T w e n t y S i d e d
This one has been on my heart for a long time. To about half of you, the title of this article probably sounds like trolling. But after watching the same argument get stuck in the same rut for the same reasons for the 1,000th time, I thought I’d try to help un-stick the debate.
Link (YouTube) |
One of the reasons this sort of thing always turns into a white-hot flame war is because people aren’t clear about what they mean when they call gamers or gaming culture “toxic”. Everyone assumes the meaning is obvious, and then they wind up in long arguments where both sides are using the same words to mean very different things, and each side concludes the other is crazy.
I realize that fussing over definitions is really tedious, but if we lay this groundwork now we can save ourselves a lot of headaches later, okay?
So what does someone mean when they say…
“Gamers are Toxic”
They probably don’t mean ALL gamers are toxic. That’s an absurd position and nobody inside the hobby would make that claim.
They also probably don’t mean MOST gamers are toxic. Again, people outside the hobby might think this if they just follow sensationalist headlines, but nobody who plays games can make the argument that most of us are horrible people.
They probably don’t mean that SOME gamers are toxic, because that’s a meaningless thing to say. Like, some portion of ANY group is going to be toxic. Some gamers are toxic. Some police officers, some businessmen, some chefs, some school teachers. Some portion of any group is bad, so saying “some gamers are toxic” is like saying “some people are tall”.
So I think the most common thing that people mean is “Gamers are more toxic than the general population”.
And… okay. That’s not an unreasonable conclusion to draw based on headlines. I get why people say this. My concern is that:
- I don’t think it’s really true.
and more importantly…
- I think repeating this is bad for the hobby.
I want to stress that I’m not ignoring the horrible abuse we see out there. I had a friend and colleague – someone that I really respect – leave games journalism due to harassment. She put up with a lot of hate mail over the years, but when someone tracked down her home address and SWATted her, she decided that she wasn’t willing to risk her personal safety for the hobby. She’s talented, compassionate, and insightful. She did good work, and now she no longer writes about games for a living. I want to stress that she wasn’t some controversial firebrand that picked fights and posted politically charged screeds. One of the reasons I enjoyed her work was that she didn’t engage in that sort of thing. She was just, you know, writing about games.
“Shamus, you just admitted that your friend was harassed out of the industry. How can you turn around and claim that gamers aren’t toxic?”
And here is where the misunderstandings come from.
Person A says, “Gamers are toxic.”
What they MEAN is, “We have a harassment problem.”
What the other side HEARS is, “People who play video games are evil and abusive.”
Person B responds with, “No, gamers aren’t toxic.”
What whey MEAN is, “This hobby is filled with good people and you shouldn’t paint us all with the same brush.”
What the other person HEARS is, “Abuse doesn’t happen.”
This is a disaster of a conversation, even if we ignore the whole political bent to the exchange and how these arguments often intersect with the wider culture wars.
The other thing that causes confusion is that when some people say “toxic” they’re talking about grotesque and illegal stuff like doxxing, harassment, and SWATting. When other people use the word “toxic” they mean “people being kinda rude on the internet”. For the record, I’m going to be talking about the first kind of toxic. If you’ve read comments on YouTube or discussed politics online, then you know that being rude is NOT unique to games.
To get back to the main point: Yes, I’ll agree that abuse happens, and that real people are hurt in the real world. My objection is that I don’t think gamers deserve the reputation that society is giving them.
In the aughts, the Lakers fans had three different riots that led to widespread vandalism like flipping police cars and bonfires in the streets.
In 2000, there were the UEFA Cup Final Riots, where multiple people were stabbed to death. These killings were seen as retaliation for the murder of two Leeds United fans a month earlier.
In 2012, 79 people were killed in a football riot. 79 peopleI had 79 people in my script, but now I see that Wikipedia claims it was 74. I’m not sure where this numeric discrepancy came from. Also 500 people were injured.!
I know we’ve had our controversies in gaming, but it’s not like the Mass Effect 3 ending caused riots that killed a dozen people. The botched launch of Fallout 76 didn’t lead to Todd Howard burning police cars.
I’m not saying that we should ignore the harassment in gaming just because sports riots exist. I’m trying to make the case that – in a large enough group of people – there will always be a few bad apples, and that we shouldn’t blame the hobby itself.
People act like gamers are this terrible subculture filled with abusers and criminals, but I think it’s far more likely that gamers are just another group of ordinary human beings and no more deserving of shame than any other. The vast majority are good people, and a vanishingly small minority are really, really horrible. We should be careful to not blame the entire community for the actions of that minority.
I mean, there are over two billion people in the world who play video games. It would be weird if some of them WEREN’T psychopaths. You can’t blame a group for the behavior of its worst members. This is true whether you’re talking about religionsHashtag NotAllJedi kill younglings., ethnicities, nationalities, or just hobbies. When you attribute the misbehavior to the larger group, you’re taking the blame off the guilty and smearing it all over the broad populace, many of whom are victims of the harassment in question. That’s not how guilt works.
It’s not just that this characterization is unfair, it’s that engaging in this sort of rhetoric is bad for the hobby.
When you claim that “Gamers are Toxic”, you’re reinforcing a narrative that politicians have been trying to sell for decades. The older generation is always throwing a moral panic about the new generation. In the old days it was reefer madness. Then rock and roll was corrupting our kids. Then Dungeons & Dragons was turning our kids into Satanists. Now the narrative is that video games are turning our kids into amoral antisocial killbots. This is a vile narrative, and there are always a handful of politiciansI’ve avoided singling any specific politicians out, but in the USA you can find examples of the two major parties taking turns riding on this bandwagon. and demagogues looking to make a name for themselves by blaming and censoring games. We should not be giving those people ammunition.
Also, this idea that gamers are toxic and entitled is used as a shield by the publishers to hide from legitimate consumer advocacy. Electronic Arts regularly tops the list of most hated companies in America, and their typical defense is to claim that the polls are the result of ballot-stuffing by fringe groups. The only reason this excuse appeases shareholders is because it’s supported by the narrative that we’re toxic, unreasonable people. If the Ford Motor Company put out a terrible car that nobody wanted, they couldn’t claim that the critics were just toxic weirdos, because there isn’t a pre-existing narrative that Ford owners are crazy people.
The media is also part of the problem. If two guys get in a knife fight over a bet they made on a Broncos game, the headline will be “Deadly Stabbing a Local Sports Bar”. If those same guys get in a fight over weapon skins in Counter Strike, the headline will be “Gamers Killing Each Other Over Virtual Guns”. This isn’t because the media is some evil cabal of anti-gaming jerks. They’re just people trying to sell newspapers. Stories about the underbelly of sports don’t get as many clicks as scary stories about the fringes of gamer culture. When we repeat the idea that the hobby is filled with awful people, we’re helping reinforce this feedback loop. We’re reinforcing the narrative that creates the panic that drives the clicks that encourages news outlets to showcase more sensationalist stories. Then the older generation starts to think of us as an alien subculture that needs to be controlled and defended against.
“Hey Shamus, who cares what’s going on in sports? I’m talking about harassment in gaming, and saying that Gamers Are Toxic is a good shorthand for that. I don’t care if it hurts your feelings. I know what I mean when I say those words, and if other people can’t figure it out then that’s their problem!”
Okay. Fair enough. I’m not your dad and you’re free to use whatever words you want. I know how upsetting this stuff is and I know the usual response to injustice is strong rhetoric. If you want to call gamers toxic, then I can’t stop you.
But be aware of what you’re doing. When you say those words, you’re helping to build a narrative that protects the predatory corporations at the top, you give more fuel to a media machine that profits from reinforcing negative gamer stereotypes, you give ammunition to demagogues who want to strip games of their status as an art form, and you give the harassers the attention and feeling of relevance that they crave. And after all of that, you’re just going to end up in this argument again:
You end up trying to explain over and over that you don’t mean ALL gamers are bad. And worst of all, none of this does anything to stop harassment. It’s just another shouting match where nobody changes their mind.
Note how when sports fans leave the stadium and begin wrecking the city, the media usually stops calling them “fans”. They become “rioters” or “hooligans”. That creates a nice line between the guilty and everyone else. I think it would be smart if we started doing the same. Someone calling a SWAT team on you because they didn’t like your review of Call of Duty doesn’t represent “gamers” any more than the idiot setting fire to police cars represents football fandom. Either kind of footballHand Egg.
.
So now you’re wondering what word we should use to describe the toxic harassers? I don’t think it’s my place to say. Pick your own word. Whatever fits. One of them is bound to catch on sooner or later. If we can come up with terms for Goldfarmers, Griefers, Laners, Loot Ninjas, Noobs, and Smurfs, then we can certainly come up with a handy word to describe criminals that isn’t “gamer”.
Yes, there are bad people in this hobby. But there are orders of magnitude more good people. Every year tens of thousands of people get together online and in the real world to raise millions of dollars with charitable causes like Child’s Play, Extra Life, Desert Bus, Humble Bundle, and the twin speedrunning marathon fundraisers Awesome Games Done Quick and Summer Games Done Quick. We have entire organizations dedicated to inclusivity, mental health, and accessibility. This hobby covers the world and includes people of all ages, all walks of life, and all lifestyles. Anyone can enjoy this hobby. Everyone is welcome.
By all means, let’s stand together against harassment. But while we’re doing that, let’s not perpetuate the toxic gamer narrative and make the harassers the face of the hobby. The term “gamer” should not be a pejorative. When the stakes are this high and tempers run this hot, let’s be precise in the words we use to describe the problem.
I know this article was pretty serious. Hopefully we’re not enemies now. No matter where you fall in this debate or how you feel about the term “gamer”, try to be patient with the opposition. Be good to each other out there. Thanks for reading.
EDIT: Well, this was a pretty good discussion. It didn’t melt down the way I thought it would. However, I can see things are getting personal in the comments below, and all of the interesting discussions have concluded or burned out. I need to step away from the computer for a bit, so I guess this is a good time to close the comments.
Thanks so much to everyone who kept this friendly. This really was a useful discussion.
Footnotes:
[1] I had 79 people in my script, but now I see that Wikipedia claims it was 74. I’m not sure where this numeric discrepancy came from. Also 500 people were injured.
[2] Hashtag NotAllJedi kill younglings.
[3] I’ve avoided singling any specific politicians out, but in the USA you can find examples of the two major parties taking turns riding on this bandwagon.
[4] Hand Egg.
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I’ll be honest, I don’t think you can do this topic justice without acknowledging the political dimensions of the harassment that does occur among gamers.
As well as how often harrassment from one side or the other goes unreported (or overreported).
There is no harassment from “the other” side.
If you must have a tribal “Us v Them” ontology, there are only people who perpetuate harassment, and those who attempt to extinguish it. Harassment directed at harassers is either infighting on the one side, or successful perpetuation of the norm of harassment.
This is going to give you a much worse understanding of the world than a model which acknowledges that among the people yelling at each other, you can divide them into two groups and most of the yelling on this subject happens across group lines rather than within them. For instance, the group model is much better at predicting whether one specific person who yells will be friendly or angry towards another person who yells.
But I don’t want to predict who will be friendly or angry. I want to live in a world with fewer toxic people.
“By definition, there are no toxic people on my side” is a great way to get toxic people to flood into your side, since they know they’ll get a pass for their toxicity.
I think you’ve really hit on something important here. I’ve only heard the word “toxic” widely used this way in the last five years at most, and I contend that the side which popularized (i.e. weaponized) it very deliberately exclude themselves, you know, “by definition.”
Shamus says:
But I bet we’ve all seen plenty of people use “toxic” to refer to anything they don’t like (including legit criticism), as long as it comes from the other side. Having read through the comments, I saw Bloodsquirrel explain it better than I would have:
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=48701#comment-1238583
Obviously, this cuts straight to the heart of why harrasment can be under- or over-reported.
Good luck changing the world without first understanding the world.
As someone who is part of a minority group I’m frustrated that Shamus didn’t mention this, because *a lot* of the harassment I recieve definitely has poltical dimensions.
I don’t know if it’s because he isn’t aware of it, or if he doesn’t address it out of a concern for preventing flamewars, but it definitely weakens his overall argument.
His analysis of the misunderstanding of the phrase “Gamers are toxic” is however very accurate.
If I’d brought it up, the discussion would have been ONLY about that, and the more reasonable message of “Let’s not generalize and perpetuate ugly stereotypes” would have been lost in the noise.
Maybe it weakens my argument, but I think this is the only way my argument could survive.
And in fairness you did kind of bring up the political weight of [criminal behavior being embraced by a few people in the hobby] anyway, though perhaps as faintly as possible. Your personal anecdote is a specific example that has gendered pronouns, and while not pointing to a minority, it does probably point to a social/cultural problem that is politically weighted and part of toxicity in our broader culture.
This is surely an observation you don’t need. But it really jumped out at me and I appreciate that you didn’t eliminate your personal experience from the script due to it having the weight of a social problem attached.
Question for you. If it weakens your argument… doesn’t that mean that your argument is wrong on its face? You’re trying to do this neutral, sounds good type message while ignoring certain elephants in the room.
I don’t think it weakens his argument in the sense that it invalidates what he’s saying; I think (if its being weakened at all) its just because he can’t address every nitpick someone might have, when trying to address a very specific point. It doesn’t make it wrong–its not like he brushed the issues under a rug or ignored them; he acknowledged that they exist, and that they aren’t something that he can address given the scope of the point he’s trying to make. And I think that’s an entirely reasonable thing to do.
That political harassment exists does not ruin Shamus’ thesis of, “painting an entire group of people with a single brush is too narrow a way of looking at a complex and politically charged issue.
To me, it’s more like trying to diagnose someone’s health problems on the basis of what they’re eating (not nutricious enough) and exercise (not doing enough) when the town’s water has lead poisoning. Those other things might be improved upon to create greater overall health, but the diagnosis is laughable to the point of being suspicious if it ignores the literal poison.
(No, it’s not at all an accident that I’m using a real life racism problem as my analogy.)
Going back to the article, talking about gamer toxicity without talking about very accurate reasons people might believe that (say an international hate movement that targeted various minority and special interest groups or the admission of certain radical political groups that they used said hate movement to create members for later actions) seems uh… slight would be the nicest way to put it.
But that’s not what he’s talking about. He’s talking about painting an entire group with a single brush, and about how people’s understandings of the argument are different. He’s not talking about the NATURE of gamer toxicity and the guises it takes (although he did take great paints to acknowledge and address them anyway, despite them not being relevant to the points he was making.)
No. It means my argument is vulnerable to people who insist on thread-jacking the topic because they’d rather argue about X, and if you prohibit X they attempt to dismiss your argument without taking on your points in detail.
This is a problem with the mechanics of discussions between people, not a problem with the reasoning of the argument.
EDIT: Ninja’d by SoldierHawke. I am too slow today.
Part of the problem with the argument is that people who do really negative things willfully do those things under the umbrella of the term gamer on purpose whereas the positive examples maybe not so much.
Example: Person A considers themself a hardcore gamer to the point where they self identify with that as a label. They doxx a journalist for suggesting Call of Duty’s writing isn’t very good.
Person B has played games before but doesn’t own any game consoles. They just considered games to be random entertainment, like a movie or reading a good magazine article. This person sees the Desert Bus Charity stream and appreciates the sentiment. They donate $20. Person B is used as an example of “Gamers who don’t participate in hate,” in purposes of arguments such as the OP.
(To be clear, the point of persons A and B is NOT that gamers are always bad and general public is always good. Not at all. Just that person B is a false positive used as a smokescreen to make the group’s reputation more positive than it perhaps deserves.)
My point being, “do people who THINK OF THEMSELVES as being in the group label ‘gamer’ trend towards toxic behavior?” is a much more enlightening question than “if you use the label gamer for any person who plays videogames in any context, what kind of trends apply to those people? Are they more toxic than people who never play games at all?” Is the self-described gamer sub culture itself, toxic? Are there norms within the group that are not so good, is certain bad behavior encouraged, etc. I think the answer to THIS is definitely, provably yes. It even ties in with the sports stuff mentioned in the article. Are hardcore fans of football more likely to participate in riots or what not than the general population? Yeah, it seems like there’s data to support that, that the culture of BEING a fan contributes to those crimes.
Some of the kindest and most generous people I’ve known self-identify as gamers. I’ve known gamers who’ve donated to, organise drives for and even started charities. I’ve seen gamers be the support network for people going through their most difficult times. There was a gamer I never knew, by name, face or voice, who gave up a weekend for me to fix a weird crash that was seemingly unique to my copy of Oni. Reverse engineered the game files and wrote me a patch, just because I – some random spotty ingrate on a fansite message board – asked!
Seriously, what a guy. I have two big regrets: not showing the proper appreciation (I really was an ingrate) and more importantly, not preserving the patch – I still have my Oni CD, but of course now it doesn’t work..
“Positive examples maybe not so much” – well, maybe it has something to do with basic decency, or even profound goodness, not having that viral spice. But bad news has zest – and wings.
I work in a hospital. I’ve seen first hand that, time and again, members of the general public are absolutely capable of being rude, abusive, vile, and even physically violent towards both patients and staff. It’s true they’re often at moments of acute pressure in their lives. Short of losing rational capacity to act, I don’t think it comes anywhere near to being an excuse.
People across the spectrum of hobbies give themselves monikers. ‘Gamer’ is hardly a remarkable identity term when you consider the world is full of gearheads, ramblers, ravers, cineastes, potholers, bookworms and gourmands, to barely scratch the surface. All those groups are statistically guaranteed to contain dickheads in some number, but we don’t seek to culturally load those terms with negative connotations based on the actions of their worst elements. It isn’t fair make assumptions about the character of someone who calls themselves a biker just because the Hells Angels exist.
I and my friends think of ourselves as gamers. We’re not toxic, we don’t trend towards toxic behaviour, our norms are just fine, thanks, and we’d appreciate not being tarred with anyone’s brushes.
“Some of the kindest and most generous people I’ve known self-identify as gamers.”
Just a note that many people who harass/threaten “others” are very kind and generous within their in-group.
Related: Racists donate to charity too. Even (or especially) for the benefit of “those people”
Very astute! Yes, I can’t prove a negative. My experience of my friends’ behaviour towards me doesn’t preclude the possibility that, unbeknownst to me, they are racist or abusive to others! In fact they probably are awful, because wouldn’t it be exactly like an awful person to be nice as a cover for their crimes? Brb, suing for friend-divorce!
Or… maybe leading a life according to the principle that you can’t disprove the people you associate with might be secretly terrible would be madness… so I choose to go with the evidence of my personal experience, which flows in the complete opposite direction to the grotesque caricatures and ‘statistical likelihoods’ ascribed to gamers in this thread and elsewhere.
My experience is my experience. A data-point. I never presented it as a logical refutation of anything. So kindly take your weird scare quotes and cast aspersions somewhere else.
Off on a tangent, but a subset of a group identifying themselves with a name that intuitively includes everyone outside the subset, should be challenged as often as possible. Letting toxic people label themselves as ‘gamers’ is like letting a terrorist group label themselves as ‘activists’. If they try to take the center like that, make a new term and shove them into it (like the ‘hooligans’ example below). Keep the center central.
Very much this. The violent and radical fringe of a (sub)culture very often hides behind or justifies their actions by claiming to be “passionate” about whatever that (sub)culture is centered on. They will, in fact, very often present themselves as the ideal that other members of the (sub)culture should aspire to. I don’t know how it was in other countries but around here pursuing football hooligans met with certain resistance because 1) the football industry was scared of “alienating fans” and 2) seeing that things were “in the air” hooligan groups really, really tried to spin this narrative of football fans being harassed and persecuted and how matches would turn into these sombre affairs with no live audience, sports bars would be closed and the sale of any sports paraphenalia would be forbidden.
Far as I know the breakthrough came mostly when the industry figured out that hooligans were causing them more harm than good, I think regulations were passed shifting more responsibility to the clubs and football organizations and suddenly they became great supporters of security, cameras on stadiums and so on. It certainly doesn’t translate one to one and there is much more depth to the subject but particularly in case of multiplayer games I think it is significant that publishers not dealing with harassment or being very lenient has often been pointed out as an issue.
