I think some people choose games as a hobby *because* they are bullied and ostracized. Games are very fun and engaging no matter how many friends you have. Most multiplayer games match you with random people rather than requiring you to bring local friends. If family circumstances are chaotic, games can be constant.
If these guys had better lives they would probably still like games, but it wouldn't be their core identity - just what they do between film class/hiking trips/church youth group/hanging out/debate team/etc.
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
I'm really not in the mood to effortpost on bullying, but let me put it like this:
It is incompatible to simultaneously believe that being bullied for liking e.g. "girly music" as a guy or being "too into sports" as a girl is a thing, but being bullied for liking games or fantasy or being too good at school subjects isn't.
This is a prime example of cognitive dissonance creating a counterfactual. Your position needs "being bullied for liking games" not to be a real thing because if it were, you would have to consider the experiences of those who have been to have some validity, which throws a spanner into the general argument that nerds aren't really marginalised and don't have any justification. But if you start denying the vector bullies pick as being a part of the bullying experience, you wipe out lots of other vectors, like not fitting a gender role.
Ask yourself how well you would respond to someone saying a poster who was bullied for being "too flamboyant" or "too butch" that it wasn't really that aspect of them that was being bullied, it was just something the bully "knew would hurt them."
I understand, but I have to agree with Badger here, in your examples, the flamboyant or butch are bullied because they dont conform to the norm, but so is the socially akward kid that then goes to make games as a part of their personality.
They are all bullied for the same reason, even if the insults are different for each. If that makes sense?
Edit: And it also answers part of my initial post, it seems that not belonging to a tribe and its standards is punishable by bulling in that world.
This is as it always has been with humans: in-groups, out-groups, and social ranking within them. Everybody's playing Pokemon, but the kid who is always playing pokemon and doesn't talk about anything else is quite likely to end up being bullied for not falling into the norms within the tribe. Unless he or she finds themselves in a different group of like-minded people. But then they'll probably look down on the Digimon people and...
People are stupid, insular, and assholes to each other.
Source: am people.
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
I think some people choose games as a hobby *because* they are bullied and ostracized. Games are very fun and engaging no matter how many friends you have. Most multiplayer games match you with random people rather than requiring you to bring local friends. If family circumstances are chaotic, games can be constant.
If these guys had better lives they would probably still like games, but it wouldn't be their core identity - just what they do between film class/hiking trips/church youth group/hanging out/debate team/etc.
Yes. It's the question of personality vs. identity, and making sure we draw the distinction between them.
My personality is such that I tend to find games rewarding and fun and like to dive into them as an escape.
I do not define myself in terms of games or what games I play however.
Maybe with one exception. <.<
So attacks on games are not attacks on me, they're just a pastime I enjoy and can engage in civil discourse about.
Would that have been true in the past? Well, I cared enough that I hid that I played games from most folks. I ended up for a period of time adjacent to the nacient alt-right lines of thought, but was reflective enough to escape that particular trap. But I can see how other people can end up in there. It's a nice explanation for why your life sucks: it's not your fault, it's everybody else who's an asshole, you're fine! And those people trying to change the games? Clearly they're trying to change you because you enjoy things the way they are.
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
If these guys had better lives they would probably still like games, but it wouldn't be their core identity - just what they do between film class/hiking trips/church youth group/hanging out/debate team/etc.
This is a pretty loaded statement. I'm not saying making games your "core identity" is a good thing, but your counter-examples of what a "better life" looks like are kinda leaning into a classic "don't be introverted, go outside and play like all the other kids." I'm really not a big fan of things that imply (intended or otherwise) introvert is a dirty word, or just the general idea that inward-facing lifestyles are not really living.
Mmmhhhhhmmm... I cant agree with a bunch of stuff in there, a lot of people simply keep to themselves, no trauma required, but like I said before, I had no experience with bullies, despite doing all the nerdy stuff you can imagine, so I cant really concede or deny how the bully mind works. But I dont want to derail into bullying, I was more concerned in the enviroment that makes "gamers" isolate, since all the talks here start from the point where the gamer is already isolated IRL.
Yes, with a quick verbal "boom." You take a man's peko, you deny him his dab, all that is left is to rise up and tear down the walls of Jericho with a ".....not!" -TexiKen
I understand, but I have to agree with Badger here, in your examples, the flamboyant or butch are bullied because they dont conform to the norm, but so is the socially akward kid that then goes to make games as a part of their personality.
They are all bullied for the same reason, even if the insults are different for each. If that makes sense?
It does not. Again, extrapolate just a bit to see where it leads. "I'm not really racist, I'm just calling you n~ because it's what makes you stand out."
Also, social awkwardness is much more often a consequence of sustained bullying than a cause. Bullies like to isolate their victims, creating a negative reinforcement cycle where they impede social growth, and create more vectors to insult with. This, coupled with the general social popularity of most bullies, makes "normal society" intimidating for victims; they don't get to learn social mores because they're being excluded for the psychological benefit of their bully. This is something that the left talks about happening with more explicitly marginalised groups, so it's bizarre to create this blind spot for bullying (when bullying is so incredibly co-contingent with racism, sexism, homophobia, domestic violence, etc.).
And equally, "making games a part of your personality" is awkward because it's one of the classic "well you choose what you enjoy" illusions. A predisposition to certain types of entertainment is actually part of someone's personality. It's not immutable, and may very well change as they grow and have new life experiences, but trying to split the two is a lot less clean than you might think.
