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
I play games that are only for fun and lacking in artistic merit. I pretty much only play solitaire games and bubble shooters. But I thought those weren’t real games either? Even though they do fit into the fun and agenda free category.
My lady brain is all befuddled. Do I still get to be a femicommunazi?
@WWTH
Only if you play solitaire while burning a scented fucking candle, wearing pants, and cackling about all of the man-feels you’re hurting. LOL
Maybe I missed a comment like this, so apologies if so. One of the issues with this comment concerns how we view the world, what is considered “the norm” and assuming it is neutral. So, for this guy, it is likely he sees no political agenda in a single-shooter game (or dude dressed in army camo with assault rifle on shoulder) about shooting brown people and/or having Asian prostitutes proposition him.
When the script deviates from this “neutral”, there are people that get uncomfortable. Of course, the scripts are not neutral. “White cis-het male” is not a neutral position, it is simply the dominant one that is taken for granted.
There is a characteristic of memory that we remember events that depart from our script or expectations. (The classic memory event is a building with two doors, and often one of them is locked. You will record the locked events and think that you always hit it when it’s locked. In truth, you didn’t record the times you just opened the door.) I think something similar is happening here: one game/show/movie/whatever features women or PoC and people flip out, thinking the world is coming to an end. My neighbor (an unpleasant older white lady) lectured my husband and me many years ago about race. Among the things she was upset about, that there were more brown people on her teevee. I was too shocked to formate a proper response. What I notice is that commercials especially have started featuring more variety of outward appearance, more diversity. She sees a threat. Funny enough, there are still plenty of white dudes in major roles.
I seem to recall too when Obama started making appointments, he made an effort to include various races and more women. There were people flipping out thinking it was the end of white men in power or something. But if you look, Obama still appointed plenty of white men. Funny enough, no one started “just asking questions” about the white male appointees. But all the PoC and women! It must have been affirmative action!
One of the standard manosphere raps against feminism is that it’s ‘privileged’ and focuses on petty first world problems like manspreading.
Then you see rants like this, where the privilege bubble is so thick that actual war, horrors, and totalitarian regimes get appropriated, compressed to cartoonish proportions, and used as a prop to give Epic Meaning to the cushy, unchallenged lives of couch-potato snipers. Nothing is more privileged than willful ignorance. GG-ers probably snooze through history class, then rush home to play Brothers In Arms on the X-Box. Are their inner lives really that empty, that they have to borrow other people’s suffering in order to feel consequential?
See, this is what I’m talking about, this ridiculous rhetoric. To hear this guy talk, he can barely even leave his house anymore because of all the evil pink forces arrayed against him. It’s just a SEA of Ghostbusters remakes out there!
Is he saying that feminists designing video games will turn out a product as shoddy as Soviet tractors? Because those tractors were deliberately designed to work with existing conditions. For years, the Soviet Union was a closed system, and raw materials were hard to come by. Belarus tractors were made to be tough as nails and easy to fix with a few simple tools, because Soviet farm collectives tended to be located way out in the butt end of nowhere, miles away from workshops and factories. Once the Soviet Union opened up to outside influences, they quickly adapted Western engineering principles to make their tractors competitive on the global market. Nowadays Belarus tractors have a high reputation, and some people actually prefer them to flashier western models because of their durability and quirky features.
So the tractor example actually demonstrates that inferior products are the result of closed systems, while diversity and outside influences improve quality. Healthy competition drives innovation. You’d think these uber-free-market guys would understand that.
Annnnd it always comes down to The Threat, doesn’t it? “Do as I say, or else you’ll be exiled forever from the Women I Approve Of box!”
(women examine box, note its cramped dimensions and lack of air, hightail it out of there)
As for offspring, apparently it hasn’t entered his mind that feminists don’t only come from feminist parents. Kids in misogynist households often grow up to be feminists as well, because they make the conscious choice that they don’t want to be controlling shitmuffins like their parents. Seems to be rarer for it to happen the other way around.
@Buttercup
“Seems to be rarer for it to be the other way around.”
I’ve noticed that, even outside of misogynistic families. Generations are becoming increasingly more liberal and open minded as they buck the beliefs of their parents. Im 26 and have baby boomer parents and while they’re pretty cool there are some things they say that I just can’t agree with or even stay silent about. We try not to argue though.
I’m surrounded by seagulls at the moment and I’ve just noticed that they and MRAs have a lot in common. They spend a lot of time ingesting trash, they try to steal anything good you might have, they’re everywhere, and they never shut up with that awful cawing of theirs. Oh yeah, and they shit on people.
My retort when people leap to Stalin or Hitler:
Oh, you think communism is terrible, eh? You know who else thought like that? Hitler!!
(reverse the names as needed)
Scarletathena,
I’ve seen that assumption a lot with the female Ghostbusters complainers. They’re not misogynists! It’s just that making the cast all female is a gimmick! It’s telling that casting women is seen as gimmicky when we actually make up half the population.
