[POLITICS] Extra Credits seems to have driven off a cliff

[Specter Von Baren]

So about two weeks ago Extra Credits posted a video that has been, I believe, their most downvoted video they've ever had on Youtube and one that has caused their biggest loss of subscribers ever as well.


Now at first I didn't want to say anything about this because I can see the trajectory of how this conversation is likely to go. But ya know what? Let's just do it, let's just dig into this. Everything else is crazy and dumb lately with the world so let's just dive into this both old and new debate again.

Do you agree with this video's message? Do you agree with what its intent is? Do you agree with HOW it went about this? Or do you disagree? Go ahead Escapist's let's hit this one hard.

 

[BrawlMan]

So about two weeks ago Extra Credits posted a video that has been, I believe, their most downvoted video they've ever had on Youtube and one that has caused their biggest loss of subscribers ever as well.


Now at first I didn't want to say anything about this because I can see the trajectory of how this conversation is likely to go. But ya know what? Let's just do it, let's just dig into this. Everything else is crazy and dumb lately with the world so let's just dive into this both old and new debate again.

Do you agree with this video's message? Do you agree with what its intent is? Do you agree with HOW it went about this? Or do you disagree? Go ahead Escapist's let's hit this one hard.

I stopped caring about EC since 2012/13. They started getting overly preachy, and getting so much of their research wrong. When they started defending Micros-transactions and loot-boxes, I knew they sold out and lost all hope. The nazi video....they became another Sarkeesian and Jack Thompson. Preaching how playing x turns gamers in to y with no facts, and only fantasies and assumptions backing them. The kind of crap you would see in the 90s/2000s. My respect dropped even further. As the old saying goes, "He/She who fights monsters, shall become one."

The Act Man put them in their place:

 

[CaitSeith]

Any Escapist member who frequents the political threads at the Off-topic forums can see discussions about self-proclaimed nazis getting more and more attention in USA, and the video reflects the worries from Extra Credits about nazism becoming normalized. I don't think I can say anything insightful about it though (at least not in the Gaming forums).

"Don't think just because you chose to ignore the World that the World is going to ignore you"

 

[CritialGaming]

The results of outrage culture. When you have the mainstream media trying to popularize and provide infamy to the "disenfranchised" you are bound to see people and channels make nonsense arguments in order to virtue signal and white knight.

I've been around the gaming world a long time, and I've never once heard anyone ever complain about being on the nazi/terrorist team. The teams in FPS multiplayer games have never mattered in terms of their theme. From CS:GO, to team fortress, to COD, it doesn't matter to the player. They just know they have to shot the other side of the screen and that is it.

The biggest example of the "team" not mattering is Overwatch in which the other team doesn't even have a different color than you. Without a different cosmetic on, you can't tell one Tracer from another.

None of that video holds any water under logical argument. It's just verbal diarrhea.

Any Escapist member who frequents the political threads at the Off-topic forums can see discussions about self-proclaimed nazis getting more and more attention in USA, and the video reflects the worries from Extra Credits about nazism becoming normalized. I don't think I can say anything insightful about it though (at least not in the Gaming forums).

"Don't think just because you chose to ignore the World that the World is going to ignore you"

The problem with that concept is that you have to apply the "evil" values to what amounts to a blank avatar. Whatever side in a shooter you are stuck on, the game play is no different. There isn't an exposition of ideas dumped upon the player, there isn't even any context to why the battle is taking place in the first place other than "hey you qued into a multiplayer match".

Games, movies, 99.9% of books, don't normalize Nazi/terrorism. They don't make those ideals feel romantic.

The news does though. The popularize it, the accuse everyone of being it especially if you disagree with their values and viewpoints. But I guess that's none of my business.

 

[Diablo2000]

Before anything, lets get this out of the way first:

They did nazi the backlash coming.

Okay, moving on...
This video is dumb, incredibly dumb.

