Why is casual racism/sexism more accepted in video games than other forms of media (these days)?

i realized yesterday that when i was 17, the internet was glowing green CRT monitors and IRC and it wasn't until I was 19 that Netscape and "the information superhighway" became a real thing

there were colour monitors before 1992 iirc

Yeah but if you use BBS terminal software it was command line stuff anyways.

i think the chrono trigger warning is a gzeus SPINAL FUNCTION reference to this classic opening post
I just played Chrono Trigger for over an hour.

my first exposure to using the internet was my freshman year of college on b+w monitors in the "computer lab" which was thirty pcs in a basement
i did light flirting with a stranger from australia and it BLEW MY MIND
i cannot imagine what growing up with the contemporary web must do to the mind of the average teenager. i would've gone completely insane.

i miss that xtranormal video

http://xtranormal.com/watch/545351/wimps
sadface

tbh for my teenage kids the "contemporary web" just means minecraft videos on youtube and email to friends. also maybe naked people but that's not really for me to know

For kids younger than a certain age, the internet is completely obscured by applications and there's no real web access, yeah

Did those dudes exist when Chrono Trigger came out, though?

Probably not to the same degree tbh, but I feel like Chrono Trigger as a "thing"/classic is as much due to its enshrinement since emulation and widespread Internet. I mean most of the people with Chrono Trigger icons presumably did not play it on a physical SNES/Super Famicom, right? Not that I blame Chrono Trigger or emulators for anything, but there's definitely some "board culture" thing for which avatars taken from emulated 16-bit classix is about as appropriate a shorthand as any other.

if my implied point wasn't clear above, whatever else the internet did it also gave agency to shared bad behavior framed around games/sci-fi/sharpies/whatevs

Not even just 'bad behavior' but anti-social behavior in general. Add to that schizophrenic and hormonally influenced teenage mood swings and now having an outlet for when you get home after you've been bullied. I remember being bullied and just sitting in my room thinking about it and not being able to do anything but just contemplate that this is now my life. I have to go to school tomorrow and see this person. If I had the internet at the time I probably would have been flinging shit right back at them.

the internet has certainly birthed a whole genre of trolling-as-entertainment. i mean, i came across this guy's one tweet:

https://twitter.com/PhilSandifer/status/585613555631837184

and look at the responses

and if you check the guy's mentions, they're still going:

https://twitter.com/search?q=philsandifer&src=typd&vertical=default&f=tweets

this is one of the biggest cognitive dissonances between gg/"these people" and normall-ass people who use the internet (overlaid, but not the same as, the basic left-right diffs) -- a whole lot of people on the internet/in games/in tech just have a basic experience of it as a place where you are constantly fucking around and messing with people. like, that's just what you do. it's what the environment is for. if you take it seriously, you've "lost," but in another way, you've just misunderstood what this place is

you see this all the time when GG people half-blame all the bad shit that's happened (even to some of them!) as the work of "3rd party trolls," and then half-justify it all by saying, hey, it's the internet, what do you expect? as if the greater chan universe is just what the internet is.

but for your average person, or your average woman more accurately, to get on twitter and suddenly get these people's attention and deal with a good hateblast of violent creepery, it's, well, it's the whole issue we're dealing with

tbh "a place where you are constantly fucking around and messing with people" is how a lot of posters treat this place, or used to treat this place before they left

I sorta thought/think that those were people who just didn't have much to say, mixed with self-loathing, but w/e, it's just (to me a mostly shitty) part of posting here

yeah i was about to say, ilx def has its rough and unforgiving aspects. it's quiiite a few orders of mag different tho

of course

I would like to think our hazing is non-gender specific

it's not always but whattayagonna do

figure out how to haze in a non-gender specific way imo

forks otm, ilx taunting can veer into the territory of misandry

tbh we're a lot worse at encouraging people to provoke their tendency toward mental illness

^^^ very true

it's easier on the hands to do so on console than PC

everyone I know who's an old complains about playing fps games on pc

― mh, Wednesday, April 8, 2015 8:11 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just wanted to clarify that there are no console fps games; there are fps games, which are played with WASD and a mouse, and then there's america's army: fuck yeah or whatever it is one plays with the lil sticks

the other weekend i escorted a friend to an anime convention and won an unreal tournament tournament against a bunch of kids who obviously wanted to be playing something else

