You’re so right about this type of content being shoved down people’s throats on TH-cam. I’ve never watched any of their videos yet still get constant reminders!
I used to watch some of these videos back in 2018/2019/2020 out of couriosity before I realized what they where doing, never managed to watch a full 15 minute videos of one of these guys.
I’m genuinely embarrassed that I used to believe these people’s utter tripe and even moderated one of their servers for some time. But then again, it led me to where I am today watching this very video, so it was clearly worth something.
You took the words out of my mouth, bub. Sure, there are genuine films and games that are very far-left and alienating (I.E. Barbie, Class of 09, Life is Strange, Black Christmas 2019, the Candyman reboot, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and the crowning champion of insane far-left gobbledygook, The American Society of Magical Negroes). But thanks to "Reverse-Sarkeesians" aka. Media Grifters, the conversation surrounding the real issue of far-left politics in media has been utterly _destroyed._ And I was a victim of their warped ideals, insane double standards, and love of taking advantage of unfortunate implications in works of fiction that are just badly written. In short, Media Grifters and the legions of parrots they've given rise to are their own worst enemy.
The funniest part about that baby face guy was that he was so hyped for Starfield as if it were some innovative new RPG experience but the pronouns ruined that for him
For context: No, the pronouns didn't make go to do his rant. He legitimately tried to put hours into the game. He was quite dismissal about the pronouns part in the creator. Confused, but not world ending. The game started to stop being fun to him when he jokingly started add in stereotypical "leftish" things. Which most of them came out. His immersion got broken by the writing of the game. He tapped out around six hours in. This is the context many don't talk about and just take the rant as the full context.
@@Wesmoen The pronouns part of the game is exclusively found in the character creator, he was playing the game for the first time when he had the freak out. Literally making his character, idk what you're even talking about, did we watch the same video?
@@tree4318 in the livestream he just rubbed his eyes and asked in a calmly matter why preferred pronouns were on by default. Quite relaxed if you asked me.
As someone who actually has worked in the tech industry and game development over the last decade, these right wing reactionaries talking about game devs as if they know a god damn thing about the industry makes me rage. I have actual lived grievances about the industry, and they touch on none of them. The tech industry and in particular the video game has severe issues (Worker mistreatment, crunch, mass layoffs and studio closures, etc.), non of them are related inclusivity of the games being built. There are TH-cam channels like People Make Games that are unapologetically progressive in their messaging, but they are drowned out by the deluge of hack right wing grifters trying to make a quick buck on the platform.
Is making bad games that no-gamer would want to buy one of the grievances? Who was the audience for Concord? For S Squad K the Justice League? Who will be the audience for Fairgames? Is this not part of your grievances? Do you think that the vast majority of gamers would want to buy games with non-sexualized characters? Why would they? Don't you think that this is a problem? I want to be frank with you, I'm on the GG2 bandwagon EXCLUSIVELY for the ban on sexualization. I don't care how many gay/black/disabled characters there are in a game, as long as they're good looking. I've always been progressive, maybe even too much, since I'm not the puritan kind of progressive. (P.S. oh, and by good looking I mean that women have too look like women, I don't mean the androgynous "safe horny" kind of good looking).
@@kaisersoymilk6912 Imagine telling an actual game developer who works in the industry that games can't be sexy anymore. Like, we both know you now it's wrong, but why would you ever think a game developer would buy what you're selling?
@@kaisersoymilk6912 I was going to write this big long explanation of the difference between developers and publishers and the economics of risk adverse publishers, but then I realized that you don't actually care about any of that and just want to vent about stuff that annoys you personally. You're the type of person who couldn't be bothered to spend 5 min doing actual research into how the video game industry functions before posting, and I'm not going to waste my time trying to explain to someone who very obviously doesn't care and just has a bone to pick.
Sadly that's usually the point of this culture war BS, to put focus onto made up issues to ignore real ones. It's sad how much outrage sells over positivity.
I see so much shit thats just "woke, la woksime, bad game because woman" When its more just The games a buggy, unplayable mess, no ones gonna buy it because of that
The whole content is out of place. You look at video-games since 70's when they firstly came out and no such themes are ever present. Then by second half of 2010's there is a rapid shift that by less than 4 years these themes become 50% of the norm.
@novinceinhosic3531 the content isn't out of place though? Games since the 90s have had all sorts of things in them comparable to those today, fallout 1 and 2 feature gay, and lesbian characters, the content isn't "out of place" it's more just women are less sexualised in the media and so on, and social media allows for a vocal minority to be even more vocal. Most people I talk to couldn't care less about the content of a game, they care more about its quality.
@@thecarrierpigeon6657 I totally disagree. Homosexual characters are more a thing of commedy or just side characters with not too much exposition, while female characters nowadays are more sexualized than ever before. The difference is that you have either oversexualized or androgynous as women devs are ugly looking and want to reflect their appears in characters that posses a lot of power in order to compensate. You can see the same phenomenon with ugly men devs back in the day. What is unique and has never existed before up until past mid 2010's is the corporate LGBT vibe and PC policing, these things were never a thing before 9 years ago and they only kept increasing past 2020.
I remember back in the day, Gamergate was allegedly started to demand for better journalistic integrity. So when I noticed reviews with disclosures to clarify if they have had any kind of relationship with a developer for transparency I was like "Well, that was the goal, right guys?" And then they started attacking women, queer people and people of colour who worked in the industry. And then all the TH-camrs who were covering Gamergate started to talk about how Islam is invading the UK. And it was like "Oh wow, this entire debacle has been a successful psy op".
True that. Like, yeah, they did expose that there *was* a concerted effort to smear detractors and that most mainstream games journalists were in whisper networks to collaborate on promoting certain narratives and circle the wagons to protect their own, something that is *still* a problem like how Naughty Dog hired an IGN journalist in exchange for positive coverage or how they refused to report on an ally of theirs bullying an ex to self un-alive. But the takeaway for the critics isn't that this is happening, but that "woke" people are doing this, as if them being woke was the bigger problem there.
@@crazyinsane500 Im pretty sure people were talking about the dodgy relationship between journalists and publishers long before Gamergate started a moral panic. I think Sterling made at least 4 videos about it pre gamergate. Also, who are you talking about? An ally of Naughty Dog?
And I swear gamergate is what led to the TH-cam alt-right pipeline. I never saw any of the right-wing like Ben Shapiro types or anything being suggested to me until after all the gamergating nonsense. I never watched a single gamergate video. I never watched in Anita sarkeesian video. I never watched anything like that but then right when gamergate was at its peak I started getting all of the critical drinker guys videos recommended and all of these other people
There is no evidence that Gamergate was in any way a "harassment campaign". It just lies and propaganda from grifters who assume that every criticism is harassment because they know their ideas are indefensible.
Let's be honest, Andy doesn't think Indiana Jones is woke because he gets to play as a straight white guy who always gets the girl. That's the problem with these grifters and conservatives. They only see Woke when there is a person of color or a woman they aren't attracted to as the main characters. Look at how suddenly ASSASSIN'S CREED is supposed to be a faithful historical adaptation just because a Black man is one of the main characters. Even though the character is Literally based on a historical figure. But now all of these would-be gamergaters will write paragraphs on how Yasuke wasn't a real samurai and it was just a formality.
I've been saying this since people started whining about it; since when was AC historically accurate? Yasuke is ironically one of the more historically accurate playable characters since he's the only one that actually existed.
@@chetmanley1885 ooh do you bring up the apple of eden from the very first game? The box from rogue? Sword of eden from unity? Blackbeard glazing edward kenway? Connor being pivotal in the american revolution? There are so many innacuracies. I think they mean the time period being accurate or whatever. Or using unity to rebuid a piece of the notre dame.
TH-camrs blaming DEI for why games are bad is like complaining about your house being unliveable because you have an annoying neighbour… And not the fact that the roof is falling apart, the rooms are full of mold, the landlord is raising your rent prices, there’s a skeleton in the basement, and the entire house itself is built on top of a massive sinkhole ready to collapse at any given moment. But that neighbour is sure annoying though.
I think Dead Domain is pretty good for thoughtful, progressive content on games and gaming culture. They do quite a lot on general political stuff, but as an active gaming streamer they have definitely done some good work on this topic, I'd definitely recommend checking out their work.
seeing gamergate make a resurgence makes me want to interact with the communities for games that I play more, especially to act as a role model that I didn't have when I got caught in it myself. But seeing the toxic way that the internet functions now also makes me want to just ditch the whole thing and do zero community interaction. Hard to find a balance lmao
Every time I see those pronouns freakout I secretly hope that one day they make a game that as a joke allows a "no pronoun" choice, which would remove every pronoun in texts and dialogues and result in grammatically incomplete and incomprehensible sentences, and then watch these people's reactions.
Hate sells. Problem is at this point the market is over saturated with these hate farmers looking for a crop to cultivate. As such they have to get more extreme and go after shows, games, and movies they may have ignores before. Not they are just throwing darts at everything and hope they hit a target. It seems that pushback toward these hate farmers has grown in the last year and that's good.
The thing that gets me about people being upset about games being woke when debating them they’ll say their opinion has nothing to do with rightwing politics or being a Trump supporter. Then they’ll admit they are a rightwing Trump supporter but say their aggressive opinions has nothing to do with that then spout off some nonsense about wanting to preserve the integrity of video games.
"The Failed Resurrection of GamerGate" Really need to narrow down _which_ failed resurrection of GamerGate you're on about because the "culture war" grifters keep trying to make it a thing again.
And GamerGate is just resurrected anti-SJW slop reheated after it's been dug out of LiveJournal's dumpster, this shit keeps _going_ and it's _bothersome_ .
It's tiring isn't it? Honestly to me lately more and more channels like this one are being recommended to me again. It's maybe only because I've reported and "don't recommend" most of them
Algorithm hygiene is something that will be needed to be taught in the future. My Facebook algorithm just devolved into an endless stream of conspiracy bullshit, and it was partly my fault for engaging with that content. So everywhere else, I just push the "do not recommend" button at the slightest suspicion. It mostly works, although you have to be constant because it never fucking ends.
What helped me clean my recommendations (actual small channels and less ad driven youtubers) is a chrome extension i use in brave called DeArrow, it un click baits the title and thumbnail of videos and auto skips filler, ads and self promotion. You can even submit your own title recommendations and whatnot for other people.
This is so true. I absolutely *hate* looking up any info for a new game on this platform. I have to sift through so much shit to not only find an *actual* review, but one from someone who even bothered to play the game.
At this point I'd tell you you probably should look at the speedrunning community. They won't necessarily tell you if the PLOT is good, but at least they'll tell you where the game's broken and if it's fun-broken or bad-broken.
I think I am more online than I was during gamergate because I had no idea it even happened or what it was until recently. Tbh from my perspective it all just comes off as people trying to capitalize on outrage.
Gamer gate is at least smarter than comicgate. That whole movement was basically used for no names to trick people into giving them money for their mid ass comic books.
The weird thing about Andypants is he brings religion in when talking about video games like he’ll say things like games use to be made be good Christian men and I’m like 1 how could you possibly know that and 2 what does someone’s religion have to do with game development.
No kidding, like the original Doom was decried by Christian organizations because they assumed it promoted Satanism when you're the one out there killing demons that are trying to invade
@@BlueBeetle1939 Like I'm surprised they don't slam New Vegas for the inclusion of Arcade Ganon. he's gay, openly so, and you can sleep with your enemy Benny as a guy. Yet New Vegas is the most loved game in the franchise. Or people blaming "DEI/Woke" for the recent fall in subscribers in FF14. The game is between content patches, this ALWAYS happens.
I was on board with Gamergate for a time. Journalists really did need their feet held to the fire. Then when they started kissing the ring of extreme right wingers like Matt Forney and Milo, I instantly saw the writing on the wall; this was just another beat stick for cultural conservatives with an annoying "How do you do fellow kids?" veneer.
