This is a site for discussing roleplaying games. Have fun doing so, but there is one major rule: do not discuss political issues that aren't directly and uniquely related to the subject of the thread and about gaming. While this site is dedicated to free speech, the following will not be tolerated: devolving a thread into unrelated political discussion, sockpuppeting (using multiple and/or bogus accounts), disrupting topics without contributing to them, and posting images that could get someone fired in the workplace (an external link is OK, but clearly mark it as Not Safe For Work, or NSFW). If you receive a warning, please take it seriously and either move on to another topic or steer the discussion back to its original RPG-related theme.
The RPGPundit's Own Forum Rules
This part of the site is controlled by the RPGPundit. This is where he discusses topics that he finds interesting. You may post here, but understand that there are limits. The RPGPundit can shut down any thread, topic of discussion, or user in a thread at his pleasure. This part of the site is essentially his house, so keep that in mind. Note that this is the only part of the site where political discussion is permitted, but is regulated by the RPGPundit.

Author Topic: When did you first start to notice the SJW takeover of the hobby?  (Read 9391 times)

Stephen Tannhauser

  • Curmudgeonly Refugee
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • S
  • Posts: 1205
Re: When did you first start to notice the SJW takeover of the hobby?
« Reply #60 on: September 18, 2021, 01:12:56 AM »
I suspect that he was also tired of dealing with Teddy Beale/Vox Day, who was running the 'Rabid Puppies' campaign -- which was Sad Puppies with no class at all.

More formally, the Sad Puppies was a campaign to see if the Hugos could be restored from the in-crowd publishers' clique control that had come to dominate it over the last couple of decades, whereas the Rabid Puppies had already written it off as beyond rescuing and explicitly acknowledged that their goal was to, in pretty much exactly Day's own words, "burn the whole thing to the ground".

Classless it may have been, but not as classless as the "asterisk" token given out at the particular Hugo ceremony for the "No Award" votes, which may not have been deliberately designed to look like a human anus but the resemblance to which was gleefully joked about at the ceremony in question.
Better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt. -- Mark Twain

STR 8 DEX 10 CON 10 INT 11 WIS 6 CHA 3

Ghostmaker

  • Chlorine trifluoride
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 4013
Re: When did you first start to notice the SJW takeover of the hobby?
« Reply #61 on: September 18, 2021, 11:13:25 AM »
I suspect that he was also tired of dealing with Teddy Beale/Vox Day, who was running the 'Rabid Puppies' campaign -- which was Sad Puppies with no class at all.

More formally, the Sad Puppies was a campaign to see if the Hugos could be restored from the in-crowd publishers' clique control that had come to dominate it over the last couple of decades, whereas the Rabid Puppies had already written it off as beyond rescuing and explicitly acknowledged that their goal was to, in pretty much exactly Day's own words, "burn the whole thing to the ground".

Classless it may have been, but not as classless as the "asterisk" token given out at the particular Hugo ceremony for the "No Award" votes, which may not have been deliberately designed to look like a human anus but the resemblance to which was gleefully joked about at the ceremony in question.
Personally, I figured Rabid Puppies was primarily to stroke Beale's enormous ego.

From remarks Correia has made, I don't think even he thought the Hugos could be salvaged. He was simply making the point that the emperor had no clothes and the Hugos had devolved into circlejerking. I could be wrong about Correia's views though.


ChrisFox

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 44
Re: When did you first start to notice the SJW takeover of the hobby?
« Reply #62 on: September 18, 2021, 03:57:01 PM »
Sad puppies you say? Talk about good timing for me to enter the thread. Apologies for the length in advance lol.

I had been a gamer geek for years, but in 2010 I quit World of Warcraft, and stopping playing Pathfinder every Saturday. I put everything I had into teaching myself iPhone development, and rode the tech wave into a San Francisco startup job despite not having anything like a degree. This was the only time in my life I put gaming on hold, before or since.

When I left gaming was what I considered normal. Everyone was welcome. It was a tolerant space, and if we got a bad apple we tried to reform them. Real jerks were pretty rare, and dealt with harshly. Being gay was no longer noteworthy.

Fast forward to 2014. I'd been a software engineer for a few years. Long enough that in my spare time I started writing again. I finished a novel, and published it. That book did well. So did the next one. A few books later I quit the software gig to become a full time author, and it is here that we start getting back to the point of the thread.

I became very well known in the author community. I participated in hundreds of tiny groups, and got to know tons of people. I was on all sorts of podcasts. I thought of the author community as the same seamless whole that the gaming community had been to me. Right, left, center, white, black, alien...we were all authors trying to make a living telling stories.

