A little while ago, I wrote about chat app Discordand how I thought it was a jolly fine piece of software that had all but replaced Skype and various other solutions for, among other things, in-game voice chat.
Besides high-quality voice chat, Discord is also pretty great for creating text chat servers with custom channels (each of which can have their own permissions set if you so desire) and various other bits and pieces here and there. The app is clearly largely designed with the Final Fantasy XIV community in mind, given its built-in commands to search sites like XIVDB and Gamerescape, but it’s also a flexible, lightweight, easy-to-use and cross-platform chat app that is super-easy to get signed up for and really easy to use.
So I’d like to invite you along to come and chat! I created a server named after my other website MoeGamer, along with a bunch of channels. The server is primarily intended for people to talk about Japanese video games, anime, manga and the like, but there are a selection of other channels for people to talk about what they might be interested in. I’ve had a few people sign up over the course of the day, but not really much participation as yet; understandable, really, since no-one wants to be the first person to say something!
A request, then, dear reader. If you’d like to have a chat with me and hopefully some other like-minded individuals, please do two things for me.
Firstly, join the server here. (You can use Discord via the Web, but I recommend downloading the standalone app for the best and most flexible experience.)
Secondly, participate! Jump into a channel you like the sound of — the invite link I’ve provided will take you to a “welcome” channel that gives you a summary of what all the other channels are all about — and start talking. Even if no-one seems to be saying much to begin with, people who join the server and channels will see the conversation history when they come along for the first time, so if there are some comments, thoughts and even pictures for people to respond to when they sign up, new members will be more inclined to start participating themselves.
I’d love to build this server into a nice little community where we can chat, share stories, share pics and share our thoughts on all things anime, gaming, manga and whatnot. Discord is a great means of doing just that, and I’d love to see more people making use of it and supporting the great work the developers are doing — it’s currently only in alpha, and is already a really well put together piece of software. And who knows? You might even make a few new friends or discover a few new interests in the process.
You know, I really shouldn’t be surprised about this any more, what with us living in the Information Age or whatever it is we’re in, with the Internet an omnipresent, omniscient collective of intelligences (in most circumstances) that, as a whole, never sleeps. But it does.
What, I hear you ask? The fact that someone, somewhere in the world, is probably doing the same thing you are at the exact same time as you.
I don’t often think about this, but it occurs to me when I fire up a multiplayer game that isn’t the current “flavour of the month” or Call of Duty. For example, I downloaded Tetris for my PlayStation 4, as it’s a long time since I seriously played Tetris and I fancied something that I could play together with Andie. The PS4 version of Tetris has an online mode where you can play any of the game modes with up to three other people playing at the same time as you. In the case of the “Battle” modes, you can directly interfere with one another, as is the tradition in Tetris multiplayer, but there are also a number of modes where you’re pretty much just playing alongside other people, perhaps to compare performance or pick up tips.
Now, Tetris is one of the most well-known, loved and respected games in the world, but I still find it surprising that there are people out there who make time to sit down and compete online. I’d ask “why?” but then I’d be forced to ask myself why I had chosen to play it online, too — and their answer would probably be the same as mine: to have some sort of “connection” with another person, even if it’s a non-verbal one that is as simple as a shared interest. (Aside: Online Tetris players are frighteningly good.)
It’s not just Tetris, either; I can sit down and play a mobile game like Brave Frontier, Love Live! School Idol Festival or Drift Girls and jump into one of the online modes in those and still find a live opponent to compete against. Again, in most cases, communication isn’t direct — most of these games don’t have a chat facility due to the impracticality of it in a mobile game — but it’s oddly heartwarming to be sharing an experience with other people, even if it’s only for a few short minutes as you attempt to full-combo Snow Halation or raise your ranking in the Drift Girls world tour mode.
Anyway. It’s kind of cool to occasionally connect with people in passing like this; with gaming often being a relatively solitary pursuit, it is sometimes nice to feel like there are other people out there who are into the same things as you — and perhaps even to share an experience with them.
Now I’ve probably got time for a quick Love Live! score match…
Here’s a curious paradox for you: how much of the supposed epidemic of “bullying” and “harassment” going on on the Internet these days is down to people bringing it upon themselves?
This isn’t a question of “victim blaming”, as the buzzword has it, but it’s an actual phenomenon that I’ve observed — and, in my younger days, even engaged in myself. I can’t explain why I did such a thing, but I know I did it, I know that I was aware I was doing it even at the time, and yet I simply couldn’t stop myself.
