Hardcore gamer = someone who plays only cinematic grizzed white dude games and/or military fetishizing FPS
Casual gamer = anyone that is not a 15-25 yo male, and/or plays anything outside of the previously mentioned games, especially if those games are colorful.
So basically the gaming community is full of gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery. They make sure they’re the loudest voice heard when anything about games is talked about, and won’t be happy until all games a homogenous stream of bland, hyper-realistic but with a grey filter slog of mindless action with no heart or soul. And don’t you dare force them to read any dialogue or story.
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If someone puts “gamer” on their dating profile tho
Yeah the indie community is great. My complaints are more the popular gaming community that was particulaly strident during the PS2, 360 and gamergate era
I will never forgive the gaming community for shitting on Wind Waker when it first came out for being catroony
WW was a fantastic game and the graphics aged gracefully. I replayed it back in 2016 and had a blast.
I think the early 2000s PS2 era was the peak of modern gaming. Colourful games, decent 3d graphics. The FPS era hadn’t fully began on consoles yet.
The less said about the late 2000s, the better. That’s when all the “gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery” really got kicked into overdrive. Every game got a sepia piss filter as well. And after that we got the blue filters which were somehow even worse.
Oh god I am in an eternal struggle against the „creatives“ and their constant use of disgusting filters which destroy the natural colors. Tho I must confess I loved the golden filter of deus ex human revolution and the grain filter of ME1 and yes even the brownish tints of dragon age, I know I am bad haha.
Honestly some games benefitted from the piss filter, like Fallout New Vegas. If it were made with modern graphics I would want them to keep the piss filter instead of being vibrant like Fallou4 76
Filters have their place tbh. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense aesthetically.
The issue is falling back on it to the point it becomes a meme.
I think if you are making a depressingly sad game (like Dragon Age) then yeah using the shit brown filter to make it feel even more grimy works
I am currently doing a replay of like old rpgs and I‘ve finished dragon age like a month ago, personally I didn’t find like sad at all, maybe if you like get the worst outcomes, the only thing that made me go „huh“ was when characters tell like random tales and they go „…and then they were brutally assaulted and murdered“ which often feelt like a bit edgy for edgys sake. Also like why would anyone defile the ashes? Tbf the brown filter did work for me only in like certain areas.
I dont understand how MOBAs becomes one of the biggest esports when gameplay consists of farming and the teamfights are full of visual bloats that unless you spend 100 hours reading the wiki including the fcking patch notes you understand absolutely nothing. Like just to give you a glance"buy physical attack because everyone does this and this guy wields a sword" but also stuff like “buy this magical attack because these dagger wielding assassin scales magic attack”. Why is the goddamn dagger considered magical?
Like at least in stuff in counter strike the game despite some other tactics such as lineups it still overall easy to understand (plant the bomb and kill the enemies),.
Same way that Harry Potter became a cultural icon, very fucking aggressive marketing to burn it into peoples brains everywhere they look. This isn’t a joke btw Harry Potter is an example of some of the most aggressive book/mass media marketing ever done and set a precedent for extracting as much capital as one can from a source.
Same way that Harry Potter became a cultural icon, very fucking aggressive marketing to burn it into peoples brains everywhere they look. This isn’t a joke btw Harry Potter is an example of some of the most aggressive book/mass media marketing ever done and set a precedent for extracting as much capital as one can from a source.
Agreed, and as another example, Game of Thrones was the Grown-Ass-Adultman version of the same kind of aggressive pervasive marketing and media exposure. I tried to watch that edgy hog slop many times, including “this part will hook you”
clips recommended by associates, and long after I gave up and wanted to just ignore it I kept getting media blasted, everywhere, even in like doctor’s office waiting rooms, with magazines with front page WHO MURDERFUCKED THEIR WAY TO THE IRON THRONE THIS WEEK?! DAE LE RED WEDDING DAE LE SHAME hog slop smeared all over them.I learned way too much about that show through sheer involuntary oversaturation. It’s like it soaked through my skin.
