Don’t forget:
“conventionally attractive” and “ugly and woke”
That’s “conventionally attractive” and “political” actually
Some conservatives play games.
They do not constitute gamers as a whole.
Now, did Epstein help orchestrate gamergate and the rightwing ideology into gaming spaces on reddit and 4chan? Absolutely. I mean, look at Asmongold and his botted audience full of non-white, self-hating, conservative, cuck, MAGA, often non-American “gamers.”
I, for one, have found many welcoming communities and lifelong friends through gaming who couldn’t be further from these ideologies.
But, just as you have billionaire tech idiots who misinterpet scifi, purposefully or not, you also have gamers who try and claim that gaming, and art as a whole, isn’t political. Or if it is, it’s woke. And I can’t understand how they can lead such an unexamined, non-self-reflective life other than that they really are just…less intelligent. Which, apparently the pinhead Marc Andreessen himself says he never does any self reflection so…guess that tracks.
I’m sure some of them out there have said things like Wolfenstein are woke cause you kill nazis. And they’re anti-antifa after all. Or because a black woman becomes a leader. Take your pick, if they were smart enough to read between the lines it’s just as woke as Superman to them. Can’t have empathy, only selfishness under neoliberal capitalism.
But, for those of us that love to understand the references and message art is trying to tell, I mentioned Wolfenstein and I love video game essays on the topics, so here are two. One showing how fucking weird and batshit insane the Nazis were (dyk: they believed the Aryans race was descended from the moon) and another going into just how comfortable the Nazis would be in America, almost like they idolized America or something…oh wait. I’m sure that’s not topical at all right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QydfhmIy9pw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIIglIWwwj0
To me, growing up with gaming, I’ve always felt that gaming has been a microcosm for society at large, often experiencing some of the same cycles just earlier and at a more rapid pace. Gamergate and mainstreaming rightwing bullshit, microtransactions, live services, an all digital future where you own nothing.
We’ve got rightoids here in gaming unfortunately. There’s unintelligent people in most walks of life. Don’t be afraid to call them out on their BS and emasculate them. A trick white leftist men should learn is to use your privilege to amplify the voices of those without. Because boy howdy, nothing is more submissive than a conservative white man to another, more dominant white man. What point is there to privilege if not to use it to lift others up? Honestly, that’s the most “manly” thing to do, use your strength to protect and embolden others and as someone in a white body in this society we have a lot of power that we often don’t even recognize just within conversation. Shut those fuckers down and they’ll turn tail when they can’t “master debate” their way out. Gosh knows I’ve done that here and I’m pretty sure that’s why I was on the Tesseract list.
Eject those fuckers from society, shame them into the shadows where they belong so gaming and its wonderfully diverse creators and communities can flourish. Gaming has always been a refuge for those of us that have been outcast, all the way back to the days of tabletop. Just look at the “satanic panic” and how we were conjuring up demons because we wanted to have fun with our friends and use our imaginations together. Anything that might break the status quo, oh no, can’t let that stand. They might be talking about things like equal rights, or fighting against corrupt governments and politicians in their political intrigue plotlines! Don’t let the fact that it’s being mainstreamed allow us to assimilate to their ideologies. Just like we’re seeing with the massive backlash towards Sony and ending physical media. Keep the fight going. Amplify the good voices and stomp out the conservative and corporate controlled voices. We’re gamers, we should know how to solve puzzles, how to keep fighting and defeat insurmountable odds. How many times have we fought gods after just leaving town after fighting rats in a tavern the week before?
Sorry for the long rant, I’m feeling that revolutionary fervor more and more each day lol.
dont direct the blame toward gamers, direct the blame toward conservatives, whose views these actually are
Don’t fall for the bait.
That’s conservative logic, not gamer logic. Some rather loud and obvious conservatives happen to be gamers. I know plenty of gamers that are extremely progressive.
I, for one, am a gamer and secretly plotting the communist revolution.
Way to spoil the secret 😩
there is only 1 gender: “custom”
Look, just don’t bring your damn politics to my game about war and politics. We are just here to shoot ̶b̶r̶o̶w̶n̶ people and relax. I don’t want to think about the implications behind the media I am consuming.
Yeah! Why are modern games so political?! The classics were so much more nuanced. I remember when Wolfenstein 3D came out… My favorite part playing that game was how ambiguous the creators were about the inspiration for the bad guys.
This is unrelated to gamers.
There are plenty non-gamers who think like this.
