“Standoff” was a school shooting-simulation video game developed by Acid games that was on track to debut on the online gaming platform Steam until it was pulled by the platform in late May. The decision to withhold the game from the public followed a viral campaign organized by parents of the Stoneman Douglas Highschool shooting victims that gathered 100,000 signatures calling for the cancellation of the game.

Anton Makarevskiy, a lead developer at Acid games, said in a half-hearted apology letter addressed to the Steam community that he did not intend to promote violence or hatred with the game, but was following in the footsteps of other shock-value phenomenal games like Postal or Hatred.

To reduce the growing backlash, Makarevskiy created a private forum as a sounding board for gamers to voice their contempt over Steam’s removal of the game. In the forum anonymous members exalted Makarvskiy for his opus magnum, listing it among other gruesome works produced in the same vein like A Serbian Film, and Two guys one hammer.

It seems that the supporters of this game all fit a similar profile: edgy young people who’ve flirted with dark fantasies and are drawn to hyper realistic brutality and violence. Some commenters on the forum referenced their appreciation for Isis snuff films.

It’s been 8 months since the game has been pulled from Steam and in the aftermath of the controversial firestorm hailed by free speech proponents and school shooting victims, a glaring detail had gone under the radar. While critics were so shocked at the violence portrayed in the game, they would have been even more shocked had they investigated actual footage from the game play.

In the game, a player takes on the role of an active shooter and can choose his killing instrument from an arsenal of weaponry including AK-47’s, knives, machine guns, and pistols. When the player steps foot into a school, he is confronted by poorly animated swat officers who are all trying to kill him. If he gets past the swat team (which is super easy to do) he can then hunt down civilians who are scattered around the school.

The game has some standards as it avoided featuring children civilians in the schools…Which is… good? I guess. But perhaps highlighting an equally twisted fantasy it only features young attractive women as civilians, all of whom are scantily clad, defenseless, and literally immobile. The women are placed around the school like sitting ducks and either don’t run away when they are shot at or very stupidly fumble over each other trying to find escape. They are portrayed as lifeless, brain dead creatures diversified solely by the color of their clothing, while their athletic builds and giant breasts are uniform traits.

This problematic portrayal of women led me to dig a little deeper into Makarvskiy’s life, and on the 5th minute of my Googling I unsurprisingly found a video of him… wearing a fedora.

Now, a fedora isn’t always the trappings of an incel women hater. Some men pulled off the fedora. Look at Winston Churchill or Theodore Roosevelt, luminaries of their time who rocked the fedora with unabashed pride.

So I’m not saying that you’re an incel if you wear a fedora, I’m just saying that every incel owns one. The Fedora caught on as an incel trend mainly because it denotes a lack of social consciousness and mainstream style. To put it in perspective, the height of the fedora was during the roaring twenties, almost 100 years ago.

If you haven’t heard of “incel” before, I’d suggest Googling it because I don’t want to go into a full incel profile here. But very briefly “incel” stands for “involuntarily celibate” and it’s a self-identified term used to express men who are contemptuous over the lack of sex they are getting. Here is a music video I made to demonstrate:

The incel community has evolved into advanced networks of socially awkward women haters who blame all their problems on the rest of the world. The utter contempt of people and social situations is the glue that binds the counterculture incel communities. Using their social contempt as a springboard, they’re able to jump into toxic realms unchecked by social norms. Some school shooters were active in incel communities, and they are often praised for carrying out incel fantasies of giving an unfair world a taste of its own medicine. The toxic incel groups largely exist on internet forums such as The Red Pill, on Reddit, and a new up and coming group dubbed Incels Without Hate, which they named in hopes of rebranding their collective image.

Incels have developed a language of their own to describe various skewed world views that fuel their animosity. Attractive men who’ve conquered women’s sexuality and keep them out of incel reach are called “Chads.” Chads are muscular men whose magnetism and confidence threaten incel hopes of ever attaining sexual relationships because they simply cannot compete. A “Stacy” is an objectifying term used to describe the women that the Chad ensnares. Stacy is busty, attractive, and too stupid to realize that she is missing out on the “nice guys” by settling for a Chad.

So essentially Stand Off serves as a toxic virtual playground for incels to live out their deranged fantasies of slaughtering Stacy-like women. Though there is no evidence that the creator is an incel, his 100-year old sense of fashion and his violent fantasies directed towards women led me to pick up on a strong incel scent.