The Legend of GayBlade
blog.archive.org
blog.archive.org
But I suppose there was only so much time.
Finishing at Doom seemed an odd place to stop, though I guess an argument can be made that's the start of the modern era even though it was nearly 30 years ago now. There's definitely setup there for a sequel covering things like MMOs.
I think Doom made sense to end on. It was really the first modern 3D FPS. Plus, in the mid-90's (when it was released) there was an explosion of gaming. It would be hard to summarize the period after the mid-90's to today (look how much they had to cut out during the comparatively quiet 70s and 80s.
Though every year in the mid-90s was indeed a huge step forward so it'd be tough to cover everything that happened.
It's a bit funny to me they didn't drop the term 'Doom clone' in there before going straight for FPS. That term hung around for years as a testament to its influence.
I thought it did a great job of covering the topics that were chosen. It wasn't quite as good as The Toys That Made Us but it was still very enjoyable if you're into video games and I really hope they're making another season.
“ One thing to say though, is that perhaps you should be careful to have an accurate historical record? Queer theory did not exist until ~mid 1990s, so perhaps none of these games are LGBTQIA+ — they’re Gay and Lesbian works.”
Given the intentional double entendre and commercial success - it's now a cultural icon - I'm going to optimistically interpret its existence in a positive light. I mean, I can't imagine this product existing in many (most?) countries at the time.
[zoidberg] why not both? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w02QxQZGQc [/zoidberg] (NSFW)
The problem isn't really out in the open harassment anymore though. I haven't been in HS for a bit now, but I'm a grad student in a fairly progressive university. Nobody would really think we have homophobes here anymore. But, in reality they exist and just learned how to hide it better.
To give an anecdote, I'm quite straight passing and it came up that I had a boyfriend at a bar with some other students while at a conference. For the rest of the week, this one guy in my cohort would make comments to me once everybody else got out of earshot. Stuff like how "sneaky" I am or how he wondered why they let people like me into the conference. I just ignored him and it eventually stopped.
Are you gay? Because, if you're not, then you might just not be experiencing the homophobia head on any longer since it isn't so much out in the open.
Implicit transphobia is still a thing (it wouldn't be unheard of for someone who's trans here to have an experience similar to yours) but fortunately that's changing too.
Note: I should add that this social progress only really applies to the city I'm in and maybe the two other big ones here. There are some rural areas that are sanctuaries (to the point of sounding like legends though they're 100% real) but most of the state geographically speaking is still as far in the past as the deep south in America.
I should add that I'm not quite sure exactly how the trend of homophobia that you speak of is hitting younger people. I haven't noticed a shift backwards in real life or on-line. If you're referring to social media homophobia you should realize that "zoomer humor" is radically different from typical humor and many kids will sound like a deranged homophobes/racists/sexists until you realize that they themselves are gay/black/female and are making jokes at their own expense. That being said, ask before assuming they are or aren't joking.
[0] - I'm not sure about the legitimacy of Slate as a publication but a brief skim of this article makes me think it hits on everything relevant in the controversy (if you don't already know about it; it's semi-common knowledge nowadays): https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/06/jk-rowling-trans-me...
In what way - many queer students?
I'm not sure where that came from since I don't think anyone knew what it meant and it definitely wasn't used as an insult by us kids. I don't think I learned what it meant until well into my teens. Pre-internet days, of course.
There is a theory which connects him to the black death also, which would fit to the game mechanics.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wer_hat_Angst_vorm_Schwarzen_M...
(The gay-bashing element is just a metaphor, you see.)
It's semi-interesting, though, that the "queer" was the one with the ball.
It took serious guts to be the "queer" for any length of time - after all, it was you vs. everybody else trying to tackle you. The kids who spent the most time with the ball were the fastest, toughest kids. So "queer" was a slur but also, the "queer" was the fast/strong/brave one.
Of course, there are many regional variations. It sounds like in some places, there was no ball involved, and "smear the queer" was just a name for an ass-beating.
I detest this slur now, and I hate that I used to use words like that as jokes/insults. Today I would be fighting alongside my gay friends against folks using those words.
You'll find that there really isn't consensus around the use of queer as an identity -- some in the community hate it, others love it. There's a lot to unpack in its history, and it's continuing to evolve every year.
That aside, the near-total reclamation of that slur by the LGBT community is such an interesting topic. I can't think of any other slurs that have been quite so fully reclaimed.
I would probably say that positive/neutral use of the term outweighs negative use like 10 to 1 at this point. Maybe 50 to 1.
It was sort of unique that way. I didn't know any other game that had dozens of totally unconnected names.
not by much, because even taken literally creating a game around the fact of beating up the odd member of a group isn't exactly what I'd consider a great pedagogical concept
For all of those reading that think this is ancient history; I'm 27 and went to school in a city more progressive and accepting than any in America.
