Have Gamers Become Too Sensitive?

Listen to the last segment of this weeks Bombcast. Now let's discuss the toxicity that a site's staff can bring about. Forget about the users.

mmm I am not quite sure what the question about gamers become too sensitive has to do with the example of the usual internet rage. Are we saying the offender is sensitive and felt the needs to make a statement or questioning if the original reviewer is too sensitive if offended? Or maybe a little bit of both.

In terms of the standard internet vitriol, I see it as just internet being internet and people being people. Honestly I see similar behavior in real life to really isolate this as an internet only issue. Perhaps the power of the web makes this more noticeable in larger observable quantities. Is it good? Probably not, but I don't see a good solution.

Anonymity has become a touchy subject. The whole subjective accountability is a recipe for disaster. All it does at best is suppression, it does nothing for the issue of people are still shitty. If anything it gives extreme statements more weight and breeds followers, sort of like what is already going on at the moment. It also essentially gives individuals who could "take the hit" an even louder voice not unlike what is already happening in the real world.

"Too sensitive" is such a pointless notion. It's a lazy counter to a poor argument or criticism.

It's nothing new, but it's a problem the Internet gave a steroid injection to through its ability to give everyone their own personal echo chambers. I'll save everyone having to read up on Internet echo chambers and suggest googling it if you're interested (this is a pretty good article). I talked about "Mapper vs. Packer" theory in another read recently, which is a psychological theory about how people handle alternative views. The majority of people are wired in such a way that they will reject alternative views and instead use their own views and experiences to reshape those alternative views. Because the Internet has given everyone their own soap boxes, the ability to tailor their social media environments to include dozens if not hundreds of contacts fitting their own world views, and the ability to block all inconvenient views, it just makes things all the worse.

So yeah, gamers are too sensitive, but it's a microscopic part of a much larger and complex issue.

great post, i remember reading about how even google was wiring search engines to link to articles that fit more in line with your browser history, so if you search for something political and you read like left or right wing media mostly then those results typically show up. That may or may not be a thing anymore as i stopped following stuff like that years ago for the sake of my sanity lol.

Its always been this way. The Internet just makes it easier to see how grand of an issue it is. Easy way to solve this for yourself is to stop caring about every little opinion you dont agree with; no matter how absurd or how big of a douche bag the opinion holder is.

Maybe this is not the best place to talk about this because, you know...

True. This thread really didn't need any debate this specific. The topic at hand was general sensitivity.

My favorite example of this was the time a thread was locked and someone sent me a reply to a question that I asked. That happens sometimes, but this specific person told me not to bother replying, because they wouldn't read it. Talk about just wanting to just tell someone how they should think. It was kind of funny.

For the record, they did give me something to consider, and it did alter my opinion on a certain topic a little. They also hit me with an appeal to importance argument that was pretty poorly constructed, but I honored their request and didn't reply.

Everyone is too sensitive. Everyone. Since the beginning of time. We are human beings.

Remember there was a time before video games and internet when people would get offended at the fact that a black person would sit at the front of a bus.

Hell, we've improved.

So disagreeing with a friend is much different than disagreeing with a stranger anonymously on the internet; so I think comparing the two is dubious. But I do agree with gamers being overly sensitive. I wasn't a part of online communities in the early 2000's/late 90's, so I can't speak to the difference from now a days. I think some of it probably stems from the fact that the internet is more open and available to a larger amount of people now, than it was then.

Way fewer political / social issue arguments. WAY more system wars arguments. In a lot of ways, despite a fair amount childish behavior, gaming has matured quite a bit. I think that's due to people in their 30s wanting to discuss more adult topics such as sexism and racism, rather than relive the endless "my console is better than your console" debates of their younger years. You don't see much of that at all on this site, and I think it's because the audience skews a bit older, and we've all had enough of that in our lives.

I think society in general have become way too sensitive, but that's another debate entirely.

And one that has been exacerbated (and exploited) by Twitter, where the words are mashed down to fit into an easy-to-misinterpret 160 characters (or whatever it is) or a goddamn hashtag.

