Toxic gaming culture explained by the people who study it

boing
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I… don’t think that’s the case, actually. I think it’s that editors have assumed that men were the primary readers of sci-fi, even if they weren’t. There were many women who wrote for science fiction magazines, but under pseudonyms or initials, because male editors thought that men and boys wouldn’t read women. And the number of women who participated in fandom culture are likely vastly underestimated. Women have also always been active in the fandom, originating cosplay and fan fiction (especially in the Star Trek fandom, where women basically invented slash fic).

The argument that women are somehow new to science fiction writing and fandom is part of the myth that men were the ones who made it the cultural powerhouse it is today. Let’s not forget, that the first science fiction writer of course was a woman.

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Good points. I just think the Rabid Puppies thing was not just a new thing that popped out of nowhere.

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There’s also this female pioneer of fandom (or the “amateur press” as it was known in those days):

Still, in the early days it was tough for a woman to break into fandom even when they were participants in the SF community (as opposed to fandom) with unknowing fans of their own. From everything I’ve read, up until the late 1960s there was a white boy’s club atmosphere in fandom that withered but never fully died out.

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I totally agree there. They were reacting to the increasing visibility of women in fandom, more than the reality of it. They had it in their heads that they were oppressed nerds who couldn’t get laid because of their “weird” hobby, and when it became clear to them that actually, lots of women are into fandom cultures, and they STILL couldn’t get laid, they just went on the offensive to “take back” something that never solely belonged to their gender in the first place (you can say the same for race, too). They just couldn’t admit that maybe their sexist attitudes were the real problem in the first place. Or maybe it was fears of “their” culture somehow being devalued by being associated with women (and people of color).

I imagine there are many other like her, who are entirely unacknowledged as well. Plus, what about all the unacknowledged labor of wives and girlfriends of male sci-fi writers?

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Or they could just be sociopathic shutin assholes that don’t know any better.

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They are never Übermenschen. In fact, not even close.
And deep down, they know it.

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This seems so weird to me. Most young white guys I know are, like most young other guys I know, a bit aggressive, and the online world is a good place to test those boundaries. I don’t know how this is a race thing. They aren’t worried about our territory. It has been toxic FOREVER. Even back when it was just a bunch of white dudes in Molten Core. Am I the only one that thinks this doesn’t fit reality?

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I think it’s particularly strange because; at least in my experience; people have not had difficulty just ignoring or definition-shuffling things that were technically games, but which they were disinterested in or disliked; and then getting back to playing the ones that they did.

This hasn’t always been the height of intellectual consistency(“Quick: you think that everything Popcap touches is lowbrow trash; please elucidate the distinction between degenerate ‘bejeweled’ and the larger corpus of tile-matching games”); but even by the standards of people who think that video games are a hobby it wasn’t treated as a hobby and so wasn’t something you sought out opportunities for; just a reactive disengagement mechanism.

What we have now; in a context where having so many AAA shooters with gruff 'n gravelly space he-marines that you don’t have time for sleep has never been easier or cheaper; can only be explained by people voluntarily sacrificing time with the games they allegedly care about in order to go play at culture war(which, ironically, is pretty similar to competitive social networking, as done by complete assholes; which has historically been seen as the most un-gamelike of ultracasual barely-games.)

That, I don’t get; and from that incomprehension arises a series of other things I fail to understand(most notoriously, ‘ethics in gaming journalism’ apparently being the grim scourge of an obscure indie passion project possibly gaming a review; rather than Activision et al. pretty much treating all gaming publications of any size as an irregular corps of their marketing arm; which seems like the problem that people who aren’t in the market for indie games about feelings but are going to pre-order either Medal of Halo: Reloaded or Gears of Duty IV; and are reliant on the gaming press for information on which is less overhyped might actually be worried about).

The only “serious gamers disparage the degenerate ‘casuals’ and all their trappings” thing that ever really made sense was the concern over the fact that ‘casual’(and later ‘mobile’) are grimly optimized skinner boxes under a thin candy shell, made by chillingly mercenary neutral-evils who would happily twiddle your μ-opioid receptors if there were a javascript library for that; which threatened to leak over into the domain of ‘real’ games that used to have good, honest, retail prices. This concern has largely been borne out (why hello loot crates and CS skin gambling!); but has also never been a matter of cogent opposition by the most ardent of the culture warriors; nor has it been associated in any obvious way with the alleged incursion of the other into their rightful territory.

