![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.]
So, yesterday we talked about how the perception how people play games can lead to arbitrary distinctions about whose gameplay style is more legitimate and the problems that can spawn from those attitudes.
Yesterday, we saw this scenario lead to the prioritization of competitive multiplayer games and the development of a mindset where playing to win, using any means permitted by the game itself, was the only acceptable mindset for play, with players who might be playing a game for fun as automatically inferior. I didn't point it out then, because I didn't remember it then, but the menu distinctions in Super Smash Brothers 4, the version for the Wii U console, for online play, are divided into "For Fun" and "For Glory", and I think this encapsulates neatly the distinction between the two styles described yesterday (and shows how much the people making Smash continue to try and build a game that can appeal to both of these styles of play, even if it means trying to make sure they don't mix).
There's an additional part to how video game culture interacts with others that needs specific attention, and is definitely co-morbid with everything we talked about yesterday. Because video games trace their roots to programmers and tabletop games, they inherited most, if not all, of the problems that come from an environment composed mostly of men, and the problems that come from being invested in a fandom where the fans are composed mostly of men. Clearly, there have always been not-men in these spaces, but the attitude toward not-men is usually, to put it mildly, corrosive. For example, Bestselling author Seanan McGuire recounts a tale of tabletop campaigns wherein she reveals that she had weighted dice in high school and learned a specific technique to guarantee rolling a 20 on an unweighted d20 so that she would not have to suffer through DMs who thought it was a good idea to make her character roll to avoid being sexuality assaulted. Seanan's story is one of a cornucopia of stories of this same nature, not just for tabletop gaming, but also for technology culture and programmers as well. "Techbro," after all, is not something that appeared ex nihilo, and you can search for as many examples as you can stomach about "culture fit" for companies, workplaces, and startups, where the culture almost always involves tokenization of minorities and women, a persistently -ist culture, whether obvious or subtle, and a privileged attitude that praises disruption and making the world better for people who work and think like them, often without regard for the very real consequences of what might happen when their thinking (or lack thereof) interacts with the rest of us.
This is, in itself, also an extension of the work environments of various corporations encapsulated by the "glass ceiling", so wherever you look, there are intersections. If I miss one, it is probably because I didn't see it, not because it isn't there. And video games are not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only fandoms where men attempt to close the door on the full participation of not-men in fandom spaces. (You cannot award a Hugo to an Archive for the Archive itself, divorced from the works inside it, for without works to demonstrate what an Archive can do, there is nothing to marvel at, to pluck an entirely random example out of thin air.) Not-men in video game spaces, as I was growing up, were usually divided into two camps which they inherited from their predecessors. The first camp suggested that not-men were insufficiently knowledgeable, dedicated, or serious about the pursuits of their interest, and so they weren't True Scotsmen. Like all shifting goalposts, of course, there was no way that a not-man could prove they were sufficient in any of those spaces, even if they understood the game well, practiced regularly, and played with the "hardcore" mentality. And put up with the wall of sexist and misogynistic "jokes" about assault and being there as eye candy or any other comment someone in the group wanted to make about their outsider status. Being "one of the guys" was always a conditional statement, and someone being treated like "one of the guys" often was predicated on their seemingly-enthusiastic participation in their own marginalization and contributing to the toxic environment.
This attitude spawned Gamergate. No matter what fig leaves that segment of video gaming kept insisting was the "real" reason they were upset, the community itself would quickly prove their real complaint was that there were not-men in the space and people might be taking them seriously. The most common fig leaf in use was "ethics in game journalism," an accusation that prominent women reporters and reviewers of games had their positions and salaries through sexual favors or a mass conspiracy to promote feminism through game reviews, rather than by virtue of their experience in the industry playing, reporting, reviewing, and (most importantly) criticizing video games and their design decisions. (See Tropes vs. Women in Video Games as an example of the kind of criticism that drew outrage and serious threats of life and limb to the targets of the harassment campaign.) A significant point of the language used in Gamergate spread out to other places, adapted to the environment that they landed in, much to the joy of people who now have complaints about "SJWs" in places that didn't before. (Although the arguments may have still been there, new terminology arrived to describe the situation more succinctly.)
