Update: Made a steam community opposing this crap:
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/CasualVendetta
What follows is a modified and linked up version of an argument I had on steam which I will not link because I do not want to ever see it again. (Despite my willingness to speak, the hate does as a matter of fact hurt me. I’m no emotional masochist I just have an over developed sense of responsibility to speak up on macroscopic issues.)
I see servile pandemic myopia everywhere. Anytime someone complains about anything there seems a disproportionate and ready supply of enablers eager to make apologies for whoever is the most oppressive in the room. At first I thought it was just plants, sock puppets, and insiders, but I realize it’s much scarier than that.
So they say it’s my choice to participate and that absolves them, so therefore it’s as if I’m fair game for anything they are permitted to do by those with more power and ALL COMPLAINT must therefore be invalid. How convenient for everyone with a single scrap of power over anyone in any context eh? Awful lot of people getting screwed in this culture “by choice” by that logic. Like the homeless apparently since they “choose” to not work.
Bait and Switch
It’s like no one is permitted to speak anymore unless it is to kiss the ring. Spineless wretches.
Let me be clear about something. Yes I personally hate try hard masochists and other variants of the “hardcore” gamer. I emotionally wish they’d change or vanish, but again, the point, which I was taught as a child and apparently no one else was, is that my freedom should end where yours begins. While I may desire X from them I will not force X from them nor will I argue that others with more power should force X from them on my behalf unless that force is required to protect freedom at the larger scales.
That is the core difference between every argument I make in most any context and its clash with the obsequious mob. Every argument I make is in favor of either adding freedom, or opposing the removal of a freedom. The only exceptions are those cases where a given freedom on balance leads to less freedom at the larger scale. Like for example the freedom to acquire infinite wealth.
One Possible Solution
To oppose me therefore is by definition to oppose someone else’s freedom because that is how I formulate my positions and arguments. The only possible exception is if I were in error and X argument I am making actually leads to less freedom, in which case the only counter argument is to show/explain how Y argument is superior in the net freedom context thus exposing my error or offering a superior (greater net freedom at one or more scales) alternative.
Most importantly I am always willing to give counter evidence and logic a reasonable hearing.
Apologists are constantly finding new ways to say that freedom is worthless and I should be happy to have less of it.
Games are thought experiments. Hypothetical worlds from which we can learn and through which we can teach. So far the vast majority of lessons taught are subsets of might makes right, at both the direct and meta level.
You can most clearly see this trend of volition manipulation as expressed by preemptive surrender and corporate exploitation apologism in the gaming community because being a “trivial” or “non” issue that trend is allowed full freedom to bloom under IPL’s monopolistic glow. They are exceptionally good at making principled arguments on the net seem futile, especially in gaming contexts because they are monopolistic autocracies all. For profit, and interestingly filled with school attending children.
Arguments in gaming contexts are a window into what the future will look like when this more servile crowd is finally released into the world to use these same arguments to defend corporate and government behavior outside the world of games.
The direct level of game world argument is not so important. The game world can after all be changed at the whim of the coder.
The meta level however is the real world. Game aren’t typically a diary or a private garden, they’re a public park. Into which they invite the public in exchange for the opportunity to make a sale or to which they have sold a ticket. The rights you grant them get you into the habit of thinking a certain way about what is legitimate business practice and how it interacts with your human rights and everything built on those rights, such as your rights as a paying customer, your access or lack of, to recourse, and how disputes should be handled.
Since these people are often young, being gamers, this mental habit is all the more important.
Clearly many are of the disturbingly large camp that is of the opinion that no one above them can do wrong, ever. That simply because we can leave, or because pay is not being extorted (if not then as well) they are therefore ethically unencumbered and ALL complaint is therefore evidence of a personal flaw in the complainer. (This is the function of bullies. To enforce meta-rules and punish free thinkers and anyone else not in line.)
This is a question of social faith ultimately. It’s a kind of prosperity doctrine which they implicitly accept because it is hammered into their minds by virtually every piece of media on earth produced during the 20th and 21st centuries.
Especially the entrepreneurial media, which accounts for the vast majority of all media you see.
“How Should Artists Get Paid?” Isn’t a Question, it’s an Insult
That freedom is only exclusive to the coders of a given game is because of a rifle. (Actually a whole army ultimately.) In a sane world, not populated by boot licking drones, publicly exposed code would have to be open for the same reason ingredients must be displayed on the food boxes and cans. And in that world I would be able to fork their project if I didn’t like what they were doing with it and all who agreed with me could use that fork and all who didn’t could do as they individually pleased.
