I'm in my late thirties. Played a lot of video games when I was a kid through college and a little after. But this whole idea of there being a "gaming culture" or how being a "gamer" is a major part of peoples' personalities just seems weird to me. Not even a complaint, just an observation.
:grillman:
We love our leftist boomers don't we folks
btw check out Hyperbolica if you can! I'd love to see what you think of it considering your long history with games over time!
That looks interesting! I’ll check it out when I’ve got some time. The map design reminds me of Antichamber.
I am somewhat younger and it's word-for-word what I am thinking as well...except I don't even know what "funko pops" are.
I am also a long timer, who in my younger days went from innocently jumping around in Manic Miner on ZX Spectrum, to later collecting cards for women I had virtual sex with in Witcher1, and finally eugenic engineering in Crusader Kings 3.
Im sorry i have to ask but how in tune are you with all the wierd ass memes that you see here
I'm in my 40s. Video game fandom isn't new, but "gamer" as a purchased consumer label is relatively new.
Before social engineering and modern marketing manufactured the "gamer" label, video games were something people did. People could be Nintendo fans or Sega fans and sometimes get into some really heated and toxic Genesis vs SNES console war disputes. There were absurdly overhyped marketing vehicles attached to garbage games (Rise of the Robots was a legendary 90s example of that), and there were all the ingredients needed for "gamer" culture except for the label itself. In time, those ingredients mixed and the remarkably reactionary capital-G Gamer culture we came to know today came into being, baked to a chuddy sizzle when G*merGate became a thing.
I know that someone's pretty young as a chud when they claim that the 90s were some sort of ethical games journalism lost era. BULL. SHIT. That was the era where game magazines were by and large paid advertisements (not much changed there) where in-house products can and were given glowing reviews if they were tied to the corporation publishing the magazine. It was also the era of multi-page ads that showed a naked woman's body in segments and don't even tell you what the game is about, or even show screenshots on most pages ("Forsaken" was its name if you're curious). Sure, if they were alive at the time they'd jerk off to that and probably buy the game because beeewbs, but it wasn't ethical games journalism, whatever that was supposed to be.
Go back far enough and there were MORE women than men in arcades, back before marketing ghouls determined that male arcade visitors were more likely to spend lots of money if feeeemales weren't around socializing and otherwise distracting them. It was a decision made, an artificial one, to use advertising and social engineering tricks to gradually evict women from early video game fandom. E T H I C A L.
Go back far enough and there were MORE women than men in arcades, back before marketing ghouls determined that male arcade visitors were more likely to spend lots of money if feeeemales weren’t around socializing and otherwise distracting them. It was a decision made, an artificial one, to use advertising and social engineering tricks to gradually evict women from early video game fandom. E T H I C A L.
This is, aside from being very fucked up, pretty interesting. Do you have an article about it?
These are not the article I originally found. They're not nearly as good. If I can find the original article that gave the specific details and even showed examples of pre-and-post dudebro marketing focusing in the 80s, I will link that later.
https://uwm.edu/news/book-excerpt-pac-man-lured-women-video-game-arcades/
https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/12/female-gamers-and-masculine-marketers-polygon-s-history-of-the-sexist-selling-of-video-games.html
When you say "gamer culture" the things that pop into my head are lan parties and handwritten/mspaint cheat sheets.
Women have no place in the Console Wars :le-pol-face:
I suppose either way it's the idea that gaming can have its own culture. Might be nostalgia tbf, but it used to be more positive :sicko-wistful:
I feel the same way about "stoner" culture.
What you do for fun isn't a substitute for a personality.
I'm pro legalization as is any sane leftist, but the "DUDE, WEED, LMAO" capital-s Stoner culture is obnoxious and its enthusiasts are often bad neighbors and worse roommates in my experience.
Agreed. Obsessing over anything like that is cringe AF. Same with "sportsball" cultures or anything like that that people dedicate their existence to. I will say at least stoners usually aren't screaming for genocide and not nearly as egotistical as these "gamer" shits though. If I were to have any defense of stoners it's that it's generally harmless to the rest of the population. Even if it's still cringe.
eh, people have always formed subcultures around hobbies. Sports, gambling, partying, drug use, sobriety, sex, chastity, whatever it may be, people form cultures around it. Gaming is very immersive and multifaceted so it's no surprise people form subcultures around gaming, or even individual games. Even back when video gaming was simply shit like PONG people would have tournaments.
