Gamers and capitalism

Didn't Peter Coffin make that claim first in a more substantive way?

Also shout out to Superbunnyhop as well for covering videogames in a leftist manner whilst some how keeping it palatable for mainstream and right wing audiences.

Coffin may have said it too/instead. I barely distinguish the people on breadtube tbh.

I think he can get away with what he does because he isn't LARPing with commie accessories like Noncompete, nor does he come across as condescending like Hbomb. (or both like Coffin) I haven't watched anything by him in a while but IIRC he just sticks to material analysis rather than idealist notions of how the industry works.

That's kind of belied by the fact that virtual economies in games are horrifically dysfunctional due to mismanagement and vulnerability to the very simplest abuses by players, even (especially) those constructed with some input by professional economists.

The gamergate fiasco did so much damage to the reputation of the left that we're only recently starting to get over it.

Regardless of what gamergate was about, it birthed a whole new generation of rightwing ideologues and brought new life to dying old reactionary ideas and even sanitised them as hip and counter culture (whether true or not) giving such adherents the moniker "alt-right" and the "intellectual dark web", giving them a mysterious charismatic subversive appeal that just being plain old rightwing would not afford them.

So with this new established subculture amongst young males that is openly hostile of any leftist thought and occupied with mocking "sjws", they will never come around to any leftist theory on capitalism, theory is already unrewarding work and effort to commit to anyway if you're a leftist with job and other commitments so it's no surprise that ordinary people and reactionaries will never get around to it.
This is further compounded given that the popular sentiment of keeping politics to yourself and that politics ruin entertainment also keeps people from pursuing political theory.

The "sjw" hate train is slowly starting to lose momentum, in a few years you'll see more class-conscious activism in video-games that goes beyond window dressing like "empowering women".

Did it really? Progressive liberals are the ones who got exposed as vacuous charlatans. The actual Left doesn't seem to have been harmed much aside from typical conflations with liberalism because it largely stayed out of the shitstorm. Huge missed opportunity, tbh. I would have tried to push the window our way if I had been a conscious anti-capitalist at the time, but all I could do was focus like a laser on journalistic impropriety.

It's such a terrible shame leftists made such a pig's breakfast of GG. We had momentum and dominance on Youtube among anti-SJWs from the Atheism+ debacle, as well as sympathy among Paulbot lolberts from OWS, and a majority center-left population among GG itself for the first few months… It was everything we needed to cleanse the left of SJWs and draw in sympathetic centrists/rightists.

Then we pissed it all away, having gained nothing except the lingering enraged paranoia among SJWs that causes them to lash out even more hysterically at normalfags whenever they think they see a spoopy GG shadow among their midst.

Hbomber is becoming bit of a liability, have you heard of Mauler? Basically Mauler does several hour long reviews and picked apart Hbomber's Dark Souls ones and showed that Hbomber was being disingenuous and taking some other reviewers opinions out of context etc and made a compelling case as to why Hbomber was wrong.

Hbomber smugly brushes him aside on twitter to the effect of saying "TL;DW" and even called him a rightwing edgelord though Mauler had yet to reveal any reactionary opinions.

It's frustrating because Hbomber is one of the major poster boys of the left, and Mauler is now an upcoming guy who has several videos breaking 1 million views despite being several hours long, and Mauler appears to be drifting to the right with the kind of people he's recently streaming chats with.

Whilst we're on the topic of Mauler, it's also annoying how other breadtube channels with worthwhile content went out of their way to defend The Last Jedi (Mauler's claim to fame) like Shaun who made a contrarian review in defence of it.

Yes, no one remembers or talks about the tiny details, people like Sargon, Milo and the like gained notoriety.

No one cares about the "charlatans" you mention, as far as the right are concerned we're all the same and nobody cared to make the distinction, relatively speaking almost nobody became socialist out of the aftermath.

It didn't help that prominent liberals like Charlie Brooker and other liberal intellectuals were anti-gamergate and pro Anita Sarkesian (concurrent hot topic at that time).

It was a great gift to the right and socialists suffered collateral damage, the cultural marxist slander went mainstream when it couldn't with Brevik and we went from a time when reactionary moral panics were a dying phenomena that only old people paid attention to, to a time now where young people won't shut up about it to the detriment of all other existential problems that we face.

Gamergate was about different things to different people. In the long run, anybody who was after fighting porky kids got used by Zig Forums.

