TRASHFUTURE - Developers of the World... Unite! ft. Trevor Strunk

Episode Date: March 26, 2018

It's a nerdcast, folks! Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@milo_edwards), and Suze (@SuzeMarsupial) subbing in for Hussein (@HKesvani) talk to Trevor Strunk (@Hegelbon), the host of the inimitable No Cartridge (@NoCartridge) gaming podcast. We begin by reading an article about milennials building a mountain fortress from which to rule the world with apps, and then Trev tells us about how Gamergate birthed the alt-right, and the new and interesting ways in which the games industry is exploiting everyone's labour... including people who don't know their labour is being exploited. Also welcome to the new, good sounding Trashfuture with its high quality audio.... which has been lovingly produced by Nate Bethea (@inthesedeserts), who you may remember from a previous episode of this podcast, or his own podcast, Hell of a Way to Die (@hellofaway) Follow us on twitter (@trashfuturepod) Buy a shirt from @tinycomrade Anyway this was the most @ handles I've ever put in a single description love Riley

Trev, what's Fortnite and why is there so much porn of it? Fortnite is a battle royale game where like, so like you can think about it in terms of games like PUBG, has anyone, are you guys familiar at all with like Player Unknown's Battleground? Oh yeah. Or H1Z1, okay. I'm not. I can say with quite some confidence that I have never gamed. I actually, you know, spend a lot of time talking to women.

No, I don't. There are women characters in both games. I'm not sure there are women. Women also play video games. I know that's like wild new information, but yeah. Well now you're talking my language. You mean women who can be controlled? Let's say we formally open the show, boys and girls.

Let's do it. Yeah, so I will now officially welcome everybody back to Trash Future, the podcast for how the future is trash. Buy a shirt. Commodify your descent with a shirt. I strongly recommend Suze is wearing a custom text one right now that says omblin mindset on it. Not a joke from the show.

A private joke between us. Wow, that's great. I like that. So that's fun. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's a joke that's never been on the show before. I guess it is now. You too wish to become part of this illy inner circle of DM in jokes.

Buy a shirt. And support, support. Friend of the show, Tiny Comrade. Yeah, support, turn to the show, Tiny Comrade. I am Riley. You can find me on Twitter at Raleigh. You may remember me from all other episodes of this show. Who am I here in the living room with?

Hey, I'm Suze. I'm on Twitter at Suze Marsupial. And you may remember me from a previous episode where I am genuinely struggling to remember what we talked about. President's Club. Yes, that's right. But it was a lot of fun. And we have a couple of friends, because we're all friends.

In the bowl. In the bowl, Skyping in today. I am, I'm Travis Strunk. I do a podcast called No Cartridge. You might know me from Twitter. I'm at Hagelban. I talk about video games and leftism and stuff like that. Sometimes people will DM me really long and rambling questions about marks.

And depending on my abilities at the moment, I will answer it or forget about it. And from Mother Russia. It's me, the seditious Russian element. My little birds. You might also remember me from every previous episode of this podcast. I'm currently heading up a campaign to get more women into gaming by releasing a pink edition of Monster Energy. I think that's like the right and progressive thing to do.

Yeah, you can hit me up on Twitter at Milo underscore Edwards. So yeah, what's in the news this week? Let's let's get let's get into it. Let's do the fucking local local news roundup. Yeah, welcome to BBC. I was going to do, I was going to do a couple of because we're going to be talking about like gaming and programming and stuff. I was going to do a couple of selections from Ian Miles Chong associated

blog in cell corner, which is hilarious. Because it's like his whole brand is that I guess he doesn't fucking is mad about it, but is good at games, but is mostly mad at games because some games have women in them. But I mean, I was then sent this article by friend of the show, Andrew, who you can find at Old Man, Ontario. He is a good follow. I recommend him. But he sent me this this article that said the title is Welcome to Powder Mountain,

a utopian club for the millennial elite. Please tell me where we can do a lot of coke. I mean, really, they didn't think of that. That would have been such a better idea. No, I think that's a feature, right? I'm sure you if an exclusive. Yeah, it's got to be some coke there. I did initially misread it because I wasn't wearing my glasses as power mountain,

which I think in some ways is even more fitting. Yeah. Oh, God. So tell us about this exclusive resort. Really, what is its motivational statement? This is what I love at the the by line of the article, the summary line of the article is when these young entrepreneurs bought a remote ski resort in Utah, they dreamed of a more paradise.

Everybody has to now bite down in a pencil. They dreamed of an exclusive socially conscious community. So good. You didn't read the second part, though, which is is this the future or Mount Olympus for Generation Me, which I don't understand as a Mount Olympus for Generation B also be the future. There was a Mount Olympus for previous generations. Like, oh, yeah, the boomers on their rarified cliff top perch in the heavens looking down upon us mortals who were merely renting a mountain.

Normandy Beach was the Mount Olympus for the greatest generation. Well, that's just Mount Olympus. So is anyone else invited to the ski resort? Or is it literally just like six guys having some fun? I think I mean, like the millennial elite are basically just people whose parents were born rich. But yeah, it's the the what I love is just is just that it has this idea that it is both exclusive and socially conscious, which is pardon the pun, peak liberalism. Thank you.

They should rename it. Yeah, like we want to we want to be socially conscious, but we also want to do it in an environment free from the elements of society we don't like. Well, yeah, I mean, it is in Utah and it's on a snow covered mountain. And it's like, wow, geez, guys. Could you be a little less on the nose about this? I can tell you exactly. I can tell you what what they're saying.

Like it's like basically rich people like fucking Peter Teal, you know, the fucking tech vampire chills out there. It's not a millennial. Martin's. No, he's a millennial like Dan Ninen. Martin Sorrell, Hollywood producers, whatever. Like basically just old rich people are going to try and like, you know, bang young millennials presumably or take their blood in the case of Peter Teal.