Commander Stephanie Sterling Is a force of nature when it comes to left-leaning creators in the gaming space. She gets a lot of hate for being trans. I would rather people criticize that her videos often beat a dead horse, however solid her points are. Grievances aside, she's got a strong voice, and her writing is consistently top-notch.
@@DrJoeLovelace The funny thing is it is indeed by their definition, they just don’t realize it when it’s old work because they have no media literacy.
It baffles me when people say “bro I like female characters in (insert older work here)” when you know damn well that they’d lose their minds about it if that older work came out today
woke people are complaining about games with good character designs, like marvel rivals. i also dislike people complaining about wokism but woke people are far more annoying.
@@stevenbishop1782 if it’s rainbow capitalism then that could be the only thing other times it could because the game itself isn’t good from the gameplay or story and less to do with character designs
Whenever i see any of that GanerGate related garbage, i slap in that "Do Not Recommend" like a can of Raid. Too many of these frauds, if ya ask me. Amazing video, btw.
It's still hilarious to me all these months later that Pronouns Man, a self-professed super fan of the Tennant era of Doctor Who went ballistic over a plot in Starfield about a woman who's a clone of a man, calling it part of the modern woke Californian agenda. Somehow forgetting the Doctor's Daughter, a Tennant era Doctor Who episode about a woman who's a clone of a man. Oh well, grifters gonna grift.
I'm still highly confused how he managed to get away with saying "I want to play a video game about exploring the vastness of space hundreds of years in the future," and that DIDN'T involve meeting species that may or may not have specified genders, and that hundreds of years from now, our present day idea of "gender" may be broadened enough that "pronouns" make more sense to express that. Apparently he thought "exploring the vastness of space" should be defined by "blue women wearing bikinis?" What is this, first season of OG Star Trek?
The issue these days is that the gaming journalists are little more than paid shills, and the reviews became absurd. Games are failing of their own accord, as they usually do.
ah they? i'd question that narrative too. i reckon are paid but most are not. so saying journolist with no criteria makes it sound like you mean all when its very clear its not. you need to use precise language.
@@kudosbudo Fair enough. And who is and isn't a 'journalist' can be debated. But we're in agreement that it's more of a late stage capitalist thing than a PRONOUNS!! thing why big companies are coming out with games that people don't seem to want.
There have always been good and bad journalists and publications in the games/gaming space from the literal beginning of the industry. Shilling and poor journalism, or meaningless reviews, are not a unique element of “things today” and to be honest I can’t say that things are worse today in that regard than they were before. IGN scores were infamous in the 2000s. “Terribly boring, everything is broken. 8/10” was a common joke about game reviews when I was a literal child. And back then, a lot of the shilling was printed on paper and you paid money for it. At least now, any independent would-be journalist or critic has multiple pathways to self publish and promote their work
@@oneilprovost2287 The main egregious thing with game reviews is less the shilling and more the review score inflation. 5/10 should be average, not "it's bad, but it's playable". That should be like a 3/10. 7.5/10 shouldn't be "eh it's average"! (or in the case of Pokemon Ruby/Emerald, "there was too much water in Hoenn IMO" 7/10 too much water)
Still embarrassed I fell into that rabbit hole around 2014-2016. I still think Sarkeesian was a bit of a grifter and spreaded misinformation, but there was no excuse for the absolute madness directed her way I can’t take anyone seriously who says “woke” unironically. Not saying there’s no shallow pandering, but these people freak out over ANY non-white, female, or LGBT representation. Or a woman looking “unattractive” to them. Or flipping out and boycotting games over character creators listing “body type A and B” instead of “male and female”. Part of what left me stuck in the “anti-SJW” grift for years was also being sheltered from actually talking to the people these people fearmongered about. I was lead to think nonbinary people were all maniacs who identified as washing machines. Then I actually met and talked to NB people and…wait a minute…you mean they were completely normal reasonable people the whole time? And years after I realized that I also realized I was NB myself lol. Andypants and Synthetic Man are the absolute worst of the worst. Andy has also started saying outright anti-semetic shit too, saying the author Brandon Sanderson was “lead to his satanic downfall by a Jew”.
A bit??? She was a absolute annoyance. Also activists were the ones who were up the forefront so of course people would assume that. I tbh do buy it myself but even then I feel Noone listened .
I'm now stuck trying to figure out how the gamer gate movement would've viewed the eu4 mod anbennar since it's got countries that are very feudalistic, mysogonistic or worse but also things like feminist religious organisations and the ability to create genderless people with magic(there is a lot more depth to its religions, countries and peoples but I doubt gamer gate types would actually look that deep)
The right wing has always hated gaming, remember all the Christians outraging at GTA, or any games with violence. They've just changed their target to DEI or basically anything that doesn't just have white characters. It does feel though that there has been a shift in the big companies, even 10-15 years ago you could tell that there was people and developers that were truly passionate about what they were making and wanted to not only entertain but have interesting stories with interesting characters. I think thats why indie games are so popular at the moment, you can genuinely feel the passion they have for their art form and it doesn't just feel like its only goal is to maximise profits. I dont think the shift should be to just making games that try and be mindless entertainment and "apolitical" , but instead i want to see more smaller independant developers make games about things they truly care about, All the big gaming companies are basically all American run and perpetuate the same Neo libral status quo nonsense, I want to see a greater diversity in the types of people that makes these games. having games made by African, or Indian companies would be really cool, and make the amount of games just so much more intresting, it would feel like theres a game for everyone and there would be.
I don't know how you said that they changed on DIE since these very old commentators were literally opposed to pastors trying to ban games because of their violence. Moreover the religious folks back in late 2000's were not gamers at all, they were clueless about the industry they were fear mongering. This is not the case for these guys and girls who are decades old gamers.
@@novinceinhosic3531 Isn't it weird though how the second they start talking about video games they have absolutely no idea what they're saying and constantly make objectively incorrect statements though, on top of the fact that they lie about the "woke" video games they talk about as well? Strange.
@@novinceinhosic3531 Have you ever heard of Genwunners? They're insufferable "old fans" of Pokemon who whine and cry like babies the second ANYTHING changes. Genwunners cried because Gold/Silver starts in Johto and the post-game Kanto is scrunched down for space limitations. Genwunners cried about how in Crystal you can select a girl character (a staple of the series now!) and about rebalancing and adding in new moves. Your "seniority" in the gaming sphere doesn't make you more capable of being correct than newer players, but it sure makes you more capable of being *_wrong_* than a new gamer just because They Changed It Now It Sucks.
@neoqwerty I'm not familiar with the Pokemon scene since I don't particularly like the IP, the type of games in the series, not I've played many Japanese titles. From what I could gather about Genwunner, it doesn't seem to be a fitting analogy. There is a big difference between a small section of gamers that got stuck with certain mechanics that they considered to be the best and observing a progressive trend in the gaming industry for the past 15 years. This can be best observed in franchises which I myself saw degrading title after title. I'm not saying that differences in tastes aren't a thing, old God of War players may not like the new God of War, while the opposite, new God of War players may not like the old ones, it's perfectly normal as the IP has changed, both in gameplay and even general presentation, but then if you compare the new God of War with titles around the same years and with similar content and then take a step back and see the general trend, then you can clearly that the trend exists. Seniority does matter, as I have younger family members and I see what preferences they have and how's their relation to older titles. There is a total shift between generations and mostly is caused by how people are introduced into industry by the flood of trendy content.
The funnest thing about gamer gate is the posts where people complain about women in games not being "sexy" enough often exposing the posters lack of knowledge of basic female anatomy, like the famous aloy twitter post where a guy complained about aloy having tiny little facial hairs, if you do not know that women can develop slight facial hair you have never gotten close to a woman before.
It's funny you mention that. I was playing Horizon Zero Dawn (The remastered version) the other day, and I looked at Aloy's face and went "wow, that's such impressive detail to see some of the hair on her face". I then had the immediate thought that I'm sure people would have complained about this, so I had a quick google search and sure enough... It becomes a big drama. Completely missed me by, but why can't that be celebrated?! I was just amazed that someone would bother to do that.
I’ve (46) decided to turn my channel into a space for bonding with my son,(26) leaving behind the commentary videos that once brought in views. Bonding with my son, who was born with Asperger's syndrome and later diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in his teens, through gaming shared moments go beyond views, algorithms and monetization. Having in-depth, philosophical, intellectual conversations about the games we play, sharing with him the Sci-Fi tapestry that is Cyberpunk 2077, is invaluable. This is my contribution back to the gaming community.
I’m sick and tired of hiding these grifters’ channels only for them to pop up again a month or so later. Some hbomberguy level research and presentation here. Subscribing 👍
Since I'm fairly old now, I've given myself license to never remain silent when someone says something evil, hateful, or downright ignorant. Earned another sub, you have. Cheers.
I cannot stand the anti fan bs channels just screaming about nothing for weeks until the next thing they dont care about comes out for them to scream nonsense over
I think you overlooked first thing that we as Europeans can't argue at all. Americans aren't Europeans. They live in similar yet strongly different circumstances in economics and in society. I remember watching Ben Shapiro's hard interview with Andrew Neil on BBC. That is a clear cut between our positions in almost all aspects of life.
0:10 he’s actually correct, but not for the reasons that he thinks lol (Forcing people in the closet to disclose pronouns will either be forced to lie about their preferred pronouns or be outed).
@ hmmm… tricky question. There is a lot of bias due to the influence of the games publishers and platforms. So much can get ‘claimed’ if games get cast in a bad light. I’m into soulslikes and fightincowboy has a large catalogue of playthroughs. Plus I’ve played Zeldas since forever and zeltic comes up with some good theories on lore. I suspect there is space out there for more deep dives. I find it interesting how many film theory channels there are on here and relatively few on the same level about games.
@@DrJoeLovelace Aegon of Astoria is an occasional poster on Souls games, he's very thoughtful and often references Foucault and others, well worth a view.
@@Para2normal There's Rosencreutzzz (his display's just Rosencreutz), who's probably the only milsim leftist I ever stumbled on. It was a massive stroke of luck and I'm pretty sure my algorithm pushed him to me only because I binged Veritas et Caritas and Cambrian Chronicles and the robots got genre-confused between "history" and "military sim games".
It's not just individual YTers or the algorithm, a big part of it is that _because_ it's all shallow, vibes-based stuff and nobody cares about self-contradiction, it's easily spread. Shaun's recent video on Stellar Blade demonstrated how hundreds of those kind of videos were created from just 2 sources, and how most of those vids were just someone nodding along to somebody's else takes. It was ridiculously easy to check that both of those sources were wrong, and the narrative built around them was ridiculous, but, as far as gg2.0 is concerned, why bother? The vibes they want are there, and facts are minor details anyway. The problem (for the right-wingers) is that while this "just nod along to the vibes" strategy lets them dominate the media (even pre-internet, remember Rush Limbaugh's Dittoheads?) it all falls apart once there are actual stakes and actual power politics.
Hmm, the "gate" part is pretty apt, because I see people trying to slam the gate shut and keep people out because they don't want to see games change. Media changes, it's kinda difficult to stop that. There was rage over Star Trek when it was originally airing because it showed women in leadership roles and it had the first interracial kiss shown on TV
He's right. Gotta make a game where you can leave the pronounce empty. Let NPCs use definite article or some thing like that. Challenge regressives with more progress!
I really noticed all the grifting content lat year when i tried to research gaming content for how i want to do it myself. it genuinely killed my drive and made me quite depressed about the state of gaming but luckily i found a lot of left leaning creators and media critics that rekindled the hope. My own plan is to start making video content this year more talking about things games are doing "right" (even bad games like Suicide squad kill the justice league) cause in my opinion one thing that especially has died down is the celebration of the cool things developers implement or do. When something is considered bad in the broader culture then people will just never engage in a discussion about it anymore which i think is bad cause even from thing that have failed/are bad we can take away the pieces that were actually good to highlight them and make sure the good stuff will stick around. Also good video sorry forgor to say this at the start, my sub is here and i hope the like and comment will boost the algo.
