Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - Gamergate Failed [TW: no Sargon]
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GamerGate failed at it's stated intentions, but I think we can see that the cultural resistance that we put up never actually wained.
Yes Journalists are still Leftists and corrupt
Yes the big publishers and developers are pushing virtue signaling.
But GamerGate wasn't an accident. It was an intentional ploy by the Leftists in the media to balkanize audiences into being controllable subjects that were loyal to their outlets; and it utterly failed.
History Lesson:
First, we had been seeing Leftism in Journalism going back to 2012. This was not new, the ideological capture of Game Journalism was already complete by 2014
Second, corrupt practices in game-entertainment goes all the way back to the early 1900's when Arcade machines were effectively money laundering for the mob. You aren't going to totally root out corruption within gaming. It's like rooting out cronyism in 'professional wrestling'. The industry has an underlying foundation on emotional manipulation. What we needed objective journalism for in 2014 was the fact that developers and publishers had been refusing to give us demos for years, and had even started creating fake demos that were not even built with the same software as the game itself.
Third, Game Journalism was dying because of YouTube. The Video Game magazine market was already collapsing. Play Magazine had already stopped reviewing games much earlier. All of the magazines, and even Nintendo Power to a degree, were fairly biased shill booklets because the medium wasn't profitable. But YouTube had recently lifted it's 10 minute maximum limit to videos, and now people started streaming games. Before it became entirely normalized, the publishers, and many journalist outlets, were pushing to criminalize livestreaming and uploading videos of gameplay.
GamerGate started as clear corruption and abuse by Zoey Quinn using her (intimate) connections to get favorable coverage, including even her own backers and investors to make reviews for her shit, all while abusing and cucking her boyfriend... but the defense for her was both political and economic. YouTubers were publishing videos that showed how badly wrong the Games media was in it's reviews, and had exposed corruption by showing how brazenly the journos were lying.
The journos went to war because they (correctly) saw their Access-Journalism oligopoly becoming unsustainable. So, attacking the audience would balkanize a political user-base to them, and prevent the audience from going to the obviously better source: Video Essayists, Walkthrough players, and Live streamers.
To be clear: this didn't work.
Game developers and publishers are basically shilling access journalism to content creators, because it's now a fully mutualist relationship that gets much more attention than the journalist outlets. The "content creators" are significantly more biased towards the genera, but not necessarily the product itself. Certainly not more than the journos were. The CC's biases are obvious, clear, and consistent (so it's a bit more transparent than the journos). The CC's are also vastly more competent in the genera than the best journos in the business (because they tend to focus on specific niches of gameplay styles, or only genera's that interest them).
For example: A journalist will basically tell you nothing different about any pokemon game, because (at a glance) they are all identical, and in many ways this is true. But the Pokemon CC is likely a competitive player, and has a long and inane explanation about how ability changes and breeding algorithm changes vastly effect top-level gameplay. He will do a video on that. If you are a basic player, you'll know whether you want to play it in 10 minutes; but if you are a hardcore fan, you'll know how to change your strategies after 30 minutes.
As a result, the industry itself is is monetarily shifting away from the journalists. Most of the shit they show involving SJ is because they are all out of Silicon Valley, and their Marketing departments haven't been fired yet. The underlying economic foundations are not salvageable; and the fact that these journalism outlets themselves are only making money based off of ridiculous Woke Capital investment rather than profit, shows you that the industry is already dead, and being propped up.
Finally, what Xbox Live Games brought in is now a full fledged cottage industry. AAA games might make money, but there is a vast industry of independent games, that are no longer even really that small anymore. When you also add that more countries, particularly Eastern and Central Europe are pushing out games rather than very specific studios in New York, California, Toronto, and Tokyo; the industry is facing vast, global, competition; even from "small businesses".
The Late 90's early 00's corporate dominance of major studios is seriously broken, and totally irreparable. Social Justice in the gaming space was a desperation move ten years ago. It's already dead, we're just waiting for the inevitable 2020's Gaming Crash which (given the economic conditions) can't be avoided anymore.
It's not Get Woke, Go Broke.
It's Go Broke, Get Woke, Croak We are headed towards the croak phase. As with the USSR, these things take time, but the longer it is delayed, the more total the collapse will be.
Gaming will survive the crash (even if Blizzard might not), but there will be plenty of parallel structures to latch onto that will take their place.
Can you explain what you mean by that?
Although I don't necessarily subscribe to Italian Elite Theory (especially on the grounds of what ought to be), I can't deny that some of it's assertions are entirely correct.
One of those assertions is that elites will always exist, and will always be supported by institutions. You can't ever just remove elites altogether and hope that institutions survive. Nor can you have an insittutionaless society. Elites can only be replaced. Normally, by separate institutions that can support them, and basically swap out or transition people over to the new institutions.
You need to build a parallel structure for people to move onto. If we were talking about education, this would be basically about building tons of private colleges and private credential systems, away from the current crop of state education schools & universities.
The video game industry already has an absolute fuck-ton of parallel structures in the form of small businesses that can more quickly respond to market forces (independent game studios) as well as parallel: secondary markets (content generation), marketing platforms (livestreamers and video presenters), publishing systems (Twitch.io, Steam, GoG, none are exclusive to an oligarchy of large developers), education (game jams, online courses, coding suites, Unity tutorials) so on and so forth.
When economic downturns arrive, the largest and most centralized structures will naturally take the largest hits because they are the slowest to respond. Plenty of small businesses will be able to respond quickly, and even if many go under, they are quickly replaced by entrapanuers who see the gap and can quickly act to take advantage of it.
As a result all large businesses use regulation and subsidy to protect themselves from market forces. The governments that are loyal to these corporations are prepared to damage the economy in order to save only the largest businesses. However, this power does not exist in the video-game space the way that it does in Energy, Transportation, Food, Weapons, etc. DC isn't coming to bail them out. Even if the parent companies are getting bailed out, the game studios are still going to get cut because consumer choice will lead people away from entertainment. Meaning that true deflation is the only result for the whole industry.
That allows the larger, established, and no longer functioning structures to collapse; but provides much needed growth opportunities for the smaller companies, along with cheaper labor from experienced people from the larger corporations that don't find the value in their game studios. Additionally (like with Twitter) the bureaucratic hangers-on will get immediately thrown to the wolves to protect the profit line.
You are right in how gaming will survive the crash, and thankfully we already have anti-woke/non-woke developers ready to capitalize on this by securing ideologically aligned talent that only works for large companies for paychecks.
Play the music, Mr. Romer
Yes, it's always been get woke, go broke, but that's not what's really happening. What Raz0r is describing is the actual series of events. We just see it as woke -> broke, specifically because we're only looking at the last second results.