Are gamers getting stupider?

[shrekfan246]

Which leads to hilarious discussions where some people try to tell me that video games do not and cannot influence somebody's attitudes or outlooks in any way. And I'm desperately glad that that's not happening here.

Oh, Christ, that argument just makes me weep for the state of society, not even with any hyperbole. I get that some people just aren't used to self-reflection or anything of the sort, but, like, how blinkered a life do you have to lead?

 

[Schadrach]

Feminazi is an incredibly stupid term that no sane person should ever use unironically.

http://www.dailywire.com/news/8386/feminist-journalist-all-men-are-rapists-and-should-amanda-prestigiacomo

Replace 'men' with 'jews' and you get the idea.

Ill admit its a rather low standard of proof, but those kinds of feminist do, in fact, exist.

Rather amusingly there was a Mozilla add-on that would do just that -- replace men with Jews and women with Aryans on websites that tend to have feminist bents. It was pulled down for promoting Nazism which I find hilarious. Now you just have /r/menkampf and /r/StormfrontOrSJW to go to for that kind of comparison.

Well shit, first thing I noticed was Life is Strange and I was hoping that we were all gonna take turns shitting on it. At least I was going to. 4 pretty damn good episodes only to get Mass Effect 3'd at the end with a vast pile of bullshit. Yeah I'll pass on it.

You're going to hate me for this, but I was calling the ending of LiS after episode 2. It's not like they were waving Donnie Darko and the Butterfly Effect in your face or anything, or that a certain thing keeps happening to a certain character and you keep undoing it, or that your meddling is seemingly making things...not right (to be fair it's ep three before you can really see a trend going on this one). I literally called everything about the "Save the bay" option other than who took Rachel Amber.

 

[TelosSupreme]

Which leads to hilarious discussions where some people try to tell me that video games do not and cannot influence somebody's attitudes or outlooks in any way. And I'm desperately glad that that's not happening here.

Oh, Christ, that argument just makes me weep for the state of society, not even with any hyperbole. I get that some people just aren't used to self-reflection or anything of the sort, but, like, how blinkered a life do you have to lead?

That's basically what I was getting at. I mean yeah, video games can introduce you to new opinions and ideas, sure. But at the end of the day you still have to make the conscious decision to agree or disagree with them. I love Night in the Woods but it didn't convince me to become a socialist. In fact I reached the complete opposite conclusion, but that's because I already had my own biases when entering that story.

Media should be platforms for discussion, not a collection of competing instruction manuals. And sometimes it can just be simple entertainment. What am I going to learn from a game like SSX other than that I could never fall 75 feet from a slope and survive?

 

[Drathnoxis]

Very true.
I remember when steam first came out and everyone jumped on the bandwagon almost without hesitation.
I had already been gaming for at least 10 years before that (and consider those years the golden ones) and I was appalled that such a horrible practice could go on with almost nary a complaint.
I vowed then and there that I would never support any online verification scheme and have held true to my word.
Despite steam still going 12 years later I have never (and will never) download that or any other such platforms.

Preach brother. I've also never used a digital distribution platform. I'd rather abandon modern games altogether than pay money for a game that I won't own.

 

[McElroy]

Very true.
I remember when steam first came out and everyone jumped on the bandwagon almost without hesitation.
I had already been gaming for at least 10 years before that (and consider those years the golden ones) and I was appalled that such a horrible practice could go on with almost nary a complaint.
I vowed then and there that I would never support any online verification scheme and have held true to my word.
Despite steam still going 12 years later I have never (and will never) download that or any other such platforms.

Preach brother. I've also never used a digital distribution platform. I'd rather abandon modern games altogether than pay money for a game that I won't own.

But you have missed out, haven't you? And at the end of the day, even if your licence expires the bits and bytes will live on - and somebody will always be ready to share.