I play video games, but my “identity” as a “gamer” is not important enough to me to care about defending the label.
If someone says “gamers are trash,” you either know exactly the type of person they’re talking about, or you are the type of person they’re taking about.
I have no desire to argue “well I’m a gamer and I’m not like those people” because I don’t give a damn about the “sanctity” of such an arbitrary label. Also, not only are there tons of toxic gamers who are guilty of all the -isms, but there are also a lot of gamers who are all-to-eager to minimize the shitty actions of the former group and I don’t want to be associated with them either.
“That’s just how online gaming is” or “You think that’s bad? You should’ve seen call of duty lobbies back in the day” are common refrains from people who may not be hyper-toxic themselves, but they’re completely adjusted to bigotry being the status quo for the hobby and they don’t even see it as a problem to be corrected.
Also, I’m white. Seeing people criticize racism in gamer culture and jumping to the defense of the label as if that’s the problem feels very on brand for the way that white people tend to prioritize things. The bigotry is a much bigger problem than my “right” to call myself a gamer without the extra baggage. It feels a bit like still trying to defend twitter. I play video games, but yes, gamers are trash.
This is unrelated to gamers.
There are plenty non-gamers who think like this.
There are plenty of gamers who don’t.
This is just a subset of people.Yup.
I have family that supports all the awful shit going on in my country right now (US). They tell me it’s just politics, and that I’m wrong to stop talking to them.
The gamers I play with all openly talk about how wrong Trump and his administration is. We used to try to be apolitical, but the second term opened the flood gates. It is no longer moral to not talk about everything going on.
Gamer since 1982 (both D&D box set and Apple ][)… fuck these manbaby chuds.
They are called conservatives.
…and mysoganists.
theyrethesamepicture.webp
There are plenty of gamers who do and are especially toxic. Your post reads like a ‘not all men’. There’s nothing wrong with targeting a vocal subset, it doesn’t invalidate any other group.
All inclusive statements like this are in fact, lazy and stupid. Using them automaticly makes you wrong. And it makes you vulnerable to equally stupid retorts like not all men. They are unforced errors in public discourse.
If you want to target a vocal subset, that’s great! Do that instead.
I see your point.
All sweeping generalizations are, in fact, false.
That vocal subset has tarnished the term ‘gamer’ as a whole for me, I reflexively go to associating that label with them. There are those who game who are not part of the toxic Manosphere, but self describing as a gamer is a red flag for me.
Yeah, i am a gamer i don’t give a fuck about what the right is trying to push regarding identity politics or “the woke left”. Even as a long time gamer i believe that love has nothing to do with gender or specific body parts, it all comes down to personal preference and the freedom to choose what you are looking for. don’t just pin this on the gamers please.
It’s a subset of people that overlaps with gamers in a big way. See: gamergate
A majority of people are gamers now.
The subset of people who are like this, are a small minority; Both among gamers and the general population.Gamergate included a small fraction of one gaming type, at best.
a subset of people are pieces of shit. Lots of people are gamers. Grandmas are gamers. Grandpas are gamers. School teachers are gamers. Doctors are gamers. CEOs call themselves gamers too. Cops are gamers. ICE chuds are gamers.
perhaps there’s a difference between
people who play games
and
those with the identity of gamerThere’s not. I’ve never heard of gamergate before this thread and I know I’m not alone. I’ve probably referred to myself as a gamer before as it’s shorter than saying I play video games.
I can see where you’re coming from, but I don’t think using the word for the sake of convenience doesn’t necessarily show it’s not a useful distinction.
I draw, built, paint, and craft almost daily. But it’s just something I do. It’s not my identity. I don’t see myself as an artist—even though I may spend as much time on art as some who do see themselves as an artist. I’d feel weird using the word artist to describe who I am just because it’s shorter than saying I like creating artwork.
That sounds to me like theorizing if perhaps there is a difference between people who play football and people who identity as a footballer.
What does that really mean?
Both enjoy their hobby with the only difference being if they choose to introduce themselves by the hobby, but still doesn’t really tell us much about them.
