4 ms·

No, he meant gamers. That doesn't absolve others from bad behaviour but "gamers", i.e. group-conscious, very online, hardcore players congregating on /v/ and ma

by jcora 8y ago

No, he meant gamers. That doesn't absolve others from bad behaviour but "gamers", i.e. group-conscious, very online, hardcore players congregating on /v/ and many other such places, are probably _the_ most vitrolitic group on the Internet rn., save for those parts of the alt-right that don't play games.

whatshisface 8y ago
How could you ever hope to measure and compare the relative vitriol of internet communities? Anyone's perception will be heavily biased by what the media likes to report on (drama on Potted Plant Watering.com is a lot less likely to make the news than tweets about violent video games, which are on the list of talking points already). The most vitriolic ones are probably sub-forums that we've never even heard of.
- lawlessone 8y ago
  >Anyone's perception will be heavily biased i'd say biased by receiving a lot of death threats.
- twic 8y ago
  It would be a fascinating project, but i confess i have no idea how you'd quantify the vitriol. I suspect that the posters here arguing that gamers are the worse are not familiar with some of the shenanigans going on elsewhere, for example: https://fanlore.org/wiki/What_happened_with_hivliving https://fanlore.org/wiki/What_happened_with_hivliving
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
CzechTech 8y ago
alt right and gamers... the only thing you're missing is trump
dd36 8y ago
"teenagers"
- Loughla 8y ago
  I disagree. The folks that I see who spew the most hate are in their mid-20's to late-30's. Maybe that's just me confusing anecdotal evidence for truth? But I believe just hand-waving and dismissing it as 'teenagers' is not giving this problem the attention it really does deserve.
  - Insanity 8y ago
    I hope you are wrong but I am not convinced that you are. Whenever I encounter such behaviour I just assume it's a teenager without thinking about it.
    - logfromblammo 8y ago
      The environment is such that the only people who can get wound up that tightly are people with a lot of free time and no full-time jobs or family obligations. Students. People on permanent disability, for whom the socialization built into the game is their easiest route to socialization with anyone at all. Retirees. Otaku. Gold/character farmers that make money from the game in violation of the ToS. Most people with full-time jobs and families don't have time to get all that worked up over a community built around one or more fantasy worlds. It still happens sometimes, though.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
    Mid 20s to late 30s (aka millennials) are the largest demographic group. Assuming poor gaming behavior equally impacts all ages, by their sheer size, of course this age group would be most visible.
SkyBelow 8y ago
Is there evidence that gamers are the most vitriolic? Seems a common accusation but not a commonly sourced accusation, especially with a source that controls other variables. I know there are plenty of anecdotes, but there are such anecdotes about other groups as well and it could be that vitriolic from other groups isn't given equal coverage.
- jsgo 8y ago
  Dunno, seems to me a subset definitely took ethics in games journalism to an extreme. Are they the most vitriolic? Don't know. I tend to avoid such groups so I can't say. But they definitely made a bit of noise.
  - astrodust 8y ago
    Watch out man or the knitters will come for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarn_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarn_bombing
    - jsgo 8y ago
      haha, never heard of that before but that's comical. The socks on the statue is gold.
  - newsgremlin 8y ago
    The problem is when you view that extreme subset as the whole group because of an opinion and point of view that happens to align.
- astrodust 8y ago
  Many other groups are, based on the Reddit data, full of "gamers", like alt-right (/pol) politics and pits of despair like The Donald.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Just like all the other subreddits. That's a poor way to associate anything.
logfromblammo 8y ago
...the gamers that have specifically been cultivated as fans by the AAA distributors and their studios. For years. There are plenty of people who consider themselves gamers that won't touch "gamers" and their community with an 11-foot pole. I am particularly miffed about the current gaming business environment, wherein many games require a constant network connection, force you to play with strangers, and set up the gameplay to encourage frequent in-game purchases. And you can't pause it for a week and pick it back up right where you left it. Why would the major distributors care about people like me, who will wait until all planned DLC is released, then buy the complete package on sale and then not buy anything else for 6 months, when they can string along addicted superfans who will pay $15 per month, forever, and also take the place of well-programmed NPC scripting and AI by being a vicious live-human opponent for everyone else that plays? See Fallout 76 for an egregious example of this. There are no NPCs in it. So the intentional experience for players is to wander around an empty-feeling world, full of mutant animals whose main challenge is to kill them before they eat you, getting quests from holotapes, and to have human griefers--who are bored with the game, but still either want to get their money's worth out of what they paid for it, or to punish the developers by ruining the gaming experience for others--pestering them constantly to activate the dueling function or launch nukes at each other. I'm not going to subject myself to that, or pay money to allow my misery to be someone else's fun. But I had zero hesitation whatsoever in snapping up West of Loathing, or its DLC, Gun Manor. That's single-player, offline, pausable, scripted, funny, and has simple mechanics with clear win conditions. No online leaderboards or competitive mechanics or guilds or clans or PvP means you don't ever have to play with people who make the game less fun for you. If there's no meta-game, you never have to touch the out-of-band communities. The "gamers" become irrelevant. Maybe someone writes a FAQ with spoilers, that you might look up if you get stuck.
- Nursie 8y ago
  Haha.... somewhat familiar from my time playing Ark:Survival Evolved. On the PvP servers, you needed to be part of a huge tribe, otherwise a huge tribe would find you and wipe you out. At the very least they would 'own' the servers and demand tribute, on threat of complete wiping. The megatribes themselves seemed to be run as slave labour. No taking a week or even an evening off. It didn't help that the game seemed to be written around grindy, long-duration tasks. On PvE, where you couldn't destroy anyone else's stuff, people would jsut spam the entire map with the cheapest thing they could build, denying others the ability to play. Any criticism of this in the game forums was quashed by the studio. And on reddit was usually met with superfans screaming that "You're just not hardcore enough" or "You're just sore you didn't get there first" or "Of course you can't have good stuff in the game unless you put in 40 hours a week..." F*ck that, frankly.
astrodust 8y ago
"Gamer" has come to mean the worst aspects of the online gaming community, like having unhealthy obsessions, of slamming people for their appearance, sexuality, gender, or anything that sets them apart from "normal" gamers. It's trash talking that's been weaponized and perverted into something deeply dangerous. That whole scene should be burned to the ground starting with 4chan. If your community can't keep your members in check, can't provide good examples, you're going to slowly corrupt and mutate into something you can't control. It happens every time.
newsgremlin 8y ago
The term gamer means nothing anymore. The only requisite is to have an interest in playing games. There's no conditions attached to the point where people argue over what is a "real gamer". The only way to discern gamers as different "groups" is by what games, forums, sites, and platforms gamers frequent. Reddit, 4chan, ign, eurogamer, pcgamer, kotaku etc. I find toxicity is often attached to multiplayer games of the competitive variety with player interaction.
manigandham 8y ago
There are billions of gamers worldwide. It is just people.

