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

[Hades]

Yeah I wasn't terrible impressed with the video either.

Aside from the usual complaints I also think that punishing people for picking Nazi's can end up in opening a big can of worms that's not in anyone's interest. The Nazi's might have been uniquely vile but they were hardly the only evil regime in history. So if Nazi's should be removed at best or have its players punished then why should devs stop there? Its not like the Soviet Union was any less terrible and unlike the Nazi's they survived long after WWII to terrorize Europe and butcher their people.

And what of time periods outside of WWII? In Assasins Creed Odyssey there's not a real difference between Athens and Sparta. There's no real difference between the founders of democracy and a city that brutalized its slave population and threw its babies off a cliff if they didn't meet their standards. Or perhaps games were you can play as the infamously slaughter happy Mongols, or maybe those wacky Romans who nailed Jesus and many, many many others on a cross for a horrible death.

Pretty much every faction and nations has a moment were they were horrible, horrible people so singling out the Nazi's is weird. I know there's a big fear in right wing extremism but Nazi's in video games is neither cause nor symptom in that matter.

That said I find the massive subscriber loss to be somewhat....petty. Yeah the video presented a poor point poorly, but if we stopped our subscription every time a Youtuber said something silly nobody would have any subscribers left.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

Having finally watched this video... yeah, this is, overall, a pretty bad take that proposes band aid solutions to a problem it doesn't really seem to have a very good understanding of. Maybe there's some context here that I'm missing, because I don't really play multiplayer games, but it starts with equating Nazis with terrorists. "Terrorist" is a very ambiguous term that could describe a lot of different groups with a lot of different ideologies. It could, indeed, describe saboteurs in Nazi Germany who'd be, by most definitions, a morally righteous group. But that aside: I don't think WW II multiplayer shooters having one group of players play as Nazi's promotes actual Naziism moreso than chess having one player play as the white side promotes white supremacy. Sure, there are undeniably good reasons to question how Nazis are depicted in video games and if that depiction might be too positive or too appealing but simply having players take the role of members or the Wehrmacht in a simulated WWII battle is not, by itself, causing problems.

Don't get me wrong: I'm an antifascist, proudly so. I think it's the most important issue our society is facing right now. But there are more productive ways to engage in antifascist activism than to mess around with shooting games. I don't think the video game industry, as a whole, promotes fascism. The type of unhealthy capitalism that's very condusive towards the growth of fascism, sure, but not the actual ideology itself. Racism, sexism, classism, nationalism... all of these are views people pick up from influences other than video games.

 

[Squilookle]

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.

Totally agree with everything you've said here, except for one thing. The USSR doesn't get to use that defense- until 1941 they were firmly in the Axis' bed and invaded Poland while Germany was doing the same, as planned out with Germany beforehand. They also conducted genocide before WW2 (possibly larger even than the Holocaust but that's neither here nor there). So Soviet-Era Russia is by no means allowed to say it did atrocities as a reaction to someone else. Blood was on its own hands well before the rest of Europe started getting in on the act.

That said, I'd just love to see what solution that Extra Credits idiot has in mind for a WW2 shooter that involves a multiplayer match fought between the Third Reich and The Russian Red Army. Or even more interesting: what disclaimers are needed before someone jumps into a historical multiplayer battle between Imperial Japan and troops of the Chinese Communist Party.

 

[sonofliber]

Used to like them, then they made the mmo video with the guy crying on how it affected his life (btw guy had a girlfriend, friends and kept studying he just played a lot, his problem was literally drowning in a glass of water) lost my respect there.

Then i liked extra history, until for each of their series they had to had a lies video, one-two i get, for all of em? Do better research and dont adorn history, thats how fake history gets spread


In short, i kinda lost respect for them

 

[Abomination]

I am still subscribed to them, but that video was just awkward to watch. I didn't even see the point of it, unless it was - for lack of a better term - an attempt at heavy virtue signalling? Nazis are bad, apparently. Here's a video of us repeating this mindset again and again and implying that if you are okay with playing as the Axis in a multiplayer shooter then you're a Nazi... sympathiser?

A big lot of moral grandstanding over an issue that honestly does not even exist. Thanks, World of Tanks, for sponsoring a few of our videos.

 

[09philj]

In Assasins Creed Odyssey there's not a real difference between Athens and Sparta. There's no real difference between the founders of democracy and a city that brutalized its slave population and threw its babies off a cliff if they didn't meet their standards.