The only political elements directed at minorities I’ve noticed in gaming harassment are the same as the political elements that I’ve noticed everywhere; this is almost certainly due to me being able to conceal my political beliefs and not be identified as a minority, so I only see the public harassment.
Also, as far as I know, I’m in a US/Canada-centered cluster, so politics of other countries won’t affect me.
Tbh i think the main problem.i have with the gamers are toxic arguement and the many different ways of saying this is that theres so many different cultures, fandoms, sub cultures, sub sub cultures submarine cultures etc that its kind of meaningless if isnt narrowed to a specific group or even individual. Hell even in famously toxic games like call of duty you can find groups of lovely people and then find groups like the “Edgy Clan” who live up to their name. We used to call them the Eggy clan though which I guess they lived up to aswell cause they smelled :)
Eh, “political” is a loaded term in this context, no one knows what you really mean and it turns the topic into an instant minefield.
Most often it’s a nuclear option used to shut down discussion and shame and attack people.
In any case, Rubbing is racing.
Large companies like EA handwaving criticism with “toxicity” is definitely a problem these days, and I personally think that narrative is being pushed intentionally just because it’s easier than having to fix anything (because God forbid EA has to spend any of their billions of dollars on making good games). A large part of the great reaction to the Sonic movie’s second trailer was the surprise people had over Paramount actually fixing their initial design to the point where I keep seeing people say that they’re gonna watch it just because they took the time to improve it. That’s telling.
Although some gamers can definitely get a bit crazy with how far they take things. Death threats, swatting, and doxxing over stuff like CSGO skins. It’s a classic scenario where a few bad eggs on both sides ruin things for everyone. Maybe humans just have a toxicity problem.
I feel the same way with the whole “gamers are entitled” thing (which I guess is an offshoot of the ‘toxicity’ issue), especially with how many fans buy into it so they can cheer on their favorite franchise/company/whatever. Seeing people post things such as “wow, you expected x/y/z on top of everything else? you’re so entitled, you should be glad they even released it” makes me feel like I’m in some really lame episode of twilight zone where I’m the only person on earth who has to pay 60+ dollars for a new game.
That one is easy to solve though. I’m not entitled to anything but nobody is entitled to my purchase either.
You also have the flip side of this, where a publisher essentially weaponizes the toxicity of the worst parts of their fanbase. E.g. if the gaming press is legitimately criticizing a publisher’s business practices, or their working conditions, or you have labour organizing by the publisher’s staff, or the staff is speaking out against abuse or harassment, or a particular dev, maybe one specifically charged to communicate with fans and customers, says something a segment of the fanbase doesn’t like. Then you might see the publisher paint a target on their critics or the liability employee, opening those people up for abuse from the toxic fans. So the publisher can bemoan toxicity to their shareholders when it comes to some legitimate criticisms, while employing it against others. When the real culprit in most cases is the publisher not taking responsibility for their decisions.
This is a great take on this subject. Sadly “Us vs Them” approach and creating an “other” party to villify seems to be the more popular approach.
Yup. Labeling and manufacturing of an “in group.” Some people latched onto the label “gamer” and decided to be exclusionary about it – not uniquely, the cultural image of a gamer has always been poorly-matched to people who play games. But some people have been going further, defining the properties of a “true gamer” – and describing people they don’t want to let into their clubhouse as “fake gamers.” I think the backlash against “gamers” is based on accepting that exclusionary group’s definition of what a “gamer” is – by creating an “in” group, you automatically give other people an “out” group for free. (Especially with places like Twitter trying their hardest to find a group for you to hate so they can show them to you and increase your “engagement.” I think that’s why this has seemingly gotten worse recently.)
Personally, I think the cultural image has been off for so long maybe we just need to abandon the word.
> But some people have been going further, defining the properties of a “true gamer” – and describing people they don’t want to let into their clubhouse as “fake gamers.”
Problem: this applies to literally every other hobby and subculture that’s ever existed. True metalheads, true film buffs, et cetera.
> Personally, I think the cultural image has been off for so long maybe we just need to abandon the word.
The Michael Bolton counterargument comes to mind. Because a bunch of political activists have driven themselves crazy over one example of the same low-level bad behavior that exists everywhere on Earth doesn’t create any requirement on my part to “abandon a word.”
True Scottsman too.
Yeah… There was a video by SFDebris, made recently (and it’s on youtube as well), with same or closely related topics. It was a companion video to an Enterprise episode “Terra Nova” (I think), and he did a well researched take on things. The funniest (or saddest) thing is, were the comments, that somehow both agreed with the video and blamed “the other side”. Quite ironic
I mean, the “us” vs “them” is kind of the point of the video – people who harass others, dox people, or do illegal things, shouldn’t be included in the group “gamers”. They happen to play video-games, but they are not a welcome part of the community.
To explain myself more/better: it’s similar grouping, operating at different levels. “Us” gamers shouldn’t include “them” toxic people in our group identity, and when communicating about ourselves, so that the “them” outside of gaming don’t view “us” gamers as an external “them” to be shunned.
When listening to the misunderstanding segment, I was thinking about the Double Illusion of Transparency (and, to a lesser degree, my PhD, which I won’t link.)
In any event, you presented an excellent and well articulated argument. Well done.
Unfortunately in the gaming industry it’s far worse than that. Instead of Ford, imagine if Consumer Reports and Car and Driver and most automotive press outlets attacked its own readership, running with a harrassment narrative to demonize legitimate criticism of the car (or of themselves).
Your next paragraph does address that “The media is also part of the problem” but it sounds like you’re referring to the “mainstream” normie press. The gaming press specifically is the worst offender, which definitely wasn’t always the case. You link Jack Thompson, who the gaming press went to great lengths to oppose, but when the next prominent gaming-blaming demagogue arose, the gaming press embraced her.
That last sentence is suspiciously specific in the use of pronouns. I’ve got a hunch who you are referring to and I bet if asked which examples of the “gaming press” you consider particular bad you’d reply with Kotaku, Polygon and RPS. I’ve spent enough time on r/pcgaming to recognize the usual bunch and their dogwhistles.
Dogwhistling? I hate that term. It’s either too sinister of a qualifier used to maliciously describe certain omissions, sometimes neutral ones, of information; or it otherwise just gets applied incorrectly despite its intended meaning.
The way I understand it, the term “dog-whistle” in politics refers to a hidden message in political speech that would have some general, direct meaning to most sections of the populace, while also signalling a different, obfustaced message to the in-group. For example, a far-right demagogue referring to “the global elite” might be using that term as a codeword for “the jews”.
But, in Kunedog’s case, there is no direct message. Anyone who isn’t familiar with (I assume) Anita Sarkeesian will have no context as to what Kunedog’s talking about, forcing them to either stay uninformed, or look up the information themselves, in which case they will form their opinion on the matter, hence they’ll be fully qualified to judge the commenter’s post for themselves. Now, I dunno, it may be possible that, in the former case, the uninformed readers will pick a specific level of agreeing to assume that Sarkeesian is the same type of demagogue as Jack Thompson in most ways (including, perhaps, thinking that she has his political career, legal clout, prudish moral outlook, etc.?), but even then they surely wouldn’t be invested enough to act upon this incomplete information, I think.
I’m willing to chalk up Kunedog’s last sentence to an attempt to stay apolitical, as per Shamus’s guidelines, which is kind of difficult to do (hence, no wonder his attempt appeared to be so clumsy) when his whole argument revolves around the extremely controversial GamerGate controversy.
You’re right, it wasn’t a dogwhistle, but it wasn’t trying to fly below the radar either; I wouldn’t expect to get ban/modhammered just for mentioning Sarkeesian. I just figured on this site almost everyone would know who it meant (and yeah, the pronoun was part of that). Dunno, maybe in retrospect I shoudn’t have confused that handful of readers.
We’re discussing things that are generally prohibited (or at least highly discouraged). Practically everybody here is talking in pseudo-code to converse about things everybody is already wisened up to. And this public figure being referenced is kinda hard to just gloss over in recent history.
So of course it looks suspicious. There is no way to bring her up without it facially looking so. I wouldn’t go there myself, but this is unfair.
“Video game content should be censored under the coercive power of the state” and “Here are some things that video games do over and over that potentially alienate large segments of the video game audience; maybe consider not doing them in the future or at least think about it before just lazily repeating tropes?” are not remotely equivalent stances and the level of vitriol the latter received was entirely disproportionate and painted the entire hobby with exactly the negative image Shamus is discussing in this video. That’s why the defensive response from the non-toxic segments of the hobby was so strong.
Had the toxic segment been capable of exercising a modicum of restraint and dispassion there would have been a lot less “embracing”, but that’s apparently beyond their capabilities.
It’s an issue of incrementalism. The people who complained about the latter tend to claim that “asking nicely” is a prelude to “asking not so nicely” and finally “state censorship”. Given those assumptions, it’s understandable to get mad and try to stop things before they progress to the level of laws being proposed.
Thinking that criticism of stuff that is often quite flawed on its face is a slippery slope to STATE SUPPRESSION of art does not exactly benefit the standing of those making those arguments. Example:
-This Tracer pose is some sex sells BS. Her character is much cooler than this. They should do a different victory pose instead.
-YOU WANT THE GOVERNMENT TO TAKE AWAY MY PRETTY LADY GAMES.
Even if you disagree with the first argument… the second one is insane. Full stop.
Is it though? Think of the UK and their adult content pass. Governments have stuck their noses into places where they have no business before. I don’t think it would take a particularly deranged mind to imagine that there may be people who would like for certain media to be regulated in ways that aren’t very consumer-friendly.
EDIT: Or creator-friendly, let’s not forget the freedom of creators to make content that appeals to themselves.
One problem with your argument is that there is no need to resort to the coercive power of the state when you have the coercive power of large, monopolistic social media corporations that control the discourse. Who needs government when you can just have your critics shadowbanned? And that’s what the allegedly “non-toxic” segment of the hobby happily and eagerly resorts to.
Frankly, Jack Thompson was more honest. And at least you can vote out politicians; you don’t have that level of input into how Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” commission works.
Transparency and democratic processes aren’t particularly useful elements in developing cultural change.
On the other hand, I’m pretty sure it was the journalists who started telling ‘gamers (as in the people buying the games the industry is developing and following our news outlets) are horrible people’. Of course the reaction of the gamers didn’t help to dissuade people of that idea.
I think another issue is how the game news outlet moved away from consumer reports to the current state
I’ve been following this for a while and have written articles on the “Gamers are dead” fad that happened a while ago, but I think here that the main issue is not with gaming per se, but with the overall cultural context that games have ended up attached to. (I’ll try to avoid getting too far into politics other than to identify groups as examples without making any comments on who is right or wrong).
The precise same debates over things being “toxic” are happening in all sorts of places, and the same sorts of tactics and abuse — including things like doxxing and SWATing — are happening in them as well. I’ve seen the toxic narrative, at least, being heavily used in things like, say, the atheist movement and in feminism and in all sorts of other places. So this isn’t anything unique to games, and is a broad cultural context. For the most part, these sorts of things are widespread and it is easy to argue that their use in the gaming discussions aren’t something that comes from gaming itself but are imported from outside of it. This argument can be buttressed by the fact that at least some of the main people declaring “Gamers are toxic” came from outside of gaming, or at least didn’t have gaming as their primary focus (which is not to say that there isn’t criticism coming from inside gaming itself). In the various “Gamers are dead” discussions, I consistently noted that the articles didn’t seem to reflect gaming as I knew it or as the people I followed knew it. There were lots of assumptions about what gaming was like, but these were often wrong. For example, there was one article that accused gamers of simply buying whatever the gaming companies told them to do … around the same time as companies like Bioware were getting hammered for not providing the sort of game gamers wanted.
Gaming might have missed most of this except for the Gamergate issues, which dragged gaming into this broader context. Yes, gaming was always criticized, but that issue crossed multiple dimensions and so dragged it into the larger discussion and problematic issues. This is not to say that there weren’t abuse problems inside games itself, but for the most part gamers had called some of that out. But a lot of that was seized upon to call gaming toxic and to single it out, and to use that to drive other agendas and changes they wanted to make in games.
But while you say that most people who say “Gamers are toxic” don’t mean “SOME Gamers are toxic”, in the broader context a lot of them really DO mean that. They use that to claim that unless gaming — or other areas — fix the issues they want fixed, then gaming itself is bad or, at least that it’s willfully ignoring these issues that it needs to fix. The ones who are more reasonable about it usually use it as a shorthand for “Gaming is toxic”, and might actually have reasons they give for saying that. But then again the phrase is far more rhetorical than it is meaningful, and in the larger cultural context really is the phrase that people use when they want to gripe about these things.
I, personally, think it clear that gaming isn’t any worse than anything else. I see the same abuse and rants and arguments and tactics being used pretty much across the board. There may be things that are unique to gaming — multiplayer abuses, for example — but not enough to say that gaming is particularly toxic. However, I don’t think most people really do think that, but they believe that the rhetoric is, at least, the most persuasive to use.
I think this is undeniably a part of it. The presence of violence, looting and sex in games is interpreted in some quarters as perpetuating patriarchy, colonialism, misogyny etc*. At which point anyone who wilfully engages with such content can be deemed suspect by association, so ‘gamers are toxic’ follows, not on the grounds of demonstrable behaviour, but inference and innuendo.
*arguments I can respect academically, but I find the way their proponents tend to assume players incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality (or thinking for themselves in general) hugely condescending.
Have you read ‘Banakou, D., Chorianopoulos, K., & Anagnostou, K. (2009). Avatars’ appearance and social
behavior in online virtual worlds.’? It’s an interesting read and the data seems solid.
That’s a really interesting concept. Can you explain a little (since I’m a bit unfamiliar with these arguments)?
Sex, I understand. Violence (verbal, physical and mental), I understand. Misogyny is, well, ’nuff said. But is that it or are these arguments regarding all violence and sex? I’m really unfamiliar with this sort of stuff, honestly not trying to start any arguments. Is violence, in general, specifically thought to be tied to the patriachy?
The same could be said about violence, looting, and sex in films or TV shows, but nobody views “film watchers” as suspicious/dangerous people, because of the type of entertainment they’re watching.
Well, quite.
Technically not, but there have been numerous institutions and resolutions that have moderated what could be shown in media, see Hays’ Code for Hollywood and Comic Code Authority* among others. There have also been numerous actions against violent or otherwise “inappropriate” movies both specific and in general and, as an example against books, from the mid until late 19th century there was a major moral panic surrounding reading of penny dreadfuls, which were blamed for rise in juvenile crime and increase in suicide rates. An additional argument, my opinion on it aside, is that of agency, putting the player as performing (through an avatar) the actions rather than just witnessing them, something especially compelling when coupled with the fear of the strange new medium that many people did not partake in and did not understand, similarly to tabletop RPGs where people understood it as “players becoming thieves, murderers, whores and occultists”.
*I know CCA was not mandatory (not sure about other such codes) but it was created in response to attempts to pass legislations preventing distribution of, for example, comic books featuring crime or horror. Also while not technically mandatory not having CCA’s approval would seriously limit your distribution options and drove some publishers out of business.
Note that those situations are in the past; Nobody *right now* is labelling every film-watcher as something horrible. Film as a medium, and a group of interested people, is capable of amazing art, positivity, etc, and people who do bad things and happened to watch some films, are not held up as exemplars of film.
I absolutely agree the accusing the hobby itself and the people who play it as “toxic” is unfair and unproductive.
The real underlying problem is misogyny and how it is expressed within the gaming community and within the culture at large.
Yes, of course, men are the targets of harassment in gaming. But not to the degree or severity that women are. Notice that it was Shamus’ female friend who was driven from the gaming industry. I think it’s safe to assume that Shamus does not regularly receive rape threats.
“The real underlying problem is misogyny and how it is expressed within the gaming community and within the culture at large.”
To me, this statement makes it sound like you’re taking the blame off of one group of people (gamers) and dumping it on another (men) which doesn’t seem like an improvement. Instead of the “not all gamers” debate, you end up in the “not all men” debate, which is mechanically the same argument / misunderstanding.
Now, I agree with the premise that women get more harassment. That lines up with my extremely informal experience and observations. But I think the roots of the problem are the same. A very small group of very productive lunatics are harassing a lot of people. When you say “misogyny”, people hear “large-scale widespread hatred of women by men”, and there’s no way that doesn’t end in an argument from a hundred indignant guys like me who don’t like having the blame of harassment smeared all over us because we share a gender with the harassers.
I haven’t heard your specific take on this problem so I don’t know how much you’d agree with what I said above. I really don’t want to presume anything or put words in your mouth, but at this point in the debate it would be common from someone to clarify that their definition of “misogyny” doesn’t match with how I’m using it here. Something like:
“Hey, these harassers obviously hate / feel aggression towards women. That’s misogyny!”
And… fair enough. I think the problem with this branch of the argument is that “misogyny” is a lot like the “gamers are toxic” phrase, where everyone is using the same word / words to mean VERY different things. I don’t keep up with feminist-type arguments enough to really map out these misunderstandings, so I might be off-base here, but to me it seems like the same breakdown in communication that we see in gaming circles.
I don’t know. From the statistics I saw, it looks like that both sexes, mostly, receive the same amount of online harassment (outside, of stalking for young women, it’s the only outlier that stands out). I think I saw sources, that claim that men receive more of online harassment, but I can’t remember where it was from (you know, you see the title, make a “huh” sound and go with your life).
For much of it, while this may sound like victim blaming, I think part of the problem is that a lot of the abuse towards women and the women-specific abuses are used because women publicly state that it really bothers them. A lot of the worst stuff is always people who are at least partly trolling, in the sense that their main objective is to bother the people they are directing the comments and behaviour towards. If it becomes clear that it DOES bother them, then it’s seen as a success and is soemthing that they continue to use.
Ooh, a double-edged sword, that is interesting. So the question becomes whether men should be more forthcoming about harassment, which would fuel the trolls; women should be more reticent about harassment, which would be psychologically unhealthy; or we should meet halfway and get the worst of both worlds.
…And we can’t take a fourth option, because banning video games solves nothing.
I believe that’s called ‘generating engagement’ on Twitter and Youtube…
I’m female and I fully agree with this. From what I’ve personally witnessed, while women probably do experience slightly more abuse overall (and also different types of abuse), this is complicated by the fact that women also tend to take it far more to heart. Male gamers are more likely to just shrug it off or respond in kind, which means that even fairly serious instances of harassment get a lot less attention if the target is male. This is further complicated by the fact that the harassers know this, and like most bullies, they tend to pick soft targets.
Another thing I’ve personally noticed is that female gamers can be just as vicious to each other in other, more subtle ways. My worst ever online experience, by a large margin, was on a forum dominated by supposedly mature adult women. Rather than loud, angry insults or Internet-tough-guy threats, you got stultifying groupthink where even polite disagreement on certain topics made you persona non grata. After I decided to cut my losses and leave, I saw one member slag me off as a “terrible human being” on a completely unrelated website, just for disagreeing with her over a video game.
What I really can’t say is what can be done about any of this. The problem is that it’s the easiest thing in the world to make (say) a death threat online, even if you have zero intention of following through on it – it’s not like the old days where you’d have to track down someone’s address and personally deliver them a note. Banning certain words or phrases doesn’t help, since – as I mentioned – it’s entirely possible to be really, really nasty to someone using perfectly innocuous language. On the other hand, just saying “learn to deal with it” is clearly inadequate, especially for more serious types of abuse that go beyond verbal altercations (e.g. stalking and the like).
The ease with which people can make threats online, is one of the arguments I’ve seen for only allowing real identities and not pseudonyms – if a person had real consequences for that type of behavior, they’d be less likely to do it.
When some angry idiot in Xbox Live chat says “I fucked your mom last night”, no one worries that their mother has been unfaithful and might get a divorce from her husband. It is universally understood that not only is this not a true statement, it’s not even meant to be interpreted as a true statement, it’s a howl of frustration put into words.
