I'm curious about the anti-videogame sentiment in the retro era. What were the most notorious cases and key figures in this? When and why did it all start? Was it just typical outrage / shock caused by parents, and subsequently politicians trying to milk it for popularity? Was Mortal Kombat the first big case of this?
I only recall Jack Thompson and Leland Yee (what a name). Yee didn't end well and was yeeted into jail for corruption. Also, Clinton tried it once, bashing on Guilty Gear of all things.
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I've never understood why everyone had a problem with vidya of all things back in the days. Like there are some well-regarded old movies for example that are so vulgar and fricked up I'd rather my kids play Postal and GTA instead of watching them
"But video games are iNteRacTive" was the argument thrown around at the time.
>Alright, son. You've been trained in the ways of MGS all your life. It's time to make history -- take the shot.
>WTF Where's the R1 Button on this thing? Box button -- hello??!
Riiiiight. Because that's what would happen
Stfu ya twatwaffle
In vidya, you are in control of your actions while in movies you are merely watching someone else do it. This is simplified and arguably moronic but I'm sure this is at least partly why video games have been causing controversy.
Also plenty of movies have been controversial too but maybe not to the same extent. Music too. There was that whole association of parents fuming over "inappropriate" music in the 80's.
Remember when there were suppose to be lyrical sheets attached on top of creating that label? Whatever happened to that, I wonder.
it really makes me think that those groups were just there to collect money for themselves by attaching themselves to a popular issue and then going away. sort of like blm. I dont think those groups had a legitimate problem with games or music, since you could just vote with your wallet and not buy them. but collecting money to run a boycott? $$$
It was a new medium. Movies, modern music, and comics were all controversial when they were new as well
People b***hed about movies back when they were new too. And I know some famous director called sound movies a moronic fad because "nobody wants to hear actors talk".
>Clinton tried it once, bashing on Guilty Gear of all things.
Based Clinton
Night Trap was a controversial game also, released the same month as Mortal Kombat.
Man, Jack Thompson. I haven't heard of that guy in ages. What became of him?
The only one I can remember by name was Jack Thompson.
The biggest ones on the news were Mortal Kombat, Carmageddon, and GTA.
I don't recall much fuss about Doom strangely enough, at least in Europe.
>What became of him?
He was disbarred.
Only tangentially related, but there a was an absolutely brilliant troll in the Italian usenet newsgroups in the late 90s that went by the name "Association of Catholic Families Carlo Borromeo", who would write posts against games citing completely invented by very credible US studies and scholars, as well as hilariously literally translated game titles like "Male residente".
The funniest part was that some people took it so seriously that complained to the provider which banned the local server.
>As an adult I realized he was right about a lot of shit
Alright, Jack. Time to go back.
Somebody explained on Ganker once that Pokemon actually does have some specific occult imagery in it (not just ghost Pokemon but stuff like Alakazam) which is why some kids weren't allowed to play it. Same with Digimon which also had bewbs later on
>somebody explained on Ganker once that Pokemon actually does have some specific occult imagery in it
Must've been this guy
?feature=shared
It was before Pokemon Go anon
He probably hated Pokémon before Go came out
People act like this was just an American thing but Joel from Vinesauce is Swedish and he talked about how when he grew up he had to hide Kadabra's existence from his parents because back then most Swedish households were pretty Christian.
Hide it because his parents wouldn't let him play pokemon then, I meant
The grass is greener and all. Japan used to be known as a Mecca for lewd shit but the second conservative interests got in the way it did an immediate 180. One nice thing about the US is that while these things ebb and flow, it's rare for literal laws to get in the way. Government tends to stay out of the entertainment business compared to elsewhere.
>he talked about how when he grew up he had to hide Kadabra's existence from his parents
KEK worthy typo.
>back then most Swedish households were pretty Christian.
The frick? Sweden's been atheist as hell since like the 70s outside of some backwaters in the north and south.
He's from Umea, which is the closest thing to a city in the sticks, so yeah that checks out.
Digimon had sexy women clad in bondage gear as '"monsters'" since the very beginning you zoomoid frick.
>which also had bewbs later on
Angewomon and Lilymon are Genwun poketard
It's the same kind of thought police that used to act like Dungeons & Dragons was satanic.
The same kind of mentality that claimed Rock & Roll was the Devil's music.
The same ilk of person today that doesn't want you to be able to see ample breasts on slender women.
Things like the "Temperance Movement" have been around for a long time and still exist today.
It was a new medium and evolved rapidly. Plus it appealed to mostly kids. We went from Donkey Kong to DOOM in a decade.
People like to dunk on moral guardians but having kids of my own changed my perspective a bit.
Gumbermint and bad faithers were only ever concerned with violent media turning kids (and people, but think of the kids) into killers on top of getting votes based on fear mongering. All violent vidya can ever do to kids is traumatize and mentally scar them depending on their tolerance to whatever levels of violence.
