Hardcore gamer = someone who plays only cinematic grizzed white dude games and/or military fetishizing FPS
Casual gamer = anyone that is not a 15-25 yo male, and/or plays anything outside of the previously mentioned games, especially if those games are colorful.
So basically the gaming community is full of gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery. They make sure they’re the loudest voice heard when anything about games is talked about, and won’t be happy until all games a homogenous stream of bland, hyper-realistic but with a grey filter slog of mindless action with no heart or soul. And don’t you dare force them to read any dialogue or story.
Hardcore gaymer = fighting game enjoyer
Casual
g*merconsoomer = everyone elseI dont understand how MOBAs becomes one of the biggest esports when gameplay consists of farming and the teamfights are full of visual bloats that unless you spend 100 hours reading the wiki including the fcking patch notes you understand absolutely nothing. Like just to give you a glance"buy physical attack because everyone does this and this guy wields a sword" but also stuff like “buy this magical attack because these dagger wielding assassin scales magic attack”. Why is the goddamn dagger considered magical?
Like at least in stuff in counter strike the game despite some other tactics such as lineups it still overall easy to understand (plant the bomb and kill the enemies),.
Epic G!mers got so locked into what Real Pro Esports Take This Seriously Please MOBAs were supposed to be that they bragged about how a foregone conclusion match could drag on for over a half hour and just invite more enraged slur flinging all the while. The “meta” of the entire thing is so bleak and joyless that when I directly asked a few enthusiasts, in person, what they actually enjoy about it, the most common answers were, I kid you not, “the winners make money”
and “the drama; people get so mad.” 
L*ague dropped at the right place at the right time and everybody started chasing the MOBA dragon just like people were trying to chase the WOW dragon.
And then the PUBG/Fortnite dragon.
Same way that Harry Potter became a cultural icon, very fucking aggressive marketing to burn it into peoples brains everywhere they look. This isn’t a joke btw Harry Potter is an example of some of the most aggressive book/mass media marketing ever done and set a precedent for extracting as much capital as one can from a source.
Same way that Harry Potter became a cultural icon, very fucking aggressive marketing to burn it into peoples brains everywhere they look. This isn’t a joke btw Harry Potter is an example of some of the most aggressive book/mass media marketing ever done and set a precedent for extracting as much capital as one can from a source.
Agreed, and as another example, Game of Thrones was the Grown-Ass-Adultman version of the same kind of aggressive pervasive marketing and media exposure. I tried to watch that edgy hog slop many times, including “this part will hook you”
clips recommended by associates, and long after I gave up and wanted to just ignore it I kept getting media blasted, everywhere, even in like doctor’s office waiting rooms, with magazines with front page WHO MURDERFUCKED THEIR WAY TO THE IRON THRONE THIS WEEK?! DAE LE RED WEDDING DAE LE SHAME hog slop smeared all over them.I learned way too much about that show through sheer involuntary oversaturation. It’s like it soaked through my skin.
Yeah GoT was an interesting watch for me during college and was something that was a insta conversation starter whenever you just met someone and knew jackshit about them but were sure they at least watched GoT. It was also pretty amazing to watch it get morphed into another HBO skinemax show with similar asthetics very quickly (then again the books themselves also have some squick as well so GRR doesn’t come off completely clean).
In 1980 something, Nintendo of America made the decision to sell the Nintendo Entertainment System as a gendered toy
This would later be considered a bad idea and roundly mocked
Me playing a gameboy color at age 7
My friend at the time: “Why do you have that, it’s not called a Game GIRL”
CORE MEMORY
Also being called a lesbian for playing Nintendo with the boys in grade school. The nineties, man.
Your friend was a spoothead
I’m so sorry you were friends with young Ben Shapiro
Bro it was the 90s, most little boys were mini Shapiros
They shoulda just called it the Game Child smh.
