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It's the culture around it. "Gamers" is a made up term that only came into existence more recently. Through marketing, it has become a culture around playing video games and being a dick to people online with it.
Even before Gamergate, this behavior was prevalent with online gaming. I used to play Starcraft 2 online and there was just as much racial slurs and other bigotry spammed in the chats during 4v4 matches.
the culture around it
"why are petite bourgeoisie fascist" lmao read Marx libs
Yes, read make sure you read the chapter in Capital where Marx explains the dialectics behind 16 year old gamers who use the n word.
This is why the only multiplayer games I play have aggressive skill based matchmaking or player classes. It's not fun for me to dunk on everyone and win by 30+ seconds, and it's not fun to be on the receiving end of that either. Playing people at your skill level is much more fun
I browse the Apex sub sometimes, and a lot of them are you in arms constantly because the SBMM makes the game too hard for them (even though most commenters are well above average in skill), and they make a point that less skilled players "don't deserve" to have it easy or some shit. Very weird, when not dying 4 seconds after the game starts surely makes it more fun for less skilled players. Gamers often forget about the "having fun" part though, and yell at the devs when they can't stomp on the noobs and rack up a 20-kill game so easily.
That said, overly agressive SBMM can defeat the purpose by just emulating ranked mode, and it could probably use a bit of tuning.
identity signaling
No Marxism on Chapochat :comfy:
don’t be a dick to people and enjoy your hobbies
at no point will the petite bourgeoisie ever acknowledge class, it's in their interests to obscure it.
I'd say it's about 70/30 on normal people vs psycho gamers. Only problem is that 30% spends 18 hours/day gaming so you run into them all the time.
I agree. There are some GOOD gaming communities, hard to believe, but they're out there.
The Doom community overall is pretty good. ZDoom and Doomworld forums do not tolerate racism and transphobia.
The only problem in the Doom community over the past decade has been that stupid fucking mod called Brutal Doom and it's neo-nazi creator and the fan base around it. Brutal Doom sucks and it's creator was such a massive piece of shit, he kept getting himself banned from every forum and most players weren't fans of Brutal Doom's community cause it brought all these new players to the community who's first and only experience with Doom was through that shitty mod, so they went around complaining about how the vanilla game sucks and certain map sets are impossible to play with Brutal Doom's changes. Not fun times at all and the general community hated the Brutal Doomers so much, they didn't want to deal with them. They mostly populate the Doom subreddit and post on Youtube and other gaming forums about how the game sucks without the mod.
I'm too communist to be a gamer. The only multiplayer games I play are coop - I used to play competitive but eventually I came to realise that I just despise them. After I spent over 1000 hours on payday 2 I discovered that that's what I enjoyed, whereas games like siege just made me a bad, mad, sad lad.
it's possible that I'm just bad, but that only reinforces the point - what are 'bad' people supposed to do if all they're expected to do in multiplayer games is suck, or not play them at all? that's big capitalist energy is what that is.
what are ‘bad’ people supposed to do if all they’re expected to do in multiplayer games is suck, or not play them at all?
Increasingly I've found that people who suck or can't afford to play a game but who are still interested in that game will watch other people play it online instead.
A big part of this, I think, is that gaming allows a person to really bury their head in the sand, stop learning on a general scale, and disengage with life. And the people that do it are at least well off enough that they can afford the hardware, and the service subscriptions necessary to really put themselves into the virtual sensory deprivation chamber for potentially years - so the system is at the very least working for them to this minimal extent.
I would also argue that competitive games foster this insufferable-ness because they inherently drive this community that idolizes the gods of whatever game they play. The community lashes itself to a very small elite clique of pro gamers that ultimately become the role models for what you, the community member, should aspire to be. This leads to all kinds of bat-shit behaviors to achieve this, but one thing is for certain, the further away you are from the best, highest levels of play, the more you are just scum under their shoe in their eye (this sort of fervor becomes more intense the closer to the elite a gamer is, and tamer the more 'casual' they are, typically). To attempt to play competitive games leisurely is generally met with a certain venomous attitude that makes it clear that folks who just want to have fun are undesirable.