>fear mongering politicians
I would agree that this is the underlying reason for the controversy, it was an easy target as gaming was more unknown in that day and age. Politicians pulled the same trick with comic books before they became mainstream. Having lived through the Jack Thompson era I remember the controversy around GTA being "you can pick up a prostitute then murder her in that game". Funny thing was most kids didn't even know this and would have never tried it in-game without the psycho church moms advertising it for free. After we heard our moms scolding everyone we all had to try it.
>People like to dunk on moral guardians but having kids of my own changed my perspective a bit.
I agree but like, there's a difference between "I won't let my kids play it" and "society can't be allowed to have this".
To be fair to current parents, they're in a bit of a different situation, at least regarding video games. An 8 year old playing the retro Mortal Kombats is very different from an 8 year old playing the not-retro Mortal Kombats. There was no game equivalent to The Last of Us in 1994.
8 year olds aren't interested in The Last of Us.
>There was no game equivalent to The Last of Us in 1994.
That's not a fair argument when that one Japanese sprite game exists where you chase women in order to rape them vs Manhunt levels of violence.
I think Mortal Kombat was always pretty violent in general, especially with blood turned on. Obviously it's a lot more realistic now but compared to Street Fighter or something it was always a lot more graphic. I'll give you The Last of Us though.
I think a small portion of people get ideas from video games but most of it is caused by the person's environment/external forces like being surrounded by crappy people and bad drivers. I don't play many of the gory or violent games but people in real life annoy me more than any video game has.
>Obviously it's a lot more realistic now
did you even play the nukombat? the fatalities are fricking joke and cartoony as all shit. original had that grit that made it realistic
Then maybe don't let your 8 year old play it. And if the argument is, "well they can go to a friend's house and play it", that's the argument people used to have for banning pornography.
Eh, I kinda understand it. Lots of parents today dislike how all-emcompassing social media is in their kids' lives, but they can't just forbid their kids from using it either when all the kids' friends use it and all social communication involves it. Likewise, a kid being banned from playing Doom in 1993 would just play it at his friends' house. When things are that big and everpresent, there's no way to actually shield your kids from it without shutting them off from society.
Have the parents tried talking to their kids about the media they consume instead of letting it do the parenting for them?
I mean you have kids during the lootbox/microtransaction era, so I feel like you are correct to be wary of that so it's a little different imo.
id say the start of the mass censorship was from the PMRC and their attempts to censor music and videos.
PMRC and the massive monetary success of their wives-of-DC cabal spawned/inspired the ESRB
so tipper gore
hillary clinton
shit like that
basically exactly who youd fricking expect
They were right tho. Don't sell M rated games to kid
>Don't sell M rated games to kid
There weren't ratings yet, there were no "M rated" games to sell, that's the point.
It started the same way every anti-pop culture mission starts. Old people not liking the kids being into some newfangled shit they don't understand. It happened to Elvis and the Beatles. It happened to the anti-war movement. It happened to television itself and then different generations of television shows within. George H. W. Bush famously said he wants families to be like the Waltons and not the Simpsons. Remember that the Hays Code came around because early movies started to depict some pretty intense stuff for the day. It's always about protecting the youth and society at large, at least that's the stated goal.
It's why I laugh a bit when people look at current anti-whatever trends as if they're a new thing. It's never been a new thing. The players and issues keep changing but it's all the same shit happening. It's cyclical. The 50s were very conservative and then the 60s and 70s rolled around and movies and TV started pushing boundaries again. Then the 80s got conservative again with every TV show finger wagging you about the evils of drugs and gay sex. This lead into the 90s where shows started pushing boundaries again with stuff like Married With Children and the afforementioned Simpsons as well as Nickelodeon everything doing bizarre shit like Ren & Stimpy. We're arguably in a conservative period right now in a sense. There aren't really R rated movies anymore, for example, and a lot of M rated video games, at least anime ones, keep getting censored. This too shall reverse course in due time.
I think it started because boomers who were treated as super special their whole lives and suddenly there is this thing but its absolutely not targeted at them. Now its 1990 or 1991, they have to figure out some excuse not spend money on these new 16 bit systems coming out so the vilification on games from 1990 to 1995 begins.
First I remember a good solid year they had news stories on video games causing epilepsy and how this is a super serious problem.
From around MK1 they started on the violence thing, they tried to drag this story out but after a bit into the ps1 gen no one took that seriously so game were left alone until they could attack the sexual imagery in the 2000s.
I remember one news story after mario 64 came out and had this really old women saying they need to be banned because poor children can't afford the new system, the system wasn't even that expensive at the time.
Main thing I remember is we weren't allowed to bring the video game system to grandma's place during a birthday with the excuse being epilepsy flashing, truth is they probably just didn't want us messing with the tv.
When GTA 1 came out all I saw was one newspaper article saying its violent.
I remember age of empires seemed violent when you killed enemies but it never became a target.
