So the Call of Duty video game franchise that brought us the infamous “No Russian” mission, where you had to physically remove Russian civilians from an airport – not many complaints of “terrorism simulators” when it’s Russkies who are getting gunned down – now has another offering, in which you as a Syrian rebel fighter need to do combat with Russian gas killing animals.
https://twitter.com/thecozygenie/status/1134176966213603328
I submit that sneaking in with stealth, staging a false flag attack (the latest revelations indicate that the OPCW sought to sideline experts who did not go along with the “Assad is responsible” narrative), and escorting White Helmets to the scene would be a more accurate mission scenario for a Syrian rebel.
In fairness, the reactions to that Tweet were highly negative, which reflects the gap between the politically correct Russophobia of video game publishers and rank and file gamers (a gap that is also markedly present in Hollywood).
Anyhow, this led me to wonder: Who is The Enemy in video games? Do Nazis still have that honor, or have we displaced them?
Fortunately, there’s a study by Brandon Valeriano and Philip Habel (2016) just about that:
Digital games are among the most popular forms of entertainment media. Despite their ubiquity, the fields of political science, International Relations, and political communication have generally overlooked the study of digital games. We take up this void by examining the international enemies depicted in combat games – specifically, first-person shooter (FPS) games – which can speak to the process in the construction of international threats in society. Our review of framing the enemy gleans perspectives from multiple disciplines including International Relations, political communication, and digital gaming. Our empirical analysis traces the evolution of images in digital games from 2001 to 2013 to reveal the identity of the enemies and protagonists and to examine the context of the game – including the setting where each game takes place. We find that Russians are a popular form of enemy in FPS games even after considering terrorists as a broad category. Our review of the literature and our empirical analysis together present a foundation for the future study of digital games as a process of framing of enemies and transmission of threats.
The heroes are almost all Americans, where nationality is given. This is unsurprising, since almost a third of the world’s video game development studios are American.
The villains are indeed most often Russians in the best selling games since 2000.
Moreover, we must conclude that white, straight, male Russian moderate ultranationalists such as myself are the most repressed and underprivileged race in the United States.
Consistent with expectations based on the work of Maness and Valeriano (2015), Russians are prevalent enemies. Among real-world threats linked explicitly with a nation-state, Russians dominate FPS with twelve uses, not even eclipsed by the combination of Middle Eastern (six uses) and Latin American (five instances) terrorists. In fact, referring back to Table 1, among the top five games by sales figures, Russian enemies are featured in four – as they are the typical enemy for the Call of Duty series. … Most important for international affairs, Russians appear twelve times as the enemy, either as Russian nationalists or as a re-assertive Russian Federation in alternative reality-based games.
In fairness, I would rather be portrayed as a crazed revanchist than as the mafia hitman + prostitute combo more typical of the 1990s. So I suppose that is an improvement.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Since Russians are white, that’s make them “safe” villains (it’s hard these days to make a people of color a villain)
If Russians are portrayed as brave, competent, powerful and scary like Nazi Germans are then this will have the opposite effect of dehumanizing Russians, instead typical gamers will start to identify with the ‘evil’ enemy rather than gay Americans. The traditional stupid drunk horde or the mafia would be more effective in inducing Russophobia but would also be much less compelling.
It’s just like in the good old Reagan Years. Publish anything making clear who the designated enemy is today.
The graphics are better than in Raid over Moscow though.
The LA Times is on the case:
‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’ adds a female Middle Eastern soldier’s POV. Here’s why
A difficult proposition at the best of times. Does that work with American soldiers?
Kickass strong women against Islamic State! I didn’t know there is an actual brigade of those (and I thought this is the YPG, aka “protection forces”, which is not particulary female, and not necessarily as ethical as the IDF). As for US support, the less said the better. In any case, Turkey ain’t happy.
Go read the news, fat nerds!
Comin soon: Freedom Gas Genocide Predator Hellfire Simulator! No? Okay then.
What does that even mean!
