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Comment by kabacha | Hacker News Reader

Everytime I read "for gamers" I can't help but throw up a bit in my mouth.

What's up with this obscure tribalism? I'm having trouble coming up with any other mass-hobby that has such a sour tribalistic identity.

I love video-games and board games but defining yourself by type of mass entertainment you consume is just so dystopian to me.

> dating for TV watchers

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I dunno your comment feels like someone being overly dramatic to try and win internet points.

Would you have this same reaction if someone said they were creating a social network for programmers? Music Lovers? Runners? Cooks?

Saying that you are creating something that is targeted to a group of people is perfectly fine... complaining that people identify as that group of people seems silly.

I don't know about OP, but I'd feel the same way about any of those. It's assuming that everything about your personality fits into some stereotype. It's one thing to create a social network to find other people to play games with, it's another to assume that if you play games, then you must have a specific personality/lifestyle that is appealing to other people who also happen to play games. It's just a hobby, your identity doesn't have to revolve around being a "gamer".

Do you keep your files in various directory structures or do you have a flat root that everything goes into?

I don't identify ONLY as a gamer... I'm a gamer, a Dad, a Canadian, a jr developer, a painter, etc etc etc. If I feel like consuming content about a specific one of those subjects it's useful when they call out who they are targeted for.

You are confusing the use of labels or even self identifying as belonging to those labels with the attitudes of those who are in those groups.

You're taking a vocal minority and painting the entire group with it ... think of other areas in life where you wouldn't do that...

Some hobbies consume a lot of your time, some less. I hike, climb, go running, ski, snowboard, etc.

I would say I'm a climber, since that takes up a lot of my time. I will spend 3 evenings a week in the climbing gym and often go to the mountains on weekends.

If I date somebody it's a big bonus for me if they climb, too, it makes scheduling together time much easier.

I'm not a gamer, but most gamers I know spend significant amount of time on gaming, so much so that it often crowds out other social activities (which is ok). If a gamer wants to be together with a gamer the seems reasonable to me.

> It's assuming that everything about your personality fits into some stereotype.

It's not "every"thing, but "some"thing. It's just a simple patternmatching-mechnism to filter out people who might be interessted in whaterver you are selling. Nothing prevents those people to also match other patterns or even indicate that it's forbidden to match multiple patterns.

What if I'm an audiophile programmer who has won multiple marathons and likes to cook as a hobby ? What then ? Interests and identities are fluid that's why trapping people in boxes never works in long term

Who’s trapped? You can opt into this if you’d like to meet other gamers. If not, do nothing.

your making it sound like someone is applying the label to you and forcing you to take actions based on it. It's self identifying ... you can be all those things and your not "trapped".

This idea — that who you are abides somehow outside of what you do — is the defining fantasy of our culture, and it appeals particularly to children. The world of the middle-schooler is a world of types. My son talks incessantly about VSCO girls and Karens and other categories of people he has learned about from YouTube. He described a classmate as “the kind of person who borrows your pencil and doesn’t give it back,” i.e. she borrowed his pencil and didn’t give it back. For a while he tried to propagate a type of his own invention, “the Suzan,” whose behavior was ill-defined but tracked closely with that of my mother of the same name. It did not catch on, and eventually he concluded that he was not the kind of person who could come up with memes.

https://theoutline.com/post/8627/raising-a-teen-personality-...

I don’t like identifying myself with labels like that. It feels too prescriptive and restricting. I’d prefer to describe what I believe and what I do.

That said, I feel that this usage of “for gamers” is pretty innocuous. I take it to be a shorthand for “this is for people who are really into games”.

Maybe it is an issue of linguistics. I've noticed then whenever you have 1 word-defintion for an activity people ten d to be much more tribal: foodies, gamers, hiphopheads are all communities that are often infamous for taking themselves way too seriously.

I agree that tends to be problematic. Especially labeling yourself in that way.

In-group behavior is surely enchanced when said group has a name? It might even create a feedback loop of discovery and self-identification.

You are currently on Hacker News, which is designed to appeal to a certain demographic that includes you.

I agree with you. But I think Twitch's angle here is that most hardcore gamers are usually the types to stay at home. They see a market to connect people that usually are not lent to social interaction.

Another word for what you’re describing is simply a subculture. Which for gaming in particular, is a completely optional part of the experience.

I've been thinking about this recently, and personally, I find some weird sense of empowerment in identifying as a gamer. All my life I've been thinking of gaming as some sort of defective personality trait, like overeating in reaction to stress or being lazy. And as far as gaming has made it in the public sphere, I still don't think it's really respected as a hobby. If anything, it's much worse than it used to be, because now people will also assume that you're a racist/sexist/xenophobe.