Excellent video, very put together and well researched. Your point on how these channels feel repetitive and baseless is what I’ve been feeling about them for a while and honestly while they have made discourse around games and movies much worse, they made me realize how dumb I was back in 2016 because I while I was not harassing anyone, I did enjoy those roasts of sjws since they seemed pretentious from the lens I was given of them at the time. When channels like Andy and Drinker began talking about things that I myself experienced I realized how off they were and it eventually led me to leaving the fanbases for these type of reactionary channels and focus on more deeper analysis. Btw idk if you watched the video, but a channel called Crimes New Roman released a vid talking about how we should experience more things ourselves and I feel it really fits this discussion with the grifters out there feeding false narratives
I fell down this rabbit hole so hard, started when I began watching Mauler videos when the Star Wars sequel trilogy came out, then all of a sudden *boom* recommendations for gamergate stuff turned into ClownfishTV and all this other anti-woke nonsense that's essentially just man-children whining about action figures from the 80s. But the worst was yet to come, because after that TH-cam starts recommending you Stephen Crowder, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and if you don't think critically about it, you realize you're just in this insane rightwing grifter echo chamber. Glad I got better, but it was a struggle.
Fell down the same type of rabbit hole, around 2015-2018. Vids from the skeptic community and the initial gamergate wave sucked me in. Though i didnt comment and only consumed, it took me a while to break through the BS. Couple that with me being in my late teens going into adulthood. I think alot of people like to give off an air of superiority or hide it, but there are many that went through this "phase".
I would often watch star wars theory videos in which whilst he was very critical of the sequel trilogy, he would still try to see the positives and I liked him for it. I didn't love the sequel trilogy but there was *some* interesting stuff in there. But everytime I watched him, Mauler and the others would pop up even if I put down I wasn't interested. The algo was destined for me to be with him. In the end, I stopped watching theory because it would just invade my screen with these types of people. It's a shame and I don't know if he's made the pivot at any point, but it makes you become bitter of all content, rather than seeing people on here who just want to talk about media and culture in a nuanced manner.
Odds are that his “break out” video was his honest take, but the algorithm grabbed and showed it to so many people he then realized, “Hey, I can make a living off this outrage nonsense” and he was off to the races. Money always ruins art, or in this place any form of creativity.
I thought I lived through this time but the way it stands seems everyone on every side are dead-set on making me feel gaslit about the events that unfolded.
Really liked this new type of gaming focussed video, keep it up :) I feel like calling someone a commie is a very American thing, I've not really seen it that much as a Brit. Also, I feel like these types of non-woke folk are allergic to acknowledging nuance: it either is or isn't, much better A therefore B can't exist, without acknowledging that not only can 2 things be true at the same time, but there's also a sliding scale or spectrum of trueness, if I'm making any sense. I've found this aspect of these kinds of people the most difficult to get around during discussions.
The commie thing stems from what's called "McCarthyism" McCarthy was a politician during the cold war era who got fame and power by creating a kind of satanic panic-like moral outrage based on the fear of "rising communism" It became so prevalent that it had neighbors reporting neighbors because they thought they were communist spy's. It was basically the Salem Witch Trials but with communism. His little fake freak out is singularly why U.S. culture is so negative towards anything even remotely socialist to this day. Like food stamps are considered "communism" here. It's insane.
You know, I've only ever seen/heard the "fucking pronouns" part of the rant. I never saw his gameplay or the fact that he created himself to put in the game. So to put it another way, he created a self-insert but was ranting that an NB would be able to do the same with pronoun choice
I truly hope that the speech about profits over fun at the Gaming Awards last year will open these kinds of people‘s eyes to the fundamental problems of the industry. We have bigger fish to fry, nobody cares about what pronouns you go by in a game.
The issue with this thesis is that games where about profit from their very inception. Remember the 1982-83? We see the difference between trends, while the profit is always there. The only difference is with regards to online platforms that allowed to easy bloating with mocro-transactions, which were the logical conclusion since the dawn of MMOs and beginning to take shape by late 2000's. Games will never ever be about anything else but profit and people understand that, that's why it's pointless to criticize a game for the micros, as you can just do the math and calculate the final product price at the very end. If it's sold for 60, but to be fully playable you need 90, then you shall consider it a 90$ game and judge it as such.
@ but it’s also not fair to ignore the criticism either. There are multiple issues that we can talk about with the gaming industry until the cows come home, and I do understand that not all games were made purely for fun (for context, my first console was the Wii and I remember the shovelware that came from it, both good and bad). But they rely so heavily on micro transactions, kind of defeats the point of being able to have fun in video games. Micro transactions incentivize people to sell money for a better experience when the better experience should already be available to them.
@@sugarm1860 I spoke many times about the MMOfication of single players and it should not surprise us the RPG emulation of the skinner-box elements in the mandatory-online single-players is a trick to get people addicted to spend money to play less the bloated grindy games only to reach the good parts, which many times it's gated behind paywalls, and we see these type of things in all digital industries, not just video games. I'm thinking the "RPG" trilogy of the Assassin's Creed series or Battlefront 2 as the biggest slops in this trend. You look at these games, you see that their assets are of good quality, yet the game is purposely made trash to rip you off.
Getting mad at a option in a game (one you don't even have to choose btw) is hella cringe and petty, sad that some people get genuinely upset at it and other diversity stuff, instead of just ignoring that it's there and enjoying the gameplay
I made the mistake of showing interest in a game and like clockwork the algorithm put a unch of grifters rage farming on my feed. It might helps to point out that most of the time the people spouting this nonsense have not played the game.
Oh yeah definitely. I remember when Grummz tried to spearhead a crusade against Monster Hunter Wilds and the community just went "bro, we're here to hunt monsters, not stare at tits and ass." There's this cutscene in God Eater Resurrection, I believe it's where you meet Soma for the first time and there's another God Eater there who starts bragging about his skill to you before he's immediately eaten by an Ogretail. That's Grummz basically, he's the God Eater so full of himself that his plot in the story is to get eaten by one of the least deadliest enemies in the game
Is it weird how i haven’t seen many lefty’s with over 1,000,000 subs just a few years after they started yet right wingers get launched into the homepage very quickly?
Don't like to admit it as right leaning person but liberals/progressives are just better at making roleplaying games, look at Disco Elysium, a Roleplaying game so good it created it's own mini rpg subgenre of point and click RPGs(a few examples of this subgenre are Citizen Sleeper, Saturn and I think Encased), and it was made by self proclaimed Marxists, or Baldurs Gate 3, a Roleplaying game so good even the most staunch anti woke person on YT, synthetic man(don't agree with his politics, he takes things too far), had to admit that the game is good despite being woke in his view. So Ig that's why I try to watch "woke" video game essayists, helps keep the mind open, because I was proven wrong in my biases before when I thought only anti woke people can make good games and video game essays 😅
There's also Josh Sawyer, who was the director of Fallout: New Vegas. A very prominent progressive in the video game space. I wouldn't inherently be against watching right-leaning video essays, as long as they were open about it and interesting. Outside of the gaming world, the main news source I read is the Financial Times. A paper that is the organ for big business! The problem I find is that the arguments of TH-cam often fall into "woke", which doesn't really have an analysis and they can't spot what is "woke". Or if they do, it gets very stale and the same point is repeated over and over again. You need a Milton Friedman or Warren Buffet who likes video games and video essays. There's so much stuff to discuss in video games like natural selection theories, how capitalism has progressed society or anything like that. I can't believe I'm giving you lot ideas 😂 but it would be a richer discussion if there was less outrage and more nuance to the intersection of politics and video games.
the ones that tried to push gamergate, like asmongold, andy and pronouns guy make so many leaps in logic that I questioned reality, like sweet baby inc was controlling all those gigantic corporations to push a woke agenda (wtf) and they ignored how they also worked on amazing games like god ragnarok, or how andy claims to have talked with ubisoft developpers, that agree with everything he wanted, no he didn't, he barely has 100k subs. Made learn that people will believe everything they want to believe despite how stupid it is
Fun fact: Grifters are now PRAISING Monster Hunter Wilds despite trying to launch a crusade against it for being woke (which failed because the community tore Grummz apart which led to his pathetic attempt at trying to look like a fan). During the pandemic, I watched a lot of these guys, but I've grown to hate them in recent years because they're only interested in satisfying their own desires. Funnily enough too, people like Grummz and Az, were it not for this movement, would be lolcows. Az is a narcissist who hates criticism (as shown with his obsession with ActMan) and will stroke his own ego for being "proven right" years later. Grummz meanwhile has not only scammed people, but was also outed not too long ago for being a fan of Lolicon. I believe there's more but talking about Grummz actually gives me a headache with how much of a troglodyte he is
I'm sorry to Andy, but his precious New Vegas is woke as all heck. Not only are two of the party members gay, Cass is bi, and the player can take perks that specificly make you gay/bi. Caesar really enjoys having the homosexual Arcade as his male "company", and Red Lucy will sleep with the MC no matter what they are. The entire premise of the Fallout franchise is how the unregulated capitalism and imperialism of the early 1900's led to a dystopia even before the bombs dropped. Look at the various entries in computers and newspapers in the lore: they paint a very bad picture of the USA in that conservative-bent timeline. The nuclear war became inevitable because of this. And let's not forget all the obvious anti-war and anti-patriotism messages; frequently painting the US government, the Enclave, as the bad guys over and over again. To be fair you can work with the remains of the Enclave in New Vegas, but they're so defeated and demoralized that they'll just attack whichever side you point at, and the entire remnants can fit into a single vertiberd. And then there's the whole social commentary that takes place with how ghouls are treated in the rest of the Fallout games, and how accepted they've come to be in the lands of New Vegas. If it was being made today, Sweet Baby Inc could look at New Vegas and go "hey guys, maybe tone some of this progressive stuff down". But I guess people like Andy lack media literacy to understand these things. Maybe if every suit of power armor came with a pride flag color scheme by default, they MIGHT get the hint.
to the best of my knowledge the only complaint I ever saw that is even plausible to throw it. Anita is not understanding that in the hitman level where you can illuminate adult dancers, you actually get punished for doing so, but I don’t even know if that argument is 100% legitimate. I used to think her tags were stupid now I just don’t care.
I’m right wing, but I don’t watch any of these guys because it’s so boring and repetitive and whiny. It’s a constant narrative of “oooooh we’re soooo suppressed, gaming is dead!” And then a quick walk back when we get a good game. Then when another game has a gay pride flag, it’s back to doom and gloom. All I wanted was to hear about video games! These guys became the exact thing they fought against, all to make a quick buck.
I'm ALMOST certain Andypants is 100% selfaware that his videos are bullshit and he does it as a troll, but also to make money. So TRULY a grifter through and through lmao
It's a movement that took place in the middle of the last decade. Its premise at first was fair and one could argue politically neutral: to make gaming journalism feel more professional, since for years companies had been feeding money to these media outlets to inflate their review scores. However, extreme conservatives quickly took over the movement and used it to harass those same journalists over feminism and minorities, which at first had nothing to do with the movement but quickly became the main talking point. And after journalists came everyone else, there's a good reason "I'm a gamer because I hate women and minorities" became such a widespread meme, and it all has its roots here. Of course, when people talk about reviving Gamergate they talk about this latter version about harassment, queerphobia and the likes, those original talking points about fair journalism not swayed by companies have been long lost.
Girl dev slept around with an amount of journos for exposure. One guy on twitter made a joke about it by calling it "Gamergate" Games Press tried to sent the message they do have integrity, but they forgot about their access journalism. People started to react on it by memes and journo got angry by making articles about it. In the end, trust in game journalism is gone.
@@Wesmoen Correction, she was accused of doing that by an ex boyfriend. The Journalist she supposedly slept with for positive reviews did not meet her till at least 2 months after the review, and he was reviewing a free game.
None of this could even be claimed to be DEI if developers would just make videogames and not these god awful "interactive movies" that seem to be the norm now in western gaming. Any trollbot that tries to claim Zelda or Elden Ring is "woke" doesn't get any traction.
