You are mixing things here.
The idea that some people know better than the individuals whats better for these individuals is common sense.
A doctor knows better than the individual whats better for the individual.
A good uncorrupted economist knows better than the individuals whats best for the individuals.
A parent knows better whats good for the child individual than the child individual thinks.
The right will use the ignorance of the individuals against them, pretending they let the individuals make their own (uneducated) decisions. Thats how in my country, Canada, many low class people vote against their own interests.

You are mixing the above with something completely different, which is the social subversion all western societies are exposed to.
The fake-left, some of which call themselves progressives and are using the ostracization terror tactics that you mentioned, thats a different thing, and you have to consider the fact that they have consistent support from the right wing, who owns all the media.....please dont tell me the media owners are leftist, and yet they support wildly the fake-left.
Excellent points, respect.
Thats like saying words dont hurt people.
Art, just like words can and will hurt people, but the main purpose is manipulating people and their attitudes...kinda quoting Jaques Ellul here.

Really? Are you serious? yes of course in theory ideas can be discussed properly, but i dont see it applied in real life...at all.
We live in a time where censorship rules supreme, namely the censorship imposed by the fake-left with the avid support of the right owned medias. Good question would be how would you define a "bad idea", especially in this day and age where the definitions of good and bad are imposed to us by the overwhelmingly fake-left media.

Well, we know where you fall, then. I've successfully diagnosed conditions in some people that doctors failed to diagnose, until i gave them the suggestion. But i'm just a peon. And how does some economist know what's better for some individuals? Does the economist know what their interests even are? No, any economist right now would look at my life and tell me to dump my girlfriend, move to another area, and abandon my religion and principles, because that's the only angle the economist would have. I think i'm quite fine deciding what is and isn't important to me, which an economist can't do any more than I can decide what's important for them. Saying someone can't vote because they're uneducated is saying that you, yourself, know their own interests better than they do, which i find incredibly difficult to believe. You're no better than the subverters, yourself. False flag? No, the media is supported by the corperate democrats, which are largely on the left. You may call them fake left, but they are the left, none the less. This is where you on the left need to clean house: even the non-media is part of your "fake left," including many members of these here forums. I've seen the tactics first hand, hence this very topic's creation. Do you think that we have a bunch of right wingers here just to fight with us other right wingers here and get topics closed and controversy started? I imagine you aren't that silly. These people are the left, whether you agree with them or not. Not all lefties are like them, but that doesn't change that they're lefties. We can actually trace their history back to Germany under Hitler and longer. So, you have no faith in humanity that we can reason? Do you not give us agency? Objectively speaking, i am not injured by insults. My feelings may be hurt, but they do not kill me. Sure, i could be killed by a mob, but that is a mob, not words. Do you blame guns for murder, or the holder of the gun? What agency does a gun have? What agency does art or words have? We expect society as a whole to be reasonable, even if that's not how it always turns out. How can anyone objectively remove corruption, if the corrupting payoff is your own ideology? What's different from the philosophers and all the degree holders from the pastors and preists of yesteryear? We've "improved," but does that really justify the same tactics and mentality? Is it not the same blind arrogance? But are you not, basically, calling for the same thing? What is the difference when the fake-left censors from when you are saying that ideas are hurtful and harmful? I will concede that, right now, we aren't going by free speech rules, but that's kinda what this whole thing is all about. Suddenly, free speech has come back into question, and rather than using free speech to debate the validity of free speech, some individuals decided to take matters into their own hands on behalf of other individuals without any consent of these individuals and/or society as a whole. And, they're getting some pushback. Objective standards. Philosophy, evolution, etc. I have a free ebook if you'd like, but not too many people like the author. Even I have some criticisms, but it's a good start. Enjoy this.

kohlrak, you didnt understand much of what i said, it happens to me too, so i wont judge you, but seriously, read again what i said and what you replied.
This discussion is interesting but we are bumping a pretty "bad" <---definition pending, thread.
Maybe we should take this to a new thread?

Umm... No read

http://canadianpatriot.org/what-is-the-fabian-society-and-to-what-end-was-it-created/

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/Fabian_Society_coat_of_arms.svg/2000px-Fabian_Society_coat_of_arms.svg.png

This was the Lefts Idea all the time the right have nothing to do with the media
Leftist's = Fabian party supporter = NEW WORLD ORDER

Note their Coat of arms is a WOLF in SHEEP'S SKIN!

