I don't think "we don't tolerate bigotry here" is an unreasonable rule, but evidently gamer communities insist on being toxic.
I had been thinking about getting Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 but I think I won't be, now. It's absolutely whacked to cave to pressure on something like this.
Is it just me or have gamers just been getting worse and worse? Seems like ever since GamerGate they have continued to get louder and more hateful.
us Millennial and Gen X gamers saw the transition from 2D to 3D to HD gaming. Every jump was so incredible and we were grateful for it.
Gen Z gamers are not grateful for shit. They complain and bitch and moan about the smallest things like "This is a AAA game and the frame rate is off by 2???? GARBAGE. Look how the shadows don't follow the character properly. GARBAGE. The water doesn't look realistic enough! GARBAGE! THIS IS 2025 NOT 2005!"
Whereas everything to us older gamers nowadays just looks "slightly more HD than the last slightly more HD game".
This is a true story:
I went to a party for my wife's karate group, and there were some Gen Z kids there, early and mid 20's whatever. I talked with one gamer about Nintendo and the topic of Pokémon came up. If you don't know, Pokémon has one of the most toxic fanbases ever. A lot of Millennials I know are completely oblivious to this - they all just play the new games no problem. But the younger gamers have a HORRENDOUS fanbase. They shit on Nintendo all the time about Pokémon. Now, when this youngin' mentioned how Pokémon Sword, Shield, Scarlet, and Violet (all most recent) are the worst games ever made (because of the usual complaints like frame rate and shadows and tree rendering whatever), I brought up the fact that out of all of Nintendo's IPs, Pokémon has the most stressed and overworked employees. This is true. IIRC, employees who churn out Pokémon games are the only ones who have deadlines. Zelda, Mario, literally anything else Nintendo makes doesn't have strict deadlines. The employees working on those games are much happier and dish out quality products all the time. Pokémon meanwhile has always been the most in-demand IP from Nintendo. So I explained that the reason a lot of their newer games may not come off as "polished" is because the employees have been suffering crunch time because of high demand. It's essentially a vicious cycle. High demand for quality games overworks employees and they dish out bad products which makes even more high demand for quality games which overworks them even more---
No joke - this kid started yelling at me. He made a few people turn their heads because he was legit like "BUT NINTENDO HAS NO EXCUSE FOR MAKING SUCH A BAD GAME. It's JUST BAD." And thankfully someone else distracted him with another conversation but I was thrown off by this because I had met this kid before and he was completely fine and quiet with his nerdy ways.
Also Gen Z gamers would totally not handle OG Tomb Raider or Metroid if they were released today. This is also a true story: I took my wife's nephew shopping to a video game store. He's a little insufferable (more on that later in another thread actually, if I feel like it). He wasn't sure what to get and I saw that the Metroid Prime Remastered was out and I said, "Hey have you ever played Metroid?" and he groaned saying, "They keep putting women in video games nowadays." And I looked at him and went "Metroid has been a thing since 1986, dude." And he shut up after that like "Oh....didn't know that."
GamerGate was kicked off and sustained by millennials, unfortunately. Obviously zoomers have picked up the mantle by now, but they didn't start the fire.
I did hear that the Pokemon fanbase is toxic but most of what I've seen is millennials and Xers complaining that the Pokemon games are bad/simplistic (never mind that they are made for kids.)
All that's to say: our generation doesn't get a pass on gaming toxicity. We've been just as bad.
Funny I actually missed out on the whole GamerGate thing entirely. I knew there was a thing that started because someone said "the camera is always focused on Lara Croft's butt" and people were arguing "that's just literal third-person POV" and then it wasn't until like five years later and 9023729832 YouTube video essays that I realized what that whole thing was about.
GamerGate, strictly speaking, began with an accusation that Zoe Quinn slept with Nathan Grayson to get a positive review for their game, Depression Quest.
In reality, the two of them had dated but all Grayson had done was list Quinn's game among some other indie games. There was no "review," per se. Certainly nothing high profile.
But this specific little accusation quickly spiraled into "video game journalism is corrupt, vagina-havers are sleeping their way to good reviews."
The misogynist angle is important because you have to understand that GamerGate is, first and foremost, misogyny. It's also become racism and all kinds of other bigoted nonsense. I just don't want anyone to get the impression there was ever a grain of truth to the whole "ethics in video game journalism" thing. It was never about that, it was always about going after anyone who wasn't a cishet white man who dared to participate in the world of video games.
Anita Sarkeesian happened to be getting into video game critique from a feminist perspective around the same time and of course she took a huge brunt of shit for it, too. I think she's done OK, though? I recall she had promised a lot of things when crowdfunding and they did not all materialize but that's hardly unusual for crowdfunding efforts.
Anyway, this whole mentality never went away and has essentially taken over Gamers, as a group. (Anyone who isn't like that is "not a real gamer," you see.)
