GamerGate - and it's continuing aftermath.

[BIL]

Or maybe people's mental processes are so fucked that any word with any political trappings whatsoever is now unusable in any other context? Hang on, let's get someone to do a study on usage of the word "abort".

That does happen, yeah. Did you know Nazi Germany appropriated African American culture during the occupation of Poland? And they were hardly the first to do so!

[Volteccer_Jack]

That Tarantino picture at the top of the article is the perfect reaction to those angry tweets.

[evil_ash_xero]

Great, now Earth Defense Force is racist according to Neogaf: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1282757

You know, I still go there when there is a game show, or I want to know about updates on new games. I really resent it, but there is a lot of info on that site. And then something like that pops up, and it's like "I fucking hate this site".

I went there a while back, looking or some info, and there was a thread called "Remember when there were no brown people in games?", or something like that. God, some of the people on there are so lame.

Also, is it my imagination or are most of the "women" on that site (people with girl's names or pics of themselves) actually transsexuals? Just something I noticed.

[Volteccer_Jack]

I went there a while back, looking or some info, and there was a thread called "Remember when there were no brown people in games?", or something like that. God, some of the people on there are so lame.

My dad wishes it known that he remembers when there were no white people in games.

[BIL]

House of the Zed's Revolution 60 longplay completed today. Only one you'll ever need, imo! Here's the full playlist. I quite enjoy this chap's measuredly exasperated Britlandish tones. Includes the solution to the game's unwinnable-sans-mouse final boss, which unfortunately has not yet been patched. :[

PROTIP: BriBri initially tried to spin the game-breaking bug as a Psycho Mantis-esque "puzzle," but had to back down because not even a consummate liar such as herself could countenance that. I think she should've tried to get more mileage out of it! It's at least a slightly more interesting MGS reference than the face-slappingly trite ones already peppering the game.

Of course Psycho Mantis didn't just murder Snake instantly until you figured it out. And you hadn't chosen gamepad over mouse at MGS1's outset, only to find your chosen device unusable at a critical junction. And above all, MGS1 wasn't simply playing a mean-spirited trick on the player with its control port swap; it was the organic conclusion of a playful scenario involving a "mind reading" enemy, initially imperious and untouchable, eventually brought low by the seasoned observation of Colonel Campbell.

...

Yeah BriBri, this comparison is unflattering. I can see why you backed off! I am just a brute male, but sometimes I get flickers of empathy before going back to grunting and killing. :[

Also, is it my imagination or are most of the "women" on that site (people with girl's names or pics of themselves) actually transsexuals? Just something I noticed.

We're on Hyper Internet II: Super Turbo these days. Even the neckbeardiest muhfucka is a wimmenz or some shit.

Let's just say you really wanna do your due diligence before getting down with any "Secret Gamer Girl" (wink wink), or you'll be in for the same surprise Eazy-E got in classic gangsta rap joint "Nobody Move!"

[Zen]

I went there a while back, looking or some info, and there was a thread called "Remember when there were no brown people in games?", or something like that. God, some of the people on there are so lame.

My dad wishes it known that he remembers when there were no white people in games.

Shocking, wanton cultural appropriation on display back in the day.
Outlaw - 1976, I believe? Featuring red and (beige?) people (to say nothing of the game that it ripped off, Gun Fight - 1975, which featured yellow people).
All shamelessly wearing cowboy attire! Oh, the humanity!

Fortunately, in 1977, sanity returned to games and white folk once again donned the chaps an stetsons in the sequel, Boot Hill.

[mamboFoxtrot]

Slowly, but surely, Skykid will have his Social Justice Bullshit thread back again.

[evil_ash_xero]

Slowly, but surely, Skykid will have his Social Justice Bullshit thread back again.

Hey now, this is MY thread!

But honestly, it's all about the SJW crap.

[BIL]

If this thread didn't exist I'd have to make one just for WuWu, who incidentally will be keeping the GG torch aloft no matter what.

>IT WAS DEAD, BUT ALIVE AT THE SAME TIME.
>IT DIED THREE TIMES AND WAS REBORN TWICE.

