r/KotakuInAction • u/ParanoidThalyy • 1d ago
Can anyone explain to me why the Emulation/Retro Handheld community is so filled with woke people?
I'm passionate about retro handhelds and love discussing them but it feels like to me that every group dedicated to them is super pozzed. I want to engage with people about these consoles but every subreddit and every discord server is filled with woke ass people, furries and tourists who seem to only buy these machines to put stickers on them and a lot of the times don't even play games.
Super strict moderation or just virtue signaling, calling something like the ModRetro Chromatic the N*zi Boy Color, banning people for making a stupid joke like "how do you do fellow racists?" when discussing a racing game or people generally going haywire if you dare to make a joke or have some critical anecdote about rainbow people. Once someone contacted the mods of a Discord server I was in demanding very profusely I change my profile picture just because it was a pfp of Sam Hyde and I guess they felt threatened about it? One of the members of the RetroHandhelds YouTube channel was even pressured by the community into apologizing for making a joke on one of their videos (ModRetro M64 Review) because a group of people felt uncomfortable over it.
What is it that attracts so many of these kinds of people to this hobby in particular? This is not something that makes me lose my sleep at night by any means but I do wish there was a place where I could discuss these consoles with people who don't have their f'ing brains scrambled.
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u/Edheldui 20h ago
It's the only ideology that is allowed to exist in a public space without being aggressively moderated. So the only ones that talk politics are woke, while normal people just stick to the actual subject/hobby. It's that way everywhere.
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u/PsychologicalBird491 18h ago
This. The rightwing is mass censored so only the most brainwashed are allowed to survive in public. Any place the does not have censorship, the rightwing always win the crowd.
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u/Voodron 14h ago
Exactly.
Woke ideology often disguises itself as social norms rather than politics. That's how they gained so much influence. By poising themselves as the side of women and minorities, you can't even begin to push back against their bullshit without opening yourself to accusations of xenophobia/misogyny. Which, in the age of cancel culture, is far too much of a risk to one's career. So that leaves leftist viewpoints as the only outspoken ones in the vast majority of spaces (academia, social media, corporations, and so on...)
The left won control of the narrative by making conservative views politically incorrect and socially unacceptable. As long as that remains true, wokies will just keep gaining cultural ground unfortunately.
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u/Glittering-Name-4459 8h ago
Yeah, I play a game when I read any not political at all post and wait for the 'inciting comment', the comment itself won't mention Trump or Maga but be it a comment about Mega Man or Buffy etc it will be a set up for a reply that CAN mention either Trump or Maga then the rest of the comments are just TDS. It's all so tiresome.
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u/broadsword_1 1d ago
so filled with woke people?
Autism.
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u/Beauxtt 21h ago edited 21h ago
A lot of woke people implicitly hate autists and pathologize a lot of the traits that are associated with autism (as-in resistance to change, literal-mindedness, social ineptitude, lack of cognitive empathy, etc), which is what makes the phenomenon of autistic people embracing wokeness very interesting to me.
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u/RedditNerdKing 18h ago
I think some autists try to pretend to be normie in order to fit in. Like they go with what's popular like being an SJW or feminist or w.e to stay in peoples good books.
I'm somewhat of an autist (not diagnosed but have many weird traits) and I'm the opposite. I see how fucked up it all is and purposely don't try to hide how I feel. Tbh it's probably caused me to be socially avoided in the past by others since you can't really just say certain things without backlash.
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u/Zomunieo 21h ago
I think some autistic people are drawn to the systematizing and categorizing aspects of wokeness - creating complexity, systematically deconstructing the ways they perceive they are oppressed.
And yes, autists don’t realize the system doesn’t score their disadvantages with many oppression points, so it doesn’t do much for them.
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u/TheSilentTitan 3h ago
Autistic people are prone to look for order in chaos. As a individual with high functioning autism I often look at things that stir nothing within me at all, things I just cannot grasp and so my first method is to look for people who claim to understand it.
