It has come to light that the original logo in 2004 was a Koffing with a Swastika instead of the normal crossbones thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPG6vIN8Kx8

Video by cecilily - We need to talk about the Nazi past of Smogon

gamer-gulag

This is so outrageous it seems fake, but they adressed it last year and decided not to change the name which is peak freeze-gamer

  • Comrade_Mushroom [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    352·
    2 days ago

    You’re telling me the people who started something because they were elitist gamers who wanted to reduce something fun and artistic entirely to a cold, soulless numbers game were also disgusting fascist pigs?

    Thank goodness something like that would never happen anywhere else, especially not at my favorite video game company, Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.!

    • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      221·
      1 day ago

      wanted to reduce something fun and artistic entirely to a cold, soulless numbers game

      As an autistic person who enjoys numbers games this feels kinda ableist tbh. People find joy in different things, you’re not better for disliking numbers.

      • Comrade_Mushroom [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        You could be right! I’ve just come across a lot lot lot lot lot lot lot lot lot of people who sure did think they were better than everyone else for liking vidya game numbers more than others. And you only need to spend about 90 seconds with any group of WoW players who treat that game that way to uncover a social environment as disgustingly bigoted as anything you’d find on 4chan. And those guys sure didn’t hesitate to utilize slurs of all varieties when putting down anyone and everyone who dared to care even a little bit about anything other than what the 3rd party website that ranked them said about how big their numbies were, at every available opportunity.

        “Hardcore” Pokemon players could be different, I dunno. And I’m certain it’s not a 1-to-1 edgeworth-shrug

        I know I shouldn’t generalize, it’s not a thing I appreciate when others do. I just have a built-in bias because the most vile words I have ever heard another human speak came from number-centric WoW players who thought you were a lesser human being if you didn’t care about your numerical parses as much as they did theirs; it is a type of person I struggled with for more than a decade, during which time I never met a single group of “hardcore” players who, as a whole, managed to avoid this type of behavior. (And many of the people who started out as players of the game exhibiting this behavior, are now high-ranking members of the company.)

        • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
          3·
          10 hours ago

          From what I understand of the current pokemon competitive community, it’s actually really cool people, a lot of the most well known folks in the community like BigYellow and PlagueVonKarma are nonbinary or trans, and it seems to be a really supportive community where people encourage each other rather than the sort of toxic communities the far right creates. I’ve had quite a few people start up a nice chat with me after a match, which I can’t really say for most competitive online communities.