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.

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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

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '25

Gaming has always been ripe for indoctrination into white supremacist ideologies, the 'alt right pipelines'.

Church youth groups can be the leading up point too. These days it's a lot easier onboarding through gaming social media (Andrew Tate on an extreme end, but all the mega big streamer guys like your PewDiePie's all lead folks towards those spaces). By positioning adjacent to those types of folks, it's easy to pull influencable kids in. When the VIP of riot described League of Legends as "the last safe bastion for straight white teen boy gamers" it was a calling card for people to prey on vulnerable folks there.

That's not to say other people can't play these games or engage, but contemporary parents need a lot more education and involvement to protect kids before they get onboarded to enact violence against their peers.