To some people the left and progressives are totally the same. You're right that the left not making it about labor relations was a huge missed opportunity, which IMO was mostly because the liberals yelled so much about misogyny (lefties allowing liberals to fuck their shit up per usual). Either way it was very beneficial to the right, as (once again!) the left failing to get involved meant that the normies swung right.

It's a shame but what matters is to not keep making the same fucking mistake. Forget the liberals telling you someone's problematic. We need class unity not """left""" unity. Bypass the whole "shift people left" thing and go straight for people's material interests. Putting the weight on ideology that people do is idealism. We need to be communicating and organizing with workers regardless of their "politics" which today pretty much amount to what team you root for. It's a trap that liberals are unfortunately very adept at luring lefties into. We need to be ready at a moment's notice to drop anti-idpol bombs on them and call for unity and solidarity in place of that horseshit. Call them out at every single opportunity for trying to divide the workers/poor against each other instead of against our mutual enemy.

Harris is not a leftist, which is enough reason he shouldn't be a fucking poster boy for the left. Someone posted a screencap of him stating his position (forgot to save it) and he's not even really a succdem. More like somewhere between Keynesian and neoliberal. He just pretends to be a lefty sometimes to trigger the right wingers. A culture warrior and nothing else.

socialism, capitalism, or any other economic thought does not apply to things that are not only non-scarce, but also unownable do to their nature(like being unable to bottle lightning or fence in an ocean)

You can create artificial scarcity though. And capitalism benefits from that. In pretty much any other system though you would be right that economics kind of don't apply.

the way they do so is a closed, controlled market though

But what happens in a post scarcity world then.

I'd be surprised if even 1% of people who play video games are able to understand this sentence.

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Most people play video games.

All this shit about gamergate and e-celebs (many of whom got big on youtube) only make me wonder why nobody from either Zig Forums or Zig Forums has yet to make a single youtube video.
Go spread the cause on the internet!

Because YouTube is a cancerous shithole containing nothing of value that is frequented only by the stupidest people on earth.

We have though and look how that turned out.

Those were the days that can only be brought to understanding before those who weren't there when reminisced on a dark saturday night, over a cocktail of estrogen pills, British quality MDMA and ketamine, cheap lager, anxiety meds and blood drenched from a virgin's cut wounds.

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No thanks bud. They'll remove anything good enough to invoke action. It's capitalist liberal central.

A lot of assumptions there (unless you're specifically talking about /v/). Have a pasta of mine:
All the stereotypes about gamers (overlap with weebs/comics/tabletop, technically inclined, adolescent, antisocial, apolitical or libertarian and in spite of recent whining from salty PoMos gamers always have been and still are primarily left-leaning, etc.) certainly have a basis in fact, but the biggest problem with stereotyping gamers is that it isn't a niche hobby anymore. Even ignoring the casuals "playing" whale-subsidized mobileshit/socialshit (who make up 1.3 billion "gamers" worldwide, concentrated into developed nations), hardcore gamers amount to ~35M Americans, and being primarily younger males, that means around a quarter of the ~133M American males under 65 are probably gamers:
npd.com/lps/pdf/core-gaming-snapshot-report.pdf (size of gaming)

As such, any stereotypes melt away under the fact that, really, we're all normalfags now.

Even ignoring this, it's typically tied into an even further reaching assumption, given out by the screeching one often sees now about how gamers, techies, STEM, etc. are all being subverted by neonazi frogs, and only the Enlightened® PoMo humanities majors can save us. It's a colossal load of nonsense, their shit stinks at least as much as ours, and they know it. The facts needed to debunk it are hardly DEEPEST LORE:
verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/ (individuals)
opensecrets.org/overview/industries.php (employers)
pewinternet.org/files/2016/09/2014-survey-of-AAAS-members-full-survey-questionnaire-and-topline.pdf (scientists specifically)
theesa.com/article/new-study-finds-video-game-players-are-highly-engaged-politically/ (gamers specifically)

This

Because rambling background noise talking head videos are an inherently terrible and shallow medium with which to build the activist class consciousness we need. Like Twatter, Opinionstube needs to be evacuated of what few normalfags sustain it more than it needs to be conquered.

Because of crippling shame, I'm a failure at life who dropped out of university, still living with my mother at 31 and work minimum wage jobs, that even with my smug know it all tendencies, I feel like I'm the last person who should be preaching Marxian economics in public.