First of all, it's the same argument as "If you play GTA, you'll became an psychopath" and it falls on all the same traps. Playing an Nazi, "Normalizing" or at the worst "Memeing" them, doesn't necesseraly mean that the player sympathizes with their overall ideology or is bound by their belief.
Their suggestions aren't free from idiocy. Either you have an "Training Scenario" with characters all on the "Good Guys" side simulating an real scenario which doesn't work on every setting, only very specific ones or punishning players who willingly choose Nazi or Terrorist because apparently if you do that you are an Nazi sympathizer and therefore deserves such an treatment, which even ignoring the fact you have to equate players playing as Nazi as actual Nazi, it is a very shitty thing to do.

The argument of "If you going to use historical events as a excuse them you have to be as historical as possible" is in equal parts an double edged sword and nonsense. Of course, if you are going to base an game on a historical setting you need to follow certain historical accuracies in order to make the setting feel genuine, but as always if it's entertaiment then the first priority is, oddly enough, to be entertaining. There's a huge diference between taking historical liberties to make something entertaining and being disingenuous with the setting. We can agree that "Rescue of Soldier Ryan" is not historically accurate because such mission wouldn't never be authorized in the first place, but it had an respect to the setting it took place in.
The video makes it sound if you take even an small historical liberty, then your argument of being "historical" falls apart, which is absurd notion.

At the end they just backpaddle without offering no real insight or solution to the non-issue they imposed.

So, yeah. I'd they deserved the flak this time. This was clearly poorly argumented, absurdly worded and poorly thought out video.

 

[Red Sentinel]

Any Escapist member who frequents the political threads at the Off-topic forums can see discussions about self-proclaimed nazis getting more and more attention in USA, and the video reflects the worries from Extra Credits about nazism becoming normalized. I don't think I can say anything insightful about it though (at least not in the Gaming forums).

I mean... we've even had completely unabashed Nazi sympathizers on this very forum, and they've been here for years.

Although the new regime/moderators/rules seem to be weeding them out.

 

[Saelune]

I stopped caring about EC a bit before Dan ended up leaving.

I have recently started watching Dan play Dark Souls Remastered co-op along with Dan Jones, the second animator after that lady broke her arm.

(Dan made a Lets Play channel for Extra Credits, but I guess kept it during the split and rebranded it.)

More on topic though: The normalization of Nazis is due to people arguing that White Supremacy is 'just a different opinion'. Really I blame the ACLU for defending the KKK all those decades ago. No, the KKK nor Nazis should be allowed to parade ANYWHERE.

 

[Baffle]

Get woke, go broke.

Be a Nazi, hopefully you'll die cold, alone, and incontinent. Ah man, I couldn't even get mine to rhyme! It's much less effective that way!

The Tories tried it with 'Don't be a ****, vote Norman Lamont', but they didn't realise that plebs pronounce the 'oh' in Lamont as 'oh', so you'd have to be proper northern to say 'Diven ya be a coont, voote Norman Lamooont'. Which no Geordie said, ever.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

For my own part, I've been losing interest in their channel slowly ever since Dan (Prime) left. I much preferred his voice to the new guy, I don't mean the high pitched aspect, but his way of speaking in an... open and friendly way that wasn't intrusive or demanding.

Like... The history episode that was about Kamehameha. You know what kind of joke is perfect for this episode, and so did they, but they showed restraint when they did make the obvious Dragonball reference by only having it come up when it would have made sense even if the man's name wasn't Kamehameha. Now it feels like there's too much of a... "Am I right guys?! *wink*" feel to the jokes and subjects.

This episode has caused me to unsubscribe. This message is poorly researched, poorly presented, has poor solutions and is a poor idea too. The spirit is correct, "Nazi's are bad." but it goes against arguments they've made in the past against things like violence in games making people violent.

It's such a shame but I guess this is just the way things happen when a show goes on long enough

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

It wasn't EC after Dan left. I was subscribed for a year and some change past him leaving, not watching anything they did, out of sentimentality, since I was a fan for over 10 years and am still proud we fixed Allison's arm. These last few weeks were tragically idiotic, though, so I did indeed unsub from their YT channel after some deliberation. Though, again, I had not seen a video of theirs in over a year.


