Culture Wars General - KiA Diet Coke Edition

[Dom Cruise]

That baffles me. They grew up fighting against those kinds of groups. They know GTA and Mortal Kombat didn't cause children to go on murder sprees, but when Anita comes along suddenly Dead or Alive and Dragons Crown turn you into a rapist.

Danny o'Dwyer said he got into games journalism because he used to phone in to talk radio and debate people who blamed games for all of societies ills, but now he's known for Tweeting that anime arse causes rape. https://archive.li/GW2cY

You'd think they'd stop the moment the words left their mouth and realize what they're doing is the same bullshit they debunked as a teenager, but they don't.

I still can't get over that cultural reversal, it was such a radical 180 and so unexpected.

Because in the GTA days it wasn't just the violence that was controversial but sex as well, remember the Hot Coffee scandal? Everyone in the gaming community dismissed the controversy as ridiculous.

So whether it was sex or violence, absolutely everyone who played video games was in agreement that content should not be controlled under the excuse it causes bad behavior, that was just such an agreed upon thing for so many years I still can't believe how suddenly it changed.

But nothing happens without some build up and I do remember before Anita came along and before people felt like they should be offended by fanservice in games, some people did used to mock it as tacky and ridiculous, which in hindsight clearly anticipated the pearl clutching direction things would take.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

Jack Thompson gets remembered as a fundie (which he was) but he also made a huge point about calling out misogyny and sexual violence in rap music (which SJWs almost never bring up) and GTA, and in the latter he was joined by feminist groups. A decade later, murdering prostitutes and taking their money in GTA went being just part of the game to being some horrible, awful thing that must be removed entirely.

These people are worse than Jack Thompson and the feminist soccer moms because they target the source and convince people to self-censor. Most of the old censorship crowd just wanted to restrict it to 18/21+ and keep it locked up and hard to access (although some were more hardline).

 

[Judge Dredd]

But nothing happens without some build up and I do remember before Anita came along and before people felt like they should be offended by fanservice in games, some people did used to mock it as tacky and ridiculous, which in hindsight clearly anticipated the pearl clutching direction things would take.

On of the earliest I remember was Caroline Petits review of The Third Birthday where she said Aya Brea was a submissive sex object. It was called out then as much as it is now.

But hindsight is the key I think, because that early days of wokeness in gaming slipped under the radar with the "art games" movement. At the time the assumption was insecure games journalists demanding games "grow up" because Rodger Ebert talked shit about games, but in hindsight we know it's because they never really liked games, and the games press were shilling walking simulators in exchange for blowjobs.

 

[Dom Cruise]

On of the earliest I remember was Caroline Petits review of The Third Birthday where she said Aya Brea was a submissive sex object. It was called out then as much as it is now.

But hindsight is the key I think, because that early days of wokeness in gaming slipped under the radar with the "art games" movement. At the time the assumption was insecure games journalists demanding games "grow up" because Rodger Ebert talked shit about games, but in hindsight we know it's because they never really liked games, and the games press were shilling walking simulators in exchange for blowjobs.

Yes, before woke SJWs there was the "games as art" era.

But the irony is I was a lot more sympathetic to that movement, I've always preferred games like Silent Hill 2 over something like Call of Duty, but I've also always loved sexy game girls, once they targeted those for destruction, as well as evolved to believe that "art" means shrill, pretentious political propaganda, I was done.

And Silent Hill 2, which I would consider to be gaming's crowning artistic achievement, is pretty unwoke, the story in Silent Hill 2 all revolves around a man, while there are female characters who are very well done and interesting, they are still secondary to his story, one of them even winds up in "damsel in distress" distress situations that you have to protect her from, doesn't get any more unwoke than that.

Keep in mind Silent Hill 2 has a huge female fan following, but there's a difference between a female gamer and a "woke" female gamer.

It's sad though because I really do think there wasn't anything really wrong with wanting to push games forward as an artistic medium, but that culture got so totally fucked in the ass by Social Justice and now views games as a means for presenting political messages first and foremost and a work of art a distant second, so they've ironically only held games back as an artistic medium while also taking some of the fun out of games purely meant for entertainment, they've been nothing but a negative influence on video games.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

And Silent Hill 2, which I would consider to be gaming's crowning artistic achievement, is pretty unwoke, the story in Silent Hill 2 all revolves around a man, while there are female characters who are very well done and interesting, they are still secondary to his story, one of them even winds up in "damsel in distress" distress situations that you have to protect her from, doesn't get any more unwoke than that.