*blocks your path*

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I was one who was anti SJW who turned against atheism eventually

Tetris. One of the best selling games of all time and 100% Soviet approved. Based.

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That was painful to watch.

gaymers can't even boycott drm games
send gaymers down to the countryside

It's not really losing momentum, it's just not gaining any right now. Wait until the 2020 election season gets going and it'll pick right back up every time Shillary opens her mouth.

This is because of the liberal moral panics that the left has been complicit with.

Lol no. Casuals may lean to the left, but hardcore gamers have always been libertarian-ish, only becoming alt-right relatively recently because the left wouldn't stop going along with liberal feminist bullshit.

Gamers, STEM, etc, are becoming hard-right because they perceive that the left is attacking them. There's nothing difficult about this concept. The PoMo humanities majors are the ones who've been causing all these problems.

Lots of luck.

Stupid tankies always argue there is no time for fun in their Communist Utopia(TM) and that anything that's not working and reading communist theory is a waste of time. Guess that drives gamers out.

I mop the floor with user in every competition we've ever organized and I've always leaned progressive.

It's absolutely amazing the same people who railed against Christard moral panics and believed in free expression so absolutely they defended neonazis out of sheer principle the throughout their history into the early 2000s, like ACLU & EFF, started siding with such movements. Mostly it was new people entering their ranks, but a disturbing number of oldschool liberal individuals I'd been following personally went insane circa 2007.
If by "libertarian-ish" you mean the left-ish "dudeweedlmao" kind. You don't have the numbers to back that claim up, but most every poll I can think of (and my own anecdotal experience of most gaming communities) backs me up. Even GG itself was left-leaning before it died and got eaten by Zig Forums spergs.
I think it's worse than that. The problem isn't that they perceive the left is attacking them, but that there's no faction within the left they're aware of defending them.

It's like with mass economic immigration, where even in robust multi-party democracies like Europe, the only obvious choices presented to citizens on the issue are "vote nazi" or "get fucked".

Ditto. A lot of the libertarians (in the Joseph Dejacque sense of anti-authoritarian left wingers) focused on pissing off feminists more than actually defending the gaming culture against the rabid SJWs.

Either way, the right "libertarian" way isn't the way of defending gaming. Capitalism is the very reason why gaming is shit nowadays with the DRM, worthless DLC, pay-to-win, etc.

Not to mention the shitty cinematic games with no replayability pumped out regularly because the profit rate has gotten so bad they need players to zombie-like consumptive beasts.

I actually sort'a hope that will, combined with "let's plays" and journo subhuman whining, become a self correcting problem. It's just a short hop from absurdly linear games with handholding modes, to literal "skip all interactivity, even walking-sim/VN prompts, and play the cutscenes like a movie" mode. Combined with most or all monetization of LPer parasites on Youtube/Twitch eventually going to "game" publishers, that would mean future Call of The Last of Effect titles would just end up on Netflix and the actual game industry could shed that entire (audience, devs, journos) cancer in one shot.

But ~communist subversion~ killed video games and you know it.

Propaganda that is not based on truth always fails. When you deny it and blame it on liberals, you're lying in your heart and they know it. They know what the left is about, and what it's up to in video games; and when you tell them that's not real leftism they confirm to themselves that leftists are all liars who would never say a true thing even to save their own family.

Lurk fucking more until you find out what those words mean, 'k?

Gaming was always shit because of capitalism, it is just more shit today. It is rose tinted glasses that we focus on the diamonds in the rough like Metal Gear Solid in the sea of commodified crap. Going all the way back to the days of Atari, good game design was by accident from the perspective of the capitalist thus the mountain of shovelware leading up to the crash of '83. There there was the cross promotion where prior to the crash there were poorly made cartoons of videogames.

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Reminder that the "great crash" affected only the console market and their walled-garden bullshit, and that home computer bedroom coders churned out awesome games nonstop, with freeware/shareware titles and the demoscene thriving on BBSs, giving birth to everything great about PC gaming today.

Computer games are the most communist form of expression that has ever existed, requiring only a computer, developer docs, and free time, to create something (especially for the first 20 years of the medium) on par with the greatest capitalist products, distributed around the globe for free in unlimited quantity with the ring of a modem.

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The problem with a lot of gamers is that they don't understand who is on their side and who isn't. SJWs are causing so much damage to gaming with censorship, so gamers go to right-wing anti-SJWs thinking they are the solution.