Bang young millennials and then take their blood when their guard is down because they're in that post orgasmic glow gorilla mindset. What they're actually doing is it says during the February weekend I attend, there are only three talks each lasting an hour. The remaining three days are spent skiing, snowshoeing, eating and drinking, relaxing, yoga or spa sessions or partying in crowded hot tubs. Again, I can't emphasize enough this clearly is just like an old people fuck palace where they're going to try to take people's blood.

Oh, man, I'm reading more into this. It's like it's not just that, but there's also like weird filigree around it. Like there's the they talk about the other stuff they do like further future. Did you get to that part? Oh, no, go ahead. It is. It's a few paragraphs down. It's a gathering in the Nevada desert attended by the ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt,

which has been described as, quote, burning man for the one percent burning man is burning man for the one percent. I was I was about this is the one percent of burning man. It's like if you went to burning man, you're like the people here aren't terrible enough. Something I think is interesting is how this drive people have, especially the more money they have to make their holidays seem somehow important. Like, you know, if you have close on a billion dollars, just go and, you know, enjoy yourself and like do what the hell you want.

But people seem to reach this point where it's like, oh, yeah, you know, we could just like, you know, go skiing and like, you know, make out in hot tubs and have a bunch of fun. But but it has to be it has to be more than that, you know, it is not either enjoyable enough or enough of a status symbol to just have a great holiday. But, you know, it is it's it's political somehow or not even political. If that's a bit of a dirty word in the context. But it's, you know, it's for the future or it's building something new. And to me, that that just makes it a hundred times more tiresome than just rich people doing

rich people shit. Well, it's the if this is almost this this is perfect. This leads into this perfectly, where he this is sort of an attendee at the at the at the festival being discussed, talked to by the driver, someone called Chowla. What's it remit Chowla, the chief executive of an app designing company. Nice and specific. When I hitch a ride in Chowla's SUV, he tells me how he came to invest in Powder Mountain. He's one of the investors.

He'd been on a disappointing trip to Verbia where the food was quote not that progressive. But then he went to Utah where he bumped into 30 of his friends. And there was a moment when they served coconut water. Coconut water was the thing he'd been craving in Switzerland. But it was an experience on a summit cruise ship that Chowla said made the biggest impression. He was on the deck casually talking to the founder of a not-for-profit company whose career had been devoted quote to building schools in Africa or something like that. And I felt embarrassed to say a run a technology company.

So Chowla said the first thing he did when he got off the boat was to set up his own now defunct not-for-profit company, the charity swear box, a website connected to Twitter that would monitor how often a user swears in their tweets and recommend they make a donation to charity. Groundbreaking. There's something about that that makes you feel very much at the mercy of it all, isn't it? That's the Mount Olympus-ness, right? It's like that's why this thing makes me so mad is that these fucking simpletons, these basically these sort of wide-eyed lottery winners have essentially just decided that they are the gods. And that's what socially conscious and exclusive means. It's they're now going to tinker with society and make it better for all of us

from their literal mountain stronghold. And you're right, there is a real kind of element like mythology there in that, you know, every single thing that went down on Mount Olympus and the impact that it had in like actual people's lives was always at some whim based on pettiness or jealousy or getting one up on somebody. So it's, it's. I want Peter Teal to dress up as a swan and impregnate women in the lowlands of Utah and then disappear into the like, I can't wait for one of these guys to decide that to like fix discourse on Twitter. They're going to give everyone an electric shock collar that, you know, if you swear at a blue tick person gives you a little, you know, because that's exactly that's what charity

swearbox is. It's like you dirty people all need to get better. I'm going to make a little thing that kind of just puts you in a little bit more of a box. And then you're going to basically, I'm going to make a little cop or if that's going to make a tiny cop that can't actually hurt you because he's really small, but he's going to basically annoy the shit out of you. I'm going to build an annoying cop. And that's my contribution to the world that feed the cop inside your phone. Exactly. I mean, the thing that gets me about it is the is the progressive food. Yeah, that's really wild. Isn't it like food was not that progress? I mean, like there's there's two things, right? Like what's progressive food? The one thing like does he mean sourcing or I don't I don't

understand, you know, it's not like the second thing that makes me understand less is that he needs coconut water in Switzerland. And it's like there's nothing environmentally progressive about you know, importing bottles of coconut water to Switzerland, because the coconut as far as I know is not native to Switzerland. I've never been so I don't necessarily know. There's a lot of stuff in Switzerland that let's say wasn't in Switzerland originally, but is there now? What if someone made an app that made coconuts native to Switzerland? We could save the entire world. Put it on the blockchain, baby. But yes, words like progressive become really malleable in this context. It's just like, all right, is is something new? Okay, then it's better. We'll do it. This is progress

in terms of basically being a bourgeois taste. This is what progress is bourgeois taste looks like not the acceptance of trans people as Brendan O'Neill might suggest. Well, I think I think like the other thing is that like it's not it's not even like it's not even just bourgeois. It's also just like this tech bourgeoisie that, you know, to them, literally every single element of progress, including political progress is just the next step. Like this is the whole disrupting culture, right? Where like the the thing you do to make a better world or a more just world is just like do something different and disrupt what had happened before as opposed to just like actually considering the consequences. It's if you guys think that they might be elitist, don't worry,

they have a response to that. So this is the report of talking to another of the investors. He tells me he's open to the suggestion that his community is elitist. These criticisms, he says, there's a truth to them. But he insists that he strives to make authentic connections with people from all walks of life. For example, he says, earlier in the day, he met a worker at a ski resort who was taking guests on a tour. Quote, I literally could have said, all right, have an awesome tour. And instead, I was like, so you're here all year. And he goes, no, I'm actually from New Orleans. And I'm like, really? I like reading it like with the intonation of being like, really? Like he just like doubts that the guys from New Orleans, I just make it up.