Yeah GoT was an interesting watch for me during college and was something that was a insta conversation starter whenever you just met someone and knew jackshit about them but were sure they at least watched GoT. It was also pretty amazing to watch it get morphed into another HBO skinemax show with similar asthetics very quickly (then again the books themselves also have some squick as well so GRR doesn’t come off completely clean).
Epic G!mers got so locked into what Real Pro Esports Take This Seriously Please MOBAs were supposed to be that they bragged about how a foregone conclusion match could drag on for over a half hour and just invite more enraged slur flinging all the while. The “meta” of the entire thing is so bleak and joyless that when I directly asked a few enthusiasts, in person, what they actually enjoy about it, the most common answers were, I kid you not, “the winners make money”
and “the drama; people get so mad.” 
L*ague dropped at the right place at the right time and everybody started chasing the MOBA dragon just like people were trying to chase the WOW dragon.
And then the PUBG/Fortnite dragon.
The SEGA ads of the 90s were something.
Yeah I think that style of marketing started it.
Hardcore gaymer = fighting game enjoyer
Casual
g*merconsoomer = everyone elseThese people should be locked in a room and forces to play nothing but 50 turn Mario Party rounds for the rest of time
And then 50 rounds of Wii Sports
Remain convinced the only good community in games is the fighting game community. But, alas, they engage in the bad shit too from time to time.
The smash community has been pretty horrific over the years even by gamer standards.
Street fighter just got a massive influx of new fgc players so I can’t really tell.
Guilty gear community is very supportive of Bridget
By the sheer virtue of being a mixed bag the fighting game community probably wins least toxic.
The smash community has been pretty horrific over the years even by gamer standards.
There’s something about Nintendo fandoms that makes them more tribalistic and toxic on average than competing equivalents.
I dunno the sexism is pretty bad especially when they complain about the woman fighters boobs being smaller or whatever
since I’m a newbie and just getting into SF6, I’ve been trying to find good streamers to watch that haven’t been “cancelled” or problematic or are ragers when they lose. mainly stick with Justin Wong, Maximilian, and Japanese streamers lol.
I firmly believe that it’s because you can get punched IRL for being out of line
Yeah arcades/local fight game spots are cool because people gather in person, so there’s less of a problem of someone being a shithead because they get booted or shunned.
Whoever caused all this shit. Wtf dudes?? Especially cross with the people who made MMOs.
I’ve been hearing The Wife Aggro jokes since I could remember my dad’s dial up modem. My dad made those jokes too.
You can’t escape The Wife Aggro. It’s fucking impossible. If you call it out, you’re the bad guy. That dude is helping his The Wife!!! You don’t even have one, virgin.
Yea there’s a reason why I can barely tolerate playing current WoW with the boys. I won’t even touch classic.
The Wife Aggro is STILL THERE. MAKE IT STOP.
Lots of good points being made but I don’t like when it veers toward hatred of demanding games on a conceptual level. Ultrakill has lots of heart and soul and also challenges the player in order to evoke a certain experience, and that is part of the art of games.
“Hardcore” games without much story, games with leaderboards and bragging rights, aren’t always being made to exclude and insult players. That stuff is fun sometimes, like Hyper Demon, a beautiful minimalist game in both concept and execution that many players will not necessarily excel at.
Petty, pedantic point perhaps but I do like a game that expects me to learn a bit to win.
Tbf ultrakill literally has the option to enable aimbot and you dont need any crazy techs to beat the main story.
Yeah the mentality that every game should be beatable by a 90 year old who has never touched a computer before otherwise it’s not “accessible” is so fucking dumb. When I play my hardcore difficulty pokemon romhack because I want a harder game, I don’t expect Nintendo to make the actual game that way. When people who want easy games play challenging games, they demand that the developers make them easy(see dark souls easy mode discourse). It’s this mentality that liking challenge makes you “toxic” which just idiotic.
