Narrative Warfare: Seven Years Rent-Free, #Gamergate!

What a long, strange trip it's been.

(By Kukuruyo)

Seven years since this all jumped off with #gamergate, eh?

And the gaming industry--video and tabletop--continues to be a trashfire overall, but man has the word gotten around by now. Sure, the news media across the board still does what it did, but so has the awareness that it is a pile of shitheels and shill pretending to be proper investigators and reporters for the people- a tanking in credibility now comparable to that of governments.

Since then, the word's gotten around. Even the religious aspect to the enemy--that they are the Death Cult, a Chirstian heresy--has started to get around to major nodes like Reddit. So has the word that the best thing to do is to starve them, fork off our own parallels, and route around them.

Some areas are easier to do this in than others, and because it is neither flashy nor speedy it is often overlooked until the momentum picks up and becomes an avalanche- a Preference Cascade in action. We're seeing this happen in comics and genre fiction novels, where independents have successfully forked off and built up parallels to converged insitutions, with videogames not that far behind.

Other areas remain difficult to address due to the importance of the power behind their position, with the most immediate example being payment processors. As it is now, while there are projects in the works it is difficult to fork and replace them due to the power that control over finance provides to the enemy; even then, they can fall back to the credit card companies themselves. For now, the practical alternatives are themselves limited in application for political reasons (because they are Chinese or Russian), but they are available; so long as you can deal with those limits, you'll be fine.

Nonetheless, the overall trend doesn't look good for the enemy. Their positions are eroding and collapsing, but some of what they control has further to go than others and this is the source of the disparty between reality and apperance; there is simply more to erode in film, television, and videogames than there is in comics, tabletop games, and genre fiction novels.

And make no mistake: the smaller segments are already in a state of collapse, and it is ultimately to our benefit to hasten that collapse as best we can.

The other day I said that tabletop RPGs will be best served by making the environment inhospitable to the enemy. This is applicable across the board, and a lot of the general direction I said in that post regarding how hobbyists should serve that scene are applicable generally: more self-sufficiency, tenacity, and cultivation of individual character and skill; less reliance on Muh Product, Muh Brand, and on centralized solutions.

We never needed them. They depend on us. We are the real thing. They are the illusion. We continue to Git Gud. They remain scrubs. Paul didn't break the Harkonnen on Arrakis in a day; it took years. We're already outlasting them, and we continue to live rent-free in their heads.

We have already won. It just takes time for a corpse that massive to finally run out of momentum and fall.