In 2014, when the geek internet was blowing up with the
controversy Gamergate, the forums at SomethingAwful.com were no exception. It
was such a toxic subject that it was confined to one thread. SA’s resident
communist movie critic, SuperMechaGodzilla, entered the fray – condescendingly lecturing everyone on
capitalism, the fun of videogames, Christianity, anti-semitism, and media
studies.
Everything below here is written by SMG, who is not me. Posts are separated by quote bubbles, or an asterisk.
Games aren't as fun as when you were ten years old. Who stole fun from the games?!
'Gamers': the liberal-jewish-feminist conspiracy is hoarding all the fun, censoring our free speech, forcing games to be more multicultural and so-on. If we simply 'deregulated' the industry and got rid of such things as affirmative action, the invisible hand will carry us back to the state of innocence of when I was ten years old.
'SJWs': games were fun when I was ten, but now I'm aware of insane neonazis on the Internet. The games industry really needs to be made more multicultural, like Starbucks. If major corporations simply tell gamers that racism is bad, these rednecks will have to stop openly fantasizing about rape holocaust.
Reality: games have never been 'fun', and cannot be. The capitalist system that produces them is deleterious to human existence and cannot be reformed or purified. You will never be ten years old again, and no-one can be singled out for blame.
It was fantastic, and extremely educational. A point of view on GamerGate that was neither social justice totality, nor liberal/libertarian defensiveness.
His posts from the thread have been copied here for
posterity.
Everything below here is written by SMG, who is not me. Posts are separated by quote bubbles, or an asterisk.
Games aren't as fun as when you were ten years old. Who stole fun from the games?!
'Gamers': the liberal-jewish-feminist conspiracy is hoarding all the fun, censoring our free speech, forcing games to be more multicultural and so-on. If we simply 'deregulated' the industry and got rid of such things as affirmative action, the invisible hand will carry us back to the state of innocence of when I was ten years old.
'SJWs': games were fun when I was ten, but now I'm aware of insane neonazis on the Internet. The games industry really needs to be made more multicultural, like Starbucks. If major corporations simply tell gamers that racism is bad, these rednecks will have to stop openly fantasizing about rape holocaust.
Reality: games have never been 'fun', and cannot be. The capitalist system that produces them is deleterious to human existence and cannot be reformed or purified. You will never be ten years old again, and no-one can be singled out for blame.
Neurolimal posted:
The problem, of course, is that the journalist in question didn't give her anything notable with regards to coverage of Depression Quest, which makes it bizarre when people focus on it as an example of corruption in the industry when we have like, a decade worth of first-hand accounts of corruption in the game industry, in game journalism, and in the relation between the two
it's like if, at a serial killer's court hearing, where said killer has taken photos of him next to severed heads of the victims, the prosecutors focus entirely on an angry conversation he has with some nobody that he never interacted with otherwise
Since games have never actually been fun, 'games journalism' has served the very important purpose of cultivating desire (through endless hype) and then dispensing a modicum of vicarious satisfaction (through endless 9/10 review scores).
With the recent phenomenon of 'preordering' games, companies have cut to the chase and monetized desire itself. It might seem counterintuitive, but you can see this taken to a logical extreme with Star Citizen. The 'fun' comes from endless desiring. This is why it's often totally shattering when a hyped game is actually released. Remember the lead-up to Doom 3? The act of playing the actual game is totally vestigial to all this.
Since the games are not actually fun, games journalists 'enjoy them for me.' A 9/10 review functions like a sitcom's laugh track - a pavlovian trick to tell you that, against all evidence, fun has been had. That's why you see ridiculous outrage and death threats when Toy Story 3 drops below 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.com, or when the latest Zelda only gets an 8.5. A lower score actually makes the experience less fun, because the journalist did not adequately 'enjoy it for me.'
Gamers know full well that games never live up to the score, but that has never phased them because - it bears repeating - the actual gameplay is totally vestigial. It's an open secret, because gamers are satisfied with it. Mountain Dew is garbage, and everyone knows it, but gamers drink it anyways. Same situation.
This is the context in which gamers had the sudden traumatic experience of seeing Games Journalism Itself gang-fucking a dumpy blue-haired feminist, and she doesn't even have a good personality. If games journalism exists to cultivate desire and enjoy things for me, then here it was cumming hard inside the very personification of callow, bourgeois liberalism.
That's the real reason why you have this unprecedented explosion of rage. For many, games journalism no longer enjoys things 'for me.' It enjoys them 'for her.' Zoe Quinn - and, by extension, the liberal-jewish conspiracy - has siphoned all fun from the act of preordering.
Kyrie eleison posted:
you might just be incapable of enjoying things because you actually lack an experiencing soul. epic dew joke btw
I don't have a soul, and I'm here to save the thread.
Kyrie eleison posted:
at least you admit it. what do you intend to save it from?
Whatever presents itself. I haven't played a videogame since around 2008, but gamergate is a remarkable microcosm of class conflict.
This is a kind of confirmation of what I've written. Corruption for money is, to gamers, absolutely normal and acceptable. Anyone can theoretically get in on that action, because capital is 'universal'. Nintendo Power and IGN were simply "small groups of like-minded friends [ensuring] a decent payday for themselves."
The keyword there is 'decent'.
Recall EugeneJ's transcendentally moronic post comparing Zoe Quin to Barack Obama having an ass-fucking affair with Anderson Cooper. There's a grain of truth there. Everyone knows that Obama and CNN are corrupt liberal-types. It's an open secret. If Barack were revealed to be a literal homosexual deviant, however, that would show that he cares about something more than money: sweaty, gay homosex.
That is the threat, and it's why Zoe Quinn is objectionable to gamers where covert advertainment was not. When Games Journalism is literally in bed with the feminists, the universal corruption becomes a particular corruption. They cannot get a piece of it.
In the above screencap, the Anime Man insists that the liberal-jewish-feminist conspiracy cannot stop the free market. The jews cannot take away our EA Sports games because consumers demand EA Sports games, and the free market must supply EA Sports games. 'Companies will not ignore us!' However, if he is so certain of this, why say it out loud? The form of the post reveals a deep insecurity - it functions as a secular prayer directed at the invisible hand itself: 'you won't ignore us... right?'
Gamers have really been confronted with the fact that the market truly does not have their best interests at heart. It is cold, impersonal, and actively destroying them. Rather than accept this truth, they shrink from it. It is more comfortable to believe that the market's benevolence is not absent but simply misdirected towards an outgroup. As a result, the goal is to win back the market's care and attention, bringing society to a prelapsarian state. Twitter hashtags serve this purpose. Broadcasting a meme over twitter is always a means of amplifying speech and directing it at a specific entity - games companies, celebrities, the big Other, etc. These entities will then hear you, and fix things for you.
The interesting contradiction is that he refers to himself as a 'countercultural normalfag'. How does he reconcile his minority status with the fact that he supports billion-dollar corporate entities? Simply, it goes back to his belief that financially-motivated corruption was simply "small groups of like-minded friends [ensuring] a decent payday for themselves." Capitalism, in the view of the gamer, can and should allow small groups to flourish, and it only doesn't is because of 'corruption'. This is where the gamers and SJWs are ultimately indistinguishable. SJWs simply call this 'multiculturalism'.
Dazzling Klaxon posted:
i read the whole super mecha godzilla post, it was good shit, except i think the 'small groups of friends ensuring a payday' referred to the contrived indie award 'scandal' thing and not, like, game development studios.
He refers to it as a 'problem' in a halfhearted way you'd refer to the common cold, before jumping to the real problem, which is that games-daddy doesn't love us anymore.
The remarkable thing is that the gamer sees basic supply and demand as an expression of the people's will. We demand Sonic the Hedgehog, therefore corporations are at our mercy. They must supply what we demand, right?
However: DLC is perhaps the purest form of supply and demand - a means of artificially limiting supply, allowing for inflated prices because gamers have an overwhelming desire to endlessly preorder virtual spaceships. The gamer should be overjoyed but, instead, he declares this a conspiracy by degenerate artists (jews) to 'castrate' society.
Why the contradiction?
Despite the complaint, the message is that the gamer could tolerate DLC if it's for something he desires. DLC is bad, and we all hate it, but it's tolerably bad if it leads to spaceships and noscope headshots. That logic of corporations giving us Sonic because we threw a fit is still present. DLC is, however, utterly intolerable if it leads to a lesbian reading a poem or something. That would be "someone else's agenda" (jews). They're now supplying something we never demanded and, worse, "someone else" is amassing the enjoyment.
In other words, the terrifying threat to gamers is that they will stop desiring games, losing the urge to spend retarded amounts of money on them. That's the apocalyptic scenario where the hobby can, actually, die. That's the "castration": shutting down your Steam account.
Of course, in reality, games are not actually fun, and have never been. Gamers are slowly realizing this, but they are not reacting well. It's the end-times for Mario World.
This is another good example. If animes increasingly become increasingly gay, the quality of the animation will not suddenly drop or something.
The fan's fear is that he will lose the basically-sexual urge to purchase animes. Castration. And, without that urge, he'll come to the realization that he never actually liked anime in the first place. He was only in it for the unthreatening tits. Reality crumbles around him as he no longer has a 'hobby'.
*
The path to authentic appreciation of anime is to first accept in your heart that it truly sucks. Then you can realize how good it is.
big duck equals goose posted:
Disagree. Video games are supposed to be fun. Everything else is either A. Educational. B. Shit
Videogames are not, and have never been, fun.
The Snark posted:
Only movies are fun, and only the ones that have sufficiently deep and winding complex plots interwoven with nearly indecipherable symbolism like Pan's Labrynth and Prometheus.
Anything less is just magical battlesuits that target minorities.
Movies are not fun either.
*
Oh hey, the last couple pages have seen an unironic debate over 'objectification' in which the concept of class isn't even broached.
Objectification of women (in games or whatever) is symptomatic of the fact that they are of lower class in reality. The symptom is not the problem, and to focus exclusively on the symptom is a liberal obfuscatory tactic. It's a deceptive mask over class conflict.
Objectification of women (in games or whatever) is symptomatic of the fact that they are of lower class in reality. The symptom is not the problem, and to focus exclusively on the symptom is a liberal obfuscatory tactic. It's a deceptive mask over class conflict.
natetimm posted:
Regardless of your opinion of Wardell and his interactions with employees, it was handled way differently than any woman would have been. The fact that people are still acting like he's guilty of something other than being politically incorrect even when the woman has apologized and admitted she was wrong speaks to the culture surrounding the issue.
The above quote is a good example of this deception at work.
Uncle Wemus posted:
SMG what is fun i must know.
Spaßgesellschaft, or 'Fun Society', is a society in which work is not considered a part of one's identity but simply a means to accumulate money - to be spent on 'self-actualization' through entertainment, hobbyism, and other forms of consumerism. This fantasized 'self-actualization' doesn't actually happen - it certainly doesn't happen as a result of videogaming - and that's why gamers are now in a tizzy.
As written before, gaming is not actually about playing games, but about desiring them. It's an endless pursuit of an impossible fulfillment, which companies capitalize on by providing novelty. That's the fun.
With the 'mainstreaming' of videogames, there is no longer an excuse for the inability to 'self-actualize', and there is consequently no pleasure in gaming. Back when videogames were deemed only for (man)children, there was an effective prohibition against gaming that made it a somewhat pleasureable transgressive experience. That pleasure is now dwindling. Thousands of games can be downloaded for free in minutes, and they're being played by grandma on the bus. With all this available to you, why aren't you having fun? Why aren't you 'self-actualized'?
Gamers are being confronted with the fact that games are not fun, and have never been. So, terrified of losing their desire, they compensate by imagining a conspiracy where their potency is being sucked from them by liberal jew-feminists.
Uncle Wemus posted:
Where can we go for self actualization? Should video games not exist?
The idea that this is a fight over free speech and censorship is a deceptive lure that many idiots have clenched with a death-grip.
There's no 'should' about it. Videogames exist, they aren't going away, and they aren't fun. The question is 'how do you react to this,' and many react... poorly.
If you're looking to avoid becoming an idiot, but for some reason still want to play videogames, the solution is to truly accept that videogames aren't fun. That's actually pretty difficult and scary, as evidenced by this whole situation.
Kyrie eleison posted:
listen i appreciate your ideas but if you want to effectively condemn games you're going to have to come up with a better reason than this whole 'they are not fun' thing because that does not fit the experience of any actually-human person alive
Fun has been had, but gamers spend more and more money for less and less satisfaction because they believe - erroneously - that the fun was caused by games.
Matoi Ryuko posted:
Thanks for nullifying all of the fun I've had playing games since 2004. I didn't realize what it was that I was experiencing was actually not fun. Silly me.
That, but unironically.
A basic analogy would be the fable of the goose with the golden eggs. A man collects a gold egg every month, until he cuts open the goose in search of unlimited gold. Naturally, the result is only a dead animal.
In this case, the story has a twist ending where there were never any gold eggs in the first place, and the man doesn't learn a lesson but instead blames reptilian egg-theives for the missing gold.
A basic analogy would be the fable of the goose with the golden eggs. A man collects a gold egg every month, until he cuts open the goose in search of unlimited gold. Naturally, the result is only a dead animal.
In this case, the story has a twist ending where there were never any gold eggs in the first place, and the man doesn't learn a lesson but instead blames reptilian egg-theives for the missing gold.
Dazzling Klaxon posted:
this makes sense when it comes to people desperately awaiting the next ubisoft pile but games have an immense amount of variety when you get away from budgets that equal the GDP of small countries
That games are not, and have never been, fun does not makes them bad. I personally think games are good, but I am under no compulsion to purchase or play them.
Kyrie eleison posted:
we get it. you hate games,
You do not get it, because I do not hate games. I told you that I think games are good.
I wrote a handful of posts about how capitalism is bad, and your response is "you hate games!" Why is that?
Kyrie eleison posted:
i get that you want to work capitalism into this somehow, and say capitalism is creating bad games.
You do not get it, because I did not say that at all.
I said that games are good, not that they are bad.
Here is a helpful chart to illustrate:
Pleasant Friend posted:
What are games good at?
Anime Schoolgirl posted:
such a menace that deeply insecure nerds get so angry about them even existing and end up propping misogynistic causes unconsciously
Gamers cannot imagine games without capitalism. In some cases, they cannot imagine arousal without capitalism. When informed that women are of a lower class, they protest "what, so I'm not supposed to look at tits and get a boner?!"
Compounding things, SJWs follow an identical logic: "We must attack these games! No, you are not allowed to get that boner!"
This type of idiocy can be readily identified in this thread, even the last page.
Matoi Ryuko posted:
We were just talking about how playing fetch with our dog is only fun because of capitalism or something.
No-one will take your dog from you.
QUEEN CAUCUS posted:
No it's way better than watching people argue about whether or not video games are art or Buffy the vampire slayer or whatever the fuck
As usual, there is a very simple answer that is difficult to accept: videogames can be read as art but, generally, are not.
Anime Schoolgirl posted:
how are you going to be listened to by 95% of the participants you gotta fox news more bro
Ok let me try: "Games could be read as art if the reptillian elite didn't have absolute control over the art world. We men must fight endlessly for their permission!"
*
Urinals can be read as art but, generally, are not. The same can be said of videogames.
Matoi Ryuko posted:
Your posts can be read as intelligent and thought provoking but, generally, are not.
Yes, exactly. Like videogames, my posts are good.
Matoi Ryuko posted:
Yeah there's that games not being fun thing again, like I tried to convey earlier, I guess I should tell my little brother that all the fun we had last night playing Soul Calibur wasn't "fun", per-say, but instead we were tricked into enjoying eachother's company by corporate interests. Damn those corporations, they'll rue the day they made me spend time with my family.
No-one will take your brother from you.
