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Gaming’s toxic men, explained - Experts tackle the phenomenon of angry men, trolls, racists and misogynists in the video game industry
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- Title
- Gaming's toxic men, explained
- Published
- Jul 25 2018
- Word count
- 7234 words
I think the real explanation is that too many white dudes who play video games are nerds with an outrageous sense of entitlement because they haven't learned that their feelings don't matter to anybody else, never have, and never will -- and they make it everybody else's problem because they aren't willing to suck it up and deal.
I'm saying this as a white dude who plays games, but if that's too harsh for you try this: too many gamers are used to having everything their way, and either can't or won't accept that gaming is no longer exclusively for or about them. They need to grow up and learn to share if they don't want to be made outcasts again.
"White dudes" please go look at Brazil's gaming culture and then get back to me.
I don't live in Brazil, so what happens there really isn't my problem.
I live in the US, so what happens there is my problem, and there are a shitload of white dudes who play video games in the US who didn't get smacked around enough as children.
Everyone’s feelings matter. I don’t think such broad generalizations and advocating the abuse of children even as hyperbole, further targeting by race and gender, is the kind of discussion we want to foster here.
Maybe not, so I'll rephrase my point in the hope you'll find it more palatable: too many gamers are used to having everything their way, and either can't or won't accept that gaming is no longer exclusively for or about them. They need to grow up and learn to share if they don't want to be made outcasts again.
Do you not play any multiplayer games online? Brazilians are all over the place, and they're just as toxic as anyone.
I play Dark Souls and No Man's Sky, both on PS4. The former doesn't allow voice chat. I disable voice chat in the latter because I don't have a headset, don't intend to buy one, and am not interested in talking with other players.
If you go by the Bartle taxonomy, I lean heavily toward the "achiever" and "explorer" types, and am not much of a "killer" or a "socializer". As such, I have little use for most online multiplayer games or the people who enjoy playing them.
So your point is "I don't see it so it's not a problem" then? Toxic gaming culture is a problem in places other than the US. Just because you don't engage in online multiplayer doesn't mean you can put your head in the sand and deny it exists.
No. My point is that while it is indeed a problem, it isn't my problem. :)
That doesn't make it okay to make sweeping generalizations just because it's something you don't encounter day-to-day.
Duly noted.
Do you not play online games? US and Brazil play on the same servers alot of times unless you are playing a major title. So it does effect United States players.
As any CS:GO or Dota player will tell, toxic behaviour is a global phenomenom that is not restricted to white people at all.
I also never got the impression that it was about entitlement; it was usually just the occasional shitty person that was blaming their teammates or people getting too angry about losing or teenagers with poor behaviour; poor impulse control, rather than entitlement. It also depends on the game; I found toxic behaviour to be far less of a problem in WoW than in Dota or CS:GO and also encountered fewer rascists/misogynists (mind you, I am a guy, so I can't really speak for how a woman would see this).
I do agree that this is somewhat of a problem though; it's probably the primary reason I don't play competitive multiplayer games anymore.
Riot Games did some research on the trolling phenomenon and discovered:
This means that most toxic behavior really is just someone having a bad day. The fix is to implement incentive structures that bias players toward good behavior, at least in multi-player competitive games like League of Legends.
That's interesting and like you say, the fix is to have incentives (including UI) that make it less easy to translate real world frustration into in-game frustration.
Overwatch is pretty friendly in that respect. Fortnite tries hard as well.
Part of it is definitely that League matches, in particular, take a long time to get rolling. Unlike, say, Call of Duty, League matches are a heavy time investment. And when someone feels that they aren't getting maximum enjoyment from the game - e.g. they are losing - they are more likely to be toxic. It's no fun to watch a game spiral downwards, and with a game as time-intensive as League the pressure is immense.