Just for fun, let’s all list fun games that’ve been TAINTED by the SJW MENACE!!!1
Dragon Age and Portal were already mentioned, so: Skyrim. The Dragonborn can be a dark-skinned woman as soon as a light-skinned man; same-sex marriage doesn’t get a second glance; strong messages that racism and fascism are bad, freedom of religion is good and morality isn’t black and white (neither side in the war is even close to innocent). Sure, it still has problematic elements, but compared to Shoot The Muslims Part 54087…
Everybody is right: feminists and MRAs, commies and capitalists, Christians and atheists… everybody is right. Youe hear them and they are all right.
I am not MRA at all, neither MGTOW. I am just a “john”. I do not believe feminism is the problem at all. Feminsim is OK cuz make women very sluttie and that is fantastic. The problem is just women (feminist or conservative). 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.
But women can be very funny, too. Like the writer of this blog.
@M.
“Just for fun, let’s all list fun games that’ve been TAINTED by the SJW MENACE!!!1”
I guess all the Nancy Drew games by “Her Interactive” might count, Nancy was created to be a feeeemale solving mysteries like the Hardy Boys did, in order to reach out to a female audience. So I guess it’s a case of the Hardy Boys books being “ruined” first by her books and then her books inspiring some games. And she doesn’t even take her top off, it’s a first person view game so it’s harder to objectify her!
What the everloving fuck!?
I just typed out a big comment and when I hit post, it just disappeared!
Fuck you WordPress!
It’s not in moderation. It’s just gone. Whyyyyyyy!?
Anyway, it was about the lack of MRAs in the comments on this article about a new comedy that makes light of prison rape http://variety.com/2015/film/news/sxsw-will-ferrells-get-hard-stirs-controversy-with-gay-racial-jokes-1201453998/
I guess it’s okay to not be compassionate to men and boys if you’re not a feminist!
The rest, I’m not even going to try and replicate.
There’s WIMMINZ in my XCOM!!! Retroactively! All the way back to 1994!!
FemShep is misandry!!
Lightning is Cloud with boobs! Again misandry!!
And D&D makes you play a genderqueer metrosexual granola-chewing elf now!
KSRay–the Stalin/Hitler retort is my new favorite thing ever, and I’m going to steal it unabashedly.
Noticed that this didn’t get replies, and it’s an important question.
In short, it’s the Comforting Lie.
Roosh and his ilk tell socially inept men that they can get what they want without actually having to work at self-transformation; that there’s a simple method or system that, once mastered, guarantees sexual funtimes.
It’s an incredibly seductive lie, too, because it means that there’s nothing wrong with the guy buying into it–he just didn’t know the ‘secret’. So the ‘students’ of game and Pick-Up Artistry invest heavily in this revelation; sometimes financially, but also in terms of time and effort and emotion.
Of course it’s bullshit, but human beings are incredibly reluctant to admit to being fooled once it’s happened, so we have all sorts of methods of dealing with cognitive dissonance that kick in once our current beliefs run headlong into reality.* It isn’t ‘game’ that’s fucked up, it’s just that the woman you tried to neg at the bar wasn’t ‘normal’, because… because… because she’d been brainwashed by feminism! Yeah! If it wasn’t for those filthy commie feminists, you totally would’ve gotten laid last night.
And so the doubling-down continues; each time they run into another contradiction, they construct an ever-more-elaborate theory to account for the ‘aberration’. So, when their PU game continues to flop, that just means that ‘feminism’ must be more prominent than you ever realized, because it seems like ALL the women in the bars near you are similarly indoctrinated.
*:In general, I’d say that people are even more willing to say, “I was wrong,” than they are to say, “I was fooled.” Admitting ignorance is difficult, but it’s seen as a sign of self-improvement to be able to say you now know what is right. But admitting that you got scammed is incredibly painful, because it undermines your self-confidence very directly.
For an example of this, just look back at the recent “Sarkeesian Effect” split up–Aurini was so heavily invested in the validity of Roosh’s ‘game’ that he nearly tanked the whole thing, despite it being a source of income for him.
@freemage
“Admitting ignorance is difficult, but it’s seen as a sign of self-improvement to be able to say you now know what is right. But admitting that you got scammed is incredibly painful, because it undermines your self-confidence very directly.”
Though sometimes you see the “I wasn’t wrong, they lied to me! It’s their fault I didn’t do proper factchecking!” ,where they admit to being decieved but dump all the blame elsewhere. But for that they need to be prepared to actually admit that what they said was wrong, wich few are prepared to do.
Says a man losing his shit over women not following and supporting him. He doesn’t even see the contradiction.
“This is your natural behavior women! This is what you are like! Now behave like it or I’ll make sure you are miserable and abused your entire life!”
I do believe our friend just summed up patriarchy. He’s even assuring men that if they stay the course on the manly mission of hating women, they’ll still get laid.
