What Motivates Vitriolic Responses in Gaming Culture

Note: Just a quick note. I'm going to reference the Last of Us Part 2, and I imagine the comments below will talk about the game, but this post isn't just about that game. It's about gaming culture in general. So, please avoid talking about spoilers. There are other threads on here for those conversations.

I'm curious what you guys think about this topic. I'm curious in it because, in my job as a mental health therapist, a big part of my life revolves around what motivates behavior. But some behaviors are easier for me to understand then others. And even when I logically understand some motivations, I can't fully understand them. This has all come about based on some of the responses I've seen to the Last of Us Part 2. It has been intense, at least by those who care to react and post online, and it's been so on all sides. Those who like the game and don't all the same have had some pretty dramatic responses and in turn responses to each other. This response I don't think speaks to this game in particular, but to aspects of gaming culture.

Yes, other cultures are plagued with vitriol. I imagine vitriol is a part of the human experience and we can all engage with it for a variety of reasons. But since this is a gaming forum and most of us know gaming pretty well, I'm curious what you all think motivates vitriolic responses in gaming culture be it to specific games, genres (I'm looking at you walking simulators), gaming personalities, the press, publishers, developers. All and more have seen some intense responses.

For me, with regards to the Last of Us 2, I was one of those folks that liked the game and its story. So when I saw dramatic responses, I found the start of vitriol brewing in me. In fact, I may have expressed that response in these forums. In my own spoiler thread about the game I essentially said that people who think differently than me lack empathy. Yikes. That's clearly not true, obviously. So what motivated me to have that response to those that disliked the game? I think for me it came down to disappointment. I want gaming to continue to evolve and part of that involves game stories that make people have a myriad of reactions. Which the Last of Us Part 2 does, but I also want to make sure those games continue to exist and I suppose I worry the lesson learned from some intense negative responses will be 'don't make games like this anymore because people don't like or want them.' So I was disappointed and scared of gaming becoming stagnate.

But vitriol isn't just about games, like I said. We could just as easily talk about vitriol in regards to 'sjw' comments or how women or queer people are treated. Unfortunately, from my perspective, we're spoiled for choice. So what do you all think? What motivates vitriolic responses in gaming culture? Is there one clear cut answer or is on a more case by case basis? If you've had an intense reaction, what has motivated that reaction in you?

The entitled, hyper controlling responses of fans is nothing new to nerd culture. If you go back the 1960 Batman, you can see the nascent the seeds of nerd rage culture. The Glen Weldon of NPR(huge comic guy and very fun to read) said it best:

“Nerd culture is often open and inclusive, when it is powered by the desire to seek out others who share common interests and enthusiasms. But nerdish passion is strong and unmindful; its very nature is to obliterate dispassion, nuance, ambiguity, and push human experience to either edge of a binary extreme: My thing is the best. Your thing is the worst. Moreover, if you do not love my thing in the same way, to the same degree, and for exactly the same reasons that I do, you are doing it wrong.“

One of the biggest issues in video games is that publishers openly court and pander to these hardcore fans, fully well knowing they are the biggest gate keepers. They see these fans as source of free advertising, hype and assured sales. But they are also the fans that are most likely to take any perceived slight or insult as something deadly serious. These hardcore fans of video games the source of the vitriolic abuses thrown at developers. And they are also willing to accept allies to bolster their claims, even if those like minded people might also be pushing some regressive agenda about women or minorities.

These fans, of course, do not represent the majority of people who will play these games. If the millions of units sold, they are a tiny portion. But they are given outsized importance because marketers would prefer their praise over their wrath. Marketers says ”power to the gamers” and the super fans say “Yeah, that’s right, we do have the power” without an ounce of irony.

And because we like games and are not garbage people, we get to deal with them. These people who believe they are the center of the gaming world because marketing teams told them so.

I think there's also a lot of people, gaming or what have you, that just don't properly distinguish between an attack or criticism towards a thing they like and an attack on them personally.

Sunk cost is a big part of it. People want the console hardware and games they've invested in to be validated.

Not only that, they want their particular interpretation of and relationship with the stuff they've invested in to be validated. Hence the gatekeeping.

Gaming sites area crossroads where people meet. Often globally. I can see you are trying to keep this tied to a game (which I have not played) but ppl. may have their eyes fixed on 2 things;

One is how they feel about the game, and that encumbers their own values, how they look at things, both in their projected social values in such as TLOU2, how they were raised/what society, and political views.

