Bro clearly did not live through the 80s and 90s satanic panic and school shooting rise.
They were trying to pin violence on games when gaming was 8 pixels that vaguely resembled a human, to say nothing of the backlash D&D and the like got. There were entire movies made about how D&D was a pipeline straight to devil worship it was such a commonly believed myth.
This wasn't small outlets either, stuff like that was what turned me off of most news outlets in the first place. The second you know a bit about any subject news reports on, you start seeing very quickly how little journalistic integrity there is.
There was a paper I thought I could trust until I was interviewed as a teen and not only was the only quote used not something I even said, but every piece of information about me that wasn't my name was wrong.
I mean, innocent people went jail over this bullshit. Some of them for a long ass time. All because of some self appointed "Experts" with zero actual expertise (You can't have expertise in something that isn't happening)
Yeah there was one news post involving Luigi showing his steam game hours lmfao and his most egregious of 400 hours in pubg looks fucking normal for most 26 year olds, if the news saw my wow hours they’d say I have a problem
I fucking love doing 4 minutes of math problems to land a kill shot, but at the same time, people acting like video games with guns is a direct pipeline to violence or even my mom who called me earlier today to talk about chat ai and how it causes suicide and is evil, it’s all just bullshit fear mongering of trying to blame problems on new stuff you don’t understand.
Sniping in other games: "Boy, I sure do love playing LucasArts' point-and-click adventure games!"
Sniping in ArmA: "Drag function, ballistic coefficient, bullet weight, initial velocity, zero range, sight height, shooting angle, wind speed, wind angle, altitude, temperature, relative humanity... Am I missing something? Oh fuck, I forgot to account for barometric pressure! Now I'll never make the shot!"
You forgot coriolis effect and rifling tightness and how many spirals per inch the barrel has, as well as target height, and speed. Also, you have to time the shot between breaths and if you’re really good, heartbeats.
They aren’t pinning it on video games though, if you read the article it’s because one of his friends they interviewed brought it up so they were explaining it for the quote
well it's not like they just make shit up. new york times isn't like "today, the 33rd of fleptember, the emperor of kerflofflestan, pomodoro III, announced that his space agency will be sending a wooden ship to uranus"
They’re really desperate to get a partisan angle on it despite the fact fucking everyone who has ever interacted with it despises the for profit healthcare industry. You can smell the stupid desperation behind the parent media organizations applying spin on so many of these stories lately.
News is a revenue stream and since we obliterated regulation in the 90s media consolidation and the ad spend arms race that followed meant news got more and more “attention grabbing.”
More murder, more sensation, more negative. Then, the cable news went straight up hot take pundit driven. The majority of people get their news not from the actual news broadcasts that utilize and actual news room that gathers and gets stories (still picking the most attention grabbing of the lot) and then reports it, but instead they get their news from pundits who aren’t delivering any news, they are using the news that same way the Daily Show does, as a basis for material. The issue is the material is being used for heightened opinion, hyperbole, and hot takes that tell people who to blame, hate, and how to be angry.
If the owners of major outlets could make more money with 24/7 coverage of puppy adoptions and babies laughing they would.
As for broadcast news, it’s still predominantly news gathering and reporting. Thank god.
However, the “digital content,” sister of broadcast is a completely separate thing. But people don’t realize this they see the branding and assume it’s all equal.
It’s not. The digital content is in direct competition with social media, content mills, blogs, etc… therefore it has shit lowk this story. Completely devoid of actual information but enough words to slap a clickbait title on and blast out across social platforms to garner clicks.
And all it does is erode the brands to the point we are at today where people will scream “duh MSM this” and “billionaire media owners that!”
If you get your news from actual news gathering and reporting outlets, not “digital publishers,” not pundits, not content mills, not social media accounts, and not hyper partisan outlets then you’ll realize that most of what you get from those other places is not news at all. It’s just news as a basis for bullshit content.
In all honesty, the majority of mainstream journalism and media is essentially propaganda. While it may be partially truthful, there's always a strong bias and data is often omitted or re-emphasized to emphasize one viewpoint over another. They selectively choose what to show, what not to show, and how to show it. It's like an echo-chamber of particular belief systems, only showing you what you want to see, or showing you what they want you to see in an effort to change your perspective. It's a whole mess
Pathetic. Everyone played that fucking game during the pandemic cause there was nothing to fucking do. My friends who didn't play video games played it. My 13 y/o niece played it. Such a stupid spin attempt.
All of their recommended articles are praising and lifting up billionaires — smiling Jeff Bezos recommends books on being happier, smiling Elon Musk tells you habits for being wealthy and successful. Then there’s the snarling Mangione photo and his slaying of the poor billionaires CEO. NBC is nothing but a propaganda mill for the rich.
The bad part is just a couple of paragraphs down they say:
"Among Us" is a child-friendly whodunnit game in which a group of friends run around several space station-like maps. The “crewmates,” who are simply drawn, cartoonish-looking astronauts, run around the ship and complete tasks.
The intent of the game? One member is a killer and attempts to off the other crewmates. The death animations are silly and shown as someone getting stabbed in the back or having their neck snapped. Once a body is discovered, a crewmate reports it and a conversation ensues to deduce who the gamers think committed the crime. If they’re wrong, an innocent player will be ejected in a humorous animation of them floating off into space. If they’re right, the crewmates win. If the “killer” gets all the crewmates or gets all the innocent ones ejected, they win.
But at the same time I can't believe it's real because it's such a nothing article. It's literally talking about how someone played Among Us with Luigi and Luigi was assigned to be the killer in Among Us. That is such a nothing story. The fact that someone is calling this a news article and getting paid for it is wild to me as well though
The thing is, I’m pretty sure the kind of folks on this subreddit aren’t the target audience. To us, sure, this is a nothing article. For the pearl-clutchers at which it’s aimed, this stokes hysteria over the classic “videogames make you violent” talking point.
It’s 100% aimed at social media algorithms. Which will get it in front of the right audience. Shit like this will blast its way across Facebook and X feeds of those pearl clutchers.
This is the world we’ve built, even actual news gathering and reporting outlets have to play the game to get views digitally.
While I am sure they don't care who engages as long as they engage, to be clear the target "pearl clutchers" here are anyone that will click on anything negative realted video gaming + crime. That would be a nice Venn Digram of gamers raging about, "video games DON'T cause violence," and stick in the asses raging about, "video games DO cuase violence," and anyone else caught up in the big news flavor of the week.
I am pearl clutching about some the state of media literacy, information systems, and how we are all to stupid for our own good. I'm an elitist pearl cluthcer thank you very much.
It’s digital content. The purveyors of news via digital publishing are in direct competition with content mills, social media accounts, etc.
Therefore they have to employee some of the same bullshit tactics to get eyeballs.
If the algorithms that drive the majority of users to an article weren’t designed for hyper engagement we wouldn’t see NBC digital and others have to pump out as much highly clickable bullshit.
"Among Us" is a child-friendly whodunnit game in which a group of friends run around several space station-like maps. The “crewmates,” who are simply drawn, cartoonish-looking astronauts, run around the ship and complete tasks.
Is that some malicious compliance from NBC staff writers?
Like they are forced to make this negative spin articles or something, so deliberately chose to make it something ridiculous that only Fox/NewsMax/OAN viewers would take seriously and they can't read so it doesn't matter.
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u/theLanguageSprite lackadaisy 2025 babeyyyyyyy 17d ago
Thank you for posting the actual article because there is no other way I would have believed it was real