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Is Gaming Leaving Gamers Behind? [linked article]
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You don't spend billions of dollars on a sub-culture.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
My response to this sub-topic is related to what is in yellow below
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I dont think its that we like new features because the problem with that comment is that you actually need new features in order for there to be new features. I think the problem we have is a LACK of new features.
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the explict reason in my head why I stopped playing ArcheAge is because to me it felt like I was playing nothing more than an expansion pack to EQ2 from 2006. Which makes me feel that the comment in yellow is an EXACT opposite of my reasons.
That might clear it up a bit, we might be talking about two different things
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
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guess it depends on your definition of subculture
I think console gamers are a subculture -- and thats a billion dollar industry
another lucrative subculture - Trading Card Games
Konami’s Yu-Gi-Oh! $26 Billion in Sales in North America
http://www.toydirectory.com/monthly/article.asp?id=1021
EQ2 fan sites
I think both sides have a point.
On one side it is a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing and will before to long be an activity that everyone does now and again like TV.
However, gaming is my hobby and I put a ton of time into it. More than any hobby my parents or grandparents had. So with that if I cant call myself a gamer what am I supposed to be called?
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
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I am using the term "sub-culture" wrong. Kind of the way people will use "niche" to mean "small" when it doesn't necessarily mean "small". Video gaming has been a billion dollar industry since before Y2K. It's a sub-culture, but it's not a small or cheap sub-culture.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Meeeeeh, ESRB actually says that 2/3 of households play games. NPD says that 91% of youth 2-17 years old play games. I think that games ARE culture. The sub-cultures are probably the variations on the different types of gaming systems.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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I would agree however there is a difference between people who like movies and a movie buff.
Many of us here at MMORPG this is our full time hobby and if we didnt have to work it would consume most of our daily life.
Are we gamer buffs?
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Usually subcultures mean people share certain specific interest and build up certain commonalities based on that (their own jargon/style of dress etc.). "Gamers" are so diverse in the types of games they play and things they enjoy I don't think they have much in common. It would be far more accurate to refer to "MMO players" or players of say Minecraft or Call of Duty as their own distinct subcultures.
Really talking about "gamers" as a cultural group makes about as much sense as talking about "book readers" or "movie watchers". I'll be happy if this antiquated term just dies out.
book worm = someone who reads a lot
movie buff = someone who likes a lot of movies
gamer = someone who games a lot.
It sounds like the media at the moment has a problem with the word 'gamer' to describe the same thing the other examples are providing. would they be less offended if we just called ourselves 'game buffs'?
understand 'Gamer' currently dosent imply people who are not 'gamers' dont play games. it implies that 'gamers' makes games a hobby.
People should stop getting suck into whatever the media says
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I'm willing to challenge being called a Gamer (regardless of what you play or platform)
will not lose its negative stigma with the mass population of adults
videogames to me are like comic collecting (but a bigger market)
they both have billions of fans
but i still get the same strange looks from adult nongamers
when i tell them i'm a gamer -- which is equivalent to me telling the same people
I play Dungeons and Dragons !
I'm happy with my recreational choices, i dont care that most adults cannot relate
related article
http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/gamer_152/blog/the-stigma-surrounding-video-games-and-how-to-stop/72902/
To declare that you spent a weekend playing video games to some would make it seem as though you’d partaken in a slovenly and perhaps slightly shameful activity, but saying you spent a weekend watching sports, it would seem to almost everyone that you had committed your weekend to an entirely socially acceptable activity, even though the difference between these two activities is not all that great.
In fact you could argue that if you had spent your weekend playing video games as opposed to watching sports you would probably have gotten more mental exercise. However, when these are the prejudices held against people who would play video games on a regular basis, it’s understandable how those who have dedicated a large portion of their lives to video games haven’t exactly been met with praise and admiration.
EQ2 fan sites
it is getting better but your insight is dead on. I told someone I didnt know very well that I was a gamer without hesitation or embarrassing subtext for the first time only a few years ago. I am now proud to call myself a gamer, its only the most significant innovation in leisure time ever created in the history of mankind.
I do wish there was less murder simulators in the industry, it does get tiring and I get tired of having to explain that I am not a serial killer.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
I will keep the "Gamer" self designation as long as possible. I don't usually get uptight about particular words, but I'm not going to be happy being called a "Gaming Buff".
So "Gamers" are a subculture, but "Gaming" is not. I think that is where the conflict lies. This is new for gaming and gamers. There is viniculture and wine snobs, but a lot of people just drink wine. There are car aficionados, but nearly everyone drives a car. Gaming is moving into an area where there are "Gamers", but many people play video games. The same thing is probably going to happen with mead, though probably without the vitriol and negativity.
