Gamers are the worst (and best) people

On gatekeeping and harassment.

Gaming Social Thoughts

Gamebros.PH

7 minutes

I was very hesitant about posting this article. An anti-gamer rant on a blog that praises games? Blasphemy.

Still, I ended up hitting the “Publish” button because being able to love something completely means to look at its ugliness along with the good side; and to accept the reality of its imperfection, while at the same time helping it achieve that impossible state in whatever way one can.

It’s true. The vocal majority of people on the Internet don’t think very highly of those who self-identify as “gamers.” Five seconds at Google will paint a general picture:

Well, at least we’re smarterer? Kidding and pseudo-proofs aside, it’s easy to understand the overwhelming disdain for gamers as a group (mob, really). Go to any popular videogame blog/site and check out the comments, but make sure the kids aren’t peeking over your shoulder. Some of the things gamers post in these public places are the meanest, most bile-filled things you’ll ever read online. There’s way too many people taking things way too seriously to leave any more room for fun.

Shit gamers have done  #

I won’t even go into the kind of shit gamers say because enough has been written, recorded, and parodied about that - and also because that’s just the icing on the cake. When you get into some examples of things gamers have done, it gets really depressing:

A montage of quotes by and about Phil Fish.
Indie game developer Phil Fish (creator of Fez) was told that people will pirate his game because they don’t like him
Headline on Kotaku reading, BioWare Writer Describes Her Gaming Tastes; Angry Gamers Call Her a “Cancer”
Jennifer Hepler, writer at BioWare, became the target of an online harassment operation organized by disgruntled fans of the Mass Effect series who were unhappy with the ending of the final game
Screenshot of a blog post by Notch, entitled: “The DDoS attack continues, I'll just get back to coding, then.” The body of the post is as follows: DDoS stands for “Distributed Denial of Service”. Denial of Service means you occupy certain resources for a long period of time, making other people not able to use them. A real world example would be running up to the cashier at a super market and paying in small coins, counting every single one really slowly, then finding out at the end you didn't have enough in the first place. The “Distributed” means it's done from a lot of places at the same time, so it's much harder to simply deny access to the clients that do that. Usually this is done via computers infected with trojans, so people participate in this without even knowing they're doing it. As to why minecraft.net is being targeted, I'm not sure. While the guys hosting my server are looking into things, I'll get back to coding.
Minecraft’s multiplayer servers were once rendered inaccessible thanks to hackers who were dissatisfied with the way its creator, Markus “Notch” Persson, was handling the game
Screenshot of a Tweet by Wolfram von Funck, reading: “DDoS on our site. Someone seems to hate us. :(”
Some suspect the same group of hackers to be responsible for preventing people from buying the recently-released indie game Cube World (developed by Wolfram and Sarah von Funck) by taking down its servers
Screenshot of a petition headline by David Fontenot, reading: “Microsoft: Give us back the Xbox One we were promised at E3,” with the headline image of Don Mattrick from the Xbox One unveiling and the caption, “I've made a huge mistake.”
Microsoft was ready to take a step into the next generation of game distribution with their Xbox One, but gamers weren’t comfortable with the idea and so they backed down (though Microsoft’s fumbling of their marketing delivery certainly didn’t help)

Not just vidjagames #

This isn’t isolated to console, PC, or videogamers, either. Friends who play in card gaming circles and tabletop role-playing groups have told stories that make me want to facepalm myself into a coma: people who stall an entire tournament just because of one slight calculation in the point system; friendships and relationships torn apart over a basketball game; grown men fighting over printed pieces of cardboard, or numbers on a sheet of paper.

