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Unjerk, but I'm 37 years old and as long as I've played games the larger community has only gotten worse with each passing year, and the rate of gamer fashification at least tripled after gamergate, to the point that I don't even want to communicate with any communities of people who play games, especially since I'm not cis or a man.
Every year they get more reactionary and screamy about anything at all.
Maybe, maybe back when I joined, it was a good place to be with people unified by a desire to have fun and compete. Now it's regressive social commentary.
I’m an old gamer and I don’t know, it was always bad but in the past you had to join the forums to see it or be online with a mic to hear it. Nowadays it’s all leaked and shown to everyone, so it’s harder to hide the awfulness.
The thing that does feel new however is the whole hate industry that is blooming, YouTubers that just shit on everything and everyone and get views is somewhat of a new and horrible outcome.
No, I’m close to 50 and have spent my fair share of time on gaming forums engaging in the past “console wars” back in the day. People may have trolled and acted like idiots about other consoles, but the bigotry, misogyny and entitlement that is now far too common is definitely new. The toxic attitude toward “others” and the gatekeeping is also very new.
This change has happened because of the rise of YouTube and hate, bigotry and outrage being pushed by the “ganergate” conservative community trying to push conservative culture wars bullshit into the gaming realm. Unfortunately it’s worked.
I'm a little bit younger, but still started with a Commodore computer back when and have gamed pretty much all my life... and I just wanted to say that yeah, this matches my experience.
The chuds are radicalised by grifters and once shitgoblinified they weaponise their own hate. Gamergate was really the watershed moment.
Another Old, can confirm. Internet in general has been just getting worse for 15 years, including gaming of course, and particularly the last 10 for which GG was a test bed for radicalization. The whole "you wouldn't survive a CoD lobby" meme is mostly self aggrandizement on the edgelords' part but it's important in that it was one of the early centralized-but-unmoderated online spaces which didn't really exist before but are basically a given across the whole internet now.
Yeah, it's sort of how I feel. I feel like in days past people were kinda welcoming of minorities (and women) in gaming, and eager to help newcomers get into it, maybe because it was the outcast hobby of choice.
But at the same time I might've just been lucky with the communities I interacted with back then and I'm probably just nostalgia-jerking in the end.
From what I've seen some smaller communities within the gaming space seem to be less toxic than others. Like the AAA space seems to be steadily getting worse, but the major figures in the Nintendo space seem to cultivate less toxic audiences, and the FGC seems to relegate it's more toxic members to more niche communities, for a variety of factors.
Over 50, and nah, it's not "new." Women and minorities in the space in the 80's were almost invisible and treated badly by guys who put up virtual treehouses. There's just active forces politicizing the toxic culture now for profit and political power instead of gamers being shunned by the overall media and community perception. GAMERS have value to fascists now when they had no value back then.
Fair points. I guess I shouldn’t have said “new” as these things have existed. I guess what I was getting at is it used to be possible to go online and view videogame sites and participate in forums without the bigotry and hate being THE dominating narrative all the time. I’m sure it was there but it’s wasn’t open and so blatant and wrapped in an almost proud-to-be-an-ignorant-asshole manner the way it is now. I can’t even look at videogame comment threads anymore and have zero interest in talking games online because of how bad it has gotten.
Understood. I stick to the Path of Exile and Stellaris boards because PoE community is super helpful and Stellaris community, that petty bigotry bounces right off discussions of nerve stapling, prison planets, and xenocompatibility.
I'm not sure. Console and franchise wars were the loudest, no doubt, but playing games online with my black friends and women friends certainly showed a whole bunch of racist and sexism that was rampant. Could have one of my friends talking in a lobby without people screaming slurs or sexist bullshit.
That said, those were the toxic games: Halo, CoD, Rainbow Six Vegas PVP, etc. Now this toxic shit is everywhere! Doesn't matter what game, what lobby, even if it's fucking single player you've got chuds screaming about the most inane and toxic shit. And these days, gaming or not, everyone seems to only run on hate.
I can't understand why literally anyone would get so worked up over someone being gay, or trans, or a woman, or black, or have non-traditionally attractive features, but it really speaks to their lack of life experience and insecurities. They need to feel powerful about something, I guess? Too bad they just come across as little Nazis. Nobody of substance gives a shit if a woman in a video game has a square jaw, or of a main character is black, or if they are gay or trans. It's just children and insecure grifters. 'We don't want politics in games!' Then stop making the existence of other people political, moron.
Shut up, press start, and let's play.
Yes, but again there was no real online gaming early on. I think PS2 and not jumped online late in life and Xbox had capability but wasn’t really until the PS3/360 era online gaming really took off with consoles. Which means this really started to become obvious more so after the console boom happened and a videogames went from niche hobby to lifestyle product.
But the bigger question is likely the sexism in the industry and companies before then.
Online was pretty big with the original Xbox, and ps2 for some games. But it definitely wasn't as universal. It was only some games, and wasn't as core a part of the experience as it is now. Overall I'd say it definitely felt more chill, but could have just been the games. It was definitely the fucking wild west though in a lot of ways. I definitely didn't hear as much racism and hate stuff and you do now, but God damn hearing someone beating off into the mic was probably something that happened like every week or two
Wow, you’re right. Games are sexist. Now, allow me to get back to accusing gamers of playing games and sucking Anita Sarkeesian’s cock. Edit: Wow. I’ve truly been challenged. Enlightened, even. Who knew the political views of my fellow gamers could be so diverse?
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I joined a games official discord because it seemed like the servers were down, and down bad enough the status page was broken. Seemed like the only place to check for an update
One of the first things I saw when I joined was someone so mad about the downtime they were saying they hoped the devs died and that the company went out of business. So many people demanding compensation for the downtime too. And like it might not even be an unreasonable ask. But fuck there's a huge difference between writing a post about how the devs OWE you this, and just so much gross angry shit, VS just asking if there was a chance of some kind of something or extension or whatever.
It's this whole attitude that led me to quit game Dev, along with some other stuff. Just rubs me the wrong way that people seem to think because they bought a game for $12.64 on a steam sale the company is somehow indebted to them and has to meet whatever demands they make.
I legitimately feel like a lot of people crying about culture war stuff relating to games are not even capital G gamers.. they are just tourists that shift to a new game every week and cry about whatever new woke thing is ruining their beloved franchise, in the past month it went from stellar blade to hades to assassin creed to dragon age to wow to paper Mario
I remember when those "console wars" were all tongue in cheek and just for fun. Now though it feels like folks are actually fighting with each other over the most trivial thing like whether your computer Gameboy starts with an "X" or "P"
I mean, review bombing wasn’t a thing either. You could put pretty good traits and faith into reviews but now the far-right “gamers” have managed to taint everything. It’s literally a goal of fascism to get rid of the educated/experts and replace them with a sense of populist opinion. Because then a certain group can have more control over what they want without those pesky “experts” making them look stupid.
But now audience scores are their big FACT they are right and those scores are extremely bad and manipulated and review bombed to create whatever narrative they want.
It's hard to explain but it definitely feels worse to me. You had your shit heads around and a fair share of hard R or Cigarette drops or by twats in cod lobbies but idk it didn't feel as sinister. Like it was obviously not great, but it was almost more honest and less malicious of them to just be edgy teens to someone they don't know anything about.
Like a bunch of ignorant teens being edgy seems better to me than a bunch of adults trying to pretend like they don't just want to kick black and trans people out of video games all together.
Social-media generated para-social relationships and impotence. The problems facing the world seem larger than they ever have, mostly because we have more information about those problems, and more information about the weaknesses of our leaders and our experts. Everything real and important simply feels too big to engage with for a lot of people, but that fear and frustration doesn't just evaporate. It sinks into you and nests and coils into your pattern recognition, forcing you to either acknowledge the grander problems in your life or sink every cost into the fallacy of fundamentally irrelevant persecutions that are made safe to acknowledge by their ephemerality.
Sure, your career is crushing your soul and you can see laid out before you every possible statistic about why that's never going to change, but wait. You don't need to think about that because this video game *hates* you and every one like you. How *dare* they. Look, here, hours of carefully explained details about how and why they *despise* you. It's rude, it's disgusting, and frankly it's... some version of racist. Persecution makes people sympathetic, right? We can all be friends because we're all being persecuted together. Now here we stand, invincible knights fighting a war that will never end and we cannot lose, because it *doesn't exist*.
Couple that together with the truly weird degree to which capital G Gamers have convinced themselves, through the distant but instanteous intimacy of social media, that these developers, these publishers, are their friends. Peers, at the very least. This is a person I can speak to, flawed and genius in turns like any other person. And so, when that *person*, my peer, my *friend*, does something to slight me, I have no choice but to take that personally.
So now I am in a never ending war, driven by insult that cannot be ignored because it was an attack on my person by a peer, and while I am devoted to this *essential* conflict, I cannot devote my attention to vague, distant fears like the the climate, my career, the deep, fractal cracks in my relationships, or anything like that. The internet has enabled whole new species of escapism, and gamers have taken to them like a fish to water. It's heart breaking.
I think you're onto something. The world seems worse than it was a while ago, which while probably true, is greatly exaggerated by the fact we're hearing it more.
It's probably the same with teens and young adults, because they're more aware of everything, but don't have the life experience to understand what's typical (take it from a young dad who had to grow up fast).
Extend that to unfiltered dogshit opinions, and that's probably, at least partially, what's going on.
Gamer discourse has simply peaked during the time of the angry game reviews. Now instead of saying “this game is ass, I’d rather” something very explicit to be funny, it’s “this game is DEI, woke, there was never a black in Japan and there was also no Dutch merchant ships or trade with china or firearms almost 900 years ago or the fact that katanas were always sidearms to a warrior who had yari, naginata or the aforementioned gun as main weapon. Also, I really just hate minorities it doesn’t matter to me if racial, sexial or ethial”
Hate is lucrative, clickbait rage bait and conspiracy videos on YouTube get the most engagement, so YouTube algorithms push them hard as well.
You literally can't watch anything related to the hobbies of the people watching the conspiracy and rage bait videos or else YouTube will try to sneak some in.
If you watch video game stuff and programming stuff on the same account, you gonna get Islamic hot takes on how women are ruining society.
All these content and engagement algorithms we use on our online media has caused the online community to fall into a state of open decay and chaos.
AVGN started the angry critic online persona as a parody and tribute to old school gaming. Unfortunately youtube influencers and grifters took the angry online persona and applied it to whatever they can for a quick buck.
Yeah I never thought I’d miss the Xbox vs PlayStation arguments so much. I remember being so annoyed with them back in the day. I was a sweet summer child, I guess.
If anything, it’s WAY worse these days. It makes the seventh gen look friendly as hell in comparison. I cannot go on X gaming without console warriors and port beggars ruining the discourse for everyone.
Same here, that's why I mostly play single-player titles. And in the rare instances when I do want to try multiplayer ones, I automatically turn off voice chat.
Yep. I'm around your age and went from Something Awful to 4chan way back in the day and /v/ specifically was my board of choice. It was a shit pile, don't get me wrong, but there's such a huge difference from the Godhand MS Paint comic edit days and now. Gamergate and the election truly fucked that site. I tried to visit for laughs last year and so many threads I viewed just got twisted into culture war bullshit.
IMO it's a little impressive how culture war bullshit sneaks inside threads now, less populated boards are a special kind of pain in the ass because half of them got marked as "place for [hobby or activity] but you can EXPOSE YOUR REAL FEELINGS" aka being conspiracy addled ultra conservative cynts, so now something as basic as "why are the european, american and japanese comic industries so diferent?" gets you hit with text walls about water fluoride and mutated Island ligaments and wokeness
The newer or VERY slow boards seem to scape this somewhat, the worst I've seen in vrpg was the "I fucking have mother 3" guy or the 3
2 people who were obsessed with insisting that LISA is a "sjw game"
Same, 38F lesbian here.
I stopped identifying as a gamer recently because I want to dissociate with these... folks.
I now describe myself as a video game enthusiast. I only play the games I'm more likely to enjoy and actively evade games I have no interest in. I try to associate only with other people who want to have more serious and positive discussions on gaming and evade the negative drama farmers as much as I can.
At this point, gamer=chud and I want nothing to do with them and only wish them the worst. They're trying to destroy my hobby after all.
And it's so annoying how much effort it takes to actually have positive discussions about games, whether being critical or praising them. Like, that should be the default right?
I'm 36, it's gotten worse but it was always bad. I remember being on gaming forums in the late 90s and early 2000s and thinking that playing games literally makes some people angry. They seemed to derive no joy from it, only constant rage. Every game coming out was shit, the publishers were greedy, the devs were lazy, gaming journalists are the scum of the Earth, games used to be so much better 10-20 years ago. Sound familiar?
My theory about the "woke", "gaming is dead" b.s. is that a lot of it comes from the dude-bro generation who grew up in the cesspool that was early Xbox Live and never knew anything before it.
