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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37110 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Winning game designer banned from future Spiel des Jahres events for anti-Israel symbol.

Board gaming is a much bigger hobby than it used to be. The Spiel des Jahres award was created in 1978 to highlight family-friendly games, and I played some of the early winners (Rummikub (1980) and Scotland Yard (1983))--but it was 1995's winner, The Settlers of Catan, that really changed the face of board gaming in the United States. As an established presence in the European market, the Spiel des Jahres evolved from a simple trade award to the gold standard for "must have" games. Like most at-home hobbies, board gaming also got a bump from the COVID pandemic--but more broadly, the nerdification of American culture has fed board gaming in much the way it has fed video gaming, comic books, and other IP-adjacent hobbies.

These days there are three "Spiel des Jahres" awards--the children's award, the regular award, and the "complex game" award. This year's "complex" winner was Daybreak, "a cooperative game about stopping climate change." The creator, Matteo Menapace, presumably wrote his own bio, though I don't know that for certain:

...a game designer and educator, former artist in residence at the V&A Museum in London. He designs cooperative board games inspired by social issues, such as food politics, memory loss and the climate crisis. He also teaches people how to make games that encourage collaboration and help people navigate complex conversations.

Anyway, Matteo reportedly wore a pin or sticker or something looking approximately like this onto the award ceremony stage. The announcement describes this as

a symbol ... that Jews will perceive as anti-Semitic ... by pointing out the outlines of a 'Greater Palestine' that denies the existence of the State of Israel.

Predictably, a reddit post in the most popular board game sub refers to it as a "pro-Palestine" sticker rather than an "anti-Israel" sticker. These days the line between those things can seem pretty thin, or so it seems to me. The commentary is predictable enough... I suppose in this case I would say that it seems like the political symbol in question "deliberately skirts the border of comprehensibility." Matteo is clearly an activist, who was doing activist things. The Spiel des Jahres people are clearly on board with the DEI rhetoric, and employ it in this announcement, so this may be one of those "leopards at my face" moments, too. But I don't know what Matteo's nationality is (Google suggests maybe he's an Italian living in the UK?), and Germany has some fairly strict anti-semitism laws for, you know, historical reasons, so there may be a culture gap issue here as well.

This must be very confusing for people used to virtue signal on (current thing). He’s performing the right signal for his crowd, he thinks, but then a small change of context reverses the polarity of it all. Did he expect that reaction?

It’s a game about stopping climate change. To point out the obvious, it probably didn’t win an award on the basis of its mass appeal.

And I think that matters- the game, and game designer, was probably engineering this at some level to win an award. He knew enough to tell that pro-Palestine would go over less well in the awards ceremony.

But you'd think that, if the game won on politics over quality or popularity, then he wouldn't have gotten booted--presuming, of course, that Greens tend to lean towards Palestine over Israel.

Ugh, Rummikub won awards? I absolutely despise that game, and assumed it only existed to cash in on some sort of rummy…fad.

The organizers are free to cancel whomever they want, I guess, even if their reasoning is foreign to me. Likewise, I’m not going to hold Schrodinger’s watermelon pin against Menapace; “pro-Palestine” might have to mean “anti-Israel,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean “denying the existence of the State of Israel.” Is/ought, right?

I’m not even sure we can blame the organizers for being insensitive to that distinction. Your observation about “deliberately skirting the borders” reminds me that Germany has probably dealt with boundary-pushers on its speech restrictions. I would not be surprised if those restrictions were intentionally vague to discourage playing games. No pun intended.

Ugh. /r/boardgames (and boardgamegeek, the largest dedicated hobby site for boardgaming), and the boardgaming hobby in general, are emblematic of my growing disgust with leftist politics. boardgamegeek hasn't quite gone as far as RPGnet (which famously explicitly banned any support for Trump on its discussion forums), but they have moderators who openly declare that their "political" forum is a leftist space. Anything right of AOC has to be expressed in the most tepid terms, and expect to get dogpiled with impunity, while any degree of heat in response will get you banned. Boardgamers are the fucking worst. (I can say this, I'm a boardgamer. Although I'm a dirty hex-and-counter wargamer, and only old white supremacist men play those.)

Anyway, a watermelon has been a Palestinian symbol for a while now, and I'm actually a little surprised that Matteo got this much heat for a relatively innocuous pin, especially given that Israel/Palestine remains a kind of third rail in boardgaming, as in most other liberal spaces, because of the intersection of leftist Palestine supporters and Jewish gamers. It suppose it is because the award is German and Germans are extra-sensitive to anti-semitism complaints.

I am willing to extend someone enough charity to accept that "Pro-Palestine" does not necessarily mean "Anti-Israel" (in the sense of "wants Israel destroyed'), let alone "anti-Semitic." Pro-Palestine right now is basically the BLM movement of 23-24. A lot of leftists' support really doesn't go any deeper than "Israelis are bombing children, this is very sad." That said, you often don't have to peel back a pro-Palestine activist's views very deeply to find a seething hatred of Israel, and possibly of Jews.

RPGnet (which famously explicitly banned any support for Trump on its discussion forums)

Or for ICE. Or for Dobbs, or any other abortion restrictions. Or a variety of police-related matters. And that's just the explicit rules! If you have an account with access to Tangency, look at the first and second debate threads -- I highlighted the thread closure on the assassination attempt, but the "A+" behavior thread that has someone I remember from my time highlighting how Trump ("literally"!) wants them shot is a pretty good and very far from unique glimpse into leftist and even some progressive-dominated spaces now. And especially appalling for anyone old enough to remember when Darren MacLennan and co were so very proud of very clear and thick line separate their normal free speech principles from an exception for nazis-and-only-literal-Nazis.

Sorry, for the most part I try to limit my pettiness with the principle of 'don't get your enemies free real estate in your head', but that site is just such a perfect example of the faults in its own philosophy that every time someone mentions it I have to check to see if it's at least stopped getting worse, and I'm always disappointed.

Has there been any forum to succeed RPGnet that doesn't require a blood-sealed pledge to leftism? A part of me misses being able to browse threads about TTRPG development, strategy, and playing.

I'm not really hoping for much, admittedly. It feels like any vaguely popular thread gets flooded with leftist activism with tacit and/or explicit moderator support.

Not exactly what you're asking but we have a blood on the motte tower discord server that occasionally has some discussion on the other games chat. DM me if you want an invite. It's been thoroughly colonized by dramanaughts but of the more manageable sort.

I am not a member of either and so cannot speak from experience, but I think that RPGPub aspires to be apolitical and TheRPGSite is more-or-less explicitly unwoke.

I haven't been browsing it myself but I know of therpgsite.com.