The world must know how hard it is being a woman on the internet.

"WAAA, STOP HARASSING ME"

Spoiler

Jesus Christ, that is disgusting! A bit like WuWu's infamously unkempt house!

Spoiler

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

[picture of inside Wu's home]

Reported for doxxing. Have fun in jail with Rolph.

[BIL]

I actually have no idea if that really is Wu's house/earbuds. Hadn't assumed so, even funnier if it is.

[Skykid]

Spoiler

Ha ha! What a fantastic loon!

[Durandal]

https://archive.is/to0pJ

‘Forza Horizon 3’ Depicts a Better Australia Than Australians Deserve

By James O’Connor
September 27, 2016

When Bart came to Australia during season six of The Simpsons, the country I call home lost its mind. For weeks our magazine covers, our television ads and our conversations were dominated by Bart and his family's upcoming 22 minutes of misadventure. The episode was so popular that after it aired that a trading card series was released, mostly depicting screenshots and quotes from the Simpsons' trip. On reflection, "Bart vs Australia" was a mid-tier episode at best, but it continues to resonate with us – not just because the royal family of modern pop culture recognised us, but because its exaggerated depictions of unreasonable laws, national hysteria and a beer-swilling, inner-tube floating idiot prime minister continue to feel relevant.
Australians don't quite lose their minds over media representation the way they used to, but Forza Horizon 3 is still likely to make a splash. Most racing games that depict Australia relegate our country to a single track. The Melbourne Grand Prix Circuit, set around the Albert Park Lake, features in many F1 games (the Adelaide track having sadly been forgotten to time), Project Gotham Racing 2 memorably sectioned off a particularly tourist-friendly section of Sydney for one course, and the Melbourne-developed Real Racing 3 featured an excellent, appropriately realistic race based in its home city.
Outside of racing games, depictions of Australia have largely come from Australian developers, and have aimed themselves at international markets that can't move past Crocodile Dundee's depiction of the country. Krome Studios' Ty the Tasmanian Tiger series, for instance, always wrapped its enjoyable platforming up with cultural stereotypes and "ocker"-isms, but the character is still considered something of a national icon.

To my mind the most accurate video game representation of Australia, as it stands right now, is 2004's Escape from Woomera. It's a game that was made partly with funding from the Australia Council (for the Arts), and is meant as an indictment on our treatment of refugees. It was released in an unfinished form and proved hugely controversial, attracting criticism from politicians and human rights organisations.
Forza Horizon 3, developed by UK-based Playground Games, understandably features a very different depiction of our country. The game nails the version of Australia that we try to sell on our tourism posters. It's all gorgeous rainforests, stunning beaches lit by clear skies, quirky country towns, and wide-open spaces. But Horizon 3 goes much deeper than this to feel authentically Australian. The traffic and distance signs look just like the ones on our roads. The garbage bins out the front of houses look like the bins we have here, with red lids for trash and yellow for recycling. The "barn finds" are no longer busted-up cars in traditional wooden buildings, but in rickety, shitty old iron sheds. The most impressively realistic touch, though, is the way streets outside the game's one major suburb are incredibly poorly lit at night. It means that they're a pain to drive on, but this makes the game feel authentic. The developers very clearly understand the aesthetics of Australia.

This has produced some feelings I did not expect to experience. Forza Horizon 3 is an inherently celebratory game, coming from an overseas developer wary of being respectful. Playground Games' Australia is so lush and beautiful, so exciting, so fun and inviting and varied, that at times I started to feel something close to patriotism. I know that this isn't even the real geography of Australia – roads have been greatly condensed, distances cut drastically, and a few things have been moved out of one state and into another. But still, there were moments where I became genuinely emotional at the beauty of my country, so lovingly rendered here. I experienced something that felt an awful lot like pride.
This is not a feeling I'm entirely comfortable with. On the same day my review code for Forza Horizon 3 appeared in my inbox, our current prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull – who unseated previous gargoyle prime minister Tony Abbott during a now-traditional vicious leadership spill in September 2015 – introduced a much-maligned same-sex marriage plebiscite legislation in Parliament. This plebiscite, proposed by a prime minister who has openly stated that he supports same-sex marriage, will let the public vote on whether they think same-sex marriage should be allowed or not. Every existing poll indicating that Australians are ready and willing to accept it, yet apparently this is still a matter for debate. Funding will be given to parties on either side of the debate, meaning that we're likely to be bombarded soon with government-funded campaigns opposing the rights of same-sex couples. Bigots will be given a large forum, and funding, to voice their hate. Despite arguments that this will be a costly course of action, one that could potentially endanger the lives of vulnerable queer Australians and ultimately slow the process, our government is stubbornly insisting upon it.