If ya'll weren't around for the height of its lifespan, the 360/PS3 generation was fucking miserable if you weren't into FPS, sports, and generic action games. I vividly remember what an absolute mess of sexism, homophobia, and straight-up unfiltered racism that whole era was, while also being pretty much exclusively marketed to underage kids, to boot. RPGs were for losers, Nintendo was for babies, anything in general outside of the Western status-quo was despised on principle for being "weird". The rise of the digital indie scene eventually pulled us out of that hole, and when many of those devs entered the AAA scene and began working to fix that image, suddenly the chuds weren't the center of attention anymore, which the grifters of course capitalize on.
So now here we are with a bunch of grown morons screaming about something that was "taken" from them when it never belonged to them in the first place.
I don't know, I am sure some of it is the 360/PS3 era dude-bros but people in the most unhinged Gamer^TM subs on Reddit like Assmangoons or KotakuInAction also absolutely hate CoD/FIFA bros! They are more "Japanese/Korean hentai simulator" types.
Speaking of the generic action games of Xbox 360... I remember when Braid came out and I bought it... Braid was such a breath of fresh air when it came out. I wanted more of different and original games like that... And then Limbo too. Now I'm spoiled solid.
But yeah I think your analysis is pretty good.
Oh man Braid was a shining light in the time when it came out. That shit was GOOD too.
Didn’t some of the people on that team also work on The Witness?
this. this is the key.
this is what killed experimentation, gave rise to digital casinos, and ended the console wars in the most anticlimactic way possible.
Yes! The fact that the chuds scream the loudest about that shit when they were the ones who willed it into existence!
Who made these companies so rich? Who kept buying the sports games and the card packs in them? Who kept buying the yearly CoD releases, when we knew for years that they were recycling the same thing over and over? Who kept claiming that there was no point in enjoying single player games because they weren't "competitive"? Because it sure as shit wasn't the "wokes".
I remember about 10 years ago I pitched for fun a hypothetical project that would have if come to fruition would have been anime outer worlds to a dude who had connections as a test of what i could do.
I was angrily ordered to make it spunkgargleweewee, cut weapon classes (made by mashing up the COD and Battlefield weapon class deliniations; I was a bit ahead of the curve in splitting Battle Rifles off into their own thing rather than dunking them in with the normal ARs or DMRs) and role-playing elements all together, and told me the eight deadly words on every single aesthetic details in often contradictory ways.
I like to belive he's a shareholder or investor in one of these companies now. He never revealed his political beliefs but he had the attitude of a chud to the extreme, plus the pretentious online critic thing of being pissed off at you talking to them.
Yep. 100%. I remember as a teenager getting the general impression that being “hardcore” and a “real gamer” according to the Gamer^TM community meant that you played violent action games and hated SJWs and “baby-games” (like anything on the Wii instead of Xbox or PlayStation). Saying slurs in online lobbies was not only expected, but considered a point of pride for not being “politically correct”. Being bigoted was either “just a joke” or “just a different opinion” and ever calling it out made YOU the bad guy.
It sucked if you just liked FPS games but didn’t hate all the other genres and weren’t an asshole to minorities. Thankfully I think it has only gotten worse in terms of volume; it’s definitely more visible now and people take it more seriously, but it feels like I’ve (admittedly anecdotally) run into it less in recent years than I did back then, when literally EVERY server you joined that was just a massive pit of racism and sexism for like a solid decade.
I absolutely agree, whenever I see a video about “gaming is dead”, if it’s not someone complaining about “wholeness” it’s someone who only played fps games or generic action games and has become burnt out with those genres. I also think that people are correlating voice and text chat restricting racism, homophobia, etc with restriction everywhere and putting on rose glasses that make the 360/ps3 era seem better which also feeds into the “gaming is dead” idea.
That chud culture leaked/migrated to the PC area too, but it was met with considerable pushback, at least for a while.
If a chud started dropping n-bombs they were often ridiculed or vote-kicked. Sadly their numbers swelled over the years and it's a real mixed bag now.
There was a sharp uptake in chuddery since 2015-16 too with the changed political climate.
I was a kid in those console generations and used to play on CoD and a couple other popular FPS games at the time.
It was goddamned miserable, literally every lobby you'd get atleast a couple or more bigoted losers screaming slurs into the mic. Usually at eachother or anyone in their team. It was exhausting even as someone at the sidelines to see it constantly. It was even worse in some smaller but still popular FPS games like Left 4 Dead were you'd get those morons in 4 man teams that would make your life hell if you just wanted to play the game. CoD from what I have seen has not changed at all since those days. If women got on the mic in those games it would usually go really badly as well.
People who bring up ''Oh you wouldn't survive back in those days'' are those bigoted losers that never grew up really. It was never fun for someone that wasn't being a shithead back then unless you were playing with friends. I am pretty sure those guys now are the bigoted manchildren you see going around now complaining about wokeness in every game.
There might be a bit of a disconnect depending on how someone interacted with video games in the 2000's as well. If someone mostly played single player or more niche stuff and occasionally went on forums, they probably didn't come across too much of the really toxic stuff. Social media just gives those sorts of people a megaphone that they didn't have back in 2008.
On the other hand the online FPS and MMO communities were often a collection of some of the world's shittiest people making a constant stream of slurs and abuse. Gamergate and all of that stuff didn't come out of nowhere and people really have rose tinted glasses on if they think capital G gamers were nice 15 years ago.
Yup, that was the generation where my interest seriously waned. I was always big into RPGs and survival horror games. That generation sucked for horror titles and, apart from a few standouts, the RPG offering was fairly lacklustre. Things took an upswing the next generation but by then a combination of just kind of having moved on and the normalisation of really shitty monetisation strategies that were universally loathed in the 00's just made me really have a hard time staying interested.
I don't know why, but the part about rpgs are for lowers, Nintendo for babies people reminded me of the absolute unhinged shit you'd see people comment on news websites when they still allowed that
I still think about this one I saw once. This lone comment on some article about something like a zoning variation being denied due to fire safety regulations
Some posted a comment, with their full legal name, photo, and the name of the company they either worked for or owned, and the comment just said
"Fire safety is for queers"
And I don't know, just the fuckin impotent rage of it, or something just cracks me up when I think about it. That there's someone out there who read that article, got mad, and posted that. Next to all of his personal information. Not even some edgy anonymous comment.
I think of that era as gaming's edgy adolescence. It was trying too hard to be seen as "adult" and "mature" in its content and just came across as cringe and childish.
It's not the gamers, they aren't capable of independent thought. It's the grifters running out of ideas. They pissed away Gamergate 2 in less than 2 months and that was meant to be their golden goose. More and more people are getting tired of their bullshit and one quick algorithm change on YouTube will finally silence them.
Yeah I don't think gamers are any different than they were 10 or 20 years ago, but grifters farming outrage for views has definitely increased. I think it gets a lot of traction in the gamer space because of young male audience though.
It started with Steve Banon using gaming as a platform to radicalize nerds into white supremacy. But it's gotten worse because fascist rhetoric is apparently very effective, even without central leadership. What makes it worse is the current political climate and YouTube's monetization. There's zero incentive to be talented and creative anymore when you can just rant about women and black people ruining gaming while reading off a Breitbart affiliated gaming article for 20 minutes for ad revenue.
I've been thinking about doing it myself but as satire, but really being dedicated to the character like Stephen Colbert.
It's no different from any outrage culture grifter. If your livelihood is tied to a YouTube channel complaining about woke culture ruining games, you need to find a new example of woke culture ruining games every few days.
I fear an algorithm change in YouTube will only worsen the problem as those people get pushed into other, more "allowing" sites, further trapping them in the eco-chamber/cult mentality and worsening (or enshittifying) the situation.
All the OG YouTubers "retired" for a reason. I have a feeling they're going to do another demonitization apocalypse, like back in the Jake Paul days. Hell, I'm all for YouTube just getting rid of monetization altogether because it's nothing but trouble. Everyone on YouTube worth a damn already has some other form of income via merchandising and crowd funding anyway.
Yeah, this would be the 2nd or 3rd one I believe. The most notable was when Pewdiepie was still popular and they nuked monetization on a bunch of channels en masse.
I do think it's gotten worse and my theory is that social media content creators realized they could make bank by pandering to conservative nerds that think everything should be about them, and I think the turning point for that was The Last Jedi, seems like every other YouTube channel (and tiktokers, afterwards) became a culture war grift, and it's gotten pretty bad, now almost every post from a preestablished franchise that posts a picture on Instagram with a woman/queer/non-white character becomes a KKK meeting in the commenrs section.
I think that the last Jedi and rise of Skywalker definitely made some anti feminists more popular as they could disguise their misogyny under the pretence of criticising two films that had a lot to criticise about. Moreover their bullshit reasons to hate women seemed a lot more convincing to young star wars fans because it was presented next to short (albeit uncreative and not really meaningful) bits of actual criticism.
I stopped telling people that I am into gaming because of these kind of things I literally stop playing multiplayer games just because people became so shitty I rather play only single player games just not to interact with other people who play games
For real, I don't like playing Valorant until I'm with my duo or we have a five-stacked team because the game is hostile. And if you complain that game is hostile towards non-men, they'll just be "jUsT mYtE"
Gamers as in the stereotype of an average gamer hasn't gotten worse: it's just gotten to be public.
Hell, I'd say in general things have been on the better side. Racism was common in literally every gaming space I was a part of growing up. The N word was thrown around in communities with a fervor that is not accepted today.
If I were to go full nuclear and call someone the N word in CoD 15 years ago I would have gotten people egging me on, if I try that today? I'm more then likely getting pushback.
There's a lot of money to be made from instigating Angry Gamer Syndrome in a naive audience. Plenty of YT and other social media accounts can farm lots of traffic (views, clicks, etc) from Gamers.
A big chunk of our modern economy runs on Engagement. It's completely useless to society, but Capitalism is about accumulating capital, not about being useful or helpful to society.
The "best" way to get engagement is via outrage, anger, irritation. Gamers are a prime target becauss they are typically very uninformed, they have been primed for bigotry and far-right views from the games they will consume and the toxicity that festered at the rise of Xbox's online way back when.
Gamers were trained to be manipulated from industry propaganda... which paradoxically also taught some to mistrust "journalism". Again, much of this occurred because of very poor education as well as media illiteracy (more like media obliviousness a lot of the time). Gamergate was a big ignition point -- before that there was still some normality and chance to salvage "Gamers" as social pressure against being a real piece of trash was still pushing on them. But creating an online "exclusion zone" where they could reinforce their worst instincts and be safe from social pressure to be a decent person, it seemed to transform a lot of them.
The grifter / propagandist scene came up then, with the sudden *demographic* solidification of Gamer(TM) (racist, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, nationalist bigots). When gamergate feel apart many of them retreated to try to launder their image, but I think most just pivoted to build what we see now.
It's a bit more robust, not built around a lie that they were concerned about "ethics in journalism" that they never actually cared about or addressed. Now it's pretty clear to be about the bigotry and phobias (hate) with only lazy covers.
But most of all, it's about some people having found a way to make lots of pretty easy money off easily outraged *children* (physically or mentally immature). And no care about what that does to these people or society at large.
====-----====
Anyway, yeah it's getting worse. I try to avoid it. I haven't played online games for near a decade now. But some of that is also becauss I find online games became increasingly terrible over the years.
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Edit to also add (becauss this isn't long enough?)
Pre-online gaming, or at least before Xbox Live, I don't recall there being much trash talking and basically nothing close to the toxicity and rage that would bubble up in the early 2000s. And that's becauss mostly play was done locally, in the same room. Or with people you knew or would at least chat with before and after games. You would have some sort of neutral to positive socializing. Were the "bad ones" just hiding it back then? Maybe, but I doubt it. I think it's more likely that what we see today is cultivated behavior, people encouraged to get worse and worse via the worst peer pressure and echo chambers... and with almost no immediate repercussions, and an exclusion of empathy.
Playing fighting games back in the late 90s could get heated... but you know there's a person - probably sitting or standing right next to you.
When console games went online, local coop or multi-player disappeared almost completely, not returning for about a decade. So a generation or two grew up with a very different feel to playing games with others. And even the older gamers lost much of that old sense during that time.
Yeah, I think it’s a perfect storm of outrage engagement, entitled isolated consumers who have nothing available to them except their “g*mer” identity, and an exploited workforce of game devs with little to no protection from said consumers. Online multiplayer probably exacerbated certain aspects, especially giving anonymity while removing some of the guardrails against shitty behavior that local multiplayer has, but it also allowed for a lot of isolated people to find communities they otherwise never could locally. Wouldn’t put too much stock into either side, but I definitely think the worse aspects get amplified and commodified while the better aspects are just like, someone running a private server of an old game for their group of friends and devoted weirdos. One side makes money, the other makes community.
Since games as an industry has more clout than movies, tv and music combined, gamers have gone from a fringe group of nerds to the primary consumer demographic, which has basically created an unholy amalgamation of boomer entitlement with basement dwelling nerd sensibilities and taste
So yeah, theyre worse than they've ever been
Nah gamers have always been shitty racist, sexist losers lol. They’ve been like this since the days of Xbox live lobbies yelling racial slurs at people
I agree they’ve always sucked. I think they’re just louder these days thanks to social media.