Was it? I remember it being praised for yeas and “saving the game industry”
gamergate was unironically the mainstream debut of the alt-right and I will stand by that assertion
Yes I agree coupled with the refugee crisis of 2014-15, fash talking points became mainstream.
The way you phrased your comment makes it sound like your take is controversial. Are there really a lot of people who think otherwise?
I had never heard of them until Milo Yannopolous got popular in 2016. Back then, it meant “alternative right” as an opposition to GOP establishment and RINOs. Boy, they sure got a lesson in entryism as every piece of shit in America jumped on the train.
Just as intended from the monsters that made it happen.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/steve-bannon-world-of-warcraft-gold-farming.html
It became more and more intertwined with the right wing as the 2016 election drew closer. Gamer Gate and adjacent communities turned into a pipeline for the alt right, with YouTubers like Sargon of Akkad radicalizing libs into fascists.
I watched it unfold on r/KotakuInAction at the time. It was a weird crossroads for me.
It was a weird crossroads
Same. I was all for severing the ties between gaming journalists and publishers and ending the status quo of paid high review scores, but luckily past-me saw and rejected the misogyny that was also heavily present in those spaces and I didn’t end up turning into a nazi.
I watched it unfold on r/KotakuInAction
You just brought up icky memories
I don’t know if “post-contrarianism” is a term but I wish it was because it describes posts like this one perfectly
Post country music fan
Also yes I fully admit this is a dumb post.
Whoever caused all this shit. Wtf dudes?? Especially cross with the people who made MMOs.
I’ve been hearing The Wife Aggro jokes since I could remember my dad’s dial up modem. My dad made those jokes too.
You can’t escape The Wife Aggro. It’s fucking impossible. If you call it out, you’re the bad guy. That dude is helping his The Wife!!! You don’t even have one, virgin.
Yea there’s a reason why I can barely tolerate playing current WoW with the boys. I won’t even touch classic.
The Wife Aggro is STILL THERE. MAKE IT STOP.
I don’t care that much tbh because while the “gaming community” is indeed dogshit (personally I’ve stopped playing any sort of public multiplayer game since voice audio became the norm anyway), we also seem to be in a golden age of independent awesome video games, including specifically ones with dialogue and story. And the small sub-community of players of those are usually much saner and welcoming.
I remember gaming always being seen as a “boys club” for as long as I can remember. They were thankfully pretty welcoming of me (being a brown guy and all) but girls playing games were either given the m’lady treatment or chastised for making a mistake that would get them seen as being bad at the game. Often both.
The sad part is that there have been girls and women playing and developing games since the beginning but they were mostly pushed into the background, so now they get accused of invading a so-called male space. Can’t win
AFAIK the arcade boom was pretty popular with both men and women, since at that time it was a social hobby and kids were doing a lot of hanging out and hooking up at arcades. It wasn’t until the turn to console gaming, which was primarily an anti-social activity, that video game advertisements started really focusing in on young boys. Nintendo bears a lot of the blame here, since they defined the western market following the big crash, and they saw the NES as exclusively a boys’ toy - but it wasn’t just them of course, in particular I remember the OG XBox’s marketing doing a lot to create a “bro culture”, along with stuff like the channel G4, which I think was created intentionally as a reaction to the previously existing perception of gamers being nerdy.
and they saw the NES as exclusively a boys’ toy
So there’s a bit more to this, if I remember all this correctly, Nintendo couldn’t exactly call the NES a ‘video game console’ when they started selling it in the US because the crash had pretty much made that a really bad financial move to call it as such. And also they had to sell it in the toys section to start with, which has had and still has a lot of segregation between boys and girls toys. And also considering how brick and mortar stores have acted for a long time, they likely had a bit of a hand in this in the way of demanding nintendo to pick if it was a boys toy or a girls toy or else they won’t stock it.
Children (overwhelmingly boys) who played vidya games were nerdy. There was a brief period during the Pac-Man era when vidya games were for everyone, and soon it went into hardcore weirdness. Games got hard and unless you had the patience to play again, and again, and again, and again…you can forget being a part of the crowd. Games with 45 levels when nobody ever got past level 4.