Matoi Ryuko posted:
He's not my brother, he's just like me, a product of venture capitalists. A cog in a grand clock, a slave to "fun". I dunno, I'm not very good at emulating the kinds of things you post.
I wrote a handful of posts about how capitalism is bad, and the response is "you hate games!", "you hate dogs!", and now "you hate small children!"
Why is that?
Matoi Ryuko posted:
capitalism has little to do with games being fun or being art,
If that were true, you would have nothing to fear.
That is the problem: gamers oppose bourgeois liberalism and SJWs oppose racism, yet both factions are afraid to attack the cause of those ills.
The loud outcry on both sides of the 'Gamergate controversy' is an elaborate ritual to ensure that nothing ultimately changes. They are both fighting to preserve and strengthen the capitalist system, under the illusion that they are protecting free speech, dogs, journalistic ethics, their brothers, art, etc. That is why what I've written is relevant.
*
For the movie fans out there, a very good documentary about Gamergate was released earlier this year.
It's called The Den.
It's called The Den.
Matoi Ryuko posted:
The impression I get from your solution is, in my opinion, not only outmoded, but borderline violent. Attempting to dismantle capitalism undermines the end product of capitalist society: the end of capitalist society through means of technological advancement. We are hooked into this system because of biological imperative, not because of fear. The best example is how our food has to keep up with our population density, if we are one day able to overcome our reliance on agriculture and livestock because of technological means, then that will be the time to leave capitalism behind us. This is why I believe we have nothing to fear but restrictions on scientific advancement, and if that time comes, you and I might just find ourselves on the same side of the picket line.
Biotruths and the singularity?
God bless this Gamergate mess.
*
Kylie: i love you, but you do not seem literate and are fantasizing about an equality that is somehow divorced from class, interpreting authentic equality as an attack on men.
That's not a good look.
What's your opinion on reverse racism?
That's not a good look.
What's your opinion on reverse racism?
*
Kyrie eleison posted:
a lot of things. i don't want to go into it too much because it's kind of outside the scope of this thread, but i think aside for the obvious physical differences, men and women generally have different temperaments.
i do not support unjust advantage of one gender over another. generally speaking i think equality of opportunity is fair. i think there are instances where men have unfair advantages and instances where women have unfair advantages.
This is what happens when you do not think about class.
Women have 'equal opportunities' and only fail because of their 'biological temperaments'. When Kyrie fails, however, it is a product of 'hostility and injustice.'
The reality is that women are of lower class for the same reason you are. Instead of thinking "this shouldn't happen to me!", you need to realize this shouldn't happen to anyone. You could have allies, but are instead allowing yourself to be duped into betraying your own people.
*
Digiwizzard posted:
SMg why is capitalism fun i gotta know!!!!
I explained it already: the fun of gaming comes from the endless desiring. It's fun to desire games and to receive temporary satisfaction of that desire through the act of purchasing. Companies exploit this fact by providing endless novelty - things to desire and opportunities to purchase them. DLC and microtransactions allow you to even desire and purchase the same game multiple times! Gamers will protest that DLC prevents the fun from happening, but that's a misconception. The gameplay unlocked is not fun; the fun comes from the act of unlocking.
The psychology of fun is illustrated most concisely in the film THX 1138, when Robert Duvall buys a chunk of red plastic, carries it home, and immediately throws it away. The plastic chunk exists only to be purchased and then disposed of. Duvall repeats this action every day, because it provides a modicum of satisfaction.
Games are technically better than they've ever been, but gamers are having less fun than ever before. This is because they are more accessible than ever before. Imagine if Duvall could simply press a button to have infinite red blocks pumped directory into his home.
*
Steam is having a big sale!
Vermain posted:
There's a comparison in gaming to be made with the auto-ejaculation machine of THX-1138, as well, with the increasing dominance of "cinematic" games and endless achievements for completing otherwise relatively mundane in-game tasks. The theoretical main draw of a game (the actual gameplay) is sidelined, such that you don't have to even play the game in order to "experience" it.
I do disagree somewhat, though, in that gameplay can be fun, though it depends on your definition of "fun." I draw a clear distinction between desire and fun. It's pleasurable ("fun") to solve complex problems and perform difficult mechanical tasks successfully, just as it's pleasurable to desire something (though not as pleasurable to finally obtain it). However, the fun of gameplay is not entirely beholden to desire, because the intermediate steps of problem solving and rewards are fun enough in and of themselves.
To expand on this argument, and to relate it to yours: the problem is not that games (if we can talk of "games" in a generic, Platonic way for a moment) are not fun, but that they are subordinate to the demands of capitalism. To bring it back to THX-1138, it's not that a block of plastic cannot be a nice, decorative piece, but that it is insisted upon by the economic system that you buy one. The confession booth that Robert Duvall visits turns this consumerism into a religious experience, with the blanched face of the Anglo-Saxon Christ imploring him to "buy more." The actual art of a game - its gameplay and related themes - becomes perfunctory to its purpose as a commodity to be sold for a profit, and the person buying the game becomes compelled to purchase it because of the neverending need of desire for something new, even if (or perhaps because) the actual essence of the game continues to be the same, sterile essence of the games purchased before. All that remains, then, is the pleasure of desire.
The trouble with gameplay is that 'problem solving for a reward' generally manifests itself as grinding. Grinding is not just the usual 'levelling up', but is also familiar in multiplayer shooters, where the player is encouraged to repeat the same map thousands of times in order to experience the occasional glimpse of something interesting.
Grinding is not separate from the logic of desire, but a purer manifestation of it. It's why Progress Quest and Cookie Clicker are fun, despite not having gameplay. Microtransactions are simply a method of more directly monetizing grinding - 'pay to win' doesn't ruin fun, but actually allows for maximum fun.
It's incredibly fun to pay to win. That's why people do it. The problem is that, once you've paid to win, all you're left with is a videogame - and videogames are not fun at all.
The Snark posted:
You seem to have just said Progress Quest and Cookie Clicker are fun, and I have to say- I most strenuously disagree. As, apparently do you? Also no, paying to win is not fun. It's a fairly reviled thing in most cases! It exists in spite of that and because it's a profitable exploitation! There are, unfortunately, plenty of unthinking people who will shovel cash into things like Candy Crush. It's not because paying to win is fun, it's because they're easily manipulated by game design.
The 'commonsense' approach to games is that you pay money and then, after paying is over, receive fun gameplay. Spending money (and grinding, buying updated consoles, updated graphics cards, etc.) are understood as mere obstacles in the way of the fun.
However, this is provably untrue. With piracy, pay-to-win microtransactions, the sheer number of games now instantly available, speedruns, walkthroughs, and so on, these obstacles are being progressively eliminated. There is now absolutely nothing stopping gamers from having direct and instantaneous access to the fun they were promised - yet, we are not in a golden age of gaming enlightenment. Gamers are unhappier than ever before.
What you call 'manipulation' was necessary to conceal the truth: that games are not actually fun, and have never been. It's basic psychology. If you tell a kid that he's not allowed to eat vegetables, he will enjoy vegetables more than if they are simply given to him. The act of prohibition is what sustains the desire.
Vermain posted:
The desire for mastery is a desire, but it's a healthy desire. It is what ultimately drives us towards great accomplishments, and is (along with the self-direction of labour) what makes work theoretically enjoyable.
This is where I would disagree. What's necessary is to make the shift from desire to drive. If desire is a carrot-on-a-stick that prompts forward movement, and the carrot itself is just a fantasy object never meant to actually be obtained, then the only way to go is to consciously pursue something that you know does not exist.
It's as I wrote about anime: the path to authentic appreciation of anime is to first accept in your heart that it truly sucks. Then you can realize how good it is.
The point where you truly accept in your heart that games are not fun, and appreciate just how not-fun they are, is the point where they become art.
The Snark posted:
Things that happen in your mental image of the world have at best a questionable relationship to the actual world and you casually disregard absolutely all other possible motivations that don't support your bizarre statement and tortured logic. It's entirely viable that gamers do not universally elect to pirate games because they would rather not steal, or because they see it as dangerous, or because they would like to see more fun games made by a given developer and understand developers are not making games as an act of charity. Also 'gaming enlightenment' huh? Kind of wonder how you picture that.
As I said before, your certainty is your damnation.
This, i claim, is ideology.
SunAndSpring posted:
I refute all your claims, SuperMechagodzilla, with this sage aphorism from a true philosopher of our era.
"Blow it out your ass."
Duke Nukem 3D, being not very fun, is one of the best games ever made.
As a contrast, Duke Nukem Forever was extremely fun - for over a decade - until gamers finally obtained it.
Uncle Wemus posted:
The popularity of let's plays makes me think that people don't actually like to play games. Hell some games probably have more LP views than sales.
Yep.
Sephiroth_IRA posted:
It doesn't matter they should still get airtime to present their case. NPR goes on and on and on about how fair they are and how they go to great lengths to present both sides fairly.
Fair and balanced.
Teach the controversy.
Sephiroth_IRA posted:
National PUBLIC Radio.
Exactly. Truth does not come from presenting all sides, but presenting the correct side: that of the proletariat.
Kyrie eleison posted:
reminder that virtually the entire news media posted completely false stuff about 4chan threatening emma watson leaks because they are all pauper shills begging for clicks, incapable of doing research because research requires effort, and so long as something fits their liberal narrative on the surface they just run with it
This is accurate.
Responding by redefining 'equality' and 'justice' in ways that exclude class also fits perfectly into the liberal narrative, Kyrie.
*
i did not say NPR is correct here. i said that truth comes from siding with the proletariat, which they are not.
Nebulon Gate posted:
SJWs believe economic class to be piddly compared to the horrors of biphobia and misogyny.
We should be under no illusions. Misogyny is bad, but it is bad exclusively because it is a form of class discrimination.
Kyrie may be an idiot, but he is an idiot because he has been misled into attacking his own class on behalf of the rich.
natetimm posted:
The only difference between one-book worshippers like Christians and Communists is that Chritianity has at least been able to integrate itself into functional society without becoming a giant shitshow at every opportunity. Just most of them.
Christianity is communist.
Kyrie eleison posted:
i'll entertain this for a bit, i'm always confused as to what class i belong to because the maoists say i am part of the bourgeois automatically just by virtue of living in a first world country whereas the trots seem to think i'm proletariat unless i have a billion dollars
the left has generally been reminding me that i am the privileged party who should be ashamed of my privilege repeatedly, in fact that's what gamergate is about in large part. so which class do i belong to again? i thought i was the oppressor?
Liberalism is not actually leftist.
Authentic leftism has nothing to do with shame either. You do have obvious advantages, because you don't live in Somalia. You aren't a woman living in India. That, however, does not invalidate the existence of poverty of class conflict in the United States. That's why the point is that this shouldn't happen to anyone.
It's a pretty safe bet that you are a member of the proletariat, but you have been misled into believing your enemy is equality itself. That's buying entirely into the rhetoric of bourgeois liberalism, which appropriates antiracist and antisexist language in order to preserve and strength a system of exploitation. In that sense, you are a proletarian who unwittingly serves the interests of the bourgeoisie.
Uncle Wemus posted:
Does anyone play starbound? There was a big hype then it came out and everyone forgot about it including the dev.
SMG what about current biggest game in the world league of legends? The dlc/purchasable stuff doesn't make you win so what desire keeps it popular?
It's popular precisely because the DLC doesn't make you win. If you actually won, there would be nothing left to desire, and people would move on to the next game.
natetimm posted:
I don't know if you've thought out to the end goal of the proletariat running everything in the US but it would probably be a lot shittier than it is now due to the rather socially regressive views held by a majority of the working poor.
This is classist rhetoric. You are an SJW.
Trust in the people.
Elissia posted:
what even the fuck is happening in this thread anymore
Gamergate is happening.
*
A whole lot of people itt are trying to use the internet to fight 'corruption', forgetting this site's motto.
The internet is corruption.
"We gotta get on twitter to protect the internet!" And now you're stupid.
The internet is corruption.
"We gotta get on twitter to protect the internet!" And now you're stupid.
XK posted:
I went over to the NPR page to find their gamergate thing:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechcon...and-video-games
This is their featured quote:
"I don't think I've ever released a game without getting some sort of rape threat.
- Zoe Quinn, video game developer"
FYI thread: normal people care more about their neighbors getting rape threats than they do about the integrity of gaming journalism.
If you want to actually oppose liberalism, you need to choose your battles wisely.
Kyrie eleison posted:
the truth is important, and will win against their slimiest establishment tactics. look how far this has gone already
It's going somewhere alright. This thing is taking place in the land of public opinion and you've hitched a ride on the libertarian rape train. Toot toot.
Kyrie eleison posted:
given your agreement that there is media collusion and that this causes bourgeois liberalism to triumph, shouldn't you support undermining its legitimacy rather than try to intimidate people away from doing so. who is serving their interests now
'The media' didn't cause this.
Phobophilia posted:
basically #gamergate is the equivalent of putting trigger warnings on every single piece of media made in history or making facebook give you 50 different options to describe your gender
Yup. People believe bad things are caused by 'the media', so the plan is to tweet incessantly until the media listens, and helps them.
They are pretty much literally praying to major corporations.
*
Grandma somehow reads an article about Zoe Quinn while looking for the crossword puzzle (because she's a gamer).
To grandma, this is the story of an eighteen year old girl who makes toys for disabled children, being attacked by ISIS.
To grandma, this is the story of an eighteen year old girl who makes toys for disabled children, being attacked by ISIS.
happyhippy posted:
So I am thinking of setting up a new game review website, and I want your feedback on it.
Games will be rated out of 1000 points, 1000/1000 being the best.
But instead of actually playing and criticing the game, only sexual acts and bribes will affect the score.
But I want to make sure that I am giving the public the best quality review.
So how many points should be awarded for the following:
- Sex with male developer.
- Sex with male developer with pink hair.
- Sex with female developer with non-colored hair.
- Sex with female developer with colored hair.
- Sex with developer with thick rimmed glasses.
- Sex with 40-50 year old CEO.
- T-shirts and tacky plastic shit.
P.S Patreon my poz hole.
Corruption comes from sex, not money.
EasternBronze posted:
Internet harassment used to just be something that happened to anyone who gained any type of fame coupled with doing or saying something that could be mildly upsetting to almost anyone.
Unless it happens to a woman who agrees with my political opinions in which case it vindicates everything we agree on and means that she is a good person being attacked by those sorts of people.
White males!
In the real world, rape- and death-threats are a "yelling 'bomb' in a crowded airport" situation. They don't even count as free speech because they are quantifiably worse than, say, holocaust denial.
This is something I had to explain in the year of our lord 2014.
EasternBronze posted:
You're breaking out of character. I was expecting a 1000 word essay linking internet threats with capitalism.
Good thing the internet isn't the real world, hope that helped.
I also will impotently take a stand against strangers saying mean things on the internet.
Your mom uses the internet, and so does your employer. The internet has been your real life for a while now.
Irony is a way of trying to escape this fact. It's not working.
Nebulon Gate posted:
In the real world, some anonymous twitter troll going 'I'M GONNA RAPE AND MURDER YOU' has as much credibility as 9/11 truthism, i.e. next to none. SJW personalities all know this, hence why their houses aren't covered in SWAT teams at all times. It makes for damn good fodder about the mysoggknee of the internet, though, and getting that sweet, sweet kickstarter and patreon money.
You are supporting a practice that contains the words 'rape' and 'threat', and wondering why you don't have mainstream support.
There's no conspiracy. The internet's made you stupid.
