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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37167 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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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.

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