Fifteen or twenty years ago, when some angry idiot made an internet death threat, no one took them seriously for the same reason no one takes Xbox Live Guy seriously. The idiot was understood to have lost the argument as surely as if he’d Godwin-ed it by calling someone a nazi, and people moved on with their lives.
Internet death threats have not gotten significantly more serious in the last two decades. There’s no spike in people following through and actually performing the murder. I propose that the solution to this problem is for people to wise up to the fact that internet death threats get about as much follow-through as “my uncle works at Nintendo and he’s going to ban you.” The internet is not real life.
You make a lot of sense! I’ve said something like this a long time ago but no one took it seriously, to the point I was starting to doubt it myself. Thank you for reaffirming my initial hypothesis :)
With the rise of social-media platforms, and the default “everything public”, there’s a lot more chances for people’s info to be available somewhere, ready to be abused. Twenty years ago, people had a lot fewer chaces to actually find out the home addresses of somebody they want to harm. Shamus even brought up a relevant example in the video – the woman who was swatted; If the harasser had lived in the same city, they could have left a letter in her mailbox with a knife or bullet attached. People are wising up to the horrible public-defaults, but I don’t think threats from someone who’s “just on the internet” should be so readily dismissed at the present time.
I stand by this point. How much easier it is to follow through on an internet death threat is a distraction when we can ask directly how many people follow through. I have never heard a single example of it actually happening, and the “online threats are serious business” crowd would be shouting that kind of thing from the rooftops if they had it. Online death threats are so safe that I can’t even compare them to lightning strikes or shark attacks, because those have actually killed people!
While probably true and covering the dimension of probability of follow through, this argument misses the dimension of plausability. And I would claim humans as a whole are much more focused on the latter and hilariously unequipped to handle the former.
Our brains can’t handle statistics intuitively in the best of circumstances and our modern outrage focused media diet helps trick our brains to overfocus on any danger that gets talked about as long as there is a plausible reality where we can imagine it happening.
So I think the point of publicly available location information is a very important factor to the increased fear of online threaths.
Well there was the Wichita swatting? And I think any successful (or even attempted) swatting should be treated as at least a serious endangerment of human life since, you know, police have guns and they’re trained to shoot if they feel threathened, like if they’re told they’re dealing with someone who committed murder and is holding hostages.
Additionally once we reach the point of someone doing stuff like sending me a package, standing in front of my house, sending other people to my house etc. I would feel a touch uncomfortable deciding on my own that “they’re not going to follow through and they’ll just keep sending me trash” though I guess mileage may vary.
If it needs a solution, I’d prefer to make creating fake identities an onerous process. Add 15 minutes of CaptCHA to the account creation process, and see whether trolls bother to make alts.
The trolls[1] aren’t the problem. It’s the people angry and/or crazy enough to stalk someone, SWAT them, etc. Fifteen minutes wouldn’t be a barrier to them.
[1] By “trolls” here, I mean people making idle threats, or otherwise causing little substantial harm. Hopefully that matches what you meant, otherwise I’m arguing past you. (Does that count as an accidental “straw-man argument”…?)
Well, if you’re assuming they’re obsessed, then real names won’t stop them either. SWATting isn’t even a thing you need an account for, that’s an over-the-phone thing. Taking fifteen minutes to make an account that can be shut down in a few seconds would be enough of a shift in effort to discourage the vast majority of bad behavior.
If you meant these statistics, you’re welcome. I thought of sharing them anyways because I just lately happened to come across them once again. I’m not sure how well renowned pew is as a source, though. I might ask someone who might know better but I often get the impression they have a solid reputation in the anglophone world.
By these numbers, men get harrassed more generally, but women get stalked more and more sexual harrassment.
I believe that Pew is generally considered to be one of, if not the most respectable sources for polling.
Looping back to some of the arguments above I think part of the issue lies between the difference with receiving threats and feeling threathened. There are numerous reasons why women would feel more threathened and/or would be more likely to admit to such feelings.
I recall a study of online harassment that centred around prominent journalists that showed that the male journalists received far more abuse and harassment (though less gendered of insults), but also that almost all of that was because of one specific journalist who received something like 10x the median level of abuse.
(Yes, I remember which specific journalist, I am purposefully choosing not to name names.)
I didn’t elaborate a great deal on my previous post because I try to keep my comments within the TL;DR length. :-)
My position:
Not all men are misogynists.
Not all misogynists are men.
Misogyny is part of a larger cultural problem involving how masculinity is defined, expressed and reinforced.
Since the beginning, video games have been primarily by, for, and about men and frequently reinforce rigid and stereotypical ideas about masculinity.
This in turn negatively impacts how women are depicted in video games, as well as their level of participation in the industry, and their treatment within the gaming community at large.
While these issues exist within society at large, they are particularly concentrated and more readily apparent within the video game industry, which has led to the “gamers are toxic” rhetoric.
“Not all misogynists are men.”
I find it interesting. According to the same pew research, half of the harassment the women receive comes from other women. Does it mean, that half of women are misogynists to some degree?
I hope it didn’t come off as a snark
I believe in gender studies that’s called “internalized misogyny”, but I haven’t read any (published, peer reviewed) papers that show any statistics about the phenomenon.
Yeah, I was going to say this. I’ve met women like this (thankfully only a couple) but it’s like the (and this is where I point out I’m not black or American so my wording might not be perfect, so please grant me some leeway) racism apologists (such as the character portrayed by Samuel L Jackson in Django Unchained).
A good example of a female Misogynist is Cersei Lannister, especially so in the books compared to the show.
At one point, she effectively sexually assaults another woman not because she has any legitimate sexual interest in her, but because she wants to perpetuate the cycle of sexual violence she herself experienced under Robert.
???
I must have missed that bit. Is that the bit where she sleeps with a woman who’s trying to curry favour (loads of unpleasent imagery used) and then just abrupty kicks her out of the room? It’s been a while.
Not that I disagree with you that Cersei is mysoginist; in particular a passage where she hears of a group of nuns being raped and one of her responses is ‘they were probably crying out for a good raping’ comes to mind.
Not the person you replied to, but yeah it’s that passage. She specifically wanted to cause her pain to find out what it was that Robert felt all the times he forced himself on her
I suppose you could ask: if half the harassment men receives come from other men, does that mean that half of men are misandrists to some degree?
Part of what makes this discussion messy is that it is dependent on the motivations of people’s actions, which is often very difficult to ascertain.
Unfortunately, no. Harrassment, as I understand it, is an entitlement issue (and I could be completely wrong here in my simplistic understanding/wording). You can suffer harrassment but have no effects of harrassment take place.
i.e. Most of the harrassment that men experience has no further bearing on their lives outside of the individual incidence. For women (not getting into minorities right now), due to the way the societal structure has been (currently) put together, there are sub- or excess-consequences that could and or do apply beyond individual incidences to, not only, a wider behavioural pattern but also a general, individual, weakening of the opportunities available to those women who experience the harrassment.
Half of harassment coming from men does not mean that half of men are harassers.
What it effectively means is that there isn’t any particular gender relation to harassment; approximately half the population are men, and are responsible for approximately half the harassment. Thus, gender is not a predictor of whether someone engages in harassment or not.
(And thus this holds true for misogyny as well.)
That was essentially what I was getting at, yes. The numbers tell you nothing about motivations.
Not really. Misogyny and misandry are the case when the harassment specifically targets someone because of and/or by means of their gender. A common example are rape threats, which are almost exclusively perpetrated by men and targetted at women.
There is a different problem among men though, and that is toxic masculinity – i.e. certain highly problematic expectations of how men are supposed to behave, almost always overlapping with homophobia and misogyny. For example, the seemingly harmless imperative “man up!” implies that a) only through certain behaviour is a man a man and b) being a man is superior to not being one.
Depends on what being a man is considered superior to. If it’s considered superior to being a woman, then I would disagree; if it’s considered superior to being a boy, then I would agree, because I believe maturity is better than immaturity (and I think the general current of Western Civilization has traditionally held the same position). “Man up!” is generally a call to practice the virtues of fortitude or bravery—which are, of course, hardly exclusive to men, but have been seen as part of the ideal for men to strive for in many times and places around the globe and throughout history. I certainly agree that the ideal of manhood held by some (perhaps many) men today is bad, but not that having an ideal to strive for is inherently bad in and of itself—we should instead seek to replace a bad ideal with a better one.
Just to nitpick this deduction: just because half the abuse comes from women doesn’t mean half of all women are misogynists (or abusers). It only means the women who DO act this way cause approximately as much abuse as the men who do. I believe the difference should be obvious, isn’t it?
No, it doesn’t.
Half or more of women ARE misogynists to some degree, mostly to a very small one, but that doesn’t follow from the ratio of harassment sources
For a related question, do female sports journalists (or any kind of industry that was previously male dominated) receive the same kind of harassment? I have no idea, just curious.
I don’t follow sports very closely, but from what I’ve seen, people seem to prefer to take it out on the players. but if a journalist happens to have a controversial opinion, they can expect to receive a lot of hate. For what it’s worth, I haven’t heard of female journalists receiving much in the way of threats, but I’ve also never heard of a female journalist taking a particularly controversial position.
But in one of Shamus’s responses, he talks about female journalists at the Escapist receiving hate mail despite not putting forth any really controversial opinion. Meanwhile, there are a number of (televised) sports “around the table debates”* where various commenters express opinions and argue or agree with each other about particular players, coaches, teams, whatever who are making good or bad decisions or performing poorly, which you think would be controversial enough with certain other fans. Do they get flak that gaming journalists/commenters get?
* I don’t sports at all, so this is the kind of stuff I see on TVs at restaurants, hair salons, waiting rooms, etc. Maybe there’s a better term for it?
Maybe not directly, but I can specifically say that, anecdotally, for specific sets of fans who watch sports in bars, “female commentators” are derided more than men because they are respected less by the fans that are talking about the commentary. Usually, there is an immediate hurdle that any female commentator must clear (time-dependent, of course) that male commentators do not, partially because the male commentators sometimes (though not always) have the visual recognition and partially because they are often dressed to titilate the audience…. whether that is a right or wrong interpretation, that is the subconscious interpretation that the audience absorbs… and of course, if the general audience did not have a misogynistic bent, it would not be the first port of call for our subconscious response. Which is why there is a patriarchal society present in most of the world.
It’s about the unequal response to equal stimuli than anything else (for me). I mean, a man in a suit and shirt (with a well-toned body) is sexy. A woman dressed in a sexy suit or dress ensemble with a similar level (there’s no critical way to assess sexy) body is no less sexy. However, one is demonstrably treated differently than another when other factors are accounted for.
And to be fair, I don’t think the broadcasters are really “in” on the blame here. They have long-since wizened-up to this sort of behaviour but the general audience that is watching? I don’t think so much.
Part of the issue is going to be the impact of the cultural context though. If I watch a men’s sport and there’s a female colour commentator, that tends to annoy me. Why? Because it feels like pandering. They wouldn’t have played or coached the game and so won’t have any unique insights about the specifics of playing that game, nor would they have interesting stories about their time playing the same game. So they always seem to be there just to be women doing male sports, an impression that I get because such moves are often celebrated as such, so the cultural context of “you need to help women break through into male dominated areas!” makes it look it’s a public show of doing so rather than a decision made because it provides the best broadcast.
On the flip side, I dislike it when women’s sports have male colour commentators. For most of the sports I watch, there have been enough women play the game that they should be able to find a woman who can talk about the specifics of her sport and give interesting stories of her time playing that specific sport.
(I don’t care about play-by-play or sideline reporters either way).
On this specifically, I like how the Canadian networks handle curling. Most events are mixed, in the sense that men’s and women’s teams compete at the same events in their own categories, and so what they do is have one play-by-play person — men, but these are men that have been doing it for decades and are noted for doing so and so to replace them with a woman would DEFINITELY be pandering — and then they have one male and one female colour commentator alongside them. Then, when they go to the events that are men or women only, they keep the same crew, keeping the gender/sex equality. But there are differences in the games, as shots that men might make women can’t, so both of them when commentating on the opposite sex game have to be careful when suggesting shots to make sure that they don’t suggest shots for the women they can’t make or reject shots for the men that the men can make. But because it’s the two of them, you get an interplay that sorts all of that out.
…
This was probably a distraction, but, hey, it let me talk about curling again [grin].
I’m sorry, but although this is seen as commonly received wisdom, data doesn’t seem to back the idea that women are especially or excessively harassed on the Internet compared to men. In fact, the data I’ve seen (pew research) suggests the opposite (although obviously not denying it does happen). Do you have anything to back this opinion up?
I believe that it comes from anonymity and consequent dehumanisation, which has little to do with specific phenomena like “mysogny” and has far more to do with general, non gender specific reasons.
I think anonymity is the key here. Men and women are socializing in a somewhat different manner. Men can rough each other with quips and non-offending insults. It’s a “frend-enemy” determination system, of sorts. If you take the joke and make a comeback – you’re clearly a friend. If not – you’re a stranger and it’s better to stay away. Women, from what I can gather, and with some notable exceptions, aren’t like that and they don’t understand this dynamics, and vice-versa, especially when genders aren’t known from the outset. Plus, there are a lot of teens here, that aren’t skilled enough in the art of socialization. I assume, a huge percentage of perceived online harassment is from this misunderstanding, of how people try to connect to each other.
May be I’m wrong here, but at least, that’s how I see the issue
During GG, I remember hanging out online with some folks from the Escapist. Of the women who worked there:
1) All were less famous / popular than me.
2) They were less controversial than me. (I shit all over the PS3, and some popular shooters of the day. They didn’t really do / say anything provocative.)
3) They got an order of magnitude more hate mail than I did. What it looked like to me is that there was a handful of guys going going down the list of female journos and sending them hate mail.
(I’m not sure what definition of “harassment” pew research was using. Maybe we’re talking about illegal threats and attacks, or rude messages.)
I realize this is just one person’s observations and not a proper statistical analysis. I only offer this as an explanation for where that “received wisdom” is coming from. People aren’t making it up. It might not reflect the wider internet trend, but SOMETHING was causing that disparity.
EDIT: This would have been more appropriate as a response to Deadly Dark, who cited the study in question, but that comment didn’t appear until after I’d written this one.
Well, there are few avenues that can explain this disparity between stats and your experience (if we assume, that stats are correct). Some of them could be wrong, I admit, but it is worth to consider (I hope).
1. Yes, it is an anecdotal evidence. Averages doesn’t mean that everyone gets equal share of harassment. Somewhere its more, somewhere its less, it varies from person to person.
2. Variances in perception. Perception could possibly be clouded for different reasons. E.g. the clouded perception is same reason why the lifetime numbers for female on male rape are low – because the male victims recontextualize it in their brains. They remember it differently from how it actually happened. (I hope I didn’t violate blog rules here; if anything like that – I apologize)
3. Have you read the messages that female writers were receiving? It is possible, that if you to receive the same message, you would not interpret it as a harassment if it was aimed at you. Different people have different standards (for different things).
4. Unaccounted factors. What the women were doing, what other men were doing, whether being popular gives you more or less hate mail, these are open questions.
He addressed most of these in his 1,2, and 3 posts.
I mean, I didn’t even review the research but my first port of call would be: “where are these people working, in which field?”
Being harrassed “on the internet” “on average” is very different from, 80% of women work in 10% of these fields and are harrassed 0% of the time and the women who work in the other 90% of fields are harrassed 100% of the time versus men who work in a wider variety of fields are are harrassed on a more general basis.
I mean, people are referencing a link but I’m not seeing it in this thread of conversation…
Seems like GG might be an obfuscating factor here, when trying to use this ancedote to generalize toward the hobby as a whole and over time.
Example: Someone hears about GG, and they come to the conclusion that female journalists are trying to crap on their beloved hobby. As revenge, they specifically send hatemail to female journo’s. You get skipped because you haven’t been highlighted as someone ignorant crapping on the hobby.
The hate mail might have been sent as a response to the more specific events going on, rather than because the person in question generally hates girls.
This is, of course, just supposition on my part.
Edit: Do you recall comparative levels of hate mail before GG happened?
There are two ways of looking at this, IMO:
1) Gamers’Gate is an indication of wider societal pressures:
A focussed entity allowed people who felt entitled to behave in a certain manner to join in an do things they felt appropriate (because not all GGs did the bad things).
2) Gamers’Gate is not an indication of wider societal pressures:
People decided that female journalists (and journalists who were calling for better behaviour in the general “gaming social structure” where going to deny them of their rights and abilities to behave fairly.
My money is on (1). Before GG there was no entity for people whose frustrations/emotions aligned. In the same way that activists cannot be said to be “active” until they find an organisation that aligns with their desires, beliefs.
Note: GamersGate is a small digital storefront that’s been around since at least the mid aughts.
GamerGate is the other thing.
I only point this out because I know the confusion caused problems for the poor folks that ran GamersGate.
Side rant: I hate how “-gate” has become the universal suffix to turn any word into the description of some kind of (actual or perceived) scandal. Yeah, it’s a reference to Watergate which is absolutely in no way at all related to the concept of a gate, but just happened to be the name of the hotel where some of the events transpired.
Hear, hear!
There’s a trope for that.
Argh! Crap. Haha, sorry for the typo. I *knew* it was GamerGate my mind just derped.
Thanks for the correction!
But yeah, that is incredibly unfortunate for those people!
I don’t know about this particular study, but you’re definitely right that how “harassment” is defined, and measured, is the most important part of these studies. The last two times I actually dug deeper into one of these studies to see how it was done:
-The first said that men were significantly more harassed, but it turned out they were literally just looking at how often curse words from a generic list were used in replies. I am not joking when I say that in this study, someone telling the poster “You’re f***ing awesome!” was counted as abuse, while threatening to come to their house and kill them was not. What the study was actually measuring was that men had a more vulgar audience in general.
-The second found no significant harassment difference, but the *only* way it was measuring harassment was by whether the recipient felt it was unusually high or low. If I recall correctly, no baseline to compare to, no questions about what they considered high or low, literally just whether or not that particular person felt like they received an abnormal amount of harassment in one direction or another. While there are interesting things you could do with this data, it’s not that useful for comparing the actual amount of harassment two different populations receive, which is what they were purporting to study.
I wish there were “like” buttons on this blog so I could like this post.
One possible confounder is that men are overrepresented in gaming, enough that most harassment can be directed at men and women can be harassed at a much higher rate.
Another factor is that much of the harassment tends to be sexual in nature, and many people send unwanted sexual-related things to women without the intention to harass, but those are taken and reported as harassment; meanwhile, the men only receive the things intended as harassment, and are much less likely to report them.
You say “not to the degree or severity”, but you mean “Not at the same frequency” that women are harassed to that degree.
I can show you a case of a male gamer being harassed worse, or at least just as badly, for every case you can show of a female gamer (or gamer-adjacent person) being harassed. But the case I can show is going to be an outlier even for a moderate level of harassment, and moderate harassment of women is pretty typical.
I disagree that people aren’t saying “all gamers are toxic”. They do, you can find it on twitter all the time, and those people usually mean it. The sad thing is, gaming media doesn’t help. Making an article about gamers doing charity fundrasers and stuff like that doesn’t make enough money. Making article about non-existant female e-sport player being harassed does make enough money.
I don’t understand the work that “non-existant” is doing in that last sentence.
He’s probably referring to this case when Kotaku made an editorial piece about the harassment of a female player that never existed.
For the record, “oneangrygamer” is absolutely not a useful source for anything, and not even in a political right vs left sense where you naturally need to take everything with a grain of salt. It’s an outspokenly alt right personal blog that still to this day takes a strong stance in favour of the gamergate “movement”.
Whoops, wrong link. How about these two? Are they reputable enough as sources? The second one even has a tweet from the author of the Kotaku article in which they acknowledge that it was a fake player.
Well, with that much glowing praise, I am now compelled to read and bookmark OneAngryGamer.
Thanks for the recommendation!
