Culture Wars General - KiA Diet Coke Edition

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Save the Loli said:
Have you looked at the news lately? The military-industrial complex these days LOVES troons, Pride Month, etc.
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For the plain and simple reason that if you slap a troon or fag flag on a corporate memo, they're practically immune to criticism. Selling ineffective weaponry? Indulging in grift? All they have to do is wave the rainbow flag and they'll be shielded.
 
Judge Dredd said:
Moral ambiguity, deep characterisation, or downer endings can work in small amounts. Look at films like The Joker, The Mist, or Silence of the Lambs. But most of the time, people want to see Vin Diesel drive fast cars and blow things up.
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oldfags know that was always the case. 9 out of 10 movies have a happy ending where the protagonist ends up with the girl. it's escapism, seeing the same shit or worse as they see on the news all the time isn't that entertaining.
every medium has a large amount of crap and lowest common denominator content, because it simply works best financially from a numbers perspective. pulp fiction was a big deal 100 years ago for the same reason YA and other stuff is now: not too long, simple setup, clear outcome, sometimes scandalous content (think GOT or violence porn "horror" now). didn't stop great works from being made, but from a simple statistical perspective it was always the minority.
it's part of sturgeon's law and also reason for "everything was better in the past" - no, most people just forget the crap and remember what they enjoyed or even watched (since you simply can't read/watch everything, and word of mouth and advertisement was always a thing).
and even if shit it worse than usual, in time this will inevitably change like everything else, either the soft way where tastes shift or by shit going so bad you got a hard reset and no one got time/money/mood for crappy entertainment anymore (see: the effect 2 world wars had on media and culture at large in it's wake).
 
Gears of War is a good example of how politics in games have almost always been kind of gay, the Iraq war satire was as subtle as a chainsaw gun to the face, especially moments like fighting your way through the ruins of a college campus with "no blood for Imulsion" posters on the walls, real subtle touch there.

Not to mention being anti-Iraq war was as basic bitch as it came during the mid-00s (not saying it was the wrong stance, just that that was how most people felt), the left have always been band wagon hopping retards, it's just that the band wagon used to be 1000 times more tolerable.

And while the political messaging was obviously there, it still didn't get in the way of the games just being fun actions games where cool dudes kill cool monsters with cool guns.

But Gears is kind of that pivot point from where most games were simply "video game" video games towards the far more pretentious future of games today.
 
ZMOT said:
oldfags know that was always the case. 9 out of 10 movies have a happy ending where the protagonist ends up with the girl. it's escapism, seeing the same shit or worse as they see on the news all the time isn't that entertaining.
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But even simple entertainment and popcorn like Terminator 2 didn't have that "yay, Skynet is defeated" *roll credits* Even in a movie like that there's some ambiguity.
Plus we're talking about books, not a top spinning at the end of Inception in massive Hollywood movies.

And sturgeon is a fish, not a law. [I've been posting in Beauty Parlor and it rubs off...]
 
Guitar Hero streamer Acai is playing Guitar Hero Smash Hits right now. As he started playing Pantera's "Cowboys from Hell", his chat started sperging out and dilating about the band being racist and Acai responded by overlaying a Kirby song over the ingame audio so he wouldn't hear the actual song.
 

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Really? You don’t say!

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Well, to be fair, she did the good ol’ “If you don’t like it, don’t watch it“ spiel. It must have worked wonders!

Plus, there’s this:
Simultaneous with the reshuffling of their various YouTube channels, this decline continued into March, wherein the channel’s views further decreased, with most videos averaging around 15,000 – 20,000 views and the month’s breakout uploads – this time reviews of Gran Turismo 7, a Goldeneye: 007 retrospective, and a first impression of Elden Ring eventually plateauing at 27,000.
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Interestingly, the month held one massive outlier, as the network’s review of Elden Ring broke 48,000 views.

However, it should be noted that this performance is less indicative of an explosive love for G4 and Xplay’s content and more a hunger from fans of the series for any information they could get on the game prior to its release.
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In other words, I guess it‘s safe to say that the real winner in all of this is Elden Ring. And the thing is, it didn’t have to really do anything.
 
