Do gamers tend to be liberal or conservative?

I've never noticed any kind of political divide when it comes to traditional games. I've met a lot of people from different backgrounds, but they never allow their political opinions to come between them.

Regarding politics versus actual in-game content: I've seen some traditional gamers online try to single out issues like "pandering" in RPGs, but I've never heard it brought up at the table. People usually don't feel the need to comment on stuff like D&D 5e spelling out the ability for players to roleplay sexual orientation or gender identity. Traditional games have always enforced a great deal of freedom and character customization, so that's not even unusual.

And regardless, I usually never encounter people with socially conservative views in my gaming sessions. They may be fiscally conservative or even deeply religious, but they're more of the "Love Thy Neighbor" types.

As for the converse: I don't think I've ever met anyone with authoritarian-left views - that is, in any context of daily life, not just gaming. I've certainly heard about them online, but never met one in person. I was banned from a message board one time for not being politically correct enough about the issue of rape, but that's the only direct encounter I've had with that sort of attitude.

These games are played in-person, where identity politics take a back-seat. We're united in our nerdome, but that's about it.

If you wanted a portrait of a "typical" gamer?

Neckbeard, metalhead, overweight, poor social skills, right-leaning.

But that's just the most-represented. Prolly not even the majority.

I tend to be "let's avoid further politicization of our hobby" party.

>I don't think I've ever met anyone with authoritarian-left views

It seems you've never visited a medium to large university.

That's bullshi... wait, this actually would make sense.
Dammit, why would this make so much sense?

Liberal same with comic books, although there are exceptions here and there

Liberal? Conservative?

Boy, I am an equal opportunistic asshole.

A nazi bouncer? The fucker must be pretty spry after so many decades.

I imagine he stays in shape with some secret nazi super science. We don't dare to pry for details.

I consider myself moderately conservative and my group has a second gen hippie, and the rest are pretty liberal.

is that a penis

>It seems you've never visited a medium to large university.

I grew up in the South. My university had (obviously repressed) pastors proselytizing about resisting the temptation of homosexuality, Army recruiters corner to corner, rednecks hanging Confederate flags from their dorm windows, more pastors sermonizing about the impeding apocalypse that will be brought on by our evil liberal ways, and some guys persistently disseminating materials related to the Neo-Confederacy and the Klu Klux Klan.

No, it's a flag.

no, USA just waves it around like one

>I recognize that bulge

Depends on the character and setting.

I have never noticed a particular leaning myself. It probably depends where you are.

I'd say no real correlation. I've played with hyper liberal people, center right/left people, alt-right MUH PURE WHITE RACE Neonazi types, black uncle ruckus types, MUH MOTHERLAND malcom-X wannabees, etc.

Game-Designers, probably overwhelmingly liberal.

That's how our group is.

I would say gamers tend slightly on the liberal side. Mostly because gaming is more frowned upon in conservative circles then in liberal circles.

I was under the impression that tumblr types were taking over gaming

Yes, totally.
Next edition of D&D will replace classes with genders and do away with races.

Nice. That said, there is essentially no non-authoritarian political movement that is anything approaching mainstream in America. The Democrats and Republicans are both defined by authoritarianism.

It would make sense that games being a niche hobby Have niche political leanings.

They take over gaming media. Because media visibility / vocality is their thing. I swear those libtards have hefty racial bonus to media use or something.
Anyway, the point is that just because you hear about gaming tumblrinas the most doesn't mean most gaming people are tumblrinas.

So, you've started to ship your friends. How does it feel?

>this thread
We all know what's going to happen, yet we must reply. Whatever, let's get this shit started:

In my experience, the vast majority of people are completely apathetic to political alignment and actively go out of their way to play things they aren't comfortable with, or are very comfortable with. Since the pretense is major nerdy weirdos playing weird dice-based games, most people are fine.

I have an ultra-right wing friend who plays magic, but that is an entirely different beast, and he's a pretty alright guy. The most heated political discussions in table top have come over games of magic. We have one guy in our play group who belongs to a certain section of this website that will become triggered if I mention it, and he's objectively awful to play with. He just spews memes and generic trendy edge-lord nonsense typical of that particular board. One of our left-of-center players called him out on having misinformed opinions he parrots from elsewhere, he responded by throwing a temper tantrum and yelling until he was escorted out of the store.