Two is that they, perhaps not all on the front burner, may be choosing sides with others whos expressed views corroborate with their own. Or because this is a discussion that can degenerate into rhetoric by and against those who say opposite, is more important even then having a side.. Or what comes out is an individualistic stance.

But what is up front are values/ one's sense of Self, and even for the most trivial, we have the tendency to oppose those who do not share them.

Yep. I've seen developers do this first hand when it comes to review scores. It's really weird. You can put all the blood, sweat and tears you want in a game's development but you can't choose the reception.

The loudest criticisms are also the least worthy of engaging with. Some people are just sexist, or racist, or homophobic, or transphobic. Of course, those ones get the most air time because they are the most scandalous. Some websites will embed tweets with tiny engagement numbers in an effort to paint a picture or highlight a story. This is perhaps not as common as it used to be, thankfully.

All consumer industries have spent decades trying to equate brands with identities. You could probably argue that "nerd" or "geek" culture and particularly "gaming" culture has unique features that make people more susceptible to identifying brands as personality. That Glen Weldon quote is a good start. Combine that with technologies that allowed near-instant, near-global communication (including the ability to seek out like-minded folks) and the fact that "nerds" were more likely to be early adopters of this technology, and that could be a reason that the gaming space seems worse than others. If we accept that nerds/geeks/whatever have been defined partly by social awkwardness and isolation, and also that gaming companies explicitly targeted straight, single men in their ads in the 80s and 90s, it starts to become clear why some people attach their identity to games. This is just the impression I get. I have not researched this, but as a possible explanation for WHY gaming seems worse about this sort of thing, I believe this is part of it.

Regardless of what vitriol the LoU2 leaks and now released game has spawned, Neil Druckman and his third party cronies poured gasoline all over the fire by having them go around false flagging YouTube creators left and right (regardless of spreading copyrighted material) costing some not only their channels, but their livelihoods. Then had Metacritic pull a rottentomatoes freezing negative user reviews, and have their access media shills paint anyone with a negative view of the game in broad strokes (just like every other controversial release of the last few years) dismissing anyone with legitimate complaints as being all sorts of phobic. I was gonna get the game on release despite the leaks, but the way they've handled things the last couple months changed my mind. It was however pretty amusing when the third party outfit they had striking down YouTube channels accidentally flagged Sony's own with a copyright claim. Oops.

@shindig: At least with the case of developers I think I can sympathize a little more. Like if I spend hours and hours making something and then the person I show it to is like "wow this is shit" it would be hard to escape the immediate of response of "wow fuck you too".

@shindig: For developers it's more understandable. Their bonuses can be tied to Metacritic scores, but even if they aren't technically obviously having a badly received game can hurt your career. It's totally understandable why people would get upset if they thought unfair criticism was hurting their career directly, even if it's not something you can control and it's not mature.

As for consumers, I think that a lot of it is driven by a combination of immaturity and the way that anonymity and lack of community affects interactions. People just don't feel the need to be polite about their opinions or towards one another because there are no real consequences to being a jerk online. If you're super toxic your post might get locked or you might get banned, but even that's not a huge consequence compared to real life. So people just let their frustrations with others not agreeing with them, or with something not being what they wanted, go unchecked.

But there are consequences. You can still hurt people's feelings or make a bad argument. People should think more about what they're saying and how it might affect the people on the other end (this is where maturity comes in.)

You should write every post as if it were directed at @rorie. You might disagree with him about something or think he is wrong on some issue, but would you want to make him feel bad or get angry? Of course not. He's a lovely person. And most of the people on these boards would be lovely people if you got to know them. If you think about the person on the other end of the criticism, whether it be another user or a developer, you're likely to be a little more measured in what you say and how you say it, which makes for better conversation and clearer writing.

I think Giant Bomb is actually pretty good as Internet forums go. It mostly doesn't devolve down to personal attacks and there's not a lot of bigotry or hate expressed on these forums. It has a good moderation team. But we could all stand to treat each other and people's opinions with a bit more understanding and empathy.

Are we only specifically talking about when groups of people go overboard and attack games, developers and other players? Or just angry responses in general, because it was only today i was playing Modern Warfare and someone unhappy with their performance started insulting everyone.