I totally forgot about the Depression Quest thing. I recall the name Zoe Quinn floating around but I was so disconnected from what was going on when it was happening that I only vaguely recall how the whole thing started. Anita Sarkeesian was more the person I recall, and later saw videos about, which I didn't realize was an extension of that. Funny how they don't seem to touch on the Zoe thing that much compared to Anita. People seemed to have diluted a lot of the GamerGate situation from the Zoe Quinn situation to the Anita situation, grossly summarizing the whole ordeal as "nerds got unreasonably mad when she suggested video games focused too much on a woman's ass".
Patriarchy affects virtually all fields in virtually all walks of life. You see it in Hollywood, in sci-fi/fantasy communities, in the science community (subdivided into biology, physics, etc.), in computer science, in history (as in, the field of history) - men turn everything into a "gentlemen's club" that bar women from participating or being recognized.
A while back in 2020 when my channel started to get mildly famous from creating machinimas, someone invited me to a machinima Discord server. The server is mostly filled with Gen Z gamers, and it didn't take me long to realize the hotbed of misogyny and radicalization that had been taking foot within the gaming community. Conversation came up about Noah's Ark (forgot why by now) but I joked (very lightly) about Noah's Ark, and everyone got mad at me. Like *seriously* mad. Like "We could ban you for this if you do it again" mad. And I remembered thinking "Are we five years old here? Come on, man." I started to see the signs that Gen Z culture was becoming conservative based on my interactions with the people there. Someone in my age group in another server told me not to worry about it because I was "generalizing" based on a small population. Whoa, buddy. That guy has surely kept his mouth shut now after what happened with the last election.
So you have a couple factors at play here IMO. The older generation of patriarchy from GamerGate, and the newer generation from Gen Z raised on radicalization across the Internet.
Gen Z as a whole isn't conservative. you can't really boil down any generation into any one thing. it's fair to say a lot of the "trad culture" stuff you see now is from Zoomers, but so is a huge amount of left-wing sentiment.
But, as you say, patriarchy is ubiquitous, and no generation is immune to that (yet.)
pretty sure the vast majority of (at least youtube) antiwoke gamer chuds are millennials still. im sure other platforms have different skews but if you look at all the big accounts its overwhelmingly millennials on there.
audiences? who knows, but i bet they skew younger than the creators. that said, its not really a generational thing, i dont think. Though I will say, a lot of this is motivated by reaction to injured nostalgia and millennials/gen X have more nostalgia injury (and nostalgic brain decay in general) than anyone else when it comes to media
I'm glad you brought up the nostalgia because of the current gamer mentality is based on a false image of what the past was like. Gaming was more inclusive in the '80s. It wasn't until the "edgy" era of the '90s that video game companies decided to focus on teen boys and young men, at the exclusion of women and girls. Plenty of women and girls played games anyway, but that gets conveniently forgotten.
The situation is even sillier now because gaming is such a global phenomenon that cuts across demographics. "Real Gamers" like to be exclusionary and act like mobile or even console gaming isn't "real gaming," but come on. It really is just this contingent of loud, resentful men being angry that a hobby which never belonged to them might include other people.
also, as a gamer, we should bite the bullet and execute all gamers already. video games were a mistake xD
(01-26-2025, 02:01 PM)gorzek Wrote: I'm glad you brought up the nostalgia because of the current gamer mentality is based on a false image of what the past was like. Gaming was more inclusive in the '80s. It wasn't until the "edgy" era of the '90s that video game companies decided to focus on teen boys and young men, at the exclusion of women and girls. Plenty of women and girls played games anyway, but that gets conveniently forgotten.
The situation is even sillier now because gaming is such a global phenomenon that cuts across demographics. "Real Gamers" like to be exclusionary and act like mobile or even console gaming isn't "real gaming," but come on. It really is just this contingent of loud, resentful men being angry that a hobby which never belonged to them might include other people.
what really gets to me about this stuff is that half these people arent even part of the hobby. they praise/condemn media based on a trailer or a vibe, and then later admit they were never interested, never played/watched it, or only engaged with a series from a distance. i have no idea how that isnt immediately disqualifying for people who paint themselves as reviewers, but that's where we are. intellectually bankrupt cultural critique sells, i guess
(01-26-2025, 01:10 PM)gorzek Wrote: Gen Z as a whole isn't conservative. you can't really boil down any generation into any one thing. it's fair to say a lot of the "trad culture" stuff you see now is from Zoomers, but so is a huge amount of left-wing sentiment.
I felt like though when Gen Z first "gained sentience" and entered the crowd, we were all like "aight you cool" and expected them to be the "new hope" so to say. But that definitely was not the case. I think it would have been more accurate for me to say that Gen Z young men have become more conservative/religious than expected, no thanks to dude bro podcasts and extremists online. From what I've read, the divide between young men and women in their political/religious believes have diverged a lot, as referenced in how dating nowadays is apparently in the shitter and nobody seems to be getting along.
From what I've seen, yes, it's young white men who have become the most reactionary, but that's pretty much always your most reactionary group, regardless of age.