Watch this Kaboro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxcpMo6UiQU

You'll understand what I am against what all conservatives and alt-rightists are against the media is OWNED by the leftist NWO the NWO is Annuit Coeptis Novus Ordo Seclorum

Which actually means

Undertakings of the FABIAN SOCIETY (leftist) CLAN

I may sound like I'm a Crazy Nutter with an aluminium (Aluminum) foil hat on but it's the truth EVERY GOVERNMENT whether it is RIGHTIST or LEFTIST is the FABIAN SOCIETY CLAN!

Ever heard of the term "CONTROLLED OPPOSITION" that's what the Rightists are they are Controlled by the fabians or leftists - They are trying to destroy all SOCIETIES and CIVILISATIONS!

Whew... I need to calm down a bit.

Also watch this one just for fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-klNO-AjW6M it's a bit long though like a movie.

What would you Like to know about the future, I know all about it because I'VE BEEN THERE!

You tried that with me when you said I was nes and only here to scam games.I doubt that you could diagnose a pimple.

"First, games were always political. Did you not fight the commies in some games? I mean, sure, Sonic the Hedgehog wasn't all that political, but did you know the original Final Fantasy (and similar games) were censored in the 80s for political reasons? What about Duke Nukem 3d? I could go on for a good long while.

Secondly, it's not coming from one side. The jumping down everyone's throats is, for the time being, but it was he other way before. Remember when some idiot thought that "evolution" and "evolve" would be more appropriate than "shinka" (when we were already keeping japanese names of many pokemon anyway) or "metamorphosis" (i understand the name is long, but so is evolution) and the churches went into a panic? Don't mind me, i'm on the right, but we can't pretend we're innocent if we want to make a moral argument: that's what our opponents do. It is the same type of crowd (people who think they know better than individuals what's best for those individuals), but it's not the same crowd per se. Admission of this helps us see the real problem: the arrogance of social planners to tell society what they are to believe, at risk of ostricization."

I'm glad you brought this up, I wanted to go into more detail in my original post but thought it was too long already. Ok, here goes:

1) There is an important difference between political content for the sake of gameplay versus political content for the sake of an external agenda. It is normally pretty clear which is which and it can help if you use historic reality as a guide. For example, when are we fighting national socialists in German castles in Wolfenstein 3D, it certainly seems to make sense for gameplay's sake, as there were indeed a number of national socialists owning, associated with or living in castles during the second world war and most allied soldiers were indeed Caucasian males. On the other hand, Battlefield 5 represents a version of world war two in which many weapons, vehicles and landscapes are rendered historically, but where female, disabled and certain ahistorical minority soldiers were commonplace among the ranks of the various armies as well. This is odd and distracts from the gameplay experience as much as palm trees in Norway would. On the other hand, what Battlefield 1 did with the historical Harlem Hellfighters was AMAZING, historical and inclusive. The point is, where a game reflects history more or less authentically, there is a lower chance that the game in question has had political content inserted by external pressure.

Another interesting factor is looking at alternative histories or games set in the future. As we used the original Wolfenstein above, let's use the recent sequel to make this point. The moment they have the ability to write any history they want, it is telling that one particular side immediately pushes to insert an African-American woman character that ridicules and despises men while blaming all men for nuking America. She goes on saying whites have given up and only black people fight the resistance fight. Finally, she convinces BJ that "White f****** nazi scum" is to blame, not just Nazi scum. It seems rather odd to group all white people and national socialists together considering the tens of millions of "white people" who just died fighting national socialism a decade earlier.

Look at "Papers, Please" this game doesn't have you fighting the commies, on the other hand it has you playing in an alternative reality inspired by the Soviet Union in which you play AS an alternate reality "commie." The game is amazing because it does this without beating you over the head trying to convince you how this socialist paradise is misunderstood and is really a great place. It just gives you the gritty reality of bleak soviet breadlines, border guards and ten-year waiting list existence.

There is also a BIG difference between the politics inserted in video games and the political controversy happening outside of the games. We, as gamers, are pretty used to ignoring the latter, but the former, with it's unwelcome intrusion into our existing franchises, comes as an obnoxious unavoidable surprise and often damages our enjoyment of the actual game.

And I am relatively certain that if you did "go on for awhile", you would be bringing up example after example of political controversies surrounding games, NOT changes made to the actual content of the games themselves to follow a political agenda. There is a big difference.

2) You are correct that all sides in politics have had something to say about gaming, but you are obviously incorrect in inferring that all sides have actually changed the content in the games themselves. Using your example, "the churches" never formed lobbying groups to infiltrate gaming and insert pro-Christian messages into game content. There's no mission in Mass Effect where you help Ashley (a main character) with her Christian faith (indeed, I am not even sure if it is mentioned in the third game), yet you are able to help a tertiary homosexual character with the loss of his "husband" - completely disconnected from the trilogy's plot and clearly inserted artificially to satisfy the political agenda of an external group. No, Christian groups didn't infiltrate game publishers and game journalism in an attempt to artificially change the content of games and the landscape of gaming, they said their piece and then created a sub-culture within the larger gaming culture that produces Christian-friendly games. I mean, most of those games suck, but more power to them - live and let live! I do not understand why other groups don't do the same and create their own gaming sub-cultures rather than taking a wrecking ball to existing mainstream gaming culture.