I still remember discovering them on this site, they must have had like only 10-15 vids back then and I binged on them and was an instant fan. I was with them and not the escapist when they split. I was with them when they had the very very SJW-ish take on that thing that happened in 2014 that you have to voldermort in this website, cause you can agree to disagree with people.

This is the last straw. No, you're not any more akin to a nazi for playing a nazi in a game. Not even slightly.

 

[tippy2k2]

I'm thinking if you see an Iron Cross in a video game, decide to read up on Neo Nazi propaganda, and based on your reading you decide "You know what, these guys make a lot of good points about how evil everyone but the Aryan Race is!", it wasn't the video games that scrambled your brain.

 

[09philj]

We can agree that "Rescue of Soldier Ryan" is not historically accurate because such mission wouldn't never be authorized in the first place, but it had an respect to the setting it took place in.

Similarly, Nazis are Nazis regardless of what setting you dump them in or what you call them, and thus should be afforded the appropriate (dis)respect. (And this is a perfectly fine thing to do, since it allows for the idea of Nazis to be combined with things that didn't exist in the Nazi's heyday, or even now) That said, almost every audience has some morons who'll find some way to conclude that any work's obvious Nazi analogues were the good guys, regardless of how hard the creator attempts to demonstrate the opposite.

 

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

Before that video dropped, I thought EC had #MeToo'd itself out of existence like so many other outlets.

After it dropped? Just another trash channel that wants to talk about normalization but has no fucking idea what normalization actually entails. Like so many other outlets. All these damn fauxgressive channels line up to suck Foucault's dead and rotten cock, not one of them read a page of his actual work.

These twits can't ever pick a side. Show Nazism, you're normalizing Nazism. Hide Nazism, you're whitewashing Nazism. Never mind how game publishers have to walk the legal minefield that is European censorship law with regards to depictions of Nazi Germany. Herp-a-derp-a-doo. It's almost as if they're more interested in clicks and ad revenue than a coherent, honest, consistent point about the way game designers approach the topic of Nazism in games about WWII.

WWII games made me a Nazi about as much as D&D and hair metal made me a Satanist.

 

[BrawlMan]

Before that video dropped, I thought EC had #MeToo'd itself out of existence like so many other outlets.

After it dropped? Just another trash channel that wants to talk about normalization but has no fucking idea what normalization actually entails. Like so many other outlets. All these damn fauxgressive channels line up to suck Foucault's dead and rotten cock, not one of them read a page of his actual work.

I don't know who Foucault is, but he sounds important. As for the description you described, the fauxgressive are basically "SJWs"/"Anti-SJWs"/"feminists" (the type that use feminism to hurt or put down others when things don't go their want.) who like hearing the sound of their voice and deluded themselves in to thinking they're the center of morality. In other words: Kyle's mom. I can't believe I am saying this, but I almost miss Jack Thompson. At least it was fun mocking most of the time, and a majority of people never took him seriously. I am glad the same applies to this EC video too.

 

[I can't enter my old name]

To be fair, lots of people play these kind of games and become Wehraboos.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

To be fair, lots of people play these kind of games and become Wehraboos.

World of Tanks would get clutches of Wehraboos occasionally. Then the resident company historian would lay into them a bit, the rest of the user base would start memeing hard, and the Wehraboos would do something just overtly Nazi enough to get banned and everybody would have a good laugh.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

I wouldn't call having an opinion you disagree with 'jumping off a cliff' and good on them for not caring and giving their opinion even if it pisses off their audience.

Though to be honest I don't care much for Extra Credits anymore, its really feels like its more for game makers than game players. I love Extra History though.

It does feel very creepy when people make all these memes about playing Nazis and you suddenly wonder why you can't figure out when the Nazi jokes are really just edgy jokes or just humor laden real alt-right propaganda anymore thanks to Poe's law.

