Useless gaming news & chatter

[Cyrrex]

No, but we can label your (and others') dismissal of the humanities writ large as part of the gaming culture Maven was lamenting in the first place.

 

And yes, I have no background in video game culture studies.  Guilty.  I confess to not wanting to learn more, I prefer my wanking to be more physical.

[jakonovski]

As someone who has studied both natural and human sciences, this kind of kneejerk dismissal is rather common. Funnily enough it seems to go both ways.

[KallDrexx]

Why does it matter either way? 

[Maven]

Wow, OK. Very interesting discussion. When I think gaming culture, I think Penny Arcade Expo as evidence it at least *exists*. You say "enthusiast gathering", I think "the place where my people gather," though not anymore -- and I'd accept the argument that it was delusion on my part.

Growing up with games, it becomes a part of who you are. You adopt values and loves in the absence of any other cultural traditions. It's born of commercialism, but you still learn to associate with the symbols (N7) and the moments (Arrow Through Knee).

I don't have a 'people', any type of connection I found was through a love of games. Maybe this is a unique phenomenon for anyone under the age of 35.

If I had to guess, this is the well-spring of passion that people have for these properties and what drives them to get into the industry.

[ezrast]

Jesus Christ what sort of windmills are you people tilting against? You can't seriously be arguing that there isn't a substantial set of media, iconography, and vocabulary that originated with internet gamer dorks and is primarily perpetuated by internet gamer dorks.

We're not giving you a definition because culture is a fucking common word and we all know that you're perfectly capable of having a reasonable discussion about it, if only you weren't so keen on complaining that the pseudo-intellectual cyber-bullies are trying to put you into a box, or whatever.

TotalBiscuit is gamer culture; DPS spreadsheets are gamer culture; Leeroy Jenkins is gamer culture; SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB and THE PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE are gamer culture; PAX is gamer culture; f13 is gamer culture. None of those things are video games, but every single poster on this forum knows where they come from and why they're significant, whereas non-gamers will at best have heard the reference but not know what it means. Yes, your grandma plays cell phone games and isn't part of the in-group; in other news, I ate an enchilada last week and I haven't turned into a Mexican yet.

[schild]

Is no one else paying closer attention to the fact haemish is slowly turning into a secondary character from an early Neal Stephenson novel?

To those of you saying there isn't: Of course there's gamer culture, don't be fucking retarded.

[Rendakor]

I didn't say there wasn't gamer culture, just that this thread isn't the place for discussing it in a serious manner.

[schild]

And I wasn't necessarily responding to you. Or anyone in particular. Just the entire conversation. There's nothing to even "discuss" about this topic. It's stupider than the, uhhh, whatever that girl's name was who was a thing for like a week.

[Lucas]

in other news, I ate an enchilada last week and I haven't turned into a Mexican yet.

Yet.

[schild]

in other news, I ate an enchilada last week and I haven't turned into a Mexican yet.

Yet.

Yét.

[ezrast]

in other news, I ate an enchilada last week and I haven't turned into a Mexican yet.

Yet.

Yét.

Todavía.

[Margalis]

My objection was to the "I fell into gamer culture" and the "culture and the internalized norms" stuff. Less that there is a loose culture in some sense and more that there are shared values and norms beyond trivial things like knowing who MegaMan is.

There is a somewhat well known game journalist who is also a former Neo-nazi who claims that he became a Neo-nazi because of "gamer culture." Most gamers share certain knowledge and proclivities, and if you're into games then playing them is part of your lifestyle. But I think people vastly overestimate how similar people who play games are, especially as Haemish points out you now have Grandma playing Angry Birds, mom playing Candy Crush, kid playing Minecraft, older kid playing COD and dad playing football simulator.

COD players have a culture. Dota 2 players have a culture. (It involves a lot of swearing and Russian) I don't know that gamers as a whole have much beyond a shared hobby. And even then there's a huge difference between a shared hobby like golf, which is a specific sport associated with a socio-economic class, and video games as a whole.

I also don't really think "geek culture" is a thing beyond liking what people at Comicon tell you to like and Joss Whedon stuff. It's like drinking Coke because you see a lot of Coke commercials, there's no culture there you're just being a predictable consumer.

