Anyone have any idea why gaming communities are so reactionary? Like I get it with a lot of IRL sports, because of its ties to patriotism and national / regional chauvinism.
But I don’t get why people who have seen their games get increasingly shittier in a very short span of time, don’t hate what capitalism has done to them more.
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Not entirely, but more or less, plus far right grifters noticed the birth of that new subculture which is, as you said, in their very class condition very susceptible to their propaganda, and fell hard on them.
Just bouncing off your “not entirely” response - something interesting I noted in Peru was the utter ubiquity of internet cafés advertising pre-installed League of Legends, Dota 2 and WoW clients inside, and the variety of the clientele they served in age, apparent gender and apparent status. Was a bit of a culture shock coming from the U.S. where nigh every gamer has their own console and/or computer.
By “not entirely” i mean that this “Actual working class is too busy producing parts of that computer to play any games” is nonsese, because obviously not every worker produce parts of computers and most of them do have at least some free time and if they do play games in this time it shouldn’t be really our place to tell them they are too busy to do that. At least i and apparently you too know plenty of workers who do it.
Good point about internet cafes, they are apparently main way of playing games in some parts of the world. In Poland they were popular around 20 years ago when nobody had a decent internet but now prices of both computers and internet fallen sharply and they disappeared.
Because what a lot of gamers see is a correlation between improved representation of minorities in video games and also capitalism squeezing the fuck out of gamers and ruining countless loved franchises. Media is only too happy to jump on this
Edit: I want to expand on this further. I think the correlation is somewhat intentional. AAA developers know that, in order to maximise profits according to the wishes of stakeholders, they have to start doing things which will be unpopular like cutting out parts of the main game to repackage as DLC, loot boxes or other forms of gambling, battle passes, heavy focus on monetised cosmetics, outsourcing to low quality third party developers, cutting corners on live service with peer-to-peer matchmaking or shitty slow servers, raising game prices, etc.
All of these things will inspire a negative reaction from fans so they need to find a way to deflect it and appealing to the liberal “SJW” (for lack of a better term) crowd is exactly how they do that. When gamers turn around and call out developers for releasing a shitty new game, the devs can just cherry pick a few reactionary comments and attribute all the game’s criticism to that whilst they can rely on a whole army of liberals to do the pushback for free, salvage their PR and then carry on being shitty.
We’re now at a point where a lot of these shitty profit-pushing methods from AAA devs are completely normalised now and the only people left who remember how good we used to get it with video games are a bunch of guys from the 90s starting to show our age
because nerd-dom, geekdom, and gamer culture all serve as a shared culture for white cishet men to enable a victim complex. it also serves as a substitute for actual european culture, where a colonial culture of whiteness and white supremacy is more important, more dominant, etc.
this is the primary reason imo, and why regardless of what happens in the gaming sphere whether it be related to all the “SJW culture war” stuff, or how capitalism fucks up games and the people who make them, you will ultimately only ever see a lukewarm response from “gamers.” after all, whiteness implies colonialism, and colonialism implies capitalism, so there will be excuse after excuse why capitalism is not the reason why every gaming company turns to shit. all these gamers have a personal investment in it; it’s a core part of their identity even though they complain about game publishers all the time.
There are several motives for why they are like this-that:
- There aren’t a lot of women in the computer science area, much less in games, mostly because of oppression and stigmas. Even if woman stood up and point to their bullshit, they just abuse them, like when a woman asked about beauty standards in WOW, and well see by yourself.
- Other most video games companies are the epitome of liberal philosophy, they want to make the more money for less work without any kind of shame; exploitation, abuse, underpayment, directly lying to millions if necessary. It’s crazy how this companies work.
- Video games are a golden mine to government (thus Nazis); campaigns to recruit people to the army, to past ideologies like the communist are evil or war is necessary or China bad (LOL), harassment, and psychopathy are also promoted, and a lot of mental system to make the player an addict.
- Anglo world is the biggest gaming market, so you know, scratch a liberal and so on.
A few hundred o even millions of “gamers” are aware of the greediness of companies and criticize it one example could be the case of blizzard and all their recent actions. And the smaller games made by normal people are a lot more progressive, even some big ones have crazy takes…
Anglo world is the biggest gaming market
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“It’s the insidious reason #3 that makes capitalism far worse than feminism, but that’s not as obvious from the get-go.”
Why do you hate feminists? This is such a weird take, that feminism is bad, just not as bad as capitalism, but from the outside feminism looks worse than capitalism?
This is like that time you compared feminism and LGBTQ movements to fascism. What’s the deal?
Nazbol moment.
Woah wtf they compared feminism and LGBTQ+ to fascism?!
Fucking gamers 🙄
Edit: okay just read the rant in the modlog, I’d hoped to not see these sorts of unhinged reactionaries in a ML space but clearly I was naive.
Gamers and not hating women and women’s rights challenge: impossible
Also capitalism doesn’t damage the gaming industry as much as feminism? Are you fucking kidding me?! Video games ARE being destroyed by capitalism lmao. Feminism doesn’t really impact the gamers (god I wish it did) because the cultural zeitgeist of gamers is inherently bigoted and exclusionary. Gamers dont give a shit if feminists find their favourite games misogynistic because gamers thrive on being contrary outcasts in their own little sphere. A circle jerk in which they control and bully others unless your white and male and L33T.
“How can we bully and dominate others to make ourselves feel better because our self worth is exclusively associated with our ability to play a video game”.
I genuinely adore video games and have played them kinda excessively since I was a little kid but it’s shit takes like this and cringe embarrassing incel energy fueled bigotry that makes me embarrassed and ashamed to consider myself someone who plays video games.
Gamers and recognising the symptoms of their anger but not the cause 🤣
Why would being female or non-caucasian matter in playing video games?
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