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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23439 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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According to the results of a search right now, there has been no discussion here of the Pragmata controversy so far.

Wikipedia talk page

(There is no Wikipedia article on it, at least not yet.)

Summary on Know Your Meme

Shoeonhead's video

Forbes review

Slant Magazine review

I’d put forth the following arguments:

It seems the Blue Tribe generally views Gamergate as a propaganda defeat because they see it as a long-term contributor to the MAGA/alt-right phenomenon but at the same time I don’t think they concluded that they themselves are even partially to blame. Therefore they are looking for opportunities to fight back, and are now including the pedophilia accusation in their attacks on evil gamers. As far as I can say, this was generally not yet the case back in 2014.

I’m also noticing something that eluded me so far, namely that the probable reason why both the original Gamergate (the Zoe Quinn controversy) and the current controversy proved to be effective ragebait to the Blue Tribe is that they are fueling two of their grievances at once.

One: they generally believe that toxic loser men are aiming to police women's sex lives out of resentment and hatred. I don’t think they have anything specific in mind. (I once asked here what this stuff is even supposed to be. I only received one answer: ‘compelling or aggressively encouraging women to not be floozies.’) It’s just a general vibe that makes them feel the ick. It’s why they think Quinn was unjustly attacked.

Regarding Pragmata I think their train of thought is the following: this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.

Their other usual grievance, of course, is that toxic males want to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for women, turning them into their own toxic ghettoized playgrounds.

All of this is a nothingburger, other than the fact that it's successful despite doing a bunch of things that nobody in the western games industry wants to do. So they have no excuse for not doing it.

If it had sold 30,000 copies nobody would have cared. But it is successful.

doing a bunch of things that nobody in the western games industry wants to do

Out of fear of backlash, you mean? Or out of simple profit considerations? Or something else?

Pragmata is:

  1. an original IP
  2. prominently featuring a character designed to appeal to and monetize the (male) protective instinct (known as "moe" in Japanese parlance)
  3. an IP with a fresh gameplay idea and concept that required many rounds of prototyping, tuning, and testing, significantly more than if they just lifted and copied the gameplay skeleton wholesale from a competitor.

The game industry doesn't like any of these things. They like predictable fiscal outcomes, safe products, and the industry itself is staffed by people who despise their (mostly male) audience and have seen games as an opportunity for social engineering for years.

It's no surprise the current wave of independent developer success has come from generally outside the games industry, or people who had to leave the entrenched game industry to start up their own companies.

prominently featuring a character designed to appeal to and monetize the (male) protective instinct (known as "moe" in Japanese parlance)

The game industry doesn't like any of these things.

Nonsense, drivel, sir I say that this is not only balderdash it is poppycock!

Bioshock 2 came out 16 years ago and has since been followed by modern beardy dad games like The Last of Us, where you take on the role of a beardy dad looking after a child.

That isn't the response you think it is; Bioshock 2 is a great game but was not widely considered to be better than its predecessor by the normie population, and was then followed by a pseudo-sequel, Infinite, which was built around critiquing that exact sentiment, among other things. The Last of Us did that, and then, as if out of spite, followed it with a sequel where the protagonist dad figure is murdered, while you play as the murderer for significant chunks of the game time.

The Game Industry(tm) is an awful place stuck between the inevitability of having to make commercial art to sustain itself while also despising the people they make it for. You might also look at Hollywood for another example of this phenomenon.

They like predictable fiscal outcomes, safe products

Is this actually true? One major point of criticism these days towards AAA games the last few years is that so many companies are trying to create the new Fortnite, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into live service game after live service game, with the Venture Capital-like math where 1 "infinite money glitch" success pays for 9 failures.

Concord is the most prominent example (rumored to have cost $400MM, almost certainly at least $100MM - shut down in under 2 weeks due to lack of players), but there are others, like Marathon this year (also by Sony, which bought the devs Bungie for almost $4 billion, with likely an additional >$100MM spent on development - currently averaging around 10-20k players on Steam). Sony is also currently working on a live service game based on the Horizon franchise. I'm not the first person who has pointed out that Sony owns a ton of franchises known for great singleplayer games that they could have poured a "modest" sum of around $20MM-$50MM for development to generate a "modest" profit fairly reliably instead of going for moonshots. Likewise, Ubisoft owns a ton of great singleplayer franchises like Splinter Cell or Prince of Persia, which they tend to ignore in favor of trying to make the next 10MM+ selling AssCreed game with microtransactions. Maybe they finally hit rock bottom and are reversing course with remaking Black Flag.

Heck, if you gave me $20MM, I bet I could get enough devs together to make a competent remaster Bloodborne which would almost certainly make a nice, safe profit, given how much bigger Soulslikes and Fromsoft have gotten in the 11 years since the original release. Yet Sony seems to have no interest in that.

The whole point of live service, as pointed out by someone here recently re: Adobe, is predictable fiscal outcomes. Bean counters and finance execs like predictable cashflow statements that come from subscriptions or regular cash injections. They'd rather make $20 every two months on a battlepass for the next two years than $60 up front, but if they could charge you $60 and then use the battlepass model as well that's even better.

Concord was a bad idea from the beginning because it was developed and designed by morons who internally steamrolled any criticism of the project and it was attached to the reputation and faith of Herman Hulst, who believed in it so much he didn't bother playing it. There's also rumors that the entire thing was a grift to get Sony to pay for the studio and in that essence it was very successful. Bloodborne is a bit of a special case, from what we know it's because Miyazaki doesn't trust Sony with it.

They'd rather make $20 every two months on a battlepass for the next two years than $60 up front, but if they could charge you $60 and then use the battlepass model as well that's even better.

Subscriptions surely are nice and low-volatility when it works, but it seems like a case of "10% of the time, it works every time." Which is necessarily high volatility.

For Bloodborne, I was under the impression that Sony owned the rights and could just tell Miyazaki to pound sand? Are there weird rights issues surrounding the exclusive deal they made back then?

I played the Pragmata demo and found it fine. Fun gimmick with the combat hacking thing but I feel like it'd get tiresome over 20 hours so I didn't buy it, but the demo was perfectly entertaining.

The game industry doesn't like any of these things. They like predictable fiscal outcomes, safe products, and the industry itself is staffed by people who despise their (mostly male) audience and have seen games as an opportunity for social engineering for years.

Sheer expense of a new game is definitely a part of this. The economics of doing anything AA or above seem to be straight up 'you hit okay sales or you're looking at a serious possibility of bankruptcy' whereas in previous eras there seemed to be a lot more scope for shovelware without absolutely annihilating yourself if something missed. This may also tie into the death of tie-in games and whatnot, which seem to have steeply declined in recent years where studios would put out solid 6.5/10 mediocrities loosely based on popular movies or TV series. From an outsider POV it does seem somewhat insane that the pursuit of graphical fidelity seems to be forcing such insane expenditure on new releases.

Fun gimmick with the combat hacking thing but I feel like it'd get tiresome over 20 hours so I didn't buy it, but the demo was perfectly entertaining.

