On Genocide and Ethics in Games Journalism

This is the one where I get angry.

It’s one hell of a sensation to stop and recognize that you wasted the better part of your life. I’ve talked at length on how I wish I had not dedicated myself to the coverage and judgement of video games. It’s a medium that doesn’t deserve appreciative scrutiny and serves an audience that can’t understand it in the first place. Amidst all the regrets is the undeniable fact, though, that there was a Pro Quo for the Quid of my labors and I’m in a modestly comfortable situation as a result of them.  

The fact that I spent an inordinate amount of that waste of time wasting even more time in front of the camera campaigning for the democratization of video games; to become more inclusive in terms of players, in representation of underprivileged communities in the games themselves and amongst the people making the games in addition to the general deemphasis of the middle-class whiteboy as the locus of gaming in general - That’s what I’m slowly beginning to accept was foolhardy and worthless. That endeavor: Which brought with it reams of threats and harassment, alienation of potential audience, sanction from my superiors and limitations on my future employment and endeavors, was predicated on a sincere belief that it was towards a common good of decency and acceptance; a modest utopia where the majority understood that tolerance of others brought with it a significant reduction in the seemingly insurmountable friction of day-to-day existence.  In less than a year I have come to realize that that goal was predicated on a false compact. One that ostensibly championed a simple but decent “rising tide” notion but was, like the neanderthal gamers who didn’t want girls and gay people in their games, was predicated on opposition and the desire to isolate others.  A career wasted not only on the bullshit consumerist manna that is video games but on the bullshit promise that I was playing for the better team, the one that knew better and strived for idealistic but achievable goals to shape a superior world that wasn’t predicated on fear and retrograde notions of conformity and cheap tribalism. Yup, I sure as shit hitched my dumbass wagon to the wrong diseased pony since I was 23 and come October 7^th it threw me off with a big fuck you from colleagues, friends and strangers; apparently for everyone else it wasn’t about doing the right things but satisfying the same demented, paleolithic urges to draw distinction and satisfy the carnal need to hate, to empower oneself with the strength of the mob and revel in the status from selection and sacrifice. A bacchanal of the desperate to be seen, indistinguishable from those I mocked and reviled among Trump loyalists, just with less ankle edemas.   

My original intention with this piece was to break down the semantic/semiotic unity between the majority of online (and campus, it's not that different) pro-Palestinian protestor rhetoric and the right-wing idiot tantrum that was the GamerGate movement of 2015 (can’t speak to its new incarnation, I barely saw it, but it seemed even more stupid and mouth-breathy). Then, a couple days ago I read/watched coverage of the Pico-Robertson protest at Adas Torah Synagogue, read the limp dick excuses of why it was acceptable (don’t get me wrong, it’s legal, yes I know you think it’s about “stolen land” it’s still just bitch boy behavior when you can’t admit it’s because you hate jews) and realized even after all the disappointment and excising of assholes from my sphere of influence I still have people in my life copacetic if not enthusiastic about this quality of protest and language with regard to jews (yes, I’m looking at you) and willfully blind to the no longer subtextual but fucking on-the-goddam-surface hate wrapped in a shell game of codified terminology that feels as genuine as thoughts and prayers from republicans when news camera spooge over dead kids in school. Why the fuck am I going to waste my time and energy to make a case to you when one either sees the parading bullshit or doesn’t? Who the fuck am I going to convince and why? If you suck go right ahead and keeping sucking your onanistic glass dick of righteousness. I’m not telling anyone not to be a Jew-hating fucknut because their small life didn’t amount to much and it’s far more American to turn that corrosive frustration of your own meager worth towards an amorphous enemy than subject oneself to humbling self-analysis.  Go right ahead and hold your withered cock in your hand while watching sociopaths in keffiyehs and wayward lesbians yell at Jews at their temple on your TikTok, just don’t act surprised when I shove my boot up your intersectional ass.  

I was going to use as an example this tortured meme from Maddy Myers, game editor at Polygon (progressive-minded pop culture website that daringly called out Kojima on his myopia towards the asexual) - and apparently living life in-between community theater productions of Midsummer Night’s Dream - which she dropped back in February: 

The evident linguistic and pictorial strain to come to the shocking conclusion that “Some jews are hypocritical” should make one wonder exactly how she has a job as a writer (Maybe it’s one of those “Make-a-Wish” things) but the heavy lifting of “Zionist” as a qualifier for “jews” is an excellent case study in the ever-shifting utility of this word as backdoor means to say, “fuck the heebs” at a boba tea shop. At least the white supremacists aren't cagey about using the Big Z to mean exactly what they mean.  

