Hardcore gamer = someone who plays only cinematic grizzed white dude games and/or military fetishizing FPS
Casual gamer = anyone that is not a 15-25 yo male, and/or plays anything outside of the previously mentioned games, especially if those games are colorful.
So basically the gaming community is full of gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery. They make sure they’re the loudest voice heard when anything about games is talked about, and won’t be happy until all games a homogenous stream of bland, hyper-realistic but with a grey filter slog of mindless action with no heart or soul. And don’t you dare force them to read any dialogue or story.
I agree with your complaints towards the apparent predominant gaming culture. But I also believe that there have never been more indie games that are contrary to that culture or just ambivalent to that culture than ever before.
Yeah the indie community is great. My complaints are more the popular gaming community that was particulaly strident during the PS2, 360 and gamergate era
I will never forgive the gaming community for shitting on Wind Waker when it first came out for being catroony
WW was a fantastic game and the graphics aged gracefully. I replayed it back in 2016 and had a blast.
If someone puts “gamer” on their dating profile tho
Lots of good points being made but I don’t like when it veers toward hatred of demanding games on a conceptual level. Ultrakill has lots of heart and soul and also challenges the player in order to evoke a certain experience, and that is part of the art of games.
“Hardcore” games without much story, games with leaderboards and bragging rights, aren’t always being made to exclude and insult players. That stuff is fun sometimes, like Hyper Demon, a beautiful minimalist game in both concept and execution that many players will not necessarily excel at.
Petty, pedantic point perhaps but I do like a game that expects me to learn a bit to win.
Tbf ultrakill literally has the option to enable aimbot and you dont need any crazy techs to beat the main story.
Yeah the mentality that every game should be beatable by a 90 year old who has never touched a computer before otherwise it’s not “accessible” is so fucking dumb. When I play my hardcore difficulty pokemon romhack because I want a harder game, I don’t expect Nintendo to make the actual game that way. When people who want easy games play challenging games, they demand that the developers make them easy(see dark souls easy mode discourse). It’s this mentality that liking challenge makes you “toxic” which just idiotic.
We already solved this problem in the 90s. The solution is to design a hard game but also have cheat codes to make the game easier (or even harder). But most modern game developers are completely allergic towards adding a simple god mode or infinite ammo code into their shitty game, so we’re stuck with arguing over whether story mode is good or not (it’s good if you insist on not having cheat codes).
that would cut into their microtransaction profits
people won’t want to buy the “time-savers” (in enormous quotes) if they can just put in the konami codeBut most modern game developers are completely allergic towards adding a simple god mode or infinite ammo code into their shitty game
This is so wack to me. Every game should be like Jedi Academy, and have a console where you can spawn in any NPC in the game/give yourself any cheat power you can imagine, because all that stuff ever does is make the game more fun.
Currently playing Noita and I have to say that “diagetic cheat codes” are by far my favorite way of doing this
Yeah you could just enter the console command for infinite health or install an infinite health mod, and those should both also be available
But when you’re allowed within the normal rules of the game to build an incredibly janky and dangerous item that spawns the enemy that drops a heart container when killed, with lots of opportunity to accidentally explode yourself along the way, that just hits different
Let people know the intended experience is challenging. If people aren’t able to meet the game at its level of challenge, for any number of reasons, and turn the difficulty down to where it is doable to them, why not let them? Set the default to the “intended experience” but let people of different ability levels have their fun too.
By the way, people who are much better than games on average are also not having the “intended experience”, but no one is upset at them for not “respecting art”. People playing Dark Souls on guitar hero controllers or w/e aren’t having the “intended experience”.
The anti-easy mode discourse is just ableism in a mask.
No need to take it that far, I’m not against difficulty levels but it’s not always easy to tell how to make a game easier in that sense. If a “scene” in a game revolves around “get the ball in the cup when I say go,” not getting the ball into the cup when the screen says go means you don’t progress. It’s within the scope of “artistic vision” for the dev to want a character in the scene to congratulate you for getting that ball in that cup only when you’ve done it is all I’m saying.
