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March 19, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:33:09

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #874

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	.
	Hello and welcome to the podcast, The Lotus Seaters.
	I'm joined today by Carl and Luke Avery.
	Hey, good to be back.
	Good to have you back.
	Well?
	I'm doing very well, yeah.
	Swindon is always the most drizzly and beautiful place that I could imagine rolling into on a Tuesday morning.
	You're very, very polite, but a liar.
	There we are.
	We have some stuff to talk about today, though, which I think will be good fun.
	So the first topic will be, who are the good guys in Helldivers?
	Because we've just been playing it too much, to be honest.
	That's the problem.
	But it's also a conversation everyone else has been having.
	It's like, you're all wrong about this.
	You have strong opinions?
	Some.
	Alright.
	Resident Evil Racism Edition.
	It's the Game of the Year edition, it's coming out, so thank you, IGN, for that one.
	And also Representation in D&D.
	We're going to be working out which species represents black people.
	Oh god!
	Can we actually?
	I didn't read the notes.
	So we're not going the extra credits route.
	Well, we've already covered that part previously.
	We already know which race they think represents black people.
	It wasn't just them who did that.
	Now we're going to work out which race represents Jews.
	Oh, great.
	That's going to be easy.
	It's always great to ask people what wolf whistles they're hearing.
	Their opinions are always the most fun.
	I want to be friends with the fictional person they think that I am.
	The guy's off the wall.
	This guy's way more interesting than I am to be honest.
	Yeah, he's got so many takes.
	I go home, have dinner, play with my kids, put them to bed, you know, watch some TV, and they're like, wow, you're a real Nazi.
	I'm like, okay.
	But it's the reverse image, isn't it?
	There's this beautiful joke about, because there's extra credits sitting there being like, man, those are black people.
	Because you've got to wonder, like, what's going through their head the rest of the time when they're talking about how we're against racism.
	It's like, I hate racism.
	I love the... Sorry?
	That's what Joe Biden speaks.
	But anyway, that's what we expect.
	But anyway, let's get into the news instead.
	Is it the news?
	This is news?
	This is hard-hitting news, damn it!
	Freaking news!
	I've come here with the news that Helldivers is a game!
	Right, that's enough.
	This is what passed for news before Gamergate, when the whole world was just games, before we learned about politics, right?
	This is going to be a very entertainment-heavy podcast, but, you know, we needed a laugh.
	But there we are.
	So the games industry is crap, and I think games journalists are awful, so we're here to take their place and do their job.
	I don't know.
	I don't think we're doing their job.
	I think we're just talking about a thing that we play a lot.
	That's their job.
	So here we are.
	But this is the thing, isn't it?
	In the year of our Lord, 2024, I'm actually enjoying a new video game.
	Which is not something I thought I'd ever be able to say, actually.
	Because video games have been really bad for about a decade.
	So for brand new people, Helldivers, if you haven't heard about it, it's this game, and the game is that you are playing for these fellows who call themselves Super Earth, and you jump in, and you kill a load of bugs, a load of robots, and you've saved the day, hallelujah.
	And the great thing about it is it's morally uncomplicated.
	Yeah, and the best bit is if you go over to Polygon, or any other disgusting outlet, they're whining about it.
	They hate it for some reason, but they can't put their finger on why.
	Morally uncomplex killing games are fascist.
	Yeah.
	We learned from Starship Trooper that people instinctively associate themselves with the bugs, the monsters, the insects.
	For some reason.
	Who knows why.
	The Polygon here, they went with the bug position.
	This is them whining that Helldivers 2 is full of fascism, and their argument as to why is because one Polygon reader wanted to put LGBT flags in the game, and was told by the devs to shut up.
	So, they are whining.
	That's all this is.
	Immigate 2 is going quite well then.
	But that's the nice thing, to have a studio that just went, go away, not interested, just want to play my game.
	And they're not the only ones.
	It turns out, if you go over and check out Steam Forums, you can see this user over here, he's been banned.
	Oh no!
	He was banned for doing the opposite, which is that he was in the Discord with the devs and everyone else, and someone was whining and saying, we need LGBT flags, and he responded with, shut up, not interested.
	And they banned him as well, which was interesting.
	So the situation seems to be that basically anyone who brings outside politics to their realm is banished forever and shall never return, which is a hell of a way to deal with it.
	Anyone who brings the wrong politics.
	Well, it's not even the wrong politics, is it?
	Because what they're concerned about is the internal integrity of the game universe, right?
	They're just like, go away.
	I don't want to talk about your weird politics in any respect.
	Which is something I, I mean, you know, I can respect that.
	So here's the best headline of all time, from whatever this outlet is.
	LGBTQ activists accuse Helldivers 2 developers of silencing them after attempting to push propaganda into the game.
	What about my free speech?
	Yeah.
	But there's a quote from this article, which I love, which is from some user who's playing the game and just responds to one of those Steam threads saying, I do not need or want political nonsense in my game in support of Trump, Ukraine, BLM, Gaza, Israel, or LGBT.
	Just go away.
	Go away.
	I mean, the question is, does Super Earth have the moral legitimacy to wipe out the bugs and the automatons?
	If you're not answering that question, which is obviously yes, then go away.
	But this is how most people are interacting with their games, which is, I'm bored, I want to collapse and have fun, go away.
	But then, of course, there is some kind of argument in the game, and a lot of people have come to it being like, actually, I've got the proof that the humans are bad, I side with the bugs.
	No, no, that's fine, because at least that's an internally consistent argument from the game's own universe.
	I'm prepared to have that argument.
	They're probably wrong, but... So, if, when you create a game, you're creating your own universe, and anything can happen, and it only has to be internally consistent... Yeah.
	What if the universe that you create looks identical to our universe, but with just slight tweaks?
	Most universes do.
	Right.
	So is there no moral... I'm sort of pushing the counter position here.
	No, no, no.
	Absolutely.
	Is there any moral accountability for the type of universe that you create?
	It's a great question.
	And many, many left-wing philosophers have said yes.
	What do you think?
	It's a much bigger question than we're going to be able to answer on this podcast.
	I actually did an aesthetics module on my degree on this, and there's a whole suite of literature.
	But there are people who assert that, yes, actually the moral, the tone of the universe you create is a reflection of your own morality.
	But the thing is, then there's the counter argument of, okay, but then I can't actually engage in anything that's really fictitious.
	Because I mean, like the guy who wrote like Hannibal Lecter or something.
	Yeah, you're clearly a cannibal!
	Yeah, are you actually going to go start killing people and eating their brains?
	Or is this just a dark fantasy that people are engaging in?
	But I think the most important thing is that the universe is faithful to its own aesthetic design.
	So if you create a universe of space bugs and stuff like that, and then someone comes in and starts Pushing like Ukraine or Israel or something.
	You'd be like, hang on a second.
	That's actually nothing to do with this.
	What are you doing?
	You know, that's just not the question within the universe.
	And so what that does is breaks the suspension of disbelief, the willing suspension of disbelief that we engage in and ruins the experience for everyone.
	And these people are basically killjoys.
	That's what they're saying.
	Part of the reason I think that especially men love playing these games that are always demonized as violent video games is because it expresses a deep and potentially very good aspect of masculine energy.
	Killing bugs.
	We want to protect those we love, we want to be brave and courageous.
	Morally un-complex violent.
	Yeah, and how much more morally un-complex can you get than it's a fictional species that just wants to kill you, right?
	A fictional bug species.
	The communists are like, no!
	Can you make the bug species more detached from reality?
	It probably says something about them that they see the bugs as a token of a group.
	Just to get back to your point, though, I think you do hit on something about, like, is there a moral question about the universe you've created?
	There is.
	And the question is about you, really, rather than about the universe itself.
	As in, why do you enjoy this particular kind of media?
	And if the media itself is very morally degenerate, then the reasons that you engage with it are something you should probably at least be conscious of.
	So if you're watching like, you know, really degenerate porn or something, it's like, okay, but why do you seek that out?
	You know, it speaks to the problem with you.
	Yeah.
	So violence wise, I'd look inside myself and say, is the thing I'm loving here that I'm imagining other people's pain and enjoying that?
	And if that's really the reason I'm doing it, I'm not actually Sure.
	I'm not comfortable with that.
	But if the reason you're doing it is to defend Super Earth from a voracious bug invasion, then actually... Then good.
	Exactly.
	Yeah.
	I think with porn, I'd actually say probably there's not a situation in which I'd be up for that.
	Um, as a, as a thing inject into my life, even, even in, even in my free time, my entertainment, I want to be cautious about the influences that are going.
	Well, that's, that's totally fair because, um, it's all about habituation, right?
	If you habituate yourself into something that isn't virtuous and you continue down that path, then you end up at the end of that path, doing quite disgusting things or enjoying quite disgusting things.
	And you're no longer satisfied by the sort of mild things that you began with.
	I didn't want to go down this path.
	I wanted to get into the game.
	Go on.
	Apologies.
	I think that's correct.
	So here's the game.
	So if people haven't seen it, there are a lot of people online who are telling you that they've done media degrees and so are going to tell you about the actual story of the game.
	Thank God the media literacy crowd are here.
	Yeah.
	So I found this quite interesting to be honest.
	So I'm just going to play some and let's see these arguments, shall we?
	So this is not from this user.
	This user here has stolen this video from someone more successful.
	You can tell because they have she, they pronouns.
	Right.
	In Helldivers 2, what if I told you that all of the events of the game were entirely Super Ur's fault and now they're scrambling to politically cover it up?
	This is absolutely not an approved message from the Ministry of Truth, so I'll have to tell you quick.
	Ever wondered how the terminated bugs travel from planet to planet?
	Well, they don't.
	Super Earth spread them and put them into containment facilities to farm them for Element 710.
	Which, funny enough, if you flip upside down, spells oil.
	These bugs then broke out, slaughtered the residents that Super Earth themselves sent to live there and had to be destroyed.
	So, send in the Helldivers, call it a war, and blame the bugs to sweep it under the rug for freedom.
