Culture Wars General - KiA Diet Coke Edition

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Some dinky niche game but a Trump reference planted in by localizers.
 
Does anyone else get really deeply, profoundly fucking sad when they think about the gaming culture war?

I was thinking back to 2013 when the political culture war was really starting to gain steam and one of the first things was the controversy over the female character designs in Dragon's Crown, which sure, they were kinda over the top, I could see some people thinking they took things a little too far to the point of ridiculousness (though I still disagree)

But to think that evolved into the ResetERA mentality that despises any breast size larger than "flat as a board", we're not talking over the top sizes, we're talking the very concept of breasts period, that there are seriously people out there that get offended over video game breasts.

It's just so.... fucking stupid.

Gamers have always been a very argumentative bunch, but it used to simply be over the merits of a game, which console was the best and while that could get tiresome as well, it was at least, you know, shit actually directly about video games and not political BS like "representation" or breast size.

It just fucking sucks man, how did we wind up here?
 
Dom Cruise said:
Does anyone else get really deeply, profoundly fucking sad when they think about the gaming culture war?

I was thinking back to 2013 when the political culture war was really starting to gain steam and one of the first things was the controversy over the female character designs in Dragon's Crown, which sure, they were kinda over the top, I could see some people thinking they took things a little too far to the point of ridiculousness (though I still disagree)

But to think that evolved into the ResetERA mentality that despises any breast size larger than "flat as a board", we're not talking over the top sizes, we're talking the very concept of breasts period, that there are seriously people out there that get offended over video game breasts.

It's just so.... fucking stupid.

Gamers have always been a very argumentative bunch, but it used to simply be over the merits of a game, which console was the best and while that could get tiresome as well, it was at least, you know, shit actually directly about video games and not political BS like "representation" or breast size.

It just fucking sucks man, how did we wind up here?
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My mom always used to have a saying when it came to censors, and that saying was this:

Jaimas' Mom said:
It will never stop at tits.
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She was referring to art book censors at the time, but she wasn't wrong. These assholes have literally always been there for as long as Video Games have existed. They aren't unique to the left or right, and before we had the current batch that started to become uppity around 2008, we had them in the 80s and 90s trying to tell us video games were making our children violent or that they were introducing children to concepts like evolution (yes, this was a thing, and yes, Lyndon LaRouche has a number of colorful and insane quotes on it). We even had assfucks like PETA trying to moral panic over cooking and hunting games.

Before it was video games, it was rock music, popular cartoons, and Dungeons and Dragons. Before then it was Elvis. Before that it was Jazz. The only difference between the moral panic dipshits then and the ones now is that one's a Type 1 on the chart and the other's a Type 11. These people don't care about video games, it's solely about power dynamics, their own fears of obsolescence, and their inherent belief that they are more qualified to dictate your life than you are. So after "please think of the children!" failed, they decided to find other ways in to give them indirect control over the medium. They eventually settled on going after diversity and inclusion.

The thing is, Video Games were already inclusive. There's been female protagonists since 1984 (earlier still if you want to get really fucking pedantic), and minority protagonists since the same (earlier still if you count sports stars like Pele). And when DIGRA got taken over by ideologues in the mid 2000s, they tried very hard to prove this need for diversity and inclusion. The problem? Every single study they did showed the exact fucking opposite. No one cared about the race or gender of the characters, and if the story itself was decent, the gamers would accept absolutely anything.

While overfed tards like Jim Sterling will try to define her as "the monster gamers created," it's a load of shit - Anita Sarkeesian only has relevance because she was effectively astroturfed by the entire indie gaming press which we can prove now were openly in collusion long before Anita's Kickstarter ran. They never needed to prove any claim she made about harassment, just as they never needed to with any of their other useless friends. The media was going to go with the "Gamers are sexists" angle regardless of any evidence that existed. The claims that she's faced "non-stop harassment" hits a brick wall when she publicly said before the UN that she considers pointing out when she's lying to be harassment.

The worst part is that people like Anita will never go away. There will always be more like her, and still more after those.
 
