@johnham said:
Real talk; if you think Leigh Alexander's "Gamers are dead" piece was meant to say literally that all gamers are bad people, or that all white male gamers are bad people, or that games focused on that slice of the market shouldn't exist anymore, you're either misreading the article (in good faith), or purposely misreading the article to drum up more hate.
Alexander's piece was about the widened scope of contemporary gamer culture. "Gamers are dead" is not meant to say that the people who've helped gestate this medium have no place in its future, it's saying that we, as a community of people who love games, have finally helped to usher this hobby truly into the mainstream. "Gamer" as a designation at this point is almost meaningless because from a certain age downward almost everyone knows something about games, and has played and enjoyed them. If you truly read that article with an open mind and read it as "hostile" to its audience, I would suggest that you shouldn't take internet thinkpieces about video games so seriously.
I also think it's really interesting that this piece has become a GamerGate canard, because it has literally nothing to do with ethics, at all. Even if the article was openly hostile and couldn't be read in any other way, how does that present an ethical quandary that GG feels needs addressing? Being mean to someone in an editorial isn't an ethical issue. The reality is that the "Gamers are dead" article is a loose, poorly considered pretense to harass another female voice in the industry.
That's what I've always thought was strange about this whole thing, too. The idea of "gamer" culture is dying, and it's a really great thing! We won. Everyone is gamers. Everyone will be gamers. We built this really amazing thing by nurturing it and supporting it for decades, and now it's growing up and it's going to do weird things that we don't expect. That should be something we get really excited about and embrace.
And yet there are people who view this so differently. People who are bringing back the old, deceased concept that if you like games as more than a "casual", you're a "nerd". If you play more than a certain amount of hours, or engage with games more than most people, you're back to being the antisocial neckbeard who hates women because they don't pay attention to him. Seeing people actually tweer "GamerGate made me realize bullying was right all along!", that shit is disheartening.
If you want to interpret "gamers are dead" as something nice and colorful, where "everyone's a gamer now, gamers don't exist", go for it, but I think it's naive. What it really is, for most of the people saying it (especially outspoken misandrists), is "us vs. them" again. It's "we're better, nerds". It's shunning that pesky minority of people who just so happen to have a different hobby from everyone else - not better or worse, just different. Patrick, I know you're passionate about football, which I personally can't find anything exciting about, and I used to feel smarter about people who really get into the sport. Now I just see it for what it is, a different thing to get passionate about. I don't get the "we won" or "we lost" mentality, but I don't have to, and I can't judge anyone on it. Same as I can't suggest, "yes, you like games because you are a cis white misogynist male". A hobby doesn't really make a person.
If a person watches football, you could say to them "oh you like watching people compete, don't you?" Well yes, that's sports culture. Gaming culture is about gaming. So someone does a bunch of misogynist stuff that gets really publicized, and... gaming culture is dead? Nope. Most of America likes sports on some level. Is sports culture dead?
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