I guess, fundamentally, I just don’t really get it because I can’t wrap my head around the fact that what looks to me like a profoundly pointless fight distracting people from the nearly post-scarcity supply of more or less exactly what they claim to want looks to them like a zero-sum war of annihilation over salvation goods that can have only one owner regardless of any empirical observations of their abundance.

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Obligs:

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One of the first women to appear in the early sci-fi pulps was Clare Winger Harris, who came in third in a story contest for Amazing Stories in 1927. Hugo Gernsback’s introduction to the story (“The Fate of the Poseidenia”) reads:

“That the third place winner should prove to be a woman was one of the surprises of the contest, for, as a rule, women do not make good scientifiction writers, because their education and general tendencies on scientific matters are usually limited. But the exception, as usual, proves the rule…”

(emphasis mine; excerpted in Jeff and Ann Vandemeer’s Big Book of Science Fiction)

I’d also recommend taking a look at Harlan Ellison’s introduction to Joanna Russ’s contribution to Again, Dangerous Visions, which is a frank assessment of Ellison’s past misogyny. A brief excerpt:

"the cop-out reservation that held for so many years. It went like this:

"‘This Leigh Brackett/C. L. Moore/Katherine Maclean/Margaret St. Clair/E. Mayne Hull (fill in the appropriate name for your own past sins, guys) is a helluva writer. She writes so good you think it’s a man. You can’t tell the difference.’

"Well, that was nonsense, too. Another glaring example of what we did to our women writers for so many years…

“for almost fifty years in speculative fiction, we have denied ourselves perhaps half the great writers who might have been. By insisting that women could only write well if they wrote as men, by hardboiling themselves, by subscribing to the masculine world-view, we have disenfranchised and even blotted out an infinitude of views of our world as seen through eyes different and wonderful.”

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Don’t forget that the middle-aged female demographic is one of the most important ones for mobile gaming as well. They’re the ones who purchase the most in-game currency for things like speed-ups or bonus candies on Candy Crush and their like.

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I grew up playing video games, and while all my friends who did the same happened to be male, I never got the impression that video games weren’t “for” girls. The closest thing I can relate to this toxicity is the sort of annoyed feeling I got when a lot of things that used to be niche became mainstream- I and a lot of my friends spent childhood enjoying traditionally “nerdy” things like Dungeons and Dragons, Doctor Who, anime, etc.- stuff that was obscure or considered uncool, but which has since exploded in popularity.

There’s a sort of irritation when something that’s like a secret you and your friends share, something that makes you and your relationship to each other special, is no longer obscure- suddenly there are anime conventions with thousands in attendance, Dalek toys for sale at Target, and nerd-themed bars where people can drink and play board games in public rather than their friends’ basements. People who might have bullied you in grade school for those very same hobbies are now able to enjoy them without “paying their dues”, so to speak.

I don’t feel like video games were ever obscure- when the NES came out, even people who didn’t play video games knew who Mario was, and it’s not like people were singled out as weirdos or bullied for enjoying video games. But gamers were still very much their own group, and were often scapegoats of the media- the idea that violent video games made people into school shooters or mindless zombies wasn’t too far from the idea of Dungeons and Dragons turning people into baby-murdering Satanists. Moral guardians with absolutely no idea what they were talking about were trying to turn people with a harmless hobby into villains.

Then, around the time the Wii came out, casual gaming and more family-friendly gaming became big business. For a lot of gamers, this shift became uncomfortable- a lot of shovelware and low-quality games were being released to people who were too young or inexperienced to know better, and a lot of games that weren’t bad at all were being released for a different audience than the traditional definition of a gamer- instead of being geared towards primarily white males who grew up with Nintendo and Sega, games were now for everybody. In the eyes of these increasingly toxic traditional gamers, not only did these new gamers not “pay their dues”, they were causing an overall decline in the quality of video games. Now the same aunt who tried to get Mom to take away your Playstation for being a “murder simulator” was happily playing Bejeweled on her phone. There’s a kernel of actual injustice there, and that’s all it took for some people to justify their privilege and declare anyone who wasn’t a traditional gamer an enemy invader to “their” hobby.

Please note, I’m not agreeing with these toxic gamers at all. I’m also not trying to justify toxic gamers’ behavior, but I hope this might make it a bit more understandable to someone who didn’t grow up with video games, and show why some of them feel so much anger, resentment and insecurity. They’ve made a conscious decision to be assholes and nothing excuses that, but in their minds they’re still the victims. Meanwhile, I look forward to the increased diversity, creativity and freshness that will be an obvious benefit of more inclusiveness and representation in characters, developers and consumers.

