Funny, I watched the videos she made and I don’t recall her at any point advocating for microtransactions or season passes.
I watched them and also don’t recall much substantive analysis or her having much influence on anything at all, but a bunch of manchildren cried about it anyway
Oh yeah that’s the funniest part about it, as feminist analysis goes her videos were pretty boilerplate and tame. But the chuds talk about her as of she was calling for all heterosexual men to be sent to concentration camps.
This was my experience, too lmao. I went to go watch her videos expecting something like lesbian separatist gender essentialism slop. Instead, I got the most basic feminist critiques of video games, such as the extremist position that women are people and should have agency. Chuds were frothing at the mouth and seething over topics I’m far more radical on.
I didn’t engage with Gamergate bullshit because misogynistic men were just being misogynistic. Any time you try and explain something like intersectionality or toxic masculinity, they ignored what you said and went into a rage.
I never watched her stuff but the impression I get from lefty spaces after the fact is that it was simpler and using games as a medium to make a new wave of people ask a few questions about why society is the way it is. I don’t know what tone they were in but I don’t expect anyone who is taking that on to be super condescending about it.
I think that’s a decent goal, and the need for it is kind of epitomized by what the response was.
I still refuse to call myself a gamer. “I enjoy games” “I’m into computer games”
I still refuse to call myself a gamer. “I enjoy games” “I’m into computer games”
Same. I hate the word gamer. It’s not an identity, it’s an activity I enjoy doing sometimes.
I wouldn’t say I’m a reader or a theme parker or a movier. I say I enjoy reading, going to theme parks, and watching movies.
I watched her Watch_Dogs video and saw her make the exact same point three times in a row and it was a pretty shallow one about player agency in relation to quest resolutions
One thing I hate about those men is they think they have depression and alienation and shit, but they LIGHT UP LIKE A CHILD ON CHRISTMAS MORNING for a “new thing is WOKE” thread, everytime. They are not depressed, they are rationally consistent with their beliefs, which is living a life of being miserable all the time. It’s not depression it’s a natural outcome of bad values and morals!
When Shaun did that deep dive on anti-woke gamer slop content creators a couple years back, he had an observation that a lot of them don’t seem to actually enjoy playing video games nor play them that much. He theorized, and I’ve seen this argument in other places, that they and their audiences’ tastes changed as they got older and they’re just not into video games anymore. But rather than accept this, they try to find some boogeyman.
I think that ties into what you’re saying about them having bad morals/values. They’re using the anti-woke outrage to avoid self-evaluation and criticism, especially that uncomfortable acknowledgement that the media they consumed as a child wasn’t as transcendent and perfect as they remember, they were just inexperienced and impressionable at that age.
deleted by creator
DLC BADWOMAN BADWOMAN MAKE DLC!
Surely she advocated for $80 MSRP? Ballooning budgets? Abusive crunch schedules?
It was subliminal, it flashes super fast on screen so your brain sees it.
female gamer reparations via microtransactions for swimsuit outfits in JRPGs and 2D fighters.
This is what I mean when chuds never let go of grudges. They are constantly seething when someone they’re told to hate becomes a special target. And they love the rage they feel, it makes them feel justified and special.
What did Anita actually do? In terms of influencing video game production in the grand scheme of things? Likely nothing.
And they’re the same people who lecture minorities they need to learn to forgive and forget.
They dunked on Anita, helped usher in the 21st century golden age of conservatism, and helped reboomerize gen Z. And they still think “not enough revenge!”
All of those things were the point. “Anita Sarkeesian ruined video games” was a talking point literally invented by Jeffrey Epstein to do exactly those things. Gamergate was possibly the single most successful psy op of the 21st century so far.
The woman whose videos like 800 people watched, 500 of whose viewers were just a bunch of whiny brats hatewatching becaue they had no life? Where maybe the other 300 were actually interested in some valid critique and interesting ideas?
The Woman Who Ruined Videogames
if only she destroyed gamers too
basic feminist critique hit the G#mer sphere like a nuclear strike. she’s still living rent free in their irradiated minds
Oh my god. Just leave her alooooooooone. Jesus Christ she is their god damn boogie…well boogiewomen gives boogie wonderland vibes but you get my point. Like her commentary was just some basic ass shit too.
bro how are they still stuck on this discourse
Great man theory
Anita Sarkeesian did nothing wrong
It really is incredible how much of a boogeywoman she has become to them. Gamers have to check under their bed every night for Anita Sarkeesian for fear that she’ll turn all their games woke.
