One of the many strange things about Breitbart’s alleged “tech editor” Milo Yiannopoulos is how much he cares about convincing people he doesn’t care.
The self-described “provocateur” even dressed up as a literal clown for his recent profile in Out Magazine.
You’ve no doubt heard about the Out piece already; it’s been a teensy bit controversial. But what you probably didn’t know is that Salon sent a camera crew to his photoshoot with photographer Jill Greenberg. And that along with the camera crew they sent writer (and friend of We Hunted the Mammoth) Amanda Marcotte.
“Perhaps I got a bit caught up in his self-mythologizing,” she writes in her account of what followed, “which is why I thought he would have some fun answering provocative questions while he was getting his picture taken.”
Turns out Milo did not have much fun with her questions:
I never did get good answers to my questions, though I did learn that Yiannopoulos likes to reduce feminism to “angry lesbians” supposedly tricking naive young women into getting too fat to get boyfriends.
But I did learn one important fact: Milo Yiannopoulos is not playing around. He is utterly sincere about his far right views.
He is sincere enough that he lectured me for about 15 minutes, and got so caught up in the moment that he seemingly forgot that he was half-naked while wearing a wig and make-up. He was sincere enough to get genuinely wound up during this time.
Ultimately, he was having so little fun with her questions that he — perhaps channeling his idol Donald Trump — threw a fit and demanded she leave the premises.
He was so sincere that, when the Salon team shut off the cameras in order to move into another vantage point, he demanded that I leave the room, refused to answer any more questions, and called me a “bitch.”
The best part of all this? You can watch some of these testy exchanges on video over on Salon. There are two different versions of the video posted there; the one at the top has more Milo in it.
Turns out Milo is not so much a sad clown as a mad clown.
@Virgin Mary
I’m so sorry that happened to you.
I grew up with authoritarian parents who followed authoritarian belief systems too.
You deserve to be happy. I hope that you have work now — or maybe a hobby — that is fulfilling.
Best wishes.
PS: I hope that you had fun in Wales.
@Axecalibur, re: Gone Home and Depression Quest being called “non-games” by GGators:
The reason for that is because they aren’t targeted to white men, so GGers don’t consider them “real” games.
Something similar happened with point-and-click adventures when they moved towards a female audience: the gaming press couldn’t declare that the P&C Adv. genre was “girly” because they would’ve had to stop loving the Sierra and LucasArts games, so instead they just pretended that the entire genre was dead during the ’95-’05 period.
[source]
@Tizio
These days, it doesn’t even matter who they’re targeted at – I’ve seen Skyrim, Fallout, Zelda, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, StarCraft and CALL OF FUCKING DUTY all called “Fake casual non-games,” despite being targeted squarely at dudebros, because feeemales play them anyway.
@Tizio
Hmm… Gaming segregating itself based on the inflated entitlement and ingroup biases of an over pandered cross section of middle class white boys, who then grew into entitled, bigoted, middle class, white men with a chip on their collective shoulder? Wonder where they learned that…
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8tt84AKnL1r5sazco1_500.jpg
Remember when the industry said that turn based RPGs and survival horror were dead based on the focus tested advice of 12 year old boys? And the press went along with it. And the people who would become, the ostensibly antagonistic, #GG went along with it
‘Girls don’t play games’
‘But look at this survey’
‘Nope! If girls played games, there’d be more girly nongames for em. Supply and demand. Checkmate’
‘Girls play the same games you do, ya know?’
‘So, then they should shut up about representation a such. Cos it obvs doesn’t matter, if they’re willing to play ‘our’ games anyway’
And on and on it goes. Sad part? It’s pretty hard to satirize #GG, without it just as easily applying to the industry as a whole… *sigh*
Thanks for the read!
I don’t really see a problem with that, to be fair. GG is just a recent and extreme symptom, y’know ?
I usually go with the Sarkeesian motto : sexism in games doesn’t make games inherently bad. It needs to disappear precisely because of those amazing games that are also otherwise full of cringy stuff that alienates gamers.
Y’know, I remember when being a Gamer had nothing to do with these fancy electronic doodads. In all my childhood, nobody ever once gave me a problem about video games, because everyone else played them too. D&D? Whole other matter (Or Werewolf/Mage/Vampire; the fits some people threw about those ones were astonishing). We were geeks, nerds, bully magnets, cat-sacrificing Satanists. There was an entire cottage industry based on vilifying tabletop gamers. These jackasses whinging about the ‘stigma’ of playing video games don’t have a damn clue. There’s a lot less of that crap directed at tabletop gamers these days, which I appreciate.
In other video game news… It seems Pokemon Sun & Moon are going gender-neutral, letting male characters wear female clothing and vice versa, and whoo boy, the usual suspects are NOT happy.
I am, of course. *thumbs up*
@SFHC
Dark Souls 3 has identical character creation options for all characters, including haircuts, face and body paint… down to beards. I bet GGers aren’t happy, seeing how they used the first one as a standard for their “real” games.
Now what I really wanna see is character creation that replaces the “male/female” thing with non-mutually-exclusive body parameters, and a choice of pronouns for how NPCs adress you.
@SFHC
Now I’m definitely buying Sun/Moon. :p
@SFHC
Oh, this is something good indeed.
Thus Spake ZaraImaginary Petal:
And don’t forget those charming Sun/Moon commercials showing boys as well as girls playing, and prominently showcasing people of color. OMG forced diversity! Wimminz invading male spaces and stealing my freedumb of freeze peach! SJWs! ETHICS IN VIDEO GAME JOURNALISM!!
