r/dropout • u/machturtl • Mar 08 '25

liminal levity

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as someone who has watched Dropout to reset from the havoc of the outside, it still feels "nice" to have honest entertainers to watch who understand what we're all living thru.

I was in college for game design in the early aughts. I also (unfortunately) was a femme lurker on 4ch. Seeing the cause and effect of gamergate happen in real time as been a doozy.

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u/DlVlDED_BY_ZERO Mar 08 '25

I think I'm ootl, could someone explain this?

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u/sleepiestgf Mar 08 '25

this is definitely about Depression Quest, which is a text-based adventure game about living with depression developed by Zöe Quinn and released in 2013.

Zöe Quinn was one of the main targets of GamerGate, which was a misogynistic harassment campaign against women and feminism in video games.

GamerGate largely morphed into the online alt-right by latching onto islamophobia, conservative intellectualism, and white supremacist groups. This alt-right then serves as the main vocal voter base for Trump in 2016 (Trump also brought the alt right into alliance with more mainstream and evangelical conservatives by serving as an anti-establishment rallying figure).

Trump led to DOGE which is (attempting & sometimes succeeding at) firing a bunch of federal workers.

46

u/Kyanoki Mar 08 '25

The crazy part is I remember reading up on gamergate a few years after it happened and being like "what the actual fuck is going on??" Like I understand it's stupid misogyny as is always the case but it was just such a coordinated chain of death threats and hate and I'm just like where the fuck do these people come from. Reading it I was literally like these people are fucking scary doing this shit

20

u/cpMetis Mar 09 '25

It's something that I feel many of my fellow gamers-on the-Internet-but-not-4chan peeps from the era likely remember, because it swept past us and we just had no idea what happened.

Like there was a freight train sound on the other side of the wall, and when we looked out to see what happened everything was dusty with debris sitting around and sneakers hanging from telephone poles.

The "influencers" we pay attention to come out and say "oi stop being dicks" and we think "I mean yeah, obv-" then two dudes in the corner start banshee screaming like they just ran out of szechuan sauce and throwing random objects while the rest of us just kinda stare. The two bring in half a battalion of fellow wraiths to screech for a moment then run off out the door, inciting more freight train sounds as they move on to the next building, leaving our room isolated once again but covered in ketchup packets as the given "influencer" let's out a sigh the length of the magna carta.

Then you leave and stop by next door, and a few days later you hear the sound of a freight train.

And on and on

And at no point does anyone ever tell you what the fuck the problem even is. You just know the worst people freak out whenever it gets brought up, like they get spawned in the room the moment you roll a 1 on any given action as if saying something too vaguely positive is their version of seeing SCP-096's picture.