Permanently Deleted

    • VernetheJules [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I didn't reach fascism but I stuck around for a while because I was a privileged kid who really only had videogames in my life.

      "Why the hell were these sjw's so bothered by this? Literally all I did was exist and somehow everything is my fault?"

      Is what I would tell myself. Basically with no knowledge of how to separate myself from these critiques I really felt like I was being told to internalize those criticisms, and I rejected that. I knew not to be shitty towards women, so what harm was it if I I played these games? To me it felt like the "videogames cause violence" panic.

      After a while I started to realize something felt off and my mind opened up a bit. For one thing, it was seeing brazenly transphobic rhetoric that gave me an "are we the baddies" vibe. Like it never made sense to me why people could be so shitty to trans people, when trans people just wanted to go about their lives.

      Anyways It took a few years of being around women more and listening in to their discussions (also there were some good Reddit posts, like one that explained toxic masculinity did not mean all men are inherently bad) which got me to realize GG was this giant self-sustaining bastion of ignorance that I had naturally taken to.

    • Awoo [she/her]
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      edit-2
      3 years ago

      "Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" is not just a fun saying. It accurately describes a phenomenon that shows time and again that the smallest things they disagree on can send them hurtling to the far right.

      Doesn't help that there was almost no left at all back then and spaces like reddit were entirely controlled by libertarian-bros.

    • 5bicycles [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Like, what? A normal person who didn’t like what they were hearing would simply ignore Anita Sarkesian and go back to playing COD (a loser move, but better than being a nazi)

      I mean, many did. At least at the time. It's not like even back then video games were still nerd shit, every dudebro in the country hopped on CoD every day to do sick 360 noscopes. And they didn't care about this shit, because they were neither interested in video game discourse nor terminally online. And the gamers back then fucking hated CoD, it was this intermediate period between CoD being for gamer nerds, because only they play video games, between gaming becoming mainstream enough that CoD gets talked about again en masse, where no self-respecting gamer would admit to touching the stuff.