by jcora 8y ago

whatshisface 8y ago

How could you ever hope to measure and compare the relative vitriol of internet communities? Anyone's perception will be heavily biased by what the media likes to report on (drama on Potted Plant Watering.com is a lot less likely to make the news than tweets about violent video games, which are on the list of talking points already). The most vitriolic ones are probably sub-forums that we've never even heard of.

lawlessone 8y ago
>Anyone's perception will be heavily biased i'd say biased by receiving a lot of death threats.
twic 8y ago
It would be a fascinating project, but i confess i have no idea how you'd quantify the vitriol. I suspect that the posters here arguing that gamers are the worse are not familiar with some of the shenanigans going on elsewhere, for example: https://fanlore.org/wiki/What_happened_with_hivliving https://fanlore.org/wiki/What_happened_with_hivliving
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

CzechTech 8y ago

alt right and gamers... the only thing you're missing is trump

dd36 8y ago

"teenagers"

Loughla 8y ago
I disagree. The folks that I see who spew the most hate are in their mid-20's to late-30's. Maybe that's just me confusing anecdotal evidence for truth? But I believe just hand-waving and dismissing it as 'teenagers' is not giving this problem the attention it really does deserve.
- Insanity 8y ago
  I hope you are wrong but I am not convinced that you are. Whenever I encounter such behaviour I just assume it's a teenager without thinking about it.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    The environment is such that the only people who can get wound up that tightly are people with a lot of free time and no full-time jobs or family obligations. Students. People on permanent disability, for whom the socialization built into the game is their easiest route to socialization with anyone at all. Retirees. Otaku. Gold/character farmers that make money from the game in violation of the ToS. Most people with full-time jobs and families don't have time to get all that worked up over a community built around one or more fantasy worlds. It still happens sometimes, though.
- JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
  Mid 20s to late 30s (aka millennials) are the largest demographic group. Assuming poor gaming behavior equally impacts all ages, by their sheer size, of course this age group would be most visible.

