Right. I can’t think of any good preamble today (let alone a witty one), so we’re just going to muck right into it.
I recently ran across a very interesting new series. They run under the title Extra Credits and currently can be found on the Escapist, a website seemingly dedicated to giving a spotlight to the cream of the crop of all the random crap that’s hurled onto the internet. I must, I admit, congratulate them on doing a good job at finding neat new stuff and promoting this sort of thing. I think it’s a marvelous way to build the community up and encourage more of the same. Peering at the stuff people churn up there was part of what spurned me into making this blog.
Now, Extra Credits is a web-series (is that the official title of these now?) that discusses games in a professional, interesting and frequently humorous fashion. Its run by a three person crew with the work neatly divided between writing, presentations and of course artwork. This is the internet. We can’t listen to people talk for over five minutes unless some one gives us pretty pictures or our toddler-like attention span shoots off to find something with more flashing colors. The series is relatively new, only boosting a handful of shows so far, but the sheer quantity of comments and views they’re getting indicates a very successful future lies ahead. I’ll toss a link down to the archive of them at the bottom of this post (and I recommend looking through it) but today’s ramble focuses on the end point of one of their latest broadcasts.
The broadcast in question is concerning gamers, or rather the label that is ‘gamer’. What it means, how it’s presented in society and what it’s liable to become in the future. All in all it’s worth checking out below.
What I’m interested in is a small segment at the very back of it where they talking about the community of gamers at large. It’s not a particularly happy piece. Mentioning how gamers can, to put it mildly, be rude hateful bastards. And trust me, I am putting it mildly. This issue is one that actually gave me a bit of pause when they brought it up. On the surface, it’s very simple. In fact it’s explained in the most simple way possible by the couple of guys over at Penny Arcade in a lovely comic titled ‘Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory’, or GIFT from here on out.
For those of you who hate links, it can be summed up in politer language as so;
Average Person + Anonymity/No Consequences = Annoying Hostile Person
Proof of it can be seen everywhere on the internet. There’s no lack of it. In chat rooms, on XBOX live, in forums. It can be explained by understanding that the farther a person is from some one else, the less they feel when they hurt or offend that person. In other words it becomes more humorous and less terrible when you’re sufficiently distanced from the target of your ridicule. GIFT doesn’t elaborate on why people act this way and frankly I don’t have enough space either, but it hardly needs scientific tests to support it at this point. In fact, finding a community on the internet that isn’t plagued with this is considered shockingly rare.
So what does this say about the gamer community itself? Well, Extra Credits said it was our duty to clean up our community. Begin to reject the people who behave like this en mass and just like in society outside of games, it will be suppressed. This train of thought indicates that it’s certain individuals inside our community that are drawn to this behavior, that thrive off of it. Honestly I’m a hair’s breadth away from accepting that explanation and setting off as another man waging an impossible war against assholes that may or may not ever come to an end, but for one thing. I went to PAX.
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| Digression time! |
What is PAX? PAX is Penny Arcade Expo. In terms that won’t confuse those of you who aren’t slaved to a computer, it’s a convention for gamers made by gamers with the express intent of trying to be fun (for gamers). It’s a gigantic building that gets annually crammed with over 75,000 people that have shown up to be wowed by the game developers that support the convention, showing off all the new titles coming out in the next year. The convention has spread and now it’s run twice a year, rotating between Boston in the spring and Seattle in the fall. Well, sufficient to say PAX succeeded in wowing me and I went to it last year, but it wasn’t only the shocking quantity of content that its hosts managed to contain in one building that surprised me. It was how people acted.
We’ve talked about GIFT enough now that it should be clear that the internet has a proportionally large amount of pricks in it. Or so it seems, anyways. PAX stands in defiance of that. It is still difficult to really describe the odder qualities of the people there. I could blather on about ‘trust’ for the next four paragraphs and I don’t think I’d quite get it across. People were just…nice. Confusingly accepting. Everything I saw was what years on the internet lead me to believe shouldn’t happen. It was the opposite of what I expected in fact. A community that was so riddled with hateful bastards became a community that just accepted a huge variety of people without as much as a shrug.
To make this clear I need to explain that gaming culture is by no means united. It is diverse. In the same way there’s about a dozen different groups for book lovers out there you’ll find a cluster of gaming cores that are all distinct from one another. There’s the tabletop crowd (Think RISK, just…really, really complicated and in-depth), there’s the FPS crowd (your ‘average game’, you have a gun and people who need to be shot), you have your RPG groups, your MMO groups, your Turn-based groups, your RTS folks – it goes on. Hell, those aren’t even all the major sets, I’m sure I missed a few, I’m not even going to touch the sub-sets. Almost all of these groups of cliques. Yes, yes, there are many people who play multiple types, but in every one of those cores there are people who hate at least some of the other ones. PAX shoves all of these people in one giant building and says “You people there. Be friends.”, and then they are. It’s baffling. It’s insane.
Now I’m not saying that everyone at PAX immediately broke out dancing at random and everyone who meets anyone else stays friends for the rest of their lives, but there’s almost no negativity. People are just accepted, regardless of what they look like or how they came dressed up (which many did) or what group they belonged to. Everyone got tagged as a ‘gamer’ those days and that meant no one was tagged at all. Many of the same reasons people are assholes on the internet were present at the convention. No one knew anyone else and after the three days there no one was ever going to see anyone they didn’t want to again. Hell, even in that building with 75,000 others it’s quite likely you won’t see the same person twice. No one knows anyone else too. After all, it’s not like anyone was wearing a name tag. So there we both have a distinct lack of consequences for hurting some one’s feelings, coupled with anonymity.
But no GIFT.
Why?
And what does this say about the community?
Now I’m not an idiot, I know there are additional factors. Making fun of some one directly in front of you means they can punch you in the face whether they know the name it belongs to or not. I’d say it’s not a huge one though, as gamers aren’t by nature the body-building sort. Is there a change when you can see some one’s face as they get insulted? Bullying exists with that in mind. Is it further reinforcement that you need to distance yourself before you can be hurtful to another person? Is it possible that the gaming community might be one of the nicest out there, just ruined by the fact that the internet lets it become cruel?
I can’t say for certain, but I’d suspect so. If that’s the case however, how do we clean up the problem? It’s no longer a matter of removing or shunning hostile individuals and gaining respect for people, it’s an issue with the medium we communicate. How can we fix that through the interface the internet and games provide for us? I honestly don’t know if we can. Not in every game, not in every facet of the internet.
Doing so was a key part of games becoming equal to things like movies and books, if the folks at Extra Credits are to be given any trust. If we accept that then the future of games and the people who play them could be dubious at best.