While this loud minority was complaining about the presence of not-men in their spaces, Pew Research, in 2015, points out that nearly half of women in the United States play video games, (gender binary and other such cautions apply), but tellingly, people who identify as "gamers" (and are this the loud minority) are very heavily skewed toward young men, and since they're the loud minority, the perception persists that young men play video games in the greatest numbers, despite the numbers saying otherwise. But game companies that want to make money, especially the big ones that want to fund more AAA games, they can't listen to only the tiny minority, but instead have to see what's going on with all of the other people who play games and have money to spend, and aren't going to buy your game if it advertises itself or it plays as a game that's meany only for that tiny, loud, minority and their points of view. But don't take my word for it, look at the data. Activision (most properly, Activision Blizzard) is the parent company of both King (who make match-three-with-microtransactions Candy Crush Saga and its various spinoffs, all of which are probably agreed on as "casual" games, at least to an observer) and Blizzard (who make Overwatch, a team-based first-person shooter with cosmetic microtransactions and its own eSports league, generally thought of as something more in the "hardcore" camp to an observer). Activision Blizzard made $4 billion USD in microtransaction revenue in 2017. Half of that revenue came from King. $2 billion USD from match-threes that offer someone powerups for a small fee, which is the same as than the entire rest of Activision Blizzard made across their microtransactions, which include not just Overwatch, but a Call of Duty title, Destiny 2, and several other Blizzard titles. The match-3s collectively nearly outperformed all of the other games in Activision Blizzard stable when it came to revenues. Tell me again who the hardcore gamers are that sink their money into playing?
As with many fandoms, there was never a time where only men were present, but instead, a small group willfully tried to make it that way and made their own environment toxic as a consequence. You can probably draw correlations between the "worth" or "skill" involved in a game and how much that game, or genre of game, is perceived to be popular with not-men, regardless of whether or not the game is "casual." And, really, if I want to look up what people are gushing about with regard to Overwatch, I can throw a dart and be equally as likely to hear someone talking about the story of Overwatch (and the canon queers present) or fanworks of those characters (especially the queer ones) as I would be to hear someone praising the actual gameplay itself. There's a significant chance that I'd throw the dart and hear someone complaining about all the griefing and trolling going on in the actual game, rather than someone talking about the great gameplay or the impressive moves being done in eSports competition. The loud minority is stuck confronting the reality that they are not the people being courted, they are not the people solely funding the development of games, and that the spaces they thought were comfortably going to be theirs forever are being settled by people they would never consider to be part of the fandom, ever. They're losing, and the rather than give in, many of them have decided they intend to fight their losing action to the last man and avoid having to change to the new reality.
Which leads us to the second problem with the caustically toxically masculine environment and how it relates to not-men. By setting themselves up in a competitive, men-only environment where toxic behavior is the norm, anything in the realm of not-men, not-masculine, becomes anathema. Hell forbid that a not-man come in and wipe the floor with the entire group (leading swiftly to objections about how it didn't count, based on arbitrary rules and shifting goalposts – who are the scrubs now, chumps?), but Hell equally forbid someone suggest playing in a manner not approved by the group, or deliberately pick other characters (and play them well), or otherwise remind them that there are other ways to play and/or enjoy the game. Or Hell forbid that someone might be looking to just play, rather than to improve their skills against their opponents to be more of a challenge. You can start hearing the statements like "That's gay" or "you play like a girl" or "what a n00b" and other such insults going around at that point, because someone is pointing out that the toxic environment is not a thing ordained by the deity of choice, but instead involves conscious participation on the part of everyone there to perpetuate it.
These kinds of environments, left unchecked, give rise to not only Gamergate, but the ideas contained in concepts like pick-up artistry, involuntary celibacy, and men's rights advocacy. Again, these things predate the resurgence of video games and the ubiquity of the Internet, but they grew significantly with the Internet's ability to network groups of similar ideology together. Anecdotally, in my high school, some of the students posted in a classroom, presumably with the assent of the teacher, the logo of a joke started by the television show Married…With Children, proclaiming they were against "Amazonian Masterhood". Smaller-me gave that the side-eye then, and bigger-me definitely gives it the side-eye now. However, if you look on the Internet these days, you'll find that the group exists, outside the confines of the show that spawned it. And as groups without that particular name. Because one of the more common things that happens when a group has excluded all other perspectives but their own is a tendency to believe their own perspective is absolute truth and to try and defend it against reality intruding. What truth there ever was to the stereotype of the genuinely good-hearted nerd man that needs care and patience from the woman he pursues to win her over and show how good a person he is has been pretty viciously shattered by the way that men who want to cast themselves in that role behave, online and off, toward anyone they perceive as not-men. And toward men who try to draw them away from that space by presenting alternatives to the radicalization happening in those spaces.