*
Slavoj Zizek: Our fundamental delusion today is not to believe in what is only a fiction, to take fictions too seriously. It's, on the contrary, not to take fictions seriously enough. You think it's just a game? It's reality. It's more real than it appears to you. For example, people who play video games, they adopt a screen persona of a sadist, rapist, whatever. The idea is, in reality I'm a weak person, so in order to supplement my real life weakness, I adopt the false image of a strong, sexually promiscuous person, and so on and so on. So this would be the naïve reading... But what if we read it in the opposite way? That this strong, brutal rapist, whatever, identity is my true self. In the sense that this is the psychic truth of myself and that in real life, because of social constraints and so on, I'm not able to enact it. So that, precisely because I think it's only a game, it's only a persona, a self-image I adopt in virtual space, I can be there much more truthful. I can enact there an identity which is much closer to my true self.
A Spider Covets posted:
why all the gamers so concerned about who gets their dick sucked
Corruption comes from sex, not money.
*
The Rantic hoax is my absolute favorite so far, because it illustrates that Gamergate is ultimately indistinguishable from viral advertisement.
This is a very exciting time for us. Who is us? I'm Anonymous for starters, and I have in front of me a number of gamers, or my forum, or in old language of a couple of thousand years ago, my disciples - those who are trying to prepare themselves for entry into the Gaming Level Above Human, synonymous with the Singularity, the Kingdom of Heaven. We're going to talk to you about the most urgent thing that is on our mind, and what we suspect is the most urgent thing on the minds of those who will connect with us.
We'll title this tape, "Videogaming About to be Recycled - Your Only Chance to Evacuate is to Leave With Us." Videogaming about to be recycled - Your only chance to survive or evacuate is to leave with us. Now, that's a pretty drastic statement - pretty bold - in terms of gaming journalism, in terms of anybody's intelligent thinking. To most people who would consider themselves intelligent beings, they'd say, "Well, that's absurd. What's all this Gamer's Gate stuff? What's all this misandrist, libertarian talk?" You know, intelligent human beings should realize that all things have their own cycle. They have their season. They have their beginning, they have their end. We're not saying that videogames are coming to an end. We're saying that videogaming is about to be refurbished, spaded under, and have another chance to serve as a garden for a future masculine gaming community.
We'll title this tape, "Videogaming About to be Recycled - Your Only Chance to Evacuate is to Leave With Us." Videogaming about to be recycled - Your only chance to survive or evacuate is to leave with us. Now, that's a pretty drastic statement - pretty bold - in terms of gaming journalism, in terms of anybody's intelligent thinking. To most people who would consider themselves intelligent beings, they'd say, "Well, that's absurd. What's all this Gamer's Gate stuff? What's all this misandrist, libertarian talk?" You know, intelligent human beings should realize that all things have their own cycle. They have their season. They have their beginning, they have their end. We're not saying that videogames are coming to an end. We're saying that videogaming is about to be refurbished, spaded under, and have another chance to serve as a garden for a future masculine gaming community.
*
"Finally, there is the reversed racism: ... racists themselves become a “threatened minority” whose free speech must be protected, i.e., they use the prohibition as evidence that racism is a minority position which has to be defended against the multicultural hegemony. Racism can then be articulated as a minority position, a refusal of orthodoxy. In this perverse logic, racism can then be embraced as a form of free speech. We have articulated a new discourse of freedom: as the freedom to be offensive, in which racism becomes an offence that restores our freedom: the story goes, we have worried too much about offending the other, we must get beyond this restriction, which sustains the fantasy that ‘that’ was the worry in the first place. Note here that the other, especially the Muslim subject who is represented as easily offended, becomes the one who causes injury, insofar as it is the Muslim other’s ‘offendability’ that is read as restricting our free speech. The offendable subject ‘gets in the way’ of our freedom. So rather than saying racism is prohibited by the liberal multicultural consensus, under the banner of respect for difference, I would argue that racism is what is protected under the banner of free speech through the appearance of being prohibited."
Slavoj Žižek. "Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion."
Slavoj Žižek. "Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion."
BottledBodhisvata posted:
1. A man is recorded in his own home by a mistress (or somebody else, the story seemed unclear who the actual source of the recording was.) On this recording, he is found to be saying things that are racially insensitive.
2. This recording, without his knowledge or consent, is released to the media, who publish it--again, without his knowledge or consent. It should be noted, they profit off this publishing.
3. The man then loses his property (in this case a sports team he owned). He is subject to weeks of public ridicule, scorn, hatred and contempt for something he said, again, in the privacy of his own home.
Your scenario is extremely easy to solve. All parties involved should lose their property.
The vocally racist individual is publicly chastised so that the ground-up racist institution of professional sports can be preserved. They can claim that they are 'taking steps to eliminate racism', by conflating 'racism' with 'a racist person'. The racist, in turn, can make this into a free-speech case - using the constitution to protect his wealth. In other words, the counterattack on hidden racism doesn't go far enough.
The obvious ideological slant is most evident in how you frame 'the public' as this amorphous thing that is terrorizing the poor little rich guy with its 'hatred'. But it's also obvious because your story that's ostensibly about the importance of privacy focuses mainly on the sanctity of property ownership.
Shinjobi posted:
The issue at the core of this, for me anyway, is all of this happening in a private setting. If you've worked out a deal to record yourself for some reason, well you kinda leave yourself open. But if I'm having a conversation with my SO about whatever one night, I think it's a bit much to have people drag words never meant to be heard by anyone but my SO, and use them against me to cost me my job. Not talking about abuse, or arguments, or anything that might require police. I'm talking private conversations. I do not think someone should lose their job due to perfectly legal things done in their own home. You can make an argument for spokespeople, or sponsors, since you are indeed supposed to be an icon. But for fuck's sake, if I work in a cubicle and I wind up losing my job because some dude snooped outside my house...that's bullshit.
What you are talking about actually has nothing to do with privacy, and everything to do with protecting workers from their employers.
natetimm posted:
Show me one other twine developer getting that amount of press from those guys. They're treating her like she's the goddamn Oprah Winfrey of games because she had something to do with a shit game none of them want to attach a numerical score to with a 10 foot pole while simultaneously hyping and praising it. It's some serious sycophantic bullshit.
Wait so you want them to attach a numerical score?
natetimm posted:
they actually have to start assigning objective scores [...] the criteria literally any other game would be judged on.
lol
A devastating 6.7/10 for graphics.
natetimm posted:
LOL basically, yes.
So: your evidence of sex-corruption is that they didn't give her the ridiculously inflated scores that all games objectively deserve?
BottledBodhisvata posted:
I'd really like the anti-GG people to actually put into words exactly what evils the GG people are hoping to accomplish. I think both sides can agree that in the process of this activity, both sides have acted stupidly, but if there are stated goals, I'd really like to see those defined.
Games aren't as fun as when you were ten years old. Who stole fun from the games?!
'Gamers': the liberal-jewish-feminist conspiracy is hoarding all the fun, censoring our free speech, forcing games to be more multicultural and so-on. If we simply 'deregulated' the industry and got rid of such things as affirmative action, the invisible hand will carry us back to the state of innocence of when I was ten years old.
'SJWs': games were fun when I was ten, but now I'm aware of insane neonazis on the Internet. The games industry really needs to be made more multicultural, like Starbucks. If major corporations simply tell gamers that racism is bad, these rednecks will have to stop openly fantasizing about rape holocaust.
Reality: games have never been 'fun', and cannot be. The capitalist system that produces them is deleterious to human existence and cannot be reformed or purified. You will never be ten years old again, and no-one can be singled out for blame.
greg sexyvibes posted:
Really is too much social justice crap on this site these day.
The content of the games, as in GBS, is utterly irrelevant.
For example: you can apparently murder strippers in Hitman. Gamers say this is wonderful free speech, we mustn't be 'castrated', blah blah blah. SJWs say that it's awful and should be - at least - 'balanced out' by providing non-objectified female characters with agency and blah blah blah.
The correct interpretation of Hitman is that it's totally accurate: Hitman's unlimited freedom to kill, rape, steal, etc. - the basic gameplay of exploring this extralegal 'zone' - reflects the logic of unbridled capitalism. In reality itself, women are exploited, have less agency than men, etc. The problem of stripping has nothing to do with nudity and everything to do with economic and class disparity. Making them NPCs is totally appropriate.
SJWs should wholeheartedly promote Hitman's nudity, violence and degradation as accurate, while interpreting it. Attacking the game content itself reveals a deep mistrust and fear of the lower classes. SJWs basically fear that redneck gamers are too stupid to understand their thought, so they hope to change the content of the games directly in order to rescue poors from having to think critically. Sarkeesian's videos are deeply patronizing.
In light of this, the 'gamer' contingent must fight for harsher Marxist analysis than ever before - re-appropriating the language of progressive struggle from those who abuse it. That's the only way to 'win' this shitshow.
Cardboard Box A posted:
"Let me put it in terms you might understand. The games media is the mythical Patriarchy. The small few wielding power over the masses to enforce their viewpoint and regime on everyone."
This is actually fairly accurate. 'SJW feminism' is a brand of liberal multiculturalism,
"And multiculturalism is the dominant discourse now through which all of us have to, are forced to, articulate our politics. And I think multiculturalism has, in that way, it’s done a big disservice. Because it has just silenced anti-racist discourse and anti-racist politics ... which now has been defined as an extreme kind of politics. And meanwhile, the deeply-embedded racial inequalities in ... society continue to be reproduced. And multiculturalism masks them, it glosses them over, and it has become a policy of governing and managing communities of colour, so that those politics only get articulated in the name of culture, and culture is defined in highly patriarchal terms."
- Dr. Sunera Thobani, University of British Columbia
SJWs construct the LGBT community as a 'cultural community' that is subordinate to the patriarchal capitalist system. Their rhetoric displaces anticapitalism and, consequently, upholds sexism and other forms of classism.
My favorite example of this is how Sarkeesian complains that Princess Peach gets kidnapped often, glossing over the fact that Peach is a monarchist.
EasternBronze posted:
Anything on the internet that makes such sharp dividing lines and draws so many people in it will inevitably catch alot of crazies in the net on both sides.
The answer is not in the middle. It is to the extreme left.
Lightanchor posted:
uh, princess peach is supposed to abolish the monarchy forever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZKtFfHIGrA
Ughh
DrPlump posted:
I'm not a Marxist. I don't believe that human history is simply a product one group opposing another. Personally, I believe in a more organic system approach, where society is like an organism, struggling to survive and adapt to various external and internal pressures while trying to maximize happiness and pleasure while minimizing pain.
FYI you're describing corporatism, which is typically associated with fascism.
Lightanchor posted:
uh, princess peach is supposed to abolish the monarchy forever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZKtFfHIGrA
Aight fuck it, I'm watching this again. The Last Princess is like textbook liberal ideology.
Sarkeesian's limitations are immediately obvious in the fact the people are completely missing. She conceives of a medieval kingdom with not a single visible peasant. Instead, it's a narrative of individual empowerment: "It's high time she saves herself." "She's gonna be the protagonist of this particular adventure ... leveling up her skills along the way." The narration emphasizes that this is "her kingdom" and "her land", which has been taken from her 'illegally'. There's no clear difference between her kingdom and that of the villains besides this ill-defined legitimacy.
So is she empowering herself to do? The story is implicitly cyclical, with the Last Princess struggling to return to the prelapsarian state of the opening shot - the one where she is an ethnically-ambiguous rich woman chilling in her palace's library. This society is literally stolen from her by an conspiracy of white men, who are presented as obscene intruders that disrupt the harmony and unity of the kingdom. When they are killed, we're told, the Princess just steps down from power because there's no longer any need for... laws? The kingdom enters a state of utopian purity. It's a transparent ideological fantasy. Who does the work?
It's noteworthy that the Last Princess empowers herself through the mechanics of third-person stealth. This gameplay is familiar to anyone who's played Splinter Cell or Hitman, or games of that sort. It's the technologically advanced 'lone assassin' whose extralegal tactics are used to preserve and sustain the existing order. The subtle twist in Sarkeesian's plot is that the princess was never rescued by "a handsome hero" because the hero was part of the conspiracy of white men to hold her back. So, naturally, she becomes the white male protagonist. Sarkeesian fully embraces the logic and politics of Tom Clancy.
The failure of the Last Princess is that it is indistinguishable from liberal 'Girl Power' cartoons of the 1990s. Captain planet sort of shit. Far from opposing the liberal capitalist system, Sarkeesian's ideal game involves protecting it from ill-defined despotic figures who hate our freedom. It's justification to invade Iran.
The Snark posted:
Personally, while the idea behind the game concept is well-meaning, the author (Sarkeesian) reveals their indoctrination by the Misogynist Patriarchy by having the Princess's first act be the theft of a sword (penis)- implying a woman cannot hold power without this instrument.
Everything is misogynist with the power of Imagination! Even interpreting the video as a justification to invade Iran is possible with Imagination!
It's not even subtext. The basic storyline is a quest to defend the liberal multiculture from a despotic patriarchy. It's easy to read the Last Princess as an Obama figure.
As noted earlier, SJWs wish to change the content of games directly in order to prevent you from having to think critically, because they believe you are too poor to think critically.
Your refusal to analyze falls perfectly in line with this SJW logic, and does nothing to oppose them - when even a cursory analysis can and does display their incredible failure in concrete terms.
how me a frog posted:
But isn't a "gate" a scandal of some sort? What is the scandal, what does it mean when someone is pro-gamergate.
It means that they are promoting a narrative where they are not taking sides in a moronic 'controversy', but rather trying to reveal a scandal that is being repressed by unseen agents who control the media (jews).
They are shifting the debate over games' content towards being a debate over whether a debate exists. Fair and balanced. Teach the controversy.
how me a frog posted:
I see, thanks. I still don't really get what the actual scandal or debate is. Depression quest wasn't -that- bad.
It's because, as noted before, Anita Sarkeesian's ideal protagonist is Barack Obama in drag, and this ideology is now gaining traction in what was initially a 'safe space' for white libertarians.
EasternBronze posted:
Isn't it funny that whenever someone complains that maybe we don't need to critically analyze our shooty games there's always one guy that comes out and does a
"well if we can't have critical analysis than we'll have pro-nazi and KKK games that support slavery and than we'll lack the tools to really explain why this is bad"
but than it turns out every example of this is just a tender white dude angry that someone with a southern accent got a voice acting gig or a skyrim "race" with dark skin getting a bonus to strength.
Again, you are buying into the SJW narrative of liberal criticism versus the ignorance of the unwashed.
This thing is a very good example of how both sides have gamergate have no language to talk about class. You have a homeless, mentally ill orphan girl / terrorist / mechanic / movie pimp and SJWs are like "that's racist." They have difficulty understanding or describing a lower-class white character.
Of course, gamers respond by saying this is totally realistic and normal.
What's really going on is that the writer tossed a bunch of dissonant class-signifiers together, to create a bizarre comedy fantasy poor. Probably intended for some transgressive effect, it's really shamefully unfunny: 'random', and toothless. Far from being racist conservative, the writer of Borderlands 2 is just romanticizing poverty.
MariusLecter posted:
i didn't like gone home and cant see why anyone would
but that people think it only got good reviews because of some feminist new world matriarchal order conspiracy is hilarious
Gone Home lacks DLC, microtransactions, grinding, purchasable hats... and as a result, it provides pretty much no fun whatsoever. This fact makes it one of the purest examples of game art. That's not a value judgement; it probably sucks. Gone Home just is art, and gamers don't know what to make of that. Give them Gone Home and they will try to 'speedrun' it. The speedrun takes roughly a minute. The whole concept is alien to them.
This scares the gamers because, like I said, they fear losing their desire. And if they loses their desire because of Gone Home, that's like being forcibly castrated by jew feminists.
The relation between this fear and 'involuntary celibacy' is unmistakable: "If women don't want to have sex with me, that's like being forced into virginity forever."