See “Zionist Jews” allows the reader to infer “Christian Zionists” as a neologism for “Jesus-Sucking Fucksticks That Need Jews in Jerusalem for the Return of their Hate Messiah.” it also makes a lot of room for “Anti-Zionist Jews” - pretty much Uncle-Toms in Yarmulkes Holding Outdoor Seders to Whitewash Isra Hirsi and her Ivy League campers otherwise called Jewish Voices for Peace - as a substantive proportion (they’re not) of the infinitesimal population of jews in this country The meme then kicks into high gear by subsidizing the notion that those “Zionist Jews” who believe, in some form, of Jewish self-determination - because after centuries of shitbags like Maddy Myers, shitbags like my former friends and colleagues who have a nasty habit of getting worked up about our existence in their communities and then hunt us down and kill us en masse (sometimes off-site) based upon decidedly questionable intel about our activities – that we are ideologically aberrative creatures of curiosity and alarm. 

And before you question my above definition of Zionism might I remind you that, as the Jew here I get primacy in this discourse, not you (I believe this is the foundation of your monument to fragile existence - the microagression). It’s not like I go around defining what “pretty lady” means. 

The ultimate trick here is in establishing the equivalence of Jewish Zionists with TERF’s (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists; more or less J.K. Rowling and her cunty associates that dress up their trans hate in feminist rhetoric) who, despite being the anti-trans boogeymen par excellence on the internet (as opposed to the actual republican state legislators) that seem to manifest in the real world with the frequency of funny web comics. This association is key, like all the other mythic actions ascribed to Jews over time it is a tautological mixture of certainty and obscurity; We’re out there because you can’t see us. It is in this act of obfuscatory levelling that would give Heidegger a stiffy that Ms. Myers achieves the true intent of her semiotic drivel which is inverting Zionism (read as regard for Israel’s existence not necessarily support for Israel's actions) into a deranged corollary of Judaism (as TERF’s are to feminism) while simultaneously conflating the prevalence of Jews to the population of women in general (the “historically oppressed” that feminism implies in the TERF movement). The ultimate effect is creating a moral slipstream for people to yell at “Zionists” distinct from “Jews” without ever getting into the complicated words and sentences around its endlessly argued definition.  The same slippery logic was employed to poorer effect by GamerGaters who purported their beliefs to be legion, and the SJW’s to be a dangerous minority overrepresented in games writing, successfully duping the stupid fucking men and the women who drank their beer into the safe exceptionalism of their movement. That Trump guy did something similar; I’ve read, but that’s too much to expect of a Polygon scribe because it involves the world outside their navel. 

Now, please don’t think that I take Ms. Myers to be capable of the synaptic prowess to have set out to formulate her Predator meme with this level of articulate intention. In fact, I don’t believe many of you bother to think that much about anything but it exemplifies the latent thinking, the juvenile narcissism and insecurity (“I had to get this out of my brain”) that facilitates the mewling spinelessness of the whole pro-Palestinian movement; the desire to remain respectable by one's own standards while simultaneously indulging that libidinal need to yell at an ethnic group for their existence. Like a bunch of radical feminists who hate trans women.

Before waking up this morning and throwing out my original intentions for this piece while throwing up my hands in resigned disgust over a wasted career when I could’ve just promoted cash for gold and softballed shitty videogames at G4 and Rev3 like they wanted me to - because someone forgot to send me the memo that human relations are cheap and disposable and one’s reputation is going to get chewed up in fatuous nonsense regardless because everyone around you is scared, weak and resentful - I was going to also highlight this little ditty from some mouth-breathing fucknut named Max Nichols who was or still is working at Bungie. 

It wasn’t this post (in response to his utterly predictable and nonsensical online leftist reasoning on something that wasn’t Israel) specifically that raised my ire but how afterwards he went on an emotive tear saying that I had publicly called for the extermination of all Palestinians, which I have never done. In fact, I haven’t opined on the current war in Gaza in public, period. I have solely commented on the crude Jew-hating rhetoric and actions in America and online (I deleted my social accounts, so you’ll have to take my word on it. If you can’t, feel free to eat shit and die with JK Rolwing). One would be hard pressed to believe this given the saliva-speckled hysteria spewed with infantile glee when I deigned to imply that I thought Jewish lives mattered a little bit. I have very strong feeling on Palestine, have advocated for a two-state solution since before Ms. Myers could spell hegemony. Regardless this piss-brained Systems Activity Designer at Sony’s Sisyphean rock of a game studio saw fit to make this baseless claim (or was it baseless? I am a Jew, y’know, so I can’t be trusted) repeatedly even after I had to use a third party to inform him that I was set to take legal action if he couldn’t produce the evidence. That offer still stands, Max. 