SkyBelow 8y ago

Is there evidence that gamers are the most vitriolic? Seems a common accusation but not a commonly sourced accusation, especially with a source that controls other variables. I know there are plenty of anecdotes, but there are such anecdotes about other groups as well and it could be that vitriolic from other groups isn't given equal coverage.

jsgo 8y ago
Dunno, seems to me a subset definitely took ethics in games journalism to an extreme. Are they the most vitriolic? Don't know. I tend to avoid such groups so I can't say. But they definitely made a bit of noise.
- astrodust 8y ago
  Watch out man or the knitters will come for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarn_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarn_bombing
  - jsgo 8y ago
    haha, never heard of that before but that's comical. The socks on the statue is gold.
- newsgremlin 8y ago
  The problem is when you view that extreme subset as the whole group because of an opinion and point of view that happens to align.
astrodust 8y ago
Many other groups are, based on the Reddit data, full of "gamers", like alt-right (/pol) politics and pits of despair like The Donald.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Just like all the other subreddits. That's a poor way to associate anything.

logfromblammo 8y ago

...the gamers that have specifically been cultivated as fans by the AAA distributors and their studios. For years. There are plenty of people who consider themselves gamers that won't touch "gamers" and their community with an 11-foot pole. I am particularly miffed about the current gaming business environment, wherein many games require a constant network connection, force you to play with strangers, and set up the gameplay to encourage frequent in-game purchases. And you can't pause it for a week and pick it back up right where you left it. Why would the major distributors care about people like me, who will wait until all planned DLC is released, then buy the complete package on sale and then not buy anything else for 6 months, when they can string along addicted superfans who will pay $15 per month, forever, and also take the place of well-programmed NPC scripting and AI by being a vicious live-human opponent for everyone else that plays? See Fallout 76 for an egregious example of this. There are no NPCs in it. So the intentional experience for players is to wander around an empty-feeling world, full of mutant animals whose main challenge is to kill them before they eat you, getting quests from holotapes, and to have human griefers--who are bored with the game, but still either want to get their money's worth out of what they paid for it, or to punish the developers by ruining the gaming experience for others--pestering them constantly to activate the dueling function or launch nukes at each other. I'm not going to subject myself to that, or pay money to allow my misery to be someone else's fun. But I had zero hesitation whatsoever in snapping up West of Loathing, or its DLC, Gun Manor. That's single-player, offline, pausable, scripted, funny, and has simple mechanics with clear win conditions. No online leaderboards or competitive mechanics or guilds or clans or PvP means you don't ever have to play with people who make the game less fun for you. If there's no meta-game, you never have to touch the out-of-band communities. The "gamers" become irrelevant. Maybe someone writes a FAQ with spoilers, that you might look up if you get stuck.

Nursie 8y ago
Haha.... somewhat familiar from my time playing Ark:Survival Evolved. On the PvP servers, you needed to be part of a huge tribe, otherwise a huge tribe would find you and wipe you out. At the very least they would 'own' the servers and demand tribute, on threat of complete wiping. The megatribes themselves seemed to be run as slave labour. No taking a week or even an evening off. It didn't help that the game seemed to be written around grindy, long-duration tasks. On PvE, where you couldn't destroy anyone else's stuff, people would jsut spam the entire map with the cheapest thing they could build, denying others the ability to play. Any criticism of this in the game forums was quashed by the studio. And on reddit was usually met with superfans screaming that "You're just not hardcore enough" or "You're just sore you didn't get there first" or "Of course you can't have good stuff in the game unless you put in 40 hours a week..." F*ck that, frankly.

astrodust 8y ago

"Gamer" has come to mean the worst aspects of the online gaming community, like having unhealthy obsessions, of slamming people for their appearance, sexuality, gender, or anything that sets them apart from "normal" gamers. It's trash talking that's been weaponized and perverted into something deeply dangerous. That whole scene should be burned to the ground starting with 4chan. If your community can't keep your members in check, can't provide good examples, you're going to slowly corrupt and mutate into something you can't control. It happens every time.

newsgremlin 8y ago

The term gamer means nothing anymore. The only requisite is to have an interest in playing games. There's no conditions attached to the point where people argue over what is a "real gamer". The only way to discern gamers as different "groups" is by what games, forums, sites, and platforms gamers frequent. Reddit, 4chan, ign, eurogamer, pcgamer, kotaku etc. I find toxicity is often attached to multiplayer games of the competitive variety with player interaction.

manigandham 8y ago

There are billions of gamers worldwide. It is just people.