As you say, the key question isn’t ‘are gamers toxic’, it’s ‘are gamers more toxic than people in general (to a statistically significant degree)’.
I suspect the answer is no, not really, but that digitally expressed toxicity is easier to capture and spread awareness of than IRL toxicity.
I don’t know about that. It really depends on how you define gamer and toxicity. But I think that it’s plausible that gamers really are statistically different from the general population in various ways, which may include toxicity, if only because gamers, for most reasonable definitions of the term, are a self-selected group. Gamers are not drawn uniformly from the general population and we should not expect their statistics to match those of the general population. I don’t know if gamers are more toxic, on average, than non-gamers–no one does–but it’s definitely possible.
And get away with, don’t forget. A lot of people will change their behavior when protected from having to use their names or being within arm’s reach of their target.
Never discount the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
The thing about the GIFT is that it’s basically been entirely disproven at this point. Rates of harassment – and who did it – changed not one wink in the wake of Facebook’s Real Name policy.
Oh yeah, the GIFT specifically mentions the anonymity. So that’s why it got retired.
The bit about being within arms reach still applies, though. If internet trolling were easier to meaningfully punish, I bet if it wouldn’t happen as often.
There’s a separate question among people who want to shape gamer culture:
“What can I do to make gamers noticeably better than people in general?” or “What can I do to make this corner of gaming less toxic than people in general?”
A lot of gamer-world controversies get set in a different light if you imagine people seriously asking those questions, and the related “What can I do to be in a corner of gaming culture that is less toxic than the corner I am in now?”
It’s feasible, but labor-intensive, for a small fraction of people in a corner to cause particularly toxic groups to leave a particular corner (I’ve done that), but that actually results in the overall situation being worse, because those toxic groups go somewhere else. Likewise it’s relatively simple for individuals to leave, but that makes that corner worse in a positive feedback loop (everyone who isn’t okay with a little bit of racism leaves, the corner is now populated exclusively by people who are perfectly okay with a little bit of racism; then people who are okay with a little bit of racism, but not with overt racism leave, until the only people who are left are the ones who are okay with the extreme overt racists acting with no inhibitions whatsoever).
Instead of arguing about whether gamers should be labeled as toxic, we should be doing something about the facts which cause us to be labeled as toxic.
Is that actually worse? It would be a miracle if everyone in the world agreed on how much racism we should be okay with, so given that people are going to disagree, it seems like the ideal situation is one where all the people who are okay with tons of racism end up in one place and all the people okay with no racism go somewhere else: everyone ends up in a place tuned to their particular preferences. That seems like an improvement over sticking everyone in the same place where they make each other miserable.
Because the problem is never solved. Ideas, once they reach a certain saturation point, don’t die: they become self-sustaining (at least as long as free speech is allowed). If you segregate (maintain separation), either intentionally or simply by passively accepting self-segregating populations, you guarantee that it will continue. And those people that are self-segregated into certain idea space? The rest of the world still has to interact with them, on the internet, at the grocery store, in local politics, in global politics, and indeed all the way up to war. And the more segregated they become, the more emboldened they become, being surrounded by nothing but people who agree with them- and an outside world which is apparently hostile.
And furthermore, humans are naturally self-segregating. That whole 100 monkey tribal brain problem. The question becomes whether or not you think it’s possible to weed out the idea entirely, or instead choose to accept it. But accepting it is basically a trap, because I’m pretty sure that all ideas effectively have a positive spread rate due to the second problem: physical reproduction. Even if you let the groups self-segregate out, and even if the idea has an objectively low adoption rate for the uninitiated, the people within those groups will reproduce and increase the number of people with their ideas regardless. So unless you maintain a continuous counter-pressure, the idea will grow anyway, and the more people who align with it the more pressure it takes to keep the spread down no matter how low the transmission rate.
Over the last few decades (century or more?) there has been a lot of change towards a more equal/accepting/etc type of culture, with plenty of people raised to believe X turning away from it and helping more people do so. But in some ways and places we may be running into the limit, where the outside “pressure” to discard negative ideas is starting to equalize with self-segregation and minimum physical reproduction (and their inherent spread rate, when many of these ideas are quite attractive). As such, the effort required to continue reducing those problems goes up, even though the problem may be lower than it ever has been.
But refusing to do so, or even lessening the pressure that currently exists, will only guarantee the reversal of current progress.
Except cesspits are also breeding grounds, and they don’t stay in the cesspit.
Even worse: they don’t just seem to be breeding grounds, but also intensification chambers. Places where the ideas not only spread, but also get more vitriolic, violent, and hateful when left to their own devices.
This idea was suggested pre-Civil War. I suggest you do a bunch of research to see why it’s like… super terrible. The key point is… non-racist people do not need to give way to racist people. In fact, they MUST not.
…how does that even work? Are you saying they’ll make bigger problems in the long run because they’ll have time to plan things without supervision? That only applies in meatspace where people can only be in one place at one time. A toxic person is like a bad fart, expanding to stink up as many rooms as they have access to.
So that’s why the average American more closely resembles a sapient pumpkin than a primate, it all makes sense.
After having worked many years in the industry as journo, developer and publisher before moving on to entirely different industries, I must say that gaming has more problems baked-in as many other fields. As such I don’t know of “toxicity” is the right term, but gaming as a hobby and gamers as a subculture are the juncture of many overlapping internet-based subcultures.
Gaming as a subculture has become a veritable breeding ground for anti-feminism, which in turn has become the gateway for alt-right and racist ideology and the research on this exists (never mind the fact that I’ve seen this happen in the past 25 years first-hand).
I experienced this (and other bad influences) first-hand when in one company I had to lobby hard for the female characters to not wear boob-plate armor and be designed as equally “cool” choices for players. And I was the goddamn producer of that game. The counter-arguments were weak at best and steeped in a deep-seated immaturity.
And it’s this overall immaturity that I would – if I had to – blame for this and other effects. “Gamers” as they are commonly known had been a refuge primarily for a specific kind of adolescent boys and/or men. Notice how the “jocks” might have played games when they were young but shedded that hobby when it became inopportune to ride with the cool kids.
Now those cool kids get to celebrate comic-book movies and games, which must breed resentment with those that were bullied for those same hobbies only years ago – this is where all that rhetoric about “normies” comes from that is especially potent in certain subreddits and – surprise – on the *chans of the US-based internet.
To put it very bluntly – many gamers might not *be* basement-dwellers anymore, but intellectually many of the very vocal gamers out there might as well still reside in their own mental basements. I would know because it took a short, but very intense, relationship with a woman (a proud feminist) many years ago to rip me from my own mental basement and after that happened I couldn’t help but look at big parts of gaming- and internet-culture in a much different way.
As long as “gamers” don’t shed their siege-mentality that has them lash out against anyone who wants to challenge the status quo (because sadly enough that’s all it takes) they will not lose that public image. Case in point: I don’t agree with Anita Sarkeesian on all points, but I wholly agree that the reliance on tropes that portray women in a certain way is lazy and if the industry wants to be better, it has to step up. I’d rather my daughter identify with strong female protagonists instead of playing Mario/Link who needs to help/save the princess for the umpteenth time again (and no, the sole existence of Lara Croft doesn’t count). The fact that Anita received death-threats for her video-essays says a lot. Or that Zoe Quinn had to change coasts and still has to use an anonymous forwarding service for her personal mail. No matter how much you might disagree with someone, nobody deserves this. Least of all over damn video games!
I can’t help but feel that people for which games, comic-books, fantasy serve as a big part of their identity as a person relegate themselves to a state of arrested development, a self-inflicted intellectual immaturity that leads to overblown, childish behavior, _especially_ in adults. The internet just exacerbated this trend. The stories I could tell about emails and forums messages and direct personal abuse at trade shows I received for the games I worked for.. mind boggling.
So yes – we could waste time discussing semantics or we could take a good hard look at ourselves, the subcultures we’re part of, and recognize that there is damn lot of work ahead of us, because neither gaming nor fan-cultures will end in a positive place if we don’t put a hard stop on current developments. Sure, we could engage in whataboutism and point at sports or other subcultures, _or_ we could start with the subculture that is dear to us and make the change that we want to see.
There’s a bit of intersection with table-top gaming culture too, that has had a lot of influx of new female players, and there’s some resentment from certain male players about that.
“intellectually many of the very vocal gamers out there might as well still reside in their own mental basements.”
I think some of the issues we’re talking about is that some of these particular people (not all or even most, but enough) lack certain social skills to begin with, so “toxicity” for lack of a better word can certainly arise. Not sure of other hobbies that have had SO MANY articles and videos talking about problem players in that hobby. There are TKers and Griefers in online games, but I don’t think they are as common as the people who will sit down in a tabletop game and be disruptive towards people they are physically present with.
To be fair, though, while there are some who seem to resent that in general, a lot of the reaction I’ve seen is from female players entering the hobby and then complaining about how sexist it is and that it needs to change to suit them. Even people who want to see more female players in a space can get annoyed by that. It’s also very similar to the reactions to AD&D 4E, only directed at, ironically for the discussion, video game players instead of women,
I don’t know about that. I mean, these clubs exist in the real world. These forums and places of engagement exist in, what we think of, as a natural place. Would you be less supportive of a gamer (no matter of gender identity) walking into a gaming group and complaining that they were bald-faced Nazis? I’m not even jumping the Rubicon here.
Disucssions about tactics or rules are very different, as you noted, from reception of new players and their identity. Like, would you think it’s acceptable to have a black-face character in a tabletop RPG? Would you think it’s weird that black people, entering the hobby, would be appalled and complain about it?
In the same way that written media and visual media have changed to suit the times, gaming also needs to change to meet the new expectations and equalities of the times.
To answer your questions: I think newcomers would be totally justified in questioning and complaining about the presence of Nazis* and blackface** in tabletop/gaming/etc.
What I find harder to justify, and kind of offensive, is the implication that things comparable to those mentioned already exist in tabletop/gaming/[insert geek hobby here]***.
Unless you think, say, scantily-clad she-elves with big breast are equivalent to blackface or something. Not saying you can’t make criticisms of that sort of thing, but I wouldn’t go as far as to compare it with actual bigotry.
* By this I mean Nazis in the community, not Nazi characters in a game like Wolfenstein.
** Assuming it’s presented uncritically/positively and not in the appropiate context.
*** Yes, I know comic books in the 50s/60s/70s were pretty iffy in their handling of issues like race or gender, and reflected the prejudices of their time, but I’d argue that sort of thing is much rarer nowadays.
I agree with you that they’re not on the same level of offensive. My point was that they are offensive when those sorts of things become pervasive and are pervasive because they espouse only one viewpoint.
I mean, I don’t think people have a problem with a large-breasted, scantily clad characters in theory. However, I think at one point – not necessarily now – that was basically the common representation of those types of characters… and it wasn’t a class feature.
So, yeah, I don’t think it’s weird for people who those representations affect negatively would be annoyed or making complaints. Maybe I Godwinned too hard (and I apologise for that) but I was trying to use examples that were simple and easy to understand. This is clearly a more complex scenario… but, going back to blackface… if you were tabletop gaming in 1900 blackface characters wouldn’t cause a blip. Going back to my point in the original post – times change.
The way I read the OP, the complaints were about the hobby as a whole, i.e. what people are being sold – not individual tabletops and groups. Maybe I obfuscated my argument by speaking on the smaller scale. Again, I apologise for the lack of clarity in my point. Like is said below, if you didn’t like the group you were playing with, you’d leave. But that’s a different scenario to one where you can only buy scantily clad minis for the classes you want to play.
I’m trying to parse what the actual question is and having trouble with that, and don’t want to get into controversial assessments of people, so let me start with a personal example, since I think I have one that works. I’m going to talk about … curling.
I am a huge curling fan. Curling was always a very niche sport but due to exposure at the Olympics has become more mainstream. What I like about curling is the tactical aspect to it of move/counter-move/counter-move. But, it can be a slow sport because of that. Recently, curling adopted mixed doubles, where due to its nature things much faster and the tactical aspect is reduced (without extra sweepers it’s hard to really place rocks well, leading to a more hitting/tap game). Because people like the pace of play, there are constant comments about bringing that to the normal 4 person team game. I HATE that. They’re taking away the aspects of the game I like to appeal to a more mainstream audience that may not stick around. So, in general, my main point is that any complaints from a new audience to change things about anything that they weren’t part of original will generate hostility from long-time fans.
To try to answer your questions:
If a person joined a gaming group and found that some of them were Nazis and talked about it a lot, the most I’d be willing to accept from them is asking them to tone it down as it bothers them. If they refused, I don’t think it appropriate for them to demand that those long-time players be kicked out or have to change under penalty of any kind of DM censure. If it bothers them too much to continue with the group — and I can see how it could — then they should just leave. There are likely other groups to join and, failing that, other things to do instead.
The blackface case is a little trickier, but it would depend on how it was portrayed. If it was a historical character woven into the world that was popular, demanding the character be removed would be going too far. Again, if it bothers them that much, they can leave and go do other things.
The thing about gaming, though, is that for the most part there ARE varied instances that provide more of what those people claim to want. They tend to have no idea they exist — because they aren’t mainstream — and also don’t want to see ANY of the bad things in existence. Note that this is only the most vocal ones; more moderate people either tend to be better at this or else leave without experiencing what gaming really has to offer.
Daimbert… this is horrible. Like seriously… what are you even talking about?
“If a person joined a gaming group and found that some of them were Nazis and talked about it a lot, the most I’d be willing to accept from them is asking them to tone it down as it bothers them.”
Who would NOT be bothered by the discussion of Nazi ideology besides other Nazis? I am sincerely concerned by your thought experiment here. The most you’d be willing to accept????
This is the point. If a bunch of the group are nazis, or communists, or serial-killing cannibals, it’s their group. You can express “I’d like you to not talking about eating babies”, but if they say “Nah, we like talking about baby-eating” your options are to get over your objections, or leave. It’d be really weird to sign up for an account at the forums of BabyEating.com and demand everyone stop talking about baby eating, and you don’t have any more right to control the discourse when you show up to a gaming group in person.
This really shows a category difference in attitudes- one side sees it as a priori obvious that their preferences and values should be imposed on all groups of people, while the other side sees it in terms of there being a higher principle of free association.
That trick- the ability to say “I don’t approve of what you do with your space, but I recognize that it’s your space and that I don’t have a right to impose on it” – radically redefines one’s outlook on the world, and looks downright alien to people who can’t do it.
Another important wrinkle here:
Person A says, “I’m tired of grizzled unshaven white dude protagonists. I’d like to see something else for a change.”
Person B says, “This game has a pandering sexy lady in it. This means it contributes to Societal Ills, which means it shouldn’t exist, which means you are a bad person if you like it.”
One of these is reasonable (and welcome, to my thinking) artistic criticism, and the other is a rhetorical attack on the hobby and half the people in it. A is pretty mainstream, and B is pretty fringe, but thanks to Social Media Distortion (SMD), B gets shared more because it gets more “engagement”. So to the opposition, it looks like B is a commonly-held viewpoint.
So then there’s backlash. But people are tribal and emotional and they tend to attack based on “teams” rather than viewpoints, so then A gets a bunch of harassment as if they were advocating B’s position. Then the social media machine magnifies THAT, so that it looks like everyone is fighting with A’s reasonable viewpoint.
After a few more loops through the SMD machine, both sides are fighting against this bizzaro extremist strawman version of the other team.
This is one of the reasons I’m letting this thread run its course. Everyone is being really civil and I’m hoping we get to see the reasonable people for a change. I don’t think it will change anyone’s mind, but maybe it will make everyone just 10% more nuanced in the future.
I can dream, anyway.
You people are great.
I kind of wish there was a way for me to tag certain people with a simple “yeah, that” without adding clutter with posts that don’t add anything to the conversation itself.
It doesn’t help that I’ve reached a point where I mostly don’t bother saying anything in these discussions because I either mostly agree with the person talking or I’ve seen the arguments before and I disagree but the person’s posting pattern matchs to people I think aren’t worth talking to because I think I won’t/can’t be heard anyway.
One interesting thing is to see how the market sorts these things out.
When person A get in charge of something, you tend to get something that’s generally well-received and successful. When person B gets in charge, you get something which is purposely spiteful towards its fans, leading to a huge controversy followed by the franchise flaming out and crashing.
That’s adorable.
With consideration to the fact that this is a blog on the internet, the idea of having such a deep, almost personal, yet civil discussion feels almost… alien to me. I am also really glad that this space exists, Shamus.
In one sense, you are correct. If the example he used was “fans of the color purple” or “fans of cartoon ponies”, I’d say yeah, you shouldn’t come in and try to control the preferences of the group to be the color blue or cartoon trucks instead.
But he used the example of a violent hate group. They don’t deserve a space and suggesting that allowing the rhetoric to stand is morally neutral is morally wrong. I actually agree that you should leave the group in the example given, rather than trying to change it. But because it is unsafe to be there, not for the reason being suggested.
You’re not showing that I’m incorrect- you perfectly demonstrating my statement that your group doesn’t understand the ability to draw that distinction and considers it alien. Comparing it to “fans of the color purple” represents a hard failure to grasp the core concept- you don’t actually disapprove of the color purple. You pat yourself on the back for tolerating something that doesn’t cost you anything to tolerate because you don’t have a problem with it in the first place.
What I’m talking about is an actual principled stance. It’s not my space, and I have no right to police it. I don’t get to override that based purely on an entirely arbitrary judgment of when they’ve disagreed with me too much. I don’t get to engage in an actual violation of their rights just because they, in theory, have an ideology that would justify hypothetical violations of other people’s rights.
Of course, part of being able to do this is to have the maturity to ask questions like “What if somebody inserted themselves into my group and demanded that we kick out a member for being a communist?”. It’s a lot easier to think that you have the right to impose on people when your sense of morality doesn’t include an expectation of reciprocity.
Um, they were a group of tabletop gamers where a number of them expressed those views, in line with my interpretation of the original question. And, again, your answer here shows the precise dangers in the original question taking on a topic so heated, because my original point — which the original questions were purportedly addressing — was lost.
Let’s stick with the baby-eaters, who only eat babies and are perfectly safe for adults to be around. What do you suggest if not allowing the rhetoric to stand? You can argue with them, but if no one changes their mind eventually you’re going to have to give up or leave. From a purely pragmatic perspective, nevermind the right, you don’t have the ability to deny them a space. What are you going to do, burn their house down, ask the government to revoke the property rights of everyone who speaks approvingly of baby-eating?
I want to reply to Bloodsquirrel but can’t find the button so I reply here: The point shoebox is trying to make, I believe, is that in the case of the Neo-Nazi Club, it’s not about whether one has the right to get in the group and demand that it “changes”, but rather that Nazi Clubs shouldn’t exist period, and one should be free to express that opinion.
That’s why I think Nazi clubs are a bad example. I think a better example would be, for example, if a bunch of fundamentalist Christians joined a well established local tabletop fantasy RPG community and started demanding that from now on campaigns no longer contain magic or “pagan” symbolism or deities because it offends their religious beliefs.
This is proposing a strictly more expansive version of that right: the right to demand all such groups change stop existing, without the demander joining. If you can’t defend the narrow version of controlling one club you join, that doesn’t look good for your broader demand. No one’s been arguing against your right to express demands, but your demand probably won’t be met.
Ninety-Three, you are also creating some worrisome arguments here. Like… whoa.
“Let’s stick with the baby-eaters, who only eat babies and are perfectly safe for adults to be around.” Baby-eaters, are either murderers or opportunists who snack on human corpses. I don’t see how either a cannibal or a murderer is safe for any human person to be around, and your level of argumentation has dropped into full-on parody crazy town.
“What do you suggest if not allowing the rhetoric to stand?” Calling the police. These people are cannibals and are most likely kidnappers and murderers as well. Seriously, what are you talking about.
Let me give you the benefit of the doubt you do not deserve based on this comment and presume you meant “eaters of ONLY babies of accepted food animals, such as cows and lambs.” To that group of people which… isn’t real? That’s not a real thing, no one ONLY eats that, I would think they were being weird for constantly bringing it up, and ask that the discussion stay off the topic of food, unless the group was going to order food.
