It has come to light that the original logo in 2004 was a Koffing with a Swastika instead of the normal crossbones thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPG6vIN8Kx8

Video by cecilily - We need to talk about the Nazi past of Smogon

gamer-gulag

This is so outrageous it seems fake, but they adressed it last year and decided not to change the name which is peak freeze-gamer

  • Comrade_Mushroom [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    352·
    2 days ago

    You’re telling me the people who started something because they were elitist gamers who wanted to reduce something fun and artistic entirely to a cold, soulless numbers game were also disgusting fascist pigs?

    Thank goodness something like that would never happen anywhere else, especially not at my favorite video game company, Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.!

    • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      241·
      1 day ago

      wanted to reduce something fun and artistic entirely to a cold, soulless numbers game

      As an autistic person who enjoys numbers games this feels kinda ableist tbh. People find joy in different things, you’re not better for disliking numbers.

      • Comrade_Mushroom [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        You could be right! I’ve just come across a lot lot lot lot lot lot lot lot lot of people who sure did think they were better than everyone else for liking vidya game numbers more than others. And you only need to spend about 90 seconds with any group of WoW players who treat that game that way to uncover a social environment as disgustingly bigoted as anything you’d find on 4chan. And those guys sure didn’t hesitate to utilize slurs of all varieties when putting down anyone and everyone who dared to care even a little bit about anything other than what the 3rd party website that ranked them said about how big their numbies were, at every available opportunity.

        “Hardcore” Pokemon players could be different, I dunno. And I’m certain it’s not a 1-to-1 edgeworth-shrug

        I know I shouldn’t generalize, it’s not a thing I appreciate when others do. I just have a built-in bias because the most vile words I have ever heard another human speak came from number-centric WoW players who thought you were a lesser human being if you didn’t care about your numerical parses as much as they did theirs; it is a type of person I struggled with for more than a decade, during which time I never met a single group of “hardcore” players who, as a whole, managed to avoid this type of behavior. (And many of the people who started out as players of the game exhibiting this behavior, are now high-ranking members of the company.)

        • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
          3·
          13 hours ago

          From what I understand of the current pokemon competitive community, it’s actually really cool people, a lot of the most well known folks in the community like BigYellow and PlagueVonKarma are nonbinary or trans, and it seems to be a really supportive community where people encourage each other rather than the sort of toxic communities the far right creates. I’ve had quite a few people start up a nice chat with me after a match, which I can’t really say for most competitive online communities.

  • Frogmanfromlake [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    37·
    2 days ago

    It’s clearly changed since then with how strong of a queer presence is on that site. The video shows to me that Smogon is an example of something that started out as an edgelord hub actually doing something and changing for the better.

    • GaveUp [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      36·
      2 days ago

      There’s a lot of Nazis in queer spaces, not really an argument

      Flashbacks to last year at SF Castro Street Fair where a guy was wearing a jersey with 88 as the number, and SS lightning bolts all over like a sponsor logo

    • Piment [they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      28·
      2 days ago

      I think, at a bare minimum they should change the name and logo, but maybe I’m a lib for that as it would probably just be performative, just seems indefensible to me to keep it

      • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        19 hours ago

        but maybe I’m a lib for that as it would probably just be performative

        True but we also don’t want kids to unknowingly repeat Nazi dogwhistles. Maybe that’s why Smogon gets zero attention in official spaces, turns out Nintendo doesn’t want anything to do with a community whose name is a reference to gas chambers. I’m just mind-boggled that people don’t see this as that big of an issue.

        “Yes my community is called SS88 but we are different and mature now and getting more popular than ever”

      • KhanCipher [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        Because it is peak white liberal performative nonsense to change the name. It’s exactly what every white city dwelling liberal does when they find out something has a dark past, they change the offensive part (or do an overreaction, an example could be made for the prime directive in star trek) then pretend everything is still all hunky dory while doing effectively nothing material.

        Maybe I’ve just had too many encounters with liberals who just never really cared at all to begin with to say that.

        • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          1·
          19 hours ago

          I don’t think it’s white liberal nonsense to rename your site from a Nazi dogwhistle to literally anything else, it’d actually own up to the sites past instead of just brushing it under the rug and letting people unwittingly spread a horrible thing. The performative nonsense is having a Jewish ™ person say that the Nazi dogwhistle is not bad actually and that we have all changed, which is exactly what happened.

          then pretend everything is still all hunky dory while doing effectively nothing material.

          That’s literally what they did by not changing the name but doing an acknowledgement from one of the Jewish community leaders.

        • Piment [they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          11·
          2 days ago

          Yeah, the video mentions that multiple people are still around in leadership positions that were there during the time where that was a thing so you would probably hope to see some accountability from those individuals, In theory you could do that without changing the name and logo, but I feel like a lot of people will never look at it the same way after learning where it came from.

          • KhanCipher [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            5·
            2 days ago

            What happened more than likely is one of two things, early internet edginess, or the person paying for the site at the start did the thing that a lot of forum owners did back then “it’s my forum, and I can do what I want with it”.

            I can’t find the energy to get worked up over this in either case, mostly because there’s bigger fish to fry in the grand scheme of things, and both cases were pretty common in early internet especially the latter which is where the unofficial rule 0 of forum posting comes from, don’t piss off the guy paying for it.

  • screaminginvoid [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    20·
    2 days ago

    Good video, worth a watch if are invested in the community. At the end she argues that the site has changed, and cites the presence of a diverse community as evidence of that. Personally I am not going to use the site anymore because I am concerned about the ideology of the hosts and admins. If Smogon was and potentially still is a safe harbor for antisemitic behavior it will never be a safe space for any minority group. The logo is still a koffing, they just got rid of the swastika.