They know that monopolies like Steam are a problem, but they somehow attribute that to communism rather than capitalism. They know that freeware passion projects are better than AAA trash, but they still reject socialism. It's honestly incredible how they can believe so many contradictory things at once.

You can't even explain to them that the shit that SJWs espouse isn't leftism, because they have a Pavlovian response to a lot of the terms you would use to explain it, and their brain will just shut off once you point to capitalism being the problem.

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The bigger issue is that the SJWs themselves say it's leftism, and nobody with any visibility on the left ever objects to such statements.

It may just be better to just concede leftism to them and just say they aren't communists, since leftism is fairly vague anyway.

Metal Gear Solid is the very essence of commodified cinematic tripe that capitalism likes to give us instead of focusing on good game design. Please support your arguments with better taste.

Little hyperbolic, don't you think? Westerner PC game developers made some decent RPGs, that's fair, and then frankly a mountain of lousy action games that completely misunderstood arcade design.

youtu.be/T-2YuPGYabw

It really isn't, I haven't played 5 or 1 and I thought 4 was bloated and drawn out but it's a fluke of capitalism if anything.

Philosophytube did a recent video on something similar with Banon ie the right promotes reactionary ideology by identifying actual problems and then applying a non-sequitor to justify the right.

youtu.be/wO6uD3c2qMo

It doesn't help that most leftist youtubers take contrarian stances on pop culture, like hbomberguy defending the Star Wars Prequels & Dead Souls 2 over 1, Quintin Reviews & Shaun defending The Last Jedi, Shaun defending Blackpanther and Ghostbusters.

Political youtubers shouldn't praise shitty movies just to own the right, it only vindicates the right and serves to swell their numbers.

Didn't he sponsor that child tranny charity too? Why are these idiots considered representatives of the left?

Because the state of the left is in such a shit show that being mildly entertaining and anti-right will suffice. Most Marxist channels are boring let's be honest, I can sit through them but you need to see what the right and these milque-toast leftists are doing, you shouldn't be surprised that nobody wants to watch slide show presentations done by a passion less old dude.

It's not ideal but it's not like we can he picky. It does irk me that he raised $400k.
He could do so much for leftism but he doesn't really care about capitalism, it's more of a moralist parlour club to him so he can lambast knuckle dragging right wingers, his flat earther is a recent example like as though of all the pressing issues in the world that is a topic that needs addressing.
It reminds me of the whole atheist anti-creationist circle jerk, where it was intellectually shallow and self indulgent.
Guys like hbomber need to challenge popular conventions like the idea that the idea that leftists like to tax hardworking people and discourage "success", or how inheritance tax is an egalitarian necessity, just go on any episode of that propaganda shitshow question time on the BBC (uninformed member of the public ask right wing guests stupid questions). Hbomber and his ilk need to be challenging these kind of commonly held right wing tropes to be of any good, not just fellate their own ego.

I don't think a revolution will happen in my lifetime but I definitely won't happen if it's just a freakshow of societal pariahs strung together like garbage that only have in common their mild inconvenience at the hand of right wing Internet hate mongers.

Jimmy Dore is pretty entertaining, though he's not far-left.

True, we have a similar British version of him in Galloway who IS a far leftist and low key quotes Marx in his radio rants aimed at the working class, it's no surprise but because Galloway isn't fixated on trannies and gays, he has a lot of white blue collar workers who listen to him, though they do throw a hissy fit when he talks about immigration. Having said that Galloway isn't as entertaining, he's much more serious but he can electrify the soul of the common person if that makes sense.

Comedy, satire and ridicule are the best ways to go but we don't have these qualities in Galloway either, the smug Novara Media tries but they're slightly out of touch when they don't seem to be interested in empowering people economically. I long for the Paul Joseph Watson outrage merchant of our own, except of course his butthurt will be legitimate.

I forgot to mention that badmouse did dunk on some anti-Venezuela shill recently too, but he needs to actually make his content relatable to the working class instead of talking about shit that only his uni mates have an inconsequential interest in too.

Oh and I forgot about Non-Compete earlier though he's an American, but even for American audiences he needs to work on his material, it's a bit bloated and contrived, I commend him for painting Elon Musk in a poor light, something a lot of casual liberals would never do.

Gaming is another opiate of the masses

Isn't he less of an entertainer/commentator, and more of an actual fringe political figure, along the lines of Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader?