I realize I might have been more predisposed to make a change, because I wanted to get away from the provincialism of the place where I was raised, but it would have been equally easy for me to turn into an incel, a redpiller, or a PUA as well as a video game nerd. There but for the grace of chaos would I have gone, had it not been for the people around me, teaching me and putting things in front of me and otherwise helping to keep me away from the space of being a frustrated university-aged nerd who would fall through desperation at not being able to find a partner into arrogance and insistence that I was deserved a partner because of my virtuous status. Because I was a "nice guy(TM)" who deserved to be rewarded for being nice. Which would have redefined the space of acceptable play to include "anything that confers an advantage is fair game, and the only thing stopping me is what I don't want to use." Which, I assure my younger self, would have still covered a lot of space as out of bounds, but would definitely have let in a few things that would not have been good, especially the longer the time without achieving what I felt was owed me. (Or, if something like a PUA method actually worked, and I hung on to it because it seemed to get results, and it seemed to get desperately-needed validation from a community.) The same attitude that suggests there is only one right way to play a game, and it's to win by whatever method the game deems possible, has a sneaky way of getting out and influencing other interactions that a wounded ego (because almost nobody constantly wins, and ego tied up in winning is always hurt by losing) would influence. Ultimately, it produces someone who doesn't want to escape the "Act Like A Man" Box they've defined for themselves, even if everyone around them can tell pretty easily that the box is hurting him and he would be much better off by discarding the box and starting anew.
With time and experience, I have come to the understanding that I will not ever be a top-tier player among the teens that I host some game time with, every time I have hosted game time with them over my entire career. Early on, I had some issues with that knowledge, because I was supposed to be older, wiser, and more experienced, but, y'know, I was also having a life outside of the game and not devoting large swaths of time to it, either. I pushed back against the idea of playing the games in the most "skilled" manner possible, cause I had a mix of teens with different skill levels, and I wanted them to feel like they had a chance, or could participate, or even just have fun with each other. And, because, it turns out that I'm a lot better at certain modes of gameplay than others, so I wanted the reassurance that I wasn't totally and completely outclassed all the time. Fairness for everyone, even if it made the people who wanted to play "skill only" unhappy. I didn't understand quite as much in my early career as I do now, but I would like to believe that I was pushing back against the narrative, even then, that there was only one correct way to play the game and measure ability. I still lose a lot, but I'm doing better at keeping in mind how I'm playing to have fun, that I'm more of a mid-tier player, and that my goal is to end up in the top three by whatever character random drops my way, rather than insisting that I have to win with my best character all the time, or I don't have any skills at all and should just quit. I'm playing a different game than others in the room, and it's better for my mental health to do it that way. And if someone were to call it unmanly or that I wasn't "trying" or that I should stop screwing around and get serious, I want to believe at this point I could shrug and say "You play your game, I'll have fun with mine," and then get to secretly gloat when, inevitably, I do end up winning, for whatever reason. (Because I am not a person who can remain above it all, I will gloat. I do have the presence of mind not to do it openly, though, since I am the Mature and Responsible Adult in the room, usually.)
This took time, and thinking, and succeeding, and a lot of falling, and I still don't get it right all the time, and I still get worried that what progress I've made is not built on solid foundations, because it still seems so easy to knock me off my Zen. (Brains are very fun, remembering all the bad and making them into "this is who you really are", discounting all the times where that didn't happen as successful faking for the cameras, or pretending or some other thing that says it's not what I would actually be like, given power and a mechanism to use it without consequences.) But I have a solid support network now, and while I'm still oversensitive and a lot more likely to take valid criticism as an indictment of my whole self, instead of what level it was intended to be at (which generates fun brain issues of the "everyone is lying to you about how terrible you are, because you can't take actual criticism and they would rather pretend rather than have to deal with you melting down again over a tiny issue" variety), I'm still sitting a lot better about so many things than I was when I was younger and had invested a lot more of my identity into being the smart one who was really good at video games. I could have been someone much more regrettable than I am, and hurt a lot more people, too.
So, yesterday we talked about how the perception how people play games can lead to arbitrary distinctions about whose gameplay style is more legitimate and the problems that can spawn from those attitudes.