Jaimas said:
The worst part is that people like Anita will never go away. There will always be more like her, and still more after those.
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They mix it up for variety though, so maybe the next kind will be fundie Christians again for a change of pace.
 
CheezzyMach said:
I'm just waiting for the Left to flip it's stance again when the calls for censorship start coming from the Right.
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It always happens. Just like you didn't hear a peep about drone strikes on civilians from the same leftards who are now completely irate and reeeeing about "children in cages."
 
Jaimas said:
My mom always used to have a saying when it came to censors, and that saying was this:



She was referring to art book censors at the time, but she wasn't wrong. These assholes have literally always been there for as long as Video Games have existed. They aren't unique to the left or right, and before we had the current batch that started to become uppity around 2008, we had them in the 80s and 90s trying to tell us video games were making our children violent or that they were introducing children to concepts like evolution (yes, this was a thing, and yes, Lyndon LaRouche has a number of colorful and insane quotes on it). We even had assfucks like PETA trying to moral panic over cooking and hunting games.

Before it was video games, it was rock music, popular cartoons, and Dungeons and Dragons. Before then it was Elvis. Before that it was Jazz. The only difference between the moral panic dipshits then and the ones now is that one's a Type 1 on the chart and the other's a Type 11. These people don't care about video games, it's solely about power dynamics, their own fears of obsolescence, and their inherent belief that they are more qualified to dictate your life than you are. So after "please think of the children!" failed, they decided to find other ways in to give them indirect control over the medium. They eventually settled on going after diversity and inclusion.

The thing is, Video Games were already inclusive. There's been female protagonists since 1984 (earlier still if you want to get really fucking pedantic), and minority protagonists since the same (earlier still if you count sports stars like Pele). And when DIGRA got taken over by ideologues in the mid 2000s, they tried very hard to prove this need for diversity and inclusion. The problem? Every single study they did showed the exact fucking opposite. No one cared about the race or gender of the characters, and if the story itself was decent, the gamers would accept absolutely anything.

While overfed tards like Jim Sterling will try to define her as "the monster gamers created," it's a load of shit - Anita Sarkeesian only has relevance because she was effectively astroturfed by the entire indie gaming press which we can prove now were openly in collusion long before Anita's Kickstarter ran. They never needed to prove any claim she made about harassment, just as they never needed to with any of their other useless friends. The media was going to go with the "Gamers are sexists" angle regardless of any evidence that existed. The claims that she's faced "non-stop harassment" hits a brick wall when she publicly said before the UN that she considers pointing out when she's lying to be harassment.

The worst part is that people like Anita will never go away. There will always be more like her, and still more after those.
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The big difference though is guys in the past Lieberman or Thompson were utterly ineffective in actually changing video games, the most they achieved was Lieberman helped cause the creation of the ESRB which didn't change the content of games themselves, only gave them a rating, Jack Thompson didn't do jack shit other than expel a lot of hot air for years.

But Sarkeesian on the other hand utterly changed the way video games are made in the west, sexual content has more or less vanished from the western AAA market and it's almost all thanks to her, all it took was changing the gender of the soapbox speaker for them to get their way.

Even after all these years it still never ceases to completely piss me the fuck off.

fyi what got me thinking about this is I've been reading through the archive of now defunct gaming site Gameological Society and I see that kvetching about "wahmen in viyda games" was already in a full force by 2013, more so than I really realized. http://gameological.com/2013/06/decadent-fear-effect-2-tomb-raider/index.html


It's depressing to think just how long this has been going on.
 
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Dom Cruise said:
The big difference though is guys in the past Lieberman or Thompson were utterly ineffective in actually changing video games, the most they achieved was Lieberman helped cause the creation of the ESRB which didn't change the content of games themselves, only gave them a rating, Jack Thompson didn't do jack shit other than expel a lot of hot air for years.

But Sarkeesian on the other hand utterly changed the way video games are made in the west, sexual content has more or less vanished from the western AAA market and it's almost all thanks to her, all it took was changing the gender of the soapbox speaker for them to get their way.