It's such a poor platform for anything other than sweeping, clickbaity-sounding statements when it comes to more serious topics.

In some instances we are too sensitive in others not enough. Online discourse will not get better until you are literally forced to tie your social security number to a single online login that you will use for life to access the internet and it will showcase your real name. As long as we are able to hide behind logins then you will continue to have dumb 13 year olds telling you to kill yourself because you're an xbot and even dumber 30 year olds launching into 14 paragraph diatribes about why DMC was ruined because Dante says fuck too often.

I blame YouTube.

But aren't we here being too sensitive to others being to sensitiveness. A few hundred vocal people are being vocal online in two different camps of opinion, but should WE be sensitive to that, or just let it go? Does it matter what people are saying at all; Moreover, should it bother us enough to discuss it?

Are you saying I shouldn't be so sensitive about Nuclear Throne coming out broken on PS4 7 months ago and never getting fixed? Well too fucking bad because I paid for a game that at least functions properly so of course I'm pissed. Don't be surprised when consumers get mad when you sell sub par products.

I just want to point something out. On any given forum or video, if you look at views vs. posts or views vs. likes/dislikes, you'll notice a huge disparity. That is because lurkers make up the majority (or at least a huge portion) of users on the internet; People who don't feel strongly enough one way or another to actual comment on what they've consumed. Hence, you get a lot of "passionate" responses. In other words, I believe a lot of the conversations that we see on the internet are being held by very vocal minorities.

But this post is about gamers specifically. I believe there are actual factors we can unpack that point to why gamers react the way that they do that don't simply come down to "well, everyone is like that." Games and the internet are relatively new media. They developed at around the same time. If you grew up as the games industry was budding, chances are that you also grew up with the internet. The two media are not dissimilar, so it's not a stretch to say that gamers would take to the internet more easily than other groups. It's also not a secret that the industry has been going through some growing pains and I've noticed a strong sense of (let's call it) "resentment" as a result. I think it would be fair to say that gamers are a fairly active group of users compared to others. I think it is also fair to say that gamers would feel more comfortable stating their opinions online than those groups.

The last point I want to make is that what the hive-mind that is the internet thinks isn't necessarily the same thing that society at large thinks. If I could step out of the gaming sphere with my example, I'd like to bring up a cartoon. Common internet thinking is that Teen Titans Go is absolutely terrible. However, the show is actually very successful and popular among its intended demographic. That won't change no matter how the denizens of the internet feel about it. I'm sure you can think of many examples in gaming of games that are successful even though they are derided (Pokemon Go?) or games that receive hatred from groups that are obviously not the intended demographic. All this is related to my first point about vocal minorities carrying on a lot of the conversation. This also speaks to the fact that not all groups use the internet as extensively and openly as gamers. In that way, I think a lot of the reactions by gamers are unique and deserve a closer look.

Basically what I'm saying is that gamers in particular have a strong relationship with the internet more so than a lot of other groups. With that comes the good uses of the internet (the GDQs), and the bad uses (you know) that are unique to gamers.

Sensitivity is a good thing, but as it is so new to society people are really at a loss for where and when to apply it.

A lot of examples I read here though have nothing/little to do with sensitivity. Rather they are more examples of hive mind/monoculture especially, which is by far the most present poison I see online, and it often disguises itself as positivity.

This is definitely how I feel about the same thing. People get on these mindsets and then push everything outside of that mindset, int he past or present, completely out of the picture. It manifests itself in a lot of ways. In opinions certainly, even things like the current obsession with saying any form of media is "dated" or "does it hold up?" even if it's only 3-4 years old. As if nothing that came out before this year has any value or we should be surprised it still does. And as if our current state and ideas, in these small mindsets and groups, is SO advanced as to render the past obselete.

People are just way more short sighted and close minded than they think despite all the information at their finger tips.

