Post #4249098

2026-07-27 18:44 UTC

I've been playing Space Engineers a lot lately. One thing that's always nagged at me about it is that Marek Rosa, who started Keen Software House, the software company behind it, has some odd beliefs about "AI" and so forth. He doesn't dominate the spotlight but he keeps close to it. Today I was looking at the Space Engineers blog, and, it's got some bigger red flags than usual: a sidebar with Marek Rosa's "biography", with an image of him dressed (I think) as a Roman Centurion, and in the body of the text, "It’s all part of my long-term plan: to make civilization stronger, greater, and more resilient." And "I am proudly European , and in the last few years, I’ve come to love South Africa and its people." https://blog.marekrosa.org/2026/05/space-engineers-economy-2/

Replies (1)

@foolishowl@social.coop 2026-07-30 18:19

This is continuing to bother me. Like, I try to cut out of my life a lot of things because they have troubling associations, and I've talked about that more than once. I've wrestled with my enthusiasm for space travel fantasy, since it's a genre that has roots in colonialism, and real-world space exploration has been significantly influenced by Nazis, literally. But, lots of good people enjoy space fantasies, so there's got to be something redeemable about it, right? There's some conservative sentiment among a lot of SE players, in particular a fondness for military imagery. There was a bit of conflict about adding a female character model, but, most favored that, and the publisher eventually did. But, it's really hard to get around the far right allusions in Marek Rosa's biography. The best alternative I can think of, probably better than cutting a hobby out of my life, is to find some way to explicitly express anti-fascism and radical leftism. I'll just have to work out how.

Open ##4249097