Some notes:
First, this was my interpretation of Duoae’s thought experiment. I was struggling with his two questions precisely because of how inflammatory the examples were which then would obscure my actual point. That’s why I started with the curling example to outline my ACTUAL point.
Second, your reply here shows precisely how that happened, because you are replying that my statement is so out-of-bounds NOT on the basis that someone coming into an area that they weren’t originally part of and demanding changes, but on the grounds that Nazis should not be tolerated in society whatsoever. That’s a big part of the debate here: are these things that we shouldn’t see in any society or any media whatsoever? You can make a case for Nazis, but can you make the same case for ANY of the things that they want to change? Impractically sexy armour, for example?
Third, let me expand the thought experiment as I saw it (which could be a misrepresentation): someone is poking around, sees some people playing a tabletop RPG, thinks it looks like fun, and decides to join. When there, they find that the people say an awful lot of Nazi talking points and seem very much to support those ideas. Do you think they’re justified in going to the DM and demanding that all of those people be tossed out of the group because it bothers them, even though no one else, at least, has been demanding that? Because I don’t think a newcomer to the group can be so demanding, especially since they always have the choice to just leave. They can ask people to tone it down, they can ask more silent people in the group if they agree and see if the majority support it, but they at a minimum have to expect that the group will react with hostility to simply demanding it, especially as a newcomer.
The case for the latter is quite clear – it is blatantly sexist and misogynist when only women are depicted that way, which is almost always the case. If all your warriors regardless of gender run into battle wearing nothing but metal underwear, sure, more power to you. But we both know this is not the scenario you are talking about.
I don’t quite understand why you keep bringing up this example with the nazi tabletop group. Yes, it is reasonable for anyone at any time to demand that nazis are not to be tolerated, period. The funny thing is, while you create such a ridiculous strawman to play devil’s advocate for (I hope that is what you are doing), you just make the very point against your stance: nazis are not okay, period. Likewise, albeit on a less extreme level, misogyny is also not okay, period.
Can you make a case that NO media or game should ever do it? Because the case for harm is if it’s always done that way, not that some particular examples might, and the example was about removing it completely, not about suggesting that it be better or encouraging media to minimize it.
Because that’s what the original poster and the responses have been screaming at me about? If you want to try to address my point with a less heated example — and, remember, I have said in the comment that the inflammatory example was a bad one PRECISELY because it distracts from my original point — then you could easily go back, find the curling example which is the one I used to illustrate my main point, and focus on that. If you did that in a comment, I promise I’d talk about that and not Nazis [grin].
And I pointed out that a case could be made for that in the first quote you provided, but that the example was obscuring my point because you can make a case for eliminating Nazis from society as a whole, but not many of the things that the people coming into video gaming are arguing for.
You seem to have missed that it’s not my strawman. It’s Duoae’s. The whole point of my curling example was to shift it AWAY from what you would consider a strawman aimed at my own argument. And instead of doing that, you’ve maintained outrage at my position, which wrt the example is this: if someone as a newbie goes into a group which an existing dynamic and demands that they change that dynamic, they need to be prepared for hostility. I admit that I made a mistake in referring to whether one ought to make such demands, but again my position is that for any private/semi-private group you don’t get to demand, as a newcomer, that they change the dynamic that they like as if you are entitled to such changes. You can ask or encourage them to, and if they won’t then you can always leave.
But often what counts as misogyny is debatable. For example, I don’t consider a game giving female characters impractically sexy armour to be necessarily misogynistic. If it’s one or two, it generally isn’t. If it’s all of them, then it’s at least fanservice level, but fanservice in and of itself isn’t misogynistic, especially if the female characters aren’t just objectified but are characters that happen to be wearing sexy armour. If it’s in a context where female characters ARE nothing more than sex objects, then it would count. You, to me, made the same mistake of seeing “impractically sexy armour” and assuming that that, in and of itself, would have to mean the latter, which I disagree with.
As far as I can see, I didn’t misrepresent anyone’s argument. I put forth two examples whereby behaviour in society was tolerated and then challenged as an analogy as to why people coming into any community that is not working with the current societal norms might be offended at certain behaviour in a time where, in wider society, those behaviours are frowned upon or disapproved of.
Individual gaming groups are never going to be upheld to the same standards of the community as a whole and don’t need to be. Individual groups can be as offensive as they want but the larger community, usually, needs to adhere to the current societal norms otherwise it will face attacks from society at large.
I used Nazis not as a template for the discussion of “how bad current behaviour is” but as a black and white case whereby (I thought) if I reduced the example to its simplest form, there would be no edge cases where people could say – well, in *this* scenario your argument doesn’t hold.
I was just questioning Daimbert’s logic of not expecting the tone and behaviour of the community to change when the constituents of the community changes. If women come into the community, individual groups don’t need to change (if they don’t want to reflect those values) but the community as a whole will necessarily have to change to reflect the new people and their values.
Apologies again for Godwinning the discussion. I thought it would just be a simple example.
Duoae, I only kept the strawman phrasing because the other commenter used it. I don’t think it was a strawman, but don’t think it was relevant to my point either. Especially since as an extreme case it’s not really relevant to the discussion, as at least some of the changes demanded aren’t ones that society as a WHOLE can claim need to be eliminated.
But I do disagree with your overall point: if new audiences decide that they like something about an established community but that community’s standards differ from the overall societal norms, I DON’T think it reasonable for them to face attacks from society at large. Those newcomers who can’t tolerate what the community has always done are free to leave, since it’s an optional community. Things are different in things like a workplace where it’s forced to some extent.
On what grounds can people coming into a community demand that it change things they don’t like and expect the community to do so and not react with hostility to that? They can ask for change and advocate for it, certainly, but demanding seems out of bounds except for cases where what is happening is utterly unacceptable in any society. Which is not where we were in the original examples.
I am going to take a more extreme stance here and argue that a tabletop group that wants to play a “slave women of the jungle” scenario, where they objectify, enslave and rape women can not be forbidden by group outsiders. Yes even if women are explicitly treated as sex objects. This mostly also holds for the Nazi example, but as a German this is an even thornier issue since we have laws around that kinda thing.
You can find it deplorable. You can disapprove. You can even be morally obliged to protest against such group dynamics. But as long as the group internally agrees that this is how they want to do things and no one is harmed by them doing their thing. The value of free speech in this case trumps the distaste we feel for their opinions and in my ideal world they should have the right to do this in their private group.
Of course just because they have the right to do this, does not mean you as a newcomer to their group do not have a moral obligation to challenge their opinions and tastes if you find them not okay. It will be a hard obligation to live up to and the end result might likely be that you get shoved out and not much changes, but that is the nature of very different opinions.
What I wanted to clarify here is the difference between “You should object and demand change from the group.” and “This group should not exist, period.”.
The first sentence reads as an appeal to work toward changing opinion from within, the second reads like a call for more outside enforcement to keep speech within predefined bounds. I happen to disagree with the second sentiment, but do not currently know what people are specifically argueing for/against.
Daimbert, I don’t think your line of argument really goes anywhere without a clear explanation of why the NS people should get to express themselves, while the anti-NS person doesn’t? Surely these people are a fringe group within the larger body of tabletop players, so “greater numbers” doesn’t count? Similarly “you should expect pushback” could equally be applied to NS people expressing their views.
I think it might be better just to agree that this thought experiment is more aggravating than illuminating and just drop it.
Blame Duoae, not me; it’s his example. Also, blame everyone else for focusing on this example and not the curling one I was actually advocating for.
In light of your comment, I won’t talk about how you missed what I said about it because it would be better to drop it.
Yeah the fact that they would have a problem if someone joined their gaming group and then objected to the presence of literal Nazis – not Nazi characters, the actual humans – is horrifying.
This is the fun side of Shamus’s moderation policy – you can have a nice, civil discussion about how Nazis are just people and you should respect their views. So long as no one swears it means everything is going perfectly fine, right?
Sure, universal human rights are universal, after all. It’s kind of in the name. If the baby eaters want to have their own meetings and whatnot they’re welcome to it… as long as they don’t eat babies.
This is sort of a facile comment. Baby eaters have the right to assemble, but everything about what it is they are doing is a crime. So uh… the moment they start to talk about eating babies, plans to get some to eat, etc. It’s a crime.
Edit: misplaced reply to Daimbert’s comment at 04:48
I’m afraid I don’t think the Curling example really goes anywhere either. It appears to be asking “should I be obliged to change” and the answer would seem to be “no, but overreactions like SWATting people might be counterproductive; learning to accept change might be better for your mental health in the long run”, or, more briefly “don’t be a jerk”. I don’t think it really speaks to the original topic.
Well, the original subthread went like this:
Joshua commented that he had seen similar reactions to female players coming into tabletop games.
I noted that some of the reaction was due to “We don’t want female players” but a lot of it was due to perceived demands to change the game to appeal to them, and noted that from what I’d seen a lot of it was similar to the reaction to D&D 4E, except that hostility was directed towards video gamers (obviously, SWATing wasn’t an issue there but then again SWATing is not unique to gaming of any stripe as I’ve pointed out before).
Duoae then made the Nazi analogy.
I then tried to shift it to the curling analogy to show how demands to change something to appeal to a new or mainstream audience can annoy and anger the original audience. Obviously, I’m not going to harass or SWAT anyone, but I do view the arguments with hostility because it’s changing the thing that I liked and supported when no one else did to appeal to bandwagon jumpers who are likely to leave even IF the changes are made.
So that’s my main point: we need to make sure that we recognize anger and hostility as a reaction to demands vs some other politicized hostility. If you don’t think it interesting or relevant, that’s fair, but it is a response to what was said in the subthread.
Fair enough, although I think perhaps “hostility” isn’t a good word to use. There’s surely an argument that reacting with hostility is more “toxic” than e.g. advocating the positive points of the thing you like and ignoring anyone who appears unable to engage with you constructively?
Oh, I agree. It’s just not what’s happening now, from both sides [grin]. The one side is more demanding than advocating, and the response then is angrier than it should be, and it is a feedback loop.
>Would you be less supportive of a gamer (no matter of gender identity) walking into a gaming group and complaining that they were bald-faced Nazis?
Yes, because despite the media and Twitter hysteria Nazis are about as common, and about as influential, as flat-Earthers. Someone who rolls into a group and starts hurling accusations like that in all directions probably has psychological problems.
One of the issues I have with things like this is that I don’t recognize the image of games and gamers that you present, especially among very dedicated gamers who have been playing for decades. This is the impression given from the more mainstream aspects of gaming — FPSes in particular — and not from those who are more dedicated to gaming as gaming itself. This is not how I have experienced games, myself and among my friends even WHEN we were young and immature. This is not how Shamus works. This is not how most of his friends approach games. This is not how most of the commenters here approach games. At what point do we start to wonder if the purportedly vocal gamers really represent it? Especially since the gaming media is often choosing who to elevate based on newsworthiness, and calm, rational arguments don’t do that as well as rants.
For example, there are LOTS of reasonable criticisms of Sarkeesian out there. How many of them are ever referenced by anyone? How many people reference the case of Liana Kerzner, who received abuse FOR criticizing Sarkeesian? It’s easy to claim that the most vocal critics are simply immature, “basement dwellers” when what we survey to see who is vocal are the ones dominated by those.
But the issue here is not “the cool kids are doing it too”, but that the “cool kids” are coming in, claiming to enjoy it, and then demanding that it change to suit them. And calling those in the hobby immature for not wanting it to change.
Yes, a gamer who calls themselves one is just immature and locking themselves into that. That would include Shamus. That would include me. How many examples would someone have to cite before you start to wonder if your view perhaps might not be representative? How many examples of the same behaviour in other areas would someone have to cite before you’d consider that perhaps it isn’t a problem with gaming or “nerd” hobbies?
The first step would be to not start from a perspective where you assume that anyone who doesn’t want to see the same changes as you must simply be immature. The second step is to look at the other areas and note the things that are common among ALL subcultures — or at least most of them — and so note that these aspects are cultural and not subcultural. The third step is to make sure that you are also taking a good hard look at your own perspectives to see how much of that work that you insist needs to be done is something that is personal to you and not an issue for the subculture as a whole. The fourth step is to make sure that we can really gather a good set of perspectives to see what is really going on and where we really want to go, and do so in a way that discussion is prioritized instead of angry demands and defensiveness. Then we might be able to decide where this subculture should go.
Because I’ve read a lot of the comments on what the subculture needs to do from all sides. I often don’t recognize gaming in them, and think that their comments would destroy gaming. I could be right about this. I could be wrong about this. But disagreeing cannot make me simply immature, and if that’s the impression then my typical reaction is to start ignoring all sides.
Gaming is not a religion nor a social club. It is an industry. Individuals pay to participate with their money, and that makes them customers. And a customer has every right to demand goods and services that meet their expectations. “I want characters and scenarios I can identify with” or “this presentation makes me uncomfortable and I’d appreciate less uncomfortable options” is just as legitimate a demand as “I want a mini-van with more cargo space” or “this seat belt is uncomfortable and may cause serious injury in a crash–fix it”.
Yeah, but the problem is that for an industry that was a success and is making money has suddenly drawn in or has decided to pursue a new market suddenly is receiving demands and aggressive demands from those newcomers to change the things that they had no problem with and even consider a major part of their enjoyment. So the example I made was to 4E: changing the rules to make the game more appealing to, as the argument went, people who are used to video games and not tabletop games. If they make simplifications that take out the detail that the original audience wants, it’s hard to not feel like it’s pandering to the new audience and ignoring the people who made it a success in the first place. And the companies still have no idea if the new audience is going to stay even IF they get those changes (there have been lots of examples where media changed to pursue a new audience and not only didn’t get the new audience but lost the old one due to the changes).
It only gets worse when the arguments are more in line with “These things are bad and shouldn’t be there at all!” instead of just “We like this better!”.
Personally, I can agree with allowing people to make those changes if they want to if there’s room for companies to not do that and appeal to the original audience instead if they want to. That’s … not the typical response from the very vocal newcomers. It tends to be the sort of argument that the insiders make (see Shamus or Susan(?) who used to work at the Escapist who wanted more diversity of protagonists in FPSes).
Yeah, but if you have a customer who wants more platforming and less action in the next action platformer and another customer who wants less platforming and more action, then one of them is a problem and we should all condemn and judge harshly and write articles about toxic (platforming/action) fans.
Or we could not do that, but where’s the fun in just having everyone get along?
The problem is that we’re not dealing with “I want a mini-van with more cargo space”, we’re dealing with “nobody should be driving mini-vans! Everyone should have to be driving full-sized vans, and mini-vans should be taken off the road!”
Nobody cares if you go make a bunch of walking simulators. They care when you tell them that you have to make your game simpler and easier so that the more morally important social group can play it.
And serendipity has provided us with a beautiful example- The trailer for Ghostbusters: Afterlife was just released, and there are actually people out there who are in a rage because Sony has dared to make a movie that appears to be specifically trying to appeal to fans of the series, strongly linking itself to the previous movies and framing itself as a rediscovery of the mythos. This isn’t well-intended people wanting their own thing- they don’t want Ghostbusters fans to have their thing taken away from them and dangled outside of their reach.
Really? That’s a reaction that I hadn’t seen. I HAD seen the reaction of people talking about how this is the proper thing and proves the reboot was a bad idea, which is sort of a neener-neener reaction.
(Full disclosure: at least in part because of the controversy, I refused to watch the 2016 reboot, but may not watch this one either, mostly because it strikes me as being closer to the cheap horror movies I watch than a Ghostbusters movie).
Jeremy Gordon has a saltmine of an article about it.
He also apparently hates Baby Yoda. So….
My problem with baby Yoda is how terrible it looks when people pick it up. It’s obvious they’re lifting a lifeless prop, and it looks like the prop doesn’t weigh enough as the equivalent volume of baby. Like, with these high production values, nobody could make a decent weighted Yoda prop? They couldn’t find a way to make it move a little?
I know this is really petty, but it yanks me right out of the story every time I see someone pick that thing up.
On the other hand, Pedro Pascal is killing it in the role. I can’t believe how much he’s able to do with a helmet over his face, and I can’t believe the producers allowed it. In all the Marvel movies, everyone is in such a hurry to take off their helmet / mask so we can see the famous actor. But this show values the lore and isn’t afraid to stick to the actual character concept.
Perhaps no one in the production has ever handled a baby before? /jk
Perhaps the production looked at the complexity of having a moving puppet just for those ‘picking the baby’ scenes, how much it would weight (considering some of the actors are already lugging a few kg of armor and scenes take multiple shoots) and decided it wasn’t worth the bother. Personally I’m not bothered, but I’m also not in the ‘Baby Yoda is so cute! Squeeee!’ camp. The rest of the series is pretty solid, but the best episodes so far were the first ones.
This doesn’t really have anything to do with the Baby Yoda prop but do we know how much a Yoda is supposed to weigh? I remember seeing an article when The Mandalorian released about how in Star Wars canon no one knows the name of the species that Yoda is a part of. Did anyone ever mention a supposed weight? When Luke is running around in Empire with Yoda on his back I’d always assumed Yoda weighed next to nothing (since he was obviously a puppet) but maybe in George Lucas canon Yoda weighs 150 pounds which makes Luke’s feat infinitely more impressive.
This made me laugh. Remember in Age of Ultron, when Robert Downey Jr was so eager to be recognised that he made Iron Man take off his armor inside a Hydra base they were raiding? Which then allowed Scarlet Witch to jump him from behind and fill his head with horrifying images, that then drove the plot of that movie?
Think – if Iron Man had been played by some nobody he’d have been fine and that film would never have happened.
You know, I actually never thought about it despite all the scenes from inside Iron Man’s helmet.
A lot of things have already been said on the topic. In general, I completely agree with your assessment, and I’d like to add a quote by Amos Oz – a Jew born is Israel in 1939 whose most famous book is How to Cure a Fanatic. It’s on my reading list, but I once heard a really nice quote from it that pretty much summarizes what you’re talking about:
I absolutely agree with you that a reliance on tropes and stereotypes is lazy. Which is why I’m really not sure that using one (‘gamers are manchildren trapped in their mental basements’) to double down on another (‘gamers are toxic’) is likely to move the discussion forward.
Let me expand that point – current research suggests that the age at which people become mentally “adult” seems to move further and further back. The mental state of a 28-year-old in 2019 might be more comparable to the state of a 16-year-old in the 1960s. Research about sexual behavior suggests the same, with the rate of child pregnancies going down not just because of better sex education, but primarily because kids are more shut-in due to social media and less intersocial contact and experiencing their first sexual encounters at much later ages, combined with overbearing parents and schools and universities shielding students from bad experiences (see also: the idea that kids shouldn’t receive grades).
In simple words: Life doesn’t force us to “grow up” earlier anymore.
As such I tried – and apparently failed – to convey that the immaturity and mental basements are just symptoms of an overall societal development, not the core issue itself.
It’s also generally accepted that Behavioural Sciences research tends to reproduce the personal and cultural biases of the people designing the studies, which would be compatible with the current replication crisis. The trope that young people are more immature than In My Day is as old as human civilisation. This assertion doesn’t even begin to pass the sniff test IMO.
This is an excellent write-up of the issue, thanks.
Re-read this bit again:
> “Gamers” as they are commonly known had been a refuge primarily for a specific kind of adolescent boys and/or men.
Why do you want to take away someone’s refuge? And why are you so shocked by them turning hostile in response?
Did Henry Cavill put you up to this?
I don’t worry too much about the language I employ because when I’m talking about the darker corners of gaming, I’m talking inwards to other gamers and we tend to have honest conversations about what’s going on, why it’s going on, and what – if anything – is incumbent on reasonable gamers to do about it. I’m much more careful with my language when I’m talking outward because I understand that I’m talking to people who will, at best, misunderstand the words in a colloquial way, or, at worst, intentionally misinterpret the words because it suits their agenda, possibly for clickbait-y reasons.
