A complete lack of all moderation, an owner / management team who studiously ignores all the child abuse on their platform because it is profitable to them to ignore it, and a legislative and judicial system that is unwilling to prosecute businesses for anything in general and child abuse in particular.

It’s a perfect microcosm of the American condition, really.

It is also the most popular game ever created, unfortunately. Just one of the user created games on it tops the list for daily active players of any game ever…

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I’ll be honest… your racism example was confusing as hell. I’m US and raised in the US south which is where our whole war over slavery started so could be argued the OG racist territory. Note: I’m speaking as a white male, so I’m speaking only as I know of the loudest demographic in the country, as well as only as I know of from my particular culture, if someone of other nationalities/races can speak up to if there’s different I’m happy to learn. I’m also speaking of the predominant standard of my region, that’s the other, it’s definitely regional because as someone described the US, it’s really just 50 war tribes in a trenchcoat. My location is about as close to the dead center of the continental nation as one gets so thanks to international airports we do have some world travel, we’re in what’s typically called one of the flyover states so it’s honestly not a lot end up here that aren’t planning on living here.

Early US racism might have been more like what you described, as the Irish and Italians weren’t considered “white” but pretty much at this point it’s very obvious racial traits where the racism exists. The average you see is Whites, Blacks, Asians, Native Americans, Middle Eastern, Hispanic. You notice there’s not any distilling down to any of the more defined areas, Native Americans get lumped in even though you have Cherokee and Navajo, Asians are one even when I’ve heard that calling someone of Japanese decent Chinese is offensive as hell. But the average day to day around here is based on a quick visual identification. Honestly want to fuck with Americans, have someone from Mexico “who passes” (looks like) for white, then have them start speaking fluent Spanish with the rolling Rs that we definitely don’t have the practice for and people will be baffled. Honestly the midwest and south has a lot of trouble with racism with Jews in history because while the racists say people should be racist to them… if you mix a few people of Jewish decent with a crowd, most of us would have no idea how to point out any of the features… I legit grew up thinking Nazi Germany was killing for religious purposes until I was 12 or so and thought to ask why they didn’t hide it like early Christians… which I had to be explained that it was a racial thing.

So there’s your baseline casual racism standard of the US, we just lump everybody into super easy to define categories. After that, your descriptions where I was baffled, the specific one that got me absolutely weirded out was every single one after “some think A are better than B.” It’s pretty much a how watered down is your racism here.

A) Basic small casual racism: I’m probably guilty of it, as you saw above I talked about the base line how we see race in the country. That’s speaking from my viewpoint, mostly born of ignorance of not knowing other cultures. I think pretty much everyone is guilty of it accidentally, the important part is to learn and actively try to not be. View everyone as equal, don’t have a problem with relationships. The spicy areas of this category is the stereotyping, some more hurtful than others IE: Angry fat white dude, Asians can’t drive, etc.

B) Getting to full on racism: There might be some cases of some of the “Race A and Race B are equal but them sleeping together warrant a murder” might exist, but I’ll call it now I’ve yet to meet it. Probably because if they’re of another race and racist, I’m the white guy… and the white racism is fucking bad. At least in my area, the ONLY reason you’ll have a white person who says another race is equal but sleeping with one of them is murder is because it’s even with the Confederates and KKK trying to bring back government sponsored racism it’s still not socially okay to say you’re racist. Hell, it’s not socially acceptable then and a guy will get side eyed real hard if he starts saying his daughter won’t sleep with a (insert race here). This territory ranges from the people who are mad they can’t say the “n-word” (a derogatory term used by early Americans about blacks… which were brought over as slaves) to full on angry uncle at the Thanksgiving table who’s saying the country is going to shit because of all the immigrants. At this point it’s getting into the white supremacist territory, but they’re the ones that will yell loud but if you actually confront them they’ll shut the fuck up.

C) Here be KKK/Confederates/Nazis: I can’t speak to any of the other groupings in the US and how murders go, but if the US is going race based murder happy, the predominant group will be the whites, and the KKK/Neo-Confederates REALLY want a race war going. These are the people who believe the myths they sold themselves when they lost the war 160 years ago (and our countries greatest mistake in our history is not hanging

Industry growth. Turns out it’s a lot easier to “think of the children” when the industry is small and niche than it is when it’s making investors billions of dollars a year. Turns out capitalism makes problems harder to solve once the problem itself makes money (see also: tax preparation)

That’s also why the moral panic people switched from trying to censor games through government to trying to do it via finance (e.g. Collective Shout lobbying banks, credit cards, and payment processors).

Though if your question is about why the contrast between moral panic over game content and the lack of moral panic over actual victimization — I think that’s always been the case, unfortunately. People seem more fearful of their children losing their morals than they are of people with no morals harming their children.

Ah, I didn’t realize the original Doom had multiplayer. It’s a little hard to search for since now all that shows up is online multiplayer mods for it / source ports that came after

I’m pretty sure it did. Used to play on an ipx network we setup at work just for it. I even got it working over tcpip using ipx tunneling.

Wiki here says it had chat:

doom.fandom.com/wiki/Doom_networking_component#%3….

Doom did have text chat, much in the same vein as Quake later on.

However, Doom originally didn’t have TCP/IP, it only supported IPX/SPX networking on LANs. (Though, why use chat when you can yell.) It also supported point to point modem connections, for which the text chat was probably useful. Later versions of Doom and all modern source ports support TCP/IP though.