**
I don't think gamers in general are opposed to the idea of many people playing video games, but I think many of them are opposed to the idea of people who are not gamers directing the market on styles and trends in gaming because of the money that non-gamers are spending on video games.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
no question there are money grabs,
but that's always been the case (example movie tie ins - w books / games / candy )
online gaming is more popular than it's ever been thanks to social media sites like facebook, Browser games, and the emergence of mobile gaming like Candy Crush.
but i haven't seen this nongamer popularity impact new pc games (or maybe my head is in the sand
)
disclaimer -
I'm not counting adding new features to existing games, like WOW Pokemon battles
even EQ had the minigame gems (a derivative of TETRIS) for downtime 10 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YFeSnvYXFU
nongamers are not going to fork over $40.00 for a videogame unless its something like The SimsEQ2 fan sites
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Excellent analogy. Very well put.
I tend to agree with the direction the OP was going. There aren't enough of us "old guard" to matter to the money men, and that is understandable from a business point of view. It's very unfortunate, for the few, but I would go as far as to say it was inevitable. I guess I'm less bitter these days because I've finally come to accept what happened a decade ago. Yeah it took me a while. I'm still bitter.. Just less so.
As I have said before, though it's a very unpopular thing to say, if you weren't around for the firsts you just can't fully understand how much better the communities were and how much better online gaming was. No matter how much you want that not to be true, it is.
I hold no contempt for the new generation of 'gamers'. Not anymore anyway. I just tell things like they are.
Yes, I agree there's some "fucked up problem," but it's not the problem we think it is.
Probably the best "anti-gamer" article I read on all this was on Jacobin, not because I agree with all of it, but at least its honest enough to identify the real problem here...and it wasn't "violence against women," but an assembly line, consumerist fandom that has identified so strongly with the status-quo product, it can no longer imagine anything else.
Fair enough, but when you start to realize that games (specifically MMOs) were--at one time--something more, something female-friendly, and something that encouraged roleplay, discourse between the sexes, and creativity, you find out that the true enemy isn't "gamers", but an industry that has taken out reasons for females to even be in the games males play.
Note that I said "taken out"...this was a conscious removal. And the reason I can say this is because I played games like CoH and SWG that had housewives, female students, ballet dancers, elderly ladies and professionals play...alongside their children, no less, in games with bare midriffs, female MOBs and "tropes" included.
I don't see that kind of player in today's games, for the reasons I laid out initially...it has nothing to do with tropes, it's that there's nothing here in the genre for them anymore. It has all been taken out and put on Facebook via Zinga, with some of the most exploitive F2P mechanics ever seen in gaming, playing on a woman's natural sense of empathy. If you want to see the exploitation of women in gaming, THERE IT SITS. But if the exploitation of women is there, why isn't Feminist Frequency there?
Because Feminist Frequency is not about critiquing the way the industry exploits women, men, or any other demographic for financial gain. Feminist Frequency is incapable of seeing the genuine exploitation that is there...only this kind of "faux exploitation" based on how images of women are used. The channel is about promoting the myth that gaming is some sort of "art" that needs to conform to some bourgeois notion of pluralism...not a real pluralism, but an academically derived, sterile pluralism. Except, of course, it isn't art. It's a multi-billion dollar industry with horrendous working conditions inside of it, based on vapid consumerism. The industry was, at one time, about more. But those times have passed, at least in the MMO community, and all we are left with is exploitation.
Now that we have removed the women and gave men MMOs about combat only, you have a problem. What do you do when you remove the women? Well, you start to replace them with eye candy...but the eye candy has a purpose. It gives the male target audience (sexually active males) some libido reward for the effort they put in. You make the tasks grueling, but you reward the tasks by showing a pretty girl in something erotically pleasing...for a lot of men (unfashionable, poor or uneducated men) it is the only girl they have. And the games allow them to indulge a fantasy of having a relationship with them. Is it healthy? I can see both sides of it, but one thing it's not is unpopular.
So when a pretty, white, upper-middle class bourgeois, highly educated woman starts to make the case that it is, somehow, wrong for game companies to produce this, and that it is, somehow, wrong for the above males to like this, you get a reaction similar to Marie Antoinette telling the sans culottes to "eat cake." "Libidinal satisfaction for me, but not for thee" seems to be the subtext that typical gamers see in Ms. Sarkeesian's work, even if that wasn't her intention.
Does that excuse the threat that prompted her departure from her home? No. Honestly, I don't think she is a bad person, but you have to wonder why--after just completing a series on the misogynistic inference when games use "the damsel in distress" as a motivation--she would willingly air out such abuse on Twitter, becoming the very damsel she criticized?
Perhaps because, subconsciously, she is nothing other than a bourgeois woman, a woman who has value, who is driven subconsciously to start a war to protect her status. She, unwittingly, delivered gaming into patriarchal norms. As the face that launched 1,000 Tweets, she pitted man against man, woman against woman, developer against developer, in perhaps the biggest patriarchal, realtime game in the history of gaming, carried out on Twitter. "Pick your role and fight the endless hordes of 'misogynerds' and do battle with bosses like MundaneMatt and Christina Hoff-Sommer! Save the world and defend the virtue of a white, upper-middle class, pretty woman!" Can't you see, man, how this is becoming absurd? This war is for what, really? Women in gaming? Or is it to solidify the power-elite in gaming against the criticism it brought upon itself?
