Video games are made for profit and that has affected the production and consumption of video games in a lot of ways - the “gamer” subculture being utilised as a gateway to the far-right just being one example. There are multiple problems including:

The mainstream games industry is producing games that rely on extrinsic motivators such as increasing your rank or completing a stage rather than simple enjoyment of the experience of the game. As a result, games are becoming boring, filled with repetitive gameplay, lots of grinding necessary to progress, and are designed to be simply unenjoyable without paying for upgrades.

This is particularly an issue regarding lootboxes which are essentially a form of gambling - and found in games marketed towards kids like Fortnite as much as they are in MMOs or the like. Often unique rewards are placed in these crates which cannot be won without potentially wasting hundreds of euros on crates & they deliberately appeal to people who are obsessed with the game already, people who have invested into the branding like it’s a lifestyle, people who have poor judgement, etc. for the sake of milking cash.

While a lot of AAA  games are traditionally story based, these types of games are now more often endless, without a clear cut off point, as they shift towards multiplayer modes that extent gameplay and thus potential for profit. Often this involves endlessly elongating plotlines and creating padding and just making mediocre quality to churn out. MMOs are of course victim to this anyway, but you’re seeing this with other types of games that aren’t MMOS.

A good friend of mine is a regular Destiny player and we’ve talked before about how updates have rewarded players who effectively are willing to spend every waking hour on the game, and how this basically pushes out anyone who is working full-time, got kids, or is otherwise busy and cannot dedicate large amounts of time to a game everyday. Generalising from this example, long hours can create a culture that is extremely hostile to people who are new, learning, cannot dedicate that kind of time, cannot ‘git gud’ because they’ve got better things to do, and the lack of sympathy there creates a nasty environment for a multiplayer game.

More generally, many multiplayer games encourage a lot of extremely competitive play where people are given permission to be as openly hostile, rude, and cruel as possible without limits. The culture has little sympathy for people who struggle grasping the mechanics and instead ruthlessly mocks them and tears them to pieces. One wonders, I muse, with a healthy dose of obvious sarcasm, how on earth fascists infiltrated this space. (Caveat: This isn’t a criticism of competition in games, of course - you can play competitively without a ruthless hyper-competitive culture, you can play competitively respectfully. I think the reason people are ruthlessly competitive is partially because “the gamer” as an identity is about being angry you haven’t been given what you’ve been entilted to - and thus losing proves you aren’t entitled and worthy of all the social capital white men are supposed to have, you lose your right to be pissed off by showing yourself as ‘weak’ and validating what others have said, it’s embarassing for you. This combined with the permission to lash out at every minority imaginable leads to people just being vile and reeling off slurs casually when shit hits the fan in a game. They’re trying to grasp onto that entitlement.) 

More story-focussed games are also guilty of a version of the ‘endless game’ export large chunks of their stories to DLC. While in the past you could expect a finished, polished game for a fixed price, the process has been expanded and instead you’re expected to dish out twice the money you initially pay.

Gaming publishers have tried to latch onto marketing trends where products are sold not simply as products, but lifestyles. This is not unique to gaming - or even nerd culture. Apple is probably the most famous example of this - selling products as fashion accessories as much as they are like, computers or phones. Publishers absolutely 100% take advantage of the way their fans are obsessive about their products, they encourage it, they create special lines for them, they produce merchandise with their branding on it, they sell you the idea of being a certain kind of consumer. Which also is the reason people are so upset when you criticise games - because you are criticising their identity, frankly.

As well as trying to turn you into shills, and milking you for every penny, the quality of game production has decreased with bug-ridden games that can be patched later becoming increasingly normalised, ‘early release’ becoming more normalised instead of a decent QA team.

This is partially because of the way extremely long hours has been the norm for workers in the game industry. People are often pushed into ‘crunch’ conditions where they work 60+ hour weeks in stressful conditions trying to desperately reach the deadline that the publishers have demanded. This isn’t a particularly new phenomenon either - The Elder Scrolls Morrowind was infamous for this (which the recent polygon interview almost completely glosses over but never mind) and that was released in 2003.

Publishers dictating what developers do has long been a problem additionally - anyone who has followed what EA has done knows this, as that studio is notorious for buying successful indie studios, gutting them, and using the studio reputation to sell more.