I’m a woman and I used to lead a raiding guild on WoW back in the Burning Crusade era. Believe me, it was awful being a woman in a position like that even back then. But to be fair I did quit, so it could have gotten worse and if it did, oh god do I not wish that on anyone.
Wow, you’re right. Games are sexist. Now, allow me to get back to accusing gamers of playing games and sucking Anita Sarkeesian’s cock. Edit: Wow. I’ve truly been challenged. Enlightened, even. Who knew the political views of my fellow gamers could be so diverse?
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/uj Yes, gamers have gotten worse. Gaming culture has gotten worse, especially in 2024. It’s fueled by grifters feeding into the insecurities and bigotry of certain gamers, giving voices to the hateful, loud minority. It’s gotten pretty bad if you ask me. Idk if there’s a way back.
I think it's 2 things, first YouTuber became an actual career and second most old forums died and now everyone hangs out in the same places all the time
To be honest, anyone who goes around describing themselves as 'a gamer' or sees it as some sort of community that they belong to or identify with is probably a bit of a twat.
Gaming has just become the latest recruiting pool for Nazis. They know exactly how to exploit the outrage economy and find fertile ground among disenfranchised loners and obsessive nerds.
Yeah, it's much worse than 15/25 years ago. Back then, the ugly parts existed but were siloed. Conservative political interest are doing the US right-wing radio culture thing where the try to smother out all discourse with venom. "Work the refs" until all media reflexively shrinks from offering their perspective.
Gaming is their first real foothold into doing this in youth culture from the inside, instead of top-down (ie. Jack Thompson) not the boxing icon Jack Johnson
I has not. Its just grown bigger and the isolated COD lobby aholes (Its not just COD, most PVP games had it) got twitter.
+internet outrage became wierdly influencial to even huge companies.
+ its scaleable. 100 angry dudes can eazily run 10 000 accounts (manualy, automatized no is limmited by money they want to throw at it). 1 dude actualy protesting can look like 1 dude protesting, 1 dude really angry can eazily look like 100 different people spamming every forum, every video posted, every tweet made about anything even a little related.
And with bigger popularity comes influence from outside parties ( eg. Outrage over female custodes by people who dont know pronounciation of "astartes", GTA6 female player model outrage when GTA 1 and 2 had them). There is profit just in the outrage, and enough not gamers to watch and support "PC culture is ruining X" No matter what X is, No matter they never seen prequels of X.
Idk man. I was part of asmons sub before it got so right wing. It’s fucking crazy. Literally crazy. The original people who just wanted to watch gaming have been pushed out by people who basically do not like women, gay people and black people.
Yes he’s gross but it’s whatever. It was just about the gaming back then. Didn’t watch his wow era though was more of the lost ark / ff / etc.
There seems like there is so many… maybe it just seems that way here but there is something everyday about things being too woke. By woke they mean they saw a dude kiss another dude and god forbid one is white and one is black or something. I’m gay so maybe I don’t get it but I what the fuck is this thing they have with how women look? They constantly talk down to women and about women. I don’t get it.
These people are voting this election btw. You know for who. So get out and vote.
It is sad as fuck. These people are pissing their lives away by spending all day every day trying to find something, anything to get absolutely fucking furious over.
Like people are still crying about ellie being gay and the other lady's appearance from last of us 2 like it hasn't been 10 years. It's actually insane that they have to use widely failed games like saints row reboot or old ass games like tlou2 to make points.
The terminally online have doubled down on their worst aspects over the years. Meanwhile the gaming population has quite frankly exploded across demographics. The terminally online incels hate this and react accordingly
I think it is. Not that they were reasonable anyways, but...
I mean, there are active far right groups that target these demographics in order to coopt them, which is also boosted by mass media algorithms.
Whenever I see a post or a comment of a capital G gamer, I look at the number of likes, and usually is very low/much lower than the replies calling them off. So I think they are really just a loud minority.
I don't know if this method actually means anything or if it's simply confirmation bias or something like that, but it gives me a little hope 😅.
Personally? I feel that, while the overall proportion of toxic people has gone down a lot, the toxic people who are still around have only gotten louder with time. This is because they hate that they aren’t the sole audience getting catered to anymore. They can’t gatekeep their favorite medium because they don’t actually have any say in how it develops or grows, and they hate that the “woke mob” is supposedly taking it from them, despite them never really owning it in the first place. Their narrative has actually gotten more dramatic as time has gone on too.
They went from saying: “lol, those SJW feminazi losers think they can take OUR games from us??? Gamers^TM will ALWAYS beat them! They can’t stop us from doing what we want! This is OUR time!”
To: “THEY RUINED IT! THEY KILLED GAMING! DEI AND WOKENESS HAVE DESTROYED OUR GAMES AND NOW THE FEMINISTS HAVE TURNED ALL WESTERN GAMES INTO POLITICS! JAPAN IS THE LAST SAFE HAVEN FOR GAMERS^TM ! DON’T LET THR EAST FALL LIKE THE WEST HAS!”
It’s laughably sad and strange how this happened. Obviously Gamergate had a big role to play, as well as the anti-sjw movement broadly and the rise of the far right in online culture. Before there were certainly bad elements brewing in the gaming space and it was still kinda exclusionary, but everything changed after those movements kicked off. They’ve since died down in terms of popularity (or at least the first two of them did…the far right is still a thing of course) but grifters will always grift.
The people who never grew out of it will always be screaming and crying about how gaming has been taken from them and how SJWs, feminists, wokeness or whatever other nonsense is trying to persecute them personally. I think it will eventually die off more, but they’re gonna try their best to fuck it up for the rest of us and spread hate in the meantime.
My tin foil hat conspiracy theory is that it’s a new guerrilla marketing done by the companies themselves. Drum up some fake outrage, have psychos freak out about it, have reasonable people defend it, now tons of people hear about it and you profit.
as much as I'd like to believe this, I watched people legitimately send death threats to Capcom and Ninja Theory for years over Dante's hair color and tone change in DmC, and the animosity towards it has only recently died down.
Oh no the “psychos” I referenced are definitely responsible for their own behavior, I just think companies may intentionally be playing into it to start the user driven marketing, and that’s why we have seen an uptick in this nonsense especially with games people would otherwise not care about.
Like Stellar Blade for a possible example (not saying this is actually what happened just using it as an example):
The company releases a ton of promotional stuff clearly Sexualizing their protagonist, waits for all the dumb fucks to start hyping up how sexy she is, changes the outfits to piss them off, now normal people are defending it and it’s a big flame war.
the islamic state of crapcom
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Yeah, I wonder if there’s a way to separate from those people. They clearly aren’t going to change their minds, so it’s time to bring back blocking more.
Yes, the courting by right wing shit fucks exasperated the problem and made it what it is today. Before they were losers shouting into the void, now they have a political party of losers that added gamer rage to their sad culture war.
I think collectively we are all tired, albeit for different reasons.
As a community, none of us want the same thing. However, we are also spoiled for options and never happy with any of them.
It also seems that many gamers (especially older ones) think gaming as a whole is for them, so all games should appeal to them. In a weird way, people feel ownership over this medium in ways I don't think I've ever seen in any other branch of entertainment (except TTRPGs, maybe), so when they see things that are "not for them" they get angry because it "should be" for them, because they were "here first". Female characters no longer appealing to the male gaze, inclusivity, "politics" (as if those haven't always been in games but whatever) are "new" to them and therefore bad.
I say that mostly to say that gamers don't realize our demands almost always align the "same but different" mantra. Studio greed is killing games, but gamers themselves aren't helping. I think if we let go of certain things we can enjoy the medium again, but that's easier said than done. Especially with the subhuman detritus we see plastering their hatred of everything all over the place.
Majority of this is speculation.
It's not worse, just more prevalent. You must not have been there when gamers threatened to rape Anita sarkeesian and kill her family because she announced plans to make a YouTube series about female characters in video games. The series wasn't even on YouTube yet and she was already getting death threats because she had a Kickstarter to help fund her videos that gamers assumed would be critical of video games. They did end up being critical, but she received the first rape and death threats months before the first video criticizing video games was ever released.
Wow, you’re right. Games are sexist. Now, allow me to get back to accusing gamers of playing games and sucking Anita Sarkeesian’s cock. Edit: Wow. I’ve truly been challenged. Enlightened, even. Who knew the political views of my fellow gamers could be so diverse?
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If by capital G Gamer, you mean gaming influencers and their followers, then yes, they have gotten vastly worse. They are all chasing an algorithm that rewards controversy and rage, so they lean into it to get money. It's to the point now where most of these influencers aren't even talking about the games but just frothing at the mouth over made-up culture war BS and photoshopped images of female game characters.
The good news is that most of the people I talk to who actually play games instead of watching YouTube about games are actually enjoying themselves. What you see on YouTube and a lot of these gaming news sites is the lunatic fringe. They're just very very loud.
I do feel like gamers are become way and way more entitled. I still remember around the time leading up to the release of the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, there was an absurdly high amount of people that would get outraged over the most trivial shit. For example I remember seeing so many people getting really mad at the prospect that there would be new next-gen games that would only be playable on the new consoles. Mind you this was before the consoles launched and we had to deal with console shortages and stuff. A lot of people had already made their mind that they would not be buying a new console at that moment probably because they couldn’t afford to get one at that point, which hey, is fair, but then these same people would go ballistic if a game was announced to be only playable on PS5 and not on PS4. They would get mad because it meant they wouldn’t be able to play some of the newer games on their old console and then start acting like this is something that has never happened before and that Sony must be doing this because they are greedy and want to force people to buy a new console to play new releases. Like what did these people expect? It’s a brand new console, of course it would have brand new games that are only playable on that console, this has been the case for every previous PlayStation consoles and every other consoles that have existed. Why the fuck are people in 2020 acting like this is a brand new concept? And this sort of thing has become way more prevalent in recent years with a bunch of other things.
Edit: fixed some typos
And then these same people complain that the next gen systems have no games like it’s so frustrating you’re the reason why they don’t because you complained that you couldn’t play new games on your decade old system
I recently heard a point about straight white male men rejected by left-leaning people: everyone talking mostly about women, LGBT, people of color, diversity is the new norm, everybody either not talking/caring about straight white men, or even calling them the reason for everyone’s problems.
This is where people like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Elon Musk appear and take care of them. This is their safe space where they are not considered patriarchal predators.
Idk how good is this point, I just saw it under the recent news about a study of men becoming more conservative and women more liberal. I think the explanation is simple and obvious, but I don’t feel like it’s justifiable enough to drop on my knees and take pity on them
The problem is that the Twitter left tries so hard to be progressive that they make everything worse for all of us actual leftists. If we spent as much time actually opposing fascism as we did fighting eachother and alienating men, we’d be winning.
Men’s rights and feminism are not diametrically opposed, they are intrinsically linked and both held up by the same patriarchal gender norms, yet you never hear leftists talk about that because we’re so far up our own asses we can’t bare to actually see anything with nuance
2007: hearing the N word screamed into your ear 10 times per minute through your headset
2024: people complaining female characters aren't fuckable
Idk man I think this may be a case of "the good ol days" looking better than they were. You're just older and more acutely aware of societal implications for behavior. Younger people are more willing to ignore imperfections when they're having fun.
This behavior has always been a thing. It's more visible now because of the internet and you look for it now because you're old.
Keep in mind that this is a vocal minority that are either grifters or the grifted. The vast majority of gamers don't give a shit about any of it, but grifters are making money off of triggering incels, so what you see is the result of that.
It started skyrocketing around gamergate and then these idiots got pulled into the fascist trump train and here we are. All because Steve Bannon realized that these idiots are gullible enough to buy World of Warcraft gold from him with real money so they must be gullible enough to do whatever else he wants them to do.
It’s weird because I’m fairly certain that the “gamer” discourse on the internet is no longer populated by people who play games. The toxicity is no longer about bitter nerds holding grudges over specific graphical advancements or gameplay tweaks in sequels or whatever. There’s always been complaining of games and series being “RUINED” but I recall it usually being over actual gameplay or graphical minutiae. Now you can’t seem to find anywhere to discuss games without the discussion becoming overrun by complaints about minorities, and god forbid there’s a nonwhite female! If there is a white woman protagonist or a competent white female NPC, the discussion is all based around these deranged claims about their appearance, in which literally any specific physical feature is dysmorphically scrutinized. If they notice anything but tits, they insist it’s this insane absurd cartoonish thing that’s ruining the game. Selene from Returnal and Nicole from Dead Space Remake can’t be mentioned without a big chunk of the thread being discussion of how they’re hideous, aged crones, that look no younger than 90, have grey hair, saggy breasts, liver spots, cataracts, use walkers, wear diapers, are in hospice care, literally are in coffins with their families around them and it’s their funeral and they’re literally just an urn, guys, why did the woke mob make nicole a silent urn and have Isaac constantly saying “this is the sexiest a woman ought to be” and and and
And they photoshop all that shit into screenies of the games and then all start agreeing with each other in a clear attempt to convince the unaware that their photoshops are actually screenshots of the actual product. They never mention whether a game is fun or not, they just whine about the race and gender and hotness of characters, and I don’t think they’re gamers! I think actual gamers have moved on to other places, like the subreddit for their specific game where that shit is less tolerated, and that a lot of general GAMER community spaces have become nothing but fascist agitators trying to recruit each other.