There is stuff like autism, which make understanding folks hard. This includes stuff like not really being able to tell the difference between positive and negative response from people, until made apparent overtly through words or actions. It's really easy to internalize the negative stuff, totally miss the positive stuff, and sort of learn to assume you are missing a lot of subtext, the motivations of other people, or your ability to pick up when they aren't genuine.
Shrug. It's really easy to look up stuff like comorbidity of autism anxiety, depression, identity, dissociative and dysphoric issues. It's harder to get real numbers on representation in nerd, gaming or the alt right, and it's a thing we jump to more often than is justified and it's probably an ablest assumption to some degree. So I am mostly talking about my own experience, but I was socially awkward in kindergarten, and I didn't get bullied until I got to public school and where it was tolerated in second grade.
I don't disagree that in a lot of cases the bullying might come first.
If these guys had better lives they would probably still like games, but it wouldn't be their core identity - just what they do between film class/hiking trips/church youth group/hanging out/debate team/etc.
This is a pretty loaded statement. I'm not saying making games your "core identity" is a good thing, but your counter-examples of what a "better life" looks like are kinda leaning into a classic "don't be introverted, go outside and play like all the other kids." I'm really not a big fan of things that imply (intended or otherwise) introvert is a dirty word, or just the general idea that inward-facing lifestyles are not really living.
Well I was introverted and nerdy as a teenager, but I *did* want friends, I just had no idea how to get them. Games definitely substituted for friends for me to a certain extent. Now my life is filled with job, friends and family I hardly play (though I do want to!)
People who are happy to be alone generally don't join hate groups about how those who ostracized them from the social groups they wanted to join WILL PAY. They just noodle about happily alone.
Idea: Perhaps people vulnerable to hate groups are not actually introverts, but socially hopeless extroverts. So people mean a great deal to them, but they don't know how to interact meaningfully. So they are vulnerable to whatever weird group will satisfy their social urges without having to change.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
If these people needed anything in their upbringing it was exposure (to other people that are different) and positive reinforcement. They were denied it, be it from their parents or school peers.
I dunno if my experience is meaningful at all, but at my high school (93-97), it wasn't video games that was the target of bullying. It was the other aspects of nerddom - things that a lot of people who consider themselves to be gamers are naturally attracted to - that attracted negative attention, especially PnP games and anime. Lots of "What, you play with dolls and jerk it to cartoons?" Because, even back then, a lot of the kids grew up on the NES/SNES/Genesis, so it wasn't ever a weapon to use. The other stuff, though, was considered 'weird', especially in small, rural NH towns. If someone saw a DnD/Shadowrun/WoD/Rifts book cover, they legit wondered if you were deranged or satanic. If any anime was seen (box art, magazine cover/ad, etc.), they'd assume you were a pervert.
I dunno if my experience is meaningful at all, but at my high school (93-97), it wasn't video games that was the target of bullying. It was the other aspects of nerddom - things that a lot of people who consider themselves to be gamers are naturally attracted to - that attracted negative attention, especially PnP games and anime. Lots of "What, you play with dolls and jerk it to cartoons?" Because, even back then, a lot of the kids grew up on the NES/SNES/Genesis, so it wasn't ever a weapon to use. The other stuff, though, was considered 'weird', especially in small, rural NH towns. If someone saw a DnD/Shadowrun/WoD/Rifts book cover, they legit wondered if you were deranged or satanic. If any anime was seen (box art, magazine cover/ad, etc.), they'd assume you were a pervert.
I myself grew up in a rural area. I kinda wonder if a large portion of these problem nerds grew up in rural areas, too.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
If you start gaming because you feel awkward and left out and bullied for being different, and then you identify as a gamer because it offers a community and that way you don’t feel awkward and left out, and then you defend that community by bullying people who are different from you, and then you join the alt-right because you’re still feeling awkward and left out and bullied, maybe the problem isn’t with somebody else, maybe the problem is that neither Magic nor misogyny are going to actually make you feel any happier, maybe the problem is you
I've been thinking about this today at work and I think that honestly? The gaming alt-right is textbook fascism, in identity, in formation and in objective.
I believe that the gaming alt-right, which absolutely is fascism, comes from the same place as all fascism; a sense of persecution which transforms into an anti-intellectual desire to bring back a so-called "golden age" through a return to traditional value systems and so on.
The gaming culture alt-right wants to return to what they consider to be the golden age of video games, before all the "SJWs" and "feminazis" and so on, because they feel persecuted, humiliated and attacked. It is classic and pure reactionary far-right/fascist sentiment. Why do they feel persecuted, humiliated and attacked? Because to them gamer culture is white, male, straight, not feminist, not gay, nothing like that, they think they are being infiltrated and subverted by an invasive force of non-gamers who are pretending to be gamers, who are ruining everything, who are not the right sort of people. And again this is classic reactionary sentiment. In fact it probably maps really clearly onto modern anti-immigration sentiment; these people are coming into our community and taking our games away from us, the true gamers.
The age-old way to grow such a movement is to dehumanise, depersonalise and monstrositise the hated outsider. We saw this with Anita Sarkeesian. She was turned into an anti-poster woman, the Hillary Clinton of the gaming culture alt-right, the symbol of all that was wrong and evil about these invasive outsiders ruining video games. You see it with the depersonalising rhetoric of which "SJW" is absolutely the most prominent. Memes. Memes! My god if Goebbels knew about memes he'd explode with delight! Memes are perfectly set up to be 100% pure propaganda, in an age where you can design a hundred anti-SJW memes and spread them across the world overnight, reaching millions.