Is that real? Did you just make this up to aggravate me? Or is this these words that you're reading from a screen? Like, mother of God, that's that's how we connect to people is one question. And then, huh, you don't say. Anyway, give me your blood. It should be said. And I don't want this to get lost because it's very good that Paul Lewis, the person who wrote this article, is very resistant to these people. Like this is not a nice piece about these. No, you know, you're right. It's not like some puff piece, which a lot of these things do, they get, you know, yeah, on on critical write ups. He's definitely taking it to him. Like he, you know, when he talks about like, is now talking about how he sits in the front seat of Uber taxis and

stuff. And he said, Paul Lewis asks him, which I just kind of applauded, how many Uber drivers he's invited to summit. And for his now doesn't say, I really like the I really like what he says there where he says, like, when you start to engage with these people, you realize the humanity in everyone and how unbelievable they are. And I think this is like, people critique ID politics. And I think like the the criticism of ID politics has become, you know, like I started I did my PhD in English at a school that has a lot of people who work in basically the critique of identity politics. So it was something that I was getting into in like 2010. And I believe that from 2010 to 2018, it's become like, much more of a blunt instrument as opposed to like a careful

critique. And so you get a lot of the very real complaints that, you know, centering class, decenters race and gender in a way that I don't think it was in 2010. However, I feel like if you want a good distillation of why ID politics can be a problem, or like how ID politics become a problem, it's not, you know, oh, you know, you're you're poor before you're black or some sort of thing like that, which people do argue and should be, you know, worked against. It's the thing where you say, Yeah, you know, the way to understand people is not it's to like, know that we're all different and respect that like, this guy here is so unique, he's from New Orleans. Well, I do that's not anything. I'm just sitting here thinking about how many armed guards they have.

That was just like when when Riley started reading that paragraph about how, you know, and you can, you know, you can see you can see that the arguments start to form in these these these these powder mountain dudes heads. It's just like, yeah, we're all about being very conscious about the people in society who I must remind to stay on the other side of the fence or they will be shot. It's like this is this and you know what it is it's the it's the the liberal form of identity politics. What I think it does is it always says, oh, it always basically says we're all in this together. And that basically, everyone has to play their part. And it's there they have their thing that they do, because all everything is kind of sacred and no one can transcend where

they are. It's like at some point, one of these people is going to what I swear to God, one of these people is going to say, actually, social mobility is bad, because it reduces working class culture. It's working class genocide, because we're making everybody wealthy. And that's going to destroy culture. That's what these people are going to fucking say next. I think this is kind of moving on to this topic. I think another thing that that are kind of a liberalized identity politics does is position identity, not as a site of experience and oppression, as much as a site of like thought and content. So rather than taking, you know, this systemic view that, you know, you can look at, I don't know, numbers of, I don't know, women in politics and say, you know, these

things must be redressed so that people, you know, have like real access and whatever they say, oh, well, you know, what we need is this one particular woman, regardless of what she thinks to come in here, because then we'll have thought in here that is like magically good, because they take these categories very, very bluntly. They collapse them across lines of class and race and make a homogeneous category woman and say, well, you know, if we just have a little bit of woman content in here, then like magically, this will be good. And then so much of the force is lost. And because those categories have been collapsed, you always end up with, you know, women being championed as though they are, you know, absolute underdogs who are often extremely privileged in every other

regard. And then everything kind of grinds to a halt a little bit, which I think is bad. I wasn't sure how to end that bit. I think it's bad, rightly. That's fine. They just, you know, that's what, this is what Powder Mountain is going to do. They're going to disrupt society. And there might be a woman around when they disrupt. Well, and Susan makes, Susan makes a good point about the, the way that, you know, the bad version of ID politics focuses away from systemic groups. And I think like, you could talk about, you can talk about like the condition of being a woman or the condition of being of color as a group that, like as a condition that has its own series of systemic and historically layered bits of,

of, you know, for lack of a more subtle word, oppression, you, you literally can't talk about the being like a being a person from New Orleans who works at a ski slope in the same way. And like, that's funny on one hand, but it's also really troubling on another where like, they are doing the syllogism where they're like, yeah, like people are so unique. Like over here, here's a woman who's had to work super hard to make it to the top in tech. And over here, here's a guy who like is a chef on his off time. And it's, it's like, it's taking out all these identity things and saying like, they're all the same. And since not all of them are systemic, none of them are systemic. Hey guys, we're all in this Uber together. It's just that some of us

are driving. You're taking, you're taking an approach to politics. It's basically trading cards, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're all the, we're just, we just have to collect all the identities and make a flush. And then maybe we can win enough money to finally buy a ticket out of the scorched lands. And then we too can get a cabin in Powder Mountain. If that is, of course, the wastelands mutants don't turn our bones into a necklace first. Although we call it identity politics. It was, you know, never very much about identity in the individualized sense in the first place. It was about, you know, categories of experience that, you know, become either, you know, enforced or, or claimed or reclaimed or a combination of both like identity categories.