Not to get too armchair psychologist, but I suspect in the absence of religion, community ties, etc, people look for groups they can consider themselves a part of, for whatever flimsy reasons. So instead of "your people" being your neighbors, your extended family or your congregation it's people who love Star Wars. And I suspect a reason there is a lot of strife in these groups is that liking Star Wars isn't actually much of a connection.
----

My sister is an anthropologist. Maybe I'll ask her about geek / gamer culture.

[Falconeer]

people vastly overestimate how similar people who play games are, especially as Haemish points out you now have Grandma playing Angry Birds, mom playing Candy Crush, kid playing Minecraft, older kid playing COD and dad playing football simulator.

I don't think anyone overstimates that here. Not everyone who listens to Bauhaus is a goth. Yet goth as a subculture exists and people can be more or less (or not at all) involved with it. Or even, not everyone who believes in god is a Catholic, or they are but don't give a fuck about it. So grandma and dad will probably be never be part of "gaming culture" or absorb any of it, while the kids might. That doesn't mean they'll be drones in the big hive mind consciousness of the Gaming Culture Cult, because such thing doesn't exist yet. It means they'll internalize and learn to recognize lots of things, like customs and traditions that go beyond knowing who Megaman is from that subculture eventually picking which ones to adhere to and which ones to discard, since even in the oppressive and omnipresent Christian culture people seem to have different ethics and lifestyles. The comparison with religion is a huge stretch and not to be taken seriously, but it still shows how belonging is not always defining. And we are all gamers to the bone here, but our involvement in the culture is certainly different.

I think the problem with Maven statement was that they implied there are already some ruling habits and poor standards for human interactions defining gaming culture as a whole (which are the unpleasant one they got in touch with and hurt by), and that's questionable and probably worth another discussion entirely. You could say that "Gamergate" showed at least two very distinct and opposing sides of the same subculture.

I also don't really think "geek culture" is a thing beyond liking what people at Comicon tell you to like and Joss Whedon stuff.

Sorry but no. I understand dismissing lots of things with "people are sheep" and do what Tumblr says, or Comicon says, is easy especially on the internet, but this is lowering any discussion to an extremely shallow and superficial level especially when we are not exactly conversing about which Mario Kart version is the best ever. I know this is gonna sound weird, but I am not a fan of the concept of cultures and subcultures, yet they exist and acknowledging them, and their implications, is important.

A culture, among other things, is a collection of its customs and traditions, its history and its legacy, and how they affect someone's everyday life and preferences. Its members don't even need to be too aware of these things to be part of it as long as they have absorbed it subconsciously. Hard to come up with something like that when it comes to drinking Coke (although someone might argue that collectionism or brand worshipping spawned their own subcultures), but not so difficult when you think about the influence of everything gamey and geeky in people who are about twenty years younger than us. That said, cultures and subcultures overlap a lot and often more than one coexist in a single person, and sometimes over the years they branch into new ones or assimilate and absorb each others. Maybe that's what is confusing you.

I suspect in the absence of religion, community ties, etc, people look for groups they can consider themselves a part of, for whatever flimsy reasons. So instead of "your people" being your neighbors, your extended family or your congregation it's people who love Star Wars. And I suspect a reason there is a lot of strife in these groups is that liking Star Wars isn't actually much of a connection.

Community ties always come from a desire to feel more comfortable in a society as you say. "Safety" is not the main issue anymore as we haven't had to worry about thunders, dinosaurs, or even barbarians and looters for a while now. Such comfort can take many shapes and in the past religion and the concept of "fatherland/motherland/homeland" were easy choices to make people feel like they belonged. Now these things are losing traction for obvious reasons and new ones are taking their place. So it's not "Star Wars", it's "people who understand why I love Star Wars and why it's important to me instead of laughing about it", and that can become a very powerful bond. Tragedy is, in a not so distant future Star Citizen or Apple will become powerful bonds, but I find them only slightly more amusing than God or Allah or Scientology or Tarot reading.