So I think that you base your response to the whole vile movement off a clear diagnosis of what it is and how it works. For me these people are never going to accept the "invaders" as being just as legitimately present in the gaming community as them, they will never welcome them, they'll never accept their narratives and desire for representation as valid. So the solution is just to put your head down and keep constantly pushing for the normalisation of the non-normative. You can't be nice to these people and hope they'll come around because ultimately they don't want anyone that isn't like them in the community. Or indeed, let's be some twsited version of intersectional, in their real life communities. In their politics, in society at large. They are fascists and the only way to deal with them is to force through what they hate and push it over and over again, until you bleed the movement dry of recruits because you've normalised the presence of the once-atypical and nobody is really bothered so more. And all the time you denounce, you criticise, you raise awareness, you spread discourse. I don't think there's a neat strategic mastermind trick we can do to win the culture war. We're going to have to grind it out, everywhere it can be fought.
I dunno if my experience is meaningful at all, but at my high school (93-97), it wasn't video games that was the target of bullying. It was the other aspects of nerddom - things that a lot of people who consider themselves to be gamers are naturally attracted to - that attracted negative attention, especially PnP games and anime. Lots of "What, you play with dolls and jerk it to cartoons?" Because, even back then, a lot of the kids grew up on the NES/SNES/Genesis, so it wasn't ever a weapon to use. The other stuff, though, was considered 'weird', especially in small, rural NH towns. If someone saw a DnD/Shadowrun/WoD/Rifts book cover, they legit wondered if you were deranged or satanic. If any anime was seen (box art, magazine cover/ad, etc.), they'd assume you were a pervert.
I myself grew up in a rural area. I kinda wonder if a large portion of these problem nerds grew up in rural areas, too.
I've written briefly in old threads about my experience with bullying and I'm from an urban area. It's not something which I think is unique to rural communities. But I also think, as was previously written, that there is a lack of introspection for some time most especially when you are currently under the pressure of bullying. I have had negative reactions outside of this forum to the following statement, but I think after a certain point that I was also engaging in socially destructive and very aggressive behavior which only escalated the situation and put me into conflict with peers who weren't traditionally "bullies". Some part of why I had such a negative experience weas definitely my fault, but that was because instead of withdrawing socially my response was to lash out and escalate and sometimes strike first. Once I had other things to focus on, like scholastic wrestling which became a major part of my life and focus and is still a big part of my identity, which inadvertently removed some of the initial reasons why I experienced bullying, it became easier for me to feel like I could deescalate and I didn't have to be guarded. And then I was able to engage socially even with people who I had previously been in conflict with.
Rural areas have smaller social circles. If you live in a city and don't fit in at school you can build a life outside of school. But if you are in a small town with one school, that's pretty much it for social opportunities. School is everything.
Rural areas have smaller social circles. If you live in a city and don't fit in at school you can build a life outside of school. But if you are in a small town with one school, that's pretty much it for social opportunities. School is everything.
My experience in multiple schools in an urban area doesn't bear this out. The social circles were still small and cliques existed even if the size of the population of the city I grew up in might have been multiple times the size of a small rural town.
Rural areas have smaller social circles. If you live in a city and don't fit in at school you can build a life outside of school. But if you are in a small town with one school, that's pretty much it for social opportunities. School is everything.
My experience in multiple schools in an urban area doesn't bear this out. The social circles were still small and cliques existed even if the size of the population of the city I grew up in might have been multiple times the size of a small rural town.
Yeah. As a kid you can only build a social circle especially if you're in a big city without good public transportation. I wanted to work at my city zoo but I didn't have my driver's license, my parents could not drive me, and they refused to let me take the bus. I was stuck even though I was actively trying to change my circumstances.
Rural areas have smaller social circles. If you live in a city and don't fit in at school you can build a life outside of school. But if you are in a small town with one school, that's pretty much it for social opportunities. School is everything.
My experience in multiple schools in an urban area doesn't bear this out. The social circles were still small and cliques existed even if the size of the population of the city I grew up in might have been multiple times the size of a small rural town.
Yeah. As a kid you can only build a social circle especially if you're in a big city without good public transportation. I wanted to work at my city zoo but I didn't have my driver's license, my parents could not drive me, and they refused to let me take the bus. I was stuck even though I was actively trying to change my circumstances.
When I was a kid I loved coding very much. My mum tried to find a class that I could go to, but there were none within an hours drive. I live in a city now. There's a kid's coding class 5 minutes walk away. My teenage years would have been a lot more fun here.
My parents weren't very controlling and I was allowed to bike or take the bus anywhere I wanted from the age of 11, but there wasn't anywhere I wanted to go except the library
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
Well I was introverted and nerdy as a teenager, but I *did* want friends, I just had no idea how to get them. Games definitely substituted for friends for me to a certain extent. Now my life is filled with job, friends and family I hardly play (though I do want to!)
People who are happy to be alone generally don't join hate groups about how those who ostracized them from the social groups they wanted to join WILL PAY. They just noodle about happily alone.
Idea: Perhaps people vulnerable to hate groups are not actually introverts, but socially hopeless extroverts. So people mean a great deal to them, but they don't know how to interact meaningfully. So they are vulnerable to whatever weird group will satisfy their social urges without having to change.
To be clear, most of what we call introverts still want friends. The accepted view is still, I believe, that introverts prefer a small pool of intense, shared interest friendships. Ignoring the side arguments about "personality disorders" that sometimes comes up, people with no interest in friends at all fall under "schizoid" which is a really rare diagnosis. Much like actual autism, it's far too small a population to account for a general 'gamer' diagnosis, as some are suggesting.