Trying to grab a headline is one thing – and not a thing I’m thrilled about – but it really gets my goat when large game publishing companies use the language to shield themselves against all criticism. You’d be hard-pressed to find another business model where the provider has more contempt for its clientele than in the game publishing industry. On the one hand, they’ll gladly sell us a $60 game (or $80 if you want the special edition), while also telling us that we’re miserable, jingoistic trolls, making impossible demands because we have no clue what we want. Worse than that, they take that narrative so that they can tell us what we want, and according to them, we want the things that just so happen to maximize their revenue streams. Odd that.
Henry Cavill is a saint. Love the guy. I hope to see him starring in more movies
I rarely find any shows that interest me. The last show I finished was the HBO Chernobyl series. I only made it 2 episodes into The Mandalorian, couldn’t finish Manhunt: Unabomber, and on the whole was going to skip The Witcher (I’ll admit I’m not a fan of how they cast Triss and Yen) but watching that interview with Henry Cavill…dang man. I was never really a fan of him, didn’t like his Superman, but if those are his true thoughts then my respect for him went up by a ridiculous degree. I may even give The Witcher tv show a shot because of it.
I think that one reason that gamers might be perceived as more toxic as a group than, say, sports fans, is that gamers are present mostly on the internet whereas sports fans are often present physically in the real world. When you’re at a sporting event, you might see a person or group of persons shouting abuse at the field. If you do, however, you will also unavoidably see the hundreds, thousands, and possibly even tens of thousands–I’ll be honest, I don’t know how big stadiums are–of people who aren’t doing that. It’s hard to paint all sports fans as toxic because, gosh, look at all the sports fans who are publicly being non-toxic. You just can’t see gamers on the internet in the same way.
And a lot of the issues with unruly sports fans may also be tied to their alcohol consumption at the time. You don’t typically see riots the next day when someone finds out the score from last night’s game. That’s not necessarily the case with gamers.
Well, for the Port Said Stadium riot (the one with the 79 dead), I don’t think it’s possible to blame alcohol consumption, since it’s in Egypt (yes, there is alcohol in Egypt, like the local beer Stella, but from some back of the napkin calculs, it looks like it’s not a lot compared to European levels of consumption).
I have to admit that when you spoke about wanting to make this video I was expecting to disagree with you based on me presupposing that when people talk about toxicity in gaming they think it’s about ALL GAMERS, so it is good that you clarify this issue and shame on me for assuming.
That being said, I still don’t fully agree with the video. I think you underestimate the actual harassment issue too much. As you said, the question is “are ‘gamers’ statistically more toxic than the general population?”. You argue this is not really true, because any group has bad apples, and because football fans exhibit even worse behavior that doesn’t get attibuted to football, so gamers can’t be that bad.
I disagree with this reasoning. Yes, every large enough group has some psychos in it, but it is not just a matter of a group having harassers in it. It is also important that the harassment is specifically being done for stuff having to do with gaming. Of all people in the group “people who like Coca-Cola”, some people are going to be murderers and thieves, but the amount of people who will specifically threaten to bomb Pepsi is, as far as I can tell, a lot lower than the amount of people threatening to rape female video game critics relative to the gaming population.
The football example I think is also interesting, because I would argue that football violence definitely is indicative of a specific kind of football culture. Football hooligans are organised in specific fan clubs, and I would definitely argue that those fan clubs are toxic.
Now sure, there is definitely a big difference between “football fans” and “members of the football hooligan subculture”, but I would argue that when people talk about “gamers” being toxic, they are also not talking about “everyone who plays games”.
The word “gamer” specifically, rather than just “someone into gaming”, has gotten a sort of notoriety due to groups of toxic people using it as a name to rally under. For example, there is evidence of people from 4chan’s /pol/ infiltrating (or even starting) GamerGate so they could use it to recruit people for their toxic political movements. Or stuff like the subreddit r/gamersriseup, which used to be ironic, but is now full of propaganda for hate against women and minorities.
Part of this recruiting is turning gaming from a hobby to an identity, so that they can then present the group of gamers as being opressed for that identity, and also deny this identity to anyone they disagree with.
Sorry for bringing some politics up (I couldn’t give examples otherwise). I also understand that this was not the main point of your video, and I agree that outside of this context, the statement “gamers are toxic” can definitely be used by demagogues against anyone who plays games. But I still wanted to reply because in the video your arguments sort of imply that there isn’t really a harassment problem specific to gaming. Where I would argue that gaming definitely has a harassment problem, it is just contained and organised within subgroups of gaming. (groups who specifically call themselves “gamers”).
I genuinely feel sorry for incels. The least deserving group of people to receive hate and misinformation. They need our empathy and help, not name-calling like this
Well, like you state:
Gaming is a specifically “online” habit. Regardless of whether you play a console offline or not – the community is online, tech savvy, spends more time online and in the forums necessary to enable harrassment/engagement and more able to perform certain tasks than others.
I don’t know how you’d quantify or substantiate “casual” harrassment at a football/eggball game… I don’t know how you’d quantify/substatiate harrassment at a bar… I don’t know how you quantify the “in-person won’t hit/shout at them” human mechanic versus the “I’m far away and untouchable” mechanic.
I think this is where the disparity lies. IMO, I also agree with Shamus, I think the world has an equal distribution of assholes, it’s just that some assholes are more concentrated in location/action than others.
Okay, does anyone have any sources for their statements? Because I can cite studies all day long.
Fichman, P., & Sanfilippo, M. R. (2015). The bad boys and girls of cyberspace: How gender and context impact perception of and reaction to trolling.
Fox, J., & Tang, W. Y. (2017). Women’s experiences with general and sexual harassment in online video games: Rumination, organizational responsiveness, withdrawal, and coping strategies.
But if I’m the only one used to reading academia, I don’t know how useful this will be.
I think pew research is often cited in these kinds of discussion
https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2017/07/10151519/PI_2017.07.11_Online-Harassment_FINAL.pdf
That report goes perfectly with my comments below- it opens up with “4 in 10 Americans have experienced harassment online!”
That sounds really bad- but wait, what is harassment, exactly? Well, it turns out that it includes “offensive name calling”. I’ll be blunt: I don’t believe that there is any significant number of people who have spent any significant time online who haven’t been insulted at some point. They have more severe categories, of course, but they’re poorly defined themselves.
The word “harassment” paints the picture of persistent, predatory behavior against somebody, but by using a definition loose enough to include anyone who has been on an online argument it lets you talk about the worst end of the defined behavior while in a context where it looks like you’ve claimed that 60% of people have experienced it.
It also hits one of my pet peeves about the use of statistics: 4 out of 10 people have experienced Bad Thing. This is 40%. This means that the majority of people have NOT experienced that Bad Thing. Often, that means that things are at least not as bad as they mean to imply … which is why they use “4 out of 10” instead of 40%. And expanding the definitions goes along with that, and if we note that it includes offensive name calling then only 40%, at least, being bothered by it enough to answer it in the poll seems pretty good …
Some very flawed assumptions present in your statements here. Like that 40% is an acceptable number (because it’s not over 50%, one presumes?). Or that “not being bothered enough” would be a reason for low self reporting when it’s usually the opposite. People don’t self report when they don’t have faith in the system to help them, for example.
This is a Pew poll, I’m pretty sure that answering a pollster’s yes/no question does not go through the pathway of “will doing this cause the system to help me?”
But if you asked me to estimate how many people have experienced offensive name-calling on the internet, my estimate would be easily north of 90%, maybe 99%. Do you have any idea how utopian the internet would have to be for a majority of its population to have never been insulted? Those numbers say to me “99% of the population have become enlightened saints and we’re well on the way to world peace.” 40% is not just acceptable, it’s a number so fantastic as to make me suspect someone released a virus that removes meanness from the human genome.
Either that or the polling question is too open to interpretation and has produced garbage data.
That’s weird, or your online experience is very different from mine. I spend a lot of time online and has been for years; I’ve read things that I found offensive, read offensive things directed at some of my identities (but not directed directly at me), but I have been name-called directly twice in that entire time I’ve been online. So perhaps the idea that the majority of people aren’t directly insulted online isn’t that far-fetched.
Of course the idea would be different if, by insulted, you mean not just insulted directly, but insulted my tribe/identity/in-group.
This was a study. They weren’t relying on self-reporting, they were doing surveys- which means that their data is almost certainly biased in the other direction, since people are more likely to exaggerate slights against themselves.
And, again, this is a definition of “harassment” that can be satisfied by one person on a message board calling you a fuckwit. 40% of people being called a fuckwit, one time, is pretty hard to justify as a major social crisis.
I’m not sure why you made the presumption of it not being over 50% when my comment was explicit about saying that the majority of people didn’t experience that, which of course makes it clear that it’s not over 50% [grin].
If people are asked if they’ve been harassed online in a poll — which, as pointed out, wasn’t what happened here — a number of them who have experienced the things that they counted may not mention it because it didn’t stand out to them at the time. They might completely forget about it until reminded of a specific incident, for example, because it didn’t stand out to them at the time.
As for the number being acceptable or not, I’m not saying for certain, but will note exactly what I said: according to that study, more people than not don’t experience harassment. We may want it to be lower, but phrasing it that way instead of as “4 out of 10” certainly makes it sound less of an issue.
Just asking: Do you believe this post will still be subject to significant discussion a few days from today? I’m not sure posting these sources a) without links or even journal names to look them up and b) without any mention of their actual content but just with the expectation that people will search them on their own, read them and accept them will do much good. At least I’d don’t expect them to have any impact on the discussion under this post, as looking them up and reading them will likely take a while, won’t it?
W/e. My actual issue: I don’t think shoving source study names without actually quoting any content or the source where one may find the studies into people’s faces makes you more credible unless you make the studies easier to access for people who would like to read them.
So please, if you expect people to read them, at least include the journals or other sources who published these studies.
I really like the video, but I’ve got a really bad feeling about how it’s going to go. I think it’s going to take years before people stop talking over each other, and I don’t feel like people are ready to have a mature conversation about this (if I were a gambling man, I’d bet on this comment section getting locked within 2-3 days). If nothing else, I at least hope you’re going to get a lot of views out of this, even though you’ve got a very balanced take on the issue, which is something the algorithm tends to frown upon.
Hard agree. The particularly galling thing is that this horrible, loose, inflammatory use of sociological terminology comes directly from a bunch of people who are heavily invested in the use of sociological terminology with highly specific technical meanings.
Also all of these people use Twitter too much and are therefore directly putting themselves into contact with the people most likely to get into fights with them, as Shamus pointed out in his “leaving Twitter” post.
“If you’ve read comments on YouTube or discussed politics online, then you know that being rude is NOT unique to games.”
Excellent point. What is unique to games, though, is that much of the hobby involves directly interacting with what amounts to an internet comment section.
56% of people play multiplayer games according to the ESA. That said, not all multiplayer games have interaction so until someone does the work we can’t know how many people actually communicate with others in-game.
Also, this post already shaping up to be a powder keg – if we’re getting this many comments during the European session, I can just imagine how lively the discussion’s going to be once the Americans wake up…
Given the topic, I’m sure Shamus already considered that a foregone conclusion.
Yeah, this is going to be quite a ride.
Great video though Shamus. Here’s to hoping it gets the traction to make it count.
I love all gamers.
Absolutely LOVE that image of the two guys arguing. Is it a blank template like you’d find on a meme generator? Because that format will work for SO MANY different ‘discussions’ / arguments / flamewars.
Looks like I’ll be the first to point out that your first link “Gamers of Toxic” is a dead link.
Or perhaps I’m first because it works for everyone else.
Dead for me too. Specifically, “Some gamers are toxic” which links to “http://toxic_gamer.png”
Perhaps you meant to link “toxic_gamer.png” which would expand to “https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/toxic_gamer.png” but that’s dead too.
The first problem I see is that you’re defining gamers as “all two billion+ people who play videogames”, but that’s not what the slogan tends to mean. Even among people who are specifically insistent that gamers are more toxic than the general population, there’s no ire for the mid-forties businesspeople who play Candy Crush while riding the train to work. The literal meaning of “gamer” is anyone who plays games, but another common meaning is something analagous to “film geek”: gamers are the people who are really into gaming, the kind of people who care enough to identify gaming as a hobby, or even enough to post on message boards about it.
But more significantly, I think it’s a mistake to interpret “Gamers are toxic” as any specific factual claim. The football riots you brought up make a good comparison: I’m sure that before some of those football fans stabbed each other, people exchanged words like “Leeds fans suck!” It would be silly to try to translate that statement into an empirical proposition about the state of the world, the rioter chanting that is simply saying “I hate Leeds fans.” It’s an expression of emotion, or at most a statement of opinion, and there’s no statistic you could show the rioter that would make him say “Oh, I was mistaken, Leeds fans actually don’t suck.”
A nontrivial portion of the people saying “Gamers are toxic” seem to be in this football rioter mindset where the words don’t mean anything more than “Fuck those guys.” This naturally leads to those guys responding with something to the effect of “Well fuck you too then”, and the whole discussion gets dragged down to the worst levels of mudslinging, not because of a misunderstanding, but because of a true recognition of mutual animosity.
Making a different point from my post above, you haven’t dealt with the idea that “Gamers are about as toxic as non-gamers of equal age/gender/nationality/etc and that’s bad.” Consider the following dialogue:
“Our country has tons of fatal car accidents!”
“Actually we have 27% less fatal car accidents than other Western nations, we’re doing great.”
“I don’t care how we’re doing relative to other countries, two thousand people die every year, someone should do something!”
The typical “Gamers bad” article doesn’t need to claim gamers are worse than average in order to defend its central thesis of “This is terrible” and/or “Someone should do something”. Here the argument ends up being over that thesis: the “Gamers aren’t toxic” people generally contend that this is not actually terrible, and people shouldn’t something about it (because the proposed solutions are bad/not worth it). I don’t think this is a misunderstanding so much as a value disagreement.
I just watched 10 minutes of game footage and I don’t think I learned anything about either Borderlands OR Half-Life. But it was a nice, flashy Skinner box that distracted me from the troubling words coming from the speakers. ;) Time to invest in an animated talking head?
To be somewhat serious, I think the “gamers” criticism has seemed to get better in the past few years. Early on (15 years+ ago) “gamers” were easily one of the largest “internet demographics”, and thus acted out all the now-standard, negative dynamics of online communities first. The only thing exceptional about gaming is that it is often inherently competitive. There are winners and losers and social (and recently monetary) rewards for the winners.
Now that various social media platforms have made EVERYONE into an “internet demographic”, gamers seem pretty chill compared to people into politics … possibly because that’s an area where the rewards for winning are even higher.
The toxicity argument is a microcosm of the overall culture war (in the US and some other western societies). It’s not so much that people misunderstand one another. It’s that you have people with competing ideologies who don’t even interpret reality the same way yelling at one another.
Yeah… Shame, really. I used to look up at US culture, hoping that its achievements will lead rest of the world, my country included, to the better future. Now… I just feel sorrow for all of this. There’s a hope, but it’ll take a long time to find a common ground again. Such is life, I guess
From a 30,000-foot view, we’re already in the better future in a lot of ways. Standards of living around the world have increased substantially since World War II, and we haven’t seen world powers all try to kill each other since then. Communication and direct interaction between various peoples of the world exists on an unprecedented scale. I think there will always be problems due to human nature, but to date, this is in most ways the best time to be alive.
Think there are two big elements that you missed:
The first is that the vagueness of terms like “Toxic” or “problematic” is not unintentional. They’re part of a deliberate rhetorical strategy- if toxic means both “sending death threats” and “criticized the ME3 ending on artistic grounds”, then you can use examples of the later as evidence that the former is more prevalent than it really is. This is obviously insane, but of course you’re never supposed to be this upfront about it. If you just keep throwing around the term, then it builds an association in people’s minds.
It’s also useful to allow you to imply that people are guilty of things without having to make any specific, falsifiable claims. You can call death threats “toxic” today, then call somebody “toxic” tomorrow, and create the impression of them sending death threats when what they actually did was call something “gay” in a livestream.
Another benefit of using vague terms like “toxic”. If you say that doxxing is bad, and then you dox somebody, then you’re a hypocrite. But if the entire other side is just “toxic”, then it’s a lot easier for their doxxing to be bad and your doxing to be good, and you don’t even have to bother articulating the difference between the two.
The second element is how much of this is culture vs. culture. Part of “gamers are toxic” is actually “your tribe of gamers is toxic”. Nobody is calling themselves or their friends toxic here- it’s those people. Gamers knew for a long time that their community was full of assholes. Penny Arcade’s comic about what Xbox Live assholes were going to do when they had to go outside because Xbox Live was down was hilarious, and nobody was getting pissed off by it. But there’s a very, very different character to criticism when it doesn’t come from the group itself. And that’s not just the group’s tribal reaction- criticism from the outside comes with less inherently understood nuance, and is usually much blunter, and liable to smear the entire group. Inter-culture criticism is usually much sharper about drawing lines between groups within a culture and identifying specific problems.
Back in 2010, everybody knew that gamers were assholes and that games journalism was crap, but it wasn’t an explosive argument because game journalists were gamers and it was all self-reflection. That monoculture is gone, and now we have the Journalist tribe who can’t play anything more challenging than their cherished walking simulators versus the filthy Fortnite troglodytes. Calling the one side unethical and the other side toxic has become a defacto political statement because of where political battle-lines were drawn, and I don’t think any analysis can really succeed without address this point.
Case in point: coming up with a new label for “toxic gamers” only works if the good tribe doesn’t want the “toxic gamers” associated with the rest of bad tribe. At best, the new term will just be thrown at the entire bad tribe as soon as it has any rhetorical power.
This is called a “Motte and Bailey” fallacy.
Huh. Interesting. I wonder when the shift happened, and whether it’s entirely perception, or whether the amount of gaming skill journalists have on average really did degrade over the years.
*insert cuphead meme here*
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. From my very informal observations, it seems like there was a rapid shift at some point. If I had to guess, I’d say it was sometime in the mid-aughts?
Now, the following is just an idea I’ve been messing with. I have no numbers to back it up and I haven’t checked the launch dates of websites or anything. My toy theory is that the shift happened as gaming journalism was legitimized. In the 90s, gaming sites were basically just news-focused blogs run by a couple of people. The only ones I can remember now are BluesNews and …. ShackSomething? SomethingShack? I know it had Shack in the name. I think that was a Quake site of some sort? There weren’t any gaming “journalists”, there were just people who wrote about games as a hobby.
At some point – I’m willing to bet it was during the dot-com bubble – various ad networks popped up, which made it possible to actually make money by posting content. People started forming real companies and hiring actual J-school grads to create content for their gaming sites. That stability made it easier for game publishers to create relationship for the purposes of marketing.
That’s a pretty big shift. Suddenly there’s a clear line between the people writing about games and everyone else:
1) They have a specialized degree.
2) They get review copies.
3) They get to play games days or weeks before the public.
4) They get paid to write these articles.
5) That pay comes from running ads for the publishers they’re supposed to be criticizing.
6) Eventually we started hearing stories about critics being flown out to posh hotels to play games.
This makes it feel like gamer journalists are more journalist than gamer. Suddenly they’re no longer “us”… journalists are “them”. The whole setup can come off as a bit ivory-tower-ish, and there’s a general unease that all of this special treatment has the effect of dulling their criticism.
The excitement over “walking simulators” is probably just a side-effect of doing the job. If you need to play a new game every other week, then you’re going to play a LOT more games than even the hardcore. Worse, you’re not going to love them all. A journalist playing a game because they have to is going to be very different than a gamer that deliberately pays $60 for a game.
Eventually the journalist gets tired of the same old thing. Eventually they get hungry for something a little different. They get tired of shootin’ dudes all the time. Then in comes a walking simulator that engages a totally different part of their brain. Maybe it references some literary stuff they remember from college. Maybe it talks about ideas that are near and dear to their heart. Suddenly they’re engaged and excited again.