Other than I guess other than some anecdotal assumptions that are going to widely vary on peoples personal interactions and which social media they choose to interact with.
i don’t think many people who played games at the time were heavily invested in gamergate, but the gamergate gamers were a very loud and toxic minority. that’s often who is being talked about when you say gamer, not the average person who plays games. it’s the difference between gamer (neutral) and gamer (derogatory)
I literally don’t call myself a gamer anymore because I don’t want to be associated with that trash.
They can have the term, quite frankly, playing video games isn’t a personality but I like the idea of clearly identifying the people that think it is.
I don’t know how I feel about it.
I probably game too much, even as an elderly old man. I still call myself a gamer AND want Steve Bannon and all his diet nazis to die in the most humiliating and embarrassing way possible… crushed by frozen poop falling from a plane sounds fun.
This is what nazis do. Take good or innocuous things and pervert them. All they do is destroy.
I’ll still keep calling myself a gamer while respecting your desire to distance yourself from scum.
that’s a good mindset to have
Yeah, I’m into gaming and still in the dark about what gamersgate is about. I was on reddit but not using other social media like twitter, so maybe that played role in not getting much exposure to it.
I don’t think average gamer kept up with gamersgate, since they just were more interested in what games came out, reviews, and discussions about games.
It also ignored casual gamers. Like I think little phone games are now the biggest market. Honestly I think gamer is such a blanket term it doesn’t have a lot of meaning anymore. I am pretty sure just by how widely digital gaming is now, how many players are like under 10 years old etc like they could NOT be gamergate people.
Yeah, its like making assumptions about cinema and TV show fans, but many don’t keep up with celebrity news or culture. Its just a source of entertainment to them they like to watch.
Games being some niche demographic that is in the loop of every discourse is a very outdated old person view now. Its actually so popular now the revenue from it is more than film and music combined.
Even something like Marvel and DC being the stereotypical interest of some nerds no longer applies once it became mainstream, and that’s where games have been at for years now.
There’s also a subset of people who make up statements based on nothing more than them wanting to believe what they’re saying is true that overlaps with gamers in a big way. See: your comment.
So I guess you’re a gamer too.
What the hell is gamergate?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate
It coincided with the moment Facebook stopped being fun, due to all the reactionary boomers moving in.
Epstein funded chud movement. Started from 4chan. This video explains it in detail
Thank you so much, I always heard about it and saw it referenced in discussion but didn’t actually know what the hell happened or what it actually was, I’ll have to sit down and give this a watch!
See: Survivorship Bias
I disagree about the large overlap. It overlaps with a very loud minority that wants to take over the gaming space, same as they tried with the metal and goth fans in the early 2000 in my area. Don’t fall for this shit. Most gamers nowadays are well balanced normal human beings.
How dare you call me normal
lol
ok i am NOT normal, because most of my day consists of testing some games on my PC. But i gotta say that most people who are into gaming nowadays don’t fit the cliche of “recluse NEET gamer” anymore.
So if you don’t wanna feel normal, you are free to do so, as long as you aren’t a piece of shit my dude ;-)
I really don’t think so man. Sarkeasian was on to something when they said the media we consume shapes us and having lived the media zeitgeist of the early 2000’s I can tell you we lived in a factory for making entitled little shitheads. There’s a reason why they got so roided up at her specifically and it’s because she read the industry for filth
Meanwhile, Im just trying to earn bells so my little duck guy can have a fancy new bridge in animal crossing.
Animal Crossing is pretty nontoxic. Also it just wasn’t in the cultural zeitgeist at all during the G4 guygaming era and that’s probably related.
But I dunno. Nobody has exactly been SWATted, doxxed, or gotten bomb threats over the skin tone of Tom Nook so maybe that’s a bad example?
Its a bad example of “reading the industry for filth” because the entirety of the industry isn’t filth.
The industry made a certain kind of thing financially successful and culturally dominant. I’m sorry you feel like that’s a moral judgment on you, it doesn’t change what happened
Capitalist pig
You gotta split that up.
Sarkeesian was specifically trying to rile the rightwing chuds up. I applaud her for making that awful segment of gamers visible, so we all could see what was hidden there, but at the same time you have to acknowledge that there were a lot of gamers - i would even say a majority - that weren’t part of this shitstorm.