On the groups of people front, isn't it a pretty normal thing for communities to band together against something they don't like and make drastic decisions? Historically it's how kings are overthrown and how a protest becomes a riot, those are drastic comparisons but i can see how a similar group think would work the same with an online community, only the damage stays mostly online.
As far as individual vitriol i don't personally hold the opinion that we're all worthy of being treated with respect, some people don't get on with other people and some people are just awful, my job is public facing so i interact with a lot of terrible people regularly and it's shattered any idea that we're all reasonable to some degree, some people just aren't, so if i'm playing an online game and someone is insulting me for whatever reason, i'm not thinking despite the insults they're probably a nice person, it's more likely they're just an awful person.
I think i lost the thread a bit, basically what i'm trying to say is there are bad people, and apparently there's a lot of them.

People have the right to dislike something, and I hate that we treat someone disliking something as a hollistic attack on an ideology.

Some people just think TLOU 2 is shit

Some people start to define themselves by their hobby to an unhealthy degree. It can happen with a lot more than video games, but with the way in which video games grew up alongside the internet, and the way in which a single video game can basically be a hobby, and the way in which video games were maligned by those outside the hobby for so long, you get a perfect storm for every criticism of a product being felt by someone as a personal attack.

Think of the way some people's hobby is sports, but not necessarily sports in general, just one team. Liverpool fans or whatever, who's hobby is basically following one team. Same thing, but in video games it can exist on several levels, whether it's attachment to a console, a franchise, even a specific game. Somebody's hobby can be, say, Warframe, not video games in general, just Warframe, that's all they do in their spare time. When someone says something bad about Warframe, they take it as an attack on a huge part of their life, and thus an attack on them.

What happened to you is your investment in gaming as an art form made you form perhaps too great an attachment to the Last of Us 2, since you saw the success of video games in general depending on it's positive reception. To tear it down is to tear down your hopes for the future, and that's not a healthy way to look at things.

I do think there's a problem with the journalist/fan/developer/publisher dynamic, where each is in some way dependent on the others, but also frequently shows open disdain for the others. That disdain then also gets read as an attack on the individual, and so the cycle continues.

This article gets into it somewhat: https://www.polygon.com/2020/6/30/21307200/the-last-of-us-2-controversy-critics-press-naughty-dog-vice-review-leak-sony-ps4-playstation

Another problem is I think people tend to see the other as a monolith and that can silence a lot of people's voices. If you say "video game fans are assholes" as often journalists do, obviously they don't mean all of them, but it's implied that it's at least the majority, even if it's not true. This has been so common, and so ingrained in people that it's kind of being abused in the case of The Last of Us 2, where in several parts of the internet, the haters are being accused of all being racists and misogynists and all sorts of prejudiced, and that's silencing some important voices, particularly actual LGBT folks who are criticizing elements in the game relevant to their identities.

Really there's a mess of people, no monolith exists anywhere, but when you see criticism levied against something you've formed such an attachment to that it's become an important part of your identity, you tend to start thinking in "us vs them terms" and you start to try to fit all the criticism into an easily dismissed box. There are too many different people with different perspectives out there for that to work, whether talking about fans, companies or journalists.

Personally, I think everyone, fans, journalists, video game developers and publishers, have all had a role in poisoning the discourse, but the shift towards this kind of thinking seems to have occurred pretty much everywhere outside of gaming too, so I don't think there's an easy solution. Video games aren't a bubble of this.

Thanks so much for this! This is a really thoughtful post and exactly what the internet needs more of imo. I expect all of us have, at one point or another, got a little too attached to/invested in a position and lashed out (I sure as shit have, embarrassed and ashamed as I am to admit it)

Defending the things/positions we care about or are important to us is natural, understandable and incredibly useful when presented with kindness and respect. Far too often these days this devolves into pointless, harmful and seperatist attitudes that only attempt to dehumanise and move us further from understanding one another.

I firmly believe the motivations for getting defensive are most often for a good reason, like the one you had for defending TLOU2 (this is admittedly an act of faith that I wouldn't expect everyone to prescribe to). I think the problem lies in when these reasonable positions are twisted into something hateful that isn't about expression and understanding but belittlement and disassociation and it can be a fine line, all too easily crossed in the heat of the moment.

I personally think social media plays a huge part in this transformation, it's all too easy to find echo chambers where one opinion prevails and eventually, inevitably even, anything else is demonised and discredited with a self-assured, "righteous" fury. These bubbles, while often well intentioned, promote insular thought and aggressive opposition to anything "other".