The thing is, very few self professed “gamers” seem to care about any of these things. They don’t care about workers rights and get angry at them for being entitled and preventing the release of their games. As part of “nerd culture” more generally, gaming subculture is often composed of entitled white men who lash out at everyone and everything for not being given what they believe they, by right, should have as white men (and yes this bullshit attitude is why you don’t have a girlfriend). This involves “the freedom” of being freely misogynistic and homophobic and racist without fear of anyone reasonable criticising them. (This also plays into how they can often, in competitive multiplayer, feel that they are ‘free’ to be as horrendous as possible, and anyone challenging them is challenging that freedom to be entitled and violent and cruel, and thus by even criticising them, I am anti-freedom, anti-gaming, anti-their identity).

The games industry generally doesn’t care about this. They don’t criticise their fans; instead they cater towards their taste. As long as that doesn’t impact the image they’re trying to sell (and so they’ll never acknowledge the fact that a subset of their market is just adjacent to fascist organising), they couldn’t give two shits.

Arguably, games publishers have never really cared about anything other than profit from the get go, since gaming has its origins in arcade and fairground games which are such an obvious moneyspinner, it’s not like other forms of art where it’s about enforcing an ideological divide between classes, separating rich and poor with ‘high’ and ‘low’ are, so yeah, I accept the criticism that the present perfect “Capitalism has ruined video games” was not the correct tense to use in the OP.

Now, I originally made this post on a whim at midnight, it was meant to be a quick observation for myself and a couple of friends who know me, understand me. I don’t have lots of followers and I don’t have lots of clout; I had not expected this post to get so widely reblogged and had I known it would have been written differently.

So, for the record:

- I enjoy video games. 

- I think all fascists should choke, actually.

- A lot of people who play video games aren’t outspoken fascists but likely rub shoulders with people who are, are adjacent to groups which are, know friends of friends who are in contact with white supremacist groups, and probably tried to recently claim P*wD*eP*e has nothing to do with fascism (even though he still follows fascists, has lots of fascists in his audience, and frequently uses racial slurs… [thinking emoji]). When you are a bystander to fascism, when you shrug your shoulder at the violence fascists represent and fantasise about. You’re an apologist for it. It is not acceptable to do nothing in the face of violence.

- Obviously there are parts of the market that aren’t affected by this particular subculture - games, like the Sims for example, that are marketed towards other audience. But try and tell me with a straight face that EA aren’t monetising literally every single aspect of that game whenever possible and making the quality of the game worse for it. The OP still stands. Capitalism has ruined video games.

recovery is the process through which you learn to live with your symptoms/problems/triggers/issues/etc, to deal with them with as little self-destruction or other-destruction as possible. and it may never be over! because human life is full of stressors and hardships, especially in today’s society, and for a lot of people there will always be triggers to manage and episodes to cope with and harmful urges to redirect.

We have the “just think positively” gang that really believes that striving to be as forcefully positive as possible will cure you of your mental illness, which of course will never work because mental illness operates far beyond how many positive versus negative thoughts an individual has. But I think that line of thought has been debunked repeatedly enough that I don’t have to go into it.

Nowadays I see more and more condescending, unempathic advice that puts the onus of suffering mental illness on the actual mentally ill person. Such as “stop looking for validation from other people” (which is basically just a rehashed version of “how can anyone love you if you don’t love yourself”) or “just get discipline and learn how to go to sleep on time, eat healthy, and exercise” or “go outside and make friends” or “stop blaming everyone and start looking inside yourself for the reasons you’re suffering”. 

There is zero basic understanding of any psychological processes and even worse, no understanding of how capitalism, patriarchy, ableism, and white supremacy are the social causes of mental illness and how these social factors exacerbate individual psychological, biological, or physiological etiologies of said mental illnesses. 

Like, at most you should be aware that the environment exacerbates physiological/psychological processes or even brings out symptoms that wouldn’t be brought out in other environments. 

But even on a basic level, you need to know that having a mental illness makes it difficult to even try to engage in prosocial or productive coping behaviors. 

