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silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
I enjoy playing games in a wide variety of genres and styles. Even ones that I'm pretty terrible at, like fighting games and first-person shooters. I've played on a lot of the popular consoles (and a couple of obscure ones), and on plenty of different platforms and operating systems. I've been playing video games for almost all of my life. It gives me a small amount of perspective on the industry, trends in gaming, and a lot of opinions about how games market and present themselves, and who they're offending by choosing to present themselves this or that way. To put it mildly, there are a lot of people playing, making, and marketing games that think other people playing the game aren't sufficiently like them to qualify as "real" game-players.
As with other gatekeeping attempts, who is and isn't a "gamer" or who is or isn't "hardcore" gives more insight into the prejudices and biases of the person doing the gatekeeping than illuminates anything about where category lines are drawn. If you play games, you play games, and you get to apply whatever label you think best describes you as you play games.
Some of those labels are pretty toxic, though, so I would exercise caution and do some research to figure out what implications there are for describing yourself that way. For this post, I'm going to focus on the false dichotomy between "casual" and "hardcore" or "serious" game-players, but there's another really big one that I'll get to later on that stems from the same problem: there is way too much toxic masculinity interwoven into the fabric of the culture of people who play video games.
Since video games evolve out of programming culture and tabletop board and miniature games, many of the issues that apply to those spaces also apply to video games, sometimes in new forms, and sometimes in exactly the same form. A regrettable carryover from some of those groups are people who look down on the idea that a game is, at its core, supposed to be fun and enjoyable to the people that want to play it, regardless of whether it is their first time or their fortieth. Whether because of a misdirected belief that people who play games think they have the equivalent skills outside of the game, or an insistence that games should only be played to win, using the most advanced tactics and most powerful characters available (often accompanied by resolutely proclaiming anyone who isn't playing with the same mentality is inferior), for those people (sometimes you can spot them by paying attention to the way they behave in other contexts), there's no fun to be had unless everyone is playing at their most intensely competitive. Also, conveniently, this framework (especially as articulated in the chapter on scrubs linked above) allows a competitive player to dismiss any objections to their style as people being fettered by their own unwritten rules, rather than only being limited by what is possible in the game. Even if what is possible is through the deliberate exploitation of glitches and other unintended behaviors. (Like the wavedash in Super Smash Brothers Melee.)
It should be no surprise to anyone that the genuine concerns about violence and antisocial behavior coming from video games and video game culture are about the interactions players have with other people much more than they are about interactions between the player and characters. There are games that encourage the player to behave poorly towards characters and reward them for it, certainly, and sometimes in a really over-the-top way, but if you listen to the major complaints about game culture, you'll find more issues with people being jerks, either for laughs or because they think it's an appropriate response to call in a false hostage situation or bomb threat to the police over losing a game or a bet. Or about the casual ablism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, racism, transmisia, and other -isms slung about on voice chat or text chat, often played off as "trash talk" or things that aren't sincerely meant as anything other than a thing to get someone off their game when directed at opponents, and something harmless when directed at nominal allies. When called on it, they'll be very quick to dismiss it as someone being over-sensitive, or that they didn't actually mean it, or some other way of disclaiming any liability for their words or actions. However, if someone is approaching the game as a thing to be won, and no tactic or advantage is beyond the pale, assuming it can be done in the game (or as part of a meta game strategy), small wonder that everything else, including behaving decently around other people, gets suborned in favor of winning.
Yes, I'll grouse about fairness, sometimes to a degree where I need to walk off the frustration and where it becomes a problem to the people around me. I would like to be better about that in a way that isn't "you're not allowed to complain about this at all," which was the tactic of certain other people through deploying "you're only happy when you win." The people who aren't happy unless they win are usually the people I've described here, who are taking all the fun out of the game in their attempts to get everyone else to take it so seriously and do it their way. What I usually need is to remember that I'm supposed to be enjoying playing and that it might be prudent to stop or switch if I'm not enjoying it. (However, because of the way it was deployed and weaponized in the past, another person making the suggestion of switching or stopping is almost always counterproductive. Aren't brains fun?)
A lot of players (and the vast overwhelming majority of players with the "only winning is fun" mentality are boys and men, let's not kid ourselves) inculcated on "only winning is fun, only the hardest, most unforgiving difficulty is acceptable, show no mercy to anyone" grab the label of being "hardcore" and proclaim it to be a superior status than the "casual" players that won't amount to anything through their lack of training to understand every nuance of a game and replicate it perfectly. (Then watch them put up hue and cry about changes or patches made to rebalance the game or to remove glitches and exploits they had built entire strategies around using.) See also how they gravitate toward specific types of games, designed to show individual (or, more rarely, team) "skill," where "skill" consists of pattern recognition, memorization, and the ability to replicate specific combinations and situations that are deemed worthy and top-tier, discarding vast swaths of the game and its options along the way. Genres that tend to rely on twitchiness, memorization, or frame-perfect timing, and that usually have a violent component, like first-person shooters, 2D and 3D fighting games, or the genre of twitch-platformer masochism that Kaizo Mario, I Wanna Be The Guy and La-Mulana represent (where the difficulty of the game is the point), these games tend I be the ones that attract "hardcore" players and become "hardcore" games for young men and boys being marinated in toxic masculinity.
