I keep seeing people try to pin the Steam/Itch censorship wave on “feminists” or “progressives.” Let’s set the record straight: the real crusade against video games has almost ALWAYS come from the Right.
1990s–2000s: Jack Thompson, conservative politicians, and Christian lobbyists blamed Doom, Mortal Kombat, and GTA for school shootings. They tried to get them outright banned.
2000s: Congress ran hearings about “protecting the children,” targeting Rockstar and Midway. Games like Bully and Manhunt were dragged into court.
Today: It’s groups like Collective Shout (a conservative, Christian-aligned org in Australia) pressuring Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal to choke off funding. U.S. Republicans push bills like KOSA, obscenity laws, and age verification that threaten all online content.
Meanwhile, feminists and progressive devs have been the ones defending creative freedom. all we did as just SLIGHTLY criticize some of the goonerbait designs and refused to support Hogwarts Legacy since JKR would 100% use the money she made from the game to fund anti-trans bills
the same people who blamed Anita Sarkeesian for “censorship” are now celebrating when Collective Shout goes after LGBTQ+ creators.
Let’s not rewrite history. The far-right has always been the biggest enemy of video games. They’re the ones still trying to erase queer content, control adult art, and dictate what can and can’t exist.
Before that it was banning and burning books and music albums in the 80’s. Check out the backmasking scare. Same people.
One of the first cultural wins for the modern right was switching the average apolitical person’s view of who the most annoying people in politics were. For a long time it was right wing Christian groups, but some time during the Obama era it became progressives.
And like all right wing viewpoints, it was completely disconnected from reality. Groups who’ve never had any political power in their life became widely believed to be running society, and things that have never happened became believed to be happening everywhere and be those groups’ fault.
I at least partially blame South Park for changing the narrative to ”those whiny liberals are just as bad as the people who want to ban everything”. The rest of the work was done by that post-9/11 attitude where implying that wanting to glass the Middle East is bad was enough to get you labeled as a bleeding heart terrorist sympathizer.
or a long time it was right wing Christian groups, but some time during the Obama era it became progressives.
Probably because of the 2008 crisis which destroyed the star trekian “end of history colorblind utopia” idea of the future. There was not longer a need for it, globalism was in its terminal phase.
Feminists: Uhh… Hot take, I guess, maybe you shouldn’t portray all of your feminine characters as always horny lust demons?
Rightists:
ALL VIDEO GAMES MUST INCLUDE THE 14 WORDS. THIS IS NON-NEGOTIABLE.G*mers:
Honestly, this makes me want to write an essay on the natural “moderate” nature of leftism and the natural “extremist” nature of rightism, as in the nature of humanitarians (catch-all term for leftists, primitive communists, whatever) to not immediately resort to violent action, contradictory to the nature of exploiters and oppressors to immediately resort to violent action. I know it doesn’t have any basis in modern-day politics as the contradictions are contradicting and even the leftists are justifiably angry, but it’d still be a good thing to analyze, I think.
To use silly stereotypes:
Men complain about their favorite video games. Women write yaoi about their favorite video games.
Chicks rock.
How hard would it be to get these Christian Lobbyists to lobby against the “AI” Industry instead? Seems like a industry that has a lot of heresy to me
Impossible. American Christians love slop.
Make up a hoac about christian teens using AI for bible verses and it telling them tjat black people can go to heaven.
Then how would they be able to worship our lord and savior, Shrimp Jesus?
feminists write articles and make videos about games. rightwing christians just lobby to ban shit
and murder indie game creators through psychological warfare
Collective Shout has very obviously queerphobic goals and intents, and anyone who is keyed into any of this can clearly notice it. But of course, chuds and apolitical types either don’t know the nuance or don’t care, so they’ll just blame it on leftists and feminists and such, and it poisons discourse better than a “THIS IS WHY THE LEFT HAS FAILED” type slop could ever hope to achieve.
Gatekeep the chads and bros from everything.
They need to learn to stick with sportsball and dah clurb and leave the rest of us they have excluded from society the fuck alone.
We were doomed the moment we let the nerds into sports and the jocks into video games.
Now all games are turning into fifa/madden slop and you need an advanced statistics degree just to understand baseball.
the same people who blamed Anita Sarkeesian for “censorship” are now celebrating when Collective Shout goes after LGBTQ+ creators.
They’ll just justify it as “Haha those damn Ess Jay Double Yous wanted to censor OUR video games!!! now let’s see how they like it when THEY’RE the ones who get censored!!!”
I think feminists mostly just moved on to playing Indy games and not caring about AAA slop. It’s the right that always makes a stink.
we need to leave video games alone and start going after g*mers
GAMERS RISE UP
Yeah but also it’s fine if we are the ones who go after video games. No art is free from criticism and all art now is the product of a capitalist society and will bear the marks of one whether the author does so consciously or not.
Yes, and we leftists need to really step up our game! Can’t let the right outdo us!
I think Collective Shout are feminists, just liberal feminists. Wealthier members of a marginalized group can and do turn to capitalism as a solution to the discrimination caused by capitalism. Not that anyone on 4chan, reddit, twitter, twitch, youtube, etc recognize that nuance. They would blame feminists even if there was no feminist org doing anything. They were already blaming feminists for game quality years before this happened. Also all games are made by Indians and that’s why you can’t run anything at 120fps in 8k.
