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You know what we didn't have in a good while? A proper gamer drama.
All the actors from the past decade are basically defunct: Sarkeesian largely ceased publishing after the parted ways with McIntosh (my long-standing belief is that he was the brains behind the operation, and she alone just couldn't make enough quality material to stay relevant), Zoe van Valkenburg's last claim to relevance was an accusation against another of her exes in 2019, resulting in his suicide soon after. Youtube continues to steal lunch money from written articles about games, so Polygon and Kotaku are shells of their former selves. Vice's Waypoint has come and gone, and the only thing of note they did was having to apologize after posting a 9S forcefem fanfiction on main.
There has been some occasional flareups here and there, but nothing that could possibly rise to the 2014's heights of in(s)anity. Dare I say... until now?
You probably haven't heard of Sweet Baby Inc.. It's a "narrative consulting" company that specializes in retooling the game's scripts to better represent historically underrepresented groups. Notable releases with which they worked in the past few years include God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2 and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. For those of you who don't play often, the former two were generally favorably received, while the latter was a critical and commercial bomb that was dead in the water for years before its launch and probably killed the development studio.
The broader public (by which I mean the narrow, extremely online subset of the fandom) learned about its existence some time last year. People have been coming up with some wild conjectures about what exactly SBI's involvement was with those games. Like for example many western AAA titles in recent years struggle with modeling female faces for some reason, and the in-game models look uncanny valley-ish and quite unlike the people they're modeled after, and the conspiracy-inclined are saying that the characters are deliberately made ugly to challenge the patriarchal standards, or something. I am of two minds - most of the examples usually provided seem to be deliberately taken in-between frames, but still it's a bit weird how Japanese devs like Capcom, Platinum or Kojima Studios don't have those issues.
But let's put aside speculation about technical issues and focus on what is SBI's department: writing. Well, thing are not looking so good there either:
Oh, and as you probably expect at this point, SBI's members have been occasionally seen on twitter gloating about how the hold white male gamers in contempt. I've given up twitter and tumblr for Lent, so I won't be providing specific examples here, sorry.
A few days ago, a steam curator was created listing all the games that have SBI's involvement as "not recommended". The situation is played out predictably: some employees claimed harassment, the steam group got Streisand Effect'd and grew to 200k over the last two days, it has been mass reported, people are trolling in the fora claiming to have insider info, the forum got wiped... Kotaku has written an article about it, the article's author claims that you can't be racist against white people. It's all 2012-2015 discourse frozen in amber, time is a flat circle. The only difference now is that because it's Musk's twitter, the statement gets stamped with a community note. Contrary to what I wrote at the beginning, it'll probably blow over in a few days, but I decided to do a writeup just in case.
Myself, I haven't bought a western AAA game since 2017, and I wish all of you the same.
This has been going through a number of the podcast & youtube circles I listen to, and there's a few points made by some of them that I've pretty much come around to.
First, that as one put it, Sweet Baby Inc. is just successful Feminist Frequency. This bit of "Gamergate 2.0" just serves to illustrate that the gamers lost in the original.
Not that it was ever really a battle worth winning. That's the second point. "The only thing faker than Trump was Gamergate," as a podcaster put it. Because video games — like movies, comic books, football, etc. — are just an escapist "release valve" keeping people idle and passive. That the attitude of the Gamergaters — including the current anti-SBI crowd — is really just "burn my society down around me, I'm fine with that, just so long as you let me have this little corner of escapism."
It's treating a symptom (a potentially useful one at that) instead of going at the disease. I remember one of the videos had clips from one of SBI's top people, which included what was basically encouragement of a "nice video game studio you've got here; shame if someone were to call it sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic" strategy. But why does that strategy work to begin with? Another reason firms like SBI work is ESG scores and the corresponding low-interest money. Why is that a thing? Because our society lets fat-cat finance capitalists like Larry Fink go unstopped.
Without video games, or Marvel movies, or football to keep them passive, maybe young men would start getting up off their butts and get active. Don't "fight" to take back gaming or comic books, fight to take back your country, to take back Western Civilization. Because there won't be anyone trying to "wokify" your little hobby once the Woke have been crushed utterly.
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Let's gameplan it. If you could wave your magic wand and get masses of people to follow your guidelines. What kind of scchedule / timeline / milestones are we looking at?
Is there killing? Brainwashing? New laws? Revoking of old laws? What institutions are torn down and which remain?
I'm not sure I can go into much detail; not without going beyond the limits of what this place allows.
But the ideal scenario, as for methods, is Caesarism — we get an Augustus seizing power. Worst-case scenario, then, is probably Boojahideen — the Left gets to see what an actual "Christian Taliban" looks like.
Definitely. The question is how much will be necessary.
Russell conjugation: I educate, you indoctrinate, they brainwash.
Both, and massively so.
As with Augustus, the surface forms of some old institutions would probably survive, but the substance would be radically replaced.
For example, with academia, our Caesar's actions should fall somewhere between Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries and 1960s Suharto.
Is this meant to appeal to conservatives?
Who do you mean by "conservatives"?
The GOP establishment, for whom lower taxes on Big Business is priority one?
The "I didn't leave the Left, the Left left me" trailing edge of the perpetual revolution, who want to go, as Neema Parvini puts it, "back to Fresh Prince"? Or the Obama voter who's now voting Republican because they have nostalgia for the 2009-2010 "post-racial moment" and think that rationing covid vaccines by race is a step too far?
The "conservatism" that Michael Malice called "progressivism driving the speed limit"? The one of which Robert Lewis Dabney wrote in 1871:
Or maybe there's the "paleoconservatives," perhaps the sort about whom Wikipedia says:
As one of the Brits at the Lotus Eaters podcast put it recently (this is from my imperfect memory), "we live in a revolutionary time, so any 'conservative' opposition must actually be counter-revolutionary."
So, do I expect to appeal to the temperamentally conservative sort who stands athwart history yelling "slow down just a little"? No.
Do I expect it to appeal to the people who hold to some standard beyond a mere affection for the status quo? Who believe there's precious little left to conserve, and that every day we keep on "playing the game" by the current rules we see a tiny bit more of it chipped away? Who see that, much like planting a tree, the best time to "flip the table" was 30 years ago (or more); the second best time is today?
Perhaps.
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