yeah that sort of reaction is willful and motivated I think. To be honest, I think the new Dragon Age looks very, very annoying and bad. But I just kind of move on to other things with the understanding that it’s just another video game I think is bad. Why other people incorporate that happenstance into a weird political cosmology is beyond me lol
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I guess I don’t see what good can come from steam having like discussion sections and communities anyway. Bad idea all around
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do these people not realize that the fact that they’re grown men getting mad about sweet baby dot com is a more alarming sign of western decline and decadence than anything they whine about all the livelong day
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…Be still my beating heart! What an accusation! The anti-woke credentials of something… are being manufactured?? What kinds of lies will you come up with next, do anti-woke influencers have absurdly disproportionately lucrative financial gain in slopping out a steady string of dumb lies to their audiences?
I think it’s probably not a coincidence that all three of the games that the chuds propped up as the best games of the year come from East Asia, for two main reasons:
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The language barrier and cultural remove I would think gives the English language anti-woke mob a lot of space to project their own ideological interpretation of both the content of the game, the intent of the creators, and also the supposed reaction (pun intended) of the domestic audience. I feel like I saw this a lot with the backlash to *Assassin’s Creed Shadows–*a lot of chuds swearing up and down that domestic audience was up in arms as a plurality about the game, when I would imagine most of them are just using Google Chrome’s Translate this page on shit like the official Japanese Ubisoft YouTube page’s versions of the game’s preview trailers, and finding a few negative comments and ignoring the rest, knowing that that’s more than most people wouldn’t presume to think they could determine anything by doing that. I’ve certainly never seen any of them cite, say, an actual domestic media critic or journalistic outlet or anything like that, as in, someone or something who would be at least somewhat qualified to take at least an inexact read on the temperature on public opinion towards things, so, it’s probably very easy to project mass opinion on to a population that obviously aren’t silent, but might as well be to someone with no command of the spoken or written language that the public discourse is using to have that public discussion. In the west at least, they get to use the domestic Japanese/Korean audience as a mouthpiece regardless of what they’re actually saying, and of course the language and cultural barrier works both ways, it is probably pretty easy for the westoid chuds to drown out anyone well meaning enough to traverse the language barrier and cultural remove from the other direction to set things straight.
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This is a much larger topic but fascists also love to do the same kind of cultural projection on, particularly Japan but to a lesser-but-seems-to-be-becoming-more-common extent China and South Korea, with regards to cultural attitudes towards gender relations, variance in gender and sexuality, and other so-projected “woke” talking points. It is often presumed by fascists that, due to perhaps being societies which are comparatively more culturally grounded in tradition (which is more of an indictment of how the United States has no actual cultural history, because “United States” isn’t a culture in the same way, but I digress), Japan, China, and South Korea have of course also more, what is in their eyes, remained in the more “default” state of being more prone to being misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, etc. So that’s I think another reason the projection sticks, because I think that ahistorical and fascistic presumption has leaked somewhat out into the mainstream western perception of East Asia (I think liberals tend to come at this more out of their own false sense of moral superiority but again I digress). I would say that it’s more accurate to say that misogyny, racism, etc. is unlikely to be significantly worse in East Asia than it is in the west, it’s surely more that it takes different forms. But again, this presumption being either something fascists deliberately project on to other societies, or something clueless liberals take for granted through the haze of their own fart clouds, is likely part of what makes it easy for chuds to present themselves as an authority on the aesthetic or ideological intent or substance behind these games. Like, there are probably more innocent reasons why the girl in Stellar Blade is sooooooooooo ostentatiously pretty, that can’t just be lazily slopped out as being because South Korean society is uniquely severely patriarchal (even if, yes, South Korean patriarchy is unique in the literal sense that only South Korea is patriarchal in the distinct way South Korea is patriarchal).
I can’t think of how to test this hypothesis but, you know, it is maybe a bit conspicuous how there aren’t too many games that I can think of which are purportedly champions of the supposed impending Go Woke Go Broke backlash, and are also produced in the west and are produced by those speaking and working within the sphere of influence of the English language and communicate a lot in English (which, let’s be real, the more prominent European and French Canadian studios do still use English as a lingua franca). They often seem to say that it’s western games that have Gone Woke, and it’s much harder to lie about the cultural and social context that those decisions are being made in the creation and presentation of those games, so they have to purport that this is because the west is in decadent moral decline. I think a simple application of Occam’s razor would reveal that the way these freaks are saying games are made with this level of focus on its ideological position in the supposed culture war is just simply a fantasy and projection in all cases.
