Every day we move further from Gods light

Dusting off this blog to cover several topics that make me want to depart this planet for somewhere saner.

First up is the exposure of popular gamergater @Alison_Prime has been found out to be a persona of some guy named Steve. Steve adopted the persona (a boob obsessed lesbian gamer) originally as a WOW player, but actively engaged as Alison for over a year on twitter. The fraud came undone, when he posted calling for funds for a house fire and suspicious people went digging.

You can read about the details here:


You got Steved  (thanks to BroTeamPill for that expression).

I had a suspicion about Allison, I remember thinking photos she posted looked like different people. The commitment to the persona probably made me over look it though. Also the whole trophy obsessed gamer, didn't really fit with the rest of the persona. I'm mostly annoyed at the way they used #gamergate. Its one thing to be anon and another to be a complete fraud. 

Moving into the real world - Starbucks has revealed their cups for the festive season, moving away from even generic festive imagery to a plain red cup. 

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/11/05/war-on-christmas-starbucks-new-red-cups-are-emblematic-of-the-christian-culture-cleansing-of-the-west/

They explained their reasoning with dumb PC corporate speak: 

“to usher in the holidays with a purity of design that welcomes all of our stories.”

“We’re embracing the simplicity and the quietness of it. It’s [a] more open way to usher in the holiday,” said their CEO.

Previous Festive Design

This years red design - not exactly festive

Not that Starbucks coffee cups are a big deal, but its indicative of the wider shift away from Western Cultural expression under the guise of being 'more open'. Notice that other cultures are to be embraced and their expression celebrated and ours is to be hidden away.

Finally, I'll talk about the most face palm inducing story for last.

6 year old suspended for pretend poweranger battle 

Yup, thanks to progressive fun police we can now strike off 6 year old boys pretending to be powerangers as unacceptable.

“This can not be tolerated in the world we live in today”

Kids having imaginary battles somehow represents a threat now. Yeah ok.

Better get rid of the toy soldiers then.

Peak stupid – Have we reached it yet?

E3 and the Games Media's obsession with Gender politics

Gender politics in gamng is nothing new, so it's no surprise that in the wake of the press conferences the usual suspects took to twitter to air their grievances. These are the sorts of people who will never be please no matter how much developers pandered to them.

However it was it's prominence in the E3 coverage of the gaming press that was a little on the nose. Advocating "diversity" has become a default editorial position, a mandate. It's very much a symptom of our post feminist PC society that the inherent masculinity of gaming is somehow seen as problematic. The demographic majority in gaming (white male) are to be derided and minorities prioritized. Should a developer include minorities the focus shifts to finding critiquing the portrayal of said minority (to stereotypical, sexist etc). Never mind that half the male characters in gaming these days are fairly archetypal (and voiced by Nolan North, lol).  

I'm not sure why one should expect equal representation for a small proportion of the audience (and in the case of racial minorities, a relatively small proportion of the population) to be honest. Perhaps with the high proportion of women in games media, relative to the actual number of women who are core gamers has something to do with these expectations.

There were a few instances that this obsession was evident. The reaction to Assassins Creed and Far Cry 4 Co-op were such examples. Apparently now, there is a mandate that gender be selectable in any multiplayer mode of a game. This was not an option in AC Unity, where the players are simply Arno in different coloured robes. Of course the question was asked and Ubisoft provided an answer (the amount of work required to do a new rig and animations etc). Of course they were taken to task on this, there were editorials written and even old AC designers dug up to insist that it could easily be done. Ubisoft would be made accountable for their sin. Similarly with Far Cry 4, the co-op player is male and when asked the devs noted they had worked on a female character but the work was not able to be completed (didn't have a read for the character, etc). These answers were deemed unacceptable (even though the press are well aware of how pushed for time developers are to meet release dates).

The argument seems to be that women who game can't enjoy or feel excluded by having to use a male avatar. It seems odd to me since its so inconsequential in these games. In AC its really insignificant what gender is under the assassin robes and FC4 is an FPS, so you can't even see your character most of the time. It also seems odd that you would need to project yourself onto these characters. You aren't building up these characters or customizing them, simply playing out the action with them.

