WTF Is Wrong With The Gaming Community?

I've been around a long time now. I was here, pre-internet, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. I remember the schoolyard bickering that Atari 2600 is better than Intellivision… no no Colecovision is better than Apple II no no… IBM PC is better than Atari 7800…

A little while ago D'artagnan departed these forums. From what I can gather I guess he was tired of some of the arguing here, though I'm not familiar with the particulars. I was agnostic toward him, I felt he made good points and sometimes bad ones… but mostly I thought he was a great contributor here and it's too bad he left.

Today I went on another forum to talk about a game I'm playing. I posted a completely innocuous statement meant to initiate an exchange of ideas.

Aside from a few responses, the replies were just bizarre hate filled diatribes having nothing to do really with what I wrote. I get it, there are trolls… that's not lost on me… but there's something else going on.

You see this kind of thing about politics and religion which is at least somewhat understandable because those topics deeply affect our lives and matter at fundamental levels.

But the weirdness of getting crazy over talking about games has really gone just bonkers. Is it the food? Is it the water? People are like animals biting each other and they seemingly don't even know why.

Since my 11 year old nephew died a few years back from a rare form of spinal cancer, I've been volunteering at a local children's hospital where weekly I visit with kids who are fighting for their lives. These kids have every reason to be mean spirited and bitter and yet they're not. I'm talking about the ones old enough to understand what's going on with their bodies and the seriousness of their condition. Go to a gaming forum and say, this UI could be a tad better, otherwise the game is great... and the responses are as if you just murdered their father and had wild sex with their girlfriend.

It seems so much worse than the CompuServe days where people bitched and moaned at how bad Daggerfall was… and back then I thought that was pretty bad… but by comparison… that was baby stuff.

At least back then your resident asshole would occasionally offer a counterpoint to an argument. Today it's just, 'hey guys, on a clear summer day the sky appears to be the color blue to the normal human eye' and you're met with 'fuck you and your mother go to hell learn2write.'

It's just wild abandon anymore and RPGWatch is now quite literally the only place I will post about gaming. I've had it with every other forum I'm done. Thanks for "listening."

Kids are more connected now, 24/7. They're constantly shufffling messages back and forth to like-minded, immature brats. When the time comes for discourse with people other than people who think it's cool to be a dipshit, they don't know how.

Additionally, such interconnectedness has been with us long enough now that you got people in their 20's who grew up with this as the norm and never developed the mental faculties and consideration to discuss things rationally.

If you don't mind me asking, what forum was it? I'd like to know so I can avoid it.

Fwiw, I don't think DAtargan leaving had anything to do with arguing. (Let's be honest, that would be a little ironic. ) The impression I got was that he felt he was investing too much time posting here.

I agree with you about gaming forums in general though. I barely post on Steam anymore because of all the idiots. Sports forums are the same way tbh. I used to post a lot in discussions about college football & basketball and pro hockey, but now it seems like more than half the posts are just younger sports fans flaming each other.

JDR13 said:

If you don't mind me asking, what forum was it? I'd like to know so I can avoid it.

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Of all places... Larian's D:OS EE forum. Just a mean nasty place. I never would have expected that and you'd think a guy like Swen would attract gamers that are far less miserable considering he's such a positive upbeat guy.

JDR13 said:

I agree with you about gaming forums in general though. I barely post on Steam anymore because of all the idiots. Sports forums are the same way tbh. I used to post a lot in discussions about college football & basketball and pro hockey, but now it seems like more than half the posts are just younger sports fans flaming each other.

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I see it too all the time. I think this has been on my mind a while now, witnessing things just getting nastier and nastier and today it just really irked me that you can't even talk about a game with strangers anymore because everyone is far too interested in the fight. We passed a tipping point with this behavior, not exactly sure when, but with all the interconnectivity there is these days with the internet, humans have gone completely backward with their discourse.

Drithius said:

Kids are more connected now, 24/7. They're constantly shufffling messages back and forth to like-minded, immature brats. When the time comes for discourse with people other than people who think it's cool to be a dipshit, they don't know how.

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You're quite kind to refer to them as "kids."

It isn't the gaming community!!!
It isn't just young people(kids).

I posted something similar in general about the internet.

Face it the one thing the internet has shown us is what humans really are when you break it down. We are the worst animals on this planet. We hate for no reason, mean to each other for no reason, made up laws even to stop us from doing what people do.

I am not saying all humans would kill or rape(extreme) but we have laws for the simplest of things.

We have billions of dollars spent on just keeping track of us on our phones and chat rooms by governments. Just watch Citizenfour.

Like you I have been on the internet before the web.....

reminds me of this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWxISwEBU0U

My hypothesis would involve all the microphone using generation growing old enough to type. I've been online games since BBS doors rubbish and people seem to have become less cool as microphone use increases!

I once ran a guild of 500 but today with the noise pollution of ventrillo/teamspeak, etc being a requirement I never join guilds.

Yeah it's not limited to gamers, it's pretty ubiquitous on the net.

Before meme meant a picture with a few witty words, sociologists used it to describe the "genes" (hence... memes) of a society. So perhaps those early days of mild bitching about games on the internet became a social gene of negativity that got more and more out of control as more people joined in and time went on.

Or maybe people are just assholes; past, present, and future.

