“Nerd baby rage” sums up a lot of Lemmy
There’s an untold amount of wasted energy in gaming discourse, and it’s so pointless and frustrating because I’ve played so much indie stuff in 2025/2026 it’s exhausting to work out what my GOTY is - yet Lord Doomer, King of Organized Backlash, is still just raging on whatever game just came out for $70 with Denuvo attached. (When it’s often unlikely they’d be buying said game even if it was $60 and DRM-free)
May have a bit of a point. But developers/publishers also need to stop complaining about not enough people buying their crap games.
This strikes me a pretty self reflective:
"I'm probably going to get in trouble for everything I just said, but I'm at that point in my life and career that I just don't care anymore," Kaplan said. "The closest I come to a midlife crisis is giving zero fucks."That feels like it could be phrased better. The title and the various quotes all have very different implications. It matters why your ‘demonizing’ and what more than just whether it was something you were going to play. I mean, I’m not going to be buying any Call of Duty games. I’m also not going to pretend that they aren’t cynically produced pablum designed to feed off of malignant elements of American culture. I’m not going to demonize them for the aspects of the game I won’t experience as a non-player, but it’s absolutely reasonable to criticise them for the things they undeniably do.
No, I think the conditionals put on the statement are enough. If you’re not in Call of Duty’s audience, that’s fine: Don’t endlessly rag on it. Talk about games you like, instead of centering the conversation on what you don’t.
The cultural things you mention might make sense if you read about a school shooting and theorize “Man, this guy must’ve played too much Call of Duty.” But when discussing the industry or what we play, it’s unproductive to keep bringing up the big names in the room if you don’t care about them. Let the “GTA 6 Release Trailer” go uncommented instead of grandly announcing how much you don’t care.
Three things:
- Did you read the article? The title frames it one way. A written quote from Kaplan frames it another way, and the audio from the embedded clip frames it a third way. It’s not totally clear which framing to talk about.
- Are you seriously trying to suggest it’s sensible to connect playing video games and becoming a school shooter in 2026? The issues with CoD as a cultural object are not an imagined bogeyman from the nineties. I don’t have the time to sit and explain it just now, but you can find plenty of critical thought regarding CoD if you look around. Dan Olsen has done a video if you want something easy to consume.
- None of the framings are talking about ‘grandly announcing how much you don’t care.’ Kaplan seems to be talking about ostensibly unjustified, overtly negative coverage, a.k.a. hatin’, which I would agree is probably unproductive, and it would be dumb to criticise content quality of something you haven’t experienced, but it can’t be illegitimate to criticize the effect of something you don’t consume, or the only people who would be legitimately able to complain about something’s effect would be its fans, who are thoroughly biased.
u mad, bro?
Uh… this hypocrite is literally complaining about what they don’t like. No one cares. Go bomb some more kids.
Did he take some significant action in favor of Israel?