I suffered dreadfully at the hands of bullies in primary school. I’m not sure what it was about me — my hair, my accent, the fact my ears appeared quite large in comparison to my head (I’ve since “grown into” them, I think) or some combination of all of the above and a few other things besides — but I was a regular target for some of the schools more notorious troublemakers. And it wasn’t to do with my friendship group, either, as on a number of occasions my supposed “friends” actually sided against me in an attempt to win favour points with the bullies (who, inevitably, were the “cool” kids). Perhaps it was self-preservation, perhaps they’d really had enough of me; either way, it was a betrayal, and it hurt.
But I know that I was partly to blame for some of the incidents that happened. I recall deliberately goading the bullies on more than one occasion — swearing at them, insulting them, trying to attack them — and inevitably being knocked to the ground, winded and crying. The teachers on duty would do their usual “come over and look concerned” bit, but then nothing would ever happen to the people who had assaulted me. And so the cycle would repeat, over and over again.
Perhaps it was an attempt to claw my own little bit of “power” on the playground, because I was very much at the bottom of the food chain. Perhaps it was an attempt to let out my frustration about what I now recognise as social anxiety and difficulty interacting with some people. Perhaps I was just a little cunt. I honestly don’t know the reason. But what I do know is that despite the fact I was the “victim”, I was also genuinely to blame for a goodly proportion of those incidents — not all of them, mind, but a fair few of them.
And I’m reminded of this as I watch interactions on social media today. Mr Brandon Orselli, the chap who runs NicheGamer, an independent games site that I’ve become quite fond of, regularly has to fend off people who start attacking him, his work and his staff without any sort of provocation. Their reasoning? His site has, at times, been sympathetic to the consumer revolt known as “GamerGate”, which has now been raging for some ten months and, despite a considerable amount of evidence to the contrary, is still regarded as a “hate group” of “misogynists”.
Now, I’m not here to talk about GamerGate and whether or not it’s right (largely because I know it’s a topic of discussion that tends to become irrational very quickly — both “sides” are very much at fault in this regard, and frankly I want nothing to do with the perpetual arguments and finger-pointing) but one glance at the front page of NicheGamer will tell you that it’s absolutely not any sort of GamerGate propaganda rag. Rather, it’s an up-and-coming independent site with a clear focus, a staff that is obviously passionate about their work — including some highly knowledgeable specialist writers — and an editor-in-chief who is not afraid to stand up for himself, his work and his site.
Orselli does admittedly, at times, come across as a little arrogant on social media — but you know what? I understand the pride he takes in his work, and the pleasure he feels when things go well for his site. And I very much respect his choice to take the bull by the horns and engage these “critics” in an attempt at conversation even as they are, at times, spreading information that simply isn’t true.
Why am I reminded of my own playground experiences? Well, the sort of people who are attacking Orselli and his staff remind me of the young me. They poke and they poke and they poke and they goad and they goad and they goad… and then they call foul (or, more accurately, “harassment”) when the person they’ve been poking and goading bites back. (It has to be said, mind you, that it’s not quite the same situation: Orselli is not a “bully”, has shown admirable self-restraint and civility in these interactions, and has been a lot more calm and collected about them than I probably would be!) In other words, observing from the outside and recognising this behaviour as something I once did (as a child!) makes it seem very much like those attacking Orselli, his site and others like them are specifically going out and looking for trouble so they can further their “harassment” narrative.
Certainly nothing I’ve seen of NicheGamer’s output — and since I’ve pretty much stopped following big games sites as they don’t cover many of the games I’m interested in these days, it’s one of the few sites I do check in on semi-regularly — warrants the sort of unpleasantness I’ve seen hurled at Orselli and his team on a seemingly daily basis, whatever your feelings on GamerGate (which, as previously noted, is not the same thing as NicheGamer). If anything, NicheGamer should be applauded for trying something different in a world of identikit big magazine-style or blog-type games sites, and catering to a specific audience rather than casting a very wide but very shallow net.
But anyway. It hopefully goes without saying that this isn’t any attempt to diminish any instances of genuine harassment that actually goes on on social media — after all, I’ve dealt with it myself, so I know how shitty it is. But this sort of behaviour — deliberate provocation — just rubs me up the wrong way, particularly as I’ve suffered at the hands of bullies many times over the years, both by bringing it on myself and through no fault of my own. So in the words of Twitter’s favourite anti-bully ranger:
I read an interesting piece earlier on the subject of clickbait. I won’t quote it extensively here as I recommend you read it yourself, but I will provide a handy link for you to do just that. Here. Go on, I’ll wait.
