The human dominoes keep falling. It is with great sadness that I must report that yet another prolific name in the video game industry — a hero of mine — has sworn fealty to the ideological hegemony of the progressive fascist trans bullies on Twitter. Raph Koster, once a shining beacon for the virtual world genre and now a fading star grasping for relevance and approval, has cast his lot with the identity politics aristocrats and swallowed whole their demonic lies.
Last month, wokester Raph Koster made this statement to his followers in the Church of Twitter:
When someone dared to disagree with this delightful trans person’s tweet, (insert pronoun here) immediately resorted to name calling and tried to invoke the lack of followers (social proof) to delegitimatize them. So much for love trumps hate.
Simon/Simone Says
How pathetic is it that the esteemed Raph Koster is perfectly willing to comply with the demands of some attention-starved, obscure “trans” QA video game tester and play the children’s game Simon Says or now Simone Says and dance like a puppet and do their bidding.
Would Raph jump off a cliff to his death (like the obedient cultist in the Conan the Barbarian film) if a trans person told him to?
Bowing before trans people is a humiliation ritual that more and more seasoned video game developers are willing to endure in to stay relevant and secure future employment.
Language is Warfare
As we saw in the recent Amy Coney Barret hearing, Miriam-Webster changed the definition of “sexual preference” after Senator Hirono falsely claimed that the term is “outdated and offensive.” Controlling language is one of the chief tactics of cultural warfare. The more you control what constitutes acceptable language, the more you control people’s thoughts. This is also known as the Overton Window.
Trans rights are human rights is a preposterous and sophomoric political slogan which at first sounds innocent but its purpose is to deceive and move the football further down the field toward the goal line of achieving the normalization of transgenderism and gender fluidity.
Black Lives Matter and Love is love is are other examples of seemingly innocuous but subversive slogans.
First off, there is no such thing as trans rights, manic depressive rights, addict rights, or alcoholism rights. This is another attempt by the left to divide people and create a struggle among competing identities — yet another dubious and divisive term.
Just because a person wears a Superman costume doesn’t make him Superman. Just because a man cuts off his penis and testicles and thinks that he’s a woman doesn’t make him a woman.
The left continually ages war on Western civilization by changing the language and devising clever euphemisms to deceive the public.
Gender is also bogus term coined by the social engineers of the left. It is a false concept. There are only two sexes: male and female. To deny this is clearly anti-science and anti-biology. Sexual orientation is another fraudulent term that has been forced on the public.
Nobody has the right to leverage a serious mental illness like gender dysphoria and use it as a cudgel to demand “rights” and special treatment from their fellow citizens and be exempt from scrutiny. Those that engage in this odious behavior, are selfish, arrogant, narcissists who are in the business of manufacturing victimhood to gain social currency.
Who can blame them, as there is a big financial and career incentive to declare oneself trans today. So-called “trans” people are now in high demand in the video game industry as bizarre human mascots of inclusion, diversity, and representation that companies can use at conferences and trade shows and include them in their promotional materials, all thanks to widespread vice of virtue signaling.
To make a claim that trans rights are human rights, implies that so-called trans people have no rights and are denied basic human rights. It also cheapens the notion of authentic human rights.
It is not clear what the term trans rights even means. It is left purposely vague as are all good slogans. There is no evidence that people who call themselves “trans” are being denied any of the rights guaranteed to all Americans in the U.S. Constitution.
Lastly, there is no mention of human rights per se in the U.S. constitution. Citizens in the former Soviet Union also had guaranteed “human rights” as part of their constitution and any student of history knows how that worked out for scores of millions of enslaved people.
Authentic Human Rights
When I was a kid growing up, the idea of human rights was not a joke or the subject of a cheap publicity stunt on Twitter, it actually meant something. At the time the Soviet Union and Red China had enslaved over a billion people under the repressive yoke of communism which denied them their most basic human rights.
Human rights were understood to be: the right to life, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of mobility, the right to a fair trial, the right not to be a slave or be in servitude and the right to worship.
In enlightened 2020, the notion of human rights as defined by the intelligentsia on Twitter, has become so expansive and malleable that it can mean almost anything including the right of a man to claim he is a woman.