You wanna hear a random one that is quite funny? Yoga. Not Buddhism, no, nor "New Age". They still exist but are overlapping and being absorbed by another. Yoga, which used to be a practice belonging to other cultures but is now mutating into its own subculture, can include buddhism but doesn't have to and it's becoming an umbrella set of loose ethics and aesthetics (with their own conflicting currents) that is making a lot of people feel like they belong to something bigger and universal that is also worth fighting (comfortably) for. Incidentally, you've started seeing people fighting over and about videogames pretty violently in 2014, and I would say that's a definite sign of how strongly its members are starting to feel about this one large and contradictory community and its parent subculture.

[Yegolev]

I'm going to have to come back during my lunch break.

[Maven]

I have to get to class, but I want to make a simple point about what I saw from the Roundabout trailer: They wouldn't have used an African American for their promotional character.

Here's another example. My Accounting Textbook profiled 25 entrepreneurs at the beginning of each of its chapters. Most were white males who came from upper-class backgrounds and have founded multimillion dollar enterprises. The one African American woman profiled ran an ice-cream handtruck business. Subtle social critique.

I want to point out what's *invisible* and taken for granted about something like gamer subculture (subculture more appropriate). I don't mean to spark another long discussion, but something to consider.

[Yegolev]

There is a lot of good info here but as far as I can tell, the friction comes from people who don't want to be labeled.

[Draegan]

How do people claim that there isn't a gamer culture out there. You're all in it. It's proven by posting on this message board.

I have to say though, Haem's rambling is funny though.

[schild]

There is a lot of good info here but as far as I can tell, the friction comes from people who don't want to be labeled.

I've found that people who care about being labeled care more about being mislabeled rather than labeled generally.

Try so hard to be one thing and someone calls you something else. That shit seems to cut deep.

These people are generally all tools though, so whatever.

[HaemishM]

It's not pseudo-intellectual wankery, it is Sociology.

I stand by my definition. 

[Falconeer]

It's not pseudo-intellectual wankery, it is Sociology.

I stand by my definition. 

I don't completely disagree

[HaemishM]

I find labeling the gamer SUBCULTURE (which is almost as stupid a word to use as "culture") as a culture as if its part of some larger, amorphous culture that shares memes and in-jokes is just silly. Gaming as a "culture" doesn't have nearly enough of the sort of shared experiences that would identify cultures. I mean, you can talk about African-American culture as an actual thing because up until possibly this generation of kids, "the struggle" actually meant a shared experience - it meant something to EVERY MEMBER OF THAT COMMUNITY. Gaming has what? Nintendo? Super Mario? I'm a gamer and I never ever had a Nintendo. Hell, most of the Nintendo games you guys in this "culture" hold up as sacrosanct I never even played - Zelda, Mega Man being two examples. I only knew of them through friends or because I worked at an Electronics Boutique in college. Which is why I just boggle at things like 8-bit music as some kind of scene and pixel art as frankly stupid. The limitations of the medium caused the aesthetic, not a goddamn choice and I reckon if those guys had had HD graphics then, they'd have chosen them.

I wouldn't label the punk movement as a culture anymore than gaming, or football or any of the other hobbyist/lifestyle choices. Most of what I'd reduce culture discussions down to shared experiences and terminology born of socioeconomic, ethnic, generational or national/regional circumstances. Southern Culture may be a thing but it's mostly just fucking rednecks refusing to rise above their shitty backgrounds. Gaming culture? Why would you even bother to study something like that? It's like trying to dissect how many variants of racists there are at a football game and make some assumption based on it that all football fans are drunken racists pricks. It may be true but who gives a shit?

[Phildo]

So now we're arguing over the definition of "culture".  Cool, f13 had been lacking a philosophy and linguistics thread.

[rattran]

What does this all have to do with Iain Banks?

[schild]

I wouldn't label the punk movement as a culture anymore than gaming, or football or any of the other hobbyist/lifestyle choices.

Naw, but for real, you're wrong.

[HaemishM]

Sociologically speaking, I don't see the benefit in studying them as "cultures" all to their own, as if their mores and terminology existed in some form of vacuum. As subcultures (which is a much more apt term), they grow out of other things. If you couldn't afford a Nintendo in the '90's when they were the hotness, does that somehow make you not part of gaming culture even if you play the shit out of video games now? You can't look at the punk subculture of the '70's without seeing how it sprang out of very shitty economic circumstances in England in the '70's, or how grunge grew out of a rejection of the over-commercialization of metal music in the late '80's.

