Gamer’s traditionally have less political sophistication than a dead dog. Recent highly visible gamer moves have included review bombing Helldivers, screaming about not being able to see both labia t the same time in Stellar Blade, and whatever that Sweet Baby/DEI thing I haven’t bothered to look at is. Idk what the scale of this roblox bs is, but i am interested in the phenomena of game rage campaigns where they get extremely self righteously mad over strange, often trivial shit and make it their entire life for a few days. Wtf is happening? Is this echoes of gamegate a decade later?

  • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    This isn’t gamergate. This is just the results of a stupid reactionary country with no restriction on play time. If your parents told you communism no money, what happens when you get less in game money? Communism. What’s funny is that they’re protesting fictional wages while accepting the free child labor being used by the studios

  • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    Smells like a mixture of stupidity and capitalist grooming to me.

    Roblox is all kinds of fucked up child labour bullshit. I really worry about gen alpha. They are being conditioned to accept the most dystopian shit.

    I wonder how much of this type of thing is astroterfed by feds?

  • Rojo27 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    I feel like gamergate left a permanent stain on the gaming community as a whole. I wasn’t really online enough to have followed gamergate all that closely when it was happening, but in the aftermath it always felt like it only ever cooled down to the point where the sentiments were boiling just below the surface.

    Now, at a time when reactionary forces are constantly bombarding people crying about how wokeness is destroying America gamers are falling for the propaganda. They’re mad at the games industry for all the wrong reasons. I wouldn’t be shocked if some of the people within studios are the ones that help stir this shit up. Like wasn’t the person that created the Stellar Blade petition some sexpest formerly from Bethesda or something like that? Of course the long term effects are the creation of a new generation of reactionaries and its sad to see.

    • SaniFlush [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      Propaganda isn’t something people “fall for”, it’s something people seek out deliberately because it agrees with what they already think. The only thing which will change their minds is a lived experience which teaches them otherwise.

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        I like that redsails article, but in the context of children – and this is roblox – propaganda is absolutely something people fall for

        • MayoPete [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          2 months ago

          Same… I mean if this stuff didn’t work the right would not spend literally billions of dollars on it. The propaganda is everywhere at all times. Makes me jealous of the people living ad-free in Pyongyang.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      2 months ago

      I think Gamergate and the Alt-Right could be analyzed as the right figuring out how to mobilize masses of people using new communications technologies. Back in the day I was playing a large scale MMO where one of the factions was almost entirely guys who, in retrospect, were very obviously the petri dishes from which the Alt-Right spawned. In that sense your “stain” theory checks out - After that the new awareness that online gate campaigns could cause significant disruption and gain a lot of attention spread and we’ve seen a bunch of smaller campaigns happen.

    • let_me_tank_her [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      I think the Stellar Blade guy is an ex-Blizzard dev that was too creepy for even them and got fired before all the terrible shit went public. Wouldn’t be surprised if he was the one that was stealing breast milk.

    • Dessa [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      Even thr dev specifically encouraged it.

      Lil background for the uninitiated: Sny tried to force freeze-gamers to sign up to their service to continue playing a game theyd already been playing for months. Besides the annoyance to US gamers, in dozens of nations, that service doesn’t even exist, so many players were simply locked out of the game for no reason.

      Sony relented after huge negative press and a returns campaign

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    The Roblox one reads like a psyop. Smells the same as the Animal Crossing “protests” that were performed to attack China over Hong Kong.

    I can specifically imagine people in a meeting room discussing around a table where they can find kids early on in order to target them with anti-communism before the communists get to them. Inoculation is a major aspect of western anti-communist strategy, they aim to make people close their minds to it before they encounter it, same shit with the “tankie” campaign.

  • Huldra [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    As described, this sounds like whining that pure seniority and investment is trumped by actually being good at the game, truly idiotic to conflate with “communism” even in the already idiotic minds of the average gamer.

    And also even dumber than that, this literally is objectively good for the players of the game, removing arbitrary time gating from higher reward tiers would give you more freedom as a player to try other things, or just play other games aside from this.

    • Huldra [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      You basically make simplified games within the game engine/framework of roblox, then you can monetize it, so this described nonsense is confined to the roblox “place” “Welcome to Bloxburg”, some kind of life sim shit.

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          2 months ago

          Excluding when I was little and life sims let me do things I couldn’t in real life, the only time I’ve ever liked a life sim was “The friends of ringo ishikawa”, and that was for making me appreciate how much better it would be to try doing the productive activities depicted rather than waste time grinding for fake skills

  • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    Games that are woke that didn’t go broke so a good portion of it is a campaign to make them “go broke” to keep the slogan alive. If the anti woke campaign didn’t work, then they start going after other wedge issues like Discord drama and attacking individual members of the studios in an attempt to “cancel” them.

    At least that is what I’ve infered from the Helldivers bull. Now SONY and geopolitics are one thing, but the geopolitics actual reason conflicts with support of anti-woke policies and politicians so it gets dimissed because both chuds and liberals tactically agree on hawkish foriegn policy. Same reason chuds and liberals never want to discuss foreign policy when the border topic gets brought up.

    It’s a stink tank way of reaching the under 40’s. freedom-and-democracy