The Last Night

Quote from [HP]

12 hours ago, [HP] said: I was like, who the fuck is mundanematt, I completely forgot about that guy, but if he triggers people I like him already.

Look at his channel, his videos are about video games, right wing politics, and enforcing stereotypes of feminists, black people, muslims, and so on. Maybe don't say literal racism is good??

Quote from blackdog

5 hours ago, blackdog said: So from what I understand, and until it's more clear what the game is about, I stand by my belief that was a smart PR stunt to get noticed.

So we can't trust what a game developer actually, literally, says their game is about? It's a smart marketing move to associate yourself with a harassment campaign literally started by someone's abusive ex-boyfriend??

Quote from DrywallDreams

6 hours ago, DrywallDreams said: So we can't trust what a game developer actually, literally, says their game is about? It's a smart marketing move to associate yourself with a harassment campaign literally started by someone's abusive ex-boyfriend??

Well this is… awkward. What you say is 180° degrees different from my understanding of what happened.

It is my understanding that most people think that the woman is the one that has been unethical, so I would have thought that yes, associating with the other side would benefit the marketing.

Look I don't really have the elements to comment, when this whole thing blew up seemed a giant waste of time to follow, so I only read a couple blurbs when the thing was winding down… and this video now so maybe my perception is biased.

Regarding the devs, I dunno what they wrote or written in the (recent) past but like I reported, the director publicly apologised for past tweets and the explanation of the background of the world has nothing to do with feminism, talks about machines (AI) being superior to humans:

I honestly don't want to waste my time digging up whatever, seems like this guy tweeted waaay back aligning himself against this woman at the centre of the gamer gate, and now -in unsuspected times- because the game is gathering a lot of attention she popped back up to deviate the attention to hurt what seems a damn good creative team.

Gamergate was and still is about pushing back against identity politics in video games. Back in the day of Quinn it was specifically about feminism with all the ridiculous claims about sexism and misogyny by people like Anita Sarkeesian through misrepresentation of facts and outright lies, we covered all that extensively here. Of course the media mainly focused on a minority of trolls making abusive comments and threats (which were and always will be condemned) and deliberately ignored the actual point of the movement in order to facilitate the agenda of the ever virtuous regressive left.

Tim hasn't said anything that isn't true, feminism has become a parody of it's former self bleating on about non-existent things like the wage gap, the ever present yet totally invisible "patriarchy" and blaming everything on "straight white men". It's no longer about equality.. Hell I don't even know what it's about anymore... Anyway none of the issues that women face in real life has anything to do with video games.. 50% of gamers are female.. Achievement unlocked: EQUALITY!

Quote from DrywallDreams

8 hours ago, DrywallDreams said: Look at his channel, his videos are about video games, right wing politics, and enforcing stereotypes of feminists, black people, muslims, and so on. Maybe don't say literal racism is good??

I subscribe to mundanematt, he talks about the issues with feminism I mentioned, Black Lives Matter (a racist bullshit movement) and Islamism/Islamist terrorism which to those paying attention to the world is something to be concerned with. It's the reason why kids in my country were blown to pieces at a pop concert but people are more concerned with "Islamaphobia".. Just listen to anything that Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have to say on the subject...

Anyway... the game is looking very impressive with a very unique art style and I look forward to seeing more of it.

Quote from blackdog

5 hours ago, blackdog said: Well this is… awkward. What you say is 180° degrees different from my understanding of what happened.

Maybe it just wasn't as huge over there as it was in the US then? Sorry if that's the case! It was so massive here that I am surprised to see confusion about it, lol.

Quote from D3ads

3 hours ago, D3ads said: Gamergate was and still is about pushing back against identity politics in video games. Back in the day of Quinn it was specifically about feminism with all the ridiculous claims about sexism and misogyny by people like Anita Sarkeesian through misrepresentation of facts and outright lies, we covered all that extensively here. Of course the media mainly focused on a minority of trolls making abusive comments and threats (which were and always will be condemned) and deliberately ignored the actual point of the movement in order to facilitate the agenda of the ever virtuous regressive left.

Tim hasn't said anything that isn't true, feminism has become a parody of it's former self bleating on about non-existent things like the wage gap, the ever present yet totally invisible "patriarchy" and blaming everything on "straight white men". It's no longer about equality.. Hell I don't even know what it's about anymore... Anyway none of the issues that women face in real life has anything to do with video games.. 50% of gamers are female.. Achievement unlocked: EQUALITY!

