Over on Roosh V’s endearingly clueless gaming site Reaxxion, a self-described Red Piller named Mike Caputo is still mad at writer and experimental game developer Devin Wilson for suggesting, in a Gamasutra blog post last August, that video games aspire to be more than just “fun.”
This wouldn’t seem to be a particularly radical notion. I mean, “fun” is not the only thing that we humans expect to get out of art. Not every book I read is “fun.” Not every movie I watch is “fun.” Art is often challenging and even unpleasant. And aren’t #GamerGaters always telling us that video games are art? That they’re more meaningful than a game of Skee-ball?
Well, apparently not to Caputo, who thinks that trying to make video games anything other than fun is the equivalent of trying to bring back the Soviet Union.
Evidently unable to believe that gamers might be able to handle video games that are anything other than plain old fun, he warns readers that
video games will no longer exist as a medium in which to promote social good if they are not fun: no matter how well-designed for this purpose, their “healing” powers will go to waste because no one will play them.
And this makes him think of COMMUNISM. Because making video games that aspire to be more than “fun” is basically the same thing as making tractors that don’t work.
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, it was littered with things like factories producing farm equipment that was worth less than its component parts, because not only did the end product not work, but the cost of salvaging the components was too high to be economical. This will be the result if we allow feminists and other peddlers of academic sanctimony to continue to interfere with the video game marketplace and turn it into a PC haven.
By “PC” I’m pretty sure he means “politically correct” and not “personal computer,” because all truly manly gamers know that PC Gamers are the “master race.”
Caputo warns his readers that the evil feminaziscommies are actually worse than the real commies. The Soviets, after all, weren’t deliberately trying to make tractors that didn’t work. But feminists are trying to bring down gaming on purpose.
[T]he feminist campaign to destroy gaming is just one piece of a larger strategy to eliminate or co-opt masculinity in all its forms. Video games are one of the few media that cater more to male than female entertainment preferences: they are dominated by games involving sports, war, and fighting, and often contain images of the female body that appeal to male sexuality.
It’s true. Outside of video games, images of sexy ladies are pretty much impossible to find. And sports? Just try to find that on television or in any of the gigantic stadiums and ball parks that dot virtually every largish city in America.
It’s time, Caputo cries, to “man the battlements.”
If you imagine the world of entertainment or leisure generally as a map, video games are one of the few geographic regions where boys are still allowed to be boys, and this is simply not tolerable to feminists. They look at that territory and see a dark black stain on the pink-tinted expanse of modern culture. Feminine sensibilities and political correctness dominate the traditional media, Hollywood, academia, and publishing, while video games serve a niche market that, though large in absolute numbers, impacts a far smaller percentage of the population than other media. In other words, they have us surrounded.
But all is not lost! The only reason the evil femmies seem to be winning now is because
we haven’t been fighting back. Men have spent 50 years meekly retreating, conceding cultural territory, and even defecting to the other side. It has taken a blatant, undisguised assault on some of the least-threatening members of the male population, people who mostly just want to enjoy their hobby in peace.
Apparently, enjoying a hobby in peace involves making lots of rape jokes and sending out death threats.
Caputo’s solution? Be a manly man and don’t listen to those devious wimmenz.
The answer is to become a man in the traditional sense: self-sufficient, productive, ambitious, knowledgeable about the world you live in, and resistant to female emotional manipulation.
La la la I can’t hear you, ladies!
Women who understand the benefits they get from living in a masculine environment will do what the majority of women do best: follow and support you, or get out of your way. The rest, alone, bitter, and without any offspring to indoctrinate as future feminists, will join their ideological fellow-travelers in the dustbin of history.
Huh. You know who else liked to talk about his opponents being tossed into the “dustbin of history?”
This dude.
H/T — Responds_to_Woosh on r/againstmensrights
It’s funny how all these pro-capitalists tout the power of the invisible hand of the market but then hate the invisible hand of the market when it doesn’t give them what they want. Get over it, dudebro, that’s capitalism!
The last computer game I played was Galaxians (gave up; too difficult) so I feel really left out of all this.
