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It turns out everyone is horrible (tw: possible GamerGate thread)

Started by Barry Admin, August 06, 2018, 11:30:15 AM

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BritishHobo

God the idea of following internet drama exhausts me now. I was fucking miserable when I used to do it, and every time I see some tweet concerning gaming/YouTube personalities, I think 'oh christ, anything but that'.

Blue Jam

Quote from: BritishHobo on August 16, 2018, 09:33:57 PM
God the idea of following internet drama exhausts me now. I was fucking miserable when I used to do it

I don't know how people end up becoming trolls. Admittedly I have had a bit of fun winding up religious nutbars/antifeminists/alternative medicine types/"introverts"/incels/cunts who crop their dogs' ears etc but it quickly stops being fun and ends up just being depressing. A friend of mine used to enjoy trolling an antivaxxers' forum, seeing how quickly he could get banned, but he got bored of that too. Even if you enjoy the odd hate-read of btl comments etc, spending too much time reading stuff you don't agree with, by people you don't like, eventually gets depressing. Engaging with people who stubbornly cling to their bullshit beliefs is pointless and just feels like a depressing waste of your life. I've learned that Reddit is better when you lurk and just look at the pictures of cute dogs and don't post anything, because it's a time thief and it all feels so pointless.

CaB is pretty much the only place where I have ever enjoyed debating anything online, otherwise:

QuoteThere's no point debating anything online. You might as well hurl shoes in the air to knock clouds from the sky.

Back to trolls: In particular, I don't understand people who actively court negative attention. I used to post on a music forum where one user trolled the place by starting tons of banal, off-topic threads, filling the front page with them and making her impossible to ignore. People would tell her to fuck off, then she'd come back with "I actually cried today- how could you treat me like this? I'm a girl"- which of course just led to more people telling her to fuck off. This gradually escalated into her posting more disturbing stuff, like she was developing a character and trying to work out what would piss people off the most, and it went on for well over ten years, only stopping when the mods finally worked out how to do a perma-ban. I think she actually got off on all the hatred and the drama, like a proto-Josie Cunningham.

I guess this is because the majority of people don't like drama and try to avoid it, while a minority of people thrive on drama (including sociopaths, narcissists etc) and love to cause drama and pissing everyone else off, and the drama queens and attention-seekers are just a vocal and very visible minority.

Mister Six

Quote from: Funcrusher on August 15, 2018, 03:40:43 PM
It's not whataboutery

Raising an unconnected thing that's the opposite of the thing being discussed and saying "ooh that's bad too" is exactly whataboutery.

QuoteIt succeeded in giving faux left media a dry run for later call out your opponent as a bigot hits like 'Brocialist Bernie and his Bernie bros are bad:vote Hilary' and 'Jeremy Corbyn is an evil anti-semite and must go - see today's Guardian, and yesterday's, and the day before that: also inside exclusive interview with Anita Sarkeesian'.

So nothing, then. This big, justifiable campaign that wasn't at its core about harassing women that made male gamers feel threatened didn't manage to do anything.... Other than harass women that made male gamers feel threatened.

Zetetic

Something in Barry's new thread actually about RPGS reminded me another tangent to the Skyrim "you can be whoever you like but no one is going to care" stuff, and better to dump it in here than elsewhere:

It's interesting how close Fallout 4 seems to have come to dumping the "you can be whoever you like" stuff completely. Lots of hints they were pushing towards making the player a soldier-man. But then they didn't

Ferris

I think it's important to be inclusive with these kinds of games, so I really like being able to play Skyrim as a lady Khaajit (or whatever). I don't think an RPG could get away with giving you 0 character customization these days though.

Zetetic

You'd call it an 'action-adventure' game instead. (Which, it might be noted, depends on a compelling central 'adventure' in contrast to either Skyrim or Fallout 4.)

I'm not sure that allowing people to choose who they are within the world of the game - which I agree is important, indeed fundamental to the appeal of 'RPGs' (as opposed to whatever else) - is really about being 'inclusive'.

While some people do like seeing some significant aspect of themselves represented in the game, your example suggests it's often about being someone different to who they are (or who anyone in this world is).

Zetetic

Witcher 3 as a counter-example? Don't know if getting to play dress-up counts. (Although I note that the Witcher series has seen changes driven by a desire for greater 'inclusivity' and being booted a bit into that desire perhaps - including getting to play a woman a bit.)

Divinity: Original Sin II * finds an interesting compromise between customisation and character-driven story - you can choose to be whoever you like, or you can choose one of several predesigned characters with specific stories attached to them.

*which I mentioned as one of the examples where racism in the game's world does meaningfully affect the player

Ferris

Quote from: Zetetic on September 02, 2018, 12:59:40 AM
While some people do like seeing some significant aspect of themselves represented in the game, your example suggests it's often about being someone different to who they are (or who anyone in this world is).

You are assuming I am not a female cat.

Mister Six

Quote from: Zetetic on September 02, 2018, 12:24:14 AM
Something in Barry's new thread actually about RPGS reminded me another tangent to the Skyrim "you can be whoever you like but no one is going to care" stuff, and better to dump it in here than elsewhere:

It's interesting how close Fallout 4 seems to have come to dumping the "you can be whoever you like" stuff completely. Lots of hints they were pushing towards making the player a soldier-man. But then they didn't

Yeah, it's a bit odd that the game doesn't just make the wife the soldier if you choose to play as her. But the role-playing element of that game was to half-arsed it's not really surprising. They clearly stripped it down to the bare minimum as a deliberate choice - I'm guessing because they wanted to minimise the number of bugs that could be in the thing after New Vegas, and the fewer moving parts there are, the less likely it all is to fuck up.

biggytitbo

Thought this mind boggling thread of scans from video game magazines circle 2003-2006 ish - https://twitter.com/falldogs/status/1043512568449519616


The most amazing thing is this is the mid 2000s, you'd think it was more 1995, or even 1975.