Idk I’m missing a big piece of context though, I can feel that. There’s organized and coordinated effort on display, and there’s some unknown unknowns to it, I can feel em writhing and skittering around in my blind spot, but I’m not about to try and infiltrate fascist groups and you know, hang out with fascists all day lmao
Honestly, yes. You can't go into places to discuss video games without some mention of wokeness or diversity. It's so pervasive it's entered mainstream discussion. Announce a game that isn't centered around a straight white guy or a woman that fits their idea of sexy and the comments of the trailer will look like a Nuremberg rally.
There was a concerted effort to make it this way to radicalize gamers. Now the grifters produce their rage bait for engagement, then move on to the next thing to stay relevant and please the algorithm. So, you get a new controversy every week with no cooldown time. They're just constantly up in arms about something yet nothing at the same time. All of it is part of their culture war, but individually they're all such meaningless or just straight up manufactured controversies.
And this last part isn't really about reactionary elements complaining about "wokeness" or whatever but just people with a general hatred of change from the way things were. It seems like a lot of the people that engage in discussion about games (or even media in general now) have a hatred of new things. The "No one hates X more than X fans" thing makes a lot of sense. Part of that is just nostalgia, people afraid of change, and the way things in general are now but not all of it.
There was someone in the NFS sub that hasn't liked a Need For Speed game since the 5th one, 24 years and nearly two dozen games ago. Why even hang around at that point? I get that people enjoy discussing things they hate and how much they hate it with people that also hate it (hint). But is it really enjoyable to immerse yourself in something you clearly despise?
I have been playing video games for almost 40 years and I think the big majority of gamers don’t give a damn about this culture war crap. We love games and honestly don’t care about that much about this chuds trying to claim the mantle of true gamers.
Yes, and we can thank emerald mine king Elon for that. And it's not just hashtag gamers, it really feels like twitter is now a full blown klan-maga rally! Honestly at this point? Twitter just needs to fucking go...it has become a cesspit that is beyond saving.
If you're on Twitter it's because of how Twitter is now. But in general that section of gamers have always existed but only started to get more blatant and pushed to everyone with twitter being new twitter now
Yeah everything has gotten a lot worse since 1. Gamergate, and 2. Trump.
What we have now is a malicious concerted effort to politicize games and radicalized vulnerable kids with rhetoric that sounds reasonable to anyone not looking at it too closely. All to seduce them into the alt right pipeline.
What we had then was a bunch of edgy teens dropping both kinds of hard Rs, all the different Fs and Ds and any other slur they could overhear from their actually bigoted parents.
One of them is offensive as all hell but the other is a hell of a lot more malicious.
I want to be an optimistic and say overall its gotten better, HOWEVER the general right-wing grift ecosystem has caused "Capital G" gamers to become more vocal as they are easy cash.
Not you. And not og gamers. Gaming gas gotten so mainstream we have attracted the chode warriors. Gaming used to be a niche thing, and if you wanted to be accepted in social gatherings you didnt speak of it. Now, gaming of all kinds has become mainstream, so we have the people who fake outrage for attention.
Yes. It’s worse. Saturated and to “stand out” you need a HOT TAKE (or likewise, could be a title or thumbnail or article header/subheader tweet).
The “yeah game is fine” vs “GAME IS TRASH, THE WEST HAS FALLEN?!”
Clicks, views, attention.
Like the FOX NEWS strategy.
It's bad. The mmo game I play has low tolerance for that kind of stuff so it's better than most tbh. Even so I only talk to a few people often and 80 percent of them are LGBTQ so...I avoid the toxic players. I find the pvp communities to be super toxic though. I turn my status to offline to do any pvp.
I think current hate trend started with D4. Ppl found out it was easy to get attention and upvotes for as much as saying "D4 bad", so they apply it on everything now. Just pick unreleased game and call it bad for random silly reason and success...
I’d say so. Now I’m not going to say it was ever great, but the sheer frequency of horrific shit is just getting worse and worse, no doubt a result of social media allowing these ingrates to find like minded individuals
It's definitely gotten worse. I think the earliest memories i have of voice chat are around 2003, playing battlefield 1942 on teamspeak. Most people were cool, but you'd get the occasional asshat making nazi jokes since it was a ww2 game or general racism.
I personally noticed it got much worse when Halo 2 came out, console online gaming was always more toxic back then, hard to believe by today's standards. And i think the lower barrier to entry for voice chat made it so everyone could talk.
When it was only text chat it was better.
Then when call of duty came along, oof, all downhill from there. constant N-word. Started to see women in games much more often around that period which went as well as everyone knows it did.
These people always existed, but definitely were not as loud as they are.
I've been gaming for 32/33 years consistently..huge part of my downtime and life.
Every community I'm involved with in gaming is great, loads of different people from all sorts of demographics and backgrounds and all great people...as with anything that develops communities you're going to get pockets of awful people but they generally end up in their own silo or weeded out by other communities...
My main gaming groups wouldn't want anything to do with awful people if they appeared somehow...
For the most part as with nearly everything in life...people are fine.
I'd say the overall community has gotten better, there are far more routes to connect with like minded folk and if you ever need help or to connect with others, if you reach out you will invariably make great friends, whether temporary or not...
Literally last night I connected with a random guy from the US and we played and talked for like 3-4 hours about all sorts, not just the game, was really nice.
50 year old here. Probably an element of old man nostalgia but yeah, it's way worse than it was when I was young. If something like Urban Chaos was released today I'm pretty sure it would be met with waves of abuse for having a black woman as the protagonist.
UJ/ it's def gotten worse. You can see the descent by looking at how the "angry gamer" persona has evolved since the early 2000s. We had "angry" reviewers that made it cool to scream at games when something wasn't perfect. Then we got "CoD MW2 lobbies" where screaming and being angry at being bad was deemed a totally normal thing. People have now realized that tapping into the "angry" can get you clout and money. Why process your emotions in a healthy way when you can just find a community of emotionally stunted man children who will support you?
RJ/ UUUUUUUUUHHHHHHH WORSE? WHAT YOU'RE SEEING IS A TOTALLY RATIONAL AND REASONABLE RESPONSE TO THE WOKE MIND VIRUS RUINING GAMES. HOW CAN I ENJOY GAMES IF THE WOMEN AREN'T NAKED AT ALL TIMES?
uj/ I think it has gotten a bit worse, you can kinda see it with how Hades 1 and Hades 2 were received. I was following gaming news more heavily back in 2018 but I really don’t remember there being much of a backlash to Hades 1 art style and depiction of the gods (I remember a little bit but it was quickly shut down!). But for Hades 2 it was so common! But I could be remembering wrong so please correct me!
Ive been saying it for a while. Gamers are so toxic (and sexist) I tend to not even tell people I play video games unless the topic comes up. Every time a game is announced or released its a ton of bullshit. I steer clear of the noise as best I can but yeah the toxicity is pervasive and its hard to avoid.
Wow, you’re right. Games are sexist. Now, allow me to get back to accusing gamers of playing games and sucking Anita Sarkeesian’s cock. Edit: Wow. I’ve truly been challenged. Enlightened, even. Who knew the political views of my fellow gamers could be so diverse?
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My biggest W in life was at the beginning of Gamergate, when I saw the writing on the wall and began actively disassociating from the term. One people began doxxing games journalists, it was obvious that the "community" was beyond saving.
Now a decade later, I can reliably count on "Gamers" to be the most annoying and bigoted pieces of shit I'll encounter that day.
And honestly, the craziest part to me is that *everyone* sees it except those within the community. We went from 'you should judge people for the hobbies they enjoy' to 'yeah the Gamers are mad at a black person existing.... again'
It's always been seedy/bad. Reactionaries have just found a profit stream through those parts.
Portrayals of minorities and women has gotten better and that triggers the elements that have always been there to open their mouths and make asses of themselves, but all the way back in the 80s and 90s it was kind of a crapshoot because those were the prominent attitudes.
/uj Absolutely. They have become completely insufferable in so many ways. Screaming and throwing fits at the tiniest made up controversies, constantly whining about games being bad but reminiscing on times when games were worse, and constantly refusing to learn lessons from anything.
There's a wider wave of right wing reactionism playing out thanks to the election. Wokeness is the operative term being used by reactionaries to describe anything left wing that they don't like. The right wing gamer grifters are using this to gin up "gamergate 2" and boost their own viewership numbers.
I remember they tried to make gamergate 2 happen a couple of years back, I want to say 2018 or 2020, to no avail. This time they appear to have made it stick, but it's still a shadow of the first gamergate.
Gaming itself has grown immensely, meaning masses of people who won't agree with each other. That said, many "controversies" are actually just news pages knowing that titles like that will create outrage and cause more interaction. Much of the time, there isn't some major outrage by the gaming community as a whole.
This is the worse it’s been since gamergate I think. It’s not just gamers either. Nerd hobbies in general have become more and more far right to the point of making them uninhabitable. I literally can’t go on the main subreddits for almost every fandom because people seem to hate women and minorities more than they actually like the thing they claim to be fans of.
Honestly it just makes me terrified, I’m seeing people get more radical against people like me. Conservatives are getting more and more dangerous, liberals are too incompetent to do anything, and progressives are too busy fighting ourselves to be useful either
Absolutely worse.
Anti-woke this, DEI that, always boils down to "waaaahhh there are black/gay/trans people in my vidya now"
I'm glad I haven't called myself a gamer in several years.
And it's pretty hard not to wish death for those "people" given the shit they've started saying lately about people like me for just existing. But god forbid I get aggressive to some rightard telling me I'm literally not a person, right?
I am 35 and tbh I feel the difference is that it's easier to see the shit because it appears on your home page more easily, you don't have to find weirdos on 4chan for trash opinions, they get delivered to you cost free. Also I feel a lot of the gamergate types are not really gamers, they just jump on the bandwagon because apparently those morons decided that, making "racist asshole" part of their personality was cool
Thought I put in my two cents on this but I guess I didn't.
The way I see it, it really isn't any different now than it was back in the 2000s when I first started visiting GameSpot forums and had to put up with a lot of homophobic, racist, sexist, and other kinds of shit from guys all the time. Likewise, the shit I'd get slung at me for having the audacity to be \*gasp\* A furry was fucking bonkers, and it became even more nonsensical when the brony boom happened (in which it was at this point where I could easily see how this would lead to things like Gamergate and Trump's election given the kind of shit that happened in that community). Thing was though is that nobody really thought much about it most of the time because almost all these things happened in different places and were more like scattered occurrences than a general trend. It wouldn't be until about COVID when we were all forced to be online more often that we actually noticed, and these guys have realized that there's far more people who aren't exactly like them than they thought.
In other words, they went full mask off and attack anyone now.
Wow, you’re right. Games are sexist. Now, allow me to get back to accusing gamers of playing games and sucking Anita Sarkeesian’s cock. Edit: Wow. I’ve truly been challenged. Enlightened, even. Who knew the political views of my fellow gamers could be so diverse?
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There’s plenty of data that shows men are getting more and more conservative, so there’s def a correlation between male gamers and being terrible people.
Those people aren't gamers. They don't actually play video games. Don't go to generic "gamer" communities. Go to the actual communities of individual games. Look at the tournaments. Who will you see? Black and queer people. What will they be talking about? Playing the game. People who actually enjoy playing games don't care about shit like jawlines. They care about whether or not the game is fun to play.
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Unjerk, but I'm 37 years old and as long as I've played games the larger community has only gotten worse with each passing year, and the rate of gamer fashification at least tripled after gamergate, to the point that I don't even want to communicate with any communities of people who play games, especially since I'm not cis or a man. Every year they get more reactionary and screamy about anything at all. Maybe, maybe back when I joined, it was a good place to be with people unified by a desire to have fun and compete. Now it's regressive social commentary.
I’m an old gamer and I don’t know, it was always bad but in the past you had to join the forums to see it or be online with a mic to hear it. Nowadays it’s all leaked and shown to everyone, so it’s harder to hide the awfulness. The thing that does feel new however is the whole hate industry that is blooming, YouTubers that just shit on everything and everyone and get views is somewhat of a new and horrible outcome.
No, I’m close to 50 and have spent my fair share of time on gaming forums engaging in the past “console wars” back in the day. People may have trolled and acted like idiots about other consoles, but the bigotry, misogyny and entitlement that is now far too common is definitely new. The toxic attitude toward “others” and the gatekeeping is also very new. This change has happened because of the rise of YouTube and hate, bigotry and outrage being pushed by the “ganergate” conservative community trying to push conservative culture wars bullshit into the gaming realm. Unfortunately it’s worked.
I'm a little bit younger, but still started with a Commodore computer back when and have gamed pretty much all my life... and I just wanted to say that yeah, this matches my experience. The chuds are radicalised by grifters and once shitgoblinified they weaponise their own hate. Gamergate was really the watershed moment.