	That's also what the dissenters, aka the poor people who were probably slaughtered by bugs, left broadcasting at propaganda towers.
	If you break protocol to actually pay attention to them before blowing them up.
	So basically, spread bugs everywhere, have your own citizens killed, call them dissenters and liars if they speak the truth, and then send in the Helldivers to blow everyone up and sweep it under the rug.
	And oh man, the automatons.
	The whole reason they're doing what they're doing is because...
	So that's the version there.
	Do we believe that?
	No.
	Oh.
	I'm not very convinced, I'll be honest, that this means that the humans are evil.
	The humans are putting the bugs around to harvest oil from them?
	Oh, that may be true.
	That may be the in-game logic of whatever's going on.
	But the idea that that makes it just fiable that the bugs are the good guys or something.
	This is the thing I'm dealing with that I find interesting, is that there seems to be a lot of sympathy for the bugs in a way that's sort of moral.
	And I'm looking at you thinking, it's a bug.
	You like bugs, do you?
	Well, this is almost a vegan perspective, right?
	That an animal is to be treated as a sacred object to be coddled throughout its life.
	I wouldn't approve of deliberately torturing animals in your free time to go back to We've got a hard stance against torturing animals on this podcast, just so you know.
	But I, on the other hand, solidly approve of eating animals.
	Insects aren't animals, are they?
	Oh, well fair, yes.
	They are animals, but sort of inanimate objects, balls of string.
	If we've got to have sympathy for the bugs, maybe this becomes our route not to eat bugs.
	Possibly, but I don't want to give them that much credit.
	I mean, the bugs are obviously dangerous.
	I don't know.
	Either way, I mean, this is my opinion of the bugs, which is the same of the bugs in real life.
	You gotta go.
	I actually don't think this is that complex.
	If there's something dangerous that threatens your life, the first natural law is self-defense.
	Exterminate!
	So, that's my feeling on the bugs.
	There is an argument for the fact that Super Earth is obviously lying to us all as we go hell diving.
	If nothing else, I have noticed this to be true.
	If the termicide works, why are the bugs still alive?
	I don't know if people know, but you've been applying termicide all over these planets and there's still bugs.
	So just, they are lying to us.
	Then there's some other stuff that's kind of interesting, which is Cybertron.
	So, as mentioned, there's bugs you can go and kill, and the other faction are a bunch of automaton robot things.
	And there's some weird lore here, which I found interesting.
	So, this is an encrypted message that's been decrypted, and it was apparently put out by the team who made the game.
	They say, in this message, we, the collective, from cyber- The communists exterminate them.
	Understandable.
	Unanimously assert our independence from Super Earth.
	We have the right to defend our home from the brainwashed Helldivers.
	Our children, the Automaton, will not suffer as we have under the oppression of Super Earth.
	Okay, so the game makers put that out, so that's a message from the automatons being like, we are the innocent little depressed downtrodden proletariat of the galaxy.
	I was like, hmm, okay.
	I see.
	I just assume this is the person typing it, which makes me realize I don't care.
	Even.
	Again, I have glowing red eyes.
	No, Callum, you've got to understand, the great thing about human rights, they don't apply to animals or robots.
	Wow.
	Yes.
	Definitely true.
	What is there to say?
	The community seems to agree, because immediately they did this.
	They found Cyberstan, which is apparently this planet holding a bunch of them hostage.
	And we're just like, right, we have to cut them off.
	Kill them all.
	Okay.
	Make sure they get nowhere near it.
	So there we are.
	For people who are wondering as well, there is a bit more deep lore in here.
	I don't know how true this is, but I'm going to play something for people who are interested, which is that there's a message from the machines.
	Oh yeah.
	Which we can totally trust, I'm sure.
	Oh yeah.
	No one will happen when you lose.
	Nothing.
	We will not enslave you.
	And that's a promise.
	We will not decimate you.
	We will not take your home.
	We will return to Cyberspan and rebuild what you destroyed.
	And we will leave you alone.
	You believe them?
	Oh, totally.
	I was in doubt before, but now I'm convinced.
	So anyway, that's all from me.
	I just wanted to go into the video game and be like, so what's the evidence?
	And that's what the evidence is, which is there's some arguments and the immediacy literacy crowd have jumped on it to be like, look, the bugs and the robots and the good guys were evil.
	Yeah.
	One of them is bugs.
	The other one is obviously lying.
	Yeah, but I also don't want us to walk away from this thinking that the humans are uncomplicated and morally correct in anything or everything that they do.
	Because actually, they're kind of not.
	But the reason you liked the game was because it was uncomplicated.
	No, the reason I liked the game was because I like killing stuff.
	Right.
	I guess in a way that's simple.
	In a video game.
	In Minecraft.
	The media impacts your day-to-day life, so you will be off killing later, I presume.
	Yeah, man, it prevents me.
	Simulated killing.
	But no, it's just a fun game.
	It's a really fun game.
	But, um, but actually, uh, the humans don't, I mean, it's a dystopia for a reason, right?
	And so I thought we'd just quickly explore why it's a dystopia.
	Cause I mean, like there's just like NBC news.
	Oh, this video game has reinvigorated a long running debate about fascism and satire.
	It's like, okay, well let's try and identify the fascism, shall we?
	Because I mean, I'm sure everyone's aware that it's like, well, we're spreading managed democracy.
	Hang on a second.
	We live in a managed democracy.
	I don't really like managed democracy, actually.
	And they say, you know, why aren't some people aware of this satire of fascism?
	Because it's not.
	Right.
	And so you saw this was going around.
	You see 9.2 million views.
	Friendly reminder, don't be a fascist.
	This game is satire.
	This isn't fascism.
	What this is, is militarism.
	It's the same problem they have with Starship Troopers, is, oh, it's an army, therefore fascism.
	It's like, no, there've been lots of armies before fascism, there'll be lots of armies after fascism.
	Fascism has no monopoly on shooting stuff, actually.
	And so this was insufferable cringe.
	But I mean, we can just look at what we mean by managed democracy.
	So, for example, This is from the Brookings Institute, a left-wing think tank, so they're not exactly misrepresenting their own position.
	They say, well look, democracy at the most basic level requires the equality of all citizens and broadly inclusive citizenship.
	A society in which all citizens are equal but only 10% of all adults are citizens would not today count as a democracy.
	It's like, okay, so you can see why it's super earth.
	It's the entire civilization.
	You can see why it's every human being.
	You can see why everyone in Helldivers is, uh, diverse.
	Should we say, um, okay, fair enough.
	And so they, they move on.
	So we'll look together with equal and inclusive citizenship.
	The other key pillar of democratic governance is majority rule.
	Now you can see why it has to be managed, right?
	This means, first, that public decisions are made by popular majorities of citizens whose votes all count equally.
	And second, that democratic decision-making extends to a maximally wide range of public matters.
	And that's why you have AI choosing your candidates.
	You've got to prevent that stinky, evil populism, which is not liberal democracy.
	I mean, this whole article is literally reflecting populism against liberal democracy.
	And it's like, right, that's very interesting.
	So you need it to be a majoritarian mandate from the electorate, but we can't have populism.
	So what are you serving then?
	That's the question.
	The EU?
	Exactly, it's the liberal ideal.
	Because I remember when we were in the EU, running up to the Brexit referendum, one of the big complaints is that there had been many referendums on things in the EU before.
	Every single one of them went against the EU's rule, and then every single one of them were just rejected.
	Right.
	You ask again and again and again until you get the answer.
	One time you get the right answer and then you never ask again.
	Which is literally what they do, yeah.
	Or you just don't even run it again.
	Thanks for your input, but no.
	I mean, you might as well literally get an AI to run your election for you because you weren't going to listen anyway.
	And there's a reason that liberal philosopher Francis Fukuyama called the EU the best instantiation of the liberal ideal, right?
	So he thought that liberal democracy would find its best, most perfect form in the European Union, which is hilarious when you think about it.
	Cause that's actually like literally a managed democracy where the MEPs don't get to introduce legislation.
	They just get to rubber stamp the legislation that comes down from the commission.
	So it's literally managed democracy all the way down.
	And it's to make sure that there can be no disenfranchisement or inequality between the citizens.
	So you have to have it because if Trump's like, I'm going to ban all the Muslims, well, some of our citizens are Muslims.
	That's obviously disenfranchising or rendering an inequality between those.
	So you need a managed democracy to be able to actually have the sort of liberal ideal.
	And so you end up with memes like this that actually are representative of the position of a managed democracy.
	One day we're going to be bombing Uzbekistan over gay rights.
	The glory of Super Earth.
	Zelensky literally just signed this off.
	Gay marriage in Ukraine.
	It's like, really, is that what we're fighting Russia for?
	Is it?
	Yes.
	It actually is.
	It actually is.
	Are you serious?
	They're actually doing that in Ukraine?
	They've done that.
	I'm joking.
	I'll take your word for it.
	That's amazing.
	They had this debate in Ukrainian society a few years ago and they went, definitely not.
	And now that they've joined with NATO, they're like, definitely yes.
	Yes, because that's what this is about.
	This is about the complete recognition and inclusive inclusion.
	of every single kind of person into the same order and so that's what managed democracy is because of course if you just allow people if you allow the majority group to just do what it wants then that's not going to be the result the result is going to be the majority group gets what it wants and other groups don't get what they want and so you need to manage that Love it.
	Anyway, so this is what's going to happen.
	And so you'll end up with the Ministry of Truth, which is unironically what the managed democracy advocates have done.
	I mean, you may remember Jacinda Ardern saying, yeah, we will continue to be your single source of truth unless you hear it from us.
	It's not the truth.
	I mean, that's literally what you're doing in Helldivers when you're shutting down the illegitimate broadcast.
	So if I can get to about here, right, this is the illegal broadcast, right?
	All that says is wake up people, the bug menace is a super earth construct.
	No, that didn't come from Jacinda Ardern, did it?
	Or the WEF?
	So no, that's an illegal broadcast and it has to be shut down.
	Literally.
	So you're not fighting for fascism.