To be fair Athens also brutalised it's female and slave populations because it was a democracy where only male citizens who'd completed military training could vote so the franchise was only about 10%-20% of the entire population (and Plato and Aristotle both thought this was far too liberal and should have had a wealth requirement.). On the other hand, it was still much more liberal and cultured than Sparta.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Totally agree with everything you've said here, except for one thing. The USSR doesn't get to use that defense- until 1941 they were firmly in the Axis' bed and invaded Poland while Germany was doing the same, as planned out with Germany beforehand. They also conducted genocide before WW2 (possibly larger even than the Holocaust but that's neither here nor there). So Soviet-Era Russia is by no means allowed to say it did atrocities as a reaction to someone else. Blood was on its own hands well before the rest of Europe started getting in on the act.

Absolutely, which is why I hedged when I included the USSR among the Allies. They weren't guilt free before the war (but then again, neither was any of the Western Allies, their colonial sins were, however, a lot lesser then targeted genocide), but most of their actions during the war came in response to the Axis invading the USSR. And since the discussion in question revolved around actions during the war, it is important to distinguish between the 'traditional' horrors of war, like plunder, rape and destruction of civilian property, and the crimes against humanity level that the Axis engaged in with Generalplan Ost, the Commissar Order, the Commando Order and all that other stuff which sought to completely annihilate the Jewish and Slavic people.

In the context that EC discussed, the average soldier of the Red Army was fighting a defensive war all the way up until Germany surrendered and any atrocities they committed happened because Germany wanted to kill or enslave everyone in the USSR and had already committed uncountable crimes against humanity during their invasion. In this context, what these Soviet soldiers did after the war (ie. occupying most of Eastern Europe until it 'agreed' to become Soviet satellite states) is a different discussion altogether, just like British colonial atrocities prior to the war is a different discussion for British soldiers.
Compare to a German soldier, who fought a war of aggression to fulfill the genocidal, dictatorial ambitions of the Nazi party. A war that only became 'defensive' because the enemies of Nazi-Germany turned out to be the better warfighters and then fought to prolong the war so that the Holocaust could remain in action for as long as possible. Every soldier who served in the Wehrmacht bears a direct responsibility for aiding the Nazis, irregardless of their own political orientation, and thus bears a share of the burden for all the atrocities that Germany committed during WW2 or intended to commit, had the Axis won the war.

 

[BrawlMan]

That said I find the massive subscriber loss to be somewhat....petty. Yeah the video presented a poor point poorly, but if we stopped our subscription every time a Youtuber said something silly nobody would have any subscribers left.

They didn't even lose that much. They're still standing at 2.1 million subscribers, so no major losses. With that said, that is what happens when you become a ***** in a box stand.

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

Criticizing normalization of Nazis is fine (seriously, there is no controversy in saying "NAZIS ARE BAD"), but coming from Extra Credits it's incredibly hollow. Other people should be saying this, not an abusive, hypocritical fuck like James Portnow:

https://twitter.com/Cavni/status/1005504205170229248

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Criticizing normalization of Nazis is fine (seriously, there is no controversy in saying "NAZIS ARE BAD"), but coming from Extra Credits it's incredibly hollow. Other people should be saying this, not an abusive, hypocritical fuck like James Portnow:

https://twitter.com/Cavni/status/1005504205170229248

See, most normal, non-hypocrites who have done nothing terrible, nothing worth over-compensating for in these grandiose ways, tend not to be so concerned about such virtuous issues like saying nazis are bad, somehow. It's almost like normal people just presume it to be taken for granted and seek no glory in its affirmation.

Also lets not even get to the reaction that opening this can of worms gets out of the other side who feel attacked just because some guy is self-conscious about being a scumbag and ends up painting all of us with that shade.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

I barely watch EC Anymore, after the "James seems to have harassed an ex out of the company" debacle from a year ago. But I did tune in to this one because I thought "oh boy oh boy the comments will be a dumpster fire!"

Well, actually it turns out EC were the ones who missed the mark.

Before you reply, at least read my TLDR:

Spoiler: My TLDR take

TLDR: While they're TEEEEECHNICALLY correct, they're attacking from the wrong angle. Trying to tackle the problem by removing them from video games as an "Enemy team" is like bailing out the titanic with a thimble. Ergo, don't do that, instead focus on the stuff that ACTUALLY is normalizing nazis en-masse these days (ie, plug the giant goddamn leak in the titantic). Plus it smacks of censorship of art which is always a difficult topic anyway

Ok, now here's the long version.