But yeah, in it's like, you know, very, very powerful sense. And I do think it's been a very good thing. It was always about, like you say, like, you know, how are you related to other people and what like identifiers that you and they may hold will shape those interactions. And I think a lot of people have heard the word identity and come to the very kind of blunt conclusions that, you know, you guys have been talking about that really, you know, always come from established seats of power. They don't come from radical places, even though the thought has all been like poorly co-opted from, you know, radical thinkers who have really, really struggled to get it out there. Yeah, I think that's really, really well said. Well, you know what I what I'd like to

do actually is I'd like to begin talking about some people who are made frothingly furious by identity politics creeping into parts of the world they don't like. That's right, everybody. We're going back into video games and Trev is going to explain to me and us just what the fuck was Gamergate? Wasn't it when Richard Nixon stayed in the Gamergate Hotel and was surveilling people? So you know what I thought as well, you were online at the time, right? Yeah, I'm just surprised to learn that out of the four of us, I was a parent or maybe three of us other than Trev, I was the only one who was extremely online at the time. Yeah, it's weird, right? I had no idea what Gamergate, I know like a basic gate. Here's what I know about Gamergate. Here's kind of what

I know about Gamergate, which I know it produced Ian Miles Chong, and I know that it was like the online chat room that eventually produced the alt-right. I know it's why we have fascism and why we have that weird ant man now. It's in a way, yeah. But in some ways, no. Are you doing the Adam Curtis voice? So basically the reason that Gamergate started was I'm trying to think of a good way to say this, like since I don't know, since games have been reviewed effectively, like I don't know, since like Nintendo Power back in the day, or even before, the question of like fairness in gaming journalism or gaming reviews was question. So like this all came to a head, like the quickest and most useful way to say this is all came to a head with this

game called Kane and Lynch, which was this, I think it was an EA game. And yeah, basically it got really good reviews. And even before the game came out, people found out that it got super good reviews because EA just like paid the websites to say that. Like it just like it said, okay, here's a bunch of money, be sure to say that Kane and Lynch is like a 9.7 out of 10. And the game wasn't all that impressive and people just like lost their minds. And so after that, there was a lot of like real doubt over like, okay, why are people saying certain games are good and certain games are bad? What are their motives? Why are they, you know, who are they answering to? And as most of these things do, it's sort of,

it didn't take a turn against like, well, let's find more independent sources of reporting and like try and co-opt corporatism. It just like went into paranoia. And the paranoia is really what spawned Gamergate in that like this sort of objectivity in games journalism became focused on people like, particularly people like Zoe Quinn. And it was a misogynist paranoia, the feminist frequency woman Anita Sarkeesian, who pointed out like basically did like YouTube's of and writing and pieces on sexism in games like Hitman 2 and stuff like that and the way women are presented in it. And the idea there was like, they're doing the same thing that EA was doing in that they're just tanking video games, not on the basis of are they good video games,

but on the basis of external concerns, going back to this idea where external concerns, regardless of what they are, are leveled into a particular thing. And the assumption that whether a video game is sexist is an external concern, and not in fact part of the content of that game that should be subject to a review. Exactly. It seems to be like they're doing the thing then, which I sort of see happen, which is where they have this idea where there is the thing in itself, and then there are sort of external conditions. So you see this all the time when they sort of was all again, all of these people who are very much, you know, sort of have like hot glued

themselves to like a basement chair are sort of always getting angry about their stones here about how much we all go outside like I have been outside. All right, as recently as last month. But and I haven't hot glued myself. I just choose not to move. But the thing is, they so they've hot glued themselves to a basement chair. And then they get really, really mad about the idea of there being like quotas for women on boards. Now, of course, there shouldn't be boards, but let's not let's get past that, which is that they get really pissed about it because they're like, oh, and an equally qualified man wouldn't have gotten the position. It's like, no, that's the problem. A less qualified man would have gotten the position because these

things aren't externalities. You dip shit. Anyway, carry on. I mean, in Gamergate, the big concern was also like not just the concerns about quotas and stuff, but also that very cultural Marxist quote unquote cultural Marxism. But like the the cultural Marxist paranoia where it's like, oh, not only is is that happening, but it's all based on a series of lies that can be disproven via science or disproven via like our handpicked social social servants and stuff. And so this is how Gamergate kind of rolled into it. Like the main thing they ended up focusing on was this question of sexism because it was the one that got the most pushback because no one's no one in gaming is ever going to tell you like, hey, man, like Polygon only produces legit reviews

all the time, let alone GameSpot or something like that. Like I like people. I have friends at Polygon, I have friends at, you know, all the various places you could want. And one of the my first interviews was with was with the main guy at a giant bomb. Like I know these people and they're all very nice and I have nothing bad to say about them. But like you could have just stopped at I have friends and you would have impressed us. But like their their their work like, you know, it's not always even and no one would say it is. And especially at the bigger ones where they outsource it or are paid for it. It's kind of rough. And like, I think everyone would say like, yeah, okay, yeah, I got a point there. But the sexism stuff was so unhinged and

bizarre and hateful that that's what got the pushback. And so that's where people the the grifters of the world found purchase. Yeah, and I think we should really emphasize that like, it was death threats and threats of violence, you know, it was, yeah. There was a, you know, I think Gamer gets a really good example of one of the first big moments on the internet where we had to start thinking in a whole new kind of mode of communication about that real material ground between speech and action and the way that speech is an action at like some points when, you know, people were, you know, the people, the women mostly who were very, very much targeted by it were, you know, they were, they were not just like, you know, potentially in material

danger, but the sheer volume of just absolute vitriol. And I do think it makes a different that it's not like general vitriol, like, oh, you're a dickhead, and I hate you, but it's like a gendered vitriol. And I think some of the stuff that Sarkeesian got was, you know, quite violently anti-Semitic as well, which, you know, you definitely get when people become obsessed with things like cultural Marxism and a lot of like racist theories that they have about that, that, you know, it was, and it was like, it was like a years long, incredibly violent speech act that was, you know, directed at certain individuals, but then, you know, whole communities of people online who enjoyed this and that that means something. Yeah, definitely. And I mean,

like this is, you start to see that focus come into clearer form with two things, one being that a lot of the Gamergate, a lot of like the, the, the nexus of Gamergate happened on 4chan in, in the V, backslash V section, which is their video game section, and then also in, in Paul, which is the, the super like, people know Paul now because it's like the ultra unhinged, like Trump, openly Nazi fascist bullets in board of our time. But I mean, 4chan was really the place where a lot of the Gamergate stuff happened, where a lot of like the Gamergate ops happened, where they tried to make, you know, fake hashtags and stuff. And Twitter, but mostly 4chan was where like the main planning happened. And then also, the other thing is like the people who joined on,