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More recent ones include Heroine’s Quest, which is modern but in the visual style of the Sierra games. Also, it is free: Crystal Shard

Lori and Cory Cole also just (finally) released their kickstarted game Hero-U, set in the Quest for Glory world.

My daughters loved them both.

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For almost forever in every field of endeavor, we have denied ourselves perhaps half the great writers/scientists/explorers/philosophers/inventors/etc. who might have been.

These toxic gamer bros aren’t helping.

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FTFY

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Imagine if Shakespeare had had a sister who wanted to write…and if she’d had a room of her own…

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One might think so, but my observation is that once a hobby filled with low-status men (or really boys) gets higher status members, the low status members tend to become an embarrassment and get pushed out. Not necessarily explicitly, but there’s a pretty pervasive attitude of “you’re not wanted here” and almost everyone gets the message.

And lets face it, is there anyone who wants to hobnob with geeky young men except those who have no other choice (i.e. other geeky young men)? Social skills that may eventually make one a tolerable human being are still several years away, and even your peers generally only tolerate you because its better than being completely alone.

I’m all for video games growing up. But let’s not pretend that there’s isn’t a fairly serious amount of zero-sum in all of this. As video games break out of their ghetto and gain higher status due to actually addressing people outside of the 14 year old male demographic, we’ll be seeing good riddance to the socially maladjusted basement dwellers who are an embarrassing remnant of video gaming past.

Eventually they’ll find some other activity to congregate around at the margins of society. And with luck that will keep them isolated from civilized society, unless, like video games, it turns out the place they erected their club house turns out to be valuable real estate, and they need to be evicted to make way for a higher class of tenants.

And make no mistake, the range of these people range from the immature (which was certainly me) to the thoroughly toxic. They’re not good company (even to each other). And technology weaponizes their general misanthropy in a way that was (thank goodness) never available to me. But people will viciously defend a mud patch, especially against people they (mistakenly) perceive as having power.

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But nobody is stopping 14 year old males from playing games and socializing. Just because older people and girls do the same thing doesn’t mean that they’re now excluded. It’s just not exclusive to them anymore. Everyone is free to play alone or within their own social groups without having to mix. There is no territory to fight over. Unless it’s exclusivity.

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What I didn’t get about #germergoat was that it was so obviously disingenuous about what its actual concerns were, but so many people pretended otherwise. I mean, the whole story about it being about a too-cozy relationship between a female developer and the gaming press didn’t even begin to hold water. Especially as, as you say, the gaming press as a whole had a too-cozy relationship with the big publishers from the start, which never seemed to bother them. Moreover game critics like Rock Paper Shotgun would take the game press to task for that too-cozy relationship and in turn became a target of #germergoat, thereby proving that what the movement said it was about was not at all what it was actually about. Talking to #gamertaint supporters, they’d start off with the usual bullshit justification, but after some questioning would eventually break down and admit it was all about their unhappiness with the idea of women being in the game industry.
For so long white dudes saw themselves as the most important (and only “real”) target audience for the game industry. They saw being good at gaming as giving them some self-worth. They saw game development as having some prestige (though speaking as a game developer, only they ever thought so, frankly). They also frequently mistook being good at games as being a necessary part of (and therefore entryway into) game development, giving it an aspirational element. So there was this combination of feeling like women were going to get their girl cooties all in the games and ruin them, and also that they were losing their status as special snowflakes who were the apple of the game industry’s eye on top of which they were angry that women were making games and they weren’t (which was true because women were, um, making games and they weren’t). The fact that the same (or more) of the games they liked were being made was almost beside the point. The industry was now bigger than them, and they were less important to it.

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Aside from some gripes about line breaks, right on!

So much of this really nails it.

Making games is hard; shitting on the people that do isn’t. Doing so makes you feel SMRT.

I would love to be a game dev! But comparing my life in enterprise software versus game software seriously makes me wonder: could I hack it? Not only that, could I take the pay cut? I’m convinced less-good devs work (on average) in Enterprise as SME’s and make more.

I’m also convinced that the desire for a “full stack” dev persists in gaming and startups because the former relies on passion and the latter relies on bullshit promises. But the need is common to needing to pay fewer people.

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