All that “you’re destroying my childhood” BS, as if fandom was the sole property of geeky white males. My own childhood involved a summer D&D programme at a games store where half of the 11-year-olds were female and a summer course in SF literature at the university not only attended by female middle-school kids but also taught by (gasp) a woman. By high school, though, those girls had either been driven away or driven into exile.
The central irony of these bitter geeks is that, for all that they hated the jocks and preps in high school, in their desperation to be accepted they bought right into the toxic masculinity and patriarchal integral to those groups during high school and never let those attitudes go.
Mindy, I cannot think of any deeper circle of hell than to be a young women deeply interested in the same things as a bunch of massively insecure, semi-sociopathic young men incapable of much of the way of empathy.
You have my sympathies.
And perhaps you mistake my two experiences for “poor me” stories. They are not - they are simply my experience with how people can be displaced by improving a social group. One experience was tolerable, and the other a net positive.
My sole point was that people do get displaced when things improve. When we finally (finally!) decide to no longer tolerate sociopathy, that displaces the community of sociopaths.
And should you care about their displacement? No, not really. But not caring is not the same thing as it not occurring at all. I prefer to see the price (such as it is) front and centre for any improvements I’m fighting for.
Actually, we kind of don’t, because if we have a weakness, it’s not being able to acknowledge harm that our policy is causing, because acknowledging would behoove us to try and mitigate it.
So we’re left with the less than ideal situation that if you’re being harmed by a good policy, then you must truly deserve it, because if you didn’t, we’d be obliged to abandon a policy that on balance brings way more good.
I prefer to explicitly acknowledge who my favoured policies harm, but for many, that ends in paralysis.
It’s called growing up and it takes several years. It’s during those years that voluntary social communities among our own kind are usually best for both ourselves and for any other humans, at least for my 14-year old self and his peers.
I would hardly argue that video games are a fount of wholesome life lessons that improve our youth(I’d be hard pressed to think of any positive life lessons I absorbed from them); but I think you may be giving them too much credit as being capable teachers of the skills involved in harassment:
Games certainly do use competitive structures and simulations of violence, sometimes team coordinated; but the use of competition as a motivation is something they share with an enormous variety of activities (often even if someone tries to thwart it; as in the mostly-not-successful attempts to get children playing team sports to stop focusing on their rank and look at how everyone is participating and enjoying…); and they lean so heavily on violence as a gameplay element in no small part because simulating social interaction is hard(it’s a heroic effort if you hand-generate all the dialogue trees; and automated natural language interaction isn’t really there yet). Also because doing otherwise is hard; games tend to be hugely reductive about problem solving: objectives are usually clear cut; the world contains small numbers of tools(many of them guns) with well defined properties and capabilities; even ‘social’ things like NPC interaction in RPGs are usually dried down to “speech check”.
Anyone trying to harass actual people(and avoid the firing line themselves) based on video game knowledge would be so out of their depth compared to someone with a standard middle school education in cruelty that it would be closer to a category error than a failure.
That said, there are some less savory game-adjacent/gaming-facilitated things that can hook you up with the wrong people and help you practice the wrong lessons:
Whether it’s just your casual voice-chat buddies or a more formal clan, you can easily develop an “unsupervised assholes without moderating influences spur each other on” interaction. Not notably different than what you can do at a frat or on a team with a coach who thinks bullying makes you man up; but definitely can and does happen in player/player interaction.
There is also the phenomenon of ‘griefing’. Again a thing you do in games; but substantially metagame: a combination of exploiting the game rules to minimize the enjoyment of the target player at the game layer while typically also attacking them at a social level (unless no communications channel exists). This is a real thing; and some griefers are really nasty pieces of work; but it’s important to note how effective briefing is heavily metagame: “I shoot you a lot” isn’t griefing; because(as you noted) violence is low consequence and respawns routine. Details vary by game; but the griefer has to act in the most game-ruining way, not the most maximum-sim-violence way in order to ruin the games for the target; and generally has to couple this with solid general purpose bullying techniques.
(Please note, none of the above is to deny that games are were a lot of really terrible people met and encouraged one another to further awfulness; just to note that game mechanics themselves are of little use in teaching any social tactic(whether bullying or more noble skills); and the super-toxic meta can work on top of games without any in-game murderspreeing.
Just to clarify, putting my response to your question was meant to combine into “Should we care about them? No, but we might anyway” in the same sense as “Should I eat this entire stack of profiteroles?”
I’m sure this is the case for some toxic gamers, but not all. I’m a woman and I’ve been gaming since before most of these guys were sperm in their dads’ sacks. I’ve paid my dues. I play the “acceptable” games. They still harass me and try to push me out. They just want gaming to be a shitty bro clubhouse.