1990s was when violence was dropping rapidly, around this time the news was rife with troubled teens stories but it was false. News was far respectable back but they started sprinkling these hyped stories along with proper news, nowdays all news is just hype stories.
my GTA comment being more the PS2 entries. 1 & 2 weren't that big of a deal honestly since W95 and SEGA were still around.
All generations clash but Boomers and Millennials had a particularly contentious one because of the technology gap. It wasn't just video games. Computers in general were scary to a lot of "grown ups" back then. Which became a problem when the kids actually knew more about shit than their parents. It bred resentment because something would happen to the computer, the parents would blame the kid because "your video games must have broke it", and while the kid knew it was some virus filled email the mom or dad opened the parents were unlikely to listen. There was this weird thing where boomers were parenting based on principles of their youth and had certain expectations, but the world around them that their kids were growing up in sometimes made those practices no longer apply. I had several teachers in the 90s that insisted on really archaic nonsense like hand writing out sentences over and over in #2 pencil for an assignment that had nothing to do with repetition being of value but the teacher started the job in the 60s and so was set in ways that even shit like photocopying was pure sorcery. But even at 10 years old you knew MS Word made such a process meaningless and pure busywork. Being in school in the mid-90s was fricking weird because outside it'd be 1995 but inside it was 1965. At best you had a computer room full of Apple IIs. Will Smith wasn't lying. Parents literally just didn't understand. Video games drew a ton of ire simply because adults had trouble processing why one video game wouldn't work on another machine. They tended to think of it like VHS or cassette tapes. In fact they even called game carts "tapes." And they were used to a tape working on any stereo or VCR regardless of brand. So having that conversation with them that "this is a Nintendo game and that's a Sega oh but then there is a SUPER Nintendo and none of the games work on each other" made them VERY mad.
Some just don't want to get with the times. Either they adapt or get left behind. My Grandma's like that at one-fricking-hundred with phones.
She's slowing down movement-wise, but she ain't dumb and she knows how to use a flip phone well enough since the 2010s, it's just that when we found her another flip phone that'd work by todays standards, with the switch to 5G and all, she's treated it like it was completely alien to her when it quite literally functions the same as the one from a decade ago -- same goes for when replacing her landline phone too -- literally the same phone but new, worked the same way and everything -- totally at a lost with it.
Boomers arent a monolith of course. I know the full range. You get people who totally know what they're doing, people who have no idea what they're doing but simply live without and manage just fine, and others who have no idea how any of it works but still want to use it. The last group is the hardest to help because you have to do weird stuff to satisfy them. Like renaming the browser icon to "Internet" because otherwise they won't know how to access it. Or having to make sure their homepage NEVER changes because if it does they think the Internet stopped working. They'll learn enough to follow repetitive motions but don't really understand how any of it works. So long as they have a script to follow they're good but any deviation means they lose the ability to use the computer at all. It became a problem for me because just being able to field basic issues like just using Task Manager to close a frozen program got me the nebulous reputation as "good with computers" but that meant trying to figure out solutions to problems over the phone with people who lacked the language to describe the issue or understand my instructions. It's actually kind of hard to explain what you're doing to someone who has no context. Its way less an issue today but back in the Windows 98 days? Holy shit. Family members would annihilate their machines by deleting critical files or get a billion malware infections. The silver lining was they rarely had anything important on the computer so worst case I'd do a fresh install and they'd be happy.
tbf, considering the rise in psychiatric issues that stem from the newer generations obsession with awful modern technology (especially gaming wise), is it really no surprise that the earlier generations were insistent on trying to slow things down somewhat? i would bet a lot of them would have been more ok with the gradual switch to the new technology if it was more slowly rolled out and people were properly taught to take care of themselves over it.
hell, that same generation warned us about not uploading your entire identity online because of "stranger danger" and for a while we listened because "ugh, adults amirite", then ignored them, and because of the latter, we're all now feeling the consequences because we thought we all knew better.
What subreddit was this pasted from, again?
>In fact they even called game carts "tapes."
oh shit, so it wasnt only a thing that happened in my country
It wasn't universal but it was one of a handful of very common terms you'd hear. In my adulthood I've developed a bit of sympathy for the adults back then having to navigate something so alien. "That's a Nintendo" "This is a Genesis" "That's a Sega CD, it needs a Genesis to work." For us it came so naturally but it was one of those Bane "I was raised in the dark!" moments. It's not like a lot of this was advertised in adult spaces, either. Most of it was limited to game magazines and store catalogs with only the biggest games getting TV commercials. And even those typically only aired during cartoons and shit. I know my own parents would just repeat to the store clerk what I asked for or just take me to get it myself. I don't know if there's an equivalent thing today. I can't imagine an 8 year old talking to me about something that I have NO fricking idea what it is or how it works. I don't particularly care about YouTube stars like Mr. Beast but I understand it on a conceptual level at least.
Not entirely untrue, but still simplifying and glossing over stuff.
I'm his age and I did not see that very much. That kind of thinking was around here and there, but those people would be thought of as kind of weird, and they weren't the norm.