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Damn, that fucking sucks. 20 years is a long ass time… but Rest in Piss to that fool
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Like, not to give any credit to a consulting firm, but the fact that they latched on to one who chose to call themselves Sweet Baby is so fucking funny. Just dozens of hundreds of the stupidest guys in the world railing about Puppy Rainbows Inc. or Sunny Day Picnic At The Park Ltd., all day every day. An AI model trained on this shit might think these freaks are like militant anti-natalists or something
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Personally I think we should actually encourage fascists to project reactionary social and cultural attitudes on to specifically China, so that we can then instead back them into a corner of having to talk about it within the context of the Cultural Revolution (which, like it or lump it, has probably been one of the most dramatic societal shifts with regards to the society and culture level status of women in human history, I mean, a handful of old women who had had their feet bound were still alive as of 2014, which is the most evocative way I can think of to illustrate the cultural shift)
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In a much less nuanced addition, I also recall Stellar Blade’s place in the puerile faschy outrage landscape being a whole lot more manufactured – if the developers didn’t outright deny those politics, they at least didn’t seem to explicitly fan the flames. In Wukong’s case, we had reports, on-record social media comments & those repugnant streaming guidelines (can’t mention Covid, “politics” or “feminist propaganda”) clearly illustrating that a not insignificant part of the team are misogynistic right-wing garbage
The way that stuff was widely reported on but hardly mentioned at all when discussing the game is extremely Geoff Keighley energy
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sweet baby leave me and my family alone
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It was a laff riot seeing them tie themselves into fucking knots trying to both crawl up the developers’ asses for releasing a game that was anti-woke by way of Sexey Woman, but then also act like the game was censored by the shadowy woke cabal (not deliberately changed by the developer of course), because allegedly a handful of the (I presume at least 300-400) outfits were slightly less revealing. From what I recall most of the changes were aesthetic redesigns, for sure there was no real sense that the game’s cheesecake had been uniformly brought up to any minimum standard of modesty so it really made no logical sense to accuse the game of having been censored in any meaningful sense, and, well, not to reveal to much about myself, but if you think putting tights on under a dress is censorship, the things you must consider to be eroticization have got to be astounding
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OK see I hate to say it, but in that case I think they have a point. You just can’t find pictures of sexy ladies on the computer nowadays
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Something to keep in mind is that these kinds of people don’t even really like games. Their way of life just seems so exhausting to me. I like to send likeminded game enjoyers a funny Starfield video or whatever - a game I’m never going to play but think seems funny/bad - but I would never feel passionately anti-game enough to engage in a posters crusade. Of course I also find the idea of watching toxic youtube / twitch gamers all day painful to imagine so luckily I just have a different kind of brain than they do
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yes the error a lot of media people made with gamer gate way back when was taking the ethical concerns at face value
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Whatever happened to the strong, silent type? Like Gary Cooper?
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It took me years to figure out that that supposed review of Depression Quest didn’t even exist
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The media still hasn’t stopped treating trolls’ bad faith arguments as legitimate. That’s how one of them won the presidency.
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Meanwhile, the left can’t stop attacking itself.
Every day it seems like it’s more of a miracle that Disco Elysium is actually a thing.
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even as a big fan of disco elysium, i gotta say every bit of “drama” that comes out just makes me more glassy eyed
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today’s posts that i have now caught up on are largely good, y’all are good people
without messily replying to a handful of folks, here are words:
- there was a lot of discourse back when the alt-right were nascent about the specific definition of the word “nazi”, and i acknowledge words having both power and meaning. i recognize the critique that overusing words renders them toothless for some (even if i’d wager this is often presented from a place/person that is of poor faith), but where i ended up with here is this: i’m never going to sit down with anyone from the development team of hatred and pick at their views to discern if their breed of fascistic thought/theory is sufficiently antisemetic & other specific qualifiers to see if they fully check the boxes of neo-or-otherwise-nazi. it’s a pile of fascists all the way down; whether you’re exploring, grifting or fully-throated believing, you woke up today and again made the choice to ride with that team. those are your people
there’s absolutely avenues that call for getting into the weeds: pop-fascism (sorry) here doesn’t look like it does in parts of brazil or chile, which undoubtedly overlaps a bit with brands in eastern europe, southwest asia and the like, and i find writeups about these distinctions important and very much worth studying! i do not apply this rigor to a crowd in the corpse of twitter that basically amounts to a miserable pile of vagina-bones
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the posts about how these chuds simply mash their manbaby views onto stellar blade & japan/korea/etc are good, and with south korea in particular, there’s some big nuance there in regards to their own brand of open misogyny/anti-feminism and the reach those chuds have had, nevermind the cultural issues of revenge porn/AI fuckery
but i do think part of why that team was latched onto has to do with the lead dev being an outspoken misogynistic dipshit, i know there’s pieces on this and i’m going to pretend i’m being pragmatic & say this is a work computer so i can’t look up those links, but in the spirit of good faith, i will tell my comrades here i am simply lazy and wish to be as free as possible of the specifics of this mental detritus -
geoff keighley energy is spot-on, that’s good
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shit man i still gotta play through disco elysium, nevermind pahtologic 2 i’m letting folks down here and am uncertain when i will do better
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Y’all see the weirdo Three Kingdoms digital board game Koei Tecmo is doing for Apple Arcade?
It’s apparently shogi-inspired and they’ve commissioned a “genius AI” opponent from a team that worked on a top performing shogi AI. I’m pretty curious about it. I feel like Apple Arcade is a mostly-underwhelming service but a few times a year they’ll put out something that catches my eye like this.
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