The very same people that claim that trans rights are human rights are the first people to claim that women have the right to choose to kill their unborn children thus denying the unborn their human rights. Approximately 60 million innocent babies in the U.S.A. — most of them African American — have been murdered by the barbaric act known as abortion. 10,000 babies are aborted in America each week and most of them are black.
What is more important Raph? Saving millions of unborn babies or making sure we have enough transgender bathrooms?
In America at least, you are entitled to think what you want. The concept of liberty allows us to to believe that the earth is flat. Just don’t expect people to agree with you and validate your delusions. Also, don’t coerce people by force of law that they must acknowledge your insanity via your “preferred” pronouns.
The Untold Cost of Transgenderism
Transgenderism is very new. At this point in time, we have no way to ascertain the costs and unintended consequence of this ideology to our society. One thing that does stand out is that people who identify as transgender have an abnormally high rates of depression and suicide.
Transgenderism has many other unintended and permanent negative consequence as noted in a recent Breitbart article:
“…many pediatricians and researchers warn is fraught with danger for young children who can be headed down a road that includes puberty blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, mutilating surgeries – such as double mastectomies – and ultimately, sterility.”
I believe that transgenderism is sex appropriation that cheapens the rights of real women. Female athletes are being negatively affected by trans “women” who are winning sports competitions that they compete in. All of their years of training and dedication are suddenly meaningless.
Transgenderism also endangers young girls as grown men who claim to be women but in actuality are devious sexual perverts who exploit transgender bathrooms and showers to view them naked.
Trans History in the Video Game Industry
The trans history that Raph Koster mentioned in his Tweet is undoubtedly referring to Dani Bunten formerly Dan Bunten. Bunten was one of the first members of the Electronic Arts collective.
Bunten created M.U.L.E. one of the first Atari 2600 video games that I fell absolutely in love with. It was like no other video game. My brothers and I spent countless hours playing it!
Wikipedia’s take on Bunten’s transgender experience is refreshingly honest. I’m sure once the trans activists get wind of it, it will be sanitized, deleted, and replaced with pro-trans agitprop:
After a third divorce, Bunten, who had until then been living as male, transitioned to living as a woman. Bunten underwent sex reassignment surgery in November 1992 and afterward kept a lower profile in the games industry. Bunten later regretted having surgery, finding that for her, the drawbacks of surgical transition outweighed the benefits, and wishing she had considered alternative approaches. She joked that the surgery was to improve the video game industry’s male/female ratio and aesthetics, but advised others considering a sex change not to proceed unless there was no alternative and warned them of the cost, saying “Being my ‘real self’ could have included having a penis and including more femininity in whatever forms made sense. I didn’t know that until too late and now I have to make the best of the life I’ve stumbled into. I just wish I would have tried more options before I jumped off the precipice.”
After her gender change in fall 1992, Bunten stayed out of the video game spotlight, mostly keeping to herself. She felt as though that after becoming a woman she wasn’t as good at video game development as she had previously been, stating “So, I’m a little more than three years into my new life role as Ms. Danielle Berry, and her career looks to be somewhat different from old Mr. Dan Bunten’s. For one thing, I’m not as good a programmer as he was.”
As you just read, deciding to be transgender came with a great cost to Bunten. This cost is rarely talked about. But many people who have undergone transition surgery have come to regret it and are speaking out.
If Raph really wants to help trans people, he should be honest and let them know the consequences instead of just parroting vapid slogans.
The Left’s Ultimatum to Everyone: Convert or Die
We now live in a Dystopian convert or die world of identity politics where independence of thought is considered a heresy and one must proclaim their allegiance to this counterfeit religion or face the certain reality of being cancelled by a few hundred fanatical trans activists and their not so merry band of regressive allies. People who are cancelled by the leftist bullies and their enablers can never make a living again in industries owned and run by woke leftists which now includes most of corporate America.
It’s not fun to write articles like this where game design heroes of mine keep falling from grace like 1980s TV preachers. I feel like the junior staffer at a local newspaper tasked with the chore of writing obituaries. It’s painful having to do this every few weeks as another video game personality feels compelled to publicly swear an oath of allegiance to the madness of the microscopic but vocal trans community.
The left loves victims. Even better, once found, the left loves to emancipate its victims from the clutches of moustache twirling malefactors i.e. normal people. They used the same play book when they claimed victory for so-called “same sex marriage” after billions of people were falsely labeled as bigots for having the audacity to still believe in traditional marriage.
