Because gamers are usually maladjusted loners who have no social skills
Complete lack of censorship or moderation causes some people to get 2edgy5me, and then upon being told to stop instead double down in their contrarianism until there's nothing left but hate with only the thinnest veneer of joking on it
Also the war is cool and medieval/gothic aesthetics are fun south park conservatives.
I play Mordhau extensively, and yeah, the Chud presence is sickening, so many people being just downright disgusting. But, I've found myself a little circle of LGBTQ+ Players and its still relatively fun to play
Gaming is a hobby with a price tag that excludes the poor and minorities so you have a higher proportion of spoilt reactionaries than in other places.
Also gaming is often a very alienating way of interacting with other people as you only have a username and a character in a fictionalised setting. This makes it easy to lose empathy and forget that you are dealing with real people.
The fash pay very close attention to how permissive spaces both online and offline are to them. Once they find a place a place where slurs are fine, reactionary talking points are fine, where outright nazi shit is fine, word spreads quickly and you have an infestation at hand. Then they move from "we just want to hang out and shoot the shit, pls keep politics out of this" to agitprop and recruitment and you have a bunch of fash hitlering off 24/7. After this has gone on for a while, pushing back becomes tiresome for libs and lefties and that space is lost.
This is why strict moderation is necessary in every online medium and why you need a robust antifa irl. You need to curb that kind of stuff before it takes root, or you'll regret it later on. But publishers are reluctant to do that because they don't want to miss out on the nazi dollar. This is part of why chuds get so worked up about inane pop culture topics. They do not actually care about boob armor, but they do care about controlling online communities with a lot of young members who don't have solid political views yet and are therefore are easily influenced. This goes doubly for communities where the fash core demo of frustrated white boys is overrepresented. Same reason why Bannon picked Gamergate for recruiting.
Because people are already reactionary and the anonymity that being online provides gives them the cover to be openly reactionary
I've started playing these games with the mic/chat turned off, it's much better.
The culture is made by old white men to apeal to. children. In that reguard it is just as rascist as any other thing.
This is not scientific but I really think all of the years of power fantasy and skinner box dopamanine really does rot the gamer brain somehow. If not rot it, just keep it from developing useful critical facalty.
Either way they are emboldened to say what they want because they know they are the hero of legend. How many times have you saved the world?
A lot of it has to do with the tools games give you to deal with it. If they know you can't do anything about it, they'll be as toxic as possible.
Games with FF tend to self-regulate much better. The other night I was playing pavlov TTT and a guy yelled "Everyone, if you hate removeds, switch to the nazi skin" during the pre-round, and the rest of the server immediately banded together to hunt them down.
My experience with them from early 360 days is that they were all 12 trying to be edgy and "cool" using the words they were never allowed to say around their parents and then they continued playing shitty games with other 12 year olds as they aged and never mentally grew up so they just continued to spout their slurs. Then over time they internalized them and started actually hating poc, Jews, women, gays, and de evil sjws
Currently Destiny 2 is doing a seasonal storyline about xenophobia and bigotry and a nauseating amount of the community is trying to both sides it, even when the writing is already taking a very middle of the road approach
Playing video games is pretty ubiquitous within first world nations (and heck is even getting more common in the global south). I think the answer is the same as the answer to the question of "why are all anime fans racist/sexist/whatever". It's nothing inherent to the media, it's more just entitled people claimed ownership to the subcultures surrounding it and bullied out everyone else. Most people are just happy to consume the shit and keep it at that, but there's a subset of nasty asshole who want some ownership over it.
Well anime does have a lot of conservative undertones. It also specifically caters to pedos. There are plenty of shows that are great, but the majority of popular shows from the biggest producers are more likely to be palatable to right wing audiences than to left wing audiences.
Similarly bideo gaymes have had a representation problem forever stemming from the marketing of it towards suburban white adolescents in the 90s. The cost of a decent rig just exacerbates this.
:joker-gaming:
Similarly bideo gaymes have had a representation problem forever stemming from the marketing of it towards suburban white adolescents in the 90s.
That’s like… all western media.