Yesterday, we saw this scenario lead to the prioritization of competitive multiplayer games and the development of a mindset where playing to win, using any means permitted by the game itself, was the only acceptable mindset for play, with players who might be playing a game for fun as automatically inferior. I didn't point it out then, because I didn't remember it then, but the menu distinctions in Super Smash Brothers 4, the version for the Wii U console, for online play, are divided into "For Fun" and "For Glory", and I think this encapsulates neatly the distinction between the two styles described yesterday (and shows how much the people making Smash continue to try and build a game that can appeal to both of these styles of play, even if it means trying to make sure they don't mix).
There's an additional part to how video game culture interacts with others that needs specific attention, and is definitely co-morbid with everything we talked about yesterday. Because video games trace their roots to programmers and tabletop games, they inherited most, if not all, of the problems that come from an environment composed mostly of men, and the problems that come from being invested in a fandom where the fans are composed mostly of men. Clearly, there have always been not-men in these spaces, but the attitude toward not-men is usually, to put it mildly, corrosive. For example, Bestselling author Seanan McGuire recounts a tale of tabletop campaigns wherein she reveals that she had weighted dice in high school and learned a specific technique to guarantee rolling a 20 on an unweighted d20 so that she would not have to suffer through DMs who thought it was a good idea to make her character roll to avoid being sexuality assaulted. Seanan's story is one of a cornucopia of stories of this same nature, not just for tabletop gaming, but also for technology culture and programmers as well. "Techbro," after all, is not something that appeared ex nihilo, and you can search for as many examples as you can stomach about "culture fit" for companies, workplaces, and startups, where the culture almost always involves tokenization of minorities and women, a persistently -ist culture, whether obvious or subtle, and a privileged attitude that praises disruption and making the world better for people who work and think like them, often without regard for the very real consequences of what might happen when their thinking (or lack thereof) interacts with the rest of us.
This is, in itself, also an extension of the work environments of various corporations encapsulated by the "glass ceiling", so wherever you look, there are intersections. If I miss one, it is probably because I didn't see it, not because it isn't there. And video games are not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only fandoms where men attempt to close the door on the full participation of not-men in fandom spaces. (You cannot award a Hugo to an Archive for the Archive itself, divorced from the works inside it, for without works to demonstrate what an Archive can do, there is nothing to marvel at, to pluck an entirely random example out of thin air.) Not-men in video game spaces, as I was growing up, were usually divided into two camps which they inherited from their predecessors. The first camp suggested that not-men were insufficiently knowledgeable, dedicated, or serious about the pursuits of their interest, and so they weren't True Scotsmen. Like all shifting goalposts, of course, there was no way that a not-man could prove they were sufficient in any of those spaces, even if they understood the game well, practiced regularly, and played with the "hardcore" mentality. And put up with the wall of sexist and misogynistic "jokes" about assault and being there as eye candy or any other comment someone in the group wanted to make about their outsider status. Being "one of the guys" was always a conditional statement, and someone being treated like "one of the guys" often was predicated on their seemingly-enthusiastic participation in their own marginalization and contributing to the toxic environment.
This attitude spawned Gamergate. No matter what fig leaves that segment of video gaming kept insisting was the "real" reason they were upset, the community itself would quickly prove their real complaint was that there were not-men in the space and people might be taking them seriously. The most common fig leaf in use was "ethics in game journalism," an accusation that prominent women reporters and reviewers of games had their positions and salaries through sexual favors or a mass conspiracy to promote feminism through game reviews, rather than by virtue of their experience in the industry playing, reporting, reviewing, and (most importantly) criticizing video games and their design decisions. (See Tropes vs. Women in Video Games as an example of the kind of criticism that drew outrage and serious threats of life and limb to the targets of the harassment campaign.) A significant point of the language used in Gamergate spread out to other places, adapted to the environment that they landed in, much to the joy of people who now have complaints about "SJWs" in places that didn't before. (Although the arguments may have still been there, new terminology arrived to describe the situation more succinctly.)