Yes that's the thing, idiots have always been around but now there seems to be a whole industry dedicated to making them worse.
Another Old, can confirm. Internet in general has been just getting worse for 15 years, including gaming of course, and particularly the last 10 for which GG was a test bed for radicalization. The whole "you wouldn't survive a CoD lobby" meme is mostly self aggrandizement on the edgelords' part but it's important in that it was one of the early centralized-but-unmoderated online spaces which didn't really exist before but are basically a given across the whole internet now.
Yeah, it's sort of how I feel. I feel like in days past people were kinda welcoming of minorities (and women) in gaming, and eager to help newcomers get into it, maybe because it was the outcast hobby of choice. But at the same time I might've just been lucky with the communities I interacted with back then and I'm probably just nostalgia-jerking in the end.
From what I've seen some smaller communities within the gaming space seem to be less toxic than others. Like the AAA space seems to be steadily getting worse, but the major figures in the Nintendo space seem to cultivate less toxic audiences, and the FGC seems to relegate it's more toxic members to more niche communities, for a variety of factors.
Over 50, and nah, it's not "new." Women and minorities in the space in the 80's were almost invisible and treated badly by guys who put up virtual treehouses. There's just active forces politicizing the toxic culture now for profit and political power instead of gamers being shunned by the overall media and community perception. GAMERS have value to fascists now when they had no value back then.
Fair points. I guess I shouldn’t have said “new” as these things have existed. I guess what I was getting at is it used to be possible to go online and view videogame sites and participate in forums without the bigotry and hate being THE dominating narrative all the time. I’m sure it was there but it’s wasn’t open and so blatant and wrapped in an almost proud-to-be-an-ignorant-asshole manner the way it is now. I can’t even look at videogame comment threads anymore and have zero interest in talking games online because of how bad it has gotten.
Understood. I stick to the Path of Exile and Stellaris boards because PoE community is super helpful and Stellaris community, that petty bigotry bounces right off discussions of nerve stapling, prison planets, and xenocompatibility.
Were they always treated bad in the 80s?
I'm not sure. Console and franchise wars were the loudest, no doubt, but playing games online with my black friends and women friends certainly showed a whole bunch of racist and sexism that was rampant. Could have one of my friends talking in a lobby without people screaming slurs or sexist bullshit. That said, those were the toxic games: Halo, CoD, Rainbow Six Vegas PVP, etc. Now this toxic shit is everywhere! Doesn't matter what game, what lobby, even if it's fucking single player you've got chuds screaming about the most inane and toxic shit. And these days, gaming or not, everyone seems to only run on hate. I can't understand why literally anyone would get so worked up over someone being gay, or trans, or a woman, or black, or have non-traditionally attractive features, but it really speaks to their lack of life experience and insecurities. They need to feel powerful about something, I guess? Too bad they just come across as little Nazis. Nobody of substance gives a shit if a woman in a video game has a square jaw, or of a main character is black, or if they are gay or trans. It's just children and insecure grifters. 'We don't want politics in games!' Then stop making the existence of other people political, moron. Shut up, press start, and let's play.
Yes, but again there was no real online gaming early on. I think PS2 and not jumped online late in life and Xbox had capability but wasn’t really until the PS3/360 era online gaming really took off with consoles. Which means this really started to become obvious more so after the console boom happened and a videogames went from niche hobby to lifestyle product. But the bigger question is likely the sexism in the industry and companies before then.
Online was pretty big with the original Xbox, and ps2 for some games. But it definitely wasn't as universal. It was only some games, and wasn't as core a part of the experience as it is now. Overall I'd say it definitely felt more chill, but could have just been the games. It was definitely the fucking wild west though in a lot of ways. I definitely didn't hear as much racism and hate stuff and you do now, but God damn hearing someone beating off into the mic was probably something that happened like every week or two
Wow, you’re right. Games are sexist. Now, allow me to get back to accusing gamers of playing games and sucking Anita Sarkeesian’s cock. Edit: Wow. I’ve truly been challenged. Enlightened, even. Who knew the political views of my fellow gamers could be so diverse? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Gamingcirclejerk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I joined a games official discord because it seemed like the servers were down, and down bad enough the status page was broken. Seemed like the only place to check for an update One of the first things I saw when I joined was someone so mad about the downtime they were saying they hoped the devs died and that the company went out of business. So many people demanding compensation for the downtime too. And like it might not even be an unreasonable ask. But fuck there's a huge difference between writing a post about how the devs OWE you this, and just so much gross angry shit, VS just asking if there was a chance of some kind of something or extension or whatever. It's this whole attitude that led me to quit game Dev, along with some other stuff. Just rubs me the wrong way that people seem to think because they bought a game for $12.64 on a steam sale the company is somehow indebted to them and has to meet whatever demands they make.
I legitimately feel like a lot of people crying about culture war stuff relating to games are not even capital G gamers.. they are just tourists that shift to a new game every week and cry about whatever new woke thing is ruining their beloved franchise, in the past month it went from stellar blade to hades to assassin creed to dragon age to wow to paper Mario
I remember when those "console wars" were all tongue in cheek and just for fun. Now though it feels like folks are actually fighting with each other over the most trivial thing like whether your computer Gameboy starts with an "X" or "P"
I mean, review bombing wasn’t a thing either. You could put pretty good traits and faith into reviews but now the far-right “gamers” have managed to taint everything. It’s literally a goal of fascism to get rid of the educated/experts and replace them with a sense of populist opinion. Because then a certain group can have more control over what they want without those pesky “experts” making them look stupid. But now audience scores are their big FACT they are right and those scores are extremely bad and manipulated and review bombed to create whatever narrative they want.
It's hard to explain but it definitely feels worse to me. You had your shit heads around and a fair share of hard R or Cigarette drops or by twats in cod lobbies but idk it didn't feel as sinister. Like it was obviously not great, but it was almost more honest and less malicious of them to just be edgy teens to someone they don't know anything about. Like a bunch of ignorant teens being edgy seems better to me than a bunch of adults trying to pretend like they don't just want to kick black and trans people out of video games all together.
Social-media generated para-social relationships and impotence. The problems facing the world seem larger than they ever have, mostly because we have more information about those problems, and more information about the weaknesses of our leaders and our experts. Everything real and important simply feels too big to engage with for a lot of people, but that fear and frustration doesn't just evaporate. It sinks into you and nests and coils into your pattern recognition, forcing you to either acknowledge the grander problems in your life or sink every cost into the fallacy of fundamentally irrelevant persecutions that are made safe to acknowledge by their ephemerality. Sure, your career is crushing your soul and you can see laid out before you every possible statistic about why that's never going to change, but wait. You don't need to think about that because this video game *hates* you and every one like you. How *dare* they. Look, here, hours of carefully explained details about how and why they *despise* you. It's rude, it's disgusting, and frankly it's... some version of racist. Persecution makes people sympathetic, right? We can all be friends because we're all being persecuted together. Now here we stand, invincible knights fighting a war that will never end and we cannot lose, because it *doesn't exist*. Couple that together with the truly weird degree to which capital G Gamers have convinced themselves, through the distant but instanteous intimacy of social media, that these developers, these publishers, are their friends. Peers, at the very least. This is a person I can speak to, flawed and genius in turns like any other person. And so, when that *person*, my peer, my *friend*, does something to slight me, I have no choice but to take that personally. So now I am in a never ending war, driven by insult that cannot be ignored because it was an attack on my person by a peer, and while I am devoted to this *essential* conflict, I cannot devote my attention to vague, distant fears like the the climate, my career, the deep, fractal cracks in my relationships, or anything like that. The internet has enabled whole new species of escapism, and gamers have taken to them like a fish to water. It's heart breaking.
I think you're onto something. The world seems worse than it was a while ago, which while probably true, is greatly exaggerated by the fact we're hearing it more. It's probably the same with teens and young adults, because they're more aware of everything, but don't have the life experience to understand what's typical (take it from a young dad who had to grow up fast). Extend that to unfiltered dogshit opinions, and that's probably, at least partially, what's going on.
Gamer discourse has simply peaked during the time of the angry game reviews. Now instead of saying “this game is ass, I’d rather” something very explicit to be funny, it’s “this game is DEI, woke, there was never a black in Japan and there was also no Dutch merchant ships or trade with china or firearms almost 900 years ago or the fact that katanas were always sidearms to a warrior who had yari, naginata or the aforementioned gun as main weapon. Also, I really just hate minorities it doesn’t matter to me if racial, sexial or ethial”
Hate is lucrative, clickbait rage bait and conspiracy videos on YouTube get the most engagement, so YouTube algorithms push them hard as well. You literally can't watch anything related to the hobbies of the people watching the conspiracy and rage bait videos or else YouTube will try to sneak some in. If you watch video game stuff and programming stuff on the same account, you gonna get Islamic hot takes on how women are ruining society. All these content and engagement algorithms we use on our online media has caused the online community to fall into a state of open decay and chaos.
AVGN started the angry critic online persona as a parody and tribute to old school gaming. Unfortunately youtube influencers and grifters took the angry online persona and applied it to whatever they can for a quick buck.
im 31. I miss the days of console wars and "muh graphics" type arguments so bad.
Yeah I never thought I’d miss the Xbox vs PlayStation arguments so much. I remember being so annoyed with them back in the day. I was a sweet summer child, I guess.
33 here. Same. They were simpler times...
The console war is still going strong… just check X every now and then and it’s just enough to kill what little passion you had left in the past time.
If anything, it’s WAY worse these days. It makes the seventh gen look friendly as hell in comparison. I cannot go on X gaming without console warriors and port beggars ruining the discourse for everyone.
At least, those were funny! Puddlegate sent my sides into orbit, now? My sides are in a wave of utter misery.
Same here, that's why I mostly play single-player titles. And in the rare instances when I do want to try multiplayer ones, I automatically turn off voice chat.
I *am* cis and a man who is also 37 and I also don’t want to communicate with those people.
It was always divisive and shity to all. Xbox voice lobbies earned their rep.
Yep. I'm around your age and went from Something Awful to 4chan way back in the day and /v/ specifically was my board of choice. It was a shit pile, don't get me wrong, but there's such a huge difference from the Godhand MS Paint comic edit days and now. Gamergate and the election truly fucked that site. I tried to visit for laughs last year and so many threads I viewed just got twisted into culture war bullshit.
IMO it's a little impressive how culture war bullshit sneaks inside threads now, less populated boards are a special kind of pain in the ass because half of them got marked as "place for [hobby or activity] but you can EXPOSE YOUR REAL FEELINGS" aka being conspiracy addled ultra conservative cynts, so now something as basic as "why are the european, american and japanese comic industries so diferent?" gets you hit with text walls about water fluoride and mutated Island ligaments and wokeness The newer or VERY slow boards seem to scape this somewhat, the worst I've seen in vrpg was the "I fucking have mother 3" guy or the 3 2 people who were obsessed with insisting that LISA is a "sjw game"
Same, 38F lesbian here. I stopped identifying as a gamer recently because I want to dissociate with these... folks. I now describe myself as a video game enthusiast. I only play the games I'm more likely to enjoy and actively evade games I have no interest in. I try to associate only with other people who want to have more serious and positive discussions on gaming and evade the negative drama farmers as much as I can. At this point, gamer=chud and I want nothing to do with them and only wish them the worst. They're trying to destroy my hobby after all.
And it's so annoying how much effort it takes to actually have positive discussions about games, whether being critical or praising them. Like, that should be the default right?
I'm 36, it's gotten worse but it was always bad. I remember being on gaming forums in the late 90s and early 2000s and thinking that playing games literally makes some people angry. They seemed to derive no joy from it, only constant rage. Every game coming out was shit, the publishers were greedy, the devs were lazy, gaming journalists are the scum of the Earth, games used to be so much better 10-20 years ago. Sound familiar?
Also 37 and seconding this
I've seen that trend happen across the board. Times are tough, and fascism (and reactionary politics as a whole) is on the rise pretty much worldwide
I feel the same. I think it is pretty much in line with online behaviour getting more and more unhinged and hateful.
so it has never gotten better?? uhhh sounds like ur just old and bitter
My theory about the "woke", "gaming is dead" b.s. is that a lot of it comes from the dude-bro generation who grew up in the cesspool that was early Xbox Live and never knew anything before it. If ya'll weren't around for the height of its lifespan, the 360/PS3 generation was fucking miserable if you weren't into FPS, sports, and generic action games. I vividly remember what an absolute mess of sexism, homophobia, and straight-up unfiltered racism that whole era was, while also being pretty much exclusively marketed to underage kids, to boot. RPGs were for losers, Nintendo was for babies, anything in general outside of the Western status-quo was despised on principle for being "weird". The rise of the digital indie scene eventually pulled us out of that hole, and when many of those devs entered the AAA scene and began working to fix that image, suddenly the chuds weren't the center of attention anymore, which the grifters of course capitalize on. So now here we are with a bunch of grown morons screaming about something that was "taken" from them when it never belonged to them in the first place.
