Mendicant Bias
A quiet man of many talents who likes few things better than a morning spent blasting through HALO campaign levels. Better known as Didact, he writes about game, politics, philosophy, heavy metal, and other things at Didact's Reach and can be reached at [email protected]
April 15 is probably the single most-hated day in the entire calendar for Americans, and for any non-American (like me) who has to file taxes on American assets. This is the day when the GOSPLAN United States Congress acts through its bully boys enforcers agents within the IRS to take by force from you what is rightfully yours. Those of us who live by our own exertions rightly loathe this system and the Robin Hood ideology upon which it is founded. We especially despise the way in which the funds looted from us through this particularly odious form of armed robbery are turned by the moochers and looters of the progressive Left to the task of burning down what little is left of a once-strong and admirable culture.
When it comes to gaming, we have now seen how our tax dollars—money earned by you and me through honest work—have been turned against us. As James Robson noted recently, that money is now being spent through the myriad back-channels and appropriations methods available through the Congressional budget system to make gamers look like angry, misogynistic, racist fat spergy white neckbeards. (I paraphrase minutely.)
My friends, this will not stand. And on this, the most hated day of the calendar year, I bring you some good news to help deal with the fact that the US government would like nothing better than to bend you over a barrel and give you a sandpaper suppository.
If you are as sick and tired of the current state of affairs in gaming journalism and development as my colleagues and I are here at Reaxxion, then here are 3 things that you can do, right now, to make things better.
1. Boycott, Divest, And Sanction
Back when Israel launched its (completely justified) military intervention in Gaza last year, the hard-Left establishment of the university campuses in this country exploded in righteous indignation and responded by attempting to starve Israel of friends and funds. They launched the BDS movement, which quickly gathered force and weight due to thousands of university students signing on in an expression of inchoate rage and a rather distressing lack of common sense. Misguided though that movement was, it did have some pretty significant results.
The thing is, the rabbits of the SJW set are not the only ones who can play that game.
They’re very good at it, make no mistake, but because their entire ideology is based on the false assumption that they will always hold the moral high ground, they are utterly unprepared for what happens when their own BDS tactics are turned against them.
Enter Operation: Disrespectful Nod. The basic goal of O:DN was simple: any gaming journalism outlet that is sympathetic to, led by, or promoting SJWs and their pet causes will be targeted by angry gamers. The genius of the operation, however, was to go after the sponsors of gaming journalism websites like Kotaku, Escapist, Rock Paper Shotgun, Gawker, and Joystiq. O:DR did so using the simplest and most effective means possible. It encouraged users of 8chan and supporters of GamerGate to simply email sponsors like Intel, Amazon, BMW, Adobe, and a number of others with polite and respectful emails that pointed out what epic douchelords the journalists and editors of these websites had been. GamerGate supporters were able to draw upon a veritable mountain of evidence in the form of articles, emails, Tumblr posts, Facebook updates, and of course the long-winded post that started it all.
The goal was simply to tell advertisers in no uncertain terms that, by associating themselves with those gaming journalism sites, they were supporting people who hated gamers and would stop at nothing to slander and vilify the very clients that those same advertisers depended on for revenue.
The success of O:DR is simply mind-blowing. This operation has no real leader, no particular goal beyond cutting the revenue streams of these “journalism” sites, and no financial backing itself whatsoever. And it managed to destroy Gawker’s sources of ad revenues in the space of four months.
Operation: Disrespectful Nod succeeded because, as I have said for months now, GamerGate has captured the moral level of war. Gaming journalists were previously able to get away with all manner of slander and abuse towards us, but once their own ethical transgressions were exposed for all the world to see, their tenuous claim to the moral high ground in the war for the culture was summarily wrenched from their grasp. And because of this, we have been able to beat them in every arena of battle.
2. Starve The Beast
The hard reality is that modern gaming is a mess because game developers have been able to get away with too much nonsense for far too long. They rip us off with terrible games that they promise to make better later using DLC. They recycle the same damn game twenty times over with minimal changes to the layout, control scheme, and gameplay and expect us to keep paying full price, into perpetuity. They cancel hugely promising but risky future developments and instead concentrate on whoring out their current IP. They even insist on taking the greatest game franchises ever made and injecting them full of more filler and junk than your average Beverly Hills breast implants.