But there's a deeper fear. In imagining a Gone Home with microtransactions, the gamer reveals a nightmare scenario where Gone Home becomes desirable to purchase. If you simply add grindy combat to Gone Home, you get Bioshock. A mechanic where you can earn 'money' to decorate your virtual home? That's The Sims. Since DLC and microtransactions are the actual source of fun, the gamer would suddenly gain a great deal of pleasure from exploring the diary of a bullied lesbian (or whatever).
greg sexyvibes posted:
You said in a past (and mark say groundbreaking intuitive) breakdown that the fun of games is reading "journalists" own thoughts of a game and whether it's fun is the fun a gamer receives is the fun as games aren't fun or good. So gamers should find fun in this amazing walking simulator because the "brain pieces" deem it fun. But in this breakdown, you assert that gamers don't find it fun, you're contradicting yourself. Gamers never find fun in playing, as games aren't fun, games are boring. So shouldn't gamers be content with being forcibly placed in an uninteresting mansion discovering secrets of rich people simply because the reviewers tell them to?
Games aren't fun, but they are good.
With game reviews, it's important to remember that the text portion - what is referred to as the content - is a supplementary appendix to the numerical score. The popularity of Metacritic (and Rotten Tomatoes) is unambiguous evidence of this fact. Metacritic spares you the burden of actually having to read and interpret the individual reviews. Doing so would quickly reveal the bulk of them to be poorly-written and ill-considered.
Can you picture owning a hardcover collection of internet videogame reviews, so you can just sit back and re-read the best of them - looking for new insights and perspectives? I'd say maybe with actionbutton.net. But with Kotaku or IGN?
Like I said, game reviews function like a laugh track. The 10/10 is just an exclamation, like "great fun!"*
The 10/10 for Gone Home is controversial because it makes absolutely no sense according to the belief that games are fun, and that review scores rank how fun each game is. The 10/10 is suddenly gauging artistry, and it instantly reveals the whole system to be laughably inadequate. Imagine ranking paintings this way.
The 10/10 doesn't represent perfection, but rather the scoring system itself reaching a breaking-point and shutting down. It's functionally indistinguishable from 0/10 - an admission that this score is meaningless. In other words, the solution is not to ignore the reviews but to ignore the numbers, while being be more harshly critical of the reviews than ever before.
*"One is tempted to supplement the fashionable notion of "interactivity," with its shadowy and much more uncanny supplement/double, the notion of "interpassivity." That is to say, it is commonplace to emphasize how, with new electronic media, the passive consumption of a text or a work of art is over: I no longer merely stare at the screen, I increasingly interact with it, entering into a dialogic relationship with it (from choosing the programs, through participating in debates in a Virtual Community, to directly determining the outcome of the plot in so-called "interactive narratives"). Those who praise the democratic potential of new media, generally focus on precisely these features: on how cyberspace opens up the possibility for the large majority of people to break out of the role of the passive observer following the spectacle staged by others, and to participate actively not only in the spectacle, but more and more in establishing the very rules of the spectacle… Is, however, the other side of this interactivity not interpassivity? Is the necessary obverse of my interacting with the object instead of just passively following the show, not the situation in which the object itself takes from me, deprives me of, my own passive reaction of satisfaction (or mourning or laughter), so that is is the object itself which "enjoys the show" instead of me, relieving me of the superego duty to enjoy myself… Do we not witness "interpassivity" in a great number of today's publicity spots or posters which, as it were, passively enjoy the product instead of us ? (Coke cans containing the inscription "Ooh!Ooh! What taste!", emulate in advance the ideal customer's reaction.)"
-Slavoj Zizek, "The Interpassive Subject"
*
Gamergate is now literally about directly begging Intel Corporation for money and moral support.
These are the "cultural marxists" gamers are afraid of. These are the gamers themselves.
These are the "cultural marxists" gamers are afraid of. These are the gamers themselves.
*
E-petitioning corporations is prayer to god.
Intel pulling some ads is a miracle.
Intel pulling some ads is a miracle.
We spoke to him. We spoke as one, through Twitter, and he answered us. And he delivered unto us.
And they wept, and their women wept. And their women were forsaken. Intel pulled the ads from Gamasutra.
And they wept, and their women wept. And their women were forsaken. Intel pulled the ads from Gamasutra.
DrPlump posted:
People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.
"The only way to pass to the Other's world is through what, in our world, appears as the shit exit, as the hole into the dark domain, excluded from our everyday reality, into which excrements disappear."
"The wager of the notion of Truth is that this obscene-unnameable link, secret channel, between worlds is not enough: there is a genuine "universal" Truth that cuts across the multitude of worlds."
-Slavoj Zizek, "Do We Still Live in a World?"
natetimm posted:
If he gets put in jail for talking about this that is a seriously fucked up, egregious violation of his rights and the fact that his ex cooked up a bunch of lies to paint HIM as the abuser is so repulsive I can't believe people still defend her.
This def. corrupts the ethics of videogames advertainment.
*
Normal people care more about their neighbors getting rape threats than they do about some teen dude being gaslit.
kindermord posted:
why? of all 57,291,536,751 twitter rape threats ever made, exactly 0 have ever been carried out. a 12yo in aussie land saying 'oi ya slag gonna give you the ole johnny drop bear back round the station tank, so watch yer cunt, eh' is more silly than serious.
Normal people consider rape to be bad.
natetimm posted:
LOL @ stoking the crazed mob. Better tell all victims to shut up in case they make the internet angry. Being inconvenienced by idiots on the internet is now a good enough reason to strip someone of their rights and imprison them.
Normal people consider 'idiots on the internet' to be bad.
natetimm posted:
So bad people must be silenced and imprisoned for speaking to them.
Correct. Normal people do not consider rape threats to be good, or neutral. They are seen as bad.
Bholder posted:
Hey NERDS! Are you still acting like total NERDS? You should all stop caring about all this NERD thing like the NERDS you are!
You should act like me, a totally cool and not NERD person, and watch cool movies and football, while getting wasted and have sex with women, this is much better than what you NERDS are doing with your shitty video games.
'Gamers are dead.' That phrase is enormously traumatic to gamers. Why?
"For decades, a classic joke has been circulating among Lacanians to exemplify the key role of the Other’s knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a grain of seed but a man; however, when he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back, trembling and very scared — there is a chicken outside the door, and he is afraid it will eat him. “My dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.” “Of course I know,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken?”
-Slavoj Zizek, "The Parallax View." P. 351 (my italics)
In gamergate, 'journalism' fills the role of this chicken. Gamers know that they are alive, obviously, but do the journalists know?That's the terrifying uncertainty. "Gamers are dead" means gamers are dead to the powerful symbolic institution of videogames journalism. It is a source of validation, but it's crumbling.
Games journalists have been, traditionally, a direct conduit to the major corporations that make and sell games. They are given review copies directly, get all the latest press releases... And remember: gamers worship corporate entities as gods in a very sincere way. It is good that gamers no longer believe in games journalism, because it's awful. But instead of accepting that games journalism was never good, they indulge in conspiracy theories about a shadowy cabal (jews) who stole the purity of the institution.
That is why gamers are now communicating directly to the corporation via twitter, skipping the middleman. The priesthood of gaming is 'corrupt':
"A wide scope of phenomena - the resurgent ethico/religious "fundamentalisms" which advocate a return to the Christian or Islamic patriarchal division of sexual roles; the New Age massive re-sexualization of the universe, i.e., the return to pre-modern, pagan, sexualized cosmo-ontology; the growth of "conspiracy theories" as a form of popular "cognitive mapping" - seem to counter the retreat of the big Other. These phenomena cannot be simply dismissed as "regressive," as new modes of "escape from freedom," as unfortunate "remainders of the past" which will disappear if only we continue more resolutely on the deconstructionist path of historicisation of every fixed identity, of unmasking the contingency of every naturalized self-image. Rather, these disturbing phenomena compel us to elaborate the contours of the big Other's retreat: The paradoxical result of this mutation in the "inexistence of the Other" (of the growing collapse of the symbolic efficiency) is precisely the re-emergence of the different facets of a big Other which exists effectively, in the Real, and not merely as symbolic fiction.
The belief in the big Other which exists in the Real is the most succinct definition of paranoia, so that, two features which characterize today's ideological stance - cynical distance and full reliance on paranoiac fantasy - are strictly codependent: today's typical subject, while displaying cynical distrust of any public ideology, indulges without restraint in paranoiac fantasies about conspiracies, threats, and excessive forms of enjoyment of the Other. Distrust of the big Other (the order of symbolic fictions), the subject's refusal to "take it seriously," relies on the belief that there is an "Other of the Other," a secret, invisible, all-powerful agent who effectively "pulls the strings" behind the visible, public Power. This other, obscene, invisible power structure acts the part of the "Other of the Other" in the Lacanian sense, the part of the meta-guarantee of the consistency of the big Other (the symbolic order that regulates social life)."
-Slavoj Zizek, "The Big Other Doesn't Exist"
Of course, this is exactly what we are seeing take place. Gamergate follows perfectly the logic of religious fundamentalism and conspiracy theory - but, as Zizek says, we cannot simply dismiss this paranoid rants about liberal-jew-feminists as merely 'regressive'. It's something that will only get worse as liberal ideology becomes ever-inescapable. The only hope is for gamers to truly accept in their hearts that games have never been, fun - and, accordingly, to accept that games journalism has never been pure.
The purity of games journalism has not been stolen from you. It never existed.
Bholder posted:
Why can't these nerds understand that they just need to stop being nerds, it's such a simple thing to follow and everybody would be happy!
They cannot because it is very scary. It is a matter of fully accepting that God is dead.
That is why we are witnessing the invention of a 'dark God' known as 'the liberal-jew-feminist conspiracy', who can be blamed. This belief is actually extremely comforting, because it's a retreat from the terrifying abyss of existential freedom. It's a way of filling the void.
When gamers are declared dead by liberal bloggers, this does indeed make them dead at the level of their socio-symbolic identity. In other words, the liberal ideology exerts a performative efficiency. It is not merely an interpretation of what gamers are, but an interpretation that determines the very being and social existence of the interpreted subjects.
Instead of furiously denying it, gamers must understand that they really are dead.
Instead of furiously denying it, gamers must understand that they really are dead.
*
When gamers are declared dead by liberal bloggers, this does indeed make them dead at the level of their socio-symbolic identity. In other words, the liberal ideology exerts a performative efficiency. It is not merely an interpretation of what gamers are, but an interpretation that determines the very being and social existence of the interpreted subjects.
Instead of furiously denying it, gamers must understand that they really are dead.
Instead of furiously denying it, gamers must understand that they really are dead.
Nebulon Gate posted:
Yeah because shaming people and calling them no better than rapists who clearly hate and want to oppress women at all costs is nothing like censorship.
No-one can or will take breasts from you. Erection is possible.
*
Gamers' obsessive focus on "censorship" should be taken seriously, though in the sense that they really do feel deprived of a voice.
Recall how natetimm, in his meltdown a few pages back, repeated incessantly that zoey guinn (in collusion with the American justice system and liberal feminists) is trying to "silence" and "muzzle" male victims of abuse (by attacking gamergate and 4chan).
Recall how natetimm, in his meltdown a few pages back, repeated incessantly that zoey guinn (in collusion with the American justice system and liberal feminists) is trying to "silence" and "muzzle" male victims of abuse (by attacking gamergate and 4chan).
natetimm posted:
put in jail for talking
silence an abuse victim
oppress and muzzle
tell all victims to shut up ... and imprison them.
silenced and imprisoned for speaking
in prison for daring to speak out
silencing the folks
in jail for speaking out
muzzled and jailed for telling your story
Is posting about your experiences on the internet assault now?
using media to tell his story and people are reacting
telling your story ... is worthy of going to jail
survivors aren't allowed to tell their stories
speaks about it = attention whore
muzzling
banned him from speaking
people unjustly trying to silence him
he's effectively been neutralized. His voice has been silenced
silence their own victim
to silence, censor and muzzle
Again, this Men's Rights rhetoric follows exactly the logic of conspiracy theory. When we lose faith in the institution - when the legal system fails - it is because some entity (the feminist jew) is disrupting the balance of society, stealing freedom and harmony from us. Hence, Zoey Guinn is stealing our freedom.
It's technically accurate when gamers say "this isn't about zoey and enron". Enron is just a way for natetimm to externalize his own feelings of being ignored.
Nebulon Gate posted:
You're aware [jews] are currently claiming Intel is on the gamergate side and are thus rape apologists and support harassment against women, right? Like, this is actually happening.
Also "mah toys" thing is getting a little old, Mr. [Jew]. No one cares that shitty games like Gone Home are going to be made, or that boob armour is going away. They care because it's being done due to [jews] whinging on social media 24 hours straight until the publishers and developers relent and prostrate themselves to the altar of [jews].
Why are 'feminists' (jews) the bad guy and not the major corporations?
*
Gamers' fear of censorship is directly analogous to incel.
"If women don't wants to have sex with me, it's like they are physically castrating me."
"If women don't want to listen to me, it's like they are physically muzzling me."
"If women don't wants to have sex with me, it's like they are physically castrating me."
"If women don't want to listen to me, it's like they are physically muzzling me."
Nebulon Gate posted:
Becuase they're the force of shame-based change? Do you really not understand why people find this unpalateable? It really is hugely because of the naming and shaming based contingent.
Since when do corporations experience shame?
burritolingus posted:
It's not "they don't want to listen to me" but "they got me fired for disagreeing with them."
There's really not much difference between saying "you can't say that" and "you can say that, but we'll take away your livelihood if you do."
The companies' decisions are based on maximizing profitability. You are attributing human agency to what are ultimately market forces.
The Snark posted:
Not exactly. The Corporation itself is nothing. It's a legal construct without will, without emotions or shame. It has people in it, but when those people don't take responsibility for the actions of the corporation or rationalize it as 'all is fair in war and profiting' you get a massive fucking monster.
The capitalist system is deleterious to human existence. It cannot be reformed or purified. You will never be ten years old again.
circ dick soleil posted:
There are SJWs on both sides.
Remember, e-petitions on twitter function as prayer to corporations.
The extremely vocal objection to 'censorship' (the fear that gamers will be fired for misandrist speech), is exactly this type of prayer: "Please, tolerate me! Please let me keep my rights! Please let me stay free!"
Gamers are gradually realizing that the invisible hand is does not have their best interests at heart, and they are reacting... poorly.
This plea to the corporate gods for tolerance is, of course, indistinguishable from the logic of the SJWs. Far from objecting to liberalism, gamers are pleading for it - like pleading for a white history month so that they can receive the benefits of multiculturalism. Although they are superficially against multiculturalism, these groups are actually complaining that liberal multiculturalism isn't multicultural enough.
Mister Fister posted:
Why the lets say? She's an awful person, full stop. As a progressive myself, i'm more fixated on SJW's than anything else. It's a larger issue of SJW's not holding themselves to any sort of standard and acting in really awful ways that repel normal people.
Bourgeois liberals repelling 'normal people' is a good and correct thing to have happen.
natetimm posted:
I read a book one time and it taught me some words and I'll be damned if I don't shoehorn them into anything I ever post on the internet.
Which book was it?
*
It's not about zoey quinn; it's about the hundreds upon thousands of men being manipulated by zoey quinn.
murphyslaw posted:
Phrased that way you make it sound like she's darth vader or sauron or something and that's hilarious because there probably are some people out there who legit think that.
The 'corruption' gamers are fighting is purely defined as 'how zoey got away with it'.
NPR, the trial judge, games journalists, the American legal system, feminists, universities, 'white knights'... all these entities failed to stop zoey's insane rampage through the hearts of men.
That's the corruption.
Gamers can honestly say 'it's not about zoey' because they literally believe that there are millions of zoeys out there, with absolutely nothing to stop them. Zoey herself is just the first of legions.
*
I believe in knowing your enemy. I am nothing if not fair, and understanding.