The article makes a lot of good points, but the one which stood out most strikingly to me was the suggestion that “via clickbait, many companies believe they can do away with the concept of demographic”. And it’s absolutely true: the concept of a “target demographic” when it comes to Internet-based publications is fast becoming a thing of the past in favour of casting a wide net in the hopes of snagging as many people as possible.
It feels like it’s getting more and more transparent, too; I don’t know if this is simply because I’m aware of it from the inside — during my latter days at USgamer, I spent a lot of time publishing walkthroughs for new games to draw in the clicks, so believe me, I know clickbait — or whether outlets really are getting more and more transparent. But when, for example, sites like Forbes Games (games, note) are publishing articles about something that happened in last night’s Game of Thrones (a TV show), or sites like Polygon and Kotaku are trying their level best to relate real-world events to video games in as ham-fisted a manner as possible, something is very, very wrong.
I’ve mentioned before that I very much miss the “golden age” of magazines in the mid-to-late ’90s. Magazines each had a distinctive voice, style and target audience. Some, like the Official Nintendo Magazine, were aimed at kids, and used layout, language and presentation to match. Others, like Zero, were aimed at slightly older people who enjoyed a bit of irreverent humour. Others still, like ACE, were aimed at the general games enthusiast, not someone loyal to a particular platform. And others still, like Page 6/New Atari User, which my father, my brother and I all used to contribute to, had a tightly focused target audience of platform enthusiasts who were into more than just games.
While certain sites do still have “voices” to an extent thanks to well-known writers, there’s less and less to distinguish between them, particularly as the default “thing to care about” for these publications these days appears to be Social Issues like sexism and racism. But I find it hard to take these articles seriously when they clearly very much fall into the clickbait category — Polygon’s recent piece on The Witcher 3 maybe possibly probably being racist was a double whammy, in fact, combining two pieces of bait: the name of a popular current release, and an accusation that said popular current release is, in some way, bad and wrong. Whether or not it’s “right” to read the piece in that way — or in a manner which suggests If You Like The Witcher You’re Okay With Racism — is kind of besides the point; people do read it that way, and they quite understandably take umbrage with the implications suggested by articles like this. Same with Kollar’s piece on Dungeon Travelers 2 from a while back, though in that case the game was largely unknown and it was the publisher Atlus that was the “household name” to draw people in and then slap people around the face with a bit of This Is Problematic bullshit.
I remember before this dark period of games journalism started when a lot of people were attacking Kotaku for different reasons to today. In fact, there’s a relevant entry on this very blog from that very period, in which I explored the possibility that Kotaku might have actually been doing what I’m arguing for here: pursuing a specific demographic.
Targeting a specific demographic isn’t a negative thing, and we need to stop thinking that it is, because if you spread yourself too thin, you don’t serve any of your audience to their satisfaction. One size does not fit all, and not everyone wants to read about the same things. And that’s fine! What we need is more diversity of opinion and more places for people to go and get different viewpoints. And that’s something we’re not getting at the moment — at least not from the commercial sites. It’s pretty telling that the small, independent sites out there are doing a far better job of this than the big names — and it’s absolutely criminal that sites like this are, at present, unable to make money thanks to the business’ continued reliance on the clickbait model rather than something more fair and less manipulative.
Ultimately it’s best to find places you enjoy reading that you feel “speak” to you, but if I may give a recommendation to those of you who are into similar sorts of games to me: do check out Digitally Downloaded; editor-in-chief Matt Sainsbury and his team work hard to provide interesting, thought-provoking and well-written pieces of criticism about a diverse array of games as well as anime, manga, film and literature. They manage to produce pieces of relevant social and cultural commentary and criticism and relate them to games without pointing fingers or pandering to anyone; its writers are passionate and believe in the things they write, and the result is a site I continue to enjoy and respect even as I’ve switched off from reading most of the mainstream games media these days. It’d be great to see sites like this grow, and the industry as a whole evolve.
Will it happen? Well, that’s partly up to you, isn’t it?
Good morning from Dublin! Today has been a very long day. Technically it’s already “tomorrow” but I haven’t yet made it home from Boston (my connecting flight leaves in a couple of hours) so I thought I’d take the opportunity to scribble a quick post.
This PAX weekend has been pretty much everything I hoped it would be. I had a great time with my friends, I saw some cool stuff at the show and I picked up some fun swag.
Most importantly, we successfully carried a number of formerly Internet-only relationships into the offline realm. Doing this is always a nerve-wracking experience — regardless of whether said relationship is platonic, romantic or anything else — and so it’s always a pleasure when things come together and we all get along.
