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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.
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.
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.
This is known as "having been thrown into the pit".
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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 sort of 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.
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Progressive stranglehold on video game culture or video games themselves?
I should say the culture expressed in video games.
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