Gamergate 2 has now become official

[TheRejectionist]

 

[TheRejectionist]

 

[ThatZenoGuy]

I am very excited to see where this goes!

 

[Iconoclast]

*sigh*

Here we fucking go again. 🤪

 

[DarthOne]

I am very excited to see where this goes!

Guess who’s back again!

Between him, Sargon, Arch, and some others talking about this as well, it’s like watching a band get back together.

 

[Husky_Khan]

I am very excited to see where this goes!

They misspelled Folx... 😕

 

[Carrot of Truth]

Gamer Gate 2 Trump is running again, Damn this feels like 2016. All that is missing the the sequel to the great meme war.

 

[Blasterbot]

here we go again



have some old meme song. kek. may the monsters they create destroy them.

 

[TheRejectionist]

 

[sander093]

Guess who’s back again!

Between him, Sargon, Arch, and some others talking about this as well, it’s like watching a band get back together.

One thing I think he forgot was that it doesn't matter if no one does anything that vaguely 'harassing', like last time they'll just make the messages themselves. Anyone remember the seconds old messages, how only a handful of those messages could be found at all, or the one time they forgot to switch accounts before posting.

 

[AnimalNoodles]

They misspelled Folx... 😕

Like the Bourbons of France, They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.

 

[DarthOne]

One thing I think he forgot was that it doesn't matter if no one does anything that vaguely 'harassing', like last time they'll just make the messages themselves. Anyone remember the seconds old messages, how only a handful of those messages could be found at all, or the one time they forgot to switch accounts before posting.

They’re doing that now too from what I heard.

 

[Iconoclast]

People are saying that Gamergate 2.0 has already begun, because of the Sweet Baby controversy.

Gamergate wasn't just about journalistic integrity. It was a struggle for fundamental freedom in storytelling and a rebuke to SJW didacticism.

SJWs laugh at the idea of apolitical fiction and argue that "all fiction is political". While they are certainly correct that it is possible to impute political ideas and motives to just about any trope in a story, they clearly misunderstand what gamers meant by saying we wanted politics out of games. We didn't mean that we wanted no politics of any kind in storytelling because this is impossible; anyone can interpret anything as being political at any time, even a character sitting around staring at a Zen rock garden. What people actually meant by getting politics out of games was that yes, we actually did enjoy escapist fantasy, and no, we didn't want to be beaten over the head with heavy-handed moralizing all the time.

SJWs have this idiotic notion that all media should, one way or another, be instructive in nature, and that it should instruct the audience to believe in the correct politics. That is, they believe all fiction should strive to influence the audience's beliefs in a positive manner. This is called propaganda. The intent of propaganda, unlike artistic media, is not to provide aesthetic pleasure but to cultivate specific values in the viewer. Propaganda can, admittedly, have artistic merit separate from the message. I'm sure plenty of people have looked at old American, Nazi, or Soviet propaganda posters and been moved by their striking composition or their use of bold geometric figures, but this is beside the point.

When people consume fictional media, their primary intent isn't to be dragged kicking and screaming back into reality and be lectured like a small child. Rather, they wish to experience a kind of controlled hallucination of another world and to derive aesthetic enjoyment from it. Being constantly bombarded with messages about current-year politics that quickly become dated is a recipe for destroying this illusion and forcing the viewer back into reality. In this sense, politics are anything that would break the spell and make the viewer realize they're looking at a simulation.

What we're dealing with here are actually two competing media ontologies; the SJW stance, of didactic media that exists primarily to confront the viewer and alter their belief structure, and the Gamer stance, of hypnotic media that exists to provide immersion, escape, aesthetic pleasure, and so on. Instruction versus Art.

The SJW pattern of didacticism is very rigid. In their conception of media, there are some categories of things that one must or must not depict, which are a grab bag of leftist ideology:

Must Depict:

• Uplifting portrayals of racial, gender, or sexual minorities
• Women and minorities in non-traditional roles
• Inclusive language
• Positive portrayals of socialism, collectivism, and/or communitarianism
• Circumspect and tasteful portrayals of physical, sexual, or verbal abuse that invite us to sympathize with the abused and despise the abuser

Must Not Depict:

• Genocide
• Torture
• Racism
• Sexism
• Homophobia
• Racial slurs
• Positive portrayals of settler colonialism
• Positive portrayals of police work
• Positive portrayals of capitalism
• Positive portrayals of fascist governments, even "benevolent" fascism
• Writing the Other (i.e. when an author writes extensively about a minority they don't belong to)
• Overly sexualized and attractive women
• Unrealistic body standards (this is the SJW term for good physical fitness)
• Eroticized rape or abuse