They’ll get laid by smiling, pretty, submissive ladies who know their place so long as every woman who is not those things are sufficiently punished. He’s right. It works for ISIS. It works to an extent everywhere. What he’s suggesting is nothing new. He thinks the current levels of that same threat aren’t working anymore so men need to ramp it up. He wants to crank that shit up to eleven.
He thinks men who are silent or “neutral” agree with him.
My husband and I no longer have contact with our birth families and it is so much better than having them in our lives. We were ready to enjoy holidays.
We have nothing in common with our families of origin. Kids are not carbon copies of their parents. They think and learn and figure things out even when you don’t want them to.
It is definitely hard to admit for humans to admit that they were wrong, chose a bad path, believed the wrong people or ideas and, especially, behaved in an insulting, belittling, wrong-headed, pig-headed, (fill-in-your-own-adjective) way. It takes a lot of ovaries to say “I was wrong./I was not the best person I could be./I was gullible.” It’s hard, but ultimately, I believe it is worth it. You can only come out the other end of such an admission a better person.
Unfortunately, the world is full of people who don’t want to improve themselves truly. They want the quick fix that Freemage spoke of.
THERE’S NO QUICK FIX! (for all you caps locks fans!). There is no “one weird tip” no “ten ways to improve your (whatever)-life”. Self-improvement takes time and honesty and a willingness to look at the ugly undersides of things and ourselves.
I really don’t understand why they always revert to “alone and bitter” for feminists, unless that is some sort of projection on their part. And why do they always think feminists don’t have children, or aren’t any fun?
I’ve been married, single, married, and now am single again. The thing is, for the most part, I am happy, in or out of marriage. I have raised two children, who like spending time with me as adults (and if bad health things happen, they’ve already decided to take over my care; no nursing home in my future). I’ve never lacked for dates, got married when it seemed right and divorced when it no longer did. I’m sure there’ll be another companion in my future if I want one, and if there isn’t, well, there is a world of fun things to do with my friends. At 60, I’ve led a full life, and hope to continue to do so for the next 20-30 years; I see no reason why I shouldn’t, actually.
Not that it matters if we have children or not!
I STILL cannot believe that none of them has made a “GamerGate: The Game”.
I think that one fact, by itself, kind of illustrates … something :).
But, really, a simple arcade scrolling shooter where you take on the alien forces of the Evil Queen Sarkessian from Planet So’Jus. 9 Consecutive levels, separated by Gates defended by mini-bosses .. all, of course, modeled on / inspired by various people hated by Gamergate. You know, like a giant mayor McCheese Burger-looking villain with a purple bun and a nose-ring. Simple stuff really.
But I guess they’d rather just keep funding Rogue-Star to not make a game than make one themselves.
Really? Women are The Enemy? This guy seriously expects to get any with an attitude like THAT?
Apparently he does:
The benefits of living in a masculine environment? Oh, you mean discrimination, pay gaps, sexual harassment on the job, etc., etc.? Gee, I can’t imagine how any woman would fail to find THOSE beneficial.
Meanwhile, communism is starting to look mighty damn good to me.
Freemage: “In short, it’s the Comforting Lie.”
Yep, 100% correct.
But the ‘con’ , the ‘big lie’ does let too many men think they can ‘succeed’ without doing the hard yakka of having a cold hard look at themselves and doing something about it.
It also, sadly, closes off a lot good options that they could do to improve their shyness, social awkwardness and lack of personal interactions. Go and join a singing or drama group, join a club of some sort, become a volunteer and all those other things that would improve both their lives and grow them as people. Plus with greater personal interactions then the chances of meeting someone compatible with yourself increases (duh).
However there is something totally ironic that happens at times:
There are all these great (mostly 30+) females asking “where are all the nice guys”.
There there are all these great (mostly 30+) guys asking “where are all the nice women”
Well they are over there folks….. usually just on the other side of the room….lol.
And we can get too fired up about PUAs/MRMs and the like and forget there are a heck of a lot of nice, good guys out there. And in many ways, in many places, relationships between males and females have never been better (still lots of room for improvement of course). So it is not all bleak.
Feminism has greatly improved the lives of both females AND males and maybe that message does not get put out enough.
I do think it is important to lay out better alternatives to those males that are confused, maybe lonely, socially awkward and so on. So that they don’t get sucked into the PUA/MRM misogynistic nonsense with its superficial appeal.
These reactionary-types use that whole “dustbin of history” phrase a lot. Although, I doubt they know much if not anything about Leon Trotsky.
Hell, even the definition of “fun” is so goddamned broad as to be worthless.
I wouldn’t say that the literal terror and anxiety I felt playing the first Resident Evil (or the awesome GameCube remake!) was necessarily “fun”. Hell, thinking about it now makes me all panicky, and I would go weeks without picking the game up because I didn’t have it in me to face it. But I still loved the game. But it wasn’t pure “fun” the way that, say, playing a Mario game is.
Hates women. Doesn’t play video games. Makes site about video games. Hates women more.