are people that are like, they basically, it's a shotgun effect and it leads to your Alex Joneses. So like, who have an even bigger shotgun effect? Like, Cernovich became popular at a higher level because of Gamergate, right? Like he basically locked on to Gamergate as like the, the quote, unquote, lawyer of Gamergate. Cernovich was a, was a pickup artist guy first. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, that's the gorilla mindset stuff. Yeah, like it's, it's unsurprising that this stuff got so sort of that sort of that, that the reaction and the misogyny were so conflated because like it was, Cernovich was hit very hard by the death of Harambe and he went a bit off the rails after that. So one of the

third things that I could, because I've been, I've been putting piecing this together, like a sort of internet detective, trying to figure out what the fuck this was, because a gate usually refers to a single event or a controversy rather than like, even an imagined one, or sort of outdoors sort of metal hinged thing. No, it's never that anymore. We don't have gates like that anymore. That's a thing of the past. The future is now old man. Well, it's that, one of the things that you see is that they say, ah, video games are a safe space for men, as though there isn't, and so like, I think that, and it's, it's this thing where I think you see where you, it's like this, this, this happens over and over again, sort of when,

as fascist movements or proto-fascist movements are born, which is a one, a group that is experiencing sort of economic insecurity, but is still kind of dominant in lots of other different ways, you know, is seeing itself kind of push down certain hierarchies. And one of the things I always liked, as a sort of description of fascism, is that fascism is a reaction to capitalism when capitalism damages the hierarchies that they like. And so it's like, so they need to think like, we're, it's like, we, like, we are taking, we take all of our culture from these big game companies and these reviewers. We are basically economically dislocated, we're very pissed, and we don't have a class analysis. And so instead we're, but we're, and so, because we see, and we're pissed, and we're

going to direct our anger sort of to the side and down. I get you. Yeah. And you just want to know why they made Lara Crofts boobs smaller. Is that so much to ask? I don't think that that's invalid when we're talking, you know, as one strand of explanation in like the general fascist moment that we're having, but you know, a lot of people use it as the, as the only one. And I don't think that's useful. But, but with Gamergate, I don't know, like, there's a part of me that thinks that one of the scariest things about Gamergate is that it wasn't that complicated. In my mind, it literally was, you know, lots and lots and lots of men, mostly white men who realized that something that they thought was a space that they dominated was actually already populated by people

not like them belonging to groups that they derided. And I think one of the reasons that Gamergate was so shocking to people is that, you know, in like the 80s and 90s and the early 2000s, as a culture, you know, in terms of kind of kind of, you know, mainstream media culture really dropped the ball on how endemic, systemic and violent a lot of these prejudices are. So like, yeah, I'm sure that, you know, there's like other factors there. But I think that the standout lesson from it is always like the unbelievable violence rhetorical and otherwise of men when they assume that they are entitled to a space and then realize that they are not alone there. And I think that that is not too simplistic a central lesson to take. I think it's a really important

one, especially when we look at the kind of other movements that, you know, came out of this as a fertile ground. Yeah, I want to think about some of the other movements like we talked about this is kind of was the almost like the egg of the alt right, right? Where like this was it was so you would you would you guys say like this is kind of the moment where a lot of these guys went from basically being nihilists who wanted to shock people when they all kind of became political. Because yeah, I mean, think about it think about it this way like you have so many people who like Gamergate. I mean, even in Miles Chung, like this is someone who just wants to be popular online, like clearly he was like he was what he would in his own terms he would he is what

he would call himself an SJW like two and a half years ago, and then just like shifted gears. I mean, this is like Gamergate is one of those things that attracts a lot of people because it's about games. And what I found by like covering games as I have it for the past I don't know like you're in a half. Is it like it really is an empty signifier in a lot of ways like you can get people who think who kind of like take games and like think about them in a hundred different ways a thousand different ways. And so like if you tell a group of people like on 4chan or you know goons or any like you know the weirdos who used to go to like rotten.com or something like that right like all those sort of disaffected kids mostly again men mostly white men. If you tell them

like hey they're attacking games then you get them all in the same space and you're not going to get them in the same space if you say like hey we need to protect the white race or hey like you know the liberals and the Jews are at it again. But it's not so hard to get them to those places after you get them all in the same place. The most ambitious crossover of all time. And I think maybe like you'll disagree with me here and that's fine it's all part of the conversation but I do think I don't know I do think there's a reason that it's not that difficult to get people to those places. I don't know I try and like generally think about politics in terms of you know people make their choices and they're not that easily led and I often think one of the

big differences between the left and the right is that the right assumes that the left doesn't really believe what it says it believes but I always assume that the right believes what it says it believes and I think that's important to remember in these cases. To be fair I don't believe anything that I say. I'm mainly in it for the followers in the you know the ladies. Well Riley I mean you're not we've kind of kicked you out of the left at this point. Whatever I'm just on my own left. This is a this podcast is like heavily market research just based on like what we think the people listen to it think. We will say anything. Anything that you want us to say we will say it bitches. Oh no. Sorry. I'm so sorry. But no I agree. I agree with you. You want us to

say that sea lions are communist. Fine. I don't care. I mean I agree with Susan because like communist lines as you. There's like a I mean there's a quality of there's a barrier right like white nationalism and neo nazis have always had the barrier of they aren't heaven help me for saying this. They aren't good at branding like even like even like Heimbach Matthew Heimbach who's a very popular he's been arrested thank god but like very popular like you know fascist Nazi figure in this in America like Heimbach's party is not technically Nazi but they're they're like the the workers party of traditionalist party like OK I get it right like you're not actually a workers party like I know what you are like they're not

