Jesse Heinig

I didn't learn about Waffle House until after Fallout, when I moved to Georgia to work for White Wolf.

The reality of course should be that Vault-Tec borrows from the Waffle House Index to measure vault preparedness.

Keep in mind that when we first made Fallout, we were living in southern California, and not everyone on the team had been exposed to Waffle House!

Every year we are summarily excused for saying things like "If the prosecution wants me to believe them, they should show me evidence" and "I don't believe that cops automatically tell the truth."

We want to do our civic duty, but our country, it seems, doesn't feel the same way.

Every year, like clockwork, my wife and I receive a jury summons. Every year we block out a week to trek downtown and sit in a waiting room. Every year we spend a chunk of time doing our civic duty, as is our privilege, to try to keep an organized, peaceful, just society.

+

Double-page spread from the Starfleet Technical Manual (from Star Trek), showing the arms of Alpha Centauri on the left page with a pair of centaurs surrounded by Greek lettering, and an official type style guide on the right page.

Looks like something that would appear in the Starfleet Technical Manual

Lotta things seem like they could be communicated better here. Which missions are on a timetable? How MUCH does my karma change for various actions? (I presume saying "hi" to strangers a few times doesn't equate to murdering someone on the trail.) Where is the map key for symbols? Lots to do.

Wait a minute. In RDR2 you can get locked out of content because there are too many things to do at once and there is no indication of your time gating?

This game gets worse and worse.

Of course if you say something like "There will be no tribunals, this will just be the new norm" or "They don't have to cancel elections, they just have to use ICE to make sure that only the right people get to vote" they get all mad at you b/c you are the problem, not the fashies

This, like many parts of our society today, is a symptom, not a cause. Games that lionize milplay do so because our society does it, and they are following the money. Removing the symptom will not cure the cause.

~Fin~

Bovino milplays in Nazi apparel because it lets him feel powerful to thumb his nose at people and invoke the imagery of terror. Talking heads like Noem and Marjorie Taylor Greene do photo ops with guns (badly) to show their power and evoke the imagery of fear of death.

+

ICE agents are not doing what they do because it's "like Call of Duty." They play games like CoD for the same reason they like being ICE. They are comparing two interests that coincide in fulfilling their desire to show their power. They want to show off. They want it because it causes fear.

+

Video games sell these to gamers because there is an audience for it. Our society relishes this, people spend money on it, so of course businesses pursue that money. Ammosexuals who overlap with incels have nothing else to give them satisfaction, so that's where their dollars go.

+

This is a way for fashies and wannabees to feel powerful. They wield the symbols of power, and their power comes from the ability to deal out death at their whim. Thus they love skulls, guns, body armor, armored vehicles.

+

Before video games we had action movies. Before action movies we had cop shows and Westerns.

The original Nazis did not need video games in order to pursue The Aesthetic. They loved pomp, uniforms, and style with the accoutrements of death.

+

There is a direct line running through "games sell you milplay," through "cops are heroes and need to be militarized to fight bad guys," through "the military is cool and big heavy weapons and explosions are cool," through "the only thing stopping a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

+

Games do milplay because our culture promotes it. We see this in copaganda TV shows. We see it in movies that make deals with the military to use military hardware in exchange for glamorizing and valorizing and fetishizing the military. We see it in nonmilitary groups adopting milplay aesthetics.

+

Military games selling you costumes of customized body armor and skull masks are not the cause of our milplay commandos, they are a symptom. Those who want to shoot others without consequence love wearing these symbols of power, so games will sell cosmetic versions of them to you.

+

I saw someone commenting that the militarized oppression of today is in part due to the promotion of military adventurism promoted by games like Call of Duty (since one of the ICE agents at the latest shooting said "It's like Call of Duty") and this is backward.

I'll 'splain.

+

Rashomon the RPG module?

Wild stuff but very cool

Presumably, bots.

Between RDR2, CP2077, and AC: Odyssey, looks like some middle-aged gamedevs were thinking a lot about dying

I do not have the power to make you not angry. I also do not have the power to give you purpose. Many people share your distress, and that may serve as an indicator that if you can find a way to escape the pit of despair and find something to motivate you, perhaps you can help others to do the same.

Our challenge now is to stay focused on our goals of resisting authoritarianism and promoting liberation for everyone, without descending into the quagmire of punching each other because we're the only targets that we can reach.

+

A signature element of authoritarian regimes is imposing the sense that you are powerless. This is a phenomenon well-known to minority groups in the U.S., who are frequently persecuted by state power and reminded that individually they have no power to resist.

+

And I can certainly say with confidence that having stronger connections with your neighbors and your community, better emergency preparedness, and a clear-eyed sense of some possible scenarios and what you can do to prepare for at least parts of them can make you feel more empowered.

+

I am not a psychologist and I am not qualified or licensed to deal with issues of how you may feel with respect to social media. I can say with some confidence that there are some strong indications that social media experiences can increase anxiety and make people feel worse.

+

While my confidence in a positive outcome here in the U.S. may be low, I urge you to find a constructive use of your time, whether it is something that engages you outside of the constant online stream of terror, or something that allows you to feel like you are doing something.

+

("Normal" in the U.S. was never a good state in any case, but we have a lot of work if we are to fix or re-create anything better, so that is a different conversation.)

+

Thus, as I wrote elsewhere, voting is necessary, but not sufficient; this crisis is not going to be solved by ballots. There are a variety of directions that it can take and we must not pretend that we can simply vote everything "back to normal."

+