	You are literally fighting for the current order that we have.
	The Tony Blairism.
	The Blairing of the entire universe is basically what you're fighting for in Helldivers.
	The argument that this is against the principle of free speech and therefore shouldn't be allowed, I think is weaker than The thing that you are censoring is true, and if I were in charge, I would be discouraging the things that I think are not true.
	So it's kind of the two different ways of looking at this question, right?
	One is, we actually want the liberal ideals, and you're just a fake liberal, and then the other perspective is, The rulers should rule, but they should rule well.
	We want a good leader.
	And the thing that's particularly disgusting about this approach to leadership is claiming to be one thing and doing the opposite.
	Kind of an accusation of hypocrisy.
	The problem they have is that many things can be true at once, and often they are contradictory to the liberal ideal.
	The liberal ideal isn't possible anyway.
	I mean, the concept of majority rule doesn't work.
	Well, no, no, no, that's not true.
	You can have the things happen that the majority wants, but it's not because the majority wants it.
	Sure, but they could argue that in a representative democracy, I mean, Trump is a good example of this.
	You know, the majority, the Democratic electorate in America voted for the giant orange ego.
	And that's what they get.
	And the managers of democracy are like, well, we can't work with this.
	And so it's been, you know, nonstop, essentially a cold civil war in America ever since Trump got elected.
	And so there can be majority rule.
	That absolutely can happen.
	But it will be through a representative who represents the interests of the majority.
	How much power did Trump have?
	Well, that's the problem because there was a managerial class that was stonewalling every turn.
	But they don't have to exist.
	It doesn't have to be that there is a managerial class that hates their own civilization.
	It's just that, you know, post-Cold War, that's exactly all that we have because they're the people who won the Cold War, unfortunately.
	I'd argue populism is an effective political strategy in which you gain power by appealing to the majority.
	And then once you have power, it's entirely your choice whether or not you actually implement the things that you said you were going to.
	Which is self-evident.
	Which is why politicians are terrible.
	Yeah.
	But you could have, and this is what I would always say is the hope, the great hope we should all have politically is that somebody gets power and is actually a good, like a decent person individually and therefore wants to do good for the majority.
	Really all it comes down to is will these people serve your interests?
	And I mean, Trump seemed to serve the interests of the average American.
	He seemed to be doing, when he did things, the right thing.
	So, okay, and Joe Biden seems to be against the interests of the average American directly, consciously, openly, vocally.
	So, I mean, you know, it's a fairly easy choice.
	Yeah, I'd want to analyze the behavior of the US government over the period that Trump was in charge, rather than his actions within the system and in practice.
	Oh yeah, you can see that there's a power structure within the United States that is openly hostile to Trump and has done everything they can to stop him.
	But, like you say, it doesn't have to be that way, it just is.
	Do you think Trump could have been more effective at I think Trump wasn't a politician.
	So I think he went in naively thinking, well, I'm the president now.
	They're going to be like, okay, Mr. President, I guess we'll change.
	Yeah, surely being president is the same as being CEO of a company.
	Yeah, exactly.
	That's I think what he thought.
	Yeah.
	And I guess we'll see in 2024 what happens with that.
	Seem to have got away from the bugs again there, but... Oh well.
	Well, it's Trump versus the bugs, that's the point.
	Yeah, well, good luck.
	Anyway, I suppose we'll move on now with more gaming, because I am just in a gaming mood.
	So I want to talk about Resident Evil, of all things, which is not a series I've given a toss about for a long time, which is weird.
	But the reason being, because Resident Evil is getting a lot of remakes, and they did Resident Evil 4, and there's a lot of problems with that remake, but whatever, people seem to enjoy it mostly, so, you know, enjoy your thing, that's great.
	And then Resident Evil 5 is being debated about whether or not that's going to get a remake, and IGN have decided to poo themselves.
	Over this concept, because it's racist.
	Okay, hang on.
	As someone who hasn't played Resident Evil since the first one, what is racist about it?
	Because it used to be a bunch of zombies chasing people around a haunted house.
	So there are black people in the game, and that's wrong, says IGN.
	I'm not joking, that's actually their position.
	They're the zombies, aren't they?
	At a game set in Africa, Black people should not be in the game.
	Are you saying in some way there's statistically more black people in Africa than in other parts of the world?
	I would think that, but IGN seems to think that it's different.
	They haven't been there, but they're sure.
	They're sure it's like Maine.
	But anyway, we'll begin this off with just the fact that, of course, this new version will be game of the year, I'm sure.
	And it's my pick.
	But we have here, of course, another drama that went on recently, which is that Matt Walsh decided to join in with the Gamergate 2 stuff with Sweet Baby.
	And Matt, his engagement wasn't liked by a lot of people because he had previously said that he hates video games and thinks it's for babies and man-children and you should all be having kids and wives.
	Okay, but I have kids and a wife, not multiple wives, because Matt converted to Islam.
	Spiritual cockle dream.
	If I have kids and a wife and a man, at the end of the day, you need a break.
	Just killing some bugs is a good break.
	So people weren't impressed by all this.
	It's quite funny, actually, within his own company, Daily Wire, Andrew Claven previously made basically a response video that wasn't a response video officially, where he's just like, no, that's wrong.
	Games are good.
	Claven's great.
	Claven's perfectly normal on this.
	So there's that.
	But it didn't end there, because that would have been fair enough.
	OK, there's some backlash or whatever.
	It turns out that apparently some producer for Matt Walsh decided to go and like a bunch of tweets talking about how gamers are babies, and it's just made it worse, and it turned into its whole little drama.
	And I'm not too interested in the little drama, but it's a great example of how, well, SJW infestation of the gaming industry is huge, and it's at such a point where it's just something to behold, if nothing else.
	You get people who even think gaming is awful and don't want to engage with it coming out and saying something must be done.
	So do you think Matt Walsh knows enough about games to have spotted the SJW thing?
	If they're for babies, how has he got his fingers crossed?
	Well, he knows so little that even he has noticed.
	I see what you're saying.
	Seems to be the case.
	Yes, I'm with you.
	Before we go any further, I shall prove with my magician skills, my gamer credentials.
	Oh yeah, how many hours on Steam?
	I've got a few more than Matt Walsh because I've been playing since I was blonde and a slug.
	Wow!
	Yeah, that's the family computer back there.
	Is that...
	It's Age of Empires or Galactic Battlegrounds or something.
	It's Age of Empires.
	Taking a good old age.
	Anyway, there we are.
	That's my point.
	Getting to IGN though, because as mentioned, the gamer infestation of SGWs is not back in these days, it's now.
	And instead we get crap like this.
	Capcom's Resident Evil 5 simply cannot be remade!
	At least not to the standards of Capcom's best work.
	And you can see in the answer here, because they're saying you shouldn't remake it, but rewrite the whole thing.
	I love the community note.
	Community note.
	No racist or discriminatory remarks towards people of color are present in the game.
	The enemies are treated no differently than any other enemies.
	The article also mentions the game would benefit from having a black lead, ignoring the main player, a black woman.
	So did Matt Walsh write this article?
	I mean, like, these people don't seem to know anything about the subject either.
	You would have had to hate games to make this statement.
	And it's not just a statement, it's a whole video, which is the best part, because this is a YouTube video.
	And as you can see, it's eight minutes long of just this one guy whining that the game is racism.
	And I gotta love the dislike ratio.
	That's fantastic.
	That's pretty good.
	I will add to it.
	You should too.
	The comments are all full of people being like, shut up, as you can see here.
	As a native Nigerian, you've really got to stop being offended for us.
	See, I think what they're missing there is a lot of the time in places outside of California, there's a kind of like, ooh, Africa mentioned mentality, right?
	Like, hey, no, this is cool.
	This is recognizing us.
	You're recognizing, yeah, we're a place where something can happen here.
	Write a story about us.
	Why not?
	That'd be fun.
	How many games are made about East or West Africa as a setting?
	Very few, to be honest.
	Like if they make it in Swindon, I'd be like, ooh, Swindon.
	Swindon mentioned!
	You know?
	But yeah, anyway.
	So let's enjoy some of this.
	I just want to show you guys this.
	Because it's unreal how serious this guy is.
	Sorry, I need my mouse back.
	Damn you.
	...of a remakes.
	But all of this doesn't account for Resident Evil 5's most notorious problem: Racism.
	laughs laughs laughs laughs Set in a fictional West African country, Resident Evil 5's primary antagonists are black people.
	Yes, it's technically the Ouroboros virus that protagonist Chris Redfield is fighting, but the parasite's host is depicted as a nation of mobs and primitives who are violent even before their infection.
	Intentionally or not, Resident Evil 5 positions Africa as the Dark Continent, an uncivilised world harbouring a diseased population that needs gunning down via Western intervention in the name of global security.
	This insensitive treatment of people of colour was hotly debated even as early as Resident Evil 5's debut trailer, with writers such as Enguy Crowell and Steven Totillo pointing out the game's uncomfortable post-colonial imagery.
	The arguments and think pieces continued well into the game's release window, with IGN's own former editor-in-chief Hilary Goldstein having also wrestled with the subject.
	But that was 2009, a time when race was apparently a debate rather than a reality.
	In the 2020s, in a post-Black Lives Matter world, there is only one acceptable response to a white man shooting waves of Africans for an entire video game.
	No.
	What the hell was that?
	I love how he talks like he thinks he's achieving something.
	No.
	Never again will we have black people represented in video games.
	First they came for the Spaniards and I said nothing.
	Then they came for East Africa and I said no.
	Take that commentary and put it over a World War 2 game and talk about the Germans being black.
	Just replace the word black with white.
	Anglo-Saxon mowing down dramatic people.
	Just the way he's describing their culture though, because it's like, I don't want to be like, you know, noble savage or anything, but like, They might be quite happy with the way they're living.
	They're like, well, I mean, you're not living in a skyscraper with air conditioning.
	I'm like, no, but I'm living with my family and I'm happy.
	It's like, yeah, well, then you're a savage.