A big part of this, I think, is that gaming allows a person to really bury their head in the sand, stop learning on a general scale, and disengage with life.
You could say this same thing about any other hobby out there. I'm a guitar player. Most experienced guitarists do exactly this - sacrifice so much time to practicing, learning songs and working through things. You can see it too with artists. Social alienation can happen with most hobbies.
I would also argue that competitive games foster this insufferable-ness because they inherently drive this community that idolizes the gods of whatever game they play. The community lashes itself to a very small elite clique of pro gamers that ultimately become the role models for what you, the community member, should aspire to be.
What community? Gaming is not a hive mind community like you described it to be. There are good communities, some even ran by leftists. I used the Doom community for example. They have been around since the 90s and they have an old guard of players and modders that go back to the 90s and those people have routinely rejected the edgelords and alt right bigots. The Brutal Doom people had to make their own community cause no Doom forum really wanted to tolerate them.
All that "hardcore and casual" talk is just marketing stuff, much like how the term "gamer" didn't exist until recently with marketing.
The problem is seeing being a "gamer" as an identity. But playing video games as a hobby, is a completely different thing.
You could say this same thing about any other hobby out there.
I don't think you could say it about -any- hobby, because I don't think many hobbies have the capacity to be wholly engrossing in the way gaming is. Music might be one that shares this in common, but I couldn't say, I take your word for it.
What community?
Any competitive game has its own community that surrounds it.
Gaming is not a hive mind community like you described it to be.
Firstly, I'm speaking on the subject of -competitive games- in particular, not video games as a whole. And for competitive games, they totally are. Just lurk some forums for a while, folks are driven in such a way that they either accept some common axis that define what matters and what doesn't, or they're discouraged from participating in the game and therefore the community. I guess perhaps to further specify the clique I'm describing, these are games that have centralized multiplayer - no player managed servers, all players are forced to play with the general population of a given game
All that “hardcore and casual” talk is just marketing stuff, much like how the term “gamer” didn’t exist until recently with marketing.
It was the inverse, these toxic communities emerged first, the "hardcore", and then the corporations picked it up as a marketing tool.
The problem is seeing being a “gamer” as an identity. But playing video games as a hobby, is a completely different thing.
You're essentially just saying the same thing twice. OP asks: Why are gamers so insufferable? Gamers are the self-identified hardcore, the people who don this identity upon their selves. The people who are insufferable by nature because they aspire to be the elite in their chosen realm. Folks who play video games as a hobby are not Gamers because they do not take up this mantle for themselves, they just want to play a video game and have some fun.
It's attrition bias. The most dedicated console gamers tend to be lumpen, PMC, and petty swith considerable disposable income that they can spend on multiple consoles and on beefing up their PCs, the sort of paypigs capable of frequently wasting $60 or even $70 on a game on its release date no matter how buggy and incomplete it is at launch or how shitty the game turns out to be, or on paid DLC and microtransactions. To be fully invested in capital-G Gaming is an increasingly expensive hobby and lifestyle, the sort of lifestyle that most working-class people can only partly or occasionally participate in because they've been increasingly priced out of full participation.
The hangers-on are in a relative position of privilege, are fond of gatekeeping and exclusion, and don't necessarily see what's wrong other than in an abstract sense. The literal 14-year-olds are those whose parents pay for their consumption, and the adults who act like them are spoiled and have been pandered to for most of their lives. Critics and journalists like Jim Sterling speak for the rest of us, those who've been made to see the AAA gaming racket for what it is through lived experience, those who grew up with video games but are less invested now because they have more important shit to worry about.
I think this is the most accurate take, if you can afford to fully immerse yourself in the Gamer™ lifestyle these days you're probably in a position of privilege and don't have to worry about these kinds of things. The thing that I don't have an explanation for though is why is seems to be a hobby that has such a strong undercurrent of sexism and racism, more so than would be expected you know?
The thing that I don’t have an explanation for though is why is seems to be a hobby that has such a strong undercurrent of sexism and racism, more so than would be expected you know?
