i'm not oblivious to the irony of my feelings about this trash. when i was in my teens, magazines like egm and gamefan loved to report on joseph lieberman's campaign against violence in video games. he and his fellow senators didn't really get it, and even as kids we knew better. better than them, better for ourselves. mortal kombat was and always has been looney tunes, but these crusty old politicians took it seriously - at least enough to raise funds from clueless conservative parents. this whole era tilled the soil from which gamergate would sprout a couple of decades later. censorship was the enemy, no matter what considerations might motivate the direction of art or changes to it.

(a couple of side notes: howard lincoln, president of nintendo america in 1993, said that year that night trap would never appear on a nintendo system. well, he was wrong about that. also, it's pretty interesting to see these guys wring their hands about konami's justifier lightgun "teaching children that any problem can be solved with a gun" when we consider the world we live in - at least in the us - today. lightguns are pretty much a thing of the past, and i feel like it's a safe bet that kids who played lethal enforcers didn't all go on to become cops. but if they did, well, then i don't imagine lieberman has anything negative to say about them. i'm quite sure he's not thinking about what a tragedy it is that some old video games "justified" them becoming the violent foot soldiers of the white supremacist state. and how would we ever know if even a single cop in 2022 ever played lethal enforcers, anyway? what the fuck am i even talking about?)

here i am, well into my adulthood and reading articles about a fascist recruitment campaign which happened in roblox, thinking i'd like to make it my mission to get my nephews away from this junk. initially i frowned upon learning that the elder of my nephews was playing lots of this because, well, it's fucking devoid of any sort of aesthetic quality. funko pop shit. and, in fairness, my nephews are still young and easily distracted and who the fuck am i anyway, i'm literally talking in irc in between paragraphs here about cruelty squad and the worldview of its developer, who is supposedly anti-capitalist, though he also collaborated with the brigador devs not long after they were exposed as something awful forum posters into white nationalism and holocaust denial or whatever, and i find the whole situation frankly fucking bewildering and idk if i want to play this game (cruelty squad) which otherwise seems to be, incidentally, the exact inverse of a game like roblox... but is it really? jfc i really am an idiot. sometimes nothing makes sense. it's not like i'm afraid of some level of depravity... i mean, have you seen the movies and music i'm into? but i mean, despite my depression and the world i'm not a doomer or a nihilist. the red pill is a metaphor in the matrix, a movie that whips ass, not the hateful bullshit some 4chan nerds equate with being "based." all of this is so much weirder and more unsettling to me than mortal goddamn kombat ever even came close to being.

look, i mean... i don't want to approach my nephews as a lieberman, as some arbiter of content safe for consumption with a stick up their ass. still, one thing i do know: roblox is shit and the kids could do better. play a fucking dragon quest. discover culture, idk. maybe even go outside, learn how to be alone.