Vidya

The Video Games Post

I said I would make this post months ago, but I never got around to it.

I think there is a generally positive opinion of video games among the right-wing male youth these days. I am a gamer. I can’t ever take games out of my upbringing, I’ve been a gamer since I was very young and I’m not ashamed of it. However, I agree with the sentiment that games just aren’t what they used to be. I’ll get into that later, but there is a demographic on the right which seems to hate video games. Women. There are probably more female gamers than ever, but there has also been a transition in the public conscious away from “women can be just as big of gamers as any man” to “video games are bad and men are bad for playing them too much”. Also, a lot of women who do play video games are not really playing the sort of games men play. They’ll play Animal Crossing, or The Sims, or some sort of mobile game tycoon. They are not very gamey, they’re more aesthetic. I am always a bit skeptical of women who like shooters, for the same reason I am skeptical of women who are “one of the boys”. These women are often ehh, rather promiscuous to say the least. Nonetheless, there are definitely more “authentic girl gamers” than ever before. I know some. A lot of these women are not like you and I, they are more the tumblr-weaboo type of girl.

All of that being said, real “girl gamers” are in the minority and most women are annoyed by the frequency at which men play video games. Women complain that it takes the attention of their partners away from the relationship, and towards something “unproductive”. And I think this is a huge difference in the mindset between men and women. Men are technics-oriented. Autism, mind you, is probably related to high fetal testosterone. Autistic traits are also associated with high facial width, another corollary with prenatal testosterone. Men are nearly 4 times as likely to be autistic as women, probably because the neurotypical mean for men is already more autistic than the neurotypical mean for women.

Women are not technically oriented. They tend to view “games” or “ideas” in life as simple means, while the end-goal of life is shaped by emotion and social bonds. I don’t mean to rag on women too much here, not all women are like this. It’s just an average. And there are good things about the female brain, like their appreciation of aesthetics and beauty. albeit, this comes at the cost of desiring aesthetic authenticity. Men enjoy aesthetics but have to ground them with consistent principles. Women don’t care as much about this, they don’t recognize things as being informed by principles in quite the way men do. This is why they’ll insert black lesbian anarchists into “cottagecore”. Or play with LEGO Batman and pretend he is going to the prom or baking cookies (IYKYK). Or for that matter, freak out over unrealistically attractive women in games and TV, because it makes them feel insecure and objectified. Men recognize male characters in movies with obvious steroid bods as simply trying to reach an ideal in heroic male physique, but women don’t really feel the same way men do about the ideal form of woman. They are more focused on the feels or “vibes” of a character, and become insecure at the sight of women with unrealistic physical beauty. I have met women though, who really seem to have something of a “male gaze” for women though. Maybe they are ever-so-slightly lesbian, I’m not sure, but they’ll draw women scantily clad and with big boobs and wide hips. Interesting phenomenon, also these are the same women who play vidya. I have heard that a large swathe of.. *ahem* lewd Japanese cartoons… Are drawn by heterosexual women.

Okay, I’m getting really off-topic. Apologies. Now that we know this about women, we can understand their complaints a bit more. To them, gaming is “unproductive”. It doesn’t satisfy a social itch, since it’s solitary. And women, who seem to struggle with object permanence, get angry that men are more attentive to this simulacrum, this bundle of code, than they are to their girlfriends. Because to them, the most interesting thing in the world is other people. There is a certain unreciprocated love of other human beings which comes from male autism, and to women it can be heart breaking. Men will love you, but they will recognize the essence of you and love that while not necessarily having to express it with you all the time.

But, the idea that video games “ruined men” is feminist retconning, okay? Men have always liked this sort of thing, women should be thankful that their men are coming home to play PS5 instead of spending 3 hours after work at the bar playing darts and drinking enough alcohol to make them too tired to engage socially once they get home. Women are the ones driving the decline in sex, women are the ones driving the decline in marriage, men are simply responding to this difficulty. Subject for another post. In this respect, games can be criticized as a form of escapism. We don’t want too much escapism, we were born into this world and have to live in it. Many men who are with us today would have never become engaged in dissident thought had it not been for disgruntlement over video games, which is what I want to talk about next…

Gamergate is the reason a lot of us are here at all. It really was the most important moment for right-wing youth. Before this point, New Atheism was popular because it was Christian moms who were against Vidya. They were the ones saying it was causing satanism or school shootings or whatever. When Anita Sarkeesian opened her wide-lipped Armenoid mouth, the skeptic leviathan averted its gaze. It found its next prey, the Social Justice Warriors.

