Right on its face, is it even legal to collect head shots of minors? I know US privacy laws are a joke but there’s usually some carve outs that protect minors.
It’s illegal to collect ANY data from children under 13. Facial scans are WAY worse than the anonymized use stats those laws were put in place to block
Them having an office large enough to moderate in-game communications, on every popular language? They have some billions to spare. Serving kids requires a lot of work they have neglected for a very long time.
Facebook was a vehicle for hateful, genocidal messages in Myanmar, and they seemingly got of the hook having no person understanding local language on the market they occupied.
If Roblox primarily targets kids, they can’t go without agressive moderation, psy-help on demand, things one would find obvious, but these are never required, not to say it’s not that sexy as getting profits and cutting corners.
I don’t know if their business model would be viable if they started things right from the beginning, but it would be more stressful to them to finally start doing something about that.
Absolutely! Multiple, in fact. In order of preference:
Shut down the game, dissolve the company, and donate all remaining funds to a women’s shelter.
Prosecute groomers instead of banning and threatening the people who are trying to stop the fuckers and crying about vigilantism even when the proper reporting channels are used.
Use AI for a beneficial purpose at least one goddamn time. Scan the text and voice communications (it’s a public game, there is no expectation of privacy), flag suspicious exchanges for human review, then ban and report groomers.
Honestly, getting rid of any chat (voice/text) and DM features would would help. I don’t think kids should completely lose online gaming, just make it almost impossible to communicate with anyone on said game. I played a shit ton of Mario Kart and Splatoon online as a kid, but neither of those games offer personal messages/chat features (unless you set them up via app), so I imagine grooming would be almost impossible.
I don’t want to take Roblox away from kids, as I understand how fun it was growing up, especially if you can’t afford a console/games at home. But chat has to be either heavily moderated, or just entirely removed imo.
Pretty sure Club Penguin only let you choose from a predetermined list of ready phrases, it worked well afaik. Roblox could do that, but something something engagement
Roblox is making absolute bank. They have the resources to actually solve this if they wanted. They just believe the inevitable slap on the wrist will cost them less than they stand to make in the meantime.
Feels like Epic should shoulder some of the blame here as well, considering they allowed the fossil fuel company in the game at all. Fuck both of these companies.
Counterpoint: The really good journalism sites won’t report an issue the moment a rumor comes up. It often turns out a good amount of the rumor is overstating or misrepresenting the issue. They can lose a LOT of credibility if even one statement is wrong. So, they take time to research every fact before putting out a report.
Gaming news sites often have slow days, so they’ll take the risk. But several have already had to retract statements on the recent censorship for getting things completely wrong. Example: Many people thought Mouthwashing was just removed from Itch. In actuality, it had been removed long ago for a misstep where they had linked to their Steam page.
NASAs “habitat words observatory” was ment to be the next major telescope after the Roman space telescope, and was meant to have its primary function be the search for extraterrestrial life which would help tremendously with these kinds of situations.
Was being the key word as apparently the shitbag GOP administration decided they want to axe ALL future telescope programs including the Hubble replacement Nany Roman… Scumbags.
Their only interest in space is glory and imperialism. They don’t give a shit about the science they just want to claim Mars as US territory. And as someone that has been a huge space nerd ever since I was a kid I am absolutely livid at the defunding of NASA.
“For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other colonization spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.”
From the SpaceX TOS. Oligarchs want to rule as kings on Mars, not as Americans.
Even the commercialisation of space flight bothers me. I mean, I know its inevitable but when the point of crewed space flight currently is still overwhelmingly for science, there’s just something gross about for-profit companies making a mint off human endeavour. But I also grew up in the 80s when science and the future seemed bright and exciting and not a capitalist dystopia.
They’re not a retro company. They’re just stuck in the past, and unable to head into the future. The consistency and the quality of their products say everything anyone needs to know
China has spent decades building up their reputation of a place that produces cheap, inferior copies of better products and they aren’t going to shake that overnight or even in a few years.
Are they even trying to change that reputation? The last I heard was that if you published a game app that was any sort of popular, you could expect it to be stolen and resold in China.
I also generally find it hard to trust any software produced in any totalitarian state.
It never went away in the first place. A huge chunk of gAmErS are still incredibly toxic, basically just reich-wing edgelords who hate women and minorities.
I saw someone complain about all the “woke” things in Starfield recently. He (and I’m 100% sure this was a “he”) listed things like “unattractive females” and “accents”, and goddamn if that wasn’t a perfect example of what’s wrong with so many gamers. Naturally “pronouns” were also a problem for this chud, because even the possibility of choosing “they” as a pronoun is literal gamer genocide apparently
Yes, last I checked, one of their prime hate forums r/KotakuInAction was still active, and still filled with the most pathetic little insects seething about the fact that women and minorities exist in media. Gamergate has never really ended. Most people just stopped paying attention to these fools.
Unfortunately, that’s easy for me to say, since I’m not on the receiving end of their doxxing and death threats.
I haven’t had the best life, but I just can’t fathom being such a total loser that I’d ever get that worked up over something like video games.