SJW didacticism creates a very narrowly defined category of what constitutes an acceptable protagonist, which looks something like a magical half-fairy, half-African woman who flies around with shimmering butterfly wings and shoots magic pixie dust from her hands and rights all the wrongs in the world with no effort and no moral conflict. SJW didacticism cannot withstand the Villain Protagonist challenge. That is to say, if I deliberately elect to write an immoral protagonist (like Walter White, or Yagami Light, or whatever), they're obviously going to have to engage in evil acts, which means they're going to end up doing one or more of the things on the naughty list.

But even with a nominally good protagonist, there are many, many problems with SJW didacticism.

• Well-written protagonists are not perfect. They make mistakes. Sometimes, they break the law, experience friction with their allies, or do things that are blatantly immoral. If your protagonist is a racial or gender token, and you want them to be portrayed in the best possible light, then it follows that they're going to be a boringly moral goody two-shoes Lawful Good protag. As an author, one must have more options for crafting protagonists than "a minority who is also a living saint".
• People don't like reading about boringly perfect people who pull deus ex machinae out of their asses and solve problems with minimal effort. Most real people have imperfections, flaws, and shortcomings of their own and find it unrealistic to be asked to identify with someone who is literally, unattainably fucking perfect.
• Depiction is not endorsement. If you want to show brutal injustices to the viewer, you have to be willing to depict truly awful things. SJWs invite us to "imagine a better world" by sterilizing fiction of the aspects of reality that upset them the most, creating settings that are practical hugboxes.
• Constantly being on the receiving end of a moral lecture or being told that you're a terrible person for believing one thing or another is fucking exhausting and patronizing. Audiences don't like being condescended to.
• Their strict categories of acceptable content narrow the range and scope of possible stories, resulting in bland sameness rather than diversity.

Overall, the SJW project in fictional media is a project of censorship. They'll argue that it isn't censorship because it's voluntary and not government-directed, but the fact is that SJWs devote considerable time and energy to things like sensitivity reading (i.e., censorship) and taking over publishers to prevent the publication of media that contradicts their ideals. After pulling coups at Tor and Del Rey, they're perpetually outraged that publishers with a more libertarian bent like Baen exist.

This brings us to Sweet Baby. The idea of a one-stop consultancy providing not just sensitivity reading but also doing all the worldbuilding for devs comes across as anathema to the creative process. Think about it. Why wouldn't game dev studios rely on internal writers and designers for that? Why would they all contract with one single company to provide writing as a service? Modern gamedev honestly has way, way too much contractor work stitched together into a single product, which results in a hodgepodge mess that is aesthetically inconsistent. It really is reflected in the quality of the final product.

 

[Agent23]

People are saying that Gamergate 2.0 has already begun, because of the Sweet Baby controversy.

Gamergate wasn't just about journalistic integrity. It was a struggle for fundamental freedom in storytelling and a rebuke to SJW didacticism.

SJWs laugh at the idea of apolitical fiction and argue that "all fiction is political". While they are certainly correct that it is possible to impute political ideas and motives to just about any trope in a story, they clearly misunderstand what gamers meant by saying we wanted politics out of games. We didn't mean that we wanted no politics of any kind in storytelling because this is impossible; anyone can interpret anything as being political at any time, even a character sitting around staring at a Zen rock garden. What people actually meant by getting politics out of games was that yes, we actually did enjoy escapist fantasy, and no, we didn't want to be beaten over the head with heavy-handed moralizing all the time.

SJWs have this idiotic notion that all media should, one way or another, be instructive in nature, and that it should instruct the audience to believe in the correct politics. That is, they believe all fiction should strive to influence the audience's beliefs in a positive manner. This is called propaganda. The intent of propaganda, unlike artistic media, is not to provide aesthetic pleasure but to cultivate specific values in the viewer. Propaganda can, admittedly, have artistic merit separate from the message. I'm sure plenty of people have looked at old American, Nazi, or Soviet propaganda posters and been moved by their striking composition or their use of bold geometric figures, but this is beside the point.