There are, however, groups of people who are exceptionally awful to play games with: wiccans, furries, and people who describe themselves as mentally ill. I promise, anyone who's played a game with any of these people understands the pure hatred involved with shattering their delusion and/or micromanaging their petty complaints.

Mearls is an anti-whtie Tumblrfag.

feels good man.jpg

youtube.com/watch?v=Qkd7usfBePA

Good response. I agree.

Now, let us REEEEEEEEEEEEE.

>furries
I'd played a game with a furry once. It went pretty alright, but that's because it almost never game up. Worst thing that happened was that he linked a tumblr image of a irl bird edited to look like a griffon and I clicked around and found some g-fur.

Granted anecdotal, but eh.

around the flgs its mostly lefties except for the .mil types who are right-wing.

Everything is all shaken up polit call because of Trump right now tho.

>Everyone in a university is part of a big stalinist hivemind

When will this meme end?

See, the problem isn't with furries themselves, unless they're tremendous aspies, it's with the baggage they bring with them. I have never met a furry who wasn't into some weird deviant shit that they desperately wanted to talk about the second it came up. Some are more restrained than others, but inevitably the second something grazes against their magical realm, they're all atwitter. The most obvious examples are bizarre race choices that don't fit in the context of the setting, or weirdly personal backstories. I find it's best to just let them do their thing and pretend like it's nothing.

I played with a player who insisted on being some weird half-tiger half-lizard thing and insisted on growling somewhere between a wookie and a tiger in every fucking sentence. At first we laughed about it, but the longer it went on, the worse it got, until our group eventually disbanded and created an entirely new campaign.

On Veeky Forums there is an overabundance of lolbertarians and SJWs, but in the overall RPG community I feel that most people are politically apathetic. Certainly you will be hard pressed to find conservatives of any stripe, though people on the "alt-right" do have some representation.

I myself am a racist, eugenicist, statist.

>On Veeky Forums there is an overabundance of lolbertarians and SJWs

This is so weird, because personally I would say Veeky Forums has a lot of neoconservatives. I guess you just notice people you don't agree with more.

>I myself am a racist, eugenicist, statist.
So Alt-Right.

The group I game with right now includes an anarcho-syndicalist, an anarcho-capitalist, a conservative-leaning moderate, and two liberals (in the American sense of the word).

I agree with you, the vast majority of posters I see are neo-conservative pseudoscientists who enjoy googling things as a retort. I think the problem is that there was a major split where all the left-wing posters went to other sites because the right-wing douchenozzles kept flaming up the joint with endless tirades. Then, it came to the point where to be left-wing was to be the enemy, and anyone who identified with an alternative perspective was flamed into oblivion by autists. Now, we're at the tipping point where all the alt-right shitposting has actually manifested in the form of american politics, and people are taking them seriously by trying to fight back with alt-left shenanigans to prove them wrong. In the end, no one wins, except the shitposters who loudly spew their misinformed opinions about.

>Veeky Forums has a lot of neoconservatives
I cannot fathom what could possibly make you think that.

Unless you're interpreting the idiotic Veeky Forums Lawful Retarded Paladin memery as indicative of political alignment, there's just nothing that could possibly indicate anything close to that.

Furthermore, those idiots only shitpost about that because they want to be contrarian faggots, not because they are actually so bull-headedly dumb to believe in it.

>So Alt-Right.
Alt-right is an overwhelmingly conservative and libertarian movement which strongly opposes statism. Even with people like neomonarchists (itself a meme faction), they are only invested in authoritarianism from a religious and cultural perspective. Alt-right are bourgeoisie-cock-sucking faggots who pretend to be Christian and want to put actual faggots in camps.

My political beliefs are closer to Stalinism than the alt-right, I am very strongly anti-market, anti-theist, and anti-traditionalism.

Ah, I meant to reply to you.

So basically a communist that doesn't like brown people. Got it.

Holy shit, you sound absolutely awful to talk to about anything political. Are you going to enlist a bunch of your friends to snuff out the previous ruling class Pol Pot style, or are you more of a pussy about it and believe in Gramscian amelioration?

Going by the shitposting of late, it's conservative, going by products and sales trends, it's liberal. Really, like any apolitical hobby, it varies and really shows no trend.

