I love how people say there's no censorship...
This get's posted to reddit, and most of the top comment users have been shadowbanned by reddit admins.
Amazing.
Reddit seems to have a really bizarre moderation policy for most of the major subreddits. I think it's a shame, because it has the effect of stirring up a community that's always presented itself as anti-establishment. The site's karma system already promotes heavy amounts of conformation bias, so you've now ended up with a bunch of really angry emotional commenters. At that point, it's not a matter of conversation, it's just whatever narrative is the most interesting to read gets populated at the top.
To reddit's discredit, I think they want an enemy. They want to show that "game journalism" is "corrupt", that phil fish is a bully, that Quinn is a woman or something, that Max Tempkin wasn't a woman or something, that Patrick Klepek is a "warrior" of "social" "justice" (whatever that means), that Phil Fish is humanity's greatest monster because he gets all et tu brutus on the angry sentence website, that Geoff Keighley is literally a dorito because he was unhappy in a photo that contained doritos, that Anita Sarkeesian stole all of video game's money to make a youtube video.
And I'm not a smart man. I'm not drawing towards anything of significance here. I'm not sure if all of this anger and suspicion and doubt is reflective of industry growing pains, or if people are actively looking for drama, or if people are afraid to be confronted, or what. It's probably one of them fuzzy areas between. But it's weird, right? It feels like this stuff has been brewing for the past couple of years, and it's increasingly hostile. The people on that Reddit thread, I don't think they want a dialogue. They're in a comments section, posting opinions, but I don't think that reddit's structure is supportive of anything but general consensus. And at some point that consensus gets hostile, not helped at all by the moderation going on in that website, and you just end up with a huge crock of shit with people flip flopping between swearing at the admins, throwing out directed personal insults at fish or quinn or whoever, and it just makes me disappointed. Because I like going to Reddit.com, because there are some cool subsections of that website.
It's a situation where you wish that everyone would kinda just sit down and talk it out, you know? And I think the press don't want to, because in some ways, this whole thing is still centered around actual people with feelings. And I'm not sure if the press are just going to ignore that and try to skirt around the personal stuff and address the larger issues people are worried about, or if it's too tightly ingrained that at some point this does become a very personal uncomfortable conversation. And maybe they already are and I haven't been paying close enough attention to this mess for my own sanity.
I've spent too long thinking about this without anything worthwhile popping out the other end. I just hope that people get a grip, that they realise video games aren't coming to an end because a text adventure got mentioned on kotaku. Even if, at points, the concept of Fez 2 being cancelled
feels like the end of video games forever.