Internalised vengeance for bullying (or envy at those not bullied, or dislike for people who co-exist happily with popular bullies) is definitely a thing. People, as they mature, or just watch others succeed, see just how much social cachet and networking play into success in life, often far moreso than talent. So recognising that individual bullies have been gatekeeping you from that, and others were complacent enough to stand by, or even laud bullies, is a pretty powerful motivator for hatred, yes. The bullies themselves actively fucked with your development to compensate for their own insecurities, and the rest of society treats this as perfectly normal, hypocrites that they are!
You can substitute bullies with racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes etc. and the details do not change much. And from that pool, you will find the select few who go on to commit the actual atrocities. The rest will often just egg them on (e.g. 4chan's "beta uprising" memes regarding school shootings, various radfem types who idolise Valerie Solanas, ISIS-adjacent extremist Muslims, etc.).
So I think it's a bit more than just a desire for friends, but friends do play an important role. Making enough friends and enough personal success to feel like a bit of society accepts you won't necessarily cure the feeling of injustice at those experiences, but it is enough that you have something at stake not worth throwing away. But if those are absent, then we see exploitative groups willing to fill the gap for their own advantage; in this discussion it's the alt-right (or incels), but it's also classic cult behaviour (I would not be surprised if I learnt some of the people involved in the alt-right were intimately familiar with how cults operate).
Driving forward without an attempt at engagement will 100% radicalized moderates against you.
And what is your definition of 'driving forward' in this particular instance?
Because if 'driving forward' is 'pushing for better representation/diversity in gaming' or 'taking a zero tolerance approach to fascist views/opinions expressed by gamers', and that's something that is going to radicalise a moderate, then quite frankly they were never truly a moderate to begin with.
It's all saltwater these days:
Ocean, tears and heartbreak soup
Half alive in a whitecap foam
Half in love with a white half moon
Driving forward without an attempt at engagement will 100% radicalized moderates against you.
I don't believe this is true.
And besides what is a moderate anyway? A hypothetical "hmmm I dunno" type? A centrist? If you're driven to fascism because of antifascism then you were always a reactionary just below the surface.
That doesn't mean we don't try to push good rhetoric and constructive discourse, it doesn't mean that we write people off for eternity for not being 100 pure, but it does mean that we stop playing the fascists at their own game, and we stop being nice to them and meeting their insane childlike tantrums half-way on the off chance that they'll decide to walk back across the aisle. That doesn't work.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
If finding out that, I dunno, non-het relationships are in video games causes you (generic you) to become a member of a misogynistic homophobic white supremacist movement then you are not someone that could have really been engaged with constructively anyway, because you have a greater emotional connection to the "purity" of video games than you do to other human beings, and are a reactionary fascist.
And this is exactly the same sentiment that has led to your classic Nazi movement, when you have a closer emotional connection to your beloved ethno-national concept than you do to the real people next door. To these people the purity of video games is more emotionally important to them than literally anything else.
Driving forward without an attempt at engagement will 100% radicalized moderates against you.
We are engaging the moderates. Moderates don't find the concept of criticism an affront to man and gods.
Sounds less like engaging moderates and more preaching to the choir.
It's just head in the sand, over and over, forever. The methods can never be wrong, the message can never be wrong. It is the people who are wrong. It honestly feels a bit hopeless from where I'm standing. It's been a constant stream of doubling down upon double downs, for years, with the exact same results, and the conclusion inevitably returns to "it is the children who are wrong".
If finding out that, I dunno, non-het relationships are in video games causes you (generic you) to become a member of a misogynistic homophobic white supremacist movement then you are not someone that could have really been engaged with constructively anyway, because you have a greater emotional connection to the "purity" of video games than you do to other human beings, and are a reactionary fascist.
There's a lot of people who CAN become fascists in the right political climate but mostly won't become fascists in normal circumstances.
I mean we're dealing with people who think that women getting sexually assaulted is literally a less pressing and emotionally outrageous matter than women... making video games.
Like, how do you want us to engage with these people? It's kind of hard to not just immediately respond to them with "you're pathetic, get a fucking grip on reality" and then ignoring their childish tantrum. And incidentally? I think they're louder than before but I also think if we keep at it we can beat them. We can push back. But if someone... I'm going to say fetishises video games to the extent they do? Then there's not a lot of dialogue you can open with them. Like you go on a Facebook meme page and make friends with these nutters, see how far you get. They barely live in the same reality but I'm sure you can convince them that sexual assault in the industry is a bigger problem than being able to play a woman in Battlefield or whatever.
If your answer is that they were always going to be nazis and nothing done to them, and nothing we do matters... what's really the point of any discussion on the topic. Just keep on with your strategy of calling them pathetic, if it's the one you're gonna go with anyways then do we really need to discuss the finer points of why?
If finding out that, I dunno, non-het relationships are in video games causes you (generic you) to become a member of a misogynistic homophobic white supremacist movement then you are not someone that could have really been engaged with constructively anyway, because you have a greater emotional connection to the "purity" of video games than you do to other human beings, and are a reactionary fascist.
There's a lot of people who CAN become fascists in the right political climate but mostly won't become fascists in normal circumstances.
There's something odd that goes off in people's brains when it comes to politics. Take prison, for example. I've seen this board argue passionately for prison reform focused on rehabilitation instead of punishment, because we believe people can change. Even people who have done awful things! I've seen it for myself in real life! I worked with a murderer turned youth pastor in Southern California, never met a humbler guy.
But when it comes to gamers, we're *so fucking ready* to write off a vast majority of them as hopeless, reactionary fascists that can't be reasoned with or brought around.