Though I notice historical wargamers have a habit of being literal "Hitler did nothing wrong" Nazis. Even ones that exclusively play games that have literally nothing to do with fascism, WWII, or Germany, sometimes even playing the opponents of those things. Shit's weird.

>a communist that doesn't like brown people
no communist likes lumpenproletariat

This is spot on. In my experience the less identity baggage a person carries and declares, the better they are to play with.

I'd say designers and companies are overwhelmingly liberal, but having shifted through a variety of groups I'd say its mostly neutral, if only because people don't like to talk about politics. If it's mtg I've found more polarized people from both sides back when I played (like, 2010-2013), but in roleplaying games people tend to keep a tight lip unless the game group is part of another group which is politically charged (like, say, a game group which is part of a larger discord community) or they want to play the identity game (or have baggage).

I'd say you're right, if only because I feel you remember the act of disagreeing with someone more than the strangers online you agree with (unless you make friends with them or something).

I don't even play/post about DnD, I have no idea what the Lawful Retarded Paladin memery is.
What I'm talking about is that as soon as you mention europe someone start screaming about how it's practically already conquered by ISIS and get's bombed daily, how anytime orcs are mentioned some asshat has to bring up syrian refugees, the hilarious amount of protestant/chatolics being butthurt at each other, amongst other things.
Tldr; things that aren't about real world politics gets real world politics dragged into it a lot.

Veeky Forums and Veeky Forums as a whole is more contrarian and argumentative than having any real political bias. Many just start shitposting about tumblr or /pol/ because they will get instant replies and there are some people, especially on Veeky Forums, who misread an obvious attempt to troll for responses as a sign to start a debate. You can just post Trump's face and derail a thread, which if you're lazy and fishing for (you)s is the ultimate bait.

Everyone wants to jerk off to what they want to, play the games they want to play, and feel like people are paying attention to them. That's the closest thing you're going to get to a real political platform around here. The rest is all fluff to fulfill that last need.

>I guess you just notice people you don't agree with more.
I'm pretty sure that people do, but I can't remember the name for the effect.

I'm pretty sure there's also a thing where people generally assume others around them have similar views and things until proven otherwise, on the basis of "I like thing, I'm here and I am X, most people who like thing here are probably X like me", which happens instinctively but likely leads to a lot of incorrect assumptions.
Again though, can't recall the name, if it has one.

the authoritarians are the DM's user

I'd say a good amount of both left and right, with the vast majority leaning either libertarian right or libertarian left.
I'm personally a classical liberal (though I could be viewed as an an-cap on days that I have a particularly good faith in man), and many people in both my gaming group and the people at my FLGS are right wing of all different types, but it's texas so that's to be expected.

>My political beliefs are closer to Stalinism than the alt-right, I am very strongly anti-market, anti-theist, and anti-traditionalism
Wow. That's about the worst possible political view someone could hold. I'm actually impressed you could hold a view that litteraly everyone else would disagree with on some level.

I have noticed both extreme right and left views. I have noticed more NEETS are liberal, whereas long term gamers (ones that buy very heavily into what they love in games and fuck everything else) are more right wing. Honestly though, i think gamers are generally moderate lefts.

Sorry that you're offended.

Pol Pot was a Maoist/3rd Worlder who was legitimately crazy.

I'm not a communist, but I would support a communist revolution. The true enemy of mankind is the hedonistic, self-destructive, dysgenic, uncontrolled consumer capitalism we live in. There is no meaningful direction in either the productive activity we engage in or the consumption we partake of.

We are continuously poisoned every day by capitalist leeches to become more greedy, more materialistic, more self-interested, and both less willing and less capable of changing the world for the better.

We need to face facts and start putting the stranglehold on human reproduction and economic activity, before it's too late and we end up as another casualty of the Fermi paradox.

>I have noticed more NEETS are liberal, whereas long term gamers (ones that buy very heavily into what they love in games and fuck everything else) are more right wing.
>people who depend on others for survival and are typically you g are leftists while people who actually have a job and are typically older relatively speaking are right wing
Figures.

Though I don't know if one can really make a sweeping statement about how traditional gamers swing as a whole. It would vary alot by location and game for that matter that it would be smarter to break it down. Not that you're wrong, more so that OP is asking to broad a question.