Going to sleep on time is difficult. Maintaining a proper sleep cycle is difficult (especially for disorders in which your circadian rhythms are already disrupted, insomnia is a concomitant symptom of a disorder, or disordered sleeping behaviors are a symptom). Engaging in the effort of eating healthy is difficult (especially if you’re in a rush and need quick food sources or don’t have the money or time to cook for yourself, which already complicates a lack of motivation to eat healthy). 

There are traumas and disorders that make it hard to make friends and that make it hard to go outside and initiate relationships and that make it hard not to place so much value on external validation and that complicate attachment in relationships (e.g. lack of object permanence in the context of romantic or platonic relationships). 

“Discipline” in the form of self-critical thoughts may exacerbate self-punishing, self-hating, or self-harm behaviors. It’s not easy for people to be self-critical in a productive way if they already have a pathologizing or distorted view of themselves. 

And again, none of these things exist in isolation. You are already embedded in a social, cultural, and economic environment that often worsens your symptoms or outcomes, or makes it difficult to access help. And as bell hooks said, healing does not occur in isolation. It’s not just that mentally ill people have to take responsibility for themselves - other people have to reach out and learn how to help and to recognize when people need help. Autonomy is also an issue - the autonomy and independence of neurodivergent people is often hardly respected and often violated. 

I should add a disclaimer that of course people shouldn’t use mental illness as an excuse to be rude, abusive, toxic, hateful, or generally distasteful, but that doesn’t give any of you the right to say “stop leaning on your mental illness as an excuse for being a friendless greasy loser”. 

I am on the other hand also tired of leftists and anti-capitalists who think mental illness is solely caused by social factors and not instantiated biologically or psychologically, who think that mentally ill people who take psychotropic medication or go to therapy or get diagnoses from psychiatrists are somehow evil capitalists. If you don’t understand the psychological or physiological instantiations of these problems, then mentally ill people won’t get the help they need and the whole point about patriarchy/capitalism/etc causing the pathologization and oppression of mentally ill people would absolutely not be enough to help them. I feel like some of you say “mental illness and experiences of mental illness are caused by economic alienation and poverty and racism and stress and misogyny” (or however else those sentences are phrased) and then stop there. Okay, and? What’s next? We haven’t overthrown any of those systems yet. Are mentally ill people supposed to wait around and recover in an anarchist commune or by going out and protesting? Is that going to help them? Are they bad people for wanting to use psychotropic medication or psychotherapy to be able to manage their lives as much as possible? Are they anti-radical or capitalist bootlickers? 

Like I know some Anime Kids in school were invariably dicks but you still can’t ultimately use odd or “cringy” behavior to justify the cruel choices of other people to mock and torment others. So many of these kids have tons of trauma from being mocked just for having a particular interest or sense of style. Was a kid wearing a raccoon tail to school because they thought it was fun and cute really worth mocking them to the point of self-hatred? If kids were getting bullied to the point of tears in this year because they liked to do Fornite Dances in the lunchroom would you think it’s funny and that the kids deserve bullying for being weird? 

Like I know some Anime Kids in school were invariably dicks but you still can’t ultimately use odd or “cringy” behavior to justify the cruel choices of other people to mock and torment others. So many of these kids have tons of trauma from being mocked just for having a particular interest or sense of style. Was a kid wearing a raccoon tail to school because they thought it was fun and cute really worth mocking them to the point of self-hatred? If kids were getting bullied to the point of tears in this year because they liked to do Fornite Dances in the lunchroom would you think it’s funny and that the kids deserve bullying for being weird? 

And it doesn’t help that we have a hard time understanding what is or isn’t socially acceptable, the social isolation that comes from bullying at an early age only makes it way harder to understand social cues through time because we have no one to learn from that wouldn’t want us to drink bleach, especially when if we’re LUCKY our only other company is kids in the exact same situation as us with the same difficulties.

I would get bullied for talking to my inanimate belongings because of autistic hyperempathy. May I add, I wasn’t loud, I was a very quiet kid and I mostly sat alone.

Let’s also not act like people don’t actually bully you for simply liking something odd. They absolutely do. I was bullied heavily for still liking dolls past an age my peers deemed appropriate, even though I never once brought one to school and I made sure to never remind them of it.

“I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug

That we should create communications technologies that allow people to send whatever they like to each other.