You see a similar thing with movie critics. I remember Roger Ebert would sometimes review some obscure French arthouse film and I’d be like, “Who cares about this dumb crap? Where’s the review of Batman and Robin!? I need to know if it’s good or if I should wait and rent it at Blockbuster!” But the dude watched a LOT of films, and I’ll bet that French film was a breath of fresh air for him.
I won’t comment on the “skill” of journos (I know a lot of them at this point) but there is a clear divide between the gaming public and the journalists that cover the hobby. If you’re a journalist, the steady trickle of hate mail and accusations of corruption can be really alienating. Even if just 0.01% of the audience expresses anger at you, it can still feel like you’re fighting THE WORLD. If your site has 1 million readers, then that 0.01% is still 100 people sending you hate mail. On the flip side, to a regular gamer, the privileges of a journalist can make them seem distant and ivory-tower-ish.
Which is to say, there was already a growing rift between the two, even BEFORE politics entered in and battle lines were drawn.
Someday this will become an article, but it’s so big and complicated and spiderwebs out into hard-to-prove digressions that organizing the thing is tricky. Needs more work.
It’s worth pointing that this view may not track across the pond. In the UK there’s been a long and proud tradition of games mags which had their ‘golden age’ variously in the ’80s, ’90s or ’00s, depending on who you ask. In any given generation you could get several magazines catering to your platform of choice, be it a Sinclair Spectrum, an Amiga A1200, a Sega Megadrive, a Nintendo Gamecube or an Xbox 360 (fanboy attachment contributed heavily to a smoothing of any concerns about true objectivity – you were less likely to care that you were being fed marketing copy if you were already invested in the idea that your console of choice was the best). In summary, they were a very popular and very prominent aspect of the cultural identity of gaming over here.
I would put that popularity down to good writing (perhaps the best writing that many, alienated from literature by curriculum-mandated Shakespeare and factory-grade YA fiction, were likely to have encountered anywhere) and a friendly, humourous, and most of all inclusive tone: there wasn’t even a hint of the ivory tower; these magazines were embraced by readerships that felt the writers were of the same stripe. The conceptual model of the quintessential games journalist in the UK originated in these magazines, and although the transition to online was badly mishandled by the leading publishers, it was prominent journalists from magazines such as PC Gamer and Edge that eventually gave the likes of Eurogamer and RPS their voice.
So were the clouds gathering before the culture wars came to town? I suspect it depends on both where you look and where you look from. I would always point to the Jack Thompson years as indicative of the pre 2010s climate, not as the last time that the press and the people who read it were truly united as a monoculture, but at least as evidence that – platform wars aside – said monoculture could ever have been observed.
The first magazine subscription that I never had was for Nintendo Power. In some ways, it feigned journalism, but more than that, it was about pimping the newest video games and giving vital tips about how to beat those games. After all, how many kids were going to figure out on their own that progressing past a certain point in Simon’s Quest involved equipping a crystal and kneeling at the foot of a cliff so that a tornado would come and whisk Simon away to the next part of the game? In some sense, video games and journalism have been linked in my mind since I started gaming in earnest during the 8-bit era. But even as a kid, I had a sense that the gaming and the gaming journalism weren’t being quite as honest as they could be about their incestuous relationship.
As far as games journalists not being gamers, I guess it’s about how you define “gamer.” It would be nice to have someone who likes playing games and has some sense of what makes those games “good” or “bad.” It would be good if they also had at least middling skills at actually playing games so that they could give reasonable expectations of a game’s difficulty. But I think a lot of it is about how they see themselves. If they see themselves as one of us, they’re far less likely to throw us under the bus at the slightest provocation. They’re more likely to take a nuanced approach with the perceived negatives of what would be their own community. I don’t think I would be thrilled with a journalist who’s technically competent, but feels so little toward me and this community that he/she wouldn’t flinch at torching us if it could drive up ad revenue. I come from the “Nintendo-hard” generation, but I would value integrity more than whether or not the person could finish the game before the review was due. But – perhaps unrealistically – I’d want someone who can actually play the games and critique gaming culture in an honest, from-the-inside way.
And in the realm of critically acclaimed walking simulators, is it site policy that we’re dancing around the words “Death Stranding?”
Death Stranding is a Staggering About And Occasionally Falling Over Simulator. Totally different genre.
WRT to games journalism; I think the problem is the Internet. These days anybody can express an opinion about anything, no matter how crazy or incompetent they might be, with potentially global reach. I don’t really need to read what somebody else feels about a game; those people are a dime a dozen. I want to read stuff by a writer who is good enough at their job to give me some idea how I might feel about it. Those people are pretty rare.
‘Toxic’ is the Dark Side version of ‘Epic’.
I wish more people realized this. Unfortunately, it’ll probably take years for people to intuit it and stop acting like imbeciles.
Outstanding article, excellent infographic. I may want to, uh, “borrow” it sometime.
I think there are a couple factors in the medium of video games that make the Asshole Problem more prominent. First is that gaming/gamers are uniquely connected when playing games, unlike other online hobbies. Second is that you may have less recourse and be more forced to accommodate the Assholes.
To the first point, I can’t think of any other medium that permits strangers to yell in your ears with little recourse. Someone spewing awful hateful rhetoric on a text-based medium like the comments of a Facebook post is easily reported and quickly corrected, and then you can unfriend/block that person. Someone dropping terrible comments on a website like this can have their “contributions” erased fairly quickly. Someone uploading wretched YouTube videos can be not-clicked-on and reported. Someone trying to join a VOIP service with you typically only does so with your invitation.
Only in gaming are you (A) connected with strangers and (B) is it presumed that you want to hear what they have to say. You’re also probably required to interact with them in some way; join a game of 8-on-8 Shoot Guy and you’re probably dependent on the other seven Guys on your team to get a Win. Should Guy #3 turn out to be a complete prick who really wants to give a lecture on white nationalism and who’ll respond with friendly fire if he thinks you’re ignoring him… sucks to be you. He’s presumed by the game’s mechanics to be someone you need to listen to, and the game is expecting you to work with him.
Moving on to the second point, one of my favourite YouTubers made the point in his video on World of Warcraft Classic that sometimes you’re just going to be forced to tolerate a shithead to actually play the game. He was speaking about how raiding guilds in the old-school WoW are a very limited commodity; there’s probably only one or two per faction per server, and being a member of one is more-or-less mandatory to reach the endgame. Players that can actually complete these raids are also something of a limited commodity. If your server’s sole raid guild for your faction really needs a high-level [CLASS] and the only high-level [CLASS] available is a prick, then it might come down to simply being forced to tolerate them if the other thirty-nine of you are going to complete the content. (The channel is called Folding Ideas, the WoW Classic video is pinned, and the points I’m bringing up are touched on at around 27:30 in the video)
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Gaming might have the same proportion of assholes as any other hobby, but gaming is unique in giving them platforms and forcing you to tolerate them.
I’ll have to disagree with you on that one. Since the dawn of multiplayer games, you can vote to kick people out of a server, so if someone is really being an asshole, then either by the will of the host or the will of the majority, that person can be evicted from the server.
The last PC multiplayer game I played was DoTA 2, and its tools are quite good – you can mute people, and report them for any number of misconduct, and the system goes to great lengths to punish bad actors. Of course, it’s not a foolproof system, but tools keep getting better and better.
I will disagree with your disagreement.
While players sometimes have recourse that’s not always the case. What if the host is the problem, or the host is friends with the problem? Often you’re permitted to mute – but it’s rare that muting is the default state.
Through things like team chat / voice chat / etc. they always have platform, you sometimes have options. To use the example of small game lobbies; what if that lobby is the one with lowest latency? (After all, if you picked that one from the many, there was presumably something attractive about it). Having to make the choice to move on means the bellend has cost you something, namely a higher ping time and some of the enjoyment of the experience.
This was a very good summary of the main “gamers are toxic” argument, for and against. I’m interested in the notion that EA uses it as an excuse among shareholders, though. Why is that relevant to the article? Is the toxic fandom driving out successful women in the industry, to the point it becomes a shareholder concern? Is “the fandom” causing the company to have serious problems selling games to new fans? Or is Electronic Arts following the same path as Disney in blaming the relative failure of high profile, historically profitable franchises on a particular market segment- and looking for excuses to continue failing with this segment?
It’s interesting because at this point, comparing the Undertale fandom to the Madden fandom, and then comparing them to the CK2 fandom is hugely and absurdly broad. In Europe, racism and violence in football are serious problems, which has been addressed in the sport of football. But if you started such anti-racism measures in the golf fandom, the reaction would be utter bewilderment. Yet we continue to accept discourse on “the gamers” that doesn’t even rise to the level of a reactionary drunk raging about “the blacks.” And worse, AAA publishers are buying into this to excuse their own idiocy!
The EA stuff was relevant in that EA can use the excuse of “gamers are toxic, that’s why we got voted worst company of the year, not becauae we released a shit product full of predatory monetization practices” to shareholders and they’ll totally believe it and allow EA to keep releasing shit products, because the idea that gamers are toxic is already established in people’s minds.
I think that’s really well put, and more specific terms would help make the problems a lot clearer.
But I think there is SOMETHING more when people say “gamers are toxic”. I think it’s something like, saying gaming CULTURE is toxic. That places where gamers talk to other gamers are disproportionately affected by the harassing problem, and that creates a feedback loop where decent people are likely to leave or be less likely to call themself “a gamer”. So you end up with lots of decent gamers, but if you meet “some gamers”, they’re more likely to be the abusive sort :(
Like, AAA games are considered “more gamer-y” than casual idle phone games, and that’s “more gamer culture”. But also, more likely to be vile :(
Woah Shamus, no hard R’s. It’s “Game-a”
On a broader level:
I know what I mean when I say those words, and if other people can’t figure it out then that’s their problem!
is a terrible stance on ANY issue. Communication is not about clearly conveying an idea – or rather, that’s only half of it. The other half is LISTENING. It’s listening to the ideas the other person is bringing to the table, and it’s listening to whether or not the idea that you’re conveying is being received as intended. If it isn’t, then just saying “it’s your problem if you don’t understand me” is to fundamentally misconstrue the very point of communication.
Paying attention to whether or not someone understands you is not optional. It’s a completely critical error-checking step in having a dialogue. Saying “if other people can’t figure out what I meant then that’s their problem” is arrogant, and implies a prioritization on one’s own point of view over the ability to hear someone else’s.
Writers tend to understand this more. When your writing professor tells you hey, I understand what you THINK the point of your story is, but it isn’t coming across … the competent writer will understand it’s THEIR fault (no shame in it, btw) for not making it clearer. For considering how successfully their ideas may or may not come across, and revisiting the work to maximize greater clarity and understanding.
It’s fascinating to watch intelligent people argue on the Internet. Each person will assert an opposing viewpoint while both are using the same terms. Then the instigating argument will get set aside as they argue until they come to a consensus of how they’re defining all of the words. Of course, this back and forth becomes increasingly granular and moving the topic farther and farther away from the initial point of contention. By the time both sides have agreed to mutually-fair rules of engagement, the Internet will have gotten bored and moved on to some other version of the conversation where people are back to shouting past each other.
The best anyone can hope to do is try to clearly state their own point of view while also attempting to pre-emptively “bulletproof” their statements against any attempts to mis-characterize them. The former is pretty easy for anyone with a solid grasp of language, but the latter is impossible if people with the opposing viewpoint are even moderately determined to hold it. Now it’s no longer a case of not using clear enough language. Of course, it’s incumbent on all of us to be as clear about our points of view as possible, but if someone is determined to not understand precisely what we’re saying, it doesn’t seem crazy to me to say, “Okay, I’ve done all that I can to clearly state my case and if they don’t understand it at this point, I don’t think that attempting to be clearer is going to help.”
I agree with your sentiment though: Listening to what the other side has to say can highlight any misunderstandings or mischaracterizations of your point, but it’s been my experience that you can still hit a brick wall of the other person isn’t actually interested in what you’re trying to say. But it usually takes a couple of exchanges to tease that out and I’m all in favor of talking until that moment is reached.
I think this is only worthwhile if you don’t plan to follow up on the discussion. It’s a whole lot of effort spent to defend against no-effort posts, and you’re probably still going to miss stuff. Plus a back and forth dialogue about what you mean increases the reader’s time investment, which is a good hack to get people to find you more convincing. It might actually be better to lead with a somewhat weak argument and fill the holes in over time. (Or maybe that approach only works in Mafia.)
The main reason for doing things like that is to avoid having to spend a lot of time weaving through the common misunderstandings that you know are coming so that the focus can be on the meat of the discussion. In most discussions, fatigue and time constraints will eventually kick in to limit the discussion, so for it to be productive it needs to start from the best possible position. And if the position is at all debatable, that back-and-forth will happen but will be about the issues, not what you’re saying.
That’s the theory, anyway.
This is how I would characterize it. Nobody can predict every wrinkle in any given debate, but I think it’s worth-while to at least attempt to cover the obvious objections as much as possible right up front to minimize how much of it gets sidetracked by people having to go back and forth defending their basic verbiage instead of getting to the heart of a discussion. I do think that a good back and forth is important, but I’ve seen way too many debates flame out way too soon because they got bogged down by arguing semantics and mis-interpretations. I think it’s worth while to make an effort to do that right up front.
“Gamers as a group are just as toxic as humans in general” is a pretty good compromise.
On the one hand, it doesn’t give ammunition to anti-gamer factions.
On the other hand, it’s a pretty scathing indictment that tells us we can do better.
In my opinion when it comes to SWAT’ing I would label that (domestic-) terrorism as the goal is to terrorise a person (and considering not that long ago somebody died as a result of SWAT’ing) and should thus be treated as such.
Likewise, doxxing (one or two x’s?) should be treated as (digital-)stalking and invasion of privacy.
Also regarding fans being called toxic Henry Cavill (Superman, Witcher TV series) gives a very good response to that statement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCGooSPVC6A
I try to convince people that SWATting should be treated as attempted murder of a police officer, because the courts are a breath away from ruling that someone who is not committing a crime who has someone break into their house and run around pointing guns at people is justified in shooting the intruder.
So far, the closest they’ve gotten is “Is justified in having their gun out” if the intruders are, indeed, police who did not announce that they were police.
Hey Shamus, the link on ” Some gamers are toxic” is broken, it only lead to “toxic_gamer.png” instead to a full link. Good job with the story.
*blank stare*
I have no memory of where that link was supposed to go. Huh.
Thanks for the heads up. If I remember, I’ll fix it.
A bunch of people in the thread have been asserting that women get harassed more than men (thank you to Shamus for disclaiming your own case as anecdotal), so rather than start a bunch of [citation needed] arguments, I’m going to make the case that supposing this is true, it still doesn’t prove misogyny.
While not widely known in the general population, it is uncontroversial among researchers that men have better reaction times than women. The question of why probably won’t be answered until we figure out why reaction times differ in anyone, but luckily that’s not important here. It would be a very strange world if the odds of your teammate screaming at you didn’t have anything to do with how good you were at winning the game, so suppose that odds of harassment correlate somehow with skill at the game. Further grant that reaction times are an important part of videogames, and so should be correlated with skill at videogames. Sex correlates with reaction time, correlates with game skill, correlates with harassment received and just like that, we have a recipe for women receiving more harassment than men even if the harassers are completely blind to sex.
Reaction times are probably not the primary factor in harassment, but that’s just one example. It can be the case that women are on average, 2% different from men in twenty different areas, which leads to 2% more of each of twenty different harassment-attracting behaviours, which adds up to women getting 40% more harassment even though no one is harassing them for being women.
“Too many gamers are toxic harassers, but not in specifically sexist ways” is not really any better.
Isn’t it? It not being better seems to say that all else equal, being sexist is not worse, which in turn requires that either being sexist is not bad, or being sexist has some sort of novel non-additive property where it can be bad without its addition making things worse.
Your error is lumping a cause (sexism) with an effect (harassment).
Sexism can be bad because it causes harassment, but the harassment that it causes doesn’t have to then be intrinsically worse than harassment caused by frustration with a low-skilled player.
Sexism-based harassment is often however of a different quality in that it attacks the victim’s gender instead of their (real or perceived) lack of skill. It’s an attack on a much deeper level, not against what you did or didn’t do, but against what you are or are not.
There is another difference between the sexes. Men are just more used to a rougher tone. They are mostly fine with jelling at each other, calling names or commanding others while in a fight for the win.
Women are much more sensitive to the emotional tones of the in game communication, and promptly feel harassed. Then maybe bitch about some cursewords, the team looses and they get the fire for the lost game.
My daughter grew up with me as father, who worked many years in heavy industry, on construction sites and I had to serve in the army (It was not voluntary at my time, here in the GDR). She is used to a rougher tone at home. She had her first PC at the age of 7, grew up with the internet and is playing a lot of online games ever since we had a internet flat. Today she is 20, still playing, and never had a problem with harassment. Even when asked, she cant remember any bad experience.
Look at your own statement with me. You state that men are “rougher” than women as a gender difference, then point out that your own daughter does not display this difference. So… you can see that you’re definitely wrong right? Women can be SOCIALIZED to be more sensitive and empathetic, but that’s not a gender difference at all. If your culture says that women will be callus and use rough language, then they will do that. There is nothing intrinsic about being a woman that predisposes towards not being crude or towards being nice. That’s nurture, not nature.
This does not prove nearly what you think it does. Men are taller than women as a gender difference, this does not preclude very tall women, and I’m pretty sure height is not socialized.
Unless you’re arguing that rough language is genetic on the same level as height, that’s a pretty bad example to go with.
I’m pretty sure his distinction was intended as a generalization, not a flat rule across the board.
And a strong swing towards the ‘Nurture’ side of this debate should definitely be backed up by something other than a blunt declaration of uncontroversial ‘truth’. The general behavior of the female gender being informed by environment as opposed to innate disposition is plausible, but far from proven.
You could really use a healthy dose of humility.
It’s a generalization based on the culture that that poster is familiar with. Even the way it was phrased doesn’t bear out. “Men are just more used to a rougher tone.” Which men? How rough of a tone? Would men raised in a group with very few other men also turn out this exact same way? I don’t see why this very “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” outdated assumption means that my calling BS is proof that I’m not humble enough. This poster essentially wrote out “Ya know… boys will be boys” in a slightly longer way, and you’re annoyed with ME? Really though.
Despite what you seem to have read into Andreas’ post, he made no claim about the origin of the difference between sexes, you are the only one who took a position on nature vs nurture here. Your were taking a bold stance on a the widely-disputed and currently impossible-to-prove cause of a difference, while offering no evidence and telling your interlocutor “you can see that you’re definitely wrong right?” while not even contradicting him.
So yes, I’d say you’re the one more in need of humility.
As someone who definitely errs on the side of “gamers are toxic,” I think you’ve made a fair summary of “my side” is trying to say.
I lack a car metaphor, so let’s talk about a fictional monthly party I host. I’m pretty chill, so it’s basically an open house. People hang out, eat some snack, drink a bit, and talk about whatever they like. It’s a big party, about 100 people. While people come and go, there is a relatively stable core. Lots of people know each other pretty well. We’ve developed in-jokes. This is a community.
Now, you get 100 people, yeah, you’re going to get some jackasses. In particular, when Riley gets drunk, Riley tends to turn conversations into the ways that a particular ethnic group are responsible for the world’s problems. Riley is loud and hard to ignore. Riley is just one person, but it’s making a lot of people uncomfortable. People I like stop showing up because they’re tired of dealing with Riley. Fewer new people come to the party as word of Riley’s exploits circulate. Some of the people who do come did so because they heard it was a place they could share their dislike that ethnic group without getting kicked out.
I’m worried about this, but Riley is friends with people of that ethnic group, even employs some in management roles. Riley has never engaged in any sort of violence and never does this sort of thing anywhere else. Riley is not harassing anyone. And really, should I be policing people’s speech, limiting which ideas can be discussed at my open party? Besides, if people don’t want to deal with Riley, they can just leave any conversation Riley joins.
Riley is poisoning the well. Riley is the problem. But as host I have a responsibility to deal with Riley, including kicking Riley out if necessary. When I don’t, I’ve become part of the problem.