I had a bit of a harder time finding specific examples of dickish gamer activity in tabletop and card gaming circles (maybe because the Print Screen for real life isn’t as intuitive as on PCs), but here’s a few:

  • Geek elitism. There are, surprisingly enough, a few subcultures within what’s generally considered “geek culture,” and that these subcultures are often fairly competitive with large amounts of snobbery and elitism within them. Ironic?
  • Yet another case of blatant sexism, this one at a Magic: the Gathering tournament. Will we ever escape this?
  • A bit of reverse sexism, not as much an example of shameful gamer behavior as it is a case of gamer discrimination (which was negatively responded to by its sister site, heh) 
The Toy Story “X, X Everywhere” meme with the caption: “Dicks. Dicks everywhere.”

Don’t panic #

It’s come to the point where some feel ashamed about admitting that they love games. This is extreme; nothing should ever get in the way of being proud to do what you love, and the truth is you probably won’t even let the existence of gamer assholes stop you from enjoying the next game you play. That’s great, and I hope you do keep playing! It wasn’t the intent of this article to make you ragequit and boycott games.

Two pictures side-by-side: First, a screenshot of the heroes from “Army of Two” high-fiving; and second, a photo of two friends high-fiving after a game.

And even if being shown this ugly side of gamer horde mentality gets you down, keep in mind that for every story of malicious gamer behavior, there are just as many cases of gamers doing great things for each other and for charity:

  • Funds like Child’s Play and Extra Life exist thanks to the donations of people who love games and believe that games, simply put, make life better. The money and goods raised by these two charities goes to children’s hospitals and therapy centers around the world, where they provide patients with vital distraction from an otherwise generally unpleasant experience
  • Everybody’s heard of running marathons for causes, but not as many are familiar with groups that marathon videogames for a cause. Zeldathon and TheSpeedGamers are two communities that get together and stream live gameplay video to an audience to raise funds for different charities every month
  • More specific cases of good-guy-gamers include one where a bunch of do-gooders compiled a step-by-step manual that would help a blind man finish Ocarina of Time, and the story of a man who spent 30 years of his life helping disabled gamers play games

It’s all about perspective #

Two girls crying while consoling each other, with the meme caption: “Just fangirlin'”

The truth is, every field has its share of fanatics, assholes, and just plain immature brats. That’s what happens when enough people get together and rave about something they all love. A fanbase is formed, and we all know how annoying fanbases can get.

When people lose perspective, they tend to do and say weird things. And when someone’s love for something - a hobby, a band, a person, a game or anything else - turns him or her into an unapproachable, unlikeable ass who can’t spend the extra effort to put some real thought into what they’re about to say and how it will make others around them feel, then perspective has just flown out the window. They’re no longer contributing to the development of whatever discussion they just took the train to crazy town from. People who don’t share the same (perhaps irrational) level of enthusiasm just won’t be able to keep up, and instead will lose interest at best and call the cops at worst.

The Neil deGrasse Tyson “Watch out” meme, with the caption: “Watch out, we got a fanboy over here.”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with being excited about gaming, and I’m the worst example for this; just thinking about when I can finally play Star Citizen is enough to reduce all productivity to zero (after typing this, I quickly checked their website to see if there was any news). But my excitement is not exclusive; raving about Star Citizen doesn’t cut me out from the rest of society, and the game is not something I feel is mine by rights (“it’s about fucking time someone made a decent space sim, god!”).

At the heart of it I do believe that most cases of overly-aggressive gamer misconduct is an unbridled passion for their beloved hobby. They’re too close to it. The moment they see something “not right,” the moment they sense a disturbance in the Force, their vision clouds, heart palpitates, and teeth grind - because they know Things Aren’t As They Should Be™. Unfortunately, their actions - done in the name of all that is good for gaming - end up becoming part of the problem, not the solution. 

Scene from the movie Ratatouille where a character flashes back to his childhood after eating a dish called “perspective.”
So how do you teach someone how to regain perspective? I don’t know. I don’t think many of us would even be interested to even attempt to talk rationally to a gamer douche, opting instead to simply brush off their behavior as mindless droning, a lost cause. What I do know however is that a better use of our time would be to actually spend it enjoying a game together, rather than bicker about what in the end amounts to nothing but hot air. Because we’re cool like that.

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