Due to what has become our specific remit, we – or at least I, Nathan – have spent the week with eyes on the “government uses gamer memes” situation like a diligent newscopter. The latest development? The Department Of Homeland Security has started sprinkling Lord Of The Rings in with its misunderstanding of Halo. But though the cultural touchstones might be new (relative to, like, the 1950s and decidedly not relative to modern gaming culture), the tactics are not. Viciously calling back to an imagined better time is the oldest trick in the far-right book. On the latest Aftermath Hours, we talk about that.
This time around, we bathe in the afterglow of Aftermath’s first-ever in-person party before hinting at big changes to come (the good kind) as a result of the site’s upcoming second anniversary. Note: Due to a technical issue we learned about right after recording this episode, those changes will be coming the week after next – not next week, as we said during the episode. Apologies for the confusion.
Then we discuss the United States government’s sudden gaming fixation, following a flood of Halo memes from White House and Department Of Homeland Security accounts, as well as JD Vance’s embarrassing reveal that he not only keeps abreast of Twitch drama but is fluent in CollarGate, a widespread nontroversy about Hasan Piker turning out to be a secret dog torturer.
After that, we move on to Amazon’s devastating layoff of 14,000 people, including many of those working on New World, a once-popular MMO that’s now being wound down. As it turns out, like many others, Amazon tried to take on Steam, and also like many others, it failed miserably. Finally, in honor of the surprise 3.0 update, we share our Animal Crossing: New Horizon opinions (Nintendo was too inspired by cozy games, a genre it basically invented with… Animal Crossing.)
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can make a modern Animal Crossing where all the villagers verbally accost you again.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Chris: All of these things do have a feeling of dragging and resuscitating a corpse. Who the fuck actively cares about Halo right now? The only reason they did that is because [Microsoft] announced that remaster PlayStation is also getting – that whole conversation. I looked at that remaster and was like “If you guys want that, that’s fine.” But I can already play Halo multiple ways. The Master Chief Collection is kinda fine.
Gita: It makes me think of the sort of shared masculinity of the Halo choir in the bathroom – that kind of thing. Those are the good old days that they’re trying to harken back to. It also ties into the sort of [80s and] 90s AI slop that you’ll see on nostalgia channels now, where it’s trying to imagine a past of being a white, teenage suburbanite. A world where Halo was non-toxic, uncomplicated fun never existed. Halo’s notoriousness for being a toxic game was evident from the moment that online lobbies started existing [for Halo 2].
Nathan: Xbox Live was the original place that got called out for being full of kids saying slurs.
It’s notable too that the other series these government agencies are now drawing on is Lord Of The Rings. Same time period – at least, if we’re talking about the movies. They’re trying to harken back to specific people’s childhood. But that’s always what these far-right, often-fascist movements do. Remember the good old days, whatever those might be. For a while the aesthetic touchstone was the 1950s or some imagined version of it. Now it’s an imagined version of the 2000s. You’ve gotta advance it forward to keep things relevant to your prospective audience.
But yeah, they’re just running the same playbook as always, only this time on the media of our youth as opposed to that of older people.
Gita: It’s so funny that Lord Of The Rings is in this milieu, because most of my memory of Lord Of The Rings is reading gay fan fiction about it from that same time period. I was reading about the hobbits fucking each other.
Chris: They do kinda [seem to be].
Gita: It seems like they have, or at least that they have a very intense friendship – one of those ones where they stopped talking after a certain point in time, and then one of them comes out as gay decades later.
But it shows the limits of their imagination. They can’t imagine that there’s a massive group of people that also like Halo and Lord Of The Rings and nerd stuff [but are queer and progressive].
Nathan: This is the other thing I think it’s very important to note about fascism as a movement and ideology: It cannot create. It can only co-opt. That’s what it does: It finds something to latch onto and says that it either always [belonged to the far-right] or that an imagined version of it that never existed is the thing to which everyone should aspire. Again, they’re grabbing onto something that previously existed and people had strong feelings about at the time, and they’re trying to graft their own ideology onto it, regardless of what that thing was actually about or what other people read into it.