Nazis are not good at branding themselves as not Nazis and I think there is like despite a total willingness to be horrible and cruel and about his reactionaries you could want them to be particularly Americans are nervous about affiliating themselves with things that are openly Nazi or white supremacist like they're willing to do white supremacist and Nazi and fascist things but not under that a guess that's a wild coincidence therefore that you know so many of those logics exist expressed in you know easier to digest mainstream ways just you know in the core of of not just American politics and history but you know British European politics and history as well you know it is maybe not like a hundred percent but you know

that the division between the two is aesthetic often more than anything else and yeah it's like those people who eat off the light choices menu at McDonald's it's like you know what it is it's the um if you if you spoke right yeah well and it's it's like it's like this is the this is what people say about Trump in like saying like yeah you know the only thing that people don't like about Trump the reason people don't like Trump the only Trump is because not because he's so much different than previous presidents but because he doesn't have the same veneer of respectability as previous presidents and if you want to think about Gamergate is to Trump as uh or Gamergate is to classical conservatism as Trump is to previous presidents like there's a there's a way in which

Gamergate is disliked by people who don't like really study it and I don't like Gamergate but my reasons are sort of more so aligned with Seuss's which is that it's not that it's uniquely fascist it's that it gave a lot of people a good excuse to organize fascistly. I think like there is there's a concern about it because it's openly supremacist as opposed to something like you know your typical 50 year old republican who would you know very much like to jail every black person he sees but would not would express it in a way that say like I don't know Gerald Ford would find uh palatable. Yeah white supremacy but now with lower cholesterol. You've been doing white supremacy for years but it's taking its toll on your heart.

Well we have a solution for you. I'd like to uh I'd like to sort of almost relate that back it's that the if you asked a Nazi in 1930s Germany if they were a racist they'd say yes of course I'm a racist why would you ask me that that's a stupid question I'll kill you just to be safe um but if you ask any of these guys are you quoting like a primary source? Yeah exactly my my great uncle from Argentina um no my um but if you ask one of these guys are you a sexist they're like what no Zoe Quinn is the sexist I'm a classical liberal because it seems like they're saying no by and so for to them because to them systemic bias doesn't exist anyone who is trying to like trying to like offer a female point of view is offering a point of view that's anti-man is therefore

sexist yeah and it's this it so that's why and that's why it's given me the realization anyone who says they're a classical liberal they probably don't care about corn law liberalization they probably actually just hate women and like non-white people yeah systemic bias only exists to the extent to which like girls won't respect the blade and fuck them I wonder if something that we don't talk about so much and that is not a central point but but is is potentially an interesting aspect you know a lot of uh different things come together to to make something as explosive as Gamergate and I wonder to what extent it was um obviously you know to games and and leisure and how people spend their free time is something you know that they're very very strongly identified

with how very emotional reactions to but I also wonder whether there was a sense of uh women's proximity to technology that was policed there as well that you know it wasn't you know just about you know who plays games it was about you know the games industry and that um you know there's uh maybe if it was not always kind of explicitly expressed or consciously part of it that one of the reasons that the the kind of reactionary anger to that was so explosive was that you know technology and and and and engineering in those fields we have we conceive of them in such ingrained ways like all of us um as as a as a masculine and a masculinized ground that the it's never so much the the uh entrance of women into these fields because they're always already there it's it's

an imagined incursion when people realize that you know these spaces are already populated by groups that that you know uh this sort of huge huge huge reaction comes forth to to guard those spaces as being gendered in a particular way what do you think Riley I mean what I think is are you Paul Blart Mall Cop because that was a fantastic segue into our final segment about the games industry and the way that the market is fucking it up yeah this was something that we were going to sort of sort of get into uh which is the way in which you know like 10 years ago um back back when the air smelled better and grass was brighter or whatever or maybe we were just you know younger and less hungover maybe yeah we were younger and my brain still was good um we well no it's it's fine

now just it's good in a different way identity politics are sorry about your brain my friend so but it's i remember i would to get a game i would go and i would buy one and then you'd own the game and then you play it and then you know you'd sell it back to eb and then they give you like 10 bucks but you know you could just go buy it be like a canadian thing yes beating the system it seems as though the the the dynamics of how it's going have changed and you were talking to me about like the way that dev cycles have changed the way that the way things are marketed have changed the way things are monetized have changed you tell me a little bit about that yeah dev cycles and and and and the market i mean blame blame i think centrally the uh the advent of digital download uh

which is both like the best and worst thing to happen to gaming uh ever which is like you know as you say Riley you used to go and you used to go to the store and buy a game or you know order online or whatever right like i can still remember and this probably dates me a you're an onion on your belt which was the start at the time that's right yeah it's i i trade two bees for a nickel and use those bees to get to get a fairy to Shelbyville or as we called it Morganville now it's only these blockchain b coins you can use oh man someone should make a uh someone should make a b coin and uh and make a ton of money uh off of people who like the simpsons i remember my mom having to call like you know before i was

old enough to call stores i guess uh helping me call various like electronics boutiques and game stops to hear to find out if they had like a physical copy of secretive mana in so we could drive 25 minutes and buy it like this is like that was the past and like this is the same way for a lot of commodities but gaming particularly much like film and television you can now like circumvent that entire process like i can go on steam and buy almost any game i want and if i can't find it on steam i can boot up my ps4 and buy it on there and download it and i can play the game if i have the money to do it i can play the game in the hour or less it takes to download um and then i'm there right and so what this does is it basically super charges the process of purchase