I subscribe to mundanematt, he talks about the issues with feminism I mentioned, Black Lives Matter (a racist bullshit movement) and Islamism/Islamist terrorism which to those paying attention to the world is something to be concerned with. It's the reason why kids in my country were blown to pieces at a pop concert but people are more concerned with "Islamaphobia".. Just listen to anything that Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have to say on the subject...

Not to get too far completely unrelated politics here...

What did Anita Sarkeesian lie about? She simply said there's a tendency to portray women in video games as negative stereotypes, and showed examples of such stereotypes. The wage gap exists, here's some statistics http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Gender_pay_gap_statistics. Feminists portraying straight white men as the enemy is a stereotype that you've been sold. Women (and LGBTQ+ people, people of color, etc) just want more positive portrayals of themselves in games, that's all.

Of course Gamergate was portrayed as negative, it was started over a non-existent review of a video game. The big buzzword was "Objective reviews," a concept that does not, and is impossible to exist.

Okay, if you're going to use the "in my country" card to be against a whole religion, let me tell you about what's going on here: A year ago, a black man was shot and killed after being pulled over by police. There's a trial about it going on right now. That was one of many police shootings that happened that summer. But yeah BLM blocked a freeway so they're the REAL racists. (Really you don't want to say this shit to me, please learn the historical context behind this stuff)

Yes, terrorism is a problem, but not one that is solved by returning hatred with hatred (we've been trying to do that for decades now!). Why do you think this is happening? Anyone can be radicalized. That's enough on that because I'm really not interested in talking about this shit here.

Point is, cyberpunk has always been on the left, that's what punk has always been, it doesn't work if it isn't about progressive politics. It's no coincidence that one of the most notable examples of cyberpunk is The Matrix, directed by two trans women, and often used as an allegory for being transgender. I'm worried that this game (as well as practically every big cyberpunk game as of late) doesn't understand that.

So this went from "game looks pretty" to "transgender black lives matter" rather quickly. #MapCore

Quote from dux

23 minutes ago, dux said: So this went from "game looks pretty" to "transgender black lives matter" rather quickly. #MapCore

Politics is a hell of a drug

This is why I disasociate myself from identity politics, and why I refuse to label my political beliefs as left or right. Life has a more colorful spectrum than that, we're a complex species, I try my best to stay unbias, unpartial and analyse cases individually. Both sides seem incredibly nasty, it's tribalism at it's core, so I just sit back and enjoy the circus.

Look, here's what I see here. I see a indie dev who's making a game, made a trailer for it, trailer blew up and someone with a lot of free time went through every single one of the devs tweets, eventually that person found statements that doesn't align with his/her political agenda and decided to start a character assassination campaign. Am i really the only one who thinks that's insane? Does this mean if I release my own game, someone's gonna go through all my EOT posts? Cos if that's so, I might as well stop creating any kind of artistic media, lmao. xD

Ehrm @DrywallDreams since when the matrix has been seen as an allegory for transgenderism now?? I actually didn't know they changed sex until I read your post. Honestly and with all due respect, such a statement sounds like bs to me... unless they said something about it. Now I understand, though, why (the terrible) Sense8 was so sex-thematics-loaded: it felt like a gay politics advert.

I think you are stretching the cyberpunk definition a bit, but I guess I understand what you mean as in most cases cyberpunk stories are about rebelling to a totalitarian environment.

Regarding the gamergate issue, it might be that in UK didn't blow up as much, i dont know, keep in mind I'm not a game developer and I don't watch the news. My understanding was "lady Dev gives sex for favourable review" and all that followed just massive attempt to distract from that issue. I just quickly read the wikis and see it wasn't the case.

I always defined myself as feminist and pro-gender equality, but I can't really align myself with the extremes things have been taken in the recent years. Staying on game topics: you want better portrayal of women? Get the fuck off your ass and twitter, and make the games yourself and write the stories that deserve to be written. You can't force input equality in the creative process as a company policy. We outta strive creating fiction that appeals to other sex and race, but you can't stigmatise someone who wants to create a character with big bobs or whatever.

I'm very much in line with what @[HP] wrote and I think the possibilities of what can happen are scary. I would say beware! Beware supporting the kinds of the Quinns, because yes the harassment she suffered was terrible, but it seems it turned her into an harasser. Digging up in everybody's past or keeping a blacklist of people to smear as soon as they get some deserved attention is harassment. Behaviour like this, which really seems like what's going on with The Last Night, suggest that the moment you say something they don't like --even unrelated to the cause-- you'll be marked for life, no matter if you have been supporting them throughout.

Hope it makes sense.