There are plenty of gamers who don’t.
This is just a subset of people.They are called conservatives.
…and mysoganists.
theyrethesamepicture.webp
Yup.
I have family that supports all the awful shit going on in my country right now (US). They tell me it’s just politics, and that I’m wrong to stop talking to them.
The gamers I play with all openly talk about how wrong Trump and his administration is. We used to try to be apolitical, but the second term opened the flood gates. It is no longer moral to not talk about everything going on.
Yeah, i am a gamer i don’t give a fuck about what the right is trying to push regarding identity politics or “the woke left”. Even as a long time gamer i believe that love has nothing to do with gender or specific body parts, it all comes down to personal preference and the freedom to choose what you are looking for. don’t just pin this on the gamers please.
Gamer since 1982 (both D&D box set and Apple ][)… fuck these manbaby chuds.
It’s a subset of people that overlaps with gamers in a big way. See: gamergate
I disagree about the large overlap. It overlaps with a very loud minority that wants to take over the gaming space, same as they tried with the metal and goth fans in the early 2000 in my area. Don’t fall for this shit. Most gamers nowadays are well balanced normal human beings.
There’s an overweight of outcasts in gaming spaces, which is why queer people are incredibly overrepresented. Both among developers, players and in games themselves
But for the same reasons, you’ll find gaming related echo chambers that funnel people into hate filled ideology such as incel culture. A different kind of outcasts.
Sure gaming have become quite mainstream and you can find almost any sub group who games. But most “normies” games less than the outcasts, as they don’t need the escapism it allows for.
Within the more “normal people” group, there’s also variations. Some allow for hatred to exist within the communities they act within, some don’t, some allow for queer safe spaces others turn around the second they see it.
It’s a nuanced topic, which could turn into paragraph after paragraph. But outcasts are overrepresented within gaming. Especially rural outcasts, as they aren’t able to find a physical group to mirror themselves in
How dare you call me normal
lol
ok i am NOT normal, because most of my day consists of testing some games on my PC. But i gotta say that most people who are into gaming nowadays don’t fit the cliche of “recluse NEET gamer” anymore.
So if you don’t wanna feel normal, you are free to do so, as long as you aren’t a piece of shit my dude ;-)
That’s funny. You’d think being right wing would not align with being goth.
I knew some goths who were mostly apolitical, and so possibly susceptible to a small portion of that mindset (like I could maybe see a bit of manly manosphere type stuff) but in general that does not align with being anti establishment, which was, at least in the 90s, a large aspect of goth culture.
laughs in ancient punk
nazis don’t care about the values embedded in the culture before they show up, and they won’t listen to your critiques on how they don’t fit. nazis don’t hear nothing except bats and boots.
There was a large push in europe around the 2000,2010s by the neofolk chuds, trying to push into the goth scene. they were largely unsuccessful.
Edit: They were mainly trying to push the Nazi look to be accepted in the goth scene - Long leather mantles, Brownshirt and Tradwive shit. The Goths didn’t take the bait.
I really don’t think so man. Sarkeasian was on to something when they said the media we consume shapes us and having lived the media zeitgeist of the early 2000’s I can tell you we lived in a factory for making entitled little shitheads. There’s a reason why they got so roided up at her specifically and it’s because she read the industry for filth
Meanwhile, Im just trying to earn bells so my little duck guy can have a fancy new bridge in animal crossing.
Animal Crossing is pretty nontoxic. Also it just wasn’t in the cultural zeitgeist at all during the G4 guygaming era and that’s probably related.
But I dunno. Nobody has exactly been SWATted, doxxed, or gotten bomb threats over the skin tone of Tom Nook so maybe that’s a bad example?
Its a bad example of “reading the industry for filth” because the entirety of the industry isn’t filth.
The industry made a certain kind of thing financially successful and culturally dominant. I’m sorry you feel like that’s a moral judgment on you, it doesn’t change what happened
Capitalist pig
You gotta split that up.
Sarkeesian was specifically trying to rile the rightwing chuds up. I applaud her for making that awful segment of gamers visible, so we all could see what was hidden there, but at the same time you have to acknowledge that there were a lot of gamers - i would even say a majority - that weren’t part of this shitstorm.
I never was against Sarkeesian, even tho she wasn’t really speaking for me, but she made a part of gamer culture visible that was at that time hiding beneath the surface. Gaming society at large also made clear that they don’t want that kind of conduct to be the standard. It took a while, but if you filter out the loud minority that rages against everything they decide is woke, you can see that most gamers don’t want to be associated with this hateful crap.