If you ask me, there is no gaming culture, it's a blatantly forced, manufactured term for the purpose of social engineering.
The label "Gamer" is mainly used to invoke some kind of niche, underdog us vs. them group consciousness, while the gaming industry generates more profit annually than the movie and music industry combined. Nobody would identify themselves as "a movie watcher" or "a music listener".
The end goal, if I had to guess, was to create exactly the kind of reactionary, toxic masculine millieu we associate with the word "Gamer" these days (Btw, I fear that's also true for the kind of people who despise these "Gamers", maybe even more so. This site is proof that many people who hate traditional "Gamers" are probaly avid players themselves), re-establishing it as a mainstream cultural anchor, only this time it has this underdog dynamic, giving it a unifying and pro-active character, where people feel they have to "fight back" against an attack on their way of life. Millions and millions of young people self-identifying as members of a group of an oppressed minority of video game players. It's basically "conservatism is the new punk rock" in a different - a lot more fashy - dress (EDIT: and judging by the general state of things these days, it's working a lot better). "White (gaming) culture is under attack", yada yada yada. Someone with a firmer grip on Hegelian Dialectic than me may come up with a better explanation.
Nobody would identify themselves as “a movie watcher”
I uhh... don't know how to break this to you but
Calling "watching movies" your hobby is not the same as self-identifying as part of a cultural Gamer movement. There is no "movie watcher sub culture". Totally different quality.
go work at an 'arthouse' theater and tell me there's no subcultural milieu amongst the pretencious moviegoers
There are subcultures of cinephiles and movie buffs though. There are sub-subcultures for plenty of film genres too, hell some individual films even have their own cult followings..
You're claiming that opposing a toxic extreme side of a fandom, one that labels itself for purposes of gatekeeping as well as self-appointed elitism, is somehow equally as bad, "maybe more so?"
That's quite a stretch. Most people that mock Epic G*mers here play video games but avoid the label because of what's generally done with it by people that identify with it. It isn't some mind blowing revelation to say so, and I don't even see how it really ties into that claim.
Out of all the things I said, that's what you're focusing on? Hit a nerve, nerd? 😘
Seriously, though, it's not exactly rocket-science to predict that any kind of cultural movement, especially a highly toxic one such as this relatively new gaming bullshit, will have a somewhat equally strong pushback, hence me mentioning Hegelian Dialectics. Contrary to what the sarcasm-poisoned brain of the average hexbear user (speaking from experience) might believe, most people do not self-identify as fash, or evil, or toxic masculine. It's why chuds, when you call them racist, are retorting with shit like "but I have black friends". It's actually perfectly plausible, reasonable even, to assume that the intended effect of any social engineering was targeted at the inevitable push-back by "the decent ones" among the capital G Gamers.
You started pretty early on with that claim, and it was a pretty absurd claim.
Also, you're going Dril levels of false equivalency under pretenses of being very very Hegelian. I've seen this song and dance before. It's done in defense of treats, especially on :reddit-logo: . The treats. Are. Not. In. Danger. In fact they aren't even being criticized at all here. The toxic fringe of their fandom is.
You might like Hegel, but applying Hegelian buzzwords in a slapdash way everywhere is not far off from applying the words "logic" and "reason" to opinions to make them look more important and unassailable. :expert-shapiro:
I think it's pretty telling that your first move is the nuclear option.
I used the term Hegelian DIalectic exactly once, precisely where I thought it belonghed. Everything else is you projecting like a motherfucker.
The basis of your absurd claim was based upon your "exactly once" invocation. You also started early on with it, too, since it was the apparent basis of your argument.
You've made several personal attacks on me already, with a touch of concern trolling, and now you're complaining about "nuclear options?"
I don't think replying to you anymore is going to go anywhere good.
LOL, keep reaching, debate bro. I'm disengaging from this nonsense now.
I criticized a for-profit private enterprise, administered by some of the richest and most destructive people on the planet, and you took that criticism personally. You apparently approve of the privatization of space in a way that doesn't seem very leftist and I stand by that.
