Why is casual racism/sexism more accepted in video games than other forms of media (these days)?

just reading about nazi furries and their "furred reich", kill me now

there is this fixation these days with thinking that media shapes people. the internet stirs up extremism, the media's job is to influence popular opinion, fake news made people vote wrong, etc. i don't think violent movies/videogames/websites generally make people any more or less violent than they would be if they had some other media to express their violent tendencies. those tendencies are created more at home, by the behavior of their relatives, by their environment, by biological lottery, by familial genetic peculiarities, by the mental health spectrum, etc. everyone has a different experience growing up, and some people are exposed to violent things irl.

as for social awkwardness, it is an error to conflate that with anti-social behavior, and dangerous to couple that with tendencies towards extremism. there is a spectrum of social awkwardness, just as there is a spectrum of mental health. it is unfortunate that a modern (and ancient) solution to many problems is labeling the accused "mentally ill" and discard the problem, as if applying that label absolves any responsibility to then treat that person as a normal human. mental health (and disaba-phobia) is not just a medical issue it is a social justice issue and we've got a long way to go but it will be extremely worth it when we make progress - maybe we will find it is a root cause of many of our problems. besides captialism/over-medication doesn't seem to be doing us any favors.

did you just "not all social awkward people" me?

i agree that culture has no effect whatsoever on the people who live in it

https://mobile.twitter.com/ItsTonyNow/status/829801489581428736

i mean haven't u all heard some older white dude say some inappropriate shit to u bc they thought you were sympatico?

No, actually.

oh god

xp touché tho i have no doubt u're aware of this phenomenon

a rare note of positivity for this thread as nuclear-grade youtube irritant pewdiepie gets hammered for antisemitism

YouTube Cancels Pewdiepie's Show, Removes Him From Premium Advertising

xp touché tho i have no doubt u're aware of this phenomenon

My experience with this is:

a) someone my own age says some offensive, horrifying shit to a white person with me because they forgot I'm not white
b) someone my own age says some offensive, horrifying shit to someone who looks like me and then says "oh I don't mean you, you're one of the good ones"

or c) someone my own age says some offensive, horrifying shit to me because they want to put me in my place, but that hasn't happened in a while

i've heard multiple variants of the phrase "he jewed me down on the price" from acquaintances my age (all from smaller towns or weird exurban enclaves) and the thing that kills me is that confronting them is usually some sort of "what do you mean I said something that... oh"

most recent happened in the presence of our jewish mutual friend o_O

the guy who sold me and my dad my first car told us he didn't want to jew us down on the price and we bit tongues and left with the car.

Heard about the pewdiepie thing -- he's one of the most popular youtubers right? Was this bullshit creepingly evident all along in his thing?

every youtube gaming personality is a south park character come to life

specifically some weird cross between Cartman and Mr Garrison

i hear the "jew'd" me thing often enough that tbph as offended as i am i just assume it's unconscious bigotry and not conscious maliciousness. i think i've told this story before but more troubling is when my parents were buying a car and the salesperson asked them what it feels like to be members of the most despised people on earth.

"You mean besides car salespeople?"

(sorry, that was dumb)

i think they were too shocked to retort (and they're not those kinds of ppl anyway) - fwiw they did not purchase a car from him

my wife and i have a friend who said something about not wanting to be "jew'd down", and my wife chalked it up to something akin to using "gyp", but we both agreed that it's insane to actually say that, even unconsciously imo. but our friend, she's also from another part of the country where it might be extremely common. i dunno where it's common, i never heard it growing up around me (i heard other reprehensible shit) so it still shocks me.

isn't gyp a slur too tho

yes don't use it

I think that was nomar's point? ie it's a slur but an unconscious one that a bunch of people who use it don't actually interrogate to notice what they're actually saying (which is insane but also how part and parcel of the unreliable narrative/selective memory ppl use to convince themselves that 100% of the time they are good ppl)

remember when jaymc said "coon's age" in that one thread

really we just need a meme drive to purge all those phrases and replace them with "saxophone"

Yeah, it's in this weird zone where it's absolutely a slur - I don't use it, I call it out when I hear it, and I'd expect say an ilxor not to use it. But I expect that 95+% of the people who use it (a) have no idea it's a slur (b) have no idea it's even short for "Gypsy" (c) have no idea "Gypsy" refers to a specific ethnic group that still exists in the world and not just in vaguely-remembered childhood tales or romanticized pop songs.