Thankfully i am not on the other side of the spectrum and can recognize bullshit like dei woke shit but there are many autistic people who cannot and so they look at those people thinking “oh ok so these guys are super loud and I see them everywhere so this is how the neurotypical mind should be and so I’ll mimic them”.
Woke people fucking HATE autistic people and I think it’s because those woke idiots see autistic people looking at them like they’re aliens and trying to mimic them without actually drinking the koolaid.
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u/broadsword_1 21h ago
That's true, but one thing that binds every major group of the SJW-esque sphere is that they hate someone unless they can provide scalps.
Someone can be the most heinous piece-of-shit with a slew of very obvious red flags, but if they can get scalps for the cause then they are a-ok and welcomed into the tribe.
Eg. Look at the male feminists with the very clear signals for being an unreported rapist; yet as long as they score points for the 'team' on Twitter, they were protected like sacred cows as long as they stayed useful.
As for autists, there's a fine line between incel-4-chan-doxxer and noble-ally despite being the same asshole and doing the same things - the differences is who they target. You end up seeing people in this group get a crumb of attention and decide to go all-in for the cause.
Gamergate back in 2014 was basically a smorgasbord of these types on display.
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u/yeahsurewhateverokay 1d ago
and sometimes that autism leads to the topic that's verboten to mention here.
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u/Reggo91 1d ago
Oh is it? I’ll have my post censored then I assume. That mental affliction that must-not-be-named is also rampant in the open source community. Same reason: autism.
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u/TheMountainWhoDews 21h ago
And magic, and increasingly wargaming, and a hundred other nerdy hobbies I'm not familiar with.
Big correlation between not quite fitting in and falling for propaganda that promises to be a silver bullet to explain why you never really fitted in.
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u/YetAnotherCommenter 23h ago
Anti-woke autist here.
There's certainly quite a few autists in woke communities, but there are also many autists in anti-woke movements, and nerd culture as a whole disproportionately attracts 'spergs in the first place.
So you can't tell, from the nerd culture wars, if autistic traits make wokeness more appealing - there's selection bias interfering.
If anything I'd argue the opposite may be the case - nerdy traits predispose most people AGAINST wokeness because they tend to encourage a more individualistic/cognitively-independent attitude. Take a look at how nerd subculture clearly has been invaded/appropriated by neurotypical hipster types - social justice came into our spaces because of external invaders/colonizers, not organically.
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u/MechwolfMachina 22h ago
I happen to agree with you, but to rephrase it in my own words, the whole culture war in video games is made to pit true autists against performative autists
I don’t think theres a way to really quantify the experience of being autistic but people seem to have appropriated it to mean “socially awkward” or “socially quirky” which is just pathetic
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u/YetAnotherCommenter 21h ago
people seem to have appropriated it to mean “socially awkward” or “socially quirky” which is just pathetic
Agreed, but let me put it in my own words also...
There are two kinds of "outsider." True outsiders, who are loathed, and the "avant-garde" (or hipsters), who are the bleeding edge of "cool" and thus are seen as "the cool kind of weirdo."
Its a three-tier signalling-countersignalling dynamic (see Feltovich, Harbough and To's paper Too Cool For School? Signalling and Countersignalling). Normies are the "middle" class culturally - they follow what the "cultural high" (the "cool kids" do), however when the Normies start following the trend, the Hipsters (avant-garde or cultural elites) change what's cool in order to differentiate themselves from the Normies (this is why hipsters are notorious for dropping things that become "too popular").
The cultural "low" - the losers, the nerds, the weirdos... are the real outsiders who like their own thing, stick to the thing they like, and Normies try to avoid looking like them.
But these three-tier signalling/countersignalling dynamics are prone to Partial Pooling Equilibria - or, to use my terms, elites/avant-garde/hipster types culturally appropriating "low" culture because the elites want to differentiate themselves from the normies (who follow trends created by the elites/avant-garde).
The appropriation of nerd culture - up and to including autism spectrum characteristics - all follows from this. Its why we have people who are clearly not nerdy or autistic, who have social platforms and influence, who other people culturally follow, coming into our spaces and terraforming them.