Australia is, to be blunt, a hateful country in a lot of ways right now. In the last federal election, Pauline Hanson's exceptionally right-wing One Nation party – located in Albion, a suburb of Brisbane, which is 89 kilometres north-west of Surfers Paradise, and thus not far outside Horizon's map – gained three seats, four including Hanson herself, in the Senate. She has been the centre of ridicule for her horrifyingly racist views for years, and was once sentenced to three years in prison for electoral fraud (she ultimately served 11 weeks, as an appeal overturned the conviction), has become a major political figure once more. She was a laughing stock when she campaigned on the argument that our country is "swamped with Asians", and asked that policies of multiculturalism be abolished. Now, she's demanding in the senate that Muslims should "go back to where they came from" unless they can assimilate, and people are listening. A recent poll from Essential Research found that 49 percent of Australians supported halting Muslim immigration into the country.

That's not even getting into the fact that Australia currently operates offshore detention centres, the conditions of which are too depressing and shameful to dig into properly here. The truth is, if you live in Australia and generally identify with left-wing political policies, and care about the well being of people from all different backgrounds, with different races, sexualities, genders and beliefs, then seeing Australia depicted as a beautiful, welcoming paradise can be confronting.
To be clear: Forza Horizon 3 does not need to depict any of the things I've just listed, and going down the road the developers did – creating a hopeful and beautiful version of Australia for their extremely fun racing game – was, from a commercial standpoint at the very least, the absolute right thing to do. Whenever I've travelled, I've found that people love the idea of Australia, and believe our people to be good and kind. Forza Horizon 3 is selling that idea, and there's a certain beauty in that. The developers are in no way responsible for that making me feel uncomfortable. There are plenty of people who argue that you should leave politics out of games that aren't explicitly political, and the developers have done that, which is perfectly reasonable. But our own personal politics can't always simply be switched off, and I feel like Forza Horizon 3 is showing a better Australia than what we deserve.

There is, however, one mission in the game that tapped into something deeper for me. It's a Bucket List challenge, which gives you a specific car, outlines the conditions for you, and then asks you to complete a certain task. In this particular one, you're given a 2017 Nissan GT-R, popped into a Surfers Paradise parking lot at night, and asked to rack up 25 different drift skills. This is the most quintessentially Australian driving task imaginable – doing donuts in an empty car park at night as a youth is as Australian as a kookaburra eating Vegemite out of a gumboot, although traditionally most kids who do this sort of thing aren't going to be doing it in such a nice car.
I tried the mission a few times, sliding and spinning around in this car park, but failed twice despite the mission being marked as "Easy". It wasn't until my third attempt that I realised what the key was – I had to leave the car park. I had been so locked into my old ways of thinking that I hadn't stopped to consider the wider world, how big the game's map of Australia was, how easily I could move past this challenge if I left behind my childish desire to scuff up the parking lot.
I don't know if Playground Games intended this to feel like so potent a metaphor, but playing in a country where so much policy is dictated by wealthy baby boomers whose views have not changed a jot since they were young, who are so wrapped up in wealth and privilege that they refuse to consider the wider world around them, realising that the only way to succeed was to leave the parking lot behind felt profound. May we someday leave that parking lot, so that I and many others can feel proud to call the Australia of Forza Horizon 3 home.
Forza Horizon 3 is out now for Xbox One and PC.

:straya:

[atheistgod1999]

Some shit about FH3 and Australia's political issues.

[Skykid]

Well that's one way to stray wildly off topic.

