It's usually done as a strategy to try to fit in, to be "one of the good ones," or sometimes just self loathing given a signal boost by chuds in the same community.
It's saddening how many people, especially trans people, call themselves d-word-popularized-by-nazis, for example. Or marginalized ethnic group members that use the very slurs that are used to justify putting people like them into camps.
It's fucked up, but I am often at a loss for how to reach those people, or if such a thing is even possible. :doomer:
EDIT: It seems this is important enough to :freeze-gamer: that alt accounts must be mustered to rage at me about it. :jokah-messy:
"D-generate play" has been in use in the board game community for a long time. It means not playing the game according to the designer's intent, but attempting to exploit the rules for the sake of ruining the game for everyone else. Here's a good thread about it. Most people probably became aware of the term from Magic: The Gathering in the 90s. For example, a "d-generate deck" consisting of nothing but mountains and lightning bolts. The term was adopted from mathematics where it means "mathematically simpler", as in a d-generate parabola. Or the matter inside a neutron star is d-generate matter, atoms stripped of their electrons.
yeah this larger discussion has big "the word 'robot' comes from some language's word for slave" energy for me.
why are we ultra enough for removed but not for robot? it's not an active part of my vocabulary since i don't do math anymore, so whatever, but it seems really arbitrary. I've seen libs go after "lame" that wouldn't know about d*gen
The word robot comes from a very explicitly socialist Czech play. It wasn't meant in earnest to denigrate anyone, and the word means something more like serf than slave. It can also mean exhausting, hard labor. It's a good play too, where the robots eventually revolt and overthrow mankind for enslaving them.
I'd more closely compare d*gen to how reactionaries use words like savage, or r-t-rd, or any other ableist terms
That's interesting. I certainly didn't know the math origin of that term.
I definitely didn't think it was invented in the FGC, but I know that it's no coincidence that it's spike in use runs parallel to actual reactionaries using it to describe trans people in particular.
This was always my understanding of the term, as well, and it's the only context in which I continue to use the word. I casually understand "d-generate gameplay" as something that circumvents the game's mechanics, producing strong, simplified play, that's also significantly less fun / more annoying.