I never was against Sarkeesian, even tho she wasn’t really speaking for me, but she made a part of gamer culture visible that was at that time hiding beneath the surface. Gaming society at large also made clear that they don’t want that kind of conduct to be the standard. It took a while, but if you filter out the loud majority that rages against everything they decide is woke, you can see that most gamers don’t want to be associated with this hateful crap.
That’s a new take to me. Literally not trying to sealion here, but I actually want to know how that has come about. That would make me reconsider some things.
She wasn’t really speaking to me either, I played games that had the tropes she was talking about but it really didn’t change how I feel about them. I thought she was looking at the nature of writing, not games themselves. Or even if it was, just kind of an insane thing to go to Breitbart and Maga over
Seeing people have sincere discussion on important and contentious topics makes me really happy. I’m curious to see how yalls discussion goes ☺️
I was hoping so. I think mimic may have blocked me after seeing how ugly the thread with the other guy got. I may have to just look into that possibility they mentioned myself
That’s funny. You’d think being right wing would not align with being goth.
I knew some goths who were mostly apolitical, and so possibly susceptible to a small portion of that mindset (like I could maybe see a bit of manly manosphere type stuff) but in general that does not align with being anti establishment, which was, at least in the 90s, a large aspect of goth culture.
There was a large push in europe around the 2000,2010s by the neofolk chuds, trying to push into the goth scene. they were largely unsuccessful.
Edit: They were mainly trying to push the Nazi look to be accepted in the goth scene - Long leather mantles, Brownshirt and Tradwive shit. The Goths didn’t take the bait.
laughs in ancient punk
nazis don’t care about the values embedded in the culture before they show up, and they won’t listen to your critiques on how they don’t fit. nazis don’t hear nothing except bats and boots.
The brick breaks the glass and window frame but then the frame is repaired when he flies through it.
now i want to know if the original scene in batman beyond also has this error or it’s just the edit
GAMERS RISE UP!! 😎😎
Why is the image link showing this instead
I don’t know, but as a grammar MAGA pedant with ADHD this picture gave me cancer 🤮
Yeah, because clearly the problem here is the grammar.
The nonsense text and links leading to other bits of nonsense text makes me think it’s to poison AI crawlers.
Oooh, that’s a really good point.
Carry on them, I guess
(Still hurt my brain)
Removed by mod
Once had a guy try and tell me that assassins creed had gone woke because of Yasuke. The very real black samurai.
The same guy tried to rant to me how I shouldn’t be referring to other people as “they”, because it’s plural.
Fucking troglodyte
The only way to make a game with brown people or queer people in it is to have made it more than 10 years ago. New thing = woke. Old thing = not woke.
Thats right. Startrek is def not woke.
This is what people mean when they say they’re “apolitical”
i don’t want colored folks in my historically accurate game about dragons and wizards!!!
Don’t forget:
“conventionally attractive” and “ugly and woke”
That’s “conventionally attractive” and “political” actually
Do you realize that you’re currently doing precisely what you’re trying to mock? — Discriminating and generalizing a group of people based on their hobby.
G*mers aren’t people.
I just want a fun game like KOTOR
I think it’s undeniable there are a lot of very stupid people, and many of them are loud gamers.
One of the problems is humans are social creatures. Facts don’t change minds. In-group pressure changes minds. (And sometimes horrific trauma, but only sometimes*). The typical person, confronted with an idea that contradicts a non-trivial belief, will evaluate primarily if the person presenting the belief is in-group. The same kind of message delivered by different people has very different outcomes.
With the Internet, idiots and assholes can find their own social groups to reinforce their shitty beliefs.
If we want to fix this, we’d have to do the long, expensive, and thankless work of getting them to see us as in-group, and getting them to then adopt better ideas. Incidentally, that’s how the right wing has been operating.
Laughing at them for being fucking morons is satisfying, but it’s like picking at a scab. It’s not going to heal.
I’d rather have my body covered in scabs than have to be friends with people like them.
Fuck, I’d volunteer for a nudist motorcycle race. I can’t even ride a bike.
Guys can we please leave politics out of gaming? Not all white people wear gray shirts this is clear misrepresentation of the white identity. Typical libs always trying to force labels on us. Go woke, go broke!
dont direct the blame toward gamers, direct the blame toward conservatives, whose views these actually are
Don’t fall for the bait.