I make videos about a soviet city builder Workers and Resources : Soviet Republic. Does that count? I try and express my politics in a less direct manner on the TH-cam thru that.
"Failed" resurrection? Sir, I'm afraid they never went away, and if anything they ended up winning, looking at either the political developments since 2014, how they dominate the discussion around gaming, or how companies have started changing their stances. And it doesn't help how 2024 gave us massive fumbles such as Veilguard and its horrendous writing, Dustborn's whatever-that-was which may have been an indie but also looked like an unironic version of a parody of "woke" games you would see on 4Chan, and Concord, which is mostly a failure of Sony's idiotic capitalistic gamble toward GaaS, but also featured some frankly bizarre and awful character design that lent themselves naturally to ridicule. It was just a very easy year to push their message, the universe kept giving those people free wins, but it wasn't just the universe. And look, I agree with you here. The vast majority of "anti-woke" youtubers are either grifters or legitimate political fanatics who see communists in every shadow or in every female character with a realistic design who looks like might have a slightly larger chin in a single peculiar frame of a CGI video, not even in-game footage. However, I don't think it's easy to just chalk up their popularity to the algorithm brainwashing mindless viewers, the algorithm feeds on controversy but their side of the controversy is supported by a lot of people because a lot of people feel like they're making the most sense to them, for good or bad. And it's not because gamers are mostly backward morons either, I'm afraid, because things didn't use to be this bad literally decades ago. Personally, I think this has a lot to do with how the leftist side has, honestly, done a bunch of really stupid things over the years that gave these people a lot of ammo and a very easy time, even when they had their own debacles like pronoun-guy going ballistic over the mildest use of pronouns in the most natural place you could find them, when you're making your character in a (rather piss-poor) RPG. For instance, we have seen the leftist side, sometimes unwillingly, but sometimes also willingly, taking the side of corporations in the recent years when those greedy bastards thought the money was into supporting progressivism. A very cynical and shallow kind of progressivism of course, but the chuds then started attacking Disney and others and so a bunch of leftists felt it was a good idea to take the billionaires' side. Bad choice, it gave those youtubers the angle to argue that they were fighting against big money and painted progressivism as a force backed by corporations, which we know was always a cynical, partial act on their part. Also, staying on the topic of corporate greed, the perception that gaming is being harmed by corporate politics is very prevalent, and that's because it's true. Corporate greed is harming creativity, it's producing safe products, and it's not a woke conspiracy, it's pig-headed commercial policies by CEOs who are thinking about the safest way to money in an industry where making money has become difficult because of previous, also greedy politics, by those same CEOs. When those youtubers talk about gaming is losing its edge, at least as far as triple A goes, they're saying something that rings true, and then they redirect it against the wrong target. But even then, the argument appears convincing to people because it starts from a convincing argument that reflects what people are seeing and thinking (and also, there's a kernel of truth in those arguments, I'm afraid to say. It might be just 10% of the whole issue, not 100% as those people are telling you, but one of the factors that led to less daring and family-friendly games is also the desire to not cause any controversy when a lot of money is on the line, and it used to be that the controversy makers once were on the left many years ago). Another thing that I think strongly influenced things in favour of Gamergate, and helped them gaining the quiet, occasional support of a lot otherwise not politicized at all people, was the fact that progressive talking points in gaming spaces in the 2012 to 2016 were just very toxic, I'm going to be real. Sarkeesian's brand of feminism surely fell under excessive scrutiny and caused was more controversy than what it was worth, but it's not like it was great academic or critical content either, reactionary outrage aside there were legitimate things to be critical about. At the same time, the attitude of the gaming press at the time took on a rather sanctimonious and frankly backward stance toward certain forms of artistic expression, and I'm mostly thinking of how games like Dragon's Crown were treated. Dragon's Crown was made by Vanillaware, a Japanese studio that makes stunning 2D artworks, but for Dragon's Crown they also made their game very based on pulp Western Fantasy and Sword and Sorcery kind of designs. That's to say that it was a game with very exaggerated characters, from male warriors whose torso was the size of a wardrobe, to a practically naked muscle-bound dwarf, to a sorcerer with massive tits and an also naked Amazon warrior who boated a lot of musculature and also bikini armour and a lot of ass. It was a great game, it was splendidly illustrated and horny, and it was thrown into the mud for it by some puritanical-minded sect of the progressive movement at the time, led by very big names such as Jason Schreier. This is merely one example out of many, because the rather rabid anti-sexualization, prudish attitude from that segment of the left at the time ended up targeting a lot of other games like Bayonetta 2, and as a whole pushed the industry toward more prudish behaviour, which was extremely unpopular and, frankly, fundamentally backward and anti-artistic. That's how the "anti-woke" youtubers got their crusade for beautiful women in video games, because back in the day it was a leftist attitude to rail against that stuff, and it just never really worked out. It became exceedingly easy for the left to be marked as censorious and those people as fighting for artistic freedom, which is a rather popular position, even if the anti-woke youtubers are definitely disingenuous on that. I mean, The Act Man shows up at some point here as one of the guys that got targeted by the grifters because he allegedly was a secret communist, but back in the day he himself had videos on "feminists and SJWs vs Videogames", and I don't think it's because he had any change of heart over the years. Act Man has always been fairly reasonable, and he used to criticize certain takes that weren't very good from the left back in the day, while also being able to tell that what the right-wing is spewing nowadays is complete nonsense born out of promoting paranoia in their audience. And so it's kinda unsurprising that these outrage-based youtubers have a lot of success with people, because a lot of their starting points sound true to people and reference legitimate reasons with censorious attitudes and anti-corporate attitudes, only to then move it back to a reactionary, "anti-woke" place, kinda missing the point of what the real issues at the heart of gaming is, which is all due to corporate greed. I think that, until we realize and understand what's leading so many people to listen to these people, instead of just yelling at them for listening to grifters, and start to address what's making the right-wing message to successful and counter it appropriately, Gamergate is not going to be in need of resurrecting any time soon. This kind of direct critique to the movement, while presenting a lot of good point, unfortunately is ineffective in my opinion. It just results in people entrenching their opinions more rather than think on the flaws behind their reasoning. If one wants to dismantle the series of arguments that the current anti-wokies employs one must disarm them by proving you're not on the side of corporations, you're not on the side of censorious attitudes or trying to moralize your audience, and you gotta tone down the pseudo-academic talk because that shit is noxious nowadays. The whole way of treating subjects and the language needs to change, and some ideas seriously needs to be dropped. The left back in 2014 gave away the counter-culture to the right out of their own volition, and that really was a disabling blow to the online left that it never recovered.
yeah too bad everyone thinks being *stupid* means you're *losing*. No, that's not how it works and that's never how it worked. The right has consistently provided a feeling of safety and security to those who want to join the circlejerk. The left isn't populist in nature, it gathers around and circlejerks over how silly the right-wingers are all being. Then they feel as if they're winning, when they're not. It's nice to see just one person see through this pathetic charade, but yeah im pretty sure no one else is reading all that
I'm gonna be a bit doomer here I guess, but I don't think there is a way to fight the spread of this content. Not so long as the tech industry is embracing it. It was already hard to fight it before, but now that tech bros are going to be licking Trump's boots it's going to be quite impossible - The internet is going to be the domain of right-wing extremists. Besides, stirring up anger and hate is so much easier than trying to get people to be empathetic. There's really very little to be done, other than hope people eventually get tired of outrage content. It's really up to these people themselves to just stop being hateful.
My stance is boycott everything when the lore consistentcy, if the devs attack customers, or hypes a game up and it turns out crap I boycotted Bethesda except Doom Titles they ruined Wolfenstein, and Quake is dead so Doom it is.
To me, the US has always been a bane to video games (everything really) as much as the corporate side as the "player base". Pretty sure 99% of the misguided negativity comes from there, it always create more problems than solutions and it's a pain to discuss/reason with. I think that most American talents will always be sabotaged in a way or an other as they have been for decades now. Japan has always been the strongest in the industry except during the 7th gen, followed by Europe Otherwise, I'm over-saturated with great games, since I play almost every genre, for me to complain! On another note, I recommend to you "Mortismal Gaming". I think he is a great reviewer who simply loves video games and couldn't care less about the "drama".
Are your chosen pronouns not used in modern RPGs so that the NPCs know how to refer to you custom character during conversations? If not, the speech is even more wooden. They're not going to say your custom name, so all they have is pronouns.
You’re so right about this type of content being shoved down people’s throats on TH-cam. I’ve never watched any of their videos yet still get constant reminders!
This phenomenon makes "devolution" look legitimate.
TH-cam in general spreads fascist and right-wing channels. No moral website would allow people like Asmongold, Sargon of Akkad or the Daily Wire.
I used to watch some of these videos back in 2018/2019/2020 out of couriosity before I realized what they where doing, never managed to watch a full 15 minute videos of one of these guys.
Hey, I'm a big fan of your video.
@@UdinJibral
Same here.
I’m genuinely embarrassed that I used to believe these people’s utter tripe and even moderated one of their servers for some time. But then again, it led me to where I am today watching this very video, so it was clearly worth something.
Same here; I'm glad I made it out
You took the words out of my mouth, bub. Sure, there are genuine films and games that are very far-left and alienating (I.E. Barbie, Class of 09, Life is Strange, Black Christmas 2019, the Candyman reboot, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and the crowning champion of insane far-left gobbledygook, The American Society of Magical Negroes). But thanks to "Reverse-Sarkeesians" aka. Media Grifters, the conversation surrounding the real issue of far-left politics in media has been utterly _destroyed._ And I was a victim of their warped ideals, insane double standards, and love of taking advantage of unfortunate implications in works of fiction that are just badly written.
In short, Media Grifters and the legions of parrots they've given rise to are their own worst enemy.
@@NebLleb Please explain how the candyman reboot is far left. And could you also explain how the original isn't by your definition?
yeah same, its disgusting how it can lead young people so easily into this rabbit hole
Yeah
The funniest part about that baby face guy was that he was so hyped for Starfield as if it were some innovative new RPG experience but the pronouns ruined that for him
For context:
No, the pronouns didn't make go to do his rant. He legitimately tried to put hours into the game. He was quite dismissal about the pronouns part in the creator. Confused, but not world ending.
The game started to stop being fun to him when he jokingly started add in stereotypical "leftish" things. Which most of them came out. His immersion got broken by the writing of the game.
He tapped out around six hours in.
This is the context many don't talk about and just take the rant as the full context.
@@Wesmoen
The pronouns part of the game is exclusively found in the character creator, he was playing the game for the first time when he had the freak out. Literally making his character, idk what you're even talking about, did we watch the same video?
@@tree4318 Rubbing in his eyes and saying you should be able to skip that part in a calmly manner?
Check his livestreams and you'll find out.
@@tree4318 i didnt even notice the pronouns when making a character lol,do it clearly isnt a step you MUST do before creating character
@@tree4318 in the livestream he just rubbed his eyes and asked in a calmly matter why preferred pronouns were on by default.
Quite relaxed if you asked me.
Maybe GamerGate 2.0 should be about Elon Musk being a fake gamer richest-man-in-the-world
If only our world was like that.
As someone who actually has worked in the tech industry and game development over the last decade, these right wing reactionaries talking about game devs as if they know a god damn thing about the industry makes me rage. I have actual lived grievances about the industry, and they touch on none of them. The tech industry and in particular the video game has severe issues (Worker mistreatment, crunch, mass layoffs and studio closures, etc.), non of them are related inclusivity of the games being built. There are TH-cam channels like People Make Games that are unapologetically progressive in their messaging, but they are drowned out by the deluge of hack right wing grifters trying to make a quick buck on the platform.
Is making bad games that no-gamer would want to buy one of the grievances? Who was the audience for Concord? For S Squad K the Justice League? Who will be the audience for Fairgames?
Is this not part of your grievances? Do you think that the vast majority of gamers would want to buy games with non-sexualized characters? Why would they? Don't you think that this is a problem?