Read about it and instantly remembered Battlefield 3, with its something something terrible dictator al Bashir which brave murrican soljurrs were supposed to kill in Damascus…released in 2011, right as real war in Syria got going.
A bit too much coincidence to be a coincidence.
Who are enemies in modern Russian games (made for Russian audience)?
What is the proportion of Americans and other Westerners, WW2 Nazis, Muslim terrorists, generic gangsters, monsters and aliens?
Weird, because a large percentage of the people buying and playing these games are white males. And they see with their own eyes peoples who don’t look like them crapping up their neighborhoods/towns and threatening them. Truly amazing how those who control the narrative have been able to get people to deny what they see every day with their own eyes and make them willing to kill their own for nebulous globalist reasons.
i’m surprised it’s not still Nazis but then i don’t play FPS games much.
not as woke as wolfenstein now, but beyond battlefield 5.
“i’m surprised it’s not still Nazis”
don’t worry. there’s more nazi killing games every year it seems.
now it’s the 80s, and we’re still killing nazis, in wolfenstein youngblood.
some random new game, battalion 1944, also offers you that classic killing naaaazis experience.
insert {it’s all so tiresome} meme. because it is. 30 years of the same fckn thing in 3D shooters.
do the white helmet players get extra points for organ harvesting the wounded?
If true, they crossed the line here. It warrants a ban. Too bad that nobody in the Kremlin uses the internet or plays videogames.
Vidya is the plebbiest form of entertainment this side of watching reality TV while mainlining meth.
In stores now: Zombie-apocalypse Syrian Freedom Fighters!
Perhaps true in absolute terms, but gaming is disproportionately non-white.
I believe Hispanics are also the biggest consumers of Hollywood garbage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_video_games
“Braiiiinss … braiiiinss … also livers, kidneys, lungs, hearts, corneas …”
Well, Whites have to do their homework. What can you do?
OT: Mr. Karlin had been uncovered! Another Mossad plot foiled by vigilant Soviet patriots!
https://twitter.com/Glossophiliac75/status/1134630009816195077
https://twitter.com/Glossophiliac75/status/1134636674133233664
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/12/54/52/125452756dfcafe62a3d8551df19817b.jpg
Buying – maybe. Playing – no. Video games are now world wide phenomenon, just like Hollywood movies.
http://press.etc.cmu.edu/index.php/product/video-games-and-the-global-south/?fbclid=IwAR3px-Svv0PmiZP5q3Xv0sqia1NVJVMw_xag03Bktii2zi8M5x4F-D2vtNk
That’s what I figured, and despite being old enough to remember the Cold War it still seems a little unfair.
Certainly can’t use China, both because it would be ‘racist’ and because they’re a huge market.
That doesn’t even make any sense. Why wouldn’t neocons write George Washington biographies? The USA’s been great for Jews.
I actually searched for GW biographies. You’d expect it, but gosh, there’s a lot of them! Couldn’t find any by neocons–Ron Chernow seems to be a liberal rather than a true neocon–but his new Washington biography seems overall positive (Publisher’s Weekly complains about it). Given Hamilton (the book not the musical), the dude seems to be a huge Founding Fathers fanboy.
LOL, that Lazy Glossophiliac asswipe actually wrote me an message a while ago, apologizing for his deceitful rants and requesting to bury the hatchet (after also having called me a pedophile amongst other things), which I very graciously – if unwisely – acceeded to, in light of his long commenting history here.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-69/#comment-3075448
Looks like he is back to his usual mendacious self. (After his apology, he actually briefly followed me on Twitter again, though I see that he now has me blocked again – presumably so that he can snipe away at me in secret).
I am sure that all the statisticians and researchers were just making the numbers up: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/russia-homicides/
What a deluded asshat. Sputnik & Pogrom is not an “organization,” it is a (now defunct) nationalist magazine, which now continues as a YouTube channel.
It is primarily Egor Prosvirnin’s project, with whom I disagree with him on a number of important matters. Though unlike Glossy, he is not a dishonest loser.