Like sure, in a big AAA game with a cinematic story broken up by combat sections, I think it’s fair to say that an easy mode, even the “story mode” without any way to fail that some of them offer, is understandable. But isn’t it fair for a rhythm game to expect you to follow a beat, or for a jigsaw puzzle to withhold the picture the pieces make until you put it together? Plenty of indie games don’t really have anything to offer beyond the “toy” they present the player with. Sometimes a game is made to teach you its systems until you can do it, like learning an instrument, and I wouldn’t say that’s ableist.
How wide is the rim of the cup? How heavy is the ball? How viscous is the air the ball flies through? What counts as “doing it” or “not doing it” in any given system either involves an arbitrary line or error-bars of some sort. There’s no harm in having a setting to move that line slightly or to make those error-bars wider. Or must we bow to an auteur’s artistic vision (or a community’s bigotry) about these things? Perhaps if the artistic point of the thing is to make people suffer in some way, but otherwise?
[M]ust we bow to an auteur’s artistic vision (or a community’s bigotry) about these things? Perhaps if the artistic point of the thing is to make people suffer in some way, but otherwise?
I can’t speak for Poogona, but balancing a game for different difficulty levels while still making the game enjoyable is going to be harder for some games than others. That doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be done, just that the task is non trivial. I imagine things would be better in this regard without booj cracking the whip on devs.
It doesn’t have to be about making a player “suffer,” I’m just saying that being able to “lose” in a game doesn’t have to be ableist or done for the sake of masculine ego. And winning or losing doesn’t have to be arbitrary, I can imagine the size and physics of the ball being designed to mimic the real thing rather than being designed for maximum accessibility, which would be the choice of the dev. I feel kinda silly arguing about this now but this rhetoric about a game that might not be immediately accessible to all players being “masked ableism” and of “bowing” to artistic vision is surprising to hear. Risk of failure and design that takes advantage of mechanical depth can add to the fun, it doesn’t have to be interpreted as bigotry.
to make people suffer in some way
Yes! That’s it! You’ve hit the nail on the head. People don’t pay $60 to feel frustrated. They pay $60 to feel good. If the game doesn’t deliver what they paid for, why does it even exist?
People also don’t pay to be unchallenged, which is how we wound up with derogatory nicknames like “walking simulator”
People’s threshold for challenge and fun are all over the place and so are the games that do and should exist
But it doesn’t work that way. They get lowered to the level of the customers who don’t want to overcome challenges. All they want is a good feeling. And those brain chemicals that get released by being led by the nose around a level are real.
When you pay full price for a game, do you deserve to experience all of the content contained therein? Or do you have to spend hours of tedious frustration, feeling bad brain chemicals, just to get what you already paid good money for? You feel enough bad brain chemicals with your job and your family already, why are you spending your precious few free hours doing the same?
In older games. If turning down the difficulty in the intended way didn’t work, then they’d let you skip the section after, say, 20 failures. Or the game would have branching mission paths that made losing not a game over.
When I think of “old games” I think of the opposite, of games that had limited lives and no save systems. Not defending that, but considerations of differing player ability are certainly a newer development rather than the old way of things.
Games back then didn’t have to consider differing player abilities (which honestly isn’t that true either since multiple difficulties were already a thing) because cheat codes existed. Story mode was basically the easiest difficulty on top of a god mode and infinite ammo cheat code.
Sure but those cheat codes weren’t always easy to access before widespread internet use. You used to be able to buy books of cheat codes in fact.
Gaming isn’t fundamentally about overcoming challenges. It used to be, but it changed long ago. Now, gaming is about generating pleasing brain chemicals. When gamers “win”, they feel good. When they meet a challenge that stops them, they feel bad. It’s just that simple. People don’t shell out $60 so that they can feel frustrated and angry. You paid for the whole game, you get to play the whole game. With lighted signs pointing the entire way and a companion to overcome the challenges if you can’t solve them in the first ten seconds.
gamergate was unironically the mainstream debut of the alt-right and I will stand by that assertion
It became more and more intertwined with the right wing as the 2016 election drew closer. Gamer Gate and adjacent communities turned into a pipeline for the alt right, with YouTubers like Sargon of Akkad radicalizing libs into fascists.
I watched it unfold on r/KotakuInAction at the time. It was a weird crossroads for me.