There's also the fact that Angela is heavily implied to be a victim of sexual abuse to the point she gets extremely afraid of James for no real reason at times and contemplates suicide at various points in the game. It's a brutally realistic look at sexual assault survivors and you can be damn sure that shit wouldn't fly today.

 

[Dom Cruise]

There's also the fact that Angela is heavily implied to be a victim of sexual abuse to the point she gets extremely afraid of James for no real reason at times and contemplates suicide at various points in the game. It's a brutally realistic look at sexual assault survivors and you can be damn sure that shit wouldn't fly today.

The game is almost 20 years old and yet games have regressed as an art form due to no longer being able to handle subject matter like that in a realistic way.

 

[Syaoran Li]

The game is almost 20 years old and yet games have regressed as an art form due to no longer being able to handle subject matter like that in a realistic way.

I have to admit there is a bitter irony to the fact that the people who pushed for "Games as Art" the most were also the same people who crippled artistic integrity and greatly limited the range of artistic expression in video gaming by declaring certain subjects and aesthetics to be completely off-limits.

Thanks, Obama Anita.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I have to admit there is a bitter irony to the fact that the people who pushed for "Games as Art" the most were also the same people who crippled artistic integrity and greatly limited the range of artistic expression in video gaming by declaring certain subjects and aesthetics to be completely off-limits.

Thanks, Obama Anita.

It is ironic but what it reveals is the “games as art” crowd were mostly hipster douchebags, they didn’t care games as actual art, they cared about games’ social status as something trendy and hip rather than the domain of “basement dwelling” nerds, they were embarrassed to be gamers which is why they were so quick to be Anita ass kissers.

They cared about being posers and band wagon hoppers, real gamers don’t care whether playing games make us “cool” or not.

Same deal with the wider nerd culture and not just games, Devo said it best, “We’re Through Being Cool”, hipster douchebags are just the other side of the coin of jocks, all enemies of nerds.

 

[AnOminous]

They cared about being posers and band wagon hoppers, real gamers don’t care whether playing games make us “cool” or not.

Same deal with the wider nerd culture and not just games, Devo said it best, “We’re Through Being Cool”, hipster douchebags are just the other side of the coin of jocks, all enemies of nerds.

This is why subcultures are either xenophobic and exclusionary or they are literally destroyed.

 

[Jaimas]

Eventually, woke media will die. The Free Market will keep punching it and eventually the big money will pull out when they demand a return on the investment. In time, the industry will recover, though the scars from the war will be deep indeed.

Video Games will be fine, though the censorship row will continue due to Sony's bad decision-making, idiocy like the EGS, and so on. Customers will vote with their wallets, and things will work themselves out. Eventually, the walled garden approach will die off, just like the MMORPG bubble did. Fortnite is already starting to die off, like everyone knew it would, just like when World of Warcraft seemed invincible a decade ago only to wind up where it is now. Time is like a river, and history repeats.

Franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who will need massive retcons or full-on rebooting to salvage, but with the right teams and the right ideas, they will eventually return to where they belong, provided they fire basically everyone involved with the bad decisions that ran them each aground in the first place. The good news here is that some justice seems inevitable: Disney is getting fucked by a CEO departure, it's own ineptitude, and the capricious whims of Corona-chan, and the BBC may be losing its license fees.

The Comic Industry will never return as we once knew it. Countless mom-and-pop shops are gone, hobby stores can't carry comics anymore, and online retailers aren't going to be moving their countless copies of America Chavez anytime soon. Coronavirus killed basically any holdouts that were still holding on. Indie comics and returning old greats will eventually rise to fill the gap, but the current guard of woke tards will do everything they can to destroy their business, and it will likely be years before the medium knows anything remotely resembling health.

Tabletop gaming won't need to do shit. It'll just wait the woke out, like it always does when things suck (Lorraine Williams coming to mind). There will be a resurgence in older content while they wait, as they always have, for their enemies to be ground down under the remorseless advance of time. Eventually they'll take the field once more and get back to enjoying their insular nerd shit in peace.

 

[CheezzyMach]

Eventually, woke media will die. The Free Market will keep punching it and eventually the big money will pull out when they demand a return on the investment. In time, the industry will recover, though the scars from the war will be deep indeed.

Video Games will be fine, though the censorship row will continue due to Sony's bad decision-making, idiocy like the EGS, and so on. Customers will vote with their wallets, and things will work themselves out. Eventually, the walled garden approach will die off, just like the MMORPG bubble did. Fortnite is already starting to die off, like everyone knew it would, just like when World of Warcraft seemed invincible a decade ago only to wind up where it is now. Time is like a river, and history repeats.

Franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who will need massive retcons or full-on rebooting to salvage, but with the right teams and the right ideas, they will eventually return to where they belong, provided they fire basically everyone involved with the bad decisions that ran them each aground in the first place. The good news here is that some justice seems inevitable: Disney is getting fucked by a CEO departure, it's own ineptitude, and the capricious whims of Corona-chan, and the BBC may be losing its license fees.

The Comic Industry will never return as we once knew it. Countless mom-and-pop shops are gone, hobby stores can't carry comics anymore, and online retailers aren't going to be moving their countless copies of America Chavez anytime soon. Coronavirus killed basically any holdouts that were still holding on. Indie comics and returning old greats will eventually rise to fill the gap, but the current guard of woke tards will do everything they can to destroy their business, and it will likely be years before the medium knows anything remotely resembling health.

Tabletop gaming won't need to do shit. It'll just wait the woke out, like it always does when things suck (Lorraine Williams coming to mind). There will be a resurgence in older content while they wait, as they always have, for their enemies to be ground down under the remorseless advance of time. Eventually they'll take the field once more and get back to enjoying their insular nerd shit in peace.

Depending on how ATT and Disney act the Comics Industry could just be Marvel and DC going forward.

Wokeness didn't kill it though the current model has been on life support for over a decade at this point.

 

[Jaimas]

Depending on how ATT and Disney act the Comics Industry could just be Marvel and DC going forward.

Wokeness didn't kill it though the current model has been on life support for over a decade at this point.

It'll take a complete shake-up, but that is possible.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Eventually, the walled garden approach will die off, just like the MMORPG bubble did.

I agree with everything you said, but this is something I think will stick around for a long time simply because there's too much money in it. From the early days of NES and AOL, to Facebook, paid mods, and micro transactions.

It makes sense that the normies want their walled garden where they don't want to put any effort into finding things, and companies want the control simply because they can sell shit as if it were gold.

the current guard of woke tards will do everything they can to destroy their business

I think they will do this to other media too, but I don't think they'll be effective. ResetEra has been surprisingly stubborn in this regard, they have been utterly discredited and is now limited to harassing translators, but they still get the occasional game to be censored.

 

[AnOminous]

I agree with everything you said, but this is something I think will stick around for a long time simply because there's too much money in it. From the early days of NES and AOL, to Facebook, paid mods, and micro transactions.

It makes sense that the normies want their walled garden where they don't want to put any effort into finding things, and companies want the control simply because they can sell shit as if it were gold.

Don't underestimate the number of people who also want reasonable behavior and not to be swarmed by people calling them faggots and niggers. The problem isn't the walled garden, it's the increasing attempts to turn the entire Internet into that rather than let normies cower behind their walls.

 

[Lord Xenu]

I think O'Dwyer is hiding something, I mean no one in his right mind would tweet "You have my sword" to ZQ as she was #MeToo-ing a game dev into suicide.

Do you mean something like

Or do you mean something worse? I'm sure most of us here are familiar with the modus operandi of male feminists at this point.

Former tech reporter Peter Bright convicted on child solicitation charge

Former Ars Technica writer Peter Brought was found guilty of attempted enticement of a minor for sex on Monday. He was arrested last May.

www.dailydot.com

Former Ars Technica writer Peter Bright was found guilty of attempted enticement of a minor for sex on Monday according to Inner City Press.


The tech writer was arrested in May of last year after he set up a meeting with who he thought was a mother of a seven-year-old girl and nine-year-old boy. An FBI agent had been posing as the “mother” and communicating with Bright online. In the correspondences, Bright said he planned to molest both children and rape the girl, according to the Daily Dot.

“VERDICT: In Retrial @ArsTechnica Peter Bright Is Found Guilty of Attempted Enticement Of a Minor For Sex, Says Jury In Empty #SDNY Court,” @innercitypress tweeted.


The Daily Dot confirmed through court documents that Bright had been convicted.

U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York first filed the complaint last June. Bright had been held without bail until his first trial in February of this year. On Feb. 19, that ended in a mistrial after the jury could not come to a final decision.

It’s not clear what held up the jury at the first trial, but Bright claimed his behavior was him age acting. Inner City Press reported that Bright also made claims about his sexual interest that would contradict the charges.


“(Bright) says he prefers full bodied women with a lot of body hair – but denied that (Bright) actually likes children,” Inner City Press wrote.



The evidence against Bright lies in his WhatsApp messages with the FBI agent. In addition to verbally committing to raping and molesting the minors, Bright sent a nude photograph of himself and confessed to molesting an 11-year-old girl in the Bronx. That claim has yet to be proven.