I’m less interested in calling him out (although i am interested in calling him out because he’s a scrotum-free fuck of fabulism and has a history of speaking for the company so, his propensity for unfounded bullshit should be a concern). It’s really because he is like so many of the sad, unused dickpumps that comprised the GamerGate movement in inventing out of whole cloth anything that conforms to their hyperventilating reality-distortion brains and utilizes “facts” like a 12-year-old uses Canadian girls in sex narratives. Moreover, it underscores how important genocide is to the protest movement narrative as opposed to similar signifiers of objectionable behavior like “massacre” “war crime” and “cheap transubstantiation of other’s horrid suffering into the empty part of my brain where my self-regard should reside.” 

Genocide is the worst of worst, the terribleist of terribles. It implies a Rubicon of human extinction (although a “Jurassic Park but it’s Jews” is probably something that all y’alls have been considering) and, as a result, requires that no option be denied in its prevention. This is why Roe v Wade was termed “the genocide of the unborn” to stimulate the murder of doctors who performed abortions. This is why you can’t talk about what happened to the Armenian population in Turkey. This is why white supremacists don’t like fucking outside your lane. This is also why annoying white ladies explain why they’re slapping around brown janitors at Hamilton Hall…because “genocide.” It’s bringing an airhorn to a debutante ball, it drowns everything else out and beats nuance into submission and ensures the focus is on you (not the people dying, mind you) and eliminates all but the socially suicidal (your truly waves hello) into acquiescence. It’s catnip for the pedantically not smart, it’s the rug that ties the room together for the ugly and undesirable, it’s for people who can’t perform under the oppressive glare of complexity.  

And it makes calling me a dirty, hidden-loyalty kike seem nominal by comparison. Because…genocide: It’s for a good, righteous cause. Like ethics in game journalism. 

Anyway, that’s what I was going to write about but at the end of the day it's just rationalizing something for the already reasonable. It’s what it feels like to know you got ganked 25 years after the fact that’s worth understanding. When I was 16, I got taken at Three-Card-Monty and I felt sullied, I was a putz, a fucking normie mark and the gut-twisting disgust at myself informed a desire to stay wide-eyed and alert. I’ve only recently distilled for myself the amount of work, grief, frustration and contempt from employers, audience and the game industry that marked my televisual tenure. I used to think it made me important and relevant to suffer fools daily when in reality G4, Rev3 and New G4 got a goddam bargain out of me and I got ulcers, a deteriorated liver and self-hatred in spades as part of my nominal paycheck. I’m bitter that I let myself get worked over by the system but that anger is part of a complicated history that has many positive and nostalgic aspects. 

Sticking up for folk when it wasn’t popular. Trying to do what I felt was the right thing in pursuit of something better for more people; both in games and more broadly in…society. That’s what was always the tonic for the tough breaks, the disappointments and outright betrayals. That’s what disappeared on 10/7 for me and I see no reconciliation for it, ever. I've been following the wrong fucking card in the shuffle for forty-five goddam years. The hand I kept happily shaking obscured the shiv in the other one. I got grifted on a transcendent level and I'm gonna wake up screaming about that for the remaining years ahead. That’s the shit that’s squats in my brain as I look out the window at the pride flag. My values haven’t changed, I’m not running into the waiting arms of Glen Beck or some such shit, I’m just not wasting any more time on others. Where I came from loyalty was a constant, not a commodity whose market value fluctuates on circumstantial affinities and feeling used is an unstable compound that leads to bad results.  Yeah, I can change up all my charitable donations but that’s just momentary pique getting satisfied (although I rubbed one out when that rape-denying fuck Jamaal Bowman got dropped hard in NY-16). I don’t think anything will resolve this feeling of being snookered on a moral level; at this point I’m just gonna try and appreciate the quiet that comes after the slaughter.  

Another word to the wiseguy. 

Questions of the week

• Thinking about taking an impromptu trip to Sub-Saharan Africa, anyone have an experience? Senegal?

• Why do people write “POV” all the time in TikTok/Instagram videos. It’s rarely used correctly in addition to be fucking obvious. Are people even more stupid that I thought?

Things of the week

• Watching Requiem for a Dream after writing the first draft of this

• Rainier cherry season is too short

• Soft-Shelled Crab Sandwich at Gott’s

• New Yorker profile of John Fetterman

• J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World