1. #1

    How did video games win the culture war?

    Jack Thompson has been disbarred and is looked at and remembered as a loon.

    The Supreme Court ruled in our favor in Brown vs EMA. Leland Yee is now in prison.

    I would hope LT Col Dave Grossman and Phil Chalmers is taken seriously by only a tiny minority of the population.

    How did we win? Are more people seeing video games as a form of art? Did the financial might of video game industry influence political decisions?

  2. #2
    music helped, imo. there was a lot of anti-censorship fighting by metal guys and shit in the late 80's.

    just the overwhelming popularity of games helped itself though most of all. you can't fight what people want.

  3. #3
    This industry now does more money then hollywood.. No government with half an economic brain will ever vote against these interest any longer. Infact many of our countries now put up public money into the mix to get video game industry to open jobs in more locations because they are high paying jobs.

  4. #4
    I have no idea what you just said.

  5. #5
    Games media had not sold out in the 90s. I remember back when I was a little guy I used to watch X-Play on G4 with Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb. During the height of this stupidity X-Play used to have segments where they would talk about people like Jack Thompson and potential legislation of video games. I remember the first time I heard the "video games cause violence" argument I was like, "That's stupid. I play video games all the time and all the other boys at school are more violent than me."

    I knew even then that video games weren't some kind of secret mind control and programs like X-Play reinforced that.

    Fast forward to the 2010s, and the narrative has changed to "video games cause sexism." This time though, this bullshit was coming from the very same journalists that once defended us. The celebrities that my generation of gamer looked up to when we were kids. They betrayed us, and worst of all I still don't really know why. I suspect, it's because back then the journalists were more in touch with their audience. They knew what we wanted and that got them ratings. Then the internet became a thing that every household had, and programs like X-Play slowly died off. We had all moved on, and I imagine that must have felt like a betrayal to the journalists that we were supporting through our viewing.

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by CmdrShep2154 View Post
    How did we win?
    Self-regulation.

    The ESRB was implemented by the games industry and their rating system/age guidelines were enforced by pretty much every retailer in the country. Obviously its not perfect and young kids can still buy M rated games in many places, but overall it was very successful and that success largely appeased the loons.

    Only a few fringe loons still complained, but their complaints fell on deaf ears and they faded away into obscurity...

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pull My Finger View Post
    I have no idea what you just said.
    I'm with you.

  8. #8
    No clue what OP is saying, but if we won I want my reward.

  9. #9
    They didn't. Jack Thompson just got replaced by folks like Anita Sarkeesian milking the modern outrage culture of the trophy for participation generation to do the same thing but worse. Combine it with secret mailing list journo cabals of social studies drop outs that dont play games and actively hate people that do and its worse than ever.

    Only now instead of making you a school shooter games make you rapists, every version of word ending with 'phobe' and a nazi.

    Fucking Kirby, right?

  10. #10
    Nyet, we're in a worse situation. The very same people that dismantled people like Jack Thompson are now propping them up. It's a lot easier to defend yourself from the outside than from the inside.

  11. #11
    It probably helped that Jack Thompson was a bit of an idiot and a hack, so whilst he did pose some sort of existential threat to the industry it wasn't that massive a deal. Mostly games won the culture war because they're a mass-market product with broad appeal which have been around for many decades.

    Quote Originally Posted by dope_danny View Post
    They didn't. Jack Thompson just got replaced by folks like Anita Sarkeesian milking the modern outrage culture of the trophy for participation generation to do the same thing but worse. Combine it with secret mailing list journo cabals of social studies drop outs that dont play games and actively hate people that do and its worse than ever.

    Only now instead of making you a school shooter games make you rapists, every version of word ending with 'phobe' and a nazi.

    Fucking Kirby, right?
    Holy shit I just got victim-complex bingo from one post. Keep drinking that kool-aid about how hard it is being the audience for one of the world's biggest entertainment industries.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Helryx View Post
    Nyet, we're in a worse situation. The very same people that dismantled people like Jack Thompson are now propping them up. It's a lot easier to defend yourself from the outside than from the inside.
    I don't think anyone was taking those Gamergaters seriously when they got Thompson's support, it was just part of the Sarkeesian witch-hunt the movement liked to pretend wasn't happening.

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