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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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DiGRA 2015 concluded recently. It was pretty close to me this year, so I tried to make time to go. Didn't work out, but what I caught on Twitter seemed pretty interesting. And here's what GG wants you to think about it.

 

TL,DR:

 

"Before all of this, I had never even HEARD of DiGRA."

 

"The goal of academia can generally be summarized as advancing society through research. Unfortunately, for the most part that’s almost entirely redundant in a capitalist society."

 

"Rather than actually advancing society and civilization, a higher priority is put on the feelings of utterly unimportant individuals."

 

"Even the pozzed portion of GDC is still kept in line by capitalism."

 

"None of this is actually beneficial or important to the games industry- it won’t make anyone any money."

 

And last but not least:

 

"For all of Hitler’s faults, at the very least he was initially acting for the good of the nation."

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And last but not least:

 

 

THAT ARTICLE. :blink:

 

As I mentioned in a twitter rant, as a history student, most of this DiGRA nonsense reminds me of Wiemar Germany’s “culture” in the sense that it’s totally vapid. Back in the post-war era, Germany was rife with rampant inflation, socialist/anarchist/communist terrorism, and plenty of other problems. However, the intellectual and cultural “elite” of Germany, the artists, filmmakers, and writers, were all more obsessed with making movies about women and gays and the deconstruction of traditional values than they were actually fixing Germany. For all of Hitler’s faults, at the very least he was initially acting for the good of the nation.

 

So yeah, vitriol and all aside, it should be the goal of #GamerGate to forcibly remove DiGRA from the industry and the culture around it

 

 

There's no way to add hyperbole to those statements. It's the communist Untermensch and his Entartete Kunst, and gamergate intends to kill off existing game culture, finding a Final Solution for the SJW game designers.

 

Like Hitler did in "Wiemar" [sic!!] Germany.

 

 

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You missed the part where he said how great apartheid was.

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Apartheid is great because of the example of the miraculous, outstanding history of the success of Rhodesia, which uh... hasn't existed for a few decades...???

What a genuinely horrific person.

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"The goal of academia can generally be summarized as advancing society through research. Unfortunately, for the most part that’s almost entirely redundant in a capitalist society."

 

"Rather than actually advancing society and civilization, a higher priority is put on the feelings of utterly unimportant individuals."

 

I will never get tired of #GamerGate assigning arbitrary goals to massive and ancient institutions like academia, usually based on vague STEM fanboyism, and then blasting them when those goals seem unfulfilled. "The goal of government can generally be summarized as making sure all of its citizens are happy at all times. Well, I'm unhappy right now, the government has failed! It should be our goal now to forcibly attack government influence on society and industry."

 

Personally, I think the goal of academia, if there even is one, is to broaden and deepen our understanding of the human condition, not some positivist bullshit about progress. See, my definition actually includes the humanities and explains why people care a great deal about "the feelings of utterly unimportant individuals."

 

There's no way to add hyperbole to those statements. It's the communist Untermensch and his Entartete Kunst, and gamergate intends to kill off existing game culture, finding a Final Solution for the SJW game designers.

 

Naturally, his knowledge of the transition from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany is incredibly defective. If he's a history student, he's probably clearing his classes with low Cs, owing to uncritical thinking and fuckin' Nazi apologia. Hitler wasn't "acting for the good of his nation" at any point in his political career. He took advantage of the Great Depression, which was worse in Germany because of war reparations and American loans, to seize power and abolish democratic rule. He was backed initially by capitalist concerns that thought the fall of the government would increase their bottom line, so they were mollified initially by Hitler's war on the trade unions as he was cleaning house of rival political parties, but make no mistake that Hitler's consolidation of rule and purge of society in Germany was from the first and to the last a means for making Hitler more powerful and nothing else, even if it did help the economy. The only way that he had Germany's interests at heart is if Hitler was Germany, which he seems to felt to be the case, so...

 

Also, as an aside: fuck you, #GamerGate. The Weimer Republic was a golden age of cultural innovation and expression. Most of the "cinematic" techniques used in your vapid blockbusters and AAA games comes from that time, and you cry rivers when people talk about how there need to be less of those. Meanwhile, have you created anything of value in your nine months of existence, besides pictures of your imaginary gamer girlfriend Vivian and some of the worst writing ever to grace the internet outside of TimeCube? Of course not, so just keep talking about Nazis, because they're a perfect analogue to your movement. You're all just a lump of reactionary and toxic hate that can fool people temporarily into thinking you have some kind of goodwill towards society, but that ultimately is only in it to perpetuate its own existence and the hate that justifies it. An actual minority of your number would have your ideological enemies rounded up and executed, had you the power, and that is something that I can say about vanishingly few people in this world, especially your vaunted "feminazi" stereotype.

