Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Gold Scamming, steve bannon

Despite Security Clearance Steve Bannon Is Still Acting Like A WoW Gold Scammer

After having Elizabeth Warren taken out of the Senate for reading a letter in session, I've gone over Steve Bannon's gaming history, mostly in regards to his past as a World of Warcraft Gold Scammer. Honestly, its the basic scammer life of taking out loans of real money to buy gold and then selling it on a separate market.

Yes, Steve Bannon is a man with an impressive security clearance who used to scam players for gold on World of Warcraft for tiny, tiny profits. Before Breitbart, Bannon was the worst type of gamer we've all dealt with, so we at BC are going to look at his political motivations through the lens of his gaming background. Because of course we are.

But not only does he continue to work the same self-interest that led him to gold farming, Bannon's picked up a few more habits from the gaming world. He's even started telling members of the press who were mean to him to go teabag things. You know, because that's what you do in gaming. Sadly he seems to have gotten the terminology a bit off. In gaming, you teabag enemies you kill as an insult, naturally. Bannon seems to think that telling you to "teabag this" is some kind of powerplay where he's the winner. Don't believe me? I do not blame you. So here, watch the whole thing for yourself.

So he's moved on from gold scamming and onto tactics best left to the lowest common denominator of the FPS community. You know the type, they kill you and rather than let you keep your dignity, they proceed to hit the "crouch" button over and over while standing on top of your corpse, effectively teabagging your dead virtual avatar. I've got all kinds of thoughts about the people prone to teabagging, but Bannon's use is just embarrassing.

His growth over the last month as Trump's chief strategist has been rather quick for a man who mostly settled himself on the fringes of gaming as a gold scammer in EverQuest in 2001 and later in World of Warcraft in 2004. Also in 2004 was the debut of his film "In The Face of Evil: Reagan's War In Word And Deed" which, according to Maggie Gallagher of the Northwest Herald was serving into an "untapped market" for conservatism. The film itself seems to make it's main point that all evil is the same, and only through the courage of the good can it be defeated. What makes this so interesting given Bannon's current role is that the entire conceit of the film is rather basic, it relies on its audience having core "christian" values that they feel are in dire jeopardy which Bannon then pointed at the easy target. In 2004 we were just past the attack on the World Trade Center and Islamophobia was high. Combining the terrorism of Al Queida bombers with the cold war against "communism" along with the Nazi regime into one all-evil "Beast" is the kind of lazy filmmaking tactic you expect of first year film students. It wasn't enough that Bannon simply call Al-Quida Nazis, though, he cut in clips of Churchill's speeches. Particularly the "Finest Hour" one. Variety's review of the film reads "'In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed" places the 40th President in the guise of anti-Soviet Cold Warrior, leaving aside other issues and perspectives.'"

I didn't bring that last bit up just out of a hit-parade on Bannon, no. While an anti-Nazi movie seems like an odd choice for the alt-right poster boy, it does effectively mirror much of the black-and-white, us-against-them rhetoric that has made Breitbart the sort of alt-right bastion it has become. And that it's also the exact kind of black-and-white storytelling common in many older games. The early Call of Duty games focused on WWII for several reasons, but they've got a very binary morality system which was incredibly common in early games. Without a lot of processing power and with a younger fan base, there was little need to appeal to a more nuanced morality system or even much in the way of character development. The entire Mario series focuses on your plumber character saving a princess from an evil Koopa, Bowser. Yet we never get an answer to what makes Bowser so evil, just that he's kidnapped a princess. The guy has an immense amount of wealth that is entirely unexplained but does it matter? He has so many castles. Similarly, Variety's review calls "In The Face of Evil" as "less strictly biographical than ideological-historical, told in a stentorian rhetoric (as forcefully narrated by Irene Zeigler) that will recall for some viewers the uncompromising prose of Ayn Rand. Thus, what will turn off the uncommitted or opponents will excite true believers, with little ground for nuanced historical debate."

So Bannon started virtual currency scams, moved on to story telling with the kind of deft touch one would expect from an N64 game, turned into the kind of rule-loving pedant everyone hates to have at their game nights. They're the ones who ignore long-held house rules, who call for a rule check every three minutes, and mostly focus their hate on the female members of the group. At least, that's how I'm choosing to read the Warren situation from a few weeks ago. Sure, Bannon isn't named, but if you don't believe the man has his hands in everything, more the fool you.

And now he's graduated to early multiplayer FPS tactics like teabagging. I think it's only a matter of time until we get to the "your mom" jokes and telling everyone else to "git gud."

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