I have always and consistently stated that I am 1/4 Lak: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-7/
I do have distant Jewish ancestors, but not from my father’s side.
http://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/karlin-ancestry-chart.jpg
Glossy is a Stalinist Lysenkoist who denies genetics so he can make up whatever he wants in this sphere.
Here is my extreme flip flopping on this issue between 2012 and 2019:
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/191034375897489408
“One or two down the line. I’m c.70% South/Central Russian, 25% Dagestani, 5% other (of that mostly Jewish).”
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1088123202004492288
“The West Asian/(((Broadly European))) is 1/4 Dagestani. The Italian element is legit, believe it or not. I am exactly 1/32 Jewish, so that’s remarkably accurate.”
I remember Glossy writing back then that as soon as he read about HBD, he immediately knew it was true. Strange that he’d be Lysenkoist, when IIRC he broke with you after you pointed out that his fantasy “Based Stalin” in reality destroyed genetics research in the USSR. I think Lysenkoism denier would be more accurate.
With crazy stalkers like this Twitter sounds, it is probably to ignore and not respond to them. They will alternate between friendly and unfriendly anyway, as part of mental instability.
Because of the name though – I guess it is rational that he thinks he is a secretive Mossad agent.
I don’t need automated data scraping to use for facebook – just a search bar, and you can copypaste endless Karlins of Israel.
https://www.facebook.com/nir.karlin
https://www.facebook.com/yarden.karlinsky
https://www.facebook.com/yasmin.karlin
https://www.facebook.com/amir.karlin
https://www.facebook.com/maria.karlinskaya
https://www.facebook.com/arie.karlin
https://www.facebook.com/rotem.karlinsky
https://www.facebook.com/Alex.karlin
https://www.facebook.com/yael.parnes.1
https://www.facebook.com/jake.karliner
https://www.facebook.com/vova.karlin
https://www.facebook.com/adi.karlin
https://www.facebook.com/betty.carlin
etc, etc, for any city in Israel
So we can infer he does not work for Mossad, unless they think common to Israeli names are helpful for their secret agents who are supposed to be planning a revolution.
You should see it as a a sign of respect. In British and Scandinavian police series, Romanians play the villains – except it’s pickpockets and рэкетиры.
But those are Gypsies from Romania, at least out there in the real world.
Military shooters attract fans with their multiplayer. The campaigns are mostly a side show. Open world games like witcher, skyrim have monopolized single player.
So, MP is a propagation mechanism, and message is the payload.
No contradiction.
I’ve been following Karlin’s blog now for a while and have never detected him being dishonest, so I’ll easily accept his own description of his own ethnic make-up. But from your reply here, it does seem that Karlin’s name does sound Jewish? You’re indicating that lots of Israelis carry the Karlin surname? How did that come about (from the 1/32 Jewish ancestor)?
(BTW, I’d not think less/more of Karlin if he were 100% Jewish).
No, it is not. My very distant Jewish ancestors are on my mother’s line – 1/32 in total (so not a Jew even by the stricted interpretation of the Nuremberg Laws). My dad’s line is entirely Slavic. Karlin is encountered amongst pure Slavs as well, though it is not a frequent surname. But congratulations to Glossy on knowing how to Google.
‘Karlin’ to me sounds as if it has an English origin. My own surname has a Germanic sound, although it is actually 100% Ukrainian, so I get it.
I believe Indians, even removed 5 centuries ago from their native lands, are still too stupid to arrange effective rackets. I am sure that the most effective gangs in Sweden are Sweidish. Their pickpockets may be Romanian. But Romanian Gypsies are limited by their abilities to begging.
Talking of stereotypes, in Romania, the most loathed Gypsy is the Mures one. They are called “Hungarian Gypsies”, although I don’t know how good is their Hungarian. Their Romanian is definitely poor. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIGLK5xEc5E . He may be Hungarian, or he’s terribly stupid, but either way he doesn’t confirm the stereotype of the Romanian effective racket.