 

The irony and ecstasy is just too much for me here.

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Well, a proper student of history would in all likelihood not attempt to downplay the impact of the pervasive racism and homophopia of the 30s era Germany, seeing how its those exact "fake" problems that shortly thereafter led to the systemic murder of Jews and gay folk. Also, they would know how to spell Weimar, I'd hope (I made this jape on Twitter but I missed out here, until now).

 

In general, this is indicative of GG's inability to grasp the fact that even the abstract thinking they so despise can be of benefit to the concrete games they do like. Since Tweetdeck is apparently unable to apply my blocks to searches, I caught some of their tweets while trying to check out what folk were saying in the DiGRA hashtag, and one common trend there was them trying to tell game developers not to pay attention to any of this high-falutin' garbage because "gamers do not care about it", as if having a complex thought about games prevents you from ever making one of the Shooty McManshoot games that they like ever again.

 

And of course they are once again building this thing up as this big enemy that needs to be dismantled and that people need to be made aware of, while simultaneously harping on about how unimportant it is. Academic conferences not drawing crowds? Shocker!

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Personally, I much prefer his post about how Hideo Kojima has predicted what is really going on in society.

https://therightvidya.wordpress.com/2014/10/29/oliver-cromwell-and-the-patriots/

And the thing is, this mentality dominates the planet. At first it was confined to the northern United States: the south was founded by capitalists and operated on a non-ideological, economic form of democracy. This lasted until the Civil War, where the south decided they wanted nothing to do with the Puritan progressives of the north and tried to secede, only to get completely destroyed by the north and forced to comply with the Puritan style of running things. Reconstruction was simply the north trying to reshape the south in its image. Of course, it didn’t entirely work out, as evidenced by the existence of the Republican party today. Still, the Republicans and the American right are still fairly powerless, being only capable of slowing down progressivism instead of stopping it entirely. Indeed, the GOP still roots themselves in the various core memes of the enlightenment.

What the fuck is wrong with people.

I'm not surprised that a group of people who worship memes also consider mindless GOP platitudes to be upholding the spirit of the enlightenment. But wow.

WOW.

I've never seen a better example of how one-dimensional video game styled writing is just straight up demolishing a person's worldview. This person's logic of reality might as well be written in a World of Warcraft lore manual.

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What the fuck is wrong with people.

 

Okay, I take back my comment about this dude earning a C- in my history class. He's just straight-up playing madlibs with historical people and events to twist the past into an ideal that legitimizes his obsessions. "Social justice warriors" are modern-day Puritans, who've spent hundreds of years, since before the English Civil War, waging a secret war against right-thinking societies across the globe to destroy all human progress? Okay... Uh, no?

 

The thing is, if this conspiracy really is centuries old and overwhelmingly successful in all modern cultures, what exactly makes #GamerGate think they're going to beat it? Do they really think they're going to fight harder than the Royalists or the Confederates did? Maybe they're assuming that, now that progressivism is widely accepted as the dominant ideology and effecting actual changes in society, it's grown decadent and weak, so now's the time to strike? "Evacuate, in our moment of triumph?" Something like that? God, these guys watch too many movies.

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I'm still confounded by the idea that a plantain economy with strict social roles, little room for free soilers, and literal slave labor constitutes a "non-ideological, economic form of democracy".

He's not even the resident Hitler apologist in the class, he's the kid who exclaims "why isn't there a white history month" when he deems the 6th grade Martin Luther King day assignment not worth his time.

What is wrong with people.

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The thing is, if this conspiracy really is centuries old and overwhelmingly successful in all modern cultures, what exactly makes #GamerGate think they're going to beat it?

 

Hey, I'm almost glad someone finally speaks of centuries. It's considerably hard to prove a vastly destructive influence of something that has been around for centuries if the thing that supposedly is attacked still exists.

 

The truth, of course, is that there's no destruction, there's no conspiracy, and the truth is that the motifs of inclusion and diversity that gaters perceive as "political" have served as the spice shelf of fiction writers for millennia.

