'Gamers' are over
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
I think this quote sums up the entire article perfectly:
> These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers -- they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had.
If this was a comment on any community on the internet nobody would take it seriously, it would just be labelled the "troll post" that it invariably is. It is flamebait or even click bait if you will.
I'm happy to debate the whole "gamer culture" thing and even the worst parts of that, and many commentators have in the past (e.g. "Totalbiscuit" has touched on that topic many times). However, this article isn't liable to start any constructive or thoughtful discussion, just anger certain people, and drive away far more.
Maybe if the author spent less time trying to be "edgy" and inciting people they could have dedicated more of the article to how we move things forward (rather than throwing more wood on the fire).
Liz Ryerson: On Right-Wing Videogame Extremism http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2014/08/on-right-wing-videogame...
Elizabeth Sampat: The Truth about Zoe Quinn http://elizabethsampat.com/the-truth-about-zoe-quinn/
And for some more context on recent events: An awful week for video games (Chris Plante) http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/28/6078391/video-games-awful-w...
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The posts you've listed pull in a lot of "oh no 4chan is evil" and honestly a lot of fear and victim rhetoric unrelated to the games industry proper--bad stuff, to be sure, but hardly limited to games.
It's strange to see people being so shocked (shocked!) that many people are perfectly willing to be shitbags to one another, especially when the stakes are so low. It reminds one of interclique bullying of girls in school.
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One of the biggest annoyances I've got is this notion in the articles of "The games, they are more inclusive, more loving, more hugbox!". That's horseshit.
Games in the 80s and 90s were more honest in some ways, more open in their characters and stories. MUDs and chatrooms and whatnot allowed people to play as whomever and whatever they wanted. Ultima Online, even old Zork...so much flexibility and promise. Once upon a time you could actually do serious academic anthropology on online communities--beyond, you know, optimizing marketing. People wrote essays about online rape, about offline death, about all sorts of things and how the real and virtual intertwined. It was a hell of a lot more optimistic than what we've got now.
That's the problem: gamers are a hyperconsumerist group, and have become very sensitive (in some cases) to pandering and marketing...and when new games or titles spring up using inclusiveness or niche-audience or whatever as a growth hack, they are apt to call the games out. And this is a shame, because some games genuinely are trying to explore these places.
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Another note on cultural identity.
Society has spent the last decade and a half alternately pushing socially-irresponsible games onto young men and then making them out to be manchildren if they have this hobby.
We haven't made more jobs, we haven't made less debt, we haven't stopped marketing designed to pander to young men, we haven't sought to constructively reintegrate effectively a lost generation of males into some magical new equality-focused paradise (which doesn't exist, but that's beside the point)...and yet, when we attack their last bastion of acceptance and belonging, we're shocked (shocked!) that they become angry and fight back as best they can against some barely-understood antagonist.
I can not and will not defend individual acts of rudeness and abuse, but we need to do some serious thinking about the conditions that led up to this point--and the truth I believe lies more with consumerism, marketing, and societal pressure than some simple notion of "gamers are finally getting the purifying light of ~social justice~ and crying like manbabies".
I could be ignorant but I don't think Quinn has made anything that could attract attention on its own merit. On the other hand, Sarkisian has produced content for years and is established. I've met men-children who hate Sarkisian because she criticized their precious video games. But what has Quinn ever done to become a lightning rod?
As the children who played those games grew up, so too did the demand for slightly more grown-up, but not too grown-up, fare. Pac-Man and Q-Bert gave way to DOOM and Civilization. Video games became exceedingly violent, but in a crude and cartoonish manner that concerned few. Technology steadily improved and soon the violence was not so cartoonish. There were many other advances. Games, such as Half Life, brought seamless story telling into the genre. Games became more movie-like. However, the overwhelming majority of games, to this day, mimic only the worst kind of relentlessly violent action films.
When sound was introduced to cinema it came with massive technical limitations. Cameras had to be mechanized to synch with sound recording, and the results were much larger and louder than hand-cranked cameras. These had to be wrapped in noise dampening materials so that sound could be recorded. The result was huge, cumbersome cameras. The audience's demand for sound meant that cinematic techniques that had been flourishing in silent cinema were set back decades until camera technology improved enough to compensate. Similarly, today's gamers demand realistic worlds with people in them, but video game technology is wholly inept at portraying most forms of human interaction. It has been easy to realistically murder someone with a gun for quite some time now, but has any game managed to simulate a simple, two-way, free-flowing human conversation yet?
There is a huge, rich world of cinema beyond action films. Many will never feel the need to experience that greater world, but it is there. It allows us to see the world through strange and foreign viewpoints and learn more about the world around us. Video games, although their finances have outstripped cinema, remain inferior in this respect. Indie games are carving out a niche for themselves, but primarily by picking up where video gaming's vaudeville days left off once the realism became the craze. I feel that games, as an art-form, and gamers as an audience, will be seen as inferior, and perhaps rightly so, until realistic dramas, comedies, etc. become possible. There will always be big tent-pole action games, just as there are in cinema, but there must be more for gamers to be seen as more than blood-crazed teenagers.