I'm between 5 and 10 hours in the full game, I think, and so far it's still holding up for me. They still regularly add additional game mechanics to both sides of the combat to keep it fresh. Either side of the combat on their own would make for a ridiculously easy game but but that you're forced the juggle them still works for me, and when I think I've got it all down they add something else to juggle (danger squares in the hacking, enemies you have to clear another layer of defense before attacking, etc...)

Fair. Not saying it sucked or anything I just felt like it was a fun system but like half a notch below compelling me to actually buy the game.

In other words, they do fear backlash from their own employees, and that is part of it.

Regarding Pragmata I think their train of thought is the following: this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.

Their other usual grievance, of course, is that toxic males want to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for women, turning them into their own toxic ghettoized playgrounds.

I'm beginning to think the specific argument isn't the thing and this is the ultimate point. You have a bunch of neurotic ideologues (and, to be fair, people who outright earn a living from adulterating everything with politics) and their victory is forcing you to be as neurotic as they are about it. I'm sure they'd say it was consciousness raising or something but that's what it seems like to me.

In theory you could have just played a game about a child and thought nothing else about it. Instead, you've been forced to do woke philosophy to figure out what the hell drives this stuff.

Unreasonable demands actually work better here. There's always something. The more ridiculous it is the more sensitive you become about everything because everything can be "problematized" and the little woke-model living rent-free in your brain knows that more anodyne things yield more points when problematized.

This struck me during the Snape debacle: people, antiwoke people, were pre-outraged on essentially woke grounds (are we gonna watch some white jocks beat up a black kid??). What better victory than to loom so large in your opponent's mind that they can't escape your ideology and are in a permanent defensive crouch?

There's no winning this once it starts.

The ShoeOnHead video is actually funny. These people in the comment screenshots are insane.

"I want to like it, but can't, knowing men like it" sums these bigoted losers up pretty well.

This is probably evidence of Twitter optimizing outrage, but I've seen very little in the way of leftists criticizing Pragmata for it's portrayal of Diana (besides people suggesting that it's just a retread of the appeal of God of War/ The Last Of Us) but several people getting mad that Diana's voice actress is black (e.g. this x post)

I think the controversy of Saros is also pretty ripe culture war, but I should probably get off my ass and write up a full post myself.

This is disingenuous. The reason that people are point out Diana's VA is due to earlier crash outs in the VA community that basically boiled down to 'only VAs of the same ethnicity can reprise characters of color.'

And before you say, 'It's just twitter', this did have real-world repercussions, from the Simpsons getting rid of Apu's VA and the newest Avatar movie going out of their way to find a blind VA to play Toph as opposed to getting their old VAs.

They're pointing out the hypocrisy, but people having the attention span of gold fish, it just whooshes over thier head.

Please do, I am trying to get confirmation about whether it sucks before I buy. I am interested in the premise as an occasional King in Yellow enjoyer.

Oh to be clear I'm

A. A lefty who thinks the discourse is stupid outrage farming and

B. Someone who platinumed Returnal.

I was probably always going to buy Saros regardless of reviews as long as the gameplay looked similar, and I'm loving it even though I've only had ~10 hours to put in.

I'm on biome 6 and feel like Saros is a downgrade from Returnal. In Returnal the progression is tied to artifacts, parasites and weapon trait unlocks while in Saros the only progression is the upgrade tree (artifacts are very underwhelming). As soon as I realized that doing the "long run" catapults you into 50+ proficiency level (plus buttload of money) and makes you so overpowered that the bosses melt in 2 minutes I was severely disappointed.

Malcom Collins actually agrees that the depiction of the child is a bit off, giving the pedo accusers something to latch on to. Strangely adult features on what is supposed to be a child (in which case, robbing it of what is supposed to be attractive to a pedo, come to think of it, defeating the point?).

robbing it of what is supposed to be attractive to a pedo, come to think of it, defeating the point?

Yes, trivially.

However, adult features (and behaviors) on children are what the average person thinks pedos like (re: Cuties, etc.), so they get set off on child beauty pageantry, etc.

Of course, how would said average person ever encounter someone who would point that out, given the room temperature around the topic is so hysterical it [approves of] calling the cops on men out with their daughters?

I honestly don't see how any of the three points you cite, and gamergate writ large, are in any way relevant here. Pragmata's Diana is a 1) robot 2) child that has no possible sex life to police, the "typical male fantasy" bit swiftly evokes the meme but otherwise AFAIK there's no wife to speak of so the entire point is moot (in fact I'd posit that feeling threatened by a rather ordinary fatherly-protector dynamic, or projecting any "wifely" duties onto the robot child, are both rather embarrassing self-owns), curbing a child's freedom to an extent is pretty much the definition of parenting, and A Plague Tale exists so child-deficient women are welcome to enjoy the medium at their leisure.

As for the cause of screeching, I think it's pretty obvious:

  • unashamedly cute and funny young female
  • bulky coat but entirely bare legs/feet is fertile ground for fetish projection (as a non-footfag I don't get it but I agree it stands out)
  • canonically an android so maps heh, MAPs very neatly onto the evergreen "ackchyually she's a 500 year old dragon" trope
  • cheeky promotional badge on Twitch as irresistible self-reporting bait to gooners (please god let that bit be intentional because it would be so fucking funny)

It feels weird saying this as an admitted degenerate, but the entire """controversy""" feels like a complete nothingburger to me - unfortunately in the age of the gooner no petite/underage character is safe from uoh-posting and pedo projections allegations, judging by the badge brouhaha even normies seem to have caught on the :crying_emoji: dogwhistle. I agree with @PutAHelmetOn that, since racism doesn't hit the same way anymore, pedophilia is very likely next up for a ride on the outgroup insult treadmill; as any sort of public-facing figure you will, or already do, have to be performatively disgusted by anything remotely "loli-coded" or be branded a closet pedo. As a gachatard I'm vividly reminded of the recent ""drama"" about Tiphera, a CZN character that had the temerity to be petite and almost-flat (while explicitly not a child) among a sea of titcows well-endowed characters, and accordingly has been the subject of much handwringing from the moment she was showcased, immortalized by a memetic Reddit mod melty and subsequent closing of ranks (why is it always Reddit mods?). To be entirely fair, unlike Diana that one also flashes you every time you choose her cards in battle, but she's also not a child, and that's really the norm by gacha fanservice standards.

I'm actually surprised that this is the direction the internet decided to take with Pragmata, instead of what I assumed to be a more obvious and less explicit angle of relentlessly Shinzo-Abe-posting about blatant, egregious Japanese birth rate propaganda and emotional exploitation (seriously, you can't tell me that as a man you can look at things like this and don't feel a faint warmth in your chest). Alive internet theory continues to lose ground. I grant that some design choices stand out, as described above, but I feel like this is mostly done to give the robot child a distinctive/memorable outline and a certain degree of uncanny valley, at which IMO it succeeds.

A computer game featuring a nuclear family as characters, so a human adult woman as the wife and one or more human biological children (not androids), one where the player has to fulfill the role of the protector patriarch and husband, would obviously be much more effective ragebait to Blue Tribe online feminists, because in their view this is basically the full manifestation of the typical toxic male fantasy.

