"Absolutely: A True Crime Story" is a game about platitudes.
Newsman asked me how I feel about this video game causing gun violence issue. He asked how mad I was that the video game industry was once again being used as a scapegoat for political gain. I replied he was asking two different questions; the first being easy to answer, the second, not so easy.
He said, "No worries, answer both."
I said ok.
Do video games cause gun violence? No, don't be silly.
Does the video game industry have blood on its hands? Yes, absolutely.
The video game community has been in a state of terror since the birth of communal gaming. The rules of the gaming community are simple. If you log onto a game you must be ok with being subjected to bare racism, misogyny, and bigotry. It's woven into the cultural fabric as a rite of passage. If you choose to resist this narrative you will be targeted, harassed, or worse.
It's been that way since the arcades but online play injected the situation with steroids. The game industry knew it had a monster in its house but that monster was called the user base. So they kicked the can to the community to figure it out. Report when you hear it, mute when it keeps happening, ban here and there. Pissing in the ocean.
The internet gave hate a way to communicate. Xbox Live gave it a voice. Trump gave it a corporeal form.
But you can't say things like that, because you will get hoisted by the very petard you are trying to hoist. It's a Moot point.
Let's say a 19-year-old kid shoots up a place. The kid was born around 2000, the kid logged on around 2007, the kid began to find ways to express his anger on the internet, with gaming the gateway. The kid finds targets for his anger in real life and is able to express that hate, not in the game, but in the chat. The kid finds kindred spirits in that hate online, then finds kindred spirits in a real-life political party.
The kid dives down, down, down, the many escape holes you can find in the series of tubes and is spit out, locked and loaded in the parking lot of a Google map location near you. His life timeline reflects the growth of the internet and a certain movement. Where do we go from here?
Gamers call toxic behavior cancer. The game industry and community, let's be fair, allowed cancer to incubate till it metastasized. So it goes.
The reporter said my answer was too tangential and long-winded but he might keep the Trump quote cause of the clicks. I said, "It's your party." He asked what I was up to these days, I replied, "Great question."
Anyway, rest in peace TB, rest in peace TC, rest in peace Tall - T. Love is wise, hatred is foolish. Get out there and do great things. We believe in you. Also Jobs.
The Protoculture Mixtape: Issue: People: Luftmensch
