

Separating the fantasy in video games from real life still matters, and collapsing the two leads to bad-faith readings and moral panic. But separation is not insulation. Fantasy doesn't exist outside culture. Context shapes interpretation, and choices determine what gets centered.

The useful distinction here is not between fantasy and reality. It is between what people passively encounter and what they actively build. Ignoring that difference keeps the conversation stalled. Acknowledging it allows the discussion to move forward.