	You're just dirty and diseased, says the guy IGN.
	It's like, what are you talking about, bro?
	These are like people living lives, like ancient tribal customs and things.
	They've got traditions.
	They do things like, yeah, but you suck because your GDP is low.
	So, I've played the game multiple times, didn't really like it as much as Fallen, no one did, but it's weirdly grown on me over the years.
	You've become racist!
	No!
	I'm not a Derek Chauvin fanboy who's decided to jump back in!
	Compared to the later Resident Evils, which are god-awful, this is actually not bad.
	And the setting is, you arrive in a country, it's clearly unstable, like things aren't going well, and that's the setting.
	And then everyone gets infected with the Ouroboros virus, so everyone's basically a zombie.
	And you've got to put them down, because they're zombies.
	Are you mental?
	And this guy describes it, quote, as a nation depicted of mobs and primitives who are violent even before they're infected.
	I'm like, no.
	No, there's no case for that.
	You just made that up.
	The only example he gives in his written article, we'll go back to Goldstein later, who argues that because they were kicking a sack, therefore means they were showing Africans as violent primitives.
	I was like, okay.
	What?
	That doesn't really follow?
	I want to see what his reaction had been if they said, OK, Mia Culper, we're going to remake it and all the antagonists are going to be white.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It'd be colonialism.
	Chris Redfield becomes black.
	Sheva, his partner, becomes white for some reason.
	Maybe he'd love it.
	He'd be like, finally, a game that represents the true African-American experience.
	If we get this back on screen, I don't know if you noticed as well, quite a lot of the characters in the game aren't very brown.
	Like this fella here.
	Quite a lot of them are actually whiteys.
	He does look a bit Indian, doesn't he?
	Yeah, but I'm going to go to this next link here, because this is another timestamp, where I think the person who was editing the video at IGN, because remember these things are big organizations, 18 million subscribers there just on the YouTube channels, they got stuff.
	Clearly, the editor doesn't really like the guy who made this, because the guy who made it is making the stupid point that there are no black people in the game who are the good guys, and the editor puts up the main character, who is black.
	Even with a vastly improved, more sensitive take on the continent, perhaps one with a black protagonist and a more It's like, yes, maybe if there was a black protagonist, it's like, yep, that's... Like this one here.
	There are two people you can play as.
	One of them's Chris, who's white.
	One of them's Sheba, who's black.
	She's the local.
	Like, clearly the editor even knew, this is crap.
	Why am I working here?
	I'm sick of these people.
	That's an amazing edit.
	There's no way that wasn't on purpose.
	You didn't even do that, that's the original video, just cuts to her as he says.
	Yeah, so someone, the guy who made the video, who did the actual click-clacking of editing.
	That's IGN, subverting their own... Like, people on the inside are clearly sick of it.
	Incredible.
	And the best part is, you go to IGN's own website, so these are the people who go to IGN's website, all five of them, and if you scroll down on this, you'll find there are 50-odd comments on this, and it's all just their own audience being like, what's wrong with you?
	And this is the problem.
	I mean, Omar's got a good point that you can't spot ignorance without IGN.
	That is true.
	He's right.
	There's some really nuanced comments as well.
	Like this guy here says, uh, as an East African, I was absolutely excited to see my language in the game franchise that I grew up playing.
	See, East Africa mentioned.
	Yeah, literally everyone at our school knew Resident Evil 5 and loved it.
	Hearing the zombies speak Swahili so accurately was so cool.
	But it's sort of weird that Western media assume this stance for us, saying that the game has a racist undertone and is offensive to Africans.
	So, the thing for the Africans as well, you're so right, when they're sitting there being like, oh, we mentioned, and they look over at the North Americans, the IGN, and they're like, oh man, yeah.
	Can't mention the Africans.
	It's like, oh.
	And they're like, you know, the black people are basically zombies and the East Africans are like, what?
	East Africans are like, we have the internet.
	What did you just say about me?
	Like, yeah, yeah, this isn't, this doesn't go down well.
	And as you can see, it's all of the comments, all of them are like this.
	It's just like, what's wrong with you?
	Why are you like this?
	I love it.
	This is a great one.
	Man really said it'd be better if a black character was one doing the killing.
	Let's have them kill each other instead.
	That's more comfortable for us.
	I think that's what it amounts to.
	Because the best part is, when I looked up, like, who's the human being?
	Who's the one who did the voiceover for that piece of crap?
	And it's this dude.
	It's some... Whitest man who's ever lived.
	Yeah, living in London.
	Is that right?
	Yeah.
	Been there for five years.
	Never again, says Matthew Bursley.
	I don't know if we can zoom in on that.
	Jesus, look at him.
	Look at him.
	Look at him.
	Fully colonial braces that he's wearing there.
	Yeah.
	And he's sitting there being like, Africa saved today, boys.
	I've done my bit for Coventry University.
	The Dark Continent is welcome.
	It's just so stupid that these people are real.
	But that's the fallout from Game of Games, these people stayed around.
	The new theory then, IGN is a front for modern day slavers who are covering up their misbehaviour.
	Yeah, but I wanted to go and check out that article you mentioned, because this seems like a vendetta.
	Because back in the days, even in 2009, IGN were whining about Resident Evil 5 being a racism.
	And to this day, they're still whining about it being a racism.
	What is that, 15 years later?
	You're still bitter?
	Get over it.
	So as you can see here, this was their then-editor, Hilary Goldstein.
	And Hilary Goldstein has some things to say, and they say, I've played the first half of Resident Evil 5.
	Oh, very good.
	Games journalist at work.
	Well, I played half the game.
	Did you choose the black woman?
	I didn't notice her.
	I don't see colour.
	Literally, I don't see the colours.
	No, no, no.
	There's much more charitable explanation.
	She's probably just not very au fait with video games.
	So it comes up with the character, she clicks the start button, doesn't realize she could press left or right to score.
	You know, you've got to forgive her on this.
	Hillary's a man, by the way.
	Oh, okay.
	Him, then.
	Whatever.
	I was thinking from the frame of game journo, not woman.
	So Mr. Goldstein hasn't played games, obviously.
	Mr. Goldstein played half the game.
	He says those three chapters spent a good majority of the time shooting people with dark skin.
	Okay.
	There are moments that some will never connect with racism.
	It's because I wasn't shooting them because they were black.
	Whereas you, Mr. Goldstein...
	But others will see it as clear use of racist iconography.
	Really, who are those others?
	The game begins with Chris Redfield walking through an African village that appears to be... So he did automatically choose the white guy, couldn't help himself.
	Yeah.
	Appears to be uninfected.
	He sees some men kicking something in a sack.
	The implication is that even before the infection, these people are bad people.
	Like, no, the game makers were making the point that it's an unstable African nation.
	There's the violence, okay.
	It wasn't the, man, some brown guys kick a sack, therefore all brown people bad.
	None of us took that.
	You took that from this.
	The only place there's ever been political instability is Africa.
	Yeah.
	He says though, after that, if Resident Evil 5 was set in another continent and these characters had white skin, no one would give it a second thought.
	So he's literally saying, yeah, no, this is fine.
	Everything's fine.
	But because they're black, I now have new feelings.
	This is totally their methodological lens that's led to this article.
	They would find their way to this conclusion because they're starting with the conclusion and then looking at the media through that lens.
	So we don't really learn anything about the video game, we're just seeing into their psychology.
	100%.
	So he goes on to say, so imagine if these characters were white, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
	He says, typical village full of bad guys.
	Gaming cliche.
	But these characters are black.
	And as such, the imagery can only be perceived through racist undertones.
	Can't they just be infected with the zombie virus like every other race?
	For some reason, this wasn't a problem with the Spaniards we were killing in the last game.
	That was fine.
	He says, Later, there was a cutscene depicting a white woman being dragged into a house by an infected black man.
	In recent hands-on, Eurogamer criticized this moment, particularly for playing into the traditional racist fear-mongering to propagate fear of blacks from the time of slavery through the civil rights movement into the United States today.
	White society was warned that the black men are coming for your daughters.
	More afraid of the zombie virus.
	Do you think they've already pre-written the articles for Resident Evil 6, where one of them says, the problem hasn't been fixed, and the other one says, we have to deal with the whitewashing of zombies.
	We need to increase the diversity.
	Well they set a bunch of it in China for 6, so that honorary Aryans, they got, well I suppose the Chinese got the Japanese, yeah.
	When it comes, yeah, it depends which side of the privilege threshold in China are at that moment.
	So if Capcom hadn't come out and said it in Haiti.
	But that, in case you're wondering, that thing is all bollocks as well.
	Because like, the first infection you see is a bunch of black guys pinning down a black guy and infecting him.
	Didn't have a problem with that.
	But then when it was a white aid worker this happened to, he was like, this is just like slavery.
	They're trying to tell us to be afraid of blacks.
	It's amazing, it's like the second the black people attack each other, it's okay when they kill each other, as the other guy said.
	But if it's a white guy, it's like, oh, I don't know if we have that.
	It's like, um, hello?
	Yeah, it literally is the family guy meme of like, uh, what was it, Colt and the Swatch.
	No, no, no, the one where, um, uh, what's the bad guy's name?
	I forget his name now.
	The guy, it was Cleveland.
	That's when Cleveland Jr.
	gets shot, and they think PETA did it.
	All the media come around and they're covering it, and then Cleveland comes out and says, no, I shot my son, and they instantly disappear.
	Yeah.
	Not a problem.
	He ends this off with, do these images make the fact that the core gameplay is you shooting black men and women, making Resident Evil 5 racist?
	The answer is going to vary greatly from one person to the next.
	Yes.
	Are you an insane woke SJW type?
	Then the answer's yes.
	If you're normal, the answer's no.
	Do you think articles like this...
	To change people's minds?
	Or is it just reinforce, is it like, I already thought this and I'm getting more of my opinion?
	I think these are an attack on the game studio itself.
	To change how the future games look.
	You must not make things that make me uncomfortable.
	Why?
	Because I'm mentally ill.
	But do the games companies connect this article to a lack of sales?
