Why is casual racism/sexism more accepted in video games than other forms of media (these days)?

mordy is actually right here guys and this - "Like you can read a shitload of books but until you join book club or write book reviews you are not part of "reader culture"" - makes a v dodgy active/passive distinction but even if you take it, it wld be enough to prove mordy's point, as there are obv all sorts of oddball heterodox games being made, funded & reviewed

mb we can talk about small g-gamers so that ppl can keep their handy pejoratives. I think underlying mordy's point is that the current dominant mainstream culture is younger than the term it's claiming & will be outlived by it, so it's questionable to cede it temporarily

this all seems strange to me because I don't play (and have never played) first person shooters, which is where I think the sexist/racist bullshit resides mostly? like there is this parallel world of video games where people care about war shooters and the like, and I can tell from tv ads that those games are really crazy popular and cash cows...but then I read one of the "the end of gamers" linked here & was confused.

& I play a lot of video games! & have for like 30+ years.

I dunno I watch my kids play tons of games too & it's all minecraft & puzzle games & it's not just my influence there, that's what the kids at school play. maybe when my boy hits 14-16 he'll want to play call of duty or whatever but I dunno, that just seems like a dumb subculture to me.

I have an idea

Why don't we call all the non-FPS playing, mechanical keyboard not-having, daily showering, plaid-wearing gamers "indie gamers"

Not only could you separate yourself from the bad gamers but you could also reclaim and rehabilitate the word 'indie'

yeah I mean I get that fps gaming, especially online fps, is a cesspool, and that it's a cash thing, not trying to be coy here

but indie? I guess nowadays that's right, but I was in high school when Wolfenstein came out so I'd already been gaming a long time, and that shit was new. and then I never got a playstation or playstation 2 so I missed when that stuff became mainstream. this is just me being old I get this.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

pretty much

maybe there are sexxxay minecraft mods, I don't want to know

I don't want to call myself a gamer

― you must have me confused with my stacked as fuck and imposing friend (jjjusten), Friday, September 5, 2014 12:02 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Your entire argument has been that it is not a loaded term that most video game consumers don't really relate to

btw most video game consumers are women over 30 or w/e, who just play some games

do I do not think your world is representative, and the question you should ask is "are you a gamer, as in a term of self-identification"

― ⌘-B (mh), Friday, September 5, 2014 12:10 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yuuup most people just play some games but its not their lifestyle

very indicative of modern life when people strongly identify with their chosen form of entertainment

this all seems strange to me because I don't play (and have never played) first person shooters, which is where I think the sexist/racist bullshit resides mostly?

http://boingboing.net/2012/02/29/meet-the-sexist-racist-pigs-o.html

Perhaps weirdly, I'm on Mordy's side here. I don't think he's arguing that the "gamer" misogynistwhitemen demographic doesn't exist, or isn't a vocal and visible problem. I read his argument more that people who play games passionately, and spend craploads of money and time on them, are already diverse. This shifts the viewpoint from "gamers (for whom read misogynist white men) are under attack from evil outside forces" to "gamers (for whom read everyone who cares about games) are sick of being represented by misogynist white men and are attempting to represent themselves more fairly, in both games and the surrounding culture". It's positioning Sarkeesian et al as an immanent critique rather than an extrinsic critic.

oh yeah, fighting games, I played those now & then, and yeah, they're also sexist racist shitpits

but yeah, video game playing as a ~~lifestyle~~ is so weird to me

Also my WoW guild split in half because the players recruited to push us through content chased most of the women out of the guild via unending harassment, culminating in a bunch of horrible shit said to one of the founding members including the accusation that the only reason she was in the guild in the first place was because her boyfriend was our main tank. (Note: the accusation was not put nearly this nicely.)

Just constant belittling, n-bombs, insults, unwanted advances... raids became interminable and I was on the verge of quitting when the ppl I liked broke off and invited me into their own smaller guild. AND, the guys behind this were nowhere near the worst people on the server.

shaking my head at the fact I'm linking to metacritic as an example of anything, but:
http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/release-date/new-releases/all/date

this is where it gets to the point that, perception-wise, video games as a reviewed product swing harshly toward action RPGs, first-person shooters, racing, and third-person adventure games of the GTA variety. there are roughly eight zillion people playing Peggle and what-have-you, but it's criminally underrepresented. maybe because people don't need to read about Peggle.

really glad DJP mentioned WoW because I really think it's a game that has one of the most diverse player bases, but there are still mobs of trashkids

I think the problem is that the word has become loaded even among people who play games, because the maladjusted types that perpetuate the problem overwhelm the stereotype

fwiw I think the largest distinct Diablo 3 demographic I've run into is dads (and occasional moms) who play on weeknights after their kids go to bed

(the dude who spent most of his time creeping on every female member of the guild also is responsible for my favorite WoW story ever, when he announced in the middle of a raid that he was making a run for the border and took off for 35 minutes to go to Taco Bell so there were some bright spots to all of this)

lol, I think you have mentioned that before

Diablo 3 is more "brb smoking a bowl" which I have seen people say multiple times

as a former point'n'click enthusiast and occasional IF dabbler I was all excited about the words "adventure games" there in mh's list of most-reviewed genres and then saw "of the GTA variety".