That’s it, exactly. I used to lurk at a forum for Rules Girls, which was its own special brand of horror. Lots of members were pretty wack, but there were a fair number of smart, funny women there who didn’t want to manipulate men or gold-dig or revert to some weird paleofantasy about gender relations — they were just lonely and frustrated and having a terrible time meeting guys. If you are feeling alone and hopeless, it’s very tempting to buy into any system that says “Do A, B, and C, and you will be guaranteed to get exactly what you want.” It’s the same dynamic that makes people give money to weight loss scams and buy business-guru stuff.
I’m sure a lot of the guys who initially check out the “game” stuff are just shy, lonely, insecure people who want to meet girlfriends (or at least someone who wants to sleep with them). There’s nothing horrible or off-putting about them that makes them bad partners, but they’re having a hard time finding someone. It’s just that any of the decent ones who read that Roosh crap are going to run like hell, leaving the crazy dregs behind.
I should have said “scummy dregs” rather than “crazy.”
Karl Winterling:
Hmm, interesting.
Of course, the MRA movement isn’t the first movement in which disaffected ex-Trotskyites have played a founding role. Neoconservatism is the most famous example. Christopher Hitchens was also a Troskyite at first, before becoming a sort of secularist-neocon.
Holy crap there have been a lot of comments since I last popped my head in last night…hold up, Teal Deer inbound!
I mentioned in a thread (I think it was Anita Sarkeesian one) about a guy who got pissy because a canon lesbian (Sera) rejected his male inquisitor character, then went off about how he got rejected by a “thing” when another person pointed out that Sera was indeed, a canon lesbian.
And, yeah, I’ve seen so many fucking comments about Bioware being full of “SJWs” and how they were “pandering” because some of their characters are queer and how they talk about things other than killing and war and women wanting to give out free blowjobs to the main character and shiz. Same shit, different day.
I’m sure it isn’t. I mean, asking someone with so much privilege to empathize with people who aren’t like him is just the most terrible thing we could possibly do! So much so, that it makes us…*gasp*…communists! [/sarcasm]
QFT.
QFT too!
I love the horror genre. If a game is too scary for me to play, I’ll love it all the more. I love games that make me clutch my controller with a death grip, games that make me whimper in frightened tones begging for me to just live through this experience please oh Gods don’t let the thing chasing me FIND ME, and games where I eventually sit the player character in a corner and NOPE off for a few months because holy shit the experience is INTENSE. (Amnesia: The Dark Descent, anyone?)
Of course! Because they’ve always been told that they’re the player character, and anyone who isn’t like them is an NPC. NPCs don’t get to have stories unless they relate to the player character’s story or are somehow important to advancing the player character’s story, or in some cases, the NPC doesn’t have a story unless the player character gives enough of a fuck to actually look into it.
If you’d like to know more, I’d suggest researching “The Pink Tax”. It’s not just about unnecessary gendering of products, it’s also about making sure women pay more for pretty much the exact same shit, but it’s pink and flowery because that’s what feeeemales like.
I could point out the obvious one of Gone Home, and there’s also Life is Strange, which is a new one. The devs had to take it to a few different publishers, but all of them insisted that the main character, Max, be made into a male instead of a female like she was intended to be. They eventually were lucky enough to come across SquareEnix, who didn’t insist upon that change.
GuildWars2 has been SERIOUSLY hit by the SJW menace:
If you play a Charr you are exposed to the fact that the ‘bad charr’ don’t permit females to become warriors. Depending on your creation options, you end up next to a female charr beating the crap out of some bad charr when they offer you the chance to have an ‘easy life’ cooking for them. Your fellow charr basically just attacks them in rage because her whole identity is ‘no-shit-taking warrior’.
Female charr don’t have breasts, they have six flat nipples – a deliberate game design decision because the designers went: They’re giant cats, don’t make them look like humans just to be ‘sexy’.
Historically, the Flame Legion (bad charr) lost partly because they didn’t respect females and wouldn’t let them fight, leading to them having only fifty percent of the warriors that the ‘good charr’ did.
