Over on Return of Kings, one brave gamer dares to ask the question of our age: What will the world look like after the inevitable triumph of GamerGate?
I know, I know, just humor him for a few minutes. Because he has a rather, well, revealing notion of what triumph will look like, and it’s not one that’s compatible with the #NotYourShield propaganda that GamerGaters use to disguise its retrograde goals. Greendestiny, a veteran of TheRedPill and KotakuInAction on Reddit, sees in the video game “war” a new opportunity for gamebros to become Game Men:
It is my personal belief that, after GamerGate, video games will evolve to become a tool for raising a new generation of men. Our current education system fails horribly at providing real information on how the world works, what motivates people, and how to get laid.
Our education system is a disaster! Can you believe that not one college in the United States offers a major in Getlaidology?
More importantly, it pussifies men and turns them into starry-eyed believers in the Disney variety of life and love.
Huh. You know, there’s a cultural critic who’s made some interesting videos challenging the sexist tropes you can find in Disney movies and elsewhere in popular culture. Her name is Anita Sarkee… oh wait. Never mind.
The entire concept of sitting quietly and reading is meant for girls. Boys need the fight, the challenge, competition, and a test of their strength.
So why exactly are you trying to convince guys of this in a post you expect them to sit down and read? Shouldn’t your blog post be a video game or an arm-wrestling contest or something?
Games were always learning tools. Now they can become a tool for learning greater masculinity.
If by masculinity you mean “the proper sequence of buttons to push that will enable you to pull off an awesome combo.”
To become real men, boys must overcome challenges and find the true strength in themselves. Whether this is done in a virtual or real arena is irrelevant. By creating games that are consciously aimed at presenting a proper challenge, we can collectively make the world a better place for the next generation of men. And possibly help them get laid more.
“Hey, babe, I bet you didn’t know you were sitting next to a Level 90 Fire Mage.”
But seriously for a second: Yes, video games do teach gamers certain skills, and even something about the value of persistence. But why are the skills involved in, say, shooting dudes with maximum efficiency in Call of Duty any more intrinsically valuable, or “masculine,” than the skills involved in doing this?
They think games teach them about “reality”? *rolls eyes*
Playing games doesn’t make them sexist or violent, because they’re supposedly intelligent enough to know the difference between fiction and real life, but they are literally looking for a didactic message in games which contain sexism or violence, and believe that being masculine is about being sexist and violent.
These guys do not deserve video games. They do not deserve a place in higher education. They do not deserve to socialise with other humans, especially women. Under the bridges with them!
@Lea: Somehow I escaped that whole looming shadow. Maybe I just have a remarkable capacity to insulate myself from existential threats.
It probably helps that I’ve never seen Three Days Later.
@seraph:
For some reason your comment just made me think of a cat pretending to be a dragon.
“I iz fires. I iz… DEATH!”
http://enterthelaughter.com/images/cat-dressed-like-green-dragon.jpg
Also, the cat in my avatar is named Dracarys. That means dragon fire.
Kitty-Dragon! I can totally imagine that being a thing. A wonderful wonderful thing:
“Here dragon, dragon, dragon! Brrrrrrrrrrrip! Here dragon, dragon, dragon! Who’s a cute kitty-dragon? YOU ARE!”
Never have I wanted animals named like the ones in Avatar to be real, so badly.
Okay, I’ll admit I’ve wanted a turtleduck ever since I first saw them, but Kitty-Dragon!
Honestly, these children are just driving home the fact that they need to be grounded without toys sometime.
A few moments of quiet introspection without video games or posting misogynistic rants.
But then they still haven’t outgrown the rebellious teen phase, and would take the wrong lesson.
Hey, you know who else is really big on dating education?
http://sonichu.com/cwcki/Dating_education
Learning how to score from vidja is a mind-bendingly stupid idea. Like if you have trouble relating to people or whatever and they help you, that’s cool, you’re using your environment in a constructive way. But manufacturing games for the purpose of teaching that is lame and stupid. Go look at some Putt Putt rule 34, idek.
Hi -I’m old enough to remember the Cuba Missile crisis – I was only in 1st grade at the time but I remember watching the news and seeing film of the ships on TV – and the sense that everybody was afraid …all the time. While that did fade – it never really went away –
I always felt it marked folks -afterwards we were all a bit broken inside by the cold war – not PTSD but the effect was there – which would get trigged from time to time by things like the Reagan administrations loose talk about winnable nuclear war – which did inspire Jonathan Schell to write Fate of the Earth. And the TTAPs Study which ushered the idea of nuclear winter into the conversation which did lead to even the counties leaders understanding just what sort of utter disaster they were playing with. looking back I’d say we dodged a bullet and not by much –
ikanreed
“Honestly, these children are just driving home the fact that they need to be grounded without toys sometime.”
That’s an insult to children
Isn’t that pretty much Toothless in a nutshell?
I agree with most of your comment but have to pick at this bit.
Despite what Reefer Madness may have attempted to tell us, there is in fact a safe dosage of quite a few drugs that are illegal. Weed is probably less dangerous than booze, for example.
My favorite part of the current super seekrit but not really plan is the advice to archive. These guys haven’t even figured out that most sites don’t work like the chans yet.
Yeah, I was going to mention that too. Theoretically illegal drugs would be the unsafe ones. But politics.
I iz prowd to be kitty-dragon.
Other thoughts:
1) I turned 13 in 1989, so I was fairly young at the tail end of the Cold War. Maybe that’s why I never really experienced the existential terror that some of y’all did? (Or maybe not. After all, some of you tell stories of feeling that fear very young, and I understand a lot of people were convinced that Reagan was going to be the one to push the button.) For me, the Cold War is just a memory of spy and conspiracy thrillers that had a lot more to work with than they do today.