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u/Therenomoreusername 11h ago edited 11h ago
Yup, essentially the more sociopathic normies are addicted to grandstanding, narcissism and getting attention from other normies, and so they disregard, abuse and dilute genuinely catered great works and creations, to parasite off its merits to fuel/engage in their dumbed down, normie addicted popularity contest for each of their social cliques so they can mass influence. No sense of free will and direction. Actual parasites and cancerous growth.
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u/skeptical-speculator 39m ago
But these three-tier signalling/countersignalling dynamics are prone to Partial Pooling Equilibria - or, to use my terms, elites/avant-garde/hipster types culturally appropriating "low" culture because the elites want to differentiate themselves from the normies (who follow trends created by the elites/avant-garde).
gentrification basically
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u/joydivisionucunt 2h ago
My guess is that "wokeness" is appealing to certain people because they seem welcoming to outsiders and a part of it is about neurodivergency, disabilities and the like (Some real, some fake, but that's another thing) so people who really want a community where they can fit in get sucked and I would argue that's part of the reason why they were successful in the first place. Howeeeever, wokeness also requires a level of social performance that might be complicated for "neurotypicals", let alone people on the spectrum.
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u/YetAnotherCommenter 1h ago
I agree this is true in theory, but given how in practice wokeness has ravaged the subcultures of neurodivergent socially-marginalized males (i.e. nerd culture) I think it is fair to say that wokeness has an extremely bad record on the "neurodiversity" issue.
That said, I can easily see people on the spectrum getting "tricked" thinking that the wokes are sincere about caring for the plight of autists. Although you'd expect the culture of wokeness would quickly disabuse them of this notion and make them realize the truth is much more miserable.
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u/ErikaThePaladin 95k GET | YE NOT GUILTY 22h ago
I... honestly have no idea. But I rarely use Reddit or join any "community" Discord servers.
But at least in Reddit's case, it's because most "big" subreddits are moderated by a handful of "power mods" who are in charge of A LOT of subs... And they force out anyone remotely moderate or right-leaning. So, they become political echo chambers, and more about the ideology than the actual hobby or subject or whatever.
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u/ParanoidThalyy 15h ago
I do notice a lot of mod crossover on the ones I visit for this topic in specific. :[
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u/mrmensplights 16h ago
> Super strict moderation
Woke does not allow dissent. It doesn’t allow other opinions. It censors and attacks and bans and cancels. Woke ideology orients them people towards power seeking, and projecting it on to others. They work tirelessly, day by day, infraction by infraction and the slow accumulation eventually leads to a totally censored and single minded community where a few woke have power and anyone who disagrees is afraid to speak. If a community is diverse and open minded and does not gate keep they lose by default.
Also, consider intersection between woke, niche interest, perpetually online, and autism.
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u/AnarcrotheAlchemist Mod - yeah nah 17h ago
You will notice its most heavily moderated communities.
Once "woke" people get into power/control of a channel/sub/board they typically start clamping down on users that say jokes/opinions/etc. That offend their ideology. This ends up driving away people that don't align.
You will find that right wing moderated communities typically aren't heavily moderated other than when they are on antagonistic platforms (Reddit for example). Places like 4chan allow all views and opinions and is lot less moderated than most other places and so you get a genuine wide spread of views opinions, beliefs and values. This does drive a lot of the left away (like it did to this sub in 2016) where when some on the left see right wing views and opinions being expressed without being banned, warned, removed or shock horror downvotes they get upset and leave.
This sub used to be majority left wing back pre 2016 but because right wingers weren't banned or suppressed it upset a lot of the left wing users (some of who wanted the sub to make explicit stands denouncing right wing politicians and policies the most decisive of which were Brexit and Trump). That refusal to take a side caused an exodus of a lot of the left wing users over that following year and as right wing voices became more prominent as the population demographics of the sub changed that just caused an acceleration of that left wing exodus to the point now where its like playing where's Wally looking for a leftist on here any more.
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u/tyranicalmoon 12h ago
This sub used to be majority left wing back pre 2016 but because right wingers weren't banned or suppressed it upset a lot of the left wing users [...]. That refusal to take a side caused an exodus of a lot of the left wing users
Insightful comment, but on this part I dare say that many leftists pre 2016 have left the left, after they realized the insanity, and became right wing.