But as it stands they have a monopoly, and in the apologists mind those monopoly powers somehow absolve monopolists of responsibility instead of creating it. Trying to parse the psychological alchemy required to arrive at this perverse conclusion makes my spine ache.
In a gaming context silence is best obtained by pretending or asserting that any issue is a trivial issue, expressly because it’s “just a game” when it only is trivial in the sense that it’s the tip of a very large iceberg. It’s far more comfortable for apologists to try and dismiss the messenger because the message is pretty horrifying, and to be honest disastrous at the personal immediate level to internalize. Every day children are spanked/beaten/tortured or worse and men are beaten and raped for allowing their thinking to conflict with their masters’. For daring to ask the dangerous questions like “what gives you the right?” and “why should I?”
I don’t blame them really. Who wants to face the fact that they are totally captured? Who wants to face that a cartel of media companies and a generation of corrupt politicians have custom written large parts of their subconscious expressly to keep them working/primping, obeying, and spending without complaint?
I don’t expect you to consciously respond. In a sense I’m not even talking to you. I’m talking to your amygdala. And it won’t get the message for at least 48 hours due to the interaction between memory and sleep cycles, if the message gets through the noise at all.
Don’t think that just because you’re blind, the world is dark. Try hards ruin just about every game in the long term and they utterly dominate the thinking of modern era developers who because of the IPL social flaw mentioned before, are sickeningly profit motivated. We perversely even equate income with legitimacy. Never mind that that income has exactly nothing to do with skill, but rather perception which is almost entirely based on context.
http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/bell.asp
And if there is a group that’s easy to squeeze money out of it’s insecure male try hards and their legion of enablers and thetas. The ones that eventually sign up to be cops and soldiers and are eager to hurt others to achieve better standing within the hive hierarchy, to win the girl and to pay the bill. Hence the staggering success of COD/WOW. If you can make a place for try hards to dick race, they will pay (preferably per month) to use it. And anything you do to create the impression of seriousness and accomplishment (need I say prestige?) will be rewarded with praise and cash.
Meanwhile back in the real world, an entire generation of kids is covertly trained to never question the rules and to mock and humiliate any who attempt to persuade them to think like leaders for 30 seconds. Kids who literally don’t even know what freedom is, let alone how to acquire or defend it, even in contexts where they collectively have absolute power, near immortality, and an immunity to pain. The game world.
And we wonder why back in the real world, where you can be ritually or spontaneously beaten, tear gassed, and raped for standing up and speaking truth to power, that barring the rare and transient protest, that same generation can’t/won’t be bothered to vote, and couldn’t name a single congressional figure from their state with a shotgun pointed at their heart.
If begging for more content was all I was doing, here or anywhere else, I wouldn’t get the hate that I get from random drones eager to protect the hive mentality. Educators just to cope with the ever expanding ratio of students to teachers, and society’s refusal to revisit the idea of communal education generally, have forced said educators to become extremely adept at manipulating students to internalize the rules they wish to enforce, since they haven’t a prayer of directly enforcing them themselves when they are outnumbered 30 to 1. The problem is, that mode of thinking never stops, and kids walk around well after school and college enforcing hierarchical, bell-slave, class stratified behavioral standards without even being aware of it.
The number one function of school today is to make kids conclude that obedience is their good idea and that anyone who encourages them to be a true threat ideologically or otherwise is to be ignored or mocked, at best. Beaten, murdered, or driven to suicide at worst.
It was not like this on the net, even 10 years ago, let alone 20. But of course 10 years ago, what and who moderated their contact with the world? School administrators? Collaborator parents too scared of lower pay to stand up to people they themselves were beaten/conditioned to apologize for and to?
Why do I even bother. I’m effectively trying to talk you out of not knowing how to ride a bike or talking a marine out of a repetition conditioned reflex. How is a handful of conversations supposed to expose, let alone compete with an expertly crafted programming regimen that costs billions a year and has been constantly refined for 200 years?
http://adamcurtisfilms.blogspot.com/
I play games to try and escape the world as it is, the specific elements I am escaping are in large part a result of pandemic preemptive submission and will of the ruler internalization. I get mad, because even in a setting where we are 100% free to dispense with all that baggage we (you) go out of our way to code it in and then spend huge amounts of effort defending it as if it’s a feature not a bug.
Maybe one day I’ll quit trying to be helpful or assuming the best and I’ll just be able to silently endure the antics of a generation eager to preemptively enslave itself, not only in the shared lucid dream of the game world, but the real world as well.