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ulHI2zqUE0

I am of the same mind as you in what I play, but that is 100% wrong when it comes to 2015

well yeah.

tbh when you said "unreal tournament" my first thought was "is that even a thing"

I am aware of UT and UT2 and I think they made something with a year after it? Am I even on the right track?

there have been a few, one of which they've (rightly) decided to pretend never existed. this was the first one (UT) but the organizers thought it was the third one (UT2004). i could not convince them otherwise and i don't think anyone else in the building was qualified.

lol awesome

tbf the fps dudes are still spewing the most toxic shit imaginable at each other in their shooters
― mh, Wednesday, April 8, 2015 10:07 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wasn't meaning to suggest that other elements of the game audience isn't vile! I'm just saying those dudes could give a fuck about ethics in game journalism. Though I'm sure they would tacitly or passively support gamergate just out of a sheer commitment to being horrible. I'm just saying, trust me (TRUST ME!) no one gets more butthurt abt anything relating to the coverage of games than hardcore jrpg dudes and trust me it's not close

oh god i don't doubt it for a second

I wonder if there's a psychology thesis in studying the abnormal behaviors prevalent amongst people who like games where you shoot other people in the face vs people who like games starring magical panty-flashing teenage girls

yeah, I didn't mean to imply those guys would be into gamergate, but the trend of "you can be a garbage human being while playing video games" is something common between casual players and the complete gg weirdos!

I really casually play (lol) Diablo 3 and after the expansion for the game came out I was playing pretty regularly with this group a husband/wife couple started. They just added people who actually communicated in games, kind of joked around in a goofy way, and it was pleasant.

The game has some really gg-type weirdos who play constantly, though, and I've had a few times where one guy went afk for a second or someone played the game in a way differently than the 100% optimal rules some guy listed on a youtube video and some weirdo will just type brief shit about how people are f*gs and be a dick and ragequit.

I have the impression WoW is a lot like that -- a pretty diverse audience but a number of completely antisocial weirdos who treat everyone else like shit.

jrpg afficionados, idk, that is a whole different world of misery

are any of the major ones even online multiplayer these days? I feel like that is one of those things where casual players would play the game but not participate in dialogue with other players because it's extraneous to the game, but the hardcore people are insane and probably talk about nothing but jrpgs

We do have a record of gamerfreak convos from the Chrono Trigger era: Usenet.

Tho I fuckin' dare someone to swim thru those archives.

Come to think of it, it was 20 yrs this month that I got Trumpet Winsock working in my dorm room so's I could websurf over a 14.4

it was twenty years ago today
kingfish got the trumpet winsock to play

brb gonna ask my wife about naming our firstborn 'trumpet winsock'

I wonder if there's a psychology thesis in studying the abnormal behaviors prevalent amongst people who like games where you shoot other people in the face vs people who like games starring magical panty-flashing teenage girls

http://wotiplayed.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/2012-10-11_00001.jpg

lol borderlands

everybody knows how that one ends, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVpg0vws10Y

Borderlands has a way of simultaneously mocking & pandering to its audience that's very South Park

Ha OTM

I don't think I listened to that guy's full set of dialogue

I do know he does not like it if you shoot him somewhere other than the face

http://gawker.com/how-gamergate-radicals-seized-sci-fis-most-prestigious-1696731611

Eh, Gawker have of course plenty of reason to hate Gamergate, but it's kind of ass-backward to claim that it's the driver here - it caught on partly because it fit into a narrative of "They're coming for our.." that had already been happening in other arenas, including sci-fi (Sad Puppies was doing this last year as well) and comics.

just posting it because i didn't know about any of the sf dramaz at all

Andrew did you read the article?

Yeah - it looks like someone wrote a pretty good article about it, and someone said "now make it 25% more about GamerGate", and slapped the headline on it.

Well gg was supporting it and teaming up
It's the same cultural movement in 2 areas that have always shared strong ties
Also headlines are meant to get people to read articles, I don't really think it's misleading since gg started championing sad puppies

insert ethics in journalism joke