Insomniac Games Joins The Chorus Against Trump's Immigration Ban

Good for them. Although I'm not American, both my parents are immigrants from different countries (one of which is Middle-Eastern country) so I'm happy to see people sticking it to Donald Dump.

The fact that the game industry draws most of its talent from colleges and universities, the same places that conservatives accuse of being "liberal brainwashing" institutions, obviously means that most developers are going to be more left-leaning. If conservative gamers want to keep boycotting every liberal developer, then they'd have to boycott most of the game industry.

Not surprising.

Back in school, two of the top students were Iranian. There is some serious talent out from that country, and the US scientists seem equally concerned. One of the people affected by this is Samira Asgari, an award winning scientist who was going to research tubercolosis (a disease which kills millions every year) for Harvard.

You have a policy here that has no basis in factual evidence or nuance. Instead being based on unfounded fearmongering. And this is the result. Thank you again Donald Trump, for screwing over the scientific community.

Speaking of Iranians, and since the topic is about video games, it's worth noting that some Iranians have made huge contributions to the video game industry:

The most famous is legendary programmer Nasir Gebelli, who programmed some of the most popular early Apple II games in America, then moved to Japan and joined a startup called Squaresoft, where he programmed Rad Racer, 3D Worldrunner, Final Fantasy 1-3, and Secret of Mana. He inspired game designers like Hironobu Sakaguchi and John Romero, who credited him as a big inspiration on games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. JRPGs and FPS, polar opposite genres, have a common connection through Nasir.

Another one I recently found out about (someone mentioned him in one of the RE7 threads on SW) is Navid Khonsari, who was a writer/director/producer for games like GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, Max Payne 1 & 2, Manhunt, and Resident Evil 7. He also made an indie game called 1979 Revolution: Black Friday (about the Iranian Revolution).

Treating gaming like it can't be a political space is something I think is detrimental, politically.

During the election I kept hearing "oh, Trump won because of this, because of that", as a liberal myself, I found it upsetting that largely liberal news sources during issues regarding gamers and regressively left feminists because they just figured feminists were fighting for equality and gamers were fighting to keep their oppressive white hetero-normative patriarchal hegemony and blah blah blah, well, we saw by what razor thin margins Trump won by in some states that most assumed were gonna stay blue. Hillary Clinton had a lead in polls leading up to the Comey FBI leaks that were so damning but never amounted to one shred of insightful shame on Clinton. Some say that threw the election right there. Others say it was all those Bernie Bros voting for the Jill Stein, maybe it was that 6-8% who said they were voting for Gary Johnson who ended up voting for Trump, because by election his outcome was like 1-2%.

We wanna talk factors though that changed the election, how about GamerGate issues? I mean, let's face it, today's millennials are living in an age of information overload. They don't know what to believe. There's contradictory information hitting them left and right, they really have no idea who to think is credible. So, people tend to cling to things that touch them personally, for many that's video games. It's like two people calling out to a dog, the dog looks one way then the other not sure what way to go, it's so confused, then he sees one of the people is waving bacon in the air; which way you think that dog is going? Well, when GamerGate happened, who was it that sided with gamers? Well, it was that one journalist of the alt-right, Milo Yablahblahblah, who worked at Breitbart. If anything, I attribute the losing numbers to that and that alone, it was the factor that was in the making for longer. They're saying some of these states lost by razor thin margins? Razor thin enough to account for those recruited into the anti-SJW crowd that came out of GamerGate these last few years, when Breitbart fake news extreme far right leaning media was the closest thing to mainstream media that wasn't throwing gamers under the bus. To the sheer number of people out there that are politically apathetic, who don't know who to believe, something small like this can be the catalyst for who those people find credible in competing info-circles. People like to think of gaming, our political body, the whole thing as some trivial thing, we're not, we were big enough to throw an election to a fascist, and it happened.

I've said it before that I believe Gamergate played a big role in the rise of the alt-right. Breitbart was largely unknown before Gamergate. And now Breitbart's editor, President Steve Bannon, is the most powerful man in America.

For years, the likes of Breitbart and Trump were anti-gamer, often bashing gamers. But with Gamergate, Breitbart saw a golden opportunity to win over male gamers with their sudden switch to a pro-gamer stance, combined with their long-held anti-feminist rhetoric. The alt-right was fueling Gamergate, but most people had never heard of the alt-right before. Mainstream journalists were baffled by Gamergate, so they just simplified it down to gaming culture being mysoginist, which pushed many male gamers in the alt-right direction.

It's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the mainstream media labels certain groups of people as "racist" or "misogynist" or "terrorist" or "thug" or "fascist", then it often leads to a significant number of people from those groups actually becoming the very things the mainstream media accused them of in the first place.

Interesting to say the least. I didnt know about Nasir.

That name sounds very familiar though.

I know about Nasir because Secret of Mana is one of my favourite games (pretty sure I've mentioned that on SW), and his name is the first credit to pop up in the intro. It's the same for some of the NES-era Squaresoft games he programmed.

He only banned 7 unstable Muslim countries and you act is if he banned the entire world.

Christians are the most persecuted people in the Middle East right now. They are actually facing death threats on daily basis in Muslim countries.

Got a receipt for that?

Yep. The recent report finds that Christianity is the most persecuted religion in 2016 with 90k people killed, mostly in Africa and Middle East.

@ivangrozny: Obviously it would be best for discussion if you actually linked it.

I am on my phone for good sake. Google it. It was in all major news outlets.

@ivangrozny: Found it and thanks for bringing that up as I didn't know about it. In the future it's best to have sources ready even for stuff you may feel is common knowledge. That's just how to forum 101