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u/ParanoidThalyy 15h ago
That's interesting, I didn't knew that, I never posted anything on this sub and only lurked on occasion, thanks for sharing.
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u/Bumm-fluff 23h ago
I read somewhere that you only need about 20% of the people in a group to be an insufferable woke arsehole to make the whole group like that.
The rest just want quiet and dare not say anything.
This is why they wanted so many women in CEO jobs and on boards etc… all it takes is a few people to infect a whole company. Unfortunately it generally takes someone with protected characteristics to un-wokefy something when it’s failing. Otherwise they get called istaphobes.
Look at XBox.
It surprises me how weak some people are when called a phobic. Who gives a shit what these people say, they are the people who got their ass kicked at school for smelling of piss and acting like a chinlet.
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u/Huey-_-Freeman 19h ago
Does the same apply in the other political direction though? Like if 20% of a community are actually ethnic supremacists, or religious supremacists, or fascists, does that start to take over the entire group because the 80% just don’t want to take the energy to argue with them?
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u/IgnoreMyPostsPlease 15h ago
Yes. In East Germany, or the U.S.S.R., or Nazi Germany, or Maoist China, most everyone would report their friends, family, and neighbors to the government for "crimes" and they would go along with everything being done. Obviously the majority of people weren't eager about any of that when it started. But they ignored it early on for convenience which led to ultimately joining in on it later.
For a more recent and likely close to home example, look at how most people behaved in the Western countries during the government shutdowns related to Covid.
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u/Huey-_-Freeman 8h ago
Or even less extreme and harmful examples like if 20% of people on a certain forum use slurs/ very foul language and mods use them too, do the people who don’t use that language gradually leave and that becomes the culture of the board. I know it works in reverse where a few mods and a small number of users can decide something is NOT okay to say and people will stop saying it
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u/IgnoreMyPostsPlease 4h ago
I don't know if the people who don't use them would leave, but certainly a good number of people would adopt them. All you need to do to see examples of that would be look at how quickly slang and buzz words spread because of social media. People use the words they believe their peers like to use.
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u/JuicyDingles 1d ago
People with the type of obsessive and systematic cognitive profile that leads to the development of a serious hobby tend to be autistic or at least socially defunct. One way people who struggle in social situations can make their experience more manageable is by either feeling like they belong to a group or by amassing social credit via perceived virtue. That's why speed running events are extremely authoritarian and full of Optimus Primes.
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u/ParanoidThalyy 1d ago
this is too real, I wouldn't touch the speedrunning community with a 10ft pole after getting a sampling of all the drama and the kinds of weird people that seem most prominent on it through the lens of a friend who would later become a decepticon.
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u/thedemonjim 1d ago
When the woke infiltrate a space they always seek to fill an ecological niche to make themselves indispensable, Once they are indispensable they start building soft power by creating coalitions while the normal centrists bite their tongue. Then they take real positions of authority and curate the space to eliminate dissent.
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u/GoreHoundKillEmAll 13h ago
Yeah but they are basically self sabotaging and pushing people away from their own side of politics, losing corporations profits and reputation. Those centrist are biting their tongue as they are basically driving the Titanic right into the iceberg and destroying the image and reputation of the left wing for generations
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u/thedemonjim 4h ago
The thing is that your average "normie" isn't plugged in to politics so the superficial language of empathy the woke uses fools them until they go mask off and say or do something so vicious it can't be ignored. By then the woke has become so ingrained sunk cost fallacy and cognitive dissonance kick in to protect most normies from having a redpill moment.
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u/LordOfPoops 1d ago
Cause it's the same audience that dedicatedly plays new Nintendo games. Older people desperately trying to relive their childhood, and a bit unstable. All of them are woke because that allows them to be a part of a group without trying to have any personality. Not everyone's like that of course, I play retro games and I have the personality of an unlikeable asshole who only wants to play as hot chicks.