I think it’s more like “fashions”. Karlin is a popular family name of Jews, but this doesn’t imply it is a Jewish only family name.
Think about “Rosenberg” – this is popular name with Jews, but there is also “Alfred Rosenberg” (a Nazi).
As for Karlin, it seems very unlikely he is Jewish, even if his family name is common with Jews. From his writings, you can see he has almost no knowledge about Jews or Jewish culture, he says he is not Jewish, and he wrote literally his DNA results in this forum. (Lol how conclusive can he be, not that you should respond to stalkers)
There’s also a comedian George Carlin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Carlin
People from Romania (at least proximally) do commit a lot of crime in Western countries and just generally make things worse though
Is this article about Romania nonsense then? (Not rhetorical, I am really curious)
https://www.amren.com/features/2017/12/is-romania-part-of-the-west-gypsy/
Reality of games? Do they have video games where your main concern is not to be killed by the enemy but by the friendly fire or die in an accident or as result of stupid decisions by higher ups?
If this was somehow incorporated into Saving Private Ryan then the storming of the Omaha Beach would look at the Omaha Beach somewhat differently. Like for instance: He almost made it. Survived the training exercises and his own and his superiors stupidity and then had a bad luck being shot by Germans.
More than one person can learn how to use google:
Early Origins of the Karlin family
The surname Karlin was first found in County Limerick (Irish: Luimneach) located in Southwestern Ireland, in the province of Munster, where the name is descended from the O’Connor stem, Kings of Connaught and the family became early associated with the county of Tyrone, and in neighboring counties.
Hey Anatoly, I hear that you have an unusual fondness for eating kartoshka? 🙂
Karlin family crest image:
https://www.houseofnames.com/product/Family+Crest+Image+%28JPG%29+Heritage+Series+-+600+DPI
https://www.houseofnames.com/karlin-family-crest
That explains his anti-Angloism
But there’s something that’s obviously off about this. With all of the games that I’m familiar with – and I’m not spring chicken, its overwhelmingly white and East Asian. Just quickly going over strategy games – League of Legends and Starcraft all have top players that are overwhelmingly East Asian or white, almost without exception(I can think of only one, who is Samoan). Twitch streamers and Let’s Play segments follow this trend in “performative” gameplay, there are probably more Jewish streamers(a narrow ethnic group) than all subcontinental streamers combined
I’m less familiar with FPS and they are also less correlated with IQ unlike strategy games, but a quick scan of top Counterstrike Go pro teams show more diversity, but still not any blacks:
https://en.dafaesports.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/1-Teams-to-watch-in-2018-CSGO-1.jpg
https://liquipedia.net/commons/images/thumb/d/d4/C9_Dallas_2018.jpg/800px-C9_Dallas_2018.jpg
https://liquipedia.net/commons/images/thumb/8/8e/Astralis_at_ELEAGUE_Premier_2018.jpg/800px-Astralis_at_ELEAGUE_Premier_2018.jpg
I wouldn’t know. I do know that he lived in England for some time. Perhaps, he should have moved to the province of Munster or the County of Tyrone, where he would have felt ‘more at home’? 🙂
You have to understand that “video games” talked about in this context are predominantly smartphone trash titles with notoriously pay-focused mechanics, microtransactions and the like.
Remember various “-farms”, “-villes”, zombie game crazes? Real bank was made on mobile then, and so is now.
Small wonder you don`t see a lot of nonwhites in titles demanding a lot of skill and commitment to be on international competition level, really.
Under what I suspect is a then Brit Hong Kong influence, there’s a martial arts film centered around the occupiers of China. The Brits and Americans come out looking the best among them, with the Russians appearing the most foolish among the others (Japanese and Germans).
I had mentioned at another thread about the US film Die Hard: With a Vengeance depiction evil Germans. In Germany, these very same bad guys are portrayed as being Russian.
Decades ago, it was somewhat common for US grade school age children to confuse Russians with Germans.
