this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
87 points (98.9% liked)

Games

41674 readers
862 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Rules

1. Submissions have to be related to games

Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.

This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.

2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.

We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.

3. No excessive self-promotion

Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.

This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.

4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you're submitting before posting to see if it's already been posted.

We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.

5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.

No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.

6. No linking to piracy

Don't share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.

We don't want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.

Authorized Regular Threads

Related communities

PM a mod to add your own

Video games

Generic

Help and suggestions

By platform

By type

By games

Language specific

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Bain's schtick came down to three key points:

  • "Ethics in games journalism": Bain 100% spearheaded the "All of old media is corrupt and lying to you because of sponsorships" and the gamergate crowd used him to legitimize them. Plenty of webcomics of the era did a "I am not a bad person and I don't condone what all these angry people saying the exact same thing are doing but... maybe you should listen to us. Err, me" style joke with the mouthpiece looking a LOT like Bain
  • He would pretty regularly do "I am gonna get cancelled" level jokes on his podcast with Cox and Dodger and would go off on wild ass tangents about how it is "okay for women to look pretty" and so forth any time someone complained about oversexualized male gaze wank fantasies.
  • "Let's look at the options menu": On the surface this is really good. In practice it was yet another case of "Those evil devs are trying to fuck us" because he was active in an era where PC games were very much third class citizens for all of what we would now consider "third parties". Like, we were genuinely lucky to even GET a Sands of Time PC release and much of the "lazy devs" rhetoric goes back to people like him

His legacy is a complex one. I'll fully admit to loving his videos because he was speaking as a PC Gamer at a time when it felt like all the major publishers were abandoning us. That said, even as a young'n in the software development world (and a hobbyist gamedev) most of his rhetoric felt unnecessarily meanspirited and like it was focused on the people coding the games and not the people paying them and setting deliverables (one of the early hints that I leaned a hell of a lot more left than right...). And I mostly dropped his podcast because it increasingly felt like he was doing the same shit whichever dipshit at Penny Arcade was doing where the slightest pushback led to "I AM THE GREATEST VICTIM THIS WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN!!!". And... he was very much a well to do British man when it came to his stances on LGBTQ and there was a LOT of transphobia that we'll just pretend was ignorance.

But Bain wasn't the only influencer I enjoyed content from. And as gamergate increasingly kicked off, it became painfully obvious that the guy who still insisted "ethics in games journalism" was the true divider was saying almost the exact same talking points as the people who literally put someone I semi-regularly chatted with on IRC into hiding. Not to mention some of the biggest targets of the hate movement were people he had "feuded with" for years. And when he finally DID address things, it was very much a "They have some good points but I don't agree with how they are going about it". Its unclear exactly when he knew about his cancer but many people (self included) suspect the reason he never really spoke out against gamergate is because he didn't want to risk his money train and... I get it but also he was still profiting off the suffering of others to an obscene degree.

Skimming through it, https://www.forbes.com/sites/fruzsinaeordogh/2018/07/10/totalbiscuits-legacy-and-the-collateral-damage-of-gamergate/#5766dcb432ae is a pretty good summary of a lot of the controversies of Bain's career written shortly after his death. And I vaguely recall Eordogh being a regular contributor during the good years of Vice/Motherboard for what that is worth.

But yeah. I think the general take is that, at best, Bain was a useful idiot. At worst... he was the asmongold of his time right down to constantly framing things as people trying to steal your gu---err games. But there is very much a reason he is often considered the face of gamergate.