The disturbing online misogyny of Gamergate has returned – if it ever went away
The disturbing online misogyny of Gamergate has returned – if it ever went away
While some of their language has changed the sentiment of this aggressive online movement is just as distressing. As one of their targets, I should know
While some of their language has changed, the sentiment of this latest aggressive movement is just as distressing. It’s time for the games industry to stand up to it
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It never went away in the first place. A huge chunk of gAmErS are still incredibly toxic, basically just reich-wing edgelords who hate women and minorities.
I saw someone complain about all the "woke" things in Starfield recently. He (and I'm 100% sure this was a "he") listed things like "unattractive females" and "accents", and goddamn if that wasn't a perfect example of what's wrong with so many gamers. Naturally "pronouns" were also a problem for this chud, because even the possibility of choosing "they" as a pronoun is literal gamer genocide apparently
It never went away in the first place
Yes, last I checked, one of their prime hate forums r/KotakuInAction was still active, and still filled with the most pathetic little insects seething about the fact that women and minorities exist in media. Gamergate has never really ended. Most people just stopped paying attention to these fools.
Unfortunately, that's easy for me to say, since I'm not on the receiving end of their doxxing and death threats.
I haven't had the best life, but I just can't fathom being such a total loser that I'd ever get that worked up over something like video games.
Even on Lemmy, which is generally full of exactly the sort of people gAmErS hate, gaming communities tend to be… well, gaming communities. At least this post hasn't gotten downvoted into the negatives, but it's got 50% as many downvotes as upvotes at the time I'm writing this. Sure, maybe some of those people have legitimate issues with the article, but I very much doubt it – it's more likely they just saw "misogyny" in the title and downvoted without reading it.
Edit: are there any less, uh, gamery gaming communities around?
Oh I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. My instance actually disables downvotes, so I can't see that, but there are a lot of reddit transplants here (I'm one of them), and reddit's takes on things like feminism and women are overall not ... good.
My crosspost to gaming@beehaw.org doesn't seem to have any downvotes, so maybe there?
Edit: Do note that the other thread ended up locked because some Gamergate chuds did show up, but the mods did promptly deal with them.
Just FYI, Beehaw doesn't have downvote button so that's probably why.
I often wonder how those people function in the real world.
I imagine the answer is "what's the real world?"
I'm being facetious. I don't want to assume they all fit the stereotype of nerd that never leaves his room if he can help it.
They can probably either mask their hatred well enough, or they're in a place just as bigoted, which may have fostered their convictions in the first place. They go through their interactions with the real world seething with anger and bitterness, then seek relief in video games.
At their heart, they're no different from anyone else seeking to escape the unpleasant reality through some media - be that through building a peaceful farm, fighting powerful enemies, reading a gripping story or watching sports. They can't actually fight the circumstances that cause their pain (or at least think so), so they flee instead.
It's reallly just the source of their pain that's so much more toxic, which in turn leads to a toxic result that ends up poisoning their joy in life even more. Most likely, they've been fed that poison by someone exploiting their vulnerability and unhappiness by giving their aimless frustration a target, reassuring them that someone else is to blame for their misery. It didn't lessen their misery, but at least it gave the question "why am I suffering?" a satisfying and concrete answer. "It's not you. It's not some random and unpredictable circumstance that you have no control over. It's these people that you can do something about."
Except you can't actually do anything about "these people", but you can at least construct a fantasy of an ideal world without "these people", where naturally you're doing much better too. In the specific case of the toxic gamers, they're looking to video games for manifestations of that world, for places they can immerse themselves in and be free from the troubles of the real world.
If these games fail to sate that fantasy, to provide an environment they seek where they're powerful and "safe" from all the things that make them upset, that rage is taken to the forums and echo chambers where they share their suffering with each other to ease and validate it. It's one thing if there's some niche indie game made by "these people" - they're on the outskirts of the gaming world, you can easily ridicule or ignore them. It's another thing when there's a game placed front and center, getting all the attention and hype for a moment, and that game is full of things that hurt you.
For a twisted comparison, imagine if a new game got all the hype and (positive) attention, despite being full of Nazis, presenting them as entirely normal or even good people. You'd (rightly) be upset too. The difference - aside from the subject - is that your upset lilely isn't born from a stock of thoroughly curated hatred and anger. You'll probably not muster the same rage as these people, because you don't have it bottled up already.
I say this because I've been a hateful person too once. Not as bad as some of these specimens, but bad enough to know the spiral and to guess how much unhappier I could have been, how much unhappier they must be. They're victims turned abusers, and while that doesn't excuse their behaviour, it may help us understand where it comes from and give us an idea of what to fight:
Bigotry is born from misery seeking an outlet, fertilised by ignorance, nurtured by confirmation bias. The better our lives get, the less reason to look for someone to blame. The more we learn to think critically and question the lies we're fed, the less that "someone" will be a convenient target keeping us in the spiral. The more we're exposed to things that contradict our bias, the weaker it will get.
The last bit is what broke me out of the loop, the second is what saw me crawl back up the spiral and unravel my convictions.
Life's still tough, but at least it has gotten a lot less hateful and miserable since I stopped feeding the hate and blaming others for my own deficiencies and started working on myself.
A lot of people suck in the real world.