Victims are a means to an end for the left. The left always champions their cause and uses them as convenient excuse to attack normalcy and decency.
Remember the “kids locked in cages” hysteria peddled by the left a few years ago? They never cared about the kids who were smuggled in by Mexican drug cartels. It was never about them. They were used as pawns to demonize anyone that stood up for the rule of law. Then, when their precious victims have outlived their usefulness, they are discarded like trash to make way for the new victim du jour.
The Trouble with Tolerance
I do not relish having to write these articles. But as a Christian game designer with a website, I feel obligated by the tenets of my faith to speak out against this evil.
Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but, instead, expose them.” ― Ephesians 5:11
In 1933, the future Venerable Bishop Fulton J. Sheen said the following prophetic words:
“America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance — it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.”
“Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil … a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons … never to truth. Tolerance applies to the erring, intolerance to the error … Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in the laboratory.“
“Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability.”
Our nation has gone so far down the rabbit hole that we have enshrined tolerance into an unquestioned virtue. For too long, we have worshipped tolerance as a golden idol and we only have to take an honest look at our broken and sick culture for evidence of this.
There’s an old saying:
What we tolerate today, we accept tomorrow.
For evidence of this, society is now promoting mental illness writ large and has lost its collective mind, look no further than a 13 year old boy proclaiming that “gender is over” with his irresponsible mother enabling him and proudly displaying him like a Gucci handbag.
Then we have the spectacle of trans hucksters like Jessica Yaniv — the Borat of the trans world — making a complete mockery of the trans movement.
Already the LGBTQ movement has got their sights on normalizing pedophilia by grooming children by the promotion of Drag Queen Story Hours across America. Once sex with minors becomes law, the normalization of bestiality will be next on their agenda.
If something isn’t done to stop these cultural arsonists, the long march through the institutions will continue until there is nothing left that resembles Western civilization.
What Happened Raph?
There can be no doubt that Raph is a bona fide genius who has made a lasting contribution to virtual worlds. I’ve always admired Raph Koster for his brilliant and thoughtful analysis in his masterwork “A Theory of Fun for Game Design.” His tome was like a Rosetta stone that unlocked the deep secrets of game design. For many years, I relentlessly promoted his book on this website. I even used his insights to help land me my first job in the video game industry.
As to whether Raph believes what he is saying on Twitter I have no idea.
Just because Raph Koster tweets something, doesn’t make it true. Raph Koster’s expertise as a game designer does not make him an expert in science or biology and we should take his opinions on those subjects with a grain of salt.
Honestly, I really don’t care what Raph Koster’s view on any subject other than his area of deep expertise which are: virtual worlds and video games. In the grand scheme of things his opinion on social issues will have zero effect on their ultimate adoption or rejection by the public.
Conclusion
While Koster’s capitulation to the insufferable cult of equality is disappointing, this incident illuminates issues of greater importance beyond the opinions of one solitary man on Twitter. I find it unconscionable that artists must now publicly profess their solidarity with whatever opinions are currently in vogue. Equally bad is that artists are shaming their fellow artists into this stifling conformity of thought and are conspirators in promoting groupthink.
Like the downtrodden citizens of communist North Korea who must enthusiastically cry, laugh, and cheer on command or be sent to a concentration camp or even murdered for their bad acting skills, today’s game developers must virtue signal in an equally pathetic and repugnant display of servitude on various social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn. Failure to do so, means the death of one’s career all thanks to a cadre of power hungry militant trans activists who currently occupy the apogee of the victim totem pole.
An unprecedented war on free speech — a universal right which keeps madness like transgenderism ideology at bay — is well underway. A Muslim lawmaker in Scotland (a 96% white country) just proposed a “hate crime” bill that would make offensive speech in your home at your dinner table illegal. From the article:
Scotland’s new odious hate crime bill would go so far as to criminalize dinner table conversations if their ‘offensive’ content is reported to police.
If this draconian bill were to become law, this article would be illegal in Scotland.
When I became employed in the video game industry in the mid-2000s, I never thought I would see the day where developers would have to publicly announce their subservience to a political/social ideology or risk becoming an unemployable pariah. Most of us old timers got involved in the industry because we innocently just loved making games — not because we were activists that wanted to indoctrinate players.
