There are many people who would tell you that Gamergate was the start of the culture war as we know it today.

Many gamers would tell you that when left wing and a deterianism started to seep into their culture, there was a backlash.

But even among the mainstream, we see this narrative. NBC News, for instance, ran a story saying there's a connection between gamers and the alt-right,

and this led to the rise of Trump and certain right wing figures.

And to an extent, there's kind of an overlap for sure, but it's kind of more of an enemy of my enemy thing, I would think,

that many gamers are apolitical, but were aided by people who were political because they both kind of opposed politics.

It's complicated. But there's some news today that define particularly interesting.

See, one of the big fights in the culture war is free speech versus hate speech.

That online, you shouldn't be allowed to disparage certain people, and you have the left saying,

well, the private businesses they can do whatever they want, and you have typically the right in the anti-authoritarians saying

free speech should be protected regardless of whether it's public or on a private platform.

We're now hearing that Blizzard is going to be implementing a new kind of moderation system for the chat

on a game called Overwatch. Basically, if you want to chat while watching a pro esports game,

you have to link your account to your actual gaming account.

For those that aren't familiar, basically this means that your digital property, the games you own,

will now be connected to your username on a different platform.

Some people are concerned that this could result in you saying something wrong, getting banned and actually losing property.

I don't know if that's true, because we don't know exactly what the measures are going to be with this news.

But it does seem like they're trying to increase the risk for those who engage in certain kind of speech.

So today, I want to focus on this latest news, talk about how video games are kind of a testing ground

for many of these new political and cultural policies, and I want to talk about how gaming is kind of the

front line in the culture war. But before we get started, please head over to Timcast.com

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