Even after all these years it still never ceases to completely piss me the fuck off.

fyi what got me thinking about this is I've been reading through the archive of now defunct gaming site Gameological Society and I see that kvetching about "wahmen in viyda games" was already in a full force by 2013, more so than I really realized. http://gameological.com/2013/06/decadent-fear-effect-2-tomb-raider/index.html


It's depressing to think just how long this has been going on.
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Pretty much this, although I think Anita's success had less to do with her gender and more to do with how she platformed her moral crusade.

In the past, you had women as moral guardians, but they were either conservative Christians like Patricia Pulling, Rebecca Brown, and Phyllis Schafly, or they were soccer mom liberals who had common ground with some fundie talking points, like Tipper Gore. These women were every bit as ineffective as their male counterparts.

Anita was different because she campaigned on a left-wing platform, and was one of the first major SJW talking heads to gain mainstream traction. Seeing as she started getting really big in 2012-2013, she was able to get her foot in the door rather early. That went a long way in helping her initial image of credibility.

Prior to her, right-wing moral guardians were the norm and a lot of people in America were sort of operating on the notion that explicitly leftist moral authoritarians didn't exist outside of PETA and insignificant fringe loons.

The industry listened to her because she presented her arguments in a secular and decidedly left-wing way, which gave her an initial aura of credibility in an industry that was used to only dealing with fundies and soccer moms for the past two decades up to that point.

Had Anita's objections invoked Christian morality instead of intersectional feminism, she would be even less effective than Jack Thompson was.
 
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Dom Cruise said:
The big difference though is guys in the past Lieberman or Thompson were utterly ineffective in actually changing video games, the most they achieved was Lieberman helped cause the creation of the ESRB which didn't change the content of games themselves, only gave them a rating, Jack Thompson didn't do jack shit other than expel a lot of hot air for years.

But Sarkeesian on the other hand utterly changed the way video games are made in the west, sexual content has more or less vanished from the western AAA market and it's almost all thanks to her, all it took was changing the gender of the soapbox speaker for them to get their way.

Even after all these years it still never ceases to completely piss me the fuck off.
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The ESRB is what ultimately happened in that case, but that wasn't what Jackyboy and his buttbuddies in the establishment tried to do.

What they wanted was the Family Entertainment Act, which basically would have not only established the ESRB rulings, but would have entailed an outright ban on the sale of video games to minors, jail time for anyone who sold or distributed a game to a child who was underaged, authority for the FTC to investigate misleading game ratings, and an audit of retailers including possible “secret shoppers” to see if underage kids can buy M or AO games from stores, just to name a few. Hillary Clinton was arguing, completely unironically, that we needed to treat video games the same as tobacco, alcohol, and porn.

That is what they were after, and thankfully, they did not get.

As for Anita herself? Most people have no idea who the fuck she is. She has no ability to defend her own talking points and won't even show up if there's a chance she could face even mild criticism for her positions. There is a reason that the very first time she so much as faced the merest hint of an opposing viewpoint (at VidCon) she lost her shit. Brianna Wu is more readily able to handle herself in a public Arena.

The reason content you like keeps disappearing has nothing to do with Anita; it has to do with the braindead speds that idolize shitheads like her and view Entryism as a religion. They want control, and they will do anything to get it, and a number of companies still haven't worked out that Twitter is not real life.

Sony's decision to headquarter itself in California has everything to do with why Sony has basically blanket-censored the weird Japanese games one used to go to the platform for (and also is why you're a Sped if you get a PS5 knowing this). Nintendo's much more resistant to this infiltration, but they continue to attack from the direction of the translator's pit and community portals. They are never going to stop with this shit and all we can do is what we did for other infected media: Vote with our wallets.
 
Dom Cruise said:
The big difference though is guys in the past Lieberman or Thompson were utterly ineffective in actually changing video games, the most they achieved was Lieberman helped cause the creation of the ESRB which didn't change the content of games themselves, only gave them a rating, Jack Thompson didn't do jack shit other than expel a lot of hot air for years.

