Gamers Are Culture War Test Subjects, Speech Policing Escalates
Gamers Are Test Subjects In The Culture War, Speech Policing Escalates after Blizzard announced you would have to tie your gaming account to a separate platform if you wanted to chat.This opens gamers up to the risk that if they say bad things they could have their games revoked.Far left activist types push for ideology in gaming and esports which results in formerly apolitical people becoming active against these ideas. But why is it always gaming and where are those on the Left speaking out against this terrifying authoritarian push?Previously we saw Overwatch league crackdown on "pepe memes" which is downright strange. It seems like the Culture war is someone personal and there are people targeting gaming culture for malicious reasons.
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There are many people who would tell you that Gamergate was the start of the culture war as we know it today.
Many gamers would tell you that when left-wing identitarianism started to seep into their culture, there was a backlash.
But even among the mainstream, we see this narrative.
NBC News, for instance, ran a story saying there's a connection between gamers and the alt-right, and this led to the rise of Trump.
And to an extent, there's kind of an overlap, for sure, but it's kind of more of an enemy-of-my-enemy thing, I would think, that many gamers are apolitical but were aided by people who were political because they both kind of opposed politics.
It's complicated.
But there's some news today that I find particularly interesting.
See, one of the big fights in the culture war is free speech versus hate speech.
We're now hearing that Blizzard is going to be implementing a new kind of moderation system for the chat on a game called Overwatch.
businesses they can do whatever they want and you have typically the right and the anti-authoritarians
saying free speech should be protected regardless of whether it's public or on a private platform.
We're now hearing that Blizzard is going to be implementing a new kind of moderation system for
the chat on a game called Overwatch. Basically if you want to chat while watching a pro esports game
you have to link your account to your actual gaming account.
For those that aren't familiar basically this means that your digital property, the games
you own, will now be connected to your your username on a different platform.
Some people are concerned that this could result in you saying something wrong, getting banned, and actually losing property.
I don't know if that's true, because we don't know exactly what the measures are going to be with this news, but it does seem like they're trying to increase the risk for those who engage in certain kind of speech.
So today, I want to focus on this latest news, talk about how video games are kind of a testing ground for many of these new political and cultural policies, and I want to talk about how gaming is kind of the front line in the culture war.
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A story from Polygon.
Blizzard's trying to clean up Twitch chat by tying it to battle.net accounts.
New chat moderation system will require users to connect their Twitch account to battle.net.
They say since the earliest days of the Overwatch League, Blizzard has had a tough time getting fans and even pro players to behave themselves in Twitch chat.
Whether it was spamming emotes or simply posting offensive messages, every week of the Overwatch League meant more and more bans.
However, As we head into the League's second season, Blizzard is trying to combat Twitch chat toxicity through a new program that it will first test during Overwatch Contenders.
Contenders, the semi-professional division of the Overwatch League, hosts its own broadcast on a Twitch channel separate from Blizzard's Pro League.
It's on this channel that Blizzard will run its first tests of a new chat moderation system.
Viewers who want to participate in Twitch chat during Overwatch Contenders stream will need to link their battle.net accounts with their Twitch accounts.
The restriction, Blizzard hopes, will lead to a more positive viewing experience.
While it's clear that Blizzard hopes that this new program will help clean up the Contenders chat, and by extension the amateur and pro scene, It's unclear how exactly it will do that.
The post itself makes no mention of possible punishment, like chat restrictions or bans, let alone any connection those punishments might have to a user's Battle.net account.
While Blizzard hasn't announced specifics about moderation, it's likely that more information about its new program will be revealed after it's been tested.
There have been instances In tabletop gaming and the gaming community, where people have been permanently banned and even had their property removed over the things they've said on other platforms.
So there's a concern here that if you go into an online chat on Twitch, which is a separate website from battle.net, which is a service, they might actually seize the digital property you have because you're in violation of some kind of terms of service.
One thing that people need to pay attention to as technology begins to expand is that you don't actually own your property.
You hold a license to it so long as you agree to their terms of service.
And we can see what happens on Twitter.
If you say something wrong, you violate the terms of service, they ban you.
Well, it's also true that they could put the same terms in video game licensing, and if you say something wrong, they seize that property from you.