And often, I see many criticisms in games in the modern media presented in a "hey, don't get mad for us bringing up point X, it's a discussion" which is TOTALLY VALID but ignores many of these come along with moralistic arguments or completely one sided viewpoints too that can generalize or look down upon other viewpoints. I have done enough of it myself to understand criticism but at the same time I do think there's clear hive mind going on in many places on both sides of arguments. I would say the "sensitivity" rears its head when some can't take the other view point at all. I think certain "progressive' viewpoints do this just as much as "non-progressive" ones.

I don't have an answer on how to fix any of this. I just avoid as much nonsense as I can.

That's my recollection as well. There were however plenty of fights about female characters in games though mainly about Lara Croft (specifically her portrayal in those early games and things like her Playboy spread ). But that was about it. The sensitivity was there, just around different subjects.

But yeah games themselves more routinely tackle subjects that few would have dreamed of touching in the 90's. And games themselves have a decent job of appealing to an even wider audience than they did in 90's. So it's not terribly surprising gamers themselves discuss those issues too.

I think one of the differences back then too is that it was much harder for stuff to go viral given how decentralized stuff was, so nasty fights tended to be contained in smaller areas. So if you didn't like certain poster X or so, it was easier to avoid them by going somewhere else.

This is sadly true. As an example of this, allow me to present excerpts from a private message exchange with another user.

They wrote:

Oh god i'm full of iced coffee and i'm kind of loopy and i could be playing shovel knight instead of answering this. Why am I answering this.

I wrote:

I know, right? Sometimes I wonder about the time I spend debating things on the internet. I guess it's just in my nature.

It's getting late, so I'm not going to post a detailed reply right now, but I do thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. Even when I ultimately disagree with someone--although there was a fair amount of your post that I certainly did agree with--I always want to understand their argument, and never want to misrepresent their opinion when arguing my own.

Anyhow, thanks again and goodnight.

They wrote:

....I'm sorry, but no.

This is not a rousing intellectual debate with a number of equally valid sides and arguments. I am not sharing musings and whimsies with you or w/e! This is "what is 4+5" with more words. Posting [your opinion] in that thread was pretty inappropriate

Granted this was in a topic about a fairly heated issue--and I'm not going to go into specifics and derail this thread--but where do you go when someone expresses such intolerance for your opinion like that? A lot of people can go to a pretty dark place that just continues to build the same us vs them mentality. But I like that this place challenges my opinions and causes me to present my viewpoints with understanding for opposing views.

I just try to be the person who I would want disagreeing with me. Also, I like to argue against people who share my opinions, just as much as I like to debate people who share opposite views. I can think of a co-worker who shares many of my opinions, but expresses them with far less tolerance than I do, and I like to challenge him. Without exactly disagreeing, I like to present him with opposing views, because I have a feeling he's the type to surround himself exclusively with people who share his opinion. It forces him to consider other opinions, and it forces me to think from a different perspective.

Also, I love to throw people with "my opinion" under the bus when I see them arguing with fallacies, being needlessly belligerent, being a hypocrite, etc.

I forgot all about that Playboy spread. That was kind of weird. But I also don't remember a lot of conversation focused on Lara Croft as a woman, only Lara Croft as a character. It would be interesting to be able to go back and read the response to her creation. Unfortunately, none of the reviews on sites old enough to have reviewed the game seem to have kept their comments section.

While I agree with most of this, it's as if criticism is taken by default as valid. But it isn't always. I've made this example many times, but if you're going to complain that Metroid Prime is a shit game because it has lock-on targeting then it's very fair to say that is invalid criticism.

Most ironic is people giving their heated opinion on something on a public message board, and then giving a 'jeez why do you even care to respond to me'-speech if someone disagrees with the person in a normal manner. If you don't want people to reply to you, you shouldn't state your opinion in public. The expectation that you can say whatever to a potential of thousands of people without anyone disagreeing with you is absurd.

Yeah I agree. I think games have grown as a medium and so has the discourse, even if people still have their issues. Back then it was much more system wars-y and also super based in the hype driven cycles of AAA games, which were the thing back then with a much smaller market of games that we would think of as "indie games" now. You would have people dissecting page long previews and speculating and all kinds of stuff more. There are just so many more games now. You see very good games come out now and they might not even get their own forum thread. Back then a magazine could tease a game cover and it'd be talked about for weeks. Really some of the only things I see like it anymore is Kojima, how he did the marketing for MGSV and now with his next game in its early showing. It has definitely changed a lot.

