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Post by Deleted on Dec 15, 2015 21:41:04 GMT -5
You're seriously telling me you think there's NO political undercurrents in the middle of all this? And at any rate I was referring more to this thread than the GameFAQs poll itself. There are political undercurrents because the people who are yelling about it do not go outside. I highly recommend it. I *do* go outside, so save the sarcasm for someone else. It may make you LOOK wittier, but it doesn't actually make you smarter.
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Post by Joseph Joestar on Dec 15, 2015 21:45:22 GMT -5
It's funny how "gamer" has become an acceptable pejorative, but "SJW" is off-limits. One isn't openly racist. And really, we need a new word for overly active internet crusader. Oh hey, internet crusader! That's not bad! It's both accurate and insulting if you remember all tthe horrific things that happens during every single damn crusade ever! Yeah, they're just unintentionally racist. I guess my issue with it, much like just about everything else that people have been coming to blows about over the past year and a half, is that certain people seem to be ok making blanket statements about a group of people they don't agree with or particularly like, but when other people do the same about them they throw a fucking fit.
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Post by JDarkside on Dec 15, 2015 22:05:07 GMT -5
To be fair, that's hardly an equal ground thing. This isn't like 90s era US two-party politics, this is more like the modern centralist Democratic party (good intentions but unaware of their many bad ideas) and modern tea party Republicans ([insert easy joke about guns/terrorism/"the gays"/libertaianism/"IT SNOWED NO GLOBAL WARMING"/ect here]).
Both are certainly awful, but one of them isn't advocating policies that the nazis were really enthusiastic about. I mean, once you've seen people openly think open and literal nazis are cool people, you're not going to be as hard on the other guys until they do something around the same level, whichh is about once every three months or so instead of a weekly occurrence.
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Post by vivianjames on Dec 15, 2015 22:27:38 GMT -5
My horse has always been Symphony of the Night, since it's out I'll just enjoy the shit show.
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Post by JDarkside on Dec 15, 2015 22:28:54 GMT -5
Really, Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme should have taken the crown.
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Post by Ike on Dec 15, 2015 22:30:38 GMT -5
There are political undercurrents because the people who are yelling about it do not go outside. I highly recommend it. I *do* go outside, so save the sarcasm for someone else. It may make you LOOK wittier, but it doesn't actually make you smarter. Alright, let me be real for a minute then. The internet and really society in general are increasingly becoming attached to defending what they perceive are important political positions, and that's what spawns idiot discussions like the one that's been going on in this thread. You get people getting offended over the connotations of words like "SJW" and "gamer," but nobody actually tries to define those words in any way that satisfies anybody. Like "hipster," "SJW" and "gamer" mean exactly whatever the person wants them to mean at any given time, and have all kinds of stereotypes hung on them, so every time one of these words gets used we fall into this moronic trap where everybody suddenly becomes bluntly obtuse and hides behind this curtain of irony and obfuscation where they say what they're saying only when it's convenient and take offense when they infer something from someone else's use of the word. Like JasonX saying something to the effect of "gamers" deserving the social scorn they get. All of us, unless you are legitimately fucking brain damaged, knew exactly what he was referring to because of the context, but people decided to take offense to it anyway because they self-identify as a "gamer" because they are either 1) representative to some degree of the neckbeard stereotype category he was calling out, or 2) are taking the word for its bald-faced definition, i.e. a person who plays games. The people in category 1 who self-identify as a "Gamer" know what they are and will take offense on that ground - the people in category 2 are afraid of getting lumped in with category 1 and seek to defend the honor of a word that frankly means very little anymore, since the vast majority of society, at least in the US, plays games regularly. It's like identifying as a "TV watcher," which is a ridiculous distinction to make, because nowadays more people do watch TV than don't, and the people who do are so otherwise varied that nothing meaningful can be said about "person who watches television." The barriers between people are gradually breaking down, and now people are retreating into gradually more specialized "camps," because the anonymity afforded by the internet combined with the basic human need and desire to belong to a group create that atmosphere to such a degree that people will proudly identify as part of a "fandom." In the old days, this would have been a function served by religion, but people are largely beginning to move away from that, too. As time goes on and people become more and more entrenched in their groups, people begin to take the mores of those groups really really seriously - but the catch here is that those mores are by no means a regular or cohesive thing in a group category that could contain millions of people from wildly different backgrounds, so we begin to resort to stereotyping everyone outside of the group and then become that much more entrenched to the point where there is a significant portion of the population that dedicates themselves, full-time, to defending the honor of groups whose main source of connection can be as trivial as an entertainment medium that prominently features a suspiciously athletic fat man who loves mushrooms. They're trivial in the sense that if video games disappeared from the world today, the world wouldn't really be that much worse off for it, save that a lot of people would find themselves utterly without an identity. What are you, in the absence of video games? Answer that question and suddenly it will become much more clear why specific people get so invested in whether games like Undertale espouse a particular value-set, because they see the world entirely through that lens. We're in a world now where there are a whole lot of people who are emotionally children but have the brains of adults, so their adult values start to comingle with mass media to the point where they become nearly indistinguishable, which explains both "SJWs" and the backlash against them. "SJWs" are generally stereotyped as people who want desperately for mass media to be the forefront of the discussion about how we interact with society generally, without the emotional maturity to understand that mass media isn't a codification of our social values, but is in fact exploitative of them -- pathos sells. But few people question the value of mass media in this capacity, because the people mature enough to understand what it is put it in its proper place in their minds and don't pay it the attention that the stunted many do. It's why you have "both" sides of this idiot slapfight