Tolik, I hope that you’ve read the entry that I provided for you, regarding the Karlin family name, and have forgot about Mr. G. It actually includes a lot of interesting information, including the Karlin family motto:
In online multiplayer games one frequently gets fragged by incompetents on one’s team.
Some people’s Jewish paranoia is ridiculous. Anatoly is very obviously Russian, just look at the photo on the side. No Jew ever was seen holding a two-handed sword, while wearing a tank top and slippers, with a bald head and sporting a 90s goatee, on a public park. His DNA test is wrong, he should be 100% Russian.
Many common “Jewish” surnames are simply common surnames that were adopted by Jews during the period when they were taking up conventional naming practices. Presumably, Karlin is one of those.
Yeah yeah yeah that’s bad sure why not. It is. Discriminating against BASED and REDPILLED(to use the parlance) Russian whites. K.
But I take a great issue with the portrayal of the Syrian leadership and the situation going on in Syria. This is of course a form of social conditioning or whatever it is called and they are trying to garner support for ILLEGAL and INVASIVE american interventionist shenanigans. How dare they portray the evil white helmets and terrorists opposing the erudite and graceful Assad as “moderate” rebels, when they use body doubles, when they are not neutral, when they wish to literally cleanse the land of all Shias and Alawites(I’m muslim, but I seriously dont know if Alawites are shia or just another sect), when they want Sharia, when they shoot people for not being religious enough, when they subjugate them through many forms of theological oppression, when they go around desecrating and blowing up churches, etc etc.
*There was
RIP to a great. One of the best in Comedy.
He has no discernible Eastern European or general Jewish blood. He was Irish.
Excuse you, the Punjabis came to Brampton and they quite literally ethnically cleansed the area of the blacks
“1/4 Dagestani” and “Jewish” are not contradictory.
There’s a thriving and very prominent Dagestani Jew community in Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Jews
They’re famous for typically Jewish things like amassing huge sums of money from shady business practices.
Magicka is infamously funny for being a “cooperative” game where you almost always end up dying repeatedly to your “friends.”
The massive multiplayer games which mimick command structures have similar issues, of course. EVE is great in how it has gigantic corporations and federations, but it can feel pretty sucky to be a peon and feel effectively impotent and invisible in the grand scheme of things, or your fortunes to be heavily tied to hopefully competent leadership figures who naturally, tend to disappoint.
Кarlin’s ancestors were Avars. Jews-mountaineers from Dagestan is a completely different ethnos
AK: Laks.
Well, yes. If he was really a mountain Jew he’d be making bank in some tasteful downtown building instead of writing articles for Internet losers.
Good samokritika.
Thanks, I tried.
Clan Macpherson
Motto: Touch not the cat butt
Yes, you’ll find that one of the longest lasting feuds evolved within Ireland between the Karlin clan and the Macpherson one. Here’s proof that both cats and humans dig the old butt rub:
https://youtu.be/pql099lhG_c
Hmmm…Lev Nussimbaum?
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58c302b837c581a0d280b5d3/5c8925c3a4222f13f0ba292b/5c8b258641920225d54fe31f/1552622989283/File_006.jpeg?format=500w
So true with Ashkenazi as well as Sephardic Jews. Typical Sephardic surnames: Russo, Casuto, Matarasso, Canetti and Candiotti
Today, it is impossible to miss the racial subtext to a political animus against Russia. But in more innocent times, I think Russians made reasonably fun though overused villains.
You had Cold War competencies added to a collapsing economy. Made Spetsnaz members freelancing seem plausible. Plus, the language is very fun – it is good to hear a countdown in Russian that you need to rush to avert.
Not to mention, after all, who likes seeing blacks or Arabs? Even, if they are villains. Nigeria is probably the greatest single threat to the world now, but are you realistically going to have a Nigerian femme fatale?
Globalist villains are, in general, sorely lacking. If I had a time machine, I would go back to the ’50s and try to finance anti-globalist propaganda, via TV and movies. Something in the line of James Bond or The Man from UNCLE, but with a globalist organization being the villains.