While this loud minority was complaining about the presence of not-men in their spaces, Pew Research, in 2015, points out that nearly half of women in the United States play video games, (gender binary and other such cautions apply), but tellingly, people who identify as "gamers" (and are this the loud minority) are very heavily skewed toward young men, and since they're the loud minority, the perception persists that young men play video games in the greatest numbers, despite the numbers saying otherwise. But game companies that want to make money, especially the big ones that want to fund more AAA games, they can't listen to only the tiny minority, but instead have to see what's going on with all of the other people who play games and have money to spend, and aren't going to buy your game if it advertises itself or it plays as a game that's meany only for that tiny, loud, minority and their points of view. But don't take my word for it, look at the data. Activision (most properly, Activision Blizzard) is the parent company of both King (who make match-three-with-microtransactions Candy Crush Saga and its various spinoffs, all of which are probably agreed on as "casual" games, at least to an observer) and Blizzard (who make Overwatch, a team-based first-person shooter with cosmetic microtransactions and its own eSports league, generally thought of as something more in the "hardcore" camp to an observer). Activision Blizzard made $4 billion USD in microtransaction revenue in 2017. Half of that revenue came from King. $2 billion USD from match-threes that offer someone powerups for a small fee, which is the same as than the entire rest of Activision Blizzard made across their microtransactions, which include not just Overwatch, but a Call of Duty title, Destiny 2, and several other Blizzard titles. The match-3s collectively nearly outperformed all of the other games in Activision Blizzard stable when it came to revenues. Tell me again who the hardcore gamers are that sink their money into playing?
As with many fandoms, there was never a time where only men were present, but instead, a small group willfully tried to make it that way and made their own environment toxic as a consequence. You can probably draw correlations between the "worth" or "skill" involved in a game and how much that game, or genre of game, is perceived to be popular with not-men, regardless of whether or not the game is "casual." And, really, if I want to look up what people are gushing about with regard to Overwatch, I can throw a dart and be equally as likely to hear someone talking about the story of Overwatch (and the canon queers present) or fanworks of those characters (especially the queer ones) as I would be to hear someone praising the actual gameplay itself. There's a significant chance that I'd throw the dart and hear someone complaining about all the griefing and trolling going on in the actual game, rather than someone talking about the great gameplay or the impressive moves being done in eSports competition. The loud minority is stuck confronting the reality that they are not the people being courted, they are not the people solely funding the development of games, and that the spaces they thought were comfortably going to be theirs forever are being settled by people they would never consider to be part of the fandom, ever. They're losing, and the rather than give in, many of them have decided they intend to fight their losing action to the last man and avoid having to change to the new reality.
Which leads us to the second problem with the caustically toxically masculine environment and how it relates to not-men. By setting themselves up in a competitive, men-only environment where toxic behavior is the norm, anything in the realm of not-men, not-masculine, becomes anathema. Hell forbid that a not-man come in and wipe the floor with the entire group (leading swiftly to objections about how it didn't count, based on arbitrary rules and shifting goalposts – who are the scrubs now, chumps?), but Hell equally forbid someone suggest playing in a manner not approved by the group, or deliberately pick other characters (and play them well), or otherwise remind them that there are other ways to play and/or enjoy the game. Or Hell forbid that someone might be looking to just play, rather than to improve their skills against their opponents to be more of a challenge. You can start hearing the statements like "That's gay" or "you play like a girl" or "what a n00b" and other such insults going around at that point, because someone is pointing out that the toxic environment is not a thing ordained by the deity of choice, but instead involves conscious participation on the part of everyone there to perpetuate it.
These kinds of environments, left unchecked, give rise to not only Gamergate, but the ideas contained in concepts like pick-up artistry, involuntary celibacy, and men's rights advocacy. Again, these things predate the resurgence of video games and the ubiquity of the Internet, but they grew significantly with the Internet's ability to network groups of similar ideology together. Anecdotally, in my high school, some of the students posted in a classroom, presumably with the assent of the teacher, the logo of a joke started by the television show Married…With Children, proclaiming they were against "Amazonian Masterhood". Smaller-me gave that the side-eye then, and bigger-me definitely gives it the side-eye now. However, if you look on the Internet these days, you'll find that the group exists, outside the confines of the show that spawned it. And as groups without that particular name. Because one of the more common things that happens when a group has excluded all other perspectives but their own is a tendency to believe their own perspective is absolute truth and to try and defend it against reality intruding. What truth there ever was to the stereotype of the genuinely good-hearted nerd man that needs care and patience from the woman he pursues to win her over and show how good a person he is has been pretty viciously shattered by the way that men who want to cast themselves in that role behave, online and off, toward anyone they perceive as not-men. And toward men who try to draw them away from that space by presenting alternatives to the radicalization happening in those spaces.