Isn't rpgcodex the based equivalent? I don't do games or gaming forums, but didn't they pin an announcement after the Chris Avelorn(?) accusations expressing their shock and disappointment that he wasn't gay?

I remember seeing the screenshot, and that sort of humor is always a good sign.

There's still good'ol /tg/.

Somewhere on my shelf is a self-print copy of Dogs in the Vineyard. How low the mighty have fallen, &etc.

I've never gone back to see where Lumley is now. I prefer my memories of a better time.

Well, he definitely wouldn't have written Poison'd today.

Although I'm a dirty hex-and-counter wargamer

I've recently played some hex and counter wargames, albeit computer ones. Unity of Command 2, to be specific. But I am looking for something a little less like an elaborate chess puzzle, and not weirdly AAA-game expensive. Do you have anything you'd recommend?

Huge range. What kind of games do you like? Quick 1-2 hour games, or monster campaigns? Napoleonic, World War II, space?

The Command and Colors system is a pretty good entry level system.

My personal preference is World War II, though I also like ancients and sci-fi; not so much Napoleonic or Civil War (which are also hugely popular genres). Some old favorites are the Avalon Hill classics like PanzerBlitz and Starship Troopers. For the truly dedicated there is Starfleet Battles and Advanced Squad Leader, but those are basically lifestyle games.

Axis & Allies has many, many versions from mini-games to long campaigns with online versions.

GMT has a very wide range, and Space Empires 4x is a very approachable alternative to SFB (and you can play it on BoardGameArena).

One of my favorites is Empire of the Sun. The full campaign game is a long slog (12+ hours if you are playing face to face), but there are several minigames that are much easier to play.

Most heavy wargames have Vassal modules so they're easy to play online and/or asynchronously.

I think I was a bit unclear. In this case I was asking about computer games, not board games. Though I'll definitely look at some of these anyway.

Ah, sorry, I mostly play cardboard. But boardgamearena and Vassal do give you computer options if you want human opponents.

I've been told World of Warships is very good, though I haven't tried it.

GMT has a very wide range, and Space Empires 4x is a very approachable alternative to SFB (and you can play it on BoardGameArena).

Space Empires 4x is legit great. It's been years since I last played it, but the last time I did I played a fairly small scenario with a buddy of mine. I had horrible luck exploring my system, and he was raking in extra production points of colonies well before I found a single one. So I invested heavily in speed and initiative tech, and harassed the fuck out of him. Constantly parked my weakest units over his planets to block their production, and then ran them away when he was forced to respond. I made up for my terrible luck by stealing the initiative, and I took it pretty far.

Unfortunately my friend has really bad analysis paralysis, and around 2 AM I just couldn't possibly play any longer. My first serious competitive fleet rolled off the assembly line, and we staged one last battle where all the dice split in his favor and I was left with nothing but smoking wreckage. We called the game for him then. But man, that first part of the game I really fucking enjoyed. If we had kept going, I may have pulled it off since at that point I had been fucking with economy so long, I had actually leapfrogged him despite starting in such an inferior position.

Talon is also pretty good - it's basically the tactical-level expansion for SE4x (and, honestly, a better version of SFB).

The same developer who put SE4X on boardgamearena also had a prototype for Talon, but unfortunately, there wasn't enough interest and he gave up.

Yeah, I own a first edition copy of Talon I've yet to crack open. It's on my pile of shame.

I have a few favorites that may or may not have digital implementations.

  • Twilight Struggle
  • Command & Colors: Ancients
  • No Retreat!
  • Sekigahara
  • Storm over Stalingrad
  • Washington's War

Do you have any thoughts as to why boardgames in particular became so strongly leftist?

I think it was essentially a three step process for this and all other hobbies:

  • The original Internet culture was generally left-libertarian.
  • Internet forums ate the hobby: because they were such an efficient way to engage with other hobbyists, they outcompeted every alternative cultural center of the hobby.
  • The left-libertarian founders and their successors largely became woke leftist, bringing the forums along with them.

The second and third steps happened in parallel during the aughts and early teens.

Not just the fact that reddit and facebook ate most hobby forums?

I would add the centralization of internet forums into places like reddit under bullet point 2.

One of the downsides of unification, super-spreader mods and ideas can travel much farther than in a more fractured landscape.

I'm not the person you asked, but here (Canada), adult board games are strongly associated since at least the early 2000s with hipster culture (craft microbreweries, kombucha, etc...), which is heavily leftist: liking "old fashioned" board games rather than modern videogames (or heavily capitalistic collectible card games / Warhammer style wargames) is inherently hipster-coded. Then there's the europhile part, seeing as some of the most celebrated modern games are european, and the ones most people famously dislike are american games like Monopoly...

I don't think boardgames are really very different from RPGs or video games or comic books other nerd spaces. Basically, was a (primarily white and male) nerdy niche interest that slowly attracted attention from a more diverse audience (not bad in itself), but this more diverse audience perceived "white and male" as a problem that needed to be fixed. And because white male nerds tended to be liberal and more often than not were actually happy to see more girls, minorities, etc., in their hobby, they did not see the shape of things to come, in which they would be demonized and ideological conformity would be enforced.

In the 80s and 90s, gamers were mostly liberal, but everyone knew the guy who was an Alex Keaton Reaganite (granted that Alex Keaton was a liberal's cuddly and palatable version of a Republican) or a libertarian who liked to complain about age of consent laws (o..O) or the weird reT^rn Catholic or occasionally, someone with more hardcore rightist views. And they were tolerated, for better or for worse, because nerds always considered themselves inclusive, before that was a buzzword. This had some obvious failure modes (e.g., Walter Breen), but mostly people could accept the guy with "out there" views as long as he wasn't ranting every game night.

I personally remember the time one of our buddies brought a cousin from Georgia who straightforwardly told us she "didn't believe people should marry someone of another color." All of us liberals kind of looked at her with aghast expressions, but afterwards just shrugged to ourselves and agreed "Well, that's how she was raised."

To think that someone could say that in a gaming space today and not immediately be ejected (and probably dragged online) is to laugh.

Tangentially, I have seen the same phenomenon in the Unitarian Universalist Church (in which I was briefly interested). It's primary a nerdy white liberal social group that (when I was around) was constantly engaged in hand-wringing about how white it was. Blocked and Reported did an episode covering the results.

Do you have any thoughts as to why boardgames in particular became so strongly leftist?

It's not boardgames in particular. It's almost everything. Video games (famously). Hiking. Knitting. That's the culture war in a nutshell.