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Just never gets old when the hate mob that formed around the idea of punishing women for having sex accuses its enemies of being puritanical.

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Just never gets old when the hate mob that formed around the idea of punishing women for having sex accuses its enemies of being puritanical.

Not just puritanical, but literally the direct ideological descendants of the Puritans. The mind boggles!

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So in the mind of gamergate, they're Hitler fighting against the hordes of sex crazed Puritans who want to enslave white men?

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But presumably, by this guy's logic, enslaving white men would be fine and good just so long as it were economically beneficial? Or are white men exempt from the status of "utterly unimportant individuals"?

Wait, if thousands upon thousands of people can be deemed "utterly unimportant", what is the status of this gaming thing they're so keen to protect?

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I'm not sure that this is quite the right place for this, but I thought Simon Pegg's response to some controversy surrounding some of his recent statements was thoughtful and thought-provoking. From the article:

 

Recent developments in popular culture were arguably predicted by the French philosopher and cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard in his book, ‘America’, in which he talks about the infantilzation of society. Put simply, this is the idea that as a society, we are kept in a state of arrested development by dominant forces in order to keep us more pliant. We are made passionate about the things that occupied us as children as a means of drawing our attentions away from the things we really should be invested in, inequality, corruption, economic injustice etc. It makes sense that when faced with the awfulness of the world, the harsh realities that surround us, our instinct is to seek comfort, and where else were the majority of us most comfortable than our youth?

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We should put together a collection to pay for history and logic professors to grade these kinds of articles and post them on the author's blog, big red pen and all.

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We should put together a collection to pay for history and logic professors to grade these kinds of articles and post them on the author's blog, big red pen and all.

 

That feels like using a cannon to kill a mosquito. Do we really need a history prof to point out such nuanced ideas as "Apartheid was bad" and "It's spelled Weimar"?

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Do we really need a history prof to point out such nuanced ideas as "Apartheid was bad" and "It's spelled Weimar"?

 

Also, we've already seen what the academic voice means to gamergate... zip. :mellow:

 

So in the mind of gamergate, they're Hitler fighting against the hordes of sex crazed Puritans who want to enslave white men?

 

It's just one gamergate voice... although you'd find a heap of apologists once you'd ask for opinions on the article in gamergate circles. I tried this once with the infamous reaxxion "John Birch" article. The results were horriffying (right down to "I didn't read the article, but if the SJW gets it, I'm sure I'll agree"). And what can you do? Tell them it's fascism, to their face? Yup, did that as well. Didn't take.

 

The Vidya article is as clear cut as it gets. Of course, I find it telling how easily the guy is drawn to Nazism in an attempt to describe what threatens games and what gamergate should do. There are, of course, other gamergate descriptions that sound more euphemistic. But some eerie elements are often the same: The art form "belongs" to certain self entitled people, the constructed "we", and this art form is under "attack" from outsiders, which justifies violent "defensive" action.

 

By the way, Vidya has corrected Wiemar in the meantime. Well, that settles that. Time to ask ourselves who this Nichetze guy is. :P

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By the way, Vidya has corrected Wiemar in the meantime. Well, that settles that. Time to ask ourselves who this Nichetze guy is. :P

really obscure philosopher, you probably haven't heard of him

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That feels like using a cannon to kill a mosquito. Do we really need a history prof to point out such nuanced ideas as "Apartheid was bad" and "It's spelled Weimar"?

 

Phew, I thought itsamoose was talking about Simon Pegg's article for a moment. I was about to get FURIOUS.

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We should put together a collection to pay for history and logic professors to grade these kinds of articles and post them on the author's blog, big red pen and all.

Also, we've already seen what the academic voice means to gamergate... zip. :mellow:

 

As a teacher, I also just don't know how I'd grade it, even giving a lot of leeway with the hypothetical assignment. There is literally not a single sentence in either of the linked articles that is not at least a highly ideological half-truth, and I've never assigned anything where that'd pass. I'd just be crossing out every other word and just writing "Support!" and "Where did you get this?" in the margins. It'd be about as informative as going through The Hobbit with a red pen to grade its connection to reality.

 

Phew, I thought itsamoose was talking about Simon Pegg's article for a moment. I was about to get FURIOUS.

 

Right? I love that Simon Pegg thinks about Baudrillard hard enough to apply it to his professional milieu.

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