There's something called the online disinhibition effect.
That because we're anonymous or so far away that people kind of don't care if they say bad things.
What I feel, I feel like this is an attempt to do a, like to do something about that.
To basically try and remove your anonymity by connecting an account you have with your actual credit card information and property you have a license, you own the licenses to, to where you chat on other platforms.
Thus, when you say things, they will know it's you.
But more importantly, Create that fear that you might actually get banned permanently from the games that you paid for because you're saying the wrong thing.
Now, to the main point that I want to make is, it's not so much this particular news, but things we've seen in the past as well.
For instance, you may not know that Overwatch League actually cracked down on Pepe memes among players and fans.
The league said it wants to discourage the use of images associated with hate groups.
And that story is back from March.
And I always thought it kind of crazy that simply because some people use Pepe meme, they associate it with a hate group and thus people in Overwatch can't use a regular online meme.
Obviously, anybody who understands anything about the internet knows that Pepe is not some kind of weird hate symbol as much as Hillary Clinton and certain organizations want to claim it is.
Simply because a group of people that is relatively small uses a symbol or a hand gesture doesn't mean they get to keep it and it's now their symbol.
But for some reason, the Identitarian Left wants that to be the case.
And I feel like all this really does is it actually emboldens and pushes people to the right.
I'd be willing to bet that most gamers are apolitical.
They just want to play video games.
In fact, it's a meme.
The meme is, I just wanted to play video games.
But what happens is, when you bring this ideology to the forefront of where people are enjoying their escape, their leisure, You're effectively forcing them to choose a side, and they're going to side against you when you tell them that they can't even post their memes anymore.
There's a bunch of different pictures from Overwatch League.
And again, if you're not familiar, Overwatch League is a pro sports video gaming series.
And we can see in some of these images, you actually have people with Pepe signs.
Why?
Because Pepe is just a meme.
It's not necessarily anything specific.
It represents a bunch of different concepts.
But for some reason, gamers are considered the enemy of the mainstream left, and I can't... I honestly don't know why.
But we have this story from NBC News just last year, how gamers are facilitating the rise of the alt-right.
It's got 66,000 thumbs down and only 612 thumbs up, but it has 213,000 views.
I can't for the life of me understand why they want to target video games specifically.
Why don't we see calls for gender diversity in basketball and baseball and football?
When you do a Google search for diversity in major league sports, they talk about their management staff.
They talk about administrative staff.
But they don't talk about the actual players.
It's easily accepted that the top players in the NFL and NBA are dudes and you're not
going to see women.
Now, there's no rule saying women can't compete in these events.
They just haven't actually made it.
They're not good enough compared to these other guys.
You can look at some other physical sports like skateboarding and you can see a clear
distinction between the skill of men and the skill of women.
Now, I think the argument for video games is that there's no physical barrier, thus
women should be as good as men.
But we still see the same thing play out.
It's mostly guys.
Yet for some reason, video games is chosen to be the front line of the culture war.
I looked to Quora to kind of answer this question.
They said, why are anti-social nerds gamers attracted to the alt-right?
While I think it's rather hyperbolic to make that statement that gamers are attracted to the alt-right, the left certainly pushes that narrative, and I kind of wanted to see what their answer was.
Now, obviously Quora isn't the best citation because it's typically just online user answers, but there is a really interesting answer from this man, Michael Coran, who last year said, Most gamers are apolitical, in the sense that their identity as a gamer does not move them around on the political spectrum.
The only real way to get gamers to shift is to attack their hobby.
In the past, both left and right attacked gaming.
Though today, the right has let up a bit.
The recent catalyst was the Gamergate fiasco, where a handful of bad actors stirred up a kerfuffle over a controversial figure in the industry.
Normally, these blow over quickly.
This wasn't even the dev in question's first rodeo.
But this time, the gaming press was implicated in the hijinks, and they weren't going to stand for it.
Round two was the Gamers Are Dead articles, a coordinated barrage of condemnations of gamer culture by most of the major gaming press sites.
I'm not sure what the objective of these articles was, but for many gamers, including those not involved in the earlier kerfuffle, it was a betrayal most foul.
The final act was the arrival of the saviors from the right.