As far as I can tell, it's really just organized groups within these hobbies that have the political slant. I'm sure you could say something about long hikes marches through institutions, but I don't think it's necessarily swung the hobby as a whole. To point to your video game example, the game development studios, journalism, and awards groups are quite leftist, but the median gamer generally doesn't care while playing the latest Assassins of Duty.

I don't play in public servers much, but has random voice chat improved that much from being full of slurs a decade ago? I think that's true of hiking too: the median participant is just hitting the trails, not reading about how the backcountry isn't diverse enough, regardless of their feelings on the matter. The median quilt group is a bunch of old church ladies, even if the media coverage is woke. Everyone right-of-center doesn't just sit around doing nothing all day, even if they aren't catching up on the best board games to play based on politically-issued awards.

I guess that line of thought is that the rebellion that happened in video games could easily happen elsewhere. It might take a different form, since not all audiences should be expected to react like the average gamer circa 2015 (young, male) quietly unsubscribing and continuing the hobby with their friends, making alternate groups, or just sighing and getting along begrudgingly.

You know, embedded in a conservative filter bubble, 0% of the people I know would seek out a new part of their favorite hobby(whether that be games, novels, what have you) on the basis of awards. For the 800 lb gorilla in the room, I think that’s why country music has such woke awards out of step with the audience- conservatives ignore the awards, and the people who watch the awards shows without being paid liberals with little preexisting interest in country music, but who will buy a song to support an emerging black artist or whatever.

I think it’s got a lot to do with how liberals like to take advantage of meta spaces that people use to talk about stuff. Most conservatives I know have almost no interest in the meta game of their hobby unless they have a specific question. A gamer looking for help in a game or wanting better gear for their sport pops in, asks the question and leaves. So the people who sit around talking about the activities all day would tend to be liberals and thus be better equipped to enforce their wills on the hobby or at least the hobby meta game.

I mean, boating and hunting forums are as much pro-Trump politics as they are boating and hunting… but outdoor gear awards tend to be geared towards the liberal side of the things they’d get used for.

I am willing to extend someone enough charity to accept that "Pro-Palestine" does not necessarily mean "Anti-Israel"

I agree, in principle. In practice, in my experience, anyone with strong views on the matter tends to seek ideological purity. I have a number of problems with Israel, which are often difficult to express without either being accused of antisemitism, or being praised by outright antisemites. I have many more problems with "Palestine" (in any of its many incarnations), which are all but impossible to express without being accused of Islamophobia, being pro-genocide, being racist, and so forth.

Boardgamers are the fucking worst. (I can say this, I'm a boardgamer. Although I'm a dirty hex-and-counter wargamer, and only old white supremacist men play those.)

I agree, as a boardgamer, that boardgamers are terrible, and online boardgame forums are excellent demonstrations of Conquest's Laws. What amazes me is how the same can today be said of pretty much every hobby that was ever demographically "geeky white male." RPGs, video games, anime, comic books--but also science, engineering, philosophy, and information technology. These spaces have been absolutely overrun with people insisting "it's not just for you!" and for maybe the first decade of the new millennium, the response I usually saw was... this, basically. But post-Awokening (and with the help of "Woke Capital") a lot of old school nerds and geeks have been hounded to the edges of the space. It's weird to watch properties that weathered and survived the "moral majority" censorship of the late 20th century cave with zero resistance to the new millennium's church ladies sensitivity readers. You could kill children in the original Fallout. Warhammer 40k was not PG-13. It used to be okay for something to not be for you.

Maybe it's different in the UK where GW is based and Warhammer stores themselves have a notable retail presence alongside independent stores that sell it, but I'm pretty sure Warhammer has always been PG-13, if not marketed even younger. Sure, it's stuck in a weird place where it has to combine an ultra-violent and occasionally horny setting with that, but the sales pitch to parents has always been something like: Here's a hobby that appeals to boys which is indoors, quiet, creative, doesn't involve screens, and requires some mathematics. Loiter in one of their stores for long enough and you will hear something like that pitch being given to some parents by the staff. Maybe even "like cooler airfix" (though that's so old a reference that it might only work for grandparents now). More formally, there's also this.

As an aside, I think their failure to offer brush-on primer even though it would be worse than spray primer is a mistake in this context. Sales of aerosol paints are age-restricted here. Sure, their parents can buy it, but I think some fraction of them will refuse because of the association with graffiti and hooliganism.

The "if not marketed even younger" image is the box of MB Games' 1990 Space Crusade - which alongside OG Heroquest was a deliberate (and not repeated) attempt to extend the Warhammer IP to mass-market board games (MB was already a Hasbro subsidiary by 1990) through a licensing deal. So it was deliberately targetting an audience that was less geeky than the core Warhammer audience, as well as younger. The aesthetic of the box art is consistent with other MB Games of that era.

GW did a similar deal with Fantasy Flight which lasted from 2008-17, but given Fantasy Flight's business model that was an attempt to broaden their reach within their core ubergeek audience.

GW still does smaller box games that are sold through Target, but you are right that they're no longer aiming for a younger audience with those. But if we take the strongest possible interpretation of this, then contrary to the comment I was responding to, GW has actually narrowed the demographic it sells to, not broadened it.

This is definitely something I've seen in Warhamer stores in the UK - I've seen mothers come into those stories with their young sons, and the staff simultaneously try to pitch it to the young boys as something cool and exciting, and to the parents as something that's creative, healthy, and so on.

They were going for something like this - which looks lame to teenage boys, but that is definitely how you would sell Warhammer to parents.

always been

...

doesn't involve screens

I'm thinking about a timeline that reaches back quite a bit earlier than widespread parental concern over screen time (other than television). Many figures do not rate "PG-13," though of course in the late 1980s the UK had "Page 3" and the U.S. was often portrayed by its internal critics as quaint and backward in its insistence on stuff like sexualizing breasts, so maybe things really were/are just different across the pond.

Of course, "get 'em hooked young" has been part of their marketing approach for a long time, too; as with the Japanese pulling cross imagery out of video games in that era, "just don't mention Slaanesh" is a pretty low bar. But woke capital seems to have accomplished what church ladies couldn't, as these days it seems like the true Emperor of Mankind is the diversity consultant heading up HR.

Reminds me of this old warhammer ad. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=du0emDgJ-L4&pp=ygUYd2FyaGFtbWVyIHR2IGNvbW1lcmNpYWwg

Go back far enough and the screens of concern would have indeed meant TV. But by the 'awokening', phone and computer screen time would be the concern. Either way, pg-13 was already a Warhammer thing long before 2014.

It used to be okay for something to not be for you.

It pains me that this is such a lost thing nowadays. There's nothing wrong with things that don't appeal to everybody! In fact, I would go so far as to say that's what makes life interesting - we can each be into different things that others would find unbearable, and we are better off for it because each of us is happier than with something that tried to appeal to everyone at once. But for some reason, that's now treated like it's morally abhorrent.