But that systems war type stuff was real crap back then. You can see traces of it even on GB, which doesn't trade in that bullshit at all, when it first started having console alignment. I don't think anything dumb was meant by the GB guys at all when they did that but I think it just goes to show how much more divided things were.

As far as sex and portrayals of women, I really can't recall much of any talk about any of that besides maybe saying "hey it's silly". Like the Playboy spreads or DOA boob jiggle when that became a thing. To me that stuff was laughed at but not actually criticized overall. But I think the medium grew into having that criticism be talked about like it is now.

@spaceinsomniac: Good post. I just really hate the dismissal and style of looking down upon differing opinions by many that I see. A fair number of people can be so unchallenged by their thinking that anything outside of it is seen as a shock and repulsive.

I think it's more accurate to say that people are more sensitive in general, but gamers specifically? No.

@spaceinsomniac said:

Yeah I don't remember any specifics, I just remember it being a hot button topic in some circles in ran in.

That's kinda what I was trying to get at with my decentralization of discussion point. It was super easy to not see this stuff if it wasn't happening where you were hanging out. Everything was so fragmented compared to what it is now. That's partly why I hang out on GB instead of twitter and tumblr etc. Talking in those places to me is a bit like shouting in a megaphone in a public park, whereas in a forum it's more bit more conversational.

Some of the very nastiest fights I saw back then were almost completely contained in their subcommunities. E.g. I don't know if you are aware of Beast Wars, a CGI Transformers cartoon show that ran in the late 90's, but that was extremely extremely divisive show among Transformers fans because it didn't feature the original series characters and the Robots turned into Animals instead of vehicles. The infamous "Trukk not Munky" debates is what I hear some people call it today http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Trukk_not_munky. Some of that shit got real raw at times.

Places like Usenet or ICQ/AIM etc is where this stuff like this tended to go down. At least that's where I saw it. I'm sure there is tons of other examples I had no idea about because they weren't places/communities I engaged with.

Guess I'm just saying I feel like the fights were there, just on the topics of the day and it just wasn't everywhere like it is now.

@artisanbreads

I bet a "I survived the System Wars" T-shirt would sell like gangbusters .

Really glad GB didn't allow that nonsense to infect here and now you mention it it is odd they allowed us to pick an affiliation. You are absolutely that stuff got crazy hyperbolic and divisive.

Thought it would be interesting to contrast this with my reallife social interactions.

In this house I can't say anything without having someone else tell me that I'm lying, or that it's ignorant. That I don't know what I'm talking about. So if I want to say anything I have to collect proof so that I can present it if... well... when they challenge my story. It's like some people want to feign intelligence or knowledge by always making it look like you don't know anything, but they know everything about this. (While they rarily got it right.) They will never ever trust me on my word. That kind of hurts me.

I found this to be much worse than the online bullying I get confronted with, personally, because it means I have nobody I can share information with. I can't just talk about the news without bringing a piece of paper with all the details and then some, because I will be interrogated about where that information came from and how that is possible. I can't say 'did you hear about this crazy thing?' because it will only be twisted to make it look like I'm crazy. And you can't just turn off the real world the way you can simply turn off the screen or visit a different online community. (It's not THAT simple, I know. But still...)

In the long term, as long as we're talking the usual online crap and not the targeted online bullying that happens, I have more problems with the real world interactions. I could be an exception in this.

That sounds kind of awful. Family is supposed to be supportive, not dismissive and accusatory. I can understand if you strongly disagree politically and they're challenging you on that sort of thing, but if you couldn't say something like "I just heard a gunman killed almost 50 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando," without your family asking for proof or pretending like you're crazy, that's a problem.

Hopefully you can create--or already have created--a support network of friends to help in the areas of your life where your family seems to be unsupportive. That, and if you ever decide to have children, you'll at least know not to make the same mistakes.