- Pick a game with an Australia based race track:

- Spend rest of article talking about immigration and political issues not represented by race track:

- feel smug:

[Volteccer_Jack]

In the last federal election, Pauline Hanson's exceptionally right-wing One Nation party – located in Albion, a suburb of Brisbane, which is 89 kilometres north-west of Surfers Paradise, and thus not far outside Horizon's map – gained three seats, four including Hanson herself, in the Senate.

That's not even getting into the fact that Australia currently operates offshore detention centres

VIDEO GAMES

Forza Horizon 3 does not need to depict any of the things I've just listed

So even you, the author, know this is garbage, yet you shoved it down the world's throat anyway. Fuck you.

[system11]

In the last federal election, Pauline Hanson's exceptionally right-wing One Nation party – located in Albion, a suburb of Brisbane, which is 89 kilometres north-west of Surfers Paradise, and thus not far outside Horizon's map – gained three seats, four including Hanson herself, in the Senate.

That's not even getting into the fact that Australia currently operates offshore detention centres

VIDEO GAMES

Forza Horizon 3 does not need to depict any of the things I've just listed

So even you, the author, know this is garbage, yet you shoved it down the world's throat anyway. Fuck you.

Pretty much how I felt about it. It's nearly a review, but full of self loathing and virtue signalling.

[BIL]

Further to totally qualified engineer WuWu's adventures in DIY custom earbuds: oh my god, Sugru themselves are a bunch of mansplaining misogynists too! Official guidance from manufacturer: when Sugru is used to make custom earbuds, it is not to be in direct contact with your ear canal. Just like that rude mansplainer said, it is intended for use with silicon-tipped earbuds.

I hope nobody besides Wu was actually stupid enough to take her advice and apply adhesive directly to their ear canal. That is a great way to trap bad stuff and encourage a jaw-shatteringly painful ear infection, the sort deserved by only the most shameless liar and charlatan.

[atheistgod1999]

At school today (yes I know, but hear me out), the principal started talking over the loudspeaker about something really awful that happened at school. His tone of voice made me think that someone fucking died. Actually, something even worse happened: some student drove around the school in a car with a Confederate flag on top. He said that we should do more things for accepting of everyone except people who support the Confederate States of America.

I'll keep my mouth shut this time, because I don't feel like getting in trouble.

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

At least it wasn't Pepe.

[Mischief Maker]

At school today (yes I know, but hear me out), the principal started talking over the loudspeaker about something really awful that happened at school. His tone of voice made me think that someone fucking died. Actually, something even worse happened: some student drove around the school in a car with a Confederate flag on top. He said that we should do more things for accepting of everyone except people who support the Confederate States of America.

I'll keep my mouth shut this time, because I don't feel like getting in trouble.

Holy shit! Would you be sympathetic for a kid driving around with a Nazi swastika on their car?

[phase3]

"Gamergate" is just some culturally insignificant media white noise generated by the internet's ever-present penchant for dichotomous thinking. Both sides of the argument are equally as vapid and unimportant. I'm not sure how so many of you have been able to be so entertained by this for so long. Literally nothing about it has provided anything of value to anyone whatsoever.

But whatever floats your boat.

[Volteccer_Jack]

If people are gonna bitch about the Confederate flag, IMO they should do it for the sane reason; you know, the endorsing treason thing. I don't like this thing where all of our wars are presented as one-dimensional battles between pure good and pure evil. Especially when talking about the most horrible and pointlessly violent and murderous war in American history. Like okay, people just want to ignore all that and pretend the Confederacy seceded for the sole purpose of keeping their slaves. PROTIP: Lincoln didn't proclaim a single fucking person emancipated until doing so was strategically necessary.

Holy shit! Would you be sympathetic for a kid driving around with a Nazi swastika on their car?

The only way complaining about the way douchebags decorate their property could be stupider or more inconsequential would be if we were talking about a car in a videogame.

*makes post with literally no value to anyone whatsoever complaining about other people doing same*

At least you didn't drag out your waste of time for several paragraphs like that Forza review.