Society has arguably been on the attack against young men since the dawn of time, but it has gotten really bad since the 1960s or so. It comes from the left and the right, who both fear the creative destruction young men like to engage in. This was arguably bound to happen in a society with decreasing birth rates. Gerontocrats hate young men with a burning passion. But anyways, in this sort of environment men can’t help but indulge in some escapism just to escape the sheer boredom and blandness of it all. The internet and video games represented one of the last places where men dominate. Companies recognized that their fans were all men, and their developers were mostly nerdy White and Asian guys, and no one really cared if some element of a game was vaguely offensive or problematic because, well, it’s just a game. And then the feminists came. And if it was only that they were entering the online space and talking about how they don’t like video games, it would be whatever, but they were simultaneously infiltrating companies through corporate bloat jobs (and soon enough, The Great Troonification) and demanding that the companies and their games change to appeal to them and not their traditional audience. The audience was demonized as evil bigots, and this was often used to excuse criticism having nothing to do with political elements of a game.

For the gamers, and the anons, there wasn’t anywhere to go to just plug your ears and ignore this. The Internet Old Guard fought back. They reoriented themselves around making anti-SJW content, and it was huge for a long time. Not only were the infringements of the Shitlibs met with rhetorical fangs, but many young men began to be honest about their inner discomfort towards certain groups who were developing a shell of institutional protection. The “cringey” people. The furries, the gender cases, the fat-pride people, and to some extent the gays (at least, the flamers). This actually probably did have permanent positive effects. The “76 Genders” stuff was shelved permanently in favor of the vague and less potent “non-binary” term. Otherkins never rose to significance. Furries are still viewed pretty negatively or at least with disinterest. The fetishistic subculture elements of the LGBT movement have taken a backseat. The largest positive effect of all this was that normies who were making their way online for the first time in 2016 were met with massive amounts of content critical of the Social Justice regime, which could not easily be persecuted because of the anonymity and obscurity of the writers. This helped Trump a lot, especially among young voters, who were sort of memed into liking him. This is why Gen Z at that time was relatively right-wing, while now it has become extremely left-wing. Albeit, this could just be the “college effect”.

At this point, all of the things that these White Gamers had just put up with out of apathy were coming out of the woodworks. They expanded their Anti-SJW horizons to the things they had ignored in the past as “none of my business” because they began to recognize where the train started rolling. When I was in middle school, one thing I found annoying was the inaccurate forced diversity in games. At first, you might say “well I just want historical accuracy”, and it’s true that that is a big part of it. But then the counterpoint of “well what about inaccuracies that make the game playable like parachutes being 100% accurate?” and you realize that it isn’t just the inaccuracy. It’s about what inspires this inaccuracy. It is a deliberate attempt to erase your ancestors’ history, to try and convince people that the West was always like it is today. It was always diverse and always full of protected groups, but simultaneously that it was run by the worst people in human history. It’s the same with mary-sues. Yeah, you can say “oh well Rey being the best Jedi isn’t that unrealistic when there are magic space wizards” but no, it’s clearly not the sort of concession being made to create a magical and fatalistic world fit for a story. It’s an attempt to pill the audience, to make them say “well it just doesn’t feel very realistic that the best Jedi ever would be this girl” because they’ll respond to that by chastising you for even implying that women don’t do as good at the tail ends of such fields (which is, of course, a perfectly good intuition to have). Basically, it is a game of dialectics that leads to a gradual unraveling of all of the liberal dogma someone accepted apathetically throughout their life.

But ultimately, gamergate was a failure. It failed because no amount of online kvetching or bad sales can stop these middle management types. They don’t really care if the company loses money, they’ll probably job hop in two years anyways and be absolutely blameless. Meanwhile, social media began to crack down on anti-SJW content, and politics changed heavily after Trump was elected. Different things came to the forefront. The Tumblr Exodus and mass normie influx changed the demographics of Social Media, a lot of the Old Guard probably got families and left the internet too. Others, especially in the gaming community, trooned out, and today they enforce Troon ideology in gaming spaces with an iron fist. Any vaguely anti-Trans comment can get you in serious trouble in these communities, even more than vaguely misogynistic or racist comments. Speaking from my own eye witness account.

People got mad at me last time for putting the Boob Break at the end of my post, so I’ll put it comfortably in the middle this time — subject related, of course.

The Sorceress from Dragons Crown has perhaps the best breasts in Gaming, but she caused a lot of controversy for it despite the game being pretty obscure.

So yes, while video games do serve as a form of escapism, it was the overstepping of the Left which caused much of us to join the movement. I would say, for myself, it was the catalyst which caused me to question “Libtard Cosmology”. A lot of people I’ve talked to say the same, although they know better than to admit it to leftists who will try to shape it as some sort of “pipeline” (see: Catalogue of Pipelines) that you had no agency in.