Is there a word for this? For the utter irrationality that politics can inflict upon us? There should be.
This board is the least sympathetic to the "free speech" argument of anywhere I frequent on the internet. Alt-right types are allowed to remain on most of them as long as they don't actually use racial slurs. But here there is no tolerance for them. It makes a very nice atmosphere. It's probably what people refer to as a "bubble" but who cares?
I think the Glorious Edict is a part of this. Its kind of hard to shitpost and thread derail when the best insult you are allowed to say is silly goose. It has a significant cooling effect on debate since "go fuck yourself soyboy cuck" is not considered an appropriate response despite not containing racial slurs. It weeds out a lot of the dumber ones quick and keeps Penny Arcade Forums clean.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
Just that being nice to them about being fascist scum won't make them not fascists
So we establish that these people can be reached, and we establish that our current methods are not working (IE the whole point of this thread). Therefore.... keep doing the exact same thing as before? That's a hell of a conclusion given the leadup.
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
I mean we're dealing with people who think that women getting sexually assaulted is literally a less pressing and emotionally outrageous matter than women... making video games.
Like, how do you want us to engage with these people? It's kind of hard to not just immediately respond to them with "you're pathetic, get a fucking grip on reality" and then ignoring their childish tantrum. And incidentally? I think they're louder than before but I also think if we keep at it we can beat them. We can push back. But if someone... I'm going to say fetishises video games to the extent they do? Then there's not a lot of dialogue you can open with them. Like you go on a Facebook meme page and make friends with these nutters, see how far you get. They barely live in the same reality but I'm sure you can convince them that sexual assault in the industry is a bigger problem than being able to play a woman in Battlefield or whatever.
Because not all of them are, to quote The Wire, "too seasoned."
You can counteract bad ideas with discussion. I'm sure most of us can think of a shitty opinion we used to hold that we changed after someone took the time and gave us the respect to actually talk it through. Conversely, I'm sure people in this thread can point to times they've tried to debate something politely and not gotten through (maybe even with other posters here!). But while there's this sentiment of "well, we shouldn't have to put more effort into it than the alt-right/whoever does," there are a multitude of idioms of conventional wisdom that add up to the same thing: "being good takes a lot more work than being bad."
If your answer is that they were always going to be nazis and nothing done to them, and nothing we do matters... what's really the point of any discussion on the topic. Just keep on with your strategy of calling them pathetic, if it's the one you're gonna go with anyways then do we really need to discuss the finer points of why?
I'm confused. Where and from who did you get this idea that anyone thinks this thing in this thread? How do you think we should approach people who value video games more than real actual people?
Just that being nice to them about being fascist scum won't make them not fascists
The solution I find most effective is just what we seem to be calling "deplatforming." Most of these guys aren't going to invent fascism on their own. Without things like alt-right YouTube videos and Reddit's right-wing forums, they are just going to go through life with a vague hostility to the other. But when they are led by more persuasive people, they can be easily led down the path of hate and end up volunteering for concentration camp guard duty.
Like a reasonable tactic of "how do we deal with fascists" can absolutely be "we castigate them at every turn and don't compromise our progressive attempts for them at all, grinding them out in the culture war by refusing to engage with them and pushing our agenda" if it works, and I think it does, more than I think trying to enter a discourse does.
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
The interesting thing to me is that the "foot soldiers" if you will, the patsies of GamerGate, that proto-alt-right tryout, a huge chunk of them apparently bled out of that whole thing. And as new game controversies come out I'm sure new folks get sucked into that fantatic's nest of core folks who really are Nazis, but the folks who started bleeding from the "movement" really did think there was this, like, conspiracy to hedge gaming journalism and just hand things over to whoever was being identified as the enemy. Mob mentality is funny like that.
There are a few statements that get me to more or less ignore folks these days, "SJW" said in a serious, "totally believe this" context being the most prominent example, but otherwise I'm willing to talk with most folks until they really prove they're arguing in bad faith.
Even in this thread of a lot of talking at cross-purposes a lot, I don't think anyone is straight up unreasonable. Yet. Unpopular, sure but most of what's been said is reasonable. The only folks who you can't talk with are the folks that are unwilling to use their own words, or just repeat the same thing over and over and over again, same exact words like a mantra. Otherwise, rehabilitation is probably possible. It's just not my job, or anyone else's actual job to do that for these folks. At least not yet. And maybe it should be? Maybe we need universal health care so they can go get the help they need, as the saying goes?
Still I would be willing to bet that the amount of actual factual Nazis is low, and the amount of stubborn a-holes is much higher.
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CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
If finding out that, I dunno, non-het relationships are in video games causes you (generic you) to become a member of a misogynistic homophobic white supremacist movement then you are not someone that could have really been engaged with constructively anyway, because you have a greater emotional connection to the "purity" of video games than you do to other human beings, and are a reactionary fascist.
There's a lot of people who CAN become fascists in the right political climate but mostly won't become fascists in normal circumstances.
There's something odd that goes off in people's brains when it comes to politics. Take prison, for example. I've seen this board argue passionately for prison reform focused on rehabilitation instead of punishment, because we believe people can change. Even people who have done awful things! I've seen it for myself in real life! I worked with a murderer turned youth pastor in Southern California, never met a humbler guy.
But when it comes to gamers, we're *so fucking ready* to write off a vast majority of them as hopeless, reactionary fascists that can't be reasoned with or brought around.
Is there a word for this? For the utter irrationality that politics can inflict upon us? There should be.