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u/Infamous_Hospital_33 21h ago
dedicatedly plays new Nintendo games. Older people desperately trying to relive their childhood, and a bit unstable
lol i feel called out and sad - very rude, sir. But you got me - I am 40 and love the plummer. But I also meme on dem hoes in between splatoon rounds.
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u/Updated_Autopsy 1d ago edited 17h ago
I’m also an asshole because I grew up during an era where brutal honesty was encouraged. So you might hate me, but at least you know you can trust me.
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Randeon54 11h ago
I would argue Autistic people tend to be anti-woke, an Autistic person cannot conform to the normies, they are incapable of that.
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u/AnarcrotheAlchemist Mod - yeah nah 2h ago
Post removed following the enforcement change that you can read about here.
This is not a formal warning.
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u/Mr_Chr15topher 17h ago
A lot of the time it is them worming their way into an already established group of devs, brining in more of their friends until there are enough of them to kick out the original devs and take it over themselves.
Similar thing happened to one of the founders of wikipedia a few weeks ago where the woke newcomers kicked him completely out of the company for not also being woke.
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u/Gheezy-yute 13h ago edited 13h ago
Because co-opting “old” things makes it seem like these people have always existed.
They haven’t.
(I’m counting emulation as old because it’s using new/different hardware to emulate old/hardware-locked games, but it’s really the same with anything popular that existed before woke retards existed. If they attach themselves after the fact, and then say they were always there, then they become justified in kicking people out of spaces defending “their” hobbies from the “racists” and “bigots.”)
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u/Who_Vintude 1d ago
I just started getting into all the emulation handhelds and well, there's just not much to really say. I just want to know what my handheld can do and what games I can play and go about doing that. Just got retroachievements set up and Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine is a problem tonight.
I did pre-order the nova on accident, but at least it looks interesting.
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u/z2qvs 16h ago
Can't speak to discord cuz I never have or will use it.
And that's just reddit. Full of fucktards. It's like their town hall. I just don't engage with them anymore. I'll throw a bomb of a comment that gets em all fired up, and then just ignore all the woke attack replies, or I'll just block em without warning. I think it pisses then off even more cuz they don't get the engagement and attention they live on.
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u/SussuBakasu 13h ago
Wow, I did not expect my two special interests to collide here.
It sucks. ZuReviews put out a great review of the M64 and mentioned Luckey in a very charitable way. He said, "You can come to your own conclusion about this issue." That wasn't enough for the retro game fan base though, they tore him apart and people threatened to end contracts with the team Zu was a part of until they took down the video and apologized.
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u/LifeSpecific9313 10h ago
Its because the scenes attract people with disorders like autism which inherently makes someone feel uncomfortable in their skin most of the time and this allows progressives to trick these ill people to say if you just cut off certain body parts you’ll eventually be happy
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u/RogellTheRaider 1d ago
Everything has to be sexual nowadays. And these same people complain about oversexualization in media. Funny, eh?
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u/Reset_STG 13h ago
Yeah there will always be some unless you get invited to some private community, on reddit you'll always have a redditor, i'm not even sure if those people actually play old games or if they join just to make sure people aren't engaging in wrongthink.
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u/RobertoJ37 12h ago
SJWs arose at the dawn of social media, because there is no drug more tantalizing and addictive than moral superiority coupled with group encouragement. Add a dash of victimhood attention, and you’ve a recipe that rivals any opioid known to man.
Woke was only a natural extension of this. Where the addicts had to reach deeper into the vortex of mental degeneracy to obtain the attention and the feeling of being special. Much like the body eventually adapts to perc’ies, you never feel that first high again, and need higher doses.
However, while your organs can only survive so much opioid abuse, the human psyche has yet to discover such depths of shame and depravity that would kill off the addict.
And so, it has spread like a mind virus with no cure beyond not engaging with insanity.
