Killer7 SINdicate

[Cat]

Many games journalists and many of those who admire them live in a permanent state of distress and psychologically never left the Gamergate golden age of almost a decade ago. Obviously this is something that I enjoy thinking about and I have come to call this "Gamergate Hell" because it pops up with such frequency that I needed a way to refer to it.
If Gamergate can be said to have had any successes this would be one of them. It's also said that Gamergate was the catalyst for the birth of the online right-wing that we are all so familiar with, whose memes continue to define online culture across the spectrum. I think of myself as a historical revisionist when it comes to Gamergate, and I consider it to have been too alike, most importantly alike in it's view of "games" to it's ostensible adversaries in ways I will cover in following posts.

Something of particular interest to me is the Gamer straw-man, now and then. For about two decades a stereotype has existed of a pathetic and sadistic, Call of Duty playing, Mountain Dew drinking, XxX_420 username, "edgelord" buffoon. Naturally this found a great currency when Gamergate kicked off but it never really went out of style, nor did it even change style which is what I really find curious. Zoomers, being only 40-45 years old were too young to remember the "Peak Halo" culture of the MySpace era yet still allude to this archetype. The unfunny meme that I have always hated "coldsteel the hedgehog" is an example of this. The "gamer word" meme, etc. You all know this.

My point is that it's weird that this is still around. In the case of the journalists I could ascribe it to their being so elderly, but why does this remain in the popular imagination? Why has this caricature not been updated? Is it accurate?

edit: Yes I realise there are people who affect this character for humour or trolling purposes.

[CENSORED]

My post doesn't actually have anything to do with your premise and I am taking precious time away from updating the site but I really want to say this
Gamergate was poz for disabled mongoloids and other subhumans, the whole debate essentially centered around a small yet vocal (i.e. funded) minority of feminists (who utterly and completely disappeared as soon as the political necessity of instigating gamergate had concluded; notice how all talk of "sexism in games", "objectification of women" has been replaced by getting high on estrogen and mutilating yourself) who insisted that every single videogame should be a visual novel about an allegory for depression because gameplay is sexist and oppresses the disabled, and a large majority of mutts, gays and so on insisting that, instead, every single videogame should either be a game of war style grinding simulator where you kill the same goblin eight thousand times in order to add +1 damage to your sword, or some CS-go style endless multiplayer game.

Both sides hated everything that can possibly be good about videogames (which is why every game nowadays sucks shit) which is hilarious to me. They both would have hated killer7, one for being offensive and the other for not respecting the rules of gaming which as we know are set in stone and demand that every game play exactly the same.
It was essentially an internet war fought to destroy the gaming industry forever and I guess it was successful considering Square Enix and Capcom are probably the only two companies left standing that release decent games. Capcom survived by severely decreasing costs by building an engine that allows for low-cost development, and Square Enix has an avant-garde monetization system where it doesn't even matter if their single player games sell or not (which is why we end up with weirdo artiste stuff like kingdom hearts, nier automata or even the final fantasy 7 remake) because their money comes by the dozen or so mobile games they run in parallel, with their "big" releases having the only role of keeping the respective brands alive. That, funnily enough, led to more artistic freedom.

The myth that gamergate was ran by racist white supremacists is hilarious. All the main figures of gamergate or that came out of gamergate are some different degree of mutt. The internet aristocrat (which later became metokur) is a potato nigger, sargon of akkad's phenotype would be considered apioid in the United Kingdom (which is why he was convinced that trump was president of his country I guess), Milo Yiannopolous is a gay, ShortFatOtaku was some gender weird person who was actually the spokesman for a disabled obese lesbian. Ralph Retort was the only white guy and he barely looks human. Andy racewarski was some sort of cuban, the list goes on.
This has been memoryholed completely but Gamergate even spun off into another "internet" "movement" called notyourshield where the gingerbread mutts would complain about their white masters using their plight as racially and sexually persecuted minorities to advance their agenda.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/notyourshield It's hilarious that the only source I could find as per this existing is knowyourmeme, there were a billion videos made in windows movie maker by "activists" back then. (Notice Tim Schafer also joking about crafting a piece of armor because that's the first thing that fills the mentally challenged gamer mind)

Truly a "Triumph of the Will" so to speak. This is what's considered the extreme right wing online, sexually amorphic amerimutts fighting goblins with toy swords.