Gamers are fundamentally trying to explain big, scary questions like why bad things happen to good people. That's why their movement mimics religious fundamentalism.
You look at Depression Quest and it's obviously absolutely no fun, but it's not a good example of games-as-art either. How can this bad thing end up on Steam? How could someone call it an "indie darling"? Then the maker abused a sad nerd, and she got money, and she got a news story about her, and she loves the attention and and and
How can so many bad things happen? To a gamer, the only way to explain it is to imagine a jewish conspiracy.
DrPlump posted:
Compounding the problem is the widespread belief that, despite all the evidence, exposure to media has no real world impact. While it may be comforting to think we all have a personal force field protecting us from outside influences, this is simply not the case. Scholars sometimes refer to this type of denial as the “third person effect”, which is the tendency for people to believe that they are personally immune to media’s effects even if others may be influenced or manipulated. Paradoxically and somewhat ironically, those who most strongly believe that media is just harmless entertainment are also the ones most likely to uncritically internalize harmful media messages.
In short, the more you think you cannot be affected, the more likely you are to be affected.
The motto of this website is "The Internet Makes You Stupid."
Awareness of the effects of media is the purpose of Something Awful Dot Com.
Nebulon Gate posted:
That and that there's a cabal of SJW writers who all protect each other's asses and that feminists get really, really upset that there's titties and asses and video games.
Oh nooo
Oh nooo
This is terrible
Nebulon Gate posted:
When they're all talking about how they have to protect Zoe and shit and that 12 articles with the same theme are released within an hour of each other, it's fucking suspcious bro.
It doesn't matter if there is a conspiracy in reality or not. Paranoia is in how you yourself think.
In the classic example: a man can be paranoid that his wife is cheating on him, even if the wife actually is cheating. He might start obsessively documenting her activities, going on about a conspiracy by wives to cheat on their husbands, etc.
Kyrie eleison posted:
explain to me why it is bad if it is uncovering an actual conspiracy
Because it's not a healthy reaction to things outside your control.
Kyrie eleison posted:
accurate suspicion of conspiracy is not a healthy reaction? it's more healthy to, what, be unaware of the conspiracy and suspect the conspiracy does not exist? and presumably to decry those who say there is a conspiracy as unhealthy?
also, in the case you provided -- the cheating wife, what makes it out of their control? can't they break up with them and hold them to account publicly?
Paranoid reaction: someone stole he fun from videogames! This dark god out there, and I can see his movements!
Healthy reaction: games are not, and have never been, fun. God is dead.
Kyrie eleison posted:
one of the examples you gave of 'paranoid' behaviors was 'obsessively documenting their activities', how does this differ from investigation? is it the obsessive part? like, if you care deeply about finding evidence of the conspiracy, is it that you care that's the problem? is it ok so long as you relax with some hobbies?
"The belief in the big Other which exists in the Real is the most succint definition of paranoia, so that, two features which characterize today's ideological stance cynical distance and full reliance on paranoiac fantasy are strictly codependent: today's typical subject, while displaying cynical distrust of any public ideology, indulges without restraint in paranoiac fantasies about conspiracies, threats, and excessive forms of enjoyment of the Other. Distrust of the big Other (the order of symbolic fictions), the subject's refusal to "take it seriously," relies on the belief that there is an "Other of the Other," a secret, invisible, all-powerful agent who effectively "pulls the strings" behind the visible, public Power. This other, obscene, invisible power structure acts the part of the "Other of the Other" in the Lacanian sense, the part of the meta-guarantee of the consistency of the big Other (the symbolic order that regulates social life)."
-Slavoj Zizek, "The Big Other Doesn't Exist"
In order to not be paranoid, you need to just not do this. Accept that the Big Other doesn't exist, and there is no Other of the Other to blame for its disappearance. Liberal feminists did not steal your fun. They do not have your excess enjoyment, because it never existed. It was a fantasy of impossible fulfillment.
In this specific instance, when you remove the paranoia, you are left with a handful of normal people (albeit liberals) who consider threats of rape to be bad.
Remember: normal people consider the threat of rape to be worse than the actions of Zoey Quinn, a single dumpy woman with borderline personality disorder.
These liberals thought that a meme against hatred would help, so they used the clickbait tactics available to them to create one. They didn't think too hard because they are just videogame bloggers.
Kyrie eleison posted:
you are incapable of owning up to anything, which makes you bad at debate
I answered your question.
Paranoia is your brain failing to handle the big questions, like why bad things happen to good people.
When your faith in God (or the law, or games journalism...) fails you, it is easier to believe that a dark god is tricking you than to accept that there is no God. It's just a bunch of humans.
Once you accept this in your heart, you are ready to embrace Christ.
slowbeef posted:
Did you see the CNN article posted?
Most of the media is only taking away "manbaby gamers are mad and acting like dicks to women" - they're not interested in "SJW" because no one who doesn't spend 90% of their time online even knows what that is. But they do know "video games are for kids" and the outside perception of GamerGate really folds well into that.
This is because, as noted before, normal people are more concerned about their neighbors getting rape threats than they are about liberal bias in videogames advertainment.
(I am still kinda baffled that this is something that needs to be explained.)
They are not a real threat, in exactly the same way 'welfare queens' are not a real threat. Is there at least one person abusing the welfare system? Of course there is. They're real and they're totally unimportant. If you're really set on fixing the welfare system, the solution is not to start a race war.
Neurolimal posted:
i think that mainly has to do with the fact that most news outlets dont care, and that any sort of justice4eron movement has been coopted by crazy gamers
Gamers seriously believe that a dude's loopy girlfriend threatening to kill herself should be international news.
*
When people say that videogames cause/promote violence, they are 'dumbing down' the concept of ideology for you.
The reduction of 'violence' to merely gun crime statistics is itself an ideological obfuscation - downplaying or ignoring systemic violence. (The violence inherent to the smooth functioning of an oppressive system.)
The basic belief that games are fun is an ideological fantasy that has already led to much violence. Gamers and SJWs, in their pursuit of impossible fulfillment, are both fighting to preserve and strengthen the capitalist system.
That was the basic message of 'Gamers Are Dead': "you are too 'intolerant', so you do not belong in our liberal-multicultural consumer paradise. You are unclean." And as I'd pointed out earlier, Sarkeesian's The Last Princess unwittingly provides that same ideological justification for an invasion of Iran.
That's violence - even though, unfortunately, no gamer has yet been killed.
woo
Mister Fister posted:
Can someone just pay for Neurolimal to have a Baghdad Bob AV at this point?
Hey quick question because this thread is long and I haven't read your posts carefully.
Being as specific as possible: what causes the corruption in videogames journalism, and how can we fix it?
Mister Fister posted:
I honestly don't give a shit, i just like making fun of SJW's.
Then why did you write this>
Mister Fister posted:
Don't be naive into thinking other devs or journalists aren't blacklisted or pressured either, it's a very small community centered on a few cities around the globe. It should be apparently obvious that it's a problem when Zoe Quinn (and her friends like Maya Kramer/legobutts and her indie gaming PR firm) acts as the gatekeeper and arbiter of who should and shouldn't be allowed to operate in an industry, you have a fucking problem. Just a few tweets by Zoe (and Maya doxxing the TFYC guy) fucked them over and they were trying to HELP women.
I have a theory about that last part though. You'll notice that although there are very few women in games journalism or games development, Zoe and Maya wield a disproportionate amount of power in the industry. If more women became prominent, they wouldn't have as much power and maybe Zoe's Patreon account would be empty (holy fuck she just broke $3000 a month doing jack shit)
Because it seems like the answer there would be "Zoe Quinn" and "taking power from Zoe Quinn."
natetimm posted:
I cannot wait to see the gaming highlights of all the non-capitalist societies. Capitalism as a whipping boy exists for pseudo-intellectuals to champion an even worse and more endemically poisonous form of governance rightly atrophied to academic debate and speculation.
Gamers cannot imagine videogames without capitalism. In some cases, they cannot imagine arousal without capitalism.
natetimm posted:
More actual violence than all death and rape threats combined.
'The needle' was, by all appearances, some guy acting on his own. Gamergate is a targeted campaign by a vocally reactionary antifeminist group.
Normal people consider the threat of rape to be bad. 'The needle' does not threaten anyone, besides the guy who got it.
natetimm posted:
It was being talked about in that context. You were there. The attempt to make gamergate about capitalism is just more attempts by 1-trick ponies to make everything about their issue.
You can still experience videogames without capitalism - but, without capitalism, you will be free of the SJWs.
It's not just our issue. It's yours.
natetimm posted:
I'd take capitalism with their dumb asses over whatever Communist dystopia every idiot with a polisci degree wants to be philosopher king over.
You cannot defeat the SJWs because they are a product of global capitalism.
"Of course from time to time, [Judith Butler] pays lip service to some kind of anticapitalism, but it’s totally abstract, what it’s basically saying is just how lesbians and other oppressed sexual minorities should perceive their situation not as the assertion of some kind of substantial sexual identity, but as constructing an identity which is contingent, which means that also the so-called straight normal sexuality is contingent, and everybody is constructed in a contingent way, and so on, and in this way, nobody should be excluded. There is no big line between normality identity and multiple roles. The problem I see here is that there is nothing inherently anticapitalist in this logic. But even worse is that what this kind of politically correct struggling for tolerance and so on advocates is basically not only not in conflict with the modern tendencies of global capitalism, but it fits perfectly. What I think is that today’s capitalism thrives on differences. I mean even naïve positivist psychologists propose to describe today’s subjectivity in terms like multiple subject, fixed-identity subject, a subject who constantly reinvents itself, and so on. So my big problem with this is the painting of the enemy as some kind of self-identified stable substantial patriarch to which these multiple identities and constant reinventing should be opposed. I think that this is a false problem; I am not impressed by this problem. I think that this is a certain logic, totally within the framework of today’s capitalism, where again, capitalism, in order to reproduce itself, to function in today’s condition of consumption society, the crazy dynamics of the market, no longer needs or can function with the traditional fixed patriarchal subject. It needs a subject constantly reinventing himself."
-Slavoj Zizek
natetimm posted:
Nobody was complaining in force about any of this until the journos outed themselves as a bunch of pretentious, tumblr-brainwashed fucks who openly disdained their own audience. Nobody is saying it should be against the law for them to write these articles. The question is whether advertiser dollars, largely generated by the audience these writers openly hate, should be used to sustain that type of vitriol and shallow identity politics. It's up for each advertiser to decide and it's every person's right to weigh in with their opinion. If that means the ads get pulled and the money dries up, TOO FUCKING BAD. They shit the bed and alienated the group of people that were paying their bills. Go write for some SJW rag and farm indignant clicks there. It's not unreasonable for the target audience of media to demand media that doesn't treat them like shit or something is wrong with them simply for liking something.
This is fascinating.
You feel that because you read the website (and thus contribute to ad revenue) you are paying to read it. So, instead of just clicking the x in the corner, or turning the computer off, you are doing a different... thing. Essentially, you're declaring the website your property (or some kind of paid service) and demanding that these people serve you more diligently.
It's like an idiot version of supply and demand, where you walk into a mattress warehouse and demand a bowl of soup.
Under this logic, if I were to click every ad on SA, I would quickly supplant Lowtax and be able to dictate content.
natetimm posted:
Nobody was complaining in force about any of this until the journos outed themselves as a bunch of pretentious, tumblr-brainwashed fucks who openly disdained their own audience. Nobody is saying it should be against the law for them to write these articles. The question is whether advertiser dollars, largely generated by the audience these writers openly hate, should be used to sustain that type of vitriol and shallow identity politics. It's up for each advertiser to decide and it's every person's right to weigh in with their opinion. If that means the ads get pulled and the money dries up, TOO FUCKING BAD. They shit the bed and alienated the group of people that were paying their bills. Go write for some SJW rag and farm indignant clicks there. It's not unreasonable for the target audience of media to demand media that doesn't treat them like shit or something is wrong with them simply for liking something.
natetimm posted:
I'm talking about when I buy the products being shilled in the ads, I'm giving the company money. Meaning if I'm supporting a company who I believe is doing harm to society by supporting a mouthpiece or cause I can make my displeasure known. So can other people. Then it's up to them to weigh the pros and cons of maintaining that arrangement.
Ok, I'm seriously trying to parse your logic here.
You go to Kotaku.com, and click on all the ads, and buy an XBox One. Then you find out that Microsoft (creator of the XBox One) is doing harm to society with these Kotaku ads. You've decided Kotaku is harmful, and Microsoft is paying Kotaku to host the ads you click. So you tell Microsoft (who were harming society) that you will pay them more money if they harm Kotaku.com.
Although both are harming society, you are giving money to Microsoft (and not to Kotaku.com) because Microsoft (creator of the XBox One) doesn't openly disdain you.
In fact, you were okay with Kotaku.com, so long as they didn't openly disdain you either. And you will continue reading Kotaku.com, while complaining to Microsoft, until the disdainful writers move to another (non-gaming) website. The writers can disdain you at this new website, but you don't click the ads there, so you do not feel entitled to pay Microsoft to force them to stop.
Right?
Shitty Wizard posted:
I don't see how that's an issue, if they're being assholes you can choose to not give them money/patronage for that reason. Loads of people didn't give Phil Fish a penny because he's an unstable jackass.
Normal people go to a website to read an article. The ads are perceived, by a normal person, as a nuisance in the way of the article.
Natetimm is treating the article as a nuisance in the way of the direct connection between him and the advertiser. He and the advertiser can 'team up' in a mutually beneficial arrangement to punish 'harmful' speech. With the 'harmful' writers out of the way, the advertiser can directly supply natetimm with 'harmless' speech (in exchange for cash).
natetimm posted:
No I'm talking about when I buy the products being shilled in the ads, I'm giving the company money. Meaning if I'm supporting a company who I believe is doing harm to society by supporting a mouthpiece or cause I can make my displeasure known. So can other people. Then it's up to them to weigh the pros and cons of maintaining that arrangement.
I'm still laughing at this motherfucker. Like "me and Nintendo? Yeah, we've got an arrangement."
natetimm posted:
No I'm talking about when I buy the products being shilled in the ads, I'm giving the company money. Meaning if I'm supporting a company who I believe is doing harm to society[/b] by supporting a mouthpiece or cause I can make my displeasure known. So can other people. Then it's up to them to weigh the pros and cons of maintaining that arrangement.
I'm supporting the company.
I'm giving the company money.
Society is harmed by the company.
It's up to the company.
I buy the products being shilled in the ads.
The Snark posted:
As long as people keep following the direction of idiots like Leigh and keep deluding themselves into believing everyone who disagrees with them is an irredeemable monster- several such people in this thread alone- there is no telling when this train wreck will skid to a stop!
So as long as Leigh Alexander believes them to be irredeemable, gamers will continue to behave monstrously?
That means they're just ceding control of their identities. "You think we're idiots? Well we'll show you how stupid we truly are! Bluhhh. Pooo."
In actuality, gamers are redeemable monsters. They're the ones who understand that something is wrong, and are a hair's width away from attacking the real problem, which is capitalism (meaning not the jews). Currently, it's the old saying that 'the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.' Natetimm is going on a mad rant in support of liberal corporations that take his money and do whatever they want with it. He's mad at something, but he's confused as to what that something is.
Natetimm is obviously very unhappy because, as he says:
natetimm posted:
SJWs openly disdained me.
SJWs openly hated me.
SJWs shit the bed and alienated me.
SJWs treated me like shit.
SJWs treated me like something is wrong me.
Those are just the complaints from one post - and I left a few out! When we understand that these SJWs (jews) don't actually exist - that they are just the fantasy figures of conspiracy theory, vaguely inspired by real people - you're left with this:
natetimm posted:
I feel disdained.
I feel hated.
I feel alienated.
I feel like shit.
I feel like something is wrong me.