Have you ever tried to talk these groups into revising their sentiments? I've gone head to head with both Incels and the hardcore gamer right, both. But those examples are too hard: I've tried to talk to you, a person who can actually express himself rationally and calmly on this forum - something those other groups are quite incapable of, by the way, but that doesn't mean I don't try with them. But I'm getting distracted, I've tried to directly address you about issues as important as accepting a "no" when a woman tells you no, and at using ever form of rhetoric I know of, I wasn't able to convince you of the importance of that. How can I, then, convince an alt-right gamer that it's OK for me, and POC, and QUILTBAG folk to play games, too? How can I talk them into seeing me as a human being? I couldn't even convince you of that fact!
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
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Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
Driving forward without an attempt at engagement will 100% radicalized moderates against you.
We are engaging the moderates. Moderates don't find the concept of criticism an affront to man and gods.
Sounds less like engaging moderates and more preaching to the choir.
It's just head in the sand, over and over, forever. The methods can never be wrong, the message can never be wrong. It is the people who are wrong. It honestly feels a bit hopeless from where I'm standing. It's been a constant stream of doubling down upon double downs, for years, with the exact same results, and the conclusion inevitably returns to "it is the children who are wrong".
The assertion was that people who are moderates become fascists because progressives are mean to them.
I mean, I haven't seen anyone present any evidence that this happens, but it's basically being assumed to be true. Are you saying that the current problem with white supremacy was caused by the push for diversity? Or perhaps that the alt-right/nazi march in Charlotte wouldn't have erupted in violence if they were just allowed to call for the extermination of non-whites without anyone pushing back?
I guess the last bit might be true, but appeasement has been tried before and we saw how that went...
I am incredibly dubious of the idea that people decide it's okay to commit genocide because progressives are too mean. So maybe show me at least some kind of evidence that your premise, that we need to police our tone and refrain from any kind of aggressive response to threats and violence, in order to stop the current resurgence of nazism, has merit.
Just that being nice to them about being fascist scum won't make them not fascists
More to the point, the first step in restorative justice is contrition.
I find it telling that when left leaning people say that they have principles they hold dear and won't give up, the response is that they're the ones being unreasonable, even when they're saying that they want to improve diversity and inclusion.
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If these guys had better lives they would probably still like games, but it wouldn't be their core identity - just what they do between film class/hiking trips/church youth group/hanging out/debate team/etc.
This is as it always has been with humans: in-groups, out-groups, and social ranking within them. Everybody's playing Pokemon, but the kid who is always playing pokemon and doesn't talk about anything else is quite likely to end up being bullied for not falling into the norms within the tribe. Unless he or she finds themselves in a different group of like-minded people. But then they'll probably look down on the Digimon people and...
People are stupid, insular, and assholes to each other.
Source: am people.
Yes. It's the question of personality vs. identity, and making sure we draw the distinction between them.
My personality is such that I tend to find games rewarding and fun and like to dive into them as an escape.
I do not define myself in terms of games or what games I play however.
So attacks on games are not attacks on me, they're just a pastime I enjoy and can engage in civil discourse about.
Would that have been true in the past? Well, I cared enough that I hid that I played games from most folks. I ended up for a period of time adjacent to the nacient alt-right lines of thought, but was reflective enough to escape that particular trap. But I can see how other people can end up in there. It's a nice explanation for why your life sucks: it's not your fault, it's everybody else who's an asshole, you're fine! And those people trying to change the games? Clearly they're trying to change you because you enjoy things the way they are.
There is stuff like autism, which make understanding folks hard. This includes stuff like not really being able to tell the difference between positive and negative response from people, until made apparent overtly through words or actions. It's really easy to internalize the negative stuff, totally miss the positive stuff, and sort of learn to assume you are missing a lot of subtext, the motivations of other people, or your ability to pick up when they aren't genuine.
Shrug. It's really easy to look up stuff like comorbidity of autism anxiety, depression, identity, dissociative and dysphoric issues. It's harder to get real numbers on representation in nerd, gaming or the alt right, and it's a thing we jump to more often than is justified and it's probably an ablest assumption to some degree. So I am mostly talking about my own experience, but I was socially awkward in kindergarten, and I didn't get bullied until I got to public school and where it was tolerated in second grade.
I don't disagree that in a lot of cases the bullying might come first.
Well I was introverted and nerdy as a teenager, but I *did* want friends, I just had no idea how to get them. Games definitely substituted for friends for me to a certain extent. Now my life is filled with job, friends and family I hardly play (though I do want to!)
People who are happy to be alone generally don't join hate groups about how those who ostracized them from the social groups they wanted to join WILL PAY. They just noodle about happily alone.
Idea: Perhaps people vulnerable to hate groups are not actually introverts, but socially hopeless extroverts. So people mean a great deal to them, but they don't know how to interact meaningfully. So they are vulnerable to whatever weird group will satisfy their social urges without having to change.
I myself grew up in a rural area. I kinda wonder if a large portion of these problem nerds grew up in rural areas, too.
I believe that the gaming alt-right, which absolutely is fascism, comes from the same place as all fascism; a sense of persecution which transforms into an anti-intellectual desire to bring back a so-called "golden age" through a return to traditional value systems and so on.
The gaming culture alt-right wants to return to what they consider to be the golden age of video games, before all the "SJWs" and "feminazis" and so on, because they feel persecuted, humiliated and attacked. It is classic and pure reactionary far-right/fascist sentiment. Why do they feel persecuted, humiliated and attacked? Because to them gamer culture is white, male, straight, not feminist, not gay, nothing like that, they think they are being infiltrated and subverted by an invasive force of non-gamers who are pretending to be gamers, who are ruining everything, who are not the right sort of people. And again this is classic reactionary sentiment. In fact it probably maps really clearly onto modern anti-immigration sentiment; these people are coming into our community and taking our games away from us, the true gamers.