Even on Lemmy, which is generally full of exactly the sort of people gAmErS hate, gaming communities tend to be… well, gaming communities. At least this post hasn’t gotten downvoted into the negatives, but it’s got 50% as many downvotes as upvotes at the time I’m writing this. Sure, maybe some of those people have legitimate issues with the article, but I very much doubt it – it’s more likely they just saw “misogyny” in the title and downvoted without reading it.
Edit: are there any less, uh, gamery gaming communities around?
Oh I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. My instance actually disables downvotes, so I can’t see that, but there are a lot of reddit transplants here (I’m one of them), and reddit’s takes on things like feminism and women are overall not … good.
I’m being facetious. I don’t want to assume they all fit the stereotype of nerd that never leaves his room if he can help it.
They can probably either mask their hatred well enough, or they’re in a place just as bigoted, which may have fostered their convictions in the first place. They go through their interactions with the real world seething with anger and bitterness, then seek relief in video games.
At their heart, they’re no different from anyone else seeking to escape the unpleasant reality through some media - be that through building a peaceful farm, fighting powerful enemies, reading a gripping story or watching sports. They can’t actually fight the circumstances that cause their pain (or at least think so), so they flee instead.
It’s reallly just the source of their pain that’s so much more toxic, which in turn leads to a toxic result that ends up poisoning their joy in life even more. Most likely, they’ve been fed that poison by someone exploiting their vulnerability and unhappiness by giving their aimless frustration a target, reassuring them that someone else is to blame for their misery. It didn’t lessen their misery, but at least it gave the question “why am I suffering?” a satisfying and concrete answer. “It’s not you. It’s not some random and unpredictable circumstance that you have no control over. It’s these people that you can do something about.”
Except you can’t actually do anything about “these people”, but you can at least construct a fantasy of an ideal world without “these people”, where naturally you’re doing much better too. In the specific case of the toxic gamers, they’re looking to video games for manifestations of that world, for places they can immerse themselves in and be free from the troubles of the real world.
If these games fail to sate that fantasy, to provide an environment they seek where they’re powerful and “safe” from all the things that make them upset, that rage is taken to the forums and echo chambers where they share their suffering with each other to ease and validate it. It’s one thing if there’s some niche indie game made by “these people” - they’re on the outskirts of the gaming world, you can easily ridicule or ignore them. It’s another thing when there’s a game placed front and center, getting all the attention and hype for a moment, and that game is full of things that hurt you.
For a twisted comparison, imagine if a new game got all the hype and (positive) attention, despite being full of Nazis, presenting them as entirely normal or even good people. You’d (rightly) be upset too. The difference - aside from the subject - is that your upset lilely isn’t born from a stock of thoroughly curated hatred and anger. You’ll probably not muster the same rage as these people, because you don’t have it bottled up already.
I say this because I’ve been a hateful person too once. Not as bad as some of these specimens, but bad enough to know the spiral and to guess how much unhappier I could have been, how much unhappier they must be. They’re victims turned abusers, and while that doesn’t excuse their behaviour, it may help us understand where it comes from and give us an idea of what to fight:
Bigotry is born from misery seeking an outlet, fertilised by ignorance, nurtured by confirmation bias. The better our lives get, the less reason to look for someone to blame. The more we learn to think critically and question the lies we’re fed, the less that “someone” will be a convenient target keeping us in the spiral. The more we’re exposed to things that contradict our bias, the weaker it will get.
The last bit is what broke me out of the loop, the second is what saw me crawl back up the spiral and unravel my convictions.
Life’s still tough, but at least it has gotten a lot less hateful and miserable since I stopped feeding the hate and blaming others for my own deficiencies and started working on myself.
Gamergate was one of the first online instances that showed how easy it is to spread lies and misinformation through social media in order to manufacture outrage and weaponize it against specific targets.
The same exact tactics have been used by the far-right since. Gamergate felt like a testing chamber, before the full blown nazi propaganda plan that’s getting far-right politicians elected in many places. I live in one of such places, and the online tactics used by literal nazis against progressive politicians are 1-to-1 the same used in gamergate.
Those issues with social media have never been dealt with. If anything, social media has become more mainstream since, and now these tactics of lying and manufacturing outrage have become more powerful.
Traditional media seemed to have some semblance of accountability (although not really), but in social media, anyone makes shit up, people will take their word for it, if they like what they hear (or aligns with their beliefs), and it doesn’t matter if it’s debunked, because no one listens to that part.
The only solution is, and has always been, a zero tolerance policy against any kind of hateful or bigoted behaviour, by the people who control these online spaces. No one expects 4chan to moderate their content at this point, but when someone makes a new online space for conversations, those same people shouldn’t be welcomed, or they’ll shit all over the floor, turn it into another gross place, and you’ll have to start over.
These new complaints about “wokeness” in games, that happen with every game announcement, aren’t even dog-whistles at this point. They’ve been straight up howling for a while. The follow-up attacks, threats, lies, the dismissal that “none of this happens, it’s all made up”, and the support of fellow misogynists (like the companies with a history of sexism mentioned in the article), are all just part of the program.