In a way, it’s almost like mythology at this point, so detached from anything she actually did, so unrelated to reality, they could accuse her of whatever they want, like passing a law that every game needs to have a DEI protagonist or something and these people would repeat it without question.
It’s wild. And these are the same types that will quote 1984 without realizing she’s their Goldstein.
Its wild how they keep on going back to her. I’m pretty sure the first time I head of her was on here or maybe a Stephanie Sterling video. And even then I haven’t kept up with her much and I don’t ever get suggested any of her videos even though I’ve watched enough video essays and video game content to have gotten a recommendation (I would think).
Meanwhile the industry big shots have decided that games need to keep going up in price while delivering games that can barely be considered a beta experience, let along a final release product. Without going into their poor treatment of developers or moves the make sure you can’t actually own the games you’re shoveling money at them to but.
Stephanie Sterling
After coming out, the subsequent fallout (Gamers frothing with rage and unsubbing en masse) has basically made Stephanie de-prioritized by YouTube algorithms. Even I don’t get recommendations and I’ve been subscribed for years, I used to get recommendations but not anymore.
wasn’t there also something about her not paying her editor (IIRC) fairly, pretty soon after? Seemed like a perfect storm of people tuning out because of the coming out (chuds) and people tuning out because of labor rights (lefties)
Same, I haven’t seen her videos suggested in years even though I watched her significantly more right after she came out than I ever did before that.
Damn I’ve been playing video games this whole time, someone should have told me they were ruined
sorry to tell you but… those games? Yeah… they are DEI and Sweet Baby INC.
you weren’t actually enjoying these games at all in hindsight…
that’s a name i haven’t heard in a long time.
My video games are serious art and don’t anyone dare criticize them for being a juvenile power fantasy for horny dudes.
My video games are not serious art and don’t anyone dare criticize them for being a juvenile power fantasy for horny dudes.
Is closer to what they say
I’m a turbo nerd and I have no idea who this is. I must miss all this shit playing only indie games.
Zoey Quinn was an indie game developer, most known for their game, Depression Quest. The game got good reviews. A while after their game was reviewed (like a year I think?), their abusive ex sent out a letter about how awful they were and they cheated on him with game reviewers to get good ratings. This ignores how the man they were dating at the time is someone they met after DQ came out at a very public convention. He would later get a job at a game review magazine (Kotaku IIRC).
This didn’t stop a bunch of angry GAMERS from launching a harassment campaign against Zoey Quinn, just accepting the lies their ex told as facts. It started with review bombings on places like Steam and escalated to actual bomb threats. People even sent stuff to their house threatening to removed and murder them.
Enter Anita Sarkeesian (the person in the video) who came to Quinn’s defense. Sarkeesian had a small YouTube channel where she analyzed video games from a third-wave, intersectional feminist perspective. She used her platform to debunk the lies told about Quinn. Sarkeesian’s fundraiser outlets for her channel then exploded overnight. She went from something like having an annual budget of $15,000 to $10 million per month overnight.
Sarkeesian used the funds to increase the production values on her channel (hiring an editor, lighting professional, director, etc.), set up/donated to non-profits for people experiencing discrimination in video games, donated to women’s shelters, and spent the rest helping Quinn go into hiding along with their family.
This directed attention towards Sarkeesian, who GAMERS decided was also a liar and sleeping with everyone while embezzling money. Sarkeesian released her tax returns and made finances of her organizations public, which showed she was paying herself below minimum wage while doing what she said she had been doing with the rest of the money. This didn’t end any of the harassment she received. She, too, was now getting death,removed, and bomb threats to her home and anywhere she was making a public appearance.
That’s the gist of it. Chuds are still angry at both of them for made-up reasons. YouTubers like Boogie2988, Thuderf00t, Sargon of Akkad, and Stephen Molyneux made a name for themselves during this time. Other rightwing personalities appearing in traditional media, like Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, and Christina Hoff Summers, also emerged. They were all backed by Steve Bannon, who had been open about radicalizing isolated young men through online platforms. This is around the time Epstein started doing shit on Xbox live and 4chan.
Thank you for the deep, and horribly depressing lore dive. Fucking chuds need to play with their toys in silence. Because thatsbwhat they’re threatening to kill people over, just toys.
Gamergate also was the time when neofascism learned to weaponize troll armies by ragebaiting communities like 4chan and then sending them on harassment campaigns and other PR missions. Breitbart covered Gamergate extensively, Steve Bannon leaned into this stuff a lot after just having learned the ropes of orchestrating online armies in his time as a WoW gold farm operator for Goldman Sachs.