And when people put their thumbs on the scale and try to say what can and can’t be sent,

we should fight back - both politically through protest and technologically through software”

(quoted from the website footer)

then upon clicking the “bits are not a bug” link, find this list of things the creator deems infringement of his rights: (archive.is link)

“Child Pornography

In the US, it is illegal to possess or distribute child pornography, apparently because doing so will encourage people to sexually abuse children.

This is absurd logic, and almost certainly a violation of the First Amendment (although the courts have decided otherwise, apparently based on the assumption that all child pornography is abuse).”

(quoted from the “about” page)

So yeah, instead of using ceddit/snew, use this alternative called removeddit to see deleted comments on Reddit.

I mentioned in the notes of the OP that I was reading at a college level by the time I was twelve. I was reading at a high school level in fourth grade at least. I often had to take the words-per-minute reading tests a second time, with my teachers watching me more closely, because they didn’t believe I was actually reading that fast. In second grade we had to write a short story each week, based on our choice of four given prompts. I often wrote two or three instead, just for fun. (My teacher ultimately told me that I could totally write as many stories as I wanted, but I could only turn in one for her to grade.) 

I was also suffering from a learning disability that made math almost completely inaccessible to me. And this wasn’t subtle at all. I don’t mean I took longer than other kids but would ultimately get the answers right. I mean I would break down crying in the middle of class because I was so confused and overwhelmed. I almost had to go to summer school after second and third grade because I was so behind in math. I was struggling with times tables long after most of my peers had them down; I ultimately only learned them because my teacher started playing songs to help me memorize them. I still have to sing those songs in my head now, as an adult, to do multiplication.

But–in large part because I was gifted in this other area–this incredibly blatant disability went completely unacknowledged. No one believed I was struggling with math.  They thought I was being intentionally disruptive, or that I was bored and wasn’t really trying. They got frustrated with me for embarrassing them. 

And then that impacted my self-esteem, because how could I be so smart and yet have so much trouble with math? How come no matter how hard I tried, my brain wouldn’t pick it up the way it did language? I felt like I was the bad guy, like I was somehow deceiving the adults in my life into thinking I was smart. As an adult, I still struggle with this underlying fear that I’ve somehow tricked the people around me into accepting me, and that if they look too closely I’ll let them down. 

here’s a short elaboration:

1) it’s basically a completely empty concept. the idea of ‘intelligence’ is basically like a collection of frequently unrelated skills roughly seen as relating to cognition (and sometimes really just means an educational class background!). But like, practically, it doesn’t really mean anything other than a value judgment. The set of skills associated w ‘intelligence’ are so wide and diverse that most people who have some lack others completely (the Richard Dawkins problem) but equating them all into one idea erases this.

2) measuring people along some sort of axis of ‘intelligence’ is not only like basically impossible in any good faith way because of reason 1, it’s also almost always done as a value judgment of someone’s worth. A good example of the ways this has been done to awful effect is the use of the IQ test, let alone standardized aptitude tests like the SAT/ACT. The valuing of people’s worth based upon the cognitive ability has numerous issues wrt disability, and also frequently intelligence (or perceived intelligence) is the way that other oppressive attitudes are communicated.

3) Even if ‘intelligence’ were an actual coherent thing, there are numerous other traits that are equally or more important to have in this world. What I mean here is that there is a wide scale cult of intelligence as perhaps the most important personal trait in America. The amount of social shame that comes from not performing intelligence at the right amounts is intense, much more intense than it should be compared to other traits that are seen as basically optional. small example: I feel like I became a much better person over the same time period that my cognitive abilities kinda decreased (unrelated reasons), but obviously one of those is going to have a much greater effect on like my “success” in society!

bad anti-psychiatry: recovery can’t exist with psychiatry–we need [list of legit or b.s. alternatives]

also bad anti-psychiatry: there’s no such thing as mental illness–only t r a u m a. what’s an autism or any other neuro- developmental disability?

good enough but ugh anti-psychiatry: mental illness is just a category to oppress people–not chemicals. 

good anti-psychiatry: recovery doesn’t exist but like these alternatives are usually better than just psych drugs alone

“You are extremely loyal, and guided by a strong moral code.” & “You can be too modest, however, and can come across as pretentious to others.”