You’re right; in Pragmata there is no wife, and the child is an android and not a biological human. However, the player is still supposed to be the protector patriarch to this android, and is thus, according to the reasoning of Blue Tribers, designed to pander to the toxic fantasies of angry loser males who are otherwise mostly unfit to attract flesh-and-blood women and form families in the real world.

However, the player is still supposed to be the protector patriarch to this android, and is thus, according to the reasoning of Blue Tribers, designed to pander to the toxic fantasies of angry loser males who are otherwise mostly unfit to attract flesh-and-blood women and form families in the real world.

This is the read of people who say things for clicks regardless of how bad it makes their side look, and of the unfortunate people who immitate them because they now think that's how smart cool people talk.

However, the player is still supposed to be the protector patriarch to this android, and is thus, according to the reasoning of Blue Tribers, designed to pander to the toxic fantasies of angry loser males who are otherwise mostly unfit to attract flesh-and-blood women and form families in the real world.

You're still just making this up as far as I can tell. As other commenters noted, games like BioShock have the same framing and everyone loves them.

BioShock came out before the Great Awokening.

Infinite didn't. It's just an example - there's Dishonored 2 (2016) and Witcher 3 (2015) (this one really was a nuclear family simulator).

Then there's God of War and its sequel, Yakuza 6, Death Stranding, seriously do I need to go on?

Bioshock is old enough to buy porn in the USA. And the franchise has largely been dormant since Bioshock Infinite which is old enough to go into high school if it skipped a grade. Times have changed.

they haven't

one where the player has to fulfill the role of the protector patriarch and husband, would obviously be much more effective ragebait to Blue Tribe online feminists, because in their view this is basically the full manifestation of the typical toxic male fantasy.

Isn't this The Castle Doctrine?

(seriously, you can't tell me that as a man you can look at things like this and don't feel a faint warmth in your chest)

Ironically, I think Pragmata and what I've seen of the discourse may have once again confirmed to me that I'm not well-suited to being a parent. Looking at Diana, I feel nothing at all, other than slight annoyance at some of her antics. I'm not some deranged child-free lunatic raving about "crotch goblins" every other hour of the day, nor am I an anti-pedo crusader looking for nonces under my bed, but I honestly don't think I've ever seen a child below the age of like 10, fictional or otherwise, behaving like a child would, whom I didn't find mildly unpleasant and annoying.

I honestly don't think I've ever seen a child below the age of like 10, fictional or otherwise, behaving like a child would, whom I didn't find mildly unpleasant and annoying.

Yes, but that's true for almost everyone I've ever met. Why the special kid hate? Everyone is an annoying ass, which is why you keep your hands out your pockets and your Glock loose. Kids ain't special, you're just not allowed to give the the full corrective beating until they're older.

Adults are trained to keep their annoying behaviours to theselves for the most part, so unless you engage with them on a personal level, they tend to be fairly, if superficially, pleasant. The ones that are not did not internalize the basic rules of behavior and are usually neurodivergent in some way.

I have a strong preference for the appearance of orderliness and fake niceness of adults over the very real-and-honest running around while screaming and not minding their surroundings in public, which children specialize in. I can see on an intellectual level why some may find it charming, but personally I simply dislike "kids being kids".

You're not from a culture that emphasizes and values quiet children. It's a discipline process that is best started early and needs reinforcement now and then. It makes things easier for the adults, but is arguably not so great for the children.

(seriously, you can't tell me that as a man you can look at things like this and don't feel a faint warmth in your chest)

Oddly enough, I feel that I'm protected from this game's superstimulus by interacting all day every day with a hyperstimulus in the shape of my own baby daughter. But I do admit it does look pretty cute.

Having heard nothing about this controversy before this thread other than that it had something to do with a video game, I simply could not believe the cover art was real. I still kinda don’t.

You buried the lede. They made the little girl look like an age 9 version of the hottest chick in the college sorority, complete with makeup, bedroom eyes, and long flowing hair.

Spec Ops: The Line was controversial for intentionally making the player feel like a war criminal. Is part of the artistic vision of Pragmata to make the player feel like a pedophile?

I appreciate the resistance to ideological uglification in games, but that doesn’t mean we need to make preteen girls look like Kate Upton.

Wait, what the hell? I just heard about the game now, the cover art is a little girl with a blue jacket piggybacking on a robot or something. I see nothing remotely like bedroom eyes sorority girl in the picture. She does have long hair though, it just makes her more babyish IMO. There was no lede to bury. I only get dad vibes from the art. You must be projecting sexualization where there is none, or you have different cultural standards.

What are 'bedroom eyes' anyway? I know I'll regret asking.

A look in the eyes which indicates a desire for sex, like you might see in the bedroom with your partner.

Anyone who looks at Diana and sees that is the one that should be kept under strict scrutiny, not Capcom's artists.

Yeah I agree. I don't think she does have bedroom eyes, just was clarifying what the term means.

I'm reminded of the phenomenon of, "When I look at how barbarous orcs are depicted in your work of fiction, my mind can't help but be immediately reminded of black people/other minorities, which is clearly an indication of your innate, implicit racism that you should do the hard work of inspecting and extracting."

See also: "goblins in Harry Potter are anti-Semitic, because the grotesque, hooked-nose race who runs the bank is clearly meant to portray Jews". It's remarkable that people are willing to make that claim with a straight face and apparently without awareness of how it reflects on them.

hey made the little girl look like an age 9 version of the hottest chick in the college sorority, complete with makeup, bedroom eyes, and long flowing hair.

Oh for feck's sake. I had heard nothing about this whole kerfuffle until I saw Shoe's video, but come on. Newsflash: little girls have long flowing hair. When I was that age I had long flowing hair and it was nothing to do with "hottest chick in the college sorority".

Makeup? Haven't seen enough of the images to notice, but from what I can see, that's not makeup. Again, little girls (and boys!) have clear, unblemished, youthful skin with strong colouring - when I was a girl in my early to mid teens, I was at school with girls with Dresden doll complexions and no makeup was involved at all. Now, she does seem to be wearing lip gloss, but on the other hand it's hard to tell if that's meant to be makeup or if it's her artificial skin under the lighting (she also has a shiny nose in this, and there isn't (yet) the notion that one's nose should be shiny so here's highlighter to make that happen). And besides, there are makeup sets for tweens so we're long past any pearl-clutching over marketing adult shit to kids too young for it. (That TikTok is one where I'd happily join in a torch-bearing mob protesting against it).

Bedroom eyes? I'll have to take your word for that.

Going off looks, Diana is around eight to nine years old. So she won't have the uwu features of the sexualised anime little girls (like the current case of Mimi Yanagi, another storm in an online teacup case and one where the 'artist' damn well is making a 'sexualised four to six year old but it's all chibi art and a totally fake fictional character so what is all the fuss about?') that maybe you are referencing as an internal model of "this is what a child in video games should look like".

Agreed. The character looks like a prepubescent girl. A pretty girl to be sure, and somewhat stylized. She is a bit doll like, which is fitting given that she is supposed to be an android.

I hope we are not reaching a point where anything feminine, cute, or pretty is immediately seen as sexy. But it seems like an unfortunate side effect of internet memes that anything that can be sexualised will be, leading to weird situations like this one.