Of course everyone is entitled to their political, religious, cultural and social opinions, but it was always understood that those opinions were private and not subject to a public purity test that determined whether or not you were employable in the video game industry.
Now prospective candidates for careers in the video game industry are expected to have all the correct opinions and believe in the de rigueur doctrines of diversity, inclusion, and representation which in reality is a Trojan Horse for the normalization of the sinful LGBTQ+ lifestyle.
Just as employers cannot discriminate on the basis of sex, race, creed, skin color and ethnicity, I firmly believe we also need to add political persuasion, non-religious belief, and worldview to that list to prevent this new form of McCarthyism from metastasizing. No one’s thoughts and beliefs should be used as a litmus test for hiring, firing, and the right to purchase goods and services, and receive government benefits.
For over 200 years, Americans believed in liberty and the right to have one’s own opinions. Today’s social justice mandatory belief system — both on social media and in corporate America — is in fact un-American.
One of my favorite oft-repeated quotes is from distinguished American Historian David McCullough from his book The American Spirit:
Never forget that one of our greatest freedoms is the freedom to think for yourself.
Sadly, many American millennials brainwashed by their progressive fascist teachers have never been taught that most American of ideals.
Imagine for a moment the furor that would ensue, if Raph Koster publicly opposed so-called “trans rights.” He would be subject to relentless scorn from the perpetually outraged trans brown shirts on Twitter and would probably lose 40% of his friends. He would no doubt suffer continued persecution. Live by the Twitter sword and die by the Twitter sword. Never fear, there’s always social assistance, food stamps, and UBER and DoorDash as promising career opportunities for the cancelled.
If Koster were to tell the truth, he would have the unique distinction of being an overnight hero, in that he would be one of the few people that has dared to stand up to the intolerant, regressive, neo-Marxists that have taken over popular culture via a silent coup d’état.
The previously unknown academic Jordan Peterson is one such hero that stood up to trans bullies and now thanks to his courage he is an internationally recognized household name. Conversely, few, if any know — including today’s average gamer — who Raph Koster is.
Instead of rising to the occasion and having the courage to the truth, Raph Koster took the easy way out and groveled before the tyranny of identity politics agitators.
“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
It takes no courage to agree with the radical leftists on Twitter. There is no cost associated with it as Twitter is largely a far left echo chamber owned and staffed by zealous leftists where left-wing extremism is praised and opposition to them and diversity of thought is denounced, censored, and punished.
Welcome to 2020 where prideful, black-hearted fiends who present themselves as angels of light, are waging a war on truth, beauty, reality, and ultimately the Creator, in the name of the false god of equality. You shall know them by their fruits.
I don’t want to live in a world where artists — or anyone for that matter — become useful idiots and are forced to publicly agree to a litany of articles of faith or end up having to live in shame courtesy of a depraved ideology concocted by gender studies professors and their gullible student accomplices. But live we must and fight we must with every ounce of our energy. The survival of Western civilization is at stake.
Great art requires that artistic freedom exists. How can great art be created when at least 50% of the population that doesn’t share these views is excluded or is forced to live in fear of being persecuted and shamed?
One of the purposes of art, literature, and entertainment is to offer brief sojourns into the realm of escapism to the audience. The human brain needs fallow time free from the rigors of daily life and the growing intrusion of politics and progressive activism.
Sadly, too many people in the video game business have either forgotten this basic truth or never understood it in the first place.
I have family members who are transgender. This is not idle political posturing for me.
My family barely escaped the Bolsheviks in Eastern Europe during World War 2. Many did not escape and were rounded up and taken to Siberian concentration camps and endured horrific atrocities beyond imagining. The threat of growing totalitarianism and the coercion that results is personal to me. I understand what authentic human rights are.
Well, then, we are probably in agreement on several core things!
– Totalitarianism is bad and must be resisted.
– Everyone deserves basic human rights. (Ergo, of course, that means that any given subgroup does).
There really isn’t a need to complicate it to the degree this post does. You should read my statement (which wasn’t “bullied out of me” or anything) as “this subgroup also deserves human rights.” It is not part of a slippery slope towards totalitarianism when read that way.
If I count far relatives as family, I can make a claim family members died in Auschwitz.