When people consume fictional media, their primary intent isn't to be dragged kicking and screaming back into reality and be lectured like a small child. Rather, they wish to experience a kind of controlled hallucination of another world and to derive aesthetic enjoyment from it. Being constantly bombarded with messages about current-year politics that quickly become dated is a recipe for destroying this illusion and forcing the viewer back into reality. In this sense, politics are anything that would break the spell and make the viewer realize they're looking at a simulation.

What we're dealing with here are actually two competing media ontologies; the SJW stance, of didactic media that exists primarily to confront the viewer and alter their belief structure, and the Gamer stance, of hypnotic media that exists to provide immersion, escape, aesthetic pleasure, and so on. Instruction versus Art.

The SJW pattern of didacticism is very rigid. In their conception of media, there are some categories of things that one must or must not depict, which are a grab bag of leftist ideology:

Must Depict:

• Uplifting portrayals of racial, gender, or sexual minorities
• Women and minorities in non-traditional roles
• Inclusive language
• Positive portrayals of socialism, collectivism, and/or communitarianism
• Circumspect and tasteful portrayals of physical, sexual, or verbal abuse that invite us to sympathize with the abused and despise the abuser

Must Not Depict:

• Genocide
• Torture
• Racism
• Sexism
• Homophobia
• Racial slurs
• Positive portrayals of settler colonialism
• Positive portrayals of police work
• Positive portrayals of capitalism
• Positive portrayals of fascist governments, even "benevolent" fascism
• Writing the Other (i.e. when an author writes extensively about a minority they don't belong to)
• Overly sexualized and attractive women
• Unrealistic body standards (this is the SJW term for good physical fitness)
• Eroticized rape or abuse

SJW didacticism creates a very narrowly defined category of what constitutes an acceptable protagonist, which looks something like a magical half-fairy, half-African woman who flies around with shimmering butterfly wings and shoots magic pixie dust from her hands and rights all the wrongs in the world with no effort and no moral conflict. SJW didacticism cannot withstand the Villain Protagonist challenge. That is to say, if I deliberately elect to write an immoral protagonist (like Walter White, or Yagami Light, or whatever), they're obviously going to have to engage in evil acts, which means they're going to end up doing one or more of the things on the naughty list.

But even with a nominally good protagonist, there are many, many problems with SJW didacticism.

• Well-written protagonists are not perfect. They make mistakes. Sometimes, they break the law, experience friction with their allies, or do things that are blatantly immoral. If your protagonist is a racial or gender token, and you want them to be portrayed in the best possible light, then it follows that they're going to be a boringly moral goody two-shoes Lawful Good protag. As an author, one must have more options for crafting protagonists than "a minority who is also a living saint".
• People don't like reading about boringly perfect people who pull deus ex machinae out of their asses and solve problems with minimal effort. Most real people have imperfections, flaws, and shortcomings of their own and find it unrealistic to be asked to identify with someone who is literally, unattainably fucking perfect.
• Depiction is not endorsement. If you want to show brutal injustices to the viewer, you have to be willing to depict truly awful things. SJWs invite us to "imagine a better world" by sterilizing fiction of the aspects of reality that upset them the most, creating settings that are practical hugboxes.
• Constantly being on the receiving end of a moral lecture or being told that you're a terrible person for believing one thing or another is fucking exhausting and patronizing. Audiences don't like being condescended to.
• Their strict categories of acceptable content narrow the range and scope of possible stories, resulting in bland sameness rather than diversity.

Overall, the SJW project in fictional media is a project of censorship. They'll argue that it isn't censorship because it's voluntary and not government-directed, but the fact is that SJWs devote considerable time and energy to things like sensitivity reading (i.e., censorship) and taking over publishers to prevent the publication of media that contradicts their ideals. After pulling coups at Tor and Del Rey, they're perpetually outraged that publishers with a more libertarian bent like Baen exist.

The shits made other important cultural institutions, like the Nebula and Hugo awards, irrelevant.


And because of that we have all sorts of garbage getting top tier awards and accolades.

However, samizdat is a thing thanks to e-books, and with tools like A.I. the need for editors will be reduced.

Personally, if I do read a modern science fiction book nowadays it is usually something basically self-published via Amazon or some other similar outlet.

Also, Sad and Mad puppies were a thing even before GamerGate iirc.

Similarly, indie game studios and what is referred to as AA game studios are both on the rise, the success of Palworld and Robocop and Helldivers is a testament to that.

Also, the deranged journos just want to get clicks by reeing Gamer Gate 2.0, but this time a lot more people aware of this DEI social justice garbage and more and more of these garbage news outlets are being sold off of axed.