Zoë Quinn uses they/them pronouns
Fixed!
this was also a time when new atheism was a powerful current in the internet subcultures, many of the youtubers you mentioned were (or intersected with) the militant libertarian push against young earth creationists and other evangelical christians. it appealed to the chud brain to rationally and logically beat the opponents of them gaming/masturbating on their own edgy terms. they got the opportunity to present themselves as smart free thinkers who fought oppressive theists. the more converts to atheism the better, but then came “atheism +” who criticized their lifestyle through a secular perspective and they mobilized their newfound mass against them instead. Sarkeesian was a useful symbol to these insecure men because she made enough public appearances to provide fodder for them to react to. they started calling themselves the “alt-right” because they needed some conservatism to defend themselves just not the christian kind. then they rediscovered a love for christianity because atheism and equality was too “liberal”, which they didn’t want to be called any more, and they needed something to defend the west from islam, then queerness, then black people and so on and so on… the liberalist completed their transformation to fascist as they are all fated to do.
I still really don’t understand how this happened. I was a part of the “New Athiest” community (until this, basically), but the reason it appealed to me was seemingly the opposite of 90% of that group.
I was a young teenager that grew up in a conservative small town full of evangelical southern baptists, so I had no understanding of class analysis, but could see that the white evangelicals were loudly in favor of making everything worse. When your main enemy is evangelical Christianity, the obvious conclusion is that the things they hate are good: LGBTQ rights, feminism, racial equality, and international solidarity.
How the fuck do you have “evangelical Christians are bad” as your only political belief and end up agreeing with every single thing they believe?
A lot of those atheists became STEM majors and went to work in the defense industry.
Skill issue, I became a STEM major too and I just look at fluorescent microscope images of mouse brains all day, didn’t make me a fascist
IMHO there were two key factors: one, the broadening of new atheism to critiquing religions other than evangelical Christianity, Islam in particular. That gave cover for Western chauvinism, imperialism, and “cultural Christianity” as fighting Islamic repression.
Second, for a good chunk of the movement, new atheism didn’t erase anti-feminism, it just gave it a new veneer. They centered it in pseudoscience rather than religious doctrine. What made this tricky and not readily apparent is that, at least initially, most of those misogynistic new atheists played a self-congratulatory “I have rejected religion ergo I’m one of the ‘good guys’” tune.
The first major public drama that exposed this was elevatorgate; there was some secular/atheist conference where a female attendee had an uncomfortable encounter with a male attendee in an elevator. After the conference, she made a blog post about it saying, guys please don’t be creepy. Now while there were plenty of people who agreed with her, there was also a vocal group that attacked her for it (not surprisingly, the latter included Richard Dawkins).
they were only bad because they opposed harry potter, pornography, violent video games and the powerful truth of science. the social consciousness was only as good as it was compatible with that so you’d get the occasional lip service until and unless there was pushback on saying the n-word to their black friend with the power of free speech.
I’m sad now
Check out this dope-ass owl:
Damn! That’s a dope ass owl!
That’s the gist of it. Chuds are still angry at both of them for made-up reasons. YouTubers like Boogie2988, Thuderf00t, Sargon of Akkad, and Stephen Molyneux made a name for themselves during this time.
I am so fucking happy that Internet Aristocrat/Mr. Metokur is slowly dying of cancer. I was shitty and privileged enough to fall for the anti-SJW gamergate shit back in the day, and his videos were a major vector of how it spread for me. That fucker is the one who made the 5 Guys Burgers and Fries video that helped ignite it.
Gamegater influencers should be executed for their crimes, and all gamers should be forced to go through involuntary reeducation.
Depends entirely on how old you are.
Do these fucking idiots forget they’re skinheads so as always, they WON that culture war?
The bad bad lady said the bad and unpopular opinions and everyone told her to fuck off. You won!
Fascism always requires “The Enemy” who looms over everything and can be blamed for every problem to divert from capitalism. Anita Sarkeesian could die and they’d blame her specter for haunting their games with wokeness(The game had a clothed woman in it)
They didn’t win the culture war. Video games are way more woke than they were during GamerGate. Even Call of Duty has had female protagonists, we have “Body type 1/2” as opposed to “male/female”, female characters are allowed to wear clothes and are more than just eye candy etc. If you compare games from the 2000s to the games from the 2020s, there’s a stark difference. Chuds have suffered defeat after defeat on this front for decades.