Yes, I have sympathy for Ms. Sarkeesian, but my sympathy is that she has become a pawn in a game that is not her own...and that women like my mother (who got taken to the cleaners in a browser-based Facebook game) are going to be exploited twice as hard, because everybody is thinking that the exploitation of women has to do with things like dancing girls in GTA, and NOT about a sensitive young girl who sees a fox trapped in her yard, and needs to spend money to free it, or watch it die.
Make no mistake here, friend. The real feminists know what the deal is here, and they know that if women are going to have any shot at participating in this industry, we have to get rid of the "old boy network" and nepotism that colludes, locks out discourse, and separates people from production. It is not enough to play "rally around the flag" with a fashionable media personality in the effort to look like "good people" when we do.
We have to do more...gamers of all genders deserve more.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Again I can not stress this point enough and it will save you from a lot of over texting and over thinking.
If you watch her video she RARELY makes a value judgement. Most of what she does is illustrate.
So for example she might say something like, 'in game X woman was killed' she does NOT say that its bad or good. The people who do not watch her video ASSUME she is making an overly judgemental value statement when in fact all she is doing is showing you where the grass is green.
Its like attacking me for giving someone a list of games that are violent and NOT MAKING ANY VALUE STATEMENT ON THAT LIST
people who ASSUME I am making a value statement based on a provided list are usually having an internal value confilict themselves. Not me.
does that make sense?
so for people to get enraged over someone pointing out that there are no female leads in games is nearly hysterical.
She is not saying there SHOULD female lead roles she is just saying there are NOT any. So people getting upset at that seem to be very confused
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
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gameaphile!
yeah it pretty much ticks me off when the media can convince large number of people that a word inapproate so then we have to find another word that means the same fucking thing just so we can communicate.
like..sandbox
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
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It would be a lot easier to take all of this more seriously if instead of talking about the person who made the videos you talked about the content of the videos. It would help if you discussed the response to her videos in more detail rather than her response to that response, which included death threats that the FBI felt were credible. Maybe discuss how all of that relates to the video game genre expanding to start including more people from all walks of life and how the much smaller segment of gamers now feels disenfranchised.
But no, you blame the response to one set of videos on her, and even there you imply that she's not even responsible for her own thoughts. Me thinks you have focused a little too much attention on one person to be taken seriously.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Here is a simplified version of how I see it after I had watched one of her videos
Vbloger: 'here is a list of all the video games with a male lead, here is a list of video games with a female lead'
Commmunity 1: 'how DARE you...you bitch!'
end ..full stop.
it makes no sense.
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I think "there is nothing new from the mainstream MMO world that I like" is a better way to put it. For instance personal story, full motion video cut scenes and use of phasing to tell a more detailed personal story are all examples of things from the mainstream market (because they cost a ton to make) that like it or hate it you can't deny is new.
Markets change over time and evolve or stagnate and die. It sucks if your one of the people who liked things the way they are and is great if you are one of the people who the market opens up to include.
it is true that I dont care about such features but let me give you a specific example of what I am talking about so maybe you can understand.
I bought ArcheAge, I was questing along so that I could get to level 50 to experience all the boats and stuff like that. Mind you I have experience ship combat in MMOs before, Darkfall in 2009.
Now while playing the game I was reminded on EQ2 back in 2005. Then it hit me like a rock. Wait...this is 2014 and this game feels exactly like EQ2 back in 2005.
Does that put any finer point on it at all?
Regardless if it does or not it doesnt really matter. what DOES matter is that in my head (regardless of its right or not) it FEELS to me that indie games are more innovative than mainstream and you are talking to a guy who has Oculus Rift Dk1 and DK2 and is a developer himself. On the diffusion of innovation curve I am pretty close to the 'innovation' side so to suggest I left mainstream MMOs because I am a lagard is hysterical to me.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
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Brother, if that were the case pretty much everyone on every side of this whole "gamers are over" cluster-fack shouldn't be taken seriously. One might even say that everybody in this whole event isn't responsible for their decisions per se; they are just falling back on their knee-jerk reactions to the detriment of any useful progress.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
I've been cynical too, but I still believe in the place where you can live a life of your own design, rather than the one you are stuck with.
MMOs were a liberation...liberation from scripted plots, liberation from necessity, liberation from your own condition. You could be who you wanted to be...human or orc, male or female, good or evil--and everything in between. You could do more than live in your world...you could build your world and build your own stories.
Somewhere along the way, all the things that we thought got left behind got put back in...scripted plots, anonymity, "life on rails." Somewhere along the way, these things became rote.
But I still believe in the dream, because it is simply too good not to do eventually. Technology and apathy with other formats will help bring it about, eventually. I'm sure of that.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE