Has "toxic gaming culture" preempted the future of politics?

[Selfsurprise]

(I've slightly toned down my 2017 resolution to create a new thread literally every day. In between working and scheduling some time to play 3.5 ed. D&D with my budskies, I thought it wiser to scale it down to at least three new threads every week. I like the idea of generating more discussion and content for the occasionally sedate pace of the forums, but I figured I should cut myself a little leeway...)

 

Sorry to bring up what might be a rather heavy and contentious topic, but it's something I've been wondering about and talking about with like-minded gaming friends this week. You probably couldn't of failed to notice the election of Donald Trump in last years American presidential race, or if you are British like me or otherwise a fellow European you might of noticed a worrying rise in rhetoric-centric, divisive (and if I'm totally bluntly honest, usually very right-wing) identity politics in our region of the world - though for the sake of fairness, I feel I should point out that left-wing identity politics often drags the debate down to an overtly suspectly pedantic and futile critique of race, sexuality, and everything inbetween. The less said about Putin the better...

 

As I'm pretty certain that the majority of you play computer games, you probably have some strong opinions on the rather unfortunate associations that lumber gamers of all stripes, particularly in regard to their conduct online. When people talk about so-called "toxic gaming culture" they are often referring to the variations of un-PC attitudes that characterise the more unfavourable stereotypes of gamers. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that, statistically speaking, the largest demographic of card-carrying self-identifying Gamers are usually young, white and male, arguably leaning towards heterosexuality and atheism/agnosticism. Whether your own political leanings chime with some of my annoyingly leftist views or not, I think most people would reach a consensual view that it's almost a depressing inevitability that among this demographic there will be very vocal pockets of homophobic, misogynistic, racist perspectives, alongside other kinds of -ics and -isms.

 

I would still would defend gamers from this overwhelmingly negative appraisal by arguing that the worst of the culprits are few and far between, but by the nature of their staggering ignorance tend towards being the loudest members of their imagined community. For years now I've often been amazed by how gaming culture seemed to somewhat act as bastion for people disenchanted with the political and/or cultural status quo - especially, as a self-confessed giant art nerd, the extremely knee-jerk traditionalist hostility towards contemporary art by many gamers; I always thought that much of the new media/installation/relational art of today worked well alongside an appreciation for computer games! Some of those might of been well-meaning, maybe tired of the neverending (and often unintelligible) institutional groupthink-ism that informs current social debate.

 

Maybe I was just naive or unaware of the broader tensions between a deeply flawed neo-liberalism and this decade's rise of divisive identity politics, but from my perspective I could almost be duped into thinking that society at large is catching up to some of the worst elements of the "toxic gaming community". Anybody else got any thoughts on this (admittedly nebulous) context? I'm sorry if my politiocal views have rubbed anybody up the wrong way, or you just feel bummed out by my commentary.

[Heliocentrical]

Not once have Gamers have ever been entirely united in terms of thought and as group. The concepts of "Gaming Culture", "The Gaming Community" and "Gamers" are gigantic misnomers. All those terms are mere contrivances constructed by the media and publishers for marketing purposes. They want to give you this false sense of belong to ensure that you'll buy their shit no matter what. I swear to god if anyone is soignorant to defend this system then you're apart of it and a fucking sheep. Just because you happen like a system that doesn't give you the right to excuse how fundamentally shitty and fucked up this situation is. You're doing no one any favors.

 

The racist and sexist morons which shout their ignorant views at every given opportunity are just as capable of playing video games as I am. If you can lump me in with those degenerates just because I happen to enjoy the same medium as they do then yes I suppose the "Gaming Community" has a toxicity problem if you can really call it a community in the first place. As I just explained it makes no sense to create a group purely based on surface elements. "Gaming Culture", "The Gaming Community" and "Gamers" are all pure social constructs devised for marketing purposes and please don't be fooled into thinking otherwise. It has never been to anyone's benefit and never will be.

 

While I'm at it I would like to talk about "Gamer" as a label. I fucking hate labels and absolutely reject the notion of be called anything as cringy as "Gamer". Anyone who uses a medium as part of their identity is quite frankly a sad and depressing excuse of an individual. I'm not a gamer, I just play video games. Why does everything have to be incorporated into some form of a person's identity now? Is it a social faux pas if I don't identify as a video games themselves and I say it's merely an activity I take part in?

 

It's why I refuse to even consider the thought of participating in politics despite me being rather left-leaning. If I didn't have to deal with the mentally defective individuals whom have incorporated being a Democrat as part of their identity and "lifestyle" then maybe I would. But as it stands no way in hell am I ever touching politics with a 10 ft poll wrapped with barbed wire. To give you an idea I didn't even bother to register to vote in this country. I would rather say nothing just to spite those people. That is how much contempt I have for these individuals. I feel that politics are so fundamentally toxic I refuse to take part of it in any regard.

 

I'm sorry for being this harsh SelfSurprise. But I'm completely against identity politics no matter what shape they take hold and will fight them until the day I die. People who feel the need to identify as anything deserve nothing but my contempt and my spit in their face. Your identity is a given with no need for explanation. If a person does feel a need then that tells me exactly what kind of person I'm dealing with. A weak willed, minded, spined, slave with no semblance of a personality. They're the fundamental antithesis of a living, breathing, intelligent person and deserve nothing.

[Selfsurprise]

I thought this thread might generate some strong opinions, but you might of just taken it to its extreme logical conclusion Helio...

 

Let me just say that this thread wasn't an attempt at advocating the notion of "gaming culture", merely that it was an acknowledgement of the perception of what apparently constitutes gaming culture. I'm just as troubled by the atomisation and commercialisation of identity and political orientation as you are. What I perhaps failed to do was give the topic a question to contextualise the points I was making. Do you think "toxic gaming culture" (whether you recognise it's existence, or even the pretext of it's existence, or not) somehow manifested within the demographic, before the kind of self-serving and unkind geopolitical landscape of the last ten years became de rigeur? Or was it simply a very evident early symptom of a much broader trend towards insular national and conservative tendencies?

 

This topic was partially inspired by a short but thoughtful book I read recently called The New Philistines by art and culture journalist Sohrab Ahmari, a writer that I'm rather fond of despite what I imagine are quite stark differences in mine and his artistic tastes and beliefs. In the aforementioned book he effectively accuses a lot of contemporary artists, gallery curators, theatre directors and dance choreographers of producing work that deliberately utilizes ugly and inept tropes in order to tow the ideological line of institutional critique and racial/sexual identity politics - and in doing so undermine and belittle what he feels are fundamental liberal values regarding individuality, the notion of the sublime, the transcendent, and more besides.

 

The part of me that feels a strong attraction and empathy towards so-called "de-skilled art" (think the use of found objects, the human body, participation and mundane materials in many of my favourite artists and genres works) laments Ahmari's negative reception of the sort of modern art I invest much of my time and interest in. Part of me remains suspect of Ahmari's motives for defending what he regards as Western achievements of self-expression and valuing of individual dignity, which isn't surprising given his childhood growing up in Iran, especially in regards to how he and his family were treated before moving to America.

 

At the same time, I admire his interpretation and even find myself concurring with it it at times. When I'm looking at the works of contemporary artists I'm fully aware of the ideological and institutional underpinning, the historical and influential circumstances that allow and encourage such work to exist. But I'm personally able to surpass much of the authoritarian reading of an artwork and reach my own conclusions, partly through my familiarity with the art worlds and art markets strategies, as well the strong neo-liberal bias that infuses much modern art reception and presentation. Unfortunately for a large number of people unfamiliar with the historical and commercial contexts of art galleries and the financial/political pillars supporting it, the "jargonisation" of modern art has rendered it suspect in the eyes of many. The British tabloids have convinced enormous swathes of the working classes that art is nought but a cynical asset for rich people, parasitized by an equally opportunistic class of professionals who believe-in what they publish about as sincerely as anyone unlearned in the theoretical language can fathom.

What depresses me is that Ahmari might be right about the complicity of artists in a morally indefensible artistic complex. I try my utmost to demonstrate the inherent value and imaginative scope of art in opposition of/or despite of the aforementioned complex, but it's rare to find someone willing to understand or even try to understand the disconnection.

[Heliocentrical]

Do you think "toxic gaming culture" (whether you recognise it's existence, or even the pretext of it's existence, or not) somehow manifested within the demographic, before the kind of self-serving and unkind geopolitical landscape of the last ten years became de rigeur? Or was it simply a very evident early symptom of a much broader trend towards insular national and conservative tendencies?

Well when you put it that way yes I do think the toxicity was present way before this current geopolitical landscape. But I think that kind of toxicity has to do more with a general sense of insularity rather than anything of conservative characteristics.

 

There's an element of fanboyism to this toxicity. CoD and Battlefield fanboys have been duking it out since forever because both CoD and Battlefield have marketed themselves as being in opposition with one another. Same goes for any two games that market themselves in such a way.

 

There is also an element of being cut off or disconnected in regards to gaming in general. PC gamers and console gamers have fundamentally different experiences due to different control schemes, differences in hardware, console exclusives, etc. PC Gamers, Xbox Gamers and Playstation Gamers all subtlety resent each other because of those differences. It's where arguments like 30 FPS vs 60 FPS come from. PC Gamers say that 60 FPS is objectively better than 30 FPS and that video games should be held to that standard in terms of performance. Whereas Console gamers say there isn't a difference because they can't see it and argue that PC Gamers are being too harsh on developers. The whole 30 FPS vs 60 FPS argument is just one example of how gamers individually hate each other. You can trace all the toxicity within gaming back to one source, fanboyism.

 

I suppose that gamer fanboyism is similar to nationalism in a way. They both love something to the expense of everything else. For nationalists this would be their country. For gamers this would anything they're a fanboy of.

[Descriptor]

I think the key connecting bit for all of this is the internet, and how it impacts social interactions and perceptions. Due to the broadcast nature of the internet, the loudest and worst people tend to become the most visible, since they're basically given the biggest microphone in the world. Conversely, the sane people tend to be either completely invisible, or become dragged down into the muck, creating the "toxic" behaviors that people complain about all the time. Gaming has almost always been associated with the internet, so these behaviors have been developing in gaming communities since the beginning of the internet, so it's not so much "gaming" that causes any of it, but just internet culture in general, which is heavily intertwined with gaming. Only within the last decade or so has the rest of the population (i.e., normal people) come to the internet, leading to the insanity we're facing now in the political world. Not to say that I'm arguing that we shouldn't have the internet, just that it makes people crazy because we have trouble learning how to filter out the biggest idiots, such that everyone starts to perceive that as the new normal. Incidentally, that's a big reason we're seeing more political polarization, general outrage, and "echo-chamber" group mentalities. Hopefully humanity will figure out how not to get so frenzied by this latest round of mass communication, before things get too much sillier.

 

TLDR: It's not so much that society is mirroring gaming culture, it's that the internet made gaming culture crazy (since they're so intertwined), and now normal people are using the internet, so it's making them crazy too.

[Selfsurprise]

^ There is something to said about the possibility that the internet is changing the way in which people think and accumulate knowledge. For all the accessibility and democratisation of information that the internet arguably brings, it also makes education and learning an almost peripheral thing. It's easy to disassociate new information from yourself when it's constantly available to you in a digital all-encompassing medium, like some sort of non-physical prosthetic of knowledge rather than the innate acquisition of knowledge. I think that's why I spend so much of my time and effort reading about contemporary art and visiting and engaging with art galleries. I hate the idea of just being a working class statistic defined by my retail job, so I invest in art in an attempt to be more than just another post-pedagogical subject in an age where personal interests and raison d'êtres are becoming increasingly nominal and commodified.

[patlefort]

Shitty people has always existed. The internet just make it seem worst than it is. There is only one solution and that's to ignore them and move on. Any other solution will only inhibit free speech. There is a lot of people out there that think you are toxic and want to silence you and will use anything to do it.

[Alyxx Thorne]

Moved to serious topic discussion.

[Templar Knight]

As a supporter of GamerGate, the popularly proclaimed progenitors of basically everything toxic on the internet, in gaming, and IRL currently if you believe many of the hack writers out there, I'd say to the uncritical eye, one could say so. But I personally don't believe it.

 

The media, both the ones that predominantly claim to focus on gaming and those with a wider purview beyond it have done an excellent job of alienating anyone who would want to become become a "Gamer" simply by how they've reported on games and people who play them, if you were to just read and watch their content. With only a few exceptions, many mainstream games journalism outlets have shot their own audiences on various occasions and thrown them under the bus when it comes to most modern PC politics. Its all the more ironic because back during the early 2000s and early 90s when the "video games cause satanism and violence" first really kicked off, these same sorts of outlets DID defend "Gamers" and worked to disprove many of these incredibly ridiculous statements.

 

No such thing occurs now except with by a handful of them left (Like TechRaptor and The Escapist sorta among a couple others in terms of companies or outlets). All the casual observer has seen in the past few years has been how games, the industry around them, and the communities around them are just pits of toxic, masculine, abusive, disgusting seedbeds of behaviours that needs to be exorcised with the faith of modern Feminism, SJWism, and Progressive Politics. The irony being that they aren't much different from the Christian Conservatives of nearly a decade or two before, many have even stolen the same messages and merely given a Liberal PC flavour to them.

 

I've played hundreds of games in close to 15 years of life where I've actively been playing games of some kind or another, and have seen and taken part in various communities, especially a bunch of online ones. IMO, while assholes will always exist, there is nothing inherent in gaming that makes a person morally bad compared to any other media out there, nor are the entire communities toxic. Its a bullshit story that reeks of over-simplicity, and completely ignores all kinds of facts and data that has been gathered on games, and the people who play them. But you'd never find out about that stuff unless you personally cared to look or became morbidly curious, which is the problem of image.

 

As for your question on current politics and how gaming in a sense relates to it, as a "member" of GG myself, I do agree with the idea many of us supporters have in that GG, when it came out a little over two years ago, it became a front in the culture war that had transitioned over various mediums in the years before it. Comics, Music, etc. Now it came to gaming.

 

Unlike comics which popularly seem to have crumbled before SJWism and modern Progressive politics in terms of how they're made, Gaming stood fast, by and large, against the same onslaught and the issues plaguing it and controversies surrounding GG and the fact that it didn't just die overnight and completely become overrun by SJWs was noticed by a lot of people (Also helped a lot that nobody could stop talking about GG and what was going on with it, thus more and more people, myself included, became morbidly interested in it, dig some digging, and found the heart of the matter underneath that image of toxic badness that basically every major media outlet spewed over GG if they even talked about it at all). Progressive games, by and large sucked at sales when major companies tried to do it (Just look at Sunset's sales despite the amount of pushing that was done by the circle-jerk press on that game alone and you can see exactly what I'm talking about.), the companies have basically realized that gamers by and large don't seem to give a shit about progressive politics in their games, and don't appreciate being talked down to.

 

Which I think a lot of it comes from the history of gaming, this whole thing didn't just happen overnight, it was years, decades, in the building. But with gaming being the newest entertainment medium on the block, one which has funding and profit sizes that Hollywood Directors would kill for, and is steadily increasing in its size with each passing year, its almost a given that the established mediums wouldn't shed any tears over making the newest medium that may or may not be stealing their business look bad. Plus most new entertainment mediums have been historically demonized anyway, so its not that big of a surprise.

 

Gaming has gone through industry crashes, multiple waves of moral busybodies that have tried to take our games and our content away from us, and multiple generations of developmental stages in not even half of a century with more on the way with VR. Anyone who has lived long enough to see much of this or who grew up with this stuff probably has some strong opinions on it when it comes to the second part especially.

 

As for the online aspects . . . I mean, IMO the internet is what it is as much as the rest of reality. You cannot stop people from being assholes, you either learn to deal with them (IMO the simpler option that'll save you a ton of stress when you learn to do it), or simply choose not to engage with them and go to communities that hold themselves to different standards (obviously going to authorities if it goes too far).

 

The biggest problem with going after online stuff is discerning what is sarcasm, trolling, and what is actual "toxic" behaviour, which is all the harder considering that all you have to go by is typed messages but it is easier with emoji and memes now. IMO people are too quick to jump to conclusions on many things, and love to talk in broad strokes when it comes to gaming communities.

 

Take the Overwatch Community for instance. How many people do you think gave a fuck that Blizzard announced that Tracer was a lesbian? I'll tell yea, nowhere near as many as the media reporting on it would have had you believe. Because if it didn't already confirm all of the suspicions that had been brought to life through r34, then the rest by and large just didn't give a fuck because it doesn't matter to game play. Most people don't care about who a character is in a game like Overwatch, not in that level of depth when there is basically no deep lore to speak of anyway, its a non-issue. Yet tons of outlets tried to jump on it in anticipating of like, some mass video gamer outrage that never happened.