All those things need to be corrected obviously - similar to lots of American idioms that are descended from racist slurs and are long overdue for being re-examined and purged from the language. But still a little different from, say, my late father, who was brought up to be specifically suspicious of present-day Gypsies, that they would steal your stuff and that's why you should put valuable things in the trunk before you leave the house and not when you arrive at your destination, etc.

the difference being that large portions of the US have no no cultural understanding that "gypped" (people even write it as "jipped") has anything to do with romani people, and people use "gypsy" as some sort of romanticized word for someone who's somewhat nomadic, not even in a negative way

there's no cultural disconnect from "jew'd", it's all right there

xp to DC saying my point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yGdiXCwTVk

It reminds me of the whole south park comparison -- paradoxically, I go into full-on stereotype mode when I see news of these video game/youtube idiots throwing out racist crap because I am sure that 2/3 of them have no life experience outside of video games. They go to a very socially homogenous school/workplace, go to some clothing/food/supply superstore like Target or Wal-Mart in their exurb/suburb and then going back to play more video games and yell racial slurs online. Because they only have a vague idea of a human cultural experience that doesn't involve the narrow slice they've been served up, and it's like a bizarro world monoculture

the difference being that large portions of the US have no no cultural understanding that "gypped" (people even write it as "jipped") has anything to do with romani people, and people use "gypsy" as some sort of romanticized word for someone who's somewhat nomadic, not even in a negative way

there's no cultural disconnect from "jew'd", it's all right there

This is why I said it was insane.

kinda surprised trump hasn't used it as a sign of his respect for the jewish people's negotiating prowess

Do you think that figure is higher or lower than non-Youtubers?

xp he's completely oblivious about nuance, so I'm sure he has

it's like that article about how the television show people had to get him to stop referring to lil jon as "uncle tom" -- it wasn't that he didn't know it was bad, it was that he thought it was funny he was saying a bad phrase, but it was also obvious he had absolutely no idea what an "uncle tom" was or any idea of context

PDP was running w the kind of schtick that has been South Park's bread and butter for decades. not just SP though, ironic racism is par for the course for edgy modern comedy, even progressive Colbert had his "ironic" asian/latin stereotypes as re-occurring gags. i think the joke is meant to be "We are so far past this stuff that it's absurdly beyond us (and kitschy) to indulge in archaic styles of exploitation". it is a form of privilege denial that makes one oblivious to the fact that they are just spreading more hate.

that's what made Colbert doing it so much more egregious than SP or someone like PDP imo, he should've known better

former GameGrumps member JonTron turns out to be a white supremacist and a racist. starts talking about the greatness of America's "founding stock" despite having Hungarian and Iranian parents. tries to make an argument against immigration but then goes into black crime rates.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1352025

gaming so white it turns nonwhite people white

that's really fuckin sad

no idea who the guy is but when real life becomes Shock Corridor it's like damn

 i think the joke is meant to be "We are so far past this stuff that it's absurdly beyond us (and kitschy) to indulge in archaic styles of exploitation"

do you need to be a shithead to be a gaming youtuber or does being a gaming youtuber turn you into a shithead?

i see pewdiepie has been doubling down on the nazi 'joeks' again too:

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/b4xsyutcda5niu4gk4pw.png

the subject of milo came up at work yesterday and i spent a while trying to explain to a colleague what gamergate was and how milo used it as a vehicle to gain further notoriety. unsurprisingly she was nonplussed by the whole sorry affair and i was deeply disappointed to discover just how much info about gamergate i had retained :(

I've retained too much weird conspiratorial shit. I was talking to a friend yesterday who explained a recent lunch she'd had with a retired ex-coworker. Apparently this woman launched into a series of conspiracies, one after the other, and completely believed it all -- billionaire/politician sex slave rings, local crime so bad she needed to carry a gun (she had a gun in her purse), and of course... chemtrails.

Where was this retired person getting her news, since she claimed the news media only reported lies? Youtube.

retired coworker otm

WAKE UP SHEEPLE

yeah if u ever scan t_d on reddit (pls don't do this) you'll usually find 2-3 links per fresh front page that are youtube clips. basically anyone can publish anything they want and as long as it's reinforcing the narrative somebody will believe it fully regardless of the absurdity of the claim. hell, kyrie irving believes the Earth is flat and he's frequently flying internationally and not falling off the edge of the world so idk what really is truth anyway

http://kotaku.com/scumbags-harass-woman-for-working-on-mass-effect-andro-1793410647

Jesus Christ

Starting with the transformation of a game’s sometimes silly character animations into a conspiracy, and then later a scandal in which the data points waver between incomplete and meaningless, the cycle isn’t new by this point.

http://kotaku.com/underwhelming-gay-romance-options-in-mass-effect-andro-1793677330

Since it was released, Andromeda has been criticized about how it handles gay romance options, particularly for male characters. On neoGAF, Reddit, unofficial BioWare forums, and on Twitter, there are hundreds of pages of complaints, with many people accusing BioWare of treating gay romance as an “afterthought.”