On a purely technical level, they're correct in that having the nazis/terrorists be a "team skin" technically normalizes them a little.

However.

The normalizing effect it has is so minuscule that it's basically pointless to try to deal with, especially when there are things that have a much much bigger normalizing effect.

Besides, most of us as kids played "Cops and robbers" or "Power Rangers and Monsters" or "orcs and heroes" as kids, and we didn't grow up to become crooks when we played the robbers, or aspire to hurt people/cities. Most of us can tell the difference between fiction and reality, so honestly, the impact is negligible.

You wanna know what's actually normalizing nazis and making them have their resurgence lately?

a) Major news outlets letting them onto their shows in suits, lookin' all respectable, and letting them go "Meee? I'm not a nazi, I'm just a humble nationalist! I just want to protect our country and people, don't youuuu? Yes my policy proposals are all geared towards 'fuck non whites and the jews control everything' but I'm totally not a white supremacist and the fact you say that is like you're trying to silence mee!!! Woe is me, we can't say anything anymoooore!!". And major print outlets having articles showing a "normal" day in the life of a white supremacist and making them look normal (I forget who did this, but these exist). This basically sanitizes them and makes their nasty BS more "respectable" so that average people are a little more likely to get hooked.

b) A president who is extremely loath to condemn them when they literally show up with swastikas chanting old nazi anti-jew chants and run someone over, and an entire political party behind him that makes excuses for him and them, which makes these hateful pricks feel like they can get away with being open about their bigotry, encouraging them to be louder and more aggressive.

c) It's been so long since WW2 that people have forgotten how this story ends and how the players operate, so we're all more vulnerable than we used to be.

d) As minority groups get more and more numerous and visible, a lot of people (even liberal people like my parents and grandparents) are having the natural "oh gosh there are so many immigrants/minorities, we're not a clear majority anymore, OH NO ARE THEY TAKING US OVER?!" reflex to the change in society's visible makeup, making these people more vulnerable to the "the immigrants are dirty and evil and want to ruin our country/culture" rhetoric.

e) It's easier for these nazi types to recruit people these days. Former members say that they prey on the weak, the vulnerable, the mentally ill, and the depressed, and that they try to "give them purpose" and "tell them it's not their fault, it's the Other's fault" to hook them, before slooowly reeling them in with the more insane stuff until that vulnerable person now blames non-whites/jews for all the world's problems and is now primed for violence because they think it's the only way. Considering how easily the internet lets us organize ourselves by topic and communicate, this makes it incredibly easy to find vulnerable people and reach out to them to try to convert them.

So yeah, that's 5 huge leaks in the titanic here. Maybe we should focus on patching those before we start demanding people bail out the ship with a spoon by trying to censor an artistic medium.

It's analogous to how we're always shamed to "Use less heating in winter! Take showers that are 5 minutes less! Eat meat 1 less day a week, meat contributes to climate change!" in order to avert climate change, which has a tiny impact. Meanwhile like 70% of the world's CO2 production comes from 100 companies. If we made them all cause less pollution (via heavy handed regulation), that would have an immediate and sizeable impact on climate change, while targeting only a tiny fraction of the people. We're demanding the wrong people solve the problem.

So to conclude, I think EC's heart was in the right place, and they just want to address the whole "there are now nazis in the street" problem. But their approach is the wrong one. It's ineffective and kind of wrong on its face.

Stop trying to shame people into censoring an art medium when there are literal nazis on TV and in government who are ACTUALLY normalizing the heck out of themselves. That's the real source of the problem. Why not focus on THAT instead of something that basically everyone understands is just a fictional "team skin".

If 14 year old "overly imaginative + Aspergers" me could play counterstrike and recognize that "Terrorist/counter-terrorist" was basically just a team and the whole thing was just a video game that had no meaning, basically everyone who isn't suffering from dementia can do it, there's no point addressing it.

 

[stroopwafel]

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.

Every soldier who served in the Wehrmacht bears a direct responsibility for aiding the Nazis, irregardless of their own political orientation, and thus bears a share of the burden for all the atrocities that Germany committed during WW2 or intended to commit, had the Axis won the war.

