VERGE: Gamers Need 'Deradicalization' From 'Toxic Gamer Culture', GamerGate
An article published by The Verge claims that gamer students need to be “deradicalized” from the influence of “toxic gamer culture” that makes them reject leftist group think.
Writing in The Verge, Megan Farokhmanesh tells the story of Bo Ruberg, a UC Irvine assistant professor who teaches a class on “Games & Society”. Ruberg noticed some students recording a lecture on gender in gaming, and discovered that 11 people had entered who were not signed up to the class.
Ruberg was therefore “unnerved,” and concerned that her leftist ramblings would end up on social media; Ruberg and 3 teachers assistants “spent the next few days patrolling local campus Reddit communities for their material,” clearly worried she was about to be harassed by a pile of violent online gamers ready to send her thousands of death threats.
Ruberg said they were on the lookout for “potential problems” with their students all the time:
It makes me sad to say that, because I truly love teaching undergraduates, but it’s [hard] to tell when you’re teaching a student who is open to new perspectives and when you’re teaching someone who has the potential to do harm…
It has made a lot of us teachers more cautious… We want to challenge our students to explore new ways of thinking, to see the cultural meaning and power of video games, but we’re understandably anxious and even scared about the possible results.
Farokhmanesh blames GamerGate for this “radicalization” of students:
In the five years following Gamergate, sites like YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter shifted the power dynamics between student and teacher. The harassment-campaign-turned-online-culture-war paved the way for how abusers coordinate and systematically target victims. Online harassment has moved from the web and into real life. Marginalized figures have always known harassment existed in digital spaces, but Gamergate honed these tactics and pushed them into mainstream awareness.
Steve Wilcox, who teaches game design at Wilfrid Laurie University claims that the arguments from students that “conservatives are being discriminated against” is total nonsense:
That fails to recognize that society is already kind of deplatforming people — women, people of color, and trans speakers, or people marginalized in society — despite the fact that our society is already predisposed to being prejudiced toward them in the first place.
This is despite the numerous documented instances of suppression of conservative thought and speech online. Emma Vossen, who has a PhD in “gender and games” tried to claim that student gamers are “harassers in the classroom who have tapped into social media as a powerful weapon,” as reported by Farokhmanesh.
Vossen says that “gamers are not inherently sexist [or] inherently racist”: with a little bit of brainwashing via the playing “leftist videos in… class,” or “teaching students the basics of feminism at a very young age,” these students should be dancing along to the globalist tune in no time! Until then, the academics will remain being subjected to “the same hostile ideologies that make it difficult for other voices to enter the field.”
What a shame!
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