Finally, I was not arguing in favor of "aiming for apolitical", I was making the point that:
1) Games are heavily charged with one particular viewpoint
2) This is clearly not an internal organic development or artistic choice by the game designers themselves
3) Political content is being inserted by external pressure and games should be de-politicized
4) De-politicizing game design means removing external constraints and censorship from game publishing and journalist so that it loses it's power to arbitrarily infringe on artistic freedom and effect game content.
5) Almost all external constraints, censorship and attempts to directly change game content are coming from one side.

In Goya's "The Third of May 1808" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_of_May_1808), one sees a political piece of art. It is political in the sense that it was commissioned to emphasis the brutality of one side and convince the other of their righteousness. But here's the thing, it (or something quite like it) actually happened in real life. Napoleon's troops did massacre some civilians in Madrid in 1808. That makes the art not only political, but it makes it true. The search for truth seems to me to be a central to all good art - art that tricks, art that deceives and art that lies degrades its own meaning. Bad ideas can also be true in their own way. But for this search for the truth in the arts to take place, art must be free. whenever constraints are placed on art, it suffers. whenever it is perverted for political purposes, it suffers. When games are targeted by social engineers to serve as a conduit for a political agenda, those games are not as good as they could have been.

Hopefully that's something we can all agree should be removed from gaming.

Dude, go back and read that conversation and tell me that, in all honesty, if the roles were reversed you wouldn't have come to that same conclusion. Hell, it was like you were intentionally leading me to it. The idea was earlier in the conversation, and it's when i felt like you were trying to push me that way that i concluded that you just want me to call you nes. I have enough autism (and yes, i was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder) that i can't even tell when a woman's hitting on me for weeks at a time, but i really got that vibe with you that you're trying to push me into calling you nes, so i finally gave in and did it, and you exploded and accused me of being a plant from "them." You really might want to consider asking yourself if you're having trouble getting over that old accusation to the point that you're trying to get people to say it. But, hey, i'm not psychologist.

Sweet Jesus on a stick, use the reply button and learn how to use quote blocks (it also gives me that fancy notification).

Right, this is what we call "tone deaf," and my understanding was that the pressure wasn't entirely external: someone on the dev team actually had that nutty idea from the beginning. That said, i'm not surprised by it. You think it's the first time a character was female for political reasons? And for that reason, i'm glad it came out that way: it's a perfect representation of the very thing it is: throwing a character into a setting where they don't belong for political reasons. And conversely, the grusome murders of the suffragists are the antithesis. That's the other beauty of art: it represents ideas the artist had, even if it ends up looking alot different than the artist intended. Or maybe it's satire and was meant to have the image of "see how cray-cray the left is?" Who knows? Does it matter? Right now, that's a pretty clear representation of black on white racism that everyone with two brain cells to rub together can figure out. It's not like this kind of thing is new, it just happens to reflect the current vernacular. Or do you honestly think that Duke's design was pure accident? Hell, it might've even been originally intended to be a joke at Duke's expense. I don't know the context, really. Right, and this is hardly new: we're just playing the other side. Are you familiar at all with Deer Avenger? Nah, actually i'm more bothered by the outside interference, and i'm a gamer. The inside goings-on are more a matter of "bad choices" when i look at them, just as they make bad choices about microtransactions, DRM, and other things. Sure, i'm disappointed, but I still play Duke even though i know the game is a direct insult to pretty much everything i believe. On the other hand, at least Duke does it right. It's not boring.

No, i'm dead serious about the censorship. Nintendo of America explicitly rejected certification for games with religious symbology in them, and that's just the tip of the iceburg. Alot of Japanese games featured Christian churches, and often in a way that actually made them look positive (like a place to save in Dragon Quest, the place where you bring your characters back to life in Final Fantasy, etc). However, these all had to be changed for north american release, 'cause "it might offend someone." That was the 80s. Likely, you just didn't know about it, 'cause we didn't have the same internet then that we do today. Not true: Churches threw a hissyfit when anything "unchristian" or "antichristian" was in a game, which hurt the sales of these games. And you think that didn't result in any changes? Did you know there were also games that were made specifically to reflect the bible? There are "Christian games," and, yeah, you can tell the whole reason they existed was propaganda, 'cause they suck otherwise, and i'm a Christian saying this. A moses ripoff of mario? Common, man.

