I recently watched Zero Books' little video entitled "How the Global Left Can Counter Bannon and Peterson", one of the things that stood out to me was its offhand statement that while the right has used gaming to its advantage to attract some young people, there's no reason the left can't do the same–indeed they even claimed that such an undertaking would be superior than trying to mimic the collectivization of the 1920s.
Fast forward a bit. Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 was just announced. As a fan of the original game I was honestly excited for it, around that time several people who I assume are Zig Forumslacks began fretting about a statement made by the devs that the game would be "political" that it'd be taking a "political" stance. Soon enough people began sharing repeatedly some examples of White Wolf's newest writing, most infamous being the character of "Rudi" who was a trans black muslim swedish vampire fighting for the rights of humans and vampires everywhere.
Soon enough an upswell began to emerge on /v/ that amounted to a single statement "We don't want politics injected into our games." It appeared to be an echo of GamerGate resurfacing, though this time with notably more opposition from /v/, as many people began sharing dialogue from the original Bloodlines that relentlessly mocked Bush and The Republican Party, as well as pointing out the contradiction of posters who said "You can have a game about civil wars and the environment degrading or overthrowing the government without it being political." Others quickly asked how a game about a civil war or governments being overthrown WASN'T political.
There are two things I want to hone in on, firstly if we were to give these people who claim to be bloodlines fans the benefit of the doubt and assume they played the first one and object to politics in the second, why would they be okay with a few potential jokes about Bush but not Trump? Secondly, what does it mean to these people to "not inject politics in games" when they seem perfectly fine with the politics of civil wars and government coups?
I know some people on here might answer that it's because of some inherent "Right Wing Hypocrisy", but I would argue it's much more than that. If these people tolerated jokes about Bush then they must have made at least some transition in the years between the Bush and Trump presidency that pushed them to their current mindset, secondly I believe that by studying this we could perhaps win a few people back to the left, as well as prepare the ground to win back some young people.
In the case of tolerating Bush jokes, I have a theory that the transition many young, internet savvy Americans made from mocking Bush to loving Trump lies in the evolution of one phrase: "Old Rich Politicians"
Full disclosure, I considered myself far right for some time before finding this place and slowly transitioning back to the left. My move to the right came from initially being liberal and then growing disillusioned with American liberalism in the later years of the Obama presidency.
Firstly, let's look at the phrase "Old Rich Politicians", this and some variations of it was something I heard a lot during the Bush years: The Republican Party was simply the party of rich old guys, or just old rich politicians, boomers, and corporate slimeballs. The phrase is incredibly useful, especially for Americans: our culture values youth and so the "old" part implied these politicians were out of touch, they were an alien culture to us young people, so on. The rich aspect was self-explanatory, they were insulated from the problems they were causing for the rest of us. As for politicians, well what good American doesn't hate a politician?
Yet I've noticed over the years a few extra words added to that statement, which gradually subsumed the whole thing and filtered down to wider liberal culture: "Old Rich White Men"
You see, it's the last two words which change the context of the whole statement. The "White" and "Men" part stands next to the "old" term and gradually take equality or even supremacy with the rest of the words used in the statement. Suddenly "white" and "male" are on equal parts with "old" and "rich", the phrase is used with such bile as to imply that one's race and sex organs imply they're just as out of touch or oppressive or bad as their age and personal wealth. Suddenly, the Republican party went from merely being met with implications of racism to being met with an accusation that they were just the party for whites or for men.
1/3(?)