Exactly. If you felt that the cover was too sexual, thats like some pedo virtue signaling or something.

I hope we are not reaching a point where anything feminine, cute, or pretty is immediately seen as sexy.

No, you're only seeing the connection drawn here because:

a.) angry women on the Internet want to Problematize it and equate "men getting to interact with the cute/feminine" = "pedophilia [as the most effective proxy for 'offensive to Female Privilege']"

b.) angry men on the Internet actually did see it as sexy and are crimestop-ing, or are just simping/pretending to for the benefit of the aformentioned angry women

But it seems like an unfortunate side effect of internet memes that anything that can be sexualised will be

Well, it sure beats only one gender having the privilege to determine what is sexual and what is not. That way lies your "don't worry we won't tell your folks; when you're at school, you're a girl"s.

Yeah the character in question looks nothing like an adult.

If anything, the Pragmata "controversy" is an example of seeing the fake and gay culture war strings getting yanked in real time, or whatever metaphor you want, something something outrage farming, something something grifting. People say intentionally-outrageous things to get clicks, regardless of if it furthers their own stated ideological goals or even their reputation, because clicks are the sole aim.

This controversy has two elements to it: the pedo thing and the pro-family thing.

The pedo thing is just a cost of making anything with children in it, sorta like how anything anthro unfortunately attracts furries. Yes, they made the little girl very pretty. The bare legs/feet makes for a distinctive silhouette, but that also draws attention to her physicality. (Apparently pedos are really into feet, legs, and specifically the backs of knees, but that's precisely because those are parts of children's bodies that are typically exposed to view). Getting up in arms about accusing it of being a pedo game is someone actively trying to create generic moral panic outrage when there isn't any. If I run into someone in real life who goes off on an unprompted rant about how gamers are pedos and Pragmata is Incel Pedo Gamergate Misogyny Racism, I'll update my opinion and be disappointed.

The other element is a Hassan Piker line about how gamers (a lot of his audience and periphery audience, the guy is on Twitch) are pathetic losers something something. It's just outrage bait from an outrage baiter, what's annoying is that this naked-outrage-baiter hyperconsumerist grifting socialist gay-baiting himbo nepo-e-celeb gets fawned over and glazed by the NYT.

Socialists/Marxists shitting on the concept of the nuclear family isnt a good look for them, it annoys normies and sane people. Reminding normies that abolishing the family is technically on the Marxist platform is bad tactics when socialism is supposed to just mean "the government does nice things."

I think that the Marxist platform is very diverse because there are many kinds of Marxists. I think that most of them do not want to abolish the family.

As for Marx himself, as far as I know he did not want to abolish the family, he just wanted to get rid of the "bourgeois" style of family.

I'm no expert on Marxism though, so correct me if I'm wrong.

Perhaps most Marxists don't want to abolish the family.

But, most people who want to abolish the family are Marxists.

This is generally because they can't get a family for themselves for some reason, and they want [the qualities that make others able to do that] to be taken away from you and given to them. (Or they're academics.)

The way that's accomplished is to maximize the threat each person in the relationship poses to each other. This can range from most of the basic Western stuff that's "only" financially ruinous- no-fault divorce, alimony, child support- to the more extreme stuff like encouraging children to inform on their parents, separating them entirely Residential Schools-style, or mandating them be grown in a lab and punishing all sex as rape (the Demolition Man/1984 approach). Nobody's gone back to this in the modern age yet, but if they did, it'd look more like [1].

In this way, "the capacity to maintain a family" is redistributed by the State, with those that have it paying more of the bill in the form of needless oppression (as spouses and parents lack the moral hazards the State [as an extension of the people demanding redistribution] has in this matter), while at the same time allowing those with less to escape the consequences of lacking it by having the State exert pressure on the other member(s) in legible, pre-defined ways.

[1] The Harrison Bergeron-style handicapping method for functional families, where you're not allowed to talk to each other beyond an AI intermediate that perfectly mimics your [family member] screaming personalized insults at you for X amount of time before you can listen to whatever else they want to talk to you about. Conversations between couples are ranked based on how much you disagree naturally, so it could be several days before you're allowed to speak a single word to each other, in order to level the playing field for couples that can't do that.

(Actually, AI offers so many other possibilities for the virtue-Marxist; this is just one of them. Imagine a system imposed on you whose sole purpose is to cause you unbearable pain until you've abused your spouse or kid comparable to the State average. It's a handicapper general's, or equity commissioner's, wet dream.)

Yeah abolish the family is essentially capitalist propaganda the Soviet Union and Maoist China never tried or planned anything like that.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1926/07/the-russian-effort-to-abolish-marriage/306295/ "The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage", written in 1926

When the Bolsheviki came into power in 1917 they regarded the family, like every other 'bourgeois' institution, with fierce hatred, and set out with a will to destroy it. 'To clear the family out of the accumulated dust of the ages we had to give it a good shakeup, and we did,' declared Madame Smidovich, a leading Communist and active participant in the recent discussion. So one of the first decrees of the Soviet Government abolished the term 'illegitimate children.' This was done simply by equalizing the legal status of all children, whether born in wedlock or out of it, and now the Soviet Government boasts that Russia is the only country where there are no illegitimate children. The father of a child is forced to contribute to its support, usually paying the mother a third of his salary in the event of a separation, provided she has no other means of livelihood.

Interesting, I didn't no about this. Though to modern eyes equalizing bastard children doesn't seem very radical.

Note that my quote from the same article clarifies that the original draft of the bill was much more radical, practically legalizing polygamy. But that portion was omitted from the final law.

Interesting. The early Soviet period was incredibly experimental but I didn't know this bit.

Better quote:

The session of the Tzik which discussed the abolition of marriage as an institution last autumn took place in the famous throneroom of the Tsars…

The bill was introduced by the Commissar for Justice, Mr. Kursky, a large man with tremendous blonde moustaches. He pointed out that whereas, according to the old law, the wife had no rights in the case of an unregistered marriage, the proposed law would give her the rights of a legal wife in holding property and other matters. Another new point was that wife and husband would have an equal right to claim support from the other, if unemployed or incapacitated for work. The woman would have the right to demand support for her child even if she lived with several men during the period of conception; but, in contrast to previous practice, she or the court would choose one man who would be held responsible for the support. Commissar Kursky seemed especially proud of this point because it differed so much from the "bourgeois customs" of Europe and America. In those countries, he said, the husband can bring a friend who declares that he also lived with the woman, and the latter is then left defenseless. In the villages, where sons continue to live with their parents long after they are married, the whole family is held responsible if a woman claims alimony, according to the original draft of the proposed law.

The opposition to the proposed law seemed to center around four points: (1) that it would abolish marriage; (2) that it would destroy the family; (3) that it would legalize polygamy and polyandry; (4) that it would ruin the peasants.

Leon Trotski also pronounced himself in favor of the proposed new law at a conference of medical workers engaged in medical maternity work. Trotski stressed the point that such a law, by giving more protection to women, would make for the benefit of the country's children.

