Hardcore gamer = someone who plays only cinematic grizzed white dude games and/or military fetishizing FPS
Casual gamer = anyone that is not a 15-25 yo male, and/or plays anything outside of the previously mentioned games, especially if those games are colorful.
So basically the gaming community is full of gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery. They make sure they're the loudest voice heard when anything about games is talked about, and won't be happy until all games a homogenous stream of bland, hyper-realistic but with a grey filter slog of mindless action with no heart or soul. And don't you dare force them to read any dialogue or story.
In 1980 something, Nintendo of America made the decision to sell the Nintendo Entertainment System as a gendered toy
This would later be considered a bad idea and roundly mocked
Me playing a gameboy color at age 7
My friend at the time: "Why do you have that, it's not called a Game GIRL"
Bro it was the 90s, most little boys were mini Shapiros
CORE MEMORY
Also being called a lesbian for playing Nintendo with the boys in grade school. The nineties, man.
Was it? I remember it being praised for yeas and "saving the game industry"
It's why I quit MMOs and multi-player in general. Just let me dick around. There's like 9 classes and 40 weapons just let me do what I want to do. This is my 1 hour of downtime after work before chores. I'm not going to spend that hour watching or reading some jargon laden guide so I can get berated by a 14 year old anyway.
i like that they had to give a cool name for
"The strategy we force everyone to learn because none of us are willing to develop communication skills for our team-based multiplayer games."
If I wanted to play a game with strict meta shit I'd just learn chess.
A plurality trying to imitate proplay without actually learning why they make the choices they do (The rest are one tricks who just play their main). Its why you can learn to last hit consistently and climb to plat on the income difference. Learning "Bruisers are strong all rounders, generally picked for their self sufficiency. Picking them frees the jungler to play more around botside objectives like drake" is something most players never learn
There's a time and place for it, busting a game wide open and seeing how absurd a power level you can reach is absolutely fun too
Mvm meta is absolutely crazy, you can actually be put on a banlist simply or picking weapons that are deemed to be too broken.
It's funny to clown on nerds using "the meta" using non meta stuff yourself. Beating them flying their f22s in ace combat using an F-2A or MiG 21. Beating the meta cars in Gran Turismo using a GR3 Volkswagen beetle race car. Them rage quitting in the game chat and direct messages is comedy fuel
lmao I fly the Mig 21 in DCS, get a player kill in that thing and people are just so impressed they can't even get mad. Just gotta use Vietnamese ambush tactics and know when to commit and when to run.
Starcraft 2's co-op mode is the cure for this. I haven't played it in a while so idk if there are still people playing it but you get broken special powers and units and the "meta" doesn't matter at all because you just get to have fun blasting away at the AI and every RTS should have a mode just like it because it's great.
I remember Blizz released stats at one point and something like only 20% of players had ever played a matchmade multiplayer game, and only 5% played them regularly. And then you see new RTS' come out that are multiplayer only and it's no wonder why they all flop.
SC2's co-op is still pretty active. you can find a game on any difficulty in under a minute pretty much any time of day.
gamergate was unironically the mainstream debut of the alt-right and I will stand by that assertion
It became more and more intertwined with the right wing as the 2016 election drew closer. Gamer Gate and adjacent communities turned into a pipeline for the alt right, with YouTubers like Sargon of Akkad radicalizing libs into fascists.
I watched it unfold on r/KotakuInAction at the time. It was a weird crossroads for me.
I watched it unfold on r/KotakuInAction
You just brought up icky memories
It was a weird crossroads
Same. I was all for severing the ties between gaming journalists and publishers and ending the status quo of paid high review scores, but luckily past-me saw and rejected the misogyny that was also heavily present in those spaces and I didn't end up turning into a nazi.
The way you phrased your comment makes it sound like your take is controversial. Are there really a lot of people who think otherwise?
I had never heard of them until Milo Yannopolous got popular in 2016. Back then, it meant "alternative right" as an opposition to GOP establishment and RINOs. Boy, they sure got a lesson in entryism as every piece of shit in America jumped on the train.