I think a big point is also the transition of everything being so damned online now (not gaming but communities and discourse) that what initially was gaming in the 90s and early 2000s (casual gamers, kid gamers, and then weird grown ass chud adults) were very much compartmentalized and separate. Nowadays with Youtube you had the fallout of gamergate create a self feeding subculture that propagates among dissatisfied mainly white young males who utilize one of their hobbies (gaming) as escapism from all the shit capital loves to do (alienation) and create an exceedingly angry stigma to project on anyone entering “their” space that does not conform. Add in how chuds screech the loudest and angry engagement clicks and comments lead to algorithm feedback and you have one of the worst video genres ever of usually a scruffy bearded angry
being gobsmacked they have to look at a minority in a video game for even a single fucking second but utilizing safe dogwhistles such as “woke” and “sjw” to “debate about it” (though that second one is falling out of style).The entire fake-friend “parasocial” streamer industry is fucked up. It meets a need that terminal stage capitalism established by feeding that need with the social equivalent of high fructose corn syrup. With a little fascist messaging, as a treat.
I hate how a streamer knows I’m a first timer in chat, how theres always “a friend” who gives me a free sub and WELCOME TO THE COMMUNITY. Please ffs can we go back to love of the game lets plays
there was a time when you didn’t need to specify “no commentary” when you searched for a walkthrough
JOIN THE DISCORD 
games mechanics become watered down due to the profit motive and challenging games are fun, this whole thread feels like just contrarianism to spite a vocal minority turning being a HARDCORE GAMERRRRR into a personality trait
Where did I mention difficulty?
if you mean people restricting themselves to “manly” games thats also a loud online minority, i mean nintendo still makes the most popular games out there and stuff like undertale has sold how many millions now? so saying the gaming community™ is “full of gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery” is hard to believe
No, gamers bad.
so saying the gaming community™ is “full of gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery” is hard to believe
what planet are you from
turns on voice chat in TF2
There are literally Nazis
Turns it back off
i mean nintendo still makes the most popular games out there
sorry i dont get mad at people inside my head ig
Both the Smash and Zelda fandoms have plenty of toxic chuds like yourself, ones that show up out of nowhere to concern troll and vomit ableistic bullshit if they feel like their treat is endangered by discussion of it that isn’t 100% support of the status quo.
undertale
Oh yeah, totally no toxic bullshit in the Undertale fandom, either. Never ever.
As an Undertale enjoyer, I can acknowledge that toxic fandom being a problem, unlike you.Go away.
Okay
I agree with your complaints towards the apparent predominant gaming culture. But I also believe that there have never been more indie games that are contrary to that culture or just ambivalent to that culture than ever before.
Yeah the indie community is great. My complaints are more the popular gaming community that was particulaly strident during the PS2, 360 and gamergate era
I will never forgive the gaming community for shitting on Wind Waker when it first came out for being catroony
WW was a fantastic game and the graphics aged gracefully. I replayed it back in 2016 and had a blast.
If someone puts “gamer” on their dating profile tho
G*mers never had a chance.
The 70s saw the development of really old games like Dnd, essentially some STEMlord’s pet project. Many of these ancient games were tied to Dnd, where the reactionary Gary Gygax’s influence in Dnd was completely dominant.
The 80s continued that tradition with games like Rogue and Nethack. This was also when Nintendo exclusively marketed the NES as a “boy toy.” Both of what could be retroactively labeled as indie and AAA gaming were firmly men only. Arcades tended to be dominated by men as well.
The 90s further perpetuated this trend with the console wars between Nintendo and Sega, with Sega pushing really hard as the cool and definitely being played by dudes with 'tude console. If you looked at Sega ads during that time, they were all hyper-trying-too-hard-masculine.
