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Some in depth commentary/rants: Liz Ryerson: On Right-Wing Videogame Extremism http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2014/08/on-right-wing-videogame-extremism.html http

• angersock 12y ago
  A much better read about gamers and what's probably the big problem: http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1574 http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1574 ~ The posts you've listed pull in a lot of "oh no 4chan is evil" and honestly a lot of fear and victim rhetoric unrelated to the games industry proper--bad stuff, to be sure, but hardly limited to games. It's strange to see people being so shocked (shocked!) that many people are perfectly willing to be shitbags to one another, especially when the stakes are so low. It reminds one of interclique bullying of girls in school. ~ One of the biggest annoyances I've got is this notion in the articles of "The games, they are more inclusive, more loving, more hugbox!". That's horseshit. Games in the 80s and 90s were more honest in some ways, more open in their characters and stories. MUDs and chatrooms and whatnot allowed people to play as whomever and whatever they wanted. Ultima Online, even old Zork...so much flexibility and promise. Once upon a time you could actually do serious academic anthropology on online communities--beyond, you know, optimizing marketing. People wrote essays about online rape, about offline death, about all sorts of things and how the real and virtual intertwined. It was a hell of a lot more optimistic than what we've got now. That's the problem: gamers are a hyperconsumerist group, and have become very sensitive (in some cases) to pandering and marketing...and when new games or titles spring up using inclusiveness or niche-audience or whatever as a growth hack, they are apt to call the games out. And this is a shame, because some games genuinely are trying to explore these places. ~ Another note on cultural identity. Society has spent the last decade and a half alternately pushing socially-irresponsible games onto young men and then making them out to be manchildren if they have this hobby. We haven't made more jobs, we haven't made less debt, we haven't stopped marketing designed to pander to young men, we haven't sought to constructively reintegrate effectively a lost generation of males into some magical new equality-focused paradise (which doesn't exist, but that's beside the point)...and yet, when we attack their last bastion of acceptance and belonging, we're shocked (shocked!) that they become angry and fight back as best they can against some barely-understood antagonist. I can not and will not defend individual acts of rudeness and abuse, but we need to do some serious thinking about the conditions that led up to this point--and the truth I believe lies more with consumerism, marketing, and societal pressure than some simple notion of "gamers are finally getting the purifying light of ~social justice~ and crying like manbabies".