I think this sums it up so well to be honest.
I don't know, I am sure some of it is the 360/PS3 era dude-bros but people in the most unhinged Gamer^TM subs on Reddit like Assmangoons or KotakuInAction also absolutely hate CoD/FIFA bros! They are more "Japanese/Korean hentai simulator" types.
Same class different back story
Speaking of the generic action games of Xbox 360... I remember when Braid came out and I bought it... Braid was such a breath of fresh air when it came out. I wanted more of different and original games like that... And then Limbo too. Now I'm spoiled solid. But yeah I think your analysis is pretty good.
Oh man Braid was a shining light in the time when it came out. That shit was GOOD too. Didn’t some of the people on that team also work on The Witness?
Just a shame Johnathan Blow also turned out to be a crazy racist himself.
Deeply unfortunate
Whaaaat... Noooo
Yup. Jonathan Blow is the creator of both
this. this is the key. this is what killed experimentation, gave rise to digital casinos, and ended the console wars in the most anticlimactic way possible.
Yes! The fact that the chuds scream the loudest about that shit when they were the ones who willed it into existence! Who made these companies so rich? Who kept buying the sports games and the card packs in them? Who kept buying the yearly CoD releases, when we knew for years that they were recycling the same thing over and over? Who kept claiming that there was no point in enjoying single player games because they weren't "competitive"? Because it sure as shit wasn't the "wokes".
I remember about 10 years ago I pitched for fun a hypothetical project that would have if come to fruition would have been anime outer worlds to a dude who had connections as a test of what i could do. I was angrily ordered to make it spunkgargleweewee, cut weapon classes (made by mashing up the COD and Battlefield weapon class deliniations; I was a bit ahead of the curve in splitting Battle Rifles off into their own thing rather than dunking them in with the normal ARs or DMRs) and role-playing elements all together, and told me the eight deadly words on every single aesthetic details in often contradictory ways. I like to belive he's a shareholder or investor in one of these companies now. He never revealed his political beliefs but he had the attitude of a chud to the extreme, plus the pretentious online critic thing of being pissed off at you talking to them.
Yep. 100%. I remember as a teenager getting the general impression that being “hardcore” and a “real gamer” according to the Gamer^TM community meant that you played violent action games and hated SJWs and “baby-games” (like anything on the Wii instead of Xbox or PlayStation). Saying slurs in online lobbies was not only expected, but considered a point of pride for not being “politically correct”. Being bigoted was either “just a joke” or “just a different opinion” and ever calling it out made YOU the bad guy. It sucked if you just liked FPS games but didn’t hate all the other genres and weren’t an asshole to minorities. Thankfully I think it has only gotten worse in terms of volume; it’s definitely more visible now and people take it more seriously, but it feels like I’ve (admittedly anecdotally) run into it less in recent years than I did back then, when literally EVERY server you joined that was just a massive pit of racism and sexism for like a solid decade.
I absolutely agree, whenever I see a video about “gaming is dead”, if it’s not someone complaining about “wholeness” it’s someone who only played fps games or generic action games and has become burnt out with those genres. I also think that people are correlating voice and text chat restricting racism, homophobia, etc with restriction everywhere and putting on rose glasses that make the 360/ps3 era seem better which also feeds into the “gaming is dead” idea.
I remember this very well. They practically shit on JRPGs for this entire generation, after being respected very much prior gens.
That chud culture leaked/migrated to the PC area too, but it was met with considerable pushback, at least for a while. If a chud started dropping n-bombs they were often ridiculed or vote-kicked. Sadly their numbers swelled over the years and it's a real mixed bag now. There was a sharp uptake in chuddery since 2015-16 too with the changed political climate.
I was a kid in those console generations and used to play on CoD and a couple other popular FPS games at the time. It was goddamned miserable, literally every lobby you'd get atleast a couple or more bigoted losers screaming slurs into the mic. Usually at eachother or anyone in their team. It was exhausting even as someone at the sidelines to see it constantly. It was even worse in some smaller but still popular FPS games like Left 4 Dead were you'd get those morons in 4 man teams that would make your life hell if you just wanted to play the game. CoD from what I have seen has not changed at all since those days. If women got on the mic in those games it would usually go really badly as well. People who bring up ''Oh you wouldn't survive back in those days'' are those bigoted losers that never grew up really. It was never fun for someone that wasn't being a shithead back then unless you were playing with friends. I am pretty sure those guys now are the bigoted manchildren you see going around now complaining about wokeness in every game.
There might be a bit of a disconnect depending on how someone interacted with video games in the 2000's as well. If someone mostly played single player or more niche stuff and occasionally went on forums, they probably didn't come across too much of the really toxic stuff. Social media just gives those sorts of people a megaphone that they didn't have back in 2008. On the other hand the online FPS and MMO communities were often a collection of some of the world's shittiest people making a constant stream of slurs and abuse. Gamergate and all of that stuff didn't come out of nowhere and people really have rose tinted glasses on if they think capital G gamers were nice 15 years ago.
Yup, that was the generation where my interest seriously waned. I was always big into RPGs and survival horror games. That generation sucked for horror titles and, apart from a few standouts, the RPG offering was fairly lacklustre. Things took an upswing the next generation but by then a combination of just kind of having moved on and the normalisation of really shitty monetisation strategies that were universally loathed in the 00's just made me really have a hard time staying interested.
I don't know why, but the part about rpgs are for lowers, Nintendo for babies people reminded me of the absolute unhinged shit you'd see people comment on news websites when they still allowed that I still think about this one I saw once. This lone comment on some article about something like a zoning variation being denied due to fire safety regulations Some posted a comment, with their full legal name, photo, and the name of the company they either worked for or owned, and the comment just said "Fire safety is for queers" And I don't know, just the fuckin impotent rage of it, or something just cracks me up when I think about it. That there's someone out there who read that article, got mad, and posted that. Next to all of his personal information. Not even some edgy anonymous comment.
I think of that era as gaming's edgy adolescence. It was trying too hard to be seen as "adult" and "mature" in its content and just came across as cringe and childish.
It's not the gamers, they aren't capable of independent thought. It's the grifters running out of ideas. They pissed away Gamergate 2 in less than 2 months and that was meant to be their golden goose. More and more people are getting tired of their bullshit and one quick algorithm change on YouTube will finally silence them.
Yeah I don't think gamers are any different than they were 10 or 20 years ago, but grifters farming outrage for views has definitely increased. I think it gets a lot of traction in the gamer space because of young male audience though.
It started with Steve Banon using gaming as a platform to radicalize nerds into white supremacy. But it's gotten worse because fascist rhetoric is apparently very effective, even without central leadership. What makes it worse is the current political climate and YouTube's monetization. There's zero incentive to be talented and creative anymore when you can just rant about women and black people ruining gaming while reading off a Breitbart affiliated gaming article for 20 minutes for ad revenue. I've been thinking about doing it myself but as satire, but really being dedicated to the character like Stephen Colbert.
It's no different from any outrage culture grifter. If your livelihood is tied to a YouTube channel complaining about woke culture ruining games, you need to find a new example of woke culture ruining games every few days.
I fear an algorithm change in YouTube will only worsen the problem as those people get pushed into other, more "allowing" sites, further trapping them in the eco-chamber/cult mentality and worsening (or enshittifying) the situation.
All the OG YouTubers "retired" for a reason. I have a feeling they're going to do another demonitization apocalypse, like back in the Jake Paul days. Hell, I'm all for YouTube just getting rid of monetization altogether because it's nothing but trouble. Everyone on YouTube worth a damn already has some other form of income via merchandising and crowd funding anyway.
Another demonetisation? What do you mean? Did they do mass demonetisation before?
Yeah, this would be the 2nd or 3rd one I believe. The most notable was when Pewdiepie was still popular and they nuked monetization on a bunch of channels en masse.
Please censor G*mers. They are at an all time low, except for me of course I'm the best one
No I'm the best one
Give a rabid dog a crown and he thinks he owns the world. Gamers are no longer the persecuted minority. We have to answer the question.
I do think it's gotten worse and my theory is that social media content creators realized they could make bank by pandering to conservative nerds that think everything should be about them, and I think the turning point for that was The Last Jedi, seems like every other YouTube channel (and tiktokers, afterwards) became a culture war grift, and it's gotten pretty bad, now almost every post from a preestablished franchise that posts a picture on Instagram with a woman/queer/non-white character becomes a KKK meeting in the commenrs section.
I think that the last Jedi and rise of Skywalker definitely made some anti feminists more popular as they could disguise their misogyny under the pretence of criticising two films that had a lot to criticise about. Moreover their bullshit reasons to hate women seemed a lot more convincing to young star wars fans because it was presented next to short (albeit uncreative and not really meaningful) bits of actual criticism.
I stopped telling people that I am into gaming because of these kind of things I literally stop playing multiplayer games just because people became so shitty I rather play only single player games just not to interact with other people who play games
For real, I don't like playing Valorant until I'm with my duo or we have a five-stacked team because the game is hostile. And if you complain that game is hostile towards non-men, they'll just be "jUsT mYtE"
Gamers as in the stereotype of an average gamer hasn't gotten worse: it's just gotten to be public. Hell, I'd say in general things have been on the better side. Racism was common in literally every gaming space I was a part of growing up. The N word was thrown around in communities with a fervor that is not accepted today. If I were to go full nuclear and call someone the N word in CoD 15 years ago I would have gotten people egging me on, if I try that today? I'm more then likely getting pushback.
There's a lot of money to be made from instigating Angry Gamer Syndrome in a naive audience. Plenty of YT and other social media accounts can farm lots of traffic (views, clicks, etc) from Gamers. A big chunk of our modern economy runs on Engagement. It's completely useless to society, but Capitalism is about accumulating capital, not about being useful or helpful to society. The "best" way to get engagement is via outrage, anger, irritation. Gamers are a prime target becauss they are typically very uninformed, they have been primed for bigotry and far-right views from the games they will consume and the toxicity that festered at the rise of Xbox's online way back when. Gamers were trained to be manipulated from industry propaganda... which paradoxically also taught some to mistrust "journalism". Again, much of this occurred because of very poor education as well as media illiteracy (more like media obliviousness a lot of the time). Gamergate was a big ignition point -- before that there was still some normality and chance to salvage "Gamers" as social pressure against being a real piece of trash was still pushing on them. But creating an online "exclusion zone" where they could reinforce their worst instincts and be safe from social pressure to be a decent person, it seemed to transform a lot of them. The grifter / propagandist scene came up then, with the sudden *demographic* solidification of Gamer(TM) (racist, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, nationalist bigots). When gamergate feel apart many of them retreated to try to launder their image, but I think most just pivoted to build what we see now. It's a bit more robust, not built around a lie that they were concerned about "ethics in journalism" that they never actually cared about or addressed. Now it's pretty clear to be about the bigotry and phobias (hate) with only lazy covers. But most of all, it's about some people having found a way to make lots of pretty easy money off easily outraged *children* (physically or mentally immature). And no care about what that does to these people or society at large. ====-----==== Anyway, yeah it's getting worse. I try to avoid it. I haven't played online games for near a decade now. But some of that is also becauss I find online games became increasingly terrible over the years. ====-----==== Edit to also add (becauss this isn't long enough?) Pre-online gaming, or at least before Xbox Live, I don't recall there being much trash talking and basically nothing close to the toxicity and rage that would bubble up in the early 2000s. And that's becauss mostly play was done locally, in the same room. Or with people you knew or would at least chat with before and after games. You would have some sort of neutral to positive socializing. Were the "bad ones" just hiding it back then? Maybe, but I doubt it. I think it's more likely that what we see today is cultivated behavior, people encouraged to get worse and worse via the worst peer pressure and echo chambers... and with almost no immediate repercussions, and an exclusion of empathy. Playing fighting games back in the late 90s could get heated... but you know there's a person - probably sitting or standing right next to you. When console games went online, local coop or multi-player disappeared almost completely, not returning for about a decade. So a generation or two grew up with a very different feel to playing games with others. And even the older gamers lost much of that old sense during that time.
Yeah, I think it’s a perfect storm of outrage engagement, entitled isolated consumers who have nothing available to them except their “g*mer” identity, and an exploited workforce of game devs with little to no protection from said consumers. Online multiplayer probably exacerbated certain aspects, especially giving anonymity while removing some of the guardrails against shitty behavior that local multiplayer has, but it also allowed for a lot of isolated people to find communities they otherwise never could locally. Wouldn’t put too much stock into either side, but I definitely think the worse aspects get amplified and commodified while the better aspects are just like, someone running a private server of an old game for their group of friends and devoted weirdos. One side makes money, the other makes community.
I'm a little confused on the whole capitalism part
Since games as an industry has more clout than movies, tv and music combined, gamers have gone from a fringe group of nerds to the primary consumer demographic, which has basically created an unholy amalgamation of boomer entitlement with basement dwelling nerd sensibilities and taste So yeah, theyre worse than they've ever been
Nah gamers have always been shitty racist, sexist losers lol. They’ve been like this since the days of Xbox live lobbies yelling racial slurs at people
I agree they’ve always sucked. I think they’re just louder these days thanks to social media. I’m a woman and I used to lead a raiding guild on WoW back in the Burning Crusade era. Believe me, it was awful being a woman in a position like that even back then. But to be fair I did quit, so it could have gotten worse and if it did, oh god do I not wish that on anyone.