Hilariously I once saw a stream by Mr. Metokur arguing this exact point with some indie developer (50yo fat guy, not a tranny) who was displeased at the fact that you can't make anything creative anymore without a bunch of mutants knocking on your door for "not making real videogames" (again, the silver case, FSR, Killer7 would all follow in the category of "non-games" for daring to present some different kind of interaction with the game-world that does not involve me killing goblins to craft a sword able to kill hobgoblins). That was somehow "retarded" and "didn't make sense" according to the great minds of our time. (The bone of contention was that space grinding game everyone hated so obviously I'm not saying that specific instance was true, just that the fact that gamers like very specific things and thanks to market research everything caters to the same very specific public is equivalent to bacterial pneumonia or AIDS)

[CENSORED]

[cake]

no idea whatever a "gamergate" is but id pay top dollar to produce a game show where you force all these people to live in the slums of karachi

[CENSORED]

no idea whatever a "gamergate" is but id pay top dollar to produce a game show where you force all these people to live in the slums of karachi

My personal proposition has always been to force them into a pit to fight to the death for the right of being shot in the face. That being said Anita Sarkeezian and Abby Shapiro respectively can be spared if they agree to breed with me

[melonbread]

Wasn't there already a GamerGate thread? Or maybe that's just every thread on this site, if you believe hard enough. Anyway, duplicate thread or not, it still fucking made me type the word GamerGate again, which never ceases to make me want to kill myself. Not out of frustrating memories of that culture war (let's be honest: "minor culture skirmish". No, "culture kerfuffle"). Why, ever since Watergate, things have needed the suffix of "gate" applied to them just to denote a scandal or controversy is so retarded. Its logic retro-actively implies that the hot-button topic at the center of the original Watergate was "water".

We all know water is only a problem in Mexico, where it's undrinkable because AOC cried by a "border fence" for all of the caged mijos that her own party built the cages for, and thus tainted the water supply with her Stepford-succubus spic spittle.



(And yes, obviously there aren't just two "parties" here and everyone's in bed with each other, putting on a play to give the peasants a demonstrably effective false purpose distraction and sense of team-loyalty when there ARE two groups, but it's not "Dumb hayseed Elephant" and "Educated, Empathetic Donkey". It's "Them" and "Us". Not as much of a ring to it. Anyway, I'm not blindly anti-authority or even anti-state help in specific areas, but I am broadly, and without even any nuance, "anti-establishment", and I say they're all equally responsible for that shit, but the fact remains AOC took those drama kid-vibe photos of her crying at nothing and that makes her a dumbass who, for a Puerto Rican, you'd think would know which photo ideas are and aren't good "PR"). But I undress. Oops, I mean digress. Was busy objectifying AOC.





Can we take a moment, though, to get back on topic and appreciate the TRUE gold here? The fact that OP, Cat, is asking why it keeps getting brought up, yet is, himself (themself? herself? purr-self?), bringing it up and re-stoking the fires of something they likely think themselves above the drama of, but revealed pretty quickly, perhaps accidentally, that they definitely have some horses in that passionate race. Horses that should be turned to glue and a race that is inferior, but I digress again.

"Who gives a fuck?" is the answer I keep coming back to, despite searching for other less crass or dismissive ones. Alas, it's what I'm going with. Sorry to throw cold water on you, Cat.

Anita Sarkeesian (or as I call her, "I Need The Car Keys, Again", because I like imagining her as a trad-wife dumb dumb who needs to ask her husband before she does anything. Read it with the same inflection as her actual name. Tell me that's not funny.) tried to prove some nonsense about the main demographic for video games to be a bunch of horned up males who won't play games with female protagonists unless they're sexualized.



Yeah, talk to the the female designer of Bayonetta, some time. She felt empowered by being the one to bring that character's sexy "Wiccan Sarah Palin" energy (in the first game) to life. I mean, Anita Sackinmymouth is wrong in other ways, too. I play games regularly and don't objectify women in the slightest (Yes, I know I objectified AOC earlier, but she's chosen to be known as an acronym and, last I checked, an acronym is not a woman) so Sarsleazian can shut her dick-sucker and go be the office slag over at Blizzard or Riot Games or whatever.