Also, maybe it's just my skewed perspective but it seems like the actual rule is even worse than "we must water everything down for everyone". It seems to be only the things that nerdy men enjoy which get this treatment. Board games have to be PC, video games must remove any trace of sex appeal because that scares off women, programming must be packed full of diversity statements and codes of conduct, etc. But nobody expects the local crochet club to change to appeal to men, etc. Basically, it feels like society kicked nerds out in the 80s, we went "ok whatever we're going to do our own thing", and now 40 years later the bullies are back to kick us out of the communities we built as a refuge from them in the first place. It really grates.

Obligatory Degradation of a Fanbase/Hobby.

Basically, it feels like society kicked nerds out in the 80s, we went "ok whatever we're going to do our own thing", and now 40 years later the bullies are back to kick us out of the communities we built as a refuge from them in the first place. It really grates.

This is a startlingly accurate summary of the last 25 years of my life.

The problem with this argument is if everybody was actually on your side in nerdy spaces in the first place. There were plenty of people who wanted to kick you out from the jump.

Again, I've made this analogy before, but in 1997, if among your friend group, one of the guys in your local area that is into anime, Warhammer, Doctor Who, or whatever thing you're deeply into is kind of off, occcasionally says cring things or whatever, you may put up with it, because that's the only option you have. But, this did make a current brand of nerd think they had more support than they actually did.

But, in 2024, you don't have to deal with that guy anymore, and thanks to the increased popularity of nerdy things in general, there are plenty of people with more normal views on stuff.

If the option is somebody who might know less about cool thing y you're into, but also doesn't complain there are now non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing, a lot of people are going to side with the person who knows less because they're less annoying to be around, even if you don't care one way or another.

I'd also argue video games are part of the capitalist system, while crochet groups really aren't, even though there have been rows about crochets involving race. But yes, it turns out people who own businesses want to make more money, and they'll drop their appeal to males 18-34, if it'll help them also win over older males and women.

I think a big thing your side doesn't get is the actual reason for the desexualization of games is actually less evil SJW's, but the fact that programmers, engineers, and actual gamers are getting older, having kids, and it's far more defensible to a wife to be playing a game on the lbig living room TV with characters that look like the modern Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, or whatever the game people have determined is full of 'ugly' people, as opposed to the polygons with boobs of the late 90's.

Ironically, I would compare this to a refugee situation, where refugees sometimes put up with extremist or less than fantastic parts of their refugee community because they all have to stand together. Well, some of the refugees found a new country and they have to follow certain rules and stop saying certain things and don't find that a problem, while there's a smaller group that wants to hold on to outdated traditions because that's the way it was.

  • -19

But yes, it turns out people who own businesses want to make more money, and they'll drop their appeal to males 18-34, if it'll help them also win over older males and women.

The word "if" is doing a lot of work here, what with the corpses of Star Wars, Marvel, etc. smoldering in the background. Has this idea ever worked out?

Meanwhile, you could just make the fucking Barbie movie and get all the wimminz' moneys without pissing on your other properties. God forbid you make a distinct product that appeals to ladies specifically instead of flattening your other golden geese with a rolling pin.

Part of Disney's problem in particular is that the company is just so gay now that it has a lesbian activist's idea of what women want, and it just doesn't comport with reality. Like Wonder Woman, with her bare shoulders and hunky boyfriend, made money in her first movie while drawing a substantial female audience. Then Disney comes along and says "Well if they liked that then they'll love bitchfaced pseudo-lesbians in onesies!" and The Marvels turns out to be a humiliating bomb.

If Disney were to remake Aliens, Newt would be right out, because a woman being motivated by maternal instinct is patriarchy or something. Ripley would be a gay-coded obnoxious know-it-all whose biggest problem is men telling her to smile more. It would flop horribly and we'd have to read a bunch of clickbait about how sexist everyone is for not giving a shit about it.

In any case, they're learning whether they like it or not. There'll never be another The Marvels. Deadpool/Wolverine is about to come out and make a billion dollars and blow the "superhero fatigue" excuse out of the water, too.

The idea there wasn't big political entryism leading to this change is easily refuted nonsense.

If it were true, then the current political overlords wouldn't be endlessly trying to denounce the fathers of the hobby. You can't claim to always have been a part of this and want to kick Gary Gygax and his friends out of D&D. It doesn't make sense on the face of it.

The smarter adaptation to this argument is to lie about history, like the scholars now claiming Catholic Tolkien was just fine with LGBTQ actually, but it too is transparent nonsense that people only say because they have to justify their imperium.

I've seen colonizers with more respect for the cultures they subdued than this vile usurpation.

scholars now claiming Catholic Tolkien was just fine with LGBTQ actually

Please, please say you made this up just for rhetorical effect. I think I might have an aneurysm if that is indeed a real thing people are claiming about Tolkien.

Gentleman, it is with great sadness to inform you that...Tolkien Society

https://archive.is/LvLTa

Archive link to the papers of the summer seminar. Corruption from start to finish.

Oh dear. That's really dumb. It really makes one wonder about what's wrong with some people, that they can't envision two people being close without romantic or sexual interest in each other.

there are plenty of people with more normal views on stuff.

Those "normal views" being insane fringe leftism that the exact same people would have considered ridiculous only a few years ago doesn't give you pause? At all? No introspection whatsoever?

If the option is somebody who might know less about cool thing y you're into, but also doesn't complain there are now non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing, a lot of people are going to side with the person who knows less because they're less annoying to be around, even if you don't care one way or another.

This doesn't really track, because if you don't care one way or another, then it'd make more sense to find the annoyance in the people complaining more, more loudly, more violently, more disruptively, etc, and the amount of extraneous noise and controversy created by people complaining the exact opposite - that there aren't enough non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing - is about an order of magnitude greater. If one is less bothered by calls for this ideology than against it, then that would mean that they certainly do care one way or another.

I'd also note that the description of these types of people "complain[ing] there are now non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing" is highly uncharitable at best and just downright strawmanning at worst.

I think a big thing your side doesn't get is the actual reason for the desexualization of games is actually less evil SJW's, but the fact that programmers, engineers, and actual gamers are getting older, having kids, and it's far more defensible to a wife to be playing a game on the lbig living room TV with characters that look like the modern Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, or whatever the game people have determined is full of 'ugly' people, as opposed to the polygons with boobs of the late 90's.