Give Them Enough Rope said:
Guitar Hero streamer Acai is playing Guitar Hero Smash Hits right now. As he started playing Pantera's "Cowboys from Hell", his chat started sperging out and dilating about the band being racist and Acai responded by overlaying a Kirby song over the ingame audio so he wouldn't hear the actual song.
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Well I mean it's hell, do they not expect the cowboys there to be racist?
 
Smaug's Smokey Hole said:
But even simple entertainment and popcorn like Terminator 2 didn't have that "yay, Skynet is defeated" *roll credits* Even in a movie like that there's some ambiguity.
Plus we're talking about books, not a top spinning at the end of Inception in massive Hollywood movies.

And sturgeon is a fish, not a law. [I've been posting in Beauty Parlor and it rubs off...]
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that would the rare 1/10 movie, doesn't even have a romance. not saying everything needs it (or should have it), it's simply a "broad appeal" thing. this also means going deliberately against it can work wonders, like in T2's case (personally I think you just need good characters with a good story and usually that takes care of most of it, with or without romance/happy end/etc)
 
Behold the Gran Turismo Autismobile

Seems strangely fitting for a game that tasks you with collecting 42 different variations of Nissan Skyline and spending countless hours shaving 0.001 of a second off your "licence test" times so you can get a slightly shinier trophy.
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throwaway542 said:
Behold the Gran Turismo Autismobile

Seems strangely fitting for a game that tasks you with collecting 42 different variations of Nissan Skyline and spending countless hours shaving 0.001 of a second off your "licence test" times so you can get a slightly shinier trophy.View attachment 3271324
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This is also the game that doesn't have a rotatable chase camera, which is a standard feature in every other racing game on the market today. As in NFS, Forza Horizon and Motorsport, F1, Assetto Corsa, DiRT, Grid, IRacing, Project Cars, heck even the terrible NASCAR 21 Ignition has a rotatable chase cam!
 
For some reason leftists want really overt politics in every piece of media. Not only that but they want to replace white characters with minorities and call you racist if you disagree. However if you dare try to raceswap a black character they will freak out with every fiber of their body.

These videos are great examples of lefty mental gymnastics:
 
Marissa Moira said:
So it turns out Jim Ryan is conservative who is pro-life and wanted to keep politics out of the office. Instead of kneeling towards the feelings of women in these trying times he wanted to give a shoutout to his cats who are celebrating their collective birthday.

Talk about one hell of a betrayal arc.
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That's neat and all, but does he support backwards compatibility with PS2 games? I don't care if he goes back in time to vote for Hitler. Playing my copy of Digital Devil Saga on the PS6 is a much more pressing matter.
 
I guess it's time to link to the "Banana Equivalent Dose of Politics" theorem again?
Imagine that you're about to bite into a soft, creamy, delicious banana, when someone runs over yelling "STOP! THAT'S RADIOACTIVE!", and smacks it out of your hand. I imagine you'd be pretty upset at that point, probably wonder what this weirdo's going on about. Radioactive? WTF? It's a fruit, not a nuclear fuel rod!

But you see, on the most technical level...the guy's right. Bananas are radioactive. They contain Potassium-40 and other isotopes. His actions, however, remain ridiculous. Eating a banana is obviously not dangerous. It would require eating 100,000,000 bananas at once to deliver a fatal dose of radiation, and the attempt would kill you for a host of other reasons long before you got to even 1,000,000 bananas.

And while bananas are a well known example, literally everything emits some minute, harmless trace amount of background radiation. Even our own bodies.

But what would you say to someone who told you "everything is radioactive!", and began to point at random objects around you going "that's radioactive! And that's radioactive! And so's that!"? Not someone who seemed to just be sharing an interesting though largely useless scientific factoid, but someone who seemed to be expecting you to DO something, to respond as though you'd just been informed that....well that you were around something radioactive?

You'd think that person was pretty nuts, right? Because as much as the statement "everything is radioactive" is true in the most technical sense, employing the broadest conceivable definition of radioactivity, it's also useless and absurd, and embracing it would make calling something radioactive meaningless...and also ineffectual as a warning when one is about to encounter something that actually DOES emit a hazardous amount of radiation.