Half the time women with Tusken Raider names (who disguise their sand-people lineage with enough makeup to make Divine look naturally feminine) go on whining about workplace harassment at companies they don't even work at is because they secretly wish they did and get a huge kick out of being seen as desirable by the opposite sex. Making games is hard work. The infamously (allegedly) abusive crunch devs like CDProjektRed (almost as stupid of a grouping of words as the whole Watergate thing), Rockstar, EA and others put their talented programmers and artists through can literally kill. Who wouldn't want to just be the resident floozy at one of those places, bending over at a file cabinet, getting your ear drums near burst by the cacophony of Looney Tunes wolf howls, then getting a paycheck at the end of the month just for being hot and improving morale. I certainly wouldn't want that job because I'm fucking STRAIGHT and not a woman, so I meant, like, who wouldn't want it, as in, out of the pool of everyone else on Earth who's not me. Because I SLAY the pussy. No offense, Cat, you contemptible furry. I kid because I love! In fact, I'll end this with something more your speed.




But yeah, anyway, this thread is trash.

[AngelheadedHipster]

It was a simpler time. It started with the accusation that some random critic no one's ever heard of gave a good review to a game from an indie developer no one's ever heard of because they had an affair, and when it turned out he didn't everyone just kind of went on arguing about it for, like, 6 more months out of boredom.

[CENSORED]

It was a simpler time. It started with the accusation that some random critic no one's ever heard of gave a good review to a game from an indie developer no one's ever heard of because they had an affair, and when it turned out he didn't everyone just kind of went on arguing about it for, like, 6 more months out of boredom.

It was slightly more complicated than that. Yes that was the (retarded) inciting incident, but it happened in conjunction with a bunch of low effort games being pushed by the press like "Gone Home". At the same time, you had a handful of feminists (mostly just Anita "CUTE" Sarkeezian) applying what they defined as "feminist critique" to videogames, a few of them being hired by westoid companies to write their games (you probably remember that picture of the purple haired obese fujoshi doing writing for Mass Effect).
The previously mentioned goblinoid mutts saw it as ZOG, as in they blamed the entirety of any problems in the gaming industry on journalists being corrupted by pussy.

I had huge problems with this. (Outside of the fact that both sides were filled with ugly mutants.)
Mainly that gamergate attacked the principle instead of the individuals. Gone Home may very well be dogshit, but the entire conversation revolved around "this is not a real videogame!" because they couldn't compulsively grind for horse armor in it. The whole "consumer revolt" aspect entirely revolved around "stopping bad feminists from turning all games into walking simulators" which of course is retarded. Gone Home (I'm just using this as an example because it was very prominent at the time, but there's many games like that) is just a bad example of something in the same genre as The Silver Case or Flower, Sun, and Rain where everything you do is walk around environments and interact with characters to experience a story.

TSC is endlessly more inspired for a million reasons: for once the whole presentation was inspired by Godard of all things in how text and images and sounds overlap to condense different types of separate information in one screen, secondly the writing and setting are a lot better obviously, the art is better, the soundtrack is fantastic, so on and so forth. But by framing the conversation around "non-games being passed off as games", anything that doesn't fall into the very narrow OCD-based definition of what a "game" is, is "retarded" and "doesn't make sense".

Which is why we end up with shit like what me and Cat discussed in this thread.
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=80&start=30
Why does Silent Hill have tank controls, combat mechanics and armies of goblins? Because Resident Evil did, and "that's how survival horror plays".
(Without you reading the whole thread. No we don't hate Silent Hill. We just happened to agree that the games fall into several pitfalls of "normalcy" which hinder the very inspired art design.)
I'm not trying to single out Silent Hill either. This is just an extremely pervasive attitude where games employ repetition without any thought, which is just retardation. You still smash barrels in videogames just because Donkey Kong threw barrels at Jumpman in 1981. The usage of barrels in that arcade game was inspired because it bridged the gap between basic videogame abstraction (think atari games, or space invaders, where stuff just looked like pixels) by turning the obstacle in a real thing that the player would initially recognize, and the association with jumping came from the comedy of Buster Keaton.