In fact this thing wasn't the norm in places like the US either, as some people seem to think, generally you had to look in the right parts of the country and the right demographics to find it.
Correct.
Also correct, virtually fricking nobody who was into videogames in any capacity at all came to his defense on really any point besides maybe adhering to age ratings, everyone was comfortable spewing vitriol at him in basically any space online.
There was no 'Jack Internet Defense Force' so to say.
Growing up there, I saw that kind of stuff VERY rarely, at most I saw some parents object to violent imagery at times.
>1990s was when violence was dropping rapidly
tbf a big reason for that was because behind the scenes cartels came in and murdered like 90% of the gangs in the country, so gang murders in the US basically just stopped altogether. Back then the Sinaloa cartel didn't actively cause violence outside of Mexico to people who weren't in their way because they ultimately saw themselves as a business and you don't shit where you eat. The ones who go on murder sprees these days are the ones who didn't really have power until recently and they see violence as just a matter of course.
The censorship happening now is just heterosexual stuff while they put blatant homosexualry in your face.
It's also worth noticing how in the end everything is settled by economic rational (ok, actually it's trivial to note this): I'm a Eurogay and the same shitters who were on the whole "it's corrupting our children" campaign trail when games were still a niche are the same people fighting for breadcrumbs now that vidya has basically eclipsed every other entertainment industry by scale and profitability. E.g. now we have multi-million $$$ research grants for "building a European game-design infrastructure". It's the same people who so valiantly fought against any attempts at building such an infrastructure over the past decades who have now turned into alarmists lamenting that "we are lagging behind in innovation" in computer/vidya game design yadayada. Of course, looking at the rapid pace that computer technology tends to advance at it wouldn't have taken a genius to make some sensible projections in say the early 90's on where vidya might be in 20-30 years and predict their maturity as an entertainment medium and hence their economic potential, but noooo...
if anything vidya causes less violence
hard to be some successful mass murderer if youre just some skinnyfat nerd who plays vidya all day
>b-but muh columbine
crazy that was ever even a consideration. like how many people played doom back then? literally everyone who owned a computer?
and how many turned into spreekillers?
two?
ill take the odds on that
It does seem like there's no correlation between video game violence and real violence. Plenty of other things have WAY more of a link. I know there's an argument that societies with more pornography have less sexual violence. I'm only repeating what I've heard though since I can't be arsed to do the research.
yea theres no way it has anything to do with anything
psychos happened millenia prior to vidya
>crazy that was ever even a consideration. like how many people played doom back then?
Not enough adults for it to be considered "a thing everyone does" by the media. The kind of people that took Doom into consideration didn't play computer games, and largely considered them childrens' toys, which is why it was so controversial that a "childrens' toy" was so violent and gory.
The designated board for contrariansl video game opinions is Ganker. Makes sense you guys would stick up for him. He was known for making unbelievable statements like how Christians shouldn't be suing him because he's Christian.
>Christians shouldn't be suing him because he's Christian
thats fair
making god lawyer up twice for one case
brutal
i member hearing something about rookedilary attending that sega+nintendo meeting back in the day regarding the whole debacle on mortal kombat and age ratings, but i could never find confirmation on it. is there any anon here that would know?
You gonna' explain why you feel this way or just blow your load all over the floor then leave?
>but most of it is caused by the person's environment/external forces
>Stub my toe
>Pic. related
all i recall is that i distinctively remember blacks and wiggers being pretty cool and chill back in the day in school until GTA came around. its like they wanted to use it as vr training ground to become gangsters and criminals but ofc, you get harassed on places like /v if you dare bring it up.
not that such games are sorely to blame, but they certainly help people alleviate "stress" in certain ways. am i supposed to be convinced they don't do the opposite? speedrunners sure as hell don't benefit from being obsessed with vidya imo.
>am i supposed to be convinced they don't do the opposite?
How a game, let alone any form of media, is perceived is solely based on the viewer and if they're insecure enough to base their social standing from it, especially from advertisements, then they've got shit to work with a consoler or in the case with kids, their shit parents.
>I remember one news story after mario 64 came out and had this really old women saying they need to be banned because poor children can't afford the new system
>If I can't afford it, then NO ONE should!
KEK People and their Ivory Tower mentality always seem to think they're invincible making such drastic demands. 9/10 they won't see the light of day if their demands ever go through. "Every light in the sky is a proxy" as one Gankerutist put it when up against a power tripping janny.
>This is my favorite game, that's why I put it next to my face and took a picture
It's funny looking back that people had a meltdown over Mortal Kombat of all things. It's Tom And Jerry tier slapstick.
First off, it was the anti-arcade/pinball movement. Pinball had already developed an association with the hippies and the drug scene that came with them, then the early arcade machines moved out of bars and into the pinball arcades. A lot of parents of that era looked at pinball/arcades as being a place where people wasted money and time, and did a lot of drugs. Half of those parents did exactly that at the pinball arcades 10-20 years prior, so it was a lot of hypocrisy.