I want to be frank with you, I'm on the GG2 bandwagon EXCLUSIVELY for the ban on sexualization.
I don't care how many gay/black/disabled characters there are in a game, as long as they're good looking. I've always been progressive, maybe even too much, since I'm not the puritan kind of progressive.
(P.S. oh, and by good looking I mean that women have too look like women, I don't mean the androgynous "safe horny" kind of good looking).
@@kaisersoymilk6912 Imagine telling an actual game developer who works in the industry that games can't be sexy anymore. Like, we both know you now it's wrong, but why would you ever think a game developer would buy what you're selling?
@@kaisersoymilk6912 just because you don't buy them, doesnt mean "no gamer" will buy them. There is something everyone out there.
@@kaisersoymilk6912 I was going to write this big long explanation of the difference between developers and publishers and the economics of risk adverse publishers, but then I realized that you don't actually care about any of that and just want to vent about stuff that annoys you personally. You're the type of person who couldn't be bothered to spend 5 min doing actual research into how the video game industry functions before posting, and I'm not going to waste my time trying to explain to someone who very obviously doesn't care and just has a bone to pick.
Sadly that's usually the point of this culture war BS, to put focus onto made up issues to ignore real ones.
It's sad how much outrage sells over positivity.
I see so much shit thats just "woke, la woksime, bad game because woman"
When its more just
The games a buggy, unplayable mess, no ones gonna buy it because of that
The whole content is out of place. You look at video-games since 70's when they firstly came out and no such themes are ever present. Then by second half of 2010's there is a rapid shift that by less than 4 years these themes become 50% of the norm.
@novinceinhosic3531 the content isn't out of place though? Games since the 90s have had all sorts of things in them comparable to those today, fallout 1 and 2 feature gay, and lesbian characters, the content isn't "out of place" it's more just women are less sexualised in the media and so on, and social media allows for a vocal minority to be even more vocal. Most people I talk to couldn't care less about the content of a game, they care more about its quality.
@@thecarrierpigeon6657 I totally disagree. Homosexual characters are more a thing of commedy or just side characters with not too much exposition, while female characters nowadays are more sexualized than ever before. The difference is that you have either oversexualized or androgynous as women devs are ugly looking and want to reflect their appears in characters that posses a lot of power in order to compensate. You can see the same phenomenon with ugly men devs back in the day.
What is unique and has never existed before up until past mid 2010's is the corporate LGBT vibe and PC policing, these things were never a thing before 9 years ago and they only kept increasing past 2020.
@@novinceinhosic3531 Thats some weird projecting on your part my friend.
@@TheTailow what am I projecting?
I remember back in the day, Gamergate was allegedly started to demand for better journalistic integrity. So when I noticed reviews with disclosures to clarify if they have had any kind of relationship with a developer for transparency I was like "Well, that was the goal, right guys?"
And then they started attacking women, queer people and people of colour who worked in the industry. And then all the TH-camrs who were covering Gamergate started to talk about how Islam is invading the UK. And it was like "Oh wow, this entire debacle has been a successful psy op".
True that.
Like, yeah, they did expose that there *was* a concerted effort to smear detractors and that most mainstream games journalists were in whisper networks to collaborate on promoting certain narratives and circle the wagons to protect their own, something that is *still* a problem like how Naughty Dog hired an IGN journalist in exchange for positive coverage or how they refused to report on an ally of theirs bullying an ex to self un-alive.
But the takeaway for the critics isn't that this is happening, but that "woke" people are doing this, as if them being woke was the bigger problem there.
@@crazyinsane500 Im pretty sure people were talking about the dodgy relationship between journalists and publishers long before Gamergate started a moral panic. I think Sterling made at least 4 videos about it pre gamergate.
Also, who are you talking about? An ally of Naughty Dog?
Sargon of Akkad in a shellnut
And I swear gamergate is what led to the TH-cam alt-right pipeline. I never saw any of the right-wing like Ben Shapiro types or anything being suggested to me until after all the gamergating nonsense. I never watched a single gamergate video. I never watched in Anita sarkeesian video. I never watched anything like that but then right when gamergate was at its peak I started getting all of the critical drinker guys videos recommended and all of these other people
There is no evidence that Gamergate was in any way a "harassment campaign". It just lies and propaganda from grifters who assume that every criticism is harassment because they know their ideas are indefensible.
Let's be honest, Andy doesn't think Indiana Jones is woke because he gets to play as a straight white guy who always gets the girl.
That's the problem with these grifters and conservatives. They only see Woke when there is a person of color or a woman they aren't attracted to as the main characters.
Look at how suddenly ASSASSIN'S CREED is supposed to be a faithful historical adaptation just because a Black man is one of the main characters. Even though the character is Literally based on a historical figure. But now all of these would-be gamergaters will write paragraphs on how Yasuke wasn't a real samurai and it was just a formality.
I've been saying this since people started whining about it; since when was AC historically accurate?
Yasuke is ironically one of the more historically accurate playable characters since he's the only one that actually existed.
@@chetmanley1885 ooh do you bring up the apple of eden from the very first game? The box from rogue? Sword of eden from unity? Blackbeard glazing edward kenway? Connor being pivotal in the american revolution? There are so many innacuracies. I think they mean the time period being accurate or whatever. Or using unity to rebuid a piece of the notre dame.
exactly
TH-camrs blaming DEI for why games are bad is like complaining about your house being unliveable because you have an annoying neighbour…
And not the fact that the roof is falling apart, the rooms are full of mold, the landlord is raising your rent prices, there’s a skeleton in the basement, and the entire house itself is built on top of a massive sinkhole ready to collapse at any given moment.
But that neighbour is sure annoying though.
Sadly people follow those idiots that whine about dei …. Sigh
And the neighbor is only annoying because they asked if you needed help with moving in your stuff.
And yet games with no DEI keep succeeding.
the details of the house were amazing thank you 👍
@Godzilla_Star_Eater Like Metaphor? and how do you know Astro bot has no DEI hires?
I think Dead Domain is pretty good for thoughtful, progressive content on games and gaming culture. They do quite a lot on general political stuff, but as an active gaming streamer they have definitely done some good work on this topic, I'd definitely recommend checking out their work.
I agree
unlike the goonergate people she's actually a real gamer who appreciates the art of video games
I'll have a look!
*I agree. She is great!*
I agree with this statement. DD is great!
It's not really a Gamergate. It's a Goonergate
seeing gamergate make a resurgence makes me want to interact with the communities for games that I play more, especially to act as a role model that I didn't have when I got caught in it myself. But seeing the toxic way that the internet functions now also makes me want to just ditch the whole thing and do zero community interaction. Hard to find a balance lmao
Every time I see those pronouns freakout I secretly hope that one day they make a game that as a joke allows a "no pronoun" choice, which would remove every pronoun in texts and dialogues and result in grammatically incomplete and incomprehensible sentences, and then watch these people's reactions.
They will say just what you say, that the corp are mocking them and do it on purpose.
"BEST GAME EVER! SPEAKS EXACTLY LIKE ME!!"
Pretty sure there was a mod for Starfield that ended up doing that, with those exact outcomes
@DrJoeLovelace False: "Me" is an object pronoun. No points
Hate sells. Problem is at this point the market is over saturated with these hate farmers looking for a crop to cultivate. As such they have to get more extreme and go after shows, games, and movies they may have ignores before. Not they are just throwing darts at everything and hope they hit a target.
It seems that pushback toward these hate farmers has grown in the last year and that's good.
The thing that gets me about people being upset about games being woke when debating them they’ll say their opinion has nothing to do with rightwing politics or being a Trump supporter. Then they’ll admit they are a rightwing Trump supporter but say their aggressive opinions has nothing to do with that then spout off some nonsense about wanting to preserve the integrity of video games.
"The Failed Resurrection of GamerGate"
Really need to narrow down _which_ failed resurrection of GamerGate you're on about because the "culture war" grifters keep trying to make it a thing again.
And GamerGate is just resurrected anti-SJW slop reheated after it's been dug out of LiveJournal's dumpster, this shit keeps _going_ and it's _bothersome_ .
My recommended has been ruined for years by these kinds of channels I’ve just given up on my recommended ever changing for better
It's tiring isn't it? Honestly to me lately more and more channels like this one are being recommended to me again.
It's maybe only because I've reported and "don't recommend" most of them
Algorithm hygiene is something that will be needed to be taught in the future.
My Facebook algorithm just devolved into an endless stream of conspiracy bullshit, and it was partly my fault for engaging with that content.
So everywhere else, I just push the "do not recommend" button at the slightest suspicion. It mostly works, although you have to be constant because it never fucking ends.
What helped me clean my recommendations (actual small channels and less ad driven youtubers) is a chrome extension i use in brave called DeArrow, it un click baits the title and thumbnail of videos and auto skips filler, ads and self promotion. You can even submit your own title recommendations and whatnot for other people.
This is so true. I absolutely *hate* looking up any info for a new game on this platform.
I have to sift through so much shit to not only find an *actual* review, but one from someone who even bothered to play the game.
At this point I'd tell you you probably should look at the speedrunning community. They won't necessarily tell you if the PLOT is good, but at least they'll tell you where the game's broken and if it's fun-broken or bad-broken.
The last part. There is a baffling amount of people who just do not play the games that they badmouth.
I think I am more online than I was during gamergate because I had no idea it even happened or what it was until recently. Tbh from my perspective it all just comes off as people trying to capitalize on outrage.
Gamer gate is at least smarter than comicgate. That whole movement was basically used for no names to trick people into giving them money for their mid ass comic books.
Comicsgate aka "we have gamergate at home"
The weird thing about Andypants is he brings religion in when talking about video games like he’ll say things like games use to be made be good Christian men and I’m like 1 how could you possibly know that and 2 what does someone’s religion have to do with game development.
Didn't one of the Assassin's Creed games have you fight the Pope.
They love fallout but they would hate Tim Cain
No kidding, like the original Doom was decried by Christian organizations because they assumed it promoted Satanism when you're the one out there killing demons that are trying to invade
@@BlueBeetle1939
Like I'm surprised they don't slam New Vegas for the inclusion of Arcade Ganon. he's gay, openly so, and you can sleep with your enemy Benny as a guy. Yet New Vegas is the most loved game in the franchise.
Or people blaming "DEI/Woke" for the recent fall in subscribers in FF14. The game is between content patches, this ALWAYS happens.
I was on board with Gamergate for a time. Journalists really did need their feet held to the fire. Then when they started kissing the ring of extreme right wingers like Matt Forney and Milo, I instantly saw the writing on the wall; this was just another beat stick for cultural conservatives with an annoying "How do you do fellow kids?" veneer.
Commander Stephanie Sterling Is a force of nature when it comes to left-leaning creators in the gaming space. She gets a lot of hate for being trans. I would rather people criticize that her videos often beat a dead horse, however solid her points are. Grievances aside, she's got a strong voice, and her writing is consistently top-notch.
Thank God for Them
Don't forget the Hogwarts Legacy drama she was involved in. There is a reason why her subscriber count started stagnating and then going down
the fact youre generally correct helps explain why, despite nu-gamergate being objectively worthless, the culture war is a stalemate (at best)
One of the best to ever do it and still going strong!
these same people would accuse Aliens of being "woke" if the movie came out in today's world
Sci-fi = WoKe!
@@DrJoeLovelace The funny thing is it is indeed by their definition, they just don’t realize it when it’s old work because they have no media literacy.
It baffles me when people say “bro I like female characters in (insert older work here)” when you know damn well that they’d lose their minds about it if that older work came out today
@@Paleowgh but it's well written that's the difference
@@Key-Knight87 Even if they are I heavily doubt that it would matter lmao
People complaining about woke is far more annoying than whatever they think woke is
woke people are complaining about games with good character designs, like marvel rivals. i also dislike people complaining about wokism but woke people are far more annoying.
Is it anti-woke when even the lefties are avoiding the dei games?
Anti-woke people are the worst.