The age-old way to grow such a movement is to dehumanise, depersonalise and monstrositise the hated outsider. We saw this with Anita Sarkeesian. She was turned into an anti-poster woman, the Hillary Clinton of the gaming culture alt-right, the symbol of all that was wrong and evil about these invasive outsiders ruining video games. You see it with the depersonalising rhetoric of which "SJW" is absolutely the most prominent. Memes. Memes! My god if Goebbels knew about memes he'd explode with delight! Memes are perfectly set up to be 100% pure propaganda, in an age where you can design a hundred anti-SJW memes and spread them across the world overnight, reaching millions.
So I think that you base your response to the whole vile movement off a clear diagnosis of what it is and how it works. For me these people are never going to accept the "invaders" as being just as legitimately present in the gaming community as them, they will never welcome them, they'll never accept their narratives and desire for representation as valid. So the solution is just to put your head down and keep constantly pushing for the normalisation of the non-normative. You can't be nice to these people and hope they'll come around because ultimately they don't want anyone that isn't like them in the community. Or indeed, let's be some twsited version of intersectional, in their real life communities. In their politics, in society at large. They are fascists and the only way to deal with them is to force through what they hate and push it over and over again, until you bleed the movement dry of recruits because you've normalised the presence of the once-atypical and nobody is really bothered so more. And all the time you denounce, you criticise, you raise awareness, you spread discourse. I don't think there's a neat strategic mastermind trick we can do to win the culture war. We're going to have to grind it out, everywhere it can be fought.
In my view, anyway
I've written briefly in old threads about my experience with bullying and I'm from an urban area. It's not something which I think is unique to rural communities. But I also think, as was previously written, that there is a lack of introspection for some time most especially when you are currently under the pressure of bullying. I have had negative reactions outside of this forum to the following statement, but I think after a certain point that I was also engaging in socially destructive and very aggressive behavior which only escalated the situation and put me into conflict with peers who weren't traditionally "bullies". Some part of why I had such a negative experience weas definitely my fault, but that was because instead of withdrawing socially my response was to lash out and escalate and sometimes strike first. Once I had other things to focus on, like scholastic wrestling which became a major part of my life and focus and is still a big part of my identity, which inadvertently removed some of the initial reasons why I experienced bullying, it became easier for me to feel like I could deescalate and I didn't have to be guarded. And then I was able to engage socially even with people who I had previously been in conflict with.
My experience in multiple schools in an urban area doesn't bear this out. The social circles were still small and cliques existed even if the size of the population of the city I grew up in might have been multiple times the size of a small rural town.
When I was a kid I loved coding very much. My mum tried to find a class that I could go to, but there were none within an hours drive. I live in a city now. There's a kid's coding class 5 minutes walk away. My teenage years would have been a lot more fun here.
My parents weren't very controlling and I was allowed to bike or take the bus anywhere I wanted from the age of 11, but there wasn't anywhere I wanted to go except the library
Internalised vengeance for bullying (or envy at those not bullied, or dislike for people who co-exist happily with popular bullies) is definitely a thing. People, as they mature, or just watch others succeed, see just how much social cachet and networking play into success in life, often far moreso than talent. So recognising that individual bullies have been gatekeeping you from that, and others were complacent enough to stand by, or even laud bullies, is a pretty powerful motivator for hatred, yes. The bullies themselves actively fucked with your development to compensate for their own insecurities, and the rest of society treats this as perfectly normal, hypocrites that they are!
You can substitute bullies with racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes etc. and the details do not change much. And from that pool, you will find the select few who go on to commit the actual atrocities. The rest will often just egg them on (e.g. 4chan's "beta uprising" memes regarding school shootings, various radfem types who idolise Valerie Solanas, ISIS-adjacent extremist Muslims, etc.).
So I think it's a bit more than just a desire for friends, but friends do play an important role. Making enough friends and enough personal success to feel like a bit of society accepts you won't necessarily cure the feeling of injustice at those experiences, but it is enough that you have something at stake not worth throwing away. But if those are absent, then we see exploitative groups willing to fill the gap for their own advantage; in this discussion it's the alt-right (or incels), but it's also classic cult behaviour (I would not be surprised if I learnt some of the people involved in the alt-right were intimately familiar with how cults operate).
And what is your definition of 'driving forward' in this particular instance?
Because if 'driving forward' is 'pushing for better representation/diversity in gaming' or 'taking a zero tolerance approach to fascist views/opinions expressed by gamers', and that's something that is going to radicalise a moderate, then quite frankly they were never truly a moderate to begin with.
Ocean, tears and heartbreak soup
Half alive in a whitecap foam
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I don't believe this is true.
And besides what is a moderate anyway? A hypothetical "hmmm I dunno" type? A centrist? If you're driven to fascism because of antifascism then you were always a reactionary just below the surface.
That doesn't mean we don't try to push good rhetoric and constructive discourse, it doesn't mean that we write people off for eternity for not being 100 pure, but it does mean that we stop playing the fascists at their own game, and we stop being nice to them and meeting their insane childlike tantrums half-way on the off chance that they'll decide to walk back across the aisle. That doesn't work.
We are engaging the moderates. Moderates don't find the concept of criticism an affront to man and gods.
And this is exactly the same sentiment that has led to your classic Nazi movement, when you have a closer emotional connection to your beloved ethno-national concept than you do to the real people next door. To these people the purity of video games is more emotionally important to them than literally anything else.