The second wave was the anti-NES moral majority movement. Pretty much just a bunch of controlling parents upset their children were doing something they enjoyed that the parent didn't understand, therefor it must be evil. You had Karen's at the local Circuit City grilling the underpaid teen behind the counter about the "violent content" that might be in a game he never played, since they were very concerned about protecting their children while avoiding personally checking out the content their children consumed. Because Mario jumping on and KILLING those turtles was gonna turn Junior into a terrorist.
The third wave was in the early 90's and a direct result of Mortal Kombat being an edgelord gorefest arcade machine that any kid could walk up to. That was the start of clowns like Jack Thompson, and they cried to congress about dem evil videogames, and most politicians were eager to take some pointless action to get more votes. Gaming industry saw this and knew full well it was better to overreact on their own instead of letting the government do anything in any direction, and the ESRB was established.
>anti-pinball movement
ok, I've learned something today. America never ceases to amaze me, people wanted to ban the most unexpected things
Pinball was basically pachinko back in those days, with no flippers (so little skill involved) and prizes/money awarded for hitting certain scores. People wanted it banned because it was literally a form of gambling.
yeah basically what
said. iirc the bans were being considered way after they started becoming skill based, but i'm sure a lot of people still thought of pinball as random luck.
They even treated pinball as a form of gambling because they assumed that you can score high at pinball only by luck and not by skill.
Yeah, the story of how Pinball was banned, and became unbanned in New York is pretty funny.
A guy took it to court after his machines were confiscated, and demonstrated to them right there that he could reliably hit a target, which proved it wasn't just a game of chance.
>Gaming industry saw this and knew full well it was better to overreact on their own instead of letting the government do anything in any direction, and the ESRB was established.
And they still heavy censor video games despite the existence of age rating system, even when said games are M-Rated or 17+ Rated. And shit gets worse and worse with the passing of years. So much for "progress".
when and why did game companies go from telling these activists to frick off and started bending over to them and even getting infiltrated by them?
economic crash of 2008 up to 2013 was when they couldn't maintain that energy and the gates were broken. there was nothing they could do when people were losing their homes and starving en-masse and hoping things would improve with hip-hop now cool and trendy again at the time.
I feel like the financial crash killed creativity way more than 9/11 did. the post-9/11 pre-financial crash era still had a lot of cool and fun media. in a way we STILL haven't recovered from 2008, just added another one on top of it.
it definitely did. if you want to understand where all the modern problems of the world stem from, both socially, creatively and technologically, just go out of your way understanding the general mood in those years and people looking for a way out, and finding out nobody cared about them.
that's where all the problems you're seeing today are coming from, especially in the games industry, but nobody ever wants to talk about it.
yeah I noticed that too even as a 8-9 year old
It's also why the early 7th gen was so awesome (basically 6th gen with better graphics) while the late 7th gen was the soulless globohomosexual crap we have now.
2011-2013 seem to be the most crucial points. games around then looked pretty good but there was a very strange shift that was going on around then, tech-wise too. its almost impossible trying to understand 'what' happened around then. that era in time seems to be weirdly erased mentally for a lot of people, and it ended up determining everything that was to happen that decade. everyone likes to meme about 012 but that was just jokes and gags around then.
yeah, sure, the years between 2001 and 2007 were rough and complex in their own way, but there was still enough freedom in places in the West that the rest of the world wanted to 'be' like because of how unique they were, even though there were still problems taking place. artists had to upgrade, sure, but they still cared about their craft because at least they could still put their food on their table and afford a semi-decent education while still doing a lot of art, even with the weird fashion senses around then.
OP blowing /vr/'s mind with evidence of an actual boomer.
You know that image of the person bent over, face honed in on their tiny smartphone screen? Imagine being a parent and seeing your kid spend 7 hours after school playing Pokemon Blue on his Gameboy. Shit's scary.
Video games were relatively new and therefore scary and bad.
The projection when people talk about boomers is hilarious. “They just think they’re all so special!!!”
They do though. Those "I want to speak to the manager" Karens are not a bunch of Millennials. Self-importance among Millennials and Gen Z manifests in vapid tweets and TikToks, which you can just ignore. Self-importance among Boomers manifests in being a headache to everyone around them in the general public.
Millenials and Gen Z are also the ones people get fired from their jobs for making tweets they find offensive. You aren't better or worse than anyone else.
It is of my opinion, that while they can go too far, "Karens" or at least the demanding retail shopper version of it are a net positive for society. Why? Because when things are not good, they will be the first to say something about it and demand a change. Your older ones DO remember a high trust society where we had a minimum expectation of good customer service.
Things suck and are getting worse. The Karen meme is designed to get YOU to be OK with that and not complain. Oh your doordash driver ate your fries? Better not complain, you don't want to be a KAREN! Is your kid's teacher instilling her insane worldview on your second grader? Can't say anything because that's KAREN behavior!