We then had barrels for videogames for 40 subsequent years just because they were in Donkey Kong. No thought, no inspiration, just iterating on what had been done before by artists to turn it into a product. Silent Hill has similar issues (though again, I like it a lot overall, it just unfortunately happens to be a good example of this philosophy in action.)

Resident Evil was meant to simulate a military operation in desperate situations. Therefore combat was employed to force the player into resource and menu management, and tank controls were meant to simulate encumberment and tactical movement.
Silent Hill tries to evoke a completely different type of experience, with a random civilian being stuck in a nightmarish world where the town itself is a manifestation of inner spiritual pain. Implementing Resident Evil combat mechanics haphazardly is not conductive to the game at all, but it's "done that way". Which ends up dragging the whole series down, despite having some incredibly high highs.

The reality that gamers (and producers) don't want to face is that even the games that are praised for their gameplay alone were made by weirdo artiste types. They were just copied thoughtlessly for so long that they became a "standard".

Super Mario Bros is not thoughtless. It's one of the weirdest things ever created. Italian plumber jumps from left to right on top of turtles and monster mushrooms in order to save the white sovereign of more mushroom-shaped people from a tortoise dragon man who may or may not want to rape her.
The original inspiration for Donkey Kong, which was the original appearance of Mario when he wasn't even called Mario, was 1950s american pop art in the vein of pop-eye.




Jumpman ended up being called Mario just because the italian referent for Nintendo was called Mario Segali and Miyamoto thought he resembled the pixellated character. Either way, when it was decided to put Mario into a globe throttling adventure, the framing device became the old chivalristic tale of a knight saving a princess from a dragon. Which is why Mario and Peach look like completely different species. Everything in the Mario series comes from personal inspirations, the boos are based on the enemy designer's wife being an aggressive woman who suddenly became shy when confronted. The music was composed specifically to be conductive to the jumping sound effect; I could go on for ages but I don't want to derail the discussion too much.

My point is that even the most "standard" of genres in the 80s, side-scrolling platforming, came from a variety of inspirations, mythology, pop-culture, real world.

The AIDS-infested OCD-riddled mongoloid gamer mind would have you believe that games are like a math equation that you solve for the exclusive purpose of wasting your free time trying to avoid experiencing a piece of art that might possibly activate your brain.
In reality, all the greatest innovators of videogames were weirdo artists. Shigeru Miyamoto, Gunpei Yokoi, Eiji Aonuma, Hideki Kamiya, Shinji Mikami, Motohide Eshiro (gotcha you don't know who the fuck that is), Tomonobu Itagaki, the list goes on. We lived off of "standardized" videogames for so long only because people like that built such an esoteric and complex yet intuitive framework that imitators could thrive off of it for ages. (For example, I did not list Itsuno in there because I mostly consider his work to be iterative or derivative. His games are good though, I liked all of them. I haven't listed Yoko Taro either because despite liking his games a lot as well, they also fall into the trapping of just "adopting" pre-existing gameplay styles.)

Standardization became a much bigger issue during the sixth generation because HD development became so expensive that working on proprietary engines became too expensive, which led to mass adoption of things like Unreal Engine. Creating a game from a pre-made engine is similar to painting on a canvas where the colors, the frame and the shapes have already been chosen for you: Yes a great artist can still make something from it, but the creative process starts in the middle of development rather than at the very beginning. Which is why something like killer7 could not realistically exist anymore.

At the same time though, with stuff like Xbox live arcade, game development became way more accessible to the average guy leading to a resurgence in indie gaming. In the sense that people who had never approached game development in any way and may not even have been fans of videogames were now able to construct completely new systems. And yes, a bunch of those people were academic style feminists.

What I'm getting at, is that feminists getting into gaming was ultimately a good thing because it was part of a larger conversation around the stagnation of gaming itself. For every Gone Homo, we got a Hotline Miami. For every Depression Quest, we got a Gods Will be Watching. I'm not even a fan of Undertale but I would still call it very creative. Jonathan Blow might be up his own ass but his games are great, and so are the two games made by Lucas Pope.
I would much rather have a hectic artistic context in which we get masterpieces and dogshit being pumped out simultaneously than a stagnant world of mediocrity, which is what we have now. Gamergate was a consumer revolt comprised of Game of War obsessed OCD-riddled mutts that posited the superiority of AAA goyslop just because having an indie game industry where anyone from nazis to hardcore feminists could express their own artistic opinion meant they might possibly be exposed to things they dislike.