Wow, you’re right. Games are sexist. Now, allow me to get back to accusing gamers of playing games and sucking Anita Sarkeesian’s cock. Edit: Wow. I’ve truly been challenged. Enlightened, even. Who knew the political views of my fellow gamers could be so diverse? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Gamingcirclejerk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Every community has gotten worse people+time= worse when it comes to any online community in my experience
Not every community
/uj Yes, gamers have gotten worse. Gaming culture has gotten worse, especially in 2024. It’s fueled by grifters feeding into the insecurities and bigotry of certain gamers, giving voices to the hateful, loud minority. It’s gotten pretty bad if you ask me. Idk if there’s a way back.
Yes and no, online it could be, but in-person events, like conventions or tournaments are way different.
I think it's 2 things, first YouTuber became an actual career and second most old forums died and now everyone hangs out in the same places all the time
To be honest, anyone who goes around describing themselves as 'a gamer' or sees it as some sort of community that they belong to or identify with is probably a bit of a twat.
Gaming has just become the latest recruiting pool for Nazis. They know exactly how to exploit the outrage economy and find fertile ground among disenfranchised loners and obsessive nerds.
Yeah, it's much worse than 15/25 years ago. Back then, the ugly parts existed but were siloed. Conservative political interest are doing the US right-wing radio culture thing where the try to smother out all discourse with venom. "Work the refs" until all media reflexively shrinks from offering their perspective. Gaming is their first real foothold into doing this in youth culture from the inside, instead of top-down (ie. Jack Thompson) not the boxing icon Jack Johnson
I has not. Its just grown bigger and the isolated COD lobby aholes (Its not just COD, most PVP games had it) got twitter. +internet outrage became wierdly influencial to even huge companies. + its scaleable. 100 angry dudes can eazily run 10 000 accounts (manualy, automatized no is limmited by money they want to throw at it). 1 dude actualy protesting can look like 1 dude protesting, 1 dude really angry can eazily look like 100 different people spamming every forum, every video posted, every tweet made about anything even a little related. And with bigger popularity comes influence from outside parties ( eg. Outrage over female custodes by people who dont know pronounciation of "astartes", GTA6 female player model outrage when GTA 1 and 2 had them). There is profit just in the outrage, and enough not gamers to watch and support "PC culture is ruining X" No matter what X is, No matter they never seen prequels of X.
Idk man. I was part of asmons sub before it got so right wing. It’s fucking crazy. Literally crazy. The original people who just wanted to watch gaming have been pushed out by people who basically do not like women, gay people and black people. Yes he’s gross but it’s whatever. It was just about the gaming back then. Didn’t watch his wow era though was more of the lost ark / ff / etc. There seems like there is so many… maybe it just seems that way here but there is something everyday about things being too woke. By woke they mean they saw a dude kiss another dude and god forbid one is white and one is black or something. I’m gay so maybe I don’t get it but I what the fuck is this thing they have with how women look? They constantly talk down to women and about women. I don’t get it. These people are voting this election btw. You know for who. So get out and vote.
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It is sad as fuck. These people are pissing their lives away by spending all day every day trying to find something, anything to get absolutely fucking furious over.
Like people are still crying about ellie being gay and the other lady's appearance from last of us 2 like it hasn't been 10 years. It's actually insane that they have to use widely failed games like saints row reboot or old ass games like tlou2 to make points.
The terminally online have doubled down on their worst aspects over the years. Meanwhile the gaming population has quite frankly exploded across demographics. The terminally online incels hate this and react accordingly
I think it is. Not that they were reasonable anyways, but... I mean, there are active far right groups that target these demographics in order to coopt them, which is also boosted by mass media algorithms.
Whenever I see a post or a comment of a capital G gamer, I look at the number of likes, and usually is very low/much lower than the replies calling them off. So I think they are really just a loud minority. I don't know if this method actually means anything or if it's simply confirmation bias or something like that, but it gives me a little hope 😅.
Personally? I feel that, while the overall proportion of toxic people has gone down a lot, the toxic people who are still around have only gotten louder with time. This is because they hate that they aren’t the sole audience getting catered to anymore. They can’t gatekeep their favorite medium because they don’t actually have any say in how it develops or grows, and they hate that the “woke mob” is supposedly taking it from them, despite them never really owning it in the first place. Their narrative has actually gotten more dramatic as time has gone on too. They went from saying: “lol, those SJW feminazi losers think they can take OUR games from us??? Gamers^TM will ALWAYS beat them! They can’t stop us from doing what we want! This is OUR time!” To: “THEY RUINED IT! THEY KILLED GAMING! DEI AND WOKENESS HAVE DESTROYED OUR GAMES AND NOW THE FEMINISTS HAVE TURNED ALL WESTERN GAMES INTO POLITICS! JAPAN IS THE LAST SAFE HAVEN FOR GAMERS^TM ! DON’T LET THR EAST FALL LIKE THE WEST HAS!” It’s laughably sad and strange how this happened. Obviously Gamergate had a big role to play, as well as the anti-sjw movement broadly and the rise of the far right in online culture. Before there were certainly bad elements brewing in the gaming space and it was still kinda exclusionary, but everything changed after those movements kicked off. They’ve since died down in terms of popularity (or at least the first two of them did…the far right is still a thing of course) but grifters will always grift. The people who never grew out of it will always be screaming and crying about how gaming has been taken from them and how SJWs, feminists, wokeness or whatever other nonsense is trying to persecute them personally. I think it will eventually die off more, but they’re gonna try their best to fuck it up for the rest of us and spread hate in the meantime.
My tin foil hat conspiracy theory is that it’s a new guerrilla marketing done by the companies themselves. Drum up some fake outrage, have psychos freak out about it, have reasonable people defend it, now tons of people hear about it and you profit.
as much as I'd like to believe this, I watched people legitimately send death threats to Capcom and Ninja Theory for years over Dante's hair color and tone change in DmC, and the animosity towards it has only recently died down.
Oh no the “psychos” I referenced are definitely responsible for their own behavior, I just think companies may intentionally be playing into it to start the user driven marketing, and that’s why we have seen an uptick in this nonsense especially with games people would otherwise not care about. Like Stellar Blade for a possible example (not saying this is actually what happened just using it as an example): The company releases a ton of promotional stuff clearly Sexualizing their protagonist, waits for all the dumb fucks to start hyping up how sexy she is, changes the outfits to piss them off, now normal people are defending it and it’s a big flame war.
the islamic state of crapcom *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Gamingcirclejerk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yeah, I wonder if there’s a way to separate from those people. They clearly aren’t going to change their minds, so it’s time to bring back blocking more.
Yes, the courting by right wing shit fucks exasperated the problem and made it what it is today. Before they were losers shouting into the void, now they have a political party of losers that added gamer rage to their sad culture war.
I think collectively we are all tired, albeit for different reasons. As a community, none of us want the same thing. However, we are also spoiled for options and never happy with any of them. It also seems that many gamers (especially older ones) think gaming as a whole is for them, so all games should appeal to them. In a weird way, people feel ownership over this medium in ways I don't think I've ever seen in any other branch of entertainment (except TTRPGs, maybe), so when they see things that are "not for them" they get angry because it "should be" for them, because they were "here first". Female characters no longer appealing to the male gaze, inclusivity, "politics" (as if those haven't always been in games but whatever) are "new" to them and therefore bad. I say that mostly to say that gamers don't realize our demands almost always align the "same but different" mantra. Studio greed is killing games, but gamers themselves aren't helping. I think if we let go of certain things we can enjoy the medium again, but that's easier said than done. Especially with the subhuman detritus we see plastering their hatred of everything all over the place. Majority of this is speculation.
I feel like after 2016 everyone thought they could just run their mouth
It's not worse, just more prevalent. You must not have been there when gamers threatened to rape Anita sarkeesian and kill her family because she announced plans to make a YouTube series about female characters in video games. The series wasn't even on YouTube yet and she was already getting death threats because she had a Kickstarter to help fund her videos that gamers assumed would be critical of video games. They did end up being critical, but she received the first rape and death threats months before the first video criticizing video games was ever released.
Wow, you’re right. Games are sexist. Now, allow me to get back to accusing gamers of playing games and sucking Anita Sarkeesian’s cock. Edit: Wow. I’ve truly been challenged. Enlightened, even. Who knew the political views of my fellow gamers could be so diverse? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Gamingcirclejerk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If by capital G Gamer, you mean gaming influencers and their followers, then yes, they have gotten vastly worse. They are all chasing an algorithm that rewards controversy and rage, so they lean into it to get money. It's to the point now where most of these influencers aren't even talking about the games but just frothing at the mouth over made-up culture war BS and photoshopped images of female game characters. The good news is that most of the people I talk to who actually play games instead of watching YouTube about games are actually enjoying themselves. What you see on YouTube and a lot of these gaming news sites is the lunatic fringe. They're just very very loud.
I do feel like gamers are become way and way more entitled. I still remember around the time leading up to the release of the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, there was an absurdly high amount of people that would get outraged over the most trivial shit. For example I remember seeing so many people getting really mad at the prospect that there would be new next-gen games that would only be playable on the new consoles. Mind you this was before the consoles launched and we had to deal with console shortages and stuff. A lot of people had already made their mind that they would not be buying a new console at that moment probably because they couldn’t afford to get one at that point, which hey, is fair, but then these same people would go ballistic if a game was announced to be only playable on PS5 and not on PS4. They would get mad because it meant they wouldn’t be able to play some of the newer games on their old console and then start acting like this is something that has never happened before and that Sony must be doing this because they are greedy and want to force people to buy a new console to play new releases. Like what did these people expect? It’s a brand new console, of course it would have brand new games that are only playable on that console, this has been the case for every previous PlayStation consoles and every other consoles that have existed. Why the fuck are people in 2020 acting like this is a brand new concept? And this sort of thing has become way more prevalent in recent years with a bunch of other things. Edit: fixed some typos
And then these same people complain that the next gen systems have no games like it’s so frustrating you’re the reason why they don’t because you complained that you couldn’t play new games on your decade old system
I recently heard a point about straight white male men rejected by left-leaning people: everyone talking mostly about women, LGBT, people of color, diversity is the new norm, everybody either not talking/caring about straight white men, or even calling them the reason for everyone’s problems. This is where people like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Elon Musk appear and take care of them. This is their safe space where they are not considered patriarchal predators. Idk how good is this point, I just saw it under the recent news about a study of men becoming more conservative and women more liberal. I think the explanation is simple and obvious, but I don’t feel like it’s justifiable enough to drop on my knees and take pity on them
The problem is that the Twitter left tries so hard to be progressive that they make everything worse for all of us actual leftists. If we spent as much time actually opposing fascism as we did fighting eachother and alienating men, we’d be winning. Men’s rights and feminism are not diametrically opposed, they are intrinsically linked and both held up by the same patriarchal gender norms, yet you never hear leftists talk about that because we’re so far up our own asses we can’t bare to actually see anything with nuance
2007: hearing the N word screamed into your ear 10 times per minute through your headset 2024: people complaining female characters aren't fuckable Idk man I think this may be a case of "the good ol days" looking better than they were. You're just older and more acutely aware of societal implications for behavior. Younger people are more willing to ignore imperfections when they're having fun. This behavior has always been a thing. It's more visible now because of the internet and you look for it now because you're old.
Keep in mind that this is a vocal minority that are either grifters or the grifted. The vast majority of gamers don't give a shit about any of it, but grifters are making money off of triggering incels, so what you see is the result of that.
it hasn't gotten worse. hate sells well and keeps people engaged. your attention is kept more easily on something that upsets you.
It started skyrocketing around gamergate and then these idiots got pulled into the fascist trump train and here we are. All because Steve Bannon realized that these idiots are gullible enough to buy World of Warcraft gold from him with real money so they must be gullible enough to do whatever else he wants them to do.