As a less serious example, I'm always quick to apologize or admit when I'm mistaken, and part of that might be due to having a Grandfather in my life who could never admit he was wrong about anything.

Oh I'll be fine. Thanks for saying that, I think you are right about family. I just wanted to mention it because people talk about how people treat each other online a lot. And that does leave a lot to be desired, but I just wanted to place this little sidenote, right? Let's not forget that the way people treat each other offline leaves a lot to be desired, too. And maybe we want the internet to be better than it can be without changing the actual people.

It's already done in South Korea and doesn't prevent incidents like Dog Poop Girl who was a woman whose personal information was leaked after she was videoed not cleaning up her dog's poop on the subway and ended up dropping out of school and going into hiding. It doesn't stop hate groups like Anti-English Spectrum who love to spew their rhetoric that foreign English teachers are actively trying to sleep with and ruin the lives of as many Korean women as they can. It doesn't prevent radical feminist groups like Megalia from actively encouraging their members to abort male babies. More than one Korean celebrity has been shamed into suicide by Korea's oft-rabid 'netizens'. (There's a reason 'Gangnam Style' is the most watched video on YouTube.) The elimination of anonymity is not the solution. There might not be a solution. Assholes will be assholes.

I might sometimes think that some comments made online about videogames seem to be made by people who lack some worldly perspective and haven't quite had to deal with "real" troubles just yet. Perhaps some might need to spend some time with Doctors Without Borders or similar organizations and see if they still feel as passionate about whether or not Gone Home (as an example) was a good videogame or not.

I don't think I've ever seen a convincing argument for this idea that people are more sensitive (in general) than they were in the past. To a conservative uninterested or actively opposed to civil rights, I'm sure America seems a lot more sensitive now than it did decades ago, but that's just because most people have become more sympathetic to the issues and language surrounding minority groups. On the flip side, young people are increasingly non-religious, so it's become more acceptable to poke fun at or openly mock religion. This isn't an issue of people becoming more or less sensitive - it's an issue of shifting values. And if you think people are getting thin-skinned, it's probably because you don't hold all the values that people are gravitating towards. That isn't a good thing or a bad thing, but calling other people overly-sensitive is a disingenuous way of representing people with opposing viewpoints.

I disagree on the basis of what a lot of people have pointed out in this thread already. People who enjoy video games overall are not more sensitive online or IRL, but the contingent of gamers who bother formulating responses on message forums or comment sections are just naturally more inclined to be committed to that discussion/debate.

I'm not sure I agree with that, or at least not sure I agree that it explains away everyone who has an issue with this sort of thing. People like George Carlin were calling out the concept of political correctness and over-sensitivity long ago, and he's hardly conservative.

Note that the video title is not a George Carlin quote.

I think the problem is that people's opinions are just very precious to them. I doubt this is a recent phenomenon.

@spaceinsomniac: Problem is, people use the nebulous boogeyman of 'political correctness' as an excuse to be an asshole without consequence. See the man running for President of the United States under the Republican ticket.

That sounds like less of a problem with political correctness, and more of a consequence of political correctness. Sort of a "boy who cried wolf" situation. Of course, what is a "real" wolf when it comes to this topic is highly subjective anyhow.

Regardless, I've never found it hard to disagree with anyone who is using PC culture as a shield for being an asshole, and that's true on both sides of the situation.

@spaceinsomniac: I didn't mean to say that people worrying about "political correctness" can be explained away by conservatism (in the American political sense) - I meant to say, as I think becomes clearer two sentences after the bit you highlighted, that people worrying about "political correctness" stems from having values that no longer match those of the rest of the population. Many an American liberal who remember the 1970's were horrified, I'm sure, by the "political correctness" of the 1980's, though it was entirely different from what predominates nowadays.

How George Carlin fits into this, I'm not sure. He fits the American (social) liberal who saw what happened in the 1980's bill pretty well, but in all honesty I've never found any of his political or social commentary coherent or consistent enough to say anything meaningful about him.