Yes I agree coupled with the refugee crisis of 2014-15, fash talking points became mainstream.
Lots of good points being made but I don't like when it veers toward hatred of demanding games on a conceptual level. Ultrakill has lots of heart and soul and also challenges the player in order to evoke a certain experience, and that is part of the art of games.
"Hardcore" games without much story, games with leaderboards and bragging rights, aren't always being made to exclude and insult players. That stuff is fun sometimes, like Hyper Demon, a beautiful minimalist game in both concept and execution that many players will not necessarily excel at.
Petty, pedantic point perhaps but I do like a game that expects me to learn a bit to win.
Yeah the mentality that every game should be beatable by a 90 year old who has never touched a computer before otherwise it's not "accessible" is so fucking dumb. When I play my hardcore difficulty pokemon romhack because I want a harder game, I don't expect Nintendo to make the actual game that way. When people who want easy games play challenging games, they demand that the developers make them easy(see dark souls easy mode discourse). It's this mentality that liking challenge makes you "toxic" which just idiotic.
Let people know the intended experience is challenging. If people aren't able to meet the game at its level of challenge, for any number of reasons, and turn the difficulty down to where it is doable to them, why not let them? Set the default to the "intended experience" but let people of different ability levels have their fun too.
By the way, people who are much better than games on average are also not having the "intended experience", but no one is upset at them for not "respecting art". People playing Dark Souls on guitar hero controllers or w/e aren't having the "intended experience".
The anti-easy mode discourse is just ableism in a mask.
No need to take it that far, I'm not against difficulty levels but it's not always easy to tell how to make a game easier in that sense. If a "scene" in a game revolves around "get the ball in the cup when I say go," not getting the ball into the cup when the screen says go means you don't progress. It's within the scope of "artistic vision" for the dev to want a character in the scene to congratulate you for getting that ball in that cup only when you've done it is all I'm saying.
Like sure, in a big AAA game with a cinematic story broken up by combat sections, I think it's fair to say that an easy mode, even the "story mode" without any way to fail that some of them offer, is understandable. But isn't it fair for a rhythm game to expect you to follow a beat, or for a jigsaw puzzle to withhold the picture the pieces make until you put it together? Plenty of indie games don't really have anything to offer beyond the "toy" they present the player with. Sometimes a game is made to teach you its systems until you can do it, like learning an instrument, and I wouldn't say that's ableist.
How wide is the rim of the cup? How heavy is the ball? How viscous is the air the ball flies through? What counts as "doing it" or "not doing it" in any given system either involves an arbitrary line or error-bars of some sort. There's no harm in having a setting to move that line slightly or to make those error-bars wider. Or must we bow to an auteur's artistic vision (or a community's bigotry) about these things? Perhaps if the artistic point of the thing is to make people suffer in some way, but otherwise?
[M]ust we bow to an auteur's artistic vision (or a community's bigotry) about these things? Perhaps if the artistic point of the thing is to make people suffer in some way, but otherwise?
I can't speak for Poogona, but balancing a game for different difficulty levels while still making the game enjoyable is going to be harder for some games than others. That doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done, just that the task is non trivial. I imagine things would be better in this regard without booj cracking the whip on devs.
It doesn't have to be about making a player "suffer," I'm just saying that being able to "lose" in a game doesn't have to be ableist or done for the sake of masculine ego. And winning or losing doesn't have to be arbitrary, I can imagine the size and physics of the ball being designed to mimic the real thing rather than being designed for maximum accessibility, which would be the choice of the dev. I feel kinda silly arguing about this now but this rhetoric about a game that might not be immediately accessible to all players being "masked ableism" and of "bowing" to artistic vision is surprising to hear. Risk of failure and design that takes advantage of mechanical depth can add to the fun, it doesn't have to be interpreted as bigotry.