 

[KilroywasNOTHere]

• Well-written protagonists are not perfect. They make mistakes. Sometimes, they break the law, experience friction with their allies, or do things that are blatantly immoral. If your protagonist is a racial or gender token, and you want them to be portrayed in the best possible light, then it follows that they're going to be a boringly moral goody two-shoes Lawful Good protag. As an author, one must have more options for crafting protagonists than "a minority who is also a living saint".
• People don't like reading about boringly perfect people who pull deus ex machinae out of their asses and solve problems with minimal effort. Most real people have imperfections, flaws, and shortcomings of their own and find it unrealistic to be asked to identify with someone who is literally, unattainably fucking perfect.

Eh I think there needs to be a balance. How many edgy stories exist where everyone is black and dark grey and "morality and perfection are social constructs? Social commentary social commentary with a political subtext." Or as I like to call it "Current Marvel and DC." After hearing so much "The world sucks and we're all going to die." It's nice to escape into a world where people are as they should be not as they are. Sometimes it's nice just to see Superman unironically save a cat stuck in a tree without it being some sort of commentary on the human condition.

But that's coming from someone dealing with "edge fatigue" both in fiction and in real life to the point of almost being accelerationist.

 

[Captain X]

People are saying that Gamergate 2.0 has already begun, because of the Sweet Baby controversy.

Gamergate wasn't just about journalistic integrity. It was a struggle for fundamental freedom in storytelling and a rebuke to SJW didacticism.

SJWs laugh at the idea of apolitical fiction and argue that "all fiction is political". While they are certainly correct that it is possible to impute political ideas and motives to just about any trope in a story, they clearly misunderstand what gamers meant by saying we wanted politics out of games. We didn't mean that we wanted no politics of any kind in storytelling because this is impossible; anyone can interpret anything as being political at any time, even a character sitting around staring at a Zen rock garden. What people actually meant by getting politics out of games was that yes, we actually did enjoy escapist fantasy, and no, we didn't want to be beaten over the head with heavy-handed moralizing all the time.

SJWs have this idiotic notion that all media should, one way or another, be instructive in nature, and that it should instruct the audience to believe in the correct politics. That is, they believe all fiction should strive to influence the audience's beliefs in a positive manner. This is called propaganda. The intent of propaganda, unlike artistic media, is not to provide aesthetic pleasure but to cultivate specific values in the viewer. Propaganda can, admittedly, have artistic merit separate from the message. I'm sure plenty of people have looked at old American, Nazi, or Soviet propaganda posters and been moved by their striking composition or their use of bold geometric figures, but this is beside the point.

When people consume fictional media, their primary intent isn't to be dragged kicking and screaming back into reality and be lectured like a small child. Rather, they wish to experience a kind of controlled hallucination of another world and to derive aesthetic enjoyment from it. Being constantly bombarded with messages about current-year politics that quickly become dated is a recipe for destroying this illusion and forcing the viewer back into reality. In this sense, politics are anything that would break the spell and make the viewer realize they're looking at a simulation.

What we're dealing with here are actually two competing media ontologies; the SJW stance, of didactic media that exists primarily to confront the viewer and alter their belief structure, and the Gamer stance, of hypnotic media that exists to provide immersion, escape, aesthetic pleasure, and so on. Instruction versus Art.

The SJW pattern of didacticism is very rigid. In their conception of media, there are some categories of things that one must or must not depict, which are a grab bag of leftist ideology:

Must Depict:

• Uplifting portrayals of racial, gender, or sexual minorities
• Women and minorities in non-traditional roles
• Inclusive language
• Positive portrayals of socialism, collectivism, and/or communitarianism
• Circumspect and tasteful portrayals of physical, sexual, or verbal abuse that invite us to sympathize with the abused and despise the abuser

Must Not Depict:

• Genocide
• Torture
• Racism
• Sexism
• Homophobia
• Racial slurs
• Positive portrayals of settler colonialism
• Positive portrayals of police work
• Positive portrayals of capitalism
• Positive portrayals of fascist governments, even "benevolent" fascism
• Writing the Other (i.e. when an author writes extensively about a minority they don't belong to)
• Overly sexualized and attractive women
• Unrealistic body standards (this is the SJW term for good physical fitness)
• Eroticized rape or abuse

SJW didacticism creates a very narrowly defined category of what constitutes an acceptable protagonist, which looks something like a magical half-fairy, half-African woman who flies around with shimmering butterfly wings and shoots magic pixie dust from her hands and rights all the wrongs in the world with no effort and no moral conflict. SJW didacticism cannot withstand the Villain Protagonist challenge. That is to say, if I deliberately elect to write an immoral protagonist (like Walter White, or Yagami Light, or whatever), they're obviously going to have to engage in evil acts, which means they're going to end up doing one or more of the things on the naughty list.