where and consumption we're like all of a sudden it's not enough to get a new game every so often or like you know i have to play these two games because that's all the producers can make and it's all my stores haven't in stock i'll just wait wait it out i guess it's like you beat a game and all of a sudden you have 30 other games you can play and uh there are 20 other games coming out and if you don't keep up with the cycle as a developer um your game gets buried almost instantly um and so it's this it's this pressure of you have to both be developing something that people are going to get excited about and then you got to get it out fast and if it's not out fast and exactly in the way that people want it um you're going to get buried in negative reviews on steam

and there's really no coming back from that um there are loads of games on steam that i will never know if they're good or not because i have 100 games to play and i'm not probably going to play something that is mostly negative reviews um and so basically it's taken this hobby that had opacity of options right you can only play so many games because you can only afford and go get so many games and have physical space for so many games to a hobby where everything's always on sale it's delivered instantly um there's a 24 hour news cycle for it and you can just drop a game uh within five hours or uh and get a refund like it it truly is just super charged so what's that done i think that because the interesting question here i think is like in the relationship between

the like the consumer of the of the games the developer of the games then the owners of the platform what's that relationship like well i mean the question of like owners of the platform is a really interesting question because like you have people like sony and microsoft and nintendo who have like a clear stake nintendo being the one that sort of maintained a very traditional marketplace in its own way um in that they are very console specific you're never going to see uh the switch zelda on the pc for instance um it will never happen i i can't even imagine a world in which they would put that on steam um you have to buy a switch and you have to play it from there but i mean in a lot of ways take so uh my friend and and recently a award winner

along with uh his partner and their their um uh business partner uh scott benson uh who wrote the incredible game which everyone should just go play uh night in the woods um he you know they his studio produced that game and they put it out right and you can buy it in any number of places you can buy it on uh their website you can buy it at humble bundle i think and you can buy it on steam you can buy it on itch.io as well each of those places take a certain cut and each of those places effectively is the platform right so if i buy a game on steam it's tough to tell whether my pc is the platform or their steam is the platform in some ways both are true um and as both are true all of a sudden steam takes because they're both the marketplace and the distribution point and the

way i can play the games they become way more powerful than any video game seller has ever been to the point that they can kind of like they have a horizontal monopoly on on gaming in many ways particularly indie gaming um and in terms of like producer to consumer it just it it it um it makes it it mystifies it more it mystifies the relation more it's easier to understand it's easier to think that gaming isn't produced by labor that there aren't people like coding all night to do it um that they just kind of appear on your computer because if you i you know for anyone even if you don't game i would make a steam account and just look at the amount of products that come across your desk every day um it is it is um enlightening in terms of how capitalism works

i have two questions the first one is um the the first one is um i don't even know if this is interesting to people listening but it's interesting to me um so much development in the last i don't know five years maybe a bit more is moving to you know continuous deployment and continuous integration and that has you know had some you know actually quite positive impacts in terms of oh sorry um yeah so um uh i did 10 15 years ago maybe i don't know don't like google the dates but um we all build a a program together right and um we uh we can't all build it together at once right we have a division of labor in our team so we all like build uh different parts and um then when we're um i'm simplifying this a lot but you get it um

and then when we put all the pieces together at the end um there might be all sorts of parts of the code that riley's written that conflict with parts of code that i've written they um they need to be joined up in a way that makes sense now let's say that we've spent like a couple of months working on this that's going to take a long time to put that all together in a way that works um what um people have been able to do in the last few years is move to um models of development where um you can set it up so that every time i make a small change to something that uh can be very quickly absorbed into the main base of the code and then we don't end up with this nightmare situation where it all has to be stitched up what that in short allows you to do is

that if you have anything that is you know like hosted online for example you can be incorporating those changes pretty much in real time as they're finished um so instead of having like you know kind of one finished program and if you ever want to make a change then you know it's going to take a long time um you can have a lot more like fluidity and flexibility and one of my questions to trev was going to be like especially when you have um something like um steam where um it kind of seems to me as very much a non-expert that it's kind of the console and kind of the marketplace has gaming moved to a similar kind of model and what effect do you think that has had we can cut this if this is a bad question wait hang on to just clarify this if you buy a game on steam

do you like play it online through steam you don't like it doesn't actually physically result how does that work yeah this was my second so it's on your computer you download you download the game from steam it lives on your computer but you can only play it if you're logged into steam okay so like it's effectively i don't know it's like ddrm or yeah ddrm if you if you know what that is like it's basically not ddrm drm ddrm something dance revolution management cut that keep that in that's a good joke um but yeah uh uh suz if i could if i couldn't rephrase i just want to make sure i'm getting your question right so you're you're basically asking like the integrated model would be something like where um it's not an end basically you're talking about a process where

where there's not like a specific like producer and end user but a much more sort of fluid process is that is that kind of what you're asking yeah like if i if i so if i buy a nintendo and i buy a game for it right on a disc and i play it then um no one is going to make uh changes while i own the nintendo to that nintendo which means that you know there's going to be a difference between how uh the game is played versus not and equally no one is going to come and change the game but when you have platforms hosted online if i am playing a game does it have to be is there an element of maintenance there or are there elements of the mechanics of the storytelling yeah that's a really good question yeah um there's a big element of maintenance uh in fact like some games

will come out and people will so uh i'm trying to think of the the most recent one to do this mafia three was a game that people were really excited about it was a game called mafia three yeah police two it goes it goes it goes back to gamergate mafia two was made by a gamergate guy like a guy who was openly gamergate and uh and mafia three was not made by coming out of the gamergate closet but mafia three was was made by someone who was like very much not right and like he uh i believe was he uh wrote a game about like a black man in uh new orleans amazingly enough ties back in again um uh we're all connected baby world is energy i know really killing killing clansmen so people were really excited about it because it was it sounded like a very