Although discussion is still going on all over Russia, there seems to be little doubt that the bill, with certain modifications, will be passed at the next session of the Tzik, which will be held in the summer. The more important changes to the draft law, to which the Commissariat for Justice has agreed in deference to the widespread popular protests and opposition, are as follows:

Unregistered marriage will entail legal rights only in cases where the parties concerned mutually acknowledge each other as husband and wife, where it is established before a court that they lived together and had joint property, either by the testimony of a third party or by the evidence of their personal correspondence or other documents, where there was mutual material support or joint bringing up of children.

I genuinely can't tell whether you are being sarcastic or not.

No? but I'm happy to be corrected see my other post.

Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky all wrote at length about how "bonds of blood and affection" presented an obstacle to the revolution and would need to be at weakened if not eliminated in the name of social progress. They may have never literally uttered the precise words "abolish the family" but what they were advocating for was functionally indistinguishable from it. The bit in 1984 about schools teaching kids to rat on their parents and siblings was based on real world policies enacted by both the Third Reich and Soviet Union.

Furthermore, the position that children ultimately belong to the state and that parents are merely temporary custodians seems to remain a reasonably mainstream position amongst progressives to this day, and I would argue that this fundamental disagreement about who children belong to, their parents or the state, is the source of much of the vehemence and vitriol behind issues like school choice and whether schools should be allowed to keep secrets from parents.

I'm really not trying to nitpick as you made a really good faith effort to answer my honest question. But I just can't see it, by this standard the family has been abolished in many Western European countries which I don't think I've ever heard anyone say.

Could you provide the definition of "abolish the family" which neither the Soviet Union nor Maoist China tried or planned?

I don't know because I don't know how you'd even manage such a thing it seems fundamentally incompatible with human nature which I guess is why it works so well as an accusation. Actually I realize I might be totally wrong here and not understanding the criticism, so feel free for you or @JeSuisCharlie to correct me. I've only ever seen the allegation of abolishing the family in conservative fearmongering or Socialist apologists against the same. I know Marx wrote about abolishing the family in some 19th century context. But both the Soviet Union and Maoist China were full of families and maintained the institution of marriage and allowance for parental rights over children. If your going to say parents didn't have the right to educate their children themselves sure but that's true in many Western European countries and no one says they've abolished families. I guess just they fact that the Soviets and Maoist China were full of families and on a policy level they made no moves against this, I don't even understand how one would abolish the family but getting rid of marriage seems a basic first step but every socialist/communist country, except maybe Democratic Kampuchea, maintained the family as a basic unit of society. I suppose the Cultural Revolution had children denouncing parents which is an inversion of Confucian values and a deliberate effort to flatten the hierarchy but children denouncing parents often happens with mass hysteria the fundamental structure is still maintained. Again feel free to correct me I've always just seen it as a snarl accusation based on esoteric Marxist theory and self evidently false given that Communist societies were full of families.

I believe the official BLM website had a line about "disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure"

My point is that it's a cringe artifact of Marxism. It scares the hoes, so anyone who still holds to it is an idealogue, or a shock-jock farming outrage clicks.

The Soviet Union actually briefly tried it in the 20's, with children raised by the whole commune. The bigger problem was polyamory, as it greatly increased the prevalence of both drama and STDs in the communes.

I am more inclined to agree with the idea that the paedo thing is "how dare men like the idea of being fathers and protectors!" so in the same spirit in which "oh, you're against gay rights? hmm you must be a closet poofter yourself then!" the accusation is being levelled that "the only reason you like this blonde, blue-eyed, white Aryan little girl is because you're a nonce, you Nazi white supremacist kiddy-diddler".

Well, the pedos did factually come out of the woodwork for this game.

One would generally expect that people who are attracted to little girls will flock to a game centered around a little girl. That does not mean the game was designed to appeal to pedophiles though, just like a game with dogs is not designed to appeal to zoophiles.

Hot take: anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong.

(Of course excluding "military secrets but art", "private personal information but art", etc.)

Even if it was depicting pedophillia: pedophilia is morally wrong, murder and genocide are morally wrong, yet most people have no issues with depicted gruesome murder and genocide. And most (including me) feel it's gross, but I feel lots of art is gross; it should definitely be behind a filter, like NSFW and "trigger warning" media, but otherwise, nobody should really care about what doesn't really affect them.

The reason for allowing subjective toxic waste, besides having others tolerate your disgusting (to them) fetish, is boundary ambiguity. People are too worried about persecution to publish safe art, unless they see works they know are far edgier avoid persecution (anxiety isn't logical). Furthermore, moral policing oversteps reasonable limits when it tries to target borderline examples (like this one). They shift the rules (spoken and unspoken); they either erode, making the moral policing ineffective to its supporters, or grow, leaving us with worse and worse "sensitive" art.

I have no strong argument against morally policing obvious pedophilia (or porn, or gore, or anything that most people don't like). But I still oppose it, because I'm not convinced it's worth the utilitarian/altruistic loss and potential to stray from "obvious".

As for this game: Dunkey recommends it, the Slade reviewer complements the father-daughter relationship (and the Forbes reviewer criticizes it not for pedophilia, but "zero friction"), the worst I've directly witnessed online is "over-reactive people are over-reacting".

Of course excluding "military secrets but art", "private personal information but art", etc.

I'm old enough to remember the first few bytes of the leaked AACS master key (09 f9 11 ...) because people made so much art, some of it decent, out of it. Controversy over that was a big part of the downfall of Digg, but you're not wrong that I'd probably feel differently if it was nuclear launch codes and not content protection keys.

Hot take: anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong.

(Of course excluding "military secrets but art", "private personal information but art", etc.)

This seems kind of contradictory to me. You seem to implicitly acknowledge that there are some kinds of fiction that can have real world negative consequences that are not above moral critique (leaking military secrets or private personal information), but also implicitly take the line that in the entire universe of things art can be about, none of them will have real world consequences that could match those of military secrets or private personal information.

Now, I'm personally fairly pro-icky art, and I think the simple, obvious reality is that icky art doesn't usually cause us to do icky things. Murder mysteries don't make you commit murder, dramas about rape and trauma don't make you go out and traumatize people, etc.

However, I at least find it plausible that there could be subcategories of icky stories, like those touching on suicide in a particular way, that could actually have negative effects on society and result in real world harm, perhaps in the ballpark of leaking military secrets or personal information. I think it has to be much more piecemeal than to simply say that "anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong."

Those exceptions are non-fiction.

I agree there can be some limits to acceptable expression, but they must be specific and have very good reason. I can't find a good reason against anything fictional, even fictional pedophilia. Generally when somebody morally criticizes "art", they're criticizing the fiction.

I at least find it plausible that there could be subcategories of icky stories, like those touching on suicide in a particular way, that could actually have negative effects on society and result in real world harm, perhaps in the ballpark of leaking military secrets or personal information.

In theory yes, but I think it would be too hard for anyone to form an argument against them that couldn't be broadly applied to harmless art, without hindsight.

More importantly, such infohazardous art would probably not be describable, or the reason for its ban would probably not be arguable, without leaking the infohazard. Meaning it would have to be secretly policed. Now, perfectly secretly policing art is indistinguishable from it not existing, and secret policing can be ethical (e.g. by downranking the art so the creator simply thinks noone likes it), so I don't object to it in theory. But secret police in today's first-world countries would require unimaginable competence, and historically secret police have a bad record, so I object in practice.