I actually wasn’t too worried this time around, though. Something brought us all together in the world of Final Fantasy XIV and the fact most of us have been together for nigh on two years now says something positive about us and what we mean to one another. There have been tough times, as with any relationship, and people have come and gone over time, but the people with whom I spent my weekend represent a core group that I have always very much enjoyed spending virtual time with — and it turns out I enjoy spending real time with, too. It’s just a pity we’re all so scattered.
“I’m glad everyone is exactly how they seem to be,” said one of our number last night, possibly slightly fuelled by a beer or two. “It means that everyone’s genuine. And that we’re all as fucked up as each other.”
That latter point is key, and not necessarily a bad thing. Almost without exception, we’ve all had Shit to Deal With to varying degrees over the years, and our adventures in Eorzea have provided not only some much-needed escape at times, but also an outlet through which we can talk about the things that have been bothering us with like-minded individuals.
And that is immeasurably valuable; in an age where it seems people are drifting further and further apart from one another for various reasons, it’s comforting to have a group that is pretty much always there for you. I know I’m grateful for these friends, and I’m sure they are too.
Now coffee is calling, closely followed by a connecting flight, a taxi ride back home and then almost straight back out (hopefully with time for a shower first!) to go and teach clarinet to kids. It’s all go, huh. I shall sleep well tonight, for sure.
I rarely leave user reviews on things, be they App Store/Google Play downloads, Amazon purchases, eBay sellers or Steam downloads. And I’ve realised that in not doing so, I’m being a bit of a fool.
Why? Because whenever I consider purchasing something, one of the first things I do is have a look at the user ratings and reviews and determine whether or not they’re 1) genuine 2) worth listening to and 3) something that might need to make me reconsider or confirm my purchase.
But when they work, they can be extremely useful — and every time I write one, I’m reminded how much I have always enjoyed reviewing things. Not necessarily critiquing them in depth or from any sort of theoretical perspective, but providing a simple, straightforward analysis of how much I liked something, how it made me feel, whether I think other people would like it and all that sort of good stuff.
It’s also really fun to write a negative review, though it’s also very easy to be extremely unfair when you’re doing so, which is why I try and remain positive most of the time. (People are also more inclined to disagree with something negative than positive in my experience, too, and I really don’t enjoy arguing with people.) I have made one fairly consistent exception over the years, though, and that’s with mobile games that have been truly, truly awful, particularly those that have desecrated beloved franchises like Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park and SimCity. (Oh, hi, EA.)
But I’ve decided as a belated and rather lame resolution that I’m going to start making an effort to review things that I’ve bought, played, used, whatever. Because if I make use of user reviews for their intended purpose — to find out what the average Joe on the street thinks of something that I’m considering purchasing — then I’m sure other people will do too. And, not to blow my own trumpet too much, but I feel like I’m quite good at expressing myself about the things I do and don’t like about something.
I give it a couple of weeks before I stop doing it, but for now it’s a little something I can do to help make the Internet as a whole a slightly better place. I made a start this evening by reviewing HuniePop on Steam; see if you can spot my review if you’re pondering whether to drop some cash on a pornographic puzzle game!
I know I’ve been very anti-Twitter and very anti-social media in general recently, but an unfortunate side-effect of “going dark” is, to be perfectly frank, loneliness.
It kind of sucks that social media is the default means of people communicating with one another today. I’ll grant that it’s a convenient and easy means of people to talk to each other without sharing completely “personal” details like email addresses or phone numbers, but I sort of miss the days of sending lengthy emails back and forth with people. I know the option is still there to do that, but how many people would actually respond, I wonder?
This is a preamble to the fact that I have rejoined Twitter in an attempt to reconnect with the people I effectively severed social ties with when I went dark a while back. I don’t regret doing that — remaining clear of some of the most ridiculous Internet drama in years has been thoroughly pleasant, and it makes me glad to have the close friends I do have who have stuck by me even as I was harder to get hold of — but I have found myself somewhat wanting for conversation at times.
And so we come to this, then: an attempt to recapture whatever it was that attracted me to Twitter in the first place, and kept me as an avid user for a long time until I became thoroughly disillusioned with the whole thing.
The temptation with Twitter is to follow everyone and everything. A follow isn’t the same as a friendship request on other forms of social media: it’s not reciprocal. You can follow someone and they remain completely unaware of your existence. This isn’t necessarily as harsh (or creepy) as it sounds, since many Twitter users make use of the social network primarily as a broadcast medium for keeping people up to date on the latest happenings or pointing them in the direction of posts, forums and articles that are a better place to hang out and talk in detail. Twitter is, after all, shit for nuanced discussion, as anyone who has ever attempted to discuss anything deeper than how nice the sausage you’re currently eating is will have undoubtedly discovered.