All mediated representations involve making arbitrary decisions, even if “reality” (whatever that really means in a game) is the goal. To continue torturing this metaphor: what kind of real ball and what kind of real cup are you simulating, and to what level of precision? These are choices and never have to be made just one way.
Of course you’re right, it’s not masked ableism to lose occasionally, that’s a normal part of properly adjusted difficulty. But it is quite another thing to make it impossible - that’s exclusionary and is probably not something that should be celebrated.
Yes, making games does involve a lot of intense labour, especially with the absolutely gargantuan scale and budgets many of them have now.
to make people suffer in some way
Yes! That's it! You've hit the nail on the head. People don't pay $60 to feel frustrated. They pay $60 to feel good. If the game doesn't deliver what they paid for, why does it even exist?
People also don't pay to be unchallenged, which is how we wound up with derogatory nicknames like "walking simulator"
People's threshold for challenge and fun are all over the place and so are the games that do and should exist
But it doesn't work that way. They get lowered to the level of the customers who don't want to overcome challenges. All they want is a good feeling. And those brain chemicals that get released by being led by the nose around a level are real.
When you pay full price for a game, do you deserve to experience all of the content contained therein? Or do you have to spend hours of tedious frustration, feeling bad brain chemicals, just to get what you already paid good money for? You feel enough bad brain chemicals with your job and your family already, why are you spending your precious few free hours doing the same?
In older games. If turning down the difficulty in the intended way didn't work, then they'd let you skip the section after, say, 20 failures. Or the game would have branching mission paths that made losing not a game over.
When I think of "old games" I think of the opposite, of games that had limited lives and no save systems. Not defending that, but considerations of differing player ability are certainly a newer development rather than the old way of things.
Games back then didn't have to consider differing player abilities (which honestly isn't that true either since multiple difficulties were already a thing) because cheat codes existed. Story mode was basically the easiest difficulty on top of a god mode and infinite ammo cheat code.
Sure but those cheat codes weren't always easy to access before widespread internet use. You used to be able to buy books of cheat codes in fact.
I sometimes play old games and I do not consider save states to be even remotely cheating. A challenge is one thing, but forcing you to repeat an entire 8 minute level full of tricky jumps only to make it at the boss at the end with 2 health and losing...that's just not fun. And it was bullshit even back in the day.
We already solved this problem in the 90s. The solution is to design a hard game but also have cheat codes to make the game easier (or even harder). But most modern game developers are completely allergic towards adding a simple god mode or infinite ammo code into their shitty game, so we're stuck with arguing over whether story mode is good or not (it's good if you insist on not having cheat codes).
But most modern game developers are completely allergic towards adding a simple god mode or infinite ammo code into their shitty game
This is so wack to me. Every game should be like Jedi Academy, and have a console where you can spawn in any NPC in the game/give yourself any cheat power you can imagine, because all that stuff ever does is make the game more fun.
Currently playing Noita and I have to say that "diagetic cheat codes" are by far my favorite way of doing this
Yeah you could just enter the console command for infinite health or install an infinite health mod, and those should both also be available
But when you're allowed within the normal rules of the game to build an incredibly janky and dangerous item that spawns the enemy that drops a heart container when killed, with lots of opportunity to accidentally explode yourself along the way, that just hits different
that would cut into their microtransaction profits
people won't want to buy the "time-savers" (in enormous quotes) if they can just put in the konami code
Gaming isn't fundamentally about overcoming challenges. It used to be, but it changed long ago. Now, gaming is about generating pleasing brain chemicals. When gamers "win", they feel good. When they meet a challenge that stops them, they feel bad. It's just that simple. People don't shell out $60 so that they can feel frustrated and angry. You paid for the whole game, you get to play the whole game. With lighted signs pointing the entire way and a companion to overcome the challenges if you can't solve them in the first ten seconds.
Tbf ultrakill literally has the option to enable aimbot and you dont need any crazy techs to beat the main story.
I think the early 2000s PS2 era was the peak of modern gaming. Colourful games, decent 3d graphics. The FPS era hadn't fully began on consoles yet.