This is a common occurrence in the service industry too, but just because someone is having a bad day does not give them the right to lash out at others. I've had bad days and gotten impatient and frustrated and snippy with people, but I've never treated someone like garbage or personally attacked anyone. There's having a bad day, and there's being terrible to other people. They don't have to go hand in hand. I know I don't have the right to treat others badly, but some people feel they do have that right.
Maybe not, but as a white dude I have no problem talking shit about other white dudes as a group. I'm not going to criticize women or POCs as a group, though.
What the fuck? If everyone does X and you say "everyone should stop doing X" you are not targeting women and poc what you're doing right now is targeting a group. It's just not a minority group.
I'm up there with you apart needing to specify "white dude".
I've known plenty of people that aren't white nor dude and are entitled selfish asshole.
Have you considered the possibility that for some of them, that's a perk, rather than a penalty? A lot of gamers are still outcasts, and the only thing that's changed is that as this social activity that basically served as their ghetto has been colonized by more mainstream groups, they're finding themselves marginalized from the space they used to feel safe in. And they would rather be outcasts in their outcast space, than be outcasts with their space taken away from them?
I can see a lot of parallels between your theory of toxicity and the backlash that's being leveled at perceived gentrifiers in the Seattle area. The LGBT community is being rough on the tech community because they want to keep Capitol Hill gay, just like the black community were rough on the LGBT community because they wanted to keep Capitol Hill black, just like the Catholics were tough on the incoming black families because they wanted to keep Capitol Hill Catholic Hill. Everyone would rather live in their own cultural space and be poor, then be pushed out of the space when it becomes more wealthy and popular, and threatening to shun those people has never been an effective strategy to placate them. I don't think that ascribing entitlement to people is the solution to resistance against cultural incursion, because I don't think it's entitlement, I think, for the people you describe, it's desperation.
That makes sense, but gaming isn't a rough neighborhood that people who weren't rich, white, and straight cleaned up and made their own out of necessity, only to have yuppies looking for cheap rents to move in and say, "Go be poor somewhere else, LOL".
It's big enough for everybody.
Yes, I have, but they'll get pushed out regardless of their efforts and will have to go be outcasts somewhere else.
What they want doesn't matter, has never mattered, and never will matter.
That's because people moving in are basically telling them, "We want this neighborhood now, so go be poor somewhere else."
I think there are a lot of issues with the "gaming community" that need to be addressed as video games become more and more a part of everyone's everyday life. Trying to boil it down to a single issue kinda misses the fact that the toxicity of "gamer" culture comes from a lot of sources simultaneously. A lot of that is covered in the linked article, so I won't go into it as much. But the whole "you throw like a girl" trope is definitely an issue culturally, and the fact that women have discouraged from STEM fields for a long time is an issue that is being addressed a lot in real life. I think a lot of the toxicity towards women and minorities in the "tech world" will be fixed as more and more women/minorities gain access to that space. Which is happening now. So I'm going to go back to discussing gaming specifically.
One big issue in my opinion is that is that it basically exists at a middle-school level of maturity a lot of the time. Even the people who are now in their 30s and 40s who play video games basically regress to the emotional intelligence of a 12 year old boy when it comes to their video games. It's a mental space where being better at something trumps everything. It's a boy's schoolyard mentality of "do it my way because my way is the best way." And I know that mentality because I'm a guy who was once a kid, and I remember how shitty it was back then. The nuts thing is that this drive to be the best isn't just for competitive and ranked online games, it seeps into all gaming as whole. Last year I got criticized by a buddy of mine because the ships I was building in Stellaris weren't optimal for certain enemies, and that the bases I was building in Rimworld weren't optimizing my resources right. My reaction was of course "fuck off dude these are singleplayer games I'm gonna play my way thankyouverymuch." But that mentality seeps into all corners of video games, and you see it especially now with competitive gamers who actually get paid pretty well to be good at certain video games. The whole idea that "your opinion is invalid because I'm better at this game than you" concept runs deep with the "gamer" community.
