The Video Game Industry

...Ummm...

Edit: Great, just a amazing pagetopper!

Edited by fredhot16 on Jul 30th 2021 at 4:14:18 AM

Can I just say that "gaming crackdown" totally sounds like something Moral Guardians would come up with?

"Is our society turning people into misogynist assholes? No, it's clearly the video games that are to blame."

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jul 30th 2021 at 1:18:03 PM

Yeah, @Baron Von Fist Crunch, your intentions are good, but you are getting Dangerously close to the Moral Guardians that tried to ban video games decades ago in the first place in terms of ideology, and even implying merely playing video games makes one complicit to being alt-right is literally the same level of Puritanical thinking from back then.

Edited by Demongodofchaos2 on Jul 30th 2021 at 7:34:04 AM

Just to play Devil's Advocate here, there was quite a lot of that very sentiment going around the internets in the days when That Hashtag was picking up steam and especially when That Asshole got elected

Yeah, because clearly sexism, racist and hate were invented in the 80's.

It's not like they are societal ills that have plagued humanity for millennia, no sir.

I'm a lefty, so I don't know what to tell you. Thats just my own anti-censorship stance in general.

...I feel like there might be a fog of...if not confusion, then some form of misunderstanding here.

It's not really a private secret that, well, "nerd culture", including Gaming Culture™, tends to have a shithead bent to it, if not a straight-up infestation. Hence... things like, you know, the shitstorm around Gamergate (guys, we can mention the name, just not talk about it for a page straight).

Edit: Also, this doesn’t look like a “censorship” thing or have anything to do with the real word and meaning.

Edited by fredhot16 on Jul 30th 2021 at 5:31:27 AM

In my exerience, the predominant sentiment was more "can we please somehow kick these assholes out of our hobbies".

And yes, hobbies, plural. Because gaming is unfortunately not the only hobby swamped by far-right dipshits. Roleplaying, tabletop, the metal scene, literature, you name it.

I think the reason people generally avoid saying the name is because nobody wants one of these assholes to find the mention via Google and come over to stir shit up.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jul 30th 2021 at 2:05:06 PM

Part of the Gamergate inspiration was the discovery that nerd culture had gone mainstream and fandom was far more diverse as well as widespread than it was. It was no longer a "secret" and so many white male nerd misogynists and racists retreated further into their own fandom to become the basis for Alt-Right.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 30th 2021 at 5:15:25 AM

> I think the reason people generally avoid saying the name is because nobody wants one of these assholes to find the mention via Google and come over to stir shit up.

aka the reason you don't carelessly say the name 'Etagremag' unless you want said demon to bother you

Except the alt-right are weaker than their compatriots in older generations. The alt-right are heavily outnumbered by non-assholes members of the relevant generations.

If you’re going to hold gaming accountable for the strength of the Alt-Right then that makes gaining a victory for progressiveness, because the Alt-Right is dramatically weaker than the Reganites and holds more progressive social views.

The entire thing is crap though, because you can’t draw a direct line from the rise of video games to people taking on far-right beliefs. You can simply draw one from the expansion of video games to include people holding/likely to hold far-right beliefs to the rise of the alt-right.

The alt-right aren’t nerd culture getting taken over by far-right beliefs, they’re nerd culture expanding amongst the population such that it now includes people with far-right beliefs and said people organise as the alt-right.

Honestly, I think it's closer to "nerd culture had alt-rights from the start, and when it started expanding and being joined by different people, the alt-right panicked and started trying to 'take their hobby back'".

There's also an element of alt-right infiltrating those spaces because they often attracted socially-awkward types that are just the perfect targets for that short of bullshit rethoric.

From what I understand, it's also happening to today's looked-down-upon communities. Furries, for instance, had a bit of a Nazi problem back in 2017.*

It seems to have been put under control, for now, but the fact an attempt was made shows the pattern of alt-right recruitment: find something that attracts nerds of whatever stripe and hijack it.