This also doesn't track for a few reasons. One big one is the fact that the very idea that it's more defensible to a wife to have the modern visuals versus polygons with boobs of the late 90s on the big living room TV is an ideological one. To some extent, what visceral reaction someone has is outside of ideology, but deciding whether or not to submit to that visceral reaction certainly is within ideology. This was one of the core arguments in the fight for gay marriage in the 00s - some attempt was made to convince people just not to find the idea of gay men viscerally disgusting, but the larger point was made that even if you do find them gross, this should play no part in the way you treat them. If there was some movement to get rid of gay men in media because it's just far more defensible to display non-gay men on the big TV due to people tending to just find gay men gross (whether or not this is actually true isn't relevant), most people would recognize that this would be ideologues pushing forward their ideology.

And speaking of movements, another big issue here is that we do have explicitly ideological movements that explicitly call for the kinds of changes we're talking about, with self-proclaimed examples of changes made explicitly for hewing to the ideology. This doesn't mean literally every last case of these types of changes is ideologically motivated, but it certainly points in that direction generally.

And the types of changes we see are consistent with the explicit goals of the movement and not so much with just wanting to put more defensible stuff on the big screen (which, again, would still be due to ideologues pushing their ideology). If the motivation were just that, we'd expect to see changes generally limited to taking costumes from stripper-level to, I don't know, something like dinner party-level. Maybe make some armor more properly covering. But we're not limited to just that, including androgyni-fying women and adding racial/sexual-orientation diversity. "Defensible on the TV" can somewhat track for jiggle physics on women wearing stripper outfits (again, still ideological), but really, not at all for having characters that aren't sufficiently diverse in a racial/sexual-orientation dimension. That's the kind of thing that's barely even noticeable to a typical viewer, and the ones who do notice it almost always tend to do so for ideological reasons (the very idea that there's something to notice there is, in itself, ideological, of course).

Furthermore, all this taking place in the context of the general increased accessibility of media that, in the past, used to be considered inappropriate makes it rather doubtful that this particular case of media transformation is driven by some secular desire to avoid what's inappropriate to show on the big TV. Often, the very same individuals who call for putting less-sexy women in games are also the ones who call for exposing kids, wives, and other general laypeople to media that's even more sexually provocative than a sexy woman jiggling around in a stripper outfit. So the push for these changes is primarily a push for changing what people do and don't consider appropriate to see on the big living room TV - which is almost explicitly a goal openly espoused by a massive ideological movement right now (and has been for, well, I'd guess longer than I've been alive). Given all that, the idea that these changes aren't being driven by ideologues (who have openly said that they want to cause the types of changes that we're talking about now) but rather by individuals making decisions about the type of media they themselves would feel comfortable showing to others just doesn't hold water.

The causal connection between "type of game devs would feel comfortable showing on their living room TV" and "type of game devs would want to make" is also something that seems to have greatly weakened since the 90s as well. Because of the more niche, less lucrative nature of the industry in the 90s, dev teams tended to be small enough that you could believe that the main decisionmakers in major titles were ones who actually enjoyed those games and were working towards one that they would want to play. Today, due to how much those things have changed, the executives making these decisions have other priorities they have to meet. One would normally think that the overriding priority would be profit, but other entertainment media, namely movies and TV, have shown that ideology is an even more pleasurable drug than money to plenty of executives.

Exactly so. See the press eg. lambasting Stellar Blade while being ecstatic about very detailed gay sex and fucking bears in Baldur's Gate 3. The common denominator in the whole thing is that the activists are deeply against anything pleasing to heterosexual men.

It's the same sort of thing where if you track the various forms of cultural leftism for the last few decades, the common thread in all is that normal, European men and their culture are Bad and should be done away with. You won't find a single iteration with normal white men not at the bottom of the totem pole and at blame for all of society's ills.

This is the first I’ve heard of stellar blade. I guess since I don’t own a PlayStation?

I was paying attention before BG3 came out. They’d already built up a lot of more normal hype. Sequel to a long-neglected franchise, popular AA developer, good teasers…then they had that livestream.

Which of those apply to stellar blade?

But yes, it turns out people who own businesses want to make more money, and they'll drop their appeal to males 18-34, if it'll help them also win over older males and women.

I disagree with most of your assessment because it simply does not track my own experiences--but this particular sentence did catch my attention. I was recently reading this Atlantic article about how Boeing became such a terrible company. The complete picture is of course complicated, but a quick-and-dirty version goes like this: once upon a time, Boeing made money by making airplanes. Over time, they did less and less actual making of airplanes and more and more putting their stamp on airplanes that were mostly made by other companies. By outsourcing this work, Boeing was able to increase its profits! But over time, this resulted in an "airplane company" that could not rightly be said to understand airplane-making in the way it once had.

I see this sort of thing all over the place. Amazon was a fantastic bookstore. Then, it became a remarkable everything-catalog. Now, it is a kind of shitty logistics company with a lumbering stranglehold on a couple of important channels of commerce. Each step down the path was a step toward greater profitability, but also a step toward enshittification.

The enshittification of geek culture is probably not entirely attributable to the Great Awokening--personally, I suspect that bad copyright law plays a bigger role than is ordinarily appreciated, as "control" over "key properties" comes to trump creativity and risk and so forth. But as I noted in another comment--"It used to be okay for something to not be for you." That is not something today's marketers seem to understand, or agree with. Everything has to be for everyone (except, maybe, straight white men). But even from a capitalistic perspective this is probably an actual mistake; short term, you might think "I want everyone to like this and buy it, because that will maximize profits" but long term you just end up with shitty planes literally falling apart in the sky--and whatever the cultural equivalent of that is.

Again, I've made this analogy before, but in 1997, if among your friend group, one of the guys in your local area that is into anime, Warhammer, Doctor Who, or whatever thing you're deeply into is kind of off, occcasionally says cring things or whatever, you may put up with it, because that's the only option you have. But, this did make a current brand of nerd think they had more support than they actually did.

But, in 2024, you don't have to deal with that guy anymore

Just a quick sanity check - do you think there were absolutely no changes in the sphere of nerdy-left beliefs, and thus in what is considered cringe, between 1997 and 2024? The fault lies 100% on the guy that got kicked out?

I think to be a “nerd” in the past required a commitment that served as an effective barrier to entry that allowed the social misfits the ability to build a culture around weird stuff that doesn’t really work anymore. To be an anime fan before Crunchyroll required learning to stream from the web, likely learning Japanese to dub or sub them for the community if not simply to watch the show itself. If you wanted to be a super fan of a show, you had to find that trivia and memorize it. That doesn’t exist now because nerd media and hobbies are normal now and Nerds in the old school sense are too weird to be tolerated by the normies that now dominate those things.