I do not discount your experiences at all, homophobia was still prevalent in my elementary and middle school and I also graduated in a liberal state in 2008.
No, the game itself it homophobic, and everyone who played it knew or was learning exactly what everyone meant by queer, and it certainly wasn't 'odd'.
(I absolutely hate that this was ever the case! Wish I had a clue back then)
There was no literal gay element to the game (in our town) but it was still a very hateful name for the game. The message was clear: when you had the ball, you were "queer" and therefore the bad guy and so therefore everybody chased you.
That said, we typically called the game by other names. It had a different name in every town and neighborhood, it seemed. I think we only called it "smear the queer" when we were trying to explain it to kids from elsewhere... it was called "roughie-up" where we lived, but that was apparently hyperlocal, so if the kid was from out of town he might have known it as "smear the queer."
https://archive.org/details/BAR_19810115?q=%22Smear+the+Quee...
That article claims the homophobic, ball-free game was new in 1981, the ball game seems to be well established in 1969: https://www.postandcourier.com/free-times/archives/smear-the....
I don't see any reason to believe that “queer” in the ballgame has any connection to homosexuality.
The term, particularly in the mood century, was absolutely used to describe gay people.
The pejorative use to refer to gay people wasn't the dominant use of the term until, well, quite late in the 20th Century, and the structure of the game makes it a whole lot less likely that the reference was a pejorative reference to a sexual minority rather than simply the odd man out.
It's kind of like if you someone argued that the “ball” in the name of association football was a reference to testicles and not the main piece of equipment in the game. Sure, the word also was used that way at the time, but it doesn't make as much sense in context as the alternative, and without some evidence beyond the mere existence of the sense of the word it's not a particularly compelling explanation.
That's not the game were talking about.
I don't think any of them would qualify as homophobic, it's just more a case of hearing something so much that it creeps into your lexicon and comes out by mistake sometimes in a moment of distraction or emotion. It took me a while to unlearn it myself because it was extremely common in the 90s at my school (even among guys who later came out as gay, I guess you have to fit in).
It can take a moment to realise, my original post said "bad/lame" because the use of "lame" was another popular one that took over as supposedly less offensive than "gay", but it too has the capacity to offend those that it would apply to so I thought it best to edit that out.
https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2020/08/13/tony-hawk-pro-sk...
Sometimes it takes a long time for people to think about the words and phrases they pick up.
Mind you I don't use that's lame, not a native speaker and probably also too old for that phrase.
Fag on the other hand I have very little tolerance for. It's a nasty enough word you don't really drop it accidentally unless you use it regularly in some communities (lots of gamers for instance).
When I get called a fag, it reminds me of all the times I got my ass kicked for how I present myself. I won't force people to stop saying it, but I'll mention it and won't associate with them if they don't stop.
Except, they actually wanted them to do exactly the opposite....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_...
Shouldn't that be as follows?:
> but like you said it was only 12 years ago they voted in an (unconstitutional) ban on gay marriage
Or was the vote itself deemed unconstitutional?
And I'm not sure it's totally accurate to say that what happened was people coming around to "lefty liberalism." The nature of the debate changed quite significantly after 2005. First, it became clear to the public that sexual orientation was an immutable characteristic. When I was growing up in the 1990s, it was still common to hear it called a "lifestyle" implying it was a choice. Second, there was an increased focus on equal legal rights for committed same-sex couples. Appealing to neutral application of universal legal principles is usually a compelling message for even non-lefty Americans. Around the same time as Prop 8 was passed, a state Supreme Court decision legalized same-sex marriage in Iowa. Iowans aren't particularly lefty, but a slim plurality supported the decision within a year or two. Third, in the same timeframe a number of mainline Protestant churches began ordaining gay clergy. While the political influence of these denominations is less than in the past, they’re still a powerful force in the center of the political spectrum among middle age and older Americans.
The end result of all that was Obergefell which wasn't particularly lefty or liberal. Justice Kennedy's opinion was a paean to marriage as an ancient and essential social institution. Because marriage was fundamental, participation in it could not be denied to same-sex couples just because of the programming they were born with.
Of course, none of this would've happened without decades of tireless "lefty liberal" advocacy. But public opinion changed dramatically within a single decade, and wasn't accompanied a similarly large leftward shift in peoples' politics generally. So it's interesting to think about what drove those changes.
In the early 2000s, some famous people (TV anchors, etc.) came out of the closet. In 2005, gay marriage was approved, with some controversy but according to polls 65% of the population supported it at the time. 3 or 4 years later, only a minority of extremists remained opposing it, so even the main (and in that time, practically the only) national right-wing party stops actively opposing it.
