Pseudo-activist Swine Tactics Accurately Predicted Two Years Ago

The Evolution of the Swine
You know, its interesting the directions the “roleplaying” Swine are moving in, when you think about it.  In their disdain for the hobby, they’re consistently moving their interest away from anything that requires actual participation in roleplaying games; I suppose that was to be expected. 

Let me break it down: first, you had the White-Wolf “storytelling” Swine. These were in essence very pretentious ROLEPLAYERS, who wanted to define RPGs as an “art form” and wanted roleplaying games to be serious and edgy and artsy.  But in essence, what they were playing was no different structurally than what everyone else was playing, no matter how much they wanted to pretend that Vampire was a much more “evolved” kind of RPG than D&D; in the end, it was still the exact same type of game.

Then came the Forge-Swine, the “storygamers”; these were pretentious pseudo-intellectuals that still had to pretend to be roleplayers, but actually wanted to play things that were not in fact roleplaying games, but something quite different. They went from just making absurd claims of playing a superior class of RPG (like the WW-Swine did), to actually playing something that isn’t an RPG but still calling it that, trying to redefine the very meaning of roleplaying games to suit their purposes.

But now, what seems to be emerging, rather than pretentious pseudo-artists, or pretentious pseudo-intellectuals, are the Pseudo-Activist Swine.  And the great advantage (from the Swine point of view) they have over the former two incarnations is that they don’t even have to pretend to be roleplayers!  The thing they get off on (being outraged at the rpg hobby) doesn’t require that they do any work of playing either RPGs or non-RPGs at all! They can even be bitter non-gamers, claiming an affinity or former affinity for rpgs but now they’re above it all, and disgusted by the Politically Incorrect Wrongness they see in the hobby.  Being thus divorced from any activity that demands that they actually PARTICIPATE in the hobby, they can feel free to engage in directly seeking the hobby’s destruction without the slightest hint of paradox.

I can understand how this would appeal to many Swine out there; its practically ideal for “rpg.net” (or better labelled as “Tangency.net”) for example, where Roleplaying has long become the embarrassing historical subject they have to barely tolerate as an unwelcome distraction to the important things they talk about Tangency, their real raison d’etre.  

This Pseudo-activism Swinery even lets them go to war with the remnants of the gaming forums in their own midst.  Witness the recent volleys they let loose in the subject of sexism in RPGs, where the Modclique just arbitrarily banned an entire side of the argument: on that site you can now freely talk about how horribly sexist RPGs are, but you are NO LONGER ALLOWED to actually even attempt to make the argument that they aren’t! If you do, you’re by definition engaging in sexism (since denying any accusation of sexism, no matter how absurd, is itself an act of sexism to these people, don’t you know!).

Its perfect too, for the people who live in the kind of reality bubble Tangency.net’s moderation policy fosters; a place where one poster can very seriously and straight-facedly tell someone who is trying to claim that in fact RPGs are not sexist that “you don’t get to define the consensus”.  Dude, you really wouldn’t like what the REAL consensus of the hobby looks like. I’ll give you a hint: it looks nothing like what you assholes are peddling. You are not the majority, you are a group of demented non-gamers who’ve decided to go on a crusade against a hobby some of you once loved and most of you never did.

And fortunately, on real gaming forums everywhere (obviously including theRPGsite), gamers are still very much enjoying gaming without feeling the need for a bunch of Fashionable Liberal Moral Crusaders to come in and wipe out the hobby in an idiotic and directly malignant attempt to get revenge against people they feel aren’t thinking the correct way. YOU don’t get to define the consensus, you asshole, because people like me will never let you.  And really, if the Swine didn’t win when they were pretending to be on gaming’s side (like when they tried subversion tactics of pretending to be RPG fans while simultaneously trying to redefine regular gaming into oblivion) what makes you think that the tactic of outright aggression and visible contempt for the hobby in the fake guise of “moral outrage” over the thought of someone having fun killing imaginary orcs is going to fare any better?

But hey, don’t let me discourage you from taking on a losing strategy that will be far easier to defeat than the Forge ever was.  I really do hope that these idiots do take on this Swine Pseudo-Activism as their new movement, because they won’t actually be able to damage us… unless gormless idiots start listening to them.

RPGPundit

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(originally posted October 25, 2012, on the old blog)