I don’t count most fandoms as nerdy in the 21st century as truly nerdy. It’s mainstream now and trying to compare the fandoms of the 21st century to nerd culture from the 1990s. A niche interest naturally changes upon entering the mainstream.

That's a good point. Even with politics out of the picture, nerdy spaces are fundamentally different in that way, and I remember that particular feature of them being directly attacked as "gatekeeping".

I mean, yes, there has been social change, but the vast majority of that has been positive in my view, and in the view of the vast majority of people. It's up to those guys to determine if their deepest worry is about the gender or race of their favorite superheroes or the average bust size of the women in video games or whatever is proof that SJW's have taken over. I truly do think 'the SJW's have ruined everything' types do really overrate how much everybody in nerd culture was really on their side, as opposed to people who weren't opposed to the nerd culture of 1994, but also aren't opposed to the nerd culture of 2024.

If your deepest view is culture was great in 1995 and everything was fine, yeah, you're going to be left behind, just like if you're belief that culture was great in 1970, even in 1995, you'd be considered an out of touch old guy that's being passed by. 1995 is actually a long time ago now, when it comes to culture.

I've also made this point before - in 1994, if two nerdy (likely) white dudes are having a political argument, they probably don't have too deep a connection to many of the political arguments, even if they have different views on something. On the other hand in 2024, the left-leaning person is far more likely to have non-white people, LGBT, or other groups that are effected by conservative policies, so it's not a shock that now they have a closer relationship with those folks, they're less likely to be seen as just arguments.

Like, why do I want to be personally friendly with people who want to make the lives of my other friends worse? I'm fair about this - I don't expect somebody whose pro-life, anti-transgender rights, or super anti-immigration whatever to be my friend if they deeply care about those issues.

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... I'm a bi furry, so I get what you're coming from. 'Ew, gay' wasn't just a joke limited to samef**s on 4chan, but a mainstay both in and outside of fandom spaces, tolerated in schools, and something I got from even my own family. I was a furry before SomethingAwful discovered The Easiest Target, and despite how much worse it got, it wasn't great before that.

But I also don't think it's terribly honest to compare that to a 'deepest worry' as the 'average bust size of the women in video games'. In tabletop, we're not just seeing people try to establish XX-phenotype'd space marines -- for screw over the lore or themes of 40k, it's not like the non-woke behavior from Games Workshop has been slow to do the same problems either. We just had a recent D&D history that couldn't hold its fire on calling its original authors every type of intentional evil under the sun, while people start reading entrails of games they've disemboweled for signs of The Dreaded Enemy. But those aren't concrete.

In literature, Correia's rant argument stands on its own, and there's been a prolonged campaign to try to get Sanderson, and then there's Mercedes Lackey. For video games, I'll point again to a guy getting driven of an open-source project he's run for more than a decade, in part by threats at his co-contributors' employment if he didn't step down, because he made rude comments about a (trans) spree shooter.

Nor are these rules that 'just' impact the big-names.

And I think that's kinda a distraction. The argument for against using 'gay' as an insult wasn't "we're gonna do it to 'straight white male', and it'll be fair, then". The argument for having options for a female character other than 'tits out McGee' or 'fridged' wasn't to make the only acceptable character archetype variations on Velma from Scooby Doo. I can (and have) made the argument that this was in part for the benefit of many of the people the LGBT and woke movements are themselves claiming to protect, jettisoned in favor of a world of bubble wrap.

But even that's a distraction: this retreat is bad not just because it hurts the subaltern, or betrays its own promises, but because it is wrong at its core, and to all it impacts.

Like, why do I want to be personally friendly with people who want to make the lives of my other friends worse? I'm fair about this - I don't expect somebody whose pro-life, anti-transgender rights, or super anti-immigration whatever to be my friend if they deeply care about those issues.

I think it's worth noting that if you want to drink beer and talk sports with these people, they're generally more than happy to stick to sports(/barbecue tips/home maintenance tips), and in fact one of their bigger complaints is "why do these people insist on making a friendly conversation political when it's obvious the group disagrees?"

On the other hand in 2024, the left-leaning person is far more likely to have non-white people, LGBT, or other groups that are effected by conservative policies, so it's not a shock that now they have a closer relationship with those folks, they're less likely to be seen as just arguments.

Like, why do I want to be personally friendly with people who want to make the lives of my other friends worse?

This flows both ways. Politics was interested in me personally in 2020 in a way that it wasn't before, and also in a way that disproportionately affected nerdy activities like board gaming. Why would I want to be friends with people who want to make the lives of myself and my other friends worse by supporting lockdowns, which were far more egregious than the average social conservative's demands not least because it also involves partially criminalizing homosexuality anyway? Well, it turns out that I don't really have a choice, because 90% of the people around me want to make my life worse, and the option to join a gaming community with a consensus that opposes lockdowns doesn't exist.

Am I'm banging my usual drum again? Yes. But there's a point: You've given no reason why board games should have gone left to protect LGBT friends who suffered from conservative policies, instead of going right to protect the LGBT friends (hello) who suffered from progressive policies. To go even further, the entire nerdy ecosystem depends on capitalism, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly to function. It also has a bit of an obsession with everything military. All things that have (for one reason or another) clustered into Conservatism. If nerdiness is going to have a political slant, why is that slant not for it's natural ally? If anyone's going to get politically purged, then why not the Communists whose political ambitions are mostly incompatible with the continued existence of these nerdy activities?

Is that a rhetorical question, or do you really not understand why a ban on homosexuality qua homosexuality is taken more personally by a leftist than a ban on homosexual sex by way of banning all assembly of non-household-members, regardless of sexuality or indeed the intent to have sex, with a purpose that doesn't stem from decrying them besides?

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All you young'uns talking about gaming in the 90s like those were Ye Olden Days making me feel so old...

Look, I see your side and @ArjinFerman's a little. I think the anti-woke types do underestimate how shitty things could be in the 80s and 90s. I remember taking a couple of female friends to a con (yes, female gamers existed back then!) and first thing we were treated to was a table of young men loudly talking about using mind control to make the princess give them all blow jobs... They thought this was hilarious. Yes, that's a real incident, not something I made up /r/thathappened-style, and I saw a lot of that sort of thing. The looks on my friends' faces were what you'd expect.

Today, if you pulled that at a con, you'd probably get kicked out, and I think that's a good thing. Keep your juvenile cringe sex fantasies out of public spaces.

That said - you are also overstating how "bad" things were "back then." Most gamers, even straight white male gamers, were liberal and/or accepting, off-color blowjob jokes notwithstanding. Things weren't "fine," maybe, but people were not actively trying to keep girls and POC out of gaming (quite the opposite!). You are also understating how bad things have become for those of us who used to be on the liberal and tolerant side since.