/*I say "had" because all the articles I can find about it are from that time. It's presumably possible it still very much has, I wouldn't know, not being part of that community.

That's generally how hate groups operate, yeah.

I think the issue is that certain niche interest like videogames, tabletop games or anime, precisely because they are niche in comparison to other things like cinema or sports, attracted the sort of people who could be radicalised into what became the alt-right.

For all of the resentment nerd culture had over the jocks for looking down on them, it certainly enjoyed the lack of accountability that came from being seen already as weirdo stuff.

The moment it became accepted though is also the moment that it became valid to criticize it and demand it to be better, which is what these bastards didn't and don't want to accept.

Edited by raziel365 on Jul 30th 2021 at 6:22:23 AM

To be fair, we have a name for people into indie stuff that get pissed when they go mainstream.

"Hipsters."

Basically, gaming was a treehouse and the alt-right is pissed that now there are women in it. :/

That's more people who believe that their interests are obscure means they are somehow "smarter" than "plebs" who only enjoy easily accessible stuff.

It's more about clinging to a perceived notion of intellectual superiority than reactionary anger in that case, though of course the two can overlap.

Edited by HailMuffins on Jul 30th 2021 at 10:33:02 AM

I would argue that there's a bit of an overlap there, why do you think the "PC gaming master race" meme became accepted unironically by some of these guys?

Edit:

Hell, it's not exactly a coincidence that the Wii, which was geared from the start to be casual and newbie friendly, was derided by the "traditional" videogame community when it appeared.

Edited by raziel365 on Jul 30th 2021 at 6:42:43 AM

It doesn't help that gaming became more Westernized and expensive to develop in that generation, so the niche games that they use to play have become rarer and rarer as companies avoid taking risks.

Edited by CookingCat on Jul 30th 2021 at 7:03:31 AM

-Hannah Arendt

"I would say the defining characteristic of the "classic" nerd as seen in 80s and 90s pop culture is actually jealousy of the jocks. As in, they wish they could act like a jock did and get away with it like a jock does. They've never been any different in the first place, from that perspective."

Kinda?, nerds have a sort of "revenge of the popular" thing going on for a while that exploded in the 2000 with other subculture(really a lot of garage rock and pop singer song were pretty much "a girl not like other girl thrash popular londe woman")

But indeed a somewhat awfull truth that we arealizing is that many of nerd were ostrizied not because their interest alone but because they didnt have the look for being a jock even if they wanted to be one, nerd culture is probably one case of "the ostrizied want to ostratized" example we can see.

"You can draw a direct line from the rise of video games and normalization of nerd culture, to the rise of the alt-right and all that entails. I will forever maintain that, in retrospect, a smarter attempt to crackdown on gaming might well have changed history for the better. "

......No?, aside of trying of being a little soft on moral guardians, the alt right isnt just gamers, they are subsect of white mileenial man who learn to use meme and others, is really reductive to said one and the other are the same.

I'd like to point out that very little coming out of Blizzard is actually new.

Once upon a time men harassing and hitting on their female co-workers was seen as normal, as was women doing twice the work for half the pay. As society changed a combination of societal pressure and new regulations if what forced companies to try and change that attitude; and even then we're having to struggle against examples of sexism in the workplace.

The difference I think is that up until relatively recently videogames were seen as a boy's past time that girls have little interest in, and videogame companies have managed to create an environment where they have a legion of loyal fanboys willing to leap to their defence. Also politicians unwilling to understand the industry, and as a result unwilling/incapable of regulating it.

Part of the issue is the Democrats in the 90s wanted to be the ones fighting the cultural war against music and video games.

So there was no defenders in government.

Dunno if this was posted here before, but here's a Tweet explaining the sort of people that compromise Acti-Bliz's upper crust.

AKA lots of Republican war criminals.

WoW hemorraging of players continues.