That’s a new take to me. Literally not trying to sealion here, but I actually want to know how that has come about. That would make me reconsider some things.
She wasn’t really speaking to me either, I played games that had the tropes she was talking about but it really didn’t change how I feel about them. I thought she was looking at the nature of writing, not games themselves. Or even if it was, just kind of an insane thing to go to Breitbart and Maga over
Seeing people have sincere discussion on important and contentious topics makes me really happy. I’m curious to see how yalls discussion goes ☺️
I was hoping so. I think mimic may have blocked me after seeing how ugly the thread with the other guy got. I may have to just look into that possibility they mentioned myself
i don’t think many people who played games at the time were heavily invested in gamergate, but the gamergate gamers were a very loud and toxic minority. that’s often who is being talked about when you say gamer, not the average person who plays games. it’s the difference between gamer (neutral) and gamer (derogatory)
I literally don’t call myself a gamer anymore because I don’t want to be associated with that trash.
They can have the term, quite frankly, playing video games isn’t a personality but I like the idea of clearly identifying the people that think it is.
I don’t know how I feel about it.
I probably game too much, even as an elderly old man. I still call myself a gamer AND want Steve Bannon and all his diet nazis to die in the most humiliating and embarrassing way possible… crushed by frozen poop falling from a plane sounds fun.
This is what nazis do. Take good or innocuous things and pervert them. All they do is destroy.
I’ll still keep calling myself a gamer while respecting your desire to distance yourself from scum.
that’s a good mindset to have
Yeah, I’m into gaming and still in the dark about what gamersgate is about. I was on reddit but not using other social media like twitter, so maybe that played role in not getting much exposure to it.
I don’t think average gamer kept up with gamersgate, since they just were more interested in what games came out, reviews, and discussions about games.
It also ignored casual gamers. Like I think little phone games are now the biggest market. Honestly I think gamer is such a blanket term it doesn’t have a lot of meaning anymore. I am pretty sure just by how widely digital gaming is now, how many players are like under 10 years old etc like they could NOT be gamergate people.
Yeah, its like making assumptions about cinema and TV show fans, but many don’t keep up with celebrity news or culture. Its just a source of entertainment to them they like to watch.
Games being some niche demographic that is in the loop of every discourse is a very outdated old person view now. Its actually so popular now the revenue from it is more than film and music combined.
Even something like Marvel and DC being the stereotypical interest of some nerds no longer applies once it became mainstream, and that’s where games have been at for years now.
a subset of people are pieces of shit. Lots of people are gamers. Grandmas are gamers. Grandpas are gamers. School teachers are gamers. Doctors are gamers. CEOs call themselves gamers too. Cops are gamers. ICE chuds are gamers.
perhaps there’s a difference between
people who play games
and
those with the identity of gamerThere’s not. I’ve never heard of gamergate before this thread and I know I’m not alone. I’ve probably referred to myself as a gamer before as it’s shorter than saying I play video games.
I can see where you’re coming from, but I don’t think using the word for the sake of convenience doesn’t necessarily show it’s not a useful distinction.
I draw, built, paint, and craft almost daily. But it’s just something I do. It’s not my identity. I don’t see myself as an artist—even though I may spend as much time on art as some who do see themselves as an artist. I’d feel weird using the word artist to describe who I am just because it’s shorter than saying I like creating artwork.
That sounds to me like theorizing if perhaps there is a difference between people who play football and people who identity as a footballer.
What does that really mean?
Both enjoy their hobby with the only difference being if they choose to introduce themselves by the hobby, but still doesn’t really tell us much about them.
Other than I guess other than some anecdotal assumptions that are going to widely vary on peoples personal interactions and which social media they choose to interact with.
A majority of people are gamers now.
The subset of people who are like this, are a small minority; Both among gamers and the general population.Gamergate included a small fraction of one gaming type, at best.
What the hell is gamergate?
Epstein funded chud movement. Started from 4chan. This video explains it in detail
Thank you so much, I always heard about it and saw it referenced in discussion but didn’t actually know what the hell happened or what it actually was, I’ll have to sit down and give this a watch!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate
It coincided with the moment Facebook stopped being fun, due to all the reactionary boomers moving in.
There’s also a subset of people who make up statements based on nothing more than them wanting to believe what they’re saying is true that overlaps with gamers in a big way. See: your comment.
So I guess you’re a gamer too.
