This is from JB, who correctly says that gaming is not flash applications on your cellphone, but first person shooters: that gamers care not who you are but how good you are, and if you can’t game don’t kvetch.
I think I’ve quoted Milo before, but he says it best.
Despite the common stereotypes of gamers as losers, nerds and shut-ins, gamers proved to be the perfect opponents for cultural authoritarians. The left relies on destroying the reputations of their opponents — but how do you destroy the reputations of people who have been ridiculed as often as gamers? When you’re already hated by the left, the right, and the media, the only way to go is dank.
Gamers also benefited from being one of the few genuine grassroots communities, with few leaders and no official structures. Unlike the tedious “movements” that regularly emerge from college campuses – whether Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) or Slut Walks – the gamers have no radical ideology.
They are ordinary, in some cases really quite apolitical, people, brought together by a shared hobby. They have no grand social objective beyond protecting the medium they love from authoritarian scolds and they cannot be neatly categorised.
The more you try to paint gamers as basement-dwelling straight white nerds, the more paraplegic black lesbian World of Warcraft addicts come tumbling out of the woodwork. (Is that offensive to dykes? I have no idea. Nor would the lesbians in GamerGate give a flying toss.)
One of the features of GamerGate is that it includes people from every background imaginable. A survey on GamePolitics found a broad mix of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Gamers don’t care if you’re black, white, gay, straight, or disabled. All that matters is that you know how to game. They’ll even welcome right-wing bastards like me.
And they have learned that using the most incorrect language has a bonus. I drives the petunias, the SJW who are perpetually whiny, away.
The language of gamers can be startling to the uninitiated, for sure. Gamers are fond of using words like faggot, retard, hoe, and the n-word, and they are extremely inventive at coining gratuitous neologisms by combining words in new and imaginative ways. Urban Dictionary contains a wealth of these words, for those interested. This language is the target of a great deal of criticism, and held up as evidence that gamers are homophobic, misogynist, transphobic, racist, fat-shamers, whatever –phobic have you, but that criticism demonstrates a very weak understanding of how language evolves and works. Not too long ago, moron, imbecile and idiot were medical diagnoses. They are now just common words to describe stupid people. Retard and faggot are undergoing the same linguistic transition, from referring to something very specific, to a more general word category. The opposition to the word faggot is particularly interesting because the word “gay” only recently evolved to mean “male homosexual”, and is now rarely used to mean “effervescently happy”. I’m quite certain if you described the flapper era as the Gay 20s, a significant number of people under the age of 30 would have no idea what the hell you were talking about.
The fact that Gamers do not follow the narrative, of course, cannot be tolerated. And that is why the SJW wanted to change games: tidy up the graphics, get rid of the gore, and generally tone everything down. And make it boring.
Boring.
It did not work. Instead, the language has evolved: not in the way the progressives want it to with speech codes and neutral words for the confused, but instead turning loaded, specific, politically correct phrases on their head.
To my gaming kids, Gay means pathetic. Social justice means you are a loser. And gender neutral is a nonsense. The revolution is going to happen, and it will not be further to the left.