And of course, you can see them in some of the comments in this very thread.
Almost every statement in this article is a complete lie, from the targeted harrasments to the sexism allegations and racism. Even the Hades 2 statements are completely out of context to misrepresent the problem.
Let’s go back to the beginning.
Sweet baby Ink known to extort and threaten to push their agendas into videogames, (there is a video of the CEO Kim Belair explaining how she uses threats if game companies refuse to listen to her advice) was never targeted by harassment. A steam group was made that lists all games they’ve been involved with. (SBI already does the same on their own website). Never did anyone in this steam group go out of their way to harass anyone involved with the company. It is just a group of people who don’t like this company and want to avoid buying games that they are involved with.
Then suddenly one of SBI employees started a harassment campaing against the steam group owner, and tried to get him banned from steam altogether despite no wrongdoing. He never retaliated, and instead just defended his own points.
In comes the game journalist allyssa Merchante who has historically made bigoted statements such as “you can’t be racist against white people” and starts spreading lies of a harassment campaign against SBI. People call her out, and now suddenly she’s a victim of harassment despite she being the one contacting people’s workplaces to get them fired, or phonecalling their partners in an attempt to shame.
The controversy around Hades 2 is not around square jaws, but rather, linked to the smear campaign gaming journalists have had against stellar blade, citing sexism. People were upset that gaming journalists were being hypocritical with titles like “Hades 2 Gods somehow hotter than Hades gods” while they also criticized Stellar Blade for its sexy main character claiming it appeals to white males and that it is problematic.
Ubisoft being in bed with SBI is also not a lie, as SBI officially lists Ubisoft as their customers. The new assassins creed game is another example of these same journalists spreading misinformation.
Being a retainer does not automatically make you a samurai, and playing African-American hiphop music when playing as an African is incredibly stereotypical and innacurate since Africans and African-Americans aren’t the same thing. Game journalists claim white people are just upset about there being a black character in the game (with no evidence). The game is disrespectful towards japanese, but to game journalists that doesn’t matter because they’re “white adjacent”.
The controversy around Wukong is entirely fabricated. The developers of Wukong were being extorted by SBI for 7m USD for advice they didn’t ask for, and when they refused, suddenly gaming journalist started digging around, and found past statements they claim are sexists. However, as it turns out, these statements were in fact mistranslated statements, and the original Chinese statements weren’t even remotely sexist. Of course once people started pointing this out, once again “look at the harassment campaign against us journalists” started again.
These articles always are quick to spin the narrative and paint journalists as innocent, but every.single.controversy. was retaliation against misinformation and harassment campaigns by game journalists and DEI companies. Never was it “a bunch of sexist and racist white people being upset about diversity in videogames”.
But of course the author of this article wouldn’t tell you that she and many of her peers like, liked and retweeted all the false statements I’m bringing up here, or that she follows SBI.
7 million dollars? You could get multiple professional historians, mythologists or whatever expert your game’s theme is focused on to review and revise your entire game’s story for less than that.
Never did anyone in this steam group go out of their way to harass anyone involved with the company.
Never was it “a bunch of sexist and racist white people being upset about diversity in videogames”.
Very bold statements in favour of people that I know myself are extremely “anti diversity / anti woke”. Do you even know who the creator of the Steam group is? Guy is known for being the scum of the Brazilian WoW community.
One extreme doesn’t justify another, plus what matters here is the information. Couldn’t care less about who runs or frequents the group, but I’m glad it brought awareness to SBI and their influence.
Sweet Baby Inc found themselves at the center of attention at kiwi farms, a website known for harassment and driving people to suicide. I find it very far fetched to believe they received no harassment.
Ubisoft being in bed with SBI is also not a lie
Unless I totally missed it, I see nowhere in this article that said they didn’t work with SBI?
There are so many outlandish claims in this comment with basically nothing backing it up
This 100%
I deleted my reply because it was too much but the original ign article on wukong is very tame. I can’t see why they’re so worked up to harass the author off the internet.
Some days beehaw not having downvotes is a real issue.
Defensive much? I find myself being very suspicious of this opposing narrative. I’m not up to speed on this these days, but I remember Keza MacDonald being generally outstanding in her betrayal portrayal of events in video games culture.
See, what I figured out is that I don’t have to let my son play Roblox. Sure, he might be the “weird” one who’s dad doesn’t let him. But he was going to be “weird” anyway. That’s just how our lives work.
Plus you have AuADHD, having it myself, it makes you vulnerable to predators in ways you can’t understand yet.
I would happily have more babies as children are fun.
Unfortunately that requires a partner who values intelligence, child development, learning and desires children. When I find such a unicorn I’ll make as many babies as I can reasonably raise (probably like 2 or three more maximum)
We play by the same rule, everyone is weird, no judgement for immutable characteristics. Everyone has challenges, life is already hard, no reason to make it harder for someone.
Just tried this out recently. It's good fun. I do wish it explained itself a little better at the start - I had no idea that it was essentially a roguelite - but it gets that feeling of momentum at the edge of wiping out just right
theguardian.com
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