>I'm not a communist, but I would support a communist revolution.
>We are continuously poisoned every day by capitalist leeches to become more greedy, more materialistic, more self-interested, and both less willing and less capable of changing the world for the better.
And you would support a revolution that will topple that? Son, you're not a commie, you're a goddamn anarchist.

>That feel when you meet a tumblerina
>"Oh yeah you know about traditional games?"
>"It's a hobby mostly filled with privileged white males that are usually very racist and sexist"
>"Here let me show you this blog of a random girl that had this terrible experience which I base most of my evidence off."

>(obviously repressed)

^ Motive fallacy. Not autistic, just seriously sick of the same, "if you're against it, you're in the closet" bullshit.

Maybe they are just pro-breeder. Maybe they're literally worried about boys harming each other's assholes and getting off on scar tissue instead of a real woman. Hell, maybe they're even evolutionary theists who want to encourage speciation. Think about it. Otherwise, your closed-mindedness is horrifying.

Um. It seems to me that while Veeky Forums might have been a bit leftist before, it's shifted rightward in recent years, given all the complaints about SJWs and libtards, and so forth.

Veeky Forums is overwhelmingly whatever is the opposite of everyone else. When Bush was president and popular right before the war it was all the rage to be edgy anti-christian liberals.

>We are continuously poisoned every day by capitalist leeches to become more greedy, more materialistic, more self-interested, and both less willing and less capable of changing the world for the better.
You do know that's just human nature right? And you also know that everything you support or are against have only proven to make those problems worse, right?
Or are you such a moron that you actually believe commies and non-capatilst atheistic countries are beacons of hope, love, selflessness and good will torwards man?

>Son, you're not a commie, you're a goddamn anarchist.
I'm the furthest thing from it. I want an absolutist state which directly manages many aspects of what we consider "personal life", chief among them human reproduction.

I consider myself a genuine progressive, in the vein of the early 20th century progressives, who believed that eugenics, bureaucracy, science, and rational management of the human species was the proper path.

I bet you if Trump wins, give it a year and Veeky Forums will be anti-Trump and probably communist as shit.

>you will be hard pressed to find conservatives of any stripe
only because most moderates aren't going to broadcast shit to the planet

RPGs lean to the left
wargames lean to the right
card games lean to the casual plebeian

>Trump actually gets elected
>pol becomes filled with anarchist antifascists
I wanna see it.

Absolutely correct.

That makes sense. I have only posted here since the early Obama days, so haven't had a chans to notice.

>I consider myself a genuine progressive, in the vein of the early 20th century progressives, who believed that eugenics, bureaucracy, science, and rational management of the human species was the proper path.
And who, exactly, is fit to manage mankind? You?
Such a system runs into the internet problem of determing a person inhernetly better than the rest in order to lead such a society. And then you run into the issue of finding inherelty better people to judge who should be that leader.
Because if mankind needs to be guided and managed, mankind certainly can't be doing the managing.

The alt-right is literally everything that isn't establishment right.

I'm an Anti-Statist in a rather broad sense.

I'm not sure I care much what cones after or if I'm likely to live to see it; I'd just like to end this particular human epoch.

anti trump sure, but I doubt they'll go commie. Even in the bush years /new/ wasn't commie.
Now, anti-trump libertarians, there is a real possibility.

>Because if mankind needs to be guided and managed, mankind certainly can't be doing the managing.

Not the guy you are responding to, but this is exactly why I support installing AI overlords.

Yes. Far fewer gamers are apolitical than the general population.

Do you know what, at first I thought you were just shitposting for (You)'s, but I agree with what you're describing in general, I just think you're a little misguided.

What better way for your state to prosper than by having proper tariffs and policies in place to prevent uncontrolled globalization, while promoting deconstruction and reordering of states, based on functional resource extraction vs manufacturing vs secondary manufacturing, using humanitarian intervention as the mechanism? In the end, I'm a firm believer in mercantilism, but I think the best way to accomplish this is through consent, and what better way to get moralized consent in a radically subjectified world than through theism of some sort? It's the ultimate appeal to authority for a pseudo-authoritarian state. You run a conventional democracy that's really an oligarchy as a result of various barriers to entry, benefit your citizens through developing a knowledge-based economy, then exploit neo-colonialism by enslaving shit-holes with crushing debt. If anyone ever crosses you, judge with the right while crushing with the left, so to speak. You have state-sponsored religion with an arbitrary bureaucratic hierarchy where you can stash political dissidents in moderately well paying positions for the remainder of their lives, with the promise of a brighter future if they recruit more people to their cause.

tl;dr

Why fight what you can actively shape into a positive for you and your brothers?