You talk about "escalation" and you brought that personal baggage here, unprompted. You accused me of being "obsessed with Reddit," but you're demonstrating what seems like a Reddit-style grudge because someone, yes I'll say it, criticized the space treats.
You don't have to like me, but that grudge isn't going to go anywhere good.
We're only human and we have feelings that can be hurt. I'm definitely no exception. I admit I was worried that you might start following my posts and attacking me all over this site. It's something I experienced in the past in other places and it still bothers me when I think about it. I'm sincerely glad that you posted that followup that you just did and I feel relief.
We don't agree on everything, and that's fine. I thank you for your reply. :an-eco-heart:
Nobody would identify themselves as “a movie watcher” or “a music listener”.
I think they do, actually. The people who contribute to IMDB or music lyric sites pretty much define themselves like this.
"Gamer" is just a similar ingroup. It's understandable that it got started because nerds who played computer games got bullied by just about everyone in society and computer games were the one place they could not be traumatized. It's not a surprise that having found an ingroup at last, they went overboard with it.
Ingroups are super important to humans. Humans without ingroups can and will kill themselves in despair.
You're asking the wrong guy. I'm barely able to piece together the cause and effect here.
When Halo:CE made gaming go mainstream in a way it never was before various corps started marketing heavily to the new cadre of gamers.
Big time this. Halo got all the normies who thought gaming was nerd shit. I watched as "gamer" transitioned from wrinkled polo shirt dweebs on RuneScape to Adidas slide football boys on Halo/CoD
The difference between 'playing football for fun on the weekend' and "I am a football fan if you like the wrong team I hate you"
Nah, consumption is nearly the only thing we have left in america. Foodies, and wine snobs, sports fans, movie buffs. Arguably they are weirder cause gaming is a thing you do, not just a thing you experience. If it wasn't mostly garbage it could mean something
No you're right, its really weird that society has come to the point where subjects base their entire personalities on this massive symptom of alienation under neoliberalism. Being a "gamer" isnt an unironic culture, beyond being a racist piece of shit on the internet, its a consumer demographic.
Edit: Matt Christman has the best takes on this.
Not really. I’m the same age as you, its like being a film buff, but it goes a little further because gaming can be social and competitive in a way that movies can’t.
I respect the gaming equivalent of a film buff so much more than I respect gamers.
So, oftentimes football (soccer in the US) ultra fans will form the base of right-wing paramilitary organizations.
Since the US doesn't have football ultras, I don't know if G**mers would take their place, or if it would be American ThrowFootball fans. Probably the NFL fans, I can't imagine a G*mer Brigade breaking down my door.
"can’t imagine a Gmer Brigade breaking down my door."
That is, until a streamer is egged on by his followers to swat you for ghosting or teabagging or whatever other gamer terms I barely know of in my gen-X mind.
American Football fans
, especially those who follow the professional league, are probably way less fash than g*mers.
I meant to say NFL fans, sorry stupid Amerikkkans stole the word football for a sport that almost entirely uses the hands.
No that's what I meant, people who follow the NFL tend to be less fash than g*mer types, at least in my experience.
I've seen a few fashy football fans, but mostly they're liberal, "apolitical" (so conservative), or the "I don't like Colin Kaepernick kneeling" chuds.
So I agree with you, I just had a picture in my mind of NFL chuds being Nazi street troops, but the G*mers would be more idealogically motivated to be Brownshirts (I mean Nazis, I have no ill will towards the Cleveland Browns).
This is definitely more of the "American football" types than gamers. Gamers just want to not have human contact, be fascist online, and think themselves superior. All because of the amount of time they dedicate to grinding out some bs game that has no real life impact other than taking up the time they have on this earth for some dopamine hit to their brain. Then a very select few are able to do it well enough to somehow make a living off it. In this regard it's basically the cryptocurrency of sports. If you catch one in public they will (most of them anyway) just do their best to avoid you and/or any real conflict.
early thirties
think it comes from gaming being something pretty niche until the mid nineties, when it slowly started getting more mainstream to the point that now pretty much everyone has played a videogame, and most people play one or more at least infrequentlyyou see the same thing with anime