When they carpet bombed Dresden how many German townsfolk didn't detest Hitler? Same for the Wehrmacht; most were just conscripted schmucks who would be shot if they deserted. I agree the nazi leadership and ideology was pure evil and it's easy to argue Germany deserved everything it got but a military strategy intended to inflict as many casualties as possible isn't anything less of an atrocity. Was Dresden really necessary? Was Hiroshima really necessary? Also just because Hitler is arguably the worst doesn't make Stalin or Mao any less guilty of genocide and mass displacement.

 

[CritialGaming]

Speaking of Nazis, Wolfenstein Youngblood will let you kill some Nazis 1 day earlier! If you play on PC. Which is a thing that is happening for some reason. https://www.destructoid.com/wolfenstein-youngblood-will-let-you-and-your-buddy-kill-nazis-a-day-earlier-on-pc-561559.phtml

Also I looked back at some Zero Punctuation videos and Yahtzee brought up a point about Nazi's in one of his many Spunk-Gargle-Wee-Wee game reviews. He made a point as to why Nazi's are such a common enemy in these games, and it basically boils down to the universal knowledge that Nazi's were humanities last very clear evil force. Thus the player can feel like a hero without any moral guilt of murdering hundreds of people throughout the course of the game. Not to mention that every game I can think of that features Nazis always over characterizes their evilness to make them even easier to kill.

Besides the point, Nazi's aren't really a thing anymore. Trump isn't a Nazi. Being a racist doesn't make you a nazi (it makes you an asshole). The so call "nazi" groups in America are mostly nothing more than dumbass rednecks but 99% of the them are all bark and no bite. I'll point out, Nazi's aren't shooting up schools, blowing up mosques, flying planes into towers, kidnapping and beheading people in the desert, etc etc.

Nazi is just a label that gets thrown all to easily out upon people merely because they disagree with someone's values.

If anything is "normalizing" Nazis, it's mainstream news, not video games.

 

[CaitSeith]

it goes against arguments they've made in the past against things like violence in games making people violent.

That's not true. Since their "Call of Juarez" episode they have been telling to developers to be careful that their games don't unintentionally teach the wrong lessons about the real world. And did you already forget their Hatred episode? (violence = yes; sadism = no)

The problem with that concept is that you have to apply the "evil" values to what amounts to a blank avatar.

Not an avatar, but an avatar belonging to a side clearly defined in the real world. If every player automatically applied those values to that side and recognized them as evil (no quotation marks, no irony; but as definitely evil values), this video wouldn't even had been made.

 

[CaitSeith]

I'll point out, Nazi's aren't shooting up schools, blowing up mosques, flying planes into towers, kidnapping and beheading people in the desert, etc etc.

Can I point out they stated that the same thing they argued about games that make you play as Nazis is also applicable to games that make you play as a terrorist?

It seems you and EC may agree when it comes to the later.

EDIT:

they accuse everyone of being it especially if you disagree with their values and viewpoints.

We already debunked that in Off-topic forums: If the values they have is "whole races must get out/disappear from my America", then it's reasonable they get labeled as white nationalists at best.

That's isn't normalization; that's calling duck a duck.

 

[CritialGaming]

snip

I would argue though that you aren't actually playing as a nazi/terrorist, sure you are marked as such by the uniform your avatar is wearing. But you aren't doing anything different gameplay wise from the other side of the coin, you aren't given any of the values or characterization of motives behind the uniform, it's merely window dressing to mark teams.

Plus you don't even see your outfit 99% of the time.

To your second point. I don't go to Off topic, so I never saw any of that discussion.

 

[Abomination]

I would argue though that you aren't actually playing as a nazi/terrorist, sure you are marked as such by the uniform your avatar is wearing. But you aren't doing anything different gameplay wise from the other side of the coin, you aren't given any of the values or characterization of motives behind the uniform, it's merely window dressing to mark teams.

This is the big one. It's not like there are special missions or scenarios for the Axis teams in these games to... gas X number of Jews in 10 minutes or to "acquire" X number of Pleasure Companions in a certain Chinese city.

It's just dudes in uniforms shooting other dudes in different uniforms in a WWII setting. Everyone could be in tellytubby outfits and, while absurd, the context of what is going on - running over each other in tanks - would remain constant.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I think the thing that bothers me is the tacit implication that a "Play as a Nazi permission slip" would be used to fuel Xteenillion articles and videos that Gamers are Nazis! because the people who bought the new WW2 shooter game consented to be on either side of the multiplayer.

Can you imagine what Twitter could do with a list of Gamertags/account names of players who clicked I Agree to the Play as a Nazi question?