Then this is exacerbated by 2 opposing positions, each self-training to hate the other, feeding and goading each other with vitriol in an arms race to the bottom that benefits nobody and achieves nothing of value. This sort of thing has become normalised to the extent that it's poured out of the bubbles in torrents to every facet of modern life and I really can't blame anyone for getting swept up by it.

I'm sorry for splurging all that but this is an issue that's very close to my heart and if I could change 1 thing about humanity it would be to make us all at least try to understand each other, whatever our opinions or beliefs and however exhausting and difficult that can be.

Ironically enough what I perceive to be internet tribalism, and my frustrations with it, is the single biggest motivator for me crossing that line personally, not that that's any excuse of course.

@efesell: I get developers feeling bad when they put years in to a game that gets panned or a bad review. But you know what else takes years? Writing books. And an author that went after a book reviewer for “not getting it” would look...tacky to say the least.

Developers want their games to be art, they need to understand that once it is out there, they don’t own the work any more. People will take what they will from the work, sometimes in ways the authors never intended. And that is the price of putting art out for public viewing.

@plan6: I feel like this has to happen with authors too.

@efesell:Yes, but they look like complete clowns when they do it. And books don't not have super fans that have been taking in months of hype about the book that will affirm the author's opinion and justify author's actions. The same stuff happens in book publishing that happens in video games, but the response to those actions is very different.

The media we enjoy is this weird hellscape where dumb ideas are seen as reasonable. Like a Sony marking rep contacting Rob Zacny about his review because it was so negative. The game is already selling millions of copies and is a wild success, but lets contact the guy who wrote a really well thought out critique of why he didn't enjoy the games as much as he enjoyed all those other revenge stories he is clearly a fan of. And this is seen as normal and part of the industry, to placate the fragile ego of some executive or studio head. Maybe just take the millions and ignore that one bad review?

We all need to get better at handling criticisms or attacks on something we like and not treating it as personal. For me, it's when something sucks or isn't good and I was looking forward to it that bums me out. TLAU2 and Batman v Superman being examples of that. All of my annoyance/disappointment is towards Naughty Dog, not at people who like it.

The only time I'm annoyed at fans is when they act like our point of view is coming out of nowhere or we don't have a leg to stand on. I love Inception, but "you didn't get it" was a big internet defense of it back then whenever someone had a criticism. I see where people are coming from who like the game, even though I don't like it at all.

Generally speaking, people should be nice to each other, we don't need to be nice to companies or properties.

There is also a problem is that there is no separation in discussions between people who enjoy a thing and people who dislike a thing. The reality is that those two groups don't have a ton to discuss. It is interesting to read peoples reasoning for disliking a game. But often, due to the nature of the internet and forum discussions, those dislikes are framed as either A: Objective truth, or B: Passive aggressive snark at people who are enjoying the game. And the folks who are dedicated to that argument style are often the most prolific in a discussion.

Maybe it is my age, but I also find that a lot of fans of games don't understand that it is possible to love a thing and be critical about it. Often people say things like "That sounds exhausting to analyze everything you watch or play" which is sort of a lazy way of saying "I don't want to do that." As cited above, I also love Inception. But I am critical of its flaws and Nolan's "house style" of characters who are only motivated by family relations, evil women and stilted writing. These two views co-exist in the same work and don't impact each other. And having those conflicting views didn't make the film harder to watch.

I don’t have much to add. I avoided TLOU2 because of my state of mind and what we are going through. That’s not the developer fault, or the people that are somehow in the mood for this games fault and it has taken me a week or so to internalize this and say it is okay for people to like this game. But the actions of fans and the developers once it was out there 1. Seem to have nothing to do with the game itself 2. Cast a bad shadow over gaming and AAA developers in general. I know some people are bored and that Naughty Dog and Druckmann are particularly sensitive about there baby, but there are no excuses for the behavior on display out there. There are issues going on in the world more important than a single game even if it is a very good one.

I don't think gaming is any worse than say sports or politics, I just think you see a very loud minority who are particularly younger without much life experiences who seem to lash out over ignorance.

I work in retail and you'll be surprised how many people are straight up rude to my face or even trying to con me. Seeing US politics from a far it looks vile and coming from people who should know better, and the abuse and hate footballers seem to get makes gaming feel tame.

