Head's up that I'm seeing increasing online chatter blaming the Charlie Kirk assassination on video games. 1990s-era Boomer takes on video games from people who have never held a controller are back on the menu.
I first noticed it in this Michael Savage column:
Even more disturbing, Savage warned, is the way violent rhetoric online merges with role-playing in video games until players can no longer separate fantasy from reality. “Many of these games are about fighting an oppressive fascist government. So the kid playing becomes the hero taking on fascists — then one day he carries that mindset into real life. And suddenly Charlie Kirk is a ‘fascist’ who must be eliminated.”
At the time, I dismissed it as an out-of-touch and uninformed opinion from an elderly man who didn't grow up around video games the same way the generations of men after him did. Unfortunately for us, however, there are people who listen to these uninformed talking heads. Those people are now parroting back the same "it's those darn video games that are making the kids violent" nonsense in comment sections all over the internet.
For better or for worse, video gaming is far more mainstream than it was in the 1990s. Anti-gaming arguments aren't going to have much sticking power against now multiple generations of gamers. Plus there probably isn't much interest at Steam or Sony or Microsoft on cracking down on anything that isn't porn. I'm not going to doom about it. But still, head's up.
That narrative will die with the boomers. Too many people have grown up playing video games at this point for it to be taken seriously by most people.
Lefties don't play violent games tho. They play walking sims
And their gaming spaces aren't really gaming spaces. They're spaces that police video game content/DIE box checking and bitch about people who actually play the games.
apparently, they're assassin grooming spaces masquerading as gaming spaces
Or Public Bathroom Simulator in Roblox.
They don't have to. The idea is that any game where you fight against an evil empire, etc. = "indoctrinating" the youth into becoming leftists.
That's the angle they're using to drum up hysteria over videogames again.
With some of the stuff the faggot had engraved into the bullets (“If you read this, you are gay lmao” ) I kinda wonder if he was trying "set up" the toxic gamers him and his troon buddies surely spent all their time bitching about in their commie gaming spaces. I guarantee this troon fucker was a RetardEra regular. Kirk would have made for an odd target in that regard, but it's not like these chucklefucks are particularly bright.
To be completely fair discord and Reddit are insanity spirals, they also happen to be the lefty hubs of gamers.
So, you're saying ban Leftists from playing video games.
Common sense communist control is a pillar of Americana
Frankly, it's been a fleeting effort at best, but it needs real power.
banks, stores, parks, walking the street, hell just go Cask of Amontillado on them for the sake of polite society
They don't play video games anyway. They need to be banned from influencing the content of the games.
True. It's all hipster status signaling.
No, they very much do play video games.
IfOnlyYouKnewHowBadThingsReallyWere.jpg
I don't count not getting past the double-jump section of the tutorial of Cuphead as "playing video games".
You're an idiot or being intentionally obtuse.
I'm being intentionally obtuse because it was a joke.
Western game devs are like 90% far left. It’s one of the most leftist industries in existence.
Breathing
No no, stop that.
I think they're just hubs more generally because all of the older dedicated forums died off and why pay to host your own Ventrilo server when Discord will handle all of that for you?
Just a very small mention, I guess they do that to get political donations from game studios or steam? Fighting actual fascists in video games isnt a problem. Neither in movies or books. They have to teach what actual fascism even is and how it manifests and while at it do the same about communist/marxists. And get rid of the leftist professors in colleges which call everything fascist what they dont like.
UPDATE: Found another literal Boomer running his mouth off with talking points he doesn't understand.
https://x.com/GeraldoRivera/status/1967305232364236878
Ding Ding ding, we have a winner. This one accidentally hit the jackpot and revealed the crux of the argument:
This is the only thing they can fall back on in their panicked cognitive dissonance, after having revealed that America is now a literal killing ground of the left's making. They pretend they haven't done that and that the murder was due to social and cultural factors.
The other flavour of this is the leftie side pretending that Kirk-types being pro-2A created a social factor of there being more guns around, which somehow passively got him killed as a dramatic irony. Except that the evidence of our own eyes is that it was a planned political assassination of a gun advocate. So the argument turns into 'if you're pro-2A, then you can't complain if you die by gunshot, even if it's me killing you with a gun for being pro-2A'.
For anyone to be bringing videogames into this as a factor, it's hard to look at them as anything other than deliberate obfuscators, which starts to get really weird when they're coming from the right. Could be that they too fear the obvious implications of Kirk's shooting, so they'll revert to their NPC subroutines rather than address reality.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it is leftists trying desperately to shift blame off themselves, especially since I think the “groyper” lies are starting to fail. It’s a shame to see any of the righty talking heads inadvertently helping them, though.
This is retarded, even in comparison to other bad video game takes.
Almost never happens, like statistically zero. And you need an existing issue to begin with, so you'd still be a danger of going unhinged and doing something extreme even if the trigger wasn't video games.
Oh, jeez. That's such a bad statement, so easily misconstrued.
Holy shit this is retarded. The fascists you fight in games are usually armed and, as the meme goes, "coming right fer me!" Also, "fascist" is a tiny segment of video game enemies nowadays anyway, as far as I know. It was much larger back when WW2 games were all the rage, but it's a tiny minority now.
Yeah, I think he maybe, just maybe, got that idea from all his leftist friends screaming that specifically Charlie Kirk was specifically a fascist, and not because he killed some Nazis in CoD or something. Holy shit.
This is all Roblox fault, for what its worth.
Literally within 24 hours it was filled with Kirk murder sim games and just games containing the video outright, which within mere hours of that was front page of every news program for a bit. All of this totally organic of course, nothing suspicious about it.
This was the set up for these talking point, the game that was already the devil in numerous lawsuits about how evil it was because of how unmoderated and uncontrolled it was. And then it allows this too? Clearly we need to control video games entirely!
hear me out
at this point actually do thing video game consumption is partially to blame, but it's not nearly the full story.
The far left has convinced itself of a world that is not real. it's the product of the hyperbole being thrown around. "Trump is literally Hitler", "the Republicans are fascists", erc. etc. it's been thrown around so much, that people are starting to believe the hyperbole.
now apply this to someone who consumes way too much social media, plays way too many video games, watches way too much tv, and simply doesn't live in the real world. in their games they fight oppressive regimes all the time, killing their enemies. ""I am living in an oppressive regime, so why aren't I killing my enemies in real life?" This fantasy world is reinforced by the social media echo chamber, the video games, and isolation/indoctrination they get from college campuses. If nothing pulls them out, they will eventually be too far gone like Kirk's murder.
of course, the solution isn't to ban video games, social media, and college campuses (God I wish), it's to identify and intervene on antisocial behavior.
"Suddenly", huh? How about 12 years solid of Leftist "everyone who disagrees with me is literally hitler" propaganda being blasted 24/7?
This person could be 100% delulu, fully believe ximself to be Xir Xanatus, Savior Of The Elves... And Kirk wouldn't be on his radar. That "suddenly" carries a LOT of weight.