fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2915 ]

[ SECRET POST #2915 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2915 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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11. [ SPOILERS for Korra ]

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12. [ SPOILERS for Korra ]

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13. [ SPOILERS for Ascension ]

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14. [ SPOILERS for OtGW ]

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15. [ WARNING for rape ]

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16. [ WARNING for rape ]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #416.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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I address this both to you, anon, and to the OP - when talking about people who identify themselves with a 'gamer' label, what kind are we talking about?

I don't play games, myself - not even those dinky little Facebook games or phone games, let alone computer or console games. But, most of my friends play one kind of game or another, and many of them are even video game journalists...and quite a few of them actually have the same attitude. Nearly everyone in my shared social group plays games - video games, card games, etc. - but there is a distinct difference between people who happen to spend most of their time playing games, vs those who build their identities on the games they play. People who are like the former - those who are literally building their lives and careers on games - often look down on the latter.

The people who build their identities on games - well, first and foremost, I see either of lot of them desperately using their hobby to substitute their personality, or having a very toxic personality (unfortunately, some gamers - particularly young, male ones - very much live up to the stereotype of racist, sexist, homophobic assholes, and I say this as someone who spent a few months out of the last year living with one). Additionally, even those who are building their lives on top of gaming can and will talk about other things (events, other people, other hobbies, etc.) - they have a life outside of those games. The ones who build their identities on gaming, though, either cannot or painfully struggle to - they seem to struggle to engage in anything out of their comfort zone of video games.

I think it says something when people who are literally defining the parameters of their life (i.e. free time, career, etc.) with video-gaming still look down on those who are using their single hobby as their entire personality/identity.

The problem is that both of these two categories of video-game players self-identify as gamers. The former kind happen to see themselves as a different 'breed' of gamer from the gaming-as-identity types (the latter sees no difference, unfortunately, as they are genuinely that blinded by their obsession). But they all go by 'gamer'.

So while I do think it's an unfair generalization...there is still a very good reasoning behind it.

I don't think I really understand the question.
Of my free time, the lions share is taken up with gaming, followed closely with comics, then TV, Movies, and books trailing. When I'm not doing any of these thing's I'm talking about them, pretty obsessively (about as obsessively as you average fan I suppose)

I'm sure I don't have a super engaging personality, but I've been told my face lights up when I start talking about games and comics.

I don't know if this answers your question, but I supposed I do define gaming as a big part of my identity. Yes, I'm probably a terrible bore if you don't share my interest.

I guess the best way I can parse the difference is, can you talk about something other than your interests (even if it bores you, are you still capable of it)? Are you capable of not talking about those kinds of interests when the situation isn't appropriate for them? Are you able to step away from those interests to invest time in other things (work, school, etc.) without acting like a child about being made to do those things? Even if you don't like them as much, do you enjoy doing anything outside of fandom interests? Even if it's just simple things like going for a walk, or taking your time in the shower because you enjoy it, cooking, eating (like, enjoying what you are eating, not just eating something you like)?

Basically, even if it may not be as interesting to you as fandom, can you (and do you) still reasonably function outside those immediate interests? Or do you always carry fandom and gaming over into every other aspect of your life, whether that other part of your life warrants it or not?

(And, to be quite blunt, how much of the toxic elements of gamer culture - racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. - do you carry into daily life with you?)

I don't know. I see the point you're making, but I don't feel it's valid.

It seems like you're trying to turn something that is a scale "how much does gaming interfere with your life" in to a binary "Are you a good gamer or a bad gamer" and I can answer the first one "Very much. Way more than is acceptable by most people's standards, but not entirely"

I'm capable of all the examples you give, but I don't tend to it. and I think the implication that people who don't break out of their fandom runt are incapable of it, and non functional is kinda... Shitty? Like "He only ever talks about gaming, what the fuck is wrong with him" type of deal. This makes you a bit awkward, makes you a bit odd, but it does not make you deserving of the level of shit in this thread.

As for the second part, I agree that those qualities DO make you deserving of that level of shit. racists, sexists, homophobs deserve no mercy, but I also reject the idea that these are vital, or exclusive to the gamer identity presented in the first part of your comment.

I do apologize if it comes off as a binary, and if it makes my point any clearer, I do see them as ends of a spectrum more than anything else. But the thing is that there often was a very distinct difference between the two types or groups of gamers - and a lot of the way I tried to frame the metrics above in fact come from gamers, themselves.