If you play a Sylvari, it’s made obvious that all sex characteristics are cosmetic, and Sylvari don’t distinguish between male and female lovers. Sylvari are plants designed to look like people, quite deliberately – so male sylvari do storywise fall in love with male sylvari, and female with female – and no one. Ever. Comments on this. Because it’s normalised.
There are multiple relationships of varying gender mixes and no one cares.
With the Asura, Norn, and Humans, things are basically pretty much balanced out so gender isn’t very remarkable. Some male Norn talk about killing things for their wives, some male Norn talk about their wives killing trophies to get their attention.
The five ‘hero characters’ in GW2 that your PC interacts with are three women and two men. The three women are all different ‘types’ – a warrior, a scientist, and a thief.
There is plenty ‘sexy’ armour – but there are plenty of normal options, and the wardrobe system means you can swap the look and traits of anything, so no one is locked into any one choice.
The only real issue I have with that is that they’ve made the armor less revealing on charr, which is sad, because charr coat patterns and fur look stunning and I tend to wish they were more visible.
I’m sure there are various problems with GW2, but mostly, it’s a lot of fun, and the environment tends to lead to less crap-talking about gender in PvP.
@WWTH:
It’s the “many characters each with some quirk or special ability”, “oh, what quirk will we give this one?”, “I know, we’ll make this one female!”.
Because default male.
@Macho Pig:
*blink*
*blink*
Say whut?
Is that a bad caricature portrayal of an MRA or… I mean is that genuine? I can’t fit this into reality. That was just weird.
@scarlettathena:
I am lacking those but I do try to make a point of admitting when I do something stupid (I’ll admit there has been the odd occasion when I’ve been feeling crappy and unable to handle it and have just kind of pretended it didn’t happen, but usually not…).
I am very careful to be honest as much as possible, because I know that lying just bites you later. And lying to yourself more so. Worst thing a person can do, lie to themselves, you can end up doing terrible things and feeling justified.
So, you’re not MRA or MGTOW, but all women are untrustworthy and unreliable and a problem. But you don’t hate them or anything! As long as they provide you with sluttie paid sex and you don’t otherwise have to interact with them.
Also you’re unable to read the byline on the blog and determine that “David Futrelle” is, in fact, a man, and you’re unable to make moral distinctions between diametrically opposed viewpoints, and you’re very, very bad at pretending to be neutral.
At least, that’s what I got out of that rambling, incoherent mush.
We’re not going to pat you on the head and tell you oh yes, all women everywhere suck, the problem couldn’t possibly be you. Because the problem is, in fact, you. Read over what you wrote, and then ask yourself why a woman would ever voluntarily spend time with you.
In fact, I want back the five minutes that I just spent responding to your post.
“Sluttie” sounds like a dollar-store Barbie knockoff.
@Macho Pig
“You just cannot trust women. That is all. They are not pure evil but they are not reliable. As long as you stand as a hookers client you avoid all the problems and get all the benefits.”
So, you can’t trust women but you can trust female prostitutes? How does that work, aren’t they women? Why wouldn’t a prostitute doublecross you just as easily as any other woman?
If you’re afraid a woman will cheat on you, how is a prostitute with multiple clients any better?
How do you get all the benefits of a loving relationship from someone you pay for her time/body? The only thing you can rely on a prostitute for is that she may have sex with you if you offer her money.
People don’t assume men’s primary function is sex dispensing machine, so why think that of women? Why are women who aren’t selling their bodies just unreliable sexmachines?
I’m seconding what Buttercup said about you being the problem.
Game, as described above, sounds like Sovereign Citizen bumf. An insecure and possibly desperate individual is promised access to information that will Solve the Problem. I can sympathize, to an extent – for a long time, I was convinced that art instructors had the knowledge I sought (on how to draw) and were simply withholding it for some obscure reason. Instead, they repeated meaningless bromides like “Draw a lot, as often as possible.”
Yeah, I’m learning. But the first step to real learning is admitting to yourself that you don’t already know, and that can be hard as Etruscan calculus for some of us. Judging by the OP, he’s a few incarnations from that realization.