in the first place. People see "SJWs" and see their own behaviors reflected in it if not necessarily their values, i.e. trying desperately to work an adult identity into the context of their pre-existing identity of being a gamer (hence the constant concerns about proper 'representation' at the expense of any kind of narrative consistency or humility.) This stands as a perceived opposition to the neckbeard gamer stereotype, the guy who identifies strongly as a "gamer" because his entire life is viewed through the context of that lens. So hence you get people describing Undertale as a "SJW" game even though there's really nothing particularly political about it, except that the people who like it tend to espouse the former's values rather than the latter. Each side is equally pathetic and rudderless, but they're also adults now and have to cope with that, and they apparently can't, which is why you get dudes like that RealDioBrando0 guy calling out TobyFox for Undertale personally ruining him in his main haunts, even though by his own admission he hasn't even played the game. He's pissed off about the fact that some people, perhaps even a majority of people who like video games have different values than he does, which is what GamerGate is about, what Anita Sarkeesian is about, what all of it is about, and everybody is so quick to defend their tribe that it just devolves into idiot slapfights between manchildren while the actual adults go out and experience the world while leaving video games where they belong, an entertainment product best enjoyed in moderation, and every time I bring up that notion on this forum it makes a few certain people really fucking mad because they have to acknowledge it, and the people who get the most pissed off are, invariably, the ones who are most invested in this war for idiots. They're also the most thin-skinned and reactive sorts who have the most trouble dealing with anybody maybe not believing the same things they do but can't talk about it in a detached way, because it is them. It is their identity, and it's such soft ground to build an identity upon that the slightest gust of wind from a SJW's asshole is enough to crumble them. So I would say to everybody who honestly gives a shit about whether Undertale won the GameFAQs poll or not, ask yourself, and answer honestly: if video games disappeared from the world tomorrow, by some irrevocable black magic or something, but all other things stayed the same, what would be left of you? The smaller that pile, the more self-reflection you need. Also, I don't know what to call you since you change your name every week, but at least once a month you make a pissy post about how shitty the atmosphere around here has gotten "lately," but I'm pretty sure you've been posting here regularly for over a year. It's tedious. edit: if any of that didn't make sense, I'm currently pumped full of painkillers because I'm recovering from surgery.
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Post by JDarkside on Dec 15, 2015 22:42:26 GMT -5
Ike: Makes perfect sense to me. Though I do think you're underplaying (heh, puns) the importance of games as a piece of culture. You know how they say some fictional people are more real to us than real people? That's because the ideas conveyed in those characters resonates with us on some level. Our values are not just shaped by our peers, but also by the media and culture around us, which is why marketing is a thing that chooses to be as intrusive as possible to condition to want to buy all the things (infinite houses joke, ect). It's not completely trival. There are certainly many games that left no impact on me, but discovering my sexuality, figuring out what my actual politics were based on how I felt and not by what my family told me, and just learning more about the world was possible because of many games I've played. But at the same time, nobody should ever identify mainly by their hobby, we're already seeing just how horrifying that is. Honestly, the worst example I've ever seen was a long video someone made completely identifying himself by the things they did in videogames as proof that he is great or important. He was completely sincere and went nuts when commentors criticized him. It was a circus, and honestly one of the saddest things I've ever seen.
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Post by Weasel on Dec 15, 2015 22:42:30 GMT -5
There are political undercurrents because the people who are yelling about it do not go outside. I highly recommend it. I *do* go outside, so save the sarcasm for someone else. It may make you LOOK wittier, but it doesn't actually make you smarter. Okay, I'm really not happy with where this is going.
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Post by Ike on Dec 15, 2015 22:46:04 GMT -5
When I refer to games as "trivial" I mean that they are not essential to our survival as human beings as much as the elements games are made of are. We can get along (and have gotten along) just fine as as species without video games and movies and television and even without books, but I don't think we could survive as a species without the things that make up those things. i.e. stories, music, and artistic expression.
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Post by JDarkside on Dec 15, 2015 22:48:45 GMT -5
When I refer to games as "trivial" I mean that they are not essential to our survival as human beings as much as the elements games are made of are. We can get along (and have gotten along) just fine as as species without video games and movies and television and even without books, but I don't think we could survive as a species without the things that make up those things. i.e. stories, music, and artistic expression. We'd probably die off pretty fast if we didn't have books or basic means to record information. Civilization was what let us survive major outbreaks, now we're at the point where we can't figure out what the lines are.
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Post by Maciej Miszczyk on Dec 16, 2015 3:34:03 GMT -5
jdarkside, I think I said it before but I'm going to say it again anyway. stop combining everything you dislike into one single stereotype. no, people who say 'SJW' aren't all openly racist. no, libertarians aren't advocating things that nazis were advocating. there are people out there who don't fall into either the category of people who agree with you nor some bizzare fusion of nazis, Republicans, MRAs, libertarians, gamergate, something about neckbeards and fedoras and who the fuck knows what else. that's just not how it works.
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Post by Weasel on Dec 16, 2015 3:54:42 GMT -5
Yeah, um, does anybody still actually want to talk about Undertale?
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Post by Maciej Miszczyk on Dec 16, 2015 3:59:55 GMT -5
well, when for a brief period of a few posts we started talking about OFF, I've decided to google some OFF-related things and found out that the game's creator recently drawn this. I knew he'll like Undertale
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Post by Elvin Atombender on Dec 16, 2015 8:13:26 GMT -5
(actually I like Telltale games a lot, but it still made me laugh)
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Post by Échalote on Dec 16, 2015 13:53:55 GMT -5
Damn, he actually planed it from the beginning !
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