@blackdog here's just a like from googling "The Matrix Transgender", but it sums up the analysis well: http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2017/04/10/the…dysphoria-blues

I would go further to say cyberpunk isn't about a totalitarianism, it's more about capitalism and the ideas of oppression under it. And that is the issue behind right-wing cyberpunk: only the idea of being oppressed exists, but is limited due to the right's belief in economic freedom. Oppression makes less sense if you can simply work harder and escape it, so right-wing cyberpunk (and often centrist, though centrist cyberpunk often hinges on the debate of violence in protest) doesn't focus on the reasons for oppression, but the oppression itself.

All the more reasons why I'm curious about how the story might develop drywall, right?

I mean, Cyberpunk has been stationary for a while, and its formula kept unchanged, so much so that you're being conservative about the fact of playing around with its blueprint, and give it a diferent spin.

The need to come up with a new name for a sub-genre might come up, if it really prooves to be a problem, who knows, but my point being that just because a game, movie or book deviates from the foundation of its very genre, it doesn't mean it shouldn't exist based solo on that critic, imho. We don't even know what the story will be like, so we have no grounds to be dismissive of it so rapidly.

I never really gave it a deep thought about what Cyberpunk is or isn't before this, but in my head it's a dystopiaan future where the common person is opressed by some form of power. Add rain, neon and make it night time = $money$

To wrap it up on my side, I'm giving the man a chance, if he fucks up then I'll be the first in line to critique it, until then I'll wait.

I lold at the right wing cyberpunk bit.

Quote from [HP]

2 hours ago, [HP] said: All the more reasons why I'm curious about how the story might develop drywall, right?

I mean, Cyberpunk has been stationary for a while, and its formula kept unchanged, so much so that you're being conservative about the fact of playing around with its blueprint, and give it a diferent spin.

The need to come up with a new name for a sub-genre might come up, if it really prooves to be a problem, who knows, but my point being that just because a game, movie or book deviates from the foundation of its very genre, it doesn't mean it shouldn't exist based solo on that critic, imho. We don't even know what the story will be like, so we have no grounds to be dismissive of it so rapidly.

Don't get me wrong, I'm talking about this because it is interesting to me. I'm just pedantic about the whole -punk part of cyberpunk since I'm a fan of the genre. I just see too much cyberpunk that misses the attitude of punk (and my god, we need more punk in games in this post-THPS world ).

imo there should be a different genre for not-quite-cyberpunk. Lots of stuff is falling into it recently.

I don't mean to say the game shouldn't exist, I'm worried about it not being good! Again, I've seen way too much weak cyberpunk recently.

If the dev has really changed, that's cool (being a jerk isn't cool), but as it stands I'm wary of what it's going to be.

Quote from Sprony

3 hours ago, Sprony said: Please define what cyberpunk is supposed to be because now I'm confused. Serious question btw, I'm not trolling you.

It's an image of the future portrayed through a punk ethos, meaning it focuses on the issues of systemic oppression, late capitalism, and class, as well as race, gender, sexuality, and so on. It's much more than the "neon slums" aesthetic (and isn't necessarily that aesthetic),

"punk" in the "cyberpunk" sense is a reclaimed slur. It originally meant "prostitute", and became a term for any untouchable poor person. This is why Capitalism is the villain in nearly all cyberpunk stories, it's the system of oppression that creates and then demonizes prostitutes and other impoverished people. Class struggle and the essentially physical consumption of the bodies of the underclasses at the core of the genre. If a setting is about "feminism took over the world and now you can't be politically incorrect", that's a completely different thing.

For a comparison using 90s action movies, which might be more approachable than book references, look at Robocop vs Demolition Man. In Robocop, Megacorps are buying up the entire city of Detroit, including the police force, and are fueling the conflict of the plot in order to further expand their control. Robocop is cyberpunk. Demolition Man is set in an overly politically correct future where you get fined for swearing and toilet paper is illegal. The conflict is driven by a future liberalized society's inability to deal with a 90s era terrorist. Demolition Man? Not cyberpunk. (it's still a pretty good movie though)

This popped on my YT page and spent time to watch it, pause to read the tweets etc

Personally I don't see anything upsetting regarding gender equality, I don't think Soret wrote anything offensive in the past that justifies people going after him today.

This Zoe Quinn looks to me like the guy that was standing under the supermarket sign hoping it would fall on him to sue

http://metro.co.uk/2017/02/17/man…an-sue-6455419/

Hey guyz, I found the perfect picture to sum up how I feel about this whole controversy ordeal.

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/WEI2CoN.gif]

Devs said it was post-cyberpunk rather than cyberpunk. I'm not too big on categorizing stuff but it makes sense.