The 00s, while carrying the misogynist torch, reflected a qualitative shift in its misogyny. The 00s, or more specifically, 2001 was when Halo 1 was released on the Xbox. This game, more than any other, was what pushed gaming from some nerdy shit into the mainstream. With the mainstreamification of gaming came the dudebros. The previously misogynist nerds were transformed into misogynist dudebros, and the dudebros carried their toxic competitiveness into gaming.
The 10s was when esports, or more specifically L*ague of L*gends, became commercially viable. The esportification of games began and along with it, the toxic competitiveness seeped even in games that weren’t designed to be competitive. And it pains me to say this, but speedrunning contributed to this as well. Suddenly, you started hearing about the “meta” and “optimal strats” in some indie platformer. And of course, G*merg*te sealed the deal by politicizing gaming, making g*mers consciously reactionary.
I have checked out of gaming so I can’t give you a rundown of the 20s, but it’s more of the same shit honestly. The seeds were sown during the 70s, with each subsequent decade nurturing the seedling, until it blossomed into some hideous plant with G*merg*te.
I hate esports i hate how Riot took all the actually fun modes in league like OFA and nexus clash and the pve game modes and decides to only make them appear in rotations (or not even appear for pve modes) because apparently Riot only cares about competitive and ranked play.
Also hate how certain characters like Azir is effectively neutered because its too good for the highly coordinated esport teams, whose gameplay barely resembles even the highest ranked play.
Billion dollar game cant even afford to support other game modes.
LoL says “here’s a game and some pieces tailor-made to play it” while DotA says “here’s some toys and a sandbox, it’s out of my hands now” and I think about that every day
LoL says “here’s a game and some pieces tailor-made to play it” while DotA says “here’s some toys and a sandbox, it’s out of my hands now” and I think about that every day
hell yeah, same
honestly I think dota’s way should be the way for fun+challenging games in general
The “ethical game journalism” days, to
gaters, looked like this. https://i.imgur.com/P37EDfX.jpgI know that’s an ad, not journalism, which is the point. They don’t want journalism. They want hype waves and to feel bazinga about what they buy without any downer talk whatsoever.
A lot of them didn’t even get that even the early Duke Nukem games were already mocking this shit as immature misogynist garbage. Which is how we got the dumbster fire that was DN Forever.
Randy Pitchford has always been a piece of shit but a big part of it was not getting what made the Duke Nukem franchise funny and instead doing what he thought was funny in DNF, which was some really fucked up sadistic stuff that basically had a rimshot sound after it was presented.
Battlecruiser 3000AD! By Derek Smart, Ph.D! Wow, that takes me back. The original “in development forever” game way before Daikatana or Duke Nukem.
Blatant false advertising. Nobody has ever wanted Battlecruiser 3000AD.
Uhh…😅 I did…
I thought it would basically be No Man’s Sky. Fly around to planets and do stuff. But the designer himself flamed me on USENET so I quit following it and never played.
Hey I was a hardcore gamer but i played RTS and fighting games like a gentleman
I’m old so to me MOBAs have always been “RTS, but stripped down and with a lot less map variety and basically zero story outside of excuses for why there are waifus and waifu costumes for sale.”
You just play as one guy. How hard can that be. That’s why I liked HoN actually because the courier micro and map awareness was key
Fighting games don’t count, when your opponent can punch you irl for getting out of line it really cuts down on the bullshit
I honestly think the skinner box click button get dopamine cycle of single player action games is specifically damaging to a human 🧠 in ways we won’t understand for decades. Between that and gambling type games that are just gambling with extra steps, we have a wide array of ways to do weird harm to yourself while being alienated under capitalism
A better world exits. MMOs allowed for beautiful social experiences. MUDs and like VR chat allow for self exploration. Fighting games have a diverse worldwide community dedicated to sharing and self improvement. Sport games allow people to explore important parts of their lives in new ways. Plenty of things I missed besides. But all way better than Gamerism.