Of course, one difficulty of globalist villains is that they mainly speak English. Not foreign and menacing enough, but maybe throw in a few words of Esperanto, even though it is unrealistic.
You need to replay your Man from U.N.C.L.E DVD’s. Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin spent almost every episode fighting just such a nemesis, THRUSH:
.
Imagine, CIA and KGB agents fighting a common enemy, THRUSH, together? Sounds too incredibly strange, something that only Israel Shamir could come up with. 🙂
Read Audie Murphy’s Medal of Honor citation.
Burst in laugh.
He somehow murdered dozens Gebirgsjaegers who could’t hit him from 10 m, or while he was manning a M2 in a burning M10, who were in Denmark actually.
Not only that, but he somehow managed to repel 6 Tiger tanks in a sector where there were no Tiger tanks, and did that with just a machinegun.
There are people still fanatically believing in wartime propagada, no matter how stupid, demonstrably fabricated or impossible (plane and tank kill claims) they are.
Definitely not an expert on the show, but I don’t know if an extra-national group with the ambition of worlddom necessarily means globalism. At least, in my version, I would go more into specifics with things like eliminating borders and population replacement. Homomania and negrophilia, if I could get it past the censors – probably not.
I always thought them working together against an evil international org was kind of endearing, but I don’t know if it had anything to do with the show having pinko writers or not.
I think it was more to do with SiP than anything else. He comes across as level-headed on his own blog, and he was commenting here on AK’s blog since 2012 at least, so I suspect something more personal.
Who Killed Captain Alex? has an Ugandan Mata Hari and a Russian mercenary villain (the guy in red carrying a big пулемёт). Who is black, for they obviously couldn’t hire a foreign actor on a budget of $260. It’s still more entertaining than most Hollywood movies.
https://youtu.be/kf7tv7TtOOY
I could see that. I can’t eat hummus anymore because I saw a travel series visit Israel and the bald hairy guy mixed it with his bare hands.
It’s weird that games with Russian baddies might be thriving, but Hollywood tv and films that try to update the Cold War atmosphere almost always bomb.
I was about to write some long-winded story about the gradients where Romania sits (East-West economically, South-North socially), but then I realized this Archie Munro character has never lived in Newark, NJ. I did, so he (and you) can spare me all the crap about high IQ in the West, or the mere ability to replace a broken window.
But then, the phrase ”The blond hair of the first “singer” is a good example of Gypsification.’ indicates the whole article is written by one of those Romanian losers/whiners who went to college, but has to live among the plebs. The childish complaint about music is the giveaway, more than the misspelling of “blonde”.
First, only that sort of moron would complain about music, when life is really about other things. Romania has a prolonged, severe problem with spending on other crap (most recently, 2% of the budget on defense), while underpaying doctors and teachers. And that’s something Gypsies can’t control. FFS, complain about life expectancy, not about music.
Second, stating that manele is a sign of how Gypsies are taking over the country is beyond childish. That style of music consists mainly of covers of Egyptian pop. Also, it is censored on all state-licensed media, be they private or state-owned. Manele is not Gypsy, and it’s almost forbidden. We are now in the domain of plain stupid, best documented by the claim that women dying her hair blonde become Gypsyfied. When did Gypsies turn blonde? Is Debbie Harry a Gypsy?
Merely reading that article made my IQ shrink, and gave me cancer.
There is nothing inherently Romanian about Romanians. Our cuisine, our wealth, and our abilities are where they should be, considering our neighborhood. It’s not Africa, and it’s not Luxemburg. The ability to whine is extreme, but so is that of Hungarians and Austrians. In many aspects, the country is where Germany was about 20 years ago; in others, we are screwed by the big stagnation of the eighties and nineties. We know it will not catch up, because the greater powers will again use it as battlefield. We know it won’t disappear, because previous generations had it worse, and didn’t give up.
We were useful to the Russians for centuries, and to the Turks before that, so perhaps our next suzerains could benefit from a symbiosis. It’s obvious, from the BBC, DK, SVT stereotyping, that the EU is not ready for that.