The FBI agent originally found Bright on KinkD, a social media fetish platform, in April. The “mother” said she was looking for someone to teach her children about the “birds and the bees.” Bright volunteered to “teach.”

After a month of correspondence, they set up an in-person meet. Bright was carrying condoms upon arrest.


As Bright awaits his sentence, his Twitter profile remains active. His bio states “Poly/pan/pervy.”

 

[Ineedahero]

Yes, before woke SJWs there was the "games as art" era.

But the irony is I was a lot more sympathetic to that movement, I've always preferred games like Silent Hill 2 over something like Call of Duty, but I've also always loved sexy game girls, once they targeted those for destruction, as well as evolved to believe that "art" means shrill, pretentious political propaganda, I was done.

And Silent Hill 2, which I would consider to be gaming's crowning artistic achievement, is pretty unwoke, the story in Silent Hill 2 all revolves around a man, while there are female characters who are very well done and interesting, they are still secondary to his story, one of them even winds up in "damsel in distress" distress situations that you have to protect her from, doesn't get any more unwoke than that.

Keep in mind Silent Hill 2 has a huge female fan following, but there's a difference between a female gamer and a "woke" female gamer.

It's sad though because I really do think there wasn't anything really wrong with wanting to push games forward as an artistic medium, but that culture got so totally fucked in the ass by Social Justice and now views games as a means for presenting political messages first and foremost and a work of art a distant second, so they've ironically only held games back as an artistic medium while also taking some of the fun out of games purely meant for entertainment, they've been nothing but a negative influence on video games.

I hate to be that guy, but have you played bloodborne? Because before the souls game formula clicked for me I agreed with with you about silent hill 2 being gaming's crown achievement.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I hate to be that guy, but have you played bloodborne? Because before the souls game formula clicked for me I agreed with with you about silent hill 2 being gaming's crown achievement.

I have not played Bloodborne yet but I've been meaning to, I was planning on finally doing it soon but now I hear it's rumored to come to PC so I might have to keep waiting.

But I have played Dark Souls 1 and Sekiro and yeah, they're some of the best games I've played since the PS2 glory days, but when I call Silent Hill 2 gaming's gaming's crowning achievement I mean that in an artistic, story sense, not just pure gameplay.

DS1 and Sekiro don't have much in the way of stories, it's more about the lore, which is all pretty cryptic and that's an interesting approach and I wouldn't have it any other way, but they aren't stories you get really caught up in emotionally like you do Silent Hill 2 or 3.

 

[Borax Bozo]

If you're getting Bloodborne, make sure to get the Old Hunters with it at the same time (assuming it isn't baked-in to your version). It adds a really good expansion area, interesting new weapons, and most importantly at this stage, a lot more NPC hunters since the online population is very low.

 

[Pumpkin Girl IRL]

Online felt tacked on with Bloodborne.

Being moody and lonely in offline mode contributed magnificently to the experience, I think.

 

[Ineedahero]

I have not played Bloodborne yet but I've been meaning to, I was planning on finally doing it soon but now I hear it's rumored to come to PC so I might have to keep waiting.

But I have played Dark Souls 1 and Sekiro and yeah, they're some of the best games I've played since the PS2 glory days, but when I call Silent Hill 2 gaming's gaming's crowning achievement I mean that in an artistic, story sense, not just pure gameplay.

DS1 and Sekiro don't have much in the way of stories, it's more about the lore, which is all pretty cryptic and that's an interesting approach and I wouldn't have it any other way, but they aren't stories you get really caught up in emotionally like you do Silent Hill 2 or 3.

Maybe it's just me (I am super gay for lovecraft and that's definitely part of it) but I found the story of bloodborne to be a lot more straightforward than dark souls 1 and 3 (haven't played 2 or sekiro yet), although it is definitely still more on the lore side than... I was going to say the deeply personal story of silent hill 2, but that's the thing, bloodborne is a personal story, both for the pc and for you, it's just not assembled unless you assemble it yourself (although the npcs and cutscenes seem less cryptic to me than they were in the souls games.)

You are dumped into this alien and utterly inscrutable world but as you play you start piecing together what happened - the blood heals, but it also transforms, leading to the hunt - and you are a hunter seeking a cure.

And the more you play, the more you understand - both as a player and due to the insight mechanic, as a pc - and once you know enough - through your meeting with rom, who hinders understanding, or by gaining enough insight, you realise just how little you really knew, and how utterly fucked you are - and it just keeps getting worse from there. Silent Hill 2 is the only other game that made me feel so hopeless, which is why it prompted my recommendation. God I hope it comes to pc.