Right-leaning publications and organizations noticed the vaguely disaffected cohorts of gamers and pounced.
The right coddled and the left condemned.
And as the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
Some of us warned that the attention from right-leaning sources wasn't out of charity, but we were ignored and once the alt-right became a thing, a large cluster of semi-politically active gamers was rolled into it.
I started thinking about this story because I saw this news about this experiment in chat moderation, which is a huge step up from anything we've seen for the most part, at least it's the most prominent experiment in this kind of policing of speech.
But I'm also fairly critical of left-wing identitarianism because they're rather authoritarian.
But I had a conversation with a researcher about why it is that I will typically defend the idea of true social justice and diversity, but I'm opposed to the regressive authoritarians, and I think it's obvious.
What they're doing when they condemn gamers is actually pushing people to the right.
It's really easy to talk to people about politics and policy that are left-wing and convince them it makes sense when you're nice to them and you don't immediately denounce them and insult them and accuse them of being Nazis.
But the more these news websites will call gamers and people like PewDiePie white supremacists and alt-right, the more you're telling them they are the bad guys and you're both enemies.
Well, the only thing that can happen then is people who are not politically affiliated will be attracted to those who support them.
And you end up with conservatives and people associated with the right, who like Donald Trump or otherwise, saying, hey man, I won't fight with you.
I'll support you.
Those people are crazy too.
We then start seeing gaming channels on YouTube have a shared audience with people who are politically anti-identitarian.
And the question is, why is that?
Well, it's not because gamers are necessarily alt-right.
It's because if the identitarian left is attacking gamers, The Identitarian Right, who is at odds with them, will say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
So if a gaming channel is upset that left-wing Identitarians are infecting their game, right-wing Identitarians will be upset that left-wing Identitarians are doing this too, and thus they will find a shared audience.
And this is kind of bad news for the left.
This aggressive over-policing of an apolitical hobby is leading to people being pushed away from certain left-wing policies.
Now, I certainly think it's an exaggeration to claim that there is a direct pipeline from the gaming community to the alt-right, because there are regressive left gaming communities, there are left-wing identitarian gaming communities, too.
And for the most part, I think gamers are typically apolitical and probably lean center-left.
But one of the main problems is the idea of what the left is and what the right is.
So people will look at my videos and at a cursory glance say, oh, Tim's clearly conservative because he's critical of these people.
But I'm critical of the ideology, not policy, for the most part.
I don't like ideological policy where they say we want to be, you know, implement racist policies.
I'm actually social liberal in terms of taxes and borders and all of these things.
But what happens then is when you are associated with the left and you start attacking, smearing, and insulting people who have done nothing, you make them actually embrace the other side.
And that's not the alt-right.
The alt-right's identitarian.
But they will certainly then become more independent.
and not want to be associated with you.
And if there's no legitimate arguments in favor of left-wing policies outside of the ideology, then the only thing they're going to hear is from conservatives who have open arms.
And that's probably why we're seeing Generation Z becoming more conservative.
Now don't get me wrong.
Maybe it's not the primary reason.
But it's definitely a contributing factor.
When these news organizations repeatedly smear PewDiePie, PewDiePie's fans know better.
They know it's not true when you lie about him and accuse him of being the worst of the worst.
And this means they're not going to like you.
So I don't know, let me know what you think.
Why gaming?
Seriously, that's the question I want to have.
If they want to experiment with policing speech, why aren't they tying other accounts to people's property?
Why is it gaming?
Why is it always video games that becomes the forefront of the experimentation, of the battle?
Why do they claim gamers made Donald Trump happen?
It's like gamers are the most important demographic right now, in the world, for everything, for some reason.
Maybe it's not gamers.
Maybe it's just that young people like video games, so most people end up being some kind of gamer, and all you're really doing is targeting young people who are not political.
I don't know.
You comment below and let me know what you think.
We'll keep the conversation going.
I feel like I was kind of all over the place, but when I saw this news about moderating Twitch chat by tying your account to your digital property, it feels like an escalation.
It feels like an attempt at finding a way to scare people or punish people or create a risk so that you won't engage in certain kind of speech.
And then it just feels, once again, that they're making video games the front line in the culture war, as it has been.
But again, comment below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
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