I like Mordy's point that lots of different people play games, lots of different people have always played games, and it's not cool to let the meatheads claim to be the entire culture through assholic gatekeeping while simultaneously saying "we don't all do x, we're just people who play games".

On the other hand I get the "foodie" distinction too. But "gamer" sounds so much like the only word for someone who plays games, as I'm p. sure in the past if anyone asked if I was a gamer I might well have gone "sure, yes, I play video games, I totally love god sims and 2d platformers", so I don't really get the insistence that the word has always been so obviously irredeemable, just walk away, this place is not a place of honor.

Not that there's a neutral word for "foodie" either, but playing games has not yet reached the universality of "someone who eats and has preferences about what they eat". Maybe we're getting that way, though; my gran sure likes her Mahjongg solitaire.

semper games

It'd be worth going to Taco Bell just to use that line.

The perplexed chatter on Ventrilo was priceless.

i wish i could remember the magazine i once bought in a train station that was literally Maxim for video games. i think the rating system was on a scale from zero to having a beer and a woman sitting on your lap. odious shit. like i know they didn't invent Duke Nukem, but there's no reason they had to identify so hard w/ the most juvenile part of the industry when franchises like civilization + sim city has spanned the history of video games.

― Mordy, Thursday, September 4, 2014 10:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you mean the shortlived Incite? what a pile of shit that was

http://www.oldgamemags.com/files/magazines/incite/Incite-03.jpg

btw this is something i wrote back in february before this whole shitshow, it's kinda my thoughts

other than that i try to not leave a breadcrumb trail for these fuck internet detectives so i mostly don't post on ILG, stay tuned for an epic 77-only behind the scenes thread when i finally quit this racket

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2014/02/20/the-changing-definition-of-39-gamer-39.aspx

http://boingboing.net/2012/02/29/meet-the-sexist-racist-pigs-o.html

meet-the-sexist-racist-pigs-o.html

the linked article doesn't seem to work at the moment. here's a cache.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/sexual-harassment-as-ethical-imperative-the-ugly-side-of-fighting-games#/entry/signin

This may be the first time in the history of video games that someone had said that removing sexual harassment is ethically unjust.

the naive world of 2012

sh@kedown your pt about the casual mobile games (the silent majority of games?) being closest to the ancient atari and arcade units in terms of pure ludic experience with not much narrative hook at all is really perceptive

gaming media has been creating bro gamer culture forever. i remember reading the most sexist shit in gaming magazines when i was growing up.

I bought at least one games-oriented computer magazine every month from about 1989 to 1999 and the first few years seemed like a gentler time -- though it may just have passed me by, as I was too young/naive to pick up anything risqué and may have shrugged off "gurls r dumb" jokes with "huh yeah other girls are dumb, just as well I'm not like them" etc, ugh @ me.

(and legend suggests platform rivalry was already a thing in the 80s, although I don't remember it much among my friends or in magazines: mainly just envy of other formats' fancier screenshots, excitement to go round to your friend with a different computer and a whole different set of games, etc. Spectrum vs C64 gets talked about as a rivalry but I didn't really hear any until my friend's brothers arguing Nintendo vs Sega circa 1991.)

In the mid/late-90s I began to feel alienated by token pictures of hot women on the cover of "games and general interest computing" mag PC Format, increasingly laddish/aggressive humour in the games-only mags, etc, but the echo chamber of internet comments, forums and online gaming banter do seem to have made everything a billion times worse. On the other hand the internet allows me to hear about and find indie games and not-very-gamey thinkpiece games etc, so swings and roundabouts.

tl;dr curious what the female editor of my 80s favourite Your Sinclair magazine thinks of "gamergate". Fairly sure she got dismissed by jerk game marketers and crepey letters back then but I'm guessing nothing like the death threats and men's rights warriors of now?

it's worth noting that game journalism would not exist without the efforts of Joyce Worley, who along with Arne Katz and the late Bill Kunkel, founded and created Electronic Games magazine

i remember Speccy vs C64 being pretty real in that sports fan banter kind of way

games magazines of the early 80s are awesome because they mostly read like amateur newsletters written by people who are baffled by this new thing they've been asked to write about, reviewers telling you the game is in colour or features machine code

oh and i guess Amiga vs ST probably started in the late 80s as a thing?

well duh - gaming media has been creating bro gamer culture forever. i remember reading the most sexist shit in gaming magazines when i was growing up. they taught that culture to their readership.

― Mordy, Thursday, September 4, 2014 10:55 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't think this is true. the scene appears to be occurring on social media now: the anti-feminist youtube personalities, the twitter harassment waves, the centrality of 4chan. gaming media outlets really seem like a step behind this stuff. as if a young man of today needed a magazine to teach him how to be sexist in the first place. what is terrible about this culture is self-emergent

fwiw i don't think 'bro' has the right connotations either, with its air of frats and jockiness. "gamer" writ small thinks of himself as a put-upon nerd right? the aggression seems anti-bro if anything. bros get what they want! they don't need games!