I don't know what your life is like but if you think Karens are a net positive it must be blessed. Go live in a HOA or even have a busybody neighbor on a regular street and get back to us if you still think that in a year.
Yeah I have lived with an HOA for nearly a decade and they make sure that people don't let their property go to shit and try to limit the number of rentals (which get trashed very quickly) in the neighborhood. I'm fine with them.
Something tells me you're the busybody Karen.
Sorry you live in a shitbox.
Love to see it.
Annoying but still way, way better than dealing with people of crime.
moronic contrarian. youve never worked customer service if you think karens are some kind of canary for sniffing out weakness in the system. people who act like that get worse service and their opinions are ignored
>I've never worked in any capacity
Probably why anon was complaining about homosexuals like you who do no work, just occasionally show up to collect a paycheck and then cry when people don't give a massive tip.
>people who act like that get worse service and their opinions are ignored
Only by snowflakes like you, who are quickly fired, or laid off when your employer goes bust for keeping useless shits on the payroll.
>I've never worked in any capacity
See above, NEET.
You know that the only thing that you people do is annoy and heckle service personnel? You understand that businesses and corpos don't really give a frick about and ignore you almost all the time?
>Things suck and are getting worse. The Karen meme is designed to get YOU to be OK with that and not complain. Oh your doordash driver ate your fries? Better not complain, you don't want to be a KAREN! Is your kid's teacher instilling her insane worldview on your second grader? Can't say anything because that's KAREN behavior!
no it's more like if the employee calls you out for cutting in line then you're a karen if you complain. or if you ask for a really fricked up order and then send it back and claim you never ordered it then you're a karen.
Close. That's just butthole customer stuff. Karen is specifically the bored housewife who looks for a fault to complain about and scream to the manager about to make herself feel better about her empty life. The transaction has finished, and she is still standing in front of your register slowly checking every item on the receipt and then starts screeching about how the price was off by three cents compared to the shelf price posted, then demands to see the manager about how this RUDE EMPLOYEE TRIED TO STEAL FROM ME!!!!! The employee didn't set the price on the shelf or the register, but the Karen wants to take out their frustrations on the minimum wage worker and cause them suffering just for working for the company. If a customer just mentions the price is off, the worker will fix it, there's no need for hysterics. But Karen needs her drama fix.
Despite that one anon thinking Karen is a psy-op to get people adverse to complaining about bad service, Karen is just referring to twats that attack minimum wage workers over things they have no control over. I got an Egg McMuffin the other day, it surprisingly had no egg in it. I took it up to the counter, showed it to the guy working there, and we both had a bit of a laugh about getting an Egg McMuffin and not getting an egg in it. He put another through the system, and I got the product I wanted. Your average customer service worker doesn't care about fixing problems, it's only when you turn into an aggressive twat over something they WANT to fix for you that you become a Karen.
>Karen is specifically the bored housewife
That's where it started, but (the internet being what it is) where we ended up its a term to describe any form of customer service complaint.
Where? Anytime I see anyone post about a "karen", it's always someone screaming over some minor shit. Where is it used to describe ANY customer service complaint?
Like the anon said earlier about how if you complain about how the delivery driver ate your fries you are a "Karen". Originally it was a term to denigrate the drama hound housewife but more often then not I see it used to defend poor employee behavior and performance. The term completely backfired from being used to describe people who abuse customer service employees and the meaning changed to defend employees mistakes or just downright poor behavior. It's used erroneously but that's how the term is used currently.
>more often then not I see it used to defend poor employee behavior and performance.
That's why I'm asking you to SHOW ME, because I only ever see it applied to customers going nuclear and screaming about minor shit or perceived slights.
>SOURCE!? SOURCE!? YOU GOT A SOURCE FOR THAT!?!?!? TRUST THE SCIENCE!!!!!
All I have are anecdotes from the people I've dealt with. I can give you some personal examples.
Got called a "Karen" for complaining that my amazon order was damaged.
Got called a "Karen" for stating that I had not recieved what I ordered at a restaurant.
Got called a "Karen" for complaining that the item I purchased was the wrong color. I ordered Black and I got Blue.
In fact, outside of the internet I've never once seen the term used correctly, even on people who personify the original definition.
I had a teacher like that in high school.
>Would make up rules on the spot to get a student in trouble just for the hell of it
>Would drag that student to their head teacher and chastise them for breaking a non existent rule
>The head teacher had to pretend to punish them, least the Karen teacher report them to the principal (who somehow took the Karen teacher at her word despite her being shit at everything, and disliked by most of the other teachers)
Back then = graphic depictions of violence bad
Now = sexy female characters bad
Everything was going fine until Mortal Kombat came out.
Authoritarian neo-liberals. Mostly the same people who went after metal music and rap in the 80's and early 90's: Tipper Gore, Hilary Clinton, Diane Feinstein, Joe Lieberman... etc. As for why they do it, it's just for clout because they think that is what will get people to vote for them while not pissing off the people who give them money.