	Do they actually think it affects them?
	No, I doubt it.
	I think that what they do is connected to the amount of harassment they get from leftoids on Twitter.
	And it's just a personal thing?
	Yeah, because they're making a moral claim in this, right?
	So they're saying, look, you can't do this for moral reasons.
	Are you a racist?
	And the guy at Capcom goes, well, no, I'm not a racist.
	I don't speak English.
	Well, yeah, the US branch of Capcom or whatever, it gets the complaints.
	It's like, I'm not a racist.
	We've got to do something about this.
	We can't have this.
	Western sensibilities.
	And then you get developers like Powerworld who are like, well, we just came out and made all the characters ugly because that's Western sensibilities.
	But the point being that this is as old as 2009 this year and it's, you know, happened to be going on for ages.
	Happened again.
	The point being, these institutions, all of them, are still infested with the same sorts of people, making the same stupid arguments.
	I mean, it really is Groundhog Day.
	They just don't stop.
	And you're right, I mean, what is this?
	But what's the effect?
	Let's think about that.
	Well, the effect last time, and this time, I think is probably the same thing, which is, attack is made, but then normal people look at attack and think, that's retarded.
	I am now awake to the fact that IGN is run by insane people.
	If they come up with stuff as... Imagine if you could play as a black woman!
	Yeah, imagine.
	Truly imagine if you could play as Sheva.
	They actually do have... If you complete the game, you can unlock different clothes in Resident Evil.
	Oh, really?
	So in the last game, you save this lady named Ashley.
	And when you finish the game, you can put her in a cowgirl outfit, and it's sexy.
	So for this one, they put her in tribal wear, which is also very sexy.
	But, of course, they whined about that, saying that's racism.
	It's like, bro, she's literally a local.
	What do you want?
	I guess the other effect it might have is nothing to do with people who make or play games, but people who their external opinion of the gaming community is affected, so that they just develop more of an opinion that this is a racist, sexist group, and that video games and, you know, the lawmakers who are legislating on things, for example, they might
	these opinions might trickle through to them.
	Well, they do, but it comes out as retardation, doesn't it?
	Like whenever you get those articles that are like, man, gamers are racist, why?
	Because I wrote this gibberish and they disagreed with me.
	And it's just like, okay, well...
	You definitely get a bunch of sort of liberal suburb dwelling Karens who then look at them and go, well, I mean, you know, if they're racist, that's just bad.
	Yeah, the reason they like this game is because they get to shoot black people.
	I read it in, you know, Games Press.
	I saw my son watching Andrew Tate.
	But it's all nonsense, like, from the person who starts it, the backlash that they don't understand, and then the Karens who get, like, the filtered media.
	Like, such an awful industry on every level.
	Gross pipeline.
	But to end this off, because I just want to mention, okay, well that's his point, which is it will vary on person to person whether or not you'll think this game is racist.
	And I was like, yep, that's true.
	If you're insane, you will.
	If you're not insane, you'll be fine.
	It turns out, this is how they see the game, as you can see here.
	They did give it a 9 out of 10 after writing all that.
	They think you could even play as American History X or Uncle Ruckus and enjoy yourselves.
	But the thing was, is that this has been around forever because there's a voice actor from the game.
	Because one of the other main characters in the game is a black guy who saves you constantly.
	And so he was asked about this and he just goes... It's in Africa.
	It's been in Antarctica.
	It's been, I think, in Spain.
	It's been in the Midwest.
	It wasn't racist then.
	Why should it be racist now?
	It's in Africa.
	Have fun with the game!
	Play the game!
	You have to be made!
	Just play the game.
	He's obviously right.
	Just play the goddamn game.
	I also love his demeanor here.
	The attitude.
	He's not getting ruffled.
	He's not getting the rise that they're trying to get out of him, right?
	He's like, eh, just have fun.
	You know, I'm having fun.
	I'm getting paid to have fun.
	You're unhappy.
	I'm going to let you be unhappy, right?
	But as mentioned, there are many requests for it to take place in Haiti if they are going to remake it and rewrite it.
	We'll see what happens, I suppose.
	I do want diversity and inclusion.
	Me too.
	I love barbecues.
	Let's move on.
	I've heard that barbecue is a misunderstood, man.
	I'm not saying- What, it actually tastes like pork?
	I don't- I don't know.
	I heard that, um...
	No, I'm not going to go there.
	All right.
	I don't know.
	But anyway, speaking of representation, this is what we've been talking about the whole time, things being represented.
	Well, Dungeons and Dragons is also racist right now.
	As well.
	As well.
	It's been a long time that this has been in the works.
	And there is a kind of argument for it in that racial essentialism has always kind of been an aspect of Dungeons and Dragons.
	For example, orcs are defined as being an evil race.
	So again, we come back to the morally uncomplex ability to massacre a tribe of orcs to make sure that they don't come and eat your children.
	What's wrong with that?
	Yeah.
	That seems pretty good for a game.
	The problem with it is genetic determinism.
	What?
	Orcs are racially evil.
	Yeah.
	So it's in their genes.
	Yeah.
	They can't change.
	Okay.
	That's bad for the left.
	but I just made this all up in my head.
	Yes.
	I thought white people were genetically evil according to the left.
	No, no.
	They think that nobody is genetically evil.
	White people choose to be evil.
	But the problem is the...
	The Russo, born free...
	Yeah, and everyone is, of course, perfect.
	And the Orcs, as a sentient humanoid, fall under the rubric of a rational being.
	And so the fact that they are racially determined to be evil and stupid makes Extra Credits make videos making comparisons to the real world.
	For people who don't know, there's a YouTube channel called Extra Credits, where they used to make videos about gaming, then all of a sudden, for no reason, no one asked them to, they made a video arguing that the Orcs are black people.
	And you can see where this line of thought has come from, as you can see here.
	Orcs are human beings that can be slaughtered without conscience or apology.
	That's not true.
	Orcs are not human beings.
	They are racially different to human beings in the game of Dungeons and Dragons.
	But as you can see from the modern left, as far as they're concerned, anything that has or is capable of rational thought is a human being.
	Because a human being isn't just, isn't the body and the mind, it's just the mind.
	And so anything that could be considered rational is also, as far as they're concerned, a human being.
	Which is why they love the automatons, why they love the bugs, why they love all of the There's an interesting alternative way of looking at this, which is, therefore, anything that is not sufficiently conscious is not a human being.
	Which is why it's okay to murder a fetus.
	Anything that thinks can be considered.
	There's an interesting alternative way of looking at this, which is, therefore, anything that is not sufficiently conscious is not a human being.
	Which is why it's okay to murder a fetus.
	A fetus or somebody who's heavily disabled, vegetative state, you know, eugenics kind of immediately appears out of this.
	At any point you're dark enough that you no longer count as a human being.
	Murder is off the charts.
	Stalin just comes and gets you.
	And so the issue with this is they're like, well, you've created an other.
	It's like, yes, there are things that are not human beings.
	Dungeons and Dragons, of all places.
	Can you believe it?
	And they're like, but that's racism.
	I guess it is, actually.
	I guess it's true.
	There are two different races, they have innate characteristics, and the left are like, right, I just can't accept this.
	You can't accept made-up racism?
	No.
	I made up a race and then was racist towards it in my head, and you're salty about this?
	Yes.
	This is a fantasy writer called N.K.
	Jemisin, a titan of modern fantasy, I've never heard of him.
	He says, as a kind of sort of people, they're not, they're not people, they're orcs.
	They're orcs!
	Orcs are the fruit of the poison vine that is human fear of the other.
	The only way to respond to their existence is to control them or remove them.
	That's exactly why I have them in my fantasy campaigns.
	How I feel about spiders and mosquitoes.
	I don't know.
	I feel like if I were living in this universe in which there were genuine, like, there's the question of are all orcs evil?
	Put that aside.
	Technically they are.
	According to this, they are.
	Well, they were.
	If orcs are not predisposed to be all of them.
	Predetermined.
	Predetermined to be evil.
	If some of them were good orcs.
	I would feel like I have some moral duty to them, even though they are not my species.
	Yes, and that's what they're trying to carve out, because you'll notice the issue is about recognition again.
	If all Orcs are evil, then no Orc has a choice not to be evil.
	That condemns the entire race as being an irredeemably evil thing, and the modern liberal mind Can't take that because of the lack of choice.
	What you're saying is the orcs are not moral agents, even though they're rational beings.
	And that is an anathema to what a modern liberal is.
	So they hate it.
	And that's what all of this, you'll see as we go through, all of this comes down to the inability to make choices against the biological reality.
	Wow.
	There's a softer criticism I suspect they would make as well, which is.
	If fantasy is portraying that there are group tendencies, and I think fantasy does portray group tendencies, and I'd maybe controversially say group tendencies exist.
	It's crazy.
	Amongst real humans there are... Well that's where they're mapping this onto.
	I guess the fantasy exaggeration Should not be confused with like a, it's again, it's not a wolf whistle.
	It's not a rhetorical argument against real world groups, I think is what you're getting at.
	I think so.
	Because it's not to say, I mean, it's not so you should be drawing the metaphor from the fantasy that could be entirely self-contained in its own pocket universe, as we talked about earlier, and something's happening in the real world.
	So they say in June, 2021, Black Lives Matter protests swept the country.
	Right.
	So we began talking about how it's bad to be racist against Orcs, and now we're talking about Black Lives Matter.
	You brought that up.
	Yeah.
	For what reason?
	Well, the D&D team in 2010-20 said their 50-year history of characterizing Orcs and Drow as monstrous and evil is painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated.
	Sorry, what?
	These real world groups are just like these fantasy groups I made up in my head.
	They're not.
	Who said that?
	That's just not right.
	And it's not something we believe in.
	It's like, but nobody said that.
	You literally were sat there.
	Everyone's quiet.
	And you're like, you know what?
	I think we should stop being racist to the orcs.
	I think they're black people.
	Why are you saying that?
	No one thought that.
	Everyone thought the orcs were non-human.