I won’t. I am sorry, was this a cheap shot opening fake argument? Despite it being a poor argument to start with, I will nevertheless accept it as truth and a honest concern of yours.
All rights a transgender person needs are already there. There is no need for special recognition. They are not hunted, they are not being killed. They are protected from discrimination by law.
But there are and will always be indeed people who will hate this or that group or person. They will discriminate homosexuals, transgender persons, any kind of people they hate or just dislike. Even if they are protected by laws. This is already the maximum they can do in the USA. There are many nations who turn a blind eye to prosecution of citizens by other citizens for this or that reason.
What to do?
Trying to change the whole world into acceptance of the peculiar difference of a single person or group is, this is a monumental undertaking.
Trying to do this with laws and public awareness to the point of not only calling out a single person for mistreating a transgender person, but to DEMAND acceptance to the point of obeisance, doing this often extremely aggressively, that’s not the way.
A transgender, homosexual or whatever person is hopefully not defining itself by their sexuality or other things that set them apart from the norm alone.
I know gay people who are not running around semi-naked with a rainbow banner to celebrate that they are gay. They don’t want to and don’t want to be associated with this.
I don’t think the mentioned trans rights will help your family member. He/she will face adversity. It is up for people, friends in particularly, to stand up for him/her. This is better help than hoping for mislead Identity politics, they are not the solution or salvation but only breeding evil instead of providing help and healing.
Some excellent points!
For some reason trans people are disproportionately militant compared to other people. Many of them are waiting to be offended and delight in hurling epithets at people who feel uncomfortable in their presence. Many of the people in ANTFA domestic terror group are trans. Look at the mugshots that Andy Ngo has posted on his Twitter account of arrested ANTIFA rioters and arsonists and you’ll realize that trans people constitution a disproportionate number of them.
For 40 years, I’ve noticed the occasional trans person. I didn’t think anything of it but it did make me feel strange and uncomfortable. I felt sorry for them to be honest. They were exceedingly rare until a few years ago, when becoming trans is suddenly fashionable. The trans people back then just wanted to live out their lives in peace without bothering anyone. Many of today’s trans people are abrasive, obnoxious, and seeking attention because they are trans.
When I think of the problems that trans people have it is dwarfed by the serious problems that exist in our society with things like opiate abuse, suicide, poverty and more. My niece died of an overdose of fentanyl last year. Nobody on Twitter cared about her death and the hundreds of thousands of people who died each year from overdoses and addiction. My sister is an alcoholic, she’s is dying a slow death from this horrible disease. I would never claim that both of my niece and my sister addictions were identities that need to be protected.
Good and decent people are tired of being labeled by identity politics hucksters and their enablers. Be the change you want to see in the world. Maybe then you can lecture the rest of us. Until then, please shut up and leave us alone.
Transgender folks have the same rights as everyone else, not sure what they need to fight for. What they really need is help. Not knowing whether you’re male of female is a serious psychological disorder that shouldn’t be encouraged or “protected”. It should be diagnosed and treated.
And yes, I have family members who suffer from it also. That’s a lousy reason to support the behavior. They aren’t shunned or neglected by our family, but we don’t act like what they’re doing is ok.
Let me take a look here….
Raph Koster Twitter
Joined February 2009
329 Following
19.4K Followers
Trans rights post at glance on October 31 0202
2 comments
12 retweets
72 likes
He has 19k followers and he can only muster 72 likes to sell his soul out? Makes me think that Raph is being threaten or blackmailed in this case. And no Raph, you can’t put regret in my mind- don’t try.
To the topic at hand, with the age of compromise, hubris, no bedrock moral standing, no decency , and worst of all the abandonment of truths, there is a falling out of people and looked upon heroes. Every day I am not surprised when one submits themselves to the MOB air of rulership chanting Love is Love, when really they are saying Love backwards as Evol(Evil) because they themselves are a contradiction of many facts and stances that do not make any sense at all.
Perversion is the game of Evil.
You can lead a horse to water, but there’s only so much you can do, and they return to licking the vomit from the ground. Lines are being drawn, sides are gathered. A harvest for fine grain, a harvest for burning.
Great post! You are spot on about everything, sadly many of the people living in their West coast bubble have darkened their hearts by their pride. Those people are fertile ground for the devil and his minions. It’s sad how so many people sell their precious souls for fleeting praise and the respect of men.