isn't this what mainstream thought thinks cults do?
That was yesterday. Today's cults like to keep their members trapped through deep personal bonds like family, or life long friendships. Didn't you hear about how it all changed back in the great switch?
Money.
He may fuck up over and over and over, but people online keep giving him money for it. I would imagine that a lot of our problems stem from people promoting self-destructive behaviour over the Internet by paying those who are willing to debase themselves.
I guess the part which confused me the most was where you talked about people running low damage builds. I was picturing people deliberately building low damage specs for some reason, but you were just talking about people who don't know enough about the game to actually bother learning how things work?
It's funny to me, because I actually held the world record for top dps in WoW:TBC, but after that I spent years playing with many different types of players to try and understand why some people exceed while others struggle, because I didn't think my innate abilities were THAT much greater than others. My conclusion is that it's largely about priorities, which you seem to have also noticed. Some people had good priorities, such as family taking their time and attention, but many more seemed to simply not try, because they told themselves they weren't good enough for one reason or another. The one that sticks out in my head was a particularly talented girl who was convinced that her hands were too small to reach all the hotkeys.
All that aside though, there is another dynamic I've noticed which plays a significant role in how and why gaming has become what it is: People have been wasting entirely too much time with it. I believe quite strongly that much of our problems today stem from talented people spending their time playing games rather than engaging in the other roles important to the continuing function of society. Now, no small part of that can be attributed to how our society currently functions, in my mind, where the demands imposed upon people who seek to perform such important roles have become immensely more onerous at the same time as entertainment media has become much more engaging. Yet still, we do need those who are able to actually take on these challenges if we intend for our civilization to survive the turn of the age.
Frankly, for as many bad actors that take advantage of our state of affairs to push their own short sighted agendas, I can also see much reason for good people to feel disdain towards those who decline to participate in more important matters because they're occupied with games. So while I definitely can agree with how terrible this state of affairs is for gaming, and I do believe rather strongly that it has a greater negative impact upon society as a whole than what is reasonable, I think that people need to recognize that gaming should not be a way of life for those who are actually capable of serving society in a greater capacity. Recent generations have grown up with the mentality that technological automation will "free" us to spend our time however we choose, yet that is not how things have worked out in actual practice. Instead we have just seen a mass abdication of social responsibility leading to opening up doors for anyone with a motive to seek power in the vacuums which now exist, and wicked who can not rest lest they be set upon by good people who take exception to their depravity are gobbling up all the opportunity.
the players are new-gen gamers running low-damage gear/builds; some of the most egregious anti-gatekeepers in all PC gaming since 2017
For someone who hasn't really touched social gaming in a long time, can you explain what's up with that?
They desperately needed to make it a 'movement' so they could demonize it all as one, when it was really just that men aren't interested in participating in a society that actively hates them simply for existing. That's not even getting into the elephant in the room, that modern culture is being deliberately steered in a negative direction, and many men have noticed and act accordingly.
That's really funny because I actually got the same type of ban fuckery on reddit recently. On a post about disability finances I commented about not buying avocado toast, got banned. I appealed, linking to the common meme, and they told me they would "take my word at face value that it was sarcastic" but only reduced the ban by half. Is this some new psychological theory some idiots dreamed up recently because they can't possibly interact with the world directly and honestly?
I actually made a comment in another thread about a month ago that relates directly to this:
Lying is just about the dumbest thing a person can do, in a general sense. The real world has an infinite depth, so as long as one remains earnest and honest there is no limit to how far they can take things. Start lying, however, and you'll end up 'locked' in place, incapable of moving on to anything else because you're too busy maintaining your lies.
I'm strongly suspicious that human society encourages lying so strongly specifically because it needs people to remain stationary in order to continue it's functions, as things currently are. Take the entertainment industry for example, where the most charismatic of our entire population are lavished with fame, fortune and every luxury money can buy... in exchange for lying constantly to maintain a false image of who they are.
That's very much the issue I take with such things. Our whole concept of what progress should look like is built upon elevating people beyond their own abilities, and it's causing our entire society to collapse under the weight of collective incompetence.
It's a problem of "desconstructing" something in an attempt to define it in simple terms, which end up being entirely alien to the original intent. I'm fairly certain this is the reason that AI feeding upon it's own output produces progressively worse products. It may very well be that, by the constraints of programming, such loops do emerge within a game's design. Yet if you try and focus on such things alone you end up with progressively worse results.
The entire "self insertion" concept for media has always baffled me. Unless the character's own identity is so irrelevant to the story that they have a character creator, I just want to see a story about someone interesting who is explicitly NOT me (and really, I rarely make a character who's anything like me even when given the option to do so). I've already got the real world for experiencing a story about me personally...
You can believe me or not, but war actually sucks a lot of ass. Far too many people, who have lived their entire lives in bubble wrap, don't seem to understand this point and tempt fate for petty grudges or base desires, thinking that it can't possibly happen here.
Fascism, as it was taught in ancient times while I was in school, was described as the same people running both the government and the economy. Little wonder why they keep trying so hard to redefine such a thing these days.
Well, a large part of it is that when we actually attempted to advertise our existence, the media ran a massive smear campaign to conflate "alt-right" with actual Nazis.