See: Survivorship Bias
There are plenty of gamers who do and are especially toxic. Your post reads like a ‘not all men’. There’s nothing wrong with targeting a vocal subset, it doesn’t invalidate any other group.
All inclusive statements like this, are in fact lazy and stupid. Using them automaticly makes you wrong. And it makes you vulnerable to equally stupid retorts like not all men. They are unforced errors in public discourse.
If you want to target a vocal subset, that’s great! Do that instead.
I see your point.
All sweeping generalizations are, in fact, false.
That vocal subset has tarnished the term ‘gamer’ as a whole for me, I reflexively go to associating that label with them. There are those who game who are not part of the toxic Manosphere, but self describing as a gamer is a red flag for me.
Guys can we please leave politics out of gaming? Not all white people wear gray shirts this is clear misrepresentation of the white identity. Typical libs always trying to force labels on us. Go woke, go broke!
It’s not just games anymore. Hence all the chuds losing their minds about “The Odyssey”.
I think the funniest part about the Odyssey conservative backlash is that Ben Shapiro of all people actually liked the movie because it “has clear conservative messaging with the law of Xenia”
He also for some reason thinks that Xenia is a biblical addition to the film by the director. Not sure how he ended up with that conclusion.
He also for some reason thinks that Xenia is a biblical addition to the film by the director. Not sure how he ended up with that conclusion.
Dear liberals,
You claim that you’re not sure how he ended up with that conclusion, yet you’re fully aware of what a media illiterate moron he is.
Curious.
How can it be a Greek epic? They didn’t cast the most famous Greek hero of all!? Where’s Kevin Sorbo?! DISAPPOINTED
Funny enough, Kevin is a conservative chud, too!
Wasn’t that the joke?
I’m sure it was in there somewhere
There is nothing like republican Xenia:
- bathing guests in tear gas
- gifts of insults and oppression
- exchanging gifts such as children to appease the gods
- lodging guests in jail
- safe escort to their next ICE prison camp destination
- it’s considered rude to ask who the guests are before they have finished the meal offered to them. We don’t know who’s in the camps.
It’s never been just games, it predates videogames
And Star Wars, House of the Dragon, Marvel, Pixar, etc.
Compared to games the people the meme is referencing is much more prevalent for the TV show and movie medium.
I play video games, but my “identity” as a “gamer” is not important enough to me to care about defending the label.
If someone says “gamers are trash,” you either know exactly the type of person they’re talking about, or you are the type of person they’re taking about.
I have no desire to argue “well I’m a gamer and I’m not like those people” because I don’t give a damn about the “sanctity” of such an arbitrary label. Also, not only are there tons of toxic gamers who are guilty of all the -isms, but there are also a lot of gamers who are all-to-eager to minimize the shitty actions of the former group and I don’t want to be associated with them either.
“That’s just how online gaming is” or “You think that’s bad? You should’ve seen call of duty lobbies back in the day” are common refrains from people who may not be hyper-toxic themselves, but they’re completely adjusted to bigotry being the status quo for the hobby and they don’t even see it as a problem to be corrected.
Also, I’m white. Seeing people criticize racism in gamer culture and jumping to the defense of the label as if that’s the problem feels very on brand for the way that white people tend to prioritize things. The bigotry is a much bigger problem than my “right” to call myself a gamer without the extra baggage. It feels a bit like still trying to defend twitter. I play video games, but yes, gamers are trash.
GamerRight wingerIt’s not gamer logic, it’s Gamer™ logic.
Gamer as in GamerGate.
playing Dark Souls 3
EVERY time a female character, npc, or even artwork appears
without fail
message on the ground
woman therefore beating to a pulp required ahead
200+ likes
Dark Souls 3 has a kitchen in the segment right after the sewers in Irithyll with a ton of dirty dishes stacked up and the highest rated messages there typically are “need woman.”
Oh yeah, everyone knows that one, ironic considering a jovial Catarinian named Siegward made it.
I was expecting a spot with “souls”, and a message joking about periods.
Got beat up in rocket league or something?
I feel like there’s a lot of white dudes in here that are like “what do you mean? I’VE found it so easy to avoid the toxic minority of chuds. Must be a you-problem? If anything, YOU’RE discriminating against ME by bringing this up.”
People don’t like to be generalized. This is basic stuff
So you totally get why running into blatant misogyny all the time is a real drag!
i don’t want colored folks in my historically accurate game about dragons and wizards!!!
