I wonder if anyone else remembers this. It came to my mind because I was reading this story:
The owner of a clothing shop in Cedar Glen was shot and killed Friday night, Aug. 18, after a person made several disparaging comments about a rainbow flag displayed outside the store, authorities said.
The suspect was found nearby by arriving deputies, who shot and killed him, San Bernardino County sheriff’s officials said.
This is… horrible. I don’t even know how to describe it. For the first time in my adult life, I’m genuinely horrified and fear for my LGBT+ brothers and sisters, as well as their allies (which includes me, fuck).
2013 felt… different. Two years later in 2015 gay marriage would be legalized nationwide.
I remember thinking EA was trying to pull the wool over our eyes. I remember thinking that LGBT+ acceptance in 2013 was doing well. I remember thinking they were throwing up that people voted for them as worst company over LGBT+ inclusion as some kind of way to hand-wave away their awful business practices. Going back, though…
In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT+ characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT+ policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America.
Does anyone else feel like me, and feel dumbfounded and like I just didn’t think conservatives were that organized at the time? More to the point, I just didn’t trust anything EA said and thought they were lying. I don’t think they were lying anymore. I was wrong.
I wonder, does that mean that far fewer people hated them than we thought, for their business practices? I mean, we’ve seen years of steady profits for EA, it’s not as though they’ve lost a ton of business…
I’m curious what other Lemmings thoughts are on this. I just kind of had a bit of an epiphany about it recently and came back around to thoughts on the subject because of (sigh) how awful everything is.
Wait. Out of all the bullshit and evil stuffs EA has done over the years, they were voted worse company in America over gay characters?
That is ridiculous.
There is plenty of reason to hate EA. The only good thing they’ve done in a while was making The Sims even Gayer. But then they sell you a glorified overpriced and utterly worthless stuff pack.
making The Sims even Gayer.
I’m old enough to remember the Sim Copter antics in 1996.
The game gained controversy when it was discovered that designer Jacques Servin inserted an Easter egg that generated shirtless men in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other and appear in great numbers on certain dates, such as Friday the 13th. The egg was caught shortly after release and removed from future copies of the game. He cited his actions as a response to the intolerable working conditions he allegedly suffered at Maxis, particularly working 60-hour weeks and being denied time off. He also reported that he added the “studs”, as he called them, after a heterosexual programmer programmed “bimbo” female characters into the game, and that he wanted to highlight the “implicit heterosexuality” of many games.
Servin would go on to be one of the founding members of the Yes Men.
That guy is a legend, holy crap.
It’s also telling that EA at the time referenced emails and postcards. It’s quite likely that a lot of the people on the right pushing this might not have even played any of these games themselves. They’re old geezers sending in postcards, why use a postcard??
That sounds like ea making an excuse for why they were voted worst company. I don’t doubt that they got those emails and letters but I doubt that was the major reason they got voted worst. That was a year they had a lot of gaming controversies
This is the most likely reason. Companies love reframing their earned hate as bigotry. Alt right goes along with it because it gives them validation.
This was definitely a 4Chan thing. I frequented that pisshole quite regularly around that time, and the LGBTQ±hate was a prevalent stance when it came to characters in videogames. And since they have a history of brigading and manipulating “contests” like this, I would be very comfortable in mostly attributing this to 4Chan. I remember plenty of threads about this from back then.
“Right-wing organization” would not be the right term here exactly. 4Chan themselves would likely call it along the lines of “weaponized autism”. In less inflammatory terms, they did it because they were bored, they had the time, and simply because they could. This particular case just “happened” to be about their anti-LGBTQ±stance. A lot of their actions tended to have that particular flavor.
Sickening place. Glad to have left it for good years ago.
Hopy shit.
All this time I thought that “vote” was because of some EA Sports FIFA crap, lootbox bullshit, or something like that.
Now it turns out that it was another bunch of Sad Puppies throwing a whinepocalypse about inclusion.
They are a terrible company but I never thought it was for any LGBT reason.
Right, they’ve been terrible for years. Buying up companies, firing the old guard and pumping out shove ware versions of the games. On the consumer side, broken games, no polish, annual release games that are just reskins of the previous one, DLC/micro transactions, shutting down servers while there’s still a strong playerbase.
If I saw a poll for worst game company in 2013, it would have been an easy pick from me. Nowadays, it would be harder, but only because the other AAA studios have all gotten shittier since then.
This is… horrible. I don’t even know how to describe it. For the first time in my adult life, I’m genuinely horrified and fear for my LGBT+ brothers and sisters, as well as their allies (which includes me, fuck).
2013 felt… different. Two years later in 2015 gay marriage would be legalized nationwide.
Not to say we don’t still need to keep fighting the good fight, but this just seems like evidence of cornered animals becoming more desperate.
Right-wingers know they’re losing this battle so the most insane among them are falling back to “last resort” tactics that will probably have the opposite effect they want.
Be out and proud or openly supportive as an ally, now’s not the time to let terrorists have the final say.
The right has always been very organized. The church helps keep then organized. Fox News keeps them organized as they are all fed the same crap. Politically, the Tea Party helped organize the neonazis and neoconfederates, giving them a louder voice and recruited more of the like. Then the Tea Party rejoined the Republican party shoving it much further to the right. Around that time, they also figured out social media, which gave them an even louder voice.
When Obama was in office, the news wasn’t as focused on them, so people that were living in Blue states weren’t as aware. In the south, it was still a battlefield as you lived next to people with these beliefs.
It’s their level of organization that has made the Republicans such a force to deal with. Before social media, the fringe groups stayed on the fringe of society and weren’t given a voice through various forms of media. Since social media, they have a much stronger voice and we have discovered how easy it is for people to be manipulated, like with the Jade Helm scare in TX. If you don’t remember this, there was a social media scare going around that Obama was going to take over TX and imprison those who didn’t vote for him. The posts claimed that there were a bunch of Walmarts that had been emptied and were going to be used as makeshift prisons. The posts also claimed that Obama was hiding his plan from the public by claiming it was a training exercise named Jade Helm. So effective was the scare, that Greg Abbot (who still remains governor of TX) ordered the TX National Guard to watch the US army perform its training to prevent the army from arresting civilians. In reality, the US army was just performing practice exercises around Fort Hood, which is a little north of Austin. Years later, it was revealed that the scare was the work of a Russian troll farm experimenting with social media to see how disruptive they could be.
I’m pretty sure they were trying to use gay people as a shield. There were definitely people complaining about it, but there’s no way even 20% of the people were upset about that. Tbh I don’t know why you’d believe EA when their idea of inclusion was to trot out the freak wagon and then rattle all the bars to wake up the gays for the crowds to leer at. At least that’s how it felt at the time. They liked to make a big deal about their gay characters and if a game with gay characters was bad, they (and other publishers) had a tendency to say, “oh no, all the criticism we’re getting are bigots who hate gay people. Oh no! Please come help us, please?”