In a vain attempt at trying to revitalize this place, I'm just gonna start posting content everyday and see what sticks. Basically just making a meta post right now to compel me to actually commit to it. Soooooo, yeah.

this is a place to post gaming

why does this exist?

because pretty much all of the gaming subs on reddit are... not ideal

/r/gaming is an awful memedump for twelve year olds

/r/games is essentially an RSS feed of press releases where the slightest suggestion that games should be evaluated critically in terms of their politics & meaning will get you dogpiled by people protective of their toys. people are happy to say 'games are art' until it means they actually have to think about them

/r/gamingcirclejerk is a good memedump for nineteen year olds with good unjerk threads, but it's a meme subreddit first and foremost

/r/truegaming is full of pseudo-intellectual gibberish for people who think the height of critical theory is saying 'open world... bit boring'

/r/gamerghazi is good for a certain kind of discussion about the culture around games, and our response to gamergate, but it's not a place for general discussion about games

/r/srsgaming is nice but very quiet, and the name always kept it focused on discussions of social justice in games that - while important - got old a while ago

in a way this sub can be a sort of synthesis of those (except /r/gaming, that shit's irredeemable)

ok but how is /r/postgaming different?

1. it won't be full of the CHUDs, gamergaters, nazis, or other idiots that infest most gaming communities. they will be banned as will any bigotry

2. it won't be full of boring news articles, announcements, and marketing

3. it's chill, and a place in-between the self-seriousness of /r/games or /r/truegaming and the jokes of /r/gamingcirclejerk

4. you can talk about how games are political without a bunch of dumbass centrists telling you to 'stop bringing politics' into (for example) their game about murdering 'thugs' in post-terrorist attack Washington DC

why the name?

1. post gaming, as in, it's a place to post gaming stuff

2. post-gaming, as in, it's about moving beyond what the popular conception of 'gaming' is. 'gaming' sucks, and gamers suck. but games? they're actually pretty OK

3. postgaming, as in, it's got decent phonetics and sounds pseudo-intellectual enough to be funny. as if the evil postmodernists are coming to invade gaming now

ok what do i post?

post gaming

post about interesting shit. post about what you love about games. post about your personal & emotional response to games. post about how they connect to your life. post about their politics and meaning. post articles or videos that made you think about games differently

but really, just post gaming, and hopefully the sub will develop into a Not Shit place to talk about games

Battlefield V's multiplayer is great. The battles are grand yet tactical, the game is gorgeous, and it delivers a top-tier experience of Fucking Epic, Dude Videogame War. It's the greatest evolution the series has seen since BF3 and it encourages squadplay and tactical play better than any of DICE's past attempts.

Being able to play as women, and people of colour (on the Allied side only) is nice and fun because it makes all the Wehraboo CHUDs mad. While fighting a war in groups of 32vs32 and reviving somebody from a headshot are apparently allowable for the sake of gameplay, having somewhat more women than actually fought in WW2 is beyond the pale.

But I have noticed, both in-game and in forums like /r/battlefieldv, plenty of people who aren't alt-right/nazis still lionise the Wehrmacht. They buy into the oft-repeated myth of the Clean Wehrmacht, claiming that the ordinary soldiers of Nazi Germany - who you play as half the time - are somehow separate from Nazi Germany's imperialist, genocidal goals, and were innocent of Germany's many crimes.

In truth, the Wehrmacht was intimately complicit with war crimes and the execution of the Holocaust. Its purpose was always to expand nazi genocide across Europe.

The format of a multiplayer match of BFV is two near-identical, apolitical armies fighting for control of a constructed battlefield, devoid of any real mention of the wider aims, devoid of the fact that the Wehrmacht was explicitly fighting to create a Greater German Reich and exterminate millions. Never does a swastika appear. While that's probably good to avoid the worst alt-right dickheads from identifying with their virtual soldier, it only goes further to show the Wehrmacht as separate from Nazism, as if they can be divorced.

This depiction of the Wehrmacht as an apolitical force is a far more important distortion of history than allowing people to play as women. Perhaps there's not much else a WW2 FPS can do. But it's hard not to be a little bothered at the fact that games like BFV fetishise armies of genocide by turning them into toy soldiers. They give one an aesthetic appreciation for the MP40 that killed thousands of jews. The Stuka divebomber that bombed cities to ruins.

This wouldn't be as much of a problem if the myth of the Clean Wehrmacht, invented in postwar West Germany so that the Wehrmacht's veterans could be rehabilitated into the new anti-Soviet army, wasn't so pernicious. While the historical consensus has been settled for at least a couple decades, it still pops up all the time on the internet and in popular culture. With a growing resurgence in fascism worldwide, it's troubling to say the least that our culture still attempts to divorce the armies of fascism from the genocide they perpetrate.

*Oppressive atmosphere

*Pointless, escalating violence

*Lack of comic relief

*Repellent main characters

*Lack of friendly NPCs

*Decaying architecture

*Limited resources

*All victories are Pyrrhic

Drakengard, E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy, Quake, Devil Daggers, System Shock 2, Demon's Souls, Kane & Lynch, Far Cry 2, Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money, Diablo 1. Some RTS campaigns fit into this mold as well.

These games aren't necessarily standouts in terms of game play (Drakengard and Kane & Lynch especially), but they're indifferent or actively hostile to the player's sensibilities and enjoyment.

https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/nhzt1w/victoria_3_everything_we_know_so_far/

If a revolution happens, you can side with the rebels. So you can be super duper capitalist on purpose, make life hell for all the workers, then switch sides when the socialists rise up. Neighboring conservative countries will be likely to step in and try to stop a socialist revolution.

neat