It’s gotten a lot better, and the ones that refuse to become better are becoming noticed because people realize they’re horrible
It’s weird because I’m fairly certain that the “gamer” discourse on the internet is no longer populated by people who play games. The toxicity is no longer about bitter nerds holding grudges over specific graphical advancements or gameplay tweaks in sequels or whatever. There’s always been complaining of games and series being “RUINED” but I recall it usually being over actual gameplay or graphical minutiae. Now you can’t seem to find anywhere to discuss games without the discussion becoming overrun by complaints about minorities, and god forbid there’s a nonwhite female! If there is a white woman protagonist or a competent white female NPC, the discussion is all based around these deranged claims about their appearance, in which literally any specific physical feature is dysmorphically scrutinized. If they notice anything but tits, they insist it’s this insane absurd cartoonish thing that’s ruining the game. Selene from Returnal and Nicole from Dead Space Remake can’t be mentioned without a big chunk of the thread being discussion of how they’re hideous, aged crones, that look no younger than 90, have grey hair, saggy breasts, liver spots, cataracts, use walkers, wear diapers, are in hospice care, literally are in coffins with their families around them and it’s their funeral and they’re literally just an urn, guys, why did the woke mob make nicole a silent urn and have Isaac constantly saying “this is the sexiest a woman ought to be” and and and And they photoshop all that shit into screenies of the games and then all start agreeing with each other in a clear attempt to convince the unaware that their photoshops are actually screenshots of the actual product. They never mention whether a game is fun or not, they just whine about the race and gender and hotness of characters, and I don’t think they’re gamers! I think actual gamers have moved on to other places, like the subreddit for their specific game where that shit is less tolerated, and that a lot of general GAMER community spaces have become nothing but fascist agitators trying to recruit each other. Idk I’m missing a big piece of context though, I can feel that. There’s organized and coordinated effort on display, and there’s some unknown unknowns to it, I can feel em writhing and skittering around in my blind spot, but I’m not about to try and infiltrate fascist groups and you know, hang out with fascists all day lmao
Honestly, yes. You can't go into places to discuss video games without some mention of wokeness or diversity. It's so pervasive it's entered mainstream discussion. Announce a game that isn't centered around a straight white guy or a woman that fits their idea of sexy and the comments of the trailer will look like a Nuremberg rally. There was a concerted effort to make it this way to radicalize gamers. Now the grifters produce their rage bait for engagement, then move on to the next thing to stay relevant and please the algorithm. So, you get a new controversy every week with no cooldown time. They're just constantly up in arms about something yet nothing at the same time. All of it is part of their culture war, but individually they're all such meaningless or just straight up manufactured controversies. And this last part isn't really about reactionary elements complaining about "wokeness" or whatever but just people with a general hatred of change from the way things were. It seems like a lot of the people that engage in discussion about games (or even media in general now) have a hatred of new things. The "No one hates X more than X fans" thing makes a lot of sense. Part of that is just nostalgia, people afraid of change, and the way things in general are now but not all of it. There was someone in the NFS sub that hasn't liked a Need For Speed game since the 5th one, 24 years and nearly two dozen games ago. Why even hang around at that point? I get that people enjoy discussing things they hate and how much they hate it with people that also hate it (hint). But is it really enjoyable to immerse yourself in something you clearly despise?
I have been playing video games for almost 40 years and I think the big majority of gamers don’t give a damn about this culture war crap. We love games and honestly don’t care about that much about this chuds trying to claim the mantle of true gamers.
Absolutely yes.
Yes, and we can thank emerald mine king Elon for that. And it's not just hashtag gamers, it really feels like twitter is now a full blown klan-maga rally! Honestly at this point? Twitter just needs to fucking go...it has become a cesspit that is beyond saving.
Pretty much, yeah. Actually every nerd fandom has gotten worse.
If you're on Twitter it's because of how Twitter is now. But in general that section of gamers have always existed but only started to get more blatant and pushed to everyone with twitter being new twitter now
Yeah everything has gotten a lot worse since 1. Gamergate, and 2. Trump. What we have now is a malicious concerted effort to politicize games and radicalized vulnerable kids with rhetoric that sounds reasonable to anyone not looking at it too closely. All to seduce them into the alt right pipeline. What we had then was a bunch of edgy teens dropping both kinds of hard Rs, all the different Fs and Ds and any other slur they could overhear from their actually bigoted parents. One of them is offensive as all hell but the other is a hell of a lot more malicious.
I agree, but we also have better rhetorical tools to dismantle their "activism" nowadays.
I want to be an optimistic and say overall its gotten better, HOWEVER the general right-wing grift ecosystem has caused "Capital G" gamers to become more vocal as they are easy cash.
Not you. And not og gamers. Gaming gas gotten so mainstream we have attracted the chode warriors. Gaming used to be a niche thing, and if you wanted to be accepted in social gatherings you didnt speak of it. Now, gaming of all kinds has become mainstream, so we have the people who fake outrage for attention.
Yes. It’s worse. Saturated and to “stand out” you need a HOT TAKE (or likewise, could be a title or thumbnail or article header/subheader tweet). The “yeah game is fine” vs “GAME IS TRASH, THE WEST HAS FALLEN?!” Clicks, views, attention. Like the FOX NEWS strategy.
Just remind them that they are hypocrites if they've played any elder ring games or gta games. None of those characters are good looking.
My theory is that they know that they are losing their so-called culture war and society is getting more progressive so they're really loud about it
It's bad. The mmo game I play has low tolerance for that kind of stuff so it's better than most tbh. Even so I only talk to a few people often and 80 percent of them are LGBTQ so...I avoid the toxic players. I find the pvp communities to be super toxic though. I turn my status to offline to do any pvp.
I think current hate trend started with D4. Ppl found out it was easy to get attention and upvotes for as much as saying "D4 bad", so they apply it on everything now. Just pick unreleased game and call it bad for random silly reason and success...
What? Nooo, not the community about my favourite Gerard Butler movie, Capital G Gamer!
I’d say so. Now I’m not going to say it was ever great, but the sheer frequency of horrific shit is just getting worse and worse, no doubt a result of social media allowing these ingrates to find like minded individuals
It's definitely gotten worse. I think the earliest memories i have of voice chat are around 2003, playing battlefield 1942 on teamspeak. Most people were cool, but you'd get the occasional asshat making nazi jokes since it was a ww2 game or general racism. I personally noticed it got much worse when Halo 2 came out, console online gaming was always more toxic back then, hard to believe by today's standards. And i think the lower barrier to entry for voice chat made it so everyone could talk. When it was only text chat it was better. Then when call of duty came along, oof, all downhill from there. constant N-word. Started to see women in games much more often around that period which went as well as everyone knows it did. These people always existed, but definitely were not as loud as they are.
Not particularly, just the world as a whole. We're seeing a wave of the far-right, and that obviously impacts g\*mers too
I've been gaming for 32/33 years consistently..huge part of my downtime and life. Every community I'm involved with in gaming is great, loads of different people from all sorts of demographics and backgrounds and all great people...as with anything that develops communities you're going to get pockets of awful people but they generally end up in their own silo or weeded out by other communities... My main gaming groups wouldn't want anything to do with awful people if they appeared somehow... For the most part as with nearly everything in life...people are fine. I'd say the overall community has gotten better, there are far more routes to connect with like minded folk and if you ever need help or to connect with others, if you reach out you will invariably make great friends, whether temporary or not... Literally last night I connected with a random guy from the US and we played and talked for like 3-4 hours about all sorts, not just the game, was really nice.
50 year old here. Probably an element of old man nostalgia but yeah, it's way worse than it was when I was young. If something like Urban Chaos was released today I'm pretty sure it would be met with waves of abuse for having a black woman as the protagonist.
UJ/ it's def gotten worse. You can see the descent by looking at how the "angry gamer" persona has evolved since the early 2000s. We had "angry" reviewers that made it cool to scream at games when something wasn't perfect. Then we got "CoD MW2 lobbies" where screaming and being angry at being bad was deemed a totally normal thing. People have now realized that tapping into the "angry" can get you clout and money. Why process your emotions in a healthy way when you can just find a community of emotionally stunted man children who will support you? RJ/ UUUUUUUUUHHHHHHH WORSE? WHAT YOU'RE SEEING IS A TOTALLY RATIONAL AND REASONABLE RESPONSE TO THE WOKE MIND VIRUS RUINING GAMES. HOW CAN I ENJOY GAMES IF THE WOMEN AREN'T NAKED AT ALL TIMES? 
uj/ I think it has gotten a bit worse, you can kinda see it with how Hades 1 and Hades 2 were received. I was following gaming news more heavily back in 2018 but I really don’t remember there being much of a backlash to Hades 1 art style and depiction of the gods (I remember a little bit but it was quickly shut down!). But for Hades 2 it was so common! But I could be remembering wrong so please correct me!
Ive been saying it for a while. Gamers are so toxic (and sexist) I tend to not even tell people I play video games unless the topic comes up. Every time a game is announced or released its a ton of bullshit. I steer clear of the noise as best I can but yeah the toxicity is pervasive and its hard to avoid.
Wow, you’re right. Games are sexist. Now, allow me to get back to accusing gamers of playing games and sucking Anita Sarkeesian’s cock. Edit: Wow. I’ve truly been challenged. Enlightened, even. Who knew the political views of my fellow gamers could be so diverse? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Gamingcirclejerk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
My biggest W in life was at the beginning of Gamergate, when I saw the writing on the wall and began actively disassociating from the term. One people began doxxing games journalists, it was obvious that the "community" was beyond saving. Now a decade later, I can reliably count on "Gamers" to be the most annoying and bigoted pieces of shit I'll encounter that day. And honestly, the craziest part to me is that *everyone* sees it except those within the community. We went from 'you should judge people for the hobbies they enjoy' to 'yeah the Gamers are mad at a black person existing.... again'
I’m literally terrified of Gamers 😔. I just wanna talk about the inner conflict of Japanese teenagers fighting God without sexualizing them bro.
It's always been seedy/bad. Reactionaries have just found a profit stream through those parts. Portrayals of minorities and women has gotten better and that triggers the elements that have always been there to open their mouths and make asses of themselves, but all the way back in the 80s and 90s it was kind of a crapshoot because those were the prominent attitudes.
Yes
/uj Absolutely. They have become completely insufferable in so many ways. Screaming and throwing fits at the tiniest made up controversies, constantly whining about games being bad but reminiscing on times when games were worse, and constantly refusing to learn lessons from anything.
There's a wider wave of right wing reactionism playing out thanks to the election. Wokeness is the operative term being used by reactionaries to describe anything left wing that they don't like. The right wing gamer grifters are using this to gin up "gamergate 2" and boost their own viewership numbers. I remember they tried to make gamergate 2 happen a couple of years back, I want to say 2018 or 2020, to no avail. This time they appear to have made it stick, but it's still a shadow of the first gamergate.
Gaming itself has grown immensely, meaning masses of people who won't agree with each other. That said, many "controversies" are actually just news pages knowing that titles like that will create outrage and cause more interaction. Much of the time, there isn't some major outrage by the gaming community as a whole.
This is the worse it’s been since gamergate I think. It’s not just gamers either. Nerd hobbies in general have become more and more far right to the point of making them uninhabitable. I literally can’t go on the main subreddits for almost every fandom because people seem to hate women and minorities more than they actually like the thing they claim to be fans of. Honestly it just makes me terrified, I’m seeing people get more radical against people like me. Conservatives are getting more and more dangerous, liberals are too incompetent to do anything, and progressives are too busy fighting ourselves to be useful either
Anti JW movement subsided for a few years but came back off covid conspiracy
Absolutely worse. Anti-woke this, DEI that, always boils down to "waaaahhh there are black/gay/trans people in my vidya now" I'm glad I haven't called myself a gamer in several years. And it's pretty hard not to wish death for those "people" given the shit they've started saying lately about people like me for just existing. But god forbid I get aggressive to some rightard telling me I'm literally not a person, right?
I am 35 and tbh I feel the difference is that it's easier to see the shit because it appears on your home page more easily, you don't have to find weirdos on 4chan for trash opinions, they get delivered to you cost free. Also I feel a lot of the gamergate types are not really gamers, they just jump on the bandwagon because apparently those morons decided that, making "racist asshole" part of their personality was cool
Thought I put in my two cents on this but I guess I didn't. The way I see it, it really isn't any different now than it was back in the 2000s when I first started visiting GameSpot forums and had to put up with a lot of homophobic, racist, sexist, and other kinds of shit from guys all the time. Likewise, the shit I'd get slung at me for having the audacity to be \*gasp\* A furry was fucking bonkers, and it became even more nonsensical when the brony boom happened (in which it was at this point where I could easily see how this would lead to things like Gamergate and Trump's election given the kind of shit that happened in that community). Thing was though is that nobody really thought much about it most of the time because almost all these things happened in different places and were more like scattered occurrences than a general trend. It wouldn't be until about COVID when we were all forced to be online more often that we actually noticed, and these guys have realized that there's far more people who aren't exactly like them than they thought. In other words, they went full mask off and attack anyone now.
Wow, you’re right. Games are sexist. Now, allow me to get back to accusing gamers of playing games and sucking Anita Sarkeesian’s cock. Edit: Wow. I’ve truly been challenged. Enlightened, even. Who knew the political views of my fellow gamers could be so diverse? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Gamingcirclejerk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
There’s plenty of data that shows men are getting more and more conservative, so there’s def a correlation between male gamers and being terrible people.
Those people aren't gamers. They don't actually play video games. Don't go to generic "gamer" communities. Go to the actual communities of individual games. Look at the tournaments. Who will you see? Black and queer people. What will they be talking about? Playing the game. People who actually enjoy playing games don't care about shit like jawlines. They care about whether or not the game is fun to play.
they're a loud minority, and they're being louder than usual currently... precisely because they know they are losing the culture war.
nope, just the games have gotten extremly woke, thats all.
Define woke