And as I said to diet_poison below, the point I'm trying to make is that while most gamers may not be the obnoxious, annoying, and/or toxic kind, they all use the same label, and on the surface it can be a little hard to tell apart. I do think OP is unnecessarily generalizing, but at the same time, I can see where they are coming from, and why - even as a gamer - they are cautious about gamers.

I don't think this is a fair question at all, Nyx. Being a gamer doesn't automatically mean gaming interferes with the rest of your life any more than with any other hobby. How is this even relevant?

*headdesk* That's exactly the point I was trying to make.

Yes, any hobby can absolutely become an obsession for people, to the point that it drowns out everything else. But gaming is the one that does it most visibly, and most often (if only because so many people get into it in the first place).

The vast majority of gamers are perfectly fine - functioning well outside of their hobby, not sharing in the toxic cultural elements of mainstream/visible gaming, and generally being great people to make friends with.

But there are, in fact, some gamers who can't really function outside of gaming and do carry those toxic elements of racism, sexism, and homophobia into their daily life. Like I said earlier, I lived with one of these, and in my fandom heavy social group, there are definitely gamers like this (though most of the gamers are as described in the above paragraph).

The latter kind are definitely a minority, but they share/use the same label of 'gamer' as the perfectly fine majority. And that's the problem. OP is assuming that all gamers are like the latter kind (or at least enough of them are to make it a good idea to avoid all of them), and I wouldn't be surprised if at least part of that is due to their own game-playing experiences.

Ok but saying that some people give a label a bad name is literally true for every label ever.

I'm not saying OP doesn't have the right to avoid a specific group because of a bad association, I'm just saying blanket statements are silly - and I guess it's not you who was making the blanket assumption, but some people are.

Sorry for missing your earlier point though. I think I misread your comment or maybe missed some context.

I don't blame you - in the aftermath of GamerGate, a lot of stuff has been dug up and piled on top of a shifting cultural context, so a lot of people's assumptions and bases of understanding are shifting, flipping, and getting thrown out the window.

Every label does obviously have it's bad people, but compared to most other commonly-derided labels/subcultures, the gamer culture's misfortune is that their most obnoxious and dysfunctional sector is sort of the most visible, in a way that most other subcultures can't compare to.

The thing about gaming is that it's still perceived and treated as a type of tiny subculture, when in reality it has massive corporations and entire entertainment sectors backing it...who are still focusing on and catering to that obnoxious, dysfunctional majority.

Every subculture has its bad eggs, but the gaming subculture's bad-eggs indirectly and unintentionally dominate the perception of gaming, because they have all this industry-level attention. That kind of screws it all up.

The vast majority of my gamer friends are perfectly fine, and I'm glad to be friends with them and tell anyone so if they ask. Some of the people in our shared social group, though, I try to avoid (and avoid association with) because they are so dysfunctional. They are a very tiny portion of our broader gaming social circle, but they are still the types of the people the industry caters to (as opposed to everyone else in the group), and thus they are still seen as the majority or dominant face of gaming.

And other key point here, though, is that if I were a stranger walking up to this group, I wouldn't immediately or easily tell the difference between the two. I spent enough time with everyone to know who's fine and who's not, but if I were just meeting everyone and they all told me they were gamers, I wouldn't be able to tell the two types apart, and given some nasty experiences with and understandings of the obnoxious type, I would at least be incredibly wary of all gamers until I know them better - and I don't blame anyone else for avoiding them altogether (hell, some of the gamers I know are like this, too.)

I do not know that I would actually agree that stereotypically dysfunctional gamers are the focus of the industry. I think that used to be the case to an extent but it has been changing and games are being marketed to a broader and broader consumer base each year. And I think more and more people are realizing just how huge gaming is. It never felt like a small subculture to me; it's always felt like I've been part of something that's actually pretty big, whenever I engage with the community as a whole.

I also guess I don't really understand the mindset of not wanting to be "associated with" a certain kind of person. If someone sees me and my friends and automatically assumes I must be Just Like Them, that strikes me as rather shallow and kinda dumb. People are different. If I have friends who are dysfunctional (and before you ask, my closest friends are all pretty well-adjusted as well, but that hasn't always been the case) that doesn't mean I'm dysfunctional as well. It means I happen to be friends with them and whatever it is about them that is dysfunctional doesn't get in the way enough for me to not be their friend.