The art of pleasant conversation, as my granny put it, is a lost art. People don't sit down with each other and just talk. In terms of the internet I would say its down to a lack of active moderation compared to the old bbs days. When your internet society resembles the wild west invest in lawmen.

People can be unpleasant but the old rule still applies. Don't feed the trolls, they're smelly and don't bathe often. ;-)

Silver said:

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Don't feed the trolls, they're smelly and don't bathe often. ;-)

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Trolls is an over used word on the internet. Human lack of behavior has nothing to do with being a Troll either.

CelticFrost said:

Trolls is an over used word on the internet. Human lack of behavior has nothing to do with being a Troll either.

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Agreed the word is overused. I think troll describes someone with a lack of empathy perfectly through.

Silver said:

Agreed the word is overused. I think troll describes someone with a lack of empathy perfectly through.

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But wouldn't that cover 80% of the worlds people?

CelticFrost said:

But wouldn't that cover 80% of the worlds people?

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Everyones a troll sometimes. Its the consistent trolls that earn the label.

Actually, I blame mobile phones!! Why I hear you ask. People rarely talk to other people anymore, especially face to face. Instead they send texts, or emails. This is dehumanising!!!! When we used to actually phone people and TALK to them, or drop around and visit them, we saw them as REAL people. Now we don't; they're just some faceless 'person' at a keyboard from whom we're totally protected and isolated. Normal rules of human interaction no longer need apply!! I hate to think what the current generation would do if suddenly all cell phones stopped working. They'd be totally lost and adrift!! Pity it won't happen.

The reason behind it is disfranchised young men which society churns more and more in millions. They are left to themselves, with no purpose, no guidance and nothing.

They will hang onto something that gives them a sense of identity, accomplishment, emancipation, purpose and community. So it is simply a symptom of a much bigger social trend. If they are for instance rogue-like fans, or go on and on about why isometric turn-based RPGs are superior, if gives them all the above, which they are deprived of, and which any human being needs for its own fulfillment. It might be shoddy, but at least it is something that helps them not being completely adrift.

The intelligence, civility and discipline most of the times simply are not there. But you can't exactly demand from so many young men who have never been shown better, who no one has ever taken under their wing to act this way. So while it would be easy I don't think it is fair to bash them, because the real culprits are the older generations, who were selfish and neglectful.

The reason why this place is far less affected by this is due to the higher age average. Many people are from an older generation which suffered far less from what I described above.

Corwin said:

Actually, I blame mobile phones!! Why I hear you ask. People rarely talk to other people anymore, especially face to face. Instead they send texts, or emails. This is dehumanising!!!! When we used to actually phone people and TALK to them, or drop around and visit them, we saw them as REAL people. Now we don't; they're just some faceless 'person' at a keyboard from whom we're totally protected and isolated. Normal rules of human interaction no longer need apply!! I hate to think what the current generation would do if suddenly all cell phones stopped working. They'd be totally lost and adrift!! Pity it won't happen.

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Yes, when you are not face to face there is always far less of a sense of responsibility too.

Also, when you can pick and choose who you want to interact with, and when you can drop people out of your life at the touch of a button and easily avoid them, it produces a lot of cliquish, selfish and arrogant behavior, and is overall very damaging to the human psyche.

Not to mention that as more human activity moves online, it means that those who are deprived socially will have fewer outlets, because fewer people engage in actual communities. Civic engagement in society in clubs, or engagement in charity work for instance, are at an all-time low. It fostered a lot of very selfish behavior. So it is a vicious cycle which condemns a lot of those people from being even more dependent from the online world because there is nothing for them to do in the real world.

This whole thing today started because I currently have a sprained ankle. So today I spent much of the day playing D:OS and posting on different web sites, which is something I don't get to do in contiguous clumps very often.

Everywhere I posted today was met with such hostility and I wasn't posting anything that warranted the responses. I thought it was be an asshole day or something. When I finally posted on the D:OS forum thinking that would be a reasonable place only to find that sure enough, it wasn't I have to admit, it got to me - which I'm not proud of.

When I think about it though, it wasn't just about today or last week or even last year. Noticing the creepiness of gamer-hostility has been going on a while. I'm getting to the point where I have fewer years in front of me than are behind me and part of me wonders if I'm just getting old and I don't fit in with the gamer crowd anymore. But there's still very much a kid in me and I feel that I am more light hearted and open to other peoples opinions and ideas than those who are half my age - the same people who talk a lot about how tolerant they are.

Anyway, I hear what you all are saying. Maybe I'm having my period or mid-life crisis or something. But this has been going on a long time. Wish as a community we could be seen as something other than bitchy whiner-bullies behind anonymous keyboards. But that's the way it goes I guess.

A lot of it has to do with social media. What I call anti-social media is far from pro-social and encourages groups to gather in hostility in opposition to a perceived 'wrong' on nebulous grounds. Certain people capitalise on this and profit from it. If you look at twitter its perfect for politicians and bandwagon behaviour but little else really.

Its weird isnt it. The more intelligent your are or maybe think you are the unhappier you are.

Democratisation? Not long ago interacting via a screen was restricted to certain groups. Nowadays every idiot is online.

Individualisation? Less self-disciplin, less restrained, aloof behaviour, less respect for others, including authorities - more room for 'me and my opinion'.

It's not just the gaming industry, it's not just the internet, not just online...

It's the sugar.