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Comment by LegitShady | Hacker News Reader

"gamers" aren't really a unified group any more than "movie watchers" are. Its useful for marketing to pretend so, but the only thing they share is they sometimes play video games.

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Nah, capital-g Gamers are a different breed than people who play video games.

capital g gamers is just a marketing term to try to convince people to buy RGB bling and overpriced accessories. Again, the only thing they all share in common is that they play games, which are entirely mainstream at this point.

Definitely don't agree. There's a difference in people who need support groups to tell them if a game is "too woke" for them / send death threats and people who have RGB.

It sounds like you've made up your own definition for something you already disliked and just call it gamers. Anyone reading resetera will know you don't have to be a right wing troll to be toxic.

Feels like you're missing the distinction I made. I'm not saying gamers are bad. I spend a lot of my time with games, I avoid the term for myself but am not calling gamers toxic by any means.

Perhaps you might be referring to something closer to Gamergaters?

Toxic nerd fandoms do not directly map onto the far-right. Sure, there's overlap, but not all of them share those politics or are even political. There's also plenty of people who'd tar, feather, and run someone out of town on a rail for not being woke enough. Or who just have meltdowns about how the minute something isn't quite the way they wanted it, it's "TOTALLY RUINED!!"

Some small fraction of all of these weirdos would be willing to call in a death threat or actually follow through.

We can call it whatever we want but it's a shame it's such a frequent occurance in the games industry. Is it due to the news focusing on video games, or is there something disproportionately odd that attracts that folks to games?

Personally I think it's the latter.

Edit: And I don't think it's only attractors, I think there's not enough detractors to toxic players.

https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/unity-employee-reportedly-for...

So it turns out the threat came from...a unity employee. Not 'Gamers'.

Do you understand how ridiculous all this gamers talk was?

Yeah, that makes it worse. Someone whose job it is to work on games (or at least, work with peope who make games) decided to burn their career over threatening their boss. And since it's someone who is an employee they can go postal or have accomplices.

I don't really care about the wide generalizations, I didn't make them and it's not productive to dwell on them. It's the internet, report and ignore. But I really hate how some people were downplaying this and saying it was a conspiracy all because they are mad at a CEO. Can we both hate corporate greed AND death threats, please?

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