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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.
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".
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.
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 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.
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