Let's get to that whole "gamer" thing too. I love video games, I have played them since I played "Sopwith" on DOS, and I keep up with good deal of news and events. I wouldn't label myself as a "gamer". Video games are just a hobby, and a pretty useless (yet expensive) one that that. There is a growing trend of people to make hobbies and certain types of media consumption a core part of their identity, and that leads to toxicity a lot in "hardcore" fandoms. If you're a casual fan of Start Wars and you didn't like one of the characters in the last movie, it pretty much ends there. You might complain, but that's it. If being a Star Wars fan is a core part of how you define yourself, then any attack on Star Wars and any perceived injustice perpetrated by Lucasfilms becomes a personal attack. And when people feel that they are being attacked on a personal level, they fight back. And that makes sense when it comes to some aspects IMO like race. But...Star Wars isn't really a part of you. You have no actual control over the movies, you're just a consumer. So it is with video games and the "gamer" community. And it's not unique to video games. A lot of hardcore fandoms are that way. The problem is that it gets extra weird when you're a fan of an entire industry, where you have even less real ownership than Star Wars fans.
Of course the other big problem is that the "nerd" community as a whole was so insular for so long. Mostly because being a nerd has been undesirable for so long. People often point back to the 80s, but of course it goes back way farther than that. So the community is steeped in a victim complex that doesn't really apply anymore. The nerds won, the nerds are in charge. But now the people who put nerds in the nerd box want to get in the box too, and it doesn't feel like winning. It feels like an invasion. All insular communities have an issue with outsiders, and nerd culture is being normalized really widely and really quickly. And if you are socially underdeveloped, and you really liked having a safe space to do the things you like without worrying about outside judgement, it feels like people are taking away the only thing you had left.
So for those reasons (and others) the "gaming community" is angry and vicious and super immature. The internet doesn't make it better, because now angry, mean, immature people can find like minds to reassure them that they are right and everyone else is wrong.
The solution in my mind, is integration. Maybe I'm being naive, but I think when internet neckbeards actually interact with women and minorities in their spaces they will be forced to realize that their hate was unfounded. If leaders within the community (gamers and gaming companies) make it known that they won't tolerate shitheads and trolls, people will have will have to grow up or find themselves on the outside. And the thing is, this is something that anyone playing can help with. If someone is being toxic, call them out. Don't tolerate toxicity. We're asking our kids to do it with bullying, it's only fair that concerned gamers do that same.
That sounded strangely familiar..kinda like the idea of a meritocracy? This explains a lot.
Meritocracy works well in some games, but coming from WoW raiding it's often a terrible metric to build your raid group around if you're only looking at in-game performance. Every once in a while you'll find a unicorn who's simultaneously godly skilled as a player and able to interact in a positive way with the other nineteen people, but there are far more top tier players who will throw fits and get in cat fights with other big egos or constantly shit on people. They end up fracturing the group, making people quit, and destroying a group's morale. Soon you've got half a raid that's having a negative experience and just wants to log off, and one player can never offset that no matter how good they are.
I guess if you're just going for a rank-or-bust group and don't mind rapid turnover and a toxic environment, you can shoot for mythic difficulty early by stacking your team with raw performance, but it just sounds awful. For me, in-game performance is only a part of a player's merit.
That sounds like a lot of consulting body-shops; high turnover, toxic environment to amass as much money as possible for the owners.
It's a very narrow meritocracy that sidelines a lot of traits in members that you need for a healthy community. Having the highest score didn't make Billy Mitchell a good person, but it let him set the tone of the community.
For people reading the comments first this article doesn't talk about game mechanics or design it is solely related to gamer culture.
it's not like i was expecting anything else from polygon.
Sick burn. Really though.
I think this article offers a lot of interesting perspectives on toxicity in the gaming community from a largely academic view.
Debatable. Definitely interesting though.
Interesting article, but I read it with the lens of ways to deal with this kind of culture on Tildes and came out disappointed. The article elucidates the problems but offers very few tangible solutions. Ultimately it ended up being not especially informative for me, as I already knew a bit about some of these issues.