So many games shown at E3 include customizable characters (including gender). Dragon Age, Sunset Over Drive, The Division to name a few. To me, this is more about the politics than a legitimate issue. Not only that but there seems to be this pretense of wanting to "educate" their audience. It's here that people in the games media seem to be ignorant about the disconnect with the audience on this issue. The audience actually interested in that stuff is a small proportion of gamers and they alredy gravitate to sites like polygon that specialize in identity politics. The rest of us just aren't interested in being beaten around the head with this stuff. 

Don't get me started on this article by Gamespots Tom McShea on Rainbow 6 Siege: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-disturbing-representation-of-women-in-the-rainbow-six-siege-e3-demo/1100-6420266/

The most heavy handed nonsense you are likely to read for some time.

The enthusiast press has become the SJW press. No wonder gamers are looking elsewhere for their coverage. 

Male Gamer Privilege

A response to the article on Polygon:

http://www.polygon.com/2014/4/23/5640678/playing-with-privilege-the-invisible-benefits-of-gaming-while-male

Jonathan Macintosh @radicalbytes - is the man behind  theTropes vs Women in Video Games series that Anita Sarkeesian is known for. He describes himself on Twitter as "Transformative storyteller. Pop culture critic." Which can be roughly translated as professional bullshitter.

The games media's embrace of people like Jon and Anita and their brand of argument (boilerplate feminist critique/ professional victimhood) is troubling, but that's a rant for another blog in itself. The thing that annoys me most is they are given a platform despite a demonstrated lack of knowledge ofgaming community and gaming itself, having dabbled in it only to serve their own agenda. 

Rather than refute the list point by point, I'll just raise some general objections. Really the list has things which are straight up untrue and a fair bit of redundancy. JordanOwen42 has a good video breaking down the list point by point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4NqZal3Lyk&list=WLKR8MPmIOdYr8n3l6qlhIfQ&index=19

The chief objection I have to this list is that we as gamers have always moderated our interaction with the community in order to have the experience we want to have. Their is no assumption of enjoying a particularly desired level of community just by logging into a game online. There is no welcome mat rolled out for anyone. Community and our part in it is cultivated, and I don't believe women are excluded from finding good community online. There just shouldn't be this expectation of avoiding having to deal with shit from anonymous d-bags. That the trolling is tailored to gender isn't evidence of women dealing with more than men, its just a fact of life. People attack the point of difference. People are hardly going to attack the masculinity of female gamers. 

Women have the same tools at their disposal as men to deal with undesired online interactions. Block, mute, report, cultivate a friends list of people you like to play with and fire back some of your own trash talk to even the field of play. The entire mentality of Jonathan and those who think like him is why the term white knight exists. Women are delicate snowflakes and we need to ride in on our noble steeds to protect them.

There is no exemption to dealing with shit for men. This should be immediately apparent for anyone paying attention to happenings within the community. There's this tendency to paint this narrative of women receiving a greater level of unfair treatment, inspite of stories routinely emerging of men copping it to. Just look at Phil Fish quitting game development, prominent youtubers like totalbiscuit disengaging from the reddit community for the toll it was taking on him. People don't hold back online, its just part of the nature of online interaction. 

If you can't deal with anonymous, inarticulate trolls sending you mean messages, then you may just need to close your twitter account and just game without a headset on or use any of the other means available to create the space you want to play in. You don't have to find acceptance among the scene kids to enjoy gaming. The reality is the goal here is to colonize gaming culture with their collectivist, pc mentality. That's why these articles are written carpet bombing the whole community, using guilt to conscript us to this crusade to remake the community in their image.

I just don't see it as my responsibility to reshape the community, I am just one participant in it. I always look to respond in an intelligent manner in the comments section and be respectful online and in games. The collectivist crusade just won't work, because the community just isn't what they insist it is and we are more interested in just getting on with our gaming.