That would be where the irony is re: last paragraph?

Growing up it was already Nintendo v. Sega (played out on bloodless/bloody versions of Mortal Kombat) and then Nintendo v. Sony (where it wasn't just cartridge vs. CD and load times but also about "kiddie", wholesome games vs. the gorey and murderous games like Twisted Metal)

games magazines of the early 80s are awesome because they mostly read like amateur newsletters written by people who are baffled by this new thing they've been asked to write about, reviewers telling you the game is in colour or features machine code

― Daphnis Celesta, Friday, September 5, 2014 11:09 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i interviewed kunkel before he died and katz. they were from a different world, the primordial stew from which "nerd culture" emerged...they all attended the first sci-fi conventions that started happening in the late 60s, basically a scene that sounds like it was a slightly nerdier outgrowth of hippie, tellingly their first publication was a general interest sci-fi/culture/music zine named Dead Flowers after the Rolling Stones song....they all three had a revelatory experience in Las Vegas at an early arcade and decided to cover this new "hobby", which was then just that not an "industry"

yeah i get the vibe now looking back on some of the magazines i read as a kid that a lot of the journalists were hobbyists who weren't specifically into "games" at all, and that stuff gradually expanded until it grew into its own magazines and a lot of the general "PC User" stuff slowly died

nice piece m@tt and it hits on a key point most of us seem to be dancing around: if everyone is a gamer (which more or less 70% of the population is if you want to go by the "if you play an electronic game on your phone, tv, tablet, console you are a gamer" definition) then we are all gamers even if we don't self identify... so why do we need the definition? Who the hell identifies as a "TV Viewer" or "Movie Watcher"?

The waters around "gamer" are so poisoned from thirty or more years of predominantly chauvinistic and jingoistic marketing rhetoric that it seems to me only the most sophistic of views could justify keeping it around as a desirable self-identity for most people. (Some) games evolved, (some) gamer culture did too - but the monolithic, multi-billion dollar murder simulator racket retains primary ownership. They can have it; I'm happy to secede.

a scene that sounds like it was a slightly nerdier outgrowth of hippie

growing up, my best friend's dad was a dude like this, super fascinating scene. early rennaissance fairs, tolkien fandom, gary gygax, SSI games, the macintosh, underground comix, branching into older game enthusiasms like poker and chess which have their own crazy ancient subcultures and traditions of course

These youtube/4chan gamer dudes strike me as elliott rodgers types more than bro.

u.m.sh@kedown I did not know about Joyce Worley, thanks! also I liked your article

DC I guess I was just too young then, my two best friends aged 8 had different 8-bit micros from me/each other but I just remember being like "cool, I can play games which don't exist on the Speccy". considered mentioning Amiga vs ST but my post was already rather long and Eurocentric... (yes, Atari and Commodore weren't European but AFAIK their machines were bought in much greater %s if not absolute numbers outside the Apple-then-console-dominated US)

I guess I came to Spectrum magazines when that "type-in listings for post-teenage hobbyists who may own or be considering buying multiple computers" era had mostly given way to "games magazine for format partisans" but yes, I do like that vibe in the earlier mags. Special mention for games where you can't press Break and see the BASIC listing!

never forget: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custer's_Revenge

special mention for 2 hours of typing in a ZX81 game only for the ram pack to wobble and wipe the whole thing :\

^^^ not a gamer

the aggression seems anti-bro if anything. bros get what they want! they don't need games!

― goole, Friday, September 5, 2014 11:12 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That would be where the irony is re: last paragraph?

― 龜, Friday, September 5, 2014 11:14 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right well yeah

aside from the misogyny i read a real discomfort with the codes of adult life in general from these dudes. the accusation that quinn had sex with a writer from kotaku for press has somewhat broadened into a general complaint that indie game developers and games journalists all... know each other. "things are happening that i don't understand because people being social in ways i can't access!"

flip thru enough twitter convos and you can sense the fear that there is some kind of SJW mafia that is not only going to critique games but determine what they will be

i was gonna say it's interesting that an overtly about-sex game like leisure suit larry has disappeared from the scene. but then there's internet porn now.

there's still a small but alive community around "adult interactive fiction" and other sex-oriented games

^^^ totally shagged Arianne

a guy's got to have some company sometimes :/

growing up, my best friend's dad was a dude like this, super fascinating scene. early rennaissance fairs, tolkien fandom, gary gygax, SSI games, the macintosh, underground comix, branching into older game enthusiasms like poker and chess which have their own crazy ancient subcultures and traditions of course

― goole, Friday, September 5, 2014 11:22 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah totally, throw in Omni Magazine, the old Games magazine which was more like mind puzzles and shit

i mean the whole tech industry from steve jobs (whose co-employees at atari called him "chariman mao" behind his back and complained about his b.o.) on down is really an outgrowth of late hippie