@ 🥱
@@stevenbishop1782 if it’s rainbow capitalism then that could be the only thing other times it could because the game itself isn’t good from the gameplay or story and less to do with character designs
Whenever i see any of that GanerGate related garbage, i slap in that "Do Not Recommend" like a can of Raid. Too many of these frauds, if ya ask me. Amazing video, btw.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: there is a difference between "woke" tokenism, and genuine inclusivity.
PRONOUNS!!!
I
You
He
She
It
We
They
Pronouns jumpscare!
It's still hilarious to me all these months later that Pronouns Man, a self-professed super fan of the Tennant era of Doctor Who went ballistic over a plot in Starfield about a woman who's a clone of a man, calling it part of the modern woke Californian agenda.
Somehow forgetting the Doctor's Daughter, a Tennant era Doctor Who episode about a woman who's a clone of a man.
Oh well, grifters gonna grift.
We all remember our first Captain Jack Harkness as well x
I'm still highly confused how he managed to get away with saying "I want to play a video game about exploring the vastness of space hundreds of years in the future," and that DIDN'T involve meeting species that may or may not have specified genders, and that hundreds of years from now, our present day idea of "gender" may be broadened enough that "pronouns" make more sense to express that. Apparently he thought "exploring the vastness of space" should be defined by "blue women wearing bikinis?" What is this, first season of OG Star Trek?
This is exactly the reason Elon is pretending to be a gamer.
The issue these days is that the gaming journalists are little more than paid shills, and the reviews became absurd. Games are failing of their own accord, as they usually do.
ah they? i'd question that narrative too. i reckon are paid but most are not. so saying journolist with no criteria makes it sound like you mean all when its very clear its not. you need to use precise language.
@@kudosbudo Fair enough. And who is and isn't a 'journalist' can be debated. But we're in agreement that it's more of a late stage capitalist thing than a PRONOUNS!! thing why big companies are coming out with games that people don't seem to want.
Problem is the plot on gamergate was lost YEARS ago 😂
There have always been good and bad journalists and publications in the games/gaming space from the literal beginning of the industry. Shilling and poor journalism, or meaningless reviews, are not a unique element of “things today” and to be honest I can’t say that things are worse today in that regard than they were before. IGN scores were infamous in the 2000s. “Terribly boring, everything is broken. 8/10” was a common joke about game reviews when I was a literal child. And back then, a lot of the shilling was printed on paper and you paid money for it. At least now, any independent would-be journalist or critic has multiple pathways to self publish and promote their work
@@oneilprovost2287 The main egregious thing with game reviews is less the shilling and more the review score inflation.
5/10 should be average, not "it's bad, but it's playable". That should be like a 3/10. 7.5/10 shouldn't be "eh it's average"! (or in the case of Pokemon Ruby/Emerald, "there was too much water in Hoenn IMO" 7/10 too much water)
Still embarrassed I fell into that rabbit hole around 2014-2016. I still think Sarkeesian was a bit of a grifter and spreaded misinformation, but there was no excuse for the absolute madness directed her way
I can’t take anyone seriously who says “woke” unironically. Not saying there’s no shallow pandering, but these people freak out over ANY non-white, female, or LGBT representation. Or a woman looking “unattractive” to them. Or flipping out and boycotting games over character creators listing “body type A and B” instead of “male and female”.
Part of what left me stuck in the “anti-SJW” grift for years was also being sheltered from actually talking to the people these people fearmongered about. I was lead to think nonbinary people were all maniacs who identified as washing machines. Then I actually met and talked to NB people and…wait a minute…you mean they were completely normal reasonable people the whole time? And years after I realized that I also realized I was NB myself lol.
Andypants and Synthetic Man are the absolute worst of the worst. Andy has also started saying outright anti-semetic shit too, saying the author Brandon Sanderson was “lead to his satanic downfall by a Jew”.
A bit???
She was a absolute annoyance.
Also activists were the ones who were up the forefront so of course people would assume that.
I tbh do buy it myself but even then I feel Noone listened .
It's great to see someone talking about gaming from a socialist perspective. Keep up the good work!
I’m glad when I was a young lad in college during gaming gate I was too busy watching five night at Freddie’s game theories.
I'm now stuck trying to figure out how the gamer gate movement would've viewed the eu4 mod anbennar since it's got countries that are very feudalistic, mysogonistic or worse but also things like feminist religious organisations and the ability to create genderless people with magic(there is a lot more depth to its religions, countries and peoples but I doubt gamer gate types would actually look that deep)
The right wing has always hated gaming, remember all the Christians outraging at GTA, or any games with violence. They've just changed their target to DEI or basically anything that doesn't just have white characters. It does feel though that there has been a shift in the big companies, even 10-15 years ago you could tell that there was people and developers that were truly passionate about what they were making and wanted to not only entertain but have interesting stories with interesting characters. I think thats why indie games are so popular at the moment, you can genuinely feel the passion they have for their art form and it doesn't just feel like its only goal is to maximise profits. I dont think the shift should be to just making games that try and be mindless entertainment and "apolitical" , but instead i want to see more smaller independant developers make games about things they truly care about, All the big gaming companies are basically all American run and perpetuate the same Neo libral status quo nonsense, I want to see a greater diversity in the types of people that makes these games. having games made by African, or Indian companies would be really cool, and make the amount of games just so much more intresting, it would feel like theres a game for everyone and there would be.
I don't know how you said that they changed on DIE since these very old commentators were literally opposed to pastors trying to ban games because of their violence.
Moreover the religious folks back in late 2000's were not gamers at all, they were clueless about the industry they were fear mongering. This is not the case for these guys and girls who are decades old gamers.
@@novinceinhosic3531 Isn't it weird though how the second they start talking about video games they have absolutely no idea what they're saying and constantly make objectively incorrect statements though, on top of the fact that they lie about the "woke" video games they talk about as well? Strange.
@@novinceinhosic3531 Have you ever heard of Genwunners? They're insufferable "old fans" of Pokemon who whine and cry like babies the second ANYTHING changes. Genwunners cried because Gold/Silver starts in Johto and the post-game Kanto is scrunched down for space limitations. Genwunners cried about how in Crystal you can select a girl character (a staple of the series now!) and about rebalancing and adding in new moves.
Your "seniority" in the gaming sphere doesn't make you more capable of being correct than newer players, but it sure makes you more capable of being *_wrong_* than a new gamer just because They Changed It Now It Sucks.
@neoqwerty I'm not familiar with the Pokemon scene since I don't particularly like the IP, the type of games in the series, not I've played many Japanese titles. From what I could gather about Genwunner, it doesn't seem to be a fitting analogy. There is a big difference between a small section of gamers that got stuck with certain mechanics that they considered to be the best and observing a progressive trend in the gaming industry for the past 15 years. This can be best observed in franchises which I myself saw degrading title after title. I'm not saying that differences in tastes aren't a thing, old God of War players may not like the new God of War, while the opposite, new God of War players may not like the old ones, it's perfectly normal as the IP has changed, both in gameplay and even general presentation, but then if you compare the new God of War with titles around the same years and with similar content and then take a step back and see the general trend, then you can clearly that the trend exists. Seniority does matter, as I have younger family members and I see what preferences they have and how's their relation to older titles. There is a total shift between generations and mostly is caused by how people are introduced into industry by the flood of trendy content.
The funnest thing about gamer gate is the posts where people complain about women in games not being "sexy" enough often exposing the posters lack of knowledge of basic female anatomy, like the famous aloy twitter post where a guy complained about aloy having tiny little facial hairs, if you do not know that women can develop slight facial hair you have never gotten close to a woman before.
It's funny you mention that. I was playing Horizon Zero Dawn (The remastered version) the other day, and I looked at Aloy's face and went "wow, that's such impressive detail to see some of the hair on her face".
I then had the immediate thought that I'm sure people would have complained about this, so I had a quick google search and sure enough... It becomes a big drama. Completely missed me by, but why can't that be celebrated?! I was just amazed that someone would bother to do that.
That was bait.
@@novinceinhosic3531
Um, no, seeing the rage of Aloy it wasn't just bait.
Absolutely devastated to hear that Dr Robotnik hasn't just secured another 8 year's worth of grifting.
Hey, don't drag the good Doctor into this! He may be a megalomaniac, but he _is_ also a feminist.
I’ve (46) decided to turn my channel into a space for bonding with my son,(26) leaving behind the commentary videos that once brought in views. Bonding with my son, who was born with Asperger's syndrome and later diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in his teens, through gaming shared moments go beyond views, algorithms and monetization.
Having in-depth, philosophical, intellectual conversations about the games we play, sharing with him the Sci-Fi tapestry that is Cyberpunk 2077, is invaluable.
This is my contribution back to the gaming community.
what a kick-ass parent :'D
As a 28yo I must say, you're an invaluable human being!
You're what everyone should aspire to become
@@c.E_VO thank you for putting a smile on my heart. I wish you health and happiness.
@@Nyumich thank you so much. That really honestly just made me smile. I wish you health and happiness.
You did a great job of condensing a lot of this subject matter. Cheers for the video.
I’m sick and tired of hiding these grifters’ channels only for them to pop up again a month or so later.
Some hbomberguy level research and presentation here. Subscribing 👍
Honestly I'm just upset that I can't watch a video about a game that failed horribly without having to scroll past dozens of grifting videos.
I'm always telling my liberal friends they're mad at the wrong people
? Huh? Did you even watch the video?
Since I'm fairly old now, I've given myself license to never remain silent when someone says something evil, hateful, or downright ignorant.
Earned another sub, you have. Cheers.
I cannot stand the anti fan bs channels just screaming about nothing for weeks until the next thing they dont care about comes out for them to scream nonsense over
I think you overlooked first thing that we as Europeans can't argue at all. Americans aren't Europeans. They live in similar yet strongly different circumstances in economics and in society. I remember watching Ben Shapiro's hard interview with Andrew Neil on BBC. That is a clear cut between our positions in almost all aspects of life.
0:10 he’s actually correct, but not for the reasons that he thinks lol
(Forcing people in the closet to disclose pronouns will either be forced to lie about their preferred pronouns or be outed).
He is new to me and I watch a lot of gaming stuff on here. I bet he’ ll pop up now. Such are the algorithms.
Sorry if it's due to my video 😭 (P.S what do you watch? I need some decent people on here to have a look at).
@ hmmm… tricky question. There is a lot of bias due to the influence of the games publishers and platforms. So much can get ‘claimed’ if games get cast in a bad light. I’m into soulslikes and fightincowboy has a large catalogue of playthroughs. Plus I’ve played Zeldas since forever and zeltic comes up with some good theories on lore. I suspect there is space out there for more deep dives. I find it interesting how many film theory channels there are on here and relatively few on the same level about games.
@@DrJoeLovelace Aegon of Astoria is an occasional poster on Souls games, he's very thoughtful and often references Foucault and others, well worth a view.
@@Para2normal There's Rosencreutzzz (his display's just Rosencreutz), who's probably the only milsim leftist I ever stumbled on. It was a massive stroke of luck and I'm pretty sure my algorithm pushed him to me only because I binged Veritas et Caritas and Cambrian Chronicles and the robots got genre-confused between "history" and "military sim games".
It's not just individual YTers or the algorithm, a big part of it is that _because_ it's all shallow, vibes-based stuff and nobody cares about self-contradiction, it's easily spread.
Shaun's recent video on Stellar Blade demonstrated how hundreds of those kind of videos were created from just 2 sources, and how most of those vids were just someone nodding along to somebody's else takes. It was ridiculously easy to check that both of those sources were wrong, and the narrative built around them was ridiculous, but, as far as gg2.0 is concerned, why bother? The vibes they want are there, and facts are minor details anyway.
The problem (for the right-wingers) is that while this "just nod along to the vibes" strategy lets them dominate the media (even pre-internet, remember Rush Limbaugh's Dittoheads?) it all falls apart once there are actual stakes and actual power politics.
Lol satanists? Does he want to ban Judas Priest because he thinks kids are going to commit rituals?