Online gamer culture is toxic in aggregate because too many hosts decided to let the Rileys continue to poison the well. If you participate in online gamer culture in a general way, you’re going to run into a lot of Rileys.
(I have no doubt there are other online groups that are at least as toxic. But of the groups I participate in, online videogame culture is the worst, despite fierce competition from tabletop RPGs and software engineering.)
(Apologies to real-world Rileys.)
That’s a great metaphor.
As someone who definitely errs on the side of “gamers are NOT toxic,” I see your point, Alan, and I thank you for that party analogy. It helped me understand a little more what your side’s position is, in a way I hadn’t considered before.
I still have a question though (three questions, actually), perhaps you can help me with this.
Questions 1 and 2 are.. Who _exactly_ are the Rileys, and what can we do about them? Setting aside the case of particularly vocal and vitriolic internet personalities (of which I don’t know any directly related to gaming, but I tend to self-segregate a lot) a lot of the harassers and trolls and doxxers and people who send death threats are anonymous and not always do those things on public forums (I can report offensive comments on a blog post, but I can’t filter a female journalist’s inbox for hate mail).
In your party example, you host the party, you own the venue, you can kick Riley out if he keeps being a jerk, but on the internet, our options are much more limited. I can ban Riley from shitposting on my (hypothetical) YouTube channel, but I can’t stop him from opening his own channel and spreading toxicity from there.
My third question, and this is the tricky one, this is when people start getting all heated up and shouting past each other.. where’s the line between “normal person” and “Riley”? In your party example, you gave a very clear cut case of him scapegoating on an ethnic group all of the world’s problems. I think the vast majority of people would agree this is indeed toxic behavior, but then you have the fringe cases, the blurry lines, which are were most of the controversies lie: The “Dark Souls should(n’t) have an easy mode” controversy, the “Game reviewers (don’t) have to be good at games” controversy, the “Retake Mass Effect” controversy, etc.
In any case, I still maintain that gamers (as a group, defined as people who are enthusiastic about videogames, worldwide) are NOT toxic, simply because the toxic behavior is confined to a very particular (and sadly very vocal) minority within the broader gaming community. Plus the fact that the toxicity appears to me to be either an American phenomenon, or an Anglosphere one, so I don’t generally have to deal with in my daily life, except on English speaking websites. But that’s just my subjective opinion.
Man, I’m a software developer, and I haven’t encountered this toxicity so far either. Is it because I’m not an “engineer” yet? People on Stack Overflow tend to be usually very friendly and helpful. And my coworkers are all really nice people.
Oh no, as a European I can tell you that every language/culture sphere has around the same toxicity in more or less the same basic places… at least I think it’s around the same amount.
Protip: stay away from the Python community.
There exist non-English obscenities that are outright memes solely via osmosis from angry players in online games.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cyka%20blyat
You see you are right that you as a host should probably do somethinh about Riley but it kinda ignores the fact that you would at least hope the people around him would stop him or at very least not encourage him, cause if they dont then id say thats more of a problem for your community than just one Riley. Also often its rarely as clear cut as that on the internet especially with all the in jokes and ironic BS it can be pretty hard to know if your hypothetical Riley means whats hes saying in which case it might be best just to not bring up politics around him if thats what gets him started or is just trolling in which cause you make it clear that people are getting pissed and if he cares about staying friends they will probably back down. Of course on the internet its often more than 100 people at the party which is where shit gets even more blurry and it becomes easier just to blanket ban or allow certain iffy behaviours which ignores any nuance in the situation. Tdlr I dont think Rileys or the hosts are the problem but general community reactions which egg on or tolerate rileys behaviour are more the problem which doesnt really have a solution on a large scale other than fairly harsh moderation which im pretty meh on cause it ignores Nuances.
Meanwhile, I live in a different city. I walk into a party and the host is glaring at me and demands to know what my opinion is of Riley, and whether I have any friends whose names begin with R, and starts telling all these lengthy and exaggerated stories about Riley’s misdeeds, and when I say I have no idea who this Riley person is and this is all getting a little over the top he calls the police on me and tells them I was threatening him with a gun.
Man How havent you heard of THE Riley , He’s the guy who blames literally every problem in the world on (insert ethnic, racial, gender, political, economic, People who main x class in his favourite game group
I’m almost dissuaded to contribute here, simply because reading maybe 50-60% of the posts (and then skimming because that’s a lot of posts) almost seems to be inviting something negative. Or, perhaps, those that would argue against have quieted. Early on in the comments you had a lot of people discussing counter-arguments, but towards the bottom it seems like a lot of people are closer to being on the same page and in agreement with one another. Did those at the top simply have to go off and do other life things? Maybe! Or, perhaps, feeling overwhelmed, they just sighed, threw their hands up, and felt as if they cannot be heard here and why bother.
a.k.a. me with my family at the holiday dinner table. “Whatever, I’ma just sit here and focus on my food.”
I do think there’s an additional dimension contributing to your statement, and that’s kind of been commented on above: games press and media calling for an end to the term “gamer”, and even those that play games regularly dissociating themselves from the term. On another forum I’m on, I’ve seen a lot of people decide the term does not apply to them and cast it aside. I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing in itself (by the age of 34 I don’t really know if I feel much like a “geek” like I used to, largely because what is a “geek” anyway), but I often see that dissociation with the broad generalization of those that do apply the label to themselves. However, there are those that call themselves “gamers” and then create a list of values and attributes that real gamers have.
Which is not exclusive to games. Punk and metal had a term for those they felt weren’t true punk or metal fans: posers. Sports have “fair weather fans” as a term for people that only show up in the stadium when the team is doing well.
And I think that’s part of the real problem. Your argument in this video is a mixture of human nature, cultural vocabulary, and generalization. It’s a simple, broad topic that applies beyond video games, but because gamers on the Internet tend to exist in a bubble where they see other gaming content and interact with other gamers, there’s this sense that it’s not as prevalent elsewhere because you’re not hearing about it. The Internet – and social media in particular – is an amazing invention that has somehow enabled people to enact their worst tendencies and broadcast it to a far further reach, and yet increase the number of echo chambers that exist.
I follow American football these days, and let me tell you, there’s a lot of negative behavior happening among football fans as well online. However, there’s also a history of trash talk among football fans that goes before the invention of the Internet. Ford vs. Chevy? Same thing. If we rewind approximately a century before America Online, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle received considerable pressure and anger for killing off Sherlock Holmes (I know I had found a source before that declared he had received death threats, but I cannot find it now and do not want to post something without such citation). In fact, things like harassment and death threats are nothing new. The problem is that the Internet makes it a lot easier to be well known to hundreds or thousands of strangers without affording you a salary large enough to hire someone to sift through the good and bad “mail”. Plus, it makes it far easier to do on a whim. Just sign onto Twitter, see a tweet or retweet you don’t like, and reply immediately with “Kill yourself” or “I hope you get run over by a truck”. There’s no moment of clarity, where halfway through this effort you have to then put it in an envelope, place a stamp upon it, and then sit it in the mailbox, all of which is enough time to think “You know, maybe this is a bad idea”.
Human nature is magnified online and through social media, where we already know things like likes and retweets only encourage people to behave in a way that will get them noticed. Much like the child that is told they are bad will start behaving badly because it is expected of them, someone will behave badly online if they get some sort of reward for it. Even worse, there will always be someone behind them to back them up and claim their actions just.
Then the lines are drawn.
But everyone is still in an echo chamber, only able to see the community they’ve built for themselves. A step further, these are people invested enough to take part in this. Yet once you step away from social media and start spending time away form the Internet, people… become a lot more reasonable.
Mostly.
Sadly I have a relative that has chosen an extreme side, and building that bubble, that echo chamber, goes into some far deeper psychology than I’m willing to delve into here. Nonetheless, I suppose I wish to say that Shamus did a fine job discussing his stance on what is a difficult and ultimately broad topic treated as a specific thing. I think it’s possible to take that topic further, but to do so would… well, become less broad and more specific, or less specific but more broad, and either one increases complications.
That’ll be the nature of the comment system- once all the major responses are in, anyone who reads the comments before posting will generally enter on sub-comments, either agreeing, elaborating, or disagreeing. However, there is a hard limit of how many direct responses you can go, eventually stopping around 5 or 6 I think, at which point the reply button stops appearing. Eventually all the major responses to those major responses will have been made, and so on, until the first few posts with the main activity have all their direct responses filled, and it’s become quite difficult to read do to the nesting presentation when read straight down essentially showing direct response line #1, then cutting in at the last point of divergence without re-reading it, then back to the previous one, etc. It works for a while, but eventually turns into a mush. When there is no more room further up some of the new posters might make sub-comments on those further down, and potentially re-open and run through the exact same arguments above, which would have been continued in the same spot if there was any room.
Such is the result of a compromise between single lane article comments with no direct responses, and forum (which would be full of people abusing/failing to quote the person they’re responding to and turning into a mess in a different way). High traffic text gets messy.
Comments further down the page, those made not as sub-comments, will thus tend to be people who aren’t interested in joining the ongoing arguments in the earlier posts- usually those who are simply agreeing with the main article (more or less) or presenting side-observations, anecdotes, related material, etc.
I agree with Shamus when he talks about definitions. In fact I’m just as guilty as anyone when I use my own definition when people bring it up. Alex from LoadingReadyRun loves talking about how much he hates fandoms and gamers and how he doesn’t call himself a gamer but in my mind I go “You play videogames? You’re a gamer.” Even though I KNOW that he means something else entirely when he uses the term. And I can’t help it. Someone in the video comment section made a mention of “readers” and “walkers” and while I’ve never used “walkers” I have used “readers”. In fact my Aunt even wrote inside the cover of the third Harry Potter book she got me when I was a child that “By now you should be an avid reader”. But reader never really meant anything. You read books? You’re a reader. You play soccer even if it’s just for fun? You’re a soccer player. I would say that if you watch tv or movies you’re a “Watcher” but that one doesn’t work which makes me sad since it’s the coolest of them all.
I assume it has to do with the fact that gaming as a whole is intricately linked to the online space that it’s led to all these problems. Don’t know what to do in a game? Go online and look up a walkthrough. Need a review? Go online. Want to see what the gameplay is like? Watch a video. None of my other hobbies are as linked to the internet as gaming. The closest I’ve ever come across are people arguing over aspects of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series on reddit. And that incredibly popular series doesn’t even have a completed wiki.
It certainly doesn’t help that people have spent so long trying to define exactly what constitutes a “gamer”. So many articles are written about whether people who play on mobile count as gamers or if someone who just wants to play solitaire online is a gamer or point and click adventure players are gamers. Heck it got so bad people started calling themselves hardcore gamers for differentiation. But if you ask someone outside of the hobby if all those people are gamers they’d most likely answer yes. And when you write something like “Gamers are toxic” or “Gamers are Dead” these people outside of the hobby see that as everyone. And because gaming has such a large online presence, when that stuff goes on twitter, facebook, or any other social media platform there’s a much higher likelihood of non gamers seeing these things and making assumptions based on that.
“Couch potato” is the term I think.
I embrace people calling themselves ‘hardcore gamers’, or whatever other adjectives they want to come up with, because yeah, intuitively anyone who plays games is a gamer*, and trying to use ‘gamer’ to mean something else achieves nothing except making discussion harder.
*and so are game hunters, if they want to be (because they’re looking to troll videogamers for some reason).
I think, though, that the “avid reader” distinction is useful to distinguish people for whom reading is a dedicated hobby from people who might read a book on occasion if it seems interesting and there’s nothing better to do. I’m definitely an avid reader, but my brother is not. Similarly, there’s merit in having the term “gamer” for someone who plays games as a major part of their leisure time, which might exclude many mobile-only gamers who only do it when they have nothing better to do and want to kill a little time.
I think the difference is one use of gamer is an adjective and the other is a form of identification.
Alex does not consider himself to be a Gamer, because Gamer to him has some connotations that he might not want to be identified with. Or perhaps he doesn’t see gaming as an important part of his identity so that’s not how he chooses to self-identify. (I don’t really know anything about him or LoadingReadyRun in general)
By your usage, gamer is an adjective. Someone games, has gamed, or is gaming; they are gamer. That’s logical, makes sense, but I think it’s not really that helpful in describing people.
I see things more like how Alex sees them, I think. I have ran in the past, but would not define myself as a Runner – running isn’t something I do that often (especially not at this time of year) and even when I do, it’s not really meaningful to me.
And for another, look at those drapes. This is clearly a spoiled trust fund child.
I mostly agree, but I feel that your argument unnecessarily paints gaming as an “underdog artform”, which is constantly under attack from powerful politicians and media personalities. But they are not that powerful, are they? We’re in 2019 and moral panics do not work. Nobody is questioning the place of gaming as a legitimate artform, and if they do, their opinion is meaningless. Gaming is a big boy artform now, with people making big bucks off it, and it does not need to be defended.
Yeah, it’s not like some kind of big ban has been placed on the industry which can severely impact publishers’ bottom lines. Wilco boxes? Never heard of him.
Did any loot box laws pass in any country except the Netherlands? Also… laws being passed to effect your industry specifically is strong evidence that you DO have a strong, big boy type of industry. If the government is NOT interested in passing laws to restrict or mold your business… it’s basically because you’re a niche, small potatoes market not worthy of the effort. That’s like saying Amazon is going to be destroyed because… they started collecting state income tax from purchases made there. No… that just means governments caught up to what a big opportunity they were missing by being behind the times.
I would like to remind you that gaming is still trodden to the stocks almost every time there is some kind of shooting.
Gaming is way more accepted than it was but there are still some major issues that need to be solved. Be it the relationship between gamers to each other, gamers to dev or gamers to other people and vice versa in each and every case.
Gaming being scapegoated for shootings is much more about the US culture DESPERATELY trying to avoid taking guns to task for gun shootings than anyone actually believing video games have an effect one way or the other.
On the one hand, a recent mass shooting got blamed on videogames by the President of the United States. If that’s not powerful I don’t know what is.
On the other hand, the chances of majorly restrictive legislation were never that big even in the peak of Jack Thompson’s career, and I don’t think anyone in 2019 was worried that the latest round of media hysteria would lead to anything.
The people attacking videogames are powerful, but don’t seem to have the power to actually harm videogames in more than reputation. But that’s what Shamus is mostly talking about here: the reputation of videogames as a medium.
Shamus, you said “I think the most common thing that people mean [by “Gamers Are Toxic] is ‘Gamers are more toxic than the general population’.” And I think that’s a reasonable summation of the statement, with some caveats that I’ll get into later. You then said that a) you don’t think it’s true, and b) you think that repeating it is bad for the hobby.
I think you brought up a lot of valid arguments in favor of counterpoint B…but you didn’t really prove counterpoint A. You kinda just vaguely gestured at the fact that sports riots happen and then concluded that since people aren’t dying in gaming riots, that the gaming community doesn’t have a worse toxicity problem than the rest of humanity. There may always be a “few bad apples” in any large enough group of people, but that does not mean that certain groups don’t have worse bad apples than other groups, or that certain groups attract/enable/excuse bad apples at a higher rate than other groups, and you really did nothing in this piece to disprove what you yourself outlined as the crux of the argument: that “Gamers are **more** toxic than the general population.” This is also ignoring the possibility that both video games AND sports fans have a toxicity problem. I don’t think it’s at all ok that we accept that certain teams’ fans will go ballistic during “important” games and trash cities (win or lose). If it can’t be toxic because it’s not “as bad” as 79 people dying in a single riot, then a lot of obviously bad behavior and communities will be excused as “can’t possibly be toxic, because sports are worse”. It’s just not a logically sound position to take.
I also think it’s somewhat disingenuous to say “2 billion people are gamers, of course there are psychopaths in there!” Another unspoken aspect of the statement “Gamers are toxic” is the presumption that people know that “Gamers” refers to “people for whom gaming is one of their primary hobbies, a fundamental aspect of their identity, and a connecting and attracting force for their participation in online communities.” Basically, if you don’t go out of your way to participate in online forums or other communities related to gaming, you’re not one of the “Gamers” being spoken about here. That’s not gatekeeping, it’s just a matter of definitions, which you pointed out need to be established before a proper conversation can be held.
So while among the total population of people who ever play video games, the population of abusers might not be larger than the total population of the planet….that’s not the population that matters when it comes to toxicity, which is overwhelmingly expressed through online harassment campaigns (that occasionally spill over into real-world consequences). I believe when you frame the argument this way – speaking specifically about people who self-identify as gamers and participate in online communities – that you would be hard-pressed to argue that that group of people doesn’t have a toxicity problem greater than the general population. At the very least, I can say that you haven’t satisfactorily addressed that argument in this piece.
Certainly, the problem of scapegoating is real, and corporations can take advantage of accusations of toxicity to deflect criticisms…but that doesn’t mean that all criticisms are invalid. D&D may not be leading people to Satanism, but the tabletop gaming community has some historical (and current) problems with inclusivity and misogyny. Similarly, video games may not turn normal children into violent maniacs, but certain online gaming communities certainly contribute to the radicalization of disaffected youths, and those (majority male) youths are very good at signal-boosting their views and targeting/silencing their enemies.
I am a gamer. It’s been a part of my self-identity since I was a child, and it’s still here as an adult in my 30s. Gaming culture has problems. Not just harassment problems (though it does have those) but also problems with diversity, representation, inclusivity, racism, homophobia, and a plethora of other issues. I do not think it’s at all a coincidence that kids in the 90s were the ones who were the first to really experience online gaming communities, and many of those same communities have their views stuck in the 90s when it was perfectly fine to call someone a derogatory name based on someone’s race (N-word), sexuality (F-word), or mental disability (R-word). All of those are still considered “fine” in many gaming communities (at least, they’re commonly seen) while you would almost never hear them out in the real world anymore.
So while I appreciate where you’re coming from with this piece, as a long-time fan from the original run of DMotR…I have to say, it rings hollow, for you. It feels like you took the easy way with this one, because I think you REALLY wanted to get to counterpoint B, but you brushed past whether or not the decried toxicity is actually a problem that requires the gaming community to take a good hard look at itself in order to get there.
How would I go about “proving” A? That would require a very sophisticated and careful study, which I am neither qualified nor equipped to perform.
Moreover, even if I did perform a scientifically rigorous study and compared gamers to the general population and showed that there wasn’t any statistically different behavior, it would be casually and effortlessly dismissed because of my lack of qualifications, or due to some alleged bias.
To turn the tables a bit: Where’s the proof that gamers ARE toxic? Sure, we hear lots of stories, but is that the result of toxic people, or the result of a hobby that exists in an online space that is currently one of the favorite targets of sensationalist media? Yes, online games have people using the Forbidden Words. Does that mean gamers are less tolerant than the general population? It’s pretty hard to tell. Where else can strangers congregate by random chance with the benefit of anonymity? Jerks use forbidden words. People yell at them for it. What else can anyone do? It’s not that this behavior is okay. The vast majority of people hate it, but nobody has the power to stop them because of the way online spaces work.
The one space that works like an online game is Twitter, and it is notoriously a cesspool. So I’m inclined to believe that this is an internet problem and not a gaming problem. I can’t prove it, as you noted, but it seems like a reasonable assumption to me.
Even taking that into account, is it really a good policy to say, “I’m going to go around claiming these people are toxic until you perform a study that proves otherwise!” Like I said in the video, that will get you in a lot of arguments, but it won’t do anything to slow down the harassers, which is (I think) the real goal.
I don’t recognize your picture of gaming and tabletop (and the ’90s) at all, sorry. From my corner it looked like things were going along fine until a bunch of activists decided to spin up a moral panic (something that happens roughly every twenty years in the United States, which is prone to them) and this time succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Well, this was a pretty good thread. It didn’t melt down the way I thought it would. However, I can see things are getting personal and all of the interesting discussions have concluded or burned out. I need to step away from the computer for a bit, so I guess this is a good time to close the comments.
Thanks so much to everyone who kept this friendly.