The Gaming Civil War

Gaming in this context means video games, board games, card games and the like. It is not the euphemism for gambling used by politicians and marketing droids.

Gaming tends to be the refuge for the loser who cannot made it in normal society. That is, after all, the original definition of the word geek. Misogyny is too narrow a word to describe such people: They hate everyone, including themselves. Gaming is their opiate: It is to them what booze and pot are to their parents. This is why such people — I will call them apelings henceforth — abuse feminists and other leftists, whom they see as a threat to their gaming, against whom they scream obscenities, froth at the mouth, and threaten rape and death that anyone who disagrees with them. This is also why such pleas as this fall on deaf ears.

After awhile Slashdot put in its nickle with this post about the fall-on-deaf-ears petition, and something about extinction burst:

It's disturbing stuff to say the least and damning of geek and gaming culture as a whole that we keep having these same debates and watching the self-appointed gatekeepers of gaming attempt to chase women out of the clubhouse and off of the Internet because they dare to set foot into the male domain. It's entitlement writ large — whiny children complaining that they're not getting their every whim catered to.

And they have a point. They're not. And that's why the anger has grown so much hotter and the harassment has become so much more vicious. It's an extinction burst.

Read the You Are Not So Smart site for the definition of extinction burst, and know that I do not understand how it can apply to the issue. This is not a bad habit we are talking about, but a social, almost religious issue.

What the issue is, is simply the realization among the apelings that gaming is becoming mainstream, is becoming Disney fare, is becoming a place where every sort of common and boring person cavort. Gaming is therefore becoming more hostile to them. They are trying to keep a gate when there is now nothing for them beyond it. (Never mind that most games are developed and released by big corporations like EA, Ubisoft and Bethesda, which are the true gatekeepers.) Nor is this sort of thing new: It happened when animé become mainstream in the 1990's, as the early adopters and the fansubbers lost their community and became outraged about it.

The cries of the apelings are upsetting and freaking out more than just the two ladies and their defenders. Web comicists are panicking as well. It has gotten to the point that in late August one Web comic artist (female), probably in reaction to the issue, attacked another (male) for how he depicts his female characters. I would not surprised if the male artist — who, according to TV Tropes, is notorious for inconsistent updates — decides to walk away and take up another career.

In time the apelings will realize that resistance is now futile. That the good old days of gaming are gone. When that happens, the apelings will probably do two things:

1. abandon gaming entirely and find something else to do; or
2. go underground, into their own private networks, playing their own private computer games, either their own or pirated versions of existing games.

In this way, the those old conditioned responses to the stereotypical gamer are going away and allowing gaming to advance. Yes, the apelings will go away, alright, but whether what remains is an advance is debatable. Making gaming more representative of its audience will probably make gaming more mediocre, more like popular media, or American cartoons in the 1970's and 1980's, or spectator sports or traditional Protestantism — boring and bourgeois, the kind of thing that ages and decays as the young steer clear of it.

Either way, the gaming market and such auxillary services as Penny Arcade will take a hit, because the apelings will no longer buy their games nor will talk about them on the forums they used to visit, nor will attend gaming conventions. Even if the apelings are a small market, they are an important one, because they are the ones who try out new games first, and who report any bugs in the games. Their exodus will force game companies to spend more on marketing, or take on the apelings' word-of-mouth function themselves. Focus groups, anyone? In time, the gaming industry will join publishing, newspapers, cinema and television in their states of decay.

While you would think that the leftist/academician/feminist (leftist hereafter) targets of the apelings would rejoice to see the apelings go away, it is possible that the leftists will be even angrier. Their kind of people hate it when others are excluded, even self-excluded on purpose. The leftists — the kind of people who volunteer to go overseas to build schools and clinics, even when it disrupts the local culture or serves a repressive State — tend to be proselyting busybodies who think they can save the apelings and bring them into the fold, into the mythical world of rightness and justice. In that way, the leftists are even stupider than the apelings.

Or, maybe, I should put it thus: The leftists do not want the gaming culture to shrivel or to split in two. But miaopinie I do not see how a split is anything but inevitable. The leftists and apelings are too far apart.

Finally, a fragment of an article called Game creators seek mature storytelling in games by Derrik Lang for the Associated Press appeared in the local paper this morning. I found the full text elsewhere on the Internet. It was not helpful, does not explain the reason for its tone, or even bother with the so-called view from nowhere type of journalism so common today, because the apelings' view was not expressed. Instead, the article expounds about maturity in video games, how it is supposedly inevitable. (All that says is that the developers are historicists.) The article also reveals that the interviewed obviously do not know how to deal with the apelings. There have never been more archetypal examples of whistling in the dark.