And, y'know, for some of them, that's going to net them some nice tournament money purses. (And, apparently, some SWATting from their opponents who were sore at getting beaten.) For others, it's going to be little more than an exercise on feeling superior to other people. And then having that attitude leak or into their dealings with other people, as well, especially when bolstered by feelings of privilege or of being denied things they believe are theirs by right of their privilege. Regrettably, this is also the demographic that gets catered to in a lot of games, because they're usually the ones who have the disposable income and the time to play these games this way and to demand that game companies make their next games to cater even more to this demographic if they want to continue selling large numbers of units and consoles.
I keep coming back to Smash Brothers as an example for a lot of things, but it's one of the few games of the genre that seems to be taking active steps with each patch and new game release to counteract the demand that it turn into a game of "skill", even as it provides new methods for people who want to play it that way to do so. Smash Brothers Melee, the GameCube iteration of the franchise, was the first one to rise to tournament-level prominence and capture the interest of the Stop Having Fun, Guys crowd. It's where the snipe about "No Items, Fox Only, Final Destination" comes from, as the strain documented here decided that the only acceptable character to play was Fox, the top of the top tier, on a flat stage with no ledges nor gimmicks (Final Destination), and without any of the items turned in that could shift the balance of a game through strategic use, but were derided as "cheap" and introducing an unacceptable amount of luck into games they wanted to be decided by the skill of button-pressing alone. Some of those items are very powerful and can introduce serious complications to battles, especially battles fought on flat stages with nowhere to run or hide, but none of them are undefeatable. It requires a different kind of skill and gameplay to handle items and their effects, and to position oneself on a stage appropriately so as not to be on the receiving end of stage hazards. Despite what the Stop Having Fun, Guys crowd says, their style of gameplay is not inherently superior or better to one that uses items and regular stages.
In any case, the change between Smash Brothers Melee and Smash Brothers Brawl, the release for the Wii, was so different in terms of characters and mechanics that the scene that had so loved Melee detested Brawl and set to work creating a total conversion that would undo much of the changes to Brawl and bring back Melee. They also added other characters, changed the way the attacks worked for some of the characters, added and changed stages, and otherwise created a package that they hoped the people who loved Melee and didn't want it to change would enjoy and use for their purposes. They called it Project M, and you can read about all of the changes made from the base Brawl game to produce what they felt would be the best game for competitive tournament-level "skill" play. At the time I first encountered it, I thought of it as an interesting programming project, and looked at other people playing with it, and figured that if they were happy with what it was, they could be happy with it and I would just not be part of that scene, because I was never going to be the sort of person who played the game with the idea in mind of exploiting everything to its fullest for a competitive match. Now I look at it and realize there was so much effort undertaken to recreate the game they had felt was perfect, instead of accepting the new game for what it was and trying to learn how to play that one well.
Of course, any one of those people would look at me talking this way about their playstyle and dismiss it as a scrub whining about how everyone else is too good for them and tell me that I need to either admit that I'm just going to suck and not bother them or start training to get good and beat them, at which point I will be worthy of having my opinion be known. Because they won't acknowledge anyone who can't beat them by their own rules in a way they consider to be acceptable. Which often means they won't acknowledge anyone at all who doesn't look like them, doesn't have the same reflex abilities like them, and doesn't have the same attitude toward being a hardcore edgelord as they do.
And much like other fandoms that tried to close the door and keep others out, "hardcore" gamers find themselves besieged at every turn by the people they swore were beneath them, enjoying games, playing casually, and occasionally thrashing them without breaking a sweat. The industry they thought they could control and become the arbiters of legitimacy continued on. There are still enough pockets of this toxic environment for me to say that the industry has moved past them, but there are plenty of studios and others who are doing just fine by actively catering to and releasing games for the "casual" player, and trying to make their games more accessible and enjoyable for people of all skill levels, rather than insisting there can only be more difficulty, more complexity, and more time spent on the game to be considered merely acceptable.
And, as the "hardcore" crowd are slowly finding out, even if they won't admit to it, they're losing. But we'll talk about that part tomorrow.