I don't want to lean too hard on an Anita Sarkeesian type of explanation and say it's the result of marketing and overrepresentation of white dudes among gaming protags (and also an absurd amount of women characters with cheesecake designs, and also the preponderance of pro-imperialist depictions of POC), but I'm coming up short for a better answer besides this and the "Gamers are mostly lumpen with disposable income (and are thus more likely to be attracted to reactionary politics)" explanations.
The gaming industry is really different in that like no one really knows how it operates. There's not thousands of books/movies/tv shows/albums abou5 making them the way there is for other media. I think a large part of that is that game development is so spread out, and the areas that are bigger for it mostly belong to like one or two companies. And like cause its such a different, unknown thing, a lot of people just naively assume that itd be so cool to work for one when it probably sucks ass. Its a fuckin art job, but unlike most art jobs is requires you to get degrees that could fairly easily land you a higher paying job.
Like one of the things that bums me out is that you just know every fuckin cool game director absolutely has to be a shithead cause the working conditions in the industry are just so uniformly bad. Like for as nice as Sakurai and Kojima seem, you just know they're crunching their employees to death.
On the other side, I really do think a lot of the toxicity with gamers is purposefully cultivated by the publishers. Like I fuckin gamble probably 40 dollars a month on Pokemon Go and its a frustrating experience. Its not surprising people aren't very nice to the people who make games with gambling mechanics on Twitter. Then you got shit like Battle Passes where they try to make games into a fuckin job you play for skins. You got shit like Rainbow Six Siege, which was a great game that I just had to put down after almost a thousand hours cause the community sucked so much ass. But you know Ubisoft let it be like that cause they don't wanna scare off the Tom Clancy crowd. The reason these studios invite Anita Sarkessian to visit them and stuff like that isn't cause they wanna be more progressive, its cause they wanna cover their ass while they profit off encouraging extremely toxic fanbases.
I have a personal vendetta against gamers and video games. On one hand, I think video games can be a good artform. BUT gamers are horrible apathetic humanoids and games have turned me into an uneducated NEET plant for around 4 years.
yeah, I've slowly weaned off of online shit, to the point where I just play destiny by myself and the occasional overwatch qp game, but I mostly just play singleplayer stuff. Games like Life is Strange and Prey have really helped me realize why I love games so much, it's really refreshing to play something that good again without worrying about whether I'll get t worded if I join VC
The capital-G Gamer "identity" was forged much earlier, at least as early as the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation when the X-ennials who grew up on Atari, NES, etc. were entering adulthood. It emerged partly from proto gamer-bro marketing tracing back to the mid-1990s, and as a sort of defensive response to the (arguably manufactured) moral panic surrounding violent games from that period including Doom, Mortal Kombat, Night Trap, and Grand Theft Auto.
Gamergate is more like the apotheosis of this cultural trend, refined through another ~15 years of toxic online gaming culture: teabagging, shouting racist/sexist/homophobic slurs and toothless death threats at people over the mic, chan culture/gaming forums, shitty "gamer" comics like Ctrl+Alt+Del, etc. This process was of course accelerated by exogenous economic trends: cheaper high-selling consoles like Wii which launched before the 2007 housing market crashed were trashed as "casual", and everyone but the "hardcore" gamers started getting priced out of AAA gaming as the economy went to shit.
I feel at least a part of it is this idea that you can form a community around just liking a game, but in the absence of any actual 'community actions' (i.e. without any sort of community wide collaboration) it just collapses into circlejerking, making the same jokes hundreds of times and gatekeeping, oh and also lashing out at anyone who criticises the community or the game itself. It varies from game to game how much the community fails to feel like an actual community, I'd say the more collaboration there is the closer it becomes to really being like a community, for example, take dwarf fortress, the game is extremely confusing, it looks like the pacman overflow error all the time, a third of the gameplay mechanics are bugs that everyone liked so much that they were just never removed and it's incredibly complex; on the other hand, it is extremely easy to mod due to how low tech the graphics are (every creature is represented as an extended ASCII symbol), and people are constantly working out how to do new things with the mechanics so the community has come to have this warm feeling of collaboration rather than the elitist nature it could have taken on.