I’m not going to do that this time, though. I’m not going to use Twitter as the noisy, messy hodgepodge of microblogging tool, text messaging service and RSS reader that it once was: the emphasis for me now is on the thing I always enjoyed using it for most: talking to people from all over the world.
I’m not going to follow hundreds of people. I’m not going to feel obliged to follow people who follow me unless I find them interesting. If people start retweeting things that upset or annoy me, I’ll simply turn off their retweets — retweets, after all, are by far the most irritating feature of Twitter in my experience since it’s a means of someone shoving a third party’s opinion in your face — and if they remain annoying or upsetting after that then, well, maybe I don’t really want to be following them after all.
My account is public at present, but once I have a nice little collection of followers gathered once again, I’m turning my account back to private, which means my tweets won’t be public and people will have to request to follow me rather than just being able to do so. My professional life is now completely separate from my online existence, and as such I have no need to “network” online by sucking up to “important” people and trying to make them aware of my existence by building up as much “social capital” (to co-opt a phrase that means something else) as I can.
I can instead concentrate on using Twitter as a means of talking with friends and — hopefully, anyway — having a bit of fun. And with any luck, this will help at least partly deal with the feelings of isolation and loneliness I’ve been feeling recently.
I find Internet culture endlessly fascinating and, at times, more than a little terrifying.
One of the most interesting things about Internet culture is how small it makes the world seem at times. I recall when online connectivity was just starting to become a thing — beyond the old-school world of direct-dial bulletin board systems, that is — and as well as the obnoxious phrase “information superhighway” being coined, a second, lesser-known but rather accurate phrase came into brief usage: “global village”.
The concept of the Internet — or, perhaps more accurately, the Web — as a global village is an interesting one, and if you spend some time wandering around online, you’ll come to recognise the village’s various haunts. There’s the village hall that hosts everything from coffee mornings to neo-Nazi rallies (Facebook). There’s the pub where everyone is always talking over everyone else and no-one’s really listening to one another (Twitter). There’s the deceptive village shop that looks small but actually carries a frighteningly comprehensive array of products of all descriptions (Amazon). There’s the coffee shop where socialites of all descriptions like to hang out and have in-depth discussions about everything from literature to their sexual conquests (Reddit). And there’s that dark, unlit back alley that very few people go down, but down which you’ll find either an army of like-minded outcasts or a horde of terrifying monsters, depending on your outlook (4chan and its successor 8chan).
There’s far more to the Internet than this, of course; the global village has become more of a town over the years, but it’s never really lost that sense of having “landmarks” around the place: easily recognisable places from which you can easily get your bearings and which, should you choose to make them your regular hangouts, provide a sense of comfortable (or sometimes uncomfortable) familiarity.
They’ve all evolved over time, too. Take Facebook; when it originally launched, it was designed for college students. Then it expanded to take in young, cool people in general, and allow them to keep in touch with their close personal network of friends easily. Then it expanded again to become more public and open. And today, of course, almost everyone is on Facebook to some degree or another, regardless of age, gender, interests and even level of computer literacy.
Change hasn’t always been for the positive, of course — although how you regard these changes, positive or negative, is partly down to your own individual feelings and how you want to communicate online. Twitter and I, for example, parted ways when it was becoming increasingly apparent that the microblogging service was being used by a lot of people more as a broadcast medium — and sometimes an echo chamber — than a means of communicating effectively. Its inherent limitations started to strain at the seams as people, for some inexplicable reason, started to think that it was an appropriate medium for having in-depth debates about complex issues. (It really isn’t.) Then the marketers found it, trying to encourage us to tweet using the hashtags for their products seen on adverts or TV shows — who does this? And over time the noise built and built and built until, much like Facebook, it was not what it once was. For some people, it’s still fun; for me, it had lost much of the charm that caused me to use it a great deal in the first place.
There’s a lot going on behind the scenes in a lot of places, too. Take Wikipedia, for example; at face value, it appears to be a perfectly reputable source containing a vast array of information about pretty much anything you would care to name. Ostensibly being a reference work, much of it is written in an impartial, unbiased manner — though there are exceptions. And it’s in those exceptions you start to see that yes, this is something that is put together and constantly maintained by humans, many of whom are doing it simply because they enjoy doing it. Dig further and take a peek at the inner workings of Wikipedia and you’ll see that it’s far from a solo effort; teams of editors are constantly discussing, debating, arguing and even fighting over the most peculiar of topics; in order to deal with such situations, the site has formed its own quasi-government to arbitrate disputes, with unfortunate instances going through strict, formal procedures managed not by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, but by councils of users. It’s fascinating to observe.