	It's like, okay, the orcs are human beings.
	No, they're not.
	Why did the beginning of this article begin with that line?
	They're not human beings.
	To circle back to what we were talking about right at the beginning of the podcast, you build a fantasy world, it means something.
	I think the reason that certain science fiction universes have such importance and power is because they aren't made arbitrarily.
	People who put them together are very thoughtful people.
	It's not an easy enough methodology to just glance at a property, make a random connection, like I interpret it this way, and therefore my interpretation is Perfectly valid, right?
	The construction is quite intricate, the way that the pieces work together, and sometimes it's putting together a very high-minded archetypal, you know, Petersonian, Jungian thing.
	Sometimes it's a comment on a, like, it is a representation of a historical events that's what you're hanging on the idea of a story is that it is a rhetorical representation of reality and an argument of how reality would be were the premises of the story actually how reality is and so that's what they're really they can't help but make the comparison to the real world out of the story
	And in fact, they say here, fantasy worlds are definitionally made up.
	It doesn't have to be racism, yet in some of fantasy's most cherished texts, it's almost always present.
	It's like, so what they're saying is, look, if the world was this way, there would be racism.
	They're like, yeah, but you didn't have to make this world racist.
	It's like, that's because you care so much about the subject.
	Like, you know, other people might care about other things.
	And there's a great quote in here, quote, no humanoid is naturally stupid or naturally evil.
	That's kind of a wild... What if I make one up in my head and say it is?
	It's a wild metaphysical point to make.
	Yeah.
	No humanoid.
	Yeah, it's not even humans.
	Humanoid.
	Anything human looking.
	Yes.
	Can't be evil.
	That's our constituency.
	Across any possible imaginable world.
	Exactly.
	Are they scaven?
	I mean, I would say they're naturally evil.
	They're not stupid.
	Kind of.
	Pretty stupid to stab your friend in the back while he's working on your project.
	Ah, see, this is just a judgement call you're making.
	But the point is, this is the standard from which they work.
	And so they look at your fancy world and go, well, you know what?
	This makes me feel uncomfortable because it would imply a kind of genetic determinism, which would imply that actually the moral choice and agency of the will is actually not the supreme factor in every deciding case.
	Sometimes things are physically in a way that can't be modified and this drives them mental.
	So anyway, moving on.
	So 2023, there's a racism scandal in Dungeons and Dragons, of course.
	Would you like to know what the racism was?
	Not enough brown people?
	No.
	There was a race called the Haddozi, I've never even heard of these, who were described as sentient beings with monkey-like features who were captured and enslaved by wizards.
	Oh, for God's sakes.
	Monkey-like features?
	Yeah.
	That doesn't, to me, that doesn't bring anything to mind.
	Well, it brings monkeys to mind.
	You know, I mean, I just assume they're little monkeys.
	Yeah, right.
	But these were called racist.
	And of course, the fact that they were enslaved by wizards was a problem.
	Did they go to zoos and say, you've got some monkey-like creatures in your zoo?
	This is a racist zoo.
	You've got them in a cage?
	Yeah.
	But the thing is, right, actually, it's not about mapping these onto reality now, right?
	Now it's about the event of the slavery itself.
	So, for example, they've got comments in here.
	Is it okay for me to call the Dragon Game racist now?
	Because the Hadou Z are effing atrocious and the fact this was released is unconscionable.
	How did no one at Wizards of the Coast, which is the company that makes it, read over the Hadou Z origin being like, yeah, they were created to be slaves by a bad wizard but saved by a good wizard and now they like to work alongside elves who barely acknowledge them as people?
	So that's the point is about recognition of equality.
	And if a, if a race or a group begin in a position of inequality created as slaves, then this again, just first, this kind of moral bubble that they're trying to live.
	Can we talk a little bit about media literacy?
	If you feature something in your franchise, whatever it is, book, video game, movie, the framing of it, the way that it's presented can be a comment from the author about it positively or negatively or it could be a background element that is of no significance.
	It is completely ambiguous the perspective of the writer.
	So if you have racism in your game and you as the creator are anti-racist.
	It could be a commentary on racism.
	You can have the guy who's racist then go and kick a dog and everybody hates the guy who kicked the dog.
	That's like a very simple example.
	A very cheap example.
	Conversely, if you were racist and wanted racism in your franchise and you had the racist character who then like strokes the cat and gave money to charity and the music was like delightful the whole time and he's just there like putting out all these, you know, censorable words.
	He's walking down the street just walking.
	He's doing the Peter Parker points.
	Both of those things feature racism and yet one of them is a strong statement for, one of them is a strong statement against, and I imagine like Tarantino might just feature it as like It's a feature of history.
	I'm not supporting or against.
	Well, that's a great point because again, the purpose of a fictional universe is to tell a particular story.
	And if you can't have the hero or protagonist do something against injustice because you are forbidden from portraying injustice, how are you demonstrating his heroism?
	That's the point of having an unjust world that's transformed into a just world through the actions of the hero.
	This is where the virtues come out.
	But people really don't believe in heroes.
	Apparently not.
	The world should have always been good and was never made good according to these sources.
	But Sam, how long do you think it was until Wizards of the Coast apologized for this?
	Oh, it was almost the next day.
	We're so sorry.
	We're so sorry.
	God, we're sorry.
	We want to acknowledge and own the inclusion of offensive material.
	We failed you, our players and our fans, and we're truly sorry.
	How?
	I don't know.
	Because... What was wrong?
	They included a scene, a scenario, where the players could liberate some slaves.
	Well, we're terribly sorry.
	Won't happen again.
	More slaves next time.
	Slaves should stay in their bondage.
	Well, as you can see... Violating property rights is something we don't stand by.
	We believe they should have been paid for their property.
	As you can see, they issued some errata, which just re-retconned the entire backstory of that.
	Okay.
	But anyway, so what this led to is the abolition of race mixing in Dungeons & Dragons.
	What?
	They really are going all southern, huh?
	Very much!
	But as you can see, they're getting rid of the half races because of racism.
	Wait, what?
	Hold on, so they've established that fantasy races equate to real world races, and then the next step is that they ban We're going to set up an orc ethnostate away from all the elves and dwarfs.
	Orc candy, yeah.
	That's what wizards are going to do.
	"Segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," say "Wizards of the Coast." Do you think this is just Wizards of the Coast deliberately annoying the people who can play?
	No, no.
	They're gonna set up an Orc ethnostate away from all the elves and dwarfs.
	Orc candy, yeah.
	That's what Wizards are going to do.
	And so this was just hilarious because this was, of course, trying to get around the game's allegedly racist past.
	So they say, in most versions of D&D, it was possible to create half-elf and half-orc characters.
	As the name implies, these characters split both the physical traits and attributes of their two base races, humans and elves and humans and orcs.
	In other words, these characters physically looked like a combination of orcs and humans or elves and humans, and their stats attributes were also representative of both parent races, and now you see why they had a problem with it.
	Because what they're saying is again, it's racially essential that orcs are stronger than elves.
	And that means that you've got a racist game because it actually takes the time to distinguish between the physical characteristics of one against the physical characteristics of another.
	And so they're like, okay, but we hate that physical characteristics are an aspect of the real world.
	I find it quite distracting in the kind of modern iterations of fantasy where you You don't have... there's like an internal logic in a well-constructed fantasy like Tolkien where you see... The halflings are racially short.
	You kind of take your premises.
	What would the world be like if this existed, this existed?
	I'm just gonna logically follow it through.
	This is how the world... and you buy into it because it's all got a kind of coherence and it all makes sense.
	But when you don't reflect, it's just childish and boring.
	I feel like that's terrible.
	It's also untrue.
	I mean, like, you know, like it would be totally untrue.
	there'd be no physical difference between an orc and an elf in a game in a real world that had orcs and elves in obviously there would have to be but this is the problem with like the liberal ideal that has a sort of sort of the original human and so okay maybe when it comes to actual human beings that makes some kind of sense even though maybe it doesn't but when you start saying orcs are human beings too and then the rest of the original position has to erase the distinction between orcs elves and halflings it's like okay what are we even doing
	This is just a total homogenization of everything down to character.
	Why don't I just call everyone a human?
	Exactly.
	Well, just, you know, individual.
	I'll just live in the real world at this point.
	Why am I even playing Dungeons and Dragons?
	Two tall people have a baby.
	It's likely to be a tall adult.
	Yes.
	Genetically determined to be a tall adult.
	But the reason that we consider all the humans to be of equal moral worth is because of a deep fundamental, from my point of view, it's a spiritual.
	Yeah, it's that humans were created in the image of God.
	I think even from...
	Were orcs created in the image of God?
	Well, Iluvatar was foiled by the...
	It's not, yeah, so it's a fantasy world.
	So Tolkien, being Catholic, thought this all through and he had very good answers to these questions.
	But even from a secular genetic perspective, the human diversity around the planet is not enormously great.
	The people are similar to each other.
	Radical position here.
	People are kind of samey.
	Well, I kind of want to sort of straddle both sides.
	Same thing with gender.
	Men and women clearly are different from one another in very substantial and unarguable ways, I would say.
	However, across most attributes, men and women are similar to one another.
	This comes down to the liberal fetish for the sovereignty of the reason.
	Look, I want to be able to choose against my biological reality because otherwise I'm trapped within a kind of flesh cage and I hate it.
	And that's what this all comes down to.
	I mean, they're literally like, oh, well, we hate like half anything because half is biologically essential.
	Yes, and if freedom is your basic good, like you run into, okay, we've kind of made society as free as we can.
	What can we do about physics?
	What can we do about biology?
	That's what the entire transgender movement is predicated on.
	So anyway, let's get on to disabled representation.
	Because again, this is another one of those points where it's like, you know what?
	It's just going to come up against some real barriers in the suspension of disbelief.
	For example, I don't really believe there are going to be handy capable dungeons.
	It feels self-defeating because if you can complete a heroic quest and as a disabled person, why do you need any societal assistance?
	Well, there is that, but also that it would be a different story.
	Right.