It's curious because I don't think the change was driven by any obvious big movement or campaign with media attention (analogous to, say, BLM, or in the Spanish context, the 15-M movement). Maybe I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the issue, but it seems like most people just kind of spontaneously decided that hating on gay people was stupid.
I guess secularization probably helped (2000 was also the year where a fast downward trend started in statistics like religious marriages vs. civil marriages) but it's at most a partial explanation. Most religious people now don't object to gay people getting civil marriages either.
PS: This is not to discredit the Spanish gay movements and the people who tirelessly fought for their rights, it's just that my impression is that they weren't on the news that much so most people weren't convinced directly by any specific movement. Plus, gay rights movements in Spain existed at least since the end of the Franco dictatorship but it seems that it wasn't until the early 2000s that there was the sudden change I'm mentioning, it wasn't a slow and constant change.
I think it goes to show that conservatives can generally rely on younger generations becoming more receptive to their arguments about tax and security and Chesterton's Fence (and less interested in provisions for people on low incomes) as they age to compensate for older conservatives dying off, the switching sides in culture wars tends to trend in the opposite direction.
Actually, it's a reference to Paul Graham's observation that when news articles start to appear about anything almost simultaneously, it might be the result of a deliberate effort on someone's part to sell something along with all the generated talk: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
A native advertisement is an ad, dressed up to look like news.
A submarine ad is news. It's true, it's newsworthy (though that seems to be a low bar), it's a perfectly reasonable thing to be published as news. It just... happened not to be discovered by a journalist. Instead it was discovered by a company who hunted for possible news stories that would make them look good or would mention their product, found one, and presented it to a journalist. All nicely researched and ready to go; an easy story. (If this doesn't make sense, Paul Graham explains it better.)
That's my understanding, at least. I'm sure there are tons of shades of grey and no clear boundaries between these things.
> "One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms."
I see nothing that would indicate this is an ad, covert or otherwise. It was posted by Jason Scott -- whose reputation should be familiar to readers of HN -- on the Internet Archive, and has a legitimate reason for being posted there. This is as good as it gets for "not for profit" and "not an adverticle".
Neither of those cases excludes the possibility that the article was influenced by a PR campaign in some way (author's intentions are in fact irrelevant to this question), in this case for a recently-released, and apparently not particularly great documentary by Netflix.
Of course the documentary and the release of the game are connected, but in precisely the opposite way from what you propose.
During that point, the story of GayBlade and Ryan Best become known to the HIGH SCORE production team, and Best is interviewed for it and his story told.
Late 2019, Best discovers some original materials and they are used to recover the game.
Early 2020, Internet Archive hosts a copy of the game emulated, and LGTBQ Game Archive does an extensive writeup on the game.
Mid 2020, HIGH SCORE is presented to Netflix, and a card is inserted into the documentary to indicate it was found. (I'm finding not many people have seen the card.)
(In a submarine ad, the intentions pretty much matter. It refers to an article directly commissioned or written by a PR firm).
But.
The blog post is 100% posted because of the Netflix documentary. It's causing literally hundreds of people to go 'Now I hope they found GayBlade! How do we find it!' and also a screenshot of my twitter account (which I had nothing to do with and became aware of after people starting pinging me) is in it.
The GayBlade stuff went up in January and was announced at that time, by the LGTBQ Game Archive (this was mostly their gig, the whole project to find and recover it).
Internally, our social media and outreach folk went "Hey, did you see we're getting mentioned a lot as people find GayBlade on the archive? We should do a blog entry about it." I was hesitant for the reasons people here seem to bringing up, i.e. cynicism that we must be doing it for money or something. But the fact is: we did it, we worked with Ryan Best and Strong Museum and LGBTQ Game Archive to make Gayblade playable (and also downloadable, when I realized nobody had taken that step). So why NOT talk about it, in case people missed it?
(It was also easier to point to the blog entry than endlessly tweet at people asking.)
There you go. Thanks for the trust.
One thing I would like to add, that I think we would both agree on, is that regardless of everyone's exact motivations and the actual causal chain of events, the post is still, de facto, part of the miasma of publicity for the series. Anyway, I appreciate your work, and that of archive.org.
I don't mind that discussion but I definitely don't want people thinking in any way we got money to write the entry; we simply put into a formal entry that we've had this for a while. A popular awareness of something we do helps a non-profit, so we'll clarify the context of it. I think we're both in agreement the more people know of our work, the better.
Certainly; archive.org has been singularly beyond reproach in that regard.
Many articles are sponsored. Many are ghostwritten.
Protip: Often times the second company/solution in the article about the solutions is the one that paid for it.
Who cares?
You want the FTC to step in with an "AHA! #AD!" banner forced on everything?
In any case, your comment seems very aggressive.