Last week an article was published in this section titled, “Why the Hate for Games and Gamers?” It was focused on the newfound fame of Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, a massively popular streamer on Twitch, along with the rising prominence of video games and e-sports (professional video game competition) in mainstream culture.
One aspect of the article was concerned with dispelling the idea that people who play video games are “sad,” and that this idea is propagated by “an older generation that does not fully understand the massive industry behind video games and the entertainment that they bring.”
Of course, gamers are not sad. They are just insensitive, toxic, racist and overwhelmingly misogynistic.
I am not critiquing anyone who has ever picked up a controller or aligned their hands on the WASD keys of a keyboard, much in the same way that critiques of patriarchy and structural racism are not attacks on individuals.
The wider gaming community, as represented through behavior on social media, fan sites and in-game, has a serious problem with bigotry and general awfulness.
I quit playing Valve’s “Counter Strike: Global Offensive” after being cussed out for the umpteenth time after asking my teammates not to use racial slurs (followed by those teammates calling for genocide against anyone not white).
I’ve seen Twitch chats explode in racist imagery whenever a person of color appears on the stream, as well as serious misconduct on the behalf of well-known gaming figures dismissed by the masses as harmless.
And I’m a white man; things are even worse regarding the treatment of women. The 2014 “GamerGate” movement, among many other terrible things, saw female game developers and journalists brutally harassed and inundated with rape and death threats, drawing attention to the sexism ingrained in gaming spaces.
This is not absent from the professional scene. Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, the uber-popular Twitch streamer, openly refuses to stream with female players, claiming this would spark rumors that he was cheating on his wife.
This has been accurately compared to Vice President Mike Pence’s rule about not eating dinner alone with a women who is not his wife, a concept that reinforces sexist and patriarchal ideas in general society.
The Overwatch League, a professional organization modeled after traditional American sports leagues, has been marred by multiple players being fined for misconduct of varying severity.
The league’s only female player, Se-yeon “Geguri” Kim, faced accusations of cheating when she broke onto the scene in South Korea because some other players didn’t believe a woman could play as well as she was playing.
She eventually proved her authenticity and started playing professionally, but the fact that she had to prove it in the first place is absurd.
I love video games, but hate gamers. I’ve played games for most of my life, but I no longer anchor my self-identity around the consumerist and capitalist enterprise of playing video games.
I’ll still appreciate games as works of art, on the same level as film, literature or theater. I’ll study them academically any chance I get.
But, I will not call myself a gamer as long as the communities that embrace hate and vitriol toward what they have constructed about what gaming is and who belongs there.