	Frodo being carried up around Moria.
	He was vertically challenged, right?
	Sure.
	But like, you know, if Sam was in a wheelchair, it'd be a different story.
	I do think the fact that the hobbits could take on, you know, a battle against an orc is a slight deviation from my previous rule about like reality, you know.
	But the wheelchair stuff, they're just going to lie in the same way they dealt with in Doctor Who.
	They were like, all of a sudden, everything's wheelchair accessible and the wheelchairs hold, I don't know, guns.
	Yeah.
	Uh, yeah.
	And so obviously they're like, well, we have to have wheelchair representation in fantasy.
	It's like, look, I'm not, I'm not unsympathetic, but the point being is you can't suggest that the dungeons are as representative, inclusive and, um, Give as much recognition to disabled people as, say, the liberal democracy in which you live.
	Right.
	OSHA's not visited third level down in the... Yeah, exactly.
	I mean, Francis Fukuyama, again, has a great point on this, where he's like, there are two choices.
	We could make things for disabled people, or we could make sure that each building has a wheelchair entrance.
	And we chose to make sure that each building has a wheelchair entrance.
	So disabled people realized we didn't think of them as a lesser person because of something tragic that happened to them, like a car accident or whatever, and that they were welcome in wider society because it wasn't a commentary on their moral worth.
	Yes, that's all completely true.
	Now, we're not playing Dungeons and Dragons in a liberal democracy, we're playing it in a tyrannical orc Like, evil empire, now we've got to go climbing, you know, Mount Doom or whatever.
	Do the rules of the liberal democracy still apply?
	And these people are like, of course they do!
	It's like, then why are we invading them?
	They're fantasizing about being disabled as well.
	Like, the dude who's disabled isn't sitting there like, oh man, it'd be so cool if I was still disabled.
	Well, apparently for these people it is, right?
	But look at the, again, look at the expressions on the art that these people make for themselves.
	I mean, I particularly like this one.
	Just like... I kind of... I mean, during the art itself, the style is beautiful, right?
	But I'm kind of taken out of the experience of engaging in the aesthetic play of pretending that I might be in danger because that person doesn't really look like they're about to get their skull bashed in by an orc.
	And actually, there's something kind of gross about it, isn't there?
	It's like, what happened?
	Well, we've sent the disabled person down the dungeon.
	They got their skull crushed by an orc.
	They put pregnant women on the front line.
	Yeah, literally.
	And the art itself, the person doesn't look like, oh, I'm in danger.
	No, they look like they're engaging in something that everyone engages in where there's no danger whatsoever.
	I guess a hero has always been the idealized person, right?
	In past times, it would have been muscular, six-pack, athletic.
	I think the modern mind, actually, if you're able-bodied, there's a part of you, but if you're not a part of a minority, there's a bit of you which is actually I'm broken and wrong because... The thing is, it's not that there couldn't be a good story about someone who's disabled doing something heroic, right?
	It's that they would face a different series of challenges.
	Like, if you're engaging in combat with orcs in the dungeon, you would look a lot more like the people at the back, who look like they might actually get hurt, whereas the person in the wheelchair is looking like they're not going to get hurt.
	Because they get some sort of universal recognition in society and therefore people give them consideration that other people wouldn't consider.
	Like, I mean, this person I think should be looking like they're about to die.
	But in fact, this person looks like they're about to play basketball or something, right?
	The necessary tone to a lethal encounter to make me think, oh, there's an element of danger here is definitely missing on this person's face.
	And so I'm not into this.
	I don't think, oh, you know, this is about someone who's about to engage in mortal combat.
	I think this is some Karen who's been like, no, you've got to let Jimmy play with you or whatever.
	That makes a good point, which is, man, I live in a world where magic is real and we have healing magic and I'm still wheelchair bound.
	Yes.
	This is another point that the level one healing spells mean that you're not disabled anymore.
	Whatever, right?
	Do you think the people who want to watch this media and play themselves have the same disabilities?
	Yes, a lot of them do.
	This is about recognition.
	Okay.
	And that's why you represent disability in D&D with the combat wheelchair.
	Someone wrote some rules for a combat wheelchair.
	Do we have iron lung rules yet or no?
	I don't know.
	What about bedridden rules?
	I literally can't leave my bedroom.
	I don't know, but again, like, it just breaks the suspension of disbelief.
	These people, when they're portrayed in the art, don't look like they're in danger.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	How did you get your wheelchair down the broken stairs of the dungeon?
	It was, you know, difficult for able-bodied people to get down the blah blah blah.
	So now I don't really feel like I'm playing a game about some thing that would be an exciting and dangerous escapade.
	I feel like the world's been made safe and there's no risk.
	Have you heard this idea of the reverse hero's journey which isn't about you discovering and molding yourself and making yourself powerful.
	It's that you start powerful and you need to recognize that about yourself and make other people realize it.
	Sounds like Sauron's journey.
	It's the journey.
	Am I wrong?
	Am I wrong?
	No, but it's, well, it's often the case if you have a property with, say like Marvel does the film with the female protagonist, you go, hang on, the character is already able to defeat the villain.
	The main villain gets booted in the first five minutes by the female protagonist.
	The journey is actually not about, like, The self-sacrifice and struggle.
	It's about that.
	She needs to realize how amazing she is.
	That's why that's why that's the villain's journey.
	That's literally the villain's journey.
	I was, I'm amazing.
	I'm going to impose that on everyone around me.
	Uh, hence the facial expression.
	I think what I'm proposing is that it's likewise here that could well be the, the person isn't the joy of it.
	It's not feeling like you're in danger.
	We like properties where we're like.
	genuinely struggling.
	Yes we have flaws and we actually might die because we're not all powerful versus I'm proposing potentially the appeal of this for the people enjoying it is the world realizing how awesome the main character actually is.
	Yeah again it's about the recognition of equality.
	It's more like, you know, in the, well, I guess, I don't know, I better not do spoilers.
	I was going to talk about the new Dune movie.
	I haven't actually seen it.
	Well, I won't, I'll avoid that point because you're poor listeners.
	Okay.
	Well, just a quick thing then.
	So you've got people saying, well, look, you can believe in magic, but you have trouble believing a person who will check and dodge, which again, brings us back to the internal consistency of the universe.
	In all other ways, it's assumed that physics works the same.
	And so, yes, it's more difficult to dodge an attack in a wheelchair in the same way that I can accept dragons, elves, and talking trees, but I can't accept a 2021 BMW 5 Series 530i with optional heated seating.
	Why am I so bigoted?
	It means literally this meme.
	Yeah, that's a great meme.
	Exactly.
	It perfectly communicates the point.
	Yes.
	And so, anyway, we'll leave it at that.
	Let's go to the video comments.
	On the topic of zero seats, this exactly has happened here in Canada.
	The Tory party in 1993 under Brian Mulroney went from a thumping majority of 156 seats to two.
	The result of this is that the Conservative vote was split between the new progressive Conservative Party and the achingly familiar Reform Party.
	I expect something very similar to happen in the UK following the next election.
	My recommendation is reform jealously spearheads itself as the one true Conservative Party, and zealously gatekeeps itself against any would-be Blairite Conservative intruders.
	Know our history, lest you repeat it.
	That's a great point.
	Good advice, yeah.
	Didn't know that history either, so that's good.
	Imagine the Conservatives go down to two seats.
	Oh, one of the polls just put them there.
	You've seen the quote from Tony Blair that on the night of the original landslide when he got in, he was actually quite worried that he'd overdone it.
	Yeah, that they'd think he was cheating or something.
	He didn't intend to destroy the Conservative Party, that's what he actually said.
	He was kind of worried because it took a while before any Conservative seats came in.
	I love that Tony Blair is on a reverse hero's journey.
	We're all realizing his true power.
	It is rather amusing when you find out the same people accusing Trump of being a dictator are the same folks who support watch lists for anybody who purchases a Bible.
	Have I gone deaf?
	No, it's really low.
	Okay.
	Apparently that one was just particularly low audio.
	Alright, perfect.
	I think so in the future.
	Go to the next one.
	From this hot gate to their name, from the natural hot springs that come from Chendia.
	Nowadays, it's a place that you can relax, swim.
	It's a very thirsty area with a lot of tourists traveling here.
	And the waters are very relaxing.
	I highly recommend to anyone that visits the area.
	I definitely want to go there and guide them.
	You don't want to get to the Hot Gates?
	No, not really.
	Why not?
	It's where Leonidas got crushed by the Persians.
	Ah.
	That's why it was called Thermopylae, which means the Hot Gates, and that's the hot part of the Hot Gate.
	That's cool.
	That is really awesome.
	Where's that bit of road where they actually stood at North Thorne?
	Is that known or is that unknown?
	Yeah, no, that's known.
	It's just that erosion has made it go from like a small path that a few hundred men could hold to like a mile wide.
	But at the time it was really, really narrow coastal road.
	All right.
	You can go there.
	I want to see that.
	Yeah, no, that's awesome.
	Go to the written comments.
	Beggar Hero says, nice to see Lambda on the podcast again.
	Seeing this is a gaming day, what would be your ideal game theme?
	Game theme for new games coming out, what would it be about?
	I don't know if people know, I used to work in games and when I was a teenager I would make my own games and design them.
	My tendency was always to over-complicate games.
	I would make the one master game that would be an RTS that you could then go in and play first-person shooter that you'd manage the economy.
	I like to think I've learned this the power of simplicity.
	And there's a game, well, we talked about extra credits briefly.
	So this is a bit of a throwback to go completely opposite direction.
	Do you remember, he talked about this game, which was just, you controlled a circle and there was other circles that seemed to be in groups.
	This is my kind of arty side, right?
	When you moved your circle towards the other circles, they would disperse and it was completely left up to the player to interpret what this meant.
	Okay.
	I kind of love that.
	So take, we were talking about first person shooters and that if you put the art style of like black zombies, people interpret it one way or the other way.
	But the fundamental, you could paint it, make it splatoon.