 

[CaitSeith]

I would argue though that you aren't actually playing as a nazi/terrorist, sure you are marked as such by the uniform your avatar is wearing. But you aren't doing anything different gameplay wise from the other side of the coin, you aren't given any of the values or characterization of motives behind the uniform, it's merely window dressing to mark teams.

Plus you don't even see your outfit 99% of the time.

This is the big one. It's not like there are special missions or scenarios for the Axis teams in these games to... gas X number of Jews in 10 minutes or to "acquire" X number of Pleasure Companions in a certain Chinese city.

It's just dudes in uniforms shooting other dudes in different uniforms in a WWII setting. Everyone could be in tellytubby outfits and, while absurd, the context of what is going on - running over each other in tanks - would remain constant.

I think that's pretty much their point but in reverse: going around in a Nazi/terrorist team not doing anything specific to Nazism/terrorism makes their symbols lose their intrinsic impact for the player as more and more time is spend in the game. I think they argue that doing Nazi/terrorist actions makes Nazi uniforms/terrorist attires and symbols look less wrong among the gaming community than doing glorified Nazist/terrorist (because the later is either propaganda or subversion, and people spot those intentions).

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

When they carpet bombed Dresden how many German townsfolk didn't detest Hitler? Same for the Wehrmacht; most were just conscripted schmucks who would be shot if they deserted. I agree the nazi leadership and ideology was pure evil and it's easy to argue Germany deserved everything it got but a military strategy intended to inflict as many casualties as possible isn't anything less of an atrocity. Was Dresden really necessary? Was Hiroshima really necessary? Also just because Hitler is arguably the worst doesn't make Stalin or Mao any less guilty of genocide and mass displacement.

Here's the ticket: You don't need to be a Nazi to help or acquiesce to their plans, you just need to remain passive and not resist when they get to power. No one in Germany could pretend as if they didn't know that the Nazis wanted to murder all Jewish people and start a war of conquest to eliminate the USSR, kill its population and take all their land. They knew this because Hitler wrote a book about it, then forced everyone to own it and talked about these plans constantly. I am not saying that every person in Germany in 1932 to 1945 was pure evil, but they all enabled the Nazi regime to start a world war, the Holocaust and Generalplan Ost. By not resisting the Nazi regime they became culpable, in the same way that you become culpable if your buddy presses a gun into your hand and tells you to help him rob a bank and you go along with it. So every person who took up arms for the Nazis, no matter how unwilling, naive or indifferent they were aided the Nazi cause. We can lament the people who did resist and still died due to Allied or Soviet warfare. But the average German who kept going to work to make war materials, who sent their sons and fathers to serve in the Wehrmacht and who never tried to stop the Nazis are just as culpable as those that volunteered for the SS and fought willingly.

As for the culpability of the Western Allies: They were forced into a 'Total War', a war which the aggressor intended to end only once everyone bowed to their rule and allowed them to murder hundreds of millions of people and enslave tens of millions more in peace. No one at the time could know how much pressure and destruction it would take for Germany to buckle under the pressure and lose the war, but they knew the consequences of losing to Germany. So they employed tactics that are technically legal under the laws of war but are dubious in terms of morality (strategic bombings), but they did so because they had to strike at Germany in some fashion and the idea of destroying the means of production to hinder the war effort is sound strategically. Would you have preferred that the Western Allies were so meek and timid that they'd have pulled their punches and, potentially, allowed Germany to win the war? The moral difference in what the Axis did and the Allies did is still that the Axis are the aggressors and did all they could to hurt their enemies in order to establish dominance. The Allies did what they had to do to stop Germany as quickly as possible, to prevent genocides and suffering on a level that boggles the mind. If that meant that culpable German civilians were killed or maimed, that was the price to be paid to stop the depopulation of all of Eastern Europe through industrial genocide.

Whether Stalin or Mao are guilty of other crimes against humanity is also beside the point, because in the particular circumstances of WW2 they were the victims of foreign aggression. That means that whatever they did to fight of German and Japanese attempts to commit genocide on an unprecedented scale on their people is pretty much inherently justified, because failure would mean hundreds of millions dead. In the particular discussion about world war 2, Mao (though Chiang Kai-Shek is probably more worthy of praise for defending China) and Stalin and their armies are big damn heroes for fighting off the Nazis and Japanese. That doesn't mean that Stalin and Mao aren't monsters because of what they did before and after the war, but they have some solid moral justification for being ruthless assholes during WW2.