I realize I might have been more predisposed to make a change, because I wanted to get away from the provincialism of the place where I was raised, but it would have been equally easy for me to turn into an incel, a redpiller, or a PUA as well as a video game nerd. There but for the grace of chaos would I have gone, had it not been for the people around me, teaching me and putting things in front of me and otherwise helping to keep me away from the space of being a frustrated university-aged nerd who would fall through desperation at not being able to find a partner into arrogance and insistence that I was deserved a partner because of my virtuous status. Because I was a "nice guy(TM)" who deserved to be rewarded for being nice. Which would have redefined the space of acceptable play to include "anything that confers an advantage is fair game, and the only thing stopping me is what I don't want to use." Which, I assure my younger self, would have still covered a lot of space as out of bounds, but would definitely have let in a few things that would not have been good, especially the longer the time without achieving what I felt was owed me. (Or, if something like a PUA method actually worked, and I hung on to it because it seemed to get results, and it seemed to get desperately-needed validation from a community.) The same attitude that suggests there is only one right way to play a game, and it's to win by whatever method the game deems possible, has a sneaky way of getting out and influencing other interactions that a wounded ego (because almost nobody constantly wins, and ego tied up in winning is always hurt by losing) would influence. Ultimately, it produces someone who doesn't want to escape the "Act Like A Man" Box they've defined for themselves, even if everyone around them can tell pretty easily that the box is hurting him and he would be much better off by discarding the box and starting anew.
With time and experience, I have come to the understanding that I will not ever be a top-tier player among the teens that I host some game time with, every time I have hosted game time with them over my entire career. Early on, I had some issues with that knowledge, because I was supposed to be older, wiser, and more experienced, but, y'know, I was also having a life outside of the game and not devoting large swaths of time to it, either. I pushed back against the idea of playing the games in the most "skilled" manner possible, cause I had a mix of teens with different skill levels, and I wanted them to feel like they had a chance, or could participate, or even just have fun with each other. And, because, it turns out that I'm a lot better at certain modes of gameplay than others, so I wanted the reassurance that I wasn't totally and completely outclassed all the time. Fairness for everyone, even if it made the people who wanted to play "skill only" unhappy. I didn't understand quite as much in my early career as I do now, but I would like to believe that I was pushing back against the narrative, even then, that there was only one correct way to play the game and measure ability. I still lose a lot, but I'm doing better at keeping in mind how I'm playing to have fun, that I'm more of a mid-tier player, and that my goal is to end up in the top three by whatever character random drops my way, rather than insisting that I have to win with my best character all the time, or I don't have any skills at all and should just quit. I'm playing a different game than others in the room, and it's better for my mental health to do it that way. And if someone were to call it unmanly or that I wasn't "trying" or that I should stop screwing around and get serious, I want to believe at this point I could shrug and say "You play your game, I'll have fun with mine," and then get to secretly gloat when, inevitably, I do end up winning, for whatever reason. (Because I am not a person who can remain above it all, I will gloat. I do have the presence of mind not to do it openly, though, since I am the Mature and Responsible Adult in the room, usually.)
This took time, and thinking, and succeeding, and a lot of falling, and I still don't get it right all the time, and I still get worried that what progress I've made is not built on solid foundations, because it still seems so easy to knock me off my Zen. (Brains are very fun, remembering all the bad and making them into "this is who you really are", discounting all the times where that didn't happen as successful faking for the cameras, or pretending or some other thing that says it's not what I would actually be like, given power and a mechanism to use it without consequences.) But I have a solid support network now, and while I'm still oversensitive and a lot more likely to take valid criticism as an indictment of my whole self, instead of what level it was intended to be at (which generates fun brain issues of the "everyone is lying to you about how terrible you are, because you can't take actual criticism and they would rather pretend rather than have to deal with you melting down again over a tiny issue" variety), I'm still sitting a lot better about so many things than I was when I was younger and had invested a lot more of my identity into being the smart one who was really good at video games. I could have been someone much more regrettable than I am, and hurt a lot more people, too.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-14 05:48 am (UTC)detoxing the gaming environment is clearly not that difficult. it's just that not enough people want to.
(and it seems like in neither instance would it have worked if there were another adult involved and that one didn't want to detox the place.)
no subject
Date: 2019-12-14 07:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-14 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-15 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-15 08:50 pm (UTC)