[Mandella]

It sounds like some just don't like where the bar is set. To HaemishM culture needs to be something with a history measured in centuries.

Well okay, but pop culture is still a thing, and decades can be pretty long when you're living through them.

I do know that when I'm in a room of other gamers (as in the culture) we all have something to talk about despite differences in age and politics and even genres. We all know Penny Arcade, we all know WoW sucks now and all that.

The funny thing is that, in my experience, said group of gamers usually includes several women as well as guys, and a variety of sexual leanings. So I have a bit of a problem with focusing on loudmouth misogynists as "gamer culture," but maybe I've just been lucky with who I run into..

[Malakili]

Sociologically speaking, I don't see the benefit in studying them as "cultures" all to their own, as if their mores and terminology existed in some form of vacuum.

You're the one adding that particular baggage to the idea of culture.  It certain is NOT understood to be anything in a vacuum.

If you couldn't afford a Nintendo in the '90's when they were the hotness, does that somehow make you not part of gaming culture even if you play the shit out of video games now?

Why would that be the case?  Has anyone implied that?  I really don't know what you're talking about with a lot of this stuff.

[HaemishM]

You must not be part of gaming culture. 

[Maven]

Most of what I'd reduce culture discussions down to shared experiences and terminology born of socioeconomic, ethnic, generational or national/regional circumstances. Southern Culture may be a thing but it's mostly just fucking rednecks refusing to rise above their shitty backgrounds. Gaming culture? Why would you even bother to study something like that?

I can understand taking it less seriously because gamer culture and others like it spring out of products instead of some historical tradition, but you're narrowing down what's "real" culture because it seems you judge the other cultures as unworthy of such consideration. It exists. It's real. It's worth studying.

Edit: You talked about grunge as springing from the rejection of the overcommercialization of metal music, and I see something like that with gamer culture, only in this case its apathy towards anything real or other historical tradition -- they form their own traditions and identity around the commercial fantasy and immersion in it. Gamer culture isn't in a vacuum, but what it seems to spring out of is privilege or detachment. I'm not a sociologist. Political apathy is another element I think of.

schild is right about mislabeling, but here's the thing: I can't seem to *escape* the impact that a lifetime of video games and working in the field has had on me. It's always going to be a part of me. I'm building on top of that foundation, and some days I'm pretty harsh that this was how I spent my early years.

Media is the means by which we communicate and export culture outside of our intimate circles.

[Merusk]

Who'd have guessed Haemish had so much in common with Sheldon Cooper.

Humanities aren't a thing.

There is a lot of good info here but as far as I can tell, the friction comes from people who don't want to be labeled.

I get the same feeling.

[HaemishM]

Who'd have guessed Haemish had so much in common with Sheldon Cooper.

Humanities aren't a thing.

I didn't say that. I just said that studying subcultures like "gaming culture" out of context with what spawned them leads to inbred self-congratulatory wankery. Oh wait, I didn't say that but I should have. I blame the Internet for trying to make it into a thing. I also blame gamergate.

It's like studying "pop culture" seriously. You are studying the effects of commercialized mass media on people but if you don't take into account things like class, generation and regional cultures, I really can't take you seriously. Because pop culture doesn't just create itself, it is an expression of a larger zeitgeist. That's why they should be more properly labeled subculture. And whatever passes for gaming culture is a sub-sub-subculture of a subculture (Internet culture > geek culture > gaming culture). None of which are all that interesting to study by themselves.

[Maven]

OK. I disagree on how interesting it is to study. But otherwise I'm with you on the rest.

[Malakili]

You are studying the effects of commercialized mass media on people but if you don't take into account things like class, generation and regional cultures, I really can't take you seriously.

I mean, maybe we are talking about different literature, but the work I've read on pop culture absolutely tends to take those sort of things into account.

[Rasix]

Sorry to interrupt the wankery, but AGDQ 2015 is going on right now until the 10th.  http://www.twitch.tv/gamesdonequick

And you're lucky enough to have missed the Sonic and FZero blocks.  Boring as hell.

 

[Malakili]

Yeah, I've basically had this stream on since yesterday noon.  I love me some speed running.