I enjoy playing games in a wide variety of genres and styles. Even ones that I'm pretty terrible at, like fighting games and first-person shooters. I've played on a lot of the popular consoles (and a couple of obscure ones), and on plenty of different platforms and operating systems. I've been playing video games for almost all of my life. It gives me a small amount of perspective on the industry, trends in gaming, and a lot of opinions about how games market and present themselves, and who they're offending by choosing to present themselves this or that way. To put it mildly, there are a lot of people playing, making, and marketing games that think other people playing the game aren't sufficiently like them to qualify as "real" game-players.
As with other gatekeeping attempts, who is and isn't a "gamer" or who is or isn't "hardcore" gives more insight into the prejudices and biases of the person doing the gatekeeping than illuminates anything about where category lines are drawn. If you play games, you play games, and you get to apply whatever label you think best describes you as you play games.
Some of those labels are pretty toxic, though, so I would exercise caution and do some research to figure out what implications there are for describing yourself that way. For this post, I'm going to focus on the false dichotomy between "casual" and "hardcore" or "serious" game-players, but there's another really big one that I'll get to later on that stems from the same problem: there is way too much toxic masculinity interwoven into the fabric of the culture of people who play video games.
Since video games evolve out of programming culture and tabletop board and miniature games, many of the issues that apply to those spaces also apply to video games, sometimes in new forms, and sometimes in exactly the same form. A regrettable carryover from some of those groups are people who look down on the idea that a game is, at its core, supposed to be fun and enjoyable to the people that want to play it, regardless of whether it is their first time or their fortieth. Whether because of a misdirected belief that people who play games think they have the equivalent skills outside of the game, or an insistence that games should only be played to win, using the most advanced tactics and most powerful characters available (often accompanied by resolutely proclaiming anyone who isn't playing with the same mentality is inferior), for those people (sometimes you can spot them by paying attention to the way they behave in other contexts), there's no fun to be had unless everyone is playing at their most intensely competitive. Also, conveniently, this framework (especially as articulated in the chapter on scrubs linked above) allows a competitive player to dismiss any objections to their style as people being fettered by their own unwritten rules, rather than only being limited by what is possible in the game. Even if what is possible is through the deliberate exploitation of glitches and other unintended behaviors. (Like the wavedash in Super Smash Brothers Melee.)
It should be no surprise to anyone that the genuine concerns about violence and antisocial behavior coming from video games and video game culture are about the interactions players have with other people much more than they are about interactions between the player and characters. There are games that encourage the player to behave poorly towards characters and reward them for it, certainly, and sometimes in a really over-the-top way, but if you listen to the major complaints about game culture, you'll find more issues with people being jerks, either for laughs or because they think it's an appropriate response to call in a false hostage situation or bomb threat to the police over losing a game or a bet. Or about the casual ablism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, racism, transmisia, and other -isms slung about on voice chat or text chat, often played off as "trash talk" or things that aren't sincerely meant as anything other than a thing to get someone off their game when directed at opponents, and something harmless when directed at nominal allies. When called on it, they'll be very quick to dismiss it as someone being over-sensitive, or that they didn't actually mean it, or some other way of disclaiming any liability for their words or actions. However, if someone is approaching the game as a thing to be won, and no tactic or advantage is beyond the pale, assuming it can be done in the game (or as part of a meta game strategy), small wonder that everything else, including behaving decently around other people, gets suborned in favor of winning.
Yes, I'll grouse about fairness, sometimes to a degree where I need to walk off the frustration and where it becomes a problem to the people around me. I would like to be better about that in a way that isn't "you're not allowed to complain about this at all," which was the tactic of certain other people through deploying "you're only happy when you win." The people who aren't happy unless they win are usually the people I've described here, who are taking all the fun out of the game in their attempts to get everyone else to take it so seriously and do it their way. What I usually need is to remember that I'm supposed to be enjoying playing and that it might be prudent to stop or switch if I'm not enjoying it. (However, because of the way it was deployed and weaponized in the past, another person making the suggestion of switching or stopping is almost always counterproductive. Aren't brains fun?)
A lot of players (and the vast overwhelming majority of players with the "only winning is fun" mentality are boys and men, let's not kid ourselves) inculcated on "only winning is fun, only the hardest, most unforgiving difficulty is acceptable, show no mercy to anyone" grab the label of being "hardcore" and proclaim it to be a superior status than the "casual" players that won't amount to anything through their lack of training to understand every nuance of a game and replicate it perfectly. (Then watch them put up hue and cry about changes or patches made to rebalance the game or to remove glitches and exploits they had built entire strategies around using.) See also how they gravitate toward specific types of games, designed to show individual (or, more rarely, team) "skill," where "skill" consists of pattern recognition, memorization, and the ability to replicate specific combinations and situations that are deemed worthy and top-tier, discarding vast swaths of the game and its options along the way. Genres that tend to rely on twitchiness, memorization, or frame-perfect timing, and that usually have a violent component, like first-person shooters, 2D and 3D fighting games, or the genre of twitch-platformer masochism that Kaizo Mario, I Wanna Be The Guy and La-Mulana represent (where the difficulty of the game is the point), these games tend I be the ones that attract "hardcore" players and become "hardcore" games for young men and boys being marinated in toxic masculinity.