I agree there can be some limits to acceptable expression, but they must be specific and have very good reason. I can't find a good reason against anything fictional, even fictional pedophilia.

In fact, don't people who are anti-pornography say that it harms society because men use it as a low-effort substitute for going out and finding a real woman? In the case of pedo porn, this is exactly what we want to happen.

In the case of pedo porn, this is exactly what we want to happen.

No, that's exactly what people say they want to happen. More realistically, people usually just want to use pedophiles as punching bags for status signalling purposes.

Those exceptions are non-fiction.

I guess I assumed you were talking about something like the War Thunder forum, which always seems to have military leaks and is a fictional MMO.

That's the point: War Thunder is mostly fiction, but the leaked military vehicle specs were real.

I'm sure at least a few folks have had to sit through a threat brief involving not falling for a loose rewording of Cunningham's Law.

It's explicitly in the FBI anti-elicitation guidance, yes.

The controversy is a pitiful one, on par with "the symbol of white power", 👌, or Pizzagate in daftness.

Yes, the prepubescent robot girl probably attracts literal pedos to the game: she's wearing her long hair down, there's this weird contrast between her massive coat and bare legs and feet. But I sincerely doubt that Capcom would intentionally design her to attract pedophiles or that its SMM would leave dog-whistle emoji for them.

there's this weird contrast between her massive coat and bare legs and feet

To me, and this is only on first glance, that's meant to underline the fact that she's not a real human child but an android, the contrast between heavy coat and bare legs is jarring and for a flesh-and-blood person, having bare legs and feet like that would be unprotected and dangerous. But if she's a robot, then she isn't in the same danger of injury.

Or it, together with her hair, makes her look like she's wearing a nightgown, which is probably a better angle of attack than insisting that the developers are aware of an obscure meme.

an obscure meme

At this point, I feel doubtful that 4chan's /v/ board counts as obscure. It's my understanding that the meme also is fairly popular on Twitter.

she's wearing her long hair down, there's this weird contrast between her massive coat and bare legs and feet

Ah yes, she has bare ankles and a coat that's too big for her. How scandalous.

This is just angry women complaining that a young female character doesn't hate the male protagonist, and toxic females wanting to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for men (everything these types complain about is projection). That's all.

I would have expected more hysteria over the DLC costumes; there's one that's quite a bit more form-fitting (and her hair is tied up and shortened) and as such maps closer to what pedophilia is in the mind of the typical normie.

As for the uoh-posting... the SMM is doing their job well. It's not like that isn't a target audience for the game, and "give people a slightly-edgy meme/emoji to spam in chat and thus annoy streamers on Twitch" is advertising as valuable as any other (perhaps moreso).

But the game isn't really trying to push "you should be sexually attracted to this character", far as I can tell. Of course, I've been busy catching up with my other backlog of games so I haven't had time to sit down and evaluate how cute and/or funny the android actually is yet.

Ah yes, she has bare ankles and a coat that's too big for her. How scandalous.

Truly Miyazaki tapped innto something with Dark Souls.

I mean there is that boss fight in Elden Ring with the crippled girls in graduation gowns trying to bite your ankles. Made my wife and I instantly say "the writer's thinly veiled fetish" when we got to it.

It's been a meme for years that some of the best waifus of the souls franchise have long dresses and bare feet.

I sincerely doubt that Capcom would intentionally design her to attract pedophiles

It has been suggested that Capcom has done this before, with the Mega Man character Roll.

Roll? Seriously? Maybe I have no idea what pedophiles are attracted to, but I would definitely never suggest Roll as pedobait.

Capcom did authorize the sale of a statue of her bending over with a short dress and a coquettish wink.

Isn't that generally the way with collectible figures when it's female characters, though? It's not so much paedo-bait as "crying out loud, she's too young for the standard pout'n'wink lean forward show off boobs and butt female pose".

I remember the controversy when this piece of high art was released, back in the day.

Coquettish? It's like that Rorschach test joke that goes, "You have a whole album of gay furry porn in your office and I'm the pervert?"

I don't see the connection between this and Gamergate. At best, you could say "this game causes gamers to be attacked as pedophiles" which fits with the Gamergate narrative ("gamers attacked").

My only exposure to controversy about the game was people calling it sexualized, creepy, and pedophilic. The people who call this game perverted are themselves gooners. They are kind of like woke people who call DnD racist for having low-intelligence orcs. It is a kind of self-report. "Strong man protects little child" is completely normal and wholesome in media. It does not therefore become un-wholesome because the child is loli-coded.

Pedophile is becoming more common attack de jour among the Extremely Online. I expect it will follow a similar path of the word "racist." Concretely, I expect within the next decade, a new round of MeToo/cancel culture to include cancelling men for being "pedophiles" but this will not involve any legal proceedings. The "pedophilia" in question will just be age gap relationships (not harassment!).

If this prediction is true, then it would be unsurprising to see the newest term of derision applied early to an easy target like gamers.

In short, I think the controversy is caused by:

  1. perverts sexualizing the game (even though it is not sexual)
  2. getting mad at it (because straight male sexuality is taboo)

I'll probably regret asking, but how is the robot daughter in the game 'loli-coded'?

Only in the relative sense, like compared to Baby Yoda.

The admin of Kiwi Farms claims that she looks too good, with lip gloss, makeup, and a ridiculously fancy hair style, which implies intentional sexualization.

a ridiculously fancy hair style

I haven't seen all the images so maybe there's one where she does have her hair done, but God damn, if "long hair not tied back or up" is considered ridiculously fancy, I better not show anyone that photo of me when I was nine and hadn't even brushed my glossy, long, tresses when the photo was taken!

Here's the full quote of his opinion.

By the way, someone posted this [image of Sarah Miller from The Last of Us] at me on Xitter and I think they thought it was an epic slam dunk.

But, uh, it kind of immediately proves me point. It's an even better point of reference than Ellie [also from The Last of Us]. If you compare that girl to Diana it is even more starkly obvious than Ellie why Diana is so fucking creepy.

Sarah Miller:

  • Flat, short hair (juvenile haircut).

  • Knobbly nose.

  • Close together facial features (neotenic feature)

  • Far-apart eyes.

  • Natural complex and lips.

  • Thin, fuzzy eyebrows.

This looks like a real child.

Diana:

  • Waist-length hair that is featured like a pageant girl.

  • Extreme blush.

  • Lipgloss.

  • Plucked eyebrows.

  • Dark, painted eyelashes despite being blonde.

  • Facial features are further apart like an adult woman's.

  • Facial features are both hyper-realistic and also completely blown out like she has foundation on.

  • Facial features are completely symmetrical like a Sims character.

Like come the fuck on JUST LOOK AT HOW SHE IS MADE UP.

How can you sit there and lie to my face? How can you say that these are the same designs that serve the same innocent purpose?

If you think this is the same thing you have autism. You should not have paternal instincts activated because you have autism and your paternal instincts are broken.

The website's users seem to be more or less evenly split on whether they agree with him.

