You Don't Look Like a Gamer: On Toxicity, Gatekeeping, & Women Who Share Gaming | Hacker News Reader

You Don't Look Like a Gamer: On Toxicity, Gatekeeping, & Women Who Share Gaming

gardinerbryant.com

The first thing that socially excluded nerds do after they find a community that accepts them is, of course, raise barriers and gates to keep out other people who don't confirm to their particular monoculture.

Which is a shame. It's a digital medium, it's not a limited consumable, you should derive nothing but joy from other people sharing your hobby.

It is getting better, though. Every year, it feels like there are more and more spaces with a cardinal rule - if your behaviour on the net, makes other people feel unwelcome - you are not welcome.

Virtually every community excludes people in one form or another. Describing this as a fault of “socially excluded nerds” is a weak ad hominem. Subcultures have a right to be monocultures if they like.

The Boy Scouts of America, for instance, were weak & foolish to allow girls to join. Men’s clubs exist for a reason, just as women’s clubs do. Sanctimoniously valorizing “everyone is welcome” as an unqualified good is foolhardy.

Except for the "Boy" part being explicitly stated... There is a distinction between safety, discrimination and inclusion.

I personally loathe the kind of shithead bullies highlighted in the article. It's not a crowd I like and it's not the kind of crowd I associate with and in fact they're the kind of dickheads that I have a rather consistent streak of dismissing and actively degrading. In that, I am the majority. These shitheels have little genuine clout or influence in broader communities. The wheat tends to separate itself from the chaff. Isolating a few social media examples of pig-headedness ought not be used as a broader indictment. If some fellas wanna start a discord called "real gamers no wannabes no sluts" then, well, I hope they find some sort of satisfaction there.

Yep, ego is another problem

not sure exactly what that’s supposed to mean

In any activity, once you become better, you start to think you are above everyone else aka you become a d...

That rule is a rule that excludes many socially excluded nerds. So if there are more and more spaces like that, then the nerds that those spaces exclude, are probably going to go make new communities and attempt to keep out the people who just excluded them.

The nerds have reason to believe that if their community accepts new people, eventually they will be excluded from their own community by the most popular newcomers. That's the whole reason they started their own exclusive community in the first place.

I wouldn't want to live life like a Sentinelese tribesman, I think the uncontacted tribes in Sentinel island would be happier in the long run if they integrated to the global community. But I understand why they don't.

This is the point of the article though.

These aren't "newcomers".

These are people in the same tribe being excluded or hazed for superficial reasons, nothing related to their shared interests and nerdiness over a subject.

If they were in the same tribe they wouldn’t be excluded. Unless you move the goalposts of what the tribe is.

I'm sure we can all think of simpler solutions to that problem than 'NO COOTIES'.

The exclusion they practice is not an exclusion over values and interests, which is why they didn't fit into mainstream culture. It's one of immutable identity.

Which is completely fucked, and has no excuse in a public space and forum. None at all.

>The nerds have reason to believe that if their community accepts new people, eventually they will be excluded from their own community by the most popular newcomers.

Yeah because they make other people feel unwelcome lmao. Being dicks gets them booted.

Just like blacks or gays should derive joy from people stealing their dress and lingo? Why? We create communities to find like-minded people who enjoy the same hobbies. Claiming that they "should be" anything is unhinged and part of the reason they hate you so much.

You are just ignoring reality and pretending that because the label is the same that the implementation is too. No, they don't share hobbies, they share the barely share the label and have polluted the term to the point that it's unusable.

In the past gamers were exited for new engines, pushing forward graphics and gameplay into the unknown. Now we all just use the same engines and "gamers" are excited that their niche subculture unrelated to gaming is painted on the 15-year-old engine. There is nothing "gatekeeping" gamers other than your own interest in games, if you don't have any genuine interest in games then you aren't a gamer, it's really that simple. Compare the behavior of Eminem and Vanilla Ice from the start to the peak of their career (background, come-up, acknowledging the White elephant in the room, co-sign/credibility).

What did we get for gaming? A hostile corporate takeover and femwashing and then the total collapse to were people only play a handful of forever games and indie titles. People claim that identity matters, that's not true, participation matters. If you are gay/bi but don't interact with the gay/bi community out of some prejudice or you are closeted you shouldn't feel justified co-opting gay culture when it becomes profitable. Similarly if you game, but thought that was wack nerd shit and you would never tell anybody beforehand (men&women, but mostly men), but now that there is money it you want a slice then you are just an exploiter.

So "blacks" and "gays" (black people and gay people) can't be gamers?

All he brings up are social media comments, which may have been mildly representative of people more than a decade ago, but in the present-day are widely understood to be completely immaterial.

A few years back, in one of my social media forums, I made an offhand joke about "it's about ethics in videogame journalism," since I figured that I wasn't in a toxic gaming community and that, you know, GamerGate was a thing of the past that wasn't representative of anyone actually participating in today's conversations. Cue someone who got very upset about the idea that GamerGate had any misogyny at all about it and the next hour or so of discussion descended into frantic attempts to defend the idea that it wasn't tinged with misogyny.

No, the underlying group of toxic gamers is still alive and kicking today, even if they may not be entirely visible in your circles.

There is currently a lot noise being generated because people noticed that Anita Sarkeesian consulted on Slay the Spire 2 (an amazing game, by the way). The main subreddit for GamerGate is also still very active. Those people never went away and they never figured out that they were tilting at windmills

Turds will continue to be turds. What's reassuring is that normal people have largely stopped giving their nonsense the time of day.

What's less reassuring is that all those kids grew up and are now voting.

I find it odd that the negative posts the author deputizes are pretty downvoted. The Reddit thread in particular has the reply calling the commenter out having significantly more upvotes. The twitter post in the screenshot has no engagement. I doubt these got surfaced in any meaningful way to other users.

That isn’t to say the author is wrong, exactly, but you can Chinese Robber Fallacy any kind of toxicity on social media these days. What I’ve found matters a lot more in communities is active moderation against bad behavior. Even the author acknowledges these posts got removed, but treats it like a bookend as though it’s an admission of failure.

However, talking about the importance of actively curating community isn’t as interesting, I guess. Mods continue to be the least appreciated job on the internet.

PS love you dang.

Part of the problem seems to be imposing labels and identities on yourself and others.

There's a saying that labels make you dumber and the (largely downvoted) comments mentioned in the article demonstrate this.

Labels are good, they help categorize and provide perspectives. Just try to have many of them not one or two :D

[flagged]

Well if you want to normalize playing video games, stop posting "I am such a nuurrrdd" posts with crooked glasses, face front and center and pad/console visible in the background.

Aside, I could not care less if the teen celebrity of the day is being blasted for reason x-y-z on social media.

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