And this is really sad, you know? Something is obviously wrong with this dude, and it's not caused by the jews. It's not caused by anybody.
It's time to take control of your life, even if it's more comfortable to give it over to companies in exchange for fun. Games are not, and have never been, fun. The invisible hand does not have your best interests at heart. Embrace Christ.
Ableist Kinkshamer posted:
That is who self-identified gamers are, though. Gaming as a medium doesn't need them anymore, so they've decided to go kicking and screaming into irrelevance with gamergate just like fundies tried with the war on Christmas.
War On Christmas is a good analogy, because corporations really are anti-christian - going against the teachings of Christ in any number of ways. People were then misled into thinking that they could petition them to become Christian Corporations.
This is, again, essentially prayer to the corporations. "If Walmart stops saying 'holiday', then they are on my side. What a powerful ally to have in Christ!"
That's paganism. When you have a 'console war', that's polytheism.
Fire Barrel posted:
I think GamerGate illustrates some trends that have been growing with the expanded role of social media/internet in shaping discourse. On either side of the "debate" the major voices heard are extremists that seemingly lack the ability to see complex arguments or make compromises (It's less debate and more shouting match). Their respective worldviews are black and white, with anything other than capitulation and acceptance taken as an attack or dissent. Both sides use labels to pigeonhole dissenters and both seek to deflect all criticism with their respective social causes they claim to champion. Also, each side has many people among their ranks that seem to be lacking in self-awareness. (The fact that some people, particularly among the gamers, can't understand the difference between criticism/harassment is a sad example of this)
These trends can be seen in relation to many of the social justice hashtags and you'll see that many of the most vocal people, for or against, tend to skew towards an extreme, and are similarly unwilling to accept anything less than full agreement with their stance (the #cancelcolbert tag and various ones associated with the Israeli occupation both come to mind). I think the immediacy of social media, and instant feedback in the form of likes, helps encourage this behavior.
That being said, gamer culture, and most nerd culture, is often pretty toxic and regressive for many reasons, though especially for the prevalence of weirdly out of touch social justice views. (other issues cause nerd cultures to be pretty bad too, but this thread is mainly about one facet of that)
Also, most people that are afraid of/hateful towards feminism/gender equality are idiots that don't really understand what either mean.
“Say we’ve got some guy - pre-Internet, before any of this. He really likes parrots, okay? I mean, more than any of us; he loves parrots. But he doesn’t like them in a good way. He likes to take parrots, and dip them in caramel, and shove them up his ass. He’s kind of by himself, he’s all alone. He’s just sitting around doing his thing.
Then he gets the internet. Then he starts doing searches and he finds, well, other people like shoving parrots up their ass too. ‘This is great! There are other people like me!’ And soon they start talking, they find more people, and it grows. And it grows larger and larger and larger and larger. Soon they have a website, soon they have The Parrot Ass Fanclub. Soon they have Parrot Ass mailing lists, and it just keeps going on and on like this because, having these little groups, it validates whatever they’re thinking. And it can be pretty much anything. That’s one of the benefits and drawbacks of the internet: it’s that no matter what you think, no matter who you are, you can find a group that agrees with whatever you think.”
-Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, "Enabling the Online Community ", October 2005
“We all know how Lacan reversed Dostoyevsky by saying "If God does not exist, everything is prohibited," not ''everything is permitted." I think this is perfectly epitomized by today's society of consumption. If God in the traditional sense as a universal model does not exist, then everything is allowed. You can get whatever you want but with the substance removed: coffee without caffeine, cigarettes without nicotine.
I like the dirty story that was in all the magazines about Richard Gere. This widely known scandal, for me, is the ultimate example of all this. This is the story: Gere was hospitalized because he realized — with one of the latest practices in Hollywood, the latest in sexual perversion — the fantasy of Freud's Rat Man. You take a gerbil — not a rat but a gerbil — and a vet cuts off its teeth and nails. You put it in a bag, you attach a piece of string to its tail, and you put it in your anus. The animal suffocates of course and this is "it": the pleasure. Finally it is up to you to pull the dead animal out. The problem with Richard Gere, allegedly, was that he pulled it out too quickly and was left only with the tail; the dead animal remained inside.
It's the same paradox: the Rat Man fantasy, you get it, but without claws, without teeth, it is all cut off by a veterinarian. For me this is the ultimate of this same logic. Nothing is prohibited you can even realize the Rat Man fantasy but in a reduced version: the vet takes care of it, cuts off the claws, etc.
Again what is crucial here is the contemporary computer with its universal dimension — a kind of a Spinozist machine.”
-Slavoj Zizek, “Hidden Prohibitions and the Pleasure Principle”, Flash Art, April 1992.
orangesampson posted:
When you kill the first goomba by stepping on it, you are allowing genocide.
The question to ask, when playing Mario, is why the vast majority of the mushroom kingdom's population is made up of these brown dudes and turtles. They're wandering around outside while the white dudes are chilling in their spacious houses.
The kidnapping of Peach is really like a Marie Antoinette situation.
InsanityIsCrazy posted:
One day, the Koopa, a tribe of large turtles capable of using powerful magic, invaded the peaceful kingdom of the Mushroom People. They used their magic to transform all the Mushroom People into things like rocks, bricks, and horsetail plants, thus causing the Mushroom Kingdom’s downfall. The only one who can lift the spell on the Mushroom People and bring them back to life is the Mushroom Kingdom’s Princess Peach. She is currently in the clutches of Great Demon King Koopa. Mario has stepped up to defeat the Turtle Tribe, save Princess Peach, and restore peace to the Mushroom Kingdom.
The Mario inside the TV is you. Only you can bring this adventure quest (expedition) to a conclusion.
"The safe Sphere in which Americans live is experienced as under threat from the Outside of terrorist attackers who are ruthlessly self-sacrificing AND cowards, cunningly intelligent AND primitive barbarians. ...
Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and peace of the 'civilized' West was bought by the export of ruthless violence and destruction to the "barbarian" Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Congo."
-Slavoj Zizek
DrPlump posted:
At this point I am not even sure what I belive or if I belive it ironically or unironically. When something I post gets a reaction it just feels like the other person is faking it. People can't really be that mad about Internet in this day and she can they?
To an outside observer, unless you're bad at it, there is no difference between irony and sincerity.
If you heil Hitler all day in public and then say "heh, in my private life I'm really smart and I don't like Hitler at all," that public nazi idiot persona is your true self. That's the one that people interact with, and that's what defines you. Your 'deep, inner feelings' aren't important at all. Your being is a socio-symbolic being.
One common opinion that keeps popping up is that rape threats on the internet are totally normal and acceptable because "it's just the internet, and the internet isn't real life. I'm not a rapist in real life." That's the same belief: that your public behavior isn't real, your interactions with other people aren't real... you can behave however you like, so long as you don't really believe it.
The byproduct of this 'unlimited freedom' is that you are now completely cut off from the world and even from your own identity. You live a safe space inside your head.
This is why gamers are fighting to say 'nigger' over xbox live.
natetimm posted:
All jokes are now serious because a bunch of perpetually offended idiots say so.
The inability or refusal to joke seriously is the mark of a coward.
Uncle Wemus posted:
Neuro do you believe that Leigh Alexander has done a good job of trying to turn enemies into allies by calling them fat loser neckbeard virgins
I'll field this one. Leigh's summary is fully accurate. The gamers are interpreted as such under liberal ideology, and this interpretation has a performative efficiency.
Saying 'oh no they're really good people at heart; look at their lovely culture with their colourful clothing and dances' - that's a way of decaffeinating the Other. The reality is that gamers are really awful people who are nonetheless not a real threat and ultimately redeemable. Their greivances are legitimate in the sense - and only in the sense - that they understand that society is fucked up, and that they are powerless. There's this nascent awareness of class disparity.
Realizing that games are not, and have never been, fun is scary because it reveals that you can spend your whole life pursuing something that never existed. Having unlimited access to videogames doesn't make you happy. Quite the opposite: it makes you miserable.
So they're looking for someone to blame, and what better symbol for how they feel than a sexless, sadbrained nerdlinger being bullied by a purple-haired tumblr gal with BPD. Zoe Quinn perfectly encapsulates the traits of 'the jew'. And to make thing even more potent, Eron pretty much literally cried out to every nerd website, saying "help me my internet brothers" - and had his crazed, desperate manifesto shut down by the mods.
To the people who believe that jews are responsible for the theft of society, this was the ultimate betrayal. That's the rallying point: it's no longer "we are Anonymous." It's "we are Eron." The image of him being screamed at by his purple-haired, lip-pierced abuser is gamers' vision of a boot stamping on a human face forever.
It's no coincidence that gamers are disproportionately libertarians who believe in the technocapitalist singularity in a very wholehearted way. My favorite part of this thread was when one dude sincerely argued that we need capitalism in order to usher in the post-scarcity utopia of Star Trek. What is that if not the ultimate videogame? Holodecks. Another dude condemned anticapitalist movements for their failure to produce videogames. It's holodecks.
natetimm posted:
Yes, truly nobody who has ever played a game has had fun. Please, feel free to speak for everyone.
The fun that you had did not come from videogames.
Gamers are living a King Midas situation. They desired videogames. Now everything they touch turns to videogames.
Danger Mahoney posted:
"look at all these woman objects, using the exact skeletons and ai as the male objects! you cant help but molest them in the exact ways you can molest all the male objects, it was clearly designed this way by the jew whoops i mean men"
Women are of a lower class in reality.
A game that presents everyone as exactly equal is presenting a distorted view of reality.
*
In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, your character is given a chainsaw, with explicit references to American Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (on top of the usual Scarface, and so-on).
Games can be, but generally are not, read as art. The first step to making games art is to understand that the world of GTA is bad, the player character is bad, and the makers of GTA are making fun of you. You are an American Psycho. It's a Patrick Bateman simulator, conducive to being read as satire.
When you are encouraged to throw a woman on front of a train, it's the same thing. It's a reference to The Perils Of Pauline, and you are playing the bad guy. The fact that you are allowed to get away with it is a cynical, nihilistic statement: "this isn't like some old-timey serial. You can kill a helpless woman, and no good guy will intervene. Isn't that brutal? The world is shit."
And that's juvenile.
The most transgressive thing you can do in GTA - the way to truly beat the game - is this: obey all the traffic signals, and don't harm anyone. The game breaks down instantly - because, for all your freedom to smash cars, many options are expressly forbidden.
memy posted:
Nah, this ain't hard. It's also pointless but I don't think you care
It has nothing to do with difficulty - although it's extremely difficult to accomplish anything under those limitations. It just means that you've solved the puzzle.
GTA is set up so that you are actually extremely limited as to what you can do. For example: you cannot die.
The debate around whether videogames cause violence is really, really stupid.
Al Cowens posted:
Seriously is there any way you can not like a person
There's a lot of "Am I permitted? Am I permitted? Am I permitted? Am I permitted? Am I permitted? Am I permitted?"
The answer is yes. Yes, you are.
*
It does not matter if videogames cause violence.
If they do, I'm glad. Art should cause violence.
*
Eustachy posted:
Are video games any more specifically sexist than every single other iota of pop culture
According to my research, there is no #bookergate (watergate for bookers (book-purchase enthusiasts (ppl worried about lib-jew-fem corruption in books journalism))).
City of Tampa posted:
Bioshock Infinite (a game about chainsawing the necks of 10000 cops) has triggered me by removing the female character from the cover.
Context. Bioshock Infinite has you chainsaw 10000 cops in the neck AND removed the main female character from the cover.
That is 'stupid'. It's not a moral panic or censorship. It's art that is bad.
SybilVimes posted:
Look, we get it, you don't like games, go JO to Huey Lewis or whatever it is you do.
You do not get it, because I did not say that at all.
I said that games are good, not that they are bad.
*
Someone said the characters in Hitman are badly written.
Normal reaction: "Actually, here's why they're good."
This thread reaction: "So I'm not allowed to like it? I'm not allowed? I'm not allowed?!"
Tezzor posted:
i can't believe here in the year of our lord 2014 on this very webforum there is a guy who honestly made the "but you lose 100 points for hilarious naked slut murder!" argument.
Tezz, the content of videogames is totally irrelevant. You've fallen into a dumb trap.
President Ark posted:
goons are huge babies who can't stand the thought that someone dislikes something they like and will automatically react to this by saying WAIT NO I DON'T ACTUALLY LIKE IT instead of the sane thing which is either a) disagreeing with them or b) not giving a shit and getting on with their lives
news at 11
This goes back to the point that, rather than being against games journalists, gamers are actually entirely invested in what they have to say.
If Hitman gets an unprecedented 6/10 for writing, then gamers actually believe that they are not allowed to like the game. They (jews) have taken the fun, and they (jews) are not allowing me to have it. If games are actually fun, this obviously wouldn't happen.
The secret is that games are not, and have never been, fun. If you want hitman to be good, you need to read it as art. That's not even difficult, but it is scary.
Tezzor posted:
imagine the outrage from gamers.
That's the dumb trap. You are not actually worried about the content of games. Rather, you are worried about the inaccessible inner feelings of gamers. You are getting worked up imagining their outrage, and that betrays a lack of self-confidence.
Thug Lessons posted:
I was outraged that yuo can't kill half the NPCs in Skyrim because it was a dumbass design decision, not being able to kill innocents in Hitman would be too. Ofc the game actively discourages you from doing so, so it's actually one of the best examples when you compare it with GTA where you can nuke the police station and no one cares.
As in GTA, the laughably small penalty for murdering innocent people for no reason is 'the joke'.
Here's how to shut up Tezzor:
Hitman is a Blade Runner narrative. In the first game, you play a cloned slave assassin who ultimately tracks down and murders his father/creator. The player character is a combination of Rick Deckard and Roy Batty.
If you've seen Blade Runner, you know that half the replicants are strippers and prostitutes. That is a deliberate point about how women - especially women in the sex industry - are treated as less than human.
Koos Goop posted:
Have you played Dance Dance Revolution? It's fun due to the exhilaration of dancing, and feeling the groove.
Dancing is fun.
RAGE HOLE posted:
You don't have to follow her. You don't have to agree with her or even like her. But when a huge mob is kicking downward on her for something patently stupid, the world is not made a better place by you jumping in to say "and another thing!" People in this thread, including you, keep latching onto the strawman that she is out to ban bad things from video games, and that if anybody gives any merit to any social criticism of games it will lead to otherkin transethnic demibois replacing men and women characters; and that if you would like more respectable women in videogames at all then you will never be satisfied. You are being part of the problem.
People have been so whipped by liberalism that they will argue for pages and pages about how reading is bullshit, instead of just reading better.
I gave a more detailed interpretation of Hitman as art, in like five sentences, than anyone has in the history of videogames journalism.
Thug Lessons posted:
I only played Blood Money and the penalty was pretty severe there.
Ideally, unjust murder should result in having your save wiped.
Thug Lessons posted:
That would be fucked up and stupid from every possible perspective.
Fucked up and funny, actually.
*
Congrats Tezzor for ruining the thread by actually embracing the false conflict between women and poors.
01011001 posted:
why would that be ideal
Gamers tend to fetishize a 'realism' that comes from 'graphics.' You can see the narrative where this new game (or console or video-card) has the best graphics yet, until the next one. We are 'progressing' towards 'total realism'.
As you might guess, though, that doesn't actually happen, because games also generally strive to offer complete freedom. You can do a lot of things in GTA, but you are not allowed to die. That's the curse of a vampire: you're not allowed to die.
You quickly learn in GTA that you can just start killing people to increase your star level. Doing so sends in cops, helicopters and - eventually - the army. If you escape, the city heals itself. If you die, the city heals itself instantly. That's about the point where the game becomes unplayably dull. You can't do anything, and the graphics can't cover that up.