There are billions of people on the planet, a significant proportion of whom now have some form of access to the Internet. With that in mind, it’s kind of crazy how small the Internet feels sometimes. That “global village” really is a thing and, while just like any other village, not everyone gets along with everyone else, the virtual world we’ve all helped build together is a fascinating thing indeed.
Just be careful if you venture into some of those dark corners. You might not like what you find… but on the other hand, there’s always the possibility of being pleasantly surprised, too. Explore at your own risk!
Over the weekend, mankind enjoyed a significant step forward in the field of space travel. Unmanned spacecraft Rosetta successfully detached its probe, named Philae, and landed on Comet 67P, aka Chryumov-Grasimenko. It was the culmination of a ten-year mission for Dr Matt Taylor and his colleagues at the European Space Agency, and a historic moment for humanity: we finally had the chance to examine a comet up close, and perhaps make some steps forward in understanding the way the universe works; how the solar system formed; perhaps even how there came to be life on this planet.
As much as it was a historic moment for humanity, then, imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt as a significant portion of his life’s work finally came to fruition as the probe successfully touched down and began transmitting data back to Earth.
Then imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt when confronted with a giddy press more concerned with his sartorial choices than with the scientific milestone he had just passed — the shirt in question being a rather loud Hawaiian-style number featuring rather vivid, camp, retro-style imagery of women in PVC outfits shooting guns and generally looking pretty badass. (A shirt, I might add, made for and given to him as a gift by his friend Elly Prizeman.)
“I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet,” read a headline on The Verge put together by the two-person team — yes, this garbage took two people to put together — of former Polygon editor Chris Plante and his colleague Arielle Duhaime-Ross, “your shirt is sexist and ostracizing.” And this was far from the only article published that day attacking him and his wardrobe rather than celebrating his achievements.
We don’t have to imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt. Because it was captured on film.
Can you imagine. Can you imagine reaching the culmination of a ten-year project, making such a significant step forward, and then some blowhard on the Internet telling you that your shirt is directly responsible for women not wanting to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics? Can you imagine having to deal with abuse seemingly supported by the mainstream media, whom you previously thought would be keen to celebrate your achievement but now are, quite rightly, somewhat wary of?
Welcome to a world dominated by bullies.
The Internet has brought with it many great things, one of the most powerful being the principle that “everyone has a voice”. The Internet has done more to advance the concept of free speech than pretty much anything else in the world, but while some people use this for good — to share information, to reach out to people who need help, to make friends in far-flung corners of the world without having to physically travel there — there are others who use it for ill. To lie, to cheat, to accuse, to blow things out of proportion, to bully.
This particular breed of unpleasant individual has been seemingly growing in numbers — or, if not numbers then certainly prominence — in the last few years, largely thanks to social networking sites Twitter and Tumblr. Ostensibly concerned with admirable-sounding concepts such as “social justice” and feminism, these individuals purport to be progressive thinkers who want to make the world a better place for everyone, but in actual fact are nasty, narrow-minded bullies who simply attack anyone who doesn’t see the world in the same way they do.
The mission is a colossal achievement. Millions of us have been watching Philae’s heart-stopping journey. Everyone in this country should be proud of Dr Taylor and his colleagues, and he has every right to let his feelings show.
Except, of course, that he wasn’t crying with relief. He wasn’t weeping with sheer excitement at this interstellar rendezvous. I am afraid he was crying because he felt he had sinned. He was overcome with guilt and shame for wearing what some people decided was an “inappropriate” shirt on television.
Why was he forced into this humiliation? Because he was subjected to an unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse. He was bombarded across the Internet with a hurtling dustcloud of hate, orchestrated by lobby groups and politically correct media organisations.
And so I want, naturally, to defend this blameless man. And as for all those who have monstered him and convicted him in the kangaroo court of the Web — they should all be ashamed of themselves.
Sadly, Dr Matt Taylor’s trials were far from the first time this sort of outrage has erupted, and it will be far from the last time this happens, too. These supposed advocates of social justice — referred to in the vernacular by their opponents as “social justice warriors” or “SJWs” — are renowned for two things: taking offence at everything it’s possible to take offence at, and then bullying people into submission, often until those suffering the bullying end up apologising, as Dr Taylor did.
This sounds ridiculous, but it’s all too painfully familiar for me. I was bullied repeatedly throughout primary and secondary school — and once again at one of my previous workplaces — and the execution was exactly the same. Wear down the victim’s defences with repeated, unprovoked, unwarranted attacks until they snap in one way or another — be it violently, at which point the bullies can point at the victim and say “look how violent they’re being!”, or tearfully, as in Dr Taylor’s case, at which point the bullies can point and laugh at the victim and claim that they’re only upset because they know they did wrong — and then move on in the knowledge of a job “well done”.