The less said about the late 2000s, the better. That's when all the "gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery" really got kicked into overdrive. Every game got a sepia piss filter as well. And after that we got the blue filters which were somehow even worse.
Oh god I am in an eternal struggle against the „creatives“ and their constant use of disgusting filters which destroy the natural colors. Tho I must confess I loved the golden filter of deus ex human revolution and the grain filter of ME1 and yes even the brownish tints of dragon age, I know I am bad haha.
Honestly some games benefitted from the piss filter, like Fallout New Vegas. If it were made with modern graphics I would want them to keep the piss filter instead of being vibrant like Fallou4 76
Filters have their place tbh. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense aesthetically.
The issue is falling back on it to the point it becomes a meme.
I think if you are making a depressingly sad game (like Dragon Age) then yeah using the shit brown filter to make it feel even more grimy works
I am currently doing a replay of like old rpgs and I‘ve finished dragon age like a month ago, personally I didn’t find like sad at all, maybe if you like get the worst outcomes, the only thing that made me go „huh“ was when characters tell like random tales and they go „…and then they were brutally assaulted and murdered“ which often feelt like a bit edgy for edgys sake. Also like why would anyone defile the ashes? Tbf the brown filter did work for me only in like certain areas.
Yeah Dragon Age really hammed up the "wow this ain't your grandpas fantasy game" quite a bit (though I geuss the Witcher eventually took that place with Witcher 2 and 3). I do like that Dragon age Inquisition dropped a bit of that edge though it ended up with a lot of bioware bloat
I like the piss filter in need for speed most wanted, but I think thats the only game I liked with it.
As much as people meme call of duty, they actually never used that filter in the original modern warfare games. COD4 was pale, MW2 added saturation, and MW3 was a combination of the two. But the worst colour filter has to be battlefield 3 and the blue filter.
Omg yes the blue filters are the worst, since they became synonymous with grizzled badass troy backer hero and bro-shooter archetype of the early 2000-10s
"Hardcore gamers" = the people who had enough money and free time to have a console (or two) and buy and play all the big releases. This group is mostly white, male, decently wealthy, and reactionary (in the same way any given white petit bourg is). The people shaping the game industry range from sicko libertarian dipshits (Carmack) to sicko capitalist [redacted] (Bobby Kotick). It hasn't ever been "good" tbh.
As much as I appreciate the convenience, I'll also say that every step away from "gaming as a social activity" has made it worse. I'm at least old enough to have seen the changes from arcades to inviting people to your house to play a console to online multiplayer and it all gets weirder at each step.
Importantly, also socially maladejusted enough that playing those games became their primary identity
The social maladjustment largely follows from the traits previously listed. I can speak from experience.
G*mers never had a chance.
The 70s saw the development of really old games like Dnd, essentially some STEMlord's pet project. Many of these ancient games were tied to Dnd, where the reactionary Gary Gygax's influence in Dnd was completely dominant.
The 80s continued that tradition with games like Rogue and Nethack. This was also when Nintendo exclusively marketed the NES as a "boy toy." Both of what could be retroactively labeled as indie and AAA gaming were firmly men only. Arcades tended to be dominated by men as well.
The 90s further perpetuated this trend with the console wars between Nintendo and Sega, with Sega pushing really hard as the cool and definitely being played by dudes with 'tude console. If you looked at Sega ads during that time, they were all hyper-trying-too-hard-masculine.
The 00s, while carrying the misogynist torch, reflected a qualitative shift in its misogyny. The 00s, or more specifically, 2001 was when Halo 1 was released on the Xbox. This game, more than any other, was what pushed gaming from some nerdy shit into the mainstream. With the mainstreamification of gaming came the dudebros. The previously misogynist nerds were transformed into misogynist dudebros, and the dudebros carried their toxic competitiveness into gaming.