And, y'know, for some of them, that's going to net them some nice tournament money purses. (And, apparently, some SWATting from their opponents who were sore at getting beaten.) For others, it's going to be little more than an exercise on feeling superior to other people. And then having that attitude leak or into their dealings with other people, as well, especially when bolstered by feelings of privilege or of being denied things they believe are theirs by right of their privilege. Regrettably, this is also the demographic that gets catered to in a lot of games, because they're usually the ones who have the disposable income and the time to play these games this way and to demand that game companies make their next games to cater even more to this demographic if they want to continue selling large numbers of units and consoles.
I keep coming back to Smash Brothers as an example for a lot of things, but it's one of the few games of the genre that seems to be taking active steps with each patch and new game release to counteract the demand that it turn into a game of "skill", even as it provides new methods for people who want to play it that way to do so. Smash Brothers Melee, the GameCube iteration of the franchise, was the first one to rise to tournament-level prominence and capture the interest of the Stop Having Fun, Guys crowd. It's where the snipe about "No Items, Fox Only, Final Destination" comes from, as the strain documented here decided that the only acceptable character to play was Fox, the top of the top tier, on a flat stage with no ledges nor gimmicks (Final Destination), and without any of the items turned in that could shift the balance of a game through strategic use, but were derided as "cheap" and introducing an unacceptable amount of luck into games they wanted to be decided by the skill of button-pressing alone. Some of those items are very powerful and can introduce serious complications to battles, especially battles fought on flat stages with nowhere to run or hide, but none of them are undefeatable. It requires a different kind of skill and gameplay to handle items and their effects, and to position oneself on a stage appropriately so as not to be on the receiving end of stage hazards. Despite what the Stop Having Fun, Guys crowd says, their style of gameplay is not inherently superior or better to one that uses items and regular stages.
In any case, the change between Smash Brothers Melee and Smash Brothers Brawl, the release for the Wii, was so different in terms of characters and mechanics that the scene that had so loved Melee detested Brawl and set to work creating a total conversion that would undo much of the changes to Brawl and bring back Melee. They also added other characters, changed the way the attacks worked for some of the characters, added and changed stages, and otherwise created a package that they hoped the people who loved Melee and didn't want it to change would enjoy and use for their purposes. They called it Project M, and you can read about all of the changes made from the base Brawl game to produce what they felt would be the best game for competitive tournament-level "skill" play. At the time I first encountered it, I thought of it as an interesting programming project, and looked at other people playing with it, and figured that if they were happy with what it was, they could be happy with it and I would just not be part of that scene, because I was never going to be the sort of person who played the game with the idea in mind of exploiting everything to its fullest for a competitive match. Now I look at it and realize there was so much effort undertaken to recreate the game they had felt was perfect, instead of accepting the new game for what it was and trying to learn how to play that one well.
Of course, any one of those people would look at me talking this way about their playstyle and dismiss it as a scrub whining about how everyone else is too good for them and tell me that I need to either admit that I'm just going to suck and not bother them or start training to get good and beat them, at which point I will be worthy of having my opinion be known. Because they won't acknowledge anyone who can't beat them by their own rules in a way they consider to be acceptable. Which often means they won't acknowledge anyone at all who doesn't look like them, doesn't have the same reflex abilities like them, and doesn't have the same attitude toward being a hardcore edgelord as they do.
And much like other fandoms that tried to close the door and keep others out, "hardcore" gamers find themselves besieged at every turn by the people they swore were beneath them, enjoying games, playing casually, and occasionally thrashing them without breaking a sweat. The industry they thought they could control and become the arbiters of legitimacy continued on. There are still enough pockets of this toxic environment for me to say that the industry has moved past them, but there are plenty of studios and others who are doing just fine by actively catering to and releasing games for the "casual" player, and trying to make their games more accessible and enjoyable for people of all skill levels, rather than insisting there can only be more difficulty, more complexity, and more time spent on the game to be considered merely acceptable.
And, as the "hardcore" crowd are slowly finding out, even if they won't admit to it, they're losing. But we'll talk about that part tomorrow.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-13 09:39 pm (UTC)The reaction from the "hardcore" raid crowd has been volubale, full of vitriol, and eerily consistent every time.
And yet these alternate paths are still there, which speaks rather eloquently to your last point in the post.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-13 10:35 pm (UTC)