It keeps happening, too, and these people never get called on it because they wield a considerable amount of influence and power — influence and power that lets them get away with a whole lot of nonsense.
Consider, if you will, the recent case of Independent Games Festival judge Mattie Brice, an outspoken, anti-men feminist who has claimed to be “leaving” the games industry on several occasions due to the abuse she was supposedly receiving.
Brice tweeted that she was “automatically rating low any games with men in them” during the course of her IGF judging duties and that she was “loving all this power”. Understandably, this tweet — whether or not made in jest — upset a number of people, who complained to the IGF, who subsequently, admirably and promptly asked politely that she, you know, stop doing that lest people think that their judging was rigged. Brice then complained publicly to her Twitter followers about how she was being “harassed” and how the IGF were treating her poorly, and continued until the IGF issued an apology, not her. Her defence in all this? “It was a joke” — the last fallback of the bully, and an excuse I heard many a time when working as a teacher. It was never, ever, true, and you’ll forgive me for being skeptical of this particular instance being a “joke” when we’re talking about a person who made a game called “Destroy All Men” and has often posted anti-men rants on Twitter.
And lest you think I’m singling out Brice here, she is far from the only one; she’s simply one of the most recent examples. I’ve thankfully remained largely free from this sort of nonsense up until now (though it remains to be seen if this blog post will attract zealots) but I’ve witnessed friends and former colleagues being attacked too many times over the last few years for me to sit here continuing to bite my lip.
YouTuber and PC gaming enthusiast TotalBiscuit demonstrated a good understanding of the issue in a recent post, and came to what is quite possibly the crux of this whole social justice thing and why it bugs me so much:
It’s so goddamn American.
A lot of this social justice stuff seems to be focused on a very American set of ideals and circumstances that doesn’t take into account much going on outside the country’s borders. I mean the idea that racism against white people doesn’t exist: let’s take that one on for a second. [Fellow YouTuber and Irishman] Miracle of Sound accurately pointed out the genocide perpetrated against a portion of the Irish population and the hundreds of years of oppression that they suffered under the English. Sounds pretty damn racist to me.
The concept of white privilege is very American, too. You’ll find a lot of British people, particularly Northerners like myself, bemused by it. I grew up in pit towns, or should I say, ex-pit towns, because Thatcher destroyed our economy when she broke the miners’ unions and put a lot of people out of work. Our towns were vast white majorities but I can safely say we had no privilege, no advantages for being white. Some of the richest and most successful people in our towns were Indian and Pakistani.
He’s absolutely right. These social justice types take a very American — specifically, West Coast — view of the world and assume it is the correct one, then shout down anyone who doesn’t agree with them. They release the hounds on Twitter; they publicly shame them on Tumblr; they encourage the media to buy in to the narrative, and, worryingly, they succeed. Compare, for example, the media portrayal of consumer revolt “Gamergate” as a misogynist hate campaign that wants to drive women out of gaming with the reality of it being one of the most articulate, passionate, genuine, diverse, intelligent and inclusive — albeit at times somewhat ill-focused — groups of gamers of all genders, races and creeds that I’ve ever observed. (As an aside, I haven’t involved myself in Gamergate’s activities — as a former member of the press I don’t agree with everything they stand for, though I feel they do have a number of fair points to be made — but I have spent a couple of weeks lurking around their regular online haunts to see what made them tick. It’s been eye-opening to see the dissonance.)
It is worth clarifying at this juncture — and it pisses me off that I have to add this disclaimer — that I am not against the concept of “social justice” or, more accurately, equality. Quite the opposite; I believe in equal opportunities and equal, fair treatment for everyone, and my behaviour towards other people in my own life reflects this. Meanwhile, however, these keyboard crusaders make themselves immune to criticism by simply responding to any critics with “so you’re against social justice, are you? You’re against progressiveness?” but there is a right way and a wrong way to go about things — and bullying people until they seemingly agree with you is very much the wrong way to go about it. That is what this post is about, not about standing against the very principles of progressiveness.
All this has been going on for several years now — longtime readers will doubtless recall a number of posts where I’ve alluded to this in the past, and I’ve seen more friends than I’d care to mention either fall victim to these Internet bully mobs for a careless word at the wrong time or get swept up in their twisted ideology, never to have a rational word to say ever again — and it’s time it stopped.
Why do I bring this up now? Why do I feel that this one lone blog post can make a difference?