The 10s was when esports, or more specifically L*ague of L*gends, became commercially viable. The esportification of games began and along with it, the toxic competitiveness seeped even in games that weren't designed to be competitive. And it pains me to say this, but speedrunning contributed to this as well. Suddenly, you started hearing about the "meta" and "optimal strats" in some indie platformer. And of course, G*merg*te sealed the deal by politicizing gaming, making g*mers consciously reactionary.
I have checked out of gaming so I can't give you a rundown of the 20s, but it's more of the same shit honestly. The seeds were sown during the 70s, with each subsequent decade nurturing the seedling, until it blossomed into some hideous plant with G*merg*te.
I hate esports i hate how Riot took all the actually fun modes in league like OFA and nexus clash and the pve game modes and decides to only make them appear in rotations (or not even appear for pve modes) because apparently Riot only cares about competitive and ranked play.
Also hate how certain characters like Azir is effectively neutered because its too good for the highly coordinated esport teams, whose gameplay barely resembles even the highest ranked play.
Billion dollar game cant even afford to support other game modes.
LoL says "here's a game and some pieces tailor-made to play it" while DotA says "here's some toys and a sandbox, it's out of my hands now" and I think about that every day
LoL says "here's a game and some pieces tailor-made to play it" while DotA says "here's some toys and a sandbox, it's out of my hands now" and I think about that every day
hell yeah, same
honestly I think dota's way should be the way for fun+challenging games in general
Blatant false advertising. Nobody has ever wanted Battlecruiser 3000AD.
Uhh...😅 I did...
I thought it would basically be No Man's Sky. Fly around to planets and do stuff. But the designer himself flamed me on USENET so I quit following it and never played.
A lot of them didn't even get that even the early Duke Nukem games were already mocking this shit as immature misogynist garbage. Which is how we got the dumbster fire that was DN Forever.
Battlecruiser 3000AD! By Derek Smart, Ph.D! Wow, that takes me back. The original "in development forever" game way before Daikatana or Duke Nukem.
Grizzled "hardcore" gamer brain came to be around the same time as gamergate,
I disagree heavily, especially if we're going for roots. Hardcore gamer brain was a big thing when Wind Waker came out as they collectively shit themselves that they didn't get Ocarina of Time 2: More blood and tits and instead got something with a different art style.
Cosmetics for money, lootboxes, microtransactions. People didnt like this, and wanted to stop it, and the only way they knew how was to vote with their wallets.
And again I'd claim they never did this. , just to give one out for the old heads here. And this shit never stopped, they embraced all the skin stuff with open arms honestly.
It was ME3 with the “day one dlc“ thing, where they basically rewrote a major part of their plot just to sell a companion as dlc.
Hell we can go further back on that one with Oblivion Horse Armour. But looking back at it with hindsight it seemed to be mostly down to "I pay for the whole disc, I get to use the whole disc" thing honestly. Sort of missing the forest for the trees I guess? That whole approach got thrown into disarray when everything became an always online service and then I guess it was okay.
I've recently seen some vids about Battlebit, a sort of minecraft-aesthetic battlefield clone and what everyone was raving about is that it's just like BF2 basically. You buy a game, you get a game. Maybe there's a chance here that it's been pushed too far.
I think the oblivion horse amour is another good example, because that kinda shit is just the norm now. When that came out people got pissed at bethesda.
But it never did stop them. There was outrage and then people apparently kept buying 18 editions of skyrim anyhow. It's for show, and even that has stopped.
There's also the fact that most games journalists don't like games. They're only in the business to write as a job and to get a better job down the line. You think humans can't tell when journalists despise what they're writing about? Imagine someone who doesn't like baseball being assigned to write about baseball. Imagine someone who hates home cooking and orders every meal Doordash being assigned to the food beat.
I honestly think the skinner box click button get dopamine cycle of single player action games is specifically damaging to a human 🧠 in ways we won't understand for decades. Between that and gambling type games that are just gambling with extra steps, we have a wide array of ways to do weird harm to yourself while being alienated under capitalism
A better world exits. MMOs allowed for beautiful social experiences. MUDs and like VR chat allow for self exploration. Fighting games have a diverse worldwide community dedicated to sharing and self improvement. Sport games allow people to explore important parts of their lives in new ways. Plenty of things I missed besides. But all way better than Gamerism.