TLOU2 has been a lighting rod atm but even them the subreddit is only 30k and review bombing on metacritic has a similiar number, yet were talking a game which sold 4m so far, its just such a small number agaist a largely oblivious mass audience.

And how many people sending Druckmann anti-semitic tweets pre-release actually bought the game?

@frytup: I think this person that mentioned validation is onto something.

People just want to be "right", and at an extreme case they want to bully the world into getting what they think in their opinion is "best" for whatever game or franchise or thing that they bought or will buy for them AND others (ego).

Overall I think we all should have and reserve the right to loathe a game, to express disappointment with the product. That's just the basics of having an opinion or being vocal. Developers can determine if they care or not, that's their right too.

The problem is, many fans think that their opinion is "objectively right", and they want that opinion Validated by other folks, developers, whoever.

But games, like any art, are completely 100% subjective and up to the creators. The consumers have literally zero rights here, nor should they, they are not entitled to anything, except their opinion.

Could it have to do with the nature of the medium? People spend a lot of time playing a singe game, 40, 60 or 100+ hours is becoming common for these modern large-world games, that is a big investment. A comparable medium would be HBO style long-form TV dramas like Game of Thrones or Lost which both inspired vitriolic responses from their fans.

I mostly chalk it up to life being hard and ppl needing a punching bag or young audiences being young.

@jasonr86: Without reading, yet, for me some of my vitriol caused me to self-impose social media account deletions. I recognized that in myself but moved on. For me I find it annoying that:

1. People parrot talking points about game
   • Xbox interface is bad or store is confusing
   • E3 is irrelevant and you get your wish and you're pissed about lack of gameplay and trailers.
   • Treating gameshare like it's some kind of sanctioned Microsoft feature.

• Don't even learn the operating system or understanding system featuers.

1. People not knowing how to stream to Mixer from Xbox
2. Nobody actually downloading games with gold. Or even worse their logic for not doing it. (i absolutely will not budge on this position.. though i do find myself going to the epic games store for free games every thursday at 11am and that wasnt even part of a subscription service so maybe i should change my position)
3. Not understanding PSPro doesnt mean you get a 4K BluRay

1. People giving Nintendo a pass for everything
   • I did not buy a Wii-U or a Switch because of some of there online shenanigans. I know i will have fun with whatever i choose to game with an excluding a company full-stop affects me not in the slightest.

• Some genres for me will never be fun, for me. Like RPGs. Sports games. Online FPSs It is not something that i'm willing to compromise with.

Reminding people what they are actually getting out of a 100 hour JRPG when they profess their hype on some board and commiserating with all the people that share my opinion. Or joking about whoever in their right mind has bought every Madden released

The banter is fun and harmless. But people praising PS5's June announcements needs to be called out for what it absolutely wasn't.. informative. I will be decent and i will be civil and posting here versus reddit, youtube, or facebook means im not posting into a vacuum. I'm among peers. Half of us get it. Half of us dont.

*something happened to formatting*

I'd say console fanboys that want the game to be bad so they feel better about themselves for not owning it.

I used to know somebody who's mentality was, "which ever console I have the other one is rubbish".

Also, people who jump on the bandwagon, and agree with all the criticism without thinking for themselves.

For example, I remember when No Man's Sky first came out, I really liked playing it for the same reasons Alex did, for being chill and ambient. I had some friends over, and they laughed at me for liking it, because of the things they'd heard and read online.

With games in particular, they used to operate on a pretty linear timeline. There were the good games and the bad games every year, with the community by and large agreeing on what those games were. I'm sure if the internet were around in 1997 you'd have plenty of people trashing Goldeneye online, but if you were in the 8-20 age range and owned an N64 you knew the games to have that year were Goldeneye, Starfox 64 and Diddy Kong Racing. There would be other niche favorites, like Turok, WCW World Tour, NFL Quarterback Club, Mortal Kombat 4, Mischief Makers or Blast Corps, but by and large everyone could find a consensus on what the good games were through word of mouth, rental stores and general word of mouth.