We already solved this problem in the 90s. The solution is to design a hard game but also have cheat codes to make the game easier (or even harder). But most modern game developers are completely allergic towards adding a simple god mode or infinite ammo code into their shitty game, so we’re stuck with arguing over whether story mode is good or not (it’s good if you insist on not having cheat codes).
that would cut into their microtransaction profits
people won’t want to buy the “time-savers” (in enormous quotes) if they can just put in the konami codeBut most modern game developers are completely allergic towards adding a simple god mode or infinite ammo code into their shitty game
This is so wack to me. Every game should be like Jedi Academy, and have a console where you can spawn in any NPC in the game/give yourself any cheat power you can imagine, because all that stuff ever does is make the game more fun.
Currently playing Noita and I have to say that “diagetic cheat codes” are by far my favorite way of doing this
Yeah you could just enter the console command for infinite health or install an infinite health mod, and those should both also be available
But when you’re allowed within the normal rules of the game to build an incredibly janky and dangerous item that spawns the enemy that drops a heart container when killed, with lots of opportunity to accidentally explode yourself along the way, that just hits different
Gaming isn’t fundamentally about overcoming challenges. It used to be, but it changed long ago. Now, gaming is about generating pleasing brain chemicals. When gamers “win”, they feel good. When they meet a challenge that stops them, they feel bad. It’s just that simple. People don’t shell out $60 so that they can feel frustrated and angry. You paid for the whole game, you get to play the whole game. With lighted signs pointing the entire way and a companion to overcome the challenges if you can’t solve them in the first ten seconds.
Let people know the intended experience is challenging. If people aren’t able to meet the game at its level of challenge, for any number of reasons, and turn the difficulty down to where it is doable to them, why not let them? Set the default to the “intended experience” but let people of different ability levels have their fun too.
By the way, people who are much better than games on average are also not having the “intended experience”, but no one is upset at them for not “respecting art”. People playing Dark Souls on guitar hero controllers or w/e aren’t having the “intended experience”.
The anti-easy mode discourse is just ableism in a mask.
No need to take it that far, I’m not against difficulty levels but it’s not always easy to tell how to make a game easier in that sense. If a “scene” in a game revolves around “get the ball in the cup when I say go,” not getting the ball into the cup when the screen says go means you don’t progress. It’s within the scope of “artistic vision” for the dev to want a character in the scene to congratulate you for getting that ball in that cup only when you’ve done it is all I’m saying.
Like sure, in a big AAA game with a cinematic story broken up by combat sections, I think it’s fair to say that an easy mode, even the “story mode” without any way to fail that some of them offer, is understandable. But isn’t it fair for a rhythm game to expect you to follow a beat, or for a jigsaw puzzle to withhold the picture the pieces make until you put it together? Plenty of indie games don’t really have anything to offer beyond the “toy” they present the player with. Sometimes a game is made to teach you its systems until you can do it, like learning an instrument, and I wouldn’t say that’s ableist.
In older games. If turning down the difficulty in the intended way didn’t work, then they’d let you skip the section after, say, 20 failures. Or the game would have branching mission paths that made losing not a game over.
When I think of “old games” I think of the opposite, of games that had limited lives and no save systems. Not defending that, but considerations of differing player ability are certainly a newer development rather than the old way of things.
Games back then didn’t have to consider differing player abilities (which honestly isn’t that true either since multiple difficulties were already a thing) because cheat codes existed. Story mode was basically the easiest difficulty on top of a god mode and infinite ammo cheat code.
Sure but those cheat codes weren’t always easy to access before widespread internet use. You used to be able to buy books of cheat codes in fact.
How wide is the rim of the cup? How heavy is the ball? How viscous is the air the ball flies through? What counts as “doing it” or “not doing it” in any given system either involves an arbitrary line or error-bars of some sort. There’s no harm in having a setting to move that line slightly or to make those error-bars wider. Or must we bow to an auteur’s artistic vision (or a community’s bigotry) about these things? Perhaps if the artistic point of the thing is to make people suffer in some way, but otherwise?