I watched it unfold on r/KotakuInAction
You just brought up icky memories
It was a weird crossroads
Same. I was all for severing the ties between gaming journalists and publishers and ending the status quo of paid high review scores, but luckily past-me saw and rejected the misogyny that was also heavily present in those spaces and I didn’t end up turning into a nazi.
Yes I agree coupled with the refugee crisis of 2014-15, fash talking points became mainstream.
The way you phrased your comment makes it sound like your take is controversial. Are there really a lot of people who think otherwise?
I had never heard of them until Milo Yannopolous got popular in 2016. Back then, it meant “alternative right” as an opposition to GOP establishment and RINOs. Boy, they sure got a lesson in entryism as every piece of shit in America jumped on the train.
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I think the early 2000s PS2 era was the peak of modern gaming. Colourful games, decent 3d graphics. The FPS era hadn’t fully began on consoles yet.
The less said about the late 2000s, the better. That’s when all the “gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery” really got kicked into overdrive. Every game got a sepia piss filter as well. And after that we got the blue filters which were somehow even worse.
Oh god I am in an eternal struggle against the „creatives“ and their constant use of disgusting filters which destroy the natural colors. Tho I must confess I loved the golden filter of deus ex human revolution and the grain filter of ME1 and yes even the brownish tints of dragon age, I know I am bad haha.
Honestly some games benefitted from the piss filter, like Fallout New Vegas. If it were made with modern graphics I would want them to keep the piss filter instead of being vibrant like Fallou4 76
Filters have their place tbh. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense aesthetically.
The issue is falling back on it to the point it becomes a meme.
I think if you are making a depressingly sad game (like Dragon Age) then yeah using the shit brown filter to make it feel even more grimy works
I am currently doing a replay of like old rpgs and I‘ve finished dragon age like a month ago, personally I didn’t find like sad at all, maybe if you like get the worst outcomes, the only thing that made me go „huh“ was when characters tell like random tales and they go „…and then they were brutally assaulted and murdered“ which often feelt like a bit edgy for edgys sake. Also like why would anyone defile the ashes? Tbf the brown filter did work for me only in like certain areas.
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Battlecruiser 3000AD! By Derek Smart, Ph.D! Wow, that takes me back. The original “in development forever” game way before Daikatana or Duke Nukem.
Blatant false advertising. Nobody has ever wanted Battlecruiser 3000AD.
Uhh…😅 I did…
I thought it would basically be No Man’s Sky. Fly around to planets and do stuff. But the designer himself flamed me on USENET so I quit following it and never played.
A lot of them didn’t even get that even the early Duke Nukem games were already mocking this shit as immature misogynist garbage. Which is how we got the dumbster fire that was DN Forever.
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I dont understand how MOBAs becomes one of the biggest esports when gameplay consists of farming and the teamfights are full of visual bloats that unless you spend 100 hours reading the wiki including the fcking patch notes you understand absolutely nothing. Like just to give you a glance"buy physical attack because everyone does this and this guy wields a sword" but also stuff like “buy this magical attack because these dagger wielding assassin scales magic attack”. Why is the goddamn dagger considered magical?
Like at least in stuff in counter strike the game despite some other tactics such as lineups it still overall easy to understand (plant the bomb and kill the enemies),.
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Same way that Harry Potter became a cultural icon, very fucking aggressive marketing to burn it into peoples brains everywhere they look. This isn’t a joke btw Harry Potter is an example of some of the most aggressive book/mass media marketing ever done and set a precedent for extracting as much capital as one can from a source.
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Yeah GoT was an interesting watch for me during college and was something that was a insta conversation starter whenever you just met someone and knew jackshit about them but were sure they at least watched GoT. It was also pretty amazing to watch it get morphed into another HBO skinemax show with similar asthetics very quickly (then again the books themselves also have some squick as well so GRR doesn’t come off completely clean).
L*ague dropped at the right place at the right time and everybody started chasing the MOBA dragon just like people were trying to chase the WOW dragon.
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I remember gaming always being seen as a “boys club” for as long as I can remember. They were thankfully pretty welcoming of me (being a brown guy and all) but girls playing games were either given the m’lady treatment or chastised for making a mistake that would get them seen as being bad at the game. Often both.