I'd say this tracked year over year throughout the consoles and the generations until roughly the PS3/360 era, when enough new games were releasing and enough regular gamers had hit their late-30s to early-50s that beliefs became more entrenched, and the next waves of games sought to satisfy flaws and enhance positives in specific genres rather than constant waves of innovation. Suddenly it wasn't such a simple consensus that Uncharted: Drake's Fortune or Ratchet & Clank Future were the games to own because they did what they did very well - Modern Warfare was defining the modern shooter while Bioshock and Mass Effect were flipping story-based games on their head and Skate was redefining what video game skating meant and Portal was turning puzzlers into something a little more meaningful...

Gaming just became so much less linear in its progressions, with genres stagnating and innovating on diversely different timelines and gamers gravitating towards what suited them most. But the medium still carries with it that idea that something is definitively the best, that as a game goes, as a mode of play, one thing can tower over all, and so the conversations around games still carry that air about them despite the audience clearly not playing games that way anymore. It reminds me of the thing that broke me as a rap critic, when trap became as ubiquitous as boom bap ever was as a sound but the characters on top of it varied so wildly in quality - and the popularity or lack thereof became so unfathomably unpredictable - that the genre just didn't carry the linear, There's a God on the Mic quality that it did for so much of the 90s and 00s.

Rap fans thus did the smart thing and freed themselves entirely from the best rapper alive conversation. I mean, we're sure it's Kendrick Lamar or whoever, I guess, but that's not the conversation anymore. It's is this any fun, or important, to listen to and why? Movies arguably had this same sort of self-reckoning as the Marvel Cinematic Universe took hold of the studio system and forced audiences to ask themselves whether it was really such a bad thing if they had fundamental issues with a film like The Lighthouse so long as it could at least exist and be discussed. Cinephiles decided it was more valuable to dislike a film for fun, debate-y reasons that outright hate its existence most of the time, and the discussion around film has become demonstrably better for it.

But all video games are the MCU. The Last of Us 2 has fans, as in fanatics, and that makes it start from a hell of a deep hole. I'm not sure how you correct that, but I imagine it has a lot to do with other posts that have outlined how geek culture is the most inclusive exclusionary group of the 21st century. Nobody was upset with The Godfather Part II because it treated Kay's relationship with Michael disrespectfully, or that Apollo Creed got felled in such clearly racial overtones early on in Rocky IV. That was part and parcel with those films, and it didn't matter that you were a fan of Apollo and it hurt that he was murdered in the ring by a Soviet boxer with no consequences - that was just the vibe of that movie! "Gamers" who consider themselves "fans" of properties seem to just have a harder time separating their love of a character from the things a writer lets happen to them...

I think Tim Rogers said it best in his review of the original Last of Us. Naughty Dog games have a peculiar way of convincing the player to say, "I can't believe Nathan is doing this" or "Wow, Ellie is so relatable" in a way they'd never say, "Damn Mario made a great triple jump there!" or "I really hope Link gets himself out of this jam..." Naughty Dog designs their games around an expectation that you are a guiding hand for their characters along this journey they want you to see them experience; maybe that sounds like a rebuttal of video games as a medium, but judging from the strong responses to their games and their overwhelming popularity I'd say they've very much achieved the opposite. They're one of the few studios - arguably Rockstar being another - that convince the player they are not the avatar they control, and thus they must play by the avatar's rules rather than convince the avatar to play by theirs. So to love and interact with an avatar to the degree that players have loved and interacted with Joel and Ellie...as a fan, it's unacceptable to have them change, and lose the things that we liked about them. That's not "fun" to interrogate, and so back we go to paragraph one or two...

Sorry for rambling, very long day at work. Thank you for coming to my TEDx Talk, hopefully it ended on just as pointless of a cliffhanger as many official TED speeches do!

We live in a sensationalist culture now, where only the most extreme reactions even register any more. You see it constantly on social media, tabloid headlines, even youtube titles. Something can't be just "good" it needs to be "the best thing I've ever seen" or "the absolute worst" and you need to articulate that you're "DYING" because saying "that's alright" makes you seem too dull and mundane. When we're culturally pushing people to constantly express themselves via extremes we're effectively polarizing the two sides to every argument, which is why negative reactions often seem disproportionately aggressive or vitriolic.

Ultimately, humans are just arbitrarily competitive. Look at religion, politics, even sport. I have never understood the mindless loyalty that people have to their local sports teams, especially when many of their players are signed from elsewhere in the world, and the teams themselves are often owned by foreign business tycoons. There's also plenty of people who support teams from places they've never even been to or visited, as though they're picking loyalties out of a hat. Oh, I support Arsenal now? Seems mental to me, but whatever.