I said it was the resurrection of gamergate, but in actual fact it's the return of the satanic panic. All hail D&D.
DnD for life!
@@DrJoeLovelace As someone who lived though the first one, I'm entitled to say "Aw shit, here we go again...."
Hmm, the "gate" part is pretty apt, because I see people trying to slam the gate shut and keep people out because they don't want to see games change.
Media changes, it's kinda difficult to stop that.
There was rage over Star Trek when it was originally airing because it showed women in leadership roles and it had the first interracial kiss shown on TV
!
The thumb thumbs from spy kids have never been more culturally relevant
He's right. Gotta make a game where you can leave the pronounce empty. Let NPCs use definite article or some thing like that. Challenge regressives with more progress!
I really noticed all the grifting content lat year when i tried to research gaming content for how i want to do it myself.
it genuinely killed my drive and made me quite depressed about the state of gaming but luckily i found a lot of left leaning creators and media critics that rekindled the hope.
My own plan is to start making video content this year more talking about things games are doing "right" (even bad games like Suicide squad kill the justice league) cause in my opinion one thing that especially has died down is the celebration of the cool things developers implement or do.
When something is considered bad in the broader culture then people will just never engage in a discussion about it anymore which i think is bad cause even from thing that have failed/are bad we can take away the pieces that were actually good to highlight them and make sure the good stuff will stick around.
Also good video sorry forgor to say this at the start, my sub is here and i hope the like and comment will boost the algo.
Excellent video, very put together and well researched.
Your point on how these channels feel repetitive and baseless is what I’ve been feeling about them for a while and honestly while they have made discourse around games and movies much worse, they made me realize how dumb I was back in 2016 because I while I was not harassing anyone, I did enjoy those roasts of sjws since they seemed pretentious from the lens I was given of them at the time. When channels like Andy and Drinker began talking about things that I myself experienced I realized how off they were and it eventually led me to leaving the fanbases for these type of reactionary channels and focus on more deeper analysis.
Btw idk if you watched the video, but a channel called Crimes New Roman released a vid talking about how we should experience more things ourselves and I feel it really fits this discussion with the grifters out there feeding false narratives
If [insert gamer] doesn't like pronouns how would [insert gamer] like me to refer to [insert gamer] without using [insert gamer]'s name?
I fell down this rabbit hole so hard, started when I began watching Mauler videos when the Star Wars sequel trilogy came out, then all of a sudden *boom* recommendations for gamergate stuff turned into ClownfishTV and all this other anti-woke nonsense that's essentially just man-children whining about action figures from the 80s.
But the worst was yet to come, because after that TH-cam starts recommending you Stephen Crowder, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and if you don't think critically about it, you realize you're just in this insane rightwing grifter echo chamber. Glad I got better, but it was a struggle.
Fell down the same type of rabbit hole, around 2015-2018. Vids from the skeptic community and the initial gamergate wave sucked me in. Though i didnt comment and only consumed, it took me a while to break through the BS.
Couple that with me being in my late teens going into adulthood. I think alot of people like to give off an air of superiority or hide it, but there are many that went through this "phase".
I would often watch star wars theory videos in which whilst he was very critical of the sequel trilogy, he would still try to see the positives and I liked him for it. I didn't love the sequel trilogy but there was *some* interesting stuff in there.
But everytime I watched him, Mauler and the others would pop up even if I put down I wasn't interested. The algo was destined for me to be with him. In the end, I stopped watching theory because it would just invade my screen with these types of people. It's a shame and I don't know if he's made the pivot at any point, but it makes you become bitter of all content, rather than seeing people on here who just want to talk about media and culture in a nuanced manner.
Odds are that his “break out” video was his honest take, but the algorithm grabbed and showed it to so many people he then realized, “Hey, I can make a living off this outrage nonsense” and he was off to the races. Money always ruins art, or in this place any form of creativity.
I thought I lived through this time but the way it stands seems everyone on every side are dead-set on making me feel gaslit about the events that unfolded.
Really liked this new type of gaming focussed video, keep it up :)
I feel like calling someone a commie is a very American thing, I've not really seen it that much as a Brit. Also, I feel like these types of non-woke folk are allergic to acknowledging nuance: it either is or isn't, much better A therefore B can't exist, without acknowledging that not only can 2 things be true at the same time, but there's also a sliding scale or spectrum of trueness, if I'm making any sense. I've found this aspect of these kinds of people the most difficult to get around during discussions.
The commie thing stems from what's called "McCarthyism" McCarthy was a politician during the cold war era who got fame and power by creating a kind of satanic panic-like moral outrage based on the fear of "rising communism"
It became so prevalent that it had neighbors reporting neighbors because they thought they were communist spy's. It was basically the Salem Witch Trials but with communism.
His little fake freak out is singularly why U.S. culture is so negative towards anything even remotely socialist to this day. Like food stamps are considered "communism" here. It's insane.
Nothing says “I’m a grifter who repeated 2nd grade” like fighting against pronouns.
You know, I've only ever seen/heard the "fucking pronouns" part of the rant. I never saw his gameplay or the fact that he created himself to put in the game. So to put it another way, he created a self-insert but was ranting that an NB would be able to do the same with pronoun choice
5:35 how exactly was FNV a game you dip your ACC vulture future into? That game has a meme where you go in as a young man and come out as a woman
I truly hope that the speech about profits over fun at the Gaming Awards last year will open these kinds of people‘s eyes to the fundamental problems of the industry. We have bigger fish to fry, nobody cares about what pronouns you go by in a game.
The issue with this thesis is that games where about profit from their very inception. Remember the 1982-83? We see the difference between trends, while the profit is always there. The only difference is with regards to online platforms that allowed to easy bloating with mocro-transactions, which were the logical conclusion since the dawn of MMOs and beginning to take shape by late 2000's.
Games will never ever be about anything else but profit and people understand that, that's why it's pointless to criticize a game for the micros, as you can just do the math and calculate the final product price at the very end. If it's sold for 60, but to be fully playable you need 90, then you shall consider it a 90$ game and judge it as such.
@ but it’s also not fair to ignore the criticism either. There are multiple issues that we can talk about with the gaming industry until the cows come home, and I do understand that not all games were made purely for fun (for context, my first console was the Wii and I remember the shovelware that came from it, both good and bad). But they rely so heavily on micro transactions, kind of defeats the point of being able to have fun in video games. Micro transactions incentivize people to sell money for a better experience when the better experience should already be available to them.
@@sugarm1860 I spoke many times about the MMOfication of single players and it should not surprise us the RPG emulation of the skinner-box elements in the mandatory-online single-players is a trick to get people addicted to spend money to play less the bloated grindy games only to reach the good parts, which many times it's gated behind paywalls, and we see these type of things in all digital industries, not just video games. I'm thinking the "RPG" trilogy of the Assassin's Creed series or Battlefront 2 as the biggest slops in this trend.
You look at these games, you see that their assets are of good quality, yet the game is purposely made trash to rip you off.
Getting mad at a option in a game (one you don't even have to choose btw) is hella cringe and petty, sad that some people get genuinely upset at it and other diversity stuff, instead of just ignoring that it's there and enjoying the gameplay
I made the mistake of showing interest in a game and like clockwork the algorithm put a unch of grifters rage farming on my feed.
It might helps to point out that most of the time the people spouting this nonsense have not played the game.
Oh yeah definitely. I remember when Grummz tried to spearhead a crusade against Monster Hunter Wilds and the community just went "bro, we're here to hunt monsters, not stare at tits and ass."
There's this cutscene in God Eater Resurrection, I believe it's where you meet Soma for the first time and there's another God Eater there who starts bragging about his skill to you before he's immediately eaten by an Ogretail. That's Grummz basically, he's the God Eater so full of himself that his plot in the story is to get eaten by one of the least deadliest enemies in the game
Good video with great depth and quality. You need the subs.
Is it weird how i haven’t seen many lefty’s with over 1,000,000 subs just a few years after they started yet right wingers get launched into the homepage very quickly?
Culture vulture NPCs: Games aren't edgy enough anymore!
[ Mullet MadJack has entered the server]
If I recall, none of these content creators tried to make gamer gate 2.0. The only claim of that was by news outlets or but correct me if I’m wrong.
Don't like to admit it as right leaning person but liberals/progressives are just better at making roleplaying games, look at Disco Elysium, a Roleplaying game so good it created it's own mini rpg subgenre of point and click RPGs(a few examples of this subgenre are Citizen Sleeper, Saturn and I think Encased), and it was made by self proclaimed Marxists, or Baldurs Gate 3, a Roleplaying game so good even the most staunch anti woke person on YT, synthetic man(don't agree with his politics, he takes things too far), had to admit that the game is good despite being woke in his view.
So Ig that's why I try to watch "woke" video game essayists, helps keep the mind open, because I was proven wrong in my biases before when I thought only anti woke people can make good games and video game essays 😅
I don't see how BG3 is woke.
There's also Josh Sawyer, who was the director of Fallout: New Vegas. A very prominent progressive in the video game space.
I wouldn't inherently be against watching right-leaning video essays, as long as they were open about it and interesting. Outside of the gaming world, the main news source I read is the Financial Times. A paper that is the organ for big business! The problem I find is that the arguments of TH-cam often fall into "woke", which doesn't really have an analysis and they can't spot what is "woke". Or if they do, it gets very stale and the same point is repeated over and over again.
You need a Milton Friedman or Warren Buffet who likes video games and video essays. There's so much stuff to discuss in video games like natural selection theories, how capitalism has progressed society or anything like that. I can't believe I'm giving you lot ideas 😂 but it would be a richer discussion if there was less outrage and more nuance to the intersection of politics and video games.
Of course it all boils down to power and manipulation
the ones that tried to push gamergate, like asmongold, andy and pronouns guy make so many leaps in logic that I questioned reality, like sweet baby inc was controlling all those gigantic corporations to push a woke agenda (wtf) and they ignored how they also worked on amazing games like god ragnarok, or how andy claims to have talked with ubisoft developpers, that agree with everything he wanted, no he didn't, he barely has 100k subs. Made learn that people will believe everything they want to believe despite how stupid it is
Fun fact: Grifters are now PRAISING Monster Hunter Wilds despite trying to launch a crusade against it for being woke (which failed because the community tore Grummz apart which led to his pathetic attempt at trying to look like a fan).
During the pandemic, I watched a lot of these guys, but I've grown to hate them in recent years because they're only interested in satisfying their own desires.
Funnily enough too, people like Grummz and Az, were it not for this movement, would be lolcows. Az is a narcissist who hates criticism (as shown with his obsession with ActMan) and will stroke his own ego for being "proven right" years later. Grummz meanwhile has not only scammed people, but was also outed not too long ago for being a fan of Lolicon. I believe there's more but talking about Grummz actually gives me a headache with how much of a troglodyte he is
Incredibly well done video, your arguments are super well expressed
My youtube feed is a fucking minefield my guy its 2016 again
I'm sorry to Andy, but his precious New Vegas is woke as all heck.
Not only are two of the party members gay, Cass is bi, and the player can take perks that specificly make you gay/bi. Caesar really enjoys having the homosexual Arcade as his male "company", and Red Lucy will sleep with the MC no matter what they are.
The entire premise of the Fallout franchise is how the unregulated capitalism and imperialism of the early 1900's led to a dystopia even before the bombs dropped. Look at the various entries in computers and newspapers in the lore: they paint a very bad picture of the USA in that conservative-bent timeline. The nuclear war became inevitable because of this.
And let's not forget all the obvious anti-war and anti-patriotism messages; frequently painting the US government, the Enclave, as the bad guys over and over again. To be fair you can work with the remains of the Enclave in New Vegas, but they're so defeated and demoralized that they'll just attack whichever side you point at, and the entire remnants can fit into a single vertiberd.
And then there's the whole social commentary that takes place with how ghouls are treated in the rest of the Fallout games, and how accepted they've come to be in the lands of New Vegas.