The simplest solution is to allow the players to die. The more advanced solution is to allow the city to die. The most advanced solution is to make rescuing the city the more desirable outcome.
Tezzor posted:
thanks for repeating this meaningless gibberish because i called you an overrated hack
Misogynists are shit, but they are not a real threat. You are a distraction.
Nebulon Gate posted:
Lol@people claiming women are the proletariat.
http://oecdbetterlifeindex.org/
The proletariat includes people from all segments of society.
What we are seeing now, in this thread, is what happens when people have no language to talk about class.
Tezzor is confused - essentially saying that sexists (individuals) cause sexism (systemic oppression). Gamers, for their part, just say "no it doesn't."
In reality, the reverse it true. Sexism is just a symptom of class conflict. Attacking individual sexists is just cutting heads off a hydra.
am0kgonzo posted:
the same as any other npc hth
They are not the same as the other npcs because they are women, who are of lower class.
01011001 posted:
i have no particular complaints with what you said here but im missing how you think that follows from deleting a save after an unjust murder
Death doesn't necessarily mean the literal death of the character in the plot. It just means having some sort of consequence. If you want a proper murder simulator, you need extremely harsh penalties for murder. You could go so far as to have the game uninstall itself, but that might be excessive.
Nebulon Gate posted:
I actually don't know if you're serious.
The violence allowed in videogames is symbolic. Killing a puppy NPC for 500 points and killing a white supremacist NPC for 500 points mean totally different things, despite being worth the same points.
That's why games can be (but, generally, are not) read as art.
Nebulon Gate posted:
Just to be clear, you are actually arguing to me that because women are of a lower class than men, killing them in a video game is far more egregious, correct?
When you kill a male character in a videogame, you are killing a male character. If you kill a female character, you are killing female character.
That is not a value judgement.
SybilVimes posted:
You should try Lose/Lose
Pretty sure you'd love it's consequences thing, really, try it, please.
This owns.
01011001 posted:
its overharsh to assume that murder always leads to personal backlash in real life, which is what youre implying here. consequences upon the deaths of innocents and even the deaths of non-innocents has been handled in quite a few games though. is there some reason youre limiting yourself to a gta-esque framework here?
Realism in games is distinct from mere simulation. You can probably murder someone in real life and get away with it, but when you do it in a game, it is totally irreal and trivial.
In order to get the psychological realism of commiting some terrible crime, you need to go beyond simulation. (I'm focussing on GTA because it's a big, familiar example of a 'sandbox game'.)
Nebulon Gate posted:
A negative impact on the player's psyche, the entrenchment of some hierarchical system or another, perpetuation of existing misogynistic attitudes, anything.
I am not really concerned with 'impacts'.
The makers of the game put a great deal of time and effort into making unique female character models, hiring female voice actors, recording the dialogue, animating the characters, etc. They did this because female characters are not the same as male characters.
In Hitman, this contributes to the themes of being an artificial person who is under the complete control of some weird organization. But, on top of Blade Runner, this is a riff on James Bond. Bond villains are traditionally rich degenerates, and Bond likes to get back at them by seducing 'their' women. That's the appeal: an uncouth ruffian who sticks it to the rich by taking their stuff, indulging in conspicuous consumption, seeing the rich men get cucked (lol!!!).
In Hitman, the formula is just slightly different: instead of optionally seducing the 'bond girls' to get back at the villain, you can only optionally murder them. Hitman comments on the Bond narrative by making the character an asexual clone weirdo.
This is an example of how games can be, but generally are not, read as art.
memy posted:
SMg you have yet to address the issue with your opinion re: gamers afraid of admitting games aren't fun, that being that /v/ has for years said that video games are not fun.
I don't know what v is, but I mean more than just saying it. I mean truly accepting in your heart that games are not fun. Even then, that is only the first step towards authentic appreciation.
For example, you can have a person who is like 'man, games are shit' - but continues to preorder games and then discard them, at regular intervals.
Such a person would be a pitiable wretch.
memy posted:
/v/ is 4chan's video game board and the place that everyone claims started hashtag gamer gate
/v/ also condemns the very idea of preordering, just fyi, and ridicule anyone who admits to doing so.
You previously said that the outward face people show is in fact their true face. So when /v/ calls video games unfun and says that the consumerist tendencies of video game culture are a poison on the medium, is that not their true beliefs?
Gamergate is based on the (often strongly disavowed) belief that games aren't fun because the fun was stolen by jews. That's not the same as accepting that games are not, never were, and cannot become fun.
Evidence to the contrary would entail some examples of their authentic appreciation of games.
memy posted:
Except that /v/ has said time and time again that games are, by definition, not fun, and always have been. Jews can't steal what was never there.
I would need more contextualizing information to understand how they reconcile that stance with their support of Gamergate.
GENDERWEIRD GREEDO posted:
if you've ever read SMG's posts in cinema discusso you'd realize that fun is not really much of a factor in his life
As a consequence, my experiences are richer. I pluck an apple from the tree, and it tastes sweet.
ThisGuy posted:
I mean this probably isn't the place, but isn't tropes women pretty far left? I listened to her on a podcast mention that she was kinda a marxist. Like, how could she go left-er?
Even the Jacobin article, linked a few times in this thread, is fairly moderate. He supports SJWs almost purely on the basis that:
"The assimilation of games into the larger culture poses a problem for a reactionary segment of gamers ... It means engaging with a society that, while it is still capitalist and patriarchal, still suffused with racism, has also been challenged for decades by those it has traditionally marginalized."
In other words, gamers are such ridiculous David Icke conspiracy theorists that the fucking Jacobin is like "welp, liberal capitalism's not that bad." The point of the article, though, is that it's still In Defense Of Gamers. Going beyond Sarkeesian, the Jacobin is saying they've just been duped into betraying their own interests - as gamergate ultimately only benefits the rich. That's the leftist perspective.
From Sarkeesian's kickstarter: "she uses her web show to explore representations of race, gender, sexuality, class and ability in popular culture." The trouble is that those things are not all equivalent. Class obviously supercedes everything, because issues of racism and sexism can only be understood in terms of class. Sarkeesian places classism fourth on the list, beside ablism.
Fansy posted:
We see principles like freedom of speech as fundamental human liberties, they see them as weaknesses to be exploited to destroy us.
As much as SJWs and so on are funny, this shit is deadly serious. This is not a game. By threatening the United States they threaten all of humanity. Because however much the US might do the wrong thing at times (and there's a whole other group of people involved in a lot of that too), what are the realistic alternatives? Chinese/Russian hegemony. Not a world any of us would want to live in.
I have also seen rumors that some libertarian/anarchist activists are also communists. This also would make sense since it also erodes confidence in the state, engenders distrust towards government narratives about world events, and so on. Adam Kokesh's show used to be on Russia Today for christ's sake.
http://np.reddit.com/r/SRSsucks/com...jws_are/cl4ll5p
This is why Gamergate fascinates me, even though I haven't played a videogame since around 2008.
Gamers - disaffected white men - cannot imagine an alternative to capitalism. There is only the authoritarian capitalism of China and Russia - 'capitalism with Asian values' - or American-style liberal capitalism.
The latter is, of course, perceived as as in decline as a result of the devious machinations of the (jews) and the acting-out of communists.
Anticapitalism is not perceived as a 'real' alternative. They only weaken the capitalist system letting the jew parasite grow stronger.
This is, of course, literal fascism.
Mister Fister posted:
It's not the cheating you idiots, it's fucking around and then covering it up by convincing your partner that you don't need protection to have sex. You honestly don't believe that would fuck you up if your partner had sex with a bunch of people then manipulated you into not using protection to cover it up, possibly exposing you to STD's? That's fucking horrifying.
It's easy to understand your logic.
Diseases are a bad thing. A bad thing could have happened to a good person. That is scary.
Compounding things, a bad thing was done by one person to another. It is easy for you to imagine millions of Zoe Quinns all fucking sad dorks, browbeating them, infecting them with disease. You... empathize.
Mister Fister posted:
I guess you'd have to have some empathy and put yourself in Eron's shoes and think a moment if it happened to you, but then again, SJW's don't ACTUALLY have empathy.
It is easy for you to put yourself in the shoes of the sad dork. It is easy for you to imagine a partner infecting you with disease. It's illegal. It's illegal. It should be illegal. You can imagine a coverup, being unprotected, being fucked up, being manipulated, being unprotected, a coverup, being exposed. It's fucking horrifying. It's fucking horrifying. It's fucking horrifying.
It is easy for you to imagine millions of Zoe Quinns. You put yourself in Eron's shoes. A bad thing could have happened to me. I feel exposed. I feel manipulated. I think there's a coverup. I have EMPATHY. I can imagine millions of Zoe Quinns. I feel unprotected. I feel exposed. I think there's a coverup....
But I have good news for you! Videogames are not, and have never been, fun. You must be free.
Sephiroth_IRA posted:
Anyone that has a problem with anita, Zoe quinn or journalistic integrity really just hate the glorious free market system. I believe all moral and ethical standards involved journalism should be removed completely. Anita and zoe are captains of their particular industries and deserve everything they have. Now you might ask me how its fair that Zoe Quinn makes more money than the common worker. The answer is that it isn't get used to it.
This is pretty accurate.
The reality is that the gamers themselves, in their decades of complacency, have left themselves in a state of total weakness. They allowed everything related to games to be determined by market forces, and now they themselves have become unprofitable.
With the ease that GTA-Man can steal a car, liberals have effortlessly commandeered videogames.
No 'moral outcry' can stop this now.
If you define "stopping this" as "forcing some liberals to make insincere twitter apologies," then gamergate is a rousing success.
Zoq-Fot-Pik posted:
Games are actually good.
BOBBY: When I turn 18, I'm going to do whatever I want for videogames. Tattoos, piercings, you name it.
HANK: Come here, there's something I want you to see. (Hank takes down a box from the shelf and opens it up) Remember this?
BOBBY: My beanbag buddy? Oh, man, I can't believe I collected those things. They're so lame.
HANK: You didn't think so five years ago. And how about your virtual pet? You used to carry this thing everywhere. Then you got tired of it, forgot to feed it, and it died.
BOBBY: (looks at a photo of himself in a Ninja Turtles costume) I look like such a dork.
HANK: I know how you feel. I never thought that "Members Only" jacket would go out of style, but it did. I know you think stuff you're doing now is cool, but in a few years you're going to think it's lame. And I don't want videogames to end up in this box.
*
SunAndSpring posted:
Like seriously if your idea of comedy is posting walls of text where you liken Inception to the proletarian's struggle for worker's rights in a Trostkyist perspective, then you probably have severe autism and should seek therapy.
I do not actually exist.
qnqnx posted:
THis is the second time you say that, and the second time I wish it were actually like that
Your wish has been granted. I do not exist, and never have existed. You are free.
qnqnx posted:
Uuuuuuuh is there a medical term for reverse solipsism
When you encounter an unfamiliar bit of text, it may 'trigger' weird thoughts. Is he crazy? Am I being trolled? Is there a conspiracy of purple-haired women acting against me?
I understand the comfort and reassurance these fantasies provide.
However, it's important to understand that it is fundamentally impossible to know. From your standpoint, I do not actually exist. But what I have written is true.
*
If videogames are actually fun, there is nothing to worry about.
No one will take videogames away from you. You can have infinite fun.
*
I heard that games journalism was being corrupted and, with no journalistic oversight, games would become unfun. Gamers were dying.
However, provided you have an internet connection, you can download infinite games. If games are fun, this is infinite fun. There's nothing to worry about, right?
Corek posted:
Holy shit I just realized that they're mistaking calling SMG crazy and insane for calling game developers crazy and insane. Gamergate literally thinks that SMG-directed insults are somehow floating through time and space until they hit Brianna Wu.
SMG has now become integral to 4chan Gamergate conspiracies.
Curious.
It is true that my Anti-SJW posts have come under 'organized attack' by an 'SA splinter group', but I am not a games developer, and Imp Zone is harmless.
LittlePriest posted:
Mostly it's a place for the imp zone rejects to complain loudly that they're better than this thread. It's all they do. And they do it here, non-stop, until they got probated for a while.
The fun in games is missing, and some blame the theft on care.
The goal of imp zone posters is to stop caring, in an effort to restore the missing fun.
Care is externalized and attributed to an other, betraying insecurity: 'you are making me care. I'm not in control. You control me.' This is why their stated indifference is accompanied by vigorous scrubbing and fear of disease. In the basic meme, care is conceptualized as a clinical depression that spreads like AIDS.
In reality, videogames are not - and have never been - fun. So there's nothing to worry about.
AHungryRobot posted:
what?
The idea that games are fun is an ideological fantasy. This helps people deal with fears of disease, death, unhappiness, and so-on. Big questions, like why do bad things happen to good people.
Unfortunately, fun is not very effective. Gamers today have access to unlimited fun, but are unhappier than ever before.
In order to be free, you must accept that games are extremely good, but not fun.
SybilVimes posted:
Telling someone to kill themselves isn't a fucking death threat you retarded cum monkey.
It is entirely in keeping with the ideology if imp zone, where caring is conceived of as disease.
In your fantasy, you stop caring so vigorously that the other person just spontaneously dies. Hence, the preoccupation with suicide and 'meltdowns'.
KonvexKonkav posted:
That's stupid since playing video games does in fact release dopamine. You only need to google "dopamine video games" to find that out, or play a videogame that you haven't obtained yourself in any way to confirm that. If that's SMG's definition he's an idiot.
Doctor Plump is close, but my posts concern the psychology of ideological fantasy and desire, not the bare dopamine release itself.
Kylra posted:
IKs are trying to trick people into reading this thread again by changing the title and tag so it is not immediately recognizeable. How devious.
What, however, if we reject the notion of the eternal return of the same as the repetition of the reality of the past, insofar as it relies on an all too primitive notion of the past, on the reduction of the past to the one-dimensional reality of "what really happened," which erases the virtual dimension of the past? If we read the eternal return of the same as the redemptive repetition of the past virtuality? In this case, applied to the nightmare of The Gamergate Thread, the Nietzschean eternal return of the same means precisely that one should will the repetition of the potential which was lost through the reality of The Gamergate Thread, the potential whose non-actualization opened up the space for The Gamergate Thread to occur.
natetimm posted:
This type of toxicity is universal across the internet the only difference now is people are attempting to harness pity from experiencing it to elevate their careers by pretending it's endemic to certain communities.
Normal people consider the threat of rape to be bad.
natetimm posted:
You talking about what normal people think is like a dog lecturing on algebra.
A dog teaching algebra would be amazing.
Internaut! posted:
I think a lot of nerds blinkered to social activism have been awakened to how pervasive SJW culture really is, and how they will never be accepted by those people
meanwhile sjw cool kids and their lackeys continue to look down on nerds and sniff their own farts like usual, and big game companies run by MBAs instead of indies run by SJW types will keep making the wrongthink AAA titles that gamers enjoy
so yeah deffo a victory for the game nerds over the shame nerds
Why do you want to be accepted by SJWs?
*
I have been awakened to how pervasive SJW culture really is, and how I will never be accepted by those people
meanwhile sjw cool kids and their lackeys continue to look down on me
big game companies run by MBAs will keep making the AAA titles that I enjoy
so yeah deffo a victory for me
*
Fighting liberalism is good, but individual SJWs are false targets. You need to think bigger.
*
In the meantime, we should focus on Internaut's complaint that SJWs don't respect him.
It's been a recurring theme.
SJWs are awful, so why are folks like Internaut and Natetimm demanding their respect?
natetimm posted:
Wait, what?
Since videogame journalism's traumatic declaration that "gamers are dead to us", we have witnessed gamers' Evanescence-style pleas to the SJWs:
"Save me from the nothing I've become
Now that I know what I'm without
You can't just leave me
Breathe into me and make me real
Bring me to life"
These pleas have ranged from the rape threats, to pushing for a 'fair and balanced' teaching of the controversy, to the direct e-petitioning of major corporations. Each of these tactics is a demand for respect - and for resurrection.