I imagine there's a similar parallel in being a "hacker". When a hacker is a kid, they're rebellious because they're intelligent and bored in their schoolwork[1]. And they like to take things apart and figure out how they work, and they're not totally understood by the rest of society that just wants them to settle down and conform to a set of social rules. I imagine that that kid would find the identity as a hacker to be empowering. And I think that is empowering because it's finally saying to this kid that his behavior is actually useful and good for the world, if he can harness it in the right way.

One final small point: I don't think that people necessarily always "consume" video games. Building games, like Minecraft/Factorio/Terraria/Starbound/Oxygen_Not_Included/Satisfactory/Stardew_Valley don't seem particularly consumptive to me. I struggle to identify competitive games as consumptive either. If I play a game of soccer with friends, I don't say that I'm "consuming" the game of soccer. So why shouldn't the same apply to Fortnite? Then there are single player games that don't fit the builder profile. But a lot of single player games aren't necessarily consumptive either. Recently I've been playing Dark Souls 1, and while some of my experience in that game could be called consumptive, I don't think all of it does. A lot of that game is figuring out how it works, building a strategy to combat a boss, and what I'm doing there is not exactly consumptive.

[1] Just like gamers: https://youtu.be/fJOm1zXvVcs?t=277

Are people that play video games defining themselves? Or are other people defining the gamers and they've taken the title for themselves?

I think there's a good mix of both.

There's definitely a marketing push from tech manifacturers-and-like with messages such as "you need to use this gamer mouse if you're a real gamer" but there's also a lot of tribalistic self-segregation. Especially in discussion communities.

It's very apparent when you browse various gaming communities on reddit, for example my favorite anecode woul be r/gaymers - it's gay people who play video-games — the correlation here is a real headscratcher.

It's much more extreme on platforms like Discord, I've been kicked out from few discord communities because I was a casual gamer and didn't identify myself hard enough with "the brand": "why are you even here if you don't dedicate yourself to gaming 24/7"

I don't mean to generalize and gaming communities on average are friendly, fun and enjoyable but the extremes are definitely very vocal and sometimes seem to be steering the medium too much.

The tech marketing part makes some sense though. The requirements for gaming are often higher in many ways that people would require for casual use from their devices.

I think these extreme gaming communities are set up with gate keeping in mind. Many people that play video games have been a part of communities that eventually just die because "casuals" take it over. That can be frustrating especially for competitive games. I think communities like that are fine, but they aren't meant for everyone.

I’m surprised you didn’t mention gamergate.

Gamergate in no way defines what it means to be a gamer. But I feel like that one can’t talk about the term “gamer” as a cultural phenomenon without gamergate’s presence being felt lurking somewhere in the shadows.

It’s hard to be proud of liking games, perhaps distinctly so as a man, when so many men are such poor examples of good sportsmanship when playing with others. I’m not really going to put too fine a point on it because it applies in many contexts surrounding gaming, including journalism, but also in livestreams and online play. People can talk tough without any intention of gatekeeping, but interpretations and effects matter as much as intent. Harming others because of their gaming or association with gaming isn’t fun, and it isn’t part of the game. Just leave it on the field.

Am I old? I feel like I shouldn’t even have to say all of this, and this isn’t directed at OP but more at gamers generally, and friends of gamers.

no other hobby is as oppressing as being a gamer.

That level of hyperbole is insane. I get far, far more grief about being interested in rocks and geology than I do gaming.

Gaming is mainstream. A huge multi billion dollar industry caters to gamers every need and desire.

They're joking.

There's a whole #GamersRiseUp meme that makes fun of gamers acting like they are an oppressed group. r/GamersRiseUp has been banned, but it was a satire version of r/gaming.

You get rape- and deaththreats for being interested in rocks and geology? How common is doxxing and people getting killed "by accident" in that community? Because as sad as it is, this are the lower levels of the gaming-world.

It's the behaviour of any subculture at scale.

I doubt that. I know many subcultures and yes, they all have a level of toxity, but usually not to this extreme level. But to be fair, this level of harm is more focused to specific sub-subcultures in gaming. Probably "gaming" as a culture is to broad definend to really explain this things.

In terms of risk of death from other people, rocks and geology is likely vastly more risky due to economic incentives. Gaming gets bad publicity simply due to scale, but on average it’s extremely tame.

Being a gamer while female?

ducks

[Disclaimer’: not female, pro gamers of any or no gender]

‘ yes this joke has a disclaimer. no, this isn’t part of the disclaimer, but part of the joke

I feel like being part of the KKK counts as a more oppressing hobby. Or did you mean oppressed? In which case, how did you arrive at that idea?

The hobby is oppressing you or whatever subset of people you are inserting yourself into is oppressing you.

I don't see how simply being a fan of games, playing them, collecting them, or creating them can be oppressive on it's own.

Hobby =/= Community

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