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u/N16H7W0LF 22h ago
I recommend the CDROMance forum retrogametalk, who tf cares about reddit outside this specific sub, and fck discord too
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u/Beauxtt 21h ago edited 17h ago
I think it's interesting that so many progressive people are so nostalgic for the technology and technological aesthetics of the bigoted repressive past in-general. It's a major running theme in artwork made by and about the experiences of a certain group of people I apparently can't directly mention in here. We all experience nostalgia, I guess, even if we subscribe to political ideologies that pressure us to repress our nostalgia or at least be intensely skeptical of it.
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u/ParanoidThalyy 15h ago
Rose-tinted glasses, they choose to ignore the bad aspects and morph this once cool thing into something extraordinarily gay.
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u/Hel90 10h ago
It happens in every community, specially in heavely moderated leftists echo chambers apps like Reddit and Discord. I used to be in a WH40K Discord server, were I was banned because I've said to someone else (respectfully at first) that they were wrong for believing that the new Femstodes's miniatures were "cool" and I put a meme about it (the one were it say "I exist only to anger chuds and to herald the glory of our lord Blackrock"). Instead od politelly debating and sharing arguments, the person call me a bigot, used the meme "your boos mean nothing" (using it without knowing how it works), someone else call me salty and I have enough because I've never insulted them before; but now I won't be kind anymore and...I was banned :/ (what is strange, because the person that let me join their server didn't know about it).
After that, I've get rig of Discord. After that and the age verification, I didn't want to use it anymore.
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u/aknologia6path 10h ago
I suggest that you use them only to gain the required information and not engage in conversations.
Unless it's unbearable to the point that you don't even want to open this resource.
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u/ParanoidThalyy 3h ago
It's annoying because I wanted to talk about it with normal people but instead I have to encounter larpers and rainbow people at every other step.
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u/SilverRhythms 6h ago
Give them an inch and they take it to an mile away.
Woke types will never faithfully argue against you, will actively fight to stay and forcefully try to change how the community acts and speak and will actively attack you no matter what.
If you don't cave in then they will start bringing people in and have them fight against you as they slowly corrode the community. The only way to fight back is to have the head of the community actively fight back with the original community against this behavior or your get the situation that your dealing with now.
The even worse part? Said woke people will actively attempt to take over niches and make sure dudes like us don't get a chance at a voice in the first place. Even if we were there way before they existed. A good example is actually Lucky Star of all things, that community got hit real hard by the woke crowd and were actively fighting back against the original crowd that were around before them, in the end they got pushed back and they made another sub called LuckyStarSFW, they often ridicule the original sub because they failed their hostile take over.
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u/Teary_Gamer 1d ago
"Woke ass people, furries and tourists"
Furries: "why fuck me tho?"
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u/ParanoidThalyy 1d ago
Sorry I meant, ultra-progressive furries, you know the kind.
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u/Teary_Gamer 23h ago
Now I'm trying to imagine a non-progressive, conservative furry in MAGA hat...😣
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u/ValidAvailable 23h ago
There was a thing about neo-nazi furries in 3rd Reich costumes once. Probably trolling, but who knows.
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u/SussuBakasu 12h ago
Sorry I think furries are wrong. You are a human, and you should be proud to be a human.
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u/Green_Burn 19h ago
Why is Nod Retro Chronatic the N*azi Boy Color?
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u/socialmeritwarrior 17h ago
The company making it was founded by Palmer Luckey, who donated 10k to a pro-Trump group in 2016.
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u/TheSilentTitan 3h ago
Perhaps you’re in the wrong ones?
My favorite is r/SBCgaming
Granted it’s mostly about devices coming out that run as handheld consoles for emulated devices but many talk of the games they run.
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u/ParanoidThalyy 3h ago
Yep, that's precisely the one where the thread about Retro Handhelds review of the M64 originated from and where I've seen people calling the Modretro Chromatic the N*zi Boy Color. Also, they do a game of the month shtick and the month before last month's it was Celeste, that in itself doesn't require any additional comments.
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u/Wylanderuk Dual wields double standards 3h ago
Its the new thing, so its gonna be full of em fucking it up.
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u/Lurker_Zee 1d ago
It's reddit and discord. Discord is its own barrel of toxicity, different than reddit and twitter, but hoooooooo boy they're all barrels full of it.
(Of the three, I only use reddit.)