But Sarkeesian on the other hand utterly changed the way video games are made in the west, sexual content has more or less vanished from the western AAA market and it's almost all thanks to her, all it took was changing the gender of the soapbox speaker for them to get their way.

Even after all these years it still never ceases to completely piss me the fuck off.

fyi what got me thinking about this is I've been reading through the archive of now defunct gaming site Gameological Society and I see that kvetching about "wahmen in viyda games" was already in a full force by 2013, more so than I really realized. http://gameological.com/2013/06/decadent-fear-effect-2-tomb-raider/index.html


It's depressing to think just how long this has been going on.
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The beautiful thing is, we now have literal decades of old games to fall back on, be it through official means or through emulation. Video games aren’t a captive market where gamers have to eat whatever drivel AAA studios shit onto their plates. Would it be nice if the majority of AAA games weren’t woke-pandering and-or generally shitty? Sure. But nowadays, we have SUCH a massive library of easily accessible old games that a shitty Western market isn’t going to stop anyone from enjoying playing games as a whole.

In the long run, they’re only fucking themselves over by driving away their paying audience. They need their audience - but as movie studios are slowly recognizing with woke bomb after woke bomb, their audiences really don’t need them.
 
Dom Cruise said:
But to think that evolved into the ResetERA mentality that despises any breast size larger than "flat as a board", we're not talking over the top sizes, we're talking the very concept of breasts period, that there are seriously people out there that get offended over video game breasts.
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There were feminists in the 90s bitching about Lara Croft's breast size so that wasn't anything new. Hell, that was probably one of the first left-wing criticism of video games specifically rather than the soccer mom concern over violence like in Mortal Kombat (which comes from the same root as people bitching about slasher films).
 
Jaimas said:
The reason content you like keeps disappearing has nothing to do with Anita; it has to do with the braindead speds that idolize shitheads like her and view Entryism as a religion. They want control, and they will do anything to get it, and a number of companies still haven't worked out that Twitter is not real life.
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The shitheads also knew how to take advantage of things going viral: by framing it as outrage and watching the two sides ping-pong it back and forth until it gets loud enough for the normies to notice. Pretty much everything that useless sites like Vice, Vox, and the rest crap out is designed to make people want to spread it.
 
The western release of Persona 5 royal is going to be censored. (I know there's a Persona thread but the OP here mentioned game censorship stuff is supposed to go here so I put it here. )

https://www.ign.com/articles/persona-5-royal-will-change-homophobic-scenes-for-western-release

Atlus has confirmed that certain scenes in Persona 5, which were considered homophobic and offensive by many fans, will be updated and altered in the Western release of Persona 5 Royal.

Speaking to IGN during a Persona 5 Royal preview event, Atlus Communications Manager Ari Advincula explained that dialogue in certain scenes – specifically ones involving Ryuji and two effeminate male characters – would be changed so that those men were no longer shown in a “negative light.”
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Vapewizard said:
The western release of Persona 5 royal is going to be censored. (I know there's a Persona thread but the OP here mentioned game censorship stuff is supposed to go here so I put it here. )

https://www.ign.com/articles/persona-5-royal-will-change-homophobic-scenes-for-western-release
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Advincula also explained that their localization team has an “internal content review team” she described as “very on the pulse about what’s right and what to do.” She explained Royal was “a chance to make it right.”
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I could have sworn we weren't supposed to be China. Did Red Dawn happen without me realizing?
 
SiccDicc said:
I could have sworn we weren't supposed to be China. Did Red Dawn happen without me realizing?
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Thank Sony for this. Any game on a Sony console's been getting pre-emptively censored before it comes out, even if it only releases in Japan.
 
Jaimas said:
Thank Sony for this. Any game on a Sony console's been getting pre-emptively censored before it comes out, even if it only releases in Japan.
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Nah, this is Atlus' doing and video games being censored to not offend the Western market is something that goes way back.

Hell the whole "Poison is a tranny" shit started because people were offended female henchmen were in Final Fight.
 
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