By Nelson Schneider - 10/13/24 at 02:37 PM CT
It seems like ever since the Orange Retard, Trollnald J. Dump, was elected President in 2016, the Culture Wars have been enflamed – as he might say – “like never before.” Seemingly in reaction to the MAGA movement, every single Marxist Sleeper Agent activated simultaneously… and prematurely.
While the Long March Through the Institutions has been partially successful in that it has captured both corporate Human Resources and the Ivory Towers of academia, the rest of the culture in the West was largely ignored. Obviously, the plan was to abruptly replace the existing culture with a Marxist worldview and hope that the Normies were so placated by their Bread and Circuses (e.g., welfare and professional sports) that they wouldn’t notice.
And, honestly, it almost worked. Normies are completely blind to the Culture Wars and mindlessly drift along, consuming whatever media or culture they happen to bump into, like NPC jellyfish. Gamers, on the other hand, have been discussing and arguing about the merits of their subculture for decades, even before the rise of Internet forums and chat applications made the process “easy” and thus flooded the subculture with the lowest common denominator. In spite of the influx of Casuals, e-Girls, and other varieties of non-Gaming Gamer, at the heart of each of us is a cultural awareness that simply doesn’t exist in the broader population.
Even as our own forums, where we have discussed and argued for decades, become ever more censorious, even as fads and meme-games come and go, there’s an ever-present ability, willingness, and even eagerness to call-out BS when we see it. Thus, it came as no surprise when a poll on one of the biggest and Woke-est Gaming forums today, NeoGAF, revealed that over 95% of Gamers don’t care about “Inclusivity.” The emergence of this poll – and the shocking fact that it was allowed to stand and was not moderated, censored, or deleted by the forum’s staff – was first covered by Tech4Gamers. However, the comments in the thread do a fine job of painting the scene without further commentary.
Of course, trained in writing and rhetoric as I am, I can’t help but wonder if the NeoGAF users and blogger at Tech4Gamers might be misinterpreting something. The language used in the poll specifies “inclusivity,” and everyone participating in or writing about this poll seems to assume that the “inclusivity” in question is the kind that is frequently accompanied by “diversity” and “equity” in the Woke Marxist playbook. However, I’m not entirely sure that every Gamer voting in the poll was thinking that way.
It is an unfortunate fact that, as cultural groups are attacked by other cultural groups, they all tend to circle their metaphorical wagons and double-down on their central beliefs. It has been happening this way in the West since at least the Roman Jewish Wars, and further examples can be seen in modern Islamism and Fundamentalist American Christianity. With regard to Gamers, though, “inclusivity” is a word that isn’t always shackled to its brethren in the DEI acronym, but has also been associated with “dumbing down” and “casualization” of videogame experiences since Nintendo first tried to increase their market base by appealing to people who weren’t already under the established cultural umbrella of “Gamer,” by making simpler games that were more accessible and inclusive to people without a lot of practical and mechanical experience with the medium. Simultaneously, Sony started releasing high production value titles that included difficulty options that would allow anyone to experience the games’ Cinematic quality without needing to have any prior experience or skill.
Some people within the Gamer subculture took great offense at the accessibility and inclusivity of these predominantly 7th Generation experiences. The cultural pushback was swift, violent, and counterproductive, as the perceived need to counter “inclusivity” with “exclusivity” suddenly shifted the focus of videogame discussion and critique from praising titles that were as close to objectively excellent as possible to praising titles that only a small number of people could “appreciate,” and only after a great deal of auto-hypnotic brainwashing and circle-jerk echo-chamber discussions, all of which ultimately produced the modern Gaming phenomenon of dogmatic and mantra-spouting Souls Trolls.
Ultimately, it seems that Gamers’ awareness of external attempts to manipulate the subculture is a bit of a double-edged sword. While Gamers are the loudest and most willing voices who will continue the shouting contest against intrusion from both the Woke Marxist Left and the Fundamentalist Christian Right, their awareness of external manipulation has made them somewhat oblivious to internal manipulation by self-ordained gatekeepers who, at first, only wanted to keep outside corruption at bay, but ultimately succumbed to their own internal corruption.
When I think of “inclusivity” in Gaming, I think of titles with universally-relevant narratives, relatable character arcs that speak to the broad relativity of the Human Condition. I think of gameplay mechanics that bring joy and pleasure to everyone who picks up the controller. Of course, maybe I only think this way because I don’t have a Twitter-X account and have been spending increasingly less time reading Gaming forums. Let’s just hope that in our self-protective zeal, we don’t allow Gaming to crash and burn due to our own decadence and refusal to self-critique.