Obviously, not the whole industry is catered to them, not by a long shot - but quite frankly, ask any random layperson to describe an average gamer to you, and the dysfunctional stereotype is what you'll get. More importantly, all the 'big' games - the ones with a lot of visibility, big consumer bases, large multi-business attention, etc. - are usually the kinds that at least ostensibly cater to that kind of demographic (or at least tend to have the kinds of problems associated with the dysfunctional demographic, i.e. racism, sexism, etc.)

It's a similar problem with my own hobby/subculture: I know damn well that most readers and writers of fanfiction are perfectly fine people...but I also know that to the average, non-fandom person, the most visible fanfiction types tend to be the creeps. In most situations that I can afford to do so, I'll wait until someone gets to know me, and then say that I do fanfiction, because I love to break down barriers and stereotypes like that.

But I wouldn't blame anyone for avoiding me from the get-go if the first or only thing they knew about me was this hobby - and that's because I'm sometimes wary of real life people if the first thing I know about them is that they are into fanfiction. It's my involvement in the community that drives me to try to get to know them better, anyway. But more than once, getting to know someone who's into fanfiction only unearthed further creepiness - thankfully, they were a minority compared to most people who I found friends in upon discovering a shared interest in fanfiction, but they are not enough of a minority to stop me from being wary about future real-life fanficcers I meet.

As for the social thing...I suppose I should add that 'my social group' here is a group in college. We don't get much chance to be isolated from everyone else - we are constantly in eye-view and next door to complete strangers, and some of those strangers will later turn out to be classmates, or even teachers. If I have to work with someone 'professionally' (either a collaborative project or them grading my work), I would rather they not associate me with the people who got caught looking up video game porn on the school wi-fi or the people who can't remember to keep their damn voices - and obscenities - down when they're playing on their handhelds in the fucking cafeteria. I know the creepy or dysfunctional types are not the majority, not typical of gamers, and not typical of most people sitting in that social group...but they don't know. ("They" being the teachers, TA's, classmates, etc.)

If I get to know someone and they turn out to be into all this stuff, that's great! And if someone gets to know me, then eventually I'll tell them I'm into this stuff because breaking down stereotypes, yay! But if I'm not already in a fandom-centric context and the first thing I learn about someone is that they are really into it - video games, fanfic, whatever - then I become wary. Did I just happen to meet them first at a rare time that they were thinking/talking about it...or do they always talk about this stuff, which is why it's my first impression of them? I like to give people benefit of the doubt and try to get to know them better, anyway, but I've been burned enough to not blame others for not having the same patience. Especially if they are gamers or whatever, themselves, because their experiences are probably a hell of a lot worse than mine.

I guess I just don't share your fundamental mindset. I honestly don't care if someone forms a certain idea of me based on me being a gamer or not. If they decide that makes me ~weird~ and not worth getting to know, it's on them. That seems really shallow and pre-emptively judgey to me. So far, it's worked out for me just fine. For example: "If I have to work with someone 'professionally' (either a collaborative project or them grading my work), I would rather they not associate me with the people who got caught looking up video game porn on the school wi-fi or the people who can't remember to keep their damn voices - and obscenities - down when they're playing on their handhelds in the fucking cafeteria." Why would they associate you with those people if you're not the one who actually did it? I guess my question is, do you think people do that? Like, assume X person is like Y person because they share a hobby (and Y person did something annoying related to that hobby)?

I also tend to hang out with nerdy circles of people, and I tend to not give two fucks what others think of me, unless it's someone I already know.

I guess I also don't think "gamer" and think "ew basement neckbeard creep". And I dunno, do most people still think that? That image has been changing a lot, and gaming is becoming more and more part of mainstream pop culture. And at any rate, I've found that people from just about any hobby demographic can be racist, sexist, or otherwise awful; I'm not going to say "well s/he is a gamer so s/he is more likely to be a bigoted jerk". I guess I can understand avoiding people on statistical evidence for your own safety or emotional well-being, but not necessarily beyond that.

What games are you calling the "big" games? Are you talking about GTA and CoD? (Those are the two that make me think of the neckbeardy stereotype the most.) I'd argue that there are other franchises, even some Nintendo franchises, that are as big if not bigger than those. And I honestly don't know what the average "layberson" thinks are the biggest or most popular games. It'd be an interesting question.

Well, it's not about whether or not I think people do that - it's actually happened to me, before. I've had people legitimately surprised to see me talk extensively about something (i.e. class material) because they only times they'd ever seen me beforehand, it was with that 'geek group' on campus. I've also had at least one classmate admit that they'd been avoiding me (in my attempts to set up study groups) because they've seen me at that table with those people, and assumed I was "more of the same".