Dumb, trashy and vulgar. WYB?
You don’t have to put up with this nonsense, though. As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, there are alternatives out there.
If you find modern gaming to be sterile and stupid, Good Old Games has dirt-cheap classics that you can pick up for a song. And they are DRM-free. That’s right: you buy a game, and it’s yours forever. You can install it as many times as you want, and no one short of God Himself can tell you off.
If you do want to play decent modern games, buy them second-hand from GameStop or Best Buy. Game publishers won’t see one red cent of that money, which means that you’ll be able to punish them swiftly and terribly for abusing your intelligence and your wallet.
If you’re fed up of being tied down to a particular platform or console, Steam games can run on any operating system, including my beloved Linux. Thanks to Steam, you can build your own top-end gaming rig using open-source software and play some of the greatest, most brilliantly designed and most playable games of all time to your heart’s content. No longer are you tied down to the buggy, bloated software of companies like Microsoft; no longer are you kept prisoner within Apple’s walled garden.
And if you hate the fact that the US government is now using your money against you, then you can starve that particular beast too.
Go Galt. Don’t pay one single dime in taxes more than you have to, and preferably don’t pay any at all. Don’t give the bastards any more of your money. Force their wretched and miserable system to collapse, as it one day inevitably must.
3. Donate To Reaxxion
Really angry complaints can be written on $100 bills and mailed to us directly
Reaxxion and its big brother, Return of Kings, depend on two things: advertising revenue and donations. We generate the first by being perhaps the only gaming site around that provides a proud, distinct, and utterly unapologetic masculine point of view. And we do it by consciously providing something different, something of value to our readers and to you as a gamer.
We are men who write because we love video games, and we hate what has been done to the gaming industry by those who we consider to be the lowest and basest form of life possible. (Even fungus has its good points when compared to your typical SJW: some fungus, for instance, actually tastes good, whereas cannibalising an SJW would probably give you severe indigestion.)
We do not, and never will, hire women to write for this site, even though a sizable part of our readership is female. We will never insult your intelligence; we will always strive to treat you with respect, as gentlemen should; and we will never pander to you, or to anyone else. We are fiercely independent, and we will keep it that way: we will never descend into the kind of incestuous, slimy relationships that so many gaming “journalists” had and continue to have with the very developers and publishers that they are supposed to be keeping honest.
That is who we are, and that is what we stand for.
Our Code of Ethics is strictly enforced, and no one who writes for this site is above its dictates.
Yet the fact is that it costs money to create, host, and deploy all of this content. Advertising revenue will help us maintain and build this site, but to take it to the next level, we need your help.
We may well be winning this war. But we can’t fight it alone.
If you have found value in what we write, please consider giving Reaxxion a small donation. We will use that money to hire more writers, build out the site’s interface, and increase our presence in various conventions, gaming awards, and product tests.
By the way, don’t think that yours truly gets any benefit from your donations. I write for Reaxxion as an unpaid weekly contributor, and that’s exactly how I like it. I do so entirely of my own free will: my day job keeps me both very busy and quite comfortable. I write for this site and for my own blog because I love to write and, apparently, some people like to read what I produce.
Be assured that every penny that you donate will go toward building out this site, and by extension toward holding the gaming industry accountable for its follies, castigating it for its excesses, and—yes—applauding it for its rare moments of sanity and creative brilliance.
Best of all, remember that under U.S. tax law, charitable donations are tax-deductible. You get to screw over the US government twice: once by reducing your tax bill, and again by funding a site that proudly and defiantly sticks its fingers right into the eyes of those who fund studies that slander gamers everywhere. And it’s completely legal.
Onwards And Upwards
This site has had some major successes in the past five months of its existence. As we pass each milestone, we take stock of what we have won—and lost—and we will learn from our triumphs and our mistakes. This site has grown thanks to our staff writers, and thanks to you, our readers. It is a tremendous honour to write for this site and for you, and we will never take that privilege lightly.
And if you hold what we have done to be good and valuable, then I hope you will take that one extra step and help us write the next chapter in our story.
Read More: 3 Ways Women Have Ruined Video Games