[Mischief Maker]

If people are gonna bitch about the Confederate flag, IMO they should do it for the sane reason; you know, the endorsing treason thing. I don't like this thing where all of our wars are presented as one-dimensional battles between pure good and pure evil. Especially when talking about the most horrible and pointlessly violent and murderous war in American history. Like okay, people just want to ignore all that and pretend the Confederacy seceded for the sole purpose of keeping their slaves. PROTIP: Lincoln didn't proclaim a single fucking person emancipated until doing so was strategically necessary.

I dunno. Look at the Confederate Declaration of Secession and it's all about Free States failing to cooperate with Slave States on the extradition of escaped slaves.

If you want to be pedantic you could say that from the South's perspective their entire economy had become centered around the incredibly lucrative cotton industry and the Free States giving safe harbor to escaped slaves were cutting into the profits of plantation slavemasters. You could make that argument if you were a fucking sociopath.

Next you'll be saying the WWII Holocaust was morally balanced because of the Treaty of Versailles.

[Zen]

If people are gonna bitch about the Confederate flag, IMO they should do it for the sane reason; you know, the endorsing treason thing. I don't like this thing where all of our wars are presented as one-dimensional battles between pure good and pure evil. Especially when talking about the most horrible and pointlessly violent and murderous war in American history. Like okay, people just want to ignore all that and pretend the Confederacy seceded for the sole purpose of keeping their slaves. PROTIP: Lincoln didn't proclaim a single fucking person emancipated until doing so was strategically necessary.

I dunno. Look at the Confederate Declaration of Secession and it's all about Free States failing to cooperate with Slave States on the extradition of escaped slaves.

If you want to be pedantic you could say that from the South's perspective their entire economy had become centered around the incredibly lucrative cotton industry and the Free States giving safe harbor to escaped slaves were cutting into the profits of plantation slavemasters. You could make that argument if you were a fucking sociopath.

Next you'll be saying the WWII Holocaust was morally balanced because of the Treaty of Versailles.

Godwin's law all day long.
This and the your post above, comparing the Confederate flag to the Nazi Swastika.
C'mon man, really?

[Zen]

"Gamergate" is just some culturally insignificant media white noise generated by the internet's ever-present penchant for dichotomous thinking. Both sides of the argument are equally as vapid and unimportant. I'm not sure how so many of you have been able to be so entertained by this for so long. Literally nothing about it has provided anything of value to anyone whatsoever.

But whatever floats your boat.

The media and the internet certainly played their part in the "noise" but perhaps you, like many others it seems, miss the forest for the trees.
What were are seeing is a dynamic that existed before and will exist after, that silly tag has long ceased to be used.
The use of this word, like most tags, ends up restricting and eventually misrepresenting (and indeed, some might hope silencing) the initial cause, reaction and hoped for (for some) resolution.

[Blinge]

Uh oh Mischief. Our primary cancer proliferation executive, Zen has invoked Godwin's Law!

Now nothing you've said is valid. No matter how legitimate or useful such comparisons might be, memes have told us we can't mention nazis.

Thankyou zen, and thankyou memes.

actually ag99 what the hell does your confederate horror story have to do with gamergate.

[Zen]

Our primary cancer proliferation executive

Now nothing you've said is valid. No matter how legitimate or useful such comparisons might be,

Two posts, both concluding with a forced comparison to Nazism.
The only attempt at invalidation of the opinions voiced by Mischief Maker, he makes himself, by descending to hyperbole (nothing personal, Mischief Maker, I'm interested in your points sans the silliness)

Do you think it "legitimate or useful", to compare an idiot driving around with the intention of provoking a reaction, to Nazism?

memes have told us we can't mention nazis.

only in your mind, Blinge, only in your mind.

actually ag99 what the hell does your confederate horror story have to do with gamergate.

Actually, I would say his primary goal was to bait readers of this thread into a heated response.
I was hoping he would be ignored. Oh well.

Thankyou zen, and thankyou memes.

Your welcome Blinge.

[Blinge]

Your welcome Blinge.

You're*

[Zen]

Your welcome Blinge.

You're*

Thank you, Blinge.