And this whole argument that "straight white guys can talk calmly about politics and tolerate people with different views because it doesn't actually threaten them" just infuriates me. Like yes, politics is serious. But stop catastrophizing every damn political difference as an existential threat. That's how we got to where anything less than 100% validation of trans people is "wanting a trans genocide," and people who have qualms about abortion - any qualms! - "want to take away women's bodily autonomy."

I am unironically reminded of this reddit post I just read today. (tldr a woman who's been in a "mixed political marriage" for years is now contemplating divorcing her very good husband who is a good father to their children because he will probably vote for Trump). Now even granting that the post itself is very likely made-up ragebait, it's not the first time I've seen sentiments like that, and if you read the comments, well, the vast majority are basically affirming her decision to divorce her loving husband and become a struggling single mother with a special needs child because her husband "is literally aiding fascism and doesn't consider her or her daughters human."

Ok I know I’m probably falling for bait but holy smokes that reddit post is mind-boggling.

They have two notions that cannot both be true: A) My husband is a good person, B) All Trump supporters are bad people. It just seems so backwards to conclude: Therefore my husband is a bad person. Can’t they see it would be more reasonable to break the other proposition and conclude that not all Trump supporters are bad people? They are trusting Twitter/Reddit over their own experience with the guy? Gosh I need to stop reading this stuff or I’ll go crazy

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They thought this was hilarious. Yes, that's a real incident, not something I made up /r/thathappened-style, and I saw a lot of that sort of thing. The looks on my friends' faces were what you'd expect.

I might need to walk back the thing about gender-blindness being a good idea (as I explicitly rejected it recently), but in my defense, the idea that men and women are literally the same was the assumption of those times, and it was promoted by feminists. And in defense of these guys, under that assumption, that's a pretty tame and harmless joke.

I think the anti-woke types do underestimate how shitty things could be in the 80s and 90s.

That fact that you are also boiling my views down "everything was great back then" is even more frustrating than the fact that he was doing it.

I mean, yes, there has been social change, but the vast majority of that has been positive in my view, and in the view of the vast majority of people.

Citation very, very badly needed. With all due respect, I think you're completely out of touch with what actual nerds (as opposed to the bullies colonizing nerd spaces) think. Apart from vocal progressives in Extremely Online forums, I have never encountered nerds who think that the invasion of politics (left wing or otherwise) into their beloved activities is a good thing.

Like, why do I want to be personally friendly with people who want to make the lives of my other friends worse?

For one thing, because you're wrong and approximately nobody wants to make the lives of your other friends worse. If you can't see that, then you need to take a step back (many steps back) and learn to view things from your opponents' perspective rather than your own.

For another thing, because that is how society works. We all have things we disagree strongly with each other on. Having a functional human civilization requires that we live and let live as much as we can. And sure, kicking people out of your hobbies based on your political disagreements does not by itself destroy that social contract. But it does undermine it, and like clockwork the illiberal attitudes of "let's kick the baddies out of our social club" turns into "let's kick the baddies out of good jobs" turns into "let's kick the baddies out of society altogether". It's important to fight this sort of toxic thinking on the small scale before people start to apply it on the larger scales.

I'm going to tap gattsuru's sign here. This is what they are under the mask; Outlaw83 is doing you the favor of taking it off. They want to crush you. They want you out of society, or at the very least on some ignorable margin. This is how society works... for them. There's no need for them to tolerate disagreement if they can simply boot out anyone who disagrees. Yes, it's a very illiberal attitude... but they're not liberals.

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[A]proximately nobody wants to make the lives of your other friends worse.

Prefacing this response by stating that I am on the side of Team Nerd rather than that of your interlocutor: this statement in particular seems false. In particular, it seems false in a quokkic, mistake-theorist’s way. There are absolutely many right-wing nerds who want to make e.g trans people’s lives worse. For example, when a poster suspected of being trans on 4chan is met with countless replies of “you will never be a woman”, I doubt that those replies’ authors are not intending to cause pain. Granted, one can say that this is a defensive reaction to an SJW takeover of nerd hobbies—hence that old “why did you make us do this? We just wanted to play video games” image. But if that’s the case, then this is just arguing that the conflict is justified instead of arguing that there is no conflict.

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I mean, yes, there has been social change, but the vast majority of that has been positive in my view,

Your previous argument was basically "we didn't change, we always wanted to get rid of you, we were just stuck with you, and now we're not". If there was change, that argument is fudamentally false, even if you consider the change to be good.

If your deepest view is culture was great in 1995 and everything was fine, yeah, you're going to be left behind

What if your deepest view isn't that everything was fine, but we had some good aspirational principles like freedom of speech, color / gender blindness, and meritocracy, and then those principles were explicitly rejected as something wrong to aspire to, and not just something we failed to achieve yet?

I am willing to extend someone enough charity to accept that "Pro-Palestine" does not necessarily mean "Anti-Israel" (in the sense of "wants Israel destroyed'),

His wasn't an pin in the shape of watermelon slice, but a pin shaped like a map of Israel with Gaza and West Bank coloured as a watermelon. The former can be taken to not be antizionist, the later can not. It is a symbol of a one state (Palestine) solution.

I am willing to extend someone enough charity to accept that “Pro-Palestine” does not necessarily mean “Anti-Israel” (in the sense of “wants Israel destroyed”)

I’d agree if the pin were just a generic watermelon or flag. But given its shape, it’s hard to make that argument. The pin in question is essentially the Middle Eastern equivalent of this image. Wouldn’t you characterize someone wearing that design as “anti-Taiwan”?

Ugh, half the posts in the /r/boardgames thread are deleted by the mods (and the thread now locked).

Unfortunately, /r/boardgames is a cesspool and has been for years at this point. I stopped visiting because I was sick and tired of reading people's political opinions in a forum which is ostensibly about board games.

Me too. For a time I tried to write a board gaming blog, and it used to get a lot of traffic when I'd post it to reddit. But eventually the politics of the sub just crowded me out. Especially after the mods themselves started parroting lines like "Everything is political" when I complained that I just wanted to enjoy some escapism. And this was back when people were arguing over Days of Wonder removing slaves from Five Tribes (still have my copy with slave cards), or when a game I backed on Kickstarter, Draco Magi, had it's cover artwork censored to make the woman on it less "sexualized". I think the final straw was when Shut Up & Sit Down posted this terrifyingly Orwellian review of Cards Against Humanity essentially stating it was a terrible game because it caused you to have politically incorrect thoughts, and people should not play it to avoid accidental thought crimes. This point of view was not appreciated.

Things have gotten so much worse since then.