woke and fun video game where you got to kill a bunch of racists um and it didn't pan out very well and one of the complaints was it's really buggy it doesn't seem complete and people said wait for the dlc to buy this game right which is to say wait for wait for when everyone wait for when everything is produced and already done and then put your money down because it'll be a complete game then um the most sort of radical version of this was uh final fantasy 14 which is an online game like fully online so it's like an mmo rpg sort of like a world of warcraft massive multiplayer online rpg um and the first version of it was just broken basically not broken but like people didn't like it i'm gonna get i'm gonna get this wrong people are gonna give you email so i'm sorry

but this is the basic story everybody close your dms up to this episode uh so like they they put out this game right and uh and people didn't like it the user base kind of died out um and then they re-released it effectively and now the current final fantasy 14 is much more enjoyed it's it's sort of like optimized and different um but it's still final fantasy 14 and in fact that first final fantasy 14 can't be played anywhere you can't like if you wanted to go play it you you cannot do it there are youtube's of it and stuff there are let's plays but you can't physically go back and play that game it's gone forever right um which is the most extreme version but it goes back to your point which is like you can be playing a game and it'll download patches over time and then

when you pick it up again it'll have balance patches and um multiplayer games it'll have little bug fixes i mean that kind of stuff happens as it goes along so it comes into the marketplace at a much less finished um capacity and and and that's because and so so what that's basically because if you you need to get a game out so fast you need to keep turning them out super fast and if you don't then you just fall into obscurity yeah and i mean honestly like you know not to not to let the the devs off the dev companies off the hook they're using and you brought this up in in in the in dm and i thought this was a smart idea where like they're actually using people as free labor i mean all this stuff gets marked as complaints and people will email and say you know you have

to the terms are if you say say you're playing overwatch or some sort of multiplayer um shooter right um people will say you have to make certain characters stronger or weaker and that relatively uh i'm sorry uh well making someone stronger would be buffing them and making someone weaker is nerfing them um thank you for explaining these terms to people who fuck sounds like something i do in my sex life are you a buffer a nerf my love i always i like to employ a nerf gun in the bedroom to trev if you were going to give us like a few kind of standout takeaways about these changes that have happened and the impact that they have on both like people who game and their experience and as you say like not to be like forgotten you know the people who work and the

labor that goes into games in terms of where we are now and where that might go in the future what would your headlines be i mean so the one is the one is the riley's point about about using your fan base as labor which is i mean it's absolutely true like the the the groups that i mean they they aren't quiet they'll tell the devs what they don't like about the game and then the devs will go back and say like okay fix this and they'll make changes and then people will complain about the changes and it's a cycle now right it's not just it's not just a finished product it's like a game may not be c of thieves just came out which is this pirate game um and people are saying like well give the game time it might not be a complete game for a year which is a

a totally foreign thing to for a person like watching the first season of a show and knowing that so many shows get good in season two that's exactly you have to write it yeah yeah don't don't have to write season two yes that's actually something i talked about uh on my sort of riley's kami book club episode last time which was how dare you how dare you steal my thunder well it was the um it was the the idea where it's like what's happened in sort of neoliberal capitalism is that sort of we have this thing where emotions are now the main sort of main sort of thing being produced and people sort of and in work kind of play kind of have just sort of collapsed into one another as everything we think is fun is actually stuff that's producing

value for someone else yeah and so when that's right when we're when we're playing these games and obsessingly the fan fan personing over them gonna Justin Trudeau it um Justin Trudeau what we end up doing is you shut up uh i'm i'm gonna silence a woman now is what you do is you end up um you end up in this situation where because you where you sort of feel a sense of sort of affinity for this company and you start loving this profit making enterprise because it gives you your canon and it gives you your form source of identity and so all of a sudden you're willing to perform as free labor yes you're you're performing free labor for them because out of a sense of sort of out of a sense

of emotional connection and they're all too happy to pocket the surplus no you're totally right and like this is so this is the other the other takeaway that i have is that there's a there's a level of um there's a level of commitment that to to the various companies and the various uh almost always men although women too more and more but but still it's mostly a great men theory kind of of game development where you get your Hideo Kojima's etc so you get people like like figureheads like Miyazaki for the Dark Souls games or Hideo Kojima for the Metal Gear games and they're held up as these these brilliant auteurs but you still hear stories about them like Kojima apparently at one point just like burst into the room uh when they were making Metal Gear

Solid 5 and said to his devs we need multiplayer and they'd never worked on it ever in the game it he's like we need an online multiplayer and he left and he said make it happen and so people like and that's that's the other thing like the flip side of it is that's why people are talking about unionization at GDC which is a big games conference right now devs and coders and people are talking about unionization because they're being forced to work like 80 hour weeks for no pay and no security meanwhile everyone is still sort of stuck in the cult of the auteur it's a contradiction that's really not to sound like too much of a marxist but you know the shoe fits no please do the contradiction it's a contradiction that's coming dangerously close to resolution

let me say that and i think uh in games you have a very potent confluence of a kind of a great man theory of art and creativity and the the lone genius in the artistic sense and of the great man of technology and you know the the the computing genius who builds a billion dollar empire in his bedroom you know both of which are fictions that obscure labor and you know in terms of you know hundreds and hundreds of developers you know writing code doing like the both the intellectual and the physical labor of making these programs that's a very real thing and the great thing is i'm going to bring it all back round is the is while they're doing all the real work uh they're these people are going to be in powder mountain baby fucking fucking blasting rails in a hot tub

and just like massaging one another's shoulders about how like genius and wonderful they all are and how socially conscious they are and they're gonna do they're gonna make a game for the boys again all right um i think that's a really strong note to leave it on thank you so much to trev for beaming into my living room on the hyperspace by farce of online i think sus i think sus is kicking me in my mixing equipment out of her house what oh no so i'm back living on the street coming um looks like you'll have to stop at the chip shop hey look at you using english slang top of the fucking shit i'm so bad at this country famously english expression that yeah yo well thanks for having me this was a blast yo trev you are always welcome here on tf the p about

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