[M]ust we bow to an auteur’s artistic vision (or a community’s bigotry) about these things? Perhaps if the artistic point of the thing is to make people suffer in some way, but otherwise?
I can’t speak for Poogona, but balancing a game for different difficulty levels while still making the game enjoyable is going to be harder for some games than others. That doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be done, just that the task is non trivial. I imagine things would be better in this regard without booj cracking the whip on devs.
It doesn’t have to be about making a player “suffer,” I’m just saying that being able to “lose” in a game doesn’t have to be ableist or done for the sake of masculine ego. And winning or losing doesn’t have to be arbitrary, I can imagine the size and physics of the ball being designed to mimic the real thing rather than being designed for maximum accessibility, which would be the choice of the dev. I feel kinda silly arguing about this now but this rhetoric about a game that might not be immediately accessible to all players being “masked ableism” and of “bowing” to artistic vision is surprising to hear. Risk of failure and design that takes advantage of mechanical depth can add to the fun, it doesn’t have to be interpreted as bigotry.
to make people suffer in some way
Yes! That’s it! You’ve hit the nail on the head. People don’t pay $60 to feel frustrated. They pay $60 to feel good. If the game doesn’t deliver what they paid for, why does it even exist?
People also don’t pay to be unchallenged, which is how we wound up with derogatory nicknames like “walking simulator”
People’s threshold for challenge and fun are all over the place and so are the games that do and should exist
But it doesn’t work that way. They get lowered to the level of the customers who don’t want to overcome challenges. All they want is a good feeling. And those brain chemicals that get released by being led by the nose around a level are real.
When you pay full price for a game, do you deserve to experience all of the content contained therein? Or do you have to spend hours of tedious frustration, feeling bad brain chemicals, just to get what you already paid good money for? You feel enough bad brain chemicals with your job and your family already, why are you spending your precious few free hours doing the same?
Hey I was a hardcore gamer but i played RTS and fighting games like a gentleman
I’m old so to me MOBAs have always been “RTS, but stripped down and with a lot less map variety and basically zero story outside of excuses for why there are waifus and waifu costumes for sale.”
You just play as one guy. How hard can that be. That’s why I liked HoN actually because the courier micro and map awareness was key
Fighting games don’t count, when your opponent can punch you irl for getting out of line it really cuts down on the bullshit
games mechanics become watered down due to the profit motive and challenging games are fun, this whole thread feels like just contrarianism to spite a vocal minority turning being a HARDCORE GAMERRRRR into a personality trait
Where did I mention difficulty?
if you mean people restricting themselves to “manly” games thats also a loud online minority, i mean nintendo still makes the most popular games out there and stuff like undertale has sold how many millions now? so saying the gaming community™ is “full of gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery” is hard to believe
so saying the gaming community™ is “full of gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery” is hard to believe
what planet are you from
turns on voice chat in TF2
There are literally Nazis
Turns it back off
Okay
i mean nintendo still makes the most popular games out there
sorry i dont get mad at people inside my head ig
Both the Smash and Zelda fandoms have plenty of toxic chuds like yourself, ones that show up out of nowhere to concern troll and vomit ableistic bullshit if they feel like their treat is endangered by discussion of it that isn’t 100% support of the status quo.
undertale
Oh yeah, totally no toxic bullshit in the Undertale fandom, either. Never ever.
As an Undertale enjoyer, I can acknowledge that toxic fandom being a problem, unlike you.Go away.
No, gamers bad.
