By Matt Underwood It boggles my fucking mind how we lost gamers to the right. Capitalism is the biggest cause of the decline of gaming. Microtransactions, gambling addiction loot crates, pay to win, selling games in piece meal snipets, charging full price for flawed garbage that will “get fixed later”, relying on the community to fix their shit for free(looking at modders and Bethesda), monopolistic growth removing competition and thus reducing quality and innovation, etc… Like gaming is a microcosm of the absolute failures of Capitalism. Everything wrong with Capitalism shows up in the gaming world. And all gamers think is “Look how feminism and diversity is ruining my video games!”
Gamers were infiltrated and subverted. A lot of people are really depressed about it.
If anyone’s curious for details this isn’t a conspiracy theory, Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulis openly admit to doing this.
Even though the business plan was a flop, Bannon became intrigued by the game’s online community dynamics. In describing gamers, Bannon said, “These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power. … It was the pre-reddit. It’s the same guys on (one of a trio of online message boards owned by IGE) Thottbot who were [later] on reddit” and other online message boards where the alt-right flourished, Bannon said.
Yiannopoulos devoted much of Bretibart’s tech coverage to cultural issues, particularly Gamergate, a long-running online argument over gaming culture that peaked in 2014. And that helped fuel an online alt-right movement sparked by Breitbart News. “I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away,” Bannon told Green. “You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”
I consider myself a gamer and was a young guy online in the early 2000s. Before WoW’s “Barren chats” and Thottbot forums, you’d see what we now describe as angry incel energy in other gaming forums and especially places like 4chan.
When I read that article years ago describing how Bannon and Yianno harnessed that movement, it made perfect sense to someone like me who watched it happen – and happen so subtlely that I didn’t even notice it was happening. They harnessed the power of internet trolls.
4chan, and later WoW and it’s infamous Barren chat, were just trolls saying offensive things for the shock value and giggling behind anonymity. To some degree it still is. I was playing The Old Republic MMO last year and all the low level areas were filled with alt-right trolls very reminiscent of WoW’s Barren chat (especially on the Imperial side… No subtext there). But I remember when you’d start to see the rise of “Anonymous” and the idea that something could escape 4chan into the real world. And that’s what Bannon was able to manipulate. The idea of Trump as president started like a 4chan prank and was backed by internet trolls. And then it basically went viral and caught on and you know… 2016 happened.
The issue – and reality is – that video games generally appeal to men and single men who have more time on their hands tend devote that time to the hobby. That is to say it attracts incels. And it’s an easy hobby that glorifies the lack of other abilities. Like, I’m a gamer. I’m not good at sports, or handy or crafty. So it’s not like I have hobbies like fishing or woodcarving or some shit. There was definitely a point in my life where right at the end of college when my girlfriend dumped me, I spent my free time with games and in that toxic gaming culture, and I easily could have slid into that mindset.
And when you look at the alt-right, it’s a lot of the same thing – people angry at their own inadequacy and forming a community that gives them value.
GG as a whole yearned for any positive acknowledgment by the wider world. As it was, everyone only got to see one side, name that of those same journalists and social activists GG was opposed to. Several anti-GGers even used the GG campaign to boost their own career.
So when Breitbart, an unrelated website, started posting articles, GG fell over themselves in their enthusiasm. Yiannopoulis effectively became a GG-celebrity within days.
Here’s his AMA on KotakuInAction, in case you want to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
This all stopped after a while. I don’t remember the exact details anymore, but I think it was the right-wing propaganda of Breitbart which eventually turned many away from them. By that point, the damage was done, though. Those receptive to Breitbart’s propaganda were already exposed and possibly converted. Breibart articles are still sometimes discussed on the board, but from a brief search the last discussion was 6 months ago.