Sounds less like engaging moderates and more preaching to the choir.
It's just head in the sand, over and over, forever. The methods can never be wrong, the message can never be wrong. It is the people who are wrong. It honestly feels a bit hopeless from where I'm standing. It's been a constant stream of doubling down upon double downs, for years, with the exact same results, and the conclusion inevitably returns to "it is the children who are wrong".
There's a lot of people who CAN become fascists in the right political climate but mostly won't become fascists in normal circumstances.
Like, how do you want us to engage with these people? It's kind of hard to not just immediately respond to them with "you're pathetic, get a fucking grip on reality" and then ignoring their childish tantrum. And incidentally? I think they're louder than before but I also think if we keep at it we can beat them. We can push back. But if someone... I'm going to say fetishises video games to the extent they do? Then there's not a lot of dialogue you can open with them. Like you go on a Facebook meme page and make friends with these nutters, see how far you get. They barely live in the same reality but I'm sure you can convince them that sexual assault in the industry is a bigger problem than being able to play a woman in Battlefield or whatever.
There's something odd that goes off in people's brains when it comes to politics. Take prison, for example. I've seen this board argue passionately for prison reform focused on rehabilitation instead of punishment, because we believe people can change. Even people who have done awful things! I've seen it for myself in real life! I worked with a murderer turned youth pastor in Southern California, never met a humbler guy.
But when it comes to gamers, we're *so fucking ready* to write off a vast majority of them as hopeless, reactionary fascists that can't be reasoned with or brought around.
Is there a word for this? For the utter irrationality that politics can inflict upon us? There should be.
Just that being nice to them about being fascist scum won't make them not fascists
I think the Glorious Edict is a part of this. Its kind of hard to shitpost and thread derail when the best insult you are allowed to say is silly goose. It has a significant cooling effect on debate since "go fuck yourself soyboy cuck" is not considered an appropriate response despite not containing racial slurs. It weeds out a lot of the dumber ones quick and keeps Penny Arcade Forums clean.
So we establish that these people can be reached, and we establish that our current methods are not working (IE the whole point of this thread). Therefore.... keep doing the exact same thing as before? That's a hell of a conclusion given the leadup.
You can counteract bad ideas with discussion. I'm sure most of us can think of a shitty opinion we used to hold that we changed after someone took the time and gave us the respect to actually talk it through. Conversely, I'm sure people in this thread can point to times they've tried to debate something politely and not gotten through (maybe even with other posters here!). But while there's this sentiment of "well, we shouldn't have to put more effort into it than the alt-right/whoever does," there are a multitude of idioms of conventional wisdom that add up to the same thing: "being good takes a lot more work than being bad."
I'm confused. Where and from who did you get this idea that anyone thinks this thing in this thread? How do you think we should approach people who value video games more than real actual people?
The solution I find most effective is just what we seem to be calling "deplatforming." Most of these guys aren't going to invent fascism on their own. Without things like alt-right YouTube videos and Reddit's right-wing forums, they are just going to go through life with a vague hostility to the other. But when they are led by more persuasive people, they can be easily led down the path of hate and end up volunteering for concentration camp guard duty.
There are a few statements that get me to more or less ignore folks these days, "SJW" said in a serious, "totally believe this" context being the most prominent example, but otherwise I'm willing to talk with most folks until they really prove they're arguing in bad faith.
Even in this thread of a lot of talking at cross-purposes a lot, I don't think anyone is straight up unreasonable. Yet. Unpopular, sure but most of what's been said is reasonable. The only folks who you can't talk with are the folks that are unwilling to use their own words, or just repeat the same thing over and over and over again, same exact words like a mantra. Otherwise, rehabilitation is probably possible. It's just not my job, or anyone else's actual job to do that for these folks. At least not yet. And maybe it should be? Maybe we need universal health care so they can go get the help they need, as the saying goes?
Still I would be willing to bet that the amount of actual factual Nazis is low, and the amount of stubborn a-holes is much higher.
Have you ever tried to talk these groups into revising their sentiments? I've gone head to head with both Incels and the hardcore gamer right, both. But those examples are too hard: I've tried to talk to you, a person who can actually express himself rationally and calmly on this forum - something those other groups are quite incapable of, by the way, but that doesn't mean I don't try with them. But I'm getting distracted, I've tried to directly address you about issues as important as accepting a "no" when a woman tells you no, and at using ever form of rhetoric I know of, I wasn't able to convince you of the importance of that. How can I, then, convince an alt-right gamer that it's OK for me, and POC, and QUILTBAG folk to play games, too? How can I talk them into seeing me as a human being? I couldn't even convince you of that fact!
The assertion was that people who are moderates become fascists because progressives are mean to them.
I mean, I haven't seen anyone present any evidence that this happens, but it's basically being assumed to be true. Are you saying that the current problem with white supremacy was caused by the push for diversity? Or perhaps that the alt-right/nazi march in Charlotte wouldn't have erupted in violence if they were just allowed to call for the extermination of non-whites without anyone pushing back?
I guess the last bit might be true, but appeasement has been tried before and we saw how that went...
I am incredibly dubious of the idea that people decide it's okay to commit genocide because progressives are too mean. So maybe show me at least some kind of evidence that your premise, that we need to police our tone and refrain from any kind of aggressive response to threats and violence, in order to stop the current resurgence of nazism, has merit.
More to the point, the first step in restorative justice is contrition.
I find it telling that when left leaning people say that they have principles they hold dear and won't give up, the response is that they're the ones being unreasonable, even when they're saying that they want to improve diversity and inclusion.