But even with a nominally good protagonist, there are many, many problems with SJW didacticism.

• Well-written protagonists are not perfect. They make mistakes. Sometimes, they break the law, experience friction with their allies, or do things that are blatantly immoral. If your protagonist is a racial or gender token, and you want them to be portrayed in the best possible light, then it follows that they're going to be a boringly moral goody two-shoes Lawful Good protag. As an author, one must have more options for crafting protagonists than "a minority who is also a living saint".
• People don't like reading about boringly perfect people who pull deus ex machinae out of their asses and solve problems with minimal effort. Most real people have imperfections, flaws, and shortcomings of their own and find it unrealistic to be asked to identify with someone who is literally, unattainably fucking perfect.
• Depiction is not endorsement. If you want to show brutal injustices to the viewer, you have to be willing to depict truly awful things. SJWs invite us to "imagine a better world" by sterilizing fiction of the aspects of reality that upset them the most, creating settings that are practical hugboxes.
• Constantly being on the receiving end of a moral lecture or being told that you're a terrible person for believing one thing or another is fucking exhausting and patronizing. Audiences don't like being condescended to.
• Their strict categories of acceptable content narrow the range and scope of possible stories, resulting in bland sameness rather than diversity.

Overall, the SJW project in fictional media is a project of censorship. They'll argue that it isn't censorship because it's voluntary and not government-directed, but the fact is that SJWs devote considerable time and energy to things like sensitivity reading (i.e., censorship) and taking over publishers to prevent the publication of media that contradicts their ideals. After pulling coups at Tor and Del Rey, they're perpetually outraged that publishers with a more libertarian bent like Baen exist.

This brings us to Sweet Baby. The idea of a one-stop consultancy providing not just sensitivity reading but also doing all the worldbuilding for devs comes across as anathema to the creative process. Think about it. Why wouldn't game dev studios rely on internal writers and designers for that? Why would they all contract with one single company to provide writing as a service? Modern gamedev honestly has way, way too much contractor work stitched together into a single product, which results in a hodgepodge mess that is aesthetically inconsistent. It really is reflected in the quality of the final product.

And the interesting thing about this Sweet Baby business is that the government is involved.

 

[Scottty]

Reading through that list of what the SJW control-freaks want, makes me think that someone ought to make a story titled Invasion of the Space Balrogs or something like that, with almost everything in it calculated to trigger SJWs as much as possible.

And make the hero who can fight them be an elderly Christian priest (white male, of course) who has a water-pistol loaded with consecrated water.

 

[Agent23]

And the interesting thing about this Sweet Baby business is that the government is involved.

They are trying to get more clicks and crybully beg big guv for money because muh Trump/evil Nazi gamers.

 

[Bigking321]

I think they meant that the company was being partially funded by homeland security. Or something like that.

 

[Captain X]

There was another company that was defending Sweet Baby that is funded by the government, but I also also meant more direct involvement:

The Feds Are Coming for “Extremist” Gamers

Gaming companies are sharing gamers’ user information with the government to root out so-called domestic violent extremists.

theintercept.com

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have mechanisms to share and receive domestic violent extremism threat-related information with social media and gaming companies,” the GAO says. The report reveals that the DHS intelligence office meets with gaming companies and that the companies can use these meetings to “share information with I&A [DHS’s intelligence office] about online activities promoting domestic violent extremism,” or even simply “activities that violate the companies’ terms of service.” Through its 56 field offices and hundreds of resident agencies subordinate field offices, the FBI receives tips from gaming companies of potential law-breaking and extremist views for further investigation. The FBI also conducts briefings to gaming companies on purported threats.

The GAO study also follows pressure from Congress to top gaming companies to crack down on extremist content. Last March, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., sent letters to gaming companies Valve, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, Riot Games, Roblox Corp, and Take-Two Interactive demanding that they take actions to police gamers.

Of course this comes as no surprise, because the FBI got involved last time as well, though back then it was to investigate the allegations of death threats.

https://vault.fbi.gov/gamergate