In other words, it's just the democratic statist voter mind being afraid of freedom and choosing slavery as it was programmed to be. "Yes sir, I would rather consume the next entry of Uncharted, rather than possibly risk hearing something I disagree with." Considering I never bought or played Gone Homo and I can barely name any other dogshit indie game made by mutants, but that same context allowed me to become a lifelong fan of Hotline Miami and Papers Please, I much preferred that system to what we have now.
The current state of indie games, where it's gatekept by an army of crossdressing estrogen fiends, is a direct result of Gamergate scaring away any creative voice for fear of being blacklisted. There is no separation between the two; indie-trannies employ the same exact tactics as gamergaters did (because they are the same people) by making anyone whose opinion they dislike loose their jobs and sponsors through coordinated smear-jobs.

The old adage of "you must protect the opinions of others, because censorship will eventually come for you" proved to be true, because as soon as the biodemocrats were done getting rid of "radical feminists", they started getting rid of "far right extremists". Once they were done with that, they applied the "far right extremist" label to anyone who believed sex was biological, and so on, so forth.

As a result, the creative wave in indie gaming is completely gone and we are now living in a world where videogames may as well not exist, because major publishers all pump out the same shit they have since 2008 and indie games are all earthbound-inspired allegories for taking estrogen to cure depression. This is a direct result of Mr. Metokur not dying from cancer soon enough and I do directly blame him and his homosexual butt buddies.

Another huge issue I had even at the time is that Gamergate brought nothing to the table. Anita's feminist critique was at times retarded, like Melon's earlier example about Bayonetta. That showed that Anita's scriptwriters (I want to make babies with her) had no artistic literacy whatsoever when it comes to imagery because Bayonetta herself is meant to be a feminist icon; she is coded as a sexual dominatrix who is confident in her own body not for the appeasement of men (she does nothing but toy with them in the game and in the second one she's so obviously in lesbian with Jeane that they might as well be married) but because that was her own way of taking control of her own self after being bound by rules her entire childhood & teenage years (Which is why there's a butterfly motif in her design. She came out of her cocoon to finally be able to fly.)
The ultimate result of this is her becoming her own mother through Cereza. Bayonetta, as the ultimate feminist icon, finds all the strenght that she needs to finally let her own childhood trauma go, within herself, by nurturing and protecting her own childhood self. The villain of the game being her own fucking father.

You might even make an argument that Anita's position is the chauvinistic one, because when looking at Bayonetta, all she sees is an ass (and she is therefore "objectifying her" and demeaning the work of her character artist). HOWEVER by having that retarded opinion in the aether, it at least sparked a conversation that allowed me to have a better understanding of Bayonetta by disagreeing with it.
The only opinion brought to the table by gamergate was "LoL! I don't care. Imagine caring. I just want to slay six hundred identical dragons with my +10 Sword of Thunderous Rage which I crafted from Kobold skin." Complete mindrot for mongoloids. I would go as far as to say that Anita also had some good points, for example when she brought up Double Dragon 1 as an example of a game using sexist tropes because you go rescue your girlfriend. I wouldn't agree that said trope is "sexist", but I would definitely call it "retarded" considering it was only applied because they were imitating Mario and Zelda without any thought to it (as I previously explained, Mario and Zelda purposefully harkened back to chivalristic/arthurian conventions which were then coated with a billion different things making them ultimately original products, much like George Lucas did with Star Wars), due to their popularity. Streets of Rage has a much more interesting setting specifically because they applied thought to what exactly would be conductive to beat 'em up gameplay than the original Double Dragon did.