So that's not how in common parlance we use the term "radioactive". When 99.9999% of people call something radioactive, they mean that it is MEANINGFULLY so, that it emits enough radiation to warrant special caution.

Everything I just said about radiation applies to politics as well.

There's a common argument going around that "everything is political". Sometimes it's phrased "all media is political" or similar. By everything, people don't generally mean that rocks and air are political, of course, but they do mean everything human beings do and think and perceive.

And like with radiation, in the broadest possible sense they can defend this statement semantically. You can read between the lines of anything anyone does and certainly anything anyone creates, and glean some insight into how they see the world, their little unquestioned assumptions and biases, and you can play six degrees of Kevin Bacon between those details about a person and an outlook on politics. Theoretically, under this reasoning, the statement "the sky is blue" is political, since by framing the assertion in such factual terms, you're claiming an objective, observable reality, and thus discounting certain postmodernist beliefs.

But saying that belief in a blue sky is political is about as ridiculous as declaring bananas radioactive. You would have to make so many assumptions layered on top of other assumptions to get from belief in a blue sky to any viewpoint on nations, governance, or any hot-button modern issues that you would never be able to reliably guess a person's stances based on whether they said the sky is blue...and a different person could come to the opposite conclusion about what that person believes on basically any issue through another chain of assumptions that's no more or less valid and no more or less likely to be right. And as it applies to gaming, the basic "rescue the princess" excuse plot is no more likely to signal support for traditional gender roles than it is support for feudal monarchy. Really, such broad cliches are more like political inkblot tests. What you see in them says far more about what YOU believe than what the writer believes.

We've all been to a family or social gathering where someone has said "let's all get along and not bring up politics". And virtually nobody is actually CONFUSED as to what that statement means, just like virtually nobody is actually confused when someone says to avoid exposure to radiation.

But when someone says "I don't want politics in my video games" or "Super Mario isn't political", there sure are a lot of people who FEIGN confusion, who condescendingly explain to you that everything is political because everything a person does reveals some little tidbit about their belief system. And based on that definition they offer, they want ACTION, they want the politics they see in media to be called out, they want creators to be held accountable for their messaging. They are no more offering an abstract factoid than the person frantically pointing at a tree and screaming "IT'S RADIOACTIVE!!" Of course, I bet you could look through the histories of almost every person who's said that, and find some point where they've demonstrated understanding of the normal definition of politics, be it referring to a "political account" on twitter (after all, under their stated beliefs aren't all twitter accounts political accounts?), saying they "got political" about something (weren't they always political about everything?), or simply knew how to follow a "no politics" rule in a discussion space without assuming they'd be banned for any discussion of anything. So either they're disingenuous or their own actions prove them wrong and demonstrate that you CAN'T interpret a person's politics from throwaway statements and implicit assumptions like that. Well, either or both...most often, probably, both.

At the end of the day "everything is political" is a motte and bailey argument.

The motte is that it's possible to interpret small details about a person's worldview, their attitudes towards society, humanity, and life, from the things they do, say, and create...even if they're not consciously trying to make a point.

The bailey is that these guesses can be relied upon to judge a work or a creator, to draw conclusions about where they stand on tangentially related real world issues, or even to predict how other onlookers will interpret the same media, and that media creators have a social responsibility to include explicit political messaging that the arguer agrees with.

There may be trace amounts of politics in everything people do, just as there are trace amounts of radiation emitted by everything. But neither are meaningful or have any likely effect on people. Things can still be sorted into "political" and "not political" as easily as they can "radioactive" and "not radioactive" based on that standard. People understand a difference between the amount of politics in Metal Gear Solid and the amount of politics in Tetris just as easily as they do between the amount of radiation in uranium and the amount of radiation in breakfast cereal. One is meaningful and should be treated accordingly, the other is so negligible that it can reasonably be treated as not existing.

Dialectical analysis of Megaman is no more reasonable than that guy swatting a banana out of your hand. It's an ideological bludgeon, a tool for guilt tripping media creators by convincing them that they can't escape politics, or allow their audiences to do so, and thus must pick a side...the veiled threat that picking the wrong side will be met with severe social consequences is generally at least implied.
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