As for nukes…honestly…I know that the world is objectively better in a lot of ways, and the fact that the fingers aren’t on the triggers anymore is one of them, but I must confess that there are days when a cleansing fire from the skies sounds like a good idea.
2) In all seriousness, most colleges in the United States offer classes in Getlaidology. It’s not on the official syllabus, but do y’all remember First Year? Everyone is out from under their parents’ watchful eye for the first time, in a place where the Authority Figures don’t give a shit what they do with their happy bits as long as it’s not in public and everyone involved agrees to it. Most folks are in the best physical shape they ever will be again (certainly better than they will be after four years of testing their limits of alcohol and sleeplessness). Everyone’s hormones are still at that teenage high tide. Everyone is spending these late nights together in the lounges or the study carrels or just walking the campus. Everything is so intense. Everyone is eager to explore new things. In this atmosphere, it is not hard to find someone to get naked with you. Lots of college students, especially in the early days, are perfectly willing to give someone a tumble if they’re even remotely cute, or witty, or interesting in any way (though you’d better learn fast how to make it worth their while if you want repeat business).
Which is, of course, the problem. It’s not that there is no course of GetLaidology, it’s that the MRA’s and PUA’s want to cheat. They don’t want to spend until 3 AM in the lounge talking with that theatre major from down the hall. They don’t want to lie out on the Quad and look at stars with the redhead they met at Convocation. They want to look at the teacher’s answer book so they can get straight to sticking their dick into a wet hole. They don’t get that Getlaidology is all about class participation.
Hell, I was born in 1989. Everything about the red scare and commies and the cold war is completely foreign to me. 9/11 was probably the first big tragedy I was aware of, but even then it never caused me fear or anything. I was 12, for one, and for another I’m pretty sure the propaganda around 9/11 and terrorists didn’t match the propaganda around nuclear war. Or if it did, I was blissfully unaware.
@Seraph4377:
Basically, people tend to figure out the answers to the test through experience. PUAs think they already have the answers, and when those don’t work they want to change the test.
@kirbywarp:
Okay, I learned from Fade and her sister that I sometimes am patronizing and condescending, but god DAMN do we have a lot of young’uns around here and I just want to bundle them up and protect them from the world. And I can’t, both physically and ethically.
This is what it’s going to feel like in ten years or so, isn’t it, when my sprouts have friends and spend a lot of time out of the house. Not to mention go off to college in another 17 years.
@Falconer:
Pretty much, yeah. On the other hand, you get to shake your fist and yell “get off my lawn” with impunity! That could be fun.
Ages are weird… I don’t get a good sense for how old people are on the internet, so I guess I subconsciously assume everyone’s around my age. It’s always bizarre to find out someone is much older or much younger, especially YouTube personalities where I listen to them talk and then all of a sudden they’re talking about their sons and daughters.
Things get weird when the veil of anonymity is lifted, even for a little bit.
@seraph4377: We’re the same age. I remember the end of the world being a possibility, but not living in moment to moment fear. A lot of media of the 80’s had post-apocalyptic scenarios and anti-nuclear messages. Most of the times I played with Playmobile or Legos, they were in post-apocolyptic scenarios (Mostly because it was an excuse to mix the spaceships, cars and knights together).
Although to put it in perspective, I’m much more certain that Global Warming will fuck up the world than I was about nuclear war doing so. We don’t seem to be taking it half as seriously as people took nuclear weapons.
@kirbywarp:
Give us the slightest provocation and we turn into Maes Hughes from Fullmetal Alchemist.
My precious little daughter asks for The Cat in the Hat Comes Back by name, and doesn’t like the electric mixer so she asks us to turn off the motor.
My precious little son wiped his own face on his napkin at Thanksgiving dinner, and gets up in the middle of the night and comes and asks to lie in bed with me.
They don’t actually see women as full human beings. That’s why they aren’t interested in actually getting to know said women by actually talking to her about things they share a common interest in and sharing an emotional bond.
What was that thing Dale Carnagie said, “the surest way to get people interested in you is to be genuinely interested in them”?
I’m pretty shy and no master at Getlaidology, but even I know some basic things.
I think part of that is because Republicans were just beginning to lose the plot in the Eighties, while here in 2014 they’re near the end of the process. Thirty years of Rush Limbaugh and his descendants repeating over and over that liberals are your enemy and that Global Warming is a lie they are telling you will have its effect.
Even if that weren’t the case, nukes are very vivid and immediate. Button presses – Whoomf! – world burns. This is so much slower, and easier to disbelieve if that’s what you’re determined to do. I bet young ‘uns like Kirbywarp have trouble remembering that “severe” winters like last year and (according to all predictions) the one coming used to be standard.
“We’re having a winter just like the ones we used to have all the time, for the first time in ten years! Global warming is a hoax! Even though Australia is having an unprecedented heat wave right now!”
@Seraph4377:
Aaaactually, I grew up in New Hampshire, and I remember how fun the big snow storms and blizzards were up there as a kid. As tall as I was, there were times where the snow piled up waist deep. I also remember when snow used to start falling in November, instead of January.
I’ve gotten the distinct impression that those snow storms are rarer, and that the snow arrives much later, as I’ve grown up. As someone who loves huge snow storms, it’s been quite sad.
Granted that I’m in California, but it just got cold here about a week ago (cold as in under 50 degrees at night), and it’s December. When I first got here about 15 years ago it was get your coat out weather by October unless you were pretty far inland, and today I was actually too warm in just a sweater and jeans earlier in the day.
Only if you’re white.