I'm not saying that Double Dragon was bad for it. What I'm getting at is that allowing a true diversity of viewpoints is conductive to conversation, which in turn is necessary to make art. 2001 a space odyssey, Solaris and Dark Star were three different responses in a film industry that couldn't be any more diverse, all three take a completely different stance on the same issue and I would argue all three of them are good.
Art as a form of conversation is now impossible in the west as a whole, both in the gaming industry and in the movie industry (where everything is now some form of capeshit. There's no substantial difference between Iron Man 3 and Bladerunner 2049. They are the same movie, much like God of War 4 and the lust of ass 2 are the same game.) because only one opinion is allowed. Gamergate mutts argued in favor of "games as math problems", only being able to be built around very specific templates, and got exactly the world they wanted, which is why the fearmongering about it is so absurd to me.
There were no sides to begin with. Everyone just wanted to suck goblin feet and hated art, so art is gone from pop media entirely.

[Rake]

It was slightly more complicated than that. Yes that was the (retarded) inciting incident, but it happened in conjunction with a bunch of low effort games being pushed by the press like "Gone Home".

Gone Homo is fantastic, because what's meant to evidence that you are playing as "Katie" the implied sister of the real protagonist (the lesbian you spend the entire game reading about, alongside her supporting cast of befuddled hick family members) is that Samantha's letters are eventually addressed towards Katie.

However, nothing actually proves this. As such, the "gameplay" becomes far more literal- in actuality you are playing as a stranger who spends so much time examining everything they become as familiar with this family as you (the player) do by the end of the game.

[CENSORED]

I would like to add two more things:

1. You weren't around to see it but, hilariously, this website got listed as "pro-gamergate" back in the day just because we had a thread on the old forum making fun of gaming journalism being dogshit. This actually predated gamergate by several years. It's hilarious because gaming journalism was always dogshit going back to famitsu taking bribes in the 80s, it was dogshit during gamergate and it's dogshit now, nobody with a brain ever listened to a game journo because they don't know how to play videogames, how they're made or why they're made.

2. My unrelenting support of YIIK (despite its gameplay being like pulling teeth at the moment) and the Allanson brothers is because I see it as the last gasp of the indie game resurgence; it is a fact that it plays like no other RPG and they've even committed to rebuild the whole game for free to make gameplay a lot more engaging. Unsurprisingly, the same people who would have called the Allansons "dangerous feminists" and tried to cancel them if the game released in 2014, now call them "dangerous transphobic conspiracy theorists" and try to cancel them in 2022.


https://www.brokenhandsmedia.com/blog/2 ... rap-part-6

I would like to quote Andrew Allanson saying "YIIK is not about Earthbound. It's about Earthbound fans." and say that the Allanson brothers may be blacklisted by the entire internet but they'll always have a room ready for them in Paradise Hotel.

Gone Homo is fantastic, because what's meant to evidence that you are playing as "Katie" the implied sister of the real protagonist (the lesbian you spend the entire game reading about, alongside her supporting cast of befuddled hick family members) is that Samantha's letters are eventually addressed towards Katie.

However, nothing actually proves this. As such, the "gameplay" becomes far more literal- in actuality you are playing as a stranger who spends so much time examining everything they become as familiar with this family as you (the player) do by the end of the game.

Fantastic point about Gone Home and I would like to bring up that this reinforces my point as it existing in the same genre as The Silver Case, just being a much less inspired example of it.
In the 25th ward, you are constantly given hint as per who the infiltration agents are in which group and what motives they have. However, no real "climax" is reached by the end. It's only by replaying the game over and over and putting together details such as Kinijo being in league with the "building administrator", the "building administrator" who died, what his name was, who used his name to infiltrate the building, that the climax of the story starts to exist within your head, as it happened completely behind the scenes. Which is why the game fast-forwards to an epilogue that is set 13 years in the future, in a "world without war", that is nonetheless as chaotic as before the whole system of control began exerting itself on the setting of Moonlight Syndrome. Which is represented by a return to the town of Hinashiro where the story began, as it is once again tormented by ghosts as it was in the more optimistic Twilight Syndrome. At that point the ultimate result of all maspros, takes charge as the new supernatural investigator.

This type of narrative can only really exist in videogames. It baffles me that the existence of something like Gone Homo or the 25th ward is so threatening to goblin farmers just for being different, because in no way is it trying to become the "new standard". In fact, there's too many chinamen in the world for anything but grinding to be the standard in gaming. Even the original RE games are now considered too avant-garde by not employing common "gamisms" such as walking and shooting.