Not to mention that you'll probably end up with death threats or worse if you say something that one gamer group dislikes. The behaviour of gamers on social media has been awful beyond belief these last few years.
I still remember her crying to me over coffee about how much her new job sucked. In her words: video gamers are monsters. Apparently they had tracked her down because she had her job title on her facebook page, and even though her facebook page was private, they were able to get some insider at facebook to do the search for them. Once they found her name, they made her life a living hell. Why? Because one of the manufacturers ended up shipping fewer units than they initially promised, and so she had to delay a couple dozen preorders by a week.
Even if I were an avid gamer, there is no way I would work in the industry.
She should report it, with the timeline of events. People I know at Facebook say there is zero tolerance for this kind of thing.
The anime industry is the same way, and I'd imagine has a lot of crossover in the gamers/fans. There's been a recent #MeToo incident in the anime world that I'm 2 degrees of separation from, and the horror stories of what the people directly involved have had to suffer are absolutely appalling. The attacks are anywhere from drive-by posts to public social accounts all the way to death threats (which are being directly turned over to the FBI). I worked in the anime world directly for 18 months. By 6 months in, I knew I didn't fit in. By 12 months in, I was actively looking for something else. At 18 months, I was finally at a new job. That was the shortest stint on my resume.
MK Co-creator Ed Boon expressed him sympathies on Twitter and a number of fans replied to him, asking why he wasn't including specific characters in the next installment in the series.
The absurdity of this is numbing on so many levels.
I can't help but think that this is just the effect of gaming becoming a part of mainstream media. It absorbs the culture of what mainstream internet culture is. A place where the loudest, ugliest voices stand out in the crowd.
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.
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.
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.
I find toxicity is often attached to multiplayer games of the competitive variety with player interaction.
There aren't any gaming hooligan groups I've heard by any means.
For online toxicity it may be a bit closer, but again, it'd be interesting to see the breakdown by hobby or interest. Stuff like the last series of Doctor Who and Ghostbusters and Star Wars have certainly seen a few controversies recently, and it seems reactions to films/online film criticism can at least as acerbic as anything said about games.
You can try to limit the scope of the term so it doesn't apply to effectively everyone with access to either a computer or smart phone, but care must be used so that it doesn't become a fishing expedition as the criteria eventually settle to be whatever is needed to obtain the desired result (this is a significant problem anytime one looks for trends in large data sets).
Looking at you /r/justrolledintotheshop and /r/woodworking.
i'd say biased by receiving a lot of death threats.
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:
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.
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.