You're kind of missing the point of the discussion though. There's no problem with disliking something, the question is why some people feel the need to express their own opinions through attacking others?

Passion towards a hobby leads to strong emotional responses. If you really invest in something, having someone tell you you're wrong can lead to irrational anger.

Not just with games, seems like every fandom has these same issues. Hell, I remember some really stupid arguments about metal genres when I used to frequent music forums.

Then there's just the issue of knowing what the best is like, so any flaws stand out more.

- Games: "This writing sucks!"

- Sports: "This quarterback sucks!"

- Anime: "This CG sucks!"

- Wrestling: "This feud sucks!"

I try to post positive things about stuff I interact with, but for whatever reason that feels less important than expressing when something sucks. "Gotta call out that this game drops to 59fps sometimes!" Because if it's a solid 60fps, there's not much to say outside of "it's working as intended."

Most people just don't communicate online the same as they do in real life.

Despite having unfettered access to information, people are dumber today than ever. Also, a lack of anything better to do from said vitriolic people.

I wonder if these two factors are related somehow. I know I've had some spare time on my hands lately! Uh oh...

I feel like a big issue the games dicourse have, even relating to the subject of vitriol, is looking at the space as though it exists in a vacuum. That everything that happens within games are related directly to games and only games. At one point, this was maybe the case. It was, for lack of a better term, nerds vs nerds. It was system wars and genre tastes. People spoke about games and with each other about games without nuance, just subjective extremes. Between friends though, that lack of nuance still comes with unspoken understanding of the other. On the internet though, you get a mass of people that don't know each other, they just see a wording abut something they dislike or like that trigger a respons just as harshly without any sene of there being another person on the receiving end.

That aspect is still there and people trying to chalk it up to "people are young" or "anonymity breeds bad behavior" have never read faceook comments on news articles or opinion pieces. People don't care if you know who they are, they will still word themselves completely without manners because people still feel protected behind a screen to just say whatever.

Back to my point of vacuum. Games are big now but so is the discussion about games. To that end, what gos on outside of games leak into games. And all of those social raw spots that are sparking discussions outside of games are added on top of games now. With the added bonus that people, despite games being reasonable accepted, still viewing games like they do still exist in a vacuum and made by a 'game factory' for you to play with. When gaming press discuss politics in games, you have readers that never politicized games suddenly feeling like that one friend they have on facebook that is always questioning things has arrived inside their hobby that they use to escape from all of that. Even people that enjoy them sometimes act like games exist in a vacuum. And just one point like that, such as politics, have a trifecta of things inside of it. First you have the politicial viewpoint versus the apolitical. Then you have the general disagreement about any given political 'truth'. And when we look at the popular gaming media, it's very reflective of media in general, a lot of them share a similar political outlook that may differ from large parts of their audience that may feel like their point of view isn't heard, so they must speak louder.

But I think the biggest issue in regards to vitriol is general lack of awareness that what you say and how you say it is going to be read by another person. But I also think we have become a lot more aware of this and even internet at large has become so big that it isn't just a select few that are on it regularly these days. When internet was a bit smaller as far as regulars go, it was easier to deal with vitriolic people because either they were thrown out of any given community, or the community was so harsh that only the people that could deal with that stuck around. These days everyone is everywhere and we're all a lot more prone to protest vitriol and engage with it rather than ignore it.

When I was younger there was the saying of "don't feed the trolls", but today I feel like it needs to broaden. The problem is, if you never speak up, it is going to push other voices away, but when you do speak up chances are you're just going to feed into the vitriol, which is just a vicious circle.

As for myself personally, I don't remember where I read it or who said it, but a philosophy I started to go by was to focus on highliting things I enjoyed rather than tear down things I didn't. I still sometimes engage with people I find saying problematic things, but that's at times becaue I know I can take whatever comes and I don't want their perspective to color the space enough to drive other voices away or not feel included.

Tribalism fueled by the anonymity the internet provides. Everyone is so eager to just pick a side and have at the other side that all forms of meaningful critique get lost in the shuffle. People can't just like, or dislike things anymore they have to go forth and spread their opinions to the masses in the social media landscape and inevitably the name calling starts. The internet is like the vent line in the paper, occasionally you get a meaning comment about a pothole but mostly it is just one neighbor bitching about another neighbors music.