The sad part is that there have been girls and women playing and developing games since the beginning but they were mostly pushed into the background, so now they get accused of invading a so-called male space. Can’t win
AFAIK the arcade boom was pretty popular with both men and women, since at that time it was a social hobby and kids were doing a lot of hanging out and hooking up at arcades. It wasn’t until the turn to console gaming, which was primarily an anti-social activity, that video game advertisements started really focusing in on young boys. Nintendo bears a lot of the blame here, since they defined the western market following the big crash, and they saw the NES as exclusively a boys’ toy - but it wasn’t just them of course, in particular I remember the OG XBox’s marketing doing a lot to create a “bro culture”, along with stuff like the channel G4, which I think was created intentionally as a reaction to the previously existing perception of gamers being nerdy.
Children (overwhelmingly boys) who played vidya games were nerdy. There was a brief period during the Pac-Man era when vidya games were for everyone, and soon it went into hardcore weirdness. Games got hard and unless you had the patience to play again, and again, and again, and again…you can forget being a part of the crowd. Games with 45 levels when nobody ever got past level 4.
and they saw the NES as exclusively a boys’ toy
So there’s a bit more to this, if I remember all this correctly, Nintendo couldn’t exactly call the NES a ‘video game console’ when they started selling it in the US because the crash had pretty much made that a really bad financial move to call it as such. And also they had to sell it in the toys section to start with, which has had and still has a lot of segregation between boys and girls toys. And also considering how brick and mortar stores have acted for a long time, they likely had a bit of a hand in this in the way of demanding nintendo to pick if it was a boys toy or a girls toy or else they won’t stock it.
I think a big point is also the transition of everything being so damned online now (not gaming but communities and discourse) that what initially was gaming in the 90s and early 2000s (casual gamers, kid gamers, and then weird grown ass chud adults) were very much compartmentalized and separate. Nowadays with Youtube you had the fallout of gamergate create a self feeding subculture that propagates among dissatisfied mainly white young males who utilize one of their hobbies (gaming) as escapism from all the shit capital loves to do (alienation) and create an exceedingly angry stigma to project on anyone entering “their” space that does not conform. Add in how chuds screech the loudest and angry engagement clicks and comments lead to algorithm feedback and you have one of the worst video genres ever of usually a scruffy bearded angry
being gobsmacked they have to look at a minority in a video game for even a single fucking second but utilizing safe dogwhistles such as “woke” and “sjw” to “debate about it” (though that second one is falling out of style).deleted by creator
I hate how a streamer knows I’m a first timer in chat, how theres always “a friend” who gives me a free sub and WELCOME TO THE COMMUNITY. Please ffs can we go back to love of the game lets plays
there was a time when you didn’t need to specify “no commentary” when you searched for a walkthrough
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G*mers never had a chance.
The 70s saw the development of really old games like Dnd, essentially some STEMlord’s pet project. Many of these ancient games were tied to Dnd, where the reactionary Gary Gygax’s influence in Dnd was completely dominant.
The 80s continued that tradition with games like Rogue and Nethack. This was also when Nintendo exclusively marketed the NES as a “boy toy.” Both of what could be retroactively labeled as indie and AAA gaming were firmly men only. Arcades tended to be dominated by men as well.
The 90s further perpetuated this trend with the console wars between Nintendo and Sega, with Sega pushing really hard as the cool and definitely being played by dudes with 'tude console. If you looked at Sega ads during that time, they were all hyper-trying-too-hard-masculine.
The 00s, while carrying the misogynist torch, reflected a qualitative shift in its misogyny. The 00s, or more specifically, 2001 was when Halo 1 was released on the Xbox. This game, more than any other, was what pushed gaming from some nerdy shit into the mainstream. With the mainstreamification of gaming came the dudebros. The previously misogynist nerds were transformed into misogynist dudebros, and the dudebros carried their toxic competitiveness into gaming.