An Elizabeth Hargrave rant wells within me.

That said, Cards Against Humanity is a terrible game that's funny once and then just becomes endless dick jokes.

An Elizabeth Hargrave rant wells within me.

Do tell? I've been significantly checked out of the hobby. Just broke my heart when GMTGames, one of my last bastions of male, pale and stale that I enjoy so much, cancelled Scramble for Africa in response to massive backlash around it's "colonizing" themes. I heard a smidgen about Wingspan winning all the awards, and some accusations of favoritism because it was designed by a woman. But nothing that implies the sorts of hysterical cancellation games or vote rigging that occurs during say, the Hugo Awards.

That said, Cards Against Humanity is a terrible game that's funny once and then just becomes endless dick jokes.

Yeah, not liking Cards Against Humanity because it gets boring is fine. Because it does. Not liking Cards Against Humanity because it goes against The Ministry of Truth... that's a whole other things. Leave it to a Brit to treat 1984 like a manual.

I personally think Wingspan is an over-complicated and half-baked game that is highly overrated precisely because it's designed by a woman who's a loud feminist in the game designer space.

However, Elizabeth Hargrave also has gone on repeated crusades against Gamelyn Games (publishers of the Tiny Epic series) because of their "objectification of women." I.e., women are too pretty. Now normally when I see these sorts of complaints, I expect to see chainmail bikinis or women in obvious sexual poses - you know, stuff that is clearly for the "male gaze" and whether or not you think that's a bad thing, you can't deny that that's what it is. But all the examples Hargrave has ever complained about were pictures where the men were also beefcakey, and the women were not obviously "sexualized," just... you know, a little too pretty, a little too hot.

I struggle to suppress uncharitable thoughts about women who resent the existence of more attractive women and reminders that men indeed find such women attractive.

Hargrave has of course also gone on rants about "underrepresentation of women" in game design (i.e., not winning enough awards), which almost got Ryan Dancy, the CEO of Alderac cooked when he made the mistake of trying to respond with the "pipeline" argument and dared to say something about women not taking criticism very well. (Hargrave did not take the criticism very well. Dancy duly groveled and apologized.)

Well, googling what she looks like more or less perfectly matched what I imagined from her politics. So I guess there is that.

Reminds me of Charlize Theron.... in Monster. That hairline in particular made me wonder if we were talking about an actual woman at all, or a person who went the male pattern baldness to estrogen route you start to see more often.

But nobody ever praised board gamer for their looks. Or smell. So you can't say she doesn't look the part.

Man, now I wonder, can you still chew the body odor at Gencon?

I in no way want to endorse scolds going on moral crusades, but I do think that the boobs+butt torso twist pose is stupid, and that mage is very clearly drawn in said pose.

Also, agreed on wingspan.

Eh, I'll give you the boobs+butt torso twist being a very comic book pose, and the other chick is showing a lot of cleavage, but I maintain that standing next to a half-naked roided axeman, you've basically got highly unrealistic power fantasy body types.

I can't find the other one she complained about, but it was a different game where they clearly tried to "do better" with a female archer on the cover in a more realistic archer pose, but Hargrave still found her objectionable because her butt was too round and she was pretty.

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Days of Wonder removing slaves from Five Tribes (still have my copy with slave cards)

If I’m buying off eBay how do I know which edition has the slave cards intact?

No clue, because even if someone got the original edition, if they were conformist enough Days of Wonder allowed them to request updated game components with the Arabic slave trade expunged.

Ugh, there are few ideas I hate more than the "everything is political" mantra. I know exactly what you mean because I saw some of the same behavior. People weren't allowed to push back on politics and say "I just want to enjoy my leisure activity in peace", they were expected to just shut up and let the politics bullies ruin their fun. I think that insisting that everything is political is the most toxic idea I've seen in any sort of hobbyist space, bar none. And I mean bar none - I think that even something like outright racism (ugly as it is) ruins hobbies less than people trying to make it into their activism soapbox.

I think the final straw was when Shut Up & Sit Down posted this terrifyingly Orwellian review of Cards Against Humanity...

That's so unsurprising to me that it hurts a bit. Those guys are absolutely insufferable. I guess it's not shocking, because it's people who came from Rock, Paper Shotgun which was itself insufferable for injecting politics into everything. The moment when I realized I needed to stop listening to SU&SD was when they had a review of the game Istanbul, where they spent a significant amount of time complaining about Orientalism or something. And of course, when people on /r/boardgames pointed out "this is really obnoxious", they got told off for it.

I have a half-baked theory- I think that board games tend to be nerdy (of course) but also relatively low-stress, and low-competitive. I know there are exceptions, like professional chess, but for the most part it's a pretty relaxed hobby. The result is a group that isn't fierce enough to resist takeover from the political entryists.

And, Fundamentally, the hobby still has a chip on its shoulder when it comes to being actually inclusive (i.e., bringing in non-nerds and especially women). Board games are only fun if you have other people to play with, so there's going to be a push to support whatever "current thing" is.

yeah, you can't just chill at home enjoying a board game by yourself. You need other people, and usually a specific number of very dedicated gamers to play the more complicated games. Putting together a group of exactly 7 people to play a multi-hour game of Diplomacy is something of a game in itself, so you really have to work at it and bring in anyone you can get sometimes, even if they're kinda toxic or bad at the game.

I suppose in this case I would say that it seems like the political symbol in question "deliberately skirts the border of comprehensibility."

Do you think so? I would say that the meaning is pretty comprehensible to both his allies and enemies even if it's obscure to neutral bystanders that aren't obsessive weirdos about things happening thousands of miles away. As one of the obsessive weirdos, I would certainly interpret the natural meaning as "this whole thing belongs to Palestine".

I would say that the meaning is pretty comprehensible to both his allies and enemies

Yes, certainly--but it comes with plausible deniability for those who are not allies or enemies, but merely useful idiots who parrot nice sounding slogans. In the now-locked boardgame subreddit thread, one user says:

Don't tell me it was just something like "to the river to the sea, Palestine will be free". The idea that that's understood as any sort of call to violence is pure fearmongering / gaslighting.

Which is gaslighting! The chant (and graffiti) in Arabic has for decades been "From the river to the sea, Palestine is Islamic/Arab." But people who don't know or appreciate history can say "oh, freedom from the river to the sea, how nice, I'm definitely in favor of that!"

If you know the watermelon represents Palestine (which I did not until just now), it is indeed pretty clear. If you don't, it's "why the hell is this guy wearing a watermelon?" I guess it's a true dog whistle.

I actually previously associated it with Green communists. I was amused to find that there is probably a lot of overlap between these people and the Hamas enthusiasts among the Western crowd.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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