J.P.

Gamergate was one of the first online instances that showed how easy it is to spread lies and misinformation through social media in order to manufacture outrage and weaponize it against specific targets.

The same exact tactics have been used by the far-right since. Gamergate felt like a testing chamber, before the full blown nazi propaganda plan that’s getting far-right politicians elected in many places. I live in one of such places, and the online tactics used by literal nazis against progressive politicians are 1-to-1 the same used in gamergate.

Those issues with social media have never been dealt with. If anything, social media has become more mainstream since, and now these tactics of lying and manufacturing outrage have become more powerful.

Traditional media seemed to have some semblance of accountability (although not really), but in social media, anyone makes up shit, people will take their word for it, if they like what they hear (or aligns with their beliefs), and it doesn’t matter if it’s debunked, because no one listens to that part.

The only solution is, and has always been, a zero tolerance policy against any kind of hateful or bigoted behaviour, by the people who control these online spaces. No one expects 4chan to moderate their content at this point, but when someone makes a new online space for conversations, those same people shouldn’t be welcomed, or they’ll shit all over the floor, turn it into another gross place, and you’ll have to start over.

These new complaints about “wokeness” in games, that happen with every game announcement, aren’t even dog-whistles at this point. They’ve been straight up howling for a while. The follow-up attacks, threats, lies, the dismissal that “none of this happens, it’s all made up”, and the support of fellow misogynists (like the companies with a history of sexism mentioned in the article), are all just part of the program.

And of course, you can see them in some of the comments in this very thread.

As a huge fan of No Man’s Sky (maybe my favourite game), this is the game that really got my attention. It looks stunning.

I’m not sure about why that’s the standard, but it may have to do with the fact that in fighting games you don’t want to be jumping all the time, it’s something that you have to do carefully, while crouching is something you do constantly, and most motion inputs involve the “down” direction (like quarter circles or the shoryuken input), and having left-down-right lined up makes it pretty easy to do those motions. Think about pressing your Q-W-E keys in quick succesion. You can probably do that without much practice. That’s a half-circle-forward motion. If you have “down” in your thumb, a half-circle would be like pressing “Q-Spacebar-E” in quick succesion, which is more difficult.

Maybe it’s also because people often use the space bar in keyboards to jump in many games, and that’s what they were used to.

In any case, once you get used to this layout, it’s very comfortable.

They are arcade sticks that, instead of using a joystick with 4-directional switches, use 4 buttons for the directions. They are often called “Hitbox” because that’s the brand that popularized them. Some people also call them “all-button controller” or “stickless controller”. The advantages are ergonomics (many people have developed carpal tunnel syndrome from traditional joysticks) and economy of motion (it’s easier to press 4 buttons with 4 fingers than move the entire wrist/forearm to move a joystick).

It’s pretty much like using a keyboard for fighting games, but you only have the buttons that you actually use, the keys are large buttons, and there are no issues with pressing many simultaneous buttons (many keyboards have problems with that). People also often use PCBs that are compatible with PS5 or other consoles, and also SOCD cleaners (which is a piece that helps configure which inputs should be sent if you press “Simultaneous Opposite Cardinal Directions”).

They’ve been gaining more and more popularity over the last few years. If you are good at typing, you may be more comfortable playing fighting games with this than with a traditional joystick or even a gamepad.

I’m no economist, but I’m pretty sure what we have now is 100% capitalism. It’s exactly how many people predicted capitalism would look like if given enough time.

Many years ago, a libertarian classmate asked me how I think the world would look like if corporations were unregulated. I told him (again, without being an economist) that corporations would probably become the new countries, that they would own everything like monarchs used to, as a few corporations monopolized everything. (I still find his answer funny: “And wouldn’t that be better?”. I just told him “Of course not!” thinking “WTF?”).

My point is that this idea that the current system is “worse than capitalism” and “capitalism is dead”, stems from some kind of idealization of what capitalism is supposed to be like, and not from the realities that many people have been pointing out throughout the XX and XXI centuries about how capitalism works and what its end-goal is. This is exactly what capitalism looks like. “Technofeudalism” seems like yet another way of not addressing the issue, like when people say “the problem is not capitalism! it’s crony capitalism!”. As if there is some form of capitalism that has ever put people over money.

Also:

It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism.

Again, I’m no economist, so someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure the capitalists (i.e. the owners of the means of production) have never produced capital. The workers do. The capitalist have always taken the profits of their worker’s labour in exchange for using those means of production. You could call that “charging rent”.

There is nothing new about what’s going on right now, except on the superficial level, the specific tech that’s being used to achieve the monopolistic goals of any corporation. Given enough time, the inevitable concentration of power that capitalism leads to, will always look like feudalism.