And then came Sad Puppies. As an author I got to see how the sausage is made. I knew most people on all sides, and got along with everyone. I was Switzerland, basically. But it got harder and harder to stay neutral as I saw one side argue in good faith, and the other do an end run around them to take over their cons.

Over the next five years scary milestones kept popping up. Podcasts like Writing Excuses, my dream to be on, publicly stated they didn't want any more white male authors as guests. Sorry, Chris, wrong skin color and gender. Every award we have to give was given to a PoC or woman, usually both, regardless of quality. I saw the stories, some amazing, some not, get pushed entirely on the identity of the author. It had nothing to do with the strength of the writing, and everything to do with perceived virtue.

The Hugos and Nebulas have always been popularity contests, but now it became about activism. And it didn't stop there. Every author who'd come before us was scrutinized, and dissected. The authors who's shoulders we were standing on. If they could find something worth cancelling, then they did it. Award names were changed. Pillars of the science fiction community were removed.

It didn't matter that if you read the person's comments you could see they weren't racists. They'd said that fiction about a certain skin color, in the 1950s, would not sell to their audience. They didn't condone it. They talked about an ugly reality every working writers faces. Rent comes around every month, and if you don't play ball with the publishes you don't eat. The publishers don't eat if no one buys their books.

We lost the fight. The awards were hijacked, and are now no longer taken seriously in the real author community. It was a bitter pill for me to swallow, because not only was  I was captain naive, but I dreamed of winning one of these awards. Since I was a little kid. And I had thought we were all friends. We'd had drinks together at conventions. We'd partied on several beaches.

Those friendships held until the end of 2016. Then the author community fractured, as other communities fractured. By 2019 when they renamed the Campbell award I bailed out, and stopped doing podcasts and conventions. I couldn't handle the division and strife any more.

Where did I go back to? What was my go to escape? I could go back to gaming! Rejoin the hobbies I loved so much.

I've been a member of RPG.net since the month it opened. I have accounts on pretty much every gaming forum going back into the 90s. Over the next week or two I found that every last one had been infiltrated and co-opted. No longer did we talk about gaming. There were no threads about when is Dark Sun coming to 5e.

Now it was all about racism, and sexism, and oppression. And not in a good way. Life long gamers know that those themes are already baked into most of fantasy, because most fantasy authors were geeks who got bullied as kids. This was different. I began to see extremism. Real extremism. For the first time in my life.

Instead of tolerance people began to tell you how you were supposed to play, and if you disagreed you were an istophobe. Things came to a head for me when the Last Jedi came out, and have gotten so much worse since then. Only then did I realize an agenda was being pushed in all forms of entertainment.

I had expected to return to roleplaying to find it the last bastion of free thinking and tolerance. Instead I found it was actually one of the very first places to fall. And the signs were there the entire time...I just didn't know to look for them. I still remember playing a con game in 1998 that we still call the stupidest plot ever.

We were sent to rescue griffin eggs. The heavy handed, poorly written plot was all about how men are evil for enslaving beasts, but we were going to fight the system and free an adult griffin...that had already killed a child.

Hearing some of the people in this thread mention it going back even earlier to the 70s is fascinating. I would love to hear more about  the early days of gaming in general, but especially how the rot spread.

I started gaming in the early 80s, but didn't really come into my own until 1990 when I was a Freshman in high school. Gaming with girls was the norm, and equality wasn't something we even thought about. Black, white, asian, jew...we were just misfits.

Anyway, thanks for attending my TED talk haha

Trond

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 2743
Re: When did you first start to notice the SJW takeover of the hobby?
« Reply #63 on: September 18, 2021, 09:39:32 PM »
Sad puppies you say? Talk about good timing for me to enter the thread. Apologies for the length in advance lol….

You do seem to have that writing bug still 😀
Yeah, I’m afraid RPGs were infested early on.
Anyway thanks for sharing!

Ocule

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 451
Re: When did you first start to notice the SJW takeover of the hobby?
« Reply #64 on: September 22, 2021, 09:23:04 PM »
Quote
When did you first start to notice the SJW takeover of the hobby?

Probably too damn late.
When I was on Facebook, I joined a bunch of D&D pages. The largest was run by raging SJWs (1 trans person, 1 pink-haired obese person who wrote a module or two for WotC, etc.)  One tactic they would use was every couple of weeks they would let a bait post sit for a few hours and get a lot of comments, then afterwards go through and ban every opposing viewpoint.  The fact that it was the largest page was a clue.
Then, Twitter, as the actual WotC staff would pander to every far-left nonsense that swung by.

Glad I am no longer on either platform.

Jesus I know exactly the group you mean
Read my Consumer's Guide to TTRPGs
here. This is a living document.

Forever GM

Now Running: Mystara (BECMI)