@Paradoxical Intention and PocketNerd
Jim Sterling actually did a 100% objective game review:
https://youtu.be/eMU1_-_4WKg
Also, you’re not a real gamer unless you played Tennis for Two on the Donner Model 30. In 1958.
@ anne lewis
You probably already know this but a lot of modern oscilloscopes have all those old games as Easter eggs if you know which button combo to press.
@SFHC
Well, if that trend continues, GGers will soon declare all games to be “not real games” and drop out of gaming entirely, thus permanently ending GamerGate.
We can but dream. But I suspect gamergrotz are sufficiently invested that some of them will be cranking about this until their dying day. Like, in 2066 there will still be a few angry octogenarians grousing on the global ARnet about how those ffeeemales completely ROOOONED electronic gaming in the 2010s with their forced diversity and their regressive left political agenda, therefore nothing from the next five decades counts as real gaming. It’s all been for filthy casuals who never knew the terrible suffering of growing up in a house with a Super NES. ::world’s saddest violin plays::
@SFHC
I can see why Call of Duty made the list. Don’t even get me started on the number of fake gamer boys I’ve met who claim to be gamers but then you find out they only play CoD and they don’t even own it, they just play on their roommate’s copy.
@Dalillama:
My very first tabletop RPG was Vampire: the Masquerade. My first GM was none other than James “Grim” Desborough, a man of some notoriety and the proof that you can be an excellent GM without being an excellent person.
Imagine my surprise when, more than a decade later, that same Mr Desborough cropped up as a gamergater and a prominent harasser.
Evidently, he felt it necessary to fight for ethics in tabletop games journalism.
Apologies in advance, I’m sick and bleary and altogether non-functional right now, so this is gonna be a bit of a garblemess.
Pretty sure it has been said, but yeah, the whole “Real Gamers” thing is just about excluding people, doesn’t matter what game it is or what it’s about. If it’s popular, it’s not a “real game” by definition. Just like someone had said about the indie music scene, it’s all about social posturing and not about actually enjoying the game. Ironically, being a “real gamer” has nothing to do with gaming and everything to do with mocking people who actually enjoy games. We’re through the looking glass, people.
I dunno what it is about Call of Duty, though. For awhile I was living in shared housing, and shared a living room with a guy who was probably the most chill person I had ever met (the kilograms of weed probably helped with that)… until he put on his headset and started playing CoD. It turned him into a raging troglodyte. If I was ever going to play that sort of game, the experience of watching him shouting at 14 year olds through a TV screen was enough to put me off permanently.
(Living in that shared housing probably represents some of the absolute depths of depression that I’ve pulled myself from, though, so my memories are probably a little unreliable. I won’t be going back there any time soon!)
I like video games, but I’m with Dalillama in that I generally prefer a social game like a roleplaying game if it’s available – and if it has the right players. I’m picky now! Huh.
My first tabletop RPG was plain old Dungeons and Dragons, a box set with the red book. There was a lull of a few years around high school (I had been told that my hobby was capital-E-evil so didn’t play anymore until I moved out), then I found some people who wanted to play. I found some hard-science-fiction settings and ran some games, and had an excellent time.
Still play, though not as much time for it anymore, obviously. That urge is sort of migrating into an urge to make video games, which I really don’t have time for, and don’t have a community of friends to help or encourage, so it’s frustrating. Getting that social feedback is so vital for self-directed projects sometimes!
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes
Here’s some social feedback for your urge to make video games:
But…but if you play Dungeons & Dragons you end up hallucinating in a sewer. Tom Hanks told us that so it must be true!
(Also you’ll get eaten by those giant alligators people have flushed down the toilet)
Thanks, Anne 😉
I do work on it, just not with enough focus or force to actually get it done in a reasonable amount of time. At the moment they’re prototypes and experiments, ’cause I don’t have the time available to do it but I want to keep the process going, at least a little bit. Right now I’m looking at ways to replace the usual decision-tree system used by most games.
Usually, you’re presented with a set of choices and you select one, navigating a tree-like structure based on what you think the best outcome will be (This is like Bethesda’s conversation systems, basically). AI-controlled elements go through the same process as the player, just using heuristic rules and environmental variables to decide which choice to make. Works well, clean, easily understood, but also deterministic and game’y. Players tend to pick the choices which they think will get them a particular game result and not what they would reasonably do, because it’s a very simple deterministic system.
I’m looking to see whether I can replace that with a stochastic system (not random) by using a Hidden Bayesian Decision Forest or something like that instead of the simple decision trees. Instead of a choice being available because you happen to have 15 Strength to lift that gate or whatnot, the system would look at all of your stats, and all of the possible ways you could open that gate, instead of it being a simple binary. Player calculations would no longer focus on numbers, but on personality traits and best-guesses. More realistic (though there is of course a danger to removing the simple determinism; players like mathing things out sometimes)
So far it’s been a neat little experiment! Just started, though, so we’ll see if it’s actually viable.
@Alan Robertshaw
Or you could accidentally help an evil cult summon Chthulu. Really.
@ Alan
That’s from an old Jack Chick tract, if you don’t know its origin. He was a cartoonist who created some horrifying comics for fundamentalist Christian kids. Dark Dungeons was made in to a movie with his full support, maybe he was a satirist all along? Who knows?!
This is another gem…
Hasn’t he made Mrs Henn look like a happy merchant / cultural Marxist?
More horrors here
https://www.chick.com/m/reading/tracts/readtract.asp?stk=0034