The criticism that games will make people closed off and anti-social is always hilarious to me, considering it always comes from people who are chronic TV addicts.
Bro, pick up a controller. Play the game with me. You're the one who isn't getting how this works.
>When and why did it all start?
Since the beginning of video games boom, with boomers demonizing arcade games for being "too addicting". Also even back then we had moral hysteria with games like Cluster's Revenge and DeathRace arcade game.
And now all these people that used to mock Jack Thompson are now acting like him and worse. There are even cases of morons who are now like "Maybe Jack Thompson was right all along". Don't forget that moot himself sold out his audience during GamerGate for Zoe Quinn's sake.
ZQ did kill actual people tho, unlike that cringe boomer Jack Offson
ha ha oh man you guys are total suckers. all the bullshit about video game violence was propaganda Nintendo pushed to discredit Sega their main rival.
are you saying nintendo has a propoganda department specifically to eradicate anything sega related? sounds schizo tbh, but interesting if true. a bit insane that they would hijack a whole country's entertainment industry just to do that.
That was clearly not a thing at least as early as the late SNES era when Nintendo started publishing things like Killer Instinct.
Jack Thompson was active mostly around the GTA San Andreas era.
I do not respect Rockstar one bit for bending the knee over the Haitians controversy with Vice City.
Running With Scissors > Rockstar games.
Too chicken shit to make real social commentary and stand by it. Will only make social commentary when it's safe with the liberal hivemind.
Is the new Postal going to have any actual edgy shit in it though? I feel like everyone's too scared now.
>Is the new Postal going to have any actual edgy shit in it though?
4 is not as edgy as 2 was, no. Some of the humor seems to be based around what they did with the later expansions to Postal 2. But regardless of whether or not it's social commentary ups the ante, they did not ever get convinced to change anything about their games. They never bent the knee and that's what i respect more. I can't ever take Dan Houser's social critique seriously knowing that he plays it safe when confronted about it.
>social critique seriously
Does this look like a guy who should ever be taken seriously?
Didn't he got jailed for tax fraud or something before the plandemic?
>retro era
>xbox 360
No matter what anyone tells you in this thread, no one on /vr/ is both old enough to remember and well researched enough to know what they're talking bout.
So just ignore everything in this thread and go on with your normal fricking day.
Remaster when? I don't want to buy a PS3 please.
It was 100% an American thing. Americans are unable to look at the ugly sides of their society (high crime rate, high poverty in certain areas, racism, mass shootings, shitty healthcare system, millions of homeless people, terrible public school system etc etc) so they always need a boogieman to project their problems on. Americans are genuinely convinced they're the greatest nation to have ever existed and the rest of the world wants to be like them. When they're confronted by the ugly sides of their society they don't find solutions, instead they blame something else like terrorists, certain political groups, certain elements of pop culture, the current president etc. It's a core part of the American identity.
It wasn't just the burgers, many places in Eurpoe (esp. Germany) were _very_ apprehensive to violence and had similar concerns.
this shooting in particular triggered a sizable chimpout over violent video games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnenden_school_shooting
>It was 100% an American thing
That's ignorance speaking and not understanding the world outside your own country. In my country being Australia there's still the idea that video games influence real life behavior and therefore there are very strict laws on what is acceptable. Things like drug abuse, mass murder sprees/things that encourage you to murder innocent bystanders, extreme violence or sexual assault are viewed as taboo themes that could influence negative behavior. To name just a few games with bans off the top of my head:
Manhunt 1 & 2, Postal 1 & 2, Hatred, Hotline Miami 2. Outlast 2 got censored for some very violent and graphic scenes. and yeah movies are not seen the same way at all. Cinemas aired things like the SAW movies over here and that doesn't factor into the ratings board. The whole argument relies on interactivity with medium. Some Americans on here think it's a thing to do with conservative vs. liberal (and that might be true for their own country). But not in this country really. I can't really think of when labor or liberal were for changing these laws or having the debate about it. It's because it's far easier to remove something negative then having to deal with something that could potentially influence negative behavior. And while some people may call these views outdated or ancient, it's not about because it's just some old law that nobody bothered to change, the ratings board are just strict and in most cases they do believe that interactivity is apart of the argument established long ago, despite it being widely debated.
My nation's glowies don't fund domestic terror cells with taxpayer dosh when things get too calm thoughever.
>muh racism
stopped reading there
Imagine writing all these blogs while being moronic.
Basically zero compared to the shit other medium got, books, movies, music, you name it.
it's kinda weird how a man trying to ban video games received much less vitriol than a woman only sharing constructive criticism
>it's kinda weird how a man trying to ban video games received much less vitriol than a woman only spouting propaganda disguised as constructive criticism
FTFY, also you weren't there, Zoomer. He was getting shit on left and right in online forums at the time, death threats and all.
Dude, Jack Thompson was HATED back then. It's so quaint in retrospect but if you were paying attention to gaming news he was like our own little Westboro Baptist Church.