My overall nerdy circle, I loved to death, and as I was lucky to not have to worry too much what other people think of me, I stuck around - despite how often I was genuinely humiliated to be sitting at the same table as people who were shouting at each other indoors over a stupid card game, or looking up porny fanart on their laptops in public, or grappling for a handheld console or some kind. If we were somewhere on our own, I wouldn't give two shits, but we weren't, and eventually there comes a point where damn adults need to learn to not have certain things on a screen in public or how to keep their voices down indoors, and some people in the group just do not get the memo - despite how often the rest of us try to fill them in.

I've had people within the group repeatedly asking me to keep an eye on some of the unsavory types when they started going from obnoxiously dysfunctional to downright creepy. I've also heard the friends who were literally building careers on video games - aspiring industry journalists, voice actors, design artists - admit to avoiding this table or social group for similar reasons.

It's great that you don't jump to "ew basement neckbeard creep" when you hear "gamer"! But a lot of people do and that's the point I'm trying to make - these stereotypes exist, and that while they stem from a minority of gamers, these stereotypes are not unfounded. And yeah, GTA and CoD are some of the most well-known video games outside of gaming communities. I am well aware they are not what most gamers play, but not all non-gamers are. I've had friends complain about how, when they tell someone that they play video games, they are often asked something along the lines of "oh, like Call of Duty/Grand Theft Auto/World of Warcraft".

None of this is even slightly new. Cracked did an article on this years ago, and most of what they talked about then is still relevant now.

Quite frankly, I think OP probably has a pretty good reason for avoiding gamers, despite being a gamer themself. I don't know what that reason is, but based on my own experiences with real-life geek/fandom circles, I can make some pretty educated guesses and not blame them for their caution at all.

Hm, it kinda sounds like some of that stuff was unique to your circle. I've hung out with nerds who are really chill and don't do things like that.

I still think it comes down to a fundamental difference in overall outlook. I tend to have little patience for people who judge a group based on a minority so I just don't really much care if they think Bad Things of me based on a group I'm in. Not saying the way you do it is wrong; there are benefits and drawbacks to both outlooks.

The only exception is making professional connections, because that's the only situation I can think of where I care what people who are basically strangers think about me. Once I've worked with someone for a while I don't care if they know I'm a nerd - they've already formed their impression of me by then anyway.

As for OP, I don't really care if OP avoids gamers - I just don't think their basis for doing so is super strong. You say the stereotypes have merit, but you also say they're based on small minorities, and anyone who knows this and continues to avoid people based on that stereotype are either a) avoiding people based on a potentially dire outcome where it's simply not worth the risk or b) avoiding people for a "reason" that I frankly think is shallow and unfair. Not my business who OP or anyone else associates with, but that's my opinion on the whole thing.

As an addendum, I also think the neckbeard-gamer stereotype, while still present, is fading. Might still be very prevalent now (not sure, I never got that impression even before I started gaming a lot, but eh) but it is on the out.

I'm not sure how unique it is - as we've both experienced, the overwhelming vast majority of nerdy types aren't like that. But most people I've talked to (online and real life) who hang out with fellow nerdy types in real life also mentioned "a few bad eggs".

In my experience, it's more like option A - it's a small chance that you can really damage your perception in the eyes of people whose opinions you care about.

I think one of the big disconnects for us is that for myself - and many others - my social life and my professional life aren't isolated from each other. They interact heavily with each other, which means I have to make sure my overall reputation/perception is a good one, because I'm never quite sure when that will leak over into my professional life (or at least my version of professional life - for many people, it may just be social life, but that social life is critical to them in a way it may not be for everyone).

It is definitely fading. My own friends are a big part of that, as is the growing overall popularity of video games. It's just that right now, while it's fading, it's still highly prevalent. Video games aren't really seen as just the hobby that they are for most people - they still have certain stereotypes attached to them, namely neckbeard stereotypes or something "kids" do and grown adults shouldn't be doing. It's a very stupid assumption, but unfortunately some very stupidly assumptive people have significant influence on my life and it isn't always obvious who they will be, so I really have to be careful to make sure the first thing people learn about me isn't how much I love fandom. (Of course, once people get to know me, I'd love to reveal it, because I will at the very least break down stereotypes and if I'm lucky I'll find other nerds and have new friends.)

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[ SECRET POST #2915 ]

What kind of gamer?

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