Gamers have implicitly declared that the SJWs (jews) fully control lives and sense of self-worth. In reality, of course, nobody controls you. You will never be ten years old again, and no-one can be singled out for blame. You'll have to learn to respect yourself.
The Snark posted:
This broad painting of 'an entire movement' has been precisely the sort of thing that has been fueling said movement out of spite if nothing else. To say it is simply about shutting down cultural critics such as Sarkeesian is unfair, and implies that they are the only ones seeking to silence critics by any means necessary.
There is no 'side of the angels' here.
Gamergate is uniformly libertarian/objectivist.
The basic claim of 'corruption in videogames journalism' rests on the belief that 'SJWs' are interfering with the free market by inserting a political stance into what were once 'apolitical' advertainments and consumer reports.
"It's easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence--such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence."
-Ayn Rand, "The Fountainhead"
The phrase "gamers are dead" traumatized so many because - not only was it spoken by videogames journalists - it was spoken to the developers and major corporations who create games. If you're a huge fan of the XBox One, here was Microsoft being told not to bother targeting you as a market. To libertarian gamers, this was an egregious violation of 'the law of supply and demand.' We've seen hundreds of posts to this effect: the SJWs are going against the wishes of the market.
The fear is that vocal minorities(!) would use morality to shame major corporations into abandoning the amoral pursuit of their rational self-interest.
"Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion - prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me'. Then he wonders why he's unhappy."
-Ayn Rand, "The Fountainhead"
...and if that happens, the products that gamers demand will no longer be supplied - and that's 'as bad as censorship.'
Sandweed posted:
If they really cared about gaming journalism™ (lol) couldn't they just stop going to sites that they deem corrupt? Or is the fact that someone somewhere are saying things that they don't disagree with the real thing they are fighting against.
Gamers would do exactly this if they actually believed in the benevolence of the free market. However, they believe in a massive and undefeatable jewish conspiracy.
Cardboard Box A posted:
SMG wrote an editorial:
http://christandpopculture.com/hear...earn-gamergate/
I'm a better writer than that.
This guy's mistake is in arguing that liberals "merely seek to add their voice to an industry in desperate need of new perspectives," when Gamergate is already about defending an idiotic libertarian 'safe space' from liberal cultural hegemony. He's not telling them anything they don't already know.
And, in pushing for this tolerance of everyone's opinions, he is moving away from the Truth of Christ.
natetimm posted:
Well, the religious extremists have weighed in predictably and called video games false idols. Must be weird to have feminists and bible-thumpers in the same room agreeing on something.
He actually misidentifies the problem here too. Corporations are the false idols you pray to. Videogames are good, but not fun.
Uncle Wemus posted:
Jesus doesn't tolerate everyones opinions?
Of course not. He loves all people, which is an entirely different thing from tolerance.
*
The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am, effectively, eating. It’s not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that, when we think that we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology.
We live, so we are told, in a post-ideological society. We are interpolated - that is to say, addressed by social authority - not as subjects who should do their duty, sacrifice themselves, but subjects of pleasures. Realize your true potential. Be yourself. Lead a satisfying life. When you put the ["critique of ideology"] glasses on, you see dictatorship in democracy. It’s the invisible order, which sustains your apparent freedom. [...]
According to our common sense, we think that ideology is something blurring, confusing our straight view. Ideology should be glasses, which distort our view, and the critique of ideology should be the opposite - like you take off the glasses, so that you can finally see the way things really are. [...]
This, precisely, is the ultimate illusion: ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves. Ideology is our spontaneous relation to our social world, how we perceive each meaning, and so on, and so on. We, in a way, enjoy our ideology. To step out of ideology, it hurts. It’s a painful experience. You must force yourself to do it. ... The extreme violence of liberation. You must be forced to be free. If you trust simply your spontaneous sense of well being, or whatever, you will never get free. Freedom hurts.
-Slavoj Zizek
natetimm posted:
Yeah but empty fucking game cases? The fuck?
Fun does not comes from games. It comes from the act of preordering - paying for, essentially, an empty case.
breaklaw posted:
Does anyone have any insight into where the big players come down on this? I'm talking about the publishers and AAA devs like EA, Activision, Rockstar, Respawn and whoever. I tend to think they have the most control over where this ends up going and also the most to lose. Gawker and Vox media is very short money compared to the tens of billions the big guys pull in. Is anyone really expecting that they will turn against their customers too and agree to SJW-ize all the games that Anita is complaining about and that make them such huge profits?
Companies don't need to touch this because, currently, both 'sides' are desperately preordering games in search of fun - fighting to purify and strengthen the capitalist system. They benefit from Gamergate regardless of which side loses (hint: they both lose).
The push to 'SJW-ize' games is laughably impotent, and amounts to leaving a comment in the suggestion box at Denny's, asking for more kosher, halal, and vegetarian options. Meanwhile, Denny's can keep gamers docile by simply leaving pork on the menu.
natetimm posted:
[Regarding pundit Christina Sommers]She's seeing people reject the same toxic themes of modern feminism she rejected a long time ago and is attempting to give them an alternate form of feminism to pursue as a replacement. Overall, she's probably responsible for many people who would otherwise be ambivalent about or opposed to modern feminism to learn more about feminism in general through her articles.
What's the matter with feminism?
In case anyone is wondering, Christina Sommers - the woman being praised by natetimm and breaklaw - is a self-proclaimed libertarian affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, whose principal goal is:
"to better understand free economies—how they function, how to capitalize on their strengths, how to keep private enterprise robust, and how to address problems when they arise."
-AEI's Annual Report, 2008.
natetimm posted:
Still not seeing where I wrote "feminism is bad", but nice try grasping for straws. Write some more Slobjob quotes, we all really like that gimmick.
You wrote that it has grown 'extremist' and 'toxic', and are now linking to an article called 'Saving Feminism'.
What's the matter with feminism?
natetimm posted:
I will humor you.
What's wrong isn't something that's wrong with feminism specifically, but something that's wrong with a certain mentality that has bled into many kinds of social activism, including feminism. The vile, knee-jerk, reactionary form of identity politics that has grown in a toxic environment via echo chambers on the internet is the actual culprit. Whether it's race relations, feminism, economic theory, or whatever your chosen interest is, chances are if you consider yourself even slightly progressive on the issue you will find the conversation already dominated by a small, toxic, vocal minority who has made a mission out of amplifying and spreading that message.
The left in the US has spent so long fighting a unified and politically powerful right that they have created a large cadre of allies to counter them. As the power of the right wanes, the allies in this cadre are fighting for dominance. Currently, using social media, bullying and other forms of outright aggression and manipulation, the "SJW" has found themselves in a prominent position even though they have a proven track record of ruining and undermining causes they attempt to further.
The pushback against them, even though others may want to tell you different, isn't about people who hate women or conservatives looking for a new power base, even though they have attempted to latch on. The pushback is from a large, diverse group of generally progressive (at least for the US) people who no longer want to be told what monsters they are for not adhering to the SJW cause 100%. It's actually similar to one of the main complaints minority women have about feminism in the US in general - it's co-opted by self-declared leaders and arbiters who are largely white, privileged and see their crusade as more of an opportunity to increase their moral and financial standing than an effort to effect real change on society.
Okay, so the problem with feminism is 'SJWs', who are:
vile
knee-jerk
reactionary
domineering
growing
toxic
small
bullying
missionary
aggressive
deluded
manipulative
ruiners
liars
demonizers
underminers
moralistic
opportunists
privileged
parasitic
profit-driven
illegitimate
prominent
ineffectual
crusaders
This tiny insidious minority is disrupting everything. They keep saying you're a monster. They keep saying you're a monster.
You're similar to a minority woman, but they keep saying you're a monster.
You're not a monster, though - you're weak. You can't dominate shit. Even though you're ostensibly 'larger', with a diverse group of women and minorities all ready to back libertarianism, you've ceded control of the conflict. Because they keep saying you're a monster. The SJW have stolen the fun in videogames - and your potency along with it. You don't have any of those aggressive traits that they have. You're a victim. You wouldn't hurt a fly.
*
You misunderstand. I honestly believe that you are, in reality, exactly as weak, impotent, and sad as you claim to be.
natetimm posted:
I know you were expecting something unreasonable to argue and feel superior but this is just pouting.
Blaming a textbook antisemetic fantasy figure for sapping your potency is not reasonable.
You have deployed a convenient excuse for your comfortable weakness. You could be really strong, and you have all these allies, but the SJWs said you were bad twitter(!).
In reality, you have no excuse.
*
It's alright natetimm. You are in a safe space now.
Videogames are good, and you are utterly harmless. Nobody here considers you a serious threat at all.
natetimm posted:
That's good because my identity isn't wound up in the idea that I have to crusade for some twisted form of justice.
Exactly. You are harmless. You are fading into nothingness because of the toxin people.
natetimm posted:
Nah, I've always been nothing. They don't really have any effect on it. They're going to go into a decline here fairly soon as well, though. More and more sections of society are fed up with their shit and they have a proven track record of failure and narcissism.
"When the Communist regimes disintegrated in 1990, we entered an era in which the predominant form of the exercise of state power became a depoliticized expert administration and coordination of interests. In this new context, the only way to introduce passion into such a nonpolitical realm, to actively mobilize people, is through fear: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of ecological catastrophe and also fear of harassment (Political Correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear).
Consequently, the notion of “toxic subjects” gained ground. While toxic subjects originate from popular psychology warning us against emotional vampires, the frontier of toxic subjects is expanding. The predicate 'toxic' covers a series of properties that belong to totally different levels (natural, cultural, psychological, political).
Socially, what is most toxic is the foreign Neighbor–the strange abyss of his pleasures, beliefs and customs. Consequently, the ultimate aim of all rules of interpersonal relations is to quarantine (or at least neutralize and contain) this toxic dimension, and thereby reduce the foreign Neighbor–by removing his otherness–to an unthreatening fellow man. The end result: today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism is an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness–the decaffeinated Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality while features like wife beating remain out of sight.
The mechanism of such neutralization was best formulated in 1938 by Robert Brasillach, the French Fascist intellectual, condemned and shot in 1945, who saw himself as a 'moderate' anti-Semite. Brasillach put it this way: 'We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew; and the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz. … We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti-Semitism is to organize a reasonable anti-Semitism.'"
-Slavoj Zizek, "Barbarism With A Human Face"
*
It's actually very interesting to see natetimm promote gamergate as 'reasonable antifeminism', synonymous with libertarianism. And black women who oppose 'SJWs' are consequently declared honorary libertarians.
In a quick rhetorical twist, Ron Paul is now fighting white privilege - because the free market doesn't discriminate.
Mister Fister posted:
Feminism is a white woman's movement that doesn't help black women jack shit.
Feminism is egalitarianism. If white women are not helping black women, they are not being feminist enough.
*
Mister Fister and natetimm are helpfully illustrating how Gamergate does nothing to oppose liberalism.
Attacking 'toxic subjects', championing multicultural diversity in the workplace, decaffeinating otherness with this litany of 'POC friends,' masking class conflict with race conflict...
It's liberal rhetoric appropriated to attack 'white woman extremists' instead of the usual muslims.
natetimm posted:
Tell us about the jews again, internet crazy person who worships another crazy person.
Simple: 'the Jew' doesn't actually exist. It's a fantasy figure from conspiracy theories, synonymous with satanic abusers and reptilians.
Typical themes are how they drink your blood, and how they have contradictory traits like being simultaneously impotent and all-powerful.
SJWs, as you describe them, do not actually exist. There are people who kinda fit the description, just as there are jewish people in real life, but they have no actual power over you.
Uncle Wemus posted:
How can I oppose liberalism
For starters: you have to accept in your heart that videogames are not, and have never been, fun.
*
Race war doesn't help anyone.
cock hero flux posted:
logically, then, the holocaust did not happen
All they did was kill a bunch of jewish people. 'The jew', being nonexistent, was left totally unharmed.
*
Assuming you could instantly kill every SJW on Earth, videogames would still not become fun again.
*
we should always remember that SJWs are the truth of liberalism.
Mister Fister is in the unfortunate position of being a liberal who is against liberalism.
Mister Fister posted:
SJW-ism is just some sort of weird White Nationalism for upper class whites dressed up as progressivism.
That's what I said: it's the truth of liberalism.
setafd posted:
could it be he is a nutty reactionary or is he foolin'
these blurred lines, y'all
The simple rule in times like this, when everyone is posting really bizarre opinions, is that their private intentions are completely unimportant.
- natetimm presents himself as a libertarian conspiracy theorist. There's no evidence to the contrary, so that's what he is.
- Kyrie, supporting a libertarian white supremacist movement, links to a libertarian white supremacist webpage. Is it ironic? Who cares! He's a white supremacist now.
- Mister Fister is a self-described liberal who uses appropriated marxist terminology to express a profound disdain for liberals that happen to be white women - going on multiple tirades about female-on-male rape and abuse, bragging about giving white women's jobs to latino men, etc. Essentially treating white women as a jewish class-enemy. Why worry about whether he actually believes it?
As an addendum, though: once you accept that you are what you post, there's also no point in getting worked up over it. These are merely people. Any idiot can become a libertarian conspiracy theorist online, and argue for days that the reptilians are coming. Regardless of whether he believes it, it's a distraction from the truth.
(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
*
am0kgonzo posted:
the hypocrisy of the crowd that considers itself morally superior sustains me and it is what makes gamergate good & fun
Realtalk for a minute: a lot of gamergate is fueled by this 'hypocrisy' thing. Like, "how can Leigh Alexander be against racism when she's like half-white and said 'hood'?" Then footballman doesn't report a statutory rape for whatever reason. And that's presented as the smoking gun that says egalitarianism is bullshit.
This does work both ways. It's very, very easy to point out the failings of various individual gamers, but these should be understood as just people.
The correct response is that class discrimination is always rather bad. When you look up from the dirt, you're seeing this basic ideological conflict between liberals and libertarians, and the particular details are just obfuscating this, turning it into a morality thing instead of anything to do with ethics.
The motto of 'Anonymous' is "we do not forgive, we do not forget". And that's a neat summary of how the internet is used to track people's movements and punish them for whatever transgressions. The internet doesn't forget - and people, acting as the voice of the internet, won't let it go.
I differ insofar as I believe in forgiveness.
Mange Mite posted:
at this poitn im actively avoiding finding about about what gamergate is just to see if i can ever figure it out from this thread (without reading the op thats cheating)
im curious how long it will take
Libertarian gamers blame liberals. Liberal gamers blame libertarians.
People outside the scope of gaming, but who have a horse in the race, throw in support from the sidelines. This includes liberals and libertarians on SA, who begin sincereposting about the merits of liberalism or libertarianism.
It also, unfortunately, includes people who commit literal hate crimes, which end up in the liberal media like CNN and NPR.
This makes gamers even more sad, and the cycle repeats.
Mange Mite posted:
yeah this still makes zero sense, just so you know. you cant just jump into high-level conceptual stuff without laying a groundwork for osmoene whos stated several times they have no idea whats goign on. i hope you take this constructive criticism to heart.
still getting aroudn to reading the other guys response btw
im curious about these literla hate crimes though please continue
Setting: twitter
Me very sad. Man do it.
Me very sad. Woman do it.
We fight.
We sad.
***Hundreds of women are threatened with rape death, and some men also.***
Me sad. Man do it.
Me sad. Woman do it.
etc.
Mange Mite posted:
yeah ok so basically youre a troll. im disappointed in you smg, i gave you a chance and you spat in my face.
I guarantee that that's the most concise and accurate summary you're going to find.
No comments:
Post a Comment