I think a big point is also the transition of everything being so damned online now (not gaming but communities and discourse) that what initially was gaming in the 90s and early 2000s (casual gamers, kid gamers, and then weird grown ass chud adults) were very much compartmentalized and separate. Nowadays with Youtube you had the fallout of gamergate create a self feeding subculture that propagates among dissatisfied mainly white young males who utilize one of their hobbies (gaming) as escapism from all the shit capital loves to do (alienation) and create an exceedingly angry stigma to project on anyone entering “their” space that does not conform. Add in how chuds screech the loudest and angry engagement clicks and comments lead to algorithm feedback and you have one of the worst video genres ever of usually a scruffy bearded angry
being gobsmacked they have to look at a minority in a video game for even a single fucking second but utilizing safe dogwhistles such as “woke” and “sjw” to “debate about it” (though that second one is falling out of style).The entire fake-friend “parasocial” streamer industry is fucked up. It meets a need that terminal stage capitalism established by feeding that need with the social equivalent of high fructose corn syrup. With a little fascist messaging, as a treat.
I hate how a streamer knows I’m a first timer in chat, how theres always “a friend” who gives me a free sub and WELCOME TO THE COMMUNITY. Please ffs can we go back to love of the game lets plays
there was a time when you didn’t need to specify “no commentary” when you searched for a walkthrough
JOIN THE DISCORD 
I remember gaming always being seen as a “boys club” for as long as I can remember. They were thankfully pretty welcoming of me (being a brown guy and all) but girls playing games were either given the m’lady treatment or chastised for making a mistake that would get them seen as being bad at the game. Often both.
The sad part is that there have been girls and women playing and developing games since the beginning but they were mostly pushed into the background, so now they get accused of invading a so-called male space. Can’t win
AFAIK the arcade boom was pretty popular with both men and women, since at that time it was a social hobby and kids were doing a lot of hanging out and hooking up at arcades. It wasn’t until the turn to console gaming, which was primarily an anti-social activity, that video game advertisements started really focusing in on young boys. Nintendo bears a lot of the blame here, since they defined the western market following the big crash, and they saw the NES as exclusively a boys’ toy - but it wasn’t just them of course, in particular I remember the OG XBox’s marketing doing a lot to create a “bro culture”, along with stuff like the channel G4, which I think was created intentionally as a reaction to the previously existing perception of gamers being nerdy.
and they saw the NES as exclusively a boys’ toy
So there’s a bit more to this, if I remember all this correctly, Nintendo couldn’t exactly call the NES a ‘video game console’ when they started selling it in the US because the crash had pretty much made that a really bad financial move to call it as such. And also they had to sell it in the toys section to start with, which has had and still has a lot of segregation between boys and girls toys. And also considering how brick and mortar stores have acted for a long time, they likely had a bit of a hand in this in the way of demanding nintendo to pick if it was a boys toy or a girls toy or else they won’t stock it.
Children (overwhelmingly boys) who played vidya games were nerdy. There was a brief period during the Pac-Man era when vidya games were for everyone, and soon it went into hardcore weirdness. Games got hard and unless you had the patience to play again, and again, and again, and again…you can forget being a part of the crowd. Games with 45 levels when nobody ever got past level 4.
I don’t know if “post-contrarianism” is a term but I wish it was because it describes posts like this one perfectly
Post country music fan
Also yes I fully admit this is a dumb post.
The “ethical game journalism” days, to
gaters, looked like this. https://i.imgur.com/P37EDfX.jpgI know that’s an ad, not journalism, which is the point. They don’t want journalism. They want hype waves and to feel bazinga about what they buy without any downer talk whatsoever.
A lot of them didn’t even get that even the early Duke Nukem games were already mocking this shit as immature misogynist garbage. Which is how we got the dumbster fire that was DN Forever.
Randy Pitchford has always been a piece of shit but a big part of it was not getting what made the Duke Nukem franchise funny and instead doing what he thought was funny in DNF, which was some really fucked up sadistic stuff that basically had a rimshot sound after it was presented.
Blatant false advertising. Nobody has ever wanted Battlecruiser 3000AD.
Uhh…😅 I did…
I thought it would basically be No Man’s Sky. Fly around to planets and do stuff. But the designer himself flamed me on USENET so I quit following it and never played.
Battlecruiser 3000AD! By Derek Smart, Ph.D! Wow, that takes me back. The original “in development forever” game way before Daikatana or Duke Nukem.
