Gamers™ are the actual worst.

Let's talk about what people mean when they say critical things about gamers.

For starters they don't mean all gamers. It's short hand for the racist / misogynist / bigoted behaviour you often see tied to mainstream gaming culture.

The same types of people who propagate casual racist views by harassing someone who was chosen to be the face of PogChamp for 24hrs.

The same people who harass women, minorities and BIPOC in voice chats, often unchallenged because there is a toxic culture going unchecked.

That's just one facet of the culture. The other is the young men who feel victimised for no real reason. The types that will unjustly become upset saying 'women and SJW's are ruining games/twitch/insert company here' and will gatekeep without thinking anything of it.

People who will read the original tweet and see it as a personal attack and will no doubt harass a person for generalising while simultaneously missing the point of the entire thread.

For instance I consider myself a gamer, but I'm not a Gamer™.

These 'upstanding human beings' will harass developers for delaying a game, often going as far as using death threats & then complain when same game is released with bugs.

All the while ignoring practices like crunch which harm actual artists, because they're entitled children.

And the unfortunate thing is that this isn't the majority of gamers. I shouldn't have to say 'not all gamers' but time after time it's shown that publishers will capitulate to the angry gamers by putting out statements like 'our games aren't political'.

This crowd is often the ones being catered to, as much as publishers would likely deny. You can see this via poor representation in video games. While this is getting better pubs are still hesitant to push for better representation because they assume it lacks core appeal.

There are however studies that suggest that the majority of people playing video games do want better representation within their games. https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/newzoos-gamer-sentiment-diversity-inclusion-gender-ethnicity-sexual-identity-disability/

Going back to the core issue at hand. There can be a lot of crossover between these groups, and unfortunately somewhere towards the edgier side of the spectrum is the pipeline to alt right extreme viewpoints.

Which is problematic for a number of reasons I don't need to go into.

So how do we change this? Well it needs to be addressed on all levels.

As mentioned publishers and devs need to do their part to curb toxicity by broadening the appeal of videogames, rather than rolling out the same tired bs tailored for the 'core' audience.

Putting better in game tools in place to help decrease harassment.

This can also specifically apply to sites like Twitch that allow this toxic culture to fester without taking any genuine action against it.

Then there's the responsibility of us. The non Gamers™ who play videogames. It's up to us to call out this behaviour in our spaces and attempt to educate people not to be shitty to other people.

The more we normalise calling out the behaviour hopefully the less it will happen.

Part of that education is also the reasoning for this thread.

I no doubt have a minority of those people following me via my work on Twitch. Hopefully this explains why jumping to conclusions about this subject and feeling attacked is probably the wrong way to look at things.

With all of that said. Go give @CriticalBard some love today. He more than deserves the positivity.

And if you're interested in learning more about problematic gaming industry practices and gamers in general please go give @JimSterling a follow. It's literally what he does.