Protected Groups Don’t Need to Stop Playing Video Games – Bigoted Gamers Do
It cracks me up to no end the entitled gamers today who do not believe in holding themselves accountable for their own behavior and blame everything on corporations and other gamers. That those gamers then extend their hypocrisy to gate-keeping around demographics of different minorities…the disabled, people of color, sexual orientation…this anti-woke movement is a joke, and just a euphemistic cover for bigotry. We live in an era of modern gamer appropriation, where generations of new gamers colored by prejudices try to exclude vertical demographics of gamers new and old, despite that the fact that they were not here at the inception to make gaming a thing in the first place.
If we want to exclude certain gamers, my vote would be to get rid of a large swath of the mainstream gamer that started gaming after 1990. The rise of the dude-bro gamer in console generation seven is a societal shift that we can draw lines of attribution to for most of the strife and misery in gaming today. Not only has that generation’s bulk and the ones that follow it had a severe negative impact on the gaming community as it attempted to evolve to include social media (what has now become anti-social media, as my man EJ describes it), but more damaging has been the manner in which it consumes interactive entertainment. A locust-like devouring of only AAA content, voracious gluttony of micro-transactions, and an ignorance of independent games that drives production costs higher, and drives publishing houses towards consolidation and extreme risk aversion.
Gaming was unquestionably better when it was not mainstream. When it was the domain of the extreme nerd; a cultural demographic that placed its self-importance on intelligence and/or deep intellectual and philosophical critical thinking rather than acceptance.
But that has largely gone away, as gaming has become the new superficial trend that people hang ego-importance on like they used to do clothes or sports or good looks.
Without the trappings of a consumer demographic that needs to have its ego fed in Twitter Spaces or YouTube, game creators had a lot more latitude to focus on creativity rather than commerciality. While games have always been about business, and there have always been metrics around player engagement and player spend, today developers have to worry about gamers who have zero knowledge about software development criticizing their game based on the accusation of lazy devs, as an example of the toxic consumer that the industry now has to navigate.
Do I want to see increased accessibility in games? Absolutely. Do I want to see more female protagonists and people of color as main characters? Absolutely. Am I ok with games addressing political issues. Certainly. We clamor for games to be more “immersive” and more real, but then shy away from the tough chew that is consuming games that more so reflect issues in our real world.
That is the aversion and cowardice of man-babies. I am ok with those demographics having increased content that caters to them because they are not ruining games.
It’s the weak and the close-minded, the gamers that want to bury their heads in the sand and blame everything on everyone else, that is ruining games. And none of us that truly love games need them at all. It amazes and disappoints me that the consumption of an art-form is so inundated with lunks and Lemmings that the art has started to contract in some ways from its vector of 40-years ago.
Rounding Off Infinity 