cross-posted from: https://lemmy.perthchat.org/post/3844
At least the general assumption seems to be that it’s cis het caucasian dudes. If nothing else, a homo trans dude might sound the exact same as the cishet caucasian population and seem to be cishet.
If gamer communities had more people who sounded foreign or female, there would be less extremism.
I think this is probably an important part of it, but I’ve been thinking about this recently and I think there are some other factors as well. This isn’t particularly well researched, although I’ve read some interested articles about the alt-right pipelines and that sort of this, this is just my own musings especially about how the right tends to weaponize nostalgia.
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Nostalgia - Gamer communities have a strong sense of Nostalgia, looking back at some previous golden age of games as the golden age that they wish they could go back to. Like other backward looking groups, I think this leaves them vulnerable to right-wing propaganda, e.g. “Gaming was so much better before all of this woke nonsense”. It’s the start of a radicalization pipeline. When you start to think that minorities or diversity is the reason the thing you have built your identity around is getting worse, it’s a natural pipeline to right wing ideology.
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Gatekeeping - Gamer communities have always been very prone to gatekeeping. In my mind it’s not hard to connect the dots from, “you’re not a gamer if you didn’t love FF7 as a kid” to “girls can’t be gamers” to more explicit racial/gender hate and homophobia, because the people who gaming catered to in those “golden ages” were overwhelmingly white middle-class boys so the unconscious mental image of the in group “Gamers” is white and male.
I think you see these elements in play in Gamergate, which used the already existing tendency toward misogyny in gaming communities, as well as a strong sense of nostalgia, to radicalize a lot of gamers into alt-right ideologies with a paper thin veneer of defending “ethics” but actually just attacking women and minorities in gaming spaces.
As I’m re-reading this, it occurs to me that point 2 is pretty close to your own point. I think the things are related, a lack of diversity in gaming communities made gatekeeping worse and gatekeeping made lack of diversity worse.
nice write up! Have 1 lemmy bux!
I’m not sure I can trust this currency, where’s the complicated distributed consensus mechanism? I don’t have to light a forest on fire to interact with it! The value isn’t even fluctuating wildly! 0/5 stars /s
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Capitalism is particularly effective at socially isolating men.
Gamers are privileged (game systems are expensive and PCs are expensiverer) on top of the white/masc element, but game addiction also incentivizes one to not touch grass. Without dialectical experiences of the real world, it is easy to fall into self-serving idealism.
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Being a group of 1 demographic doesn’t imply right-wing? I don’t think your logic is sound here.
I didn’t write my post out correctly, but more like fertile rercruitment grounds
I think right wing extremism in gaming communities is exaggerated to justify authoritarian actions.