Looking at the eyebrows in both pictures, they seem the same to me (and you don't have both thin and fuzzy eyebrows). The Sarah picture (the one on the left, I'm presuming) also has glossy lips and light sheen on skin.

Main difference is lighting, warm versus cold tones, and one has short hair showing off her ears plus freckles.

People that want to see Diana as paedo sex doll are gonna see that, no matter what we argue.

If you compare that girl to Diana

Surprised nobody seems to have made a "child" / "child, Japan" joke there. I think that is by itself enough to explain the difference without the need for allegations, Asian vidya and media in general are less ashamed(?) of making their characters straightforwardly cute or funny pretty.

In any case I don't buy this implication that little girl + pretty = pedobait, not from overly-online scolds and not from Null. Hypersensitivity and beauty being in the eye of the beholder aside, his seems like a fully general argument against including anything any sick fuck can theoretically enjoy in any medium - so basically against anything ever, since if it exists it has porn of it, surely Null is not unaware even sarah_miller (even fucking Roll, ffs!) returns non-zero hits on the relevant websites? The only winning move is not to play, and not let lolicons live rent-free in your walls.

Or, to paraphrase:

Sarah Miller: I wasn't attracted to this, and she is kind of homely. I'm not attracted to butch haircuts or neotenous features, so that means nobody else would ever be either. By the way, I did not get along with the girls when I was in elementary school.

Diana: I was attracted to this, and that made me uncomfortable. This means other people will be attracted to this temptress too, and that's a thoughtcrime and bad. This is especially funny because of where I'm posting this opinion. Anyway, I think pedophiles would choose this one, 100%, even though I just got done explaining about how this looks nothing like an actual kid.

(This is mainly because I don't actually think "pedophilia" has anything to do with actual kids, and is more about policing men around young women, which my mind tells me this is; obviously this here is an attempt to get around that.)

This isn't really that difficult to understand.

I'll take "telling on myself" for 500, Alex.

Yes! The whole situation is bizarre. It's like something that would only be found in an Onion article twenty years ago. Lots of people revealing either pedo tendencies or just plain misandristic bigotry.

(The words misandrist and misandristic are still not part of the google gboard (Android keyboard) word list btw)

GamerGate was a failure for the Right because it did not promote any of their aims and norms in the video game industry, but only further cemented the progressive stranglehold on video game culture. Look at modern WoW. The Progressive side successfully narrated the event within the industry and increased the number of LGBT / women / trans and their influence by some percent afterward. It’s an interesting event in any case as it shows the way that Progressive power functionally works — in a gender inclusive space filled with autistic men, attractive women wield enormous social power and can essentially act as petty tyrants, and this is amplified by advocacy networks and sympathetic media which side with them above all. It’s also interesting in that it showed the influence of anonymous organization online a la 4chan, which would later throw their weight behind Trump.

I think that the wokes did see gamergate as a victory for a long time: circled the wagons around journalistic malpractice and bent over a whole multibillion dollar industry to their aesthetic tastes.

However long term it's proving to be a costly victory, with western gaming development eating flop after flop, all of which get hang around the head of activists as woke failures: The Saints Row reboot, Forspoken, Concord, Star Wars Outlaws, Highguard, Dragon Age: Veilguard, etc.

The fallout from Gamergate is like the cultural version of South Africa, left victory with disastrous consequences that they would rather not talk about anymore and needs a constant stream of academic excusecrafting (it's the microtransactions, it's executive interference, it's online naysayers, it's competition from tiktok...)

Gamergate did not involve "the right". There might have been a minority of gamers with right-of-center political views, but this was always an inter-left fight, with some of the defeated later drifting right having found some safe harbor there/having grown a decade older.

Don’t think so. The YouTubers and figures who criticized Zoe the most (Internet Aristocrat, Sargon, Milo) would join the Trump train within a year. The board /pol/ on 4chan where people disseminated information would turn Right. I suppose we can call it the proto-Right, but the reason they hated Zoe was (1) her game was trash but rated highly by someone she dated, (2) she was a slut and they wanted her personal behavior to affect her professional life. By late 2014 the Left was beginning to promote anything that helped SJW, which means that if you didn’t love a trash game made by an SJW then you were no longer on the Left.

Mate, you're just reiterating my points. What's your disagreement?

This was an inter-left civil war which pushed some of the losers toward the right. GG was a bit bigger than /pol/.

with some of the defeated later drifting right having found some safe harbor there

This is known as "having been thrown into the pit".

GamerGate was a failure for the Right because it did not promote any of their aims and norms in the video game industry, but only further cemented the progressive stranglehold on video game culture. Look at modern WoW.

That stranglehold seems to have strangled the industry to death. I'm sure the husk of Blizzard that was left after the sexual harassment catastrophe has filled its eternal legacy MMO with all kinds of woke shit, but out there in the world the industry is seeing devastating layoffs as unwanted games full of snowflake characters metaphorically pile up in trash bins. Like say Dragon Age. They successfully murdered a series, but they sure didn't get anyone to like it.

Yeah, I'm inclined to believe that the progressive victory was going to happen anyway because it did everywhere else. If anything Gamergate is just the backlash from people who sense something is moving but can't really stop it.

"Go woke, go broke" is probably overrated but gaming seems to be one of the places where it regularly happens, for the same reasons it happens at the top end of the film industry.

Progressive stranglehold on video game culture or video games themselves?

I should say the culture expressed in video games.

this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.

If that is indeed the thinking, then that's Anita Sarkeesian levels of not having played the game and missed the point entirely. There's no nuclear family, it's "single dad" coded. There's no wife. Hugh is the most supportive idealized single dad. It's not even "disgusting instinct of spreading his genes"; Hugh is more like an adoptive father. He himself has been adopted, and talks multiple times of how much he loved and was loved by his adoptive family, and how they're his real family. The game is adoption propaganda. If anything the right should be complaining that it's encouraging men to raise kids that aren't their own.

If we're going to mindread the people who screech at the game, I don't think we need to go any further than: anything that reminds men and women that there are genuinely fulfilling experiences in building a family is unpleasant because they are not currently feeling fulfilled by the life they chose for themselves of eschewing traditional family roles.

I didn’t recognize the name, so I looked it up. Ah, it’s the robot daughter one. I’ve seen a couple people playing it.

I didn’t know there was controversy, either. Google doesn’t make it obvious; none of the search results include your links, nor do the related searches suggest any drama. The Forbes review is mildly critical but not controversial. Slant’s is unambiguously positive. How confident are you that this extends beyond the Extremely Online?

It’s definitely not at the level of GamerGate, which in turn was less important than the average games journalist suggests. I prescribe less time on Twitter.

I didn’t know there was controversy, either.

No more did I until literally the other day. But someone will always find a reason to be offended by something.

It’s definitely not at the level of GamerGate, which in turn was less important than the average games journalist suggests.

GamerGate was a huge battle in the culture wars. An entire generation of nerds was redpilled by the realization that:

  1. Game journalists were coordinating with each other as a class to put out a unified media narrative.
  2. Those same game journalists absolutely hated gamers.

And, of course, this lesson was readily generalizable to other fields, such as cinema, or politics.