 

This may be because the media believes their own bullshit about gaming, since a lot of them don't play or like video games themselves and therefore refuse to understand it even though they want to talk about like they do. Its why I call them the circle-jerk press, because in most cases they seem to just copy stories off of one another without doing any independent research or thoughts.

 

Are there some bad communities out there? Yes. But that could be said about every single last entertainment community of every medium, and so many of the cases they use are over-exaggerated, blown out of proportion, or simply false to the point where I cannot even take their message seriously when it comes to online communities of gamers.

 

In short, I believe that the whole "toxic gaming community" thing is mostly a fabrication and a lie built upon flimsy foundations and debunked stereotypes that have been used for decades to try and discredit gaming as a whole, and merely serves as justification for Progressives, SJWs, and others obsessed with identity politics and other PC stuff to declare their crusade into another entertainment medium to act as the moral busybodies of it, or the custodians, if you will.

 

Which gamers by and large didn't buy any of their bullshit (either because they didn't care like most or openly resisted it like some), so other cultural elements that saw this happening within the wider cultural context and took some cues, perhaps. I honestly still roll my eyes whenever I see hacks gamedrop like its established fact we're the devils of the internet, you'd think we'd rival Nyarlethotep or Azatoth at this point by how they describe us at times.

[Icebox]

Good points Templar Knight, the stuff you pointed out is why I don't brother with mainstream news anymore.

[Heliocentrical]

@Templar Knight on the topic of GG I jumped ship as soon as Totalbiscuit did. When I first saw GG all I could see was this battleground for the ulterior motives of both the Alt-Right and Left. Totalbiscuit was the only person involved with GG who had the legitimate journalistic integrity I was looking for. But As soon as TB abandoned GG all of it's hopes for improvements regarding ethics in games journalism went with him. At that point GG had no legitimate journalistic backing and could be collectively dismissed as a politically motivated clusterfuck. The crazy thing with GG is when you boil it all down it largely had nothing to do with medium of games or the ethical integrity of journalists. It was all a facade for the ulterior motives of both the Alt-Right and Left. Both sides were insane.

[Templar Knight]

@Heliocentrical

 

IDK how much I'd say about that now. I'm an active watcher and commentor at KIA (which I'd argue is GG's biggest remaining bastion), and I'm not entirely sure I'd agree entirely with that interpretation.

 

Just for context, I "joined" GG in the summer of 2015. I'd heard all kinds of stuff from different sources about how bad they were as a group, or simply how toxic getting anywhere near the issue was, and had stayed away from it for months because I actually believed a lot of the BS around it. Eventually though, I became morbidly curious enough to start some digging into what exactly GG had done, and was currently up to. I started with the Wikipedia page, was astounded by how much hot garbage it was, and then found the GG Wiki by Dry Bones, several hours of looking through various links, timelines, and dozens of videos and articles later, I became a GG supporter.

 

I got off my fence because I realized after going through all the stuff, both on the anti and pro sides, that even if EVERYTHING the antis claimed about GG was true (its not) it still doesn't excuse the actions and behaviours of many of the antis and their supporters which were as bad, if not even worse. They weren't the morally superior people in this case, and since that was out the window, I went with the people whose case was more convincing, that of GG.

 

My thoughts on the movement is that it has indeed become incredibly diluted over time with the widening Alt-Right/Ctrl-Left culture war which it is a facet of, but I still do truly believe in its original goals and the fact that as a group, the whole thing has suffered from EXTREME narrative pushing, virtue-signalling, and bullshit in the media which only goes to outline all of its original principles.

 

I also still believe TB is a believer in its goals, he never openly declared himself in favour of us anyway more just that our goals and his aligned, I think he mostly left because he was not a fan of the shit being thrown at him from being associated with it (he's not very good at dealing with those kinds of people in any respect, but that's his business). I mean, fuck, the man was getting hate mail over it when he was on a medical bed getting cancer treatment with people saying they hoped he would die!

 

We have gained some journalistic backing since, Brad Wardell is writing a book on the whole thing and including all kinds of stats he gathered from us as a group. We've been the subject of a couple of College or University class studies which actually involved interviews with active members on KIA, TechRaptor as a site is supportive of us in terms of what we're looking for in games journalism, Ian Miles Cheong has come back having switched tables and is working on our side (though admittedly he's a blogger) etc. Breitbart and Milo have mostly dropped us since I'm pretty sure Milo figured out that he couldn't get any more publicity off of us compared to his other work.

 

Biggest thing to vindicate us recently has been the FBI's report on GG being released. Man, did that feel good to see after 2 years.

 

I also do think lots of others in the movement are aware of the dilution and the fact that we've basically been used by both the Alt-Right and Ctrl-Left as either a useful battleground or a bogeyman, its why KIA's mods are undergoing an initiative that was supported by most of the community to try and "get back on track" and stop being dragged into shit that isn't specifically linked to games, the industry, and media around it. Just have to see how it goes.

[ThePest179]

Alt-Right/Ctrl-Left

 

Lel.

 

Biggest thing to vindicate us recently has been the FBI's report on GG being released. Man, did that feel good to see after 2 years.

 

Can you provide a link? I'd like to read it.

[Templar Knight]

Alt-Right/Ctrl-Left

 

Lel.

 

Biggest thing to vindicate us recently has been the FBI's report on GG being released. Man, did that feel good to see after 2 years.

 

Can you provide a link? I'd like to read it.

 

Here is the archive post with our FOI Request that was fulfilled. Fair warning, its a lot of pages.

 

https://archive.org/details/13397040FILE1

[BTGBullseye]

Nobody ever used to “troll” anyone..

I've been an internet counter-troll for about 14 years now... People were trolling on the internet before the first BBS system was available. There have been trolls throughout history, long before the internet.

[BTGBullseye]

'Flame' describes an entirely different situation. (two angry people or groups arguing and attacking the other person/group instead of discussing the subject, basically a bunch of Ad Hominem attacks from both sides) Internet 'trolls' were first described as such during the early BBS days.

[Selous Templar]

Yeah, #Gamergate was the foreshadowing of political backlash against the establishment Left and "Progressive" ideologies in general. They messed with the most A-political people on earth who wanted nothing more than to play games in peace and for them to not be turned into a Hollywood clone.

However #Gamergate in general is such a massive can of worms I think it needs it's own topic to set the facts straight. I recommend checking out Sargon of Akkad's videos on the subject, as he's the only person I can legitimately trust regarding the issue.

[ThePest179]

Looking back on things, I used to be really anti-GG because I was going through a cringey SJW phase. Nowadays I can't help but think the whole thing was just a shitshow between two equally dumb groups who fed off the other's stupidity.

[Templar Knight]

I witnessed the first events from basically third-party distance and while I thought some of the stuff going on was bullshit, I mostly kept away because I was afraid of how toxic the whole thing looked and that I'd rather not get involved.

 

About 8-9 months after GG's official "founding", I hadn't heard much, so I became morbidly curious as to what had happened with it, and what was going on.

 

I did digging, found out that they weren't entirely dead at all, and delved into looking through all I could find on what had happened and who had talked about it in order to get a clearer understanding now that things had calmed down.

 

What I found kicked me off my fence. I reached the conclusion that even if EVERYTHING that the Antis said about GG was 100% true (its not), it still wouldn't render them as the morally superior ones when they pull almost all of the exact same shit, if not even worse. So, I came to support the ones whose core ideals I more agreed with, and at least were honest with themselves in that they had no power over the behaviour of those who used their hashtag or identified as GG.

 

Has it accomplished too much? Debatable, though perhaps the biggest achievement is that gaming hasn't gone the way of comics yet.

 

I also find the idea now that they were a prelude to the current political situation an exaggeration by hacks trying to be relevant and hip with what they think are the latest trends for click-bait. If anything, the culture war in gaming is merely symptomatic, but never a precursor of the wider socio-political situation. It would never have occurred without these wider forces already existing and turning their eyes on gaming as they have done with so many other hobbies and entertainment mediums.

[ThePest179]

at least were honest with themselves in that they had no power over the behaviour of those who used their hashtag or identified as GG.

 

I think GG could've really benefitted from having a centralized leadership; having people like Bryan "King of /pol/" Dunn and Vordrak on your side is not going to be a benefit.