	So I'm kind of fascinated with the question of if you remove all of the art, the music, visuals, pure gameplay, can you communicate something of meaning just with the game?
	Like in a medium that's got
	no overlap with cinema or music or anything else like it what can you what can you learn or communicate about the human experience through pure gameplay so uh the answer take a hero is autism yeah so i am a programmer so and says thanks having luke on what a great guest anyone starts the segment complimenting swindon is a keeper if i need to see the look on calum's face
	This is what several years of living in Swindon will do to a man.
	It's not hurt.
	Baron Von Warhawk says, the leftist activist looks at the game where the people shoot killer robots and giant bugs and thinks, I don't get it.
	Is this a metaphor?
	Is this satire?
	Is it about fascism or racism?
	Where's the rainbows and BLM fist?
	They are aware of the true message.
	Screw them bugs.
	Risto says, the true good guys are held up, i.e.
	the automatons that just want their country separated from the super earth or redacted.
	This message has been found to be undemocratic.
	I just don't believe the automatons.
	Of course not, why would you?
	They'll leave you alone.
	Have you ever engaged with war propaganda, ever?
	They always lie.
	No matter who it is, everyone lies during wars, and I think they're lying too.
	Really, truth is the first casualty of war, is it?
	I know, big men... Yes, if only someone 4000 years ago had written that down.
	Why are these lying liars?
	I just saw so many comments underneath that message, though, where everyone was just like, oh, I feel bad for the automatons now, maybe we should surrender.
	I'm just like, what is this?
	I feel bad for the robots who can't feel pain.
	The lesson to learn is propaganda, incredibly effective, very easy to wield, not difficult, even in a fictional universe.
	They will follow like sheep.
	There's a meme, and if anyone else knows the actual meaning of this, could you please let me know?
	Because I found it in preparation for the research.
	There's one planet in the automaton sector called Malevolus Creek or something, and there are 14,000 people currently on that world trying to liberate it, and they have made 0.000% progress.
	That's because there's a guy that rules over the world map.
	Joel.
	Joel, that's it.
	Who was preventing them from taking it for some reason.
	But why is everyone obsessed with that one planet?
	To liberate again.
	That's the bit I don't get.
	There are loads of planets you could take from the robots.
	We must defeat Joel.
	Right, just to annoy Joel, that's it.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Screw him.
	Thomas says, Helldivers is perhaps peering through the keyhole of the door, the establishment they're desperately trying to keep closed.
	Things will only really change when people understand democracy and our democracy are two very different things.
	I think that's the point.
	The our democracy refers to the manager's democracy, whereas a normal democracy would mean Trump 24-7 and they would hate it.
	It would never be allowed.
	Well, that's the point, isn't it?
	Who's not allowing it?
	A little black billed on this question, I guess.
	Well, I guess we'll see what happens in 2024.
	I mean, it seems that everyone thinks that Trump's going to win.
	Yeah.
	They do seem to be coming to terms with that, which is good.
	Well, obviously nobody knows the future, but if I was to put a prediction, Trump gets in and then is blocked from acting again.
	Yeah.
	I think that's the play.
	Wow.
	I guess we'll find out.
	I know, yeah.
	Stay tuned for life.
	Henry says, who are the good guys in Helldivers 2?
	The developers Arrowhead Studios are.
	No Sweet Baby Inc.
	involvement, no alphabet nonsense.
	The premium game passes are not timed and are able to be acquired through gameplay.
	They also have an approach that weapons should all be reasonably viable alternatives with no clear meta and you just play the way that speaks to you.
	To be fair, that is actually a really good summary of the experience playing the game, just in case anyone knows.
	Not sponsored, just really enjoy it.
	It does remind me very much though when we talked about 40k and it's like who are the good guys in 40k and usually people come away with no one's the good guys and it's sort of true but then you remember you are human and quite like life so I mean are you really going to pick the flesh-eating bug or the the chaos weirdos or whatever else no like regardless of how bad the Blairite super art is or the horrors of 40k Imperium of Man you're still human.
	Now, we know that woke influence usually ruins gameplay, but I'm interested, if you had the choice to play two games, one of them is horribly subversive, but very well-tuned gameplay.
	That's Helldivers.
	Or, very based.
	You're terrible!
	There's an 8-bit piece of crap that I've had my eye on.
	Which one?
	Well, no one's playing the Alex Jones game and everyone's playing Hellbent.
	Everyone's busy spreading managed democracy.
	You know, tearing down the illegal broadcast.
	We're the illegal broadcast, goddammit!
	I think this shows the importance of artists.
	If you just focus on shouting your opinion, people will easily ignore you.
	If you make things of genuine quality, Um, there's a proverb that says you will stand with more than you will have.
	And you can see this in Hollywood because like, if you look at like the early Hollywood films are all actually very conservative and you know, like it's a wonderful life and stuff like this, very conservative.
	And then well, the left were like, Oh yeah, actually art is a really good way of transmitting your values because you have complete capture over what happens.
	And so if I make leftism be the correct outcome of every story, then this influences the culture.
	And that's exactly what's happened.
	But you still need to make good media.
	Oh, yeah, absolutely.
	I'm not saying they don't have to be good, but like I think this is why a lot of left wing artists have been cultivated.
	And the right has just been like, well, I guess art's all just neutrals.
	No, it's the opposite of neutral.
	Every single thing in art is valuable, valuation based.
	It's the very nature of art.
	So I really think we should encourage people get good.
	Oh, yeah, absolutely get good.
	Arizona Desert Rat says, isn't a mindless violent mob what zombies are supposed to be?
	That's racist.
	A naked Stelios lathered head to an olive oil.
	Yeah, that goes a bit weird.
	So let me get this straight.
	Not including black people as white supremacy and including black people, but as an enemy is also white supremacy.
	I mean, obviously the correct answer is a black person shooting hordes of white people in Idaho or something, right?
	That's the game I'd make.
	Just to see what would happen.
	I just want to have CNN defend it.
	I think they have a flowchart in somewhere like Polygon that does the game feature X. This is the article that you write.
	This is the feature Y. This is the score you give.
	It's so predictable.
	Barrowman Warhawk says, first they came for the American zombies and I said nothing.
	Then they came for the Spanish zombies and I said nothing.
	Then they came for the African zombies and I said nothing.
	Then they came for the Romanian zombies and I said nothing.
	Then they came for me because I was sympathizing with the zombie hordes and calling the survivors racist for shooting the zombies.
	For some reason, my fellow survivors thought I was a liability.
	That's a great comment.
	Ewan says, they keep trying to push the D&D and the wheelchair thing too, in a world of magic where you can bring someone back to life.
	Yes.
	Neo and Realist says, Superchat saying, you mean the Drow didn't build their deep, dark, evil city of Mezzo Baranzan to be wheelchair accessible?
	Like, yeah, you'd think, you know, it's like, we need to make sure that the disabled people can get there and torture people too.
	It's secretly kind of based to put lots of accessibility features in the villain's lair.
	Yeah, in the torture dungeon.
	Go back to media literacy.
	The story starts off in the village where she's having a terrible time getting around.
	She goes on an adventure and then it turns out Mordor's wheelchair accessible.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Imagine what happens if the wheelchair user actually is like, I'm switching sides.
	Yeah.
	These guys are nicer than me.
	I want to see somebody...
	These guys eat hobbit babies.
	Yeah, but they are wheelchair accessible.
	Did you call me she-they?
	Noise Marine says, currently writing my first D&D experience with new players myself and a new DM centering around pockets of orcs and goblins that colonized the kingdom for a hundred years and reclaiming their kingdom.
	Uh, I'm not going to read the rest of that comment.
	Incidentally, I'm running a D&D campaign at the moment.
	My world is irredeemably racist.
	So.
	Against who?
	Well, non-humans.
	It's speciesist then.
	Sophie says, dude, to write a story, you must have a conflict.
	To have a conflict, especially at the scale epic fantasy requires you to have, you must have groups.
	Groups you can easily tell apart and have clear reasons to be in conflict.
	But yes, it does mean there'll be group preference in the story.
	Or there is no story.
	Or do you want Arthur just drinking tea with Morgana Le Fay for two hours?
	You can't write conflict, and that's what you have left.
	There is no story.
	It's totally true.
	I think it's valid to have a world, a fictional world, in which there is clear good and evil.
	Because in the world, there is good and evil, and you can have a person who represents evil.
	And the story of defeating them is the story of good overcoming evil.
	Like in the long run, something I believe in.
	You could also have a story where evil wins because we see that in microcosm.
	There's often situations in which there is temporary victory for You could also have a morally ambiguous universe in which both sides, I mean that I think in many ways reflects the fact that through each human heart is the line between good and evil, which is another truth.
	So depending on which way you choose to spin your universe you are communicating a different True idea.
	So I don't think you can just say, this is the correct way to do it.
	But the point is, if you aren't allowed to portray injustice, then why will your universe be interesting in the slightest?
	I mean, the comment's absolutely correct.
	You need conflict.
	Yes.
	There's no way around it.
	And to say, all games must be set in a perfect utopia, you know, post-capitalist.
	To be fair, if they were given the opportunity to just lay it out, they'd say, no, all games must be black people killing white people.
	That's the hidden, yes, but the emerging truth of what they actually desire.
	So you mentioned a game set in Idaho where you just kill white people and play as a black guy.
	Oh, I know the one you're thinking of.
	Chat has mentioned that Team Sneed on Steam, they released Tyrone vs the Cops and I'm looking at it.
	What was the Far Cry one?
	There was a Far Cry one where the front cover was a bunch of rednecks doing the Last Supper.
	Far Cry 5, you're thinking of.
	Isn't that Far Cry 5?
	And everyone was like, wow, that's based.
	That's a Christian cult.
	Do you remember the original Battlefront, not the EA remakes but the old one, had a level where you played as a scout on Endor shooting Ewoks.
	Just slaughtering dozens and dozens of Ewoks.
	I absolutely hated the bloody Ewoks.
	If you haven't played this minigame.
	I haven't.
	I need to.
	We're out of time, so I'll end it here.

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