Didn't really want to drag this out, but some things need addressing...

Quote from DrywallDreams

On 15/06/2017 at 1:52 AM, DrywallDreams said: What did Anita Sarkeesian lie about? She simply said there's a tendency to portray women in video games as negative stereotypes, and showed examples of such stereotypes

She did much more than that, she completely flat out lied on numerous occasions about scenarios in certain video games to push her agenda, the fact that you don't know about that leads me to believe you don't actually know much about Gamergate. Take a look:

You can find many examples like the above, just research it. She claimed she was doing all this because she was a gamer who loved video games and then was caught on camera saying she wasn't actually a gamer at all and everything she did was about "social justice".

Quote

Quote The wage gap exists, here's some statistics http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Gender_pay_gap_statistics.

Aside from the fact that the EU has a lot of varied figures considering that different countries hold different standards, it makes it clear from that data that it simply a comparison of the average earnings of men and women. When you take into account different jobs, hours worked, the simple fact that women generally go for lower paid and part time jobs, you can see clearly see that the different choices made by men and women make an impact on the statistics. It has nothing to do with women being paid less than men for the same job because of sexism, it has nothing to do with discrimination. Anyway, don't let me "mansplain" about it, I'll let an actual feminist (Christina Hoff Sommers) explain it to you from a US perspective since I believe that's where you live:

Quote

Quote Feminists portraying straight white men as the enemy is a stereotype that you've been sold.

Give me a break, the whole "white guilt/privilege" rubbish is pushed by feminists at every turn, stereotypes exist because there was a truth in it in the first place and the hundreds of such articles on Huffpost, Salon, Slate, Buzzfeed and the like clearly show this. Then there's sites like Everydayfeminism where every article is basically just "check your white male privilege and stop oppressing me".

Quote

Quote Women (and LGBTQ+ people, people of color, etc) just want more positive portrayals of themselves in games, that's all.

You mean feminists... most regular women don't give a shit, the vast amounts of women cosplayers wearing "boob armour" and dressing up as Quiet from MGS5 is evidence of that. How many video games feature LGBTQ people anyway let alone negative depictions? In certain games, such characters can add something I'm sure like in certain tv programmes and movies, Felix from Orphan Black for example is one of my favourite characters. Otherwise what's the point, especially with Transgender people who are a tiny minority. People of colour depends entirely on the scenario, funnily enough Anita did a recent video about this and got destroyed as per usual...

For the record, "Islamophobia" was a term used by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Mullahs in Iran to shut down any debate over the teachings of the prophet in the Quran and the Hadith. Ask yourself why there is so "Sikhophobia" "Buddophobia" "Hinduphobia" etc

Quote

Quote Of course Gamergate was portrayed as negative, it was started over a non-existent review of a video game. The big buzzword was "Objective reviews," a concept that does not, and is impossible to exist.

It really started because of the Zoe post, which you described as "a harassment campaign by her abusive ex-boyfriend" which leads me to believe you haven't actually read it because then you would see it's more like her boyfriend pouring his heart out because his girlfriend cheated on him. Zoe Quinn is a cry bully, she claims to be the sole victim of abuse but she and her minions have harassed and doxed people just as much. She's literally gotten dozens of projects shut down all over because, she objected to their themes or she cherry picked certain things people working on them said using various campaigns through petitions and gofundme donations. Now the campaign to shut down yet another talented game is in full swing as we can see. I fully accept that she got threats and was harrassed but it was mostly from trolls whose sole intent was to cause harm anyway and she gave as good as she got. Hell.. the FBI did a investigation into it and found no credible evidence of actual crimes in the making...

As for other things discussed, I can quite easily talk about the many issues with BLM or what Islamism is (nothing to do with blaming an entire religion for terrorism) but I don't want to drag this thread into the land of off topic, so I'll just end this here with a recent video:

*drops mic*

This is a really annoying hot button topic, way more than I realized. Video games are an art form, and whenever politics or even political agendas start to creep in an art form, it just feels really fucking weird to me.

From one side, you have people saying we have the responsibility to live up to our standards in storytelling and embrace equality and all of that jazz, the other side tries to protect freedom of expression and call out the other side's bullshit. I see validity in both sides arguments, what I don't agree is the way both sides have been fighting this war for a while now. You're not gonna fix the worlds problems by saying we need to make it impossible to kill hookers in video games and by blocking people commenting on your views, but you're also not going to fix the world by making death threads and calling people "cunts".

For fuck sakes people, we need to be able to have a fucking dialog without finger pointing, and at the very least try to listen to each other and trust that at the end of the day logic and rational thinking can come out on top.