I look forward to the Ron Paul memes again

He's literally just a communist who is also a racist. Those have to exist.

Then I don't know anymore.
Large scale eugenics is not applicable because the countries that have the technology don't have the authority and the countries that have the authority don't have the technology. But I guess you already know that.

Also bureaucracy only makes senses in moderation, you need lean effective structure, not bloated parasitic monstrosity it usually becomes.

Who's gonna program the AI's morality though?

Eugenics are the easiest thing ever if you have the will. It's applied to farm animals all the time.

I'm assuming you were meaning to responding to me
And, as a literal programmer who works with AI's quite a lot, I can assure you that is utterly retarded.

I am well aware of this being a problem, and I'm not sure how to overcome it.

*a programmer who
Didn't mean to put the literal in there, as that would imply I could be a figurative programmer.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bolshevism

>Such a system runs into the internet problem of determining a person inherently better than the rest in order to lead such a society.

^ 100% correct. If your politics has a single shred of this in it, then you're on the side of the oppressor (tyranny); not the oppressed.

On-topic: Which would make great characterization for a villain NPC, "I'm for the little guy. I'm better than you enough to make all the leadership decisions from now on."

>muh human nature
Nature is the enemy of thinking creatures. To behave in a way that is natural because it is natural is to willingly be enslaved. Man is the master of his own destiny.

>And you also know that everything you support or are against have only proven to make those problems worse, right?
What utter nonsense. What I support is the violent, forcible destruction of those antagonists. For them to be emboldened in the wake of that is just outright nonsense.

>Or are you such a moron that you actually believe commies and non-capatilst atheistic countries are beacons of hope, love, selflessness and good will torwards man?
Capitalism is only marginally worse than communism, in the end, because they are both means to satisfy a pig's desire for material fulfillment. I said I am not a communist, but I would support a communist revolution because I would support nearly anything as an alternative to the status quo.

>And who, exactly, is fit to manage mankind? You?
Humanity should be governed by the genuine aristocracy of elites, and its population managed until it is only elites that remain.

As far as the problem of a true executive is concerned, I think there are a few attractive options. The first and most likely is a managed democratic system in which only those deemed properly fit (the sole metric being IQ) would be allowed to hold or run for office, which has enshrined the two Rawlsian principles of justice in an unalterable constitution.

Second, there is the potential to simply engineer a perfect leader, by using modern medical and eugenic knowledge as well as the best kinds of education available to create a proper king for the current world. Personally I like this option the most, but I think it's the least technically feasible at this point in time.

Lastly, there is the simple choice to put this authority out of human hands altogether. AI, in other words.

Depends on the extent. Farm animals don't have complex desires and aspirations and tend not to kill themselves because they state decides they're going to be a baby factory or they can't be with someone they love because it would fuck up X-gene or something.

Obviously not an AI in the current sense of the word, but some sort of hypothetical like-nothing-we've-seen-before. Basically something like a human brain with the power of not having biases and the "processing power" to actually give everything proper consideration. Yes, I know this is pretty deeply in Sci-fi territory for now.

> because they state decides they're going to be a baby factory
Compensating surrogate mothers is a very simple thing to do.

>or they can't be with someone they love because it would fuck up X-gene or something
Romance and sex don't haven anything to do with reproduction. You'd of course be permitted to fuck whatever you like, but after the collection of gametes from the necessary parties, everyone would be properly sterilized.

Yeah, the difference is that farm animals are easily prevented from fucking unsuitable partners. People not so much.

Hell, even something as "simple" as stopping gypsies and rednecks from inbreeding to the point they begin resembling late Hapsburgs is unlikely to happen in our lifetime.

>the sole metric being IQ
So you're shitposting?

>those deemed properly fit (the sole metric being IQ)
>unalterable constitution