I'm done, I'm fucking tired of them.
I don't understand these pieces of shit anymore. Every "gaming" community I'm (sadly) part of is filled with these monumental pieces of dog shit, every one of them has a very vocal group of reactionary pieces of shit that just makes me wanna throw them into the Barbara Pit. UGH.
So I play mostly two games these days, STALKER "Anomaly" and World of Warships. About Stalker, I'm part of a discord server that handles everything related to the "mod" called "Anomaly", pretty fun game if you ask me, try it out if you like survival shit. Now, that game has only ONE woman in the entire world, nicknamed "Hip", which has a questline and shit. For some reason, incels in that community hate her, like holy fucking shit they hate her a lot. It's not uncommon to see "memes" directed at a fucking female NPC and those who "simp" for her (???), saying things like "Man I wish this game had gore so I can see Hip's head explode" and shit like that. WHAT. THE. FUCK.
There is always, every day, at least one comment directed at a fucking female NPC, people who take pride in "killing Hip" to "keep the Zone clean", holy fucking shit, it's exhausting. Sadly, it became quite common in that community, it's pretty fucking sad.
Now World of Warships has a mainly boomer audience, some of these american boomers I met are good people, like they just care about shooting at other boats with their boats and have some fun. Others... are quite worse. There's an entire clan dedicated to Donald Trump, how fucking cringe is that? I'm more or less undercover in their discord server and oh my fucking god, it's terrible, it's a fucking hellhole. It's THE reactionary shithole.
Some illustrious members of the Warships community, in other words, "Community Contributors" or "popular" streamers in general do like being pieces of shit. One of them, perhaps the most popular, recently called another streamer "a fucking r-word", live, in front of like 700 or more people. Another streamer said "This guy is a fucking r-word, but you know guys, it's actually ok to be a r-word, but it's not ok to be autistic" in front of 100 people because that player did a mistake (The autistic people, to him, are those who play a specific class in the game), plus the guy goes around dropping the r-word at everything because yeah, that's fine. Like what the fuck is wrong with these people, WHY? Why are they like this? Do they have no compassion? Do they have to fucking empathy for anyone? What even is their problem? Why do they get triggered with a FEMALE NPC IN A GAME ABOUT SURVIVAL IN CHERNOBYL? why do they get so fucking triggered when someone does something they don't like?
There are more examples, but these are the most recent. And this is a super specific corner of the gaming world, like STALKER and World of Warships (I bet some of you never even heard of the latter), I know it's even worse among larger and more generic communities. I just don't understand how g*mers sprinted to the right so damn fucking quick...
Oh and let alone the recent peak in sinophobia in War Thunder, a game where a bunch of chinese players go and play in the North American servers. These people are constantly harassed by white westerners who just yell at them "1989 TIANANMEN SQUARE", "FREE HONG KONG" or "TAIWAN REAL CHINA", among other a bit more racist things, the moment they spot one, like wtf are they even doing?
Fuck them.
And I need to go out as well, but fucking COVID won't let me.
All male communities
All male development studios
Entire communities of socially inept people. With the loudest voices being the most socially inept people because visibility and recognisability in a community is determined by activity-level. The most active rise to the top. This group with the highest activity and most recognisability become leadership in the community. A vanguard of sorts, if you will.
Development studios influenced by what they perceive to be the feelings of the community, which are actually the feelings led by this socially inept vanguard.
Development studios begin to become filled with this vanguard of people, who are deeply attracted to the industry because the games being made are being made specifically to be attractive to this vanguard.
The vanguard leads the studios. Games get ever more reactionary. Attract even wider reactionary communities, create reactionaries all by themselves. Create huge reactionary networks of online fans. Create reactionary videomakers. Create reactionary streamers. Create reactionary journalism. All aspects reinforce the problem.
Through polling, studio execs begin to recognise that to make more money they must be less reactionary. Studio execs begin to push back, fighting the reactionary shit because they want to appeal to wider audiences rather than a niche market of reactionaries they've created. In particular they want more women and "normal" people.
This creates a contradiction in gaming. A contradiction between the wishes of the vanguard of the community and the wishes of the business execs. Everyone recognises that this clash occurs both inside studios and outside in the community itself.
The existence of a contradiction and the elevating of the contradiction by the business side creates a reaction. The reactionaries double, triple and quadruple down upon their reactionary behaviour. Gamergate and every instance of reactionary Gamer-drama since it are the series of events I am referring to here. It works however, the business execs were right and their market continues to grow by their actions to push back against the reactionary vanguard.
You are here. Modern gaming. The videogame audience are now a community split completely in half by the reactionary side that we call "Gamers" and the non reactionary side that we call "people who play games".
Obviously I'm only doing this as a very quick breakdown. I suspect you could write an entire book on the series of events that would lead to this point. I don't mean this to be completely correct but a rough breakdown.
It really comes down to the vanguard or "power users" if you prefer. The problem of the most active community members rising to the top and becoming your defacto leadership in a community, with that leadership being the most influential in shaping the feedback you get from the community. Studios and their communities listening to and empowering this vanguard is the pivotal point in the history of gaming at which things took the turn towards the reactionary direction of today.
I really wish more people would adopt this line of thinking if it's not already prevalent. Even back then I despised the "gamers" even though I couldn't pinpoint exactly what about them rubbed me the wrong way.
I think a lot of people have started to adopt this, mainly through being against "gamer" being an identity... Or even more cringey.. A nation.