If it was being made today, Sweet Baby Inc could look at New Vegas and go "hey guys, maybe tone some of this progressive stuff down". But I guess people like Andy lack media literacy to understand these things. Maybe if every suit of power armor came with a pride flag color scheme by default, they MIGHT get the hint.
to the best of my knowledge the only complaint I ever saw that is even plausible to throw it. Anita is not understanding that in the hitman level where you can illuminate adult dancers, you actually get punished for doing so, but I don’t even know if that argument is 100% legitimate. I used to think her tags were stupid now I just don’t care.
I’m right wing, but I don’t watch any of these guys because it’s so boring and repetitive and whiny. It’s a constant narrative of “oooooh we’re soooo suppressed, gaming is dead!” And then a quick walk back when we get a good game. Then when another game has a gay pride flag, it’s back to doom and gloom.
All I wanted was to hear about video games! These guys became the exact thing they fought against, all to make a quick buck.
I'm ALMOST certain Andypants is 100% selfaware that his videos are bullshit and he does it as a troll, but also to make money. So TRULY a grifter through and through lmao
heelvsbabyface starfield rant remix goes hard 😂😂😂
Councel of geeks is a good one
I think Az should be forever cancelled he looks like Heavy from TF2
Great music edit at the start
Can someone explain to me gamergate
It's a movement that took place in the middle of the last decade. Its premise at first was fair and one could argue politically neutral: to make gaming journalism feel more professional, since for years companies had been feeding money to these media outlets to inflate their review scores. However, extreme conservatives quickly took over the movement and used it to harass those same journalists over feminism and minorities, which at first had nothing to do with the movement but quickly became the main talking point. And after journalists came everyone else, there's a good reason "I'm a gamer because I hate women and minorities" became such a widespread meme, and it all has its roots here. Of course, when people talk about reviving Gamergate they talk about this latter version about harassment, queerphobia and the likes, those original talking points about fair journalism not swayed by companies have been long lost.
Girl dev slept around with an amount of journos for exposure.
One guy on twitter made a joke about it by calling it "Gamergate"
Games Press tried to sent the message they do have integrity, but they forgot about their access journalism.
People started to react on it by memes and journo got angry by making articles about it.
In the end, trust in game journalism is gone.
@@Wesmoen Correction, she was accused of doing that by an ex boyfriend. The Journalist she supposedly slept with for positive reviews did not meet her till at least 2 months after the review, and he was reviewing a free game.
I am a creator trying to talk about games with a left leaning perspective. My first gaming video is currently in production 🎉
None of this could even be claimed to be DEI if developers would just make videogames and not these god awful "interactive movies" that seem to be the norm now in western gaming. Any trollbot that tries to claim Zelda or Elden Ring is "woke" doesn't get any traction.
I dunno I kinda like it when my games have a stronger element to story in it but I do think the gameplay needs to have more interactive fun to it.
Sorry, games are woke because they're cinematic now?
I make videos about a soviet city builder Workers and Resources : Soviet Republic. Does that count? I try and express my politics in a less direct manner on the TH-cam thru that.
"Failed" resurrection?
Sir, I'm afraid they never went away, and if anything they ended up winning, looking at either the political developments since 2014, how they dominate the discussion around gaming, or how companies have started changing their stances.
And it doesn't help how 2024 gave us massive fumbles such as Veilguard and its horrendous writing, Dustborn's whatever-that-was which may have been an indie but also looked like an unironic version of a parody of "woke" games you would see on 4Chan, and Concord, which is mostly a failure of Sony's idiotic capitalistic gamble toward GaaS, but also featured some frankly bizarre and awful character design that lent themselves naturally to ridicule.
It was just a very easy year to push their message, the universe kept giving those people free wins, but it wasn't just the universe.
And look, I agree with you here. The vast majority of "anti-woke" youtubers are either grifters or legitimate political fanatics who see communists in every shadow or in every female character with a realistic design who looks like might have a slightly larger chin in a single peculiar frame of a CGI video, not even in-game footage. However, I don't think it's easy to just chalk up their popularity to the algorithm brainwashing mindless viewers, the algorithm feeds on controversy but their side of the controversy is supported by a lot of people because a lot of people feel like they're making the most sense to them, for good or bad. And it's not because gamers are mostly backward morons either, I'm afraid, because things didn't use to be this bad literally decades ago.
Personally, I think this has a lot to do with how the leftist side has, honestly, done a bunch of really stupid things over the years that gave these people a lot of ammo and a very easy time, even when they had their own debacles like pronoun-guy going ballistic over the mildest use of pronouns in the most natural place you could find them, when you're making your character in a (rather piss-poor) RPG.
For instance, we have seen the leftist side, sometimes unwillingly, but sometimes also willingly, taking the side of corporations in the recent years when those greedy bastards thought the money was into supporting progressivism. A very cynical and shallow kind of progressivism of course, but the chuds then started attacking Disney and others and so a bunch of leftists felt it was a good idea to take the billionaires' side. Bad choice, it gave those youtubers the angle to argue that they were fighting against big money and painted progressivism as a force backed by corporations, which we know was always a cynical, partial act on their part.
Also, staying on the topic of corporate greed, the perception that gaming is being harmed by corporate politics is very prevalent, and that's because it's true. Corporate greed is harming creativity, it's producing safe products, and it's not a woke conspiracy, it's pig-headed commercial policies by CEOs who are thinking about the safest way to money in an industry where making money has become difficult because of previous, also greedy politics, by those same CEOs. When those youtubers talk about gaming is losing its edge, at least as far as triple A goes, they're saying something that rings true, and then they redirect it against the wrong target. But even then, the argument appears convincing to people because it starts from a convincing argument that reflects what people are seeing and thinking (and also, there's a kernel of truth in those arguments, I'm afraid to say. It might be just 10% of the whole issue, not 100% as those people are telling you, but one of the factors that led to less daring and family-friendly games is also the desire to not cause any controversy when a lot of money is on the line, and it used to be that the controversy makers once were on the left many years ago).
Another thing that I think strongly influenced things in favour of Gamergate, and helped them gaining the quiet, occasional support of a lot otherwise not politicized at all people, was the fact that progressive talking points in gaming spaces in the 2012 to 2016 were just very toxic, I'm going to be real.
Sarkeesian's brand of feminism surely fell under excessive scrutiny and caused was more controversy than what it was worth, but it's not like it was great academic or critical content either, reactionary outrage aside there were legitimate things to be critical about. At the same time, the attitude of the gaming press at the time took on a rather sanctimonious and frankly backward stance toward certain forms of artistic expression, and I'm mostly thinking of how games like Dragon's Crown were treated. Dragon's Crown was made by Vanillaware, a Japanese studio that makes stunning 2D artworks, but for Dragon's Crown they also made their game very based on pulp Western Fantasy and Sword and Sorcery kind of designs. That's to say that it was a game with very exaggerated characters, from male warriors whose torso was the size of a wardrobe, to a practically naked muscle-bound dwarf, to a sorcerer with massive tits and an also naked Amazon warrior who boated a lot of musculature and also bikini armour and a lot of ass. It was a great game, it was splendidly illustrated and horny, and it was thrown into the mud for it by some puritanical-minded sect of the progressive movement at the time, led by very big names such as Jason Schreier. This is merely one example out of many, because the rather rabid anti-sexualization, prudish attitude from that segment of the left at the time ended up targeting a lot of other games like Bayonetta 2, and as a whole pushed the industry toward more prudish behaviour, which was extremely unpopular and, frankly, fundamentally backward and anti-artistic. That's how the "anti-woke" youtubers got their crusade for beautiful women in video games, because back in the day it was a leftist attitude to rail against that stuff, and it just never really worked out. It became exceedingly easy for the left to be marked as censorious and those people as fighting for artistic freedom, which is a rather popular position, even if the anti-woke youtubers are definitely disingenuous on that.
I mean, The Act Man shows up at some point here as one of the guys that got targeted by the grifters because he allegedly was a secret communist, but back in the day he himself had videos on "feminists and SJWs vs Videogames", and I don't think it's because he had any change of heart over the years. Act Man has always been fairly reasonable, and he used to criticize certain takes that weren't very good from the left back in the day, while also being able to tell that what the right-wing is spewing nowadays is complete nonsense born out of promoting paranoia in their audience.
And so it's kinda unsurprising that these outrage-based youtubers have a lot of success with people, because a lot of their starting points sound true to people and reference legitimate reasons with censorious attitudes and anti-corporate attitudes, only to then move it back to a reactionary, "anti-woke" place, kinda missing the point of what the real issues at the heart of gaming is, which is all due to corporate greed.
I think that, until we realize and understand what's leading so many people to listen to these people, instead of just yelling at them for listening to grifters, and start to address what's making the right-wing message to successful and counter it appropriately, Gamergate is not going to be in need of resurrecting any time soon.
This kind of direct critique to the movement, while presenting a lot of good point, unfortunately is ineffective in my opinion. It just results in people entrenching their opinions more rather than think on the flaws behind their reasoning. If one wants to dismantle the series of arguments that the current anti-wokies employs one must disarm them by proving you're not on the side of corporations, you're not on the side of censorious attitudes or trying to moralize your audience, and you gotta tone down the pseudo-academic talk because that shit is noxious nowadays. The whole way of treating subjects and the language needs to change, and some ideas seriously needs to be dropped. The left back in 2014 gave away the counter-culture to the right out of their own volition, and that really was a disabling blow to the online left that it never recovered.
yeah too bad everyone thinks being *stupid* means you're *losing*. No, that's not how it works and that's never how it worked. The right has consistently provided a feeling of safety and security to those who want to join the circlejerk. The left isn't populist in nature, it gathers around and circlejerks over how silly the right-wingers are all being. Then they feel as if they're winning, when they're not.
It's nice to see just one person see through this pathetic charade, but yeah im pretty sure no one else is reading all that
I curate my youtube subscriptions very carefully and also still get this bigotted crap :(
0:07 damn what happened to mr clean?
Great video Joe, nice work
Commenting for the algorithm
I was fortunate enough to be to occupied by moving house when gamer gate was going on
I believe I was a kid when all of that was going on. I didn't even have a phone until I was an 8th grader
Hello Joe, have you seen this one?
Game Design in the Shadow of Genocide | Rasheed Abueideh
Palestine Deep Dive
I will put it on the watchlist!
I'm gonna be a bit doomer here I guess, but I don't think there is a way to fight the spread of this content. Not so long as the tech industry is embracing it. It was already hard to fight it before, but now that tech bros are going to be licking Trump's boots it's going to be quite impossible - The internet is going to be the domain of right-wing extremists. Besides, stirring up anger and hate is so much easier than trying to get people to be empathetic. There's really very little to be done, other than hope people eventually get tired of outrage content. It's really up to these people themselves to just stop being hateful.
My stance is boycott everything when the lore consistentcy, if the devs attack customers, or hypes a game up and it turns out crap I boycotted Bethesda except Doom Titles they ruined Wolfenstein, and Quake is dead so Doom it is.
I like how you named the exact game that, aside from not being crap, has everything you just complained about, that's funnny.
To me, the US has always been a bane to video games (everything really) as much as the corporate side as the "player base". Pretty sure 99% of the misguided negativity comes from there, it always create more problems than solutions and it's a pain to discuss/reason with.
I think that most American talents will always be sabotaged in a way or an other as they have been for decades now.
Japan has always been the strongest in the industry except during the 7th gen, followed by Europe
Otherwise, I'm over-saturated with great games, since I play almost every genre, for me to complain!
On another note, I recommend to you "Mortismal Gaming". I think he is a great reviewer who simply loves video games and couldn't care less about the "drama".
I feel embarrassed? for falling For that, TH-camrs, BS clarify, I’m talking about The TH-camr throwing a fit about pronouns not this TH-camr
Are your chosen pronouns not used in modern RPGs so that the NPCs know how to refer to you custom character during conversations?
If not, the speech is even more wooden. They're not going to say your custom name, so all they have is pronouns.