Foam on the Tsunami

"So how much easier would life be
If nineteen million motherfuckers grew to be just like me?"

 

Eminem - Who Knew

 

 

One of this blog's funnier moments came upon noticing a slight spike in hits a few years back and discovering I'd attracted the attention of some parental watchdog group called "children in peril" or somesuch, presumably for my habit of demanding your darling little submental degenerate walking shitstains be skinned alive for griefing in online games.

And they'd deserve it.

But there's an added dimension. While hardly limited to children, online games do skew toward younger demographics, and as I've tried conveying in the past, this makes players' observable behavior online a crucial indicator of where the culture is headed. Their capacity for fair-play, rising to difficult challenges, self-sacrifice in service to the team, all those sportsmanlike qualities which used to define our communal mammalian play (at least as ideals) have almost entirely died away.

 

What's left, the way online gamers act now, placed in our wider cultural context, leads me to predict:

GenZ will turn fascist on hitting thirty.

And no, for once I am not speaking figuratively, or even hyperbolically. Violence in movies or games has never been an issue... but the interactivity of the violence against other human players, the underhandedness, the demand to be able to cheat or grief or punch while never taking a punch, that reflects strongly on gamers' mentality.

 

Upon returning to League of Legends after years' absence (seriously, I used to play back when it still had a tribunal) I was surprised to see the once-coveted "carry" role is now shunned, and the once-mediocre middle lane caster role is eagerly sought. It seemed impossible for players to have shifted away from direct damage and stacking their K/D ratio. But the mystery was quickly resolved. Riot simply put in so many idiotically overpowered teleporting assassin heroes (e.g. Yasuo, Yone, Zed, Sylas not to mention the older Akali, Kat, etc.) capable of getting free kills on any squishy that everyone wants mid lane not to play a caster for cover fire and crowd control that would benefit the team more, but to farm said caster for free kills as an assassin... then be useless for team fights and force your fellows to fight outnumbered. Even when they play a bottom lane carry, quite a few insist on Yasuo.

Granted, from this blog's very start I was trying to call out the heavier and heavier shift toward designated griefer classes in every single online game. And note, it's never enough to reliably get kills on enemy players. They want it to be risk-free. They always insist on also getting to "vanish" or teleport out of combat afterwards. When World of Warcraft first launched, you could tell the idiots' mentality by one of rogues' most frequent complaints: paladin bubble-hearthing. Paladins, y'see, had an immunity spell lasting long enough to teleport back to town. Rogues, accustomed to getting free kills, kept demanding paladin bubbles be nerfed... not because rogues were losing fights, but because they considered it unfair for anyone to be able to escape their griefing. Despite rogues themselves having even more convenient escapes.

So sure, the mentality's anything but new, but it has gotten generalized across all genres. Yes, AWP whores were a problem in Counterstrike back around Y2K but at least most of us were willing to call the retarded little shits whores. Were you dismayed when the youth all idealized stalwart unbreakable '80s action movie heroes? Well, now they all want to be faceless assassins. Stannis Baratheon gets degraded to a redshirt, to be replaced with Arya... and in the final tally, you think that's a step up?

 

Magic: the Gathering was never a great game, and in fact lies at the root of much of the game industry's current idiocy like microtransactions, randomized loot boxes and over-reliance on luck-based gameplay. Its chief charm though was building up your board via chains of causality that could yield truly spectacular results:

I need a cigarette.

(addendum: in case you can't tell, I actually killed myself by overdrawing there... but damn if it wasn't worth it)

 

But at some point over the past years, its focus shifted toward proliferating "kill" cards which instantly remove an opponent's assets from the table regardless of their quality or defensive ability. A quick glance at MTG:Arena now reveals hundreds of redundant "destroy" or "exile" or "counterspell" or "discard" options, all bypassing card power/toughness values altogether. Sure, it's partly because arithmetic has gone out of style, and partly because the game includes way too many cards that can win a match singlehandedly if not immediately removed... but you have to account for the inescapable feel that if anything threatens me, I should simply get to make it go away, instantly and with utter impunity.

I doubt this is limited to MTG among card games either, having retried Gwent recently and uninstalled it in disgust when I found nothing matters except damage anymore, to the point it's impossible to win defensively.

 

Building is a thing of the past. Preventing others from building, one-shotting then running away, is the name of the game. Do you imagine this mentality will not translate to physical reality?

There's an old chauvinist mantra, a bit of plausible deniability that never really dies: "sure, I'd never call for those people of the wrong race/sex/religion/sexuality to be exterminated, I'd never promote holocausts, I'm a nice little girl... but still, wouldn't it be nice if they all suddenly just... went away?"

That's adolescents' newly burgeoning spirit: instead of pitting yourself against your designated enemy's strength, mano a mano, quality to quality, you should get to make the enemy simply disappear. Such attitudes in games are decidedly married to a politically correct education. An entire generation now has grown up walking on needles from the cradle onwards, because everything they do or say will somehow be construed as A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY!!! - unless of course you align yourself with some self-appointed group of underdogs. Now you're "progressive" you're "woke" and entitled, nay, demanded to inflict as much attrition on the designated enemy as possible, while anyone speaking against you can simply be dismissed and blacklisted as an evil subversive. Life itself consists of making "problematic" people go away while hiding behind nominal oppression.

Anyone skimming through history can probably spot the problem on the horizon: a leader will arise, charismatic or simply positioned well enough politically to rescue them from uncertainty, promise these skittish executioners a complete takeover, complete cover, promise them they will never need fear being on the wrong side of history, ever ever ever again. When you have lived in fear your whole life, if not physical fear then the fear of ostracism, of existential negation, when you have spent a childhood, a youth and half a working life atoning for some ill-defined guilt in simply being born the WRONG sex/race/sexuality, anyone promising absolution is an angel inviting you to the rapture.

And all you have to do... is turn against your absolver's enemies.

That's not so hard, is it?

Just make the evil people go away. Be willing to murder for the glorious leader, and you need never fear again. Murder with impunity. You dashing Rogue, you.

(It's a lie of course. Nobody lives in fear more than citizens of a police state, the snitches and bootlicks, always feeling the noose of social acceptability tighten around their necks as the system purges more and more faithful infidels. But by the time they figure that out, it's too late.)

They're already embracing the ideal of killing with impunity in their virtual lives. Pretty soon someone will offer them that chance in real life. This is in fact what both the right and left wings have been practicing over the past decade here in the States, perfecting the formula be it white pride, black pride, gay pride, blue-collar coal miners, hashtag mobs, a grievance here, an entitlement there, rally this-and-that. The actual cause can be anything, "the flame of a blowlamp" in Orwell's prescient words. All that really matters is an entire population indoctrinated into both fear of being targeted and starving to inflict some harm in turn... so long as they get to "vanish" behind some noble cause's smokescreen afterwards.

 

Your children are not in peril.

Your children ARE the peril.

Because you've raised them as desperately, underhandedly, sociopathically, facetiously servile, backstabbing, self-hatingly narcissistic, sadistic little apprentice Nazis. An entire society shamed and feeling cheated of their righteous glory, and painfully aware how ripe for scapegoating their neighbours look. But enough about history repeating itself or 1920s Germany. You're worried about suicide bombers and school shooters now? Wait 'til the school shooters get their own political lobby under the moral umbrella of redressing the world's racial imbalance (however interpreted) as an oppressed underclass. They've toed the line so long they're about to fall in it. You've sowed, watered (and weeded of any clearheaded opposition) a generation's worth of faceless, spineless minions desperate for validation, begging to be reaped by the first charismatic powermonger to get a foot in the door. GenZ is a fascist time bomb.