But other than this, I would say there are negative effects of gaming. Mainly, it is an attention killer. Games are way more stimulating than books, so a lot of kids don’t read at all these days. I wish I had read more as a kid, it’s good for building your imagination and your vocabulary. Video games also encourage sedentism to some extent. I don’t think sports are necessarily less stimulating that video games, but they do “hurt” while video games don’t. Kids who are athletic will enjoy both, but unathletic kids will always prefer video games because they will be huffing and puffing on the field. A lot of people who play video games are also good athletes, because they require a lot of the same things. Competitive spirit, focus, spatial awareness, quick reflexes, hand-eye coordination, and reaction time.

Ultimately, while video games can be too stimulating for young minds, the age of vidya was far superior to the age of “Social Media”. Video Games encourage practice and discipline, prioritize victory, and immerse you in creative worlds. Some games are easy and encourage mental retardation, like Animal Crossing, but some are really hard and you really have to care about achieving this goal. It is an abstract pursuit of excellence, be it against a programmed set of villains or a real person across the world. Social Media is much more overstimulating than vidya and achieves much less. I’m always kind of surprised to find that, despite all of my time online, I actually don’t use it that much more than a lot of Zoomers, except they aren’t drawing Soyjaks or writing Substacks or making edits on iFunny. They’re just scrolling. What do they even talk about all day? I don’t know, it’s a mystery. Social Media is good because you meet some really interesting people online, but most of these people don’t even do that. Somehow they spend all day on… Snapchat? HOW??? What are they doing for 5 hours on Snapchat?

Video games I think also teach you many things about life. The ideal gaming experience is to delight in playing the game, in all of its joys and struggles, simply for the sake of it. You don’t need to beat the boss so you can get something, it’s just the thing you do in the game. It is the purpose of your character. Life is similar, you should just do what you ought to do for the sake of it. You shouldn’t be caught up in what you get from it, nor should you shun wat you get from it. Also, death is not the end… Games don’t die, they respawn! And, you should be good in video games, even though the NPCs are not real. Because you wouldn’t want your character to be a bad guy. Some people act devilishly in video games, but I don’t. This is like in real life, like ehh Deontology or Virtue Ethics you know? It is okay though to hurt NPCs if they slight you or do to you injustice, because justice is the beloved daughter of Jove.

I believe that the key difference between the Indian world-feeling (described by Spengler) and the Classical or ‘Apollonian’ world-feeling (also described by Spengler) is that the Indians, to them life is just a dream. So that is why it is okay to shit in the streets and scam people, it’s just a lucid dream. The Greeks similarly recognized life as some sort of lesser reality, but to them it was like a game. To the Greeks, being a master of games was one of the best things you could be, just shy of being a hero in war. In peace time, those who would make their fame in battle made it at the Olympics. Life should be lived in the pursuit of arete, or excellence. The Greek Gymnasium was not just a gym, it was also a place where excellence was pursued in philosophy. Likewise, the Greek Olympics were not just athletic competitions. Sculpting competitions were also held at the Olympics. When you play a game, you collect items along the way, but they’re really just so that you can beat the game easier. They don’t have much significance in themselves. I guess you could say… My life is like a video game!

@whereisbalakeIntroducing the one minute version of My Life Is Like A Video Game #funny #comedy #joke #ironic #satire #mylifeislikeavideogame #xyzbca #foryou

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Athletic games are really good for another post. I think it is evidence of social decadence that most of our popular sports now are large team sports. Historically the most popular sports were either small team sports or solo sports, because that is what made someone’s skills the most clear. Team sports aren’t bad, but a lot of the reason they are so popular is because they are fun to watch and Sports have become an entertainment industry all about money.

Another positive elements of vidya is that a lot of games are very straightforward and honest in tone compared to cinema, which is obsessed with subversive and pessimistic undertone. To make video games fun you often have to crush your enemies, which can be justified either by their ontological evil or by the necessary duties of your character.

I think that video games were far superior when they were mostly oriented around campaign modes. Online gaming is fun and it’s more competitive, which fosters that spirit of excellence, but it is not romantic at all. It isn’t immersive. Games no longer feel like an adventure, there is no final goal. There is no soul put into the games either, they are no longer a work of art or an epic story but a product and nothing more. I have increasingly found myself, since the start of Coronavirus, opting for older games instead of new games. They feel fresh, even if they are clearly dated. It’s a great experience, just being absorbed into the world of a game.

What individual games might you guys like me to talk about in later Substacks? I know I am well-known by some of the older subs for playing Fortnite, but I don’t really have much to say about it. I’ve played Save The World but it’s pretty ass. FNBR might have been worth an entire ‘stack a year or two ago but now I don’t have as much to write about it. Minecraft could use a ‘stack. I’ve already written a ‘stack on Tears of the Kingdom airing my grievances over “Longhoused Link”. I don’t want this ‘stack to be too long, I’ve written too many long ones lately.