There is a reason that Scott Alexander had to censor the term, reducing us to talking about reproductively viable worker ants.

To this date, the Wikipedia article on GamerGate starts with "Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture." Anybody who reads that sentence and remembers being there knows that Wikipedia is not to be trusted on political matters.

How confident are you that this extends beyond the Extremely Online?

Not at all. Then again, Gamergate wasn't that different in that regard, was it? I view this as a small and delayed aftershock of Gamergate.

and are now including the pedophilia accusation in their attacks on evil gamers.

Simpler answer: Many of the people lobbing this are just ahistorically narcissistic freaks who fail to grasp a fundamental part of human nature. If you're wierd enough to genuinely not know what a "man" is, then art depicting the Protector role will just come off as alien and disturbing. And if you're a gooner, then obviously it just gets parsed through a sexual lens.

Similar to the women who mainline romance slop calling Sam and Frodo gay because they've never had a real friendship.

And this one became high octane culture war fuel because of all the videos of women streamers having their ovaries take the wheel on stream while playing the game. Of course deep blue types will feel attacked; reds would act the same way if there was a game that had the chuds openly feeling gay-curious. I'll go ahead and note that the latter won't actually happen because it's an apparently inborn trait for a small, sticky slice of the population whereas the former is arguably the literal purpose of cellular life.

And this one became high octane culture war fuel because of all the videos of women streamers having their ovaries take the wheel on stream while playing the game.

If you're going to put it like this, now I want you to elaborate.

I'm not going to say 'just fucking google it', but it's enough of a minor trend for compilation videos to get thrown together.

I recall someone saying on twitter that the easiest way to solve the birthrate issue is to just have women legally obligated to hold a baby for thirty minutes once every month. They might be on to something...

I recall someone saying on twitter that the easiest way to solve the birthrate issue is to just have women legally obligated to hold a baby for thirty minutes once every month. They might be on to something...

"57 (86%) of 66 eligible schools were enrolled into the trial and randomly assigned 1:1 to the intervention (28 schools) or the control group (29 schools). Then, between Feb 1, 2003, and May 31, 2006, 1267 girls in the intervention schools received the Virtual Infant Parenting programme while 1567 girls in the control schools received the standard health education curriculum. Compared with girls in the control group, a higher proportion of girls in the intervention group recorded at least one birth (97 [8%] of 1267 in the intervention group vs 67 [4%] of 1567 in the control group) or at least one abortion as the first pregnancy event (113 [9%] vs 101 [6%]). After adjustment for potential confounders, the intervention group had a higher overall pregnancy risk than the control group (relative risk 1·36 [95% CI 1·10–1·67], p=0·003). Similar results were obtained with the use of proportional hazard models (hazard ratio 1·35 [95% CI 1·10–1·67], p=0·016)."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0140673616303841.com

Getting broken link on your article.

How much can we trust that these vtubers are actual women?

The videos I saw were regular (hot women) streamers, though I don't actually watch any of them, and didn't note names well enough to mention.

  1. Most of them have been doxxed and are, indeed, biological women.
  2. "Female vtubers are secretly 400lbs neckbeards with a voice changer" is a dumb normie meme that has pretty much never turned out to be true. Voice changers are obvious pretty immediately, as are most MtF voices.

So it would be pretty reasonable to trust that they are women.

I don't think men who are better than women at what vtubers do exist in sufficient numbers to make it economically viable instead of just hiring women.

I'll go ahead and note that the latter won't actually happen because it's an apparently inborn trait for a small, sticky slice of the population whereas the former is arguably the literal purpose of cellular life.

Well, there is a body of thought behind the notion that although obligate homosexuality is an inborn minority, a much greater slice of the population can develop an interest in bisexuality depending on prevailing cultural norms, as per the Ancient Greeks.

Bioshock, dishonored, last of us all have "badass male MC protects little girl" and they're some of the most praised games ever. This one was created by a Japanese dev and appeals, intentionally or not, to the vtuber-lolicon crowd. Mainstream reviews will shy away from this because it's off-putting, to say the least, but this is probably why the game is getting pushback.

This trope feels very gendered: I can't think of any comparable examples where the player ends up playing dad to a boy. I'm uncertain if that's a fundamental type difference (sons grow up and become protectors themselves, daughters narratively always need protectors -- not agreeing with the position, just observing the trope), or a difference in magnitude that protecting daughters has a stronger emotional valence and makes a better story.

God Of War 4/Dad of Boy

Death Stranding.........

The baby you carry in the game is actually a girl.

But the baby Madds is talking to in the 3-hour-cutscenes is his son, you, the Norman Reedus.

IIRC, the Death Stranding baby has its gender unspecified for most of the game, and at the end of the game is revealed to be female.

The multi award winning God of War (the newer one, not the original games) and its sequel Ragnarok are just that.

I haven't played that one, thanks for the example. I have played BioShock (and Infinite) and Dishonored, though. Maybe I just missed that one: I'm not a PS gamer, and missed the PC release and don't really play that many single player games anymore.

God of War 2018???

this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut.

I don't follow. What is the nuclear family here? Who is the wife? Is this not a game where you play as a human with an "android" sidekick that looks like a child?

Who is the wife?

In this case, nobody. I didn't claim that the game wholly represents the typical male fantasy in the eyes of Blue Tribers, only that it feeds into it. In other words, it goes into the same mental bucket.

Seems like you kind of made that up out of whole cloth. Do you have any support for this claim? How does a game about (approximately) a single father relate to the nuclear family?

It seems much more likely that this game really is popular among pedos. This is not to say that this was intentional on capcom's part, or that you can't play this game as a normal person, of course.

See my reply here.

And acts like a child. There was a viral video of a lady streamer melting down because the android drawed you a pictur.

Side thing: Why does the robot act like a little girl? Is it a cynical programming to make her an appealing product? No, I don't think cyberwarfare barefooted child robots are a consumer product.

My understanding is the game's story isn't really that deep or philosophical, so I'll do its own work for it. The android actually is a little girl; this is how you properly align an AGI, base it on human neural architecture and make it live life as a human. After X amount of time in an infant chassis, swap it to a cute little girl chassis, eventually give it an adult body. Then you've got a "Digital Native" artificial mind that can intuitively manipulate and hack technology while also identifying with and liking humans.

Kinda like in that shitty film The Creator.

There is a plot justification for the android being a little girl: it's specifically designed to be a guinea pig for testing medical treatments intended for the creator's daughter. As for why they made the medical testing doll not just agentic, but also in a human girl-like manner, your guess is as good as mine. But of course, the real reason is probably that there wouldn't be a plot without that.

Why would you do medical testing on a robot that doesn't have blood or organs? And why would it be a super-hacker?

The plot of the game revolves around lunafilament, a pretty much magical material with the potential to replicate anything. He was trying to make a robot to test artificial body parts so she was by design incredibly lifelike. Making a robot let him test that the artificial organs worked like organs, but as you say she was not a good test subject because lunafilament is toxic if inside humans and she cannot model that. I don't remember if it explained why can hack things.

But in all honestly, the plot of the game is super thin. Just enjoy your robot kid that does all the enjoyable things kids do with none of the parts that make you want to punch something.

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