Though somebody made an excellent point in the videos comments by mentioning how its fine to play as Americans even though they dropped nuclear bombs genociding whole cities in Japan. We like to focus on the Nazis as the only bad guys of WW2 but they aren't the only ones who did horrible things. Terrible things happened to the Nazis too like the mass rape of German women(at the hands of the Red Army mostly, but the allies let it happen)

So I cant play as Japanese, American, or Russian either as well as Nazis I guess, I have no doubt the other allies did something horrible too if I researched more so lets just never make a WW2 game since everyone committed atrocities and no side was good by our moral standards.

 

[Dalisclock]

I've followed it for while but honestly there's the sense they're struggling to find things to talk about. The "Poor game devs, they just can't sell games for $60 and reasonably turn a profit because games are so expensive to make due to reasons" episode also rubbed the wrong way as well.

OTOH, I am really enjoying Extra History(and it's my go to along with OSP) along with Extra Sci-Fi. I haven't been able to enjoy Extra Mythology nearly as much though.

 

[Kyrian007]

I unsubscribed when it became apparent they were pro-publisher and anti-consumer. I didn't mind them just being pro-developer, that's fine... but pro-publisher is going way too far. I liked extra history, but it wasn't enough to keep me viewing. I only recently found out Dan left. I don't even see how it could have survived that.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

To be fair, lots of people play these kind of games and become Wehraboos.

Yup, and we shouldn't under-estimate how Wehrabooism is a gateway to Nazism for some. The problem with Wehrabooism (the fethisization of the Wehrmacht and their perceived superiority in WW2) is that a lot of the sources it draws from are written by old Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS members in the 50's and 60's, during the massive whitewashing of Nazi-Germany, and modern day closet-Nazis (ie. David Irving). What starts as typical Tiger-wank slowly turns into "the SS was apolitical" and then into "Maybe the Nazis had a few good points about the dangers of Bolshevism" and suddenly you find yourself agreeing with the idea of a global Jewish conspiracy. This doesn't happen to all, or even many, Wehraboos but the trajectory is common enough that it is easily observable.

Which doesn't mean we should censor all works that discuss the relative merits of the Nazi warmachine compared to their opponents (tl dr: it sucked, fite me), but rather that we ought to remind each other occasionally that the Wehrmacht fought for the supremacy of one of the vilest regimes to ever exist as it fought a war of genocide and conquest and it was deeply complicit in the many war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazi regime.

Though somebody made an excellent point in the videos comments by mentioning how its fine to play as Americans even though they dropped nuclear bombs genociding whole cities in Japan. We like to focus on the Nazis as the only bad guys of WW2 but they aren't the only ones who did horrible things. Terrible things happened to the Nazis too like the mass rape of German women(at the hands of the Red Army mostly, but the allies let it happen)

Everyone did horrible things in WW2, sure. The USSR, UK, France, Belgium and USA also did terrible things outside of WW2 too, whether that was colonial oppression, political terror or mass murder of their own population. The difference is that all of those countries fought in World War 2 as a defensive action. Whatever else the USSR, UK or USA did, they committed what atrocities they did to prevent the Axis from succeeding in their goal of colonial terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide on a level that is frankly unimaginable. It was Japan and Germany who wanted to depopulate China and the USSR to use as future colonies for their own people. It was Germany who started an industrial genocide with the express intent to eliminate all the Jewish and Slavic people in the world. And it was Germany and Japan who started the war to realize these ambitions.

That's not to say that the Allied strategic bombing campaign, the atomic bombs or the Red Armies "revenge" on the German population were good or decent things, they were not. But we should never compare them to the atrocities of the Axis, because none of the atrocities the Allies committed would have happened if the Axis hadn't decided to fight the world in a bid to commit the largest genocides the world had ever seen. That's why the Nazi's (and Imperial Japan) are a particular kind of evil, because they didn't see their atrocities as a necessary evil of war (as the Allies and, to some extent, the USSR did), the intention to commit atrocities is why they went to war.