He's more of a commentator, he's not an academic but was an activist since he was a kid and eventually became a Labour MP until he got booted out over his objections to the Iraq War. He's serious and speaks as an ex politician but he has more of a rabble rouser and organiser than Chomsky or Nader are, I guess it helps that he has a weekly live radio show.

Also shout out to Chunkymark who covers current events on a daily basis with his over the top pantomime style and infectious cackle. I did like Russel Brand too but he's doing less current events and is trying to be more like Joe Rogan recently.

What the hell has Chomsky ever organized?

Chomsky organized your mind, bucko.

Most video games contain market economies, sometimes simulated sometimes just as background to how you get equipment. It reinforces pro market shit and, makes us think ancient people were capitalist with kings.

They made doom, the adventure game genre and some amazing puzzles. Not being able to make good shoot em ups didnt mean they had bad games.

this is like showing up at a random funeral or in the middle of an orgy or i dont know and talking to people about socialism
stop
this is not how talking to people work
there is time and there is place for these sorts of things

also if you dont even git gud, just shut up
you will quite simply alienate the whole ideologies if you spread them while being bad at videogames

additionally, videogames, while they can be leftist, they are usually right wing and here's why:
main theme of most videogames is competition and killing other players, therefore hierarchies of merit/skill and competence arrive naturally, sure there are videogames where cooperation and world building is the goal but those games are usually seen as 'gay' and the most popular games are all about imperialism, whole scale genocide for the sake of resource monopoly, turbo hyper ultra mega dog eat dog worlds; super edition
and so on

...

im talking about gameplay
most of the games revolved around ruthless killing and gladiatorial competition
its a breeding ground for hormonal pre adolescent males of the species, you see more swastikas in videogames than you see anywhere else

ive personally played lots of wotlk wow private servers, and every other guild is called brownshirts, ss, sturmstaffl (or however you fully spell ss), luftwaffe, kriegsmarine, space nazis, racist guild, wyatt mann guild, right wing death squads……..

the nature of (most popular) videogames depicts capitalist 'dog eat dog' ruthless competition and social darwinism
in videogames, imperialism is celebrated as "skill" and "merit", you simply murder competition over and over and that just how the (game) world is

This is the biggest fucking joke ever, communists can't even make vidya.

inb4 Tetris

Tetris was even invented and popularized during the years when USSR went full revisionist

What is stopping them? Sure cuba and whatever havent put resources towards that, but they produce many other similar things like films. Im not denying the relatively small input they have made, I am questioning why you think that means they cant in the future.

Also dprk made a game. Its crap, but it does exist. If they can do it anyone can.

lol okay then.

Nazbol wasn't really a thing around gg and I was a National Anarchist back then.

1984? It wasn't that bad. And video games weren't around during Stalin so wtf man….

The state & the poor ass economy.

So did the USSR! But is it a environment for a gaming industry to develop? Nope.

What?

Yeah, they had private properties in 1984's USSR.

If capitalism was taken to its absurd and logica conclusion, there wouldn't even exist a modding community online, much less open source.

No matter how much ancaps try to convince you that capitalists care about free market. The reality is that they hate competition and want to ensure they monopolise a huge portion of the market share.

Case in point: Sony's questionable business practices, the aforementioned DRM, quarter-assed in-game locked DLC, micro-transactions, etc.

Now take the Doom modding community: A shitton of rather nice mods, even including the massively overrated Brutal Doom mod by sgtmarkIV.

Perhaps socialism wouldn't be the best approach at gaming, but it'd be certainly much better than under capitalism. Name me one single AAA game that it's worth a damn.

Nobody is excluded from the means of production, and people organize themselves.
This condition is actually far more important and valuable than "capital monopoly with red-paint characteristics." And luckily, we have it.

Yes? Programming and game design are arts, and this is reflected in the (past and present) primarily leftist nature of both professions. Not to mention that, your anecdotes aside, studies indicate their audience has been and remains primarily left-leaning as well.

pretty sure your wishful thinking is coloring your vision, all i did so far in this life is working construction, briefly serving in the military and playing videogames, and what i found out was that these 3 were right wing galore
i also suspect prisons are the same

Battle for Wesnoth > Tetris

Like I said, it's not wishful thinking, it's proven fact. I posted 6 studies upthread that debunk the ridiculous notion of "muh nahtzee gaymurz".

On the subject of construction and soldiers, incidentally, the 2nd of those studies does confirm both are indeed primarily right-wing (although in the case of the military, far moreso for the airforce & marines than the army & navy).