I guess i could concede a little: we're not talking about something as strange as suddenly makng Duke Nukem homosexual, or a game featuring a daughter who's strong and independent or something like that. We can actually foresee that coming. At least the Christians didn't go about completely changing an existing character. But, that's really just the progression of politics once the left learned from the Christians that you can do stuff like that. The left just decided to start seeing how far they could go. Point 2 is just flat out wrong: it is a thing. But point 4 is the real juicy one, and the real issue. 1 isn't necessarily true, either. 3 is a non-issue with 4. 5 is only true, today. We have to own that sin before we can disavow it. Well, there's the kicker. It's like i said above, the art represents the idea, and art then takes the comparison to real life. If the artist is on the justified side of things, the art will be viewed from the artists' perspectives. However, if the artist was an idiot, the art is viewed as an example of an idiot.

Ok, I will use reply.

But if we're talking about empirical objective truth, there is no subjective normative call to make: e.g. regardless of if a game designer was an idiot or not, his art could still be truth and therefore (I would argue) more good than bad.

Right, which is why i'm talking about the subjective. I trust that the average shmuck, given enough information on both sides, can figure out which side is most full of shit. If both sides are full of shit, at least he'll know which side is most full of shit, even though he'll probably side with the other one who's full of shit. In case where someone's right, and the other is wrong, they can figure out which one is not full of shit. Sometimes, when both sides are arguing, and there are good points on both side, the shmuck can figure out which points both sides have are valid.

Art is largely just one side shooting off their mouth, while objective reality can make a supporting or dissenting remark. The shmuck doesn't always get things right, but we trust them to get things right most of the time, 'cause at the end of the day, we're all shmucks, whether we like it or not. The question, too, is whether or not we believe the other shmucks to be equal or better than us. I noticed the people who try to run everyone's lives are some of the most unethical shmucks out there: dunning kreuger effect says that these people think all the other shmucks can't manage themselves because they can't manage their own lives.

Anyways, enough theory, time for some practice:

What should we do to let GOG HQ know that there are a lot more customers who disagree with Linko90s termination than agree with it? I'm new to this, what sorts of things have been done in the past?

Is it enough to keep this thread going and hope that the higher-ups see the groundswell of support for this guy? Or should we start a petition or something else like write directly to the executives?

I mean, at the end of the day, this is an actual human being that we're talking about who is now unemployed. I am sure he would appreciate our actions much more than our words.

As an average GOG customer i do not have GOG company insider information, i do not know the details of the whole affair, i do not know what was at stake and what factors were considered to take a decision, and i dont even know what decision was made.
Also i do not know how many GOG users agree, disagree, dont know or dont care.

Also i suspect that by insisting to take an activist stance and "raise a stink" over it, you could be very well hurting GOG without even knowing it.

We simply dont have enough reliable [url=][/url] information to go by, and aggressive action in the absence of solid information is from my experience very dangerous and could have results that are opposite to the intended results

We dont know if the actual human being was really fired, we dont know if he is unemployed....seriously what DO we know, other than it was some altercation and GOG wanted it resolved? If the actual human being had been treated unfairly and he was upset, he wouldve come up and said something about it.

Torches and pitchforks are not justice. Calm down and be rational, nowadays when im getting riled up over some issue, i know its very likely im being manipulated, so i calm down, take a deep breath and think things over, more often than not i do find that some form of manipulation (provocation is one of them) was involved.

Sometimes that manipulation is justified. For example, if you tell me you want to loose weight, would I not be manipulating you if i told my staff to flirt with you a little as you show visible signs of loosing weight?

Hello fr33kSh0w2012, thank you for posting those links.
Didnt read or watch everything, just browsed through it a bit.
Conspiracy theories wouldnt be so attractive and convincing if they didnt make sense, or if they didnt contain a certain amount of truthful facts.
My problem with all conspiracy theories that i encountered so far, is that all of them contain more fallacy than fact, there is extensive word play involved, they all come against historical evidence, and in the end conspiracy theories only make people believe they know some bigger truth, when in fact these theories are just diversions, distractions that keep people out of focus.

Not so long ago i bought a book called (roughly translated from french) "the whole history of the world in one book"
There was a particular paragraph in the preface of the book that i particularly liked and considered important:
The internet is full of good and bad information, how is a person supposed to distinguish the truth from the false if they dont know history?"

Could elaborate a lot but im afraid that most of the things i would have to say might come across as annoying to you, and this is not my intention, so i will stop here.