

Of Gamers, Gates, and Disco Demolition: The Roots of Reactionary Rage - MBCook
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/16/of-gamers-gates-and-disco-demolition-the-roots-of-reactionary-rage.html

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angersock
A very good piece, and some excellent historical context thrown in--disco, no
less!

At the same time, author is selectively ignoring (as many have) the full
picture.

Author would like to paint the aggrieved gamers as the overdogs--as the
numbers tell us, in both number of gamers and in media representation, they're
not. They actually _are_ the minority, and the complainy and hateful ones even
moreso. On one side, a bunch of angry trolls; on the other side, everyone
looking to maintain credibility in the gaming media and media at large is
arrayed against them.

The grumpy gamers are, actually, the minority.

For a lot of us growing up in the 80s and 90s, to be a gamer was not something
cool or hip. For a lot of us, learning to use memmaker and autoexec.bat and
config.sys and weird incantations to run Quake or Doom on our shitty 3.11
boxen was not something we were respected or lauded for.

Many times, you were met with "Video games? huh.". Mostly, you were met with
minor teasing for being a geek, or nerding out about video games, or whatever.
In some cases, you were met with outright suspicion or hostility--being a Doom
or Quake modder following Columbine was not something that made friends with
fellow students or administrators (or parents!) for a while. Let's not even go
into the shitty gender dynamic here for gamers, or how it usually affected
social skills and romance and all that stuff...that's just unfair to play as a
card.

In the mainstream coverage, nobody seems to be pointing this out. Nobody seems
to be pointing out that, following that period in the 90s, there was a massive
push (not seen since the early 80s) for AAA games with even further juvenile
masculine power fantasies in the advertising. Nobody notes that, concurrent
with that push, there was a strong sort of societal disdain for gamers, for
Counter-Strike players, for these folks continually portrayed as manchildren.
Playing Asheron's Call or Everquest or Ultima Online or RO or WoW didn't do
_shit_ for you socially.

But, now that it's convenient for some people's careers (for whatever reason),
suddenly we portray gamers as this super privileged class. Suddenly gamers are
this oppressing majority, this totally reasonable target for our scorn and
hatred.

And so now, just as happened before, we mock them, we jeer at them, we call
them dirty names and pan them in the press and make fun of these kids who just
want to escape into a fantasy world for a little bit and fuck around.

And then, we act so fucking surprised that some lash back, make threats, act
like buffoons...while the rest just wish we'd leave them alone, so they can go
back to playing games.