>if you were paying attention to gaming news
It wasn't just gaming news, even Hollywood got in on it. In the film xXx Vin Diesel (or Xander) doesn't name Jack Thompson directly, but it was certainly a dig at him through name of a fictional character. But there is an explanation for that one as to why anyone in hollywood would give a shit, Vin Diesel had an actual interest in gaming as a medium and started up his own studio to ensure that the licensed games of his movies actually turned out good. (search Tigon Studios, also involved with the awesome starbreeze games)
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He received WAY more. Literally nobody defended him and every single video game discussion forum allowed members to shit on him freely. It was only old dudes on TV that didn't play video games that had any kind of respect for the guy.
Gamers seemed to despise both fairly equally.
good bait. but just in case—like others said, Jack Thompson was THE villain, everyone despised him universally: every game mag, gamers, people online, etc.
if by "woman only sharing constructive criticism" you mean feminists, that's not constructive criticism. that's "we don't play games, but we need to ruin a thing for everyone because we don't like men having fun". it's literally the opposite of "constructive", it's "destructive". which is about same as Jack Thompson, except liberal instead of conservative. and feminists got every single game site / mag defending them and shilling their agenda, as well as the liberal half of social media.
Jack Thompson, for all his views, at least didn't jump to gender politics and try to demonize all men as rapists. and neither did he wield political and financial power to ruin / cancel everyone he didn't like.
It's demonstrably true that the opposite end of the political spectrum (being American liberals/white knight apologists for feminists) have done similar stuff to what Jack Thompson was doing back at his time of being in the spotlight. It just didn't pan out like they wanted it in the end and was of course met with mockery. Only difference here is that they didn't bother with taking it to court i guess. So it was quickly swept under the rug like none of it ever happened. You're correct to point out that anon's hypocrisy in this sense. I remember when feminists started a petition against GTA V for being able to kill prostitutes and claimed it promoted misogynist behavior, it was something that went around my newsfeed on facebook back at that time and i probably wouldn't be able to find it now. There's a lot of historical revisionists present on this website. So GTA V had a unsuccessful attempt at cancel culture even well before this video of sam maggs came out.
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Just to further prove my point about leftists and feminists resorting to the same sort of tactics of Jack Thompson, i actually tracked down the evidence to prove that i wasn't lying or just making up stories to deflect blame on one side of the political spectrum if the criticism is deserved. Their change.org petition successfully removed GTA V off the shelves of Target stores in Australia. So i was only partially incorrect to say they were unsuccessful. However that's not like getting it removed from EB games so it's kind of a hollow victory anyway. Maybe some of you never heard of this story because it was Australian gaming news. I didn't know it actually started in my country originally.
Here is their original petition:
https://www.change.org/p/target-withdraw-grand-theft-auto-5-this-sickening-game-encourages-players-to-commit-sexual-violence-and-kill-women/u/8910751
Target's media statement about GTA V's removal from stores:
http://www.target.com.au/medias/marketing/corporate/PDF/media-release/GTA-Media-Release-v2.pdf
A counter petition against them:
https://www.change.org/p/feminists-leave-gta-5-alone-feminists
Article from pic related:
https://archive.is/BLAYI
Same old song and dance, they're just political agitators looking for attention and their moral authority elation.
AFAIK in brazil they used to say videogames frick up your eyes and frick up the TV (because of the static image getting burned in the screen of crt tvs). Some parents would not allow their kids to play street fighter and other fighting games because they were afraid they would fight orher kids at school. Videogames started getting attention when a medical student did a mass shooting in the cinema and he was fan of duke nukem.
tv guy who did local video game show in my country in early 90s said that if kids really wanted to continue playing after sleeping without losing their progress was to turn off their tvs but let the console on to prevent damage to tvs
see, that dude was a good host, he knew his technical shit
Video Games were only ruled speech in the US in 2011 after state "violent video game" bans from the mid 2000s started going through the court system. The entire industry of outrage lawyers dried up after that point.
as I get older and see the decaying society, I start to think the people who called rock/metal/video games demonic were right.
it's called getting boomer
its called hindsight, anon.
It's called being an ironic shitposter.
Nah, they were scapegoats. If anything the failure of the education system, and the breakdown of families has been a problem more than anything. Basically no child is being raised properly at this point.
You're way off course if you think Iron Maiden is making the kids bad. All Iron Maiden ever did was make people grow their hair stupid and wear denim jackets.
>I start to think the people who called rock/metal/video games demonic were right.
today they just say rock / metal is toxic masculinity and has race problem, and video games are objectifying women. people just love to scapegoat the entertainment industry and want it to be their own propaganda machine
Maybe you're just going senile/moronic.
I mean custers revenge has got to be the start of it
>Was it just typical outrage / shock caused by parents, and subsequently politicians trying to milk it for popularity?
It's such a long running mess that it's hard to even say what the main issue was. The world was in a pretty turbulent state with religion at the time. You could trace a lot of the original ire back to TTRPGs thoughever.