Well, frankly, I don’t; I am but one voice shouting into the void, and I would doubtless be argued to be a textbook example of a white cishet male privileged neckbeard shitlord (yes, this is genuinely something that these believers in “social justice” call people), but it’s worth mentioning — particularly as the debacle over Dr Matt Taylor’s shirt has brought this whole sorry situation very much into the public eye. I hope that this helps more people to see what has been brewing in online culture for a few years now — and I hope it helps put a stop to it.
This is not a move towards a progressive society. It’s a move towards 1984-style Thought Policing, and it’s not the direction that we as a society should be moving.
The bullying needs to stop. And it needs to stop now.
As the years have passed, the Internet has undergone continuous improvement for the most part. It’s now one of the most — if not the most — democratic media in the world, for better or worse, allowing pretty much anyone around the world to speak their brains on pretty much any subject they’d care to share with anyone who wants to listen. (This blog is, of course, a prime example of this in action; I’m still frankly bewildered anyone reads this at all.)
But not every improvement in the Internet has been a positive one. In fact, one thing specifically appears to be on the rise, and it’s not at all a positive thing, despite usually being implemented with good intentions.
I am referring to websites that, within moment of you arriving, pop up a Google Hangouts-style chatbox in the corner of the screen, often featuring a photograph of some overly-chipper looking person, and invite you to “chat” if you need help.
Now, in principle this isn’t a terrible idea. Those who are less familiar with the Internet will probably appreciate having guidance on hand — immediately, and without having to seek it out — should they run into difficulties. (That said, assuming that “those less familiar with the Internet” are too dim to determine that clicking on a link that says “Help” — as most (vaguely useful) websites offer — will actually provide them with assistance is, to be honest, rather insulting towards those who are “less familiar with the Internet”. And yes, I’m primarily talking about old people.) Having a live person on hand is, theoretically, a great thing, as it means you can ask questions without having to work out what the specific search terms to describe the problem you’re having are — and then discover the only vaguely useful search result is an unanswered forum post from three years ago of someone having the exact same problem and never resolving it, of course.
The implementation, however, leaves something to be desired. Take WordPress here, for example. I started composing this post and not five seconds after the post editor had appeared, up popped a little blue box in the corner of the screen cheerfully enquiring “Hello! How can we help?” It’s distracting, it’s annoying, it’s patronising and it is, in this case, unnecessary: I have been using WordPress for… (checks) quite a long time now, and thus it’s probably reasonable to assume I know my way around most of it — and that anything I don’t know how to do I’m perfectly comfortable with looking up in help files and forums.
That doesn’t stop this silly little box from popping up every few times I start creating a post, however — yes, it’s not even every time I start writing a post. No, apparently WordPress believes that maybe two or three times a week I’ll reach some sort of existential blogging crisis and rather than, as most bloggers would do, pontificate about it for a thousand words in a self-indulgent stream-of-consciousness post, I would like to “chat” with someone about it. I do not want to “chat” with anyone from WordPress. I would like them to be on hand if I have a specific question, but I’m more than happy to use the already established channels for that — I don’t need live support.
And it’s not as if this “live” support is particularly live, anyway. Owing to the fact that most chat support people are juggling a number of different conversations at the same time — each of which is with someone who has a markedly different thinking and typing speed from everyone else they’re interacting with — it can often take minutes at a time to get a response. Not exactly “instant” messaging. And, okay, it’s still quicker than waiting a day or two for an email response — or more, if you ever have the misfortune to deal with any sort of government agency via email — but the benefit of instant messaging is supposed to be that you can get an immediate response, and if that one benefit isn’t even present in these ever-present “How can we help?” boxes, then there’s no fucking point them being there in the first place.
I might write a letter. That’s always seemed like the most satisfying — albeit least time-efficient — means of expressing your dissatisfaction. Although sadly, it’s also one of the easiest to ignore in this digital age. But the recipient actually receiving and reading it isn’t necessarily the point in many cases; often putting pen to paper is a cathartic experience that makes the frustrated party get a few things off their chest and calm down a bit. It may not resolve anything in the long run, but, speaking from personal experience, by golly does it sometimes make you feel better.
So that’s how you can help me, WordPress. You can bugger off with your patronising little chat box, otherwise you might just find yourself on the receiving end of a sternly-worded letter written on actual paper.
Or not. I might just stop getting worked up over stupid little things like this and go and do something fun instead. Hah! That’ll be the day, eh?
A little while ago, I wrote about chat app Discord and how I thought it was a jolly fine piece of software that had all but replaced Skype and various other solutions for, among other things, in-game voice chat.