The 10s was when esports, or more specifically L*ague of L*gends, became commercially viable. The esportification of games began and along with it, the toxic competitiveness seeped even in games that weren’t designed to be competitive. And it pains me to say this, but speedrunning contributed to this as well. Suddenly, you started hearing about the “meta” and “optimal strats” in some indie platformer. And of course, G*merg*te sealed the deal by politicizing gaming, making g*mers consciously reactionary.
I have checked out of gaming so I can’t give you a rundown of the 20s, but it’s more of the same shit honestly. The seeds were sown during the 70s, with each subsequent decade nurturing the seedling, until it blossomed into some hideous plant with G*merg*te.
I hate esports i hate how Riot took all the actually fun modes in league like OFA and nexus clash and the pve game modes and decides to only make them appear in rotations (or not even appear for pve modes) because apparently Riot only cares about competitive and ranked play.
Also hate how certain characters like Azir is effectively neutered because its too good for the highly coordinated esport teams, whose gameplay barely resembles even the highest ranked play.
Billion dollar game cant even afford to support other game modes.
LoL says “here’s a game and some pieces tailor-made to play it” while DotA says “here’s some toys and a sandbox, it’s out of my hands now” and I think about that every day
LoL says “here’s a game and some pieces tailor-made to play it” while DotA says “here’s some toys and a sandbox, it’s out of my hands now” and I think about that every day
hell yeah, same
honestly I think dota’s way should be the way for fun+challenging games in general
In 1980 something, Nintendo of America made the decision to sell the Nintendo Entertainment System as a gendered toy
This would later be considered a bad idea and roundly mocked
Me playing a gameboy color at age 7
My friend at the time: “Why do you have that, it’s not called a Game GIRL”
Your friend was a spoothead
CORE MEMORY
Also being called a lesbian for playing Nintendo with the boys in grade school. The nineties, man.
I’m so sorry you were friends with young Ben Shapiro
Bro it was the 90s, most little boys were mini Shapiros
They shoulda just called it the Game Child smh.
Was it? I remember it being praised for yeas and “saving the game industry”
Hey I was a hardcore gamer but i played RTS and fighting games like a gentleman
Fighting games don’t count, when your opponent can punch you irl for getting out of line it really cuts down on the bullshit
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You just play as one guy. How hard can that be. That’s why I liked HoN actually because the courier micro and map awareness was key
I don’t care that much tbh because while the “gaming community” is indeed dogshit (personally I’ve stopped playing any sort of public multiplayer game since voice audio became the norm anyway), we also seem to be in a golden age of independent awesome video games, including specifically ones with dialogue and story. And the small sub-community of players of those are usually much saner and welcoming.
I don’t know if “post-contrarianism” is a term but I wish it was because it describes posts like this one perfectly
Post country music fan
Also yes I fully admit this is a dumb post.
games mechanics become watered down due to the profit motive and challenging games are fun, this whole thread feels like just contrarianism to spite a vocal minority turning being a HARDCORE GAMERRRRR into a personality trait
Where did I mention difficulty?
if you mean people restricting themselves to “manly” games thats also a loud online minority, i mean nintendo still makes the most popular games out there and stuff like undertale has sold how many millions now? so saying the gaming community™ is “full of gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery” is hard to believe
so saying the gaming community™ is “full of gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery” is hard to believe
what planet are you from
turns on voice chat in TF2
There are literally Nazis
Turns it back off
Okay
No, gamers bad.
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Remain convinced the only good community in games is the fighting game community. But, alas, they engage in the bad shit too from time to time.
I dunno the sexism is pretty bad especially when they complain about the woman fighters boobs being smaller or whatever
since I’m a newbie and just getting into SF6, I’ve been trying to find good streamers to watch that haven’t been “cancelled” or problematic or are ragers when they lose. mainly stick with Justin Wong, Maximilian, and Japanese streamers lol.
I firmly believe that it’s because you can get punched IRL for being out of line
Yeah arcades/local fight game spots are cool because people gather in person, so there’s less of a problem of someone being a shithead because they get booted or shunned.
The smash community has been pretty horrific over the years even by gamer standards.
Street fighter just got a massive influx of new fgc players so I can’t really tell.
Guilty gear community is very supportive of Bridget
By the sheer virtue of being a mixed bag the fighting game community probably wins least toxic.
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