I remember gaming always being seen as a "boys club" for as long as I can remember. They were thankfully pretty welcoming of me (being a brown guy and all) but girls playing games were either given the m'lady treatment or chastised for making a mistake that would get them seen as being bad at the game. Often both.
The sad part is that there have been girls and women playing and developing games since the beginning but they were mostly pushed into the background, so now they get accused of invading a so-called male space. Can't win
AFAIK the arcade boom was pretty popular with both men and women, since at that time it was a social hobby and kids were doing a lot of hanging out and hooking up at arcades. It wasn't until the turn to console gaming, which was primarily an anti-social activity, that video game advertisements started really focusing in on young boys. Nintendo bears a lot of the blame here, since they defined the western market following the big crash, and they saw the NES as exclusively a boys' toy - but it wasn't just them of course, in particular I remember the OG XBox's marketing doing a lot to create a "bro culture", along with stuff like the channel G4, which I think was created intentionally as a reaction to the previously existing perception of gamers being nerdy.
Children (overwhelmingly boys) who played vidya games were nerdy. There was a brief period during the Pac-Man era when vidya games were for everyone, and soon it went into hardcore weirdness. Games got hard and unless you had the patience to play again, and again, and again, and again...you can forget being a part of the crowd. Games with 45 levels when nobody ever got past level 4.
and they saw the NES as exclusively a boys' toy
So there's a bit more to this, if I remember all this correctly, Nintendo couldn't exactly call the NES a 'video game console' when they started selling it in the US because the crash had pretty much made that a really bad financial move to call it as such. And also they had to sell it in the toys section to start with, which has had and still has a lot of segregation between boys and girls toys. And also considering how brick and mortar stores have acted for a long time, they likely had a bit of a hand in this in the way of demanding nintendo to pick if it was a boys toy or a girls toy or else they won't stock it.
I agree with your complaints towards the apparent predominant gaming culture. But I also believe that there have never been more indie games that are contrary to that culture or just ambivalent to that culture than ever before.
Yeah the indie community is great. My complaints are more the popular gaming community that was particulaly strident during the PS2, 360 and gamergate era
I will never forgive the gaming community for shitting on Wind Waker when it first came out for being catroony
WW was a fantastic game and the graphics aged gracefully. I replayed it back in 2016 and had a blast.
Souls fans when you use anything other than level 1 naked wretch with club the way miyazaki intended
Sorry but the ds1 taught me that running away to do a cheese attack that deals half of the boss hp is the way souls is meant to be played (never fight fair)
Early ds1 really hammers this home with the first 2 bosses and a lot of
still don't get it.
I don't care that much tbh because while the "gaming community" is indeed dogshit (personally I've stopped playing any sort of public multiplayer game since voice audio became the norm anyway), we also seem to be in a golden age of independent awesome video games, including specifically ones with dialogue and story. And the small sub-community of players of those are usually much saner and welcoming.
games mechanics become watered down due to the profit motive and challenging games are fun, this whole thread feels like just contrarianism to spite a vocal minority turning being a HARDCORE GAMERRRRR into a personality trait
if you mean people restricting themselves to "manly" games thats also a loud online minority, i mean nintendo still makes the most popular games out there and stuff like undertale has sold how many millions now? so saying the gaming community(tm) is "full of gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery" is hard to believe
so saying the gaming community(tm) is "full of gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery" is hard to believe
what planet are you from
turns on voice chat in TF2
There are literally Nazis
Turns it back off
No I meant you're low effort, the bait was too obvious.
That or you're either too young or haven't met enough